nihilii

Claws/Stone sounds pretty cool... EM is a great fit. /stone has tons of regen and good maxHP so that takes care of ET when ET doesn't crit. Endurance management coupled with light endurance primary makes for an easy time putting it together; opening up Barrier (over Ageless) as Destiny with little DPS sacrifice, and coincidentally Barrier completes the layered mitigation of Stone perfectly. Finally, a damage aura is always helpful to EM. Axe is also good, pulling back things in your aura. TBH, I praise EM and Axe as synergy for just about any secondary 😅 ... It's hard for powersets to miss the mark when they're high damage and either 1) bursty and endurance light or 2) great convenient AOEs and ranged. Inherently flexible, opens up so many options.

Stone Armor is plain better. Mostly the same defense numbers. Better resistances. A "better" +maxHP power, in that it recharges fast enough as a heal. Better +regen. Same damage aura. Better resists (endurance drain resistance is fantastic, whereas Ice's edge in slow resists is chipped away by Winter IOs). An extra damage boost. Much better psi coverage. Geode is a great Can't Touch This button, even if it breaks sometimes. Ice has a strong T9 for damage spikes and better endurance management. Even that endurance management isn't necessarily a clear win: some builds might prefer the passive +recovery of Stone, which also lets you slot an extra Power Transfer proc in there. Ice Armor needs help. It's playable (what isn't?), but there's no reason to play it. It's the Willpower of elemental armors.

Brute is the easiest for a truly broke solo challenge. This is because Fury accounts for much of your damage, and armors with just the base slot (or an empty slot really) are OK for low difficulty content. To refine further you'd want to go for the easiest enhanceless powersets as well. On the secondary side, /bio is clear winner. You get free tohit and damage (even if Brute doesn't care much about damage), + many end tools, which you will need more than other characters. On the primary side, Super Strength is a great pick as Rage once again takes care of +tohit and adds a bit of damage. But it is end heavy. Another approach can be to go for endurance light sets, like Claws or Energy Melee.

For each archetype, multiply the number of primaries by secondaries, minus incompatible powersets (like Shield + Titan Weapons). Add it all together. Multiply by 3 to account for a multiboxing setup. +1 over this result should be "too many".

Yeah, I think the most "conventional" path nowadays would be to run Haymaker -> Cross Punch -> KO Blow -> Haymaker -> Cross Punch -> [epic hold] as an attack chain. Proccing this out. The epic holds went from 32s recharge to 24s recharge, which is a perfect fit for this chain (near identical to KO Blow). Haymaker -> Mesmerize -> KO Blow -> Haymaker -> Mesmerize -> Dominate can be an alternative. It would likely do less damage but also be safer (you would sleep your target for an instant every few seconds and get a 40% chance for a large heal, it's almost like being Dark Melee with Siphon Life). (Arguably, if you are NOT concerned with optimal ST damage for soloing AVs, the good ol' Gloom builds might still work. In real gameplay one tends to add a Foot Stomp into the mix against trash mobs, while AV fights tend to come with teammates boosting your recharge.) I'd still embrace the new paradigm, for the sake of flexibility. If you go dark epic you can proc out the hold there *and* get Tar Patch, which is an excellent route...

This was the first reply in this thread more than 1 year ago, near universally agreed, and now somehow this is controversial. I think we're running in circles because some posters are in the "buff Brutes" camp to protect their overpowered Tanker or to hope for an overpowered Brute, and some posters are in the "nerf Tankers" camp because they're trolls who like to see others miserable. In truth there's solid arguments for both buffing Brutes a little bit and nerfing Tankers a little bit, my own preference would go to taking a look at damage scaling like ShinMagmus said and uhhhh even though it is my favorite buff ever, it's very hard to defend the Tanker p5 radius buff as balanced.

Power Transfer works in Harmonized Mind. Preventive Medicine cannot be slotted there - it's a healing set - but it will work in a passive like Health, or True Grit. Cardiac is a great pick. Given the damage stat is already so buffed with Rage, the opportunity cost of giving up Musculature is lower than it would be on any other character.

