oxmox

Everyone here is giving a solid background on the term, but in my experience "min/maxing" has been generalized to just meaning a highly optimized build or strategy. A min/maxed blaster (or anything else) just means a really strong build for that AT. Typically that includes stacking defenses to get at or near the soft cap and enough recharge to chain together your strongest powers.

Weekly TF and Hami raids, or just playing missions with the windfall temp power. As others have stated I wouldn't bother farming specifically for shards because farming threads is so much faster. If you do have a few shards already the tier 3 alpha is great value using shards, just 8 shards plus 1 weekly TF and you've got it.

I stand corrected. Do you remember your attack rotation offhand? I don't have access to any numbers right now but I'm having a hard time imagining it beating out blaze, blazing bolt, positronic fist, or whatever the earlier /atomic punch is called.

Though specifically with regards to filling your single target hold with damage procs, I don't think I would bother on a fire/rad. You have so many strong single target damage options already that I think slotting it with a hold set would probably be more valuable.

I wanted a lot of my primary and took all my secondary powers so I went /mace. IMO scorpion shield is the best value for a single skill point of any epic pool. /fire is very good if you're looking to invest more heavily.

Is there any post 20 content in Praetorian other than the Wards? Unless you're counting iTrials or something.

I'm baffled that nobody has suggested a blaster. The dmg/cd on blaster t9s is so wildly out of line with everything else in the game and most sets have 2-3 extra aoes on top of that. Triform warshades also dish out a ton of AoE damage, though they slow down a bit when you have to stop and finish off the bosses in each spawn.

Good point re: procs. I was chasing set bonuses pretty hard in my build and so didn't experiment too much with multiple procs. The base DPA for psi dart is barely better than mental blast/subdue, so I suspect procs will put those two ahead. As stated above though, neither will be especially impressive either way.

I have little experience with plant but a lot more with /psi. Psychic shockwave, mind probe, and the snipe are by far your best attacks; take and slot all of them. The rest are okay, but you'll need to fill out your attack chain somehow. Between the 3 ranged attacks, subdue and mental blast are the exact same power except one has an immob and one has -rech. Psi dart actually has a slightly better DPA than either thanks to its quick animation and you're forced to take it, so I actually use that to fill out my ranged attack chain and skipped both mental blast and subdue. The other melee attack, TK thrust, isn't awful, the damage just can't stack up to mind probe. What is nice is that it does half smashing damage which helps vs robots. The kb on bosses can also be handy at low levels. Psychic scream is your only other AoE, but it's a cone with a slow animation. I have it on my dark/psi because dark has 2 spammable cones so I'm already in position. You may find yourself in a similar situation with seeds, but the AoE damage from seeds and creepers might be enough to skip this. Drain psyche is the real gem of the set. Slot for heal and recharge rather than end mod; the recovery buff is so strong you can't possibly run out of end if you hit at least 2 targets. An extra fun tidbit is that slotting drain psyche for heal also enhances the regen debuff from 500% up to about 1000%, letting you floor the regen from AVs or GMs and solo them, which most Doms are not very good at. This is a bug that I think is scheduled to be fixed along with the tanker buffs, but luckily the tanks have stumped the devs for now and we can keep exploiting this.

Yes, /atomic is very good. In my personal opinion it's the strongest blaster secondary. The AoE hold is insane. I'll second the above recommendation for intuition radial; great synergy with everything.

What a delightfully in depth review of such a forgettable contact. Though if a contact without even a story arc gets a passing grade I feel your scale may be a bit inflated.

I'm all about psi blast but this doesn't sound right at all.

If they weren't aware of the special mechanics for that fight they may just be used to facerolling council radios and not paying any attention to chat. I can say in my experience with people trying to coach strategy, 90% of the time it's just way too much unfounded worrying over content that half the team could solo. Wouldn't be surprising if they learned to ignore most advice and got caught off guard when something bad actually happened this time.

The simplest answer would be that the level of invulnerability you're talking about doesn't exist in CoH. This isn't something unique to MMs, these 'invincible' heroes all take damage from human punches, guns, bats, knives etc. When people are described as being invulnerable in CoH, they're just able to take way more hits than a normal person before being put down. There is no Superman equivalent here: neither States nor Recluse have any showings that suggest they are remotely on Superman's level, let alone small fry like Golden Palm.

