nihilii

I use dummy trays too but it is no replacement for the excellent suggestion by OP. Try playing in 1280x800 resolution on a 15' screen, and see how many trays you can fit on screen before you can barely see anything... 😄 I'm at 5 to 6 trays on most characters, and I basically put the extra 2-3 days in the bottom middle of my screen already because combined with the insp box it would nuke right side visibility otherwise.

PR has always been a wash in DPS for me, but having a ranged attack always comes with premium value. In the end, if you can't fit TT:A with PR, go without PR, for sure.

I LOVE that Battle Hulk costume. Wow! It always amazes me how much talent there is in this community.

I mean... You can scroll up and see this is literally what I came here to do, and hence why I selectively quoted a part of your post. Two liners reply, that's it. It is your choice to go on a full rant in answer, and to directly ask me unrelated questions. Especially after your previous "only respond if you agree with me" snark directed at OP, hmm? 😉 But OK, you want me to talk about your topic of choice. I will say you put forward an adequate counterpoint to your own thesis. If incentives make players move, then incentives are a long term solution to the problem. Incentives are not temporary by nature. They can last forever. The AE offers permanent incentives. The AE successfully attracts people to content that is objectively (or pretty close to it) lower quality and more repetitive than normal. There is no reason to stop a working incentive program. A trial period does not imply it cannot be renewed. Quite the contrary. Once a trial has proven effective, there could be justification to make it permanent. Provided the community decides this is a worthy goal, and the devs agree. Which is another can of worms entirely.

Nah, I just want to challenge your claim incentives don't matter. I think you're building a rationalisation to separate AE farms and villain content that is as elaborate as it is arbitrary. There's yet another hole in your logic (to me). If incentives don't matter, then it shouldn't hurt any to double XP/merits on villain side for a month and see what changes we see, if any. If there's a significant uptick in villain population, then this might suggest incentives do matter and that we can even the populations through such tweaks. At which point a conversation on *whether* tweaking that distribution is desirable or not, could be had. If there's no change in villain population, then your theory would be proven right. No need for further discussion. Win/win.

I find this train of thought questionable. AE farms aren't exactly thrilling content either, yet plenty partake in it. *Clearly* there is a level of incentives sufficient to direct a large portion of the playerbase towards content. Example: double XP and merits for redside content for a month, see how it goes. Blueside players who prefer playing heroes lose nothing, their rewards are still the same.

The marginal increase in performance through optimizations making certain assumptions with team buffs may not outweigh the rare catastrophic failures when said team buffs fail to materialize - whether because the team composition is light on it, because some players go AFK, aren't on the ball, because the team splits... It's a bit of a Catch 22 thing: if you're with a competent, disciplined bunch, you're going to steamroll content with no difference whether you eke out 5% more here and there in your own build. If the team is more chaotic, then you want to be self-sustainable.

Claws/Bio/Soul Tanker, ranged Focus -> Gloom -> Shockwave -> Dark Obliteration -> Focus -> Gloom -> Soul Tentacles. Dark Obliteration doesn't recharge fast enough, so there's a gap every two chains. Musculature/Ageless/Degen/Assault All runs with Hybrid on 5:28 = 244 DPS. Endurance was struggling, bad. 4:44 = 262 DPS. Removed Weave/Tough/Maneuvers. Added Pyronic Judgement (one use every 90s instead of Dark Oblit!). + 1 run in melee, just to see how much damage the auras would add 3:22 = 317 DPS Build

At a quick glance in Mids, you should be end sustainable with room to spare once you do your accolades + get your Incarnates. About -0.5 EPS attacking at full speed then, or 3+ minutes to drain. Ageless gives you a full bar of end every 2 minutes. That alone would be enough, and you have CP on top.

Scrappers truly shine with ATOs. Critical Strikes can turn you in a crit machine, especially if you use the PPM system to its fullest (put the proc in your slowest recharging attack, and don't slot any recharge in that power).

Crazy good find! Time to brainstorm a sonic/bio/soul... maybe.

