Lhanis

So, I started messing around with things on Brainstorm and think I've got an outline for what I'm hoping to accomplish, and some actual answerable questions for the folks who know slotting better. Outline attached below. Original concept was going to lean into Cloak of Darkness completely hiding your character and taking a weapon set with hover to float around as a haunted, cursed weapon. Thought it would be fun. But while testing I accidentally fell in love with Spinning Strike in StJ. Sweeping Cross being skippable also lines up with my original goal of a 6 power primary. Where I'm having trouble is figuring out how I should be slotting these powers. Scrapper's high base damage makes me feel like I should be taking advantage of it more than cramming procs in to do the work, but StJ also looks like a set that gets a lot of use out of FF procs and I'm not sure where to draw the line. With what I have, the crit-proc ATO looks like it would work best in either Rib Cracker or Shin Breaker (unless I put it in Dark Regen for giggles, but on paper that looks very expensive on End). Crit window looks about the same, but I'm unsure if it'd be better in one over the other - better chance in Shin Breaker, but SB also looks like it'll want Achilles in it where RC can't take anything interesting that'd compete for space. I chose Soul for patron on account of Shadow Meld looking like a dream come true for bolstering during alpha strikes, but with StJ already being very ST focused and wanting you to stack combo I'm not sure how important I should treat Moonbeam. It's hard to find advice/examples of the revamped Dark Armor, and I can't tell if Obscure Sustenance might actually be a better pick. The revamp turned it into a clicky with no target requirement and a 25% heal on top of it's already very nice +Regen/+Recovery (though Mids doesn't actually reflect this yet) as opposed to Dark Regeneration's expensive target-based heal. OS also can have a majority of it's buff made permanant quite easily, but it has very little options for slotting compared to DR. Soul Transfer has the same issue as above, and it does so many things now that I'm not sure what I should be focusing on with it. If I take OS over DR, it'd make a good spot for Panacea/PM sets, but I don't know if that's worth losing other things that can go there. Lastly, I'm curious if Hasten is even needed with a setup like this. With StJ getting 3 decent spots for FF procs, I'm wondering if I might be better served dropping it for another power/pool entirely. The attached build was put together with non-superior sets mostly just because I wanted to see what things would look like leveling. I'm not above using purple sets (I've got more than enough inf set aside to make a fairly expensive build) but I'd like it exemplar as well as possible since I spend far more time below cap than at it. The only thing here that's really set in stone is that I very much want Fold Space which pushes me into Teleport for travel, and that I want Hover for both concept and to make Teleport more palatable. Scrapper - StJ Dark wip.mbd

So I was left to my own devices for more than 5 minutes, and the intrusive thoughts won. So now I have half a dozen half-built variants in mids that I've been putting together while I am supposed to be working try to decide which one I want to pull the trigger on and actually roll... and I'm very quickly coming to realize I really don't have a clue what I should be building for on a melee character. For reference, a vast majority of my characters fall into the Defender/Controller/MM variety, where you slap in rDef sets between your procs and just keep out of reach. Something tells me Scrapper needs a bit more than that though. Dark Armor is a Res set with minor defenses and some -tohit and fear. Do I want to try and chase positionals for extra padding despite the lack of DDR? Should I be trying to ResCap instead despite the scalar and max 75%? Do I actually want Tough and Weave? If I do want Tough and Weave, which I assume I do even if Tough just mules sets for me, that leaves me in an awkward spot for power picks. To get everything I want into the build, I need a primary I can cut 3 powers from. That's easy for some, since I don't want Confront and you don't usually take both T1 and T2. Psi Melee drops boggle, Savage can skip Shred, etc. But I have no idea what others like Titan Wep, Katana and War Mace can live without. And after all that is considered, I look at my endurance and weep for what Dark Armor has done to me, and start asking myself if I really need Death Shroud all that badly. I realize I'm mostly just shouting into the void, and that none of this is really specific enough to get any actual answers more than "it depends", but I just thought I'd share. I really did not walk into this expecting to have to relearn my mids-fu.

I don't care if Staff's damage isn't great, Innocuous Strikes is just such a fun animation 🤣 Trouble's post about the ATO procs' placement the other day is actually what started this whole thing for me... it was interesting to see how much of an impact they have on the AT overall, and reminded me Scrapper was something I'd never really given a shot. I'll be honest though... it never even occurred to me that you could slot it in Dark Regen since it deals damage. That's a wild thought. Cheers for that!

