Zect

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 Also: critting aoe's. I sometimes encounter people who have severely outdated/clueless opinions on stalkers, like I once met someone who thought that all stalkers can do is slow AS - basically still living in i23 or something.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.

I'm personally looking forward to the PPM system balance pass, and hope it happens sooner or later. Nevertheless, even if that system were fixed, my core arguments of large slot-efficiency gains, tension between KB2KD procs and 6th-piece bonuses, and this change further pandering to the un-fun, boring mass-aoe meta still stand.

I mean, this just shows your ignorance of the slotting strategy I am using as an example. Just because you aren't aware of how they work, or aren't able to make them work, and are only able to use a more conventional slotting, doesn't mean you can dismiss the balance implications for such builds out of hand. My point was to demonstrate an example of the slot-efficiency that can be gained even when purple IO's are used, using highly effective procbombing builds as a showcase, hence making a powerful balance argument against this ignorant suggestion. Your attempts at nit-picking aside, you've yet to address any of my core points of 1) huge slot-efficiency gain for all builds by saving multiple KB2KD's and turning them into enhancng/set-bonus-granting slots; and 2) removal of the tension between 6th-piece bonuses and a KB2KD proc, which forces tradeoffs, choices and build diversity.

What's easy is irrelevant; what matters is what's good for the game.

This set allows knockback-heavy powersets to gain far too much slot-efficiency. We'll use energy blast as an example. A typical nrg build is 3 ST blasts, 2 aoe's and a nuke, for 6 powers. That's 6 KB2KD procs, at a cost of 6 slots. Slotting 6x Ignorant Suggestion in one of the ST blasts is only 5 added slots, so that's 1 free slot right off the bat. It also comes with a purple (!) damage proc (1 slot), 15% accuracy and 6% damage as set bonuses, and enhancement value for the power itself. You have turned 6 slots with formerly gave no enhancement value nor set bonuses into 6 slots that now give purple scalar enhancement value and purple set bonuses and purple damage procs. That's 6 more slots, at the least. Not having to slot a KB2KD in the remaining powers has implications far beyond merely increasing slot-efficiency. Take this example procbombing nrg ST blast slot loadout for power burst: Force feedback proc explosive strikes proc gladiator's javelin proc apoc proc +5 apoc: dmg KB2KD proc Currently, due to the KB2KD proc, it is very hard to max out damage enhancement in the power. A +5 purple single is only 66%. Even musculature core would put it at 15% below the new ED cap. Musc core + overwhelming force would cap it, but both OF and apoc are unique, so this can't be repeated across the set. This introduces tradeoffs and choices that must be made in order to maximize the dps output of each of the energy blast powers. We need to choose between procs and enhancements, and this caps the power of such procbombing builds. With the need for a KB2KD proc removed, the set can now be slotted as follows: Force feedback proc explosive strikes proc gladiator's javelin proc apoc proc +5 apoc: dmg 53 Nucleolus This gives ED-capped (95%) damage enhancement. In other words, your suggestion is a gain of +29%, minimum, damage enhancement across every power of this build. That's a free alpha slot, before we even get into the advantage of using boosted frankenslotting to patch up other common weaknesses of such builds (such as low endredux enhancement and corresponding high eps cost) which use of KB2KD procs would enforce. I need to emphasize that this situation is by no means not unique to energy blast. For example, stormies have to choose between KB2KD and 6x expedient reinforcement in their slotting of tornado. Either they mitigate the knockback, or they sacrifice the set bonuses. They also cannot slot 6x thunderstrike or 6x ATIO in lightning storm if they want a KB2KD there. These all lead to interesting build design choices and tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are good because they lead to build diversity. Ultimately, though, all these terrible knockback suggestions fail to fix the real issue, if you could call it that, with knockback. There aren't really enough situations where KB is more valuable than herding up enemies into a tight clump and burning them down. We don't need more options to remove KB from the game. We need to give rise to different and equally viable strategies that can compete with the oppressive, boring, unfun, mass-aoe meta.

I like that you have to pay a slot for the KB2KD proc to turn it into knockdown. It introduces interesting design tradeoffs, especially when the proc competes with 6th set bonuses and other desired procs. Therefore, this suggestion gets a no from me. However, what I would be in favor of is adding new mobs to existing enemy groups that are best dealt with using KB. KB is just too disfavored by the oppressive, un-fun mass-aoe meta, even though nobody will come out and say it. You never hear anyone asking for a toggle to turn KD powers into KB.

