nihilii

I'm sitting here dumbfounded after having read possibly the most detailed breakdown of testing protocol on these boards, only for the answer to be... "dude, those are just, like, your personal observations, man. where's the data?!?!"

Confront has -75% range. It's pretty useful if you want to hovertank STF Recluse. Whether you *need* to, in this day and age of unlimited power, is another question...

Geas and Archmage are affected by recharge buffs. A highend build will have them up every ~8 minutes or so as it is. It makes a sizeable difference. Don't forget they're additive to whatever you also have. YMMV, but I can tell you my characters get a great deal out of them. Take Archmage: life is binary, either you're alive or you're dead. If your native mitigation carries you through 90% of sustained damage over time and Archmage plugs the gap, then you're immortal. As for Geas, it's essentially a get out of jail free card when your end bar is about to bottom out. Or when you just died, resurrect and need the recharge because Hasten is on cooldown. Or when Nemesis stacks those vengeances and you need the tohit + faster recharge on Aim. And so on, and so on. It has great synergy with Archmage, as you can just pop the two and not worry about the defense debuff in Geas. The Crey pistol is useless, no question. 30s Mag4 immobilize could be cool.

I like FU -> Focus -> Slash -> Strike for ST DPS on my Tanker. Heca in FU, Apoc in Focus, Achilles in Slash. Brutes ought to be mostly the same, although you get less out of Follow Up relatively. For AoE, you can be fancy and leverage Evis + Spin + Shockwave in whatever way you want, but I find Spin is so powerful on its own I just add it to my ST chain (replace Strike with it, for example). If I were building a Claws/Regen brute, I'd go with something like this:

I find clicks annoying in CoH. The way it triggers based on server latency, so you rush to a door or glowie and click it, and you get nothing because to the server you're not in range yet.

My bad: Proton Stream is the Sentinel version of Proton Volley.

Oubliette you absolute legend, thanks for the Lightning Field fix! 😄 Does anyone know the sound for Proton Stream (Radiation Blast)? I tried to give the .pigg viewers a go myself, but the standalone programs don't work on my machine and I'm struggling to make heads or tails of the online .pigg viewer.

The Tanker drop between Bio and the second pick (WP) is ~13%. I cannot believe you would qualify that as "drastic". It certainly doesn't look as such compared to other melee powersets. So I can only assume you're now suddenly talking about Scrappers. The full post you quoted looked at Tankers. The subdiscussion we were having was about Tankers and Brutes. I acknowledged /bio is particularly broken on Scrappers several posts ago. This is not the topic, and that point isn't relevant in a look at how TW fares on Tankers. Please argue in good faith. You can't claim data supports your ideas then handwave it all away when it doesn't turn out that way.

I'm not ignoring these numbers. I'm only arguing they demonstrate the opposite of the point you're trying to make. There are 627 TW Tankers. #5 in Tanker secondary popularity. 116 Bio/TW (18.5%) 101 WP/TW (16.1%) 88 Invul/TW (14.0%) 87 Rad/TW (13.8%) 67 Stone/TW (10.6%) 57 Elec/TW (9.0%) 44 Dark/TW (7.0%) 32 FA/TW (5.0%) 23 Ice/TW (3.6%) 12 SR/TW (1.9%) There are 618 ElM Tankers. #6 in Tanker secondary popularity. 167 Elec/ElM (27.0%) 150 Shield/ElM (23.9%) 67 Stone/ElM (10.8%) 54 Invul/ElM (8.7%) 41 Rad/ElM (6.6%) 36 FA/ElM (5.8%) 34 WP/ElM (5.5%) 30 DA/ElM (4.8%) 24 Bio/ElM (3.8%) 12 Ice/ElM (1.9%) 3 SR/ElM (0.4%) There are 677 Spines Tankers, #4 in Tanker secondary popularity. 287 FA/Spines (42.3%) 114 Bio/Spines (16.8%) 75 Stone/Spines (11.0%) 51 Rad/Spines (7.5%) 36 DA/Spines (5.3%) 34 Ice/Spines (5.0%) 31 Invul/Spines (4.5%) 24 WP/Spines (3.5%) 22 Elec/Spines (3.2%) 3 SR/Spines (0.4%) What trends can we see here? 1) more than half of all ElM and Spines Tankers are concentrated in the first two combos. On the other hand, it takes more than the first top three picks to get to the 50% mark with TW 2) when it comes to primaries with no end management and TW, invul ranks 3rd, stone 5th, DA 7th and SR 10th. With Spines, Stone ranks 3rd, DA 5th, Invul 7th and SR 10th. With ElM, Shield is 2nd (but TW and Spines can't use Shield, so we can't extrapolate where Shield/TW Tankers would land), Stone is 3rd, Invul 4th, DA 7th, SR 10th. 3) if we remove the obvious AE farm build that is FA/Spines from Spines ranking, we still see Bio/Spines as a much more popular option compared to other Spines primaries than Bio/TW is compared to other TW primaries. Bio/Spines' relative percentage ends up at 29.1% without FA/Spines, while Bio/TW is at 18.5%. In conclusion, not only there's no evidence of a particular TW tendency to ignore most primaries in favor of a select few favoring end management; but in this comparison, the data suggests the opposite. TW enjoys a greater diversity of Tanker primaries than Spines and Elec. The #7 Tanker secondary is Dark Melee, with 461 characters. If you take out ALL the 116 Bio/TW Tankers AND still keep Bio for all other Tanker secondaries, you're left with 511 TW Tankers, meaning TW loses only... one spot, to Elec Melee. TW without Bio is still more popular than Dark Melee, Staff Fighting, Street Justice, Stone Melee, Energy Melee, Ice Melee, War Mace, Savage Melee, Psionic Melee, Broad Sword, Battle Axe, Martial Arts, Dual Blades, Kinetic Attack, Katana and Claws, and all of these WITH bio. That is to say, TW without Bio still ranks #6 out of 22 in popularity.

