Zect

You can try blowing up teammates with the crystals (they stun, to help you kill your team) and then blowing up the dead teammates with fallout. PvPvE baby!

Ideal rotation is hack disembowel hack headsplitter, requiring +304% rech in hack (replace a hack or disembowel with epic snipe when available). Low rech builds, especially you with no haste and no rech boost from your armor, can mix in parries e.g. hack disembowel parry hack headsplitter, or even hack disembowel hack (small gap) headsplitter depending on rech and procs. Most BS builds fit double -res procs in the single target rotation (achilles in hack or disembowel, gladiator's fury in headsplitter). Your problems with endurance drain are because you have shit energy def. Energy def is really hard to get on melee toons. Slot EN def and start dodging them elec attacks. Try 3x eradications in your aoes (boost to +5, it's a level 30 set so it has weak enhancement values), 3-4x reactive armor in your res toggles No steadfast +3% def to all - also gives res enhancement Combat jumping 3 slotted and heightened senses 1 slotted. Classic case of throwing away pounds to chase pennies 6x makos. Usually slotting positional def (melee, ranged, aoe) def on a typed defense (fire, cold, energy, etc) toon like your WP is a mistake. Positional def bonuses only give half the value in typed def, see. But 1 set of 6x mako's in a ST attack is not bad because EN def is so rare it sometimes is worth it even at half value, and you get SL res and a damage proc to boot. 5-6x winter's bite or 3x thunderstrike muled in an epic blast, 5x manticore's in an epic snipe, 4x basilisk's in an epic hold are also potential options depending on what epic you're willing to go with. Most builds don't need to go that far though. Panacea can go in health, perf shifter/ptransfer can go in stamina respectively to save a slot each Hack and parry are attacks. Slot them like attacks. All the strongest set bonuses come from attack IO sets, so it is rarely worth it to slot them as anything else. You can take 1 slot in parry to use as an lotg mule though. 3x impervium armor for psi def is useless, you will never accumulate enough psi def to be worth it. Aegis, reactive armor and unbreakable guards are the way to go. Kismet is permanently on if you put it in a toggle instead of in parry Good epics, assuming you have no strong ties to energy: Soul - moonbeam (snipe) and shadowmeld (+def all, short recharge). Mu - zapp (snipe) and ball lightning. Notably the only pick that lets you get both a snipe and an epic taoe for those who dislike melee cones. Psi - psi lance (snipe) and harmonic mind (regen, recov, endrdx). Ice - frozen spear (snipe) Snipes are overpowered, and one of many reasons scrappers are so high on ST damage compared to blasters. When you are in combat, snipes do less damage but are uninterruptible, becoming just another epic blast, albeit an extremely powerful one. Snipes gain bonus damage based on your +tohit buff so they gain damage from your kismet and tactics.

Against pure damage, and in the absence of external buffs, it is generally better to have 1 kind of mit (either def or res) capped rather than to have both halfway capped. The reason is mitigation in this game shows increasing, not diminishing, returns - against all principles of game balance and common sense. Going from 0% to 10% def is barely any difference. Go from 35% to 45% and you can afk in mobs. Brutes are not good at building for resists, so focus on def unless you are a res set or you are within easy reach of the res hardcap. Invuln for example will always hardcap SL res. I can tell you have energy drain toggled to the max and invincibility at 1, so you can't compare these builds anyway.

Tick 'show enhancement relative levels' (and below it is also your 'show damage per activation'). They are always taken into account in ED calculations and in damage, res etc. numbers, even if the +5 signs do not show. This back and forth makes me realize how so much of build design skills are taken for granted by veteran builders. Basics such as animation time and DPA, the PPM system and what affects procrate, how to calculate recharge time under the effect of varying recharge buffs, are probably already a lot to grasp for the average player. Then you get all the quirks of mids' and its interface, like what it does and does not calculate accurately. What does and does not stack from the same caster, and whether it stacks from a pseudopet. Weird and unexpected interactions (if I slot panacea chance for +HP/end in nature's lifegiving spores and put the patch under a teammate, who gets the proc?). Things like the heatloss-burnout interaction, 4* infiltration aggro radius, etc. Not even I know everything at the bottom of the iceberg.

