nihilii

Scrapper proc builds are already very very close to this, to the point sometimes in practice it is 100% uptime. ie a rad/bio/soul can run Deva (set up ATO), Moonbeam (Critical Strikes), Atom Smasher (Critical Strikes), repeat, with a gap so minimal it serves as repositioning. It would buff mostly regular builds. But I can see your point, and I could see a global decrease in proc rate (or a targeted decrease on specific, "problematic" procs) to go with a change that stopped local recharge from hurting proc rate. A proc bomb has by nature low/no accuracy, low/no end reduction and low/no recharge. Which means you need to take care of these aspects somehow. Do that in one power and you might get away with it with no other changes, because set bonuses elsewhere carry your build. A regular build tends to be overslotted for accuracy, for example. Do that in several powers (which is what I call a proc build) and you're going to have to specifically pursue accuracy set bonuses and end management. Even recharge, which is chased by everyone and so could be handwaved away, still requires more dedicated effort as a power that is slotted with 5-6 procs is a power that is not getting a 10% recharge purple set bonus. Likewise, traditional defense building for the softcap is something you will either have to give up or work much harder. It's a simple question of opportunity cost. Every power loaded with procs is a power that is not getting juicier set bonuses. When you make a proc build, it's not as if you give up on set bonuses and just cram procs everywhere. Such a build would likely severely underperform. Those proc bombs would miss, the character would have no defenses whatsoever, run dry within seconds, and generally be a pain in the ass to play. A proc build typically cares about stat building even more than a regular build, because it's all about shoring up the weaknesses I detailed above, and doing that with less slots (every slot occupied by a proc is a wasted slot, essentially). Reaching 95% chance to hit against +4s is a quest in itself. Finding those extra slots can involve harsh tradeoffs, such as slotting defensive powers with 2 or even just 1 slot. Random example: here's an AR/Invul proc build I made yesterday. Took me about an hour, and incidentally I *just* noticed before uploading it here I screwed up Buckshot with only 87.5% accuracy, had to swap the Ragnarok Dam/End for an Annihilation Acc/Dam. You can see the above points in display. I'm slotting Chain Fences and a full apoc set in Incinerator for accuracy bonuses, + 3 slotting Sentinel Ward in full auto to grab more accuracy bonus (and +range) while having good local recharge for that power. I also use 2 pieces Winter Sets to combine chasing for slow resistance with the need for accuracy. I 2 slot or 1 slot most defensive toggles to get extra room. Finally, it's a given the character will need Ageless to function at full pace. As I'm writing this post, I went ahead and remade an AR/Inv Sent from scratch as a regular build. I originally estimated and wrote it would take me about 10-15 minutes. In the end, it took me 7 minutes. There was no deep thinking involved. I mostly just slotted sets in powers 1 by 1. With that I get all my accuracy needs fulfilled, enough recharge for native perma Hasten should one ++ the IOs, better defensive numbers all across the board. Endurance is admittedly a little low (although obviously better than the proc build), and this character would need Ageless for sustained DPS over minutes. This could likely be fixed with an extra ~5 minutes of thinking, reallocating slots towards Durability and/or Health for Miracle/Numina procs... The cognitive effort here is significantly less. Now, perhaps I'm a natural at traditional builds and suck at proc builds. We've all had years more of experience with traditional builds, if nothing else. So I suppose it's possible, but I'm not sure it's probable. In my experience, at least for me personally, proc builds undoubtedly add another layer of complexity to Mids.

I love the current proc system. Going further, I love the current balance point, which is that the heavier you go into procs, the more tradeoffs are needed to shore up weaknesses in the build. You definitely give up more in accuracy, defense, endurance, recharge for that extra damage. With damage being king the effective ratio feels just about right. I loathe many of the suggestions made so far. Limiting the number of procs in a power, for example, only removes build versatility. Proc builds require exponentially more thinking than 5-6 set pieces per power builds, at least for me, and that's great fun. Stop local recharge from affecting proc rate and call it a day. This would change nothing for proc builds, who already avoid local recharge and use global recharge. While more traditional builds would see a boost in proc power. Thus evening the damage gap, and making proc builds even more of an extreme tradeoff with relatively smaller benefits. Another suggestion that could make sense would be to tie proc damage to AT scalar, but honestly this would be a bad idea. The game is too damage-oriented as is, and procs at least offer a stopgap solution to some of the current imbalance. Scale procs to AT damage, and scrappers and blasters will be even more dominant in the damage race.

