Zect

A stone tank using granite is able to devote many slots to procs while maintaining superior defensive ability. Here is a build (not by me) that demonstrates the concept; it's one of the few high-quality builds (of any AT or powerset) on the forums - see the "in-granite proc build" section. The key takeaway is that granite provides a large amount of defensive power, allowing build capacity that would normally be spent on obtaining resists or def to be traded out for dps.

IO sets, and which categories of sets have what bonuses, are a very finely tuned aspect of balance. Resist/defense sets in general have weaker bonuses and lesser slot-efficiency, for example, because otherwise it would be too easy for armored AT's to stack up on powerful bonuses. I have many of my own speculations as to why healing sets have no purple set, but the most obvious one would be the existence of spiritual alpha: notice how dps AT's are carefully prevented from having a dmg/rech, dmg/acc or even dmg/endrdx alpha, for example, but healing AT's are allowed to get rech/heal (in fact, the only alpha with rech as the schedule-A enhancement). The slot-efficiency afforded by a purple set added on top of that would be overpowering. To answer your question, the way you squeeze slot-efficiency out of things such as heal other and heal aura is not to heavily slot them. 2x 53 D-sync reconstruction + spiritual core paragon provides more rech enhancement and only 14% less heal enhancement than 6x preventive medicine.

Rad is not bad in hardmodes, especially since hardmode AV's are one of those targets where all of rad's -def is not overkill. I would not read too much into what combos you see; concept is king for most players (and that's perfectly fine) which is why fire/ice blast are common. 45% tri-vector def on a fender is pretty easy to get at the cost of serious procbombing. That's fairly okay on rad, since rad is only a middle of the road procbombing set (+2 procs per power over standard) albeit with the ability to fit 2x -res procs. Furthermore, as a cold, you are the most vulnerable one on the team because you cannot shield nor heal yourself, and inevitably, some people slack on refreshing their barriers or other buffs. So in the specific case of cold in hardmodes, it is usually worth building more defensively; but for babymode content, you can trade out the defense for other things. Note: when building for hardmode, def is less about strictly softcapping (you won't softcap with set bonuses alone), and more about providing a hefty layer of base defense that other people's buffs can stack on top of, so that you are constantly at 100%+ to all even during the tail end of the team's barrier destinies. Don't sweat it if you're a hair away from 45%; it's more important to have a relatively even defense spread without expending unreasonable amounts of slot-efficiency. The poorly-designed build above is a great example of how not to make a cold: Low SL resists heatloss over 43s from permanent (67.6% uptime - significantly less -res output and less +endurance) benumb over 24s from permanent (55.0% uptime - atrocious anti-AV debuffing output) pitiful 27.6s rech on sleet Critical design errors are the lack of hasten for double-stacked sleet and perma-heatloss/benumb, and eschewing a resist toggle only to spend tons of slots on minuscule resist bonuses - paying pounds to pinch pennies. Procbombing is great as a build strategy, but not when it comes at the cost of core competencies in your powerset. A 4* AV will easily regen more damage in those 24s your benumb is down than half your procs can do. Here's an example of how to design a cold with superior supportive and defensive capacity without sacrificing offensive output: Assigning the remaining 12 slots is left as an exercise for the reader; I do not provide complete builds on principle. Notice that despite all the silly little res bonuses the build upthread wastes dozens of slots chasing, my build still has superior resistances due to a focus on areas where assigned slots will make the most impact: taking a resist toggle and slotting the resist powers well, while using superior slot-efficiency to win back defense bonuses and twice the global rech. Note: if you want a different epic, you can put the oblits in irradiate instead of soul drain. By the way, you might want to compare the damage done by some of this build's attacks with those of the build upthread (turn off the decimation proc first). See how much dps the procs are gaining, then consider that my build outputs almost twice the -res.

Additional incarnate powers would only be a positive thing if they are exclusive with current incarnate slots. So e.g. you could have either genesis or destiny, but not both (slotting one power would unslot the other). That would at least have the potential to create interesting tradeoffs and new, refreshing playstyles, while not contributing to power creep.