There is Entropic Chaos, but the heal is not as strong. I think we get the most bang for our buck with just Call of the Sandman. My planned slotting is: 4 apocs (damage proc + dam/rech + dam/end + rech/acc), gladiator damage proc, and sandman proc. Slotting recharge hurts the proc chances but is required for my build to chain Haymaker -> Mesmerize -> KO Blow -> Haymaker -> Mesmerize -> Foot Stomp. There's probably something smarter to do by including Cross Punch, which I tend to avoid if I can. It only boosts the accuracy and damage of Mesmerize, not the heal aspect. Yeah, seems like Ice Melee could be an interesting fit - it's another powerset with relatively weak native attacks who can use some shoring up from epics, too.

I think you've made the right case for either. Personally, I'd make it Shield/SS just to use an attack chain including Rage-boosted Mesmerize procced for heal, like discussed here. At 12s base recharge it's a great fit to replace Gloom, which used to have that same recharge but was bumped to 16s.

Wow, 45%? Funny how bias can work with "hit chances": from empirical experience, I assumed it was much lower than that. In fact I half-expected someone to come in with the *opposite* reply, using numbers to prove the Call of the Sandman proc would be a stupid choice... 😅

I use Mesmerize that way too and I think it's severely underrated. Could hardly believe we were getting this for Brutes/Tankers when Beta went public. Something that's easily missed, purple triangles on AVs don't include sleep protection. This makes for extremely easy soloing even on suboptimal builds or against tougher AVs, you have a panic button at any point in the fight. Basically impossible to die. Helpful as an opener too if you're typically on x8, sleep the AV and get rid of his squad first. Also a great help when fighting multiple AVs, just permasleep the ones you're not hitting. For that matter, it serves its purpose even as a one slot wonder. So this is an option if the only goal is a stepping stone to Harmonic Mind. On early/cheap builds I like to stick the Call of the Sandman proc in there, which does a 280 heal when it hits. The PPM is low so it hits rarely, but nonetheless it is "free" healing if I'm using it for the purpose of dropping enemy toggles.

That one Cap au Diable tune really has some kick to it!

I feel /nin is just one of those powersets that looked a lot better before /sr got buff after buff. You basically need to find value in the tools. I don't so I skip stalker /nin. The heal is nice, sure, but given that /nin basically needs an extra pool to compete with /sr in just defenses (let alone nonexistant scaling resistances), one might argue the equivalent /sr would grab Aid Self.

Strangely enough I've started liking runners, but it's hard to disagree with an option to sacrifice 1 slot for convenience. Similar to the KB->KD situation, in a sense. Although it begs the question, are there interactions where this could turn OP for non-melee characters? I suppose the aura could be set to be comically short duration, like 1 second, so you'd have to be in melee consistently for the effect to keep working. Anyway, given that powersets that get aggro auras get it for free, proliferating a more expensive yet much weaker option should be fine?

