Sir Myshkin

While it wasn't necessarily explicitly stated, I'm taking a leap from @Jimmy's last comment that the power is activating off the target, and not from the caster, but he also said there were other components not working as intended (paraphrased). Nice to see the ability is (mostly) working, now we just need a bit more clarification, and see how it turns out in the next patch.

For such a tiny box [question] it sure packed a lot of opinion in it. Turns Zamboni on and starts smoothing over the ice. Perspective is going to matter for you, personally. As you can see there's a lot of... consideration for play style when it comes to the choices you make in this game. If you build to a set's strengths, many of its weaknesses are easy to deal with, or flat out ignore. In some cases some of those weaknesses can even be altered or corrected with its paired set. Ultimately you've got to play what interests you the most because not every build fits all personalities, even if it's "the best of the best, with honors, sir!" Plant has some good AoE built into it, and Carrion Creepers is a monster ability that just keeps chugging throughout its duration, even when you move to the next spawn. Storm has a lot of crowd-impacting abilities and if you play to that strength you can do some pretty amazing things. I've played Storm/Energy Defender for a considerable amount of time not too long ago and it is a Monster on the battlefield, and has absolutely zero immobilize in its toolkit, but has absolutely no issue dusting any spawn that stands in its way. Get a couple of KB > KD covnersion IO's, build in some good proc utility, an Achille's Heel, and back it up with Gale (KD Converted), and you'll be dropping enemies on their backs all day long. Is it the "Best" for the choice of damage? Honestly, the value indicator there is so infinitesimally tiny, that it doesn't really matter. We're talking about the differences of seconds from one spawn to the next. Then when it comes to AV's, well, I mean, if they're going to run, they're going to run, but in my experience just don't use Snow Storm (it'll pretty much guarantee they run, plus it's kinda bleh anyway <-- Opinion, YMMV), and just let loose on it. I've tagged a fair few AV's, and Storm does a tremendous amount of damage all on its wee-lonesome, plus you'll be stacking in some of your own ST and Carrion Creepers. You'll be VERY busy. In the end, if you don't like it, well, okay, see all of the above posts for suggestions on alternative options!

What's interesting about this idea is that, to a degree I understand and even sympathize with that thought, but I'm more inclined to say we just need a wider range of more "difficult" content that adapts to our improved skills. The reason I'm saying that is significantly influenced by having been doing some exemplar content on two characters now that have a high-spec IO build that works down to level 15 (mostly) and level 20 at a minimum for its bonuses, and even though I loose all Incarnate functions down there, IO Bonuses tend to compensate, on top of having better slotted abilities compared to leveling up. Considering the level shifts only matter in that upper-level stuff, and a build can perform equally ridiculously at lower levels, we realistically just need tougher content options. To a degree, isn't the core idea behind being an Incarnate transitioning our character into that idea of Statesman, an individual that has a level of power vast enough to tackle what multiple heroes otherwise might struggle with? And to imagine, there was supposed to be content coming down the pipeline that would've been challenging in that state.

What's interesting about this case is that, in some circumstances, you only need ONE capable player to tackle that entire scenario. A scenario that once required attentive action planning that can now be handled by a single Blaster. Now that I'm getting more of the Incarnates fleshed out on my current project, things have progressed to the point where I see a room with multiple spawns packed together and my only thought is "Oooh Yeaah." BU+Blizzard+Atom Smasher on the first spawn, Pyronic Judgement on the second, and then move into the third with Ice Storm and another Atom Smasher, and anything that didn't insta-wipe from the first two (usually just a couple of Bosses) chase after me; then it just becomes a quick game of whack-a-mole. I have definitely--mind unintentionally--altered the perspective of a couple of Tankers in the last two weeks about crowd control, and their purpose on the team. When I nuke out a spawn, and am whittling away a Boss in short order of the remnants, and they start for the next spawn and I Judgement it into non-existence. More than once I've watched a player stop and just go "Well then..." And I feel a little bad about it, seeing it from their perspective. The truth of the matter is that I'm not invalidating their existence, in fact I'm absolutely abusing their existence on the fact that just walking around and punching things taunts and keeps enemies focused on them, and not me. The fact that there's builds out there (especially once Incarnates get involved) that are walking Nuclear Bombs on tap, it can totally feel like a Tanker lacks purpose. So to those Tanks I say: Just keep punching, please, it does more than it may seem. And if I land in the middle of a spawn looking drugged and wobblin' about the place, punch harder! *I did a cut quote with removed notification prompt since I wasn't speaking to you (Gulbasaur) directly, but to the scenario itself.

