Sir Myshkin

Something popped into my mind after reading this that I kind of want to see... A build flag that if all enhancements in a character build are TO/DO/SO/HO than enhancement diversification is adjusted by like 50%, or add an inherent power that can be given a "token" enhancement that causes this effect like the Incarnate Alpha slot does, while also restricting slotting.

As built your Rage is not Perma and carries an unnecessary end mod, swap to a Rech Redux at a minimum to at least keep a minimum level of performance. Hasten is worth having just to get double stacked Rage and a faster cycling KO Blow. Now, double stacking Rage is considerably a personal choice/opinion, but the set performs much better with the full capabilities at the ready. Looking at how you've built things, I don't really see much a reason to have not taken it. Having plenty of experience with defense sets that don't have a heal component, I've never seen much an excuse for taking Aid Self to try and fill that void. The time it takes to activate the ability is just too long to be meaningful, and often ends up detracting from better things that could be happening. You can keep it in, of course, but I'd say Taunt is a much more worthy ability to have at your disposal as Tanker just for its -Range alone to keep things within your AAO aura. Defense can go a long way with proper passive healing and stacked up Resistances like what Shield can carry. I'd also argue getting an actual travel power in there with Mystic Flight to get into Rune of Protection to help push up your Resistances during Rage crashes. This is with some modifications to improve the overall build and get Rage better in line, also adds a significant buffer of defense to help with the -20% Def crash, while also putting the build into iCap territory for Melee/AoE. Also improved endurance usage (combination of slotting and global end redux bonuses): And this one takes out the Medicine Pool and gets Taunt into the build: Quick edit that I forgot to mention: Rage in those builds will be at 87/s, with active FF+Rech procs going off that will be a lot closer to 70ish/s which is a good spot to be in. Adding another of those procs into KO Blow will also help build potential of cycling that attack more often.

Any time someone talks about wanting a "challenge" in the game, I inform them of this mission and advise they take a box of tissues for their tears and a full Incarnate team to stay alive.

Everlasting. The first attempt was in RWZ1, second was (not be choice) RWZ2. I considered hitting up random Pylons, but I don't have the time right now to invest that much into each one, and I don't think 2-3 minutes is really a fair sample size given I've watched an entire 60/s go by as "MISSED" on just 23.5% Defense. @Zeraphia you mentioned seeing this yourself, do you recall the circumstances of which/when/character at all? Oh the random things we test out of shear curiosity.

"kicks" I was arbitrarily bunching them together with a non-orthodox phrase. Easy to see that as "ticks" or take it as a typo, that's my fault, heh. The closest I have (which is... surprisingly close) to your Tanker is a Stone/Ice/Soul, level 50 but without any Incarnates abilities (not unlocked yet). Dropped by the same Pylon in RWZ (technically "#17" per vidiotmaps overlay) and took a seat. I dropped as many toggles as I could to increase opportunity down to 33% defense and chilled out for another 15 minutes. I then (and as I'm typing this, about an additional 8-10 minutes extra now) loaded up my toggles to full (just to ... I dunno, see), and I did not see a fifth tick ever occur. Character is also technically a "Hero". I also took an extra measure to split my combat logging into "me" and "pets" just to see if something weird might report off. No "pet damage" occurred. Okay, so it's been 30 full minutes, no deviation of the normal "4 Tick" damage burst.

I think a lot of folks would be staggeringly baffled by the fact that War Mace does about just as well as Titan Weapons, yet no one's protesting that one.

Following your description, that is the same Pylon I tested against. Out of curiosity, what AT/Sets, and did you have KB protection on/slotted? I can see the Vigilante icon in your screenshot, my was also Vigilante as well. Curious to rule out conditions considering you got three consecutive kicks, and I didn't see it happen at all for a much wider range of time.

Out of curiosity, and wondering if there maybe was something I'd been missing, I went over to the RWZ and played chicken with a Pylon for 15 minutes. I recorded 56 successful attacks at only 4 ticks a piece. No 5th tick ever occurred. The character did have passive set-bonus provided 23.5% defense so there were a decent enough amount of misses in there, but even at the rate of 20% I should've seen 11 of those that did hit, and I did not see any. Character was a Regen Scrapper for what that's worth. Edit: Forgot to mention I did this on the Live server since that's where you said you were experiencing it.