First of all, the T whatever is absolutely meaningless outside of T1 and T2 (usable-while-mezzed, animation-time-normalized standard blasts across all blaster blast sets) and T9 (the nuke). A T5 is not necessarily stronger than a T4: you just get it later. You do not compare powers in the same tier to other powers in the same tier. You compare powers of the same function: nuke to nuke, taoe to taoe, cone to cone, aim to aim. Don't look at the absolute damage. Look at the damage per animation time. Water jet has 77 DPA. That's higher than either the T1 or T2. In terms of DPA, 77 DPA on the strong ST blast is on the lower end, along with such sets as pistols, energy and archery. The good sets have about 100 ish. Fire gets 140+, or something ridiculous like that, because it's fire. Why? Because it has strong aoe; a bevy of useful effects such as -def, slows, knockups and downs; varied damtypes that reduce the risk of running into strongly resistant enemies; ample procbombing opportunities, which need to be factored into a set's balance budget; the ability to self-heal, which only one other blaster primary does. To compensate for this strengths, it has a slight ST weakness. Extremely fair.

Seismic/storm/fire classical elementalist. It used to be that only controllers could get all 4 elements - earth/storm/fire or fire/storm/earth - but now fenders can be an elemental master, too. And fire epic is not bad in 4* aeons and ITF; being able to self-rez is very beneficial, because occasionally you will just roll low on defense and die, or someone forgets to refresh their barrier. GFS lets you kill the yellow nictus effectively, along with providing a high DPA attack and much-desired set diversity (fenders normally lack good access to melee attacks).

I revise my builds a fair bit. It's one of the great pleasures of the game - the actual combat is fairly lackluster, and I usually find it more fun to play mids (even if that activity is firmly grounded in my extensive amount of in-game combat experience). Some people believe there is no such thing as a perfect build, or no single correct way to build, but that misses the point. Perfection cannot be attained, but chasing perfection is where the fun lies. However, I have never had the experience of looking at an old build and thinking I must've been drunk when I made it. I can always retrace my line of thought, and see what my priorities and assumptions were when the old build was made, even if I now disagree with them or have since expanded my knowledge.

Kin requires little slotting to shine, while providing you with ample amounts of rech and end. It can support any primary well and offers immense build freedom. But if you are looking for uber builds, there are traditionally three roads to go down. One is to pair it with a very high DPA set (usually fire, because blaze is just that good, and rain works well with the scourge mechanic) and do lots of damage. Another is to pair it with a procbombing set such as DP or water. Kin can cap damage on its own without you needing to slot any damage in powers, freeing you to load a ton of procs on top of that for fairly ridiculous damage. The third is the old standby of sonic attack. It can no longer stack nearly -100% res on its own, but it is now a better blasting blast set.

Storm was incredibly powerful on live (if somewhat unfriendly to the meta, which is a good thing) and its power levels skyrocketed all the way to mars with the release of non-unique KB2KD procs. I'm convinced the set was balanced around not being able to group stuff up neatly, because when it does the amount of damage it produces as a support set is sickening. The problem with Empathy is that, like MM's, almost everyone plays them badly. I can count the number of good emps I have encountered in my entire history of playing coh on one hand. A simple way to rate your empath is to look at the number of players they can consistently (>90% of the time) maintain fortitude on. 0: Dogshit 1: Garbage 2: Sub-par 3: Average. This is what SO builds are capable of, so this is the bare minimum for an emp. 4: Elite 5: World-class 6-7: God - you can get enough rech to maintain 7, but given movement, people being out of range, using other attacks or buffs etc. even very good emps may slip back down to 6. Needless to say, nearly all emps are in the 0-1 range.