I rolled as a Defender just on principle without thinking about alternative AT choices, but after I'd already started leveling up and actually checking the stats on each ability, the values, what everything did, that's when I went "Man... This would've been so much better to try with a MM." And now I want a Electric Gremlin style MM Pet set. T1 as a trio of Gremlins, T2 as "Electrical Engineers" (humans or robots) that buff/debuff, and the T3 being Deathsurge that summons a couple of Voltaic Sentinels. Filling in the MM attacks would be pretty easy too, grab a couple of blasts, Jolting Chain for sure, heck lets do something different and make one of them Conductive Aura, but have it benefit pets in the radius too. Give the pets a unique attribute revolving around electrical currents or being electrified if a mob gets impacted they take more damage from the pets, and also applies a -dam -res debuff on the mob. taps microphone Testing, Testing, is anyone hearing this? It practically builds itself!

Tangent on Electric Blast: I did not specifically slot for it beyond Alpha (and planned additional stacking effects with Interface selections), but Short Circuit will not effectively clear a mob's bar consistently at +4. The only scenario I had reasonable success with that idea was on a Kin/Elec Defender that barely managed to get Short Circuit to consistently lock down minions/lieuts on their endurance back on Retail so many years ago. I've already talked about it a couple of times now, and the problem with wiping out the endurance of an entire spawn, on top of all of the -Recovery available to Electric Affinity, means I can walk away without any concern for my safety because they will not recover for a considerable length of time (as the power stands currently in combination with the Galvanic Sentinel). When I tested the set I made absolutely no attempts at building for anything, no global, no recharge, nothing but the core abilities with Acc, End Mod, and Rech as appropriate, and some Res in Faraday and Temp Invuln just to see what numbers I would get out of it (71% between the two on S/L for what it's worth, and 23% on everything else, and IO build will be pretty ridiculous). My point is, I could stack up a swarm of Static, jump into a spawn and fire of Defibrillate, and ... nothing, I didn't have to do anything but make sure the Sentinel was next to the spawn, and it kept them is isolation indefinitely during its duration. And yes, Defib is technically broken right now and is massively over applying Sleep (and probably End Mod) mag/durations, but the point still stands that being able to 100% shut down a spawn from being able to do absolutely anything is not balanced when it is an indefinite effect. If there were no -Recovery involved it might be a different, but the combination of Defibrillate and Discharge is making it better than a perma-hold.

Just looking at the intention of things currently, its ridiculously broken, all in agreeance there, but personally I think we should wait and see what the "true vision" behind the design was once a fix to how Defibrillator The Jericho is implemented plays out. We might very well be concerned over a number that's only at the extremes it is because of the multiplicative factor of the bug. Given a decent amount of play time with both Kinetics and Electrical Blast (and some with Electric Control), each has different ways of impacting the enemy blue bar, but in many cases they all find a way out of that blue-bar struggle. I'm all for finally having a set that truly says "No" to a mob's stamina. As such, I did give this some more mulling around thought, tried skimming around to see if anyone else had suggested something like it (I may have missed if they did, doing a lot of catch-up here). There's a little thinking out loud here: I don't think we should be able to nuke the blue bar of an entire mob in a 20' radius. A multiplicative duration/magnitude Sleep attached to a spawn-drain is overpowered, irregardless of the fact that Sleep is easily interruptible. As-is, pre incoming fix, it is possible for any of us to stack up 16+ Static and walk into any mob of our choosing and knock the entire spawn out and take a coffee break. Taking into account your thoughts on the topic, Tex, had me thinking both on how we can diminish the return and add balance into the power, but I'm not sure how technically complicated it would be (if even possible without disrupting Sleep). Have Defibrillate hit the main target as it stands, and then for the follow up do a combination of a flat AoE for the Sleep effect, and add a chain effect off the initial target that delivers a shock around the group with diminishing effect each time it jumps. So if the main target gets hit for a huge amount (200%), each follow up is reduced as the chain spreads out from the epicenter. Ideally it would just show the energy/impact diminishing as it spreads around. The amount of times it chains would be based off the amount of stacks consumed (seven stacks, seven chains, etc). Not only does that control the amount that can be impacted, but it also controls the volume of end reduction as it reduces down each jump. No tampering with the chance of the effect, just reduce the amount of it each step. From a coding stand point I'm not sure how much of a nightmare that'd actually be, but has this idea come up at any interval along the line?

