nihilii

Can confirm because even though I apparently knew it in 2019, every year I forget, slot multiple ones, then end up having to respec. 🥲

It is unironically inefficient to slot acc/dam/dam/end and end/res/res or end/def/def. It was always inefficient, common knowledge was often wrong back in the day. Toggles have minimal end cost so you're generally better served by sticking that slot in your attacks. It's *doubly* inefficient on an Inv/SS, because Rage gives such a giga boost to your damage enhancement /and/ comes with an endurance crash. So the type of slotting you'd want to go for while leveling is closer to acc/end/end/end/dam/dam or acc/end/end/end/dam/rech in attacks. If you're struggling with end, don't take many poorly slotted attacks, instead stick to fewer attacks that you slot in full. Toggles, I don't know, during leveling all my characters including Tankers are pretty happy with the base slot which frontloads most of the benefit. Extra slots can come later. Extra tools: - get 8 hours of all 3 amplifiers at P2W at lvl 1. Costs 24k inf and can carry you for a while - get the Recovery Serum temp. It's so good it's not even funny - use inspirations as they drop. No need to prepare or even think. Simply using the things is such a large performance boost at low levels, regardless what you get I do this and tend to solo +1/8x by the teens, +2/8x by 20s, +3/x8 by 30s. Comparable speed to my scrappers because the increased AOE caps and radii do a lot of heavy lifting on these reputations, and the extra leeway afforded by greater survivability does the rest. Yet another Rage-related specific, /SS is a very special beast. It has 3 good native attacks but mostly by virtue of damage buffing you really are getting so much more out of alternate picks than anyone else would do. Super Strength with just Foot Stomp and no Hasten can take some time to clear out crowds. Super Strength with FS + Dark Oblit or Fireball, damage procs in both (which are affordable even while leveling, in AOEs these tend to run for 1M to 3M a piece)... You're now looking at a completely different beast, three times the damage output. Inv/ brings nothing offensively save for the +tohit; which is almost useless for /SS because Rage also gives huge +tohit. Inv/ relies on some +def but Rage crashes nuke defense. Unstoppable is a decent buffer but most casual players will not enjoy the T9 playstyle. Overall Inv/SS is a combo with fairly poor mechanical synergy and yet such obvious theme I consider it the ultimate "noob trap". I'd wager 90% of complaints about Tanker performance are tied to it. You really have to lean into non-Superman thematic choices here if you want to make it perform adequately. It is what it is.

The rez does not require a tohitroll. If you're completely overkill on endurance it may be worth just doing nothing. But if you don't, the rez may very well nuke your toggles and even cause a wipe in otherwise weakened teams. Simple heuristic: if you're confident, enjoy the double XP. If you're not, hop away.

I kill Singularities all the time with characters that have 7ft range attacks maximum (and lack repel protection). As far as I can tell, their Repel doesn't work if you're right up in their face. Or maybe they don't activate it there? If you're further away and get caught in it, there's nonetheless enough lag between each "pulse" you get the chance to close in and hit once. I won't claim to understand the mechanics, but empirically, it's doable.

/bio is slightly stronger (because it's one of the most powerful armor sets) but /rad is no slouch either. Seconding "can't go wrong with either". The two pieces of generic advice I'd give for your situation: - defense is broken good in this game, always. Even if you pick resistance/regeneration sets, you will get more mileage out of chasing defense bonuses than resistance or regen bonuses. Get the notable uniques like Shield Wall and Reactive Defenses, but beyond that, go all in on defense if you intend to build survivability. - Brutes operate with low base damage and high damage buff (due to Fury). This is largely a reversal from your Blasters, where you most likely picked Musculature Alpha and enjoyed any damage bonuses. On a Brute you might get more bang out of your buck exploring alternate routes. A favorite of mine is Vigor incarnate which pumps your accuracy, endurance and healing/regen all at once. Quite nice for both /bio and /rad, and frees up a lot of space in the build.

Tequila worked today, which let me pinpoint the issue by comparing old settings with new. HC Launcher set my Recharge Timer Location setting to "Center", which is what causes the awkward pulsing. Having it back to "Bottom" removes the pulsing.

