Sir Myshkin

Just seeing the thumbnail image behind the play button is enough that I remember when this happened, someone found a way to exploit an aspect of the character creation process (if I remember right having something to do with costume files?) which resulted in some... nightmare fueled creations for a few days.

While I appreciate the attempt at candor and wanting a clean debate on this, unfortunately these types of banners and billboards in the game did reflect the type of real-world responses the occur(ed) in America and are a ... I don't want to say parody because it makes it seem joke-ish, but they are a dark contrast to that existence. A lot of ... things have happened in the world in more recent years that may give pause or reflect differently now on the use of something like this when done with intent, but it doesn't change that even now this style of propaganda is around. Remember a lot of this game was in development almost 20 years ago, and while the development team did make modifications and updates to various different aspects of the game (including billboards at one point), at its latest we're still looking at an eleven year variance in how we as people now would see those billboards compared to back when the game was live. Taking this into consideration, this is probably not a topic necessarily directly discuss in the open because the purpose was there, I would encourage you to open dialogue with the devs, and maybe open a suggestion thread instead just talking about a more updated ecosystem for the billboard content in the game.

Speaking specifically for myself since you did quote me, and I feel you did not understand my sentiment, I will repost the following from the remainder of that paragraph with added emphasis: Frankly put I am not going to run any team at a setting I know I can't handle solo when the dynamic of the team under me is uncertain or has not otherwise had an opportunity to prove otherwise, and in line with that if the dynamic of the team is incapable of handling a higher setting, I will drop it back accordingly of my own judgement. Despite what some may protest, I will not watch people pointlessly kick the bucket at the expense of keeping a mission +4. I hold myself accountable to being able to keep the team safe and that starts at a minimum level of expectation that if I myself can't do it alone, I also will not burden that risk on anyone else. I'm not the type of person that walks into a level 50 map with an unslotted character they have no idea how to play and pops a mission up to +4 and drags 7 others unknowingly into something crazy like Carnies or Pantheon and expects them to carry me, that's [expletive]. Having said that, to your original intent of your post, yes I agree that there are situations where miscommunication (or just lack of) result in strange dynamics, split teams, and idealiz mindsets of "I'll just do it alone" which don't necessarily help anyone. Are there time were having a dividable team is beneficial? Sure, if it's clear and understood, and the team is able to make that double or triple fracture to complete a mission faster, then I won't necessarily tell a team no. Back in the day that's just what Scrappers did, and it was kind of their thing, but now a days everyone thinks they're a Scrapper and we end up with a bag full of muder-kittens that can't take commands. So, I get what avenue you came from, that's just not my street.

I haven't actually messed around with it yet. There's on-paper, and then there's in-action with this one and I've kind of waited until it went live to commit time to it, just not sure what approach I'm going to take. It should perform relatively similar to what Energy and Water do, but it has other unique synergies that could be interesting with other sets involved like Electric Affinity, so I haven't decided what to do.

Somewhere in a warehouse on Peregrine Island a Malta operative is opening up a box that just got dropped off that has parts for a gun drone and a new rifle targeting scope. Instructions just say “Now with more arcs and degrees!!”

It takes a little getting used to for those first jumping into the build, especially on the level-up, but once at 50 there's a pretty poignant pattern to things. Your first full bar of endurance is part of the management plan, once it starts to dip into the lower 25% is when hitting Conserve Power starts the cycle; for the next 90's you can do literally anything in the world, and when it drops, you should have a relatively solid blue bar still, use it up some while you look for and kill a Lieut or Boss (or better if you're that lucky) and pop Victory Rush. Watch the world burn beneath you for two whole minutes! And by then, Conserve Power is going to be loaded back up again, but Victory Rush will need 300/s, so your next fallback if you need it will be Unleash Potential. to cover. However, if at any point Unleash Potential gets popped and you're tailing off or outside CP or VR, then of course you don't need to hit either of those because UP will be covering you for its 60/s duration. Eventually get the Hybrid Support Radial because it'll act as a secondary UP for defense as well as gives a global End discount to everything (which actually really helps). The biggest way of knowing or becoming a bit more subconsciously aware of your endurance bursts comes from when you start cycling Lightning Storm and Nova more. If you're dropping three LS a minute and three Novas every two, you'll be at the max mercy state of your end drain because that's about 80 end right there.