To highlight again what Jimmy pointed out, it has been determined that Defibrillate is not applying correctly, and is actually executing an AoE effect as a ST trigger on each mob in a spawn (as in activating the Defib effect as an AoE, on each target, instead of just one execution as an AoE on the primary target), which is returning ridiculous values and also potentially the reason we're seeing mobs got sent to sleep for seven minutes at a time. Once the next patch fixes these multiplicative issues I'd revisit what it's doing then to get a better idea. I will mention, for what it's worth, that I did take a build out to Monster Island and tested Defib stacked to 20 (18 by the time the animation kicked and consumed), with Power Boost active on one of the DE Lattices. It hits for an absurd amount on a single target, but against a Monster class enemy it only budged its bar by 6-8%, despite being a nearly 1,000 point hit. I couldn't find any active Heavy Assault Units in the RWZ last night to try against an EB class, and didn't bother trying to find an actual AV in a mission, so I can't confirm quite how it'd scale for them. In general I agree with what you're saying Tex, but wait until the current bug(s) get patched out and re-evaluate your feelings on it, it might be dramatically different as a result. Edit: For what it's worth to post it here in this thread as well, Bopper started a self-contained thread for jsut Defibrillate testing, this is what I had posted over there from testing yesterday (technically 1-3am this morning):

That's why I was pointing out the discrepencies on when the actions were actually, or not at all, occurring. Typically everything is synced and ready to load out and we get the animations and damage at set intervals after the fact, but none of that was happening when lancing jousting a target, and it was even more irritating to run into when something just flat out ran beyond my radius faster than I could literally jump up in the animation. As for the Jaeger, I am honestly not surprised that a robot (thematically) wouldn't get put to sleep, it was just interesting to note that the ability was hitting, even with an absurd mag and duration, and not effecting it at all, but I could take out a Fake Nemesis. I know that the Sleep ST in Mind Control is a big gun for AV hunters that prefer that set due to its ability to actually stick through a lot of stuff, is the only reason I brought that up. I've never personally done any specific analyzation of its use, or looked into the resistance totals for the average AV when it comes to any one mez outside of Immobilize (knowing that's typically the only one that can readily be stacked for containment). Imagining that visually in my mind is just hilarious explosion of bubbles like a pile of cluster bombs going off and all we get to see is a spawn going "duhr..." Going to have to rename Defibrillate into "The Jericho."