Options > config > effects & maths Chance of damage: select 'average' View > tick 'show damage per activation'

Fightingless, 100% slow res, near permahasten, alpha only, 1 stack hardcap: 1.mbd Unbreakable guard is in static shield. If you need to unslot the adj targetings, e.g. because your 2ndary has feint instead of BU or you want gaussian's in the 6th slot, there are a couple ways to make up the missing res. You can replace some unbreakable guards with 4x titanium coatings for the SL res and split up ATIO2 into two sets of 3x for the EN res, for example. You can do the prestige sprint trick (all 4 prestige sprints plus normal sprint accept 2x celerity for 2.25 SL res).

The first thing that strikes me is why you are not using the ATIO1 proc to cap your resistances. You have procs turned off in punch, though that could be due to not wanting FF proc to show in mids. Might of the tanker proc is worth 6.7% res to all, which is a significant amount. (Note: one of the recent builds of mids does not apply the might of the tanker +res proc even if you turn it on, but it will work fine in game.) Secondly, while procs are generally good, some of your attacks might gain from slotting partial or full sets. For example, this is your KO blow. You could instead try this. Triple hec triple proc is a classic that many fenders/corrs/blasters will be familiar with. hecatomb proc, D, D/E This gives slightly more damage, and also grants 6% FC res, which will allow you to cut the winter's gift pieces. While slotting a damage proc usually beats slotting a damage enhancement, high damage attacks lose less from slotting enhancements over procs, and may even gain overall. It is always worth testing enhancements vs procs on high damage attacks to see what is a gain. Aoes are another example where the advantage of procs is much lessened, because procrate often gets shit on by area factor. This is how you slotted your foot stomp. (Last slot reserved for FF proc) Let's compare this with a set IO slotting (last slot ditto): all but D/R At first, it seems like a clear win for the procs, gaining 55.6, or +20.9% damage. However, note the lower recharge time on the 2nd footstomp. The 2nd slotting allows +30% more footstomps over the same period of time. Consider that the 2nd slotting means more knockdowns from foot stomp (= mitigation), more FF procs, less end cost, higher acc, and +15% acc, +10% rech and +6% of that FC res you seem to be slotting for, and the advantage of the procs is less clear-cut. No. Gamma boost gives end drain resistance, 86.5% of it. Always check your powers for important resists and other effects. Apart from pyronic and ionic the only really notable one is void radial. 30s of -50% damage. Note however that it's not as strong vs AV's as it looks on paper, because of how damage debuffs interact with resistance and how AV's usually have high res to their own damtype. Probably. FF procs have the best value when put in fast recharging aoes. A high chance to get a 5s proc every 9s when you foot stomp is pretty good. Change it to a 22s psinado, and it starts getting less hot. Napkin math suggests the one in punch has its procrate floored, so that's not going to be very good. It also depends on what you want the rech for. Results are more consistent with long-recharge powers than fast-recharging ones, like filler attacks. I am running out of time, but think about dropping your +3 def uniques and unslot some slots from weave, if you're truly all-in on res as you say. I wouldn't be comfortable with 65% slow res. And maybe optimize a little more for rech. If you can get to around 150-160% rech that will bring your rage close to double-rage territory, 65s recharge time. (5% from completing your adj targeting, 7.5% lotg, 10% 5x armageddon, 10% ageless radial, 110% existing global rech = 142.5%, and you have FF procs to help it along.) Finally, this is a personal thing but I like to slot rad therapy 5x panaceas instead. The meta is procs, but really, how many nukes do you need with GZ, footstomp and an epic aoe. I find the heal useful when soloing against stuff like vanguard or going full rambo on the ITF mission 1 stairs ambush.

This discussion gives me fond memories of the dawn of the IO era, when people were just figuring out how to softcap and get permahasten. Back then, the state of the art was dropping DA from your kat rotation to increase dps (procs were vastly weaker in that era so dps optimization was mostly DPA optimization), and SR was moderately meta because you could aid self uninterrupted with it to solo an AV for e-cock points. Good times, good times.

