Parabola

I've been itching to post about Energy Aura for a while now. My main is a SS/EnA and I haven't been able to believe how tough he is given some of the apathy shown towards the set. I've given him a pretty serious build and he's now way over softcap against s/l/e/f/c with n on about 43% and psi around 20%, all before using energy drain, with about 50% res to s/l and psi and a bit less to f/c (made some sacrifices to build up the psi resist). Energy drain can then put the bulk of the defences easily over the icap. He has perma hasten without anyone in entropic aura and energise isn't far off (not that I often remember to use it on cooldown as I rarely need it). On top of all that he has 85% resist to slow and -recharge. Pretty much the only thing I've found so far that can kill him is rage crashes against mobs that do heavy debuff and even then the combination of energise, defence top up from energy drain and knockdowns keep him going most of the time. If the talk of revising SS to remove the rage crash comes to fruition even this vulnerability will be removed which will almost be a shame as it gives a convenient moment to pop energy drain, energise, rage and handclap (slotted with procs). Almost ;). He was more than solid even before I went nuts with the purples and incarnates. I solo'd my first GM (Eochai) at lv43 with just what I had slotted in my levelling build and no pets (plus a truckload of envenomed daggers!). It was slow going but I didn't even look like being in trouble once. I would say to the OP don't judge the set until you have energy drain up and running - you will never run out of end again and it shores your defences up a treat while you are still levelling up. If you are somehow still having end problems after that energise also gives an end discount. One thing to note; the defence and resist numbers in mids are wrong for EnA (think I have the latest version but can't be sure). I couldn't work out why I was softcapping in game much earlier than I thought I would be so I had a look at the database. The defence and resist scales it is using are too low on all the armours and passives (I didn't check overload as I don't use it). EnA is way better than people think it is and it deserves a lot more love, Cap P has even posted somewhere around here that they can't port it to tankers without making changes because it would be too strong with tanker modifiers. That suggests to me it is in a very good place indeed for brutes. All that and it's pretty :).

I like the look of this. Been wanting to give a dark blaster a try for a while now as I'm a fan of cones. I hadn't considered /En mainly from the thematic viewpoint but the synergy certainly looks strong. I've taken the liberty of having a bit of a play with your build - I've kept the powers (mostly; dropped aim for afterburner) but reshuffled them a bit and added some purples and things. Gains a little bit here and there but the main highlight is quite a bit more recharge. Hasten isn't quite perma but a couple of ff+rech procs should see it right. I think Intuition Radial makes an interesting alternative alpha as it gives damage, range and -to hit. Dependent on whether the build is end sustainable without Cardiac of course.

It's funny really. I look back fondly at the old low level hollows and perez park experiences. It gave the hazard zones a real sense of danger, living up to their name. That sense of achievement at having simply managed to arrive at a mission was great. My hatred of igneous burns undimmed to this day!

I have one of these and it has serious synergy. Ice is a very low maintenance primary, you run arctic air, lay down ice slick and spam the immob and that's about it. Traps needs time dedicated to it to get through all the cast times and also provides defence and mez protection to keep arctic air up. The whole things plays great at point blank range and with procs in everything it does decent damage. It's pretty safe too, mobs really don't know what's hit them with everything that you have going on.

I've also been thinking about a battle axe/regen brute mad king. Every attack takes a ff+rech and regen will love the recharge on all its clicks. Not sure how survivable it would end up but it sounds like fun!

Which is why I said: But I would argue that there is more to determining the best and worst sets than raw damage even in the case of blasters. Mitigation has value and end drain can be leveraged with the right secondary.

On SO's yes indeed. I'm seriously tempted to build the 'Mad King' version of this though. Elec blast certainly doesn't do 'no damage'. It needs the right secondary to support it but it does absolutely fine. My Elec/Mental/Psi is glorious to play - run in stealthed and let off build up->drain psyche->short circuit->ball lightning->psychic shockwave and that's when the nuke isn't up. Sure, power for power other sets do more damage but it manages fine.

Welcome back! Reunion is the European server but there are people from all over on it. Enjoy the game!

I used to use this for duos I was dual boxing. What was weird was that eventually they tended to get very slightly out of sync anyway - one would always ding an enemy or two before the other.