Someone else will have to see about the ally resurrection aspect of it, but I did spend around an hour and a half bouncing around between mobs and testing time and triggers with a couple of the procs that can go into the abilities, and the impacts. So Respectively: Component Targeting: Did not appear to have an issue with targeting, was able to get it to fire off under multiple circumstances with live bodies, no dead partners to test off of (leave that up to someone else who can schedule a time for that purpose). Component Movement: This seemed off to me, when is the power truly activating? I have to break this down into sub-bullets... If I queued up Defibrillate out of range and ran into an enemy and jumped past them, the entirety of the spawn I lanced through would not have any impact from the ability by the time I landed. It was activating, and I was doing through the animation, but no event triggered on any enemies as would usually occur in a lancing scenario. If I stood within a spawn and activated Defibrillate, and any mob in the spawn started to run away from me, there was a chance they would not get impacted by the effect. This typically seemed to be around the point where if they got outside of the 20' radius before the animation showed me coming back down from the jump, they wouldn't get impacted. In both cases I'd considered this failing to work correctly, but also... at the same time does make it feel more realistic that I couldn't abuse a lancing tactic to rez/sleep a mob to avoid melee/getting trapped. Mixed Components: Draining: At a certain extent it was strange to be hitting for 300-400 point endurance reductions at just a few stacks, but it worked consistently, and ramping up to 12-16 stacks is so easy that getting a high number was pretty much a guarantee. I did try this against a range of enemy levels from 40 to 50, and then also against a Monster class Devouring Earth up in Peregrine Island. The Monster DE massively resisted it, but with 16 stacks, Power Boost, and then hitting Defib, I was able to notch out maaaaaaybe 6-8%. Static Consumption: Whether 2 or 20, never had an issue consuming the entire stack. Radius: Where is the radius for the ability triggering from? I was using Faraday Cage as a guide since it's 25' (which, btw, feels a bit small for a team, especially on a MM). I want to assume the ability is striking its effect based on player position, but without seeing lines of impact more closely, I couldn't say for sure that I was getting 20' or not, just a rough idea of it. Essentially if something didn't get impacted in Faraday, I was trying to adjust accordingly, but there were several cases that something would be just inside the edge, and not get hit (which would make sense), so I tried rotating around enemies and wasn't necessarily sure it was me, because using the same base target, got the same result despite trying to inch close to the missed target physically. I didn't spent an enormous amount of time on this aspect as it was a bit of "splitting hairs." VFX: Shouldn't we be getting a sleep animation, not a stunned? With the electric effects "chaining" the target to the ground, the positioning and lul-stance sort of work, but it doesn't thematically mix with the fact they're supposed to be sleeping. Also, isn't sleep the one thing AV's have the least resistance to? If I can super-stack Static, are we opening up a window against AV's that probably shouldn't exist? Sub notes on the VFX aspect of things, but also a question of the duration, mag, and overall effect of the abilities in question... Noticed repeatedly that if I go in, Defib with the Sentinel out and it keeps discharging, but I don't do anything else, the mob will just sit there in that stun-chain position indefinitely. Attempted to Defib with minimal stacks to keep the shortened duration, and they'd still stick like this for an extended period of time. If I go in with no Sentinel, and no stacks, I get a 15-20/s ish duration sleep, and then they move like normal. Hit a Fake Nem and a Warhulk in PI and just sat there for a good two minutes with not an inch of movement. Without being able to really see the duration of the sleep effect remaining, or knowing what that duration even is, hard to determine where the breaking point on this issue is. All I know is that I shouldn't be able to sit there for the entire duration of Faraday cage waiting for them to "wake up" and run away. Whether that's a bug in the effect, or revolving around the duration of the sleep and its magnitude, whatever, it's too long. Also, Gewehr Jaegers are immune to sleep? That Cuirasseur sat for seven minutes in the "effected" state, and now is just sitting there with the electric VFX, still hasn't run or attempted to attack me since impacted, and lost aggro long before it mattered. Component Autohit: In-game combat log files Defibrillate as auto-hit, but then rolls an accuracy check, and I've now seen it MISS and still impact a mob, and also HIT and not impact a mob. What component actually uses the Accuracy calculation for this ability, or is it all auto-hit and the accuracy check a null thing that shouldn't be checking? Also wanted to bring up Procs in this power, what formula is Defibrillate using for its effect? I've had pretty fairly consistent luck getting one, if not both Perf.Shifter +End and Sandman +Heal to trigger in the power when only one mob is in the effected radius, which doesn't line up with most AoE/Cone trigger consistency. Typically I'd need at least four mobs together in the area of effect to see even just one proc trigger, let alone two. I've also slotted the thing up to the gills with recharge reduction for faster testing. Apologies in advance if some of my questions have been answered elsewhere up to this point, but they're a bit nitty-gritty so I was guessing that to probably be a no. I haven't been as ingrained in this Beta patch as the last one due to time and other things going on. Small Edit: I did Record the majority of my time on Brainstorm testing stuff, maybe another 30-40 minutes I didn't cause I knew the file was going to get too long to sort through. Since we're on upload restriction, I'm not putting it anywhere, but if it were wanted/needed, I have it. tl;dr Bugs.