I must not nerf. Nerfs are the alt-killer. Nerfs are the number death that brings powerset consolidation. I will ask for buffs. I will permit for balance to pass over me and through me. And when balance has gone, I will turn my altitis towards the path of buffs. Where the buffs have come there will be plenty. So I will ask for even more. The Kinetic Melee topic got me thinking. (Well, the first thought I had was even though I may have had a point there, I behaved like an ass, even if I didn't quote the poster because I didn't want to make it about them. But still an ass. Don't want to make this a thing, but if you're reading this, I'm sorry for my tone.) Mostly it got me thinking about power creep. Yomo made a point most of the problems I attributed to KM were wrapped in buffs to other sets; rather than KM mechanics/playability. This opens up the question: can performance, mechanics, playability, ever be absolute? Perhaps it can be argued it should only ever be relative to other enemies and not characters. So, if you can beat content on normal difficulty settings, then you perform. I have a couple of issues with that view. First, the game is so easy you can beat normal difficulty content on absolutely every powerset. So, might as well pack up any mechanic talk and never consider any change either. We can set the bar this low for playability and call it a day, but at least for me there are powersets that are distinctively more fun to play and powersets distinctively less fun to play. We could switch the difficulty level to any theoretically unreasonable yet reasonable practically level of difficulty, for example soloing +4/x8 missions, which I'm confident every powerset can do (provided you put the work, are willing to optimize, and so on). And yet that relationship between more fun powersets and less fun powersets would still hold for me. Is it just X defeats stuff faster than Y? I don't know. I'm tempted to say there *are* a couple absolute traits, in a vacuum, that can make sets more or less playable, mechanically enjoyable, regardless of performance. For me it's definitely animation length. I don't think I can ever find a case where a power with a 2s animation doing 100 damage does not feel better than a power with a 3s animation doing 150 damage. Fast animations feel more reactive, especially when the "impact" (the damage on your enemy, or whatever the effect is for a nondamaging power) hits. It's about tickling that "player input to visual feedback" conduit in the brain. Much like 60 FPS feels better than 30 FPS, and now apparently 144 FPS feels better than 60 FPS even though it feels like yesterday big parts of the entire industry argued the human eye could not see above 24 FPS. Latency is key. But, I've had a recent experience that proved, at least in my case, it's not just about mechanics in a vacuum. Plain number tweaks with near identical gameplay otherwise can radically improve my enjoyment of a character. I *also* believe it's not an endless treadmill towards feeding yourself with more and more performance to keep up with the Joneses. Instead, I believe there are sweet spots, coupled with constant but small global increases in performance. Let's try to illustrate. Enter the Night Widow. I've had a couple for many years - first on Live, again on here. Always an enjoyable character, never my favorite character. Why is that? Night Widows are well-rounded and easy to play, melee characters with an effortless buffer over softcapped defense, good melee damage, team buffs. On the flipside they have (they had*) no frontloaded resistances, low HP, no healing, no endurance management, no aggro ability, low defense debuff resistance. At the higher end they fall off compared to Scrappers and Stalkers; at least in a solo manner, as you can always argue the team buffs make them more valuable to teams. This last update, I27p7, saw a whole lot of buffs to Night Widows. Taken on their own the list of changes can seem subtle. NWs now have a passive giving a bit of resistances and +maxHP. Placate recharges faster, and Placate in general was buffed to always give you a chance to crit even if you get hit. Crit chance was cranked from 67% to 100%. The native stealth makes you stealthier. Psychic Scream was significantly improved - to be honest I still don't even pick the power, but I can attest it is now *playable*, compared to its godawful original state. So I grab an old Night Widow I had shelved for a couple years. The idea being to respec into a build keeping the core style I like while getting the most out of these changes. That core style here being, all Claws attack, Build Up rather than Follow Up, Gloom and Dark Obliteration, Elude-based play. Throwing in the new Placate on top, that was the one mechanic change I made. Turns out I had a vampire costume on that character. Which I liked well enough