EnjoyTheJourney

You can laugh at or curse at the attached build, if you'd like. But, hopefully it provides some fodder for thinking through the alpha choice and how to get some more slow resist into the build. I went ahead and put agility core into the build. You can click the button for it on and off to see how recharge figures and damage numbers change when you have it and when you don't have it. Check out the better recharge on freezing rain (helps the whole team's damage, as well as yours) and (especially) the better recharge on your single target powers. Check out the longer time interval with multiple tornadoes and lightning storms up. Notice that agility doesn't adversely affect your AOE powers much because of their long recharge, and that their availability improves with agility. When you account for better recharge, meaning greater availability for your ST powers, the "on paper" DPS isn't radically different for your single target powers with agility core (single target powers are the most adversely affected for their DPS, at first glance). When you factor in that some percentage of damage will end up being "overkill" damage (which is wasted damage) and that more frequent power availability with agility means quicker mob defeats, agility can lead to smoother and quicker battles than musculature. My first foray into non-damage alphas was with a storm / water defender. I took musculature radial at first for her. But, I eventually shifted to agility core for her to better tame the huge endurance expenditures of storm and to have better nuke and storm power availability. More slotting flexibility because of better defense numbers was also helpful. With agility she fairly often used to solo one side of the ITF's final mission while the other 7 players worked their way through the other side of the map, on the path to the courtyard. She usually defeated a lot of mobs when competing directly with 7 other players' characters, arriving at a similar time to the rest of the team at the courtyard. That experience opened up my thinking for alpha incarnate choices other than musculature and intuition radial. SYMPHONY STORM - Controller (Symphony Control - Storm Summoning) (2).mbd

To address your question, recharge in the alpha from taking agility would affect proc rates. Ageless will not affect proc rates. Also, despite saying you're not about numbers your build is really solid through and through. You could take the procs out of one primary power and put artillery in there. Dreadful discord or enfeebling lullaby could be good picks for that because they have slower recharge and if you math out how much extra DPS you lose by taking procs out of one of them, it's not that high. You'd gain some slots and could find room for a -res or two, which would further help damage. You could squeeze a slot into brawl and get 15% more slow resistance there and get the winter's gift 20% slow resistance unique IO into the build. Agility could help you take that further, in case you ever decide to experiment with it. FWIW I resisted taking non-damage alphas for quite a while. But, having experimented with agility, nerve, cardiac, and vigor for different characters I've found that they can all be very reasonable choices, depending on the build.

The build looks really good👍. Hopefully you can reserve the name "Symphony of Thunder" or "Conductor of Storms" or some such for it. It seems highly likely that you know the following, but here goes ... If you can make endurance work with Agility core alpha then that might complement your build quite well. A bit more defense would offer a little more build flexibility while still remaining soft capped to range. Storm loves recharge almost as much as it loves making a stormy's endurance bar disappear forever. An extra 33% recharge from Agility would help to more frequently summon freezing rains, tornadoes, and lightning storms. Endurance modification would also help to manage the endurance-swallowing beast that is storm. Intuition radial offers range and slow, which would also be quite helpful. But, it doesn't offer recharge and recharge seems to be what makes storm sing.

Thank you for taking time to provide a thoughtfully considered and very reasonable set of changes. Your efforts are appreciated and the build you've suggested would do absolutely fine as is. I like what you've proposed overall, as well, and will incorporate several elements into a revised build for my character. Just got this character to level 50 and I'm currently getting his IOs in place. I'll stick with world of confusion instead of gravity distortion field, at least for now. I'd like to see the effects of "portaling" mobs into world of confusion with the contagious confusion proc in place. It would be helpful to have some extra accuracy from the AT set, though, and gravity distortion field can be a nice "ah heck" power to have. GDF may go into a later iteration of the build ahead of world of confusion. Also, I realized only after posting that I had clicked the button for lift when calculating accuracy. So, I had inadvertently assumed that the decimation build up proc was always activated when settling on how much accuracy to put into powers . Thank you for noticing the effects of that error. And, I completely spaced out about not having immobilize protection. Having no immobilize protection is usually a pretty dumb move and it may be for this character as well. But, perhaps hovering a bit above the ground and having teleport makes being immobilized noticeably less problematic in at least most cases. Not much experience with teleport + hover and so that's something I'll figure out as I go. Intuition radial is a very reasonable alpha pick. I may go for it if indomitable will seems likely to reliably be perma without spiritual. Still wavering on the alpha. Also, will take assault hybrid for 4* runs; those aren't the majority of my gameplay, but it would hopefully help damage at least a bit for those runs. Because I exemp a fair amount I tend to attune most IOs and to use PvP IOs a fair amount, as those can be boosted and will still work all the way down to level 10. So, some choices may seem a bit odd, at first glance. Mage of Dark Portals - Controller (Gravity Control - Darkness Affinity - Psionic Mastery),v2.mbd