First: Welcome Back. Second: There's a few topics you might find of interest in my signature to see some of how the dynamics of the game have changed, and also look in the guide section for the user Bopper's guide on proc formulas for the more nitty-gritty math side of what makes the stuff of my linked threads do what they do (if the back-end side interests you enough to check into it). With that out of the way, I pulled up your build and mucked about the place for a bit. Why no Moment of Glory? I'm assuming you were using Stealth and Invisibility as minor defense and mules? Well, I ripped those out of the build and dropped in Maneuvers, finagled some slots around and got you up to a proper 45% defense. With suppression Stealth was only getting you to 43% (not 45%), not quite cutting the gravy there. There are two more unique's that are really worth fitting into a build with Shield Wall (+5% Res) and Reactive Defense (+3 Res, Scales up higher with low HP). Adding this in, along with a few other recaptured S/L bonuses, pushed the entire thing up by 8% on resistances giving 40.9% S/L Res, and much better starter values in the rest. You said you wanted to get more damage into the build, procs are the way to do that now. In Focus you skipped slotting the proc, but the proc adds far more value in damage probability than the Dam/Rech enhancement does, and you definitely don't need more recharge in that attack as its benefit is only .1/s. This same consideration was applicable to several other areas, but your desire you get/keep 45% Softcap makes it impossible to really value-add procs in many other places. So traded out Eviscerate's slotting with Armageddon, got a damage proc there so I could trade out what was slotted in Shockwave to give it a KB>KD enhancement and also a -Res proc that will help boost your general overall performance against any target it triggers on. I also added one to Slash as well, for the same reason. The build has a small flaw in that its overall accuracy without Follow Up is low in many places, barely enough to hit +2 in most cases, and Follow Up is one of those that suffers. To combat that I added a Kistmet +Acc unique to give a ToHit boost to your build, once one trigger of Follow Up sticks the build will fall in line accordingly. Influence in this game is easy to obtain, you need not fear the cost of anything, so flipped Integration and Dull Pain to Panacea sets to get the 7.5% global recharge bonus (and added the Panacea unique in Integration). Endurance! So you may notice it "looks" like I stripped out some endurance, but in truth I gave you more! Performance Shifter +End proc is worth .2 eps and is oft better than a second End/Whatever in powers like QR/Stamina. With some thing scaled down, and that proc placed in you'll actually be positive ~.3 compared to before (4.04 I think it was against .98, now 3.91 [effectively 4.11] against .91). I also added a new unique from Power Transfer that procs for a 5% heal (off base HP) in QR, has a chance to trigger every 10/s for 66 HP, typically triggers 50% on average I think is the math right now, so 1.67 HP/s of value. Spin, saved this for last cause it looks like I tore into that little guy, but fear not its damage is ED smitten at 96% and Follow Up puts its accuracy in perfect positioning. Frankenslotting really reduces the necessity of what a power needs, and I was able to greatly impact other areas with those two slots. So here it is! Oh, you may recall an old ST chain many chased was FU > Focus > Slash. There's been some revisits to that (especially with the level of recharge it took to get that tight enough to work) and determined FU > Focus > Slash > Shockwave turns out a comparable close value, and better when Shockwave carries a -Res proc in them. Annihilation giving the chance for an additional -12.5% is a nice kick to the whole chain.

I pose the same challenge to all Masterminds that I tried myself of approaching a Pylon with no pets, start the timer and then do a full summon, buff, and assault on the pylon. I found that to be a much more impressive evaluation of their ability to not only deal with an immediate "oh crap, no pets!" situation, but also reflect their speed to dealing with that said immediate threat.

Choose your adventure:

Something to give a bit of food for thought. This is a KM/SR build I used to run a ton of trials with back on Retail (I didn't remake the character on Homecoming). Hits 60% melee and 57% Ranged and just 48% on AoE. Hitting 60/57 stand alone was more about the times I'd be running around away from other team members (like Lambda) and wanted that self assured factor. In my experiences the AoE that got through was so few and far between any major threat that regen and other healing methods easily compensated for anything that may have gotten through the boosted ToHit of Incarnate mobs. Build also hits its marks without the use of Combat Jumping, and has enough recharge to keep hasten "close enough." The thing with doing Incarnate stuff, unless you're only looking at doing the solo-capable content in Dark Astoria, all of the iTrials will have at least a half dozen players popping Barrier and Ageless, so any small differences in defense or recharge get so easily swept up that worrying about them is a non-issue. I chose to stick with Rebirth: Radial for the passive regen and burst heal to carry me through pretty much anything I faced, and to counter the fact that fewer people were taking the heals creating more benefit for all involved. Oh, and I never ran with Tough on, like... ever.