You will commonly see cardiac, musc and agility on shield tankers. If you are new to shield, I recommend cardiac. Shield is one of only 3 tanker armors that offer no support for the blue bar, and it has 4 toggles to the usual 3. Cardiac will solve most end problems and helps cut back on resistance slotting: cardiac core paragon is worth approximately 5% SL res and 2.5% ENFC res. The more of the following are true for you, the more cardiac is favored: you are not getting eps from your epic (no phys perfection or harmonic mind), not taking ageless of either flavor, are procbombing heavily and/or are taking renowned blue bar guzzlers like leadership. Musc (usually radial, since the endmod part can be used to wring more eps out of stamina and epic recovery powers) is not a bad choice either, though even on a shield, you may still be able to get better dps overall by trading cardiac's res for procs. I do not recommend agility, since the recharge counts as enhancement recharge (unlike rech that comes from set bonuses and buffs); it tanks your procrates and that hampers your ability to claw back dps. It's unlikely that you need to take vigor for the healing boost. Dark regen is already among the strongest heals in the game. To illustrate, unslotted against a single target: Dark regen: 30% of base hp, 30s rech Healing flames: 25% of base hp, 40s rech Dark regen is about 60% more hps than healing flames when both heals are used on cooldown. Not that vigor is bad, but my gut feeling is you are better off getting something else from the alpha, since you will already overheal a lot with dark regen. For shield, the most common way to get 45% def, 90% res is by chaining defensive clickies: melee core hybrid > rune > owts > rune on a 6 min cycle. The weakest power in this chain is melee core, worth 17% res to all with 1 target in melee. By putting ATIO1 +res proc in the filler attack, we can also maintain 2 stacks essentially permanently which adds another +13.4%. This lowers our resistance hardcap from 90% to a mere 59.6%. Then, we can afford to go another 1-2% lower: 1) the reactive defenses unique gives increased res when we take chip damage, and 2) melee core scales with foes in range, while rune and owts are stronger than it. In short, we should see res of between 57.6 to 59.6% from set bonuses alone. Here's an example of how to achieve these stats: Note deflection is slotted for res, instead of def. For tankers, it's usually better to get SL res from deflection and rely on set bonuses from unbreakable guard for melee def. Also note ATIO2 split into 2 sets of 3x, for the EN res. EN is the rarest res from set bonuses, and this is the most slot-efficient EN res in the entire IO system. While the bonuses from a set of 6x aren't bad, it's always worth considering if you would be better off splitting it up like this. Steadfast 3% should go in owts, to buff the non-SL res to be of the same strength as your other res clickies. Note that you don't need high FC res for non-farm content, so you could also trim that. You should adjust the build further depending on which alpha and destiny you take. There are three catches to this type of build. 1) This is extremely costly in terms of power choices. 4 powers spent on owts/rune means no substantial investment in epics. 2) The rech is terrible, because without epic attacks we have fewer options for rech. This is annoying when we are trying to get perma-souldrain and permahaste. Even ageless only lowers the requirement for permahasten to 158.8% global rech (incl hasten itself). It's up to you to decide how you will close the rech gap with incarnate powers, set bonuses and external resources like base empowerment buffs - the base rech buff is +20% rech. 3) Just in case you've never used it before, owts has a -60% end crash. It is unlikely that it will detoggle you since owts itself gives bonus recovery, but you should beware since it can crash at the same time as hasten. Recently I have begun experimenting with builds that replace melee/rune/owts with barrier destiny (can be considered permanent 5% def and res to all; and why not, after all you're giving the team grant cover too) and a defense amp (+7.5% res, +5% def to all). This route requires about 62.1 to 64.1% res to all plus 2 ATIO1 +res procs to hardcap res. Something like this would be almost resistance hardcapped and defense i-capped with a defense amp, for example.

Duh. Fortunately, that is not necessary to skim money off the market. All that's needed is for there to be a gap between the highest buy order and lowest sell order (and for that gap to exceed market fees). You're using a different definition of 'flipper' than I would argue is traditional, but otherwise agreed. The HC market is extremely resistant to attempts to throttle supply. Fungible items are a big part of it, but also things like the presence of converters and the loot structure in general. I have a lot more market firepower on HC than I ever did on live, but it's not worth it to bother trying to artificially engineer shortages on items. Low-effort profiteering like making money off the bid-ask spread, 'painting' the last 5 or even just buying to craft/convert is simply far easier and more effective.

