EnjoyTheJourney

I didn't check the Manticore set in a detailed way. I went ahead and assumed the damage proc was in there. doh! On that note, it's fine to drop the acc / int / rech IO and replace it with the manticore damage proc. That leaves accuracy at 94.23% for that power for +3 mobs and average damage per quickform snipe goes up by about 60. Picking damage procs for theme can work. For example, if it doesn't make sense to you that negative energy damage might come from an energy punch charged brawl or a shocking grasp then you can just drop procs with negative energy damage and focus on other procs instead. That does lead to somewhat lower damage. But, if it makes playing your blaster less fun to play to have damage procs you can't associate with that character then the extra damage isn't worth it (of course).

The simplest way to improve single target damage is to drop some attacks that have very few slots and to take charge up and build up. Alternating between those two will keep single target damage in a noticeably better place, as well as increasing AOE. Also, you can still use damage procs even if you'd like to steer clear of purples and ATOs. Even a handful of damage procs in a build can make big difference for damage output. Take energy punch charged brawl in the sample build, for example. You can put in melee set IOs in energy punch charged brawl in place of the Hami-Os, if you'd like, and put an extra slot in there to take damage higher and get another minor set bonus. Edit: I forgot that the "baseline" 100% recharge is now shown explicitly in Mids and I just realized your blaster doesn't have hasten. There's actually less than 100% global recharge in the builds you and I put together, which is leaving key powers on a long cooldown before recharging. It's worth considering dropping a power pool to get hasten because powers will come back so much faster with it.

I had a bit of a brain fart in labeling dynamo crucial to keeping endurance in a good place. If there's one thing a triple E blaster doesn't need to worry much about, it's endurance. If the ideas passed along prove in some way helpful, then that's great. Still, whatever others might say if you're having fun playing your blaster then you're doing it right.

Here's an alternative build to consider ... It's a "high budget" build, but not an "infinite budget" build. Most of the more rare IOs can be purchased using merits if the auction house price is too rich to pay. LKN-351 - Blaster (Electrical Blast - Electricity Manipulation),v2.mbd

The draft build is a bit confusing in how it's put together. Are you putting this together as a kind of "budget build"? If so, then the choices are more understandable. Either way, some thoughts arose ... Endurance drain - Seems fairly well set up for this. Defense & resistance totals - These seem reasonable overall for a blaster. AOE - Has a good amount of AOE, although maybe a bit less would also be fine. No Dynamo - This is a must-take power to keep endurance in a good place. Strike-through text was incorrect. This power helps for life regen and makes endurance management easier. Not essential for endurance management on a triple E blaster. No charge up or build up - These are bread and butter powers for blasters and not taking them reduces spike damage by a great deal. Casting one of these and then nuking is a go-to tactic for blasters. Low single target damage, especially for a blaster - The DPA for single target powers in the draft build is mostly under 200 even on those rare occasions when the decimation build up power procs. It doesn't proc often in low recharge, low cast time powers, though. So, actual in-game single target DPS seems set to be under 200 according to the numbers in Mids. Too many poorly slotted attacks - There's not much value in having many poorly slotted attacks. Take fewer attack powers and slot the ones you take to make them hit as hard as possible. Consider dropping havoc punch, thunder strike, and static discharge to take charge up, build up, and shocking bolt. Put a second slot into charge up and put the gaussian build up proc IO into that second slot. Proc up energy punch charged brawl to make it hit like a runaway monster truck. Consider getting a sixth slot into the snipe and putting a damage proc IO into that last slot. Pick either lightning bolt or charged bolt and drop the other. Use the freed up power slot to take shocking grasp. Put five IOs from the hecatomb set into shocking grasp (maximizing recharge is probably better because of better hold availability and because the DPA is really high even with max recharge) if you can afford it and put a damage proc IO into the sixth slot. These changes give you have two holds you can stack (shocking grasp, shocking bolt) against tougher mobs that haven't been completely drained. You can purchase very rare recipes using merits at a kind of vending machine available in multiple places. Recharge is helpful for any build. But, having a blaster that hits hard is a higher priority. Hopefully these ideas end up being helpful.

You may need to uninstall Mids and reinstall it with the latest working version. After that you should be able to open files again.

What makes DPS tests interesting is what is learned along the way. DPS enhancing strategies that work across all ATs are also of interest and are worth learning about. But, once that lesson has been learned (Is Recluse great? Yup! Is Geas great? Yup!, Are poisoned daggers effective? Yup!, ...) it's not clear how much more gets learned after a fairly small number of runs showing those same lessons to be true. And, those DPS enhancers that have such a powerful effect on all builds tend to obscure the effect on DPS of more sustainable, build-specific choices that would also be interesting to learn about. In the end, beyond a fairly small number of "anything goes" DPS tests, DPS tests that remove particularly powerful generic DPS boosters from the equation are much more interesting because we can learn about specific builds we might want to play in-game that way.