This is me to a T. It also helps that Fire Blast was rebalanced and brought in line on the Sentinel port. The traditional version of Fire Blast on Blasters/Defenders/Corruptors does so much more damage than everything else. If you suffer from the same powergaming munchkin disease I do, it's very hard to stay motivated picking anything else. Sentinels solve that problem. I can pick anything but Assault Rifle or Energy Blast and have a good time. I think I just motivated myself to make an AR sentinel with this post.

Fair enough. I guess /fire has it harder than everyone else, only native end management being a long recharge click that's hardly worth it against a lone target. Man... /fire does not get a fair shake, when you look at the end improvements other secondaries get. Even Dark Armor gets a bone, but nothing for Fire. If only it had Fiery Embrace.

When I say primaries "can" reach X DPS, I'm talking best case scenario. Go all out, full procs, likely /bio armor, Musculature+Ageless+Assault. Elec, Fire, DP, Dark, Rad, Sonic, Ice are all up there - that's 7 out of 13 so technically most. I'll give you this is just on the edge, but either way... One can take 200 DPS as a baseline (or even 100 DPS!) and /psi mastery will still be far from rendering primaries useless. Your main damage dealing is always going to be your primary, and that's even before we consider AoEs. I'm mostly looking at this from the angle of skewing one's perception of how OP Dominate supposedly is. If you procced a couple attacks and used the Dominate slots to cram a full set elsewhere, the difference wouldn't seem as stark. I don't want to claim there's anything wrong with traditional slotting patterns, I only take offense to the idea /psi mastery is a cornerstone of Sentinel builds to the point primaries become useless in comparison. There are many choices one can make, but IMHO there's hardly ever a reason to go Cardiac on Sentinels, when Ageless is so tempting. Sentinel mitigation levels are high enough combined with range they're basically above Brute levels of survivability in practical gameplay, and Sentinel secondaries tend to be "full service" with healing/absorb always taken care of even on sets where you wouldn't expect it (i.e. SR). So Rebirth is eh. Clarion is hardly ever necessary on an AT with native mez protection. What is left, Barrier? Barrier can be admittedly nice, but then again with a 75% res cap, you don't necessarily get as much mileage out of it. It's hard to justify even massive +def alone when luck insps are so efficient and team defense buffs tend to abound... compared to the build freedom of Ageless, anyhow. If there is ever an AT that seems designed for the Musculature/Ageless build pattern, it's Sentinels, even if there's no design and just happenstance here.

For sure! Mostly, I'm happy to see we've slowly evolved from Live prices and harsh inflation to a relatively stable system, some thanks to changes the Live devs did over the years and some thanks to the Homecoming changes. There was effort in tweaking the parameters until they got it right, and it worked. We have it pretty good indeed, and yet now that you mention bounded items I can't help but yearn for unbounded incarnate components. 🙂 I'd love to see how the market would develop around that.

Fire/EM is fine. There's been a whole bunch of new Blaster secondaries, which have attracted people away from the old reliable. Some may argue /EM isn't the best choice for a ranged blaster, but you can carry yourself perfectly fine with Fire/, and the /EM self buffs are easy and nonconditional which work well enough for a flying ranged blaster.

