nihilii

Spines/Ice has interesting synergy in that both sets have slow effects. To be fair, Elec/Ice also synergises in end drain. But end drain has been nerfed pretty hard in one of the recent patches.

I'd choose Invul. Invul and WP used to fill very similar niches. Over the years, Invul got a stream of small buffs while WP got nothing. Plus, indirect changes to the game (i.e. inherent Fitness, easy IOs, easy incarnates) were a bigger plus for Invul than WP (where Quick Recovery used to be a defining advantage). I find it hard to justify WP these days - especially against Invul or Bio. Invul is simply sturdier. It has more resistances. It has better defenses. It has more DDR. It has more slow res. It even has a little bit of psychic defense and resistance these days, its old Achilles Heel removed. For Invul, you'd generally skip Unstoppable and take everything else. For WP, Resurgence can be skipped. Maybe Strength of Will as well (but this is opinionated). I wouldn't rush Fighting personally (I never do, YMMV). Lots of goodies in the primary and secondary. I'd sooner grab Hasten for attacks. In a pinch, at low levels, spamming Divine Avalanche will likely carry you better than Tough/Weave would do.

If I could choose 2 supports for my team, they'd likely be Cold/Sonic and Nature/Sonic. Comprehensive +DEF, +RES, +maxHP, +absorb (and +maxHP boosts +absorb), slow resistance and heals package between the two of them. Tons of -RES. Decent -DAM. Decent +DAM. OKish -regen. Stellar end management. This more or less covers everything you could want.

Even with sets, Cleave -> Swoop -> Chop chain is hard to run. We need +400% rech. Perma FF proc + 100% global recharge + 100% recharge in power still falls short. For a self-sufficient character, Gash must be replaced with an epic snipe. Gash deals slightly more damage than epic snipes with a slightly faster animation, while consuming less end and needing much less recharge. This lets us replace FF procs with extra damage procs everywhere. On the flipside, we lose on the flexibility of less resisted damage type and range. I find range less of a concern than on usual melee characters given that Axe has Cleave, but admittedly that's a matter of taste. The snipe also gets an Apoc proc and a BU proc. Here was the driving logic for my own choice: - would rather keep beautiful axe concept pure of epic snipes (honestly, the prime motivator) - /nin secondary (-> Shadow Meld is less useful than on some other secondaries) - want to be exemplar friendly (-> Gash means full attack chain at lvl 22) - want to avoid reliance on incarnates even at lvl 50, for challenge stuff that disables it (-> Conserve Power is a great help for end management) - in incarnate settings, no Ageless reliance lets me have Barrier rather than Ageless To me Gash seems viable on a finalized build. At least it lets me achieve my specific goals.

Cleave is 15s base rech. To chain Cleave -> Swoop -> Chop without gaps, you'd need to be at the recharge cap.

I've got mine in Cleave. This way, I do Cleave -> Pendulum (crit) -> Axe Cyclone (crit) for AoE and Cleave -> Swoop (crit) -> Gash (crit) -> Chop for ST or Cleave -> Swoop (crit) -> Axe Cyclone (crit) for a mix of ST on boss and AoE on mobs Optimized for convenience more than anything, but I like the results!

Maybe my Mids is borked, but activating everything I could think of only gave me about 92% def. ONLY 92%!! I feel tricked, cheated, bamboozled, taken for a fool. Kinda nuts this is a workable build one could conceivably play with decent results. You even squeezed 100% slow res in there.

This opinion works in a vacuum, but I'm not sure it's relevant when discussing Sentinel AR paying a much steeper price relatively than Sentinel almost-every-other-primary. Either Sentinel AR is unfairly taxed or Sentinel almost-every-other-primary are unfairly powerful.

Sentinel nuke normalization has always been iffy what with secondary characteristics varying widely in effectiveness. Blackstar and Thunderous Blast big winners, Full Auto and Rain of Arrows big losers. I would love to see some love there - especially given the "losers" are the powersets that already took a relative hit in their original form, when other sets lost the crash on full nukes.

I'm happy to see Fire Blast (the power) fixed. Old Paragon devs adding this godawful pause for the sake of normalizing Blaster attacks during the Blaster revamp ruined one of the most enjoyable powers in the game, then for some reason Sentinels got that version ported instead of the pristine Defender/Corruptor one. No more making do with Flares for me. 🙂

The tough part in playing WP is you're basically Bio minus the clicks. Quick Recovery + Fast Healing = a weaker Inexhaustible (that's 2 power picks to be marginally worse than a single power available at lvl1 - ouch!) Mind Over Body = Hardened Carapace Environmental Modification = Heightened Senses What remains for WP? A wee bit of resistance and +maxHP with HPT. Some decent regen in RttC. Better psi resistance/defense. A T9 bumping your resistances slightly. Compare that with the extra clicks for Bio, the two auras as passive, and the offensive/defensive/efficient adaptations... WP can survive OK, in situations that don't involve defense debuffs. And with tools like Shadow Meld or Barrier you eventually plug that hole. Still, relatively speaking WP pays a tremendous price for performance that is barely better than clickless Bio. In my opinion WP only makes sense if you don't want Bio's ugly effects tarring your costume.