Message me with your in-game global handle and I'll e-mail you the two defense IO's, that'll get you moving in the right direction in a hurry.

Just to touch on it since no one else really did, you mentioned feeling squishy and on a defense-based character (to me) that tends to mean the character isn't utilizing their fullest capacity. You have that character at least up to level 26, so it is 100% viable for you to have that character reach 45% to Melee, Ranged, and AoE, and once you do that a lot of your "squishy" feelings will magically disappear. And no you don't need to spend a fortune to do it. This example here is built on just standard SO's and includes just two cornerstone IO's in Bo Ryaku that each give 3% defense. As shown this is 38% to M/R/A which, at level 26 is often good enough for a casual, but I don't know what kind of settings you're trying to challenge yourself with solo. The only investment this needs to get better is 6% defense to each of those categories. That's two Touch of Deaths, two Mako's Bites sets, Scirocco's Dervish in Dragon's Tail. Or you could leave it on SOs and pick up Maneuvers and Combat Jumping and be covered.

Of course there's one of these. @Deathstrik3, @BuiltDifferent5

One w/t Shield was there more int he mind set of having something to support tougher situations where getting resistance numbers up would matter like high to-hit that might break over the defense, or realistically Hard Mode. Unleash kind of served as a panic button for, again, high to-hit situations or the possibility of DDR corruption. And "better" might be subjective. I don't necessarily look at that build and think it could be better, but that it isn't right.

I got distracted in making an unkillable Regen Brute that the SD/KM project never took growth after I made the character. Later looking back at the build I don't like it (near say I may hate it) despite it being an actually sound and fully functional build. Debuff room, reasonable Resistances, with three team mates in range Phalanx bumps the defense into the low 60's, it maintains proc-focus in a few areas and has a lot of solid strengths. Weaken Resolve is a one-shot burst debuff every 15/s in a chain for "-25%" Res, Gloom bumps performance too, With AAO, Assault, and Power Siphon at full charge this thing rivals my strongest SS Rage builds. And yet I'm not satisfied with it XD

Okay, first thing, if we're comparing how Ice and Shield are going to play in the sandbox, Chilling Embrace does -14% where AAO only does -7%, but if we're partnering up with Kinetic Melee that can be a pretty wishy-washy comparison. SD/KM is really the more ideal pairing, AAO and Burst can get the same level of -Dam as Chilling does, but AAO is going to help rack up KM's damage more and that's kind of a big thing for a set that hits fast. Yes, marginal downside but is easy to overlook because it doesn't take much effort to keep Power Siphon up pretty consistently. The ability itself is a 10 up, 10 steady, 10 down, and its recharge can be reduced to nearly 30/s with the right effort so keeping it up "perma" is pretty doable. A more casual build can even do 38-40/s which is still pretty reasonable. Is it crazy noticeable? No, not alone. Add Darkest Night in to the mix and suddenly it gets a lot more aggressive. Keep in mind that most debuffs can get resisted by as much as half, so that 7% suddenly becomes 3.5%, which can often have someone go "eh, not worth it." But 3.5% x3 active cycling attacks, 4 with an AoE is suddenly a lot bigger, especially if you add the Interface -Dam Proc in there, and then Darkest Night on top of that for another 10-15% (reduced)? We're getting into the 25-30% range of -Dam, and those are noticeable numbers. Having said all that, going back to your thread title: -Damage Debuff Specialist If you want to try and achieve that then you're going to have to look in an entirely different place: Trick Arrow. Poison Gas Arrow is going to do huge amounts of -Dam, half of which is unresistable out of the gate. Pair that with Chem Rounds on Dual Pistols and that's about as tenacious as one can get with -Dam, not to mention all the other shenanigans Trick Arrow has.

