nihilii

Fire/something would be the obvious choice for me. It pains me that Fire Blast is so strong. Whenever I try any other primary, I run back to Fire Blast in a flash. Still undecided on a secondary.

Half of my active roster is Tankers. I think I last picked Taunt in 2010 or so. I'm... I'm sorry, ok? I just really need that 15% damage buff from Assault.

is good because it multiplies damage. That's a given. I only mean to challenge the notion debuffs are critical to the point a Khan team without debuffs is doomed. Not necessarily just in this thread. I've seen people lament they need more -regen or -res... But -res isn't going to help during those fast Unstoppable cycles, and -regen isn't what makes a dent in his 220k potentially bumped to 300k HP. A combo of both, if you have enough to shut down his regen entirely, might let you succeed in the end. Still, I think in this particular fight, there's better returns to be had in situational awareness. i.e. - unload at full strength between his Unstoppable cycles, and focus on using misc clicks, buffs, staying alive, keeping his regen in check while he's using Unstoppable. - aggro holder should stick to melee, or if there's no aggro holder, make sure to stick in melee. Apply constant damage ideally. Being at range and "uninterrupted" seems to be what prompts him to use Dull Pain. - watch for those Thunder Fist stunning through mez protection, and protect yourself in advance. I feel the single most likely cause of failure in a poorly organized PuG is when the team is barely making progress, then someone gets mezzed and dies, and it all goes downhill as others get distracted, try to rez him, etc.. Come to think of it, given that last point in particular, I'd welcome buffs more than debuffs in a weak PuG doing Khan. Making sure everyone is staying alive and well is the best way to ensure they're dealing damage. But, yeah, I guess I'm more sour about this topic than I thought, now that I think about it. It's a pet peeve of mine to watch players lose fights due to their inability to switch tactics, give up, and attribute said failure to some team meta they should have had. In the grand scheme of things, if we're talking about a full team, it's obvious adding one competent debuffer is the best bang for your buck and is also more practical than expecting 7 casual players to magically improve their game.

It was intentional, like Invulnerability and Dark Armor toggles being mutually exclusive, Unyielding rooting you... There were many questionable choices made intentionally in the early design of the game. Most were rectified, some were not. Although to an extent, the Burn design choice *was* rectified too... It used to make enemies actively run away from you. To see great engineering in early powerset quirks is rationalisation after the fact. Starting in I7 or so, with Dual Blades and Willpower... yes, you can argue engineering took place. Before that? The balance veered a lot more towards whatever Jack Emmert thought was cool on a conceptual level.

Right, one standard hold with 16s recharge slotted 3 rech / 3 hold on a "standard" IO build running ~70%ish global recharge + Hasten will do the trick for LGTF. I think just about every AT can access that, so it's soloable for everyone given enough investment. If you have 2 characters with holds, no dedicated slotting required. Reichsman is mosty the same. I don't think debuffs are all that important. His regeneration isn't all that impressive, it's the HP pool that is bonkers. You need damage most of all. I don't have characters strong enough to solo Khan, but I often dualbox Khan or Barracuda, and my duos are typically "damage guy" + "other damage guy".

A friendly reminder to nobody in particular, video recording is allowed again! There's no more reason to hint at "awesome things my build can do, if only you could be there to witness it, ah, shame shame you can't see it". If you're doing something awesome and want to share, just upload it on Youtube.

I don't play scrappers without taunt auras. I don't play brutes anymore. My scrappers are stronger. I try a brute every now and then, then quickly go back to a scrapper. Often a /bio scrapper, to add insult to injury. What happens if, tomorrow, scrapper taunt auras are normalized to 3-4s (down from 15s for some powersets) and spread over all scrapper secondaries? My scrappers are suddenly LESS powerful relative to brutes. Brutes now hold aggro significantly better. This is a desirable outcome! The scrappers I don't play now become a worthy choice compared to the scrappers I do play. Also a very good outcome. The scrappers I don't play *also* start having more of an aggro edge compared to their stalker counterparts. Arguably yet another good thing (although personally, I think stalkers need a slight bump as well... but let's not get into that too much). So: - better balance with brutes - better balance within the AT - better balance with stalkers What's not to like?

