Sir Myshkin

RadMelee/DA was one of my first characters rolled on Homecoming and it proved to be quite the beast. Most of Radiation is focused on ST performance, but you gain a lot of mileage out of the contaminate effect and the AoE drop patch. If you pair it with an armor that also has an AoE aura you'll find you do surprisingly well in the AoE department in passive damage. This factor alone is likely a strong reason it may appear to do well in that Trapdoor test as Atom Smasher in conjunction with Irradiated Ground and something like Death Shroud and a few hits of contaminated damage will wipe out all of the minions in a spawn within 6-8 seconds leaving a Scrapper focused on just the Bosses in in each group. I've definitely never had any complaints playing it.

Personally I see that as too counter-intuitive to the intention of the Seekers. They are either getting summoned directly into a spawn in order to take advantage of that small window of buff opportunity, or the player is breaking the Alpha, voiding the given argument about why using the Seekers is relevant in the first place. In either case, both tend to go against how most casually place Traps (setup, draw in). Traps just isn't an active (fast) enough set (IMO) to validate the idea of that proc in one power as the major reason for taking it. EB/AV/GMs are about the only thing in the game that could be exclusively considered worthwhile to focus the Seekers on, and they're a taxing re-summon time wise for a debuff that will invariably get heavily resisted, and the damage they contribute to a fight is negligible. I'm definitely not saying you should stop using them, but from a numbers stand point they're not worth their gross investment in time over other things a Traps user could be doing in their place which is what ultimately makes them a poor power. And no, you can't use the Decimation proc as a form of validation, that only exacerbates to prove my point. Personally I'd much rather the Seeker Drones did something cooler/more thematically appropriate like track down targets and shoot lasers at them. Pew Pew! They should be more like Tornado in that sense, chasing targets and firing off laser blasts with debuffing effects (-tohit and -dam) instead of just exploding.

Hibernate is definitely a power that folks disregard on paper when talking about an IO world, but in the SO world it was the one pin that made Ice Armor very difficult to work around because it gave the set an unstoppable full heal while it held aggro and couldn't damaged for 30/s. With IO's, most casual players won't find themselves too super stressed to be using this power that often, but those pushing the envelope a bit will find themselves in more dramatic situations. There are plenty of enemy groups out in the wild (especially for a solo player) that can threaten an Ice Armor player, and Hibernate functions as that last little nudge of "I win." When my character was traveling from 32-50 I was Tanking for teams running 50+4 and I had my share of times needing to his that buttonn, but it's an instant hold on the battle field while everything locks down, locks on, and holds tight while you charge back up, let all the debuffs fall off, and come back in swinging hard. Quite frankly if I'm not finding a reason to use that power, It just doesn't feel like I'm challenging the character enough.

All this talk of building a new and exciting Blaster and not one mention of a Mad King? For shame the likes I've never seen! Clearly the best opportunity that could every be had is not to follow all these Fire Blast pretenders and go with a real blast monster: Energy Blast! I even updated the build to the most recent Blaster patches with the change to Dynamo, and the best part ever is that this type of build doesn't care about Incarnates at all! They're focused entirely on their own sufficiency pre-Incarnates, and this beauty is one that has the luxury of sporting a back-to-back Aim+BuildUp cycle for non-stop +Damage, and for a solo player the options to unslot for maximum KB effect is always on the table! The build also features incredibly strong melee and ranged damage opportunities, and sports that ever elusive Force of Nature slaps the roof of the imaginary build-car you'll fit so much Resistance in this baby! So what are you waiting for, embrace your inner madness and try out a Mad King Today!

In this thread it’s only a couple of comments, but in the weekly threads that pop up when Traps was on the dock, Seeker Drones, Trip Mine, Time Bomb, those were all the common complaint powers. In fact, I myself skip the Seekers as I find their utility massively, well... underwhelming. The debuff tends to only hit one target out of a spawn, doesn’t last long, and for an alpha breaker Traps is pretty easy to build robustly from a defense standpoint so there’s really just not a great amount of incentive in that power pick to me. More specifically Traps can be boiled down to just Caltrops (forced pick), FFG, Acid Mortar, Poison Trap, and Triage Beacon (which to some is even optional). Everything else in the set is just frill and fun and fancy stuff that otherwise doesn’t have any real significant impact.