TBH stalkers are basically just scrappers with more crits. There's really no need to play at a slower pace if you don't want to. You don't even have to wait to re-stealth between groups, though I suspect it probably saves time overall if they aren't right next to each other. Assassin's striking out of hide is useful to burst down one target quickly, but for overall speed it's actually better to break stealth with another attack (still crits!) and use AS mid fight to avoid the longer animation time. Even if you do wait for hide and AS it's only a few seconds; I can't imagine you're actually watching Star Trek in 3 second intervals between mobs lol.

Oh no no, toxic damage is the newfangled easy mode vahz. A bunch of defensive sets give some toxic resist pretty early on. Back in the early days toxic damage didn't exist; vahz just did pure, unresistable damage. Neg energy from the morts and eidolons may as well have been pure too since most sets don't have any resist vs that early on.

I mean you're going to get some shard drops if you ever do content outside of DA / iTrials, so you may as well make use of the few you do have. Shards convert 1:1 to threads (which costs money) but the same tier salvage for each needs fewer shards. 4 shards gets you one common component but only 1/5 of a common if you convert to threads. I still recommend using mostly threads since you get them so much faster, but you're only slowing the process down by ignoring shards 100%.

Set IOs work. Can't slot normal IOs, you can slot Hami-Os but the recharge portion doesn't work.

I mean most TFs are just a series of missions with an AV at the end, so if your build can solo an AV (and IOed out lvl 50 demon/dark definitely can) you can solo the TF. Munki already named most of the tough ones and the redside equivalents (barracuda and recluse) are about the same. The ITF final fight can be tricky but it's definitely doable. For masterminds in particular I wonder about the Renault SF. The final fight there is on a tiny ledge with knockback-causing tornadoes all around. I know typically MMs have a tough time keeping their pets actually hitting the AV.

As stated above with the possible exception of barracuda where AT determines what temp power you get at the end, it doesn't matter. TFs are typically 8 man teams with multiple exemp'd incarnates running at +0/x1, so they are extremely easy. If I had to pick I'd say a kind/Sonic def. Speed boost and fulcrum shift to roll missions faster and -res debuffs for the AV. And it's even one of the ATs that gets the best temp power in Barracuda SF!

The Hami raids likely explain the two different experiences above. IIRC one of the mito types has a really high drop rate for shards, making Hami raids a great source for them. You can also get a decent amount from MSR and converting v merits to grai matter to shards or by running weeklies (esp if it's a TF that already gives alpha components). Even with all that the sources for threads are just way more generous so it may be easier to use those for the alpha. Worth noting you aren't 'locked in' to one upgrade path. You can use shards to advance your alpha until you run out then finish it with threads or do it the other way around too.

They're about to become more common because winter packs are 60% off for the winter event (25 mil to 10 mil) so people are buying a lot of them. More winter packs means more winter enhancements in circulation.

IIRC he stops after a bit. I think the end of it is triggered by you destroying all the artifacts but not entirely sure. I actually don't think I've ever used penny while doing it, just pop some greens and keep smashing stuff.

I don't think you need to go for any particular AT or power set combo to do this. Game balancing predates IOs for the most part, so you should be fine. I guess you might want to avoid builds that aim for stuff like perma hasten, perma dom, perma PA etc because those levels of recharge can be hard to get without lots of set bonuses. (Perma dom isn't that hard though, surely doable with a cheap build.)

So as I've gotten more comfortable with the IO system I'm leaning into putting together my own builds rather than rely on online help. Typically my focuses are: 1) Tank up via defense and resistance bonuses (usually more emphasis on defense). 2) Recharge buffs. Nice on everything, especially important if I'm aiming for a particular goal (permadom, perma eclipse, perma hasten etc) 3) Slot powers that I actually use and for their main purpose. I'll sometimes 'waste' a few slots just for set bonuses, but try to make sure I'm focusing on the actual main function of each power. 4) Save a few slots for stamina/health or other sustain if I'm on an end heavy build (dependent on alpha or destiny choice since either of those can go a long way to solving end issues). 5) Important unique effects (KD protection, KB/KD conversion, ATO special effects, etc) Other set bonuses I just kind of treat as a little extra benefit and rarely weight them when deciding on sets compared to the above 3 requirements. I'll put a little effort into getting a few global accuracy bonuses, but those usually come hand in hand with bigger recharge bonuses so it rarely forces any changes. Am I hamstringing myself by more or less ignoring other set bonuses, or do people agree that the above priorities are the most important aspects of a build?