Sir Myshkin

I went back and looked at what the old 2020 posting was for ranked rolled on Tankers and, yes it might be old, this is what was listed: For Melee: Claws, Katana For Armor: Ice, SR I know I've seen my fair share of Kat/SR Scrappers in my time, but can't say I've seen that many Tankers run it. Ice Armor... I'll concede does still feel on the low-end of folks running it despite how absolutely awesome the set is. I'd leave a lot of it down to graphic interference probably for why so many don't take it (at least on Everlasting). I also don't think I've ever seen an Ice/Claws. These were the least rolled pairings and reflect in greater disparity of choice: 221 Ice Armor Dual Blades 3 222 Super Reflexes Electrical Melee 3 223 Ice Armor Katana 3 224 Dark Armor Kinetic Attack 3 225 Super Reflexes Stone Melee 3 226 Super Reflexes Spines 3 227 Fiery Aura Kinetic Attack 2 228 Super Reflexes Broad Sword 2 229 Super Reflexes Ice Melee 2 230 Ice Armor Claws 2 231 Bio Organic Armor Ice Melee 2 232 Fiery Aura Katana 2 233 Electric Armor Broad Sword 2 234 Stone Armor Katana 1 235 Super Reflexes War Mace 1 If I were going to put a vote I'd tally it on Ice/Claws, not in regards to "worst options" but frankly just least played, least considered pairings.

This was originally meant to be Moonbeam and Shadow Meld but I just can't get over how much I dislike Breath of Fire at such a short cone length, and since SM isn't really needed, I swapped it to Zapp/Ball. This is also not really a proc-minded build which can skew against KM a bit in regards to its ability to pump out its early attacks in fast succession where procs do well.

Nah, go Electric, it's much cooler. Had one of these planned since Fire was a consideration, full capped res and 45% S/L/M with 50% end reduction on all attacks? Yessir.

If you want a Tank that even a Dev can't peel aggro off it, then Ice is your King. Chilling Embrace and Icicles are going to give the double-whammy of Debuff and Damage. If you pick up something like Darkest Night from Scorpion, you can double up on the -Dam (and the Debuff aggro-goodness). Mine personally is Ice/Stone for the smattering of goodness in soft controls with Stone. Multiple forms of KU/KD between ST and PBAoE attacks with a Hold and some Disorients mixed in. Keeps everything tightly locked in my sphere of influence be force.

Ah, kay, now we see! Getting defense into Ice Armor isn't tricky, it actually has several different paths that are very flexible you can take advantage of. Here is an Ice/Stone build for you to work off of, it should allow you to translate your build pretty much one-to-one for the Melee set, and you'll be freely flexible to choose an Epic. Ice doesn't need extra padding from Physical Perfection, so get something else with merit like some control to help manage the field. I noticed you grabbed Infiltration, stealth isn't exactly a good power for Tankers since it's counter intuitive to Gauntlet; you're a threat magnet! The best focus for Ice is getting Smashing, Lethal, Energy, and Negative defense up, maybe pad your psionic resistance if you've got the inclination. You'll have impregnable cold resistance so no need to really worry about cold defense, leaving fire you're really only major "weakness", but there's not much you'll face in the game that's exclusively fire so this isn't such a big deal. Energy Absorption can double stack, and can hit 10 targets each time making it possible for you to pad your fire defense well enough anyway, plus any floating team buffs, meaning this won't ever really be a concern. This is also exclusive of Incarnate abilities, so you're totally free to choose whatever you want there as well!

What are you leaning on to get there? Ice Armor doesn't pack any supportive regen boosting, and there really isn't a resource for that in the Melee sets, I could see the inclusion of Physical Perfection adding a bit, and there are a couple of Regen boosting IO's, but unless you really sacrificed all your slotting towards Regen bonuses, I'm not capturing what got you to 600%. It is possible to make Regen a survival tool, but it typically needs a support heal to patch in between which Ice lacks. Generally when you look to build up an armor set you want to start focusing on its primary function (either Defense or Resistance) and then once that it covered, moved to the next item (the opposite of what you started with), before looking at the possibility of packing in any further HP/Regen into a build.

