nihilii

You're right, I didn't use Shield Charge (or Judgement). I don't think either is good DPS compared to MA attacks. Eagle's Claw works well with the Critical Strikes proc, the lengthy animation + base recharge almost guarantees the proc will go off. Coupled with EC's bonus crit, that means your Storm Kick will almost always crit and your CAK has a high chance to crit as well. It doesn't play as well in regular gameplay, simply because whenever you kill something with EC, your special crit buff might be consumed by the time you switch targets. (On the flipside, reliable Critical Strikes-fueled Dragon's Tail is delicious.) MA/SD build below:

2 quick runs on my MA/SD (MANY thanks to @Duck-Smokes-Quack) Musc T3, Degen T3, Assault T3 EC -> SK -> CAK -> SK. BU replaces the second Storm Kick whenever up Critical Strikes set in EC Heca + ToD proc in SK Achilles Heel + ToD proc + Mako proc in CAK Gaussian in BU Hybrid active 1:47 = 486 DPS without Hybrid 2:17 = 407 DPS (got KBed once due to forgetting Active Defense) Superb damage, by my standards anyway, for a relatively light on procs build that doesn't have to use Ageless. 🙂

Wait... what? Is this a recent fix? I could swear I tried to stick it in there a few months back and it didn't work!

This is unrealistic in any context that isn't an AE roaming farm. You cannot just handwave it away as "enemies will be in melee eventually" or "I will herd every group around the corner". Time spent herding or waiting is DPS lost compared to jumping in and using a 25' radius right away. Standard Sentinel T9s currently do 63.6% of Standard Blaster T9s, and recharge in 62% of the time. Ergo damage over time is identical, on a base level. Blasters benefit from BU, but then Blaster T9s are massive overkill in most cases whereas Sentinel T9s are just enough to wipe out +4 minions and severely damage +4 lieuts *and* have perfect synergy with Aim's timer. On one hand, you're arguing the ~5-10% difference in numbers between Sents and Scrappers make a Scrapper significantly tougher at handling alphas and such. On the other hand, you're arguing a Blaster that starts with no survivability at all doesn't have a wide survivability gap because caps are the same. Sentinel Fire Blast was rebalanced, and their Inferno is the same as every other Sentinel T9, adding just 12 base damage worth of DoT (in comparison Blaster Inferno gets 159 base damage worth of DoT, a full Sentinel nuke as extra). Bruising doesn't exist anymore with the Tanker buffs. When it did, it was -20% res rather than -30%. Key part of this thread. It's no secret there are broken/overpowered options on other ATs. Sentinels are better balanced as a whole. It's a smoother experience trending towards the middle point of performance.

My mistake, English as a second language. 🙂 I meant a power *fantasy* rather, and of course there's nothing wrong with that. It's just the nature of the beast hero power fantasies are easier to accomodate.

Later arcs definitely veered off from that: you decide to kidnap Mortimer Kal's daughter on your own to blackmail him into leading you to incarnate powers. In Dark Astoria you act as if saving the world only long enough to find a way to kill a goddess and steal her powers. The I24 arcs have you forming your own mercenary group where you have praetorian big hitters working under you and ultimately defeat the most powerful psychic in the world. Mind you, I never felt the henchman thing even in I6. I didn't get the complaints back in the day and I don't get them now. It's not like hero-side treats you as a fully powered Superman as soon as level 4, when contacts tell you to be careful fighting street gangs. Yet there's this expectation the player character should be Lex Luthor already on top of his evil empire when he steps out of the villain tutorial. There's probably a perception rift that can't be fixed in that some people play this game purely as a power trip whereas some players like to be part of an universe. Typical power trips are unrealistic on both sides, but much easier to accomodate on hero side ("punch things real hard to save the world") than on villain side ("be the master of the universe and somehow don't have to use diplomacy despite endless superpowered individuals at your level or above").

We gain a need to improve, either by figuring stuff out (personal milestone) or asking other players (community engagement). We gain some level of character progression, gradually earning a full build. I think your proposed solution only guts further aspects of the game that, arguably, have been diminished too much already. It's one step further towards insta 50 with IOs and incarnates. You can't decisively name THE currently-optimal thing, and that's a good thing. That search for what works - and the different thoughts and strategies each player will have - are part of the game. Your suggestion would cut down much of this range of options in favor of a hardcoded path.