I've installed 44% aoe def on your build while maintaining other stats as a case study of how to simultaneously build R/aoe def on a fender. This also gives you a more usable emp (-regen!) and an unbreakable guard unique. The main loss is the damage procs in the aoes. I want to highlight a few things. One, it's usually better to take musc radial over core on a fender. The small loss of damage is negligible on an AT with such a low damage scalar (screech loses only 4 damage for example) and the endmod enhancement can be used to drop a slot from stamina. If not taking musc radial, the other common option is intuition radial which buffs debuffs and damage. Two, your gaussian's proc is currently in amplify. This is perfectly fine, but you may also consider putting it in tactics - this also gives you a more usable tactics. Gaussian's rolls once for every target affected by tactics, even including pets, and the proc chance is pretty ridiculous on a team. This is considering you state you are building for a team. Finally, I actually encourage you to trim back on defense a little and build for 40% R/aoe (or only R) def. In the current meta, def is very abundant and nearly all teams will have someone else running maneuvers or other defense buffs, which will softcap you. This will free up a huge amount of build capacity (going from 40 -> 45 def is about twice as hard as 35 -> 40) and will allow you to fit more utility powers and damage procs in your build. Tweaking the build to achieve this is left as an exercise for the reader. My own rad/sonic is designed to have 40% R/aoe and run a defense amp for the last 5%. This also gives 7.5% res to all and mez protection, enabling me to carry other destinies than clarion. I also prefer to skip the 2nd filler aoe and take spirit drain instead, and I prefer to use a fly/hover toggle macro and take vengeance over evasive as the last lotg mule - vengeance is wipe prevention which I consider valuable. Defender (Radiation Emission - Sonic Attack) Edit2.mbd

Not personally. However, the marketing forum during the days of Live sometimes had a snobbish and frequently antagonistic attitude, which you can still see for yourself if you look at archives of the forums. During live, marketeers also added far less value to the market: there was no practical converter roulette, no level arbitrage (I buy a level 10 recipe and craft it for pennies, you buy it as a level 50 enhancement, and we cheat the crafting station out of 500k in crafting fees) and nonfungible items meant certain items were perpetually in shortage. Luck charms anyone? All this led to more frustration with the market and marketeers, quite a bit of it deserved, so I'm not surprised if some people from that era still carry a lot of resentment for marketeers. Flipping undeniably causes prices of flipped items to be higher than they otherwise would be. When you buy something for X and sell it for X+Y to pocket the difference Y, the amount Y does not appear out of thin air: it's paid by someone who could've paid only X instead. This is not mutually exclusive with the observation that inflation in HC does not exist. While prices have generally remained stable or fell slightly, maybe they would fall more if flipping did not exist. Hence, lack of inflation does not change the fact that flipping skims money off the market, because many other factors also influence trends in price. Flippers do help the market function by constantly having buy orders out and stock ready to sell, however. They may be doing a very unoptimized setup, farming with other players in a 8 person team coupled with badly played/built hitters or too many leeches. The reality is that the average farmer is pretty bad at what they are doing. In fact, I would go so far as to say the average person is generally terrible at their choice of activity whatever that might be: most people are fearful of knowledge and growth, content to do the bare minimum and unwilling to change. This can be immensely empowering, if you realize that it is very possible to excel when the average person is so bad. It will change your life to realize that with effort and drive, you can reliably place yourself in the top 5% of the human species in any field or endeavor. Luck and privilege are necessary to get into the 1%, but you can make yourself the nat 20 that nature rolled.

Ageless radial T4 gives: 42.5% -def res for 30s 21.25 -def res for 60s 21.25 -def res for 120s On a 120s cycle, and the 3 buffs stack. This means that you will have 85% DDR 1/4 of the time, 42.5% 1/4 of the time and 21.25% the remaining 1/2 of the time (which is WP levels of awful). Thinking that ageless radial will save your hide vs -def debuffs is a classic mistake. The good news is that most -def attacks are SL and Bio is designed to meet SL damage with resists, not defense (WP being the other set with similarly hybrid mitigation). Combined with tankers being grossly overpowered, most people who make this mistake don't get to deal with the consequences. A better counter to -def is to anticipate or recognize when non-SL -def attacks are incoming, and counter them appropriately with insps or non-def mitigation clicks, while outputting high dps to kill the critters in question.