The power is particular, you have to execute it before your enemies have a chance to inflict their abilities for the debuff to impact them, so it has to be done immediately and it's a bit slow to do that. The max you'll get the recharge down to is 30ish seconds in best case scenarios, for a fast moving team this isn't enough to have it up every spawn but maybe every other one, and then you find "well maybe I'll just hold on to it for the important ones" and then "maybe just the AV" and then you're suddenly thinking "why did I take this power?" The key component of its function is the DDR it grants, but it only starts at 22% and is marginally enhanceable. This isn't bad to supplement other defensive sets that have a base to begin with, but it's not a very significant amount when starting from scratch. Ageless Radial outshines the effectiveness of this powers purpose pretty substantially by providing a much higher amount for a considerable duration of its run. For most of the game there's not many places this is likely to shine outside of Hard Mode, it's very easily an unnoticed power when it occurs in general and most regular content gets moved through so effectively that the difference of what this power does it unlikely to change the game for most.

I'm not going out and making a 100 alts or anything, but I've yet to run into a problem with a naming convention on any character I've made so far. Some more obvious names here and there have been taken on the off chance of "if it is, fun, if not, lets be more creative" when I went looking. Comparatively to when the game was "Live" there were hundreds of thousands of users creating characters and folks still managed fine, here we're just in the several thousand range I don't think we really have anything to stress right now. So I can't name my character "The Blender", maybe there's a more creative spin option out there that's better anyway?

You have more duplicate characters than I have just characters in general!

Official Repel Ball team field.

LS and Tornado can have as many casts out as you can manage so go nuts. I’d also suggest putting the BU proc in LS as well as the FF+Rech as both are almost assured to fire when you summon it granting you a nice little boost and a great way to get extra BU triggers on demand. A moderately hastened build should manage two of each fairly well. Hmm, I hadn’t thought about the BU proc in Moonbeam, that’d be a huge spike point for sure. Kind of an obvious choice now that it’s pointed out since I don’t have any recharge slotted in that power. I fixed the build I was working yesterday so I know I don’t have much wiggle room left but I think I can skip that in and give it a run tomorrow. Thanks for the reminder!

Where did you stick the crit proc, and if you did, how proc'd out did you go on the attacks? I've been monkeying with a Fire/Electric Scrapper build that only gets close to 3:00ish with just a couple of procs. If I turn on Assault Hybrid I can shave a minute, but eh. Wanted to get by without using Moonbeam, but it gets me closer when I do use it swinging for nearly 600 points under Build Up without even having anything more than Musculature and a 53 Acc/Dam HO in it. Heck in the time frame of considering posting this I got side tracked and reconfigured the build again, although I think I moved things around into the only configuration I'm going to get away with, see what it does in the evening maybe.

I hadn't forgotten about it, the idea of it though means that there would be some form of "checkpoint", which defeats the purpose of "if you die, you're back to square one." Plus, in many cases, those prison cells are often further in, meaning it would put a person beyond their "level", which then asks where do you put the prisons? How many? Easier I thought to just not have them at all! Ahahah!

Do you want Range exclusivity, or just access to solid cone work? I think that's one question still unanswered there. Yes AR has three cones, but Flamethrower is kind of a garbage power comparatively to the other two options (long animation, slow DoT, subpar damage comp), given that if we were to pick "best choice for Cones" then I'd probably suggest Dark Blast since the cone options are superior in Torrent and Tentacles both being forms of control (KB/D and Immob) which are key in keeping thing in place for cone maximization, this is something that AR lacks and would have to be compensated for in the secondary--especially considering the fire components are going to make things run. Dark Blast also has the longest range across the board for all of its attacks which means better cones. If Assault Rifle, then I would suggest pairing it with Tactical Arrow, Glue Arrow and Oil Slick will help manage keeping things in cone placement, and Ignite will double up on the fire-tantrums with Oil Slick. If Dark Blast, well then this is pretty flexible, Tactical Arrow would be just as beneficial here, but Plant offers several decent ranged options that would avoid weapons draw, as would Devices which would give Smoke Grenade for more -ToHit stacking. Personally if you were interested in playing Dark Blast, I'd probably suggest looking at doing it on a Corruptor and finding a good secondary to take advantage of debuffs there, versus trying to pull strings as a Blaster. Dark has some good tricks up its sleeve, and its fast DoT favors a Corruptor play style more.