Captain Powerhouse has stated that they are currently specifically looking at performance on a few key procs, and proc interactions with Epic/Patron abilities to try and find a balanced approached to maintaining the purpose of Epic abilities as to the original design goals and how that interacts with the PPM system. Please stop procmongering.

Short answer: Yes. I had actually started prepping builds to do a Proc Monster thread just for the the Epic/Villain AT's but decided against it. The thing about Peacebringer builds are that it's not very difficult to get Light Form perma, and there's not really a whole lot else in their toolboxes that scream "speed me up!" It also doesn't help that PB's are very much a "Paladin" character, strong defense, couple of hard hitting attacks, the ability to toss a heal out, but they are not a master of any of these tactics which puts them in a weird place. Procing them out definitely helps (a little), but they already suffer from a poor arrangement of attacks to begin with that they won't every hit that "wow" factor. That is a bit opinionated, of course, but there's a fair significant amount of people who share it; look how few people play a Kheldians. This was a Single-Form build that applies the recharge bending: Realistically utilizing the FF+Rech more benfits a Tri-Form build since it alleviates the stress of chasing a few extra global recharge bonuses to achieve perma Light Form, and is pretty flexible. I had posted this one in one of the discussion threads about Tri-Form quite a few months ago (around January I think). And while I say "Tri-Form" it really feels more like a dual-form build because of the investment made into Nova/Dwarf and the fact that Human only exists to pop Light Form, Hasten, Essence, Dawn Strike, and Inner Light. The shifted forms are just all-around stronger from a damage perspective so there's little incentive to stay Human. Heck, with a few lingering bonuses White Dwarf can go without Light Form altogether. You should be able to take the Storm/Energy off the first post and convert it over by just swapping Energy Blast for Gravity Control. The overall survival stats will be a bit lower from variance in buff mods, but it'll work out similarly.

I had/have (somewhere) the Ghost Widow figurine. I am super surprised that HeroClix are still a thing though. I remember when they first came out and I was like "Yeah, this will dry out pretty quick." The company did go under, but the brand got bought out and continues selling product!

If it’s the build that has Crush in it, then just swap that out for Propel and you’ll be fine 🙂 There should even be a propel-inclusive build in my post specifically about testing Gravity as I used it in my testing for performance.

I'd dare say many of us old-timers are still using the "original" simplified formula from back in the Retail days: ( 38343.75 / time ) + 127.8125 = DPS Do enough Pylon Run calculations and this number is super easy to memorize, and super easy to punch through the calculator without having to get parenthesis involved. There was a bit of discussion about a marginal variance that's not really accountable which the formula bulk-adjusted for over on this page. The short end of it is "The Pylon regenerates in bulk chunks, and where you are before or after that chunk alters the true value of the return DPS" In the end though, we're talking .1 variance at best between the more raw formula, and the above 'bulk adjusted' formula, which is entirely meaningless considering everyone just ends up typing the rounded value either way. This formula outputs 340.8333 compared to 340.8572 of the extended version. Oh, and here is the link back to the OG Pylon Thread where it first gets talked about!

Ah, Poison/Sonic ... I think I have one of these somewhere. Digs around for a file Ah yes, this failed experiment: I had wanted to try and manifest a single target monster out of a Defender away from more standard choices and it just didn't end up hitting the mark. But it debuffs the heck out of everything and its mother!

Hmm, reminds me I had one of these builds worked up for a friend last year, interesting how close the end numbers ended up between yours and what I had. Wouldn't take more than a quick flip of a couple IO's to put the procs in either. I rarely poke into the Stalker forum so I never saw the previous iteration of what you were working towards, but to share a build that doesn't utilize the flight pool: Concentrated Strike was in there for style points if I remember correctly (they wanted it), but obviously could easily be flipped for Smashing Blow. I don't remember what the end ST performance was but it was geared towards taking down targets quick and the person didn't end up liking it because it wasn't "fast enough" for them (but it was still around like 2:00 I think? This was back in ... September '19).