The only real imbalance with Psi Mastery compared to other epics is Dominate being 16s base rech whereas most holds are 32s base rech. For reference... in other ATs, epic Dominate is *also* 16s base rech. Defender epic Dominate is relatively stronger than Sentinel epic Dominate, as Defenders have access to more -RES and have lower base damage (= get same absolute boost from procs, relatively higher boost). Mind Probe is good, not overwhelmingly so. Psi's strength lies in having this 1-2 punch of strong attacks on 16s and 20s rech, which happens to fit well with primary gaps if you stick to just the 2 or 3 best DPA attacks there. But... Psi Mastery will never render your primary useless. Most Sentinel primaries can reach about 300+ DPS, pure range. Adding /psi mastery will let you get to 400+, provided a jump in melee for Mind Probe. The jump in melee in itself can translate to less effective DPS. (But if we ignore the conditional nature of melee, my own best DPS on Sents is an Elec/Bio.../Ninja. Sting of the Wasp + The Lotus Drops both take a -RES proc and can boost DPS beyond what Dominate + Mind Probe do, in the right conditions.) Either way, in a best case scenario you're looking at /psi making up 25% of your single target damage output. Hardly makes the primary irrelevant. Perhaps at the heart of your point, there was a sentiment along the line of... "picking /psi is more relevant to performance than picking any primary compared to any other primary"? Which is mostly a result of Sentinel primaries being uniquely well balanced within the AT, compared to other ATs where there's wider gaps between top performers and bottom performers. Other powers in /psi mastery are not as stellar as they look on paper, IMHO. Link Minds: +5% defense!! That you have to recast every 90 seconds. With a 4 SECONDS animation cast. Yeah, I tried to make this one work for months for me. Just didn't seem worth it. It's enough of a drag recasting the real Mind Link or Farsight, and these two have much beefier defense bonuses. Psionic Shockwave: does not do the damage advertised in Mids, it's much closer to half that. I suspect many think Psi is OP partly based on this. I fell prey to that mistake too. Other epics have stronger AoEs, although in a smaller radius. Mass Hypnosis is actually a fav of mine, but I don't think most people care for AoE sleeps. Barring Prococalypse, I think the most likely nerf to /psi mastery is Dominate bumped to 32s rech. That's it. That change alone would likely bring it close to par with other epics, many of which have equally proccable 32s rech holds; and some of these epics come with stronger PBAoEs, AoE immobilizes (which are fantastic to avoid runners or increase mitigation, as enemies do less damage at range). As alluded above, I think /psi mastery is incidentally much more powerful on Defenders than it is on Sentinels. Yet hardly anyone seems to call for nerfs on Defenders. Likely because 1) many people just won't see Defenders as a damage AT, 2) Defenders have juicy misc choices in other areas, be it Conserve Power + Power Build Up, or Power Boost, or Soul Drain. /soul post epic snipe nerf for Scrappers is probably still more dominant than /psi is for Sentinels, too. Moonbeam deals tremendous damage when boosted up by a guaranteed Critical Strikes primary T9, and Shadow Meld shores up your already impressive Scrapper defenses to godhood on a need basis. You might say running no local recharge Critical Strikes + Moonbeam attack chains is more optimized than what the average player does, but so is running Dominate with 5 damage procs on a Sentinel. If looking from the outside, say because psi mastery doesn't fit concept, I wouldn't blame anyone unhappy with Sentinel performance looking at psi as the perfect scapegoat (to explain why some other people are happy with their Sents). Is /psi the best? In most cases yes. Is just picking /psi a binary switch between sucking and rocking? Hell no. If you're running a standard build with 6-piece IO sets and you let loose with attacks randomly, you're simply not going to get to the same performance as someone running maximum procs on every attack and an optimized attack chain. You'll see /psi pop up often in builds because it is the current best, not because it makes everything obsolete. Just like you're going to see /soul in most DPS scrapper builds, tanker builds, brute builds... (Well, OK, someone running 5-6 piece IO sets everywhere in their primary, then picking Dominate and stuffing 5 damage procs there, might find Dominate über strong compared to their primary. Still, anyone who tried to make an attack chain out of just Dominate and Mind Probe would soon see DPA isn't the be all end all unless there's enough powers to fill out a chain.)

I find it interesting how this sort of intuitively rational thinking that doesn't work so well in real life because we've decided playing with monetary policy is good... actually works perfectly in the CoH economy. There is something truly beautiful to me in purple prices being roughly 17M inf today, just as they were roughly 17M inf one year ago. There's no complicated and cumbersome market architecture actively working behind the scene to guarantee a purple IO should be about 17M inf. Only the underlying mechanisms designed by the original CoH devs and refined with great success by the Homecoming team. Making influence both currency and store of value.

Fast cast is automatic now on every snipe when you're in combat. The +tohit = more damage still applies.

I've mostly been running /bio Scrappers, and Tankers with damage auras. I haven't teamed lately. I've casted Enflame on my scrappers/tankers (dualboxing) with no trouble. I have fought several AVs at once (LRSF, Tin Mage). I haven't used Darkest Night or Radiation Infection. I've also played my Fire/Rad Sentinel and haven't seen more running than usual (there are always runners there). The toggle debuff hypothesis so far would fit with my experience in that I don't use any.

