nihilii

I feel differently, knowing the builds involved. That War Mace build skips Crowd Control and has pisspoor AoE with just Whirling Mace. The Rad Melee build has admittedly alright AoE and self-healing. TW is still king on the AoE DPS it inflicts as a side result of its DPS prowess, and brings native -RES. Both WM and Rad builds heavily leverage the epic snipe with Critical Strikes. TW is so natively powerful it doesn't need to do so. Admittedly, it also lacks a "no redraw" option, but it doesn't need to use snipes regardless. If you stick to primary powers, the gap between TW and other choices rises. Important from a pure power point of view, even more meaningful in the greater sense of concept. I am still curious to see what Page 6 will entail. The great story is TW rebalance, but PPM changes could actually solidify TW's gap. Imagine TW gets the free damage part removed while at the same time PPM gets nuked into oblivion. It's possible in my mind to see an outcome where TW/bio goes down from 700 DPS to 600 DPS, while rad/bio degrades from 600 DPS to 450 DPS. Frankly, this is why I hope PPM doesn't take a hit. Not only proc builds make for more interesting tradeoffs, they smooth out current balance problems. Take Sentinels: most people already feel Sentinels are lagging, and a PPM hit might be the last straw. I've seen sentiment from the devs, provided my interpretation is correct, along the line of "if we fix PPM now, we can rebalance things better later". But with a development cycle spanning months if not years, this might leave some ATs and powersets, characters that are currently fine-ish if not as good as they should be, struggling for a long time. Tough pill to swallow.

This truly feels like the hard part. My inv/db Tanker is sustainable on everything without incarnates. Even Rebirth is not a strict necessity, ~300% regen and DP carry you a long way on Tanker HP. But... everything being +4 makes their damage stack that much faster, and so much longer to defeat. I'm working through mission 1 - well, I just got mapserved for a minute and died - and I already have to start kiting when the debuffs pile up, although it's still safer than using incarnate scrappers/stalkers. But while incarnates nuke a minion in 2 hits at most, I need to spend at least 6 or 7 seconds of animation for that result. Oof. My guess is, M1 and M2 will be doable, but then I probably won't even have the DPS to beat Mission 3 Romulus in any reasonable amount of time - and/or his own damage will force me to pull back and nullify my progress. -- Edit: 30 minutes to clear just M1. The killing speed wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have to pull back as soon as there's 2+ Generals + other mobs, but I do. Then I died in M2. The dwarves/novas aren't so bad most of the time, but if a Cim patrol comes up, if the defense debuffs stack... Those are not impossible problems to avoid with jousting, but there's the rub: when you kill so slow, the gap between what is possible and what is probable becomes a gulf. I simply didn't have the patience to play it as well and carefully as I could. Now, the character isn't specifically built for the task (even though one might argue a general purpose invul is made for the ITF, anyway). Swapping Typhoon's Edge for One Thousand Cuts would be invaluable, with the latter doing 100% knockdown. Could also add Energy Torrent for even more knockdown, as I'm going Energy for Conserve Power already. Still unsure the character would stand a chance against +4 AVs, however. Well. Perhaps I should load up an AE mission with level 54 Romulus and see. -- Edit 2: Testing in AE, I'm barely above level 54 Romulus regen. Until a string of misses/deflected, or I have to click Hasten/DP/CP, or... You get the idea, and that was just standard Romulus. Nictus Romulus has a self heal and a Soul Drain-type buff. I think my current build already squeezes all the DPS there is to find on inv/db, or close to it. Game over for this character!

I think the ambush is specifically tied to the group in front of the Minotaur (coming from the regular path), as Sovera surmised earlier. I sniped a boss of that group from the altar, and it immediately triggered the ambush. Whereas I was even closer to the red circle before, and it didn't spawn anything.

Well done!! Doing it without amplifiers deserves some serious props. I assume as /bio you were pushing maybe 20% energy/negative resistance, if that. Clearing spawn by spawn does seem the logical answer, but then it takes discipline to stick with the plan whenever enemies get lucky and we get so close to death we have to flee. Awesome.