That's fair, the way I wrote it is a little vague but it's also not an easy thing to put into words. By mechanically, I mean how it feels to play/tools it has available that I would want. Not necessarily whether or not it has an in-built mechanic like Momentum or Combos. Some examples: Savage Melee. I adore this set aesthetically, but my experience with it was frustrating. Back when Tanker gauntlet first got buffed, I rolled one with Savage - the End reduction was nice, and Leap is a wonderful tool, but the constant need to play around or against the bloodlust mechanic to keep yourself from getting locked out was not particularly enjoyable. Dark Melee. A generally pretty great set all around (especially on Scrapper, or so I'm told), but a lot of small issues that make it unenjoyable for me to play. Shadow Maul feels like it takes far to long, needing to proc bomb Touch of Fear to have a decent early AoE, and to be completely honost I would rather just have a normal Build Up over having to worry about saturation for Soul Drain. It's hard to give an example of an armor set here though. Mostly I'm looking at it from a tool perspective, does it have good mez prot, does it have a taunt aura (something I'm sad most Scrappers lack, but oh well), is it to clicky to maintain mid-combat, etc. It's why I clicked so well with Electric Armor initially, it just does everything I wanted it to without having to jump through hoops to get it, while also having some neat extras in speed and +End. The old iteration of Dark Armor would fall into that "dislike mechanically" catagory, which is why I'm asking about it. Hogs endurance, has to bring it's own KB prot, leans to heavily on Oppressive Gloom... all things that at least on a first glance may have changed. Cloak of Fear looks like it might be a much better pick now and potentially replace OG, Obscure Sustenance could be a huge help with endurance, now has KB prot in Cloak, etc.

I don't generally play melee. I've been here on Homecoming for some 6 years now and can count my melee characters that have made it to cap on one hand. A big part of that, I think, is that most of the melee and armor sets I like aesthetically are ones I don't enjoy mechanically. After a recent break and return to find the i28 page 2 changes though, I'm wondering if I shouldn't give it another try. I actually got rather attached to Elec armor on an E3 Sent a while back, and I've always wanted to do something with Dark Armor too... so I'm wondering how people have enjoyed the changes to them. I know resist sets aren't generally the domain of Scrapper, but it's also the only AT I've never really touched before and I feel like this is a good opportunity to fix that if I'm considering melee again. Long-winded preamble aside, I'm looking for: Thoughts on the Dark Armor changes? What to expect performance wise for a resist set on Scrapper? Primary sets that might be fun/pair well? Advice for a long time player but first time building Scrapper? That third point is definitely the biggest one on my mind. In a perfect world where Kinetic Melee didn't feel absolutely awful to play it'd be my first choice, but I've been down that road before. Any and all advice is welcome.

This table helps a ton... I've always leaned into just taking Brute instead because I never know how to properly make use of Scrapper's ATOs to capitalize on the fun factor of Big Number. Cheers, Trouble! Now you've doomed me to spiral back into crippling altitus.

My main hero vs my main villain? ... Being a bit of a trickster spirit, what side of the line my smol gremlin creature Lhanis is on depends largely on it's current mood and who summoned it. If Posi part 2 is anything to go by though, Lhanis beats Lhanis every time, no contest.

My first glance also missed the fact that most things can be set to come from the mace now, which is honestly kind of great too. I think even if I do decide to polish up the Huntsman, it's probably time to give an actual mace Bane a swing as well after all. I'll have to go poke around your updated page 7 builds for ideas while I work something out. Cheers, @KaizenSoze!

I'm a bit out of date, took a break just before Page7 hit live but have a huntsman build I was rather fond of and was considering dusting off. Did anything major change that would necessitate a build revamp? A quick browse told me that Heavy Burst is faster now and Wide Area Web looks like a solid upgrade to what it was, but aside from that I couldn't find anything significant to a Bane with no mace attacks. Probably another important question as well, though... now that it looks like the Bane mace attacks have largely been improved, has the gap between Heavy Burst/Grenade spam and an actual Melee Bane widened enough that Huntsman is no longer worthwhile?

I had time, so I did another. Still not min-max'd, but a much more thought out build than the ranged fortunata meme. Global: @farsinger AT: Widow Powers: Night Widow Pylon Time: 199 Seconds 0x8 Time: 347 Seconds 4x8 Time: 480 Seconds Character Name: Lhanis (Optional) Comment: This one had a significantly easier time with the pylon, as expected. Clear wasn't bad either, but I noticed that I had a lot of trouble dealing with runners on Ston's map which dragged the time out. I honestly expected the clear and survival to be better than my fortunata with how reliable Spin and Eviscerate usually are, but I guess Psychic Wail is just that good. There was going to be a third build, my fort!hybrid, but during pylon testing I was noticing an odd gap in my attack chain and, lo and behold, a handful of my skills straight up didn't have any enhancements. Woops. I play it so infrequently I didn't even remember it wasn't finished. The rest of my roster also leans towards heavy support and various controllers, who likely would have a DNF in at least one category, so that's probably it from me unless I decide to dust off my Dark/Dark Offender. Thanks for putting this together, I definitely learned a thing or two about my builds here!