Shield is the most well-rounded primary. Easy D/R/A softcap, near capped DDR, slow resistance, high S/L res, decent res to everything else, +maxHP. And some damage to boot. It has only 2 flaws: no endurance management, and no native healing. Usually, you can plug either of these two holes with your Destiny pick. Rad gives a reliable heal to Shield. Which means you can go Ageless. This is now a character with no holes. Add to that procced out Rad Melee is a powerhouse. Especially thanks to Irradiated Ground, which procs twice as much as a damage aura, and can take both resist procs. With a slotting of 4 damage procs (including the purple one) and 2 -res procs, you are essentially getting 10 damage procs (a purple proc is worth 2 damage procs) and 4 -res procs. IG is beastly, it can take down +4 bosses in a minute if you AFK near them (and a Shield Tanker can most definitely AFK around a few +4 bosses). IG + Atom Smasher is basically all the AOE you need. Leaving you room to focus on ST damage. Procced out Radioactive Smash -> Gloom -> Devastating Blow -> Radioactive Smash -> Gloom -> Radiation Siphon pushes some serious numbers for a Tanker. Think 400+ DPS, even 450+. That's "solo just about any +4 AV" territory, especially on a Tanker with entirely passive mitigation where you're free to focus on attacking. There is a catch. If you really go all out, even Ageless isn't enough to sustain this character. But to be fair, swapping Musculature for Cardiac isn't that big of a hit to damage. Alternatively, Recovery Serum is an option. This is the build I'm running, for reference: This is one way to build this combo. There's many other ways to build this combo. You could content yourself by proccing out IG, and building everything else defensively, full sets and all, slotting Radiation Siphon for healing... I wager you'd have a Tanker doing reasonable damage, with sustainable endurance, while being mostly impervious.

Shield/Rad. I'm a glutton for power. In truth I enjoy more variety than just playing the absolute best... but if you forced me to play just one thing, it'd have to be what I believe is the absolute best.

Haha, wow. So what kind of team does it take to run this on +4/x8?

Awesome, creative idea. Spending one power pick as Scrapper Tax to taunt would be a fair trade. I can empathise with BrandX, though. Radically changing functionality sucks if you like what already exists. The cottage rule is a good rule, even if frustratingly restrictive at times. Well, maybe it could be a weak taunt aura AND the old Confront rolled in one. With the new travel powers giving you extra trays and powers, one might assume the same tech could apply to primary powerset powers?

I wish all scrappers had taunt auras. The current state of things makes a huge difference in viability between different secondaries. Objectively, as much as I hate it, it would make more sense to remove all taunt auras from scrappers than to keep "first-class citizen status" restricted to a select few powersets. I'd rather see a middle of the road scenario where all secondaries get taunt auras, and the efficiency of said taunt aura is reworked. Sort of pulling numbers out of my ass, but I think the taunt auras are all something like 15s duration, and scrappers are mag3 compared to brutes and tankers mag4. I think it could make sense to drastically cut the duration, to something like say 3 or 4 seconds. Desired result being, if you're right up in there glued to the enemy you're hitting in the face, they won't run from you. But if you want to herd tanker-style, or even if you want to passively tag a group with a single AoE and expect them to gather nicely for you, you might see things spilling over.

It's very hard to overstate just how much of an end discount is attained by having your best attack be completely end free. A procced out EM chain with fast ET and no slow ET eats about ~2.5 EPS. A procced out Staff chain is about ~3 EPS. If you run fast ET + slow ET in a chain, as some are fond to do, EM's EPS goes down even further. That's attack chains, theorycraft by excellence. Real play has you using TF + 0 end ET 100% of the time, while Bone Smasher and Energy Punch may or may not activated. Pushing the EPS further down. And that is just EPS, mostly the psychological version of being end light (we want to attack as fast as we can, regardless of powerset). When it comes to Damage-Per-Endurance, EM is fantastic. Once again because of ET. Essentially, you consume less end than other powersets attacking at full speed. *and* you deal more damage, attacking at full speed. So your endurance efficiency is greater than a simple look at EPS might suggest, because you defeat enemies faster. But really, I am typing up rationalisations after the fact. My simple experience that leads me to this enthusiastic opinion has been that the way I build meleers (procs procs procs), they ALL need Ageless to sustain themselves. Except EM. I can run procced out EM with just Cardiac - and pick up Barrier as a result. Sometimes I still run Ageless and Musculature regardless, but either way. The existence of that choice, unique to EM for my own builds, easily illustrates just how end light EM is. It's also great fun to have a 0 end attack to fall back to, in extreme situations. Say you mess up your end management, mobs enddrained you, you've got a few points of end left and you desperately want to keep your toggles up, until some helpful end management click recharges... Slow ET, wait, slow ET, wait, slow ET keeps you in the fight until you can pick the pace up again.