Putting a character together tends to be a unique player-specific thing, like having a finger print. Twenty players can put a build together and all end up with a different layout, even if they’re given the same end goals. For me there’s rarely a circumstance I can’t cram pretty much anything and everything into a build without even considering Incarnates, and that often includes soft cap defense of some form. Typically any Alpha slot I drop into a build will be Musculature or Intuition (w/ Dam), I just don’t often find any point or use for including any of the others. Whether or not a build includes something like soft cap defense when it’s not a primary focus of the set(s) is entirely up to the player in my opinion, but there’s really no case to be made to say that it’s because “it can’t be built” to include those metrics because I know they can, it just sometimes takes a trained eye to see the best path for slotting.

Really need to narrow down the “why” of the dislike. Yes the set was changed, but the core of the changes tempered the set for better flow (momentum), so it should be giving a more consistent performance now than before. If she’s feeling like she lost a feeling crunch, than War Mace easily suffices that itch, but otherwise we’d really need to understand more about what’s going on there. Others have mentioned a couple of sets that contain chaining mechanics slash combo mechanics similar to the idea of momentum that might give the allusive thought of flow. If “flow” is a visual sense, Kinetic Melee or Claws have some visual fluidity, Dual Blades and Staff have a flow/flare.

Because frankly it just is, but I find that Kinetics as a whole is superfluous in CoH post i9 anyway. The biggest key aspects that Kinetics brings to a team are damage, endurance, and speed/recharge, and only the damage component here really matters to the Bots. If you’re wanting to stay focused on being a team centered player then you can make the combo work and effectively turn your pets into a suicide squad. With how much recharge Kinetics can generate you’ll never really suffer a great amount of downtime on the bots. Something I tried myself was to grab Whirlwind (you could use Repel, but it’s just not as chaotically enjoyable in the visual department) with a KD converter and just run amok through spawns to pull attention on you while in Bodyguard mode and let the Bots do their thing at damage cap. Basically you’re a short order Defender with an on-call hit squad and this is the real shortcoming of the combo. The largest contributor in your arsenal will end up being Fulcrum Shift, but late game folks are already obscenely powered so it’s like “eh”. It won’t be the case all the time, no, but my experience ended up that I found a better life for the character exemplaring with it after 50 than continuing to do 50 content. Kinetics is a great set to level up with in teams, but a lousy set to have in the end game (in my opinion), and is one that is rarely seen post 50. And for the record of the court, the reason I know the above is because I have a Bots/Kin. I rolled one when Homecoming went up in 2019 because it was a good support build to help teams get going in a non IO reality of those first six months. Eventually the character got shelved and only came out for an occasional TF or MSR, but now it just collects dust.

Originally I had a four piece of that set in Icicles because I personally just don’t find that proc reliable in the sense of survival, but I like the bonuses I can drag out of the set. I shifted it over to Stone Fist in a more recent tinker just to see if I could tighten up a few areas; I’m still not 100% satisfied with it. Stone Fist is actually a solid attack, and the rotation the build focuses on is SF > HM > SF > SS > SF > Gloom which would see a lot of natural attempts to fire off anyway. I also get what you’re saying about wanting to try and stick within a set for full experience, and you could probably get away with Tremors being the only AoE damage (Fault is really just a disorient/kB).

To answer your question more specifically beyond "no provoke", when you enter combat the spawn is going to separate itself against what enemies they come into line of sight with first and engage accordingly. If you or one of your pets activates a power (attack/debuff) prior to visual aggro, then their target will instantly attach aggro back onto them until (or unless) something comes along to take that aggro away. If you pet dies in combat and its engaged aggro-partner is still alive, that mob will not exactly attach to you, but will (per the AI) look for the next radial target to aggro onto, and act accordingly. What enemy AI is checking for in their Aggro AI: Line of Sight or Perception (Depth/Distance) Damage "Debuff" This could be an actual debuff that causes something like -Resistance, or a area effect like a repel from Force Bubble Taunt As in an actual Taunt power like Taunt, Confront, Provoke The AI will typically stack importance in the above order (least to greatest descending). It is possible for something to deliver enough of Damage+Debuff to override Taunt's superior trigger, it's also possible to do just straight up raw damage great enough to get the AI to skip over whatever taunted it and go after the DPS generator, so it's not a hard-line in the sand kind of thing, but the game generally sticks to this pattern. If you have pets that are 45-59% defense prepped, and sufficiently backed with regenerative support, then honestly worrying about whether you're running in as a "prime tank target" is kind of wasted time and effort. Let them soak up aggro effort because those bots being at max miss percentage, with diversified shot opportunities is going to spread your options out better that if someone does get hit you'll be able to collectively recover from it better than if it all came down on you. Personally I see the "Tankermind" concept being more suited for a Resistance focused build, or one where there's less support options available for the pets but the MM itself can get relatively well suited up. I'd use my Demons/ElecAff as an example. I took Provoke on that at 47, I was traveling around with it in much smaller groups and I personally felt that I just didn't have enough punch coming from the MM to keep enemies focused on me and not on the underlings, especially considering how team-focused ElecAff is, and how little it focuses on doing anything enemy-based. By grabbing Provoke and staying in bodyguard with all but the Demon Lord I was able to better coordinate their survival and keep enemies focused on me, which in turn kept the demons tighter together and closer for chains. Whether you take Provoke is really a matter of circumstance in a Mastermind build, and how that "Tankermind" philosophy is being implemented.

