oedipus_tex

Minor addition, a Storm/Dark/Soul Defender can also stack stuns. Thunderclap and Dark Pit are very spammable (45 and 60 sec recharge), and have favorable radiuses (20 and 25). With Oppressive Gloom you're hitting Mag 6 on anything within 15 feet--Dominator levels. May be worth considering in your search for a control heavy Defender.

Time is good enough that pretty much anything will work. Some noted synergies: Beam Rifle adds some additional -resist and -regen. The -regen may particularly help since Time's -regen isn't great on its own. Electric and Time both respond well to Power Boost, if you want to be a sapper. Electric also benefits from the PBAoE debuff time has that otherwise often isn't worth taking. It's also really nice being able to easily slow enemies who try to run away when their end bar crashes. Time's slows work really well with Ice's rains. Dual Pistols and Radiation benefit lots from procs, Time offers lots of bonus ToHit to make proc builds very juicy. Sets I wouldn't probably persue (not terrible, just not really appealing to me) are Archery (generally bland) Assault Rifle (bland and low on utility) and Dark Blast (overkill on -ToHit, Time probably prefers slows to immobilizes, and doesnt really need another self heal). Anything else is likely to be very good, just a decision on whether to go Defender or Corruptor. That's a hard one to answer because procs can play so heavily into Time builds.

Although like I've mentioned I'm not an expert at organizing and running these events, I think probably any Defender is fine. Some are better than others, but Defenders in general are force multipliers who punch above their weight the more team members you add. I'm still curious about whether blast set matters "more" than secondary set TBH. A Force Field/Sonic Defender has more single target resistance debuff than any but a couple of support sets paired with non-Sonic Attack. That said, if you're specifically rolling an iTrial support character, I'd try for one of two combinations: Single Target resistance debuffer, Single Target DPS with buff/debuff (that is, the style we mostly associate with Corruptor) So, anyone else feel free to correct me, if I was rolling an Elec/Elec Defender and was worried if I'd be laughed out of the league the answer is "no, you'll contribute plenty and have fun." If you were rolling it to try to be a top contributor in the group, personally I'd consider Elec/Sonic, maybe Elec/Beam Rifle (iffy on this but its doable), OR roll as a Corruptor, take whatever buff/debuff set I wanted, and gear as a ST DPS cannon. Whatever you do, I do highly recommend making sure the character has Stealth. There are multiple instances the team will be racing down hallways against a hail of enemy fire, and in my experience no one is likely to assist you during these moments. If you've ever done the Apex Task Force on an unoptimized squishy character and had to make the run through the sewer segment with the Hydras and pilons while the melee toons race of safely and leave you behind, you're getting an idea of what you'll encounter. I think this thread has revealed some different perspectives on what "best" sets are. Despite the name of the thread, I've never rolled and IOed a toon with the intent of specifically being an "iTrial character." I do think some people do this, as evidenced in this conversation. Most of my characters are still in some state of construction, either being underlevel, not well IOed, and often with powers that make more sense in a different context, since iTrials are an occasional event. That's part of where my perspective on Force Field comes from. I can still agree it's not a top set for these events, but having experienced the difference between 38 Defense to all on an unoptimized character versus none, I think dismissing it isn't entirely warranted. If you find yourself on an iTrial where everyone is only bringing their top notch toons I can see why it wouldn't help much, but at least the events I tend to end up participating in don't seem to be that way. I will say if I was focusing more on iTrials I wouldn't be playing as many Dominators. Someone is going to chime back in and say their Dom carries the event, and that's fine, a few specifics builds can do really well I imagine. My toons don't, though. Dominator controls are not that effective or needed in this content. Powers that make sense solo (e.g. Water Spout) often don't in 24 man leagues. That also raises a question about Sonic Attack on Blasters. They do -13% Resist per blast, and its reasonable to picture them stacking it 3 to 4 times, for a total of -39 to -52. They trade some of their DPS away to do it. Does the tradeoff work out in favor of the Blaster.

Follow up: Yep, Forge procs Gaussian's on the caster.

Bonus points if the nuke you use is Rise of the Phoenix. That's a move they'll never see coming. EDIT: OMG I just Mids'ed it. Hahahaha. BRB need to to try this on the Beta server.

