Zect

I have a hypothesis that people view the rage crash as much worse than it is because of loss aversion. Essentially, humans view losses or setbacks as much more significant than equivalent gains or successes. Rage is perma-build up, but because it comes with a drawback attached, people rate it much worse than it really is. SS absolutely was a god-tier machine in the days of yore. You should've seen the sheer carnage an SS/fire brute could dish out with bugged burn and bugged rage. I'm half convinced the reason SS wasn't as prominent as it deserved to be is that the scrapper forums were munchkin central on Live and they didn't get SS.

Why not use superior IO's? Catalysts are quite cheap. I assume you're representing the IO's you have now. I recommend omitting the D/R piece of apoc instead. With your high global rech it will still recharge quickly enough, and this increases the procrate of the damage proc very slightly. All trollers should consider filling their ST hold with 5-6 damage procs. It is good dpa even by the standards of DPS AT's and this gives trollers a tool they otherwise have poor access too, i.e. damage. If you're a dom, then you can fill it with mez sets since doms get actual attacks. Underwhelming Presence is weak as a set; I'm curious what bonuses from this set attract you. I personally think the energy font is not that good, but it's a matter of taste. You don't need 6x lotg in maneuvers. 3 is not bad for the hp, maybe 4 if you're light on acc (but farsight gives +tohit), but if you want 5x for the SL res you may as well slot temp invuln properly. Evasive doesn't give +def in combat, so slotting it heavily is questionable. When slotting sets you sometimes stop short of a critical bonus. Only 4x hold purples in time stop, for example. I really think dodging powerful and highly beneficial set bonuses is the specialty of forum builders. I recommend pulling some slots from farsight to complete 5x panacea in temp selection (or get a rech boost elsewhere), and slotting farsight with membranes instead. This boosts both tohit and def instead of just def, while losing a negligible amount of rech. Beware that powerboost works differently on toggles and farsight. On toggles the boost lasts the duration of power boost. On farsight it lasts the duration of farsight. Mids' assumes the latter behavior for all powers including toggles leading to it overestimating defense. Powerboost increases farsight's def by +11.5% to all, so you should shoot for about 33.5% or above in mids to be capped. Some key pieces are missing such as steadfast protection +3 def to all - perhaps due to a lack of slots? On the other hand, elsewhere you pursue minor irrelevant bonuses - you don't need the 10% regen in expedient reinforcement when you can just, y'know, heal yourself. Consider an unbreakable guard +7.5% HP if you can scrounge a slot. Note that the recovery from chronoshift lasts only 30s, much shorter than the duration of the rech bonus. For this reason it's not necessarily worth it to slot chronoshift for recovery, but it depends on what you think you need. Energy torrent does not need KB2KD. Despite the description, it only does KD. I recommend tactics with the gaussian proc in it if you team a lot. Every 10s when it checks to see if it fires, it rolls once for every entity buffed by your tactics including pets and teammates. It has very high uptime. Enjoy before it gets fixed. Look at these suggested changes. R/AOE def softcap with powerboost, perma-chronoshift, better dps. Pulling a slot from hasten and leaving it with just a +5 common still leaves it only 2 seconds off perma, if you want a slot badly. Controller (Gravity Control - Time Manipulation).mbd

This build is pretty bad. (I also do not recommend hyperstrike builds, which are very low quality. They are a good exercise for novice builders in identifying common build design errors, though.) It doesn't utilize slot-efficient choices for the bonuses it's pursuing, so it wastes a lot of slots. See how you can get the same or more stats from a lot fewer sets: The brute ATIO when split up 3 and 3 gives 10% SL def, the most slot-efficient SL def in the entire game (tied with scrapper ATIO). Not taking advantage of this is a mistake. This also gives us the opportunity to move the 3xFF set to a place where its proc is more likely to be both useful and frequently procced, and the enhancement value of the FF pieces is put to good use. Judicious use of boosters helps shore up enhancement values without spending slots, and we avoid chasing positional defense bonuses such as 6x numina's to focus on more slot-efficient typed defense bonuses instead. And now the ATIO2 regen proc is actually in an attack you might want to use. I also burst out laughing when I saw invincibility toggled to 10, rage toggled to 2 and the FF proc toggled on. You're only going to get that performance a fraction of the time in the actual game. Sorry, but this is just mids-warrioring - you've made something that looks pretty in the builder without thought for whether this is a realistic depiction of the performance one might expect. You might as well take barrier and toggle that on instead; it would be equally honest. Brute (Super Strength - Invulnerability)2.mbd

Both are pretty good, since seismic smash and freezing touch are some of the best melee attacks in the game. I like earth for all-out offensive blappers since beryl crystals gives 33% of ED-busting acc. That's really significant; it's an alpha slot's worth of acc and helps enable procbombing builds.

