Sir Myshkin

heh, when you said that this is all I could think of: Bopper with the math's Me doing all the field work.

Nerf Rage!

Storm/Water played as a Mad King will do and go anywhere, and with the shift in power choices it levels a lot smoother now. Link in signature will take you to a ton of info on it, there’s a water specific build in one of the other threads I posted last week.

And you all thought I was joking about Ice farming...

@Snarky the tl;dr is this: 1-3 slots for Acc/Dam/End, fill the rest with procs. If recharge has to be included, any power under 15/s, it doesn't matter, any power 15-30/s in recharge length, less is best, but a little is fine without totally borking the chances. 30-45 there's probably an efficiency sweet spot in here, one recharge enhancement often meets it, don't get greedy and you'll hit it fine. Anything over 45/s and you can fill it till your gills burst and it won't matter. What're the odds on hitting with AoE/Cone? Keep 4-5 in the cone for minimum chances, 10+ for optimal chance, that's all you have to remember. This is today's Proc Lesson.

Just took a swing at this on a Merc/Cold and everything reports normal and fine. Tactical Upgrade is reporting correctly on each Henchman. LotG 7.5% and Def level 50's slotted into the power. AoE equally reflects correct values.

Somewhere along the lines a piece of code was fixed, altered, patched, tweaked, slashed, whatever, who knows, and procs went from not working, to working in rain effects. However! They follow the standard protocol patches/fields/toggles do of Execution/10:s timer. You'll get the initial kick, and then a chance kick every 10/s after that. For most rain effects they have at least a 15/s duration which means at least two kicks. Now is that worth one proc? Probably not. Five procs? Could be argued if there's reasonable room to sacrifice the slots for it as that's high odds of at least 3-5 hits on a patch of 10 in a spawn, twice in the duration. 426-710 minimum extra damage on just basic procs, enough to knock out a minion; purple procs could etch that closer to half a Lieut.

Carry a Force Feedback +Rech in Buckshot and Repulsion Bomb and they’ll proc regularly enough to way over compensate, plus it’s possible to already squeeze around 70-80% global in the build as-is. Full Auto will be up around every 25-30/s still in that scenario which is fine, Hasten isn’t going to change that much. Power Boost, that’s either an all or nothing. Go all in and knock it down to perma, or have it where it lives without stressing the build without reason. Just as with Full Auto, the FF proc will help a lot and you’ll actually only have around 30:s of downtime with Power Boost, longer however if you choose Power Build Up. You don’t need the mule, you’re flush on places for that already, you’re a Defender who—when teaming—has scaling endurance benefits on an already very manageable build. If you’re planning on doing Hard Mode primarily, than it could potentially be more useful purely for the damage bonus. I’ll correct my numbers if I have them wrong later but if I recall correctly Assault on a Defender is 15% 18.75% constant, and Vengeance is 25% 35% for just its duration. You’d have to have at least a 50% uptime on Vengeance for it to even compete with the damage buff that Assault would be granting the team continuously. And with Tactics you’ll already be potentially bringing close to 18% ToHit to the team. Since Vengeance can be impacted by recharge, and has a 120/s duration, it is possible to get it "perma" at the cost of someone's death. This is the factor that makes it impractical to balance uptime without intentional planning. Not saying *don’t* take it, but you very well could find it being a power you rarely/never use unless you plan on spending a lot of time in Hard Mode content. I say that as a Force Fielder myself. Even on a Controller Build the power often just sat there unused, but I carried it because I wasn’t using a boosted build. If you’re playing without it now, try avoiding it and see how you feel. If you do have it, keep going and finish building and see what happens.

You have some imbalance on slotting in a few areas. Some places that could use a slot or two (or just better assortment of choices), and others that are over slotted for the power. One quick thing off the bat, if you're not going to shoot for something like Soul Drain, there's pretty much no reason for Hasten to exist in your build. When you measured your defenses you have everything turned on, and this is an unrealistic scenario presentation. Power Boost (or Build Up in this case) only lasts a short amount of time, this is ideally only being used to boost Deflective and Insulation Shields application, or as a panic button in between for defense bumping. Vengeance isn't really called for here. You could just take Assault and provide effective the same exact benefits 24/7 without waiting for someone to kick the bucket; in fact you'll find you won't see many folks kicking the bucket with 45% defense. Of which, there's set levels of where defense matters. For most of the game 45% is the "cap" (or what we call the Soft Cap) when the value of liklihood to get hit has reached its peak, then the iCap (59% rounded), and the Hard Mode (which is just scaled ridiculous). This build pretty much provides "iCap" to the party (just shy, 56% rounded). These are the goals to try and focus on with something like Force Fields. For Proc Monstering, you do want to try and leverage a little bit of your damage since Defenders do still get some decent value there, at least one IO's worth is a good call. Personally I'd invest two slots to patching things like Acc/Dam/End and then filling in the rest, but some powers you can slum down a bit, and Defenders get a lot of mileage out of Tactics thankfully. I went back to the original shell and modified it into a full build to give you a comparison:

If I could offer any advice, it would be this:

"Talent isn't a trait we are born with, it is a trait we earn over time with practice." - This was my Educational Thesis. I may have come up with the build, but I didn't learn to pilot it without a lot of time behind the wheel, and I failed a LOT of ITF runs before I came up with the undisclosed 4.0 build that I keep for myself (sorry folks, but some super heroes just don't reveal their identities). Bruce Wayne didn't become Batman overnight. Power on my friend, and may there be a day we can run a Storm/Nrg 4* Squad!

I thought it was obvious that the best way around these changes was to just start Ice Farming instead? I mean, who like Fire anyway? It’s hot, and burns, and gets ash everywhere.

It took me 16 years to roll a Dom to 50. Full transparency: I don’t like playing them, I’d much rather be a Controller or a Blaster, but there is one Dom combo that lets me do something unique that I can’t quite pull off any other way, and that’s Gravity/Fire. Wanted to do some kind of Fire Blaster for a long time but they never seemed to stick, and I’ve toyed with a lot of renditions of Gravity Controllers trying to find something that amused me with Dimension Shift, but it wasn’t until Fold Space that it finally clicked and I found my ultimate lazy Blaster. There’s nothing, not even a Tank, that can control enemy placement like this build can. Tossing and yanking spawns across rooms at the whim of a button, dropping them into a Rain of Fire and Fire Ball doom. Then, when there is a team rolling I can just pull and pull and pull and they keep slashing and hacking and never questioning why the hordes don’t seem to stop pouring from the sky in a blissful shower of XP. Some builds just wanna watch the world burn.

Assault Rifle really isn't that bad and gets a lot more flack than it should considering. If that's the direction you're going then it'll be very easy to stream line that build since there's only a core handful of powers in that set that are truly needed once you weed out the duds. Burst, Buckshot, Sniper Rifle, Ignite, and Full Auto; honorable mention to M30 for extra AoE, but purely as a proc'd out power because its base value is just too low to have worth, but it does proc very nicely and is another great FF+Rech kicker. With Soul Mastery for Soul Drain, Power Boost, and grabbing that Pet for added damage, you can put together a pretty nasty little bubbler once some Recharge packs into the build to get Soul Drain down. Another small secret that most tend not to consider too, if you get enough active recharge into a build to get Power Boost capable of being near-perma, its effect does impact toggles like Weave, Maneuvers, and Dispersion Bubble and turn Power Boost into a panic button for debuff prevention, or change up play modes for harder content. This is a "blank" shell to give a general idea of that ground work. It's basic-slotted just to show where the build can start from. It's very easy to get it from this point to 45% M/R/A with just a couple of set bonuses, and you can leave a lot of the attacks proc'd out. Given that Mid's isn't updated I didn't really go through a ton of crazy effort because it wouldn't be 100% accurate. Edit: I forgot to mention I left one power slot open for a travel choice, and there's 14 unplaced slots for.. where ever. Like I said, really a shell.

This is what I'm going to be testing shortly. I just didn't manage to get the character up to 50 and figured out before things went live (yes yes I know auto-leveling and such existed on Beta, but I had intentions on actually just keeping this around hopefully so...) LotG 7.5 and a Def in Tactical, Steadfast 3% and a Basic +Res in Equip seems that should mostly tap out the benefits of both of those abilities for enhancement purposes (values don't go up dramatically). Yes I did take Burst and M30, honestly Burst isn't a bad attack, and M30 will be decent crowd control with access to a FF+Rech Proc, plus both attacks proc out really well. The Mercs should have just about 45% Ranged and AoE defense and 75% Resistance. edit: I did that math without even accounting for Serum on the resistance and just realized it now. Equip with enhancement will hit ~40%, three Res uniques (10/10/15) hit 75%, Serum is stupid bonus I totally forgot about.