Going to second using IOs.

Most AVs are actually rather weak to immobilizes. They fold the same way as regular bosses, even with the purple triangles up. So, 2 applications will do the trick - and if you use your immobilize as part of your attack chain, you will get a double stack with the base duration even against a +4.

I tried that, but disabling Power Tray Animations kills *all* animations. Which is similarly unplayable for me, if in a different way. I need the classic power icon slowly growing so my side vision subconsciously picks up on the rough state of those recharges, but without this new pulsing that was either introduced yesterday or due to a wrong setting on my end.

My only peeve with this is I got a couple bugs and I'm unsure if it's from the new launcher messing my settings or from the new patch. First, power recharge timers were colored for some reason. Took me about 5 seconds of tasting the rainbow to realise this wasn't for me. Thankfully I found an option to turn that off. Second, power recharge timers now make the power "pulse" at certain intervals (10s, 5s, 2s, 1s). This is distracting to the point I logged off unable to cope, and can't find any setting to turn *that* off. I guess I could kill power recharge timers and live it oldschool, but it's a rather convenient feature...

Same issue with Tequila for me.

I'm not sure if this is tied to the last patch or the new launcher, because I had to switch to the new launcher as Tequila doesn't work anymore. (As for why I was still on Tequila, the new launcher was previously bugged for me and wouldn't launch the game no matter what, but worked today). Once a power recharge timer reaches the 10 second mark, the power icon pulses visibly. It does this again at 5 seconds, 2 seconds and 1 second. This feels VERY disconcerting. It grabs my attention to the point of being borderline unplayable. When several powers do this at once, my brain goes mush. Of course, I could just turn off the power recharge timers and play like before... But this is a nice feature, minus this new pulsing. Am I missing a graphic setting to turn only the pulse off? Turning "power animations" off entirely wouldn't do it, I need these.

I have not found a way to make KM work on Tankers. My Elec/KM Tanker is a tragedy of a character. Weak damage, weak survivability. KM is an old flame and I really wanted this to happen. The +RES meshed with -DAM synergy exists on paper (I even went Void Judgement to stack some more), but falls flat in real gameplay. It's rare I find no redeeming feature to love about a powerset combo, especially a melee powerset combo, but this one really was eye-opening in that I could not squeeze any performance out of it.

I multibox, but I would never do so on a team that isn't friends only. It just seems bad mannered. I don't care what other multiboxers do but I think anyone has the right to not want to team with such a setup.

Yes, for sure! I love duos, trios, quartets. At that size it feels like you're closely working with each other's strengthes; and with semi-optimized characters, most of the "tough" tasks are a good challenge. Even though it's happenstance, the game on x8 actually feels designed for 4 friends playing together. IMHO this is the peak experience.

What's your favorite thing you worked on that never made it live? And if possible, can you tell us why it didn't happen?

It cannot be helped. There's absolutely nothing in Fire Melee that could be replaced. Nothing at all.

To an extent this is true but FM is a special case because Tankers get Combustion instead of Cremate. They trade a little ST damage output for 2x the AoE output. TBH I find your reasoning justified, /EA alone is worth playing a Brute.

I think this is truer for SO builds but shifts somewhat on IOs + incarnates. During Meltdown, /rad can surpass 75% S/L/F/E/T res even before taking damage or using Barrier. Practically this means you will be hardcapped quite often, and S/L/E alone covers most of the damage the game throws at you. There is excellent synergy cycling Meltdown and Hybrid Melee too. Likewise, +41% damage (for Scrappers) is good but it's dampened by a 3s animation for 60s duration + 10s recovery crash. On SOs this is worth it. When you have Musculature and set bonuses and damage procs and a Gaussian proc in your Build Up and all, the juice is less worth the squeeze. No matter the AT, Meltdown as offensive tool never worked for me because Elude-like recovery crashes are brutal. The time I spend handling endurance at the end seems to counteract the benefit of +1 extra damage SO for a minute. Perhaps not 1:1, I think we come out ahead ever so slightly, just not as big as it might look on paper. The Brute faces the same recovery crash, of course. As you rightfully argue, Brutes get less out of +dam. So if Meltdown is slightly positive for Scrappers, then it should be less so for Brutes - neutral or perhaps even slightly negative. However, that is my point in a nutshell: the defensive boost of Meltdown is significantly more important, as going from 70% res to 90% res triples your survivability. I run tight end builds and have no discipline. Your mileage may vary. I could see Meltdown working well for someone who always activates the 3s animation while jumping and either always monitors their endurance or builds with enough surplus to cruise through the -recovery.