Defense helps a lot. You can't get mezzed if the mezzes don't land, see. (However, as you noticed, a lot of mezzes - and a lot of the most dangerous attacks - are aoe so you need to build for that too and not just regular hoverblasting.) I like defense amps a lot. The great thing is, you can also get them without ever paying START a penny. They drop from super packs, which has 2 important benefits. 1) They can be claimed from character items wherever you go, even in combat. 2) Opening super packs is, on average, a small net profit if you sell the ATIOs.

Bio on a tanker doesn't need def/res (beyond the uniques, incidental bonuses, and the lowest-hanging fruit), and it definitely doesn't need SL def. These are the stats of a bio armor tanker with just the uniques, fighting, CJ, and 1 stack of ATIO +res proc: So with no set bonuses, no incarnates, and no nothing, you're 11% away from the SL res hardcap and 4.2% def away from the FCEN def softcap. (And just to drive home how much mit it has out of the box, the above stats are with the malus from offensive adaptation turned on.) The set is designed to mitigate SL damage with res and FCEN with def. Let it do its job. Cap your SL res, take maneuvers or something for FCEN def and call it a day. Bio has no native -def resist, and can't get enough from ageless radial to matter. The set is designed to absorb damage with colossal amounts of sustain, and kill enemies with offensive buffs of +dmg +tohit and offensive debuffs of -res -regen. Let it do its job. Build for rech and slow resist, and fill everything you can with damage procs. Rech not only increases DPS, but boosts the throughput of your sustain (heal/regen/absorb) clickies, effective against all damtypes and against autohit and irresistible damage. How much rech depends on your 2ndary and build resources, but permahasten is a good place to start. Parasitic aura does not need acc. It has 1.5x base acc and you have the tohit bonus from offensive adaptation. You can safely slot 5x panacea or doctored wounds. Boost the panaceas, because PVPIO's don't lose enhancement value when exemplared. DNA siphon is underslotted. Many builds slot 6 damage procs, or 5 damage procs + touch of essence +end proc. When you need to tank something really tough, you can unslot the procs and slot 5x panacea (you can carry IO's in your enhancement tray and do this even in the middle of combat) which makes it effective even when tanking a single tough foe. By replacing IO's on the fly and turning on defensive adaptation, you retain the option to turtle up at a moment's notice even on an offensively-oriented build. Bio has a huge amount of end output. Therefore, you should not pursue minuscule end/recovery bonuses like that from your 2x mocking beratement because you typically have end to spare and should invest in other areas (dps). You also do not need dark consumption. Trade Bio's excellent endurance economy for dps by underslotting stamina and passing on recovery uniques, and slotting more damage procs. If you play on teams a lot I recommend taking tactics and putting the gaussian's proc there. Toggles only check for procs once per 10s, but the proc rolls once for every entity buffed by tactics, including each of your teammates and pets. On a big team, it fires very often. Enjoy it before it gets fixed. The way you slot shadow maul somehow misses the best parts of both sets. Dodging good set bonuses seems to be a perennial skill of forum builders. Why are you chasing the 3% damage bonus from obliteration? Just put an armageddon proc in there or something. And turn on offensive adaptation. Slotting 2 different sets in the same power like this loses you set bonuses. You added 5 slots, but only gained 4 set bonuses. There are use cases for it, but don't carelessly do this everywhere.

From TW you must take: CB - usually used to start the 5s momentum window. Also fits Achilles procs because this set is a munchkin’s wet dream. FT, RA, whirling, arc - the good attacks. Build momentum - take it or I will find you and shake you. You can skip: defensive sweep - weak. But it is a parry (I have no clue why a set with dpa as high as TW is allowed to have a parry but anyway) and can mule lotg which gives it niche uses. Titan sweep - also not really necessary since you already have 2 aoe attacks in whirling and arc. That said, if you skip both titty sweep and defensive, then your first aoe is the T8. That’s later than even SS and its infamous footstomp. [EDIT: actually, it's not - footstomp is a T9. I blame the fact that my last half-dozen SS's have been brutes - the idea of footstomp in the late 20's is burned into my brain.] Only recommended for AE sitters. I do not understand what this talk about wasting momentum time is. Momentum TW attacks are very good, but if you can replace one of them with an even higher dpa attack, it is still a gain. TW builds regularly use snipes like moonbeam under momentum, for example. Another option is to use them at the end of a momentum window before you start the next momentum window. For example, slow CB (momentum starts) > RA > arc > FT > fast CB > (momentum ends) > burn/zzap > slow CB to start momentum again. This productively uses the gap between one momentum window and the next, results in fewer slow CBs used and higher dps overall.