Both Storm/ and /Rad used to not be that great. Well, I might catch some flak for that, so let's rephrase it: some of the latest issue changes as well as HC improvements make both Storm/ and /Rad significantly better than they used to be, which might explain the silence on old Live forums. On the Storm side you can stuff KB to KD procs as well as turn Tornado and LS into extreme damage powers with procs. On the Rad side you've got fast snipes, crashless nukes and loads of options for procs in your attacks. I don't see any particular reason for the combo to be shunned. Properly built, it should be a powerhouse.

The idea radio missions are less efficient by orders of magnitude has to be the strangest thing out of this thread so far. Radio missions are... missions. In which you fight normal enemies. Who give the same amount of exp and inf as every other enemy in the game. (Except AE, where enemies actually only give *half* of the inf and exp.) There's nothing special about radio missions that makes them unsuitable for generating large amounts of influence. Crank the rep as high as you can handle, get going, and you'll see the goods coming. What is more likely: pickup groups where people stand around doing nothing until they have 8 players, then spend a few minutes picking a Council mission specifically, then go to the mission, then wait at the door for everyone to get in, then look at each other silently until someone finally gets started... then repeat the process from scratch after the mission is done because 1 or 2 players had to go... These groups? Yeah, they won't make much influence. This isn't a problem with radio missions.

I view the 10 minutes cooldown on Lore as more significant than the 2 minutes cooldown on Hybrid. i.e., if you use Hybrid for an AV in a TF, generally you'll have Hybrid recharged for the next AV fight in the next mission. On the other hand you have to pick and choose the times you use Lore. Then there's Lore being pets, and doing ludicrous damage. Against a Pylon, the resulting numbers are hard to translate into relevant data for overall performance. Hybrid is milder in comparison, it just boosts your damage. I think your counterpoint is valid. Putting the line at Lore but not Hybrid is somewhat arbitrary. It makes sense to me, but it might not to everyone.

From multiboxing incarnate arcs or Apex/TinM, I believe there's no participation requirement in those activities. My leeches get Rares and Very Rares just as often as my active character.

This looks like something I've seen before... Down to the Analyze Weakness +tohit meant to represent Achilles Heel's -res in an older Mids version that didn't take it. 😛 I don't think there's much leeway to add any ST damage, save for breaking sets in Mind Probe and such to add procs (but then, if you're not recharge boosted from external sources, you don't have enough recharge to run the optimal chain). If you want more AoE damage, it's possible to cull down Unbreakable Guard sets to 2 pieces (res, res/end), get rid of Meltdown and pick Psi Shockwave instead. But really, AoE output is more than fine with Gaussianed Aim + Ground Zero + Inferno + Fireball as an opening salvo every ~25 seconds. I have toyed with both options extensively, and as fun as Psi Shockwave is, it's not worth it IMHO.

While true, it's also worth noting that response has no accuracy whatsoever given the radical differences between RL economy and CoH economy. The comparison isn't between tomatoes and potatoes, but between tomatoes and steam-powered rocket ships from an alternate reality. Unfortunately the AR scientists call their rocket ships "potato", and so dimensional travelers with a hate for the vegetable are appaled at their space program. It's possible to find a way to get offended by anything if one tries hard enough, but the same level of effort could probably make that same person a billionaire. Even by listing drops for 1 inf on the AH, mind you. Heck, we've all started from scratch and in the first week there was *no* market to speak of. I built my main in possibly the most inefficient way, burning empyrean merits into reward merits to buy purples, PVP IOs and LotGs 1 recipe at a time, 100 merits a pop. MSR raids? Let's just say I'm a potato hater, because I missed that boat, hard. AE farms? It took me an argument on the forums months later to realise meteor farms were a thing worth doing. Incidentally, the HC economy is much closer to a communist utopia than a free market system. We've got hard price caps on close to every object: reward merits can be used to buy most things, and reward merits have a fixed inf cost. The workers literally own the means of production, as you get drops out of thin air by fighting infinitely generated mobs or completing similarly infinite tasks. Capital can be accumulated, but can never compound - and more importantly, because we're playing a video game there is no power/governance advantage you can get to by accumulating massive amounts of capital. There is even a strong case to make for the "State" itself (HC staff) as a representation of the ideal communist party: - truly benevolent towards its people - no cult of personality (ok, maybe a little cult of personality. We all love Jimmy) - applies interventionism in carefully targeted scenarios to redirect labor towards a wider breadth of the industry - leaves leeway for some level of personal motivation in earning rewards and ergo working Last but not least, look at the favicon on top of that forum tab. Red and proud! 🥳