Indeed, it is the same stun. It has to be mag <15, because as a stalker/scrapper/sentinel with amplifier (+4 mag) and your basic mez shield (+10 mag), it will not affect you. Clarion ought to be enough at any point, it gives +6 mag for 2 minutes so better than amplifiers.

Amplifiers are a significant boost there because the added mez protection protects you from that stun. It feels safe to say if it took the stun to kill you, you would have beat it with amplifiers. I could swear Tanker mez protection was enough to not get stunned by the fluffy/rommie death stun, though. Am I going crazy? Or maybe they have another stun attack as part of their regular rotation, and it unfortunately happened to hit and stack at that moment too? For him to crit at that very moment is the epitome of bad luck.

Scrapper victory! TW/Rad/Soul. This was attempt #9. Amplifiers were used, all 3 of them. General strategy was to spam Defensive Sweep -> Arc of Destruction -> Defensive Sweep -> Whirling Smash in every single encounter. Maybe throw in Rend Armor and Follow Through if I'm feeling feisty. I would strive to keep 70%+ melee defense at all times, as well as Particle Shielding up for an extra 800 "hit points". This buffer was critical during unlucky moments. 2800hp let me live where 2000hp would have been death. Ageless Radial also helped with the defense debuffs, but I tried not to assume my DDR would hold. For AVs, attack chain started as Rend Armor -> Follow Through -> Arc of Destruction -> Defensive Sweep -> Follow Through. I ultimately changed it to Defensive Sweep -> FT -> AoD -> RA -> FT, as to get both AoD and RA in the Critical Strikes window. M1: died enough on previous attempts to get the rhythm done there. Skipped the ambush with Sovera's trick. M2: from cyst to cyst, but sometimes I had to run away in the middle of a cyst for my clicks to recover, lest the dwarf/nova damage overwhelm me. As I did that, I managed to lose track of the last cyst. It took me a staggering 10 minutes to find it again, as the ambushes were getting so big I couldn't kite my way through without risking too much. I ended up clearing a bunch of mobs at the central intersection, then finally found that cyst. M3: I hopped around between generals, for Beasts and Surgeons especially I thinned their numbers then escaped before things got tough. Romulus Phalanx was easy to handle. I pulled Requiem on his own, killed his goons then took him down 1 on 1 without too much trouble - although level 54 buffed AV damage is no joke for a scrapper, and I had to stay on guard with my mitigation clicks. With Romulus, I made sure to play it safe. I pulled him, then cleared the Legatus Legionis and other misc mobs while jousting, then took out my T3 Lore Longbow. Uneventful fight. M4: I flew to Romulus directly, planning to use Imperious' help. Mapserved. I restarted with the same strategy. Imperious was great help to clear the platform Cimerorans. Then, not so much as he rushed straight to fight Romulus and the Cyclops/Minotaurs... I let him die, pulled back, killed the mobs. Then attacked Romulus. I went with the jetpack on, to play it safe. This is the moment I remembered AoD doesn't work in the air. Oops! Good thing TW DPS is absurd in any case. I simply replaced AoD with Crushing Blow, and still dealt enough damage to make good progress. I would also sometimes replace Defensive Sweep with Whirling Smash. Autohit Nictus + Romulus at range was just below the incoming damage /rad/soul can take with both absorb/heal clicks and Shadow Meld. It went down first (by luck, all 3 Nictus were stacked and I hit one without knowing which one). Then I pulled out Lore for the healing Nictus, but that did more harm than good with buffed enemies accuracy. Once my Lore died I made faster progress. Summoning Nictus was a nonevent. Something interesting happened for Romulus. I took off my jetpack, and started to fight. But I was worried about the ambushes at 75%, 50%, 25% hp. Those could be too much to handle with Rommie on top. So I moved to this location, because this is where I think the ambushes pop. The idea being to clear them out ASAP, and/or run away, rather than be caught with my pants down. But the ambushes didn't come. Until a random wandering patrol of 4 Generals showed up. I fled preemptively before they aggroed... and saw the first ambush pop up (Rommie was at 70% hp then). So I guess, if you sit around that door, no ambushes happen. I cleared the first ambush, pulled Romulus back to this spot, and nothing happened when he hit 50% and then 25% hp. What a challenge. Specialized build and tons of attempts to do what my tanker did on first try; and in roughly the same amount of time. It shows the extent to which scrappers need to worry about survivability here. Build: Likely not optimal for the task, or even in general. It was great fun building "oldschool", with full sets aiming for mitigation, rather than break everything down for maximum proc damage. With TW you get to have your cake and eat it too. Incarnates were: Cardiac T3, Degen T4, Lore T3, Ageless T4, Assault T2, Vorpal T1 Could I do it without amplifiers? Maybe, unsure. There were MANY close calls. Perhaps with full T4, and a Lore support tree.