back then, and I think the concept works well with widow powers. Fast claw attacks, psionic powers, good movement speed, stealth, it all can fit with the idea you have of a vampire. Color Elude with a bright tint, and when you run it gives you that supernatural blur of a being moving too fast for the human eye... But I shelved the character. It didn't work well enough, it wasn't compelling enough for me to play her regularly. Anyone who likes to solo hard stuff, experienced with defense sets like SR and the like, can likely guess my pain points. When you take on AVs with pure defense characters, you tend to be awesome most of the time; then they get two or three lucky hits in a row and you faceplant. Or, well, I do. In truth there's hardly any "pure" defense character anymore (thanks to buffs!). SR gets scaling resistances for example. So do Night Widows! These help a lot already, especially combined with IOs. When your resistances crank up to 60-70% while low HP, it's essentially as if you expanded your full healthbar a couple times. I find the dynamic interesting here in more ways than one. You can intuit the goal is to stack as many resistances as possible. If your scaling resistances give you up to +50%, starting at 0% gives you 50% which is nice, a reduction of half the damage you take. Now if you managed to have 25% resistances, the same point in your healthbar would result in 75% res, which means you only take a quarter of the damage. Twice as good as the previous scenario. NWs get to make great use of stacking resistances as their cap is 85%, slightly lower than Tankers and Brutes at 90% but a good increase from the standard 75% even Scrappers and Stalkers cap at. On top of that you also want to have enough maxHP to take a hit. Say you have 1400hp. If you take a 1400 hit that brings you to 1hp thanks to the anti oneshot code, it's well and good if you end up at 85% resistances, but a second lucky hit in a row will take you down all the same. On the other hand, if you were at 1800hp to begin with, now that 1400 hit leaves you at 400hp, and a next hit of the same power would hit you for maybe 200-250 damage - letting you live, and hopefully regenerate. So this new +maxHP/res passive with seemingly small-to-medium values is actually a massive buff to Night Widows. It changed the dynamic considerably. I find myself fighting lvl 54 AVs and surviving 3 hits in a row, in bright red health mind you, but also remembering the good old days of always getting "unlucky" - and of course it wasn't lack of luck, it was a statistical guarantee over time defeat would happen. We've moved the performance just enough to switch the binary from death to life. And so the vampire gets out of the coffin. That's another thing. I'm having a grand ol' time roleplaying this character, if only in my head. There's often this idea if you are a roleplayer you must clearly reject any form of performance and carve your identity as someone who does everything suboptimally, because concept is king. Now if that's anyone's thing, more power to them. But I think there's implied subtext anyone who cares about performance is some kind of power-obsessed munchkin who only sees the game as a spreadsheet and cannot possibly identify with their characters on a deeper level. I can tell you, I look down on my taskbar right now and see 3 CoH spreadsheets open + Mids on top, and just before this post I still spent a full hour standing still in a mission instance, lovingly rewriting the bio for that Night Widow of mine. We can enjoy performance and concept, and even derive more enjoyment out of the very same concept thanks to an increase in performance! What about the sweet spots of performance I mentioned earlier? Well, I think Night Widows are right there right now for example. I don't need MORE performance. There are still some weaknesses, some tradeoffs to make, and they are acceptable. It is fun for the power curve to trend up over time, regardless. Slowly. I think the Homecoming devs have done a great job with this. Think of it like inflation (which, uh, I guess might be a loaded topic these days, but bear with me). If you increase *all* the numbers slowly, relative result is the same but you get to feel good psychologically about having a higher salary / taking on bigger challenges. Our characters keep getting stronger but we also get Hard Mode TFs, we get Incarnate story arcs, we get new story arcs that tend to feature harder enemies like those midrange Vahziloks, we get the weakest enemy groups beefed up like Council and CoT. My name is nihilii and I'm a buffoholic. I love meaty numbers, I am a creep for power, IT IS NOT A DISEASE IT IS A LIFESTYLE! Give me your failed builds, your dormant alts. Your neglected rerolls yearning to breathe the Favor of the Well. I hope you too get to enjoy the plentiful bounty of developer love.