Late to the party, but this is me as well. Stalker Eagle's Claw does higher damage with higher recharge. Coupled with guaranteed crits, it feels great and a must have in your attack chain. There's something wrong when your T9 is a skippable power. The whole EC boosting your crit chance for a millisecond never sat well with me. I just leaped in the air and kicked that malta sapper, now let me crit for extra damage!! Except, uh, I just murdered the hell out of this guy's face arrested the perp, so now I'm tabbing for another target and my crit bonus is gone. At the very least we should retain the crit boost until the next hit. IMHO, EC looks awesome enough it *deserves* to have its recharge raised to 20s on all versions, and damage adjusted upwards in proportion. There's so many ST attacks in MA you're not going to find gaps in your attack chain even on SOs, unless you skip Thunder Kick.

I feel the same way. Obviously. Disregard the 10 minutes I just spent clicking through a few months worth of leaderboard.

What if income inequality was a good thing? In an economy where: - capital cannot grow passively - goods can be produced infinitely - barriers to entry are nonexistent "Income inequality" is really just another way to spell out the long road of betterment you can choose to take (or not, if your interests lie elsewhere).

For rough numbers on this, the bonus damage is +70% for Power Burst and +100% for Whirling Hands. This is base damage, or at least it's definitely affected by enhancements as you would expect. Bonesmasher also consumes Energy Focus to do a Weaken-like (reverse Power Boost) effect.

I'll take the opposite side of that argument: I find toggled Hybrid times more realistic than untoggled. Encounters that require 2+ minutes of sustained DPS are significantly less common than the other way around. You're basically looking at AV fights, strictly solo and generally excluding insps or any extras. "Burst" DPS over an entire 2 minutes is going to be more meaningful to 90%, 95%, perhaps even 99% of your character performance, because so very few encounters will require that level of ST focus out of you for more than 2 minutes. Against boss level mobs and below during actual gameplay, it's basically a wash whether you deal 300 or 350 DPS. Time spent moving and even picking targets likely accounts for a bigger difference. I'll go one further: IMHO the reason people like to post without Hybrid is for the sake of simplicity ("if it's not perma, I'm not using it"). Ideally you want to have both toggled on and toggled off runs to see how much variance it gives your particular build. And if you care strongly about having as accurate a number as can be, you'd then average the numbers (provided you do sub 2 minutes runs with Hybrid on, anyway. or you can do more complicated math to account for Hybrid uptime in longer runs).

I'd settle for a 3-5 minutes duration Voltaic Sentinel. At that length, it would become an undeniably worthwhile cast, without changing anything about the current way the power functions.

Fantastic thread, Yomo. For all the speedrunning interest we're seeing in Task Forces, I'd love to see similar attempts at influence generation. There's really cool strategies to design around the challenge. Getting Atlas explo badges for 5 merits?? What a neat trick!

I think a fire/bio could reach sub 2 minutes. For contrast, my fire/rad generally averages 3 minutes with top runs around the 2 minutes mark. This is without Meltdown, which is a wash due to its animation time; so a fire/bio has all the same tools + extra. (Of course, these times come with a complete disregard for softcapped defenses. 😉 ) In a nutshell: leveraging procs, hybrid, offensive adaptation, blaze -> mind probe -> flares -> blaze -> dominate -> fireball with gaussianed aim + arma/fury inferno whenever up. You might be able to use BB to good effect, but in (limited) testing I found it to come out about the same, and I don't want to deal with an extra power pick + its side effects in regular gameplay. Edit: @HelenCarnate has posted a 2:05 time for his fire/nin: So that's an approach if you like damage *and* defense. It also suggests fire/bio might be capable of great DPS feats. 🙂

Invul/Dual Blades Tanker Musc T3, Degen T3 Blinding Feint -> Ablating Strike -> Sweeping Strike -> Ablating Strike (slight gap before each AS) Heca + Achilles -res in AS Arma + Fury -res in SS 8:55 = 199 DPS I mained a DB/Inv scrapper for the longest time on Live. Her pylon times back then were roughly in the same ballpark. This tanker boasts greater survivability, and (now) wider cones/AoEs hitting more enemies. The power creep is real. (I love it.)

