nihilii

It's an inevitable rule of speedrunning there has to be someone posting to say current records are no big deal. Perhaps they're right: the real achievement would be to see one such naysayer beat any of the posted times. Can't say I've ever seen *that* happen!

It looks good to me. 🙂

Combat Attributes on an Invul Sentinel with Dull Pain and accolades. HP and S/L res are blue, using Vigor-powered Rebirth caps regen, and spamming Rages to get to the damage cap. I *should* know all these numbers from experience, but I made sure to log in and test just before posting. :)

Damage - cap? 500% (+400%) Base HP - 1205 Max HP - 2088 Max Regeneration - 8.33%/s (2000%?) Max Resistance - 75%

I'm guessing in general the /elec proponents lean this way because /elec has superior end management tools. Personally. I would see it as a nonissue for an endgame build: you're likely going to want Ageless in any case. Invul pros: absurdly tough against S/L, great against anything else that is non-psi, some DDR, slow resist, end drain resist. Mostly passive so you don't have to click anything interrupting your TW flow. Cons: psi hole, does nothing to boost your damage. Elec pros: damage aura, recharge buff, hardcapped resistances against S/L/E, some resistances against psi, good slow resist, end drain immunity. Cons: no defense, no defense debuff resistance, more active mitigation (although still mostly passive). Personally I'd go invul because the least I have to redraw TW, the better; and native DDR + defense goes a long way towards not having to worry about mitigation in hard situations. But it's really a "think of what annoys you most, and pick the secondary that fixes it" sort of deal. Either build will be immensely powerful in the endgame.

IIRC the Market Crash robot isn't affected by -regen, so that's something to consider when attempting to solo it with a toon that relies heavily on -regen. But just about any duo should do. With 2 melee you can swap aggro between the two of you, which is very useful because the robot stacks -maxHP on the target he's attacking, until you're low enough you get oneshotted.

This hasn't been true for a long long time. Even on the NCSoft servers, Rage was changed to apply its -10000% damage debuff crash no matter if you stack it. On Homecoming, the defense debuff is also unavoidable. If you're fine now, you simply haven't noticed your crashes and you should be even fine-r after the patch. (Or you've found a very lucky bug.)

I don't understand why would anyone reroll a tanker they currently have based on these changes. Rage on Live: use it and you get a crash 100% of the time. Rage on Test: use it, and if you pay attention, you don't get a crash. But you could play exactly as on Live, and crash as often (and now the crash is lessened). What am I missing here?

I can't recall the math, but the Performance Shifter proc is about as efficient as a full slot, except not affected by end drains. On the flipside, you are relying on a proc that may or may not proc... But on average, you will come out ahead.

No first-hand experience, but I'm guessing StJ/Bio must be pretty far up if not the top dog. /bio in offensive mode really brings the pain with +dam *and* extra toxic damage. Stalkers lose the damage aura and the -res aura, but still, offensive mode alone is beastly. Power pools beyond Hasten is dealer's choice, epics will likely be soul for Moonbeam - another thing offensive mode helps with, the +tohit coupled with kismet and tactics ensures you get maximum damage out of it. For Incarnates the Musculature Alpha + Ageless Destiny + Assault Hybrid combo is a staple for DPS builds, now that we know procs work best by slotting as little recharge as you can get away with in your enhancements (and grabbing as much global recharge as you can). StJ/SD cannot be too far behind StJ/Bio in any case, and is likely a much better build for overall content. 🙂

I'd expect Fire/Fire to hold either the top spot or second place with Fire/Bio as the highest ST damage Sentinel build, at least against immobile targets. Burn lets you slot an Arma proc and a Fury of Glad -res proc, which should boost ST damage quite nicely. Presumably, you'd run something like... Burn > Blaze > Char > Cremate > Blaze > Blazing Blast > Burn > Blaze > Flares > Cremate > Blaze > Blazing Blast, I guess? (It's really twice the same attack chain with Flares replacing Char in the second run, as to trigger Opportunity and because Char overslotted with procs takes too long to recharge). Edit: I'm assuming the patch fixing Blazing Blast would be live by the time we test this. 😛

I played the Vigilant arc and really enjoyed it. Especially the cutscene, which I thought was much better choreographed than the average Paragon Studios cutscene. Thumbs up!

Super Strength is the third most popular Brute primary, and the most popular Tanker secondary. On Tankers, Super Strength is picked more than any other two secondaries put together, including the second most popular and the third most popular together.

I don't use any knockback myself but the suggestion sounds like a big no-no for the following reason: Players who currently enjoy knockback should not be punished for it, especially as their choice is (arguably) mechanically "inferior", or at least harder to handle in optimized scenarios. I think such a suggestion would only make sense if coupled with a buff to knockback enhancements. i.e., all knockback enhancements should be damage/knockback (giving the same bonus as a pure damage enhancement) and all IO knockback sets should have purple strength on their set bonuses.