Power Boosted Blackstar is indeed ridiculous, and what's even more ridiculous as by the time you can do it it's really not that useful to do so anymore because a lot of the team already has a lot of Defense. 🙂 I really do like Dark Blast for other reasons though. Therm could also pair well with a direct damage set like Fire, Water, or Cold and a be hybrid DPS/support. It doesn't pack the sheer Resist debuff power of /Cold but I doubt any team would want to turn one down. I've wondered if putting Gaussian's proc in Forge and bouncing it off a teammate or pet to proc Build Up is worthwhile when Thermal is paired with a set that lacks Aim. Not even sure if the Build Up would proc on caster, target, or both.

I tend to enjoy A and B listers who are a step below the "obvious" pairing, so I am playing it as Illusion/Thermal currently. It's not the soloist that Illusion/Cold or Illusion/TA are but it's good enough for what I enjoy. My guesses for top performers* would be Thermal/Sonic or Thermal/Beam Rifle. I almost rolled the latter, but realized I hadn't rolled an Illusion toon since live, and it was time. I don't play Masterminds at all but based on what it does my guess is Thermal is one of the better Mastermind primaries. Even with reduced strength the effects are still good. Heat Exhaustion is -500 Regen on any AT, even MM's. The resist shields are base 15% compared to a Defender's 20%, so really not that huge a tradedown. Anyone can feel free to correct me. 🙂 * EDIT: Top performers for support I mean. I wouldn't want to try soloing a Therm/Sonic too much.

We haven't talked much about Aeon in this thread. I'll be honest, during the time it was being tested I was working on my own private project and wasn't around Homecoming much. I'm an opportunist and only hop on Task Forces as invites pop up in the global LFT box, and so far this one hasn't. Is there a lot of Resist debuff in there to watch out for?

I also just recently learned that Resistance debuff resistance doesn't care about the archetype hard caps for Resistance, it uses the "real" number. So, even on a Controller or other squishy AT, if you buff their Resistance to 100%, they are now immune to resistable Resist debuffs of that flavor. There are no -Resist debuffs I can think of in iTrials, but they IIRC Longbow missions red side are prone to include it. Another feather in Thermal's hat. (It's also often forgotten that Storm, Dark, and Cold all have exotic Resistance. We don't usually think of those sets as "big bubble" sets like FF or Sonic Resonance, but their aura power is actually pretty good, especially on Defenders). I'm surprised about the AoE mezz protection to be honest. But again this could be coming from bias playing these trials. Every toon I build beelines mezz protection of some kind. There is of course that one difficult encounter in the Underground trial where mezz protection becomes absolutely vital. Are there significant other moments where it's a factor I'm not thinking of? What's interesting about this to me is that single target -Resist is available in the Sonic Attack set in much greater volume than some actual Defender primary sets. Sonic Attack on its own can reasonably hit -60%, perhaps -80%. A set like Radiation Emission can only hit -30%. Even Thermal, which as we've noted is a high performer, only gets -30%. So it seems conceivable to me that that specific primary might supersede in this specific content. Like I mentioned I don't plan things out much. Usually if I'm joining one of these events it's going to be on someone who is not yet +3 specifically because I need to unlock stuff. I suppose that makes me a rider player. 🙂 A lot of the iTrial experience for me is played from the perspective of passive observer. I do know the mechanics of most of them, but except for a very limited number of toons don't have anything built for that kind of encounter. There's also possibly a subversive issue at play. I tend to know what the S Tier combos are and then not play them. Haha. I've always been attracted more to the middle tier performers. Hence Electric Control, Ice Control. Want to see something really damning?

