nihilii

Torchbearer is so quiet these days even with chat on I rarely, if ever, see something inappropriate. Removing public channels is a good way to go, indeed. Props to you for being a responsible parent!

In the teens, CoT is a powerhouse. Ruin Mages have bubbles and Earthquake. Ghosts with tohit debuffs are all over the place. By the 20-30s, they're still a force to be reckoned with. Hellfrosts, Succubi, minions with defense debuffs, minions with slows. Agony Mages healing their friends. Then by level 45+, they become a joke. It's all straight damage, with Death Mages doing a little bit extra, but not enough on their own. You could scale the very same low level and mid level enemies all the way to level 50, without giving them any extra power, and the resulting Circle of Thorn would be a significantly tougher faction. It doesn't have to be exactly that, but can we do something to help the guys in robes? Their highlevel disgrace makes me feel bad when I hit them in the face.

Fiery Melee got some good buffs as well!

I once made an Ice/Savage/Psi solely for the purpose of having fun spamming the Savage attacks while Arctic Air + WoC would mez things passively, and this worked better than it had any business to. Like you say, with the one extra step of using Ice Slick, standard mobs stand little chance. It's a great setup when you just want to enjoy your secondary.

I made the thread to orient my thinking regarding practical scenarios, but I didn't want to get into it in order not to shoehorn / distract from the conversation. Primarily buffbots (accounts 2&3 + friends), or heavy team situations (i.e., "what attack chain do I switch to, and out of my roster, who is my best character when i'm in a league with ludicrous buffs").

Does this mean Tanker Burn benefits from the Tanker larger radius?

Ice is the best, in large part thanks to Sleet being the real deal. Defender values and same recharge, so it turns you into a Dominator that also debuffs and supercharges your damage output. Then you get a S/L +def shield (which many players prefer to +res). Hoarfrost, to boost your maxHP. Hibernate for recovery and panic moments. It's all around an excellent epic... Perhaps even the best epic of all ATs combined? It's also fairly slot efficient, you can leave most of these powers at 1 or 2 slots. Although it is nice to 6-slot Hoarfrost if you can. Fire and Mace are still decent choices if you like these more. Follow your gut.

I tried to read this several times, but your words fly way over my head, haha. The linked topic is about testing standard mission environments with SOs or IOs. I'm interested in sustained single-target DPS under optimal conditions. How should I link the two? Several assumptions of standard fully IOed builds in, say, Pylon testing, already shift in capped damage/recharge/recovery/survivability scenarios: - personal +dam isn't as important - pure DPA is more important - special damage is more important (crits, global procs) - attack chains will trim a lot of fat (a powerset with high DPA variance might top a powerset with smoothed out DPA?) It seems to me SO builds doing missions are way further from the goal here than standard fully IOed builds whacking on Pylons?

You're right! I don't know why I forgot to mention the -RES. On second part, I consider survivability to be taken care of passively. I remember this thread but this seems the opposite of this discussion? Perhaps I'm missing something.

In my hypothetical scenario, I'd also assume tohit is capped, likewise for recovery. Any context in which you cap damage and recharge will likely have the tooling to take care of accuracy and end woes. Your mileage may vary, of course! -regen for /bio is IMHO out of scope. -100% regen from DNA Siphon will be heavily resisted by any target we want to hunt with that kind of DPS, and even procced out, not worth the animation time compared to a standard attack. So arguably, it's damage aura + proc vs damage aura + proc.

Looking at Blaster attack base damage makes me sad. In normal game scenarios they are carried by their high +damage, their AoE output, and certain edge cases like Fire Blast DoTs. Here this is not so useful. Maybe there's good combos out there. It's hard to find something matching the ridiculous DPA of fast ET + 2 high-probability crits on BS and MB.

This sounds sensible. I'm not sure where to go from there. Defaulting to EM as the "easy" choice. Likely an attack chain of TF -> Moonbeam -> Bonesmasher -> ET. Feeding MB and BS with two near guaranteed crits. Should come slightly short of 3-stack AS + 1/2 crit on Bonesmasher, but then Scrapper higher damage + damage aura should even the gap? I guess this isn't strictly within topic, but if damage ends up roughly similar between the two ATs, might as well go Scrapper. What about the Bio proc vs the Stone proc? Is there a damage breakdown on how effective either option is? Edit: I guess scrapper EM could also dynamically use ET twice whenever TF gives 2 stacks. ET recharging in 2s would fit right after TF then once again after MB and BS.

