roleki

Fire, mostly, but Beam Rifle is right there with it. Conveniently, both will ignite Oil Slick Arrow.

Not to derail, but I was part of the verrry long Alpha/Beta of Fortnite, and it felt like they had done exactly what you suggested, except instead of focusing on the top two or three answers, they tried to stuff EVERY 'want' into the core game. It was huge in places, unwieldy at times, fun in a general sense, and had the potential to be somewhat deep... but then they just shoehorned PUBG into it, and nobody even knows Save The World even exists. That would have to be one heck of an abridged dictionary to consider "fun" and "enjoyment" synonymous. Consider the following two sentences, neither of which a living human would phrase as such but I did so here in an effort to avoid splitting even more hair... 1: Schindler's List was not a fun movie, but I derived enjoyment from watching it. 2: Schindler's List was not a movie that provided enjoyment, but I had fun watching it. Fun and enjoyment are NOT the same thing.

My brain is just six different monkeys on various stimulants with their tails tied together, so forgive me if this rambles and/or doesn't make a lick of sense either in general or the context of the thread. Honestly, it's the monkeys more than me. When CoH went away, I spent the first few weeks or a month trying various games, never finding anything that seemed capable of holding my interest the way CoH had. Eventually I quit trying to find a replacement game altogether, and started a new hobby - buying Lego collections off eBay/garage sales, cleaning them, sorting them, reconstituting the component sets where possible, then flipping the uninspiring sets back on eBay. At last count, I had about ~380 gallons of Lego left from that sidetrack; to put that into perspective, think of the kid in your neighborhood who had ALL the Lego sets... they probably had about 8 or 9 pounds of the stuff. I'm sitting on ~500 pounds of it, or, about 60 spoiled-kids' worth of Lego. It's a literal boatload of Lego, if the boat in question wasn't too big. Anyway, when I bought that stuff - in lots of five or 10 pounds at a time - it would invariably arrive in a musty old box containing a miasma of bricks, cat hair, random colored pencils, bits of Contrux and Lincoln Logs, rubber balls, Penny Racers and so on. After cleaning the lot, I would turn on a college/NFL game and just spend those three or 4 hours sorting Lego. First macro (bricks, plates, slopes, Technic, etc) then micro (small bricks, medium, wide) then final (1x1 bricks, 1x2 bricks, 1x3 bricks) and so on, occasionally getting little dopamine hits from finding the black sword that only ever came in THIS set, or finding a space guy what still has a crisp logo on his torso, etc. Point I am getting to is this: if it's that boring to READ about sorting Lego, imagine actually doing it. But I kept doing it, because that process of putting the brain in park and reducing the world to a PBAoE was extremely therapeutic and something that just worked for me, even if the overwhelming majority of the time the tasks were repetitive, tedious, and not what we would classically label 'enjoyable.' As a bonus, when I was done, I had SOMETHING to show for it... if you count a couple of extra dollars and 'grounds-for-divorce' amounts of Lego as SOMETHING. So now there's this thread about a video game, wondering what we think of as fun. I don't have "fun" researching the minutiae of a powerset on CoD. It's not "fun" agonizing over whether I would benefit more from a moderate endurance discount if I slot this HERE, or if I should put that slot over here and get a small damage boost to complement all the -Res out of the secondary. It's not "fun" crafting an Air Burst then converting it to a Touch of Lady Grey to a Reactive Defenses to a LotG 7.5% enhancement and stashing it in my base because the next character I have an idea for will need 5 of them. It's not "fun" opening a Hero Pack, finagling that Kheldian ATO to something people actually want, catalyzing it, then dumping it on the market so I can leave placeholder bids for downlevel recipes that I can side-craft into Miracles and Steadfasts while still keeping inf on hand for impulse buys of the same. Defeating thousands upon thousands of custom enemies in a cave is not especially "fun" - though it is a LOT like sorting Lego, with the same neuron-muting qualities that kept me sane in CoH's absence. What *IS* fun to me, is the end result of these tedious activities... I had an idea for a character, sketched it out, leveled it, equipped it just so, tested it, analyzed it, tweaked it, and now I can break it out once every week or so and melt U'Kon G'rey with it or figure out what kind of ITF I've just volunteered for with it, or just smash huge mobs of Nemesis in PI until I get a catalyst and can park the character again. Sometimes, on a character that I felt went particularly well, I'll just open up the Enhancement screen and kind of marvel at it, like I'm Agent Smith looking at the Matrix. And that's it. I guess I'm a destination kind of guy. The 'journey' might have been fun for me at one point, but having done everything 30 or 50 times before, I am well past that. Amassing influence doesn't hold any appeal to me, it's a means to an end, or in this case, 50 or 60 ends. Spending influence doesn't do it for me either, because I was at the other end of the keyboard for every mouse click that earned it, and since that time was worth something to me, I'm not apt to piss it away. I'm here to make builds that work in my own fashion, and I do so in a manner that doesn't rely on the proficiency or availability of others. If that doesn't jibe with the spirit of an MMO or ignores the intentions of the devs... I'm not even sorry, I'm just over here having a good time.