Incidentally I do have an Ice/Atomic build just lazing about the place! I will mention a few things though as there are personal decisions involved in a few of the power selections: I took Assault over Aim, better long term constant buff versus short, small buff that I'm likely to not have the time or desire to click so often (plus teaming). It does add a toggle into the mix, and this build is a bit endurance heavy. Fast cycling AoE's, and strong ST attacks on quick animations with massively reduced recharges leads to a lot of endurance being burned, I used Tactics to fix ToHit/Acc in order to slot a bit more on Proc use, and there's also Tough in there which I personally run and accept the burn, but is something you could turn off and help stave off some of the bleed. If you're going to stay as a ranged character, Beta Decay and Atom Smasher are going to loose out a lot of purpose for you. You could skip both and take Frost Breath as a supplement instead (or review your Epic options). I planned for a build that'd work in Melee, but I've found myself capable of spending a lot of time out at range as well when necessary (or laziness). And you could get away without using Leadership if you wanted, does make getting 45% S/L a bit harder (have to give up something somewhere), and use a Kismet to patch up Acc a little (not that dramatic, only a couple of abilities are short changed), but I will say I use Vengeance a ton.

Dark Blast will give you a lot of decent range, and the further you can push that range the better you cones will work out. Energy compliments that fact somewhat nicely with Boost Range and Power Boost (the secondary effects like -ToHit in Dark will get amplified a bit here). Personally I didn't find this combination very enticing once things went from paper to action. I even tried looking at it with a different primary that could get more bang from Power Boost, and I ended up completely removing the abilities from my build altogether. The biggest thing to remember about Dark Blast is that it doesn't want to be in Melee at all, which is massively contradictory to its T9, and thematic partner Darkness Manipulation which is all Melee focused. Energy, Plant, Tactical Arrow, and Time are the most suited to stay at a distance for pairing. My vote: Dark/Time Ice Blast can kind of mix around since its core AoE function is all target drops with wide coverage patches. It does have one cone, but it's likely a skip power for most. I personally paired this with Atomic because it opens up the doorway to stack a lot of Hold effects. Positron Cell and Radioactive Cloud both generate pretty good stacks with Freeze Ray, and between the Cloud, Atom Smasher, Ice Storm, and Blizzard you'll have a lot of mass-patch control abilities (slow, stun, hold, KDs). Other options will really be up to you on whether you want to stack up some more centralized AoE with something like Fire, or mix up your Melee game since Blizzard and Ice Storm will semi-freak-out spawns while they're active and give you a little breathing room. My vote: Ice/Atomic (totally biased, and it does feel a bit Controller-ish). Water Blast is a high AoE centric set that's going to allow you to output a lot of orange numbers all over the place and you're going to want to be flexible in that fact. You may even want to grab a few good ST hitters to patch into the build so Electric might not be a bad call and will also get you access to Power Sink which you might need cycling through a ton of higher-costing AoE. Honestly Atomic is probably a solid choice with Water Blast as well, Negatron Slam is a pretty strong hitter in itself and supports Water the same way it does Ice. All of your abilities give you distance attacking though, so if you want to maintain that long-range aspect, just like Dark Blast you'll be looking at Energy, Plant, Tactical, or Time. Energy is a pretty "blah" secondary (in my opinion), Time has some decent tricks for you though, and Plant has that "Nature" theme it can blend with. My vote: Water/Electric

Redside depresses the hell out of me. The atmosphere, the color toning, the sky, all of it, depressing. Why can't I rob and steal and villain-it-up with a little sunshine and rainbows?

