Sir Myshkin

No, you're clearly making a Lee, of all things.

Adding to this as it can easily be missed for those not familiar with it: The first drop down chooses category of powers shown. If the ability isn't initially chosen in the build, it won't list in the immediate graph. Changing to "All Clicks" will provide all options and allow better shuffling around between them. That can be initially confusing/frustrating to figure out both in an empty build, and a build with skipped powers that one wants to compare to. Also, View > Damage Per Animation will straight adjust all attack data to the DPA(nimation) values with both $enhancedvalue ($basevalue) in the data box. Before choosing powers skimming through their untouched DPA can help make more relevant initial choices. This same type of information is available in-game in the power-selection screen while leveling under the "Show Details" button, or in the Enhancement Management screen for powers already selected. Personally I don't ever turn off "View DPA" unless for a very specific one-off need of that full value.

Yes, and Pain Domination has a similar ability with... hold on, one sec. Share Pain (which also gives a weird +Dam to the caster). I was testing the waters with a Ill/Pain concept (purpose driven for Phantom Army costume cloning). Historically I dislike being a "healer" per-say and the build was more bent around "benefit me" in its final run, but DFB's and all, you know? tl;dr Yes, I killed myself with Share Pain without considering the impact on my health at the time. Also, it was freaking hilarious. 🤣

Walks in, find a piece of drift wood on the endless beach that is Energy Melee hate, begins drawing a very deep line in the sand. Proceeds to confidently walk over the line. Energy Melee was fine, haters gonna hate. Walks back over the line. But you know, I wouldn't be opposed to a buff or three. 😇

There was one posted earlier in the thread on the first page, but just in case I'll just re-link it here if it's not as updated as I may recall. Energy/Atomic Blaster: You said you were wanting ranged-only, of which I'd just say pull Negatron Slam out and toss in whatever you want (I'd probably do Assault or Super Speed maybe, or wiggle-in Radioactive Cloud for a safety-net AoE hold) and do with the slots what you will. Noticed you had Flame Mastery in your empty build, if you're not planning on trying to bend something like Unleash Potential, Adrenal Booster, or one of the epic "T9" like Force of Nature, there's not really anything else inside Energy Blast or Atomic that's particularly special to the idea of a "Mad King" build and having it laced with FF+Rech isn't... really doing anything. Having one proc each in Torrent and Explosive will be enough supplement to help boost basic performance, but more isn't really necessary, and at that point we're just talking about a standard-issue "Proc Monster". It's up to you to tailor the build.

Updating the main post with some additional links to help folks find other builds that came up since this was first posted. Should include the notation for the "Phenominal Cosmic POWER!" (heh) SS/Rad Brute that's been mentioned a couple times, and some other things with it. I'll also toss in a couple others here so I can link them in for other tinker builds I haven't included anywhere. This will become my edit-point going forward (the main post has too much content now and is buggy editing), a link will be provided at the end of the post. Battle Axe/Radiation Scrapper: Updated Energy Blast/Ice Armor Sentinel: Updated Energy Blast/Energy Aura Sentinel: Tanker version of the aforementioned SS/Rad high-damage build: Updated Energy Blast/Electric Manipulation/Force Master Build (A Modification of the original build from the front page, this one is updated to include Dynamo and is more rounded as a generalist play build while retaining the core Mad King concept better).

By taking and relying on Agility at 50 you're going to find the build some what lacking in sub-50 content (exmplar, and just the general level-up process). You can reach those numbers without reliance on that Alpha choice, and you'll also have Phalanx Fighting to help support you a bit with debuffs if you team along the journey. There's some other areas where there's a lot of "meat left on the bone" as the saying goes (areas to get more improvement). Since your current build isn't shy about Purple/ATO's, then I'll leave this one here for you to compare against. Since Stalkers have the same mitigation modifiers things will exchange evenly, just have to swap out the ATO's (which happen to be pretty much the same bonuses).

Story Time! Going to spoiler this to keep the thread cleaner and the content easier to ignore/skip over. tl;dr Defender was specific to the necessity of the concept of walking up to a regular citizen and saying "Hey, can you toss a wild punch and push a button on this random stolen Sky Raiders tech? Cool, you're a hero now." What chain are you rotating through? Typical for Claws: FU > Focus > Slash (-Res) > SW (-Res) [5/s, allows for easy 2x stack on FU] This used to be the considered standard: FU > Focus > Slash (-Res), but harder to achieve for the recharge needed to get FU down, and it appears having Shockwave with the extra -Res is marginally better, and easier to obtain. This shorter chain allows for a brief window of 3x FU every third Focus.