I think I've done it with a stone/rad tanker but I don't recall for sure if it was no insps/amps. I'm confident it's possible, either way. /rad over /em, because you really want Irradiated Ground and Atom Smasher to clear the repairmen.

You're right, the lack of catchphrase for Homecoming is a problem. Now let me tell you how nerfing defense to a 40% cap will solve that problem.

You do not want to skip Practiced Brawler, it's your mez protection. Slotting Radiation Siphon is not silly, but is not strictly necessary either. You should find you have plenty of healing with the base value. Once you have Build Up and Irradiated Ground, it's fairly easy to get the Contamined effect just about all the time when you use Radiation Siphon, even without trying (which is what gives you the heal). Both powersets are good on their own and ought to be good together. I have the combo on a Tanker and love it. It's somewhat superseded by Shield, as is often the case with SR vs Shield... But still, there's a couple neat tricks to SR, and sometimes concept just can't involve being Captain America.

Arguably, this was true before Homecoming. Think Fire/SS/Soul Tanker. Remember when SS/Fire/Soul Brutes were king of the hill, pushing a ridiculous-at-the-time 300 DPS while your average middle tier scrapper, fully optimized, was in the low 200s if not below? Even before the Homecoming Tanker buff, on that particular combo so reliant on Rage Tankers still had almost 3/4 of the Brute DPS which maps out to 220ish. Tankers were definitely overbuffed, and so was EM. But it's worth remembering Scrappers got massive AT-wide buffs on Homecoming too through their ATOs (especially Critical Strikes) and fast snipe Moonbeam/Zapp. I remember on Live I stopped playing Scrappers for a long time. Brutes were simply better on every metric. Homecoming actually brought back some much needed balance in that respect.

Are sapping builds still worth it? I'd say yes. Elec Blast on Sentinels in particular is worth a look. It kept the same end draining properties as traditional Elec Blast, but Sentinel nukes recharge in 90s. That's twice as fast as the original Thunderous Blast. Couple that with nukes being crashless, and you've got your best endurance draining tool right there, up for every mob group. Tesla Cage was also buffed on Sentinels to deal high damage. So it's worth including in an attack chain, and comes with its -100% recovery too. My Elec/Bio Sentinel, built for damage, with not a single endurance mod slot, frequently drains War Walkers. I don't even have Short Circuit either. Truly, one does not have to sacrifice damage. As Doomguide points out, shutting down recovery is key - and that isn't enhanced by endmods, anyway.

Something to note with blaster vs brute/tanker that may not be immediately obvious: in a triplebox setup, the chances for your support characters to get stuck in environment are exponentially bigger. It's nice to have enemies all clumped together neatly. For that same reason I also like tankers over brutes, their greater AoE size comes in handy. Not to say you cannot make a blaster work... Heck, with 2 dedicated passive buffbots you can make pretty much any character work. There's the alternative of making the buffbots controllers too, and just spam a level 2 AoE immobilize with them; although this is taxing on endurance. Sonic is definitely one of the more hands off secondary as you can stick the shields once every 4 minutes, slap the -RES toggle on your main character, and go to town. Cold is a bit more work, what with Sleet and HL being active. If the goal is primarily defense, I wouldn't dismiss FF for this particular scenario. The defense is slightly higher than Cold, and it's nice to have mez protection redundancy with the big Sonic bubble in case things start to go south. That's for a blaster, or any other AT with a 75% resistance cap. If you main a brute or a tanker, don't even think hard: two Sonic will push you to the resistance cap with ease, and that's absurdly sturdy... while also stacking 2 -30% res toggles, to boost your offense significantly.

No kidding. Read the title in that robotic voice, too.

I think you cracked it right away. The same maps out to the real world. Sport fans get hyper aggressive with each other. Yet most people are not as engaged with Wall Street shenanigans. If they complain, it's about an undefined, remote "them". Finance is too abstract. Likewise with economics, monetary policy... It's just unnatural stuff, compared to more direct competitions that answer a primal need (at least in those of us afflicted with XY chromosomes).