I'd guess Axe is a good fit because can you ever go wrong with Axe? Cyclone's pull + pace of KDs that were clearly balanced for older lengthier animations makes for things flipflopping around all the time, much needed breathing room for Regen. The lack of special mechanics forcing a certain playstyle (combos, Follow Up/Blinding Feint, gives you maximum flexibility to use Regen clicks at a moment's notice, then resume your murdering arresting with no performance loss.

Can confirm no aggro on Nin. It's the opposite even, you become stealthy and get higher crit chance.

I think there's a small, but vocal clique on the forums who loves virtuesignaling they don't care about power in power threads. This strikes me as quite similar to bikini armor in RPG settings, in more ways than one. Sure, you can fanwank some explanation about magic protecting you or new players needing to be told powersets aren't *literally* unplayable. But we all know the real motive for these actions comes down to another kind of wanking. OP, I recommend going to the Scrapper subforum for better discussions on this topic. For a quick answer: KM has structural problems tied to its original design that were compounded with game changes over the years. It's not so much it's broken in a big way, it's just that it falls off in many ways, relatively. i.e.: - Concentrated Strike now has the longest animation of all comparable attacks. It used to be it was one of the most powerful Scrapper attacks too, but many powerful Tanker sets were proliferated since - Power Siphon was great back in the day, but Musculature Alpha + Assault Hybrid + damage bonuses + Gaussian BU have taken a lot of wind out of builds that rely on constant +damage buffing - likewise, the existence of epic snipes also hurt KM relatively, in two different ways. First it forces a tradeoff between using a snipe and maintaining max PS buffs, a choice other Scrappers don't have to make. Second it lessens the value of your native ranged attack in Focused Burst - Burst was a very slow animation and poor AoE to start with, and as a couple of other laggard sets got buffs, KM is now firmly last spot for AOE power - no real "tier3" attack option without proc abuse, Focused Burst animates a smidge too slow So that's the situation. As for the buffs I'd like to see, they follow from my above list: - shave off half a second in CS, bring it in line with the buffs to Total Focus-tier powers - shave off half a second in Focused Burst. Turn it into a legitimate T3 - shave off a full second in Burst. Increase radius from 8ft to 10ft - shave off more than a full second in Power Siphon, from 2.1s to 1s. This would make it more flexible to use - increase Power Siphon stack duration from 10s to 15s. Same top performance, less constraint on sticking to the same attacks To be honest, I don't think these buffs would be near enough for Brutes who have it even worse due to their own AT nature (low base damage, high self damage buffing = gets even less out of KM +dam). But for Scrappers this could be a solid step forward. Incidentally, KM is indeed the verified factually coolest powerset, and I know that for me personally "better performance" in the fashion I described above would increase my enjoyment to the point I might main KM again.

See, I'm not even saying that is enough. I'm saying: here's the hyperconservative tweaks we could roll out by the next day to playtest, gather data, watch the results, then eventually push live or tweak further, and so on. Rather than put off a big rework somewhere in the far future. I would 100% bet those changes would not make /regen overpowered.

I kinda hate that we have to wait for these significant revamps, often completely changing the feel of the set. When a few numbers tweak would likely do the trick. i.e. Imagine /regen with: - 30s base recharge on Reconstruction rather than 60s. Fastest recharging selfheal. Addresses the "if you don't have any buttons you're dead" - fully enhanceable regeneration on Integration and IH, rather than 2/3rd. No reason for this awkward 2/3rd in this day and age. - increase Moment of Glory duration from 15s to 20s. This makes up for the very long 3s animation. Those changes would be simple variable tweaks. 10 minutes job in the codebase. The actual hard work would be to playtest it conclusively. I bet this would already make /regen feel a lot better. Maybe not perfect. I'm somewhat conservative with the changes because I went for the things that truly could be done in a snap. But I think it could change so much already.

I don't have hard rules, but I tend to lean towards the same approach. I fully slot attacks ASAP and only worry about defenses later. Although I prefer to go with 1 acc 3 dam 2 end. It's a pain in the ass to damage slowly. But you can always have enough survivability, as it is binary: either you're alive or you're dead, and you need just enough to be alive.

I would love for that Tyrant moba tidbit to be fleshed out as a real story arc here.