I'm quite fond of Vigor anytime I can get away with it. The combination of high accuracy and high endurance reduction opens up significant build freedom. Best candidates are Brutes, who get less out of Musculature than other ATs so have an easier time making the sacrifice. Ideally with sizeable +regen/heal/+maxHP components to their secondary. Something like /energy (to boost the maxHP in Overload) or /regen (to boost... everything) can get so much out of Vigor.

I think: - TW/ is such a powerhouse it will work well on either AT. It is very bursty and with long recharges so it does good with the Scrapper ATO. But it's no slouch on a Brute either. - /elec works better on Brutes for the reasons you listed (plus having taunt baked in your attacks is always nice on powersets with damage auras) - /energy is, in my opinion, significantly better on Brutes than Scrappers *if* you're willing to use the T9, as Brutes have significantly more HP than Scrappers. It's an excellent set for Scrappers nonetheless because /energy is already one of the greats before T9 use... - /wp would likely fare better on Brutes for the res cap (which you can hit on S/L with the T9) and higher HP to fuel regen. That being said, /wp is /wp... aka not very good relative to almost any other option, in my opinion. On Scrappers /wp at least comes with the advantage of a mild aggro aura, on Brutes this advantage fades as every Brute comes with an aggro aura

Radiation is a resistance/healing based set and Brutes have a higher resistance cap + a higher HP pool. Brutes get a lot out of Meltdown, whereas Scrappers bang their head against the 75% cap. As for Savage, it's not one of those sets that rely specifically on damage buffing nor does it have crazy synergy with the Critical Strikes ATO. While the damage balance always inches towards the Scrapper side, here the relative loss is smaller for the Brute than it would be for other choices. Given Savage/Rad, I think there's a strong case to be made for Brute.

The I27p3 endurance drain nerfs were massive and unwarranted. It was sold with a damage bonus for elec blast, but TBH the damage boost is minor and every other end drainer that isn't elec blast just plain lost utility. It was possible before with a lot of work, which made it suboptimal but a fun alternate path. It's not possible at all anymore no matter how many sappers you have on your team, you can have 8 characters spamming -END and -RECOVERY and you will still get hefty damage output from the AV. This is disappointing, no other debuff has been nerfed to this extent. Take a team with 8 characters dedicated to tohitdebuffs, or damage debuffs, or slow debuffs, anything that is massively resisted by purple patch + triangles + resistances; when you stack several dedicated characters to this purpose, you will see some effect, there is a point to adding more. However, endurance drain remains shafted due to the recovery floor being extremely generous for AVs. The only advantage you get is getting to drain the 800 initial points faster, but unless your AV has toggles that's almost useless. I think the absence of sapping as a popular build before i27p3 is enough evidence the previous situation was not a problem.

I don't believe Bio/Dark is a particularly synergistic combo, but I find the beliefs "-tohit isn't needed on a Tanker" and "Tankers need to run defensive over offensive" perplexing when put together.

Given the recent buffs, it's worth considering... That being said, I find it tough to break even just 300 DPS on a Fortunata (unless we include Claws attacks, but then that's hardly psychic). Whereas a psy/*/psy sent can dish out slightly more damage. The Sentinel has an easier time with healing/endurance too, and can reach higher passive survivability. The Fortunata has better team buffs and active control (which counts as a team buff too). Sentinal has some -res, Fortunata has no -res. All in all it feels pretty balanced between the two options.