This reads like the sensible solution. Isn't this sort of how Burn works, anyway? Upfront damage + patch. Change the "upfront damage" to "DoT" and you've got an Ignite that's fun and useful.

Basically, you quoted my post while purposefully ignoring all relevant content, and posted a vague, partially inaccurate and unrelated answer for the purpose of being contrarian. Let's go through it step by step: "Highly personal, but I love the Stalker version of MA because it gets a slightly beefed up Eagle's Claw. I love EC but it's fairly useless on other ATs due to terrible DPA." "Highly personal" -> this doesn't apply to everyone "I love EC" -> I want to make EC work, what's my best path to it? "fairly useless on other ATS due to terrible DPA" -> on a Scrapper, EC does 22% less DPA than CK or CS Your reply: "Eagle's Claw has terrible dpa on a Stalker as well." -> the DPA difference between EC and CK/CS is 0.6% on a Stalker This is a difference that is more than 36x smaller than the Scrapper. THIRTY SIX TIMES. And you're trying to create a false equivalence, using the exact same word to qualify both relationships. Maddening. Simply maddening. "Even with the ATO proc, you're still better off just running conventional attacks." Seasoned troll that you are, you made this vague to keep the opportunity to run away if called out. Sure enough, your next post is now arguing the once-every-10s ATO is "infrequent", CS/CK are "slightly better" (+0.6% base DPA...), and people should just use epic snipes. Once again for emphasis. Your answer to a post saying "I love EC and this is how I make it work" is "UGH dude just use those other attacks that do the same base damage". Literally nobody is arguing picking EC is optimal. You're strawmanning harder than the strawmannest strawman here. Whole point is in relative terms. Picking EC is an enormous performance hit on other ATs. While on Stalkers, it's palatable. Between: - damage procs (= better effect on EC than on same DPA powers with faster recharge/animation) - ATO proc (better effect on a higher base damage power like EC) - adding AF stack (snipes don't) Hjarki, Hjarki, Hjarki. Will you ever beat your pathological desire to say "no" when somebody else says "yes"? It seeps through everything in your posting. Forcing you to argue 8ft radius Dragon's Tail is one of the best AOEs around. Primary school math, aka "area of a circle", is a recurring struggle for our proeminent theorycrafters who don't actually play the game. But in all fairness, in the mind of a theorycrafter who doesn't play the game there is always the target cap of enemies in melee range every single time they activate their Force Feedback'ed 8ft PBAoE. OK, I'll grant my own subjectiveness here. I know there's players who make Dragon's Tail work and work well. I even enjoy it occasionally (without fantasy theorycraft FF procs where getting DT to recharge in 4s rather than 5s would matter any...). Yet once again the point is relative. I would not trade high damage 10ft Atom Smasher for an epic TAoE. I will happily trade medium damage 8ft Dragon's Tail for an epic TAoE and their 15ft range. It's not about making optimal choices, it's about judging whether the constraints tied to my preferences are workable or gamebreaking. Anyway. Hjarki, babe. We've done this song and dance for a while. It's somewhat fun to correct your inaccuracies, to point out your lack of actual playing the game (which you never ever dare to deny or address, I get a kick out of that conspicuous silence every time...), even to concede the rare valid points or have to readjust my thinking. But to be honest, it's also equally irksome to deal with your bad faith arguments. The bullshit asymmetry principle applies: you quickly throw out falsehoods, it takes me much longer to refute them. Consider this our breakup letter. You can keep milking that bullshit asymmetry principle, but I won't be here to see it. 😪

What's a conventional attack?

I think EnA can definitely hold up in +4/x8. It is one of the beefier sets for survivability, almost like an alternate Invulnerability. DB is more in the middle of the pack (in my opinion), but as a Scrapper that's still respectable damage.

Highly personal, but I love the Stalker version of MA because it gets a slightly beefed up Eagle's Claw. I love EC but it's fairly useless on other ATs due to terrible DPA. On the flipside, Stalkers get no AoE. On the *other* flipside, Dragon's Tail is kinda ass anyway.