Lotg on its own is powerful, but where it gets ridiculous is 1) it being in a defense set, and 2) also buffing defense itself (it has the same amount of def enhancement as a D/E or D/R piece). This means that e.g. on a fender, CJ or hover with an lotg +rech in it is +2.9% def to all and +7.5% rech. Now consider that +3.1% def and +7.5% rech are typically 4-6 piece bonuses, count how many slots worth of set bonuses one is getting from a single power with no slot investment. This level of slot-efficiency is unprecedented outside of unique pieces. The question is then why, given the obvious balance implications, lotg was designed this way. Since there is a wide variety of pool powers that give +def, realistically any toon can get 5x lotgs; defense sets are the one class that every AT has easy access to. This avoids the much more serious balance problem of some powersets/AT's being able to cap out on lotgs while others cannot. Being able to get 5x lotgs in turn is important because the IO system was intended to allow for permahasten, responding to player uproar over ED. If you look at dev communication from that era, being able to get 5 lotg's and permahasten was widely promoted. This does not mean that the developers, both Paragon and later HC, are entirely unaware of the imbalancing effects of high rech. Since the start of the Incarnate era they have gotten better at simply not allowing powers to be permanent, either through denying recharge enhancement (rune) or properly tuning the base rech (parasitic aura). New and revamped sets are also generally designed to have fewer skippable powers, which may be an attempt at re-introducing build tension and making the choice to mule lotgs less straightforward. However, I would like to see more efforts to counter the softcap meta through autohit attacks and debuffs, critters with varying tohit, short-duration tohit buffs, etc.

I'm back. So my question to OP is, why not all 3? You can rename toons freely, so level all 3 and transfer your preferred alias to the one you end up liking most. If you're only concerned about endgame performance, you can instantly level to 50 and gear for free on the test server. Leveling will highlight quirks of each combo, like elec armor only getting -KB while on the ground - you can get knocked back if you jump and are hit by a kb attack mid-jump. A lot of people will say shield/DM (I see it is the most popular option in your poll) because historically this is the most meta-friendly and optimal combo. If all you want is to be meta and optimal, which is what many people really want when they ask these types of questions, look no further. Shield is among the tanker armors that can get 45% def to all, 90% res to all (although this will be extremely tight if you intend to also take psi epic - you'll be starved for powers). Tanker shields have a number of unique advantages compared to its peer armors and shields of other AT's, such as being able to get ~87% -def resistance just by stacking the mez protection power; they do not need ageless radial destiny to get high -def resistance. It also sacrifices less dps for having so much mitigation. It's no surprise that when you add lifesteal to this you produce the most or 2nd most meatshieldy tank. However, I contend that you really do not need so much survivability for this easy-ass game. Styling on critters by making the objectively most overpowered toon is fun and all, but if you are looking to spend most of your time on 1 toon you might want to make sure the playfeel is right. Energize is not really a click heal in the vein of dark regen or healing flames, and does not give as much hps. Each use heals about 1.5 healing flames' worth (counting both the direct heal and the value of the regen), but it has a recharge 3 times as long. The main benefit is actually the massive endrdx bonus (stronger even than a cardiac core paragon and fully ED-busting). This, combined with elec armor's built-in rech bonus, makes elec armor one of the best procbombing sets. You also do not need dark consumption for end management if you have access to power sink. Power sink is on a completely different level - it recharges 3 times as fast and with energize will kill any endurance problems. Usually, tankers get more dps by taking a defensive alpha and slotting damage procs in their attacks, compared to slotting for res/def then taking a damage alpha. Elec armor has higher base res values than other resistance armor sets. An elec build with resilient core paragon can cap resistances without tough. Combined with the built-in rech and end management solutions this provides considerable build flexibility, frees you to invest heavily in epic and pool powers and to procbomb like a maniac. While cardiac will obviously help (and is one of the better alpha choices for dark/), don't forget the biggest solution to the dark regen end cost problem (and one that appears a lot earlier) which is the theft of essence: chance for +end proc. It rolls for each target hit by the power, so slotting it in dark regen and being careful to use it in big herds can actually get you more blue than you started out with. Good news: they have better radius. Dark consumption is only 8ft radius. Dark oblit is 22.5ft. You can see this visually when tanks and brutes use the same epic aoe on targets that are uniformly spaced, like training dummies in the Vanguard base or cimerorans on the wall. (However, IIRC real numbers will not show it, probably because on live there were never any effects that increased radius.) The reason for this is that a pbaoe's radius is actually its range attribute while a taoe's radius is its radius attribute. Melee pbaoes are all flagged to ignore range enhancement, which is why you cannot make them bigger by +range set bonuses. However, what gauntlet does is give +50% radius (and arc strength) and this does work on epic aoes. This is correct. Even powersink itself is only 30% chance for -recovery. I soloed +4/x8 ITF's with a few elec/*/mu combos; spamming powersink, elec fences and ball lightning did not stop bosses completely from attacking although it did seem to reduce incoming damage somewhat. It is not comparable to fender/corr sapping using +special boosted effects and 100% chance for -recovery powers, and is only a minor perk.