/DM is okay. Not bad but not all that special either. Nearly all tanker native attacks fit at least 5* procs out of the gate and every melee set sits in offensive adaptation 99.999999% of the time anyway so DM isn’t noticeably ahead of the pack in that regard. Now if you want something really exceptional, try SS which almost damage caps itself. Rage crash? What crash? All I see are corpses as far as the eye wanders. * all melee and pbaoe attacks can fit 3 nonunique damage procs each. Tankers have gauntlet, so they get +1 proc from perfect zinger, for 4. They then almost always have a 2ndary effect that allows additional damage procs, such as slow or KD, that determines whether they can get 5 or 6. So the advantage of attacks that can be “reliably procced out” vs ones that “can’t” is, in most cases, 1 proc. In practice all sets also want to fit -res procs, purple damage procs, FF procs, and defensive procs like might of the tanker +res, which compete for the 6th slot and further reduce the advantage of the supposedly “proc-friendly” sets.

Sounds like you need to try a proper procbombing build. Say, /DP where every attack except your first can fit 6 damage procs. in general, fender dps comes from procs. Fenders should trade-out their superior buff mods, higher values on defensive toggles and greater slot-efficiency for more aggressive proccing.

Caveat: I haven't done 4* LGTF. I personally think the gameplay side of "hard" mode (because it's not hard nor comparable to genuine challenge content in other MMO's, it's just balanced for the gear and powercreep we have) is great. I do think they could value control more - mezzing should at least pause the hostless nictus countdown, for example. However, overall, in terms of mechanics, game design, theme, and just sheer pure fun, hard mode is a resounding success. It's a much-needed breath of fresh air into a stale old game, while not detracting from babymode content in any way - I see Homecoming is still putting out non-hard mode story arcs and such. Now the rewards, those definitely feel problematic, but they need to go in the opposite direction that you want. Instead of adding non-"hard"mode ways to get aether, hard mode rewards not only need to be massively increased, but have new, exclusive rewards added to them - ones that can't be bought on the market or obtained any way. I can still make a lot more from playing the market and farming than I can trying to run a 4* anything and selling aether, which drops outside of hardmode anyway, so there's no rational economic incentive to do it.

The cost per enemy knocked back in sonic repulsion (edit: but not the cost to keep the toggle active, which is enhanceable) is not reduced by any endredux, same as most -end penalties in the game (like haste crash, rage crash and armor T9 crash). They are all flagged ignores enhancements and other boosts in the game engine, and neither energize nor cardiac will help when your toggle target walks into a x8 spawn and you instantly lose 16 end.

I have no firm opinion yet on the new cold dom, since I have not yet played it. However, I do want to comment on the approach and fundamental assumptions that seem to underlie Homecoming team's changes: Standardizing corr/troller-res debuffs at -22.5% apiece within the respective AT's and consistently applying AT scalars to pseudopets Not allowing a powerset's history or dev decisions from over a decade ago to restrict the balance of the game here and now Nerfing problematic cases, instead of buffing other cases to parity Personally, while it's natural that there will always be specific power changes any one player disagrees with, I wholeheartedly agree with the overall direction of balance as reflected by the approach above. P.S. I was even more surprised to read that the burnout interaction was confirmed as WAI (I have expected the sleet changes for many years but this one caught me by surprise). To me this is a simply amazing - preserving a neat, but powerful and situational trick that players can use with a considerable investment, while balancing the powerset for general use, which is far more impactful to the playerbase.

Price changes year on year: Purples significantly up (even the recent MC WST failed to dent it) PVPIO’s slightly down Winter IO’s unchanged ATIO’s up for certain AT’s (especially tankers - low skill and overpowered) Other worthwhile enhancements moderately down