At the risk of belaboring one thing, the mez toggle really needs to be taken. Your tank can't hold aggro and is at risk of being defeated if they are getting mezzed a lot. Without obsidian your tank will be mezzed a lot. This provides you with a good power to take in place of cloak of fear, which is of limited value for the reasons given by others. Not sure if others noticed, but you'll also want knockback protection IOs (karma, steadfast protection, and/or the universal travel one for which the name escapes me). Probably at least 8 points worth to minimize getting knocked about. Dark armor does have fear protection in its shields, which can be really helpful sometimes. But, it doesn't have knockback protection in its shields and getting knocked around a fair amount can get a bit old after a while.

You might want to leave off the set bonus prioritization for early levels for dark regeneration. Your planned build has only 70% accuracy dark regeneration at the moment. That will let your tank down quite often, especially against mobs that have some defense. You might want dark regeneration six-slotted by level 22. Try to get accuracy to as close to 95% as you can, get some endurance reduction in it, and get the theft of essence +endurance proc in it. Edit: OAS's input is very good, as usual. Getting the kismet +to hit IO early is a particularly good choice for any dark armor user because dark regeneration starts out behind the curve for accuracy. And, dark regeneration can be procc'd up for damage and it will trigger quite often; it's particularly appealing to fit in damage procs in an endgame build, after all the +accuracy set bonuses are in place. But, while leveling up it can be a bit of a struggle to get accuracy high enough for dark regeneration. So, focusing on getting enough accuracy to get 95% chance to hit or close, endurance reduction, and the theft of essence +endurance proc is the safer choice, as it leaves your tanker in a better place for both healing and endurance management.

It's a bit confusing to see the theft of essence set in dark regeneration, but not the proc. The theft of essence chance for +endurance proc should go into dark regeneration before level 12. Pay for an unslotter or two and try it out. You can get multiple activations of the proc IO per casting of dark regeneration, when using it in crowds. The theft of essence +endurance proc is transformative for dark armor. Also, your tank doesn't have the mez protection toggle. Not sure why that wasn't taken yet. You could perhaps burn a respec, drop cloak of fear, get obsidian to replace it, and then pick up cloak of fear later once again if you really like it.

I don't recall which command I used. But, it sounds like I was using powexec, in the end. I'll try out powexecauto, then. TYVM!

I tried tying movement to autofire powers once before and got notifications on screen continuously for whichever power was not ready to be used. Is there a way to shut those notifications off? Would be great for dominators to be able to put both hasten and domination on autofire.

Your build is an interesting alternative to the build I put together earlier. It's easy to like the noticeably better AOE that you've put together in your build. You've found reasonable ways to save slots and allocate them elsewhere, as well. The "gloom vs dark blast" choice could reasonably go either way. In the end I wanted a filler power that would not take up a lot of animation time while cycling single target powers that all have higher DPA than either the T1 or T2. Not totally sure whether or not it was the right choice. It can help to switch on arcanatime casting times in Mids for all powers. Then it's easier to see where gaps might appear in attack chains and how long gaps are likely to be) and to see cases in which you could add less recharge and more procs to a power, while still maintaining a gapless attack chain. It should be interesting to see how well everything comes together for you, in the end. Good luck with your build.

Ouch! Hopefully that improves soon. For whatever reason I had fewer mapserver incidents two days ago and none yesterday. Nothing has changed about my PC. Cipher's hypothesis about the cause may ultimately be correct.

I've tried restarts and they don't seem to affect anything. The process of becoming able to access the website, to be able to login, and to be able to enter the game doesn't seem to change at all with a restart. Are there temporary files for City of Heroes that I can delete? I thought of that after posting earlier and would be happy to try that; perhaps something in that (those) file(s) got corrupted. My antivirus program is very basic. I should consider what Windows can do by way of a cleaning or optimization program if deleting temporary files doesn't work. I'll also check out deleting cookies in case something got corrupted there. Thank you for taking the time to post.

I have game mode enabled on my PC and it's set to "high priority" for graphics. This doesn't seem to be graphics-driven though. Perhaps it's an authentication issue of some kind. Also, the network priority for the City of Heroes game is set to "low". I tried boosting it higher via the task manager - details - right click on program - set network priority process. But, the system ignored my efforts.

