roleki

Unless it's to stall level progression (to accumulate threads/shards or something?) there's no longer a point to disabling XP. You get the same inf with or without it. This point doesn't get enough attention in these threads. In the time it takes you to clear a 4/8, you could clear nearly three of the same map at 2/8. That's almost 3x as many drops and inf in the same amount of time, and more spins at the wheel mean more chances at purple/pvp recipes.

Apparently there are, yeah. I craft every yellow recipe and convert it to rare, then pitch it on the AH. Whatever white/yellow salvage I have left over beyond 10 of each, goes up for 6. I don't bother crafting orange recipes unless it's something I'm going to use on a character. Whenever I get over 1.96BN inf, I buy Super Packs until I'm back down to 1.96BN. At this point, I roll characters just to store the excess ATOs. You aren't going to market-shame THIS guy.

Fire/Trick Arrow Corruptor. Rain of Fire onto an Oil Slick is a pretty good move on its own, but then you throw in all the debuffs AND scourge? And you'd still have Fireball, a full ST attack cycle, a PBAoE nuke, and an Incarnate nuke left in the tank? Not only does the "fire/OSA" thing work well together, but almost everything takes place at range AND /TA isn't looking for a whole slew of slots, so you can concentrate on set bonuses out of the primary/pool powers. It's just a really, really good pairing.

I can't find the thread that discussed it, but shortly after I rolled my first farmer on HC, there was a thread wherein people talked about a mechanism that cinched off reward rolls on content that was repeated. I can't recall the terminology, but the gist was, you got more purple drops after an update or after you do a mission or two between farms. This seems to have borne out; my parked newbs get more purples than the farmer, and if I take my farmer to PI for a couple missions, they start getting purples more regularly. Since I can't find the thread, I don't rule out the possibility that I am imagining all of this, but my experience with 60-odd farmed-up characters seems to bear this out.

Awesome! Thanks for pointing those out!

Is there a repository or method of determining what the power icon images are named, so I don't get a red X when I do something like: /macro_image <Icon Name> OSA "powexec_name Oil Slick Arrow$$powexec_location target Oil Slick Arrow" The text-button macros were fine, but now I'm getting incarnate powers and the tray is getting a little over-populated, it'd be nice if I could macro_image the powers rather than have them in the tray WITH the macros.

What farm are you hitting? Are you moving between mobs fast enough, i.e., not waiting for everything to be dead from one mob before moving to the next? As long as you've got Blazing Aura and Quills, the rest is pretty much just timing/tactics.

Thanks; it's a little shy on DPS to a pure farming build, but does what I wanted it to do. Mids is a great tool for finding that last bit of +Def or +Res 🙂

I have both Spines/Fire and Rad/Fire, and on balance it seems to me there's really not much functional difference between the two; I found it easier to cap resistance/melee in Rad/Fire and hence doesn't need Healing Flames quite as often, and that's about it. Spines is slower to kill straggler bosses, but in a farm it's not worth killing stragglers anyway. I prefer the timing of the attack chain in Rad/Fire, but that's more to do with the fact that I've got about 500 more levels of combined time running Rad/Fire than I do the other. The good news is, if you have a fully kitted-out farmer, you're more than halfway to having another 🙂

It's not a "no expenses spared" build - it might run you 630M if you paid street value for the enhancements and boosters - but my rad/fire caps S/L (and of course, Fire) resistance and has a shade over 45 melee def. It can do pretty much any farm map you want, and won't instantly fall apart like wet toilet paper outside of AE. ETA: As far as Rad/Fire goes, it's pretty straightforward... target something in the middle of the group, tap Fusion -> Burn -> Atom Smasher -> Devastating Blow -> Radioactive Smash then Fiery Embrace -> Burn -> Atom Smasher -> Devastating Blow -> Radioactive Smash... pretty much everything but the bosses are dead at that point so you just cycle through Devastating Blow, Radioactive Smash, and Proton Sweep, salting in Radiation Siphon if you feel like topping off health before moving on... Radiation Siphon 'de-contaminates' the target so you're not getting the 'contaminated' splash damage off that, is why I pretty much just save it for the end if I use it at all.... it's really just hanging around for the S/L set bonus in my build, but 300 health isn't a bad occasional benefit. Most folks avoid Proton Sweep like the plague, I find it procs fairly often and is a good way to keep Fury on the rebound at the tail end of my attack chain. Could replace it with Contaminated Strike to get more bonus splash damage, especially since I'm not getting any compelling bonuses out of that purple set that I couldn't get off another. But meh. It works as-is.

Completely off-topic, but one of the first things I did when my /EA was of age was hop into an MSR... I can only imagine how janky that would have been with four or five of us generating 50 pseudopets every 30s or so.

This is my Rad/Fire at 90 S/L/F + 45 Melee Def; I had to +5 some enhancements to hit 90 S/L but I couldn't run around THAT close to a blue number and NOT do it. Overall, it's a little shallow in Recharge (123 after Hasten) and I left a little damage on the table chasing caps, but it'll clear a 4/8 cave map without hitting Healing Flames even once. It's primarily a farming build but I've taken it out on the town with zero issues. This build also addresses two of my biggest pet peeves: running out of endurance, and missing an attack; with Destiny Ageless and just a Kismet, I could have taken a different EPP and been just fine but, meh. This does what I want. ETA: Fury usually sits at 88-92, with occasional spikes. i've moved the ATO proc around and seem to get the best results from where it's at in Burn, and I seem to keep Fury higher using Proton Sweep over Contaminated Strike as my cooldown.