I was just talking about the Red Skull at work today (who would win in a fight against The Shredder, actually). Merce don’t carry much for innate self protection other than a built in healing unit with the Medic, and some stealth with the Spec Ops, so they’re straight up a bit harder to focus on. Sets like Poison, Radiation, these don’t directly benefit the general safety of your Mercs upfront like other sets. The area of first focus you can work from is resistance though as they do have a starting point here, and there’s two pet unique IO’s that’ll pump them another 20% with just two slots which is huge. Going from that, and your desire for a “corrupt” theme, Pain Domination can fit this very well as it’s easily on par for that type of “leadership” Red Skull presented. The AoE heals and +Damage will also spread well across your mercs, and with the change to Serum making it impact all your Mercs, you can stack some nice boosts. Between their inherent resistances you can enhance now, and Pain, you should be able to break the squad into the 60-70% range. Something I’m testing for a Merc/Cold is using Socery with the Absorb toggle on the Medic to help buffer his health, and then a heavily prof’s Enflame on my strongest enemy target to get them to cause frantic fire on everything and help break up the focus on the Mercs while it adds even more damage. For your theme I might suggest dipping into Intimidate and the fear AoE counterpart. Fear is a a poorly resisted effect and you’ll be able to throw it around pretty freely (for the most part). Also, these changes are all live now, so now need to hop on to the beta server!

Actually pretty easy to swap Water Blast for Energy Blast since there's almost identical counterparts between the two sets to make the flip happen: And its main secret to being endurance neutral is in proper cycling of Conserve Power and Victory Rush around the occasional use of Unleash Potential. After Incarnate Unlocks, taking Support Radial also adds another element of endurance management with its global end discount. If these don't get managed properly the build can still consume itself pretty quickly. There should absolutely never be an overlap of CP and VR for any reason, or it will suffer downtime (and y'all have no idea how crazy "downtime" feels when this thing is traveling).

-Regen works against enemy targets the same way it does against players, except that very few things in the game give players Regen Debuff Resistance, and there are tons of auto effects for Enemies to receive defense against this, cheaters. All scales against max hp the same way, and is a percent gain. If we take away the percent gain, then the earned value goes down. The server typically ticks in rounds of like... 2/s I think? I haven't done testing checks on this stuff in a while so don't quote me on that, but I think it bumps the heal check every couple of seconds, and for Pylons it's even longer. For little critters this doesn't mean much, it only really matters for the biggin's like AVs and GMs where they have five digit carry overs. If an AV is rocking 35,000, and regens 150 HP/s, and we want to drop that percentile down, we gotta stack up those -Regen's. I believe someone mentioned earlier already that something like Poison Trap will cap out on Purple Patch with +4 to like 90% reduction which would give us like 15 HP/s. That's like bonkers nothing. The Regen of an enemy is in direct counter to the damage we as players are doing, the longer they're alive, the more they heal. If I hit with a 300 DPS attack, and they heal 150 HP/s, I'm only effectively doing 150 DPS in the wash out. But If I apply a massive -Regen debuff, do 300 DPS, and drop them to 15 HP/s, I'm now doing an effective 285 DPS. For the record, this is all clown math and not hard math meant purely as demonstration, please don't take these as pure game numbers!

Also, shout out to you for this because you beat me to it. I was planning to do this after work last night but fell asleep before getting around to it. 👍

Yeah, about that... It was never used in the Requiem video. It's slot 1 on tray 1. Maybe you were confusing it with the Caltrop icon on tray 3? They do look very similar, and if the video was loading under poor quality I could see some confusion in the matter, but no Poison Trap was not used.

This just compels me to want one of these things even more dagnabbit.

Well there's upwards of 400 active players on at any given time, between that and the forums clearly I don't have enough social bandwidth to also maintain a relationship with co-workers too. Something's gotta give. Guess I gotta quit my job.

Back peddle a little to what I said before: The removal of the -Regen does not impact the current state of performance on Beta when compared to the Live version on a singular target. I can achieve the same performance time against an "even con AV" on Beta as I can on Live simply due to the DPS shift and attack assortment increase, no inclusion or use of the MM Rifle Attacks in either case. Including the -Regen in the MM rifle attacks is more a courtesy I daresay than it is a necessity at the moment because it is giving the option of having that additional bump which would in fact increase performance for the Beta conditions. You can choose to skip the MM attacks and go about life in exactly the same state of mind as before, or you can take one, two, or three of them going forward and perform better than you did in the past.

I don't think this is going to happen. Too many of us have tested the state of the current changes and shown that the set is performing "better" at standard content than it did before, and equally with their DPS hitch when it comes to singular targeting. It would be better to look for areas to improve the direction things are at right now then trying to drag the -Regen through the mud.