While that argument is fair, it's also a departure from "FF becomes useless at lvl 35+". The average lvl 35-49 character is more likely to use SOs or generic IOs, maybe a few set IOs, than rocking a full IO set build focusing on +def. I'd love see some +absorb and even some DDR for FF. Cold doesn't need it, they have stellar debuffing abilities on top. Giving +absorb and +DDR to FF bubbles would make FF distinctively better than Cold or Time at defensive buffing... which is how it should be, given the offensive advantages those other powersets enjoy. Come to think of it, the existence of Cold is my biggest hurdle whenever I feel like playing FF. Make Force Bolt a 20s recharge, high damage attack... Double Repulsion Bomb's damage... We might just have something genuinely powerful and unique.... as opposed to just unique.

Honestly, I have never seen a Scrapper thread asking for buffs to the whole AT. Or if I did, it was so long ago and so outlandish and universally decried it didn't stick with my memory... Do you have any example in mind?

The thing with Stalkers is their very design makes for high floor and (relatively) low ceiling in DPS. At the lower end of offensive building, you're helped by: - ATOs - fast AS having insane DPA - fast AS rounding up an attack chain At the higher end of offensive building, you're limited by: - animation times - need to stack AF - need to fit AS into chain as much as possible - reliance on Hide status for maximum performance (as in, getting hit by enemies during your animation post ATO proc ruins your next critical) 475+ ST DPS sounds awesome to me and I'd definitely have to try to get there. Either way, going all out with procs I never seem to top ~600 Pylon DPS on any Stalker. I think the Pylon thread shows that pattern holding, at least for people who care to share their results. My own real world Stalker DPS is also nowhere near Pylon DPS, unfortunately. Stalkers require much more situational awareness in managing instaBU recharges, procced Hide crits and the low chance of stacks not going off. Better players can have better results, but for those of us with weaker twitch skills, it's a data point worth considering. With optimized Scrappers, it's more like somewhere near 300 DPS when defensively built and up to 700 DPS when offensively built. Much bigger variance... and higher tops, while adding the benefits of higher survivability, aggro control, and AoE damage. And you don't have to do much beyond mash your attack chain keys in order. Defensively-built Stalkers are probably an useful highend niche. You get to do more ST DPS than a defensive Scrapper and you're sturdier than an offensive Scrapper. But it is niche play, because 1) that survivability isn't required in most gameplay and 2) insps can make up for the lacking survivability in extreme gameplay that requires said survivability. Dunno if I have a point. Just thinking outloud. I like OP's suggestion of refreshing stacks. I think much of this thread has gotten more inflammatory than it needs, just because of the headline. Change "stalker needs buffs" to "it would be nice to have these slight improvements" and I don't know if there would be strong disagreement.

I love AoE sleeps. I solo most of the time, so it's basically an "I win" button for survivability against anything below AVs. I pick them up rarely is because there's so many other ways to do mitigation without taking a damage hit. But let's put it this way. It's about opportunity cost. If any of my character got a TAoE sleep as an extra power pick and an extra 5 slots I didn't pay for, they would put that sleep in their tray and use it pretty much all the time.

AVs have the same passive resistance as bosses, mag3. So you need mag4 (2 standard holds) to hold them... while their purple triangles are down. That's the second part. AVs get mag50 protection while their purple triangles are up. Coupled with their passive resistance, that means you need (50 + 3 + 1) / 3 = 18 holds to mez them. Purple triangles follow a cycle of 50 seconds up, 25 seconds down. Also worth noting elite bosses have stronger passive resistance, at mag6. So you need 3 holds to keep an EB still. This has the interesting side effect of making downgraded AVs that turn into EBs due to the "no AV" reputation setting harder to mez than regular AVs. Because these downgraded AVs keep their purple triangles.

I'll second both posters. EM is better now than ever, and arguably, IMHO, the very best melee powerset. - Single Target damage is HIGH, energy, frontloaded. - AoE damage is acceptable, with a buffed Whirling Hands. The new cone (Power Crash) is also nice if you lean that way, personally I find myself plenty busy with TF and ET. - Damage per endurance is through the roof with ET costing nothing. EM is by far the easiest powerset on your endurance bar now. - ET's self damage is now manipulable into a *heal* thanks to the Scrapper Critical Strikes ATO (if you put it in Total Focus, for example. All of this makes EM very easy to play at low level, at high level, with SOs, with IOs... It starts strong and finishes strong. But... top performance relies on playing a certain way. EM now has a "combo system" of sorts. Loose as it can be, it's still a difference from the pure free flowing style that came before. That being said, new EM probably still compares favorably to pre-nerf oldschool EM even if you mash keys randomly. And new EM is definitely better than the previous nerfed EM, no matter what. The ONE thing you lose is the guaranteed boss-level stun with Total Focus.