Incidentally, I think you have the answer right here. A dark blast/invulnerability Sentinel can be built to be incredibly tough, coupling invul's natural sturdiness with the heal in dark blast and a hefty PBAOE tohit debuff in Blackstar. Dark blast also gets a 100% KD cone attack with the KB-to-KD IO. I have one such Sentinel, but built for damage. She still handles herself against the toughest +4/x8 groups with minimal insp use (if at all). I can only imagine if I built her for defense and took Melee Hybrid + Rebirth + Vigor instead of Assault Hybrid + Ageless + Musculature.

Wow, that was fast. Great job!

I think I recall when I used to play at 100 particles, it was barely noticeable. Whereas when everything is maxed out, there's a pulsating blue light that throbs back and forth on the whole area the blue flames will hit. There's also a loud noise when this blue light triggers (much louder than the actual hit), which lets you know how long you've got until the next blue flames. I play without sound myself, but I think devs have done as good a job as can be communicating what is about to happen, barring red messages telling you you're going to be hit by something (which, personally, I find immersion breaking and more annoying than anything; YMMV). There's no doubt the twitch skill requirements are far higher than most non-incarnate tasks ingame, but that's also a result of the rest of the game being so accomodating. So it's possible for players to do great in most of the game but be ass at this specific task. Slightly offtopic and perhaps you're aware of it already, but if you like running several instances, the /maxinactivefps command can work wonders. I run 3 high graphic settings instances on a 10 years old laptop using "/maxinactivefps 5". The load on the graphic card hardly differs from running just one instance, and whichever window I have focus on stays at 60 FPS.

To me, Apex is the most fun piece of content this game has. You can perform just fine as a melee character - a TW/bio scrapper currently holds the speed record for soloing it, in about 18 minutes. Personally, I've never had problem holding aggro either. You have a big warning flashing for seconds before the blue flames actually happen, giving you ample room to position yourself / pull mobs out of range. It's actually one of the few tasks ingame where Taunt is an objective plus, as the -range is useful to get Battle Maiden to step out of a blue patch. It does require one to move much more, which is a departure from the rest of the game, so I understand where the naysaying comes from (and could even see it as justified).

It's the most damaging secondary. It's beautiful. It's awesome. One of the arguable drawbacks of TW on other ATs is that you might get locked in a slow animation while taking a lot of damage, which might lead you to faceplant sometimes. A Tanker has enough survivability to use TW without ever worrying. Plus, with Bruising on Defensive Sweep, you're highly incentivized to spam that little cone for +15% melee defense. My SR/TW *skipped Follow Through*, one of the best ST attacks, and still soloed Honoree in the LGTF finale. Took no more than a few minutes. You know... Dull Pain having, Unstoppable popping Honoree. It blew my mind at the time. Playing a TW tanker feels like having a solid middle range Brute primary on top of Tanker mitigation.

I don't necessarily disagree with you on that one either, but it's still, to me, a completely different problem from saying people are having a kneejerk reaction from reading the title and not the body. *shrug*

I don't necessarily agree with everything you said, but I don't necessarily disagree with it either. I have no qualms with the OP of that thread, and greatly enjoyed the conversation (heated as it was). I do have qualms with GM Capocollo's post in that to me it characterizes those who disagreed with OP as overreacting and uninformed. There was no shortage of legitimate reasons to disagree with OP, and imho most posters by far were legitimate.

OP advocated for adding +20% passive recharge to all toons, cutting Hasten down to +25% or so, letting Hasten be doublestacked, changing all NPC HP... This is very different from having a click power doing +70% recharge (with the advantages and drawbacks coming with it). It was demonstrated OP's suggestion would indeed make builds using Hasten weaker, in answer to which OP and a couple other posters adopted the stance "Hasten is overpowered anyway". I'm not sure whether it makes sense to suggest people didn't read the thread. Most posters were "repeat offenders", and engaged at length with the (imho) increasingly ludicrous suggestions. The constant title edits was a slight topping of silliness on top of an overall crazy thread, not an isolated event bringing out a big bad horde of meanies to mercilessly harass OP.

Regen is actually the most popular secondary for Scrappers and Sentinels if you look at the datamining devs have done: Even on Brutes and Stalkers, it's middle of the pack. Of course, popularity != performance so this doesn't invalidate your suggestion, but I feel it was worth pointing out. 🙂

So much great work done in here. Chosen parameters make a lot of sense as a baseline. At the same time, seeing as this thread is already used in performance discussions elsewhere, I kinda want to say the testing parameters might make it even more removed from actual gameplay than Pylon testing, at least for some of us. Even on SOs. Level 50 mission on +0/x3 with no insps and no temps with /wp specifically, vs level 1 character filling his tray with lucks, using insps as they drop, starting on +0/x6, buying amplifiers, recovery serum as needed, and using any secondary. Day and night. Whereas if you need to deal ST damage during an extended period of time, your DPS baseline from a Pylon will mostly hold. I know most of the participants here are well aware of that, and aren't claiming this is the be-all end-all of balance testing. Not trying to downplay the effort either. Just voicing some thoughts. 🙂

I mean your slowest power (longer base recharge time).