So I did a thing... Posted about it a couple of places, put it together (like legitimately leveled this up, about 25% off XP boosters too). I suppose in total I've probably spent 20-30 hours playing around with the character, did a few things solo just to get a feel for it, and at the end of the day it has become something I absolutely don't enjoy playing unless I'm "role playing" the 1920's Harvard Boxing League Teddy Roosevelt personality I wrote into his biography. My Primary Attack Chain: Weaken Resolve > Cross Punch > Boxing > Kick > Cross Punch > Boxing > Kick Yup, that's right. The Fightin' Pool Baby! Heavily peppered with Caltrops, two twists of Acid Mortar, and a generous gassing of Poison Trap. Without Any Incarnate Abilities AT ALL: Cleared the Pylon 6:14 (230 DPS) With the addition of T4(Assault Radial, Degenerative Radial, Ageless Core, Musculature Core, Mighty Core): 3:40 (302 DPS) All Star Power: Caltrops, for doing well over 10 DPS on its own Had to port the character over to the test server to do the Incarnate Inclusive Run, character barely has the Alpha slot unlocked on Live, and I'm highly unlikely to actually do anything else with him moving forward. I'm not much for the gun-themed sets. The MAN:

Personally I used Super Speed traditionally, but with the inclusion of Speed of Sound having Jaunt is just way too useful in my book, so I try and stick with that if I can.

I did not, and will not remake my original namesake for any reason under the same vein that I no longer use that same moniker online. I did have one character I spent an insane amount of time on that I recreated to be the "Head of House" for my personal SG, but once he hit 50 he's never been on a team since and only exists for base creation/design. It just didn't feel right to bring many of them back as that chapter is closed and it felt too much like opening an old wound.

And once again, I repeat myself when I say: I'm not talking about the set, I am talking about Rage. I am not talking about Procs, I am talking about just Rage. Again, no, you cannot invalidate the existence of IO sets or bonuses that come from them. They are clearly an integral part of the game. We can exclude damage procs without question, that's static and doesn't prove anything for anyone one way or another, but not the interactions of sets, and the bonuses they provide. Besides that, I already proved with a demonstrated build it was possible to build a character on SO's alone to invalidate the Defense Debuff if one so desired. Even in the case of a non-IO world, Temporary Powers still work exclusive to the crash and are an alternate option that has always existed, and has been used. It becomes a loop hole out of the crash in the first place. The crash is either ignored and supplemented through other means, or falls in a timing window that it never mattered in the first place, so to say the hundreds of Super Strength characters in existence all sit and twiddle their thumbs during the crash... come on. Procs play by the same rules and regulations on all AT's, that in itself is equal playing field for all, and no circumstance exists where procs imbalance an entire set compared to any other within each AT. Inherently, that's balance because its fair use for all. Rage is not fair use for all, Rage is greedy and selfish and willing to break the rules to benefit itself and hide behind the disinformation of a crash effect that is so forgettable folks probably don't even notice it happens until it's nearly over. We must not have any novices playing the game then because I haven't seen any posts complaining about "Rage killed me," and it would be a fool's errand to try and say people aren't double stacking Rage in excess; it is by the nature of this game one of the immediate things most players of Super Strength strive to achieve. Look, we're both entitled to some form of an opinion on the matter, but the proof is in the data and math. I'll leave you with this one singular tidbit: The adjusted DPA of Jab (the worst functional T1 Melee power in the game) with the crash effect accounted for, and double Rage is 49.66. Since Rage is permanent and easily achievable to do so, the effect is static 100% of the time meaning it instantly adjusts the function of the entire set and redefines it. This makes Jab the fourth strongest un-enhanced DPA attack behind Charged Brawl (overcompensated for being one of only two ST in EleMelee), Barrage (heh, funny that), and Swipe (Follow Up). Shadow Punch can be pseudo included as having better potential under Soul Drain, but that effect is not consistent, and much harder to achieve a "perma" state, so it gets Honorable Mention. If you can't see that as broken, I don't know what to tell ya. Oh, Nerf Rage.