So nice to have insight into what pseudopets are up to again; also interesting to see the Rube Goldberg stuff related to newer sets like Electrical Affinity. Good show, @UberGuy!

I can't speak to SS, but on my EM/WP (and pretty much all my Brutes) I 6-slotted my attacks because the best defense bonuses seem to hang out in that 6th slot. As for Defense numbers... if I know I'm not going to be on teams (or at least, not going to be on teams where anyone else is doing anything) I try to go up and over the soft cap on Melee if I can; for one thing, as a Brute, Melee is where I will be. For another, Melee attacks generally hit harder than ranged/AoE attacks, and mobs usually have more melee attacks than ranged. Lastly, I usually am trucking 4/8, and unless they've changed the attack mechanics, +4's get a 1.4 Accuracy bonus vs me, so even the soft cap isn't a soft cap vs. +4s. That said, if you hit ~32% def, you can cap defense with a small purple inspiration, so it might be better to try and spread your defense bonuses around to bring a few key types/positionals up to 32ish, so you are better in general content, a ready-for-anything kind of character. If you're going to be on a lot of teams/leagues, a spread-it-around approach will probably be the best way to go, and you can just kick in an inspiration or two when things get too hairy. So far as +Recharge goes, I don't specifically TRY to get a lot of it, but I do make it a point to grab Hasten; between that and set bonuses/LotG, I usually end up around 140% Recharge, then whatever Ageless kicks in along the way. In any event, like @Uunsaid, WP is kind of a special beast because RTTC. It's like Fury, but for survival. Defense helps a lot, but it's not going to destroy you outright to be shy of caps.

There's also the elephant in the room: a Tank that has a sizable survivability advantage for a small damage penalty (say, +25/-8) compared to a similarly-built Brute might be the better choice for your run of the mill door-clicker, but in situations where you can sustain a 400/ 500 damage buff, that Tank might as well be a vanity pet. But, you're really only going to get a sustainable damage buff of that type in a very specific scenario and you don't want to balance based on THAT.

Yes, name names, so we can get them the help they need!

Maybe I'm doing it wrong but when I've taken comparable Scrappers and Brutes through a 4/8 farm map, on top of having higher resists and more HP/higher raw regen, my Brutes tend to spend MUCH less time making survival clicks, much less time trying to round up mobs, and are consistently 100-300% above my Scrappers in global damage bonus. Scrappers crit and are capable of way more burst damage, but seems to me Brutes are more consistent. In terms of clearing a 4/8 cave map, my experience has been that Brutes clear them faster/more completely (and therefore get more inf/xp) because mobs only run TOWARDS Brutes; once they get in range, they don't get a chance to run off because the only clicks I am performing launch attacks that kill them. It takes Brutes longer to kill the bosses/EBs, but on balance my Brutes mow through farm maps much faster than Scrappers of the same build.

I haven't got Mids in front of me to check for certain, but I would wager Ill/Dark is easier to get to Perma-PA than Ill/Sonic would be, on account of it having a couple slots for LotG muling and a few powers that can take Cloud Senses, which gives you 6.25 global recharge at the 4th slot. Perma-PA isn't the end-all, be-all of Illusion, but "spawning PA at the location of the boss" is one of the better openers in the game, and you'll want to be able to do that as often as you can.

If they had badges for our characters' 100,000th, 500,000th, and 1,000,000th Warwolf/Vampire defeated, I would probably have all of those badges on multiple characters.

Don't skip slotting Gale with KB:KD and a FF+Recharge; turns it into spammable damage mitigation that hits quite regularly for +100% recharge.

Unfortunately, the Hold sets were designed by a janitor or something so if you want to address Endurance and Hold using sets, you have to go like 4-wide before giving either attribute a nudge worth noticing. I usually just slot Entangling Aura with a generic boosted Endurance IO and a Lockdown +2. The Lockdown doesn't trigger often since it's in a toggle, but when it hits, it hits darn near everyone in melee. Since you're of the Mind persuasion, you don't have a whole lot of reason to go into melee, but I think EA is still worth taking on that kind of character because it amplifies holds out of your primary and frankly, it looks cool.

I wasn't a huge fan of Corruptors, but Fire/Trick Arrow is insane. Light your own OSA and watch SCOURGE flash from one side of the screen to the other? It never gets old.

At this point I can't tell if it's a graphical glitch or if I'm really not getting the 10% ToHit bonus when this happens, but, if you CT and immediately execute an attack, the ToHit bonus does not appear in Combat Attributes. If you wait a moment after arrival to attack, the 10% buff appears in the CA window. If I CT 3x in a row and do nothing each time, my ToHit goes from 86 (base) to 96, 106, then 116, so the stacking part is working.

Could have been a temp power or a +Stealth IO?

So, I wound up taking Combat Teleport on my new MA/WP scrapper, and it is nice, but can someone clarify if the +ToHit is a proc, or is it supposed to happen every time you teleport? Reason I ask is, I've got a Kismet +Acc, Focused Accuracy, and Focus Chi, all of which add a little (or a lot) of +ToHit... but my +ToHit almost never moves when I use Combat Teleport. In fact, it seems like I only get the +ToHit off Combat Teleport if I'm not getting a +ToHit buff from somewhere else. Is that a graphical bug, is it working as intended, or am I just not getting this?