For what it's worth, EnA is mostly passive. It has two main clicks: the heal that gives you endurance reduction, and the endurance drain. You could get away putting the heal on auto (essentially treating it as regen + conserve power), and using the end drain only whenever your blue bar is hurting. Throwing ideas out there: - Energy Melee is a good endurance friendly primary, thanks to Energy Transfer costing 0 endurance. Even if sappers drain you without respite, you can keep spamming ET. - Bio Armor overflows with endurance management. Recovery passive at level 1, potential enhancement of that passive at level 10. Then there's DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura if you want even more end. OK, these are clicks again. But DNA Siphon can be used as an attack, and you could conceivably ignore Parasitic Aura and even Ablative Carapace, and end up at roughly the same performance as Willpower. Not that I would suggest outright *skipping* these powers, but you could approach it from a perspective of - it's there if I really really need to use them, but I don't have to obsess about it. Coming back to BuiltDifferent's suggestion, DB/EnA really seems like a strong pick for your goals. DB can run the Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals attack chain on low recharge while leveling. This full chain is available by level 22, and it's fairly endurance efficient because the Attack Vitals combo is essentially bonus damage you get for free. /EnA is also cool because it's fairly comprehensive in covering defense, some resistance, some healing... You end up with a well-rounded character that doesn't require active management to keep standing.

Sounds like a fun and especially unique combination. I don't have much input except take Storm Kick, use Storm Kick, love Storm Kick. It's the cornerstone attack of any good MA build.

The number of times I've found a character who clearly intended to slot something like a Numina unique and had a random Numina heal/end (in Health!) instead amazes me. Sometimes it's characters I've played for dozens of hours, too, and never noticed the mistake.

Travel suppression in the early issues was pretty much a PvP change. This was obvious and generated so much animosity against PvP (which was the studio's new baby), the devs had to cook up a narrative this was to stop PvE jousting. Even though nobody did any sort of jousting regularly in PvE because the risk/reward ratio simply wasn't there compared to herding and killing. All in all, I think this is the original sin that fueled further PvP-ruins-PvE sentiment forever. Objectively, later changes were much more carefully implemented, but the trust was lost on that particular idea.

This is a great list of tips from everyone. I use many of them, also see some cool ideas I didn't think of. My own bit on insps is... lucks lucks lucks. Defense as a mechanic is overpowered in this game, and defense inspirations have overpowered values on top. A single luck gives +12.5% defense. This means you can turn any character into a softcapped powerhouse by chugging 4 lucks. This will let just about any character take on x8 groups as soon as level 1. I have a convert insps to rages bind like Redzone mentioned, but I also have a convert insps to lucks bind. I use this latter one first and foremost. As a solo player, this easily improves my performance by an order of magnitude. It makes for a gameplay loop where you chug 3-4 lucks, start fighting a large group, kill things, more insps drop, you convert them to lucks, and you tend to get enough drops to keep this cycle going forever. It also makes for great externalities: you don't need to allocate too many slots to your armors. Instead, leaving the base slot on defensive powers is fine, while every slot can be allocated to offense. Creating a virtuous circle of the character defeating enemies faster, getting insps faster, eventually not only keeping their 3-4 luck per minute shield consistently, but ending up with extra insps that can now be turned into reds for more damage output. - Also, building on previous tips on Winter Packs, storing insps in email, enabling inspiration drops... Don't sleep on team insps. Team insps can easily turn the tide of the most seemingly impossible fight in a pickup group from hell. If you chug a bunch of team purples and oranges, it's like giving your entire team the Barrier Destiny. For a full minute. At any level you want.

I prefer the old faces and would hate to see them upscaled/updated. The ever present issue with "improving" lower resolution art is everyone is going to see something different in the original blurriness. Any improvement is necessarily opinionated - and that's even with human artists at the helm. When it comes to AI upscales, I very rarely see a result I don't find a downgrade from the original. Sounds good as an optional thing, tho. Like TheZag says.

Poison is an usual underrated pick, although I get the impression people are warming up to it. I'd say Sonic Blast is underrated. Not that it's not played, but the revamp truly pushed it into top tier territory and I don't think it's getting recognition at that level yet. Dark Blast and Dark Melee feel underrated. Maybe not in optimal contexts, but for casual characters. So much healing goodness and tohit debuffs, and the Dark Melee tweaks were really good to it. Battle Axe is probably underated relative to how plain fun it is. The new version truly makes the set comfortable to play in a way no other melee set is. You get range (ranged AoE even), you get PBAoEs that don't require aiming, you even get to pull things closer to you to get whacked. Symphony seems underrated. It's a solid control set in its own right and gets tons of free damage on top. It's basically Mind++.

I will use the T9 as well, but I understand where you're coming from. The cones are great and they also eat all your animation time when chained one after another, might as well stay in position to get the most out of them. I take Combat Jumping on all my alts and I have a twitchy thumb on the space bar, so it's usually just a matter of hop in, T9, hop out for me.

re: why not more cold/rad out there. I think part of the reason people keep away from /rad is an extremely... strong... SFX on the snipe. It's a like it or hate it thing. Add to that the competition. /fire is more or less a plain better version of /rad without the opinionated SFX. /sonic was always great and got buffed further. /dark has a better secondary effect and stacks healing on top. With Cold specifically, lacking any form of healing, you benefit greatly from the ATO procs. A set well-suited to procs might get comparatively less mileage out of it than with other primaries. Tohit is rarely ever an issue, so -def isn't all that hot as a secondary effect. That's my take on the popularity of that particular combo, anyway.