Hi, my name is Sir Myshkin. *pause* I... I've... I'veneverreadanyofthestoryarcssincelaunchIjustplayforthecommunity. *phew*

I did think of something else that came to mind reading people's responses here, of things I used to do back in the day and I think it'd be kind of fun if there were a more "true" experience towards it that, honestly, the underground city of Orenbega would probably be perfect for. Two things I would do a lot on live before the existence of the DFB was to gather a team with the intention that we would not stop running the sewer network until would got as far as it exited (this would take you somewhere into Skyway or Steel depending on where you turned), and it was a path that got folks into their teens easily, especially on a 2XP weekend. It was about the challenge of going as far as you could without "coming back out" because back then there was no check point, once you got that far in, if you hit the Hospital you weren't coming back. The other thing I found to be a fun challenge was in the 20's and hitting the Striga Island Council Base, the "Wolf's Throat" where the base goes underground for a stretch and is just filled wall to ceiling with enemies. Same premise as the sewer run: Go as long as you can, if you die, you're done, tap out, it's over. The goal was to make it to the other side alive. Now most of you might be thinking "Well yeah, sure, grab a team that's easy." No, the kicker on this challenge was to do it solo. So what if we had that Orenbega style map as an actual zone, casually filled and milling about like a Circle of Thorns "city zone" with transport rings to weird sections, and active underground pools, and the deeper you go, the harder the enemies get. And of course, there's no hospital to save you.

How about we fix the zones we have? Faultline has been under construction for twenty years!

The obvious outlook for the power is to cycle it on a few targets (usually possible to get it on two or three for most builds without much trouble), ideally Melee since it stretches their benefit further, and keep it on them. I did not personally play with it this way (for the most part). A prime alpha lead is a decent place to direct it for sure, but while that heal component might seem paltry at low levels, I have seen it be just enough of a spark to pick a player back up and give them the boost they need to run. Keep in mind that heals in general work off the percent game, so if there is anyone tossing green around on the team your Frostwork just boosted the grand benefit of their work too. More recently I decided to roll a Mercs/Cold with the Page 5 changes since I'd not been playing my Cold character at all since it was created years ago (weird to say that), and I direct the Frostwork towards my Mercs. The pets get a pretty substantial boost, it benefits Bodyguard, thus benefiting me. Each nets several hundred HP, spread across the T3 and T2's means I've got a lot more leverage than an average Mastermind. The Mercs can also get pumped significantly for Res stats with the changes to Serum (can cap them out for a short period), and Cold lets me soft cap them. Application of the power matters, pick the right target for the right reason at the right time and it can change a scenario dramatically.

There's absolutely no reason you can't play a Storm/Psi, but it wouldn't be a Mad King build. The key aspect of what drives those builds is leveraging the Force Feedback +Rech proc in as many avenues as possible, and Psychic Blast just doesn't have a reliable source for that like Energy and Water do. It can sort of be hacked with Dark Blast because of Torrent being a very fast cycling cone and just spamming that one attack a lot, but it's definitely not ideal. The other secret about Energy Blast being a good trickster for this is that its KB components have relatively low chance percentages, and somewhat low KB values comparatively so if they go off they're not dramatically tossing that single critter, and the AoE is easy to neuter with an Overwhelming Force for +Dam and KD conversion. For Psychic, Telekinetic Force is a very high chance (60%), high KB 8 mag hit which means whatever it hits is going to FLY, making follow up hits harder.

I couldn't possibly choose just one of my children, that would be madness! Although really it's more about whether they get their Incarnates knocked out. Hitting 50 is inevitable, but whether they score a full T4 set or not isn't always the case. Some only have T3 sets, and others barely have an Alpha (if even that much effort advanced).

Well considering I suggested it, I suppose I should offer the build too eh?

Ha! I actually built my character’s entire concept around the flight restriction. He believes the Earth refuses to let him go because he is banished to wander the land, and even if he jumps so high to brush heaven (hit the light box ceiling), he cannot break its hold and will inevitably fall again.

I’ll also chime in and say that if you’re considering Seismic Blast, really look at pairing it with Earth Manipulation and then you’d have two Blaster combos to try out. Seismic/Earth is one of the most fun combos I’ve played across any AT and it dishes out a ridiculous amount of damage, both AoE AND Single Target.

"Ceterum autem censeo Iram esse delendam!"