I primarily play Dominators, sometimes Controllers, and on occasion Defenders. I have an IOed to the gills Ice/Rad Stalker who is actually great but I lost interest in very quickly, I don't think he's seen the light of Paragon City in over a year. Can't remember how he performed in iTrials. I only ever end up in them when I'm recruited circumstantially. It's never a planned thing. I just had a look at my full roster of characters. I have 180 characters. 😄 About 30 50s. Three of these have builds I'd call complete. To be fair, what usually happens is when I create a new character of the same class, rather than rebuy all the IOs, I strip old characters and mail them over, so this isn't completely representative of my experience. But for sure I've never concentrated hard on building an end game roster. My "main" is an Elec/Psy Dominator. I picked that specifically because I considered it a solid A to B tier character, which I tend to prefer to true S tier toons. I think the build is strong, or at least as strong as this particular combo is likely to get. This is one of only two characters I've bothered to outfit with full sets of Frozens. He sits at around 40 Defense to Slash/Lethal/Melee/Ranged, uses Destiny Barrier to hit soft cap at its ebb. For sure though he's got serious liabilities in this content. Most of the damage is point-blank punches. The Regen debuff is nice but again point blank and risky. No Sleet (took the Psi pool) because the rain interupts the Sleep patch. There's probably a build for him that would function better in these trials--switching to Sleet, for example--but overall the current objective is usually "survive until the team carries us over the finish line." 😄 It might also seem like a Dominator would be well suited to grabbing control, but in my experience packs come in two types, obliterated quickly or not worth engaging. It's marginally useful to toss out Synaptic Overloads here and there without drawing aggro. Needless to say the PBAoE aura stays toggled off, because its main feature is to attract undesirable aggro. I imagine a Plant Dominator might have a very different experience.

Yeah this is kinda the direction I was leaning. Blaster and Corruptor being extremely valuable, along with certain kinds of high damage melee characters. I listed Thermal Radiation because of its unique sweet spot of being a Resistance buffer, healer, and AV debuffer. But in truth don't understand how those debuffs apply in reality. I also am definitely beginning to see a split in the comments between the more organized experiences and the wild free for alls I sometimes end up part of where a signficant portion of the team spends the duration of the event in the hospital. It's rare for me to be on a team that actually loses an iTrial, but my most recent Lambda experience primarily involved leaping from the hospital to the inner court, past the cannons, over and over. That character was I think only a +1, can't recall the powerset, only that running through the halls filled with psychic enemies without any Defense at all was a free trip to the hospital. Despite spending a lot of time constructing builds, I rarely actually deploy them; of the 100+ toons I have, around 5 are soft capped to anything. A philosophical aspect of this I think is that there's a big difference between organized trials and ragtag ones. (Not calling anyone a ragtag leader, but for sure I've had wildly different experiences with different groups). Anyway, can we talk specifics? We've said debuffs are useful, but which ones and how much of them? Is my assumption that players quickly hit the limit of -Damage and -Regen (10% and 0%) correct? After playing this game this many years I should also know more about -Regen, but most of that experience comes from 8-man teams, where the idea is "bring some." No idea what happens if you end up with 3 or 4 -Regen sources during an iTrial and whether it becomes redundant or continues to help. That would make a huge difference for sets like Trick Arrow that have some good Resist debuffs but not -Regen. One thing maybe worth asking about too is the Sonic Attack set, especially as used by Defenders. That set by itself can easily stack -60% resist before even factoring in the player's primary. I don't know how this -Resist translates into actual impact on the fight though. I have to assume my Cold/Sonic Defender isn't literally speeding up AV fights by 100%, but then again really don't know. I click stuff and eventually the enemy dies. 🙂

I can't say I share this experience. It could be the types of characters I play, but face planting during iTrials is a regular event for me. Based on what goes on in the League window I don't think I'm alone. I don't have any character in my rotation who can tank through enemies with 59 base ToHit, even with IOs and controls. There's a portion of the BAF Lambda trial where the team splits up and goes hunting for enemy packs; the only way I've ever made it through that is to use non-aggroing powers. Characters who lack Stealth I won't bring on that trial, or if I do, they avoid the hall of death portion (there's very little I can contribute to it to be honest, usually someone else carries it). If I do make it to the end of an iTrial untouched, its usually because I didn't directly engage too many enemies. Especially on any toon who hasn't unlocked the second two level shifts; that's a blood bath.

