nihilii

/invul is pretty fun on Stalkers. As in... sturdy, sturdy, sturdy. Passively so, so you can spend all your time on your Staff attacks; of which there are many. There is decent synergy with Staff. You get +10% res to everything if you use Sky Splitter as a finisher, which stacks nicely with Invul's native resistances. I have a Staff/Invul and her resistances reach 75% S/L, ~50% F/C/E/N/T... *and* Psionic, of all things. All of that while running a procced out attack chain.

Probably. I don't league much and I play on small teams much more, so that's my bias. Along with valuing 3-4x as much mitigation all the time much more than 33% extra damage in ideal conditions. That is, don't get me wrong... Damage is great. But then if that's what I want, I'll go Scrapper to do much more damage than the Brute, no strings attached. Brutes sit on this fence right now where their damage:survivability ratio just doesn't seem all that compelling at high level. It used to be Brutes outpaced Scrappers on damage, but the ATOs and easy incarnates reshuffled the deck. It used to be Tanker damage was way too low, but the Tanker buff changed that too. (And of course the Brute damage cap took a hit, although it doesn't come into play often enough for me personally, so getting slightly more consistent Fury was actually a buff.)

I think iTrials requirements were already adjusted a few months back so there's no more auto-failure for being under a minimum amount of players. It still requires the minimum 8-12 to start, which is kind of a pain in the ass. I'd love for the req to go down to 4 or even 1. No need to adjust difficulty, IMHO. Speedrunners are soloing/duoing these trials. A full team of 8 playing well and working together should have a good shot at just about any trial.

This. I will almost always get Shadow Meld if I'm getting Moonbeam, regardless of secondary; just because for 1 or 2 slots it has great value even on softcapped alts. /nin has squishy DDR and can feel the pain against Incarnate content that defense debuffs. Activating SM as you run to the next group does a great job buffing you up for the first seconds of engagement, after which you have cleared enough of the crowd you control the rest of the fight.

These days, I'm actually struggling to find the point of a Brute compared to a Tanker in the endgame. Tankers got a sizeable damage buff last year, some of it directly in their damage scale, some of it indirect through higher radius in their AoEs. A +50% buff in radius is 2.25x the surface area for a PBAoE, seeing as we're looking at a circle. In just about any normal situation, enemies are scattered enough every inch of that extra surface area is helpful. Brutes need to build Fury, Tankers always operate at fullspeed. Another slight advantage. Damage buffs are also fairly common in the endgame. Tankers get more out of damage buffs than Brutes. Musculature is probably the optimal Incarnate choice in most cases, and will benefit a Tanker almost twice as much as a Brute, relatively speaking. Tankers got higher Leadership modifiers as part of their 2020 buff: hello +15% damage Assault. All these little things add up. OP's combo in particular, Inv/SS, benefits tremendously from being a Tanker rather than a Brute. - Rage is a permanent damage buff - Rage's crashes make the extra Tanker mitigation a welcome addition Neither Tankers nor Brutes are useless... but just knowing you can find players who have directly opposite opinions of the validity of either AT should tell you game balance is in a good enough spot you don't have to worry about your choice. The divergence of opinions implies performance is muddy enough for each faction to have the perspective one AT is clearly superior to the other.

Wish granted, OP! Log in game now. Buy the Critical Strikes proc ATO. Slot it in your biggest hitter. Refrain from adding any local recharge to this power. Enjoy your controllable crits. 😉

I went all in with Winter Packs, which for me is about ~15B. By far the largest gamble I ever made. If they sell for ~35B, I'm not sure what I'll do with the inf. I'm already slotting alts on a buy-it-NAO basis. Perhaps fully committing to the amplifier lifestyle, and keeping all 3 on all the time. I tend to multibox so this can add up fast. I could also go the "speedrunner" route, and keep many charges of those tasty, tasty signature summons... Regardless, it's difficult not to get bit by the marketing bug. I'm slotting a new alt as we speak, and there's a supply crunch on several damage procs: going for 6M and above rather than their usual 2M. It is *physically impossible* not to buy a bunch of other IOs in the same set and play converter roulette, even though I know this use of my time is largely pointless.