While I usually build for comfort and theme over function, this seemed like a fun way to compare my builds to each other even if they won't be anywhere near what others can pull off. So I threw my ranged-only Fortunata into it just to see how bad it really is. Hoboy. Global: @farsinger AT: Widow Powers: Fortunata Pylon Time: 807 Seconds oh god why 0x8 Time: 317 Seconds 4x8 Time: 421 Seconds Character Name: Lhanis (Optional) Comment: Since the build is mostly just a chill one for when I don't want to have to think, it skipped most of the melee options. This means clearspeed revolves almost entirely around Psychic Wail's cooldown... so I'm not surprised to see how little variance there is between 0x8 and 4x8. That said, even if I knew my pylon time wouldn't be great I still didn't expect it to be that horrific. Staying ahead of the regen was a struggle the entire way, I definitely felt the lack of hard hitting options there when I have no debuffs to make up for it. Yeesh. I'll have to put my actual Hybrid and NW builds to the test too, just to see. I'll throw them on here when they're done so y'all have something to compare it to. (Edit: I initially misread the rules for this test, and ran the test without Ageless running. I have since re-run it and edited the times. Originally, they were pylon-839, 0x8-343 and 4x8-442. Not a huge difference, but still.)

I've played a lot of EA and a bit of MA, and I definitely agree that they are both very busy sets that really want you to focus on them. Interestingly, MA seems to fill a similar niche to Kinetics for me in how you are largely focused on juicing your team's damage, though there's more control and defense in place of the sheer power Fulcrum Shift provides. EA gets some of that, but its more similar to Empathy's spot-healing and support like Tidge mentioned above. The biggest difference in playstyle in my opinion is simply that EA suffers when the team is mobile, it really wants people to be stationary and together for chains and Faraday Cage... not a problem when everyone's pummeling down a hard target, but awkward elsewhere. MA is much more... free, I feel. Toroidal is a fire-and-forget aoe buff, Shifting tides anchors to a player, Barrier Reef (MA's alternative to Faraday) is portable and follows you like a pet. My preference is definitely MA. There's just something about dropping a Tidepool on enemies, using Whitecap to teleport into it for debuffs and CC, and following it up with your PBAoE Nuke to shred an entire group (which usually results in Tidepool triggering a frenzy and amping the damage boost it provides you to deal with anything left standing) that does it for me in a way EA simply can't replicate. Even if MA wasn't as good as it is, it just flows (pun intended) so much better than EA to me.

I don't much agree with what's in the Widow subclass section in regards to Fortuna (or the poor treatment of my dear, sweet Heavy Burst), but it's nice to see the VEATs getting some attention from folks again. The note about the inherent just about killed me, thanks for that.

Warshade and Dark Armor VFX options for Aether?! Customization for Widows?! You spoil me, HC! 🎉

Ya'll have always been awesome, but now it's official! LONG LIVE CITY OF HEROES! 🎉

My biggest issue with HM content was always that I missed the initial rush when they arrived, and after that point when the meta had become Corruptors... nobody wanted anything else. The HC community has generally been a wonderful place the past 5-ish years we've been about, but @arcane is right - the people who still regularly run the 4* content are largely some of the worst people I've had the displeasure to run a TF with. I feel like the addition of 'difficult' content is good, but a lot of folks in the community very quickly decided there was only one way to run it, and it hasn't exactly been an enjoyable experience. I'm sure that toxicity isn't universal, there are a lot of good people here. And the fact that I never settled in with one of the big SGs means I do only ever see that kind of content in PuGs or when a friend's group has an open slot. But I do feel like the HM TFs have already proven that no matter what the devs try to give us in regards to stuff like this, people will just min-max the enjoyment out of it and complain it isn't enough, or burn out and drop it altogether. It's important to remember that not everyone is here for that kind of content.

Stumbled across this one too, and appears to be tied to weapon-draw? Same issue both with the Beast Stance inherent option and the actual Beast Run travel power. Tested with Widow, Axe Brute, Katana Scrapper, Claws stalker, Savage Brute, and Dark Melee Scrapper. Hitting an attack power and then jumping from idle position triggers a male 'grunt' sound for female body types. Notably, Dark Melee and Savage didn't cause the male jumping grunt sfx, which made me think it was specific to having weapons drawn. However, Axe didn't seem to trigger it either. So it may be an issue on a set-by-set basis rather than just weapons, but Widow/Claws and Katana definitely do when the weapon is drawn. Very strange.

This! Thank you! I'd forgotten I can just grab gloom from /soul. And that is a significantly better option than the alternatives I was looking at. It comes late, but it will do just fine. I have tried a few sfx mods for psychic powers and found them either generally more intrusive or just to loud, and unfortunately I don't know enough about that kind of modding to make a file myself. I did find the guide posted here in the forums about editing said files, though, and I may look into it. There are a few other outliers I'd love to find silent options for.