Hopped on my PC to post this build and leave a bit more specific note on it then I was willing to on mobile. This is one I have plenty of experience playing personally as Ice/Stone used to be the only Tanker I cared to play because of how much it acted like a Controller in combat when paired up with the Stone Epic, and how well it could hold onto aggro above all other tanks. I did finally take a look at your (revised) build to see what direction you were going with yours, so this should provide a contrast of Incarnate-level-played experience for you to compare against. I don't have any emphasis on Psi res/def in the build and do relatively fine against those enemy groups so long as I'm paying attention and aware of their presence in an encounter. A map full of them may be troublesome, but realistically a bit of patience and bending Hibernate effectively alleviates a lot of that struggle. Some key notes from my experiences: Hoarfrost can sort of just be left on auto if you're on a team that's keeping a decent pace. The natural regeneration bump with your HP boost will be a reasonably decent "trickle heal" with a two two minute top-off. If you have things like the Panacea, PT+Heal, and Numina procs those will all add into trickle effect. In truth, this kind of applies to pretty much any character with the Dull Pain clones. Fault is kind of a "eh" power. It hits a primary target and then has a chance to spread the KB effect outward from that target, but it's relatively pretty weak. Tremor is a much more reliable ability, and if you're doing it for the FF+Rech trigger, all the more reason to use Tremor as you'll likely be surrounded already anyway, and the ability recycles quickly. If I have a spawn of 10+ around me I can usually keep firing Tremor over and over if I want to super-charge my recharge with FF+Rech activations, although this really only applies to Hibernate and Hoarfrost as nothing else has a long timer. There's nothing in Ice Armor nor Stone Melee that needs Hasten. Once the build obtains 70% global recharge everything meets its max capacity outside of Seismic Smash. Remember that Chilling Embrace has a -Damage component which acts like a reverse Resistance, and if you can combo that with other abilities like Darkest Night you can give yourself pseudo-resistance. Adding on to this note, the multi stages of aggro for enemies are stacked into their aggression levels of sight, attacked, taunts, toggles, and status ailments. If you can Damage, Taunt, and Debuff a target, they're yours for life, and these are the three things that Ice Armor does very well in just Chilling Embrace and Icicles alone in conjunction with Gauntlet on Tankers. Mobs will stick to you like glue, and in some cases even fight to get your attention if an over-aggro situation occurs and a mob runs, looses aggro, another will immediately try and take its place (it's actually quite funny to watch). Stone Melee has several pretty strong ST attacks, but is relatively light on the AoE aspect of life, and Icicles won't make up for that, and Tremors will leave you feeling a bit anemic. Despite how much I may have enjoyed feeling like a pocket-Controller, Soul Mastery offers a bit more effect options for Stone Melee in a very good Ranged attack that rounds out its attack chain nicely, gives it a solid (and ranged!) TAoE, and another toggle debuff that'll stack additional -Dam. On Darkest Night + Chilling Embrace: Some of this will get resisted, especially as you crank up to AV level, but the combined starting level for these will be -44%; that's nothing to sneeze at. On top of the -Dam, Darkest Night also throws on additional -ToHit which will help support you defensivesly in dealing with not just Incarnate content, but the offset chance of defense debuff by widening the gap between you and the enemy that much further. Energy Absorption - Sounded like you haven't played around with this much (if at all) yet when you commented about whether it would "fix your endurance". EA is the kind of power you will subconsciously get used to firing off out of habit for the defense buff, and as a consequence every time it'll be a full endurance bar fill. It only takes a couple of enemies for EA to top you off, and it's an auto-hit power so long as there is an enemy within radius at activation. It easily eliminates any and all endurance woes/concerns/considerations/thoughts/what-have-yous. Another neat aspect of this power that doesn't translate well out of Mid's is the fact that the power stacks on itself beyond 10. An initial activation will cap how many bodies it hits, but the power lasts for 45/s, and it is pretty easy to get it down to 15-20/s recharge meaning effective "double stack." At full saturation you'd be talking ~16% Defense