In general, Rad is balanced, poison is more offensive. Rad has a self heal and AM which makes solo play safer and eases build requirements with its huge end gain and rech bonus. Poison has no self heal, no self buffs - you kill or you die. Rad offers the baseline -res amount for a support set: -30%. Poison has -40% from evenom (main target) and another -25% from the aura for -65%. This is slightly more than the heavyweight debuff sets and is only exceeded by a few sets like storm with 2x freezing rain, cold with 2x sleet + heatloss and traps with 3 mortars out, and those need some setup time. (Then the trick is that envenom also does another 20% in a small aoe around the target, and if you have 2 targets next to each other and debuff them once each, the main part and the aoe part stack for even more -res.) Rad offers the complete baseline suite of debuffs: -def -res -regen -tohit -dmg -rech. Poison offers all that (though the -rech power is safely skipped), -heal and -special. It is not always useful but when it is it can be very nice. For casual/solo players, the most common application is it neuters the duration of enemy mezzes. Rad is playable at any range. Poison really wants to be in melee, because a big chunk of its debuff power is in the aura. This in turn encourages a build that has more balanced defenses and not just ranged + hoverblasting. My poison fenders usually run with 30-35 to all 3 positions and the debuffs take care of the rest. Rad's debuffs are enemy anchored toggles which means less control over positioning and placement. Bosses WILL run off leaving other enemies un-debuffed which, while usually not dangerous is generally annoying. Poison's debuffs are taoe and pbaoe and do not suffer this issue as much. One thing that both rad and poison have in common, is that they have very few required powers. Contrary to forumite opinion, this is a strong advantage, and reflects good powerset design: fewer required powers = more power picks available for pool powers and set mules = more build diversity. Rad can be played with just 5: the toggles, AM, lingering rad, and the heal. Poison can be played with as few as 4: skip all the ally powers (nobody expects to be healed by a poison), the ST hold and the slow. The great thing is that in both cases the skippable powers are in no way bad, except perhaps neurotoxic breath - they are all useful for specific build goals, AT's and power combos. Anyway, my recommendation based on your stated playstyle and build goals is actually poison/fire or rad/fire. Yes, fire. It does good damage even on a fender, even without procs, which then has the advantage that you can devote more slots to set bonuses. Rad/sonic and especially poison/sonic are fairly specialized -res debuffers because sonic is still somewhat lacking as a blast set. When you are solo you need something for your force multipliers to multiply.

An argument can be made for fire epic too: it also has a -22.5% res power, char is a better attack (tied with dominate for fastest animation among the ST holds), and it has fireball, which gets more benefit from fiery embrace. Remember that burn does sufficient DPA to be viable as a ST attack so the value of dark blast to you is debatable. Resistances in the 80's to all but cold/tox/psi is actually very good. There is room to optimize your resists further, for example by completing the 6th synapse's shock (4.5 EN res) and changing the 3x gaussian's to 3x adj. targeting (3 EN res), and you can fairly easily sit at 87-90% SLENF resists with 1 stack of might of the tanker proc. You can also shed some of the 4th piece unbreakable guards and the +def uniques, because that piddly amount of melee def will be gone the first time a roman looks at it (if you have 4 slots to invest in a resistance power, you can consider 4x titanium coating instead: the set bonuses have better resistance per slot than unbreakable guard, at the cost of being a mixture of SL and EN res instead of pure EN).

I had half an essay typed up about the game mechanical possibilities before you let slip that you build more based concept and gamefeel than optimization. With that in mind, I find that swirly time graphics are a nice stand-in for wind, water, and possibly fog, so a number of elemental or nature-themed concepts come to mind. Have you considered a corruptor? I liked my water/time corrupter a lot - although half my motivation for playing it is also to stop making stormies.

The AT is called defender not butler or nanny. That’s all that really needs to be said to them.

Bio/ or rad/ are the best overall sets. other armors surpass them in specific areas, but these two offer a balance of offensive and defensive power plus multiply layered defenses that hold up against a wide variety of enemy types. For 2ndary, there are a lot of good choices. I like SS, savage, TW (SS is very good but you really need to know how to build around the rage mechanic).

Barrage & E-punch - you’re forced to take one. Can mule hecatombs, ATIOs, absolute amazements. Bonesmasher - skippable at endgame. Replaced with epic/pool attacks at endgame (procced dominate, gloom). Whirling hands - It is usually not an advantage to skip the pbaoe in most sets. Even if you take epic aoes (eg dark oblit), pbaoe sets typically have highly desired bonuses. Power crash - the other aoe. It’s not bad, but being a cone makes it slightly less convenient than a pbaoe. Build up - Generally worth it, though there are also arguments for not taking it on certain sets. It’s stronger on sets with burst damage (eg. shield charge, or TF > ET for that matter). Take unless you know what you’re doing. Total focus and E-transfer - Take these or suck. note that skipping too many 2ndary attacks creates design challenges because you have fewer places to slot ATIOs, which only go in primary and 2ndary powers. This is doubly so because Inv/ does not have any damage power that can take them (this is a significant advantage that sets such as rad, fire, bio etc. all have).