I think Stalkers are extremely underrated. It's so fun to go around 3 shotting +4 bosses. The dominant meta of Homecoming is mass-aoe/speedkill, so you might expect Stalkers, as a ST-focused AT, to be weak, and it's true they do not farm anywhere as well as a brute. However, on a team, the main bottleneck is actually the bosses that survive the initial broadside of aoe's and nukes. If you're able to ensure all the bosses die together with or shortly after the little trash, you make an extremely significant contribution to the team's progress. Also: critting aoe's. I sometimes encounter people who have severely outdated/clueless opinions on stalkers, like I once met someone who thought that all stalkers can do is slow AS - basically still living in i23 or something. I think a lot of people still remember the AT as it was on live and have not updated their views. Stalkers are also one of very few AT's and powersets that are (or at least give me a convincing illusion of being) somewhat skill-based. Compared to a mindless tank or brute lazily mashing footstomp, a stalker moving around the battlefield and picking out targets to shank, reacting to assassin's mark and assassin's focus procs, deciding when to scrap it out and when to go for a surgical strike feels more involved, more thoughtful. The little cower that minions do when you land a slow AS is not mechanically significant but feels very pleasing to me.

Homecoming has no hard pve content (if you interpret "hard" to mean "challenging"), the equivalent of e.g high Mythic keys in WoW, final Savage floors/Ultimate raids in FFXIV, etc - content that gates players by skill level. I wouldn't want such content in coh, anyway: the engine can't handle it. "Hard" mode is more accurately described as gear-gated, since the enemy stats compensate for years of power creep by incarnates and IO's, but no additional player skill is needed. If you mean "hard" as in "high time investment", you can just buy them off the MB, which you can't even do with most badges. For what it's worth, I do think achievements locked behind insane grinds are stupid. Even Paragon studios towards the end of the game seemed to agree, because they stopped making "Do ____ fifty million times" badges. Bragging rights rewards should be skill gated if they are gated at all.

It's trivia time! Out of the 14 blast sets in the game, how many cannot light their own OSA? (answer at the bottom of this post) Here are the sets that can: Fire, energy, elec, rad, beam rifle - You know what these do. Pistols - fire ammo. AR - flamethrower, ignite. Archery - explosive arrow, blazing arrow. Technically only the dot of blazing arrow is fire. I promise you will notice no difference in play. Sonic - all attacks are half energy or pure energy. Water - Steam spray and geyser are fire damage. Yes, you can set oil on fire with water in coh. No, I am not kidding. Seismic - Meteor has fire damage. "But it's a nuke!" Yes, with about the same rech as OSA. Always use them together. This leaves the ones that can't: ...Especially since those easily get around the problem in 4* hardmode with reactive flawless interface. You're welcome.

Obviously, the thread topic is a horrible and poorly-thought-out idea; but the spirit of the request is actually one that has been amply satisfied, multiple times, over coh's history. There have been requests for level 50's to have something to work towards for as long as there have been level 50's, and when IO's launched they were sort of the answer. Back then, a full IO build was a long-term project assembled piece by piece. But it wasn't enough, and as IO's proliferated the munchkins begged for more, more. Incarnates were the next answer, complete with a pseudo-leveling system in the form of incarnate shifts, and similarly, when they launched they were a titanic grind. The muchkins never got around to complaining, because incarnates as a system were still incomplete when the game was sunsetted. As SCoRE launched their private server they nerfed incarnate progression and added vet levels. You could get generous rewards that slowly diminished over the course of 100 levels, and still continue leveling indefinitely after that, just to enjoy the ding. In fact, this is precisely kind of thing that the OP is asking for. Yet now, it's still not enough; now they want boosts that keep increasing till 1000 levels. I personally think every 50 vet levels the game should temp-ban you for a day and remind you to go outdoors. The reality is that these people want a vertical progression game, where it is expected that characters keep crawling a gear or level treadmill and getting stronger ad infinitum, e.g. WoW or FFXIV. If you want a Sisyphean treadmill to climb, you should go play one of the games that are actually designed with that in mind. What coh needs is to commit fully to the horizontal progression MMO concept, where stuff just adds different ways of playing the game, but absolute character power at endgame remains capped. This means new tradeoffs, new specializations, new and different scenarios that demand unconventional solutions, new uses for old tools, and a dynamic and varied metagame. Options must be carefully scrutinized to avoid any possibility of power creep. IO sets are an example: the advent of Artillery enabled blasters to easily softcap ranged and hence, led to a large power spike in blaster defensive ability.