You can use Add Global Friend instead of Add Friend, and then you'll see their character regardless of who they're playing. In the "Friends" tab you also want to switch to the "Global Friends" setting with the dropdown arrow on top right.

Also, the EB/AV in Incarnate arcs is just inconsistent. Number 6 has the Hamidon manifestations as AVs - and makes you fight several of them, even. Belladonna gives you an AV to fight with Chimera, and he levelshifts. There's the Tsoo AV in DA arcs who also levelshifts. But then too many AV-level enemies like Shadowhunter are stuck as EB and sometimes get killed by Pendragon before you even get a chance to step into the fight. Like @Unedjis points out, this is a suggestion with no downside. For all of you who prefer to fight EBs, setting your notoriety that way will let you do so (as it does in most of the game), up until you're in a large team.

You're looking at the numbers for a specific combination here, instead of the overall numbers of characters with the powerset (which you can see further above in the stats topic). If anything, the disparity between how often TW is picked overall versus how high a specific TW combo ranks against other specific powerset combos goes against your point: while other powersets are more often played with thematic pairings or perceived power builds, on Brutes and Tankers TW is spread onto a variety of powersets because it's so strong regardless of the powerset it's tied to. TW is overpowered and popular on any AT, and likely popular because overpowered; but in any case, I stand by the position popularity has no relevance when a powerset is so mechanically overpowered it's trivial to show it as such.

? It's the #5 most popular attack powerset on both Brutes and Tankers. Out of the more popular powersets, Spines and Rad are notoriously overplayed due to AE farming, and SS is overplayed due to theme... and due to being too strong, even if we've had pages of people pretending otherwise in the temptative Rage change topics. 😛 Considering how cumbersome TW is, I find it actually easy to read these stats as a strong signal TW is overpowered. Not that popularity should be brought into this, anyway. TW is unbalanced mechanically. I agree it's easier for players into game mechanics to get more dramatic performance out of it, but it's always worth remembering TW powers without any Momentum are competitive with good powers from regular damage powersets, so *any* Momentum is just bonus DPS. (Frankly, I wish Momentum had never been a thing. Without Momentum, the performance between minmaxers and regular joes would be smoothed out as on regular powersets. TW could have had animations in the halfway point between their unaccelerated times and their Momentum length, somewhere around 1.8s to 2.2s for each. The set would have still been the top performer but not by such a wide margin, and it would be more fun to play - granted, that last part is subjective.) I actually agree with your previous point /bio is also overpowered. That doesn't give TW a free pass. A TW scrapper that is not bio will outdamage any non-TW scrapper that is bio. The same mostly holds true for Brutes and Tankers, even if the gap is smaller there (mostly thanks to SS existing).

This is a choice you're making and not a flaw of TW on Tankers specifically. My own TW tankers (SR/TW and DA/TW, so still a magnitude less broken than Bio/TW) deal absurd levels of damage, close to a regular highend scrapper, because they don't use Taunt nor spend time repositioning; essentially, they're ridiculously survivable scrappers who make no damage tradeoff. While it's true scrappers are the worst offenders because of the insane Momentum + Follow Through + Critical Strikes proc synergy, nonetheless there isn't really a performance reason to play anything other than TW on any of the ATs with access to TW. The gap is sizeable, even on Tankers and Brutes. You might pick another attack powerset and with an extreme build, push it to where it almost meets TW in one of three aspects (ST damage, AOE damage or -res debuffing), but a TW build of similar skill will retain top performance in all three of these aspects at once.