I'm thinking Cardiac, Barrier, Hybrid. This way the build only needs to aim for the ~40% or so E/N res you get without trying. Cardiac likely bumps it 1 or 2 %, amplifiers another 8% (?). Barrier and Hybrid top it off as needed. Even if not strictly perma, perma shouldn't be too necessary as we can manipulate the situations where we need that E/N res. Autohit nictus + ranged Rommie damage should be the longest sustained E/N we face, and with Siphon Life and 2k4 hp it should be passable... I think? And when it comes to DPS, I'm guessing some form of MG -> Moonbeam -> Siphon Life -> Smite attack chain ought to bring us to the 300 or so we need to do this in a reasonable amount of time. Or does it? Perhaps I am assuming a lot based on gut feeling.

While the question has been properly answered, I feel it's worth noting due to veteran levels giving you 120 threads per level at first, and then 20/15/10 empy every 3 levels, (which equal 400/300/200 threads, even if you convert them to threads instead of the more valuable rare and very rare components), playing on higher difficulty might very well yield you more threads even though you get less thread drops. This varies widely based on your teaming habits, because everyone gets a chance for shards/threads whereas XP is shared (even if there's a multiplier). But if you solo, it's a no brainer. Soloing gets you maybe 10 or 15 threads as drops in a level, so even when you get into the veteran levels 20-25ish, those 10 empys every 3 vet levels are the meat of your incarnate gains.

I literally just killed all groups except this one and got no ambush, so your theory seems to check out!

I have never learned the trick and perhaps I should. Got to come from the opposite side, right? I figure if I can't handle that ambush, I'm going to get stomped in the Shadow Caves anyway, or in Mission 3 during mass Cyclops/Minotaurs/bosses phases. There is, of course, answers for that too. Aggro cap is easier to abuse in both M2 and M3. But I'm not even sure if "easier" would be *easy*, when even a regular single group of Cims can kill me if they get lucky with their hits and I get unlucky with my active mitigation. Edit: grabbed amplifiers, skipped the M1 ambush, started M2 hitting Cysts and running, things seemed to go well. Then I got cocky. Assuming I still had aggro from ambushes, I turned off my aggro aura and didn't renew Shadow Meld preemptively. Dwarfs obliterated my health bar in 4 seconds. Owww