Addendum: I have been alerted to an error in the build provided in my last post. Phalanx fighting is set to 1 friendly in mids, which gives the build about 4% more def than it really has. I do not recommend build goals based on assuming a certain # of friendlies in range, for tactical reasons, and most builds you will find also assume 0 friendlies in range. So I need to discuss the "normal" way I get to 53.5%, which is to take both hover and CJ and have flight as the travel power. Adding hover slotted with an lotg: 7.5% and +5 lotg: defense will give precisely 53.5% ranged and aoe def (remember to remove the lotg from weave - rule of 5) and costs the same number of slots.

I think you can only fairly judge blasters after playing through 40-50. Low-mid level blasters are completely overpowered (nukes at 26 - lol, lmao even), while 40-50 has more troublesome mobs for blasters, such as nemesis vengeance and master illusionists. However, blasters in general are in a very good spot now, and are one of the ATs that benefit the most from the current meta of high dps, mass aoe, fast moving teams. With quick snipes and crashless nukes, plus the ability to diversify damtypes and round out attack chains with a well-chosen 2ndary, the blaster primaries are far closer to each other in ST and aoe than they ever were on live. You don't need to worry about this until you get heavily into dps optimization.

Your build makes a lot of the same mistakes that the OP, and forumites in general, do: low rech, inefficient slotting choices, and a very uneven defense spread. However, I do note with approval the much higher resistances, especially EN res which a lot of people criminally neglect. Also, do not skip clobber: it is the highest-DPA attack. If you skip it, I will find you and clobber you. A good IO shield tanker should have shield charge usable at least once per spawn, and double-stacked Active Defense (<=60s rech). The latter is critical, because the defense debuff resist it gives stacks with itself in pve. With 1 stack of active def, you have 66% -def res. With 2 stacks, you have 88% -def res. In other words, not stacking it means nearly thrice as much def lost to debuffs. You'll very quickly see the consequences of this design choice when a horde of romulus' scrappers runs into you. There are significant gaps in your uptime of active def, and also of hasten, due to low rech. Next, we need to talk def and res breakpoints. This is up to the environment the tank is expected to be played in, however as a point of reference, Incarnate critters have 63.5% tohit. Hence, common breakpoints are: 58.5% to all (incarnate softcap; most sources will round up and state 59% as the i-cap instead) 53.5% to all (capped with 2 min barrier core, or a defense amp) Little/no extra investment in defense; built for dps, resists or other benefits You have 60.1/50.9/54.6. So your melee is 1), ranged is slightly above 3) and aoe is at around 2). Make up your mind! On the resistance front, your build is a melee core/owts build. Such builds can be extremely tanky by cycling their defensive clicks to cap res and def. The question is how much res to build for: Melee core is 17% with 1 enemy in range, and another +1% per additional enemy. Owts's exotic resists, as well as most corruptor/controller res shields are 15% base; slotted, they are up to 22%. This suggests building for resists that are somewhere in the range of 68%-73% to all. Any more would be wasted, and we probably do not want to be too far below either. You mostly achieve these resist numbers (well done) but only after sacrificing significant amounts of rech and damahe procs (not so well done) due to your choice of inefficient sets, such as 6x perfect zinger (meant for typed def builds) as well as your many 5x GA sets (4x is fine for the EN res, 5x is not). Like many forumites you do not take an epic blast. Taoes and blasts are not only more effective than taunt (higher target cap), they offer valuable set diversity that allows us to take slot-efficient sets of categories we normally would not have access to. Don't be seduced by little psi/tox res bonuses like 5x unbreakable guard. 3/4 damage purple sets have 6% psi/tox res as the last piece bonus. 6% psi res is available for just 1 slot. In terms of res bonuses, the ranking goes Easiest to get F/C/Psi Tox S/L/E/N Hardest to get Prioritize SLEN res before assigning slots to the more easily obtained resistances. Also, unless you really know what you're doing, don't take resilient alpha. It is designed for sets with high resistance values. Agility will give you more slot-efficiency in most cases. Here is an example of how to achieve the stats we discussed above using much more efficient choices. Observe how just the addition of 2 epic blasts provides set diversity that helps us achieve high resistances, high recharge, double-stacked AD and a roughly 53.5% def to all spread. (Stats with 1 stack of ATIO proc, melee core toggled on and 1 foe in range: ) Assigning the 16 unspent slots is left as an exercise for the reader; I do not provide complete builds on principle. Here are some build goals you can try to add on: Try to i-cap or close to it, by taking Maneuvers or hover using the free power pool, and/or replacing the 3x adjusted targeting EN res so that you can fit 6x Gaussians in there. Just kidding; I think i-capping is a waste and more resistances/damage is far better. Try to raise tox/psi resists with as little slot expenditure as possible. Try, for example, replacing the 6th piece unbreakable guard bonus so that an additional impervium proc can fit there. By the way, this is what would properly be called "nearly perma-hasten" (2.6s off; agility core needs 155% global rech for permahasten, spiritual only ~147%). Right now, even if you 2-slot hasten in your build, it is 25s away from permanent even using mids' calculation (which is inaccurate; actual downtime is longer). 25s is longer than it takes my shield charge to recharge. That is not "nearly permahasten" on any planet in this galaxy. Finally, a word of warning: some people recommend using builds that use >1 stack of the tanker ATIO +res proc to cap resists. It is extremely effective when it works; however, might of the tanker is a 6PPM proc with 10s duration. The developer intent is clearly for you to have 1 stack of it, no more, and homecoming team has stated they intend to "look at" the PPM system. Feel free to enjoy it while it lasts, but don't be surprised when the great proc rebalancing comes and it no longer works. Fire tankers exploiting bugged burn learned that the hard way.