On this point I'm going to gently disagree. Force Field with Power Boost has reliable double strength shields. On a Defender its around +38 Defense for 4 minutes. I think probably the strongest members of the team don't need that level of strength, but I would be floored if most members of a 24 man league wouldn't benefit from it. It shields the players and also their pets, is constantly available. I've played Time a lot and respect it for its strengths, but this is one of the rare cases where I think the FF'er takes it. I can really feel the difference when there's a strong Force Fielder around versus not, especially on weaker toons who are just entering iTrials for the first time. Of course there's a dark possibility here that keeping those weaker characters alive doesn't contribute as much in the overall as just getting some heavy dps and debuffing from a handful of team members who carry the event. It's interesting that you mention Electric Affinity. That's a set I'd personally rather not bring to an iTrial, due to the way the Electric buff tails off. That could be misperception on my part on how these powers work. With so many players and pets running around an iTrial I imagine the target caps get hit quickly. Most other buff sets don't have target caps that you're likely to hit. Like I mentioned before, I'm still unclear on exactly how debuffs work or how much you actually need. I do have an end game Cold/Sonic Defender built specifically as a debuff monster, but measuring how much that contributes to an iTrial is hard to do. For one thing, the character is very vulnerable to death and doesn't have an easy time approaching enemies. He can throw weight into AV fights from a distance of course. IIRC there's no cap on how much -Resist you can apply to an enemy, but I'm also not sure how much of the character's -Resist is actually applying to enemies in that content. What is the -Regen cap? I assume it's only "worth" having a few sources of -Regen and everything after that is beyond the cap. Same thing for -Damage. Like, these two seem like a case where having none of it will really slow you down, but having a ton of it won't really speed you up or aid survivability. But again am unsure of how the numbers shake out in reality.

Hey all, I've been thinking about iTrials and the new "Hard mode" task force difficulty. These pieces of content throw unique challenges at the player that make builds, archetypes, and sets that don't normally shine a lot more attractive, or encourage a different build strategy. I'll start by admitting that I don't have any comprehension of the ingredients of an iTrial archviillain fight. I know these enemies have a lottttt of hit points, but beyond that am completely in the dark about whether -Resist or -Regen are important to bring, and how much of it. I can also squarely admit that as a primary Dominator and Controller player, I don't have any toon in regular rotation who can withstand heavy engagement with iTrials packs without significant support, except for characters who can discretely engage, e.g. Mind, Dark and Electric characters using non-notify Confusion attacks. If I'm being completely honest, my Dominators in particular feel like the fifth wheel (maybe the 25th wheel?) during a lot of iContent, because of their inability to withstand attacks, vulnerability when knocked out of Domination mode by death, and point blank nature of their highest damage powers. However, I'm also unclear on how much powers like Drain Psyche (-500% Regen) and Sleet (Resist debuff) contribute and whether that is a significant contribution. A build I think that is surprisingly good, and much more effective than the core game, is the Power Boost variety of Force Field. Force Field endures many criticisms, which I won't rehash here. But Force Field has a very fast recharging high strength shield that can be doubled in strength by Power Boost. The key here is the "fast recharging" part I think--useful because death still is going to happen in iTrials. This player's role is to reapply shields at every Power Boost interval so that any revived players and any newly summoned pets get an update. The shields last 4 minutes, which is probably long enough to carry through long portions of events where the team is forced to separate. As great as stuff like Farsight is, I have more faith in Power Boosted Force Fields because they don't force a team gather, and are more available for refresh at a given moment, such as seconds after a team regather, mass resurrection, or summoning of Lore pets. Cold Domination of course has a similar shield, which it can't Power Boost, and a slew of debuffs. I'm very unclear on how useful or necessary these debuffs are in this content. Are the -Resist, -Regen, and -Damage doing much? It can be hard to get a read. I do get the feeling, adjacently, that Thermal Radiation is incredible for this particular content, but have no evidence at all to back that up. I can't comment at all about melee characters. I have one Stalker at 50 total, and he's not built well for this material. Can he be? Should he be? Blasters with high ranged DPS seem like they'd be highly desirable for this content, but I've never built one for it or seen a build specifically tailored with it in mind. I get the impression what matters here is sky high DPS but again am unclear on what assumptions should be made about the overall build. Your thoughts?

I recommend taking a look at /Psi Assault Dominator builds. Dominators are normally a very squishy archetype that is huffing for endurance. With Drain Psyche... they are still squishy, but differently so. If you take the Ice APP you're even a pretty good debuffer (Drain Psyche has -500 Regen for fighting AVs and Sleet is a very nice Resist debuff). It really doesn't matter which Dominator primary you pick. Just make sure you plan to spend on IOs, you need some Recharge to really make that archetype sing, especially with /Psi Assault. In that way that things are a house of cards in CoX, /Psi Dominators also usually do not struggle with endurance like other Dominators do. This frees you to take Destiny Barrier as your Destiny power, since you don't need Ageless. This, in turn, frees you to only have to hit 40 rather than 45 to soft cap a position. Two combos in particular that are S-Tier are: Dark/Psi Plant/Psi But any control set combined with /Psi is going to be one hell of a performer. Not anywhere near the top damage zone for Dominators mind you, but a workhorse who fulfills multiple roles. (Full disclosure: my "main" is an Elec/Psi Dominator).

