Parabola

Yup, there are many nuances to using procs for best advantage and as you say there are builds posted with the best of intentions that unfortunately don't. Quite apart from any balance concerns that people may have with ppm I think one of the better arguments for having a look at the system is how opaque it is and how much knowledge a person needs to use it effectively. On the subject of thresholds, for me it really depends on the situation. When slotting damage procs I will always do the 'replace proc with a 50+5 damage' test to make sure the proc is adding more than simply slotting more base damage would. You also have to take into account other factors though such as the effect of global damage boosts (musculature and any generally always on things like soul drain) and really importantly if you are a scrapper or stalker the effect of crits (crits don't benefit procs or benefit from them and they weaken the case for using procs over more base damage slotting). I will slot procs with chances to fire much lower than 90%, anything down to around 30% can be worth it in my experience, but it very much depends on circumstances. Force feedback procs are up there with my favourite procs and again I will slot these with lower chances to fire. In particular it's worth noting how good this proc is in aoes. It only needs to fire once to give you the effect so even with relatively low chances to fire it can be pretty reliable in an aoe. Kick of course isn't an aoe and as you show has an absolutely terrible chance to fire the proc.

Yeah I can't really say either. It's just a feeling I've had over a period of time. Having no idea how the ai is coded it's hard to speculate on what is going on, I imagine that mobs fleeing is based around a number of decision points and various things could have changed that might affect it. Maybe it's not that they are making the initial decision to flee more often but are sticking with that decision more rigidly for example. More determined to carry it out if you like. As I say I have no actual evidence and totally accept that this could just be perception bias though.

Catchy title though.

The trick to Touch of Fear is procs. Have a look at the build I posted above - I've used that slotting several times and it's never failed me. Avoid slotting anything other than melee aoe and taunt procs though - the fear and tohit debuff procs only work on the single target aspect of the power not the aoe.

Indeed. DM doesn't really need outside attacks these days. The single target rotation is strong and both the aoes recharge quickly enough. @HexxenBeast, here is my version of this. It's built to have a broad base of resistance for the scaling resistance to work from and be as close as I could to the incarnate softcaps without compromising damage. It could go more defensive by 6 slotting the purples for more tox/psi res or could back off the defence to slot a couple more health/endurance uniques.

Fair enough and rule number one is always to play the character you want in the way you want to. If you really end up liking this character you could always use multiple builds to have access to different powers for different situations. That can get quite expensive though!

I love several of the powerset revamps and other things but I think the market changes have had the broadest beneficial impact. I was a 'have not' back on live and felt frozen out of the upper tiers of play because of it. Every character I've played on homecoming has benefited from access to high end enhancements and the game as a whole feels more inclusive because of it.

Yeah this. And the reality of development is that even if you have loads of resource for the same thing you can't just keep throwing bodies at a project. There is a limit to the number of people who can work on the same thing without tripping over each other. In addition it's often the case that you need to develop things in a certain order, sometimes a bug can only be fixed after you've done other things first. You may as well carry on much as the homecoming team are doing; both develop and fix as you go along.

I think I've dropped it from all my rads. It's the cast time that disappoints me as much as anything. A power has to do something special to be worth a wait of 3 seconds to cast and ground zero sadly doesn't.

I tend to go the other direction and slot for damage. It takes procs really well so I usually go with something like acc/dam + acc/dam/end from the winter set for slow resist and then fill the rest with procs. Ignore mids if it tells you the proc rate is 30% or so (for a 3.5ppm), it is bugged and is calculating based on the aoe of the punchvoke. The real rate is 70% or something like that (not in front of my pc to check numbers). An attack chain of smite->siphon life->smite->midnight grasp is very respectable damage and you still get some healing.

Jranger should be banned as snarky nonsense which does nothing to promote forum harmony. On topic I agree that illusion could use a bit of something but I'm not sure PA is where I'd look. A higher uptime way of setting mass containment would be nice. This would be delicious.

My rule of thumb is if I've softcapped ranged def on a primarily ranged blaster then I look to add res through the epic. If I'm primarily a blapper I may try to cap s/l/e and ranged using scorp shield or if I have slots and powerpicks to spare I'll think about ice for the extra utility. If my secondary doesn't have something reliable for breaking up alphas then that becomes a factor too.

On a defender time/dp/dark with a heavily procced build can do amazing things. I actually had a dp/temp blaster myself who I rerolled into the defender version and I'm happier with her in every way.

Well, naturally I disagree. You're still not understanding what I'm saying, at this stage I suspect deliberately. I'm going to do what I should have before and leave the conversation.

Yeah I'd play this.