Powers that can be skipped without losing core functionality: From BR: Either charged or single shot. Usually skipping charged (the T2) is recommended, because single shot has a small bit of -regen when used on a disintegrating target. Arguably, lancer shot. It's not terrible, but non-sentinel BR has too many ST attacks and lancer is the one least necessary. The snipe is the highest-DPA attack. Piercing beam has -res. Disintegrate is necessary for the disintegrate mechanic. Lancer ends up without something to really guarantee it a spot, despite being a T3 blast that mezzes. From cold: Infrigidate: -def and -rech are valuable, but you already get a good amount of them from better, aoe powers that stack with themselves, like sleet. The -dmg is fire damage only and quite niche. Still has potential as a procbombing blast on some AT's and powersets, e.g. controllers who do not get a blast from their primary. Snow storm: -rech, see above. Not amazing for toggle pulling since it slows movement speed. It gives -fly, but flying critters are rare and you can just, you know, shoot them dead. However, for a solo fender the combo of snow storm + sleet helps keep enemies in the sleet more effectively. Arguably, frostwork. +maxhp is not bad, serving the same function as resistance in increasing ehp. It's also a health/resist unique mule. However, 1) the amount is small (it's based on your HP, not the target's), 2) some AT's and powersets benefit less - accoladed blasters, for example, are often less than 300 hp from their HP cap, while sets such as invuln self-cap hp - and 3) it's ST so some people find it a hassle to keep it up on multiple targets. Coh players can barely output more than 1 fortitude at once; I doubt they will really use frostworks even if they take it. Fenders on power heavy builds (fighting + dark epic for example) may skip it. Depending on 2ndary layout, some coldfenders cannot skip both infrigidate and snowstorm. In that case, choose which you think is better for your playstyle and target content.