This very much depends on what you mean by soloing the game - is it solo as much as possible as you go along or get to a high level, build and then solo big stuff? They are two very different prospects in terms of what's possible and what is a good choice of character. In another thread we have been discussing this from the angle of trying to complete as much of the game as possible as part of the levelling process. This means being stuck at low levels, with few powers and slots to play with for long periods of time. The problem with the real powerhouse GM soloing builds is that they all seem to be endgame propositions requiring powers only available late on and serious IO investment to work. I came to the conclusion that the character I wanted for a content runner (basically some sort of stalker, scrapper or brute) and the character I wanted for endgame GM tomfoolery (Ill/cold_rad_traps_dark_etc) just weren't the same thing.

I've stalled already (lv19). The problem as ever is trying to stay focused on one idea although the chain of thought that has led me astray is a reasonable one. The thing is I don't have a proper main and I desperately want one. I have raging altitis (nearly 50 alts so far) and feel pretty much anonymous in game because people only get to team with me once or twice on one character before I'm off playing something else. I've reached 50 on a couple of them but they get benched almost immediately in favour of playing something new. So I have been running my little stalker through all the content for this challenge and she is cool and all but is not main material. I got into the habit of collecting badges along the way which seemed to make sense as I also don't have a badger but then I thought surely it would make more sense to do all this on a main and badge with that - all in one place so to speak. The final straw came when I did a tf on an alt and the guy organising it was vet level 170 odd and had about a million badges. It reminded me how much I'd like to have a proper main and so I'm now dusting off a brute I started for that very purpose a while ago. I doubt I'm going to start him again though so I'm going to have to settle for the lesser prize of doing all the flashback missions and arcs. To be honest the thing with the way the contacts work blueside had put me off a bit anyway - the feeling of completeness wasn't quite there for me knowing there were loads of contacts I hadn't been able to talk to. Also, one of the ones I had talked to had run out of missions while his green bar was still not full - not what I was hoping for in my inactive contacts roster. Good luck with your quest though - hope you get further than I did!

Those groups of 4 embalmed cadavers can be brutal on a low level melee toon. Thankfully their perception is so low you can usually separate them out with a little pulling if you need to.

Is a very strong choice ... eventually. You are going to spend a huge amount of time locked at low levels without many powers and certainly without decent slotting doing this kind of playthrough. My primary requirement for a suitable toon was something that is good out of the gate - hence stalkers who get their most fundamental trick at lv1 and can have an attack chain of sorts by lv4. I did look through the various 'can solo GM's' options to try to find a toon that could do everything but the two things seem incompatible given how late those sorts of toons mature. Also as mentioned above the lack of mez protection on anything squishy would become an issue eventually - no picking and choosing to avoid mez heavy enemies when you are doing every mission in the game.

Well they seem to be giving the 'we haven't been introduced' text rather than the 'I don't have any more missions for you' one. However checking the lists of missions for these contacts they are indeed the same missions that I've done for others so that must be it. I had no idea the contacts worked like that, it seems odd - why have all these different contacts pulling missions from the same pool? I'll move on to the next level range with a reasonably clear conscience :). I'm finding this a fun experience so far (despite having described it as a slog earlier). I've started collecting badges as I go which I've never really bothered with before and there is a real satisfaction to picking up things like the unique mission badges at the appropriate time rather than having to use Ouroboros. Something which is helping is turning the hunt missions into an opportunity to work on the defeat badges - whatever I'm hunting I try to only assassinate things that count toward these (mainly bosses). Speaking of which, does anyone know the lowest mission setting that will start to spawn bosses in the regular groups?

Yes I'm sure the story arcs are shared but I thought each contact had their own batch of fluff missions to do ... perhaps not? I gave a Sentinel a go for this as I have a good concept for a ranged stalker type and /nin gives the stealth and even a small bonus to sneak attacks but in the end Sentinels just aren't quite there yet. Not enough damage and the inherent is clunky to the point of being mainly useless. It does of course depend on settings and the powersets involved but stalkers are no slouches themselves in the cleaning department. The ability to control crits and their ridiculously good ATO procs allow stalkers to do big damage on demand and importantly keep doing it. I have done a bit of story arc running as fast as possible for merits on a couple of different AT's and recorded the results (to keep a track of what to run for the greatest efficiency). The results between a brute and a stalker are always pretty close I find - I'm not entirely sure that the biggest difference doesn't come down to travel times and getting lucky or unlucky with how many times you have to shlep the length of IP.