Banging my head against +4/x8 buffed MoITF on several scrappers has given me some serious appreciation for the survivability by Tanker builds on display here. After ~10 attempts on various characters, I haven't even made it out of Mission 1. My last try was on a TW/rad/soul, built with Defensive Sweep enhanced for defense and Shadow Meld, rocking ~80-100% melee defense and Ageless debuff side. Plus the knockdown goodness and damage you'd expect from TW. Regular Cimerorans can still be a threat with 2 or 3 bosses at once. The Dwarf/Nova ambush absolutely destroyed me both times I got there. I am not using Amplifiers yet. In my foolishness, I thought the above build would be enough. Perhaps I should settle for being Heavyweight over Super Heavyweight... not that I'm even sure amplifiers would be enough. I had an earlier attempt with my claws/bio/soul stalker. It's a funky build without Assassin's Strike, fighting purely at range. Flying with jetpack, the mitigation is surprisingly good against Cimerorans, at range stalker mitigation can more than keep up. Especially when Shockwave keeps them bouncing up and down. But it is a pain to navigate in the caves, and again I got destroyed by the first Dwarf/Nova ambush. Buffed enemies truly stress 75% res hardcap characters with medium HP. On the inv/db tanker, it only felt like I had to keep my eyes open, like a "regular" hard challenge thing. On scrappers/stalkers, I'm finding even all my usual shenanigans of kiting aggressively (read: run away, a lot) can't keep pace with incoming damage. Werner's proposed DM/inv build is likely the answer. I'm going through my current stable of characters to see what gives, but I might just bite the bullet and reroll. Especially as it would finally give me an excuse to play Dark Melee again (it's been a long time). And, for that matter, scrapper Invulnerability (it's hard to say no to /bio).

Likely <5%. But >50% of my roster is level 50. An interesting change compared to Live. I actually love feeling some sense of progression, so unless I'm truly fond of a character, they'll tend to stall after hitting T3 incarnates - just so I have something to "work" on when I pick them back up. (The characters I'm truly fond of will be put through so many challenges they will need alternate Incarnates for each appropriate situation, so I will have plenty to work on regardless.)

Placate is an arguable pick as well, these days. With the Chance to Hide ATO being so reliable, using ~2s of animation time for a critical (and hoping another enemy doesn't cancel your Hide status by hitting you during that animation) feels like a poor choice. But at least Placate gives you a crit. Smoke Flash doesn't. When it comes to the mitigation aspect of these powers, we are so spoiled for choice when it comes to passive mitigation many people consider active mitigation superfluous. Not necessarily useless, mind you, but situational enough players would rather spend the picks on something else.

Invul scrappers might have a good shot at this. You get to 2400hp, 75% S/L res, 40% E/N and ~35%ish def hardly trying. Then pick something with lots of KD that can also sustain reasonably high DPS without Ageless (so you can get Rebirth). I want to believe it's also possible on a variety of scrapper builds, with "creative" incarnate strategies. Using Vorpal extensively for the +30% def. Soul Meld for more defense. Picking a support tree Lore for buffs half of the time. I could be delusional.

Slight additional tip to a great guide: P2W Offense Amplifier will give you +15% recharge, and you can buy 8 hours worth at a time. I always grab 8 hours of all 3 amplifiers on a new alt. Only costs 24k inf, 1k inf per hour, when you're level 1. And leveling speeds being what they are on Homecoming, this can carry you to lvl 25-30 easily.

This describes my own experience to a tee! Tankers with 90% res and 3k hp pool shrug their shoulders, but scrappers at 75% res and 2k hp truly feel the pain from buffed +4 cims, if they lack DDR. It doesn't help that I hardly ever build for softcap these days, as I struggle with an unrelenting addiction to purple insps. I'm curious as to how those normal fights play out with your Claws/SR, @Bill Z Bubba. I'm guessing Shockwave puts them on their butt right away, and then you shred them before their antimez shouts become a problem, and SR prevents cascading failure against the odd hit or two. @josh1622 has an impressive Claws/Bio/Soul build that could be a strong contender for the task, as it deals absurd amounts of DPS and much of it at range.