This build has plenty of issues, but I'll just point out two of the less obvious ones. The impervious skin proc is not unique, but the regeneration part of it is. If you slot two of them, you get the regeneration bonus only once and the status resist (useless for you) twice. Only the variable portion of phalanx fighting is enhanceable (the bonus that you get when friendlies stand next to you). The passive part ignores enhancement. Overall, this is yet another low-slot-efficiency tanker build that will deal with wonky recharges due to hasten being very far from permanent and defenses that are in a weird twilight zone between being i-capped and not. For reference, just to let you know this isn't some kind of personal attack against you, a shield tanker with: Agility core One of CJ/hover Weave Both 3% def uniques Powers properly enhanced with SO's ...Has ~49% def to all positions. You have all this, and 6x gaussians and some other defense sets, and your "no expense spared" build can only get 55/50/56 with mediocre resistances. Think about whether you're getting good value for your money. You ought to be able to either hit ~54% to all (i-capped with barrier), or dedicate build capacity to significantly higher resists across the board.

This build burns 2.2 eps just chilling on the sidewalk (fly off), out of 2.7 eps recovery. You then propose to use this meager budget of blue juice to power a host of extremely costly procbombed attacks with no endredux slotting. You don't even have a miracle; you really need one to make the build work, in both senses of the word. Both ageless core and cardiac are strongly recommended, else your Beam Rifle may end up being nothing more than a peashooter. (A Bean Rifle, perhaps.) Recommendations below are based on this assumption. You have too many attacks; you can drop one of these. Your endgame attack chain is some combination of disintegrate, lancer shot, piercing beam and the snipe, and you won't need the T1/2 blasts at all except as mules. Recommendation: Drop single shot or charged shot Disintegrate: 6x ATIO (whichever was in the dropped power) Tactics: 6x gaussian's This gives the same (positional) defense, keeps both ATIO sets, keeps the same number of procbombed powers, provides superior tohit and endredux slotting, and saves a power choice. I also saved you 150 million in winter IO's; if I weren't already a trillionaire, I would charge consultation fees. Drop this; take weave instead and go with a positional defense strat. Properly slotted weave will put you at 45% to ranged/aoe and you can hoverblast in complete safety. Right now, you're overcapped to SL and undercapped on all other defenses and positions. This also opens up the opportunity to take a different epic, for example, primal for power buildup that is both a build up and also boosts your bubbles, or an epic with a resist shield. By the way, your weave-less build made me burst out laughing. Not that you must take weave, but seeing a build with tough but not weave reminded me of all the complaining in the olden days from people who resented having to take 2 "useless" powers to get the weave they wanted. (Tough tends to be appreciated more in modern times.) You don't necessarily need PFF - however you provide no rationale for taking this power, nor any descriptions of playstyle, strategy, build goals, or any such information that is necessary in order to get good suggestions that are not merely forumites selling their personal preferences to you. I will note that while PFF has certain niche uses, 1) you cannot shoot or buff while it is on and 2) FF as a whole provides such powerful defense that most builds do not need it. Also, all the +runspeed uniques (which are not +movespeed, and have no effect on flying speed) you have on a flying build are really cute. It's almost as if you've foreseen you will run out of juice midair, and have to footslog the rest of the way to the bug war. You don't need this proc because tactics increases perception. Procs are not Jesus. Before slotting a proc, consider carefully what exactly it is doing for you and whether some other option might be better. This applies to all of the random procs you slotted in this very scatterbrained build - are you sure that isn't a shotgun you have instead of a laser rifle? Take this as an example. The purpose of the slotting seems muddled and unfocused; is it to self-buff with the tohit proc, to deal damage, to apply -res procs, or so on? The frozen blast proc comes with half a dual's worth of rech which is lowering the procrate of everything in this power. The procrate of the -res procs in this power as currently slotted are low (28%) so it won't apply them reliably, and they do not stack with the same -res procs you already have in your nuke. You have aim and tactics making the tohit proc much less useful as well. A more focused slotting with an eye to one or two main uses would achieve more, like 5x damage procs, 1x overwhelming force proc - aoe dps with some soft control. I'm just imagining the enemies' reaction when you shoot them, it tickles, and then 6 random effects go off. They must think you have some kind of joke party gun; a shenani-gun, perhaps. Recommend moving one of the ATIO sets from another blast to here. Then slot 5x apoc in that blast. This gains a purple damage proc while keeping other stats identical. You do not need the Rag KD proc in your ST chain because you already have knockback from your snipe. Either the heal or absorb from either of the ATIO sets would benefit you more. The psi resist bonus from the 6th Ragnarok (and all your random psi resist procs) is of little value to you if you heeded my weave advice above, since positional defense protects against most psi attacks. Those slots could be redirected to a miracle unique and recovery slotting in stamina and other powers to help fix the endurance situation. You have "too much" -KB (conventional wisdom is either 4pt, or 12pt, based on KB magnitude of common enemy attacks) with a -KB here and in PFF. You can drop the steadfast -kb and a psi resist proc and slot 3x gladiator's armor here, which also gives 3 points of -kb. If it's the EN res you want, you would be better off served slotting 4x shield wall (incl unique) in here for 4.5% EN res. You already have the unique slotted, so the real cost is only 3 slots, making it slot-efficient. BR is actually one of the better sets for procbombing, but this build is very unfocused in terms of what it's trying to achieve. You need better aim, not on your rifle but your build design goals.