All other websites work normally and are just fine. I also played another game tonight for a fair while to see if it was also having stability issues. The other game is also played online. But, there were no issues at all when playing that other game. So, what started happening yesterday is specific to the City of Heroes homecoming game launcher, the game itself, and the City of Heroes homecoming website. Things that have been happening include ... 1. Playing CoH homecoming will be going fine, and then a mapserver will start without any warning. I then lose the ability to communicate with teammates, commands issued to my character are not carried out and he or she is stuck in place, the screen repeatedly animates simple NPC / enemy movements on the screen while they are stuck in place, and after a while the game crashes. This has happened about 6-8 times in the last 24 hours. 2. When a mapserver crash happens then when a login is attempted the game launcher software will freeze and eventually given an error message. The login process does not move forward. Also, the "update available or not" check process for the live server and for the beta server either doesn't complete or it takes an unusually long time to finish the check. As well, the "news" part of the game launcher UI either doesn't load at all or it takes a very long time to load. 3. During this period of time if I try to access any website that I usually visit other than COH Homecoming, there are no issues. The connection is super fast, as always. But, after a mapserver event I'm not able to access the CoH Homecoming website for a while. The connection will time out and the "connection timed out" error message will appear instead. Eventually I'll be able to access the CoH Homecoming website and that's my signal that I will be able to log into the game again. 4. I've been trying turning my Windows 11 PC off, waiting 10 seconds plus, and then switching it on again. Not sure if it's having any effect; perhaps it's slightly speeding up the process of getting back into the game, perhaps not. Overall, some kind of problem keeps recurring. The last Windows 11 updates were a week ago, but the problems started yesterday. So, a windows update seems unlikely to be the reason. Really not sure why this is happening. Any help provided would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for the thoughtful feedback. A fair number of changes have been made and the build looks like it will function better now. Endurance management, in particular, seems to be in a better place. Barrier has become the incarnate destiny of choice, rather than ageless core. Resistances have been reshuffled a bit and are (hopefully) a bit better balanced overall. The single target attack chain is smoother, as well, with acc / rech replacing the damage IO for the apocalypse set in moonbeam. After reviewing the role of tactics it was found that at least for +3 mobs it's not really needed. Swapping it out for super jump freed up a slot and made endurance management a bit easier. Gladiator's armor was left as is primarily because it exemps so well. Other choices are, of course, also reasonable in stone skin. Stalker (Savage Melee - Stone Armor - Soul mastery).mbd

Does the tri-cannon do better at holding an AV's attention with one or more taunt IOs slotted into it? Does boosting damage also help it (ie: the pet build up proc IO, or perhaps the perfect zinger damage proc IO)? Haven't seen any posts connected to that, but perhaps asking those specific questions will lead to a response from somebody who has tried them out.

Below is a candidate endgame build for a savage / stone / soul stalker. Looking to do good damage and survive relatively well in the majority of content. Not very experienced running stalkers and not sure about a fair number of things that may strongly affect performance, including ... 1. AT IO placement, especially the procs 2. Ageless core looks almost essential to run the build. Not really loving that, makes exemping harder (which I like to do with most builds). Maybe I'm missing something about endurance management? Would prefer barrier core or ageless radial if endurance proves easier to manage. 3. A fair number of people recommend dropping hemorrhage. The slow nature of how damage accrues is a noteworthy drawback. Still, this build leans into keeping it and into trying to get 5 blood frenzy stacks built up to maximize its damage. Five stacks won't always happen and hemorrhage is clearly not optimal against mobs that would drop faster with more up front damage. Probably hemorrhage functions better for hard targets? Keeping hemorrhage does make it easier to take moonbeam and shadow meld from soul mastery. For a build with lower end defense debuff resistance and that seems to need some incarnate help for optimal endurance management shadow meld is appealing as a sorta-kinda replacement for barrier. Looking at harmonic mind suggested that it wouldn't be enough to replace ageless, but perhaps I'm wrong? 4. The main holes seem to be fire / cold / psi damage, especially fire and cold damage. Not sure how concerned to be about them. 5. Survivability against incoming energy / negative energy damage leans pretty hard on defense, as resistances aren't great for energy / negative damage. Could reduce smash / lethal damage resistances to boost energy / negative energy resistances by swapping in more shield wall IOs, having less LOTG IOs. Not sure how to best balance those resistances. 6. Not sure how smooth the attack chain will be with recharge being where it is. By the way, rending flurry isn't accurately calculating proc damage. Damage would be a great deal higher than it suggests, perhaps about 200 damage higher per activation. Thank you in advance for any feedback offered. Stalker (Savage Melee - Stone Armor - Soul mastery).mbd

