Zect

/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.

New placate is so good as a dps tool. I think Frosticus doesn't make it sound good enough, because they trickle out the gospel over the course of half a dozen posts instead of putting it all in one. Here it is: Autohit Guaranteed crit Shorter animation No internal lockout Just think of it as a 2nd BU that bypasses the damage cap on whatever attack you want to use. I particularly enjoy it on many "classic" primaries (the ones that lose aoe) because when you have fewer aoes the way to make up for it is to make every single one crit.

You have the general idea correct, but there are some issues with your design technique. Your build looks like it time travelled from late 2012 (heavy SL def). That doesn't work so well anymore after they fixed the cheese where SL def dodges all the energy blasts that have a little smashing damage in them. More generally, you want to avoid getting def/res from set bonuses as much as possible, because these bonuses and especially res bonuses tend to come from attack sets, and thus directly compete with damage procs and other desired set bonuses such as acc/rech. That means exploring means to get def/res from places outside of IO sets. For a scrapper on a res armor that wants high survivability (and I preface this by saying I intensely dislike telling people to change epics/pools because I understand this is often a concept/playstyle thing), it is nearly impossible to beat shadow meld from soul epic. Shadow meld is not permable, but that's fine because you are a scrapper. It lasts 15s and is up often enough to absorb every alpha. What you want to do is when you are running forward you use particle shield, shadowmeld, build up then you engage and use rad therapy, ground zero, etc etc, and murder the everliving shit out of everything in sight within 15s, then all you have to tank is the 1-2 survivors of nuclear warfare. With permahasten levels of rech, you can afford to use rad therapy both at the start of an engagement as an attack, and at the end to heal up after you have taken some damage. Secondly, you took agility alpha and melee radial embodiment. Don't do that. Agility counts as rech in the PPM formula and reduces proc rate. Melee hybrid is not perma. If you really want def that comes specifically from incarnate powers, take barrier. Core epiphany is perma 5% def and 5% res to all. 5% def is usually a 5 or 6-slot bonus, 6% res is usually 3 or 6 slots, so we're gaining literally dozens of slots worth of set bonuses, and these are just the most slot-efficient options, that come from unique sets like purples and ATIOs. And that's just the weak part of barrier, the last 60s. The first 60s is very strong and acts as a second alpha absorber and ghetto DDR. Of course, barrier competes with ageless which is also a strong choice for procbombers, so pick your poison. Thirdly, generally don't take meltdown unless you know what you are doing. Scrappers don't have a high enough resist cap to really get value out of it. Fourth, think about some slow resist. Def sets don't worry about this as much since they double-dip by having def also dodge debuffs. Res sets need to worry about it more. I threw together a quick example of what I am talking about: I hate providing build downloads or imports; I'm here to instruct, not do your building for you, so finish it yourself. The locations of the attack sets are whatever. Move them around as you like. I want you to look at the resists. We're at 67% ish on most major damtypes. This leaves open some options for you to cap: you can use barrier (5%) and the remaining 2-3% is made up by reactive defenses since you will take damage and not always be at full HP. You can also use a defense amp, AKA the 8 hour inspiration, which is 7.5% res to all and caps you outright. You can eat a small orange - hopefully you can utilize the very powerful resource stream that is insps dropping for you. No insps no temps is suboptimal, inefficient, and designed for epeen-stroking and forumite egotism over practical "real world" play; it's more efficient to build to reduce insp usage below a certain threshold. For hardmode, just enjoy your teammates' buffs. Some players prefer 75% SLE and neg undercapped, in which case you will replace 4x shield walls with 5x lotg. Some players prefer to cap the SL res at least - I'm sure you can find a way to do it yourself, for example slotting 2x celerity in sprint and prestige sprints - yes it does go in prestige sprints. However in general, do not cripple your build for 1-2% resists. Going from 85% to 90% resist on a tanker is a big deal, going from 70% to 75% really isn't. Just kill faster. I also want to point out the theft of essence proc in rad therapy. This can proc >1 time per power usage, and when used in a crowd completely refills your endurance bar. I don't use this in my own builds, because I am obsessed with optimizing for single enemy fights, but you should consider it; enjoy before it gets nerfed. (If there actually is a patch live right this moment on brainstorm or cryptic with nerfed theft of essence, I would like to clarify that I have not read any patch notes; I'm just very prescient. Don't ban me.) You can also switch up the pool power layout a bit. This build, as shown, does not necessarily need tactics because rad therapy has 3.0x tohit and ground zero will always be used together with BU (they have the same base rech). Tactics is more necessary when your procbombed attacks have normal acc and are not always used during a BU window. So in this case, you can consider dropping leadership. Or, if you do stick with tactics, which is not a bad option either, then try to get more value out of it by replacing the purple sets with even more procs and using ageless to make up for the lost rech and to fuel the attacks. Have I mentioned how endurance intensive procbombed attacks are? So you can conceive a sprectrum of defense to offense, where on the defense side you have the builds with barrier and normally slotted attacks, and on the offense side the tactics/ageless/more heavily procced builds. Oh, and think about hover/fly/evasive instead of jumping; it's +1 lotg.