EHP calculations depend significantly on the enemy's tohit, relative level, and rank. Many calculations naively assume 50% tohit (non-incarnate softcap), relative level +0, and minion rank. That is not the case for any mobs in the game that you want tanker survivability for. Here you go: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/12212-the-survivability-tool/ This will allow you to input your stats and the enemy's stats, and determine how long you can survive. It even attempts to factor in the effect of debuffs, if you want to. You don't need to take anyone's word for it: you can play with builds in mids, enter the stats, and everything is calculated for you using publicly known formulas for game mechanics. Finally, and I know the OP said specifically they were discounting it: don't discount damage. Survivability = mitigation x healing x dps Kill the enemy twice as fast, and you only need to live half as long.

The delayed mechanic is usually not critical, because it does not add bonus damage to the strongest attack (future pain). You are correct that while it does buff the pbaoe (end of time), that is only one target out of many and you still have to kill the rest. However, time wall is still valuable to stop AV's from running - if you've seen the infamous romulus hide and seek phenomenon, you know what I mean - and it even has a little -regen to help out in such situations. If given the choice between time wall and the level 1 melee attack, in most cases I would pick time wall because for an actual melee attack I would use future pain instead. However, you may have an immob from elsewhere in your powers or simply deem it not a concern.

I want new lores; however, while I'm not against lores of existing mobs, what I would prefer are more generic lore pets, possibly designed using the costume creator, that may suit a variety of concepts, such as the robots, phantoms, polar lights, etc. that we currently have. I want: Generic costumed supers - Wearing tights (phantoms are close, but they have no faces) Generic aliens - Wearing Biomorph/organic armor costume parts (BP are close, but very specifically ice-themed) Generic magic - Night ward living spells Generic steampunk - various gunslinger/steampunk parts Generic pulp adventurers - retro scifi parts Generic beastpeople - eagle and minotaur heads etc.