Attached is a build plan for a "dark portals" gravity / dark / psi controller. With wormhole and fold space, a key goal is to "portal" mobs to wherever it helps the team most to have them be. By default mobs will be dropped near the team's tank(s) / brute(s). Sometimes mobs will be moved onto a waiting tar patch or an ally's debuff field or control power field. Regarding cross-set synergies, gravity and dark seem to complement each other in several ways. Wormhole and fold space, in particular, work well with soul absorption, tar patch, and world of confusion. Keeping allies fairly close by having mobs brought to the tanks / brutes probably helps for keeping fade on more teammates, as well. The package of benefits from taking the spiritual radial alpha incarnate seems just a bit more appealing than from taking agility core. Never taken spiritual as an alpha incarnate before, not totally sure it's the right choice. Recharge received a lot of focus to perma soul absorption, fade, and indomitable will and to have wormhole and fold space quickly recharge. Feedback would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance. Mage of Dark Portals - Controller (Gravity Control - Darkness Affinity - Psionic Mastery).mbd

I appreciated the feedback and looked over the build in light of it. Thank you for taking the time to provide it. Unfortunately, I ran into a basic problem when testing out the build. A pylon test came out with 246 DPS, which caught me off guard with how low it was. The build is already a bit lower on AOE than I would have preferred. That fact, when added to lower end single target damage, has led me to put this possible build on hold for now. I have a few more projects I've been theorycrafting and after those have been worked through I'll take another look at this primary / secondary combo to see if damage can't be improved somehow without substantially reducing survivability.

Fire blast and water blast offer 3 AOEs, aside from their respective nukes. Being able to cycle three AOE attacks should put AOE damage in a good place for either of these sets. Fire blast would do more damage. But, water blast has a heal and it allows for force feedback +recharge IOs.

If the following webpage is accurate, then debuff strength can be reduced by the purple patch, but debuff duration is not affected: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Purple_Patch

A seismic / energy blaster might also work with Magneto. Energize from energy manipulation can be paired with the leaping pool (combat jumping, super jump, acrobatics) and power boost to provide decent mez protection against all but sleep. Since Magneto's helmet is quite good at protecting him from mind controlling effects, having mez protection can make sense for a Magneto-like character. Plus, Magneto can apparently heal himself, which energize offers. Finally, Magneto doesn't seem to easily get winded. The endurance discount in energize could reflect that. Although for most characters taking at least one of the blaps is a good choice, for a Magneto-like character power thrust might be a good choice instead of the blaps. Stun might also at least somewhat mimic Magneto's ability to interfere with others' ability to normally function. Finally, boost range could make sense for Magneto because he can apparently affect metal from a very long distance away. More generally, Magneto seems to be able to do a lot of damage. That may fit with a blaster better than it does with a defender or corruptor, at the end of the day.

In case it's interesting, here is a link to a relatively recent massively OP web article looking at the popularity of each AT on COH homecoming. It's just a 30 day snapshot. Still, the VEAT update seems to have had at least some positive effect on their popularity. Or khelds dropped a bit in how appealing players find them. Not sure which might apply. https://massivelyop.com/2024/03/07/over-42000-people-played-city-of-heroes-homecoming-in-the-last-month/ Not sure this is a "front and center" issue for discussing inherents. But, trying to understand the extent of the lack of popularity of HEATs may be relevant to HEAT revision discussions.