I apologize in advance if I’m missing something just looking at the posted chunk since I can’t pull this up in Mid’s right now, but I don’t think I’m seeing the Impervium 5% Psi resists? If you’re really looking at bulking up that’s the easiest way to invest slots into some resistance. Between five of those, Reactive, and Shield Wall you’ll get a decent base line. In regards to Incarnate soft cap, I know it is possible to hit 45% on Ice Armor without Energy Absorption, so there really shouldn’t be much of a struggle to grab 59% with EA in the mix. I can’t post a build, but I’m fairly certain it’s in the Tanker Proc Monster thread (see signature), along with some additional notes about the build.

Infinitum tanking with a Mad King Stormie on the team, they both walk into a room together, who’s first into the spawn? My standing joke/apology whenever I play it is “I don’t mean to overrule the Tank, but I hav—gotta goooo!”

What Flea linked to is one of the many portals that can help shed some light on the ideals of what it means to create a “Proc Monster” and to focus on that proc mentality. The defender edition will have a lot of the relevant info about blast sets as they’d pertain to a Sentinel, I’d suggest swinging a look at the Tanker edition to see how Melee plays out with Armors too, and also point you towards some “Mad Kings” if you want to take Sentinels on an extreme proc ride. All of those links are in my signature, or easily searchable.

Do we count the initial page load as a roll? I didn’t want to, so I rolled out and kept track how it would’ve played out. If I went off the page-load roll: Invul/SS Tanker (Laaaaame) Personally initiated first roll: Plant/Icy Dom (Actually sounds interesting).

KD favors AoE damage management far better than KB, and what I mean by that is exploding your groups apart means it’ll take even longer to whittle them down versus spamming AoE/Cones on one location. This tends to just translate into a poor gaming experience when you have to constantly chase enemies down, especially solo. Having said that there are only a few powers you really need to focus on KB>KD conversion and that’s Power Burst, Snipe, Explosive Blast and Energy Torrent. The remaining single target blasts have relatively low KB chances, and Nova should realistically be a wipe-out level event when you use it making its KB irrelevant. if you are considering an alternative blast set, as others have suggested Ice/Atomic is a pretty awesome pairing; I have one myself. Ice has several very strong ST blasts, and two location based AoEs that open up positioning options, and Atomic has a decent AoE as well. Don’t disregard what you can do with Energy Blast though, it’s still a good set.

Much of that doesn’t sell for a very high price, so maybe 70-80 million as-is. If you’re sitting on some converters and time, some of that could be flipped into worthwhile sets for better margin. See I am much more the type of player who invests influence into holdings instead of liquid funds. Much as like in life, physical properties hold more intrinsic value, and many of my characters I’ve been able to build with little Inf investment by capitalizing on drops and conversion. The gross worth of all my “holdings” is rather ridiculous compared to what I’ve actually “earned” traditionally. I’ve given away Inf, and given away enhancements, and even when comparatively lower in gifted value, one or two enhancements always seem to be more welcomed. I suppose maybe just on principle that it becomes immediate pay off to fixing their build, but I just find it to be a far more rewarding experience for both parties to send off an email containing those “last few pieces” they’re looking for rather than a chunk of inf.

The only proper way I could answer this poll:

You definitely have to make the call that is best for you as a player, but if you want to explore more of that crazy Blaster power side of things and know you’ll have an appropriate team dynamic to support you (or even if you won’t, and are just crazy enough to try) then check out my “Mad King Specials” (link in signature, it’s within the Blaster subsection).

Depends on what advantage you want to create for the build. Neither Archery nor Trick Arrow needs an excessive amount of recharge to be super effective, and most builds can get to Perma Hasten on their own with little trouble, so Ageless tends to be one you can skip. Barrier can be useful as a general team buff and to give some temporary resistance on top of defense, but this is kind of unnecessarily stacking effects with TA. Clarion wouldn’t be bad for the Mez, but honestly I’d say the best choice would probably be Rebirth because a mass support heal is the one thing TA really can’t do, nor do you yourself have beyond maybe the Defender proc or Inspirations. For Hybrid I’d likely look at taking Melee for the Status Protection. If you know you’ll be on a team or league with a lot of global clarion/Mez protection I’d consider having Assault Radial as a backup.

What would I do? I’d bring a M.A.N.

There was a pretty big stretch of folks doing an enemies buffed, player debuffed, +4/x8, no insp, no temp, master run ITF which proved to be pretty challenging.