This build prioritizes +regen and +heal. You should prioritize rech instead because it not only increases the availability of your powerful defensive clicks (ultimately resulting in more healing, absorb and regen than actually building for +regen), it adds offensive power as well. +Heal set bonuses also do not apply to absorbs (unlike enhancements, which specifically state healing and absorb). Even if we accept your build goals as they stand, you also choose a lot of inefficient sets (pounding slugfest) and allocate slots inefficiently. For example, instead of the 5th unbreakable guard in evolving armor, you could've added a 6th hecatomb instead which gives more psi/tox res. It's not like you're doing anything with the 6th slot there. Instead of 6x might of the tanker and 5x gauntleted fist, it should be the reverse because this gains 6% FC res. The eradication proc can go in a power that's better for proccing - damage auras are shit for those. This build needs a lot of work.

That build doesn't even work on a brute; it relies on meltdown with poor uptime to cap resists. It's basically a mids-warrioring build (toggle on your T9 and the FF proc in kick to give a misleading impression of build performance). I analyzed the numerous design mistakes of this particular build in a separate post here, and explained how to more efficiently achieve the goals that the above build fails at. Scrapper rads are inherently different from brutes because scrappers only have 75% resist cap. Conversely, they get shadowmeld which brutes do not. So you have to adopt a more proactive and aggressive playstyle, relying on shadowmeld to absorb the alpha, high dps output to kill most of the spawn before it wears off, and judicious use of defensive clicks to bolster survivability where necessary. You can't really copy/paste a brute or tank build 1:1.

What you have posted right here is a great example of how being wrong is very often good news. Excellent point and I stand corrected.

To make CS perma for any build you need +300% rech enhancement from all sources. 95% ED-capped enhancement (assumed) 70% hasten 50% chronoshift itself (I assume the user knows chronoshift itself gives rech) 85% other global rech = 300% My intent is to convey an impression of how difficult it is for a build designer to achieve perma-chronoshift by stating the amount of rech that needs to come from set bonuses or incarnate build capacity. Though, looking at my original quote: That is ambiguous because it is not explicitly stated what is and is not being included. So, ignore that and refer to the calculation above.

Both time and FF are high-defense (softcap all without fighting), moderate -res support sets. Time offers heals, offensive buffs of rech, tohit and dmg on top of the complete standard debuff suite of -def -res -regen -tohit -dmg -rech. FF offers mez prot, complete debuff resist, -special on enemies, repel and knockdown. While they both offer strong utility, time is more offensive and FF more defensive. Time is best played at close to medium range because of its strong debuff aura and the fact that all but one of its powers are pbaoe. FF is comfy at any range unless you want to use the repel aura. Time requires a medium to high amount of rech. Basically every IO'ed time out there will want to get ~85% global rech plus hasten for perma-chronoshift. FF can be played with very little rech since its -res powers do not have long base recharges. In practice this means FF has much more room to explore unconventional hasteless and low-rech builds. It is one of very few powersets of any kind that do not derive a significant benefit from global rech. FF does slightly more -res against a single target, but time does more aoe -res.