I'm 48 but it feels like I have 2XP enabled and a bar full of patrol XP.

I guess what I like *most* about Sentinels is the flexibility the builds allow. In terms of survivability, Sentinels start out where my Corruptors/Blasters/Defenders could only hope to end up if I chased +Def or +Res set bonuses exclusively. If I want to chase +Recharge or +Damage, or heck, +Movement, I am free to do that because I don't have to go nuts trying to keep the Sentinel upright. Second thing, since survivability is pretty much built into the character, I am free to try new things out of pool powers and Incarnates, unlike pretty much every other AT where I am shoehorning these two out of Leadership, this one out of Leaping, those three out of Fighting, Clarion and so on. Lastly, since nobody expects anything out of a Sentinel, I could take the whole dang Flight pool if I wanted, and not have people giving me side-eye for not making THIS choice or THAT choice, or failing to tuck just the right proc into THAT power. I could post a janky Sentinel build right now, taking all the weird procs like the Tempest proc (go ahead, look it up) and nobody would lean in and say, "you know, if you took THIS instead of THAT and slotted THIS over here, you could really trim your Pylon time down" or whatever, because damn near every Sentinel build is correct. Is it alive? Does it have more than one attack? Looks fine to me!

Are "fun" and "having a good time" peers in this discussion? Because it's been a long while since I had fun, but I "have a good time" whenever I set out to.

Cool, thanks for clearing that up!

I'm in the Q&A section of a Lunch & Learn, and as is usual in these situations, I find my thoughts drifting to the next character I am going to roll up instead of whatever the hell it is these people are droning on about. Anyway, I'm browsing City of Data (thanks, @UberGuy!) trying to figure out what I want to pair up with Dark/. In my head I am juggling between /Shield and /Willpower, but saw something in Willpower -> Rise to the Challenge that made me think an additional time. Specifically, the -ToHit component of Rise to the Challenge is flagged as 'Replaces Existing Effect.' What I am looking to clear up is, does that replacement effect ONLY pertain to the -ToHit applied by Rise to the Challenge every 1s 'pulse' or does it also wipe out whatever -ToHit I was applying through Shadow Maul or whatever? Would it negate someone else's Rise to the Challenge pulse?

Fire/Dark is an amazing combo and does perfectly fine whether solo, on a team, or on a league. As a /Dark you are encouraged to follow your Imps into melee, where they get the full benefit of Twilight Grasp, Shadow Fall, and Fade. You may not be able to buff your pet damage, but you can debuff their targets' Resistance, ToHit, and Regen. On top of that, you get Dark Servant, who is a mini-you, chunking out buffs and debuffs all over the place. As to whether Fire/Dark is 'better' or 'worse' than Fire/Kin, that is almost completely subjective. There are a TON of Fire/Kin out there, and people seem to like running them. Me, I am a huge fan of the Controller AT - look at my sig for a partial list of my fleet of controllers - and out of all billion of them, my least favorite is probably Fire/Kin. It just feels so... one dimensional (?)... to me. Don't get me wrong, if a pairing is going to be a one-trick pony, it helps a TON if that trick is as impressive as Fire/Kin's; I just don't like having so much of my gameplan tied to whether one power hits or not. Regrettably, I resolved early on that my only Fire/Dark would be a witch-themed character that only comes out in October to run ToT/GM-hunting leagues; other than an occasional maintenance login, I've kept her in dry storage the rest of the year. Threads like this kind of make me rethink the idea of keeping her in hock like that.

