roleki

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.

Melee Core sounds like it would do the trick; one of the reasons I hadn't rolled a /Shield before is that I was hesitant to invest in a set that really has no backup plan. Melee Core would at least shore up the resists some.

Perhaps you could split the difference and roll an Electrical Affinity character. EA gives you the ability to send heals and buffs to individuals as they need them, and as a bonus, everyone in their vicinity. It's an excellent set for handling frenetic teams that seem to value elbow room over survival, but works just as well on a team that's moving in a pack.

I would be interested in giving that a go, but timing/scheduling would need to be consistent. I usually only get to log in between riots or after the kids are unconscious (from rioting).

Melee is intriguing, not exactly sure what the Incarnate Wiki means when it references Front-Loaded abilities; on the one hand it sounds like the T4 gives 3% resistance (all) per enemy within 10' (up to 9x) but the Front-Loaded ability note says 16.08 resistance. I suppose I could check it out on Test, it makes it sound like you get 16% just by having the toggle on, no matter how many enemies are in range? It's... unclear. This is another case where the wiki kind of shied me away; it states that Double Hit takes into account the Recharge and AoE of the triggering power, and Axe trucks a lot in AoEs. Sounds like I am going to be spending more time on test than I would like.

"Well, it's DARKER!" - Player X on why they dislike RedSide "Well, it's DARKER!" - Player Y on why they prefer RedSide

Good to know; since I am usually on a team, I fire off Acid first so that EVERY tick is giving max effort. I'm at something like 52 ranged defense (on the Corruptor, would have to dig into the Defender to report out) so alpha doesn't usually bother me. Key word being 'usually.' Heh, I was Polarrhoid, on Victory as well. I don't know the exact date I hit 50, but it was either just before or just as CoV came out; I just know I was in a hurry to finish so I could concentrate on CoV. It was just funny because everybody I ran into wished me luck. I'd never had that happen before or since 😉