The real use of cryo ammo on blasters is that it lets most DP powers slot +2 damage procs. I personally use the exotic ammos more on fenders and corrs, who have other debuffs to stack with them - kins or TA's stacking -dmg with chem ammo are quite nice for example. On blasters, I prefer to focus on the damage - modern coh is increasingly about damage to the exclusion of all else, and damage is one of very few things in coh that is difficult to have too much of. DP is very strong, and I really enjoy maximum-offense procbombing DP builds.

Your build has "too much" rech. You have far over what is needed for perma-chronoshift, you don't even take advantage of the global rech you have by dropping a slot from hasten, and you still want to take agility on top of that. Cut the rech and def and invest in damage procs for dps. You have a mediocre +1.9 net eps and I predict potential endurance issues even with defender inherent endredux if you really want to run all your toggles. Tactics is valuable, but optional for times, since farsight gives more +tohit and +per. As mentioned above, distortion field is a slow, but using it to mule basilisk's is not a bad choice normally because basilisk's is not a bad set - provided you needed the rech from basilisks (see my comment on rech above). In general, take the 3 strongest ST blasts - that's screech, shout and scream. Some of my hardmode builds run screech scream shriek, taking the slight dps loss, because long-animating powers can be a liability in hard mode, but this is a niche case. Agility is not necessarily a good choice of alpha for defender times. 1) it precludes you from effective procbombing. Read up on the PPM formula to understand why. 2) fenders have sufficiently strong +def powers that they should not need the def from agility. 3) perma-chronoshift builds, ie every properly built time, also have enough rech that they don't need the rech from it. The essence of time is that it already provides tohit, def, and rech in spades, and you should be trying to build for things other than that. For a time/sonic, my recommendation is intuition radial: it 1) boosts your debuffs (hence avoiding the need to slot weak debuff sets), 2) adds damage, and 3) the +range works well with a blast set that is mostly cone aoes. The slots saved can be invested in procs: sirens song and shockwave are both quite proccable - sirens takes 3 damage procs, shockwave 4.

If you want ample aoe, take dark oblit. 4 damage procs, 2 other slots depending on what enhancement values and set bonuses you need. Tanker dark oblit has increased radius (22.5 ft). Tof is 9ft. So it's valuable despite having a much longer rech than tof. The downside is it's available late, but you're taking tof late anyway. I know why you're not splitting up your gauntleted fist. It's for the 6% SL res. If you want SL res, an option is to take all 4 prestige sprints and slot 2x celerity in all of them and sprint. You can get 11.25% SL res this way for 5 slots, and it allows more freedom in slotting your ATIO.

I'm not disagreeing with anything in your post, though I am surprised that people think I'm being sarcastic by thinking out loud. It did result in you posting a detailed analysis which is, of course, a plus. Just to be absolutely clear, I am very pleased to change my opinion on powers, builds, slotting options etc. One of the best things that can happen is to be be debunked by someone, who comes along with a better understanding or more facts, and can just state why and how I am wrong. I greatly enjoy the resulting eureka moment, because it opens up new horizons and possibilities, and that naturally leads me to benefit by being able to enjoy more varieties or more powerful builds. Now, it usually doesn't happen at once, because humans innately resist change. The immediate response is often "*snort* Yeah, sure. You're wrong," only to be followed up with "Wait a minute..." It's very interesting to retrace all the little things that can combine to form a misleading, or at the very least severely outdated assessment. See, tankers, brutes and stalkers all get only 33% from meltdown, and they have lower melee damage scalar. It's very easy to forget that scrappers get more oomph out of their personal damage buffs, and just fix the 33% figure in your head. Like I always think of rage as 80%, but if scrappers had it, it would be 100% instead. Then it's easy to condition yourself just not to think of the T9 as an offensive tool. There are builds that use it to substitute for defenses from IO sets and fill the attacks with procs, but usually one doesn't think of it as a damage buff. And that combines to result in a moment where the facts need to come in. I am actually off to rebuild some tankers with meltdown. The last time I had it on a tanker was when they still had 0.8 melee damage scalar and build design was much less advanced. Now, I am intrigued by the possibilities.

Sure, but since the set is designed to counter SL with res and FCEN with def, boosting the def would mean losing the res. People have been asking for this since WP was released. At the height of the softcap meta, taking this tradeoff actually may have been a significant buff to WP. Post-typed def revamp, my only objection to it is that sets with such biased defenses are more interesting from a build design perspective and that should be preserved.

*snort* Sure. So that's about half a BU, and on an extreme-rech build you can have maybe half uptime on it. Well, on second thought, that's actually very good on a 1.125 damage scale AT and since it also carries unbreakable guards, that helps trimming even more EN res bonuses elsewhere. Disregard my comment above. I am very excited to completely reconsider my evaluation of this power.