I'm not sure this works as you say. I've now got a bunch of the level 9-14 contacts who aren't interested in talking to me at all. I've done pretty much everything else so I need to move on if I can't get them to give me missions (although if there is a way of interacting with them it will mean that I've missed stuff in the level 5-9 range and that would leave me with a 'do I start over' dilemma).

I'm doing exactly this at the moment. I started a couple of different toons for it but at the end of the day stalkers really hold all the cards. I had a good costume for a DB/SR so that's what I went with but any/any should work. It is a slog mind. I've only got as far as level 14, but I have more or less cleared the content there. I've found that there are contacts you simply can't get introduced to no matter what which is irritating (unless I've missed something). Oh speaking of missing things, I very nearly missed the atlas park bank mission (do it at 9 or lower, it'll appear at 10 but can take a few tries).

Top of my wishlist for macro icons would be the ability to use a power icon and link to the cooldown animation of that icon. Powexec_location is fantastically useful but having to have both the macro and the original power in my tray to monitor the cooldown is a pain.

Thank you. As is typical when I came back to it the problem seemed to have resolved itself but I will bear this in mind for the next time.

I keep getting a bug where entering my sg base is placing me inside the portal - trapped inside it in fact. Once it starts happening it seems to be consistent - it doesn't matter if I try a different portal in another zone, logging in with a different character or rebooting the game. /stuck is just resetting me to the very center of the portal which is less than useful. The last time this started happening it did stop after a while but I've no idea why. Currently though my sg base is out of action it seems.

I'm finding myself increasingly interested in the idea of founding (or joining if something like it already exists) a supergroup dedicated to old fashioned gameplay. The rules would be simple; SO's (or common IO's) only and no incarnates. I don't know if that's something that other people would be interested in though? I love my twinked out toons as much as the next guy and recently I've been hugely into the whole proc monster phenomenon so I wouldn't be running all my toons like this by any means. I just think it would be nice for a few teaming dedicated toons to run in an environment that worked a little differently. I'm on reunion, let me know if you think this is a good idea or if you know of an sg that does this already?

I only six slot guassian's if I'm going to use all three positional defences. The return per slot is great then but if you're just building towards a single position it's quite an investment in slots for just 2.5%. Unless of course there is absolutely no other way to get that 2.5%. I've got an ice cubed (see what i did there?) concept sitting around waiting for me to get to it so following this with interest. Question for the floor: how do people feel about dropping aim on blasters? I find myself using it less and less in the modern teaming environment. It seems to take ages to pop both aim and build up and that wonderfully impressive alpha nuke is less impressive if someone else has beaten you to it. With the guassian's proc firing 90% of the time and with good global recharge cycling it back up often it feels like you only really need build up.

Yeah absolutely, I think we are all talking about a change that would only affect our own client. I have no desire to have to dictate to others how they should configure their powers, if everyone had some control over what appeared on their own client we could all be happy. This is effectively the same idea as the ability to do custom sound suppression in the game client. The sound of the healing auras used to drive me nuts when someone decided that 'rocking it' was the way to go on a team. I've removed the sound altogether at my end and now no more problem.

Funnily enough I tried that in the tf I mentioned above. Didn't make the slightest difference that I could tell. In desperation I ended up turning every graphics setting down to rock bottom. My framerate was probably awesome but it wasn't pretty. I now make it a point on any toon with shield buffs to spend a bit of time recolouring the shields to be as unintrusive as possible. There really is no need for them to be as bright as they are even at the default settings. The null the gull option would be a help but thinking back to that tf the biggest problem wasn't the shield on me, it was the shields on all the other players and big ass pets. If the option could enforce a minimum graphics setting on specific powers regardless of whether they are on your character or anything else that would be perfect.

Signed, many, many times. I still have flashbacks to a citadel tf I ran in a group with a demons/cold mm. I try to be a live and let live kind of guy but cave map after cave map struggling to see anything at all really tested my patience.