Khelds were designed to be the jack-of-all trades AT with form shifting being the way they do that. One could reasonably argue that khelds should have the ability to function at times like a sentinel, rather than trying to design that out by withholding mez protection from any non-dwarf form. For that matter, many (or more likely most) changes likely to be made to khelds will bring them in some way closer to one AT or another, or a set of ATs; the case for taking special care to avoid at times resembling a sentinel seems obscure. Also, for the kheldian revamp to go well khelds probably need to be both more powerful (without resorting to changeling) and to involve less complexity and friction than they currently do. That's the gateway to getting more players to be excited about playing them. Otherwise, future kheld revision discussions are likely to be attended by the developers having to ask themselves "How much time should we spend revising an AT which continues to have such a small portion of the population interested in it?" And, the inherent suggestions being bandied about (including my own, to be fair) run the risk of making the AT even more complicated by adding at least one more thing that needs to be actively managed (or at least monitored) to play the AT near the ceiling of its capabilities. Regarding friction, here are some sources already present in the AT: Managing a set of binds to get changeling to work so good damage can be achieved Power tray swapping so powers for each form are easier to manage that needs binds / macros to be efficient Get slept or stunned just after shifting out of dwarf, thereby putting a power (perhaps the nuke or eclipse for a warshade) on cooldown before it activates Form shifting itself, which takes animation time and, as was pointed out, which is both a bit noisy and visually a bit over-the-top Can be very challenging to slot, very slot starved because there are up to three forms to which to allocates slots, instead of one Human form toggle drops when shifting to non-human forms has thankfully been addressed. But, what's above is probably just a partial listing of sources of friction associated with playing a kheld that make playing them less enjoyable than it could be.

Something that may (or may not) matter to you is that illusion / cold won't be strong for AOE. If soloing GMs / AVs is your only goal then that's probably not as much of an issue. Warning: a bit of a "love letter" to illusion / TA / psy follows ... An Illusion / TA / psy controller is one of my most played and enjoyed characters in the most recent year of gameplay. It would, of course, at times be nice to have a heal. Still, as a hover-blasting debuffer / summoner who is almost always invisible at the start of fights, the build is quite survivable. Phants are "on paper" 0.54 seconds away from being perma. But, using psionic tornado, which has a +recharge proc IO in it, means that phants are effectively perma. Psy mastery also provides access to indomitable will, which is a mez protection clicky power that is also nearly perma in the build (again, though, effectively perma when using psy nado). That makes it easier to take barrier core as the destiny incarnate, which provides a good "peak survivability" option when aggro gets to be a bit too much for your controller. In addition, teams tend to love T4 barrier, especially when doing hard mode content. Overall, it's quite helpful to have mez protection which only has the cost of one mouseclick about every 90 seconds. Finally, EMP arrow is an excellent skill that debuffs / controls enemies and boosts and self resistances and mez protection for teammates in the bubble, including your controller; it is a very, very nice skill for fighting GMs / AVs. I also have an illusion / poison / psy controller. She is very capable and can make fights go even quicker than my illusion / TA / psy controller. But, her need to be in or near melee for peak effectiveness and her presence on the ground make her harder to keep alive when teaming in 4* content than my illusion / TA psy controller.

In case it matters I recall seeing data presented on these forums that measured the damage from the psy proc compared to assault hybrid. The psy proc did quite a bit less damage, overall. Edit: Found the link, it's a post by Jayboh and it's visible further down in this forum, still on the first page ...

When people think "dominator" they think "strong controls." Making a dominator with a different key strength is possible, though. For example, a gravity / dark dominator can take both wormhole and fold space. It would be the indisputably best character for deciding where mobs will be when fighting them. That would probably offer the most utility when teaming. But, there could also be a zen-like feeling from soloing with that kind of character, as you could head to the center of a room and then "invite" all the spawns in the room to a place, one after another, in which you'd like to fight them. Dark assault offers a self-heal and some to hit debuffs that help for coping with damage that trickles through defenses. It also facilitates having a "mobile doom portal" theme to a character that would be focused on managing where mobs will be when fighting them.