You're trying to make the claim that the crash, in the power's current state, in the current game, is balanced, when it is not. Even if we exclude the ability to mitigate the impact of the -Damage during that 10/s window, it does not change the fact that a double-stacked Rage vastly over clocks any attack utilized by that character in a permanent vacuum state. The very specific reason the original Devs didn't want to immediately port it over was because they already understood that giving Scrapper's a constant buff was too strong, let along one that stacked up to 160% irregardless of the crash. The part that massively gets missed (or excused away by the crash) is the fact of how aggressive Rage truly is on buffing performance even on Tankers and Brutes, and the recent Tanker modifier buff exasperates this even further. Prior to the Buff the variance in modifier wasn't quite as extreme, and Tankers as a collective were generally under performing except where Super Strength was in place because it was capable of stacking itself up to bring SS into a feeling of passable/comparable strength. Now that the modifier has been improved on Tankers, and Fury has been better balanced for Brutes there's no longer any vague layers of confusion to hide under when demonstrating just how broken the buff is. There's enough players out there who are fully aware of how much impact Rage has and are afraid of loosing that, and thus fight so hard for every inch of thread they can to keep that rug from being pulled out from under them. As for the Defense Debuff, again it is a laughable and easily ignored component of the power. Shield Defense is a terrible set to try and use as a scapegoat because of how excessive it can build up additional resistances on top of exceeding 45% defense on positionals on Tankers. And don't try and use the "balance on SO's" claim, we all know that's a farce at this stage of the game when it comes to even the most casual play. It takes very very little for a Tanker to find a pathway that invalidates a simple short-term debuff. Shield/SS Tanker, Ignores Crash: And just to prove the point, how about SR/SS built on SO's to really highlight just how aggressive IO's can make the scenario when one can achieve these levels on SO's alone with a Tanker: I'm not even after the rest of the set. I'm just after Rage.

"Cato finally won the debate..." Just saying.

Great, way to let the cat out of the bag. Might as well just go ahead and tell them about the new Clown pet class for MM's and just get the spoilers out of the way now.

The reputation system might not mean anything, but thanks for being here, being yourselves, and being a part of this community we call home. ❤️ That's the only kind of rep that matters 🙂

Agnostic Procs and Judgement's don't care about -Dam Debuffs. It may not be a lot of damage, but damage is still damage for 10/s sake, and Judgement hits hard enough to matter even if it's just on one target. The way it ends up balancing out is by putting the Gaussian's +BU in Rage to pop it after the crash expires and gain an additional +80% on top of 160% buff, which is enough to run 3-4 attacks with KO Blow. As for the Defense Debuff... That's largely ignorable for half the sets between Brutes and Tankers when they can Resistance cap (and probably didn't have Defense to begin with). Or run a Granite build that's got so much mitigation it's just leaking out of the bedrock. It's all management, and that crash is just silly. nerf RAGE!

Small history lesson on Defiance (the Blaster Inherent): The current version of Defiance is already in place to what you're thinking: Attack, get +Dam. Each Blaster attack has a specific buff value it bumps Blaster damage by for a small set duration, and they stack up together to give Blaster's a continual buff the more they blast. You may notice that this works an awful lot like Fury, except its set immediate values instead of a gradual building force. That's because Fury was the case-study of a "better choice", but they couldn't just repeat that on Blasters, so they modded to what we have today. The old version of Defiance was based on HP. The more damage the Blaster took, the more Defiance they got, but it was an aggressive exchange and only really started to pay off when the Blaster was <20% of their HP. Blasters used to die a lot. And suicide a lot. It was a dark time, and no one liked it. No one wants to go back to this.

A lot of practical testing. Super Strength doesn't necessarily equate to quite the same clear speed as Titan Weapons because of the multitude of cones at TW's disposal, but from a raw damage perspective Foot Stomp is just as capable of doing ~200 damage per application as Whirling Smash is, followed up by an attack that dishes out ~1,000 points per hit every 6-7/s (KO Blow for SS, FT or AoD as close options in TW). Everything that empowers Super Strength comes from Rage's ability to grant 160% permanent +Damage buff which exceeds the single-power granted buff of any other set. Dark Melee's Soul Drain is the closest competitor and its buff is scaled off the amount of targets it can successfully hit meaning there's always random failure to achieve full mass, and it's much harder to get "perma" status. Rage only has to get to 70/s cooldown which doesn't take much. One side effect of Dark Melee is also its lack of clear and prominent AoE, it just doesn't have the "oomph" of something like Foot Stomp in its set list. Rage is so egregious that I don't even need to take any powers other than Rage, KO Blow, and Foot Stomp from Super Strength to still be a ridiculously overpowered Tanker/Brute. I can fill with Boxing and Cross Punch to gain access to a Fury of the Gladiator -Res proc (which doesn't even trigger that consistently cause it's a low-range cone) to marginally increases the insane leverage of Rage's buff for those 10 extra seconds it randomly grants. If I can take one ability from a set, and fill the remainder of an entire build with pool powers, and still perform better than mid-line comp to any other set, what's that say about how aggressive that one ability is changing the dynamic of the AT? The only way anyone's going to give "Rage" to Scrappers is if it's nerfed into the ground, and it pains me to say it, but it'll probably never happen because every time the topic comes up in earnest, the whole of the community rages (pun intended).

