roleki

This doesn't get brought up enough. Kids today don't know what it was like to hop on a team and do the same mission 4 or 5 times, hoping that one of those times would be YOUR mission instance, but by the time your turn came around everyone had either petered out or outleveled the mission, leaving you having done the mission to death but still needing to do it -only now it was even less likely to get done in a group, so it stagnated and left your character at a development pinch point, where you'd have to solo it or come back to it when you were a couple levels more powerful. Somehow worse, this would happen, then you'd see one or two of those former teammates zipping around, +4 to you, because THEIR content was getting done while it was fresh, and you're bumbling along forced to either street hunt or do other people's content, in the hopes of getting to a level that would give you a new on-level contact. Bonus points for having died numerous times in support of the team that was out-leveling your content. Another thing I hated was, you'd spend all this time chipping away, toiling away, grinding your way to 50, and then... nothing. Hitting 50 meant retirement back then, only to be rolled out of the garage on special occasions. Nah, I loved the game from the start, but it got infinitely better the longer it hung around. I have zero desire to drag a toon from 1 to 32 the old fashioned way, let alone all the way to 50.

This is also true of FF's bubbles; if you fire PB before applying them, your affected teammates get enhanced +Def for the full 4 minutes.

I would say, Confront on a Scrapper is pretty useless, but not as useless as say, Black Hole and similar 'mob phase' effects. I mean, the worse that can happen with Confront is you lose a little DPS trying to aggro something that's already dead and doesn't know it. Phasing a mob is just, ugh. Worthless.

I am all for anything that actively makes Defenders and Controllers less viable once you've invested 40 or so levels into it. Otherwise, the game might get unbalanced and skew in favor of DPS classes.

Oddly enough, my weakest overall toons are my Fire/Rad farmers... taking them off the farm is a humbling experience. I'm bringing this up because so far, of the 15-odd 50s I've rolled up since coming back, the farmers are the only two that I don't feel confident taking anywhere and everywhere. Say what you will about Incarnate Abilities and power creep, but they really do make it easy to patch glaring holes in a given build or AT. That said, I do have some /favorites/ to just log in and do whatever with... my Fire/FF controller and my En/En blaster being the current go-to's.

Not to detract from a perfectly cromulent rant, but in my experience, Controllers generally range from "present during the proceedings" to "potential MVP" depending on whether the team has a competent Brute/Scrapper. In my opinion, if there's a red-headed stepchild in this power-crept meta, it's Tanks. The ability to herd a room into a killzone is diminished in importance somewhat when every AT has access to a nuke, making every area of a map a killzone. The ability to inherently hold aggro is diminished in importance somewhat by the ability of most teams to melt through mobs in less than the span of an attack chain. The ability to inherently survive alpha is diminished in importance somewhat when nearly every character can soft-cap defense, resistance (or both) and can slot a Preventive Medicine proc on top of it. There was a time when a team wouldn't dream of clicking into a mission without a Tank; now, you see a Tank on a team and you just hope they're not run by one of those people who still think it's 2007 or something.

Having read your comment, I still don't understand how you arrive at Crushing Field as the power to cut when even the revamped version of Dimension Shift is still the second or third worst power in the entire game, full stop. If the power percentages @ 50 thread is any indication, Dimension Shift is the least-commonly selected power in Gravity by a wide margin, appearing in only 37.33 percent of (ostensibly) final builds. Crush, the second-least utilized power, comes in at 53.17 while every other power is at 82.17 or above. Meanwhile, 91.5 percent of final builds found room for Crushing Field So even as the statistically least-utilized Gravity power, the fact that Dimension Shift generates enough angst to warrant threads decrying its usage on the forums should be a good indicator that it is THE prime candidate for replacement by a Travel-ish power.

It's especially odd (thematically) that Gravity doesn't have an inherent flight/teleport power considering /Kin gets two travel powers, sorta. That said, if I'm going flight, I go for Afterburner just so's I can slot an extra LotG+Rech, so it's not like the picks are completely wasteful.

As a controller secondary, /TA is a solid complement to just about any primary, and that's right out of the box. It may not have a killer top-end or a defining power that everyone can point to as a signature move, but anyone who has given it a fair chance would have to admit /TA helps them keep the chaos in check by providing solid debuffs and additional controls. That said, if I hopped on a PUG and saw a Defender, I'd be mildly disappointed to find out they were TA/, because that's like having a controller on outdated TOs.

I would think that /TA should have enough debuff to keep mobs from doing ALL the bad things to your Imps, especially if Smoke and Flash Arrow stack at all. Just make sure you disable redraw in the character editor interface, or you will go insane.

But that's a whole 12 hours from now!