Wm/bio/soul scrapper T4 Musculature Core, T4 Degen Core, T4 Assault Radial, T4 Ageless Clobber -> Moonbeam -> Shatter -> Jawbreaker -> Pulverize Misc clicks replace Pulverize Hybrid ON 1:22 = 595 DPS 1:05 = 717 DPS 1:11 = 667 DPS 1:08 = 691 DPS Hybrid OFF 1:24 = 584 DPS 1:16 = 632 DPS 1:23 = 589 DPS Leveled conjointly with the rad/bio, while on this Moonbeam kick. There's more variance, as Clobber has a faster animation and recharge - the ATO proc doesn't go off as reliably. The attack chain is also trickier to manage. Got to resist the impulse to use Clobber as soon as it's up, and instead go through the proper rotation with Pulverize. But when it works, it works. This is my first 700+ DPS on any non-TW character, and the other runs aren't too shabby either. War Mace deserves all the good press it gets these days. Heresy, more heresy: in this build, not only I skip DNA Siphon, I also forgo Crowd Control. Could easily swap Whirling Mace for it, but then I enjoy the brainless convenience of a PBAoE, 8 feet it may be. Build:

That's me right there. I love both missions for this reason. Actually, I love all of Croatoa because it all seemed very experimental at the time - and still is, because devs toned it down to more conservative efforts afterwards. Take this first mission. I can hang out at the stonehenge. I can defeat all but one minion of a wave and go AFK. I can aggressively seek and defeat as many waves as possible. Even the hostages are set up in a way that invites options. Do I get them one by one? Or do I snag all 3 at once and make just one trip, but face bigger ambushes? (that "but" often becomes an "and", as it is an outcome I like rather than a drawback...) It's very different from a defeat all where your only "choice" is... well, kill them all. Even the most complex and scenarized missions from later issues don't offer this level of emergent gameplay. Sometimes you get to pick A or B, sometimes you even get to pick A or B or C or D or E, but ultimately your selection comes down to carefully designed choices from the top down. There's nothing wrong with either approach, mind you. I think most people prefer their emergent gameplay to be a result of player interactions. So while I'm glad Croatoa exists, it's probably also good CoH doesn't have too much Croatoa-like content.

Rad/bio/soul scrapper T4 Musculature Core, T4 Degen Core, T4 Assault Radial, T4 Ageless Devastating Blow -> Moonbeam -> Radiation Siphon -> Radioactive Smash Misc clicks replace Radioactive Smash Hybrid ON 1:16 = 632 DPS 1:17 = 625 DPS Hybrid OFF 1:19 = 613 DPS 1:19 = 613 DPS Easily my favorite build this month. For the last year, I thought on scrappers only stj/bio could reach 600+ dps (outside of tw/bio, obviously). At least the way I build my own characters, which may involve suboptimal choices. But getting into the mindset of breaking sets and having absolutely no local recharge to maximise proc rate, and building attack chains around a full snipe crit + another crit does wonders. While Street Justice sacrifices AoE output to get to those heights, Rad Melee has Atom Smasher for active destruction, and both Irradiated Ground and Contamination passively add AoE damage to your ST attack chain. Yum. It's TW in spirit without being so absurdly over the top in damage, but also without having to deal with Momentum. A fair price to pay for convenience. Could use (many) more Pylon runs to get better estimates, but I also ran this character through Pylons as she was building her incarnates and saw a steady rise from 550ish while on Cardiac and low Hybrid/Degen to where we're at now. Fun. Build:

The extent of my thought here is that the heavy proc approach (by which I mean breaking sets up) might make you go from, say, 400 DPS to 500 DPS on some scrapper combos. As scrapper attacks tend to have lower base recharge, they get great results out of forgoing recharge and improving proc rate. Whereas with TW, you're already going to be at ~700 DPS with conventional slotting. Even if procs brought you to ~800 DPS, even if the absolute increase was the same (which I'm not sure of), the relative boost isn't as meaningful. Going from 400 to 500 DPS might be the difference between whether a character can solo Tin Mage (War Walkers specifically), going from 700 to 800 (?) would also be nice but mostly just mean being an even faster murder machine. When it comes to FF, I already have enough recharge to stuff 2 FTs per Momentum. To be sure, I would not recommend anyone use my build! I include it as an easier way to list the various procs and such.

