roleki

I understand what you're getting at, but, why would having two ferries be so odd? Would the sight of two city buses with the same destination be equally as odd?

Eh, I average a 50 a week. I don't play around, per se.

True enough, unless you consider the opportunity to start a new alt that much sooner as an award.

Way I figure, you have to have one hell of a game if people can volunteer to forego something so basic as a travel power and still have a good time with it.

It really depends on what you are running and what that character's strengths/weaknesses are, or, what attributes you want to accentuate. My Fire/FF just needs to melt things, so I went Assault. My Ice/TA will never deal much damage, but it has 30000 mezzes, so I went Control on that one.

Just as a "for instance" my Ill/Dark has 121.5% global recharge from bonuses, and gets 70% recharge from Hasten. PA recharges about 3s before they start blinking and fade out. ETA: I suppose this is useless info without my PA slotting, which I can't recall offhand. IIRC it's frankenslotted, I'll touch this up when I check it for particulars. ETA2: I've got it slotted 4x Expedient Reinforcement (A/R, A/D, A/D/R, E/D/R) and 2x Soulbound Allegiance (A/R, D/R) for 118% recharge.

Repulsion Bomb still gets a bad rap from its original, horrible design; even as amended, it doesn't SOUND very useful. That said, it is an *excellent* opener if you're a solo squish and you need to be in melee to do your thing. Lob the bomb and follow it; you arrive in melee just as everything hits the deck. Now you can fire off Nova or Void Judgment or whatever you're there to do and not take any alpha. Sure it's situational and if it were a pool power I wouldn't dream of taking it, but if FF hands you lemons, might as well make dead goons with it.

I really have to remember those exist.

All true; you can gin up a ton of global recharge in the build without really trying, and even when not wedging one in every available nook & cranny, I was still able to throw 7 FF+Rech into the build on mids. And the best I could think to do with all that was... make perma-Mass Hypnosis. Which, boo.

I've got that macro'd out! My gripe was facetious; while my en/en is pretty much built for perpetual combat, the out-of-combat snipe is worth slowing down for. Well, once in a while.

Not griping BUT! the 8s wait for my combat status to cool down seems interminable, especially if there's a dude I can pop who is barely in my perception radius and I just... want... to... explode them.

It could be that my by-eye guesstimate of 8% on Annihilation was the result of a larger debuff being resisted, and it actually *IS* 12.5% to begin with. On that front, my testing methodology wasn't particularly scientific: I plopped an Annihilation Proc in Oil Slick Arrow, then watched the DoT increase after 10s, go for about 8 ticks, then drop back to what it was. At the time I was just testing to see if the proc 'carried over' to the pseudopets; I just did the math on the ticks reported back from the combat window to arrive at ~8% as the amount of -Res, ignorant of resisted debuffs as a variable to consider.

YMMV, but I get waaaaay more shards/threads soloing than I do on teams. If you're sufficiently death-proof, you might want to dip into a 0/8 AE farm and just whomp bums until you have a plethora.

I would say that FF may be a decent pairing in this concept because it requires almost no slotting, gives you mule slots for LotG+Rech, and a couple of attacks that can slot the +Rech proc. Though if you go that route, don't bother slotting the +Rech proc in Repulsion Field. It never seemed to fire on my Fire/FF, and that dude lives in melee. ETA: come to think of it, Repulsion Bomb may be a must-have in that concept... a 15' sphere on a 30s timer that can hit up to 16 targets.

I take the ranged P2W powers on all my characters because those come in handy during flashback missions and when you need to hunt up X more vampires/werewolves for the Atlas Medallion. I keep them all in Tray 7, so I can just bring that up when I get flashed too low.

Eh, I never understood the PL-shaming on Live, and it's even worse on HC. While it is uncomfortable to say it, we don't know how long this will be around; the plug could get pulled at any minute. If that were to happen, I'd rather be flitting around PI on a fully armed and operational level 50 controller than stuck in Skyway, working towards Hasten or something. But maybe that's just me. I am utterly agog that the OP has never dinged 50 in all these years; I get itchy if a week goes by and I haven't brought one around the corner.

I have to admit, I was having trouble wrapping my head around "Resistance resists resist debuffs" but I get it now 🙂 This is on an Ice/FF controller, which is why I am suddenly very interested in -Res. I wasn't aware that Acid Arrow could take -Def enhancements, or that Achilles' Heel was so much better than Annihilation. Looks like I'll be fitting that in somehow.

So in testing the Annihilation: Chance for -Res proc, it would SEEM that it is doing 8% -Res for 8s, BUT, when I slot it in Acid Arrow (which RedTomax reported has 15% -Res for 20s) I am actually seeing a damage spike of about 28%. Does anyone know solid numbers on the -Res proc, or solid numbers on the -Res in Acid Arrow, or, know that the numbers cited above are accurate but they stack in such a way that results in a larger hit when multiple -Res effects hit?

I had the same feeling the first time I toggled on Super Jump. I spent an inordinate amount of time that day just jumping across maps, just to do it.

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.