Starts Numina Task Force, promotes it as a 'Smash and Bash KM Speed' Player 5 joins asks for invite, joins team, see the banner go out several more times in LFG to fill. Before even starting the TF, declare again conditions and settings will be 0/+1 max for efficiency and fun times. Team completes first mission, Player 5: "If we're not going to do this at a tougher setting, I'm not going to do this." Team completes second mission, Player 5: "This doesn't challenge my character." Quits TF. Me: "...?" Running a mission arc team for the third day in a row, Blaster joins up and becomes overly concerned about the team not following a Tank. "Who's the Tank, why don't we have a Tank?!" Now when I run a team, I don't require rank and file. My assumption is always 100% that whatever task at whatever setting that I am responsible for, I can solo and everyone else is along for the ride. I will not put undue stress onto a team just to fill some illusion of power that some get when 'leading'. I had been touring a team through a mission arc over several days (half dozen units a night roughly) with a pretty varying array of enemy groups folks tend to skip/avoid/never see in Radios. I am always clear that if anyone ever feels they're struggling to speak out, and if they feel they need to run back from combat to stay alive, then do so. This is my barbecue, I'm responsible for the fire. We hit a map with a hard hitting mixture of exotics and serious debuffs that took down the few sub-40's, none had actually complained except one person who became avid and livid about folks suddenly biting the dust to the point they stepped out of the mission and threatened to quit saying it was impossible to complete. I told 'em to go ahead and leave and that everyone else could take 10 while I cleared the map. Joined a Positron Part 1 about a month ago back now, 0 difficulty, just as normal a run as anyone could want to expect, however the further in we go the weirder the team lead got about each mission, how we were approaching enemy groups, our speed/efficiency. By the time we got to the last mission they wildly ran through the map to each hostage and then demanded everyone join them on the dome of City Hall without clearing any of the ground forces below and instantly triggered the ambush in the process. The team never even managed to get in one spot before it was a total wipe out. The team lead: "God this is why I don't do PUGs, you're all so stupid." Quits TF. The other seven of us stayed and completed the TF. We even went so far as to clear the entire last map trying to clear the ambush unable to get the TF to progress only to find out that because the ambush triggered with someone on the Dome and folks flying upwards, it sent CoT to the top of the sky box and we had to have a GM bring them down because we honestly couldn't find the buggers. Something I see pop up a few too many times this last few months: Sees a shout out for [insert teamage], sends a /tell to the individual. Gets no response... Sends another message, "Hey, going to invite me?" Broadcaster: "You weren't in the zone so I didn't know how to invite you, teams full." Me: "...?!?!" You're always welcome to join up with my Storm/Nrg, we'll race to see who gets to the next spawn first 😄 Snarky's secretly going to be on the next season of "How To Get Rich" talk about his "Rich Life" being "no more PuGs!!!" It'll be emotional, a real tear-jerker moment.

That is all the Mad King does!

Narrator:

I pretty much find myself finding every excuse possible to get either Mystic Flight or Speed of Sound on my characters. My current one is running Mystic with a macro tagged to TP me to my target so I can readily slip instantly into the next spawn point with no travel time. Let’s me stay with the team through to the last HP of the last enemy, yet still jump ahead before the team to Alpha. Ive become addicted to that instant Kai Kai style movement around the field.

Slows exist in more places than you might think to look for them. Almost all of the Nictus have some form of -Rech/-Slow in their attacks as one example, and that's a prime foundation of the ITF, especially the Hard Mode version. What I find a bit amusing is how something like this flips the dynamic of approach. I'd sooner want something that supports my Regen or Resistance over Defense playing an SR like this compared to the contrast of folks bending for more defense. If a team could go in with two or three tanks already sporting somewhere around the 100% line with a couple of extra Maneuvers in there, there's less a concern about DDR and cycling so much effort on Barrier. A Tank would truly be able to focus on being a Tank. I tried to design a Granite under the similar principle of cranking up the dial on stats but I was never able to get it beyond the early 60%'s for defense while keeping the capped resistances, but even that build is still a case example of taking a different approach to this Hard Mode concept. Most are just taking what they have and blasting Barrier Cycles to forgo the overall challenge of finding ways to build dynamic teams. Imagine if a Hard Mode team really could carry a Kin to counter damage buffs without worrying about its survivability because of a strong enough aggro magnet?