Grant Cover buffs your own slow resistance.

That was my thought as well. Of course, if someone can make an awesome build leveraging Burn and Fiery Embrace... Anything goes, really. Including Blasters and their secondaries. I'm looking for a general spread of resistances myself (yet another reason I liked Gobbledygook's pick), but I think anyone should be free to answer the topic according to their own criterias!

Seems like a strong first contender! With TF recharging in 4s, I'm guessing the attack chain would be TF -> ET -> AS -> then there's 1.63s to fill. I'm thinking Power Crash, for: - 100% chance to add third AS stack - PBAoE procs (arma, fury) But maybe Bonesmasher + tiny gap is better than spending an extra ~0.35s.

What do you think would be the highest single target DPS characters, assuming you're running around at the damage cap and the recharge cap 100% of the time? (Imagine buffbots following you, basically.) Has anyone run numbers on this? Firsthand experience? Any AT welcome. I'm posting this on the Scrapper board because one must post such things on the Scrapper board. -- edit: for the purpose of this question I assume accuracy, recovery, survivability and every other aspect are covered passively. As to focus on the best possible ST DPS under ideal conditions.

I could be wrong, but I recall Schadenfreude having both Siphon Life and Reconstruction. He will heal for a good chunk every 60 seconds, but he only activates it when he's below a certain threshold (50%? 25%?).

Ultimately, "infinite" anything is a bad mechanic and the source of the potential exploit. All ambushes should be capped in quantity, and all ambushes should give XP. Even if it's just underling XP.

I think you could buy super insps with them and sell said insps on the market.

Yes! It looks ridiculous, ridiculously fantastic.

It did wonders for spatial awareness, didn't it. When I move through a map, I still get flashbacks of particular stores being at particular spots even though that knowledge hasn't been useful for 10+ years.

Or running each other's Frostfire + Atta arcs in a row on a team, haha. Nowadays you're lucky if you manage to reach either boss solo before you outlevel them...

I joined in the European beta, which was middle of I3, and I recall the game as a beautiful broken mess at the time. As a Tanker, you could aggro literally hundreds of mobs, stack them on each other (as in, they'd physically share the same space, no collision), then oneshot all of them because (if I recall properly) the Tanker Gauntlet worked in such a way your single-target attacks had the tiniest AoE radius. Also, no AoE caps. Burn obliterated everything, and the standard build advice for a Fire Tanker was to take Burn and Hasten and not bother with secondary attacks. You needed the power picks and slots anyway, no inherent Stamina at the time and no ED either, so it made sense to 6-slot Hasten for recharge, 6-slot attacks for damage, grab Focused Accuracy to hit stuff, and so on. Blasters were ridiculously bad in comparison. Much lower damage than today with no inherent, no defenses, no fast snipe, crashes on nukes. The power gap was so large between ATs and powersets. Many people chased the flavor-of-the-month builds, but I happen to think the trend was negligible compared to the *real* power gap. As in, given players of similar skills, you could genuinely have a single Tanker perform better than 4 Blasters. There truly was some absurd power builds, and this was compounded by a relative lack of challenge. Outside of Hamidon, the fiercest foe you could face was a +2 Archvillain. Hardly the multiple AV fights with special mechanics we see today. I know from reading other players things were even more zany before I joined. And the mad times lasted for a couple issues longer, too. It was a fun era of the game, where each issue would bring radical gameplay changes, somehow slowly shaping this fun but batshit crazy power fantasy simulator into a legit game system with engaging balance.

Yooo! Brought a smile to my face reading your post, this is my favorite "hidden utility" as well. It's such a step up from spamming purples and oranges post resurrection and hoping to survive; not to mention it doesn't *cost* those purples and oranges. Out of insps? No big deal. I love getting back in the action with just one flip.

It's not so much the difficulty of getting a respec as it is the tediousness of reselecting every power and slot and rearrange the power tray. If we had a "save power trays" and "import from Mids" settings, or if we could respec dynamically by just clicking on powers and slots to "unlearn" them and get back other powers and slots, I think I would respec twice. Per day.