Haven't played anything in a while but reading this had me a bit curious and I had a small window of free time this afternoon so I decided to hop on and shake off a bit of rust just to see. Since most of what's been attempted was primarily Melee, I wanted to take in my MKS1 Storm Defender and my Ice/Atomic Blaster for a quick run. 10:15 in one run for MKS1, first thing I've played in months, and it's a character that doesn't take well to collecting dust so I'm not surprised I was super rusty. I found this mission's map to be super frustrating for this character, although I get the way it lays out is kind of in the spirit of controlling spawn areas and herding prevention which absolutely goes against what this character does. I can 4/8 full-clear everything but the ambush of the ITF's first mission in ~25 minutes with this. Only used Clarion for mez, no inspirations at all. 6:06 for one run on Ice/Atomic. Spent around 30-45/s kiting/held which I realistically could have avoided, but... rusty. Also added 5/s to the clock waiting for BU on the last mob just because I wanted to BU+Nuke and run over to Trapdoor. Melee Hybrid for mez protection, no yellows needed (didn't even have any in the tray anyway). If I swapped to Clarion I'm pretty sure I could clear this in 5:00-5:20 pretty consistently but that character only has Ageless at the moment. I've obviously been out of the loop a bit, I assume you have these in AE floating around?

I feel like playing Devil's Advocate. I won't input a side on "good" or "bad" about Regen as a set, but I want to put a theoretical analysis out there based on my own experiences with the set over the years. I played a Claws/Regen Scrapper all those many moons ago on the Retail servers, and I wasn't going to replicate the set here on Homecoming until a bit of a challenge/debate came up last year about pairing Regen with what should have been the most ineffective choice (based on mechanic/animation) in Titan Weapons. I built and IO'd the character much to the same degree I did the first time and ended up with a character that had mid-line defenses that could be insta-patched in MoG and Shadow Meld, runs with Dull Pain on auto, and through Instant Healing and Rebirth is capable of spending a ridiculous amount of time at 170 HP/s regeneration (sans heals). In most teams at the 50+ range I was often diving in head first and clearing through most of the basic content in the game with relative ease, often surviving just on passive choices and Dull Pain bumping up stats alongside any lingering team buffs (so many people floating around with Maneuvers and such). Even in Incarnate content, so long as I was being mindful of my surroundings, I could handle most situations fine solo, but the team dynamic is what's important about what I want to point out. A lot of this thread has been focused on solo performance of the set, very selfishly the prospect of "look how good I am (or am not, in this case) alone!" Teaming is still a big corner stone of this game however, and even in the case of high-end builds, many people are still taking those into 8-body groups and 40-body leagues where they stand out less and less... If I take a Resistance capped Tanker, with 45% S/L added Defense into a League, what is that build truly net positive on? Might manage to fill in some exotic damages, but the core bump really comes down to "not much." We'll even go so far as to exclude Incarnate abilities like Rebirth and Barrier bringing in significant--and massive radius--buffs. If I put two support characters onto the team that bring +Res and +Def, they add next to no value benefit to that Tanker, but if I apply those values to the Regen character I've no exponentially enhanced that character's value/ability. What is truly the superior build, a character that self-caps, with minimal values on healing potential and regen, or a high-performing regen/heal build that can be capped by the support of other team members? I drag along a Force Field and Sonic Resonance Defender (each with Maneuvers), and I've now got 48% Def with 55% Res to all but Psionic being applied on top of my own stats. Even without inherent debuff protection these values start to over compensate for one or two if my own defense is already 32% or higher. If I'm running a Brute for sake of the larger caps, I'm looking at 80% Defense and easily capped S/L Resistance at a minimum, possibly across the board with the correct choice of investments to diversify 35% on each. That Brute, compared to its non-Regen counter part however is packing an insane amount of healing power and at least one instant-kick "get out of jail free" card in MoG in the invent of a potential cascade failure. From this perspective Regen is really the optimal team armor in the game.

For CPU you’ll want at least a 6th gen i5 or AMD 8350 processor or better, a 9th gen i3 (or newer) or Ryzen 3 would also have enough kick. The game was optimized for graphics nearly a decade ago which would put you all the way back to either nVidia’s 900 series or AMD’s 200 series. With how tech has changed the game could actually be played on good settings with a Ryzen 5 with integrated Vega graphics or an i5 10th or 11th gen with Iris/EVO. Those later options aren’t necessarily ideal though. For stuff that’s currently on the market an AMD 580 or nVidia 1650/1660 will run it like a champ.