A simple, effective, and hopefully fun dominator could be a hover-blasting plant / fire / fire dom. Several things stand out fairly soon after getting one to higher levels, and especially after attaining permadom ... 1. Seeds reliably confuses bosses with the first application when domination is active. Very nice difference from a controller. 2. Single target damage is pretty good. 3. Seeds and fire breath work well together. First seeds, then fire breath, and then fireball when at higher levels. Usually no need to reposition after casting seeds to get the most out of this alpha strike against a spawn, quite simple to execute. Plus, the last tick of damage from fire breath often happens close to when fireball lands, which often means that a fair number of mobs fall over as that is happening. 4. Defensively fairly solid as a hover-blaster with good ranged defense. A few more notes for the attached build ... This build drinks endurance so fast that cardiac really helped out. For endurance-heavy builds often vigor is better for dominators because added accuracy adds more flexibility for adding procs. But, cardiac was taken in part for the added range, which makes both seeds and fire breath noticeably more effective. Hopefully you have a blast with your next dominator, whatever direction you take. Druid of the Forest - Dominator (Plant Control - Fiery Assault -Fire Mastery).mbd

Arsenal control has cloaking device, which makes an arsenal controller invisible to most enemies. That allows time in most situations to lay down an AOE control as an alpha, substantially reducing the number of incoming attacks. High defense totals greatly reduce the percentage of incoming attacks that actually get through, and good resistances (for most resistances, at least) significantly reduce the damage received from attacks that make it through. Fade helps with defense totals and resistances, as well as with increasing resistance to defense debuffs, all of which help to reduce incoming damage.

Attached is a build intended to be both team-friendly and to be helpful for solo AV hunting. Never really tried to make an AV hunter before. So, the kinds of benchmarks to hit aren't that clear to me. For all I know the single target damage is way under what it needs to be to be successful and I'd need to either reconsider the build or drop AV hunting from the list of things that build would be intended to do. Will probably consider the control hybrid that immobilizes mobs for hunting at least some AVs, if AV hunting goes on this character's "to do" list. The lone +resist IO in tri-gun should cap its resistances at 90% if City of Data resistance totals for tri-gun are accurate. Spirit ward on the tri-gun and healing should make it very, very tough, especially when it is also boosted by barrier. AOE is not a strength for this build. For soloing will probably aim for +4 and limit the number of mobs to about 5 or 6 per spawn, to better match the upper taunt limit for tri-gun. Single target damage is not high enough to keep AV fights relatively short without a lot of -regen. So, will probably get Longbow core lore pets to get more -regen for a longer period of time than howling twilight can provide. Feedback highly welcomed, especially from those who often solo AVs. PS: This is a candidate final build for Nightshell, who is currently soloing her way through the resistance side of Praetorian story arcs. Nightshell - Controller (Arsenal Control - Darkness Affinity - Psionic Mastery).mbd

Agreed with RQ above. I've run a fair number of blasters and dominators and do a lot of pylon testing for my characters. My dominators frequently have comparable or better single target DPS in pylon tests compared to my blasters with a similar damage type (outside of ice and earth / seismic, which can have much higher DPS for blasters than for dominators). AOE is where blasters shine compared to every other AT in the game (including dominators). Beyond the lack of a nuke, when it comes to AOE the main thing holding back dominators is the target cap of 10 enemies or less for the majority of the AOE powers in their assault sets. Despite these limitations dominators can have pretty good AOE compared to most ATs by pairing a targeted AOE or PbAOE from their assault set with an AOE their epic powerset (epic powerset targeted AOEs and PbAOEs typically have a target cap of 16, which helps to compensate for their longer base recharge times). "Dominators are not DPS" is a stereotype that is out of touch with reality and it should have become extinct quite some time ago.

Players who are very knowledgeable tend to manage just fine with a wide variety of team compositions in all but the hardest content. For example, lots of 3, 4, or 5 player teams have completed a +4x8 ITF in 30 - 40 minutes or less with no defeats or very few defeats, often doing it as a "kill most" along the way. Those team compositions are *very* diverse, not infrequently involving dominators or at times being composed entirely of dominators. Those runs are consistently a lot of fun. On the other hand, if a team leader is calling for particular roles / ATs and it's not a hard mode focus or a badge run, then to me that's also a warning sign of a team that's particularly likely to struggle. I also usually shy away from joining those teams and, when I do join, it quite often turns out that the team does struggle. Sometimes those teams do really well, to be fair. It might be fairly common that a noticeable percentage of highly experienced players shy away from such teams, which ends up somewhat weakening them. But, it may also be that the ability and willingness to flexibly respond to ever-evolving in-game conditions serves teams better than having a less flexible mind set about each teammate's role.