I think you might have missed the concern of this thread from the beginning. The origination of what was being discussed was that uncommon salvage was trending in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 INF on average, and has suddenly, and directly due to one (or potentially more) person(s) bidding out UC salvage at a minimum of 25,555 INF per unit, which has instantly cut out any surplus that existed, and been quickly swiping most commonly posted low asking prices. There are few in this game that post salvage for a significant value beyond "10" for the ask, and on occasion for some they will set the minimum sell rate from a vendor as an alternative to at least make what they would've as a preliminary. We are seeing a concern where the price is being driven up by a drastic margin, and oddly the floor that's been created (most likely by that same person) has become 12,000-15,000 minimum, as I have yet to manage the purchase of any UC salvage at 10,000 INF within the last two weeks. For the record though, in the realm of a price being set, and another player dropping a lower asking price, this isn't manipulation, and it's barely competition. Many don't care about trying to set a specific limit, and even then setting a lower asking price just gives better odds of catching a wider range that still works within their desired profit margin. If a set amount of players continually keep purchasing a product at a price that is excessively higher than the asking price, that is over paying. If the net margin begins lower than that, and a player continues to post at a lower price, yet others keep bidding excessively beyond it, that's on them. Salvage like Luck of the Gambler is a good example of this. The minimum asking rate for those pieces tends to be around 5M INF for any one piece, but between impatience, and just... random aggressive bidding, some of those parts have commonly gone up to 10M per unit. Over time it has caused the trending price of the 7.5% +Rech piece to end up at a range of 7M-8M, yet people still commonly post their asking prices in the 5M-6M range. They weren't wrong about the intent of their message, but the delivery (as I see it, in interpreting the message) was poor. Essentially you don't need to "play the market" or farm in this game to earn INF, just natural play and selling pieces as arises is possible without major impact on any one players ability to develop their characters enhancements throughout the journey from 1 to 50. As an example: If you go out and run the early TFs like Posi 1 and 2, use those merits to buy a handful of Converters from the vendor exchange, and sell them on the Auction House for 90k a piece. Lets say you cash out an early amount and put 60 up. They sell for a bit up, and you end up with 5,400,000 after fees. Now at level 10-15 I have enough INF to buy SO's if I wanted, or probably an efficient amount to get some IO's in my early 20's. I keep doing TF's though, and keep building up that stash. Forgive me if I'm wrong, I generally just click the button without paying attention, but I think the exchange is 10 Merits for 30 Converters. If I build up 150 Merits by, say, 30, I have 450 Converters, and I post them up and get lucky and average out 42,750,000 in INF. It's pretty easy at this point to go out and look for recipes I might find useful and start bidding on them low, and get them set early. If I play smart and avoid buying any single recipe above level 40 (45 max), I can keep the crafting cost of that individual enhancement below 200k. Lets use some hypothetical "statistics" as posted by another player so far. 2 Common, 1 Uncommon, and 1 Rare per IO I craft. Lets go out and buy those salvage pieces at a common (current) going rate: 500, 15,000, and 500,000 respectively. Per IO, with a 200k craft cost and (lets say) a 100k average Recipe cost, I'm looking at 816,000 INF per IO I craft. With the INF I've earned by selling Converters (and nothing else) I have enough to afford 52 enhancements in my build, or about half which is pretty much right on target for being at level 30. Now right now your argument up to this point had been that someone altering the UC salvage was going to make it ... difficult, we'll say at the minimum to your concern, compared to normal. So I did a cost reflection of buying the UC salvage at max price of 100k INF compared to 15k, and the impact in this scenario is the difference of affording 5 crafted enhancements. A cost which could be instantly recouped by simply taking down a handful of GM's, or doing Synapse, or Manticore, and getting 20 Merits and cashing them out into Converters. An extra hour of time is all it costs a normal person to recoup the current dilemma. The current circumstance of the market is an inconvenience at best for most of players. The people this impacts more significantly, is in fact--and marginally ironic to your argument--those that flip crafted enhancements on the market by buying low recipes and converting them out in bulk. That aside, this thread seriously devolved and I think we need to let time consume it and drift into the darkest pages of the forums.