Sonic Manipulation is a rare blaster secondary with a -Resist debuff built into it, but it's a PBAoE with a small radius. One of Energy Blast's key AoEs is a medium ranged cone. How well you feel you can leverage both of those elements will probably dictate how the combo feels to you. This is assuming of course that you've converted kb to kd to avoid blowing stuff out of range. Personally I think sets that rely less on cones probably feel better paired with Sonic. For example, Water Blast is pretty similar to Energy Blast but with less coney-ness, if it fits your concept. Radiation and Electric Blast don't have any cones at all. Fire or Ice do have cones, but they are less reliant on them. Interestingly, the Sonic Attack set itself is all cones except for the nuke and personally probably make me a bit uncomfortable. You could of course find ways to still use the aura with a cone, or mostly ignore the aura since the debuff isn't that critical. But a -14% resist debuff is pretty significant if you can leverage it. People tend to not think of it as much, but it probably does significantly more PBAoE damage than a standard damage aura. It even multiplies proc, teammate, and Lore pet damage.

Damage auras are generally efficient, assuming you are going to have things in range. This is pretty much true for every archetype, even stuff like Controllers if they can get into range. Think of it like this: Each combat action you make has to be "paid for" with animation time. Each click requires you to "pay" with lockout time. Not auras, though. In fact, as you move further and further into the end game and competition for clicks continues to increase, auras tend to get even better. Need to expend animation time on activating Destiny? The aura keeps ticking. Low on enemies and ready to start moving to the next spawn? The aura keeps ticking. An added plus is that a maintained aura won't trigger travel suppression. In terms of the aura's effect on regular attacks, you can basically read it as if you were getting "free" proc damage. In the overall scheme it can be significant. If it would normally take you 6 AoEs to clear most of a spawn and the aura drops that to 5, that may not seem like a lot at first. But over the course of a long mission, one less click every spawn quickly adds up and you can see why steamroller builds love damage auras.

Rule of Five gets a bit easier when you remember the "everything is a power" rule. Each set bonus is a power. You can have up to five copies of a set bonus power. This works the same way max counts work with temp powers like Tidal Power, Momentum, Bloom, etc. You can stack the power up to the limit, anything beyond gets ignored. On the more technical side, in the code it looks like this: In this case the "power" is Increased_Melee_Def_6." That is the thing you can have five copies of. Luck of the Gambler's Recharge bonus is different from the generic Recharge bonus powers. LoTG has its own specific power all to itself. It looks like this: There's also a generic Recharge power other powers use. You can stack each power up to 5 times. They do happen to give the same amount of Recharge, in some cases. But it's the power the game is looking at.

You got some heat for the build, but overall I think you've broken some interesting ground. You've accomplished soft capped S/L on a Resist armor build, which isn't very common, and an interesting direction to go in. I do wonder if you'd be better served with a Ranged defense build given the sets involved--there isn't any reason you need to be up close with enemies with these powers. But I realize you may be covering this with your debuff toggles. Main thing I'd consider is dropping Vengeance for Aim with the Gaussian's proc. Aim > Blizzard is a sick, crunchy sound I wouldn't want to pass up. Endurance may also be an issue unless you're running an incarnate like Destiny Ageless. Overall tho not bad. An interesting take for sure.