Thanks for protecting our speculative gains, daddy government. Man... I kinda get why people do the things they do in real life. It does feel good. If morally despicable. 🙂

CJ - unsuppressed P2W - suppressed I wouldn't say no to a buff, but CJ is already the best power in the game due to the unsuppressed air control it offers.

I feel compelled to post just to say @Dark Dove has been 100% right in this thread. If you skip CoD, you're losing out on 8% defense. There is functionally no difference between a Dark Tanker and any other Tanker when it comes to aggro management, except by choice. That is, a player who sits around twiddling their thumbs for 10 seconds between each group may find their stealth is recharged; and if they stroll at a snail's pace to the next group, expecting enemies to notice them without input of their own, then yes: it is possible another faster player might get the mobs' attention first. But, if you play normally, which in my book for a tanker would be jumping from group to group as soon as everyone is inside the mission and ready, always be the vanguard, and open every fight with a large PBAoE (and all Dark Tankers have one large radius fast recharge PBAoE if nothing else: Dark Regen), then your stealth is perma suppressed and you never ever lose aggro. It's also worth noting that the anemic Tanker playstyle WILL make you leak aggro, no matter what Tanker primary you play. You can't passively rely on mobs hitting you first based on line of sight. One has to actively generate threat with attacks or at least auras (which are very limited in range).

I used the Mids numbers because from memory they're correct on that stuff. Proc gain averaged out over time (you get one chance to tick every 10s, i.e. perf shifter is 25% chance for +10 end every 10 seconds ~= 25% chance for +1 end per second ~= +0.25 EPS). Vanden's thread posted above is likely the best source.

Okay, probably not. But I had to get you to click the thread open. So, I've been having some fun rethinking Elude recently. Conventional knowledge says it's not so useful in a general sense, and I tend to agree. But at the same time, once you fall down the rabbit hole of heavy proc builds and doing weird stuff... Almost all my builds these days look like this: - Ageless to take care of all end troubles, almost no end management otherwise - attacks with 3-4 damage procs, as close to capped damage as I can get, some end reduction if no better option, generally 0 accuracy which is taken care of through Kismet, Tactics and set bonuses - Musculature and Assault to maximise damage This is fine. It works. On Sentinel SR, it's not too difficult to get your defenses at 45% while also including all of the above. Although Sentinel DDR isn't capped, so defense debuffs can hurt soloing +4/x8. Likewise with tohit buffs. Or Incarnate content, where most foes have higher tohit and require 59% defense to be effectively softcapped. However: luck inspirations are plenty, and will drop fast enough to always stay overcapped. So again, this works. This is fine. Still. Thinking about Elude there's some interesting points that come to mind. 1) it doesn't merely boost your defense to god levels, it's also a sizeable recovery buff. +100%, base. Enhance it and you're looking at +3,74 end per second when all is said and done. This is comparable to the middle part of Ageless - and unlike Ageless, this is a constant 3 minutes buff, bereft of the "desert valley" during the last 30 seconds of Ageless. 2) ... and it really does boost your defense to god levels. At above 100% with toggles, you don't care about tohit buffs, defense debuffs, incarnate content... You don't care about incarnate content where mobs with extra tohit buffs throw defense debuffs at you. You are truly untouchable against anything that isn't a Devouring Earth quartz Which, in turn, lets you turn all insps into rages rather than lucks. Or blues - there's the crash managed. Admittedly, the crash is a pain in the ass. First there's the endurance bar drain. It isn't *as* bad as I expected: for some reason it's very rare for all toggles to drop, and since the Leadership activation buffs these toggles are faster to put back on too. The really painful part is the 10s of -recovery post crash, meaning even if no/few toggles drop, it's easy to drain yourself if you attack carelessly. On the flipside of that flipside, not "having" to pick Ageless for maximum damage opens up Barrier as a Destiny choice. And oh boy, is an Elude-using, Barrier having Sentinel with Master Brawler sturdy. I have taken on solo +4/x8 Apex and Tin Mage task forces several times and kicked butt, with almost no insp use (any other of my Sentinels, including the non-Elude version of that SR Sentinel, would need many insps to survive). Barrier also has the benefit of completing your Elude cycle. You're looking at roughly a ~80s gap between Eludes on a final build. So you pop Barrier at the crash, that's 30 seconds of Elude-level defense when stacked on your regular toggles. And you still keep +7.5% for the first minute, +5% for the second minute. Not *perfect*, but smoothes the gap for sure. A single luck inspiration tends to cover what remains. It's also fun to zip around with the extra runspeed Elude gives you. And, finally, in the end taking Elude is only a single power choice and 5 extra slot investment. My build gives up almost nothing to get Elude, compared to the previous build. Passive defenses are slightly under the 45% mark, but that's reached again using even the lowest part of Barrier. Would I recommend it to anyone else? Probably not. The appeal of Elude here comes down to building for heavy proc usage regardless, wanting to solo incarnate team content, liking the convenience of high defenses without inspiration use, and choosing a higher ups, lower downs performance cycle rather than stable great performance. I'm left thinking the Ninjitsu and EA versions of this could be pretty interesting. Ninjitsu gets a free +60 end click, obviously ideal to handle Retsu crashes. It's also harder to build for the softcap on Nin, and you end up with low DDR; so Retsu's benefits should be magnified compared to Elude. On the EA side, Overload gives you Dull Pain on top of massive defenses which is always nice. It's not AS nice as you might think, because Sentinel HP cap is relatively low and Power Armor already boosts your maxHP, but it's an extra something. A well timed Power Drain can also refill your bar at the moment you crash - although I find that difficult to pull off reliably. One downside to Energy Armor compared to their defense-based brethens might be that the status protection is a toggle. In the chaos of refilling your end bar and toggling back up, it's conceivable you might get mezzed every now and then. EDIT: wait, that latest part is kind of silly. With Master Brawler, SR Sentinels have their mez protection in toggles too. It really hasn't been a problem, at least so far. Anyhow. Fire/SR build below for reference:

If I got this right, at 100 end: - panacea = +0.375 EPS - perf shifter proc = +0.25 EPS - miracle = +0.25 EPS - first +5 end mod in Stamina = +0.22 EPS - second +5 end mod in Stamina = +0.18 EPS - numina = +0.17 EPS Edit: messed up the +end procs by 25%

Are the numbers correct on Scrappers and Stalkers? At 22% tohit it shows over +50% from base damage, whereas the increase should be about less than a third according to the numbers you posted here: To be more specific: - in Quick Form, Stalker Moonbeam and Zapp show 97.32 damage + 53.52 damage from tohit - Stalker Mace Beam lacks the Quick Form option - Scrapper Moonbeam/Zapp show 109.5 damage + 60.22 damage from tohit - Scrapper Mace Beam has a Quick Form option, but it does nothing At a quick glance, Blaster snipes seem correct. I only checked Ranged Shot, but it fits the 142.7 damage (0 tohit) and 172.7 damage (22 tohit) figures you posted. Dominators seem correct as well, although for some reason Moon Beam lacks the Quick Form option.

As much as I dislike blanket nerfs, at this point in the game I'd be OK with Lore getting a hard look at. It is not so fun where every hard encounter can be obliterated by pulling out giant pets and buffing them. Especially when a couple choices (Banished Pantheon, Longbow, IMHO) overshadows most other options. Lore has frustrating design in general. It's not perma, so if it dies you just lost a significant boon. But if it lives, it deals tremendous damage. It has limited amount of customisation, the many choices in theory should help with that but in practice the power level difference between Lore pets is big. I wish we would have had just one pet, lieutenant level, perma. With careful balancing across the map to make all the choices worth it. When you look at controller pets, they're all in a pretty decent place even though they vary significantly in their powers and behavior. So achieving balance there is possible, if not necessarily probable. I see many rants about Destiny or Jugement, but the former just makes your character better and the latter emanates from your character. Lore makes pets the stars of the show. I'm not sure any rational argument even matters as much for me as plain "Lore is not cool". Hell of a derail, I know. I just tend to dislike calls for widespread nerfs generally, but for some reason your "Drop Lore pets!" made something tick. In a world with no Lore, it's likely Hami would be appropriately challenging. And Magisterium. And every other trial or hard TF, too. Perhaps another middle of the road solution could be to make buffs not affect Lore pets. But that seems unfair to buff ATs.