The disparity between blaster Fire Blast and the second choice is >222%. The disparity between sentinel Fire Blast and the second choice is <130%. If we assume we can derive anything at all from that data, it seems obvious rebalancing Fire Blast has encouraged diversity in Sentinels, without hurting its appeal, hitting just the right balance. If we assume we can't conclude anything from that data, then the point is moot and there's not really a case to be made for buffing Fire Blast here. Surely nobody would try to argue Sentinel Fire Blast underperforms compared to other Sentinel primaries.

TW/bio scrapper T4 Musculature Core, T4 Degen Core, T4 Assault Radial, T4 Ageless Rend Armor -> Follow Through -> Arc of Destruction -> Crushing Blow -> Follow Through when BU is up, FT -> RA -> CB -> FT -> AoD -> CB -> FT Hybrid ON 1:03 = 736 DPS 0:51 = 879 DPS 0:59 = 777 DPS 1:06 = 708 DPS 1:11 = 667 DPS 1:04 = 726 DPS Hybrid OFF 1:08 = 708 DPS 1:05 = 691 DPS 1:06 = 717 DPS 1:02 = 746 DPS 1:04 = 726 DPS 1:24 = 584 DPS Now that we know TW is getting changes, I wanted to proc out my scrapper and see where it would get me. TW probably benefits less from the heavy proc approach than everything else, having such high damage to start with and being constricted by Momentum for attack chains; I was already at ~700 DPS with a "naive" build 5-slotting purples and 6-slotting ATOs. But then again, those previous numbers could have been lucky runs. At the time I only whacked a couple Pylons before I decided I might just get depressed about every other set if I kept going. This was one year ago, with less knowledge of procs and instasnipes and whatnot, so my other scrappers were in the 400 DPS range rather than the 500-600 DPS range. I'm not a fan of prepulls, yet it starts to make sense when damage gets to this point. I can lose 1-3 seconds on execution based on how efficiently I click Hasten, Hybrid, Build Up and then jump in, and 3 seconds might mean +/- 40 DPS. Regardless of what the actual numbers might look like in a better test, I find it similarly amazing and saddening save for the 1:24 run, every other run tops the best times of all my other characters combined. Including a Demon/Cold for that matter, which might be me being bad at MMs; but at the same time one does not have to be "good at" TW/bio, just mash hotkeys in the right order and enjoy great survivability to go with your ludicrous damage. Granted, there's more work in maintaining that attack chain than on the average meleer, but the damage more than compensates for it because when things are dead, they can't hit you back. Uh. Also probably why I shouldn't post about TW/bio in any context, it's hard not to sound like a rant. I try to respect everyone's opinions, but the combo feels so blatantly broken to me I end up sounding like a zealot nerfherder anyway. Well... I'm curious to see what the changes will be. If the extra formula breaking damage is removed but Momentum is reworked and/or a "no redraw" option comes with the package, it could be we see interesting chains to be made using Moonbeam/Zapp like almost every other high DPS scrapper these days. I even wonder if the new TW, minmaxed, could turn out stronger than the old TW? -- Edit: forgot to include build

I feel the rebalance (arguably nerf) of Fire Blast's secondary effects on Sentinels was a good thing, and encourages primary diversity. Going back to the blaster Fire Blast situation wouldn't be desirable. Secondary effects in general are actually in a pretty good spot on Sentinels, mostly thanks to their mininuke balance. i.e. Blackstar's -tohit, which is a novelty on regular blast ATs, becomes a reliable and massive -35% tohit debuff that is up every 25 seconds. Elec Blast Sentinels laugh at the complaint "end drain is useless" as they open every new fight with Thunderous Blast (90s base recharge down from 170s on other ATs). Disorients/holds on T9s are up more often, etc..

My group of friends was in the same situation. A solution we explored was to create personal SGs that were in a coalition with the main SG. Coupled with enterfrompasscode mainSG as default, and you only use your own personal base to store stuff. It adds overhead, and it makes passively sharing stuff more complicated. Would be nice to see limits raised, if it doesn't cause instability. I'd happily pay for it - give us inf sinks we can sink our teeth into.