Without knowing your incarnate strategy (even if it's just "I don't use incarnates") little can be said. When asking for critique, always state what alpha and destiny you intend to use, if any. They have a game changing affect how we go about achieving our build goals. I do not recommend SL-only builds after the typed defense overhaul; they are brittle unless you know what you are doing. I recommend rainbow (all def except psi) or SLR, at the minimum. Here is an example of how to add enough ranged def on your build to hit about 44% ranged def: 6x coercive persuasion - up from 5 6x artillery - replaces posiblast 6x thunderstrikes - up from 4 6x expedient reinforcement in Jack - replaces edict 5x sting of the manticore - replaces apocs; prop up rech enhancement with the 6th slot if need be 2x botz in SS This loses only 2.5% rech, though it costs a lot more slots. The 6th piece bonuses from armageddon and many small resist bonuses you have are doing relatively little for you, compared to the mitigation a more comprehensive softcap would. Resist bonuses increase in efficacy the closer you are to the cap, so as an unarmored AT, it is difficult to make them worth the slots - and many of these are 6th piece bonuses. Dominator builds are tight and need to be very focused on what they pursue so you should consider carefully if these tiny bonuses are doing you enough good. Totn is a set with very niche uses; you are probably better off slotting 5x panacea/doctored + 1x common acc IO for the rech. I dislike psychic scream and would rather have ice storm for an all taoe/pbaoe aoe loadout, but that's my playstyle. Your build seems designed around hoarfrost. You can save some slots by reslotting as 2x 53 D-sync reconstructions - provides more rech enhancement than 6x prevmed, accolades make up the missing HP and my panacea suggestion above makes up most of the rech. Losing the slots from this and your aoe immob would help build for ranged defense. If you insist on getting a rech bonus here you can cut the downtime by nearly a third (35.9s --> 24.7) by replacing with 5x panacea (boost all the pieces with rech to +5) and 1x rech common. This loses only 1.25% global rech.

The reason cold is considered better is that it produces much more -res, and -res is the king of debuffs because it multiplies damage dealt. Cold stacks 2x sleet and heatloss (which also gives -res). Not even TA produces this amount of -res, using disruption arrow again only relocates the beacon. -Regen is in general much less important than -res given the dps of modern toons. Benumb is permanent on high end colds, hence the lower recharge of lingering rad is not significant. Cold does not have -tohit, while Rad has the full set of standard debuffs. Cold gets +def shields instead, which are superior (not affected by purple patch or AV resists) at the cost of not protecting the cold themself. When comparing debuff sets, there are two axis to consider: 1) the spread of debuffs and 2) the amount of -res, the most important debuff, they can stack. Some sets do better on 1), others on 2), some are good at both. Rad is high on 1) (full set of standard debuffs, -dmg -tohit -rech -regen -res -def) and only midrange on 2) (neither 2 -res powers to stack nor doublestackable -res power, so only -30%). Cold is high on 1) (misses only -tohit) and best in class on 2). (-60%, another -30% 1/3 of the time) Edit: I need to clarify that this is in the context of debuffing AV's and other tough foes in team contexts, such as 4* hard mode etc. This is not to mean that cold is necessarily overall a superior set to rad. If you are soloing, cold shields do nothing for you, while rad's +rech does.

Time is defensively very powerful, among the most survivable of all support sets. It can easily softcap multiple positions even without fighting pool, and live comfortably in melee. In hardmodes, you really want to tag enemies with time’s junction, since the -dmg is valuable, and to be able to support teammates with your powerful buffs, 3 of which are pbaoe. Being survivable enough to join the huddle is a significant tactical advantage. You can try to play midfield, and stay close enough that your pbaoe buff/debuffs affect the frontline without enemies being able to melee you. This is still a useful skill to learn, because there are certain things in hardmodes that cannot be safely tanked; however if your question is “should I only build for ranged def and adopt a range hoverblasting strategy for mitigation”, the answer is that there is no need for this to be your default on time. I have a lot of time fenders and corrs, of varying blast sets, with soul epic. I play them aggressively in melee, using powerboosted farsight and soul drain to deliver incredible supportive and damage output, while shrugging off huge amounts of damage with my powerful, multilayered defenses.