Generally just the proc, even. But adding the acc/dam is certainly an option. Scrapper's Strike is decent, it's a flat increase to crit rate so it's always worth having. I like stuffing the whole set in a damage aura for the set bonuses.

I will take the opposite position on that one. For starters, Bio Armor is truly overpowered on Scrappers, and you can see from the Pylon thread primary to primary, the best Stalkers tend to either lag behind or break even with comparable Bio Armor Scrappers. I can't actually think of a primary where /* Stalker > /bio Scrapper. Perhaps Savage and Staff? Following that, it's worth considering aggro control. Without a taunt aura, AVs will run. GMs will run A LOT. This cuts into the incoming damage but your own DPS also takes a toll. Even if you are the best jouster, on a primarily melee AT you will lose DPS. Further pushing Scrappers ahead, provided they have a taunt aura. Of course Bio has a taunt aura on Scrappers, because why wouldn't Bio get everything. 😄 One might argue survivability on a /bio Scrapper isn't necessarily as great as on, say, a softcapped Stalker. But it just so happens most optimal Scrapper attack chains involve Moonbeam, which is in the same epic as Shadow Meld - and Shadow Meld meshes exceptionally well with native Bio defenses, fixing the DDR and defense hole. Finally, I would argue Critical Strikes is the best ATO in game far and beyond Stalker ATOs, provided you build around it. Sticking it in most Scrapper T9 with no additional local recharge tends to yield proc rates pretty close to 90%. This makes your next 2 or 3 hits almost guaranteed crits, essentially turning medium damage attacks into extreme damage attacks; and in a typical highend cycle, this is half of your attack chain. For me, the appeal of Stalkers is that they're better out of the box. You get AS at 6 and BU at 8, you stuff the ATOs as soon as level 13 or whenever they're available, and you can also kind of mash buttons and end up doing respectable DPS by virtue of 3-focus AS dealing fantastic DPA and BU recharging every now and then. But, those same strengthes start to make you lag behind in the endgame, at least in prolonged fights against single tough targets: - instarecharge BU isn't as much of a boon as each activation is 1.32s during which you deal no damage, and even with a Gaussian proc in there you are likely to have other, better options - you almost have build an attack chain around 3-focus AS. Not only this is a constraint in itself, but this also compounds the above problem: an instarecharged BU takes the spot of one power providing focus - epic snipes are awesome, but on Stalkers don't provide focus either - the Hide proc has a 10.25s cooldown, so you also have to build your attack chain around that. If you want a specific high damage high recharge power to crit, and build an attack chain with more than one AS within a ~10 seconds span, any miss will cause your Hide proc to be tied to the wrong power instead of your big hitter. With all these constraints, and all the advantages Scrappers get by late game, I've never managed to build a Stalker that dealt as much damage as the corresponding Scrapper. My latest failure was an EM/Bio Stalker, struggling to break 600 DPS despite excellent advice from other forum posters, whereas the EM/Bio scrapper deals 650+ without breaking a sweat. Bringing this to the final point... even when Stalkers break even with Scrappers, the mechanical effort required of you will be higher. Pylon Tests, especially good runs, are near ideal conditions for Stalkers: a static target that cannot flee and doesn't deal enough damage to threaten you. Good runs likely don't see their Hide proc crit broken by a hit! Whereas for Scrappers, a Pylon Test is mostly a regular fight. It doesn't affect your DPS as much if an AV forces you to use defensive clicks; you don't see your Hide status broken, you don't lose your focus stacks, you just resume your attack chains. It's even somewhat doable for Scrappers to manage their defensive clicks to happen during the "weak" part of their attack chain, i.e. the lowest damage power that isn't affected by Critical Strikes, and then resume their highest damage pummeling. Don't get me wrong: with a properly minmaxed Stalker, you can solo most AVs in game without inspirations or temps, at level 54. You'll likely be able to solo many GMs as well, all the way to level 50. But I think a Bio Armor Scrapper will have an easier time doing so. For level 50 GMs especially, you need 350+ DPS to outpace their regen before their resistance is considered. That is a lot of damage to do if your target is running away.