Excluding my last two builds I ran (as a test of cost), I generally just buy the entire build attuned through the auction house somewhere between level 40 and 45. To an extent maybe that sounds a bit "Inf Elitist" or something, but, honestly it's just easy to get the funds with a bit of effort, so I've never found it really all that taxing. The last two characters I hit 50 on I tried doing things a bit different as a general experiment, and primarily funded them through just crafting out what recipes they earned and flipping some for good stuff, and selling others for the raw INF as necessary. By the time the character rolled 50 I went through and used Catalysts on the entire build. For the first one I did this with I pulled all the Catalysts I'd naturally earned across multiple 50's, for the second one I just straight-up purchased the lot off the Auction House. Given that I'd earned/made enough INF to start just buying items, I only ended up needing 33 total Catalysts on the second one. I just couldn't even consider the idea of forcing myself to log in to every 50, every day to collect a Catalyst. I guess INF vs. Time. As for Merits, the only thing, and I mean the only thing I buy with Merits are Converters, and nothing else. There's not a single thing that has the INF to Unit ratio that Converters have. Occasionally there's random spikes where Boosters get some decent return, but they're just not as consistent (and in demand) as Converters. If I end up with any kind of Merit surplus after a character's build is complete, I just cash out the Merits through Converters and ship up the INF to my e-mail for another build project. I catalyze everything (Set IOs, AT-O's, WO's) save the rare exception of a Boosted IO as necessary (something I usually end up skipping because... meh, small gains); I don't rely on the Catalyst drops to do it, and just buy the necessary Catalysts. For Winter O's, those, well, no, I don't really bulk up on them. Maybe one or two sets of 5 for an occasional +5% S/L Def or something, but in a lot of my Proc Monster builds, I just end up using two (Acc/Dam and Acc/Dam/End or Dam/End) with a Catalyst because of the enhanced value is as good as +5'ing a 50 IO of the same coverage, but is easier. Yes, I'm using a 30million INF IO because it was easier than +5'ing the equivalent in a set IO that would've been substantially cheaper and I'm aware of that. Most of my earned Catalysts just kind of sit there, don't even bother selling them strangely enough. Having such a huge pile of them unintentionally is why I experimented with a "build as you go, catalyze at goal" style process. It was significantly cheaper, of course, but a bit more time consuming in process.

So much ire for Regen in one thread, scary. In other news, Deus Excalibur was recently seen doing stupid Scrapper tricks throughout Paragon City with neigh a care in the world. Regen is fine. Carry on.

Since this thread has derailed anyway, I don't feel bad for asking this off topic: So you actually log in to each of your 50's to collect their "daily" catalyst? I haven't actually run into any players that actively seek these out. Speaking for myself I ... generally don't intend on using them and they just build up on my characters in excess. It wasn't until I intentionally built a character under cheap restrictions (no INF transfer from the "bank"), that I collected up all my catalysts and moved them over to attune 15-20 some odd IO's I'd crafted from recipe drops. My most recent project I just crafted and converted into enough INF to buy the 30-some catalysts I needed. I couldn't even imagine waiting an entire month to earn each daily catalyst...

Unless I've missed a further update, the current state of it is that Shadow Maul is moving forward, but Dark Consumption is reverted to normal, and will not be getting any further alterations at this time.

It's interesting that you had this experience. Not that it'd be perfect in all scenarios (but realistically neither is Electric), but even with the -20% Crash, and not building for any intentional S/L Def, I felt Bio Armor did fine with Super Strength. Linking back to ... page 20 I think? Posted SS/Bio Brute and Bio/SS Tanker. It wasn't until a bit later that I realized (through additional research into the videos I'd recorded for data collection) that I caught a time I missed that had hit 2:00 on a Pylon, and it was very much a "perfect storm" of proc and timing. I also didn't utilize Cross Punch over Haymaker, which was later determined to provide even more swing on the DPS with the Fury proc included, but then it starts to feel less like "SS" and more like "Pool Powers+Rage+KO Blow" which just really underlines the broken of Rage.