While I prefer Brutes in general, this is especially the case with /Bio... you lose 7.5% of your Resists in Offensive Adaptation, and Scrappers just don't have as much Resists to give away as Brutes do. Figure you take a Brute and a Scrapper, both with capped S/L resists, then put them in OA. The Brute is now at 82.5 resists off 90, and the Scrapper is at 67.5 down from 75... not a huge difference, but say someone swings at each of us for 250; the Brute takes 43.75 of that, while the Scrapper takes 81.25, nearly twice as much damage. In the grand scheme of things, an extra ~40 damage off one attack isn't much, but multiply that by a whole mob's worth of alpha, and suddenly your Scrapper is pausing to fire off survival powers instead of more attacks. And while it's true that Scrappers do far more burst damage than a Brute, 92% of the time it's an impractical advantage. Say you run into something with 500HP, and launch an attack that, after enhancements and global damage buffs, does 700 damage as a Scrapper and 550 damage as a Brute. Even if the Scrapper crits, the thing would have been dead either way, and while all that extra firepower might look good in the combat log, in the actual sequence of events happening on screen it meant very little. Even when it's something sturdier like an EB, a Scrapper might clear it two clicks faster than a Brute, unless they had to fire off a survival power along the way, and now it's a bit murkier. Not saying any of that to wave off Scrappers; when they're upright and 100% on the attack there's nothing like it. I just don't subscribe to the notion that anything that is good on a Brute is automatically better on a Scrapper.

I'm sure there are some Grav/ or /Storm guides, maybe even a Grav/Storm guide, but I haven't seen them. I've played enough of all of that to give some tips but I don't think I have a 'guide-level' screed within me. Best I can do is some bulletpoint stuff based on how *I* run this sort of thing. Slot Stamina early, get the Atlas Medallion at your earliest convenience, and find a place to slot a Kismet +Acc. The good stuff comes late, it's nice to be ready when it arrives. Gravity gets an extra pair of single-target attacks in Lift/Propel; take advantage of that early, and use Gale/Freezing Rain to keep things from beating on your directly. I don't use Hurricane all that often myself, but YMMV. If you do pick it up, it might be worth running a -1 mission or two to get a feel for how it works. Basically, you don't want to run into stuff head-on with Hurricane, as that will just split the mob and make it harder for your AoEs to hit them. I've found it's best to find a destination where you want things to go, then run across the mob and back-track to shore up the edges as needed. That... will make more sense when you actually do it. Among other things, Wormhole doesn't require line of sight, AND Steamy Mist gives you a little stealth, so you can peek around corners, tag a bad guy, then dip back around to safety & bring the mob to where you want them. Just make sure Singularity doesn't follow you too closely, because that thing is a notorious bean-spiller. When you get the chance to do so, slot KB:KD in Gale, Tornado, and Lightning Storm. You lose out on a bit of enhanced values, but a Tornado that isn't chasing one target across the map is instead beating on multiple targets in a small area, whilst those targets get hammered by a Lightning Storm and knocked around by Gale. I prefer to use targeting macros for Tornado and Freezing Rain, so they can be dropped in a single click. It just makes beating stuff to a pulp that much easier. That's about all I can think of at the moment.

Rather than inf, I like to hand out ATOs at random; it's fast, can be done on a flyby, and I figure an ATO is something they can either liquidate for immediate cash or it can add a little spark of momentum on the way to 50.

It's all fun & games until those millions you'd kill to protect your children also have dads willing to kill millions to protect THEIR children, and so on.

Here's what I did with Grav/Storm; usually sitting at 278 Recharge in combat, and if I'm paying attention can squeeze out 3x Lightning Storm at a time, for a few seconds. Not much in the way of +Def or +Res, but, it does a job.

I've got a couple Fire/TA Corruptors and wound up sticking with Inferno; once you've got stuff flopping around on an OSA, that's the perfect opportunity to swoop in, hit Aim and blow up. I've got mine built up with a decent amount of Ranged defense... I could have went for more, but I kind of wanted some +Recharge and other bonuses as well. If you're not going to go for set bonuses, Acid Arrow is phenomenal with procs in it. I think I've posted this build elsewhere before, but this is how I'm running both my Fire/TAs, although the one I run the most has Reactive Interface instead of Degenerative.

I've always wondered how a Mind/Storm would work, even at 50. My Mind/Poison and Mind/Traps fellows lean on Mass Hypnosis a LOT, but somehow I think Lightning Storm/Tornado would break sleep pretty quick; I assume Gale and Freezing Rain do the honors here?