This is bizarre. You literally came to this thread to jump on my post and offer unprompted advice. I guess you expected me to fawn over Unrelenting, but it's simply an inferior choice given the personal circumstances I went at length to explain. Then you move on to claim RoP isn't going to be enough to survive. Then you flip-flop to say you don't see problems, one assumes without RoP. Like, OK, I get it. You must have taken my original line saying "widows seem frail" as some sort of insult towards the whole AT somehow. Then the ego bruise got compounded because I just wouldn't take your suggestion. However the suggestion lacks a logical case for it in this context. Now if you want to campaign for Unrelenting being an uber awesome power pick for widows, go crazy. You don't have to go all quotewarrior on me to make that point. From the start I was talking about me me me, so it's weird to involve me as if I were talking about the AT as a whole or anyone else. Seriously the *weirdest* forum exchange I've ever had over a one-liner thanking OP for their insights. People will take offense to anything.

I'm not claiming RoP is the perfect solution. But logically and given the constraints for my build, it seems to be the best solution. Unrelenting will not help (healing/regen is not the prime issue). Passive resistances will not help (can't fit them in my build + would amount to less than RoP). Whether RoP is *enough* or not - there is no sense in going for *less*. I'm not advocating anyone else follow my choices either so I'm not sure whether my opinion warrants this much quoting and arguing...

Well, to be more explicit... 1) I like maximum damage. This means procs procs procs in attacks, hardly any sets. And slotting for global recharge and global accuracy set bonuses elsewhere. Tight builds and very little room to do things like i.e. 4 slot Shield Wall for E/N res. 2) I like soloing/dualboxing TFs like Apex, Tin Mage, LRSF. Situations with obvious spikes in damage. Lack of healing/regen can be a problem, but right now the bigger problem for my widows has been lack of resistances. ~60% resistances at ~700hp (halfway) folds like wet paper against Goliath War Walkers. One lucky hit and I'm out. This is just not workable, at least at my skill level. Having predictable 85% res for 2 minutes should make for a much better buffer. It's not about having a gambling mentality. It's about lacking better options. That being said, this Unrelenting talk makes me wonder about Adrenal Booster on a Stone tanker. Hmmmm...

I haven't had any issue with mobs turning into rabbits.

My builds are starved for slots and have power picks to spare. This prohibits building for passive resistances, while spending a couple powers to get RoP is a natural fit. 1/3 uptime isn't ideal, but this is more a case of "there is no better option given the goals at hand".

RoP + scaling res, now that is genius. Widows never clicked for me, seemed too frail in hard content. This might just be the missing link!

Since you opened this thread, I've started working on the problem through opening a fair amount of Super Packs. My guidelines for pricing: - all ATOs under 10 supply = 10,111,111 inf - all ATOs under 2 supply = 15,111,111 inf - Blaster/Brute ATOs = 15,111,111 inf - Blaster/Brute ATOs with 0-1 supply = 20,111,111 inf Either ATOs are currently underpriced relative to demand and I make a lot of money; or ATOs are correctly priced and there should be some supply for a while. Feel free to ping me if we drop to 0 supply on any ATO, or for that matter, to undercut me.

I definitely try to be mindful of +RCH. I don't do Day Jobs, but the secondary mutation sometimes gets me (and that other mutation giving a heavy end discount is also one to watch for).

I surpassed my discomfort for all things anime and tried the Code:Vein demo. It's a game like Dark Souls, so you wouldn't expect much overlap with CoH. And yet... After taking one hour and a half to exit the character creator, couldn't help but see similarities.

I find it interesting Yomo specifically asked about "soloing AVs", and many of the replies have turned the question into "soloing an AV". One is a singular instance, the other implies a trend.

I wouldn't mind speedboosted Granite marathons. Like, say, in that one industrial factory instance that's basically a square with a central structure and several layers of ramps. Race from the entrance to the very top of that structure. The inability to jump makes travel a lot more interesting to manage sometimes.

One of the few reasons to play a brute, IMHO. Meltdown + Melee gives you that permanent 90% resistance cap to all but psi, stacked with the other rad goodness it's a fun time. (Of course, the Tanker version can get pretty damn close to 90% resist cap without juggling stuff. With a higher HP pool. And wider AoEs hitting more targets. And still deal decent base damage.)

My rule of thumb re: Hasten and how much Ageless helps is, if your Hasten recharge shows 132s or lower in Mids, it will basically be close enough to perma with Ageless. i.e. the moment Hasten runs out, you have one cycle of your already fully recharged attack chain to go, and then you click Hasten.

My greatest Mids trick is to be content as a ground-bound peasant. There's always jetpacks to visit the sky!