I'm still working out the kinks on endurance at the moment, but it has been a very intriguing ride up to 50, and a blast now that I've completed his build (mostly, haven't bought the 33 converters to purple and attune ATOs and WOs). From a numbers stand point I expected it to balance out a bit better, but I'm still crashing through end with how quick I'm burning through AoE's and ST's that have naturally high end costs against their short animation times. Thinking I might need to pack Victory Rush to help fix that as I'm really trying to avoid Ageless to bandaid the problem. I didn't take Bitter Freeze Ray due to its long cast, and have just been stacking Freeze Ray and Positron Cell, and then running around with Radioactive Cloud with Lockdown +2 and a couple of procs in it. Mid's doesn't reflect accuracy for the ability, but it does perform an to-hit check for hit/miss, so keep that in mind if you weren't aware (I felt compelled to double check). If you're interested for comparison's sake: Empty slot in Negatron is a -Res Achilles Heel, the set is missing from Reborn, but is slottable in-game.

The particular nature of that build, for me, just didn't sit well. Barely half of the maps in the game even get to play to the build's strength of being so far out. In open maps with greater ceiling space, it just becomes a "fish in a barrel" scenario where the mobs try and path up to you and fail, and you just clean sweep them because they can't even come close to contending with you having double the reach any of them do. Given that, putting a ton of focus in defense bonuses wasn't really worth it when I could just use Power Boost on auto to (closely) perma all my enhanced effects (including S/L softcap). In the end I rolled Elec/Nrg for other thematic reasons and by the time I hit 50 I realized that those extra abilities were really just collecting dust in my tray because they were so sporadically used for lack of convenience and/or it generally not mattering due to map limitations. If Power Boost had a 30/s duration then I might reconsider it (and honestly I feel like, for Blasters as a main-set non-epic utility, it should be), and make Boost Range an auto ability. It can so easily be made perma plus some that it just seems silly to have an intentional click that'd be more convenient (and reasonably attribute thematically) to the secondary as an auto effect. This is the Elec/Nrg: Trade out Assault and Super Speed for Boost Range and Power Boost, ends up being a quasi-ranged-melee Blapper. Deliver Thunderous Blast at 120' out? Sure thing. I mostly IO'd the character, played into a few vet levels and got its Alpha slotted, but I don't know how much I'll really return to it. I ended up deciding to roll an Ice/Atomic after the fact and I'm liking that much better. I have a really solid arsenal of stuff that I can deliver at Range, have the appropriate defenses without sacrificing, have an assortment of (pretty strong) control, and decent Melee that I don't feel too concerned if things get close.

Just because I happened to have the build already when I considered trying to make a "Max Range" Blaster in the past, this is what Dark/Nrg looks like: With Boost Range (and some other lingering stuff), it nearly doubles the range capacity of everything. 150ft on a cone? Crazy. But it didn't turn out to really be that fun.

I'm in!

Update: Uncommon salvage is now flooded back to 10,000,332, there is not currently "obvious" bulk-stack buying and bids are going out in the 12K to 15K range, with a few higher ones in there. 2,000 UC salvage just found its way back home.

The weird part about this, as I've been watching it this afternoon for a couple of hours, and the inventory (thus far) doesn't appear to be getting replenished, especially not compared to last night when there wasn't someone stack-bidding 25,555 INF (or so I can probably assume their bid stacks filled and they had nothing left pending by that point in the night). I'm going to poke back and check it again later this evening out of curiosity and see where it stands. I was still never able to fill any stack of 10K bid UC Salvage though, after 11 hours. Right now supply is 9,998,636. It was maybe ~200ish lower than that a couple of hours ago when I checked before now. If there's a massive spike (1,000+) from this point, we'll have a pretty good notion then, but if it just continues to dwindle, than we've moved past marketeering/flipping, into straight griefing by absorbing the inventory excessively. The downside at this point is that if we out bid and return it to market, the other stacked bids will just get filled anyway and we'll have done nothing but flush INF in the attempt. I think we're at a point where if it is forced manipulation than a GM would need to be involved, but by technicality the player isn't necessarily breaking any rules. It's been about a week, maybe they'll get bored, eh?