Unai Kemen (?) still has the mission, but on a timer.

I had this Plant/Energy Dominator project to make good use of the new buffs. Alas, undocumented in the patch notes, the Energy Focus mechanic boosting Power Burst and Whirling Hands is also consumed by Bone Smasher for a Weaken-like effect. Doesn't work so well with a planned Bone Smasher -> Total Focus -> Bone Smasher -> Power Burst -> Sniper Blast attack chain! One of the draws was the ability to slot the +dam ATO in Bone Smasher. So I moved on to a Fire/Energy Dominator, to use Char -> TF -> Char -> Burst -> Snipe. This isn't so bad... Except there's a couple quirks to Energy Focus. First, it has some sort of hidden cooldown, which as far as I can tell is in the 15 seconds range, during which you can't get a new charge of Energy Focus. Second, you sometimes lose a charge of Energy Focus right after getting it; I think this is also cooldown related, as I can reliably get charges if I use TF ~20 seconds apart. (And you really want Energy Focus, the damage bonus is huge: ~+70% for Power Burst, and ~100% for Whirling Hands. This effectively turns your Power Burst into a second Total Focus at range.) Nonetheless, with a new TF animation at 2.64s, a new Power Burst at 1.848s and our fast snipe in the 1.488s range, I think there's still some promise. Got one run with Musc T3, Ageless T4, Degen T1 at 3:11 = 328 DPS. Some end issues to solve, some build issues to fix. I made the choice to slot KB to KD procs in Snipe and Burst, and these could be damage procs (really, you're going to stop most KB with Fire Cages). Likewise, I have the Energy Font proc in Total Focus. Which feels like... absolute garbage. The summoned pet does flimsy -1 ticks for a little bit, when it doesn't plain forget to attack. It might be for the best to replace it with a standard damage proc. All this faffing about /nrg and settling back on fire/ really brings to mind: why not work on my previous Fire/Fire dom some more? Using Fire Blast as a staple move and Blaze only once every two passes didn't sit well for me: in actual gameplay, you want to spam that Blaze first thing as it has the best DPA. The consequence of my previous attack chain was that Blaze lacked the Apoc proc that would make it slightly more damaging. So I gave her a respec to be slightly more survivability oriented, moved to Melee Hybrid, and changed the attack chain to Blaze -> Char -> BB -> Blaze -> Char -> Fire Blast -> (gap). The gap can be easily filled with one of many clicks anyway. 1:27 = 568 DPS 1:48 = 482 DPS (got kb'ed 3 times with the dropship shooting. I forgot Dominators had Domination. Didn't put it in my tray post respec!) 1:33 = 540 DPS 1:27 = 568 DPS 1:28 = 563 DPS 1:51 = 473 DPS (poor endurance management led to a full detoggle) 1:32 = 544 DPS 1:46 = 489 DPS (no imps, melee range - with Hot Feet having an Arma proc and Fury -res) 1:57 = 455 DPS (no imps, melee range) 1:50 = 476 DPS (no imps, melee range) 1:35 = 531 DPS 1:40 = 511 DPS (with Hybrid Assault back on, and active) Also died no less than 3 times, which tempers the results somewhat. I probably would have survived if I used Melee Hybrid preventively (after the first hit), but there's always the temptation to use as little clicks as possible when testing DPS. 😉 500+ DPS at "range"...ish. Yum. There's extra power to be had with buffs/amplifiers too, thanks to gaps.

I vote scrapper. On that particular combo the damage can be as good as the stalker or close enough it doesn't matter, while you also get a taunt aura, more -res and slightly better survivability to top it off.