Fair enough. Given that explanation, Acid Arrow would be a "single source" and would not stack? Trying to figure out offline how much Res debuff I can sling on a single target if my global recharge is 135%. Ice/TA needs all the help it can get.

I have brewed up a respec on my Ice/TA and it looks like I will have enough global recharge to have 2 Disruption Arrows out simultaneously. If a mob is in the AoE of both, will it get two stacks of -15% Resistance?

I get double base damage off mine, but it doesn't notify as "containment."

I slot Seismic Smash with Hecatomb Acc/Dam/Rchg and 5x procs; against orange bosses it hits for about 615 or so per activation (~115 x2, ~71x4, ~105x1). I can't say all 5 proc every time, but I've never checked and found that one had NOT hit. Slotted up with procs, it hits like a truck.

While we are kind of on the subject of catalysts, are these programmed to drop at some interval after logging in with a character? Seems I usually get one within 15 minutes of logging in/doing stuff.

Hah! That's where Ice/TA gets it - you're going to need all that Slow/Recharge because your DPS is so sad that stuff emerges from mez before you can kill it dead.

I'm not saying it can't be done (perhaps even easily) but having run a couple of Ice/TA controllers for ~120 levels, it's hard for me to imagine anything slowing mobs down like that combo. There are 7x AoE slows in Ice/TA and 5x AoE -Recharge powers, all backed up by 4 single-target attacks that do both Slow and -Recharge. That's all before Jack stumbles by and starts waving around at people, theoretically slowing them as well. If the cap numbers indicated earlier in the thread (-75% Recharge, -90% Speed) are accurate, then Shiver floors Recharge in one application (-81.25%) as would any combination of Arctic Air/Glacier (-62.5%) and any other power (Entangling Arrow/Ice Arrow, -12.5%; Chilblain/Frostbite -25%; Block of Ice -37.5%). As for the speed floor, both Arctic Air and Shiver hit for -81.25%, Glacier hits for -62.5%, then Chilblain/Ice Arrow/Block of Ice/Frostbite all hit for -37.5%, with Ice Arrow and Entangling Arrow at -12.5%. I don't have numbers for Glue Arrow, Ice Slick or Oil Slick Arrow because RedTomax's archive didn't go that deep, but I figure they are somewhere between -12.5% and 37.5%. In any case, that's a lot of slow!

I prefer to slot the Preventive Medicine proc in a click/active power, since it fires when the conditions are met (i.e. when you need it) then drop Miracle/Numina/Panacea in Health, because then those 3x are always firing with no input needed from me. There may be a better/more recent post on this subject, but early on I found this to be very helpful: Reddit Post re: Proc Firing (PPM)

I generally focus on Controllers, so my priorities are a little different than most, but even amongst controller builds I see on the forums I tend to go a different direction. The way I play a controller, I want global recharge ahead of anything else - theory being, they don't make Recharge inspirations. Once I have +Recharge plotted out, I try to go for Endurance, whether that's from procs, +recovery, global discounts or max buffs; I go one further and get the Atlas Medallion ASAP on everything I roll. Once slotted up, my controllers usually sit between ~110 and ~117 endo and recover about 3.5 endurance per second... plenty of fuel for all those toggles and clicks. After I feel I have squeezed all the +Recharge and +Endurance I can into a build, I try to survey what's left to slot and whether I can max out one thematic bonus over another, usually +regen or + HP (just works out that way) but occasionally that's mez resistance or whatever. ETA: i tend to 3-slot both Health and Stamina, one-each at lvl 5 and one each somewhere in the teens. If I can afford the procs, I go Miracle/Numina/Panacea in Health, and then 3 pieces of Perf Shifter in Endurance. Did I mention I like to have endurance available?

Every week this cat posts the same "Why isn't HC doing THIS" thread in General, goes on to espouse how great all the other servers are in comparison to HC, moans that HC has such a large playerbase compared to other servers, speculates wildly as to why that is the case, then gets cross when people point out that his weekly 'question' is just a thin excuse to go on the same rant, again. It's just weird.

I don't remember as clearly as I used to, but I think Gravity Distortion has had the -KB for a while; that said, as a Gravity controller it's always a good idea to lead with a mez (GD/Crush/Wormhole) before Lift or Propel, to set up Containment (double damage on mezzed targets)

I would imagine it's because, while there are options to shut off both salvage AND recipe drops, it is more likely that people will shut off salvage drops and end up starving the market? Just a guess, I have no idea what metrics led them to make that decision, other than to kickstart the AH at startup?

While I wouldn't want the dev team to seed recipes or IOs, I would not mind if they seeded converters (if they don't already). Sometimes you get stuck playing ping-pong with the RNG and before you know it, you just burned through 2M.

Luckily there are plenty of other games that would allow you to live out your nerd banker fantasies.