Note to self: when in doubt between "Bug Reports" and "Suggestions & Feedback", remember there will always be droves of people telling you your suggestion sucks no matter how universally sensible you feel it is, whereas nobody bats an eye at a bug report. 😛

On a Tanker or a Brute using Elec Armor, Lightning Field makes noise at toggle activation, then fades away nicely. On a Blaster (Elec Manip) or a Sentinel (Elec Mastery), Lightning Field keeps making its loud activation noise for as long as the power is toggled up. Is there any chance the sound behavior of all versions of Lightning Field could be aligned to the Elec Armor version?

That sounds like a new bug worth reporting. My Dark/Inv (from September/October 2019) has the purple hold proc slotted in AG.

Anyway, unless this has been fixed, the March 3 fix to stop Degen super-stacking in leagues introduced a new bug where Degen only stacks once on big targets from a solo character (AVs, GMs, Pylons). It works correctly (multi-stacks) on bosses and under, but for big game hunting, Reactive is probably better right now.

Sentinel Dark Blast Abyssal Gaze has the Life Drain animation rather than the original "gaze" animation. Unsure if this has any mechanical effect, but it looks pretty silly because there's already Life Drain using this animation.

Man, you certainly went ALL the way on procs. I'm curious to hear how it'll work out. If nothing else it could be a powerhouse once you get damagebuffed to the cap, exceeding what a conventional build would get to. My one nitpick: it doesn't seem like you have enough accuracy to reliably hit +4s (+3s post level shift) on your 6-proc powers. MG, AG and Soul Storm are at 74% chance to hit. Which leads to musing #2: do you really need Soul Storm? With AG, Life Drain, MG and AB, you've got a full attack chain on your hands. Soul Storm isn't that impressive in terms of DPA as AG holds your purple hold proc anyway. You could grab Tactics instead, which would bring you right at 95% tohit with 2 50++ IOs (or cannibalize all Soul Storm slots to 5-slot Adjusted Targeting, get 9% accuracy and 5% recharge out of it too). Fun build!

BEST reroll: Fire/Regen Sentinel to Fire/Rad Sentinel. I rolled the first one when the public servers first came up, played for the 3-4 days or so to level 20ish before the servers went boom. When Torchbearer rose from the ashes, I decided to go with Fire/Rad, to try a secondary I had no experience with (and also because the absorb mechanic confused me on Regen). I leveled her incredibly inefficiently, using Blazing Blast which at the same time was bugged and did as much damage as Fire Blast with THREE times the recharge and twice the end cost. Then wasting all my empyrean merits from veteran levels on IOs (I didn't know about converters, and the market was fairly bare). Then I gradually learned about Sentinel epics thanks to @Sunsette and others. I embraced the Musculature/Ageless/procs paradigm over the Spiritual + Barrier/Rebirth I was used to. Through about a dozen respecs and finetuning over months, she became my favorite toon to play on both Live and Homecoming. I managed to solo every TF in the game under Master rules, save for Dr Khan / Barracuda. She can take on every faction on +4/x8 without missing a step. Still blows my mind. It's as close to a zero to hero journey I've ever had in this game, the sharpest power curve from starting a character to completion. The one small regret I have is that Fire/Rad is a bit of a FotM combo, if you look at Sentinel stats. I *know* I picked her powers in complete isolation from the playerbase, so it's a bit vain of me to be bothered. But I can't help but think if I picked Elec Blast instead (which is just as strong as Fire Blast on Sentinels, although in a slightly different way), I would have ended with a character just as enjoyable but much more unique. WORST reroll: so many to choose from. Perhaps Fire/MM Blaster to Fire/TA blaster. I didn't actually reroll the character, just made a new alt. The idea was to use a procced out Electrified Net Arrow as a valid part of the attack chain, and make a fully ranged AV soloer. But in practice, ENA is rather *intense* graphically, and I just can't make the GFX work in a way to fit any concept I care for.

*desire to reroll intensifies*

What a strange idea. I love it. Idk, man. I'd happily crash and die to experience a level of awesomeness seldom obtained that early in the game.

I'm just saying the theory adding damage to lower damage ATs doesn't help is a matter of opinion. Given that the game *is* damage-focused... ...Idealistic look might be to rework the game so damage isn't so overwhelmingly important. ...Pragmatic look can be to share the goods. I pick option 2. But really, I pick it because it enhances build options. Increased player agency > game perfectly balanced according to hypothetical rules, IMHO. If procs were so overwhelmingly good nobody would even use set bonuses anymore, I'd vote against procs (or for buffing set bonuses, more like).

I think this statement needs to be demonstrated. It's fine to discuss how the game should work ideally, but in practical terms, giving damage options to low damage ATs is a significantly easier task than to reengineer the whole game for non-damage effects to be worth it. For that matter, even in the Paragon Studios times most buffs followed that route. Defenders got Vigilance for a solo damage buff. Scrappers saw their damage scale raise from 1.0 to 1.125. Doms got a damage scale buff too along with the Domination rework. Blasters got more damage when it turned out they weren't doing enough. I think the game was improved with every single one of these buffs.