I think @Riverdusk makes excellent points through the thread. My own pet suggestion for Scrapper fixes would be to give a taunt aura to every Scrapper secondary, but to cap that taunt aura at 5 targets; and to raise the resistance cap to 80%. There is an extra problem with Scrappers in that arguably the best two endgame powersets (Bio and Shield) have a taunt aura, and these two are arguably the best BEFORE the taunt aura is weighed in.

I like 2x acc 3x dam 1x end most out of the 2 choices. Reason being, any attack that misses is an attack that's going to cost end. Having attacks recharge faster also means more end usage. There's generally always some power to use even on base recharge; or even if not, then there is something to do. Reposition for cones/AOEs, chase runners, use/convert inspirations, what have you. On a Brute specifically I will go 2 acc 2 end 2 dam. Sometimes even 2 acc 3 end 1 dam, or 2 acc 2 end 1 dam 1 rech, or 2 acc 2 end 2 rech. You get the idea: Brutes have Fury, so the relative boost of damage enhancement isn't as sizeable as on other ATs. You often get more bang for your buck out of boosting other aspects. 2 end in every attack truly lights the burden, and the difference between 2 dam and 3 dam is negligible on a Brute: at 75 Fury, the Brute with 3 damage SOs has 100% (base) + 150% (Fury) + 90% (3 SOs) = 340% enhancement, while the Brute with 2 damage SOs has 100% (base) + 150% (Fury) + 66% (2 SOs) = 314% enhancement. Not even a 10% difference in the final damage output, likely not something you would notice without paying specific attention to it.

People have soloed the Lady Grey task force with just one standard hold on a 16s base recharge (not Dominator/Controller), provided said hold is slotted with 3 hold / 3 rech and the build has a decent amount of global recharge. A Dominator has roughly 400% as much holding power. Their ST hold recharges twice as fast, and holds for double the magnitude during Domination. It's not exactly 4x because you're bound to animation time to an extent. But the point being, there is ample leeway and even a Dominator on SOs should be able to do it, with the support of his teammates. Said support being, basically, make sure you draw all Hamidon / mito aggro away from the Dominator so he can do his thing. If the incoming damage gets too much, you can buy Essence of the Earth inspirations on the auction house to help you. You guys can definitely do it!

Indeed, Invul is beastly on Sentinels. You get all the normal goodness of Invul, + passive absorption, + max end. Mmm. You can definitely get Sentinel Invul to be end stable without Incarnates. For that purpose, make sure you slot Perf Shifter procs in both Stamina and Durability, and the Panacea proc in Health. This is because +end from procs is multiplied by your own maximum endurance. You will have above 130 endurance if you fully slot everything and get your accolades, which makes those procs much more effective than they would be on a regular character. The end result is ridiculously sturdy. It's robust if you want to melee; but even better, as a Sentinel, you're more likely to be at range, where enemies deal significantly less damage. So in practice it often feels tougher than your average Scrapper or Brute.

You're probably thinking of the AV purple triangles. The purple patch (level++) definitely affects your damage debuffs. This is mostly irrelevant against anything before the final mission, as they're level 50 or level 51. Actually, the purple patch improves your damage debuffs against level 50s, thanks to the alpha slot level shift. You're considered +1 to them. In the final mission, AVs are at least level 53 which is like fighting +2s after level shift. Your damage debuffs have 80% effectiveness there.

While I am remotely aware of the existence of people who play CoH without 3-4 .xls spreadsheets open at all times, it's always a surprise to be reminded *I'm* the nutjob.

Everyone then plays melee/empathy and is a juggernaut of pain and death. I would be OK with that outcome.