Damage wise it doesn't need anything super thrilling for Martial Arts to work, and there's 71.25% Global for "free" in there so it's like have Hasten perma without having Hasten. The longest recharge is Crippling at 3.8/s for a Martial-exclusive chain of Storm > Crippling > Storm > Crane, if Gloom is kept then the second Storm can easily be Gloom and things still balance out well enough (1.84, 1.84, 1.05 and Gloom pops at 4.16 so each scenario is covered in a complete chain). I do have Eagle's Claw in there but in my opinion its a throw-away however Dark Obliteration animates in a second so it'd be possible to Claw > Oblit > Tail and get both AoE's covered under its buff. I know this sounds so absurd, but really it's a fully viable build and that's just what's kind of bonkers about it.

Through some screenshots for the Mids' Unable, this is with none of the defense toggles on but Combat Jumping, and the buff from Storm Kick active: This is with all the SR toggles, Weave, and Maneuvers added: Agility Core is active in both cases for the slight extra push. There's also I noticed an option to move a couple slots around at dig out another 3% Melee defense to get it truer to 95% Melee. Darkest Night will still do some reasonable lifting for 4-5% after tax too. 100% is the goal they try and go in with just to deal with the initial buffs, but most players aren't typically walking into those situations with 95% DDR like SR so it can get stripped in a hurry if they're not careful. It's actually 105% Ninjitsu (assuming this is what you're referring to given your post prior) does have 5 pts baked in, so trading out for that 20% wouldn't be a bad call, but it is a very much play-by-ear thing with some melee. I generally only use one KB IO in most of my non-melee characters and live with the off-chance I get break through, but melee can spend a lot more time in the forefront of patches which could be a greater annoyance. But, personally, I'd probably shoot for the 20% and see how I felt it played.

They must have impressive recharge to pull a nuke on every spawn at that ratio, but then I question why anyone would waste a nuke on an even-con spawn when a simple AoE tends to do the job just fine 😛 But as others have mentioned, relativity is a big part of the question here. There's pretty much no TF from 40 or lower I'd expect a team to be doing anything but 0/+1 on; not because they can't, but because most are looking to complete them as efficiently as possible for the merits/badge, not the XP. The for mission based content lower than 25 no greater than +1, up to 32ish +2, and 40 +3, and that mostly comes based off powers, enhancements, and plausibility of completed builds. This isn't some hard rule or anything, just what I expect and have seen for a very long time as a normal behavior. In fact, for TF's I think I could probably count on one hand the ones I'd expect would be abnormal at +4: ITF, LGTF, MsLTF/LRSF, and occasionally a Market Crash when someone is feeling spicy.

I had a lark in my thought process about folks chasing Hard Mode builds and trying to work out numbers and teams able to get to 100% defense on characters and I was like, "Could I do that solo? Could a character get to 100% without Barrier?" And of course there'd have to be an option somehow, right? Of course there is! Super Reflexes! But it needed a nudge, just a touch more to get close enough, enough to sneeze in the face of 100%, and I could get that out of Martial Arts. Thus, for a laugh I put together a build for anyone who wants it! A build so strong that it doesn't even need toggles to play normal content!! Our Shounen Equivalent to a One Punch Man, I give you the Super Storm Kick:

Order of powers isn't maybe exactly as some might want to take them as I pulled this together from a different SD build. I didn't really slot for an epic, and the travel is obviously whatever option one might want to choose. Once you get Rage its To-Hit buff will fully accommodate your accuracy so lower slotting will be a lot more flexible. The only thing to be leery of is that if you choose to double stack Rage, this thing doesn't have any way of compensating for the defense crash. Edit to mention there's alt-slotting for Boxing, Shield Charge, and technically Gloom and Darkest Night if you left them in under the pretense of a 50 build.