I do! I'll post mine when I'm done with this whole "work" circus. I think it's really down to preference/how you run it. If I were building a Grav/Storm and angling for durability, I would focus on loading up Ranged defense (since Hurricane has you covered in melee with a -30% ToHit debuff). I don't have the exact build in front of me, but on my Grav/Storm I opted for +Recharge and +End above anything else; I typically do not take a lot of alpha/damage because, between Wormhole, Hurricane, and Singularity, I get to dictate what I'm fighting, where. Between Gale, Lightning Storm, Tornado, Freezing Rain, and Fissure, almost everything I'm fighting is too busy getting knocked on their butts to do much offensively. Top that off with Thunderclap stacking a 2 Mag stun with the 3 Mag stun out of Wormhole, and there's never much incoming fire. That said, occasionally a blind Wormhole *will* notify the targets it missed, and if my back is to the direction from which I yanked the mob, I can have stuff sneak up on me and attempt to start a beating. Man. Grav/Storm is just a lot of fun when it's all growed up.

But in a glass-half-full kind of way, random people running undercooked characters would give max+ support characters plenty of opportunities to feel like they are contributing! Just kidding... eh, kinda? I, for one, think it's great that I might be on a team with somebody who has decided to forgo all the min/max crap while I'm over here fretting that I could only get my Rad/Fire brute to 89.53% S/L resistance.

Not to cleave the horse carcass in two, but the answer to the question will vary depending on what you actually want to do with it. If you want to solo everything from 0 to 50, then Plant/X or Ill/X would do the trick, where X is /Dark, /Rad, or /Time. If you're looking to just control the heck out of everything, then Earth/X may be your bag, where X is /Time, /Poison, or /Trick Arrow. If your goal is to be a useless XP leech for 25 levels then spend the next 25 levels becoming more awesome than anything else in the game, then Grav/Storm might be for you.

That's a good point about the +Regen doing more work between hits. Ok, I'm sold, Gabacho will go Melee!

The great thing about this game (aside from the fact it stil exists) is that I can pop out of AE on my sub-4-hour 50, run past a bunch of people in the atrium begging to door sit, hop into LFG, and after filtering through the numerous DIB/DFB LF1M, join a PI team where every one of us is at capped def/res, armed with nukes and loaded for 4/8 bears, and it won't matter one whit if the rest of the team is made of sloggers or PL'd doorsitters. People tend to forget that at the end of the day, this is all just rock/paper/scissors. Don't overthink it.

Not going to say it's impossible, but usually when they give something -KB protection in the game, it's a crazy number, like -10000% or something like that.

I want to reply, but every time I post in one of these threads, it gets locked. So nope. You guys can do this without me.

I put that [stuff] on everything. Sure, I still miss on occasion, but at least I know I did everything I could.

I'm kind of a fan of the Energy Mastery Epic; it's kind of bland on paper, but this pool offers some really powerful effects without requiring a ton of enhancement slots to get them. On top of a little extra endurance/recovery and +regen, Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection give you two extra slots for PerfShift+End; assuming you're slotting a third in Stamina, that's an extra ~47 endurance every minute, which really helps feed the machine when you're slotting a bunch of +Recharge bonuses. If slots are tight, you can just stick the procs in the base slot and move on, getting all that in return. While I usually slot them in Health/Stamina, you could also tuck the PM: Absorb Proc and PT: Chance to Heal in Energy Mastery if you really wanted to. Meanwhile, Focused Accuracy is crazy-good at +4 stuff; not to throw combat math all over the place, but a power like Radioactive Smash slotted with .425 in Accuracy enhancements would only have a 56% chance of hitting a +4, but take that same power slotted the same way and add Focused Accuracy slotted just for endurance, that chance goes up to 72% which is nearly your base ToHit for an even-con. Add a Kismet +Acc somewhere and that +4 becomes a -1 in terms of HitChance. FA also gives you decent resistance to -ToHit debuffs which you tend to run into once you're getting around to choosing an Epic/Patron. FA is a little endurance-heavy, but you can get away with a single +5 IO here and move on. I usually don't truck in Laser Beam Eyes so I've no opinion on that, but Energy Torrent is a decent proc mule, provided you're content with wasting a slot on the KB:KD enhancement. You *probably* wouldn't have room for either of these on a Rad/Bio but they're out there if'n you want them.