Probably Poison/Sonic for Venomous Gas + Envenom + Weaken + sonic attacks. Or Cold/Sonic for Sleet + HL + Benumb + sonic attacks. Cold/Sonic can be a great burst debuffer with Burnout, as those three debuffs are long recharge clicks, so recharging them instantly doubles your potential there. And Cold gets universally liked +defense shields, a defense aura with energy resistance and slow resistance, and tremendous endurance efficiency. It's hard to top Cold overall.

That was one beast of a post, aethereal. I also liked this earlier point of yours. Intuitively, it's easy to see the problem if we compare 50% chance to proc 70 damage 2 times per minute to 100% chance to proc 70 damage 1 time per minute. Expected value is almost the same when we stretch time horizon to infinity, but the first having a chance to fail changes things in practice. Paragon Devs likely sidestepped that concern by capping proc rate at 90%... but the closer you get to 100%, the more your failure rate drops anyway. 20% chance 4 times per minute = 40.96% chance to never proc in a minute 80% chance 1 times per minute = 20% chance to never proc in a minute It's a pretty extreme difference, even before we consider the extra advantages of being able to reliably proc when it comes to overkill damage, planning next attack with server latency, and so on. Tied to your Goal 7 it would perhaps make sense to cap proc rate at 50%... Passing that halfway point is where things start to go downhill with probabilities. I would so not like a 50% cap. 🙂 I'd prefer we bump up the curve from linear to logarithmic instead, for a strong ramp up at first then a decrease. Target whatever levels of proc rate are deemed appropriate. Naively, I'd assume we could base the curve on comparing the failure rate for the chance to proc on 1 try, rather than the success. i.e. 40% chance to proc = 60% chance to fail, 80% chance to proc = 20% chance to fail, making the 80% chance 3x as good as 40% - or put it another way, it should take 3x less recharge to get a 40% proc rate than a 80% proc rate.

Day #2658 of Ultimo trying out a new powerset and finding it an underperformer. But when 99% if not 100% of powersets underperform, what would be a performer? 🤔 I enjoy your threads as a guilty pleasure, although they puzzle me. Yes, Electrical Affinity is actually awesome when it comes to protection, either to the team or the character. You can basically spam the heal and the absorb for massive sustainability, and with the Sentinel you don't even need a team to protect yourself. The mez protection power is insanely good for a squishie. AND you can refill your end consistently, even as a lowbie. The only real problem with EA is that it's a very active set, and has little to nothing to boost offense. But man, as for having "little actual protection" I have to throw my hands up in the air because all you need to do as EA is basically mash hotkeys without thinking, and you live indefinitely and support your team well. It's probably the most lenient powerset out there for mitigation.

This is working as intended: Musculature adds its value to your enhancements, with a growing part of it unaffected by enhancement diversification as you go up the tiers. If you open your enhancements window, you'll see you probably have +120% or so damage enhancement on powers where you previously had +95%.

Do people really name Criticals as their favorite part of Scrappers, or Scourge as their favorite part of Corruptors? I guess they *kinda* do sometimes, even if it's a minority. Whereas here, nada. But I don't think I've ever seen anyone refer to the inherent of Defenders, Controllers, Masterminds, Kheldians or SoAs as their favorite part of the AT. Quizz time for that matter... How many of us can name the inherents for these from memory? I'm blanking out with Khelds and SoAs. I don't want to insinuate you're making a point you're not making, it's an interesting comment. I'm happy with Sentinels not being an inherent-centric AT to the point people don't really think of it. I could see a strong counterpoint that Opportunity *is* one of these inherents that is fairly in your face graphically, so the lack of mention might hint it is really unsatisfying.

I mean, I basically go at length to explain the relevance of opportunity cost and even show examples of practical consequences in the rest of my previous post you entirely ignored, haha. I guess from tone alone I did know you likely had a massive chip on your shoulder regarding procs, but it seems more constructive to assume people are genuine than trolls. Either way it got me to reason and challenge my own thinking, so thanks for your input...