The OP's suggestions are inventive and a good starting point for re-thinking the kheldian inherents. As some other thoughts, since the forms can all be activated through the same body there's a reasonable case to be made for cross-form benefits and synergies. For example, there could reasonably be limited buffs that accrue to human and nova form from merely having taken dwarf form, and other buffs gained by spending a fair amount of time in dwarf form and by using dwarf form abilities. The same could be true for nova form. Some really helpful and cool stuff can happen by allowing more synergies across forms than now exist. A handful of possible examples of always-on passive benefits from having more than just human form for a kheld ... - After choosing nova form gain a small bonus to recovery and ranged damage for other forms. Can fly for up to 30 seconds before an unmodifiable 4 minute cooldown happens when not in nova form. - After choosing dwarf form gain a small amount of unenhanceable passive resistances (say, 3.75% or 5% to all but psionic damage) in non-dwarf forms. Also, after choosing dwarf form a kheldian can teleport 3 times before a 90 second cooldown starts for that skill when not in dwarf form. Also, dwarf mez protection can be applied to non-dwarf forms, but perhaps with somewhat smaller values and in the form of a toggle that costs endurance when not in dwarf form. ... there are undoubtedly other creative ideas that could be explored. There are actually a lot of things that could reasonably be introduced. Human form benefits could also be made applicable to other forms. On a related note, perhaps time spent in a form and actually using the form to do things both contribute to a mechanic called "acclimation", "adaptation", or "attunement", rather than fury or "kheldian shift." Thus, as time in a form increases and as more things are done in that form the kheldian becomes more "attuned" to that form and there are buffs that end up being applied because of that. A decay mechanic could also reasonably be framed around the length of time not spent in a given form. The team buffs would make khelds more like VEATS, except it seems that khelds wouldn't need to devote power picks and slots to those buffs. If team buffs were to be added to khelds then their values should perhaps be carefully weighed in light of how much investment others need to make to bring similar benefits to a team. Edit: Almost forgot to mention that khelds are mostly resistance-based for their defenses. And yet, they are at a substantial disadvantage given how the game has evolved after their introduction early in the game's history compared to a number of other, later-developed resistance-based power sets because resistances to the wide variety of debuffs mobs can now inflict are typically incorporated to some degree for later-developed resistance-based armor sets. Not khelds, though, and they pay the price for that against a fair variety of different enemy factions. The ability to withstand enemy debuffs will hopefully get some attention as part of any kheldian review. Dwarf form would probably get the highest amount of debuff resistances. Nova form could reasonably be given some recovery debuff resistance, which could perhaps be additive with any dwarf recovery debuff resistances. In the end, hopefully some passive debuff resistances and/or "attunement" debuff resistances will also be available to khelds that take dwarf form, as part of a reconfigured kheldian inherent.

As long as resistance debuffs are subject to purple patch effects then it's quite complicated to try to convert pylon defeat times against higher level pylons into DPS totals that would be generated from using the same build to defeat even level pylons. Because resistance debuffs in a build are fairly common with skills and/or -res IOs it would be best to save combat logs showing -res activation data, then do some spreadsheet calculations to account for purple patch effects for -res activations, and then calculate some kind of normalized-across-different-pylon-levels DPS from there. It's probably not worth the bother. It's probably best (or at the very least, it's definitely simpler) to just treat defeats of level 54 pylons / training dummies as their own thing, distinct and separate from defeats of level 50 pylons / training dummies, rather than trying to normalize DPS calculations across all different pylon levels.

First time putting together a draft of a dark / stone sentinel build. A bit out of practice, as well, not having made any new sentinel builds in months. It seems that it might be somewhat light on single target damage with a basic single target attack chain of abyssal gaze, antiumbral beam, life drain, repeat Also wondering whether defenses will be in a good place, especially with both (dark) energy defense and resists looking a bit low. The healing powers, regen, and ability to run at maximum hit points should help to compensate for some lowish resistances. Not sure how well it's likely to go, though. Also, defense debuff resistance seems a bit low at about 33%. Is that all that stone armor gets, or does slotting need to be re-thought? Suggestions for improvement welcomed, thank you in advance. Sentinel (Dark Blast - Stone Armor - No mastery).mbd

Actually, fighting pool synergies produce modest debuffs that apply to mobs, and not more damage. This is a simple case of the in-game UI giving a player bad information. Good detective work by Uun to look that over.

Just checked Mids to see the stats for brawl and did a bit of experimenting. The TLDR conclusion is that brawl does modestly more than 20 DPA without slotting or incarnates. It does modestly more than 100 DPA when slotted to maximize damage, after the incarnates most often included for pylon testing purposes are brought into consideration. More information below, for those who would like to review the details ... (Looked into this hoping that stats for brawl would match up with the OP's description. But, that was not the case. Currently am confused.) ---------------------- Mids lists brawl as having a base of 22.52 damage for a scrapper with an arcanatime casting time of 1.056 seconds. It does not crit. Took T4 musculature core as the alpha incarnate and T4 reactive radial as the interface incarnate in Mids. Then six-slotted brawl and inserted the following IOs ... Hecatomb - damage, boosted to +5 Hecatomb - damage / endurance reduction, boosted to +5 Hecatomb - damage proc + 3 more damage procs for melee attacks (Mako's bite damage proc, gladiator's strike damage proc, and touch of death damage proc) All of this added up to 128.4% added damage (derived from 152.66% added damage before enhancement diversification) + damage procs = 123.1 damage. That's modestly above 100 DPA after slotting to maximize damage.