I've got a ranged Fort setup for when I dont feel like being scrappy, and it's got a seamless ST rotation with procced out TK Blast/Subdue/Dominate. It's fairly solid overall, and I'm happy with it's output. But... Subdue's sfx are nails on chalkboard, and the rotation goes so quickly that it's never not playing. I was looking at maybe replacing it with Arcane Bolt since I'm dipping heavily into Sorcery anyway, and it seems to fit similar enough that I shouldn't feel a loss. Bolt has slightly less damage and slighter longer anim time, but Arcane Power procs should theoretically make it a dps increase depending on how often it does come up. It also provides a non-psychic attack (even if Energy is resisted fairly often) to help soften how much robots and rikti suck. Thoughts? Opinions? Alternative solutions? For the most part I actually like the game's sound, and don't want to be driven to muting it over the endless PEWEWEWEW q.q

Theres a few ways, but the cheaper option is the 6th piece of "Sudden Acceleration" Knockback set. It adds a massive negative multiplier to knock, so that it becomes KD instead. Though you'll notice on some enemies that are weak to Knock like clockwork will still get thrown.

The defense you provide does slowly trickle out the higher up you go, but don't forget that even if everyone does build for Defcap, not everyone has a meaningful amount of DDR to prevent it from being stripped. Your bubbles will always be useful, even if it doesn't always feel like it. Especially for your squishier comrades. For procs, I don't generally bother in Repulsion Bolt. I treat it as just the 30s of -20% res personally, as outside of Mastermind or Controller you have better options for slotting up an attack. You can theoretically get a FFB proc in there, but at 4s base recharge... it won't be happening often. Bomb on the other hand is an excellent home for Annihilation: Chance for -res, and FFB. I'm sure there are more optimal setups for it, but I like 2piece Ragnarok for Dam/End + Knock, 2piece Annihil for Acc/Damage + Chance for -res, FFB proc. Can throw more Acc in it via a 6th slot but there are usually better places to spend that. Damping honostly does so much out of the box that you cant enhance, that it's honostly just best to slot for recharge. It can mule a LotG if you need it, as well... but I wouldn't worry to much about proper slotting here. It's biggest contribution is the team debuff resistances and enemy debuffs, and you can't do anything for them.

There's a lot you can do with Plant/Storm, depending on what you want to focus on. In general a lot of Storm can actually be skipped to make room for more Pool and Epic options, as the big components of it are just Steamy Mist/Freezing Rain/Tornado/Lightning Storm. Plant has wiggle room too, as you don't usually need both immobilizes and Spirit Tree is a fairly niche pick. Spore Burst too can be skipped, but I find it a decent one-slot wonder for solo play, with the Heal Self proc in it from that one sleep set. I don't have a build to throw your way, but things I'd point out are that Creepers and Seeds of Confusion are definitely your centerpiece in Plant, and Roots actually puts out significantly more AoE damage than most of the other control set variants of AoE immob. As Doom mentioned, Rune from the sorcery pool is also a fantastic defensive option, and I usually take Sorcery instead of Fighting pool because of it. Especially when paired with Storm, as your endurance is going to be a precious resource. Sorcery also provides Arcane Bolt to help with your ST damage, which controller usually lacks. One thing to be aware of, though. Hurricane is both a blessing and a curse. Like Gust, when it is used poorly you will end up being more of a hinderance to most fast or late-game teams than a help. With Storm it is very important to learn how and when to use KB and Repel to your advantage - nobody likes the enemy being scattered to the winds when they are trying to AoE a mob down, but slotting KB to KD removes the utility of having those herding tools as an option, and Storm very much benefits from smart use of them to lock enemies into a corner for your Tornado and Lightning to mulch through.

It's a bit sad, because I really like the aesthetic of Beasts. But they really need some love from the Devs before I would ever recommend them to someone. New Ninjas are actually a lot of fun, and lot less likely to ragdoll from a strong breeze like they used to be. While I'm not generally one to point at 'tier lists' because I don't feel like it's really possible to sort powersets like that in CoH, there is a reason everyone collectively agrees Beasts are at the bottom when one comes up. /Pain might be able to keep them upright and going, but it'll be far from a satisfying MM experience imo.

...I'm'a just tuck that away for later >.>; good lord look at all that Def

Your post way back about yer conesconescones Blasting is what actually inspired me to give the AT another go! I'm... maybe sorta kinda stuck in a rut and probably enjoy the Dark themed sets a bit to much. After all this testing though, I think I'm mostly coming to the same conclusion... I find myself missing my support kit and all the utility and control Miasma brings. If nothing else, all of this work on Blaster setups has made me appreciate Def and Corr more than I may have before.