Happy to help. 🙂 Answers to your questions below. - I lost Energy Torrent because knockback. Although fixing that is a slot away, AoE DPS is covered by the team. Used the slot to put Gravity Distortion Field back, AoE hold and the potent set effects from Superior Will of the Controller won me over. That's fine if you prefer it. Keep in mind Energy Torrent on Controllers is knockdown not knockback. As AoE's go, it's one of the pretty good ones. Very fast animation time, 60% chance to knockdown, opportunities to proc it out should you so desire. My original slotting had it with damage procs, you could adjust this to the Chance for 100% Recharge proc instead. Energy Torrent is near guaranteed to trigger that proc on a group of 7 or more. Force Field doesn't need Recharge nearly as much as some other sets do, but if you're using Wormhole for your team the way you describe, making it recharge a bit faster may help you out, even if you don't care much about the damage. - Why Expedient Reinforcement in Singularity? It seems a poor exchange for a little recharge time and some small resistances? (tho old build had Perma-haste... the Sleep and Immobilize resistance from Soulbound Allegiance is wasted... So may switch over if this new build doesnt hit perma-haste or there-abouts. Expedient Reinforcement or Call to Arms are often the default slotting I use for pets. The sets are reasonably inexpensive (2 million per slot generally). They also provide a Recharge bonus for only 4 slots, which is very rare. Most Recharge requires 5 or 6 slots. You'll often see it in builds in one of two configurations, either 4 slotted (for the Recharge) or 6 slotted (for Recharge + ranged defense). You had a kb to kd slotted in Singy, which eliminated the second option, so I went with the first. - Why the Artillery Enh set? Gravitational Anchor just looks better..? Mez resists are kinda cool, tho I have gone overboard on some (Sleep, Immob, Confuse & Fear) it tops others up (Hold and Stun, because they suck xD) Is the Protection I have against these effects good enough to sacrifice the Resistance? Artillery provides +3.75% Ranged Defense, which helps bring you to the Ranged defense soft cap, which is 45%. At 45% Defense to a position, you've reached peak Defense to that attack type. Moreover, it's a cheap set, costing around 2 million per piece. Purple sets like Grav Anchor cost usually around 15 million per slot. Grav Anchor also adds Immobilize time, but not damage. Extra immobilize time isn't useless, but it's probably not your primary concern, since you can always just recast the power. If you decide you want Recharge instead of the Ranged defense, I'd go with a much cheaper set, like Positron's Blast (generally 2 million per piece, 3 million for the damage proc). -Aegis in Tough, or Preventative Medicine (+Absorb) in Health? Mez and Psy resist trumps a chance at extra HP in my mind..? Or is it a frequent and sexier temp HP proc? Again, kinda my ignorance of "Chance to" style Enh. I wouldn't worry about mezz resistance. The amount of Psy resist you're getting there is also minor and I wouldn't bother with it. The HP procs on the other hand combined with your high Defenses are likely to be very helpful. I stacked up as many as I could in Health and Stamina. They won't save you from a direct assault, but they heal enough over time to make a major impact, roughly equivalent to a free Green inspiration every minute or so. It's less about surviving a prolonged attack and more about long term maintenance.

I can see why you want that information, but again can see why the game presents it the way it does. It shows you values modified by enhancements but not globals, which is fine to me. I'd find it extremely confusing if it displayed all the random buffs and debuffs that might be in play as well, unless these were broken down in a separate number. For example, Recharge. If I had Hasten on and a power said it Recharged in 60 seconds, it doesn't mean it will actually Recharge in 60 seconds. It will Recharge in 60 seconds only if Hasten happens to last 60 seconds (and no other buffs or debuffs land during that time). If 30 seconds go by and Hasten drops, the power now Recharges in whatever time is now left. You can track Recharge numbers by turning on that feature and see them recalculate in real time on the hotbar, that's really the only way to do it. The game has now way to know what "perma-Hasten" is an so on--that's the realm of Mids.

In this case I agree with the decision not to include globals, unless they developed a way to distinguish set bonuses from the general ToHit and Accuracy bonuses that tend to just float around in the game from buffs and debuffs. This is real tricky though, because there are sources of Accuracy from weird places like the Death from Below sewer trial that are basically "always on," and Tactics cast by self is probably on most of the time too, versus the random Tactics of some other player racing by. The window would also have to constantly update to avoid freezing an inaccurate value in the moments after Aim or Build Up. So, justified in this case I think.

I don't think that's a fair characterization of this thread or other players. It's fine if you think the current system works as is. It's a topic a lot of people are passionate about. But I think things will be more productive if we keep the conversation on the system and sets and not other players' implied motivations. Thanks.

IMO the biggest thing with Recharge is keeping in mind it's sometimes meant to be a penalty. That's where the PPM system goes a bit off kilter IMO. Global damage procs have a Recharge cutoff around 20 seconds where they stop considering additional Recharge time in their calculations. Don't know if that's applicable to our current PPM scenario or not, but I do think 20 seconds is where stuff starts to transition to a different way of thinking.

Yeah like the rest said, your globals aren't included. In case you're curious why, it's to prevent stuff like stepping into the aura of a teammate's Tactics or getting hit with a temporary -ToHit debuff and it resulting in confusing info in the detailed power panel.