You can directly purchase the purple set recipes at a kind of vending machine using merits gained from running content that provides such rewards. Check your "special" salvage to see how many merits your character has. You can also convert merits into "hero merits", which contain 50 merits. Then you can email those hero merits to your own account as an attachment (one hero merit attached per email). Another character on that account can open up any emails you've sent to your own account, then convert any hero merits claimed from such emails back into merits at the same vendor that allowed you to purchase hero merits in the first place. Then that character can use those merits to make any wanted purchases.

Does that mean damage resistance debuffs are subject to purple patch effects? So, for example, would the -20% resistance debuff from an achilles heel be subject to purple patch effects and thereby reduced in its efficacy against higher level mobs than the character applying the debuff? Looking back, my wording was probably imprecise.

Unfortunately, the respawn rate for even level pylons beside the main RWZ building seems to be unpredictable. So, it would be handy if there was a way to scale the DPS calculation formula to match the specific level of whatever pylon was defeated. Then DPS testing can be done whenever it fits our schedule, instead of happening in accordance with the whims of the "pylon respawn overlords." I'll check out the power analyzer; never looked at it before, but it might be quite helpful now. I'll also need to look more into regeneration mechanics to make that adjustment to the formula as well for each pylon level beyond 50.

Thank you for your response! Didn't realize hit points for enemies scaled higher than for level 50 once level 51+ was reached. Not sure how I ended up missing (or perhaps forgetting) that. Higher hit points seems like it should lead to higher regen, as well, which will change two key parts of the DPS calculation formula for each higher level of a rikti pylon beyond 50. In theory, calculations can be adjusted by replacing hit points and regen figures for each level higher than 50 for a rikti pylon and then dividing the DPS total generated by the proportion of damage done after purple patch reductions to "normalize" the DPS calculations. Basically, adjust for how many more "base" hit points and how many more "regenerated" hit points need to be gotten through, then make an adjustment for how much damage is reduced by the level gap between the pylon and the player aiming to defeat it. That has the potential flaw of essentially ignoring the potential complication of to hit chances becoming lower than 95% as a pylon's level goes up. The points you make come across as well thought through about how relatively brief (de)buff cycles become less impactful when a pylon gets tougher. Perhaps level 50 pylons become the better "burst DPS" test and level 54 pylons come at least a bit closer to helping toward understanding "sustained" DPS. Different information comes from each kind of test, perhaps. Efforts to find the hit point totals for rikti pylons have so far hit a wall. City of data information about "boss monsters", which is apparently a rikti pylon's enemy type, showed a wall of data that was challenging to interpret. The wiki entry for rikti pylons doesn't show hit point totals. Is there a specific source to which to refer to figure out the level-adjusted point total of rikti pylons for level 51 and beyond?

Currently there are level 50 through level 54 pylons / training dummies outside the main building in RWZ and level 54 pylons around RWZ, away from the main building. If one defeats a higher level pylon / training dummy than their character level, then a new formula is needed to calculate DPS. Does anybody know those formulae for levels 51 - 54 pylons, know where to find them, or have a clear idea about how to make them? One reason for wondering about this is that the even level pylons in RWZ can sometimes glitch out instead of respawn, leaving no even-level pylons available for testing on the live servers for fairly long periods of time. Thank you in advance for any help provided.Edit: My first (perhaps overly simple) thought was to divide the usual DPS total as calculated for an even level pylon by the proportion of damage done as per the purple patch reduction, given the level difference. So, for example, a 200 DPS total under the usual even level pylon formula would get divided by 0.48 and would slightly more than double against a pylon that is 4 levels higher than the character. To help make this last paragraph a bit easier to follow, against mobs that are +4 vs a character that character will do 48% of their usual damage. So, for example, a level 53 Cimeroran would take only 48% of the damage done against even level mobs from a level 49 character. A 52% reduction in damage is the purple patch effect on damage, in this case. Since -resistance isn't subject to purple patch effects and that is a key debuff which influences pylon defeat times, a simple purple patch damage adjustment might work. It could also produce hard-to-interpret numbers, though, when the chance of hitting a pylon falls below 95% for higher level pylons. On a related note, and to check, do incarnate bonus levels not apply when fighting pylons? So, for a 50+3 character, for example, it would seem that such a character won't become higher level than a level 50 pylon or training dummy. Is that correct?

Building off of Psiphon's input, if you stack active defense twice DDR goes into the low 70% range. If you take ageless radial destiny incarnate and bring it to T4, then your DDR goes up into the low 90% range even during the part of the ageless radial cycle that offers the lowest level of debuff resistance. That's very helpful for avoiding cascading defense debuff failures. Ageless radial is also great for the recharge buff and the endurance refill, as well, and so for this kind of character it's a very reasonable pick.