A very simple heuristic for me is 300+ DPS and as little conditions as possible. I say 300+ DPS as a baseline. Ideally most of your damage would be elemental as AVs often resist S/L. Ideally you'd have a little more than that too. Because you are fighting AV regen, and lvl 54 AV regen with resistances and tricks in some case, damage scales nonlinearly. Adding +50 DPS can be the difference between a stalemate and victory. That being said, all but the hardest TFs should be doable with ~300 DPS. I personally like Sentinels a lot for that reason. You pelt stuff at range with survivability almost comparable to a Stalker; which in practice (provided you stay mobile) makes for survivability closer to a Tanker than to a Scrapper, because enemies deal much less damage at range. Fire, Elec and Sonic are strong primaries. Bio, Nin, SR, Rad are great secondaries. Scrappers and Tankers are objectively better builds for that purpose, in general. It's impossible to go wrong with, say, an EM/Bio. Stone/EM Tankers were likewise absolute beasts before the Stone buffs, and now should be even better as you can play in normal armors and switch to Granite godmode only if something pierces through. Night Widows have been buffed, A LOT. They're now fully rounded characters with no real hole save for the lacking of healing, which can be mitigated in various ways. I think they would be good contenders too, again in the spirit of flexible character able to adapt. Can make full use of the second build, i.e. having a Fortunata ready to go to hold the green mitos in LGTF. You mention your Energy/Invul Sentinel. This would not be the easiest character to solo with, I'd rank it as "average" to perhaps "slightly under average". But, with good tactics, build optimisations, regular insps, eventually temps, I'd assume you could get: (tier 1: if your build is good, you should be able to turn off your brain and at most chomp on insps. You can even solo many of these on a bad build) - all the oldschool sub 50 TFs - all respec trials - Cavern of Transcendence - Death from Below - Drowning in Blood - Rularuu TFs (tier 2: you will likely have to think, there will be deaths, some optimization required) - Mortimer and Sutter. Hard fights, but level 40 scaling works in your favor. - Descent to the Hydra. Pain in the ass than anything. Honestly I'd skip this one unless you really care for the achievement of doing it solo, it's just a grind to take out the shields then shoot down the head veeeery slowly with just your one cannon. - ITF with some effort. Good middle point to know if you can take on the rest of the lvl 50 TFs. - Aeon. Mostly have to pay attention to the special mechanics. - Market Crash. The challenge here is the final robot, who breaks every game rule. No real trick to it except be on the ball, jousting helps to avoid -maxHP debuffs stacking too much. - LGTF with a dedicated build, you'd want to grab an epic hold and slot it for maximum recharge+hold. Honoree can also be a showstopper, his Unstoppable cycles may outpace your damage. (tier 3: getting into real challenge territory, failure is expected and victory should be celebrated) - LRSF. Perhaps counterintuitively the easiest of the hard TFs, because you can pull the final 7 level 53 AVs individually or in duos if you work hard at it. - Apex. Got to be quick on your feet, this is one TF where being a Sentinel over say a Scrapper can be helpful. Still a trial to beat lvl 54 Battle Maiden. - Tin Mage. No blue patches of death but mandatory 2+ AV fights *and* robots with good resistances puts this slightly higher on the difficulty scale, it's possible to hit a regeneration roadblock here. - Eden??? I haven't tried to solo Eden since they buffed it, no idea how to assess save that the Crystal Titan is a tough cookie now... (tier 4: likely impossible for Energy/Invul Sentinel, and for that matter for many many builds) - STF. Extremely difficult. The 4 patrons can be pulled individually and defeated. Taking on buffed up Lord Recluse himself is another story. You have to take out the towers but you won't have the DPS to burst them down. The hardest part as a soloer is tagging the repairmen in time too. I think an Energy/Invul Sentinel would fail this unless the player was elite. - Barracuda/Kahn. Reichsman requires gargatuan DPS, no two ways about it.

Super Strength is an excellent proc bomber if you want a melee option. All attacks take 5 to 6 procs, and permaRage means you don't need to hunt for accuracy set bonuses like you would in most other proc builds.

I agree, this is my intuition as well. One of these suggestions that might not be worth implementing because of the high effort for low reward. Especially with lack of popularity of crash T9s in general. As I've been on a T9 binge for the past... 2 years? and I pay very little attention, I've had many... adventurous... crashes. Generally several times in any play session. So I've had this suggestion idea many times, and I figured I would finally throw it out today rather than loop back to it in my head. 😅