I've already stated that it's not the survivability of a character that I see as a problem inside or outside the AE (actually in the quote you replied to). My objection is to the mechanics of the AE that allow enemies to be created that cannot harm you. I don't care if there are dev created enemies elsewhere that also cannot harm you, I just don't find that aspect of the AE system to be one that meets my 'good design' criteria. Perhaps also you can point out where I said people are cheating? Fair enough, I apologise profusely to the farming/badging crossover community. My point was in response to two comments that seemed to be saying that because fire farming doesn't give loads of badges it is balanced against running normal content. I disagree with that, and I very much doubt people are doing much soul searching about the lack of badges they are collecting while they are fire farming. I understand why people farm, it comes as no shock to me at all and I don't have a particular problem with farming as an activity per se, again I just don't like the specific mechanics available in the AE that facilitate it. I understand the builds just fine thank you, and I am aware of the bonuses on winters. You've taken a very narrow reading of my post to assume otherwise, I mention capping fire defence right there in the second sentence. I might almost think that you were so eager to argue with me that you didn't actually read what I said. My point was that you don't need to use an expensive build to farm with and that's exactly what I said in the part you quoted. Yes, you can use winters and squeeze out some more performance but the raw survivability you need can easily be met without them and you will still be able to happily burn down mountains of enemies. I'd like to state that I don't particularly agree with the op (sorry @Apparition). I just jumped in here with an opinion on the AE system; that the ability to choose enemy powers completely freeform doesn't feel like good system design to me and I'm surprised the original devs didn't make further changes to it. And again, that is merely my opinion, and not one that I expect to win forum popularity contests with or that I am campaigning to the current devs about. I understand perfectly that if farming in the AE wasn't so lucrative people would revert to farming missions outside the AE, and I wouldn't have a problem with that because they would be pitched against standard enemies. I have little objection to farming as an activity in of itself* and I certainly have no objection to building very capable characters (ludicrous accusation). * My only reservation with farming in general is if it is the first aspect of the game that a newcomer is exposed to. This is not a top heavy, endgame = the game, type of MMO. I fear a newcomer could arrive with the misunderstanding that the thing to do is blast through to 50 and they could then find a lack of content available and wonder where the game actually is.

It feels like mobs are running more these days but then again I could accept that could be just a perception thing. The ai behaviour is such a hard thing to measure after all. I'm running an ea scrapper currently and while I'm fairly sure the taunt aura does something, I'm still experiencing plenty of runners. Shockwave and focus are a great help in that regard though.

I think we can safely say that your average farmer and badge hunter are two separate demographics. Yes, the rewards of farming are narrower (although @Arbegla you can run AE for normal drops rather than tickets) but again it is clearly worth doing for financial gain or people wouldn't be doing it. It's like I said above though, I don't have an objection to people levelling faster than me or making money (I use the copious merits I generate to convert and generate my money that way), my objection is purely on the mechanics of the operation. AE farming stands out to me as a broken part of the whole system, something that wasn't intended to work the way it does. Again as I said before I understand others don't see it that way and that's fine, this is just my opinion. I'm going to leave this conversation there. You don't need an expensive build to farm, and you certainly don't need winters. Capping fire defence can be easily achieved with moderately priced IO's and why on earth would you need winters to chase fire resistance when you have fire armour? Damage output is largely dependent on how quickly you can convert inspirations into reds and chew them down too so I wouldn't consider it really worth going to town on that side of the build either. I've seen the same threads as you where people are spending huge amounts on fire farmers but it seems pointless to me.

This would be my guess. Crits are of course inherently swingy too. Actually when you have the 50% crits proc you have swings within swings. Sometimes a good run can seem to chain a constant stream of crits and sometimes they dry up completely. Happiness is good uptime on the 50% crits proc!

Forgive me but it feels like you are being a little obtuse at this point. Yes it is perfectly possible to build very highly functioning characters that can tear through content outside of AE and earn good rewards doing so. However they cannot earn rewards as easily and quickly as fire farmers can in the AE, the proof if any were needed is the very fact that people are fire farming in the AE. People aren't dumb, they are fire farming in the AE because it offers greater rewards for less investment and less effort than those available elsewhere. I see something I don't like in this but that's just my take.

I don't like it from a game system point of view. To my mind it is a distortion of the risk vs reward mechanism underpinning the game. I don't really care what people get up to but I do like orderly and mechanically satisfying systems!

But not ones that can burn their way through a sea of enemies with impunity (at least since i4 or whenever it was). No-one farms with a granite tank. Being just very survivable inside or outside the AE isn't the issue, similarly being just very damaging, the issue is the ability to create a certain combination of character and mission in the AE that results in extreme survivability and extreme damage at the same time and which is far outside what is currently possible anywhere else in the game. Anyway, just what seems obvious to me, I get that others see it differently.

Just hit the same issue. The mission also spawned higher level mobs than it should have (+2 when set to +0).

True. But the important difference is that in the AE you can take the least protective, highest damage armour set on not even the toughest AT and make it functionally immortal by creating enemies that can only attack the thing that armour set is most protected against. And you don't even need to spend a huge amount on a build to do it.

As others have pointed out the problem (imo) with the AE system is the ability to fine tune enemies so they basically can't hurt you. I'm not sure why the original devs left the power selections so freeform back when they were taking steps to address abuse of the system. If you had to select powers in blocks that forced you to have a mixture of damage types, and prevented completely avoiding the usual range of mez and debuffs attached to attacks, then the AE could still be used to tell stories but would be a lot less farmable. Hell, you could get rid of custom enemies altogether and still tell plenty of stories but that would likely be overkill.