Oh, it's okay, let them have their secrets. stumbles over a pile of builds in one of a dozen folders laying around Hey, look what I found I built back in May of 2019, a perfectly translatable iCap Stalker build: And looking at it briefly, there's still room for improvement in there, nice! 🤣

Sorry, I have to call shenanigans on those Tanker stats. They are far too over-cooked to be just Granite turned on, probably more than just the Tanker ATO+Res I'm betting too since you're going from near cap in one to 66% in the Brute version. That's 24% loss and just AT migration wouldn't cover that much variance. Also, what offense is being sacrificed by translating into a Brute? Tanker build has the +Res toggled off to show true values (but it's somewhat easy to stack that power up a couple times to cap S/L/E/N). For full transparency, Brute Build: And Tanker Build: It is the second pinned topic in the General Discussion sub forum, and is "current" as of March 2020. There are about 3,000 more level 50 Brutes than Tankers as of that update. There are approximately 44,000 more created Brutes than Tankers in total from active accounts.

Considering Kheldians aren’t a “Melee” class in the first place, that shouldn’t be a concern. They are a mid-ranged specialist with high intensity survival and an assortment of short-range skills. They are effectively “Short Stop” on the battlefield. Not tied to one specific base, but able to step in to multiple spots to complete a team dynamic. They will never really overtake any other role because of their ability to flip-flop.

I can hear my phone's battery crying already. As if I didn't spend enough time in that program. You monsters.

Entirely dependent on being on a Win10 OS, but WinKey+G is a built-in function that has game recording. It auto-recognizes the game being run and only records that specific window and nothing else, regardless of what you may flip/tab/open while it runs. Up until the full-on media restriction this is what I used to record any of the test footage I had uploaded to YouTube after crunching/editing the files down in Premier (simply convenience). The "App" that is attached to that hotkey is called "Xbox Game Bar" and is baked into Windows 10 as of... 1803 update I think, it was there but looked/functioned a bit differently before that patch and runs much better since then. Fair warning it's going to capture at native resolution with no artifacts (as is my experience anyway), which translates into potentially hefty file sizes. You'll easily get into the multi-gig territory after 30-45 minutes. Saves all the files as MP4.

Proposal for Changes to Electrical Blast: Reduce Lighting Bolt's animation time to 1.17/s (down from 1.67/s) Turn Short Circuit into a Chain Effect Range 40' Cast time reduced to 2/s and altered to [insert ranged option] that includes the halo effect of the current power Keeps same stats (Rech, -Rec, -End, Cost, Acc, Dam) Merge into single hit of damage instead of DoT, chain effect will over account for the DoT delay that existed before Change Aim to "Build Current" Increase to 65% +Dam, 10/s Lower to 15% +ToHit, 10/s Gives +Recovery, 20% 10/s Grants +3 Stacks "Current Charge" Tesla Cage Reduce Cast Time to 1.67/s Increase base damage to 150 (as total DoT) These changes bring it in balance with other single target hold attacks in Blast Sets. Voltaic Sentinel Previous Attack Removed Now has "Chain Lightning" Max 6 Chains Mag 2 Sleep 40% Chance "Knocks target's synapses out of whack causing target to black out" New Mechanic: "Current Charge" Charged Bolts, Lightning Bolt, Ball Lightning -End and -Recovery effect increased by 3% for each stack of "Current Charge" built up. Zapp Consumes "Current Charge" stacks Instant Cast Notified Orange Ring Tesla Cage Consumes "Current Charge" stacks Reduces cast time to 1.1/s Amplifies to -50% Endurance Notified Orange Ring Passive Buff Each stack of "Current Charge" grants 5% Recovery on Player Solution Solves: Improves Single Target performance through correction of Tesla Cage into an appropriate ST attack compared to other Blast Sets, and lowering Lightning Bolt to provide better DPA balance compared to Charged Bolt (very little variance in live format) Removes the short coming of Short Circuit forcing an otherwise entirely Ranged set into Melee for one ability that roots the player for an extended period Develops more utility out of Voltaic Sentinel, giving it more value in combat and patching up the poor AoE performance of the set Addition of "Current Charge" adds additional value and theme to -End/-Recovery debuff, creates trade-off in recovery performance for player as well making the set more forgiving in endurance use, stays in theme, and brings it up to a more appropriate "mid line" package with consumption through Zapp and Tesla Cage. Provides the opportunity to better leverage the secondary effect on Lieutenants and Bosses.