Cones and (T/P)AoE's factor in more than just recharge they also take into consideration range, radius, and how many targets are inside the effect zone. Essentially my simplest way of breaking those abilities down is: If there are less than 5, you've got a 40-ish% likelihood of proccing, if there's 10+ in the effect, it's almost gauranteed. Now that's not a mathematical rule of thumb, but when testing something so often the pattern starts to be more relevant and my experiences showed that so long as I caught at least 10 targets within any effect there was a pretty strong chance for it to go off, regardless of what the base values were (although in most of those cases I was also avoiding recharge enhancement as best possible) body count matters more than any of the other factors for those types of attacks. Also, just having one solid Cone/AoE with FF+Rech that can be fired off regularly will suffice, but can be very tedious to spam the same thing, and if body count drops there's lowered chances to proc, so being able to at least spam two back to back is more helpful, but not really necessary.

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Uh... nope, but doesn't take more than a few minutes to put it together. Aaand, done: So you'll have to make a personal call on this build, you can get Weave in there if you really really want to and have 40-ish% defense with one enemy in range for F/C/E/N, but as it stands the build pretty much softcaps to everything at full saturation, plus Darkest Night if you go Soul (I added Soul as it gives a better ranged ability and a nice second TAoE for Kinetics, and DN feeds the -Dam). You could also trade some global recharge for F/C/E/N Defense as well with a Winter Set in Gloom, and some franken-setting in Burst. Tactics is in there but it's not reaaally needed so if that got tossed out and Fighting was tossed in, this thing would be Incarnate Ready all-in: Power Siphon insta-fuels itself for To-Hit on the proc and builds up its own bulk, plus Invcincibility's +ToHit as well, you'll have enough clearance to take on things many levels above your weight class.

You quoted the line, but I think you might have still really missed what it was very clearly stating. Long explanation: tl;dr I see very few folks running around with a Blaster build that's bent on extreme amounts of performance to pull out 60-100% constant damage buffs, usually most are just playing a defensive build that has BU, sometimes Aim too, and are using it as burst buff. In short essentially "basic play." The Sentinel build I posted is simple and functions just by playing it, it is tremendously user-friendly which makes this comment confusing: The build attacks and plays simply as any other build, and clicks one power every 60/s rotating between two different abilities. There's nothing dramatic about how it functions, and nothing major the player needs to be focused on. So long as the character is engaged in combat and actively attacking and getting those FF+Rech procs, it'll work just fine and spend at least 90% (if not a full 100%) of its time buffed by one of those two powers, one of which is also res-capping many of its categories. This only works in a vacuum of same-for-same though at their starting points, and does not translate into the buff percentages. The larger the buff, the wider the variance. It takes a 100% buff for a Sentinel to do what a Blaster can with 65%, and that's where the struggle comes from.

Your "heavy hitters" aren't those abilities, they're your T1, 2, and 3 attacks, and even though they may "feel" slow (I've hear enough folks say this) they're actually animating very quickly; the animations are very deceptive. For all that Concentrated Strike is, you can accomplish the same amount of damage (with less chance of failure/miss) within the T1/2/3 chain of attacks, throw in an assortment of procs and you start overshadowing CS altogether. In regards to Focused Burst, with the KB>KD conversion IO's available I'd suggest taking Repulsing Torrent instead as it'll have the same range, same animation time, but gives you a second utility for "AoE" compared to FB which has a lower DPA than Quick Strike. If you're interested in taking Gloom, than there's definitely that option too. In regards to Power Siphon, you'll want the Gaussian's +BU in there, and also a couple of Force Feedback +Rech procs in places like Burst and Quick Strike to help mitigate its recharge as much as possible. Ideally you'll have 20/s of strong buff, and then 10/s of decay as it wears off, and hopefully have its recharge down to 30-33/s to help keep it cycling often enough. Kinetic Melee is one of the few sets in the game that delivers all of its mass power in its first three attacks, and the rest of the set is flair and filler (for the most part). It also is incredibly altered by play style, two different people can walk into a room with the same build and have a different experience based on how they use the attacks, and when. For a Tank, that can be dragged into the mud even further by not getting Burst until level 28 as that ability is the cornerstone of mob management for Kinetic Melee. Cycle through the spawn on the ST, whittle them down bit by bit, and then drop Burst each time it's up to clear the mobs out and knock them down.