I'll take the opposite side. Claws can slot a lot of procs, and even the Tanker/Brute version recharges fast. Go all out on procs, and Shockwave becomes a part of your attack chain. You'd run something like Gloom -> Focus -> Follow Up -> Slash -> Shockwave, I'm guessing. The lower the local recharge, the higher the chance to proc, so procs are really a lot more efficient with no local recharge at all (and if you go for juicy set bonuses, you likely will have local recharge and neuter your procs). If you don't like Gloom and aren't so interested in burning through your endurance bar like a madman for maximum DPS, there is a stronger case to be made against procs. The thumb of rule for procs roughly works the same for just about any (melee?) powerset: you're making a -2x% to -4x% trade off in other areas in order to get +x% damage. The case for procs is the belief "damage > *", or at least that this smaller level of extra damage is worth taking a bigger hit in other areas. Well, OK, now noticing the question is ONLY about Follow Up. I think it can be worth proccing Follow Up, if you don't need the set bonuses for anything specific. Consider the recharge difference between FU with 95% local recharge and FU with 0% local recharge is going to be maybe 1.4 seconds, assuming Hasten and 70% global recharge. This is big in % because we're talking 3.4s recharge versus 4.8s recharge. But once you consider you're animation-bound more than anything, ehh. You're getting that double-stacked FU spin in either case.

If you swap your old drive, make sure you move the CoH files to your new SSD, as has been suggested. Going from HDD to SSD is IMHO the highest quality upgrade for CoH, near instant loading times make travel a lot more enjoyable.

I think this is the misconception that ruins your experience. There is nothing magical about having 8 players rather than 5-6 that makes or breaks a +4 TF. On the curve of easier to harder, it becomes harder, sure. But the change from +0 to +4 is a hell of a lot harder than going from 8 players to 6 players. So, once the leader unilaterally announces to run it at +4... You can feel safe in leaving, if you don't like it. He cranked up it three notches, you added one extra. More importantly, the extra difficulty you introduce by leaving is optional. The leader can change reputation at any point between missions. Or, even if the difficulty only shows up in the last mission (as can be the case in a Kahn), have everyone log out and log back in. It's doable. Nobody is held hostage here. Nor should they feel like they are. I could sympathise with a different complaint. Namely that, once you're psychologically involved into joining a team, waiting for everyone to gather, then suddenly it turns out to +4... It can feel like the rug has been pulled over you. So you're frustrated, but you stay. Whether because you hope to change the leader's mind, or because of inertia. Still, this is also a self-inflicted problem. If you're worried about +rep TFs, it's not too hard to be proactive and say "so what rep are we running that?" "this is a +0 TF, right?" beforehand. Communication goes both ways. Too many players have this image of their favored playstyle as the baseline, and assume everyone ought to play by their rules. The leader who slams a +4 and the teammate who laments the fact afterwards likely have a lot of common on that precise point. Bottomline... We're all responsible for our play experience. A team leader takes on the drudgery of recruiting and other social aspects, and gets some administration privileges in return. Normal team members can freeload on those social aspects, but may pay the price in having their leader select settings they're not comfortable with. The game is thankfully accomodating. You should never waste your own time doing something you don't like. If you want to leave, leave right away, and don't think you're ruining anyone else's experience.

I'm a simple man. I see Sunsette thread, I hit "like". ... even though I lean with HH's reply. 😉

I believe exploration badges give you no XP as long as you have never earned any XP.

One vote for Tanker. - DB's damage relies on Blinding Feint, often doublestacked (and sometimes triplestacked). Constant +damage buffs benefit Brutes less, as they have less base damage than Tankers. - DB loves cones, cones, cones. Getting that max target from 5 to 10 on Sweeping Strike and from 10 to 16 on One Thousand Cuts is beautiful, especially coupled with the area increase. Typhoon's Edge is a paltry 8 foot PBAoE hitting 10 on a Brute, and a glorious 12 foot PBAoE hitting 16 on a Tanker. I have an Inv/DB Tanker, built with procs all over. It deals surprisingly high damage for that particular Tanker combination. Running the BF -> AV combo does everything you need. The one downside of the character is that there really isn't much to do. Most of your defenses are passive. And your attacks are straightforward. But, that's kind of a good, "first world" problem to have (everything is covered). There's always the minigame of lining cones as well as possible to hit as many baddies as you can.