Was that so hard? Procbombing builds are not some alien technology; they are very mainstream, and highly effective. I don't know why you keep trying to downplay the slot-efficiency shown in my example. Obviously, few people would spend 6 slots to save the cost of just one KB2KD proc. We should be most concerned for those cases where adding such an IO set has the greatest possibility to add unwarranted combat power. That means sets with multiple KB powers, strong tension between desired 5th/6th piece bonuses and/or other procs, and build designs where such a proc competes with desired enhancement values, among others. Storm, energy blast, energy assault, etc. are all examples. The other terrible suggestion currently active in this forum would effectively turn all KB2KD procs into free slots. This one proposes to turn them into purple damage enhancers giving purple set bonuses with a purple damage proc. That's not a small gain by any measure. Finally, you keep bringing up seismic blast. Seismic was designed with KD in mind from the start; energy was not. Half of energy's damage comes in a better damtype, and it has no mechanic that interferes with hoverblasting (which I love, by the way; this is not a complaint. I like that they added a game mechanical reason to stay on the ground, instead of going ye olde hover + softcap ranged. That's the kind of diversity we need.) All the counterarguments boil down to "it's imbalanced, but it won't be that bad" or "making KB more viable is impossible/too hard, so let's just do this instead, it's easier". You know what's even easier? Not implementing this idea; developers wouldn't even have to do anything. If you give people the option to 1) eat their cake, 2) have their cake, or 3) eat their cake yet still have it, everyone will choose #3. If we remove #3, maybe some people will choose to eat their cake while others may save it for later. #1 and #2 are only relatively viable in the absence of #3. Don't naively believe "more options = more diversity". Diversity only increases if new options are relatively equal in consideration to the old.

PBU is on a long cooldown - 240s (vs 90s for aim), making it an every-other-spawn power in best case. Soul drain may be better overall, if you are able to take dark epic's soul drain which has every-spawn uptime. A reasonable soul drain that catches 5 enemies gives as much +dmg as PBU, and soul drain can slot the gaussian proc too. The disadvantage of the soul drain route is the higher cost in slots (it needs acc, though it also offers access to pbaoes and hence set diversity, which may be a net win), power choices (T3 vs T1) and the inability to pre-buff before engaging as with aim/BU. I think the -dmg from DP is underrated; however, for situations where you fight +3/4's, I think it only becomes worthwhile when you can stack it with a primary that also has significant -dmg of its own, something like dark (-37.5%) or TA's partly-irresistible PGA - can be your own powers or someone else's on the team. Otherwise, that 40% ish debuff gets slashed to 20% by the purple patch and against HM mobs that alone may not turn a 2 hit kill into a 3 hit kill.

I seem to remember when the strat for hamidon involved paradropping regiments of PA's into the goo. Now you know why electrolytic damage kills PA, one of very few things in the game that can do so. I also remember that when croatoa released, the ability for NPC's to fight each other (like the war in the vale) was hailed as some revolutionary new technology. Prior to this, enemies "fighting" only emoted at each other. I have very few memories of those days because the game just wasn't that good and I correspondingly played very little. Those memories I do have aren't too positive: little content, little loot, little variety in builds (there was just one objectively correct way to slot your attacks), etc. People in those days were a lot more likely to come with preconceptions from other MMO's, expect holy trinity gameplay, and then not know what to do with sets like TA (and later on, cold) that literally had no heal. While not every team was like this, there were certainly groups that wanted only an empath, or a stone tank (and those stone tanks wanted a pet kin), etc. As an example of how some people back then thought, there is a godawful empath fender guide on the cesspit known as gamefaqs, that recommends taking every power from emp/ and the medicine pool, and skipping the entire 2ndary. These days, people are generally more knowledgable about the game. Then again, given some of the builds I've seen, I suspect people haven't really changed, just moved on to different mistakes. I saw ED coming from a mile away, and for all that the munchkins hated him for it, Jack deserves respect for pushing through a change that was absolutely necessary. Where Jack really failed was as a manager and communicator, as always. You don't allow multiple issues to go by before pushing out such a nerf together with your first expac, let the bad press overshadow the launch, and also give the nerf an eminently mockable name such as "ED". ED should not have come in i6. It should've been nipped in beta, or in i1, at the very latest (and the IO system should have come much earlier). The fact it was not speaks to a severe lack of balance testing, gross incompetence, and a complete failure to manage player expectations.