Screenshots I tend to just paste right into the forum post so the post stays relevant with the file. Assuming you're on Windows and have a functioning Win key, Win+Shift+S will allow you to crop out a screen shot to your clipboard on the fly. PrintScreen will just capture the whole screen onto the clipboard, but it also dumps the image into your screenshot folder for the game. All jokes aside and credit to Betty for truly taking my Brute down, most of the regular content hasn't been terribly threatening if I stayed ahead of the curve and focus on the appropriate things to take out first. Of the three ITF's I ran with teams, one I ended up taking on the Calamari Appetizer alone with a Kin because the rest of the team forgot about it and never questioned why they weren't getting bombarded. Speed Boost does 50% against Rech so I didn't feel like I was drowning at any point, but I felt like more credit went into just avoiding the mess as much as possible by shoveling down some purples in the process knowing what I was in for. That was at +4, no Alpha, and we made it through with just the two of us. If I were going to do that solo and follow some traditional no-insp rules? I know I wouldn't fare the same and would've probably avoided their summon altogether. Adding Ageless into the mix would definitely get you some more debuff resistance without major slot investment, I don't know what the tail-end value is for that though off the top of my head. I simply can't. I have a kingdom to run, a wedding to plan, a bride to kill, and an enemy to blame it on. I'm swamped.

Ahkay. I went in at +1/x8 not trusting what to expect. Seeing as how your build has quite a few notches more Slow resistances I could imagine you fared a bit better than I did, even despite the difference in spawn sizes going against me. I should probably also mention I ran that T3 Alpha, Interface, and ... oh wow what's it called Judgement, but I didn't use any Inspirations or other temporary abilities for whatever that matters. Probably doesn't. In the probability that I tweaked it before running with it, this is the build that I've been actively running with right now: As it stands I've rewound back through all of the Task Force Commander TF's with this build and performed incredibly well when others were dying around me. Most of the build exists below 30, and most of the enhancements travel down to 20 meaning it can keep a huge chunk of its bonuses to a pretty low exemplar point. And yes I really did take Mystic Flight and Inflitration that late in the build, I live with the results and it can suck in those early Posi's, but such is life. Being S/L Res capped is an insane huge part of what makes this (I think) so absurd. When I started joining Tinpex's this week I was concerned about my over all safety running in known that it would probably be the first real challenge at 100% +4 with an enemy doing a damage type that wasn't my strong suite, but I was bouncing around in reasonable confidence by the time we got to Battle Maiden on the first go and I flipped Instant Healing on and stood in the patch with her and just kept swinging. Another run the next day and I found myself soloing Director 11. We somehow missed a glowie to disable the ambush and the team had a very hard time reconciling from it to the point where I found myself as the only one on the dance floor with him for a bit: I can't say I haven't hit the dirt nap button a few times, but the greater portion have come with distractions than faults of the game, except for Betty's Arc, seriously this is criminal: Do you know how long it takes Siphon Speed to fall off? Fooorreeeeeeeeeeever. You see that? I'm trying to run. Away. This is .gif, eventually I'll move. 😛 With everything I went through on this I tried to keep my focus similar to yours, Gook, similar drive on the powers, limited option on the Ancillary, as much about the Secondary as possible. There is one thing I did add in here though that I wanted to weigh the impact value of personally when looking at Regen in a Resistance state of mind, and that was Rune of Protection. The value bump from that power isn't monstrously crazy like MoG, but for a 90/s turnaround a 25% bump can be a lot. On the average there's a lot of content where I'm not even hitting MoG, let alone the Rune, but I did find it was nice to smooth out transitional periods during IH's downtime, or if I wanted to avoid leaning on IH at all during things like CoT (as example) where I might run into more exotic types a bit more. Do I feel like this gives me a different perspective than I had before? Probably, yeah, if I'm being honest I felt like I was playing a more pure version of Regen by stacking in the Resistance over trying to go the other route and hide behind an undefendable wall of defense. Progress leads to change, and from this experience I ended up with a new build that I mentioned earlier at a project I was entitling my "Barrier Build", and I think... think I've settled on it being pretty solid. Resistance proved to be fantastic, but the idea of just never getting hit, even just a few times, was a worthy note, and having a buffer to avoid going into the negative defenses is always helpful. I built this entirely on the premise of T4 Barrier Core having a tail-end effect of 5% Def/Res for its last... 20-30/s whatever it is meaning I could minimum count that towards my build values as a pretty stable thing. I quite literally wanted all my the cake, and to eat it too, so my minimum expectation was that I couldn't loose less than I had before, but it also had to hit Melee at 45% This build is for all the chips, I haven't switched to it yet, a small portion of me fears it: Edit: Decided to add this for anyone that just wanted a peak without loading it: