ZemX

You're asking which is better: Apples or Oranges. It's easier to look at something like "Is it worth using this slot for a damage enhancement IO or a %damage proc because that's just calculating what average damage you can expect where the IO enhancement is a straight percentage added damage to the base damage of the power. The proc is whatever chance it has to fire times the total damage the proc does. That gives you the direct comparison. Anything else is up to you. Is a 20% damage proc that deals 70 damage better than a +recharge set bonus? I dunno. 42?? Procs either hit for their full damage or not at all and yeah, each target hit by the AoE rolls their own dice for the proc chance. So if it's 20% chance to do 70 damage you might see one or two of those 70s pop up over the heads of 5 targets hit with the cone. Note that some procs are self-buffs like say the Force Feedback +rech proc but they are coded so they don't stack. In that case, using it in an AoE gives you multiple chances of getting that one fire of the proc you need to gain its benefit. It's effectively like increasing the chance of the buff happening each time you use the AoE since it only has to hit one or more targets. Break out your combinatorial probability texts! No. If it hits a target, they have a chance to proc based on the PPM calc. If you miss, the chance is zero. For non-pseudo pet powers, the chance to proc is once per activation of the power per each enemy hit by that power. That goes the same for one-shot powers as for damage-over-time powers. DoTs are ones where you see something like "14.5768 points of Lethal damage (all affected targets) every 0.5s for 1.1s (100% chance)" in CoD for the description of the power effect. This is still just ONE activation but it deals damage in "ticks" of 14ish damage every half second for 1.1 seconds. Pseudo pets are different. They look similar, like a bunch of damage ticks in DoT, but they work by activating a single-shot damage power repeatedly very quickly. But this doesn't give them more chances to proc. The devs have thought of this one and have made it so psudo-pets work differently. They instead have a chance to proc once every 10 seconds. As if they were firing their damage power off only once every ten seconds. It's weird. Yeah this is just arbitrary. The PPM formula takes into account recharge enhancement but not global recharge buffs. So you slot a enhancement, it lowers the proc chance. But this is supposed to be because now you can use the power more often. The overall idea was that a 1PPM proc in a single target attack should proc roughly once every minute. If you put it in an attack that you can use twice a minute, it should work out to a 50% chance to proc. Global recharge makes a mockery of this though because it's outside the calculation and so it makes the proc have more chances to fire (because you can use ALL your powers more often) without reducing it's percent chance to fire. This is because the Alpha Incarnate acts the same way an enhancement slotted in the power does. It enhances every power that can accept recharge enhancement. It's just a different way than giving you a global recharge boost. Yes and no. Recharge enhancement always reduces the proc chance, it's just that proc chance has a max chance of 90%, so as long as you are not adding enough recharge to drop it below 90%, you are not yet reducing its real chance of firing. Yeah, you could look at those old charts of least resisted and that's probably a good strat. Unless you just do a lot of a particular content that has certain enemies weak to lethal or something (like Carnies).

I think before AT balance can be properly assessed probably procs need a look and also DPA. These are really much bigger fish causing problems not just between ATs but between powersets in the same AT. I don't have much hope the recharge loophole in PPM will ever be closed. We're all too high on it now to be withdrawn. But global arc/radius strength (a.k.a. Gauntlet) getting factored into PPM would be a less extreme but still fair change.

This makes more sense so long as Brutes "stay in their lane" which is that their damage output should be below scrappers/stalkers but above tankers. Their survivability should be above scrappers/stalkers but less than tankers. People have been trying to use Ston's data as a proxy for damage output and that's not what it is. Soloing at +4/x8 necessarily involves being sturdy enough to not die while clearing the map. If you need to focus less on defense you can focus more on offense whether that's active powers or insps or just build strategy. It's still a trade-off. But this doesn't change the fundamental ordering of the melee ATs because they aren't arranged by soloing speed at +4/x8. Never have been. Hopefully never will be. They are arranged in order of damage output and, inversely, survivability. Or they are supposed to be anyway.

Need to prove there's a problem before you fix it. All anybody has done in this thread is mostly quote Ston's test data which is, it needs to be repeatedly stated because people just LOVE to ignore it.... a test about clearing a map solo at +4/x8 with IOs, Incarnates, and proc-monstered builds all mixed in. Not only is this game NOT balanced for solo performance. It is not balanced for any of that other stuff either. Ston's data is, in other words, completely useless for balancing. That wasn't the point of it. The point was comparing the powersets for each AT relative to one another when you minmax and showing how that does solo. If you're making statements as general as "Tankers outdamage Brutes" based on his data... you're wrong. Simple as that. His data does not prove this statement in the general case. Only in the case outlined by the conditions of his test. How much of the Brute's performance is degraded by being less tough than the Tanker? Was he spending more time repairing damage? Eating oranges instead of reds? If damage output was the point, why not run at -1/x8? Because it wasn't the point. But if you want to make damage output the point... then test for it. And NOTHING else. Even if you do just look at his data, you cannot just say "Tankers outdamage Brutes" by any great amount even in Ston's test conditions. The average clear times are literally just 8 seconds different out of 5 minutes 18 seconds for the Brutes. There's more variation powerset to powerset than there is between the ATs. If you balanced powersets vs. one another first, the difference between Brutes and Tankers in this data could shift dramatically. Which is entirely why you can't just mix all the variables together and draw conclusions about what to fix. You'll likely just be breaking something else if you do that.

I would suggest Axe, Fire, or Ice melee to go with that shield. Axe is amazing. Pendulum is nicely embiggened by Tanker's inherent so you can swing it at anything and hit nine of their closest friends easily, especially after sucking them all in with Axe Cyclone. Ice and Fire both give you decent looking sword powers for that sword and board action too, and have better performance than Broadsword. Oddly enough, this thread makes me, a tanker player, want to play Brutes. I think there's a lot of over-generalizing going on based on the minmax data, so it'd be interesting to see how some of my tanker builds work on Brutes.

This weekend's Tanker Tuesday Tour was a trio of tankers who tore through three tricky tip tasks. Tremendous! Thanks to PapaSlade and MsAligned from yours truly. It was a treat.

I'm guessing that must be the 9999 Repel then because 100 points KB should have done it for the KB component.

That "variable" is a modifier. It allows power effects to scale differently depending on what AT is using them and at what level. You are looking at the power with "None" selected for the "Show for AT" field. Here's what it looks like when you select "Boss Monster". This is likely some requirement of the game engine that everything has a magnitude and a modifier. Which is probably why "melee_ones" exists as it's just a modifier whose value is always equal to "1". In any case, don't feel bad. Half the time even those with built-in knockback protection and resistance are going for a ride because of that child effect, which is tagged unresistible and is, lol, 9999 Repel.

Just checking what the plan might be for Saturday. If we're still on Bio tankers and wanting to do something 50ish, I'll have to bring a substitute. I've missed too many of these to keep up with my Bio.

It's less about playing just one character as it is about NOT playing hundreds. People who alt a lot, and especially those who powerlevel in farms, have a vastly greater demand for influence than do those who balance their time playing 50s and leveling up alts. We don't have 100s of alts, but we're also never strapped for cash because playing any 50 is basically printing money with little effort and funding a new alt is just sending an email from a rich alt to a new one. I don't even bother converting merits anymore. Used to. But now I just buy converters to use for spinning uncommon recipes into rares when they pile up enough and I want to clear them out. I build rare IOs from dropped salvage and converted recipes, then list them on the AH. Between that, selling common drop recipes, and just plain inf rewards, I never much think about money anymore. And these days the only explores I bother grabbing are the one per zone I need for LRT beacons.

I can't tell if you're being serious. I might be proud of a clever name I managed to secure or a well-written bio. I might be proud of the build, if I'm a min/maxer. But I can't imagine why I'd care about the calendar date of the toon's creation. No, it's not their "birthday". In fact that's one answer: Roleplayers likely do not give half a shit about the creation date. It is definitely not their birthday. Imagine the shame famous roleplayer @Snarky must have felt when people didn't see "First appearance: Issue:Error! (1463-10-31)" on his toon's bio? I am not half the roleplayer he is, and I still don't care when my toon was created. Then again, I didn't really care whether that was displayed or not so... why am I even here? Can we talk about Fold Space instead?

In my experience it is extremely rare in game for someone to be a big enough douche-nozzle to be kicked from a team. Most of the time it does happen, it's because someone went AFK in the mission and we completed it, then had to kick them to select the next mission. Even then their space is customarily reserved for a short time to see if they come back. As for this lone-wolfing business, it happens more often than that but rarely results in kicking. Most of the time, I'll just be silently judging you for it. To me it's more of a small breach in etiquette than a kicking offense. You'll be removed from my Christmas-card list for doing it. And I'll make fun of you to other people at parties.

Yeah, like I said a lot of this is so dependent on the content you typically run and with who. I find in most mid-level pick-up teams that I use Taunt a ton for grabbing stray aggro without having to leave "the pocket". My opener is usually Rad Infection or Ground Zero since they have the widest reach in the "piss everything around me off before the controller does with his blasted AoE immob" dept. But it's just really common to have stuff going on away from the main pack I have around me and it's nice to be able to reliably reach out and say "you there... get over here!" without having to go smack it in the mouth personally. But yeah, all that only matters if the fights are lasting long enough for it to happen and/or the rest of the team actually needs the services of a tanker. If I spent more of my time in 45+ teams, I'd probably think about dropping Taunt too. Have to confess here that I pick Lores based on theme. I am vaguely aware they offer subtle differences but mainly, the only thing I care about getting from them is damage and because I spend as little time as possible in 45+ teams, I don't fret a lot over those other differences. I'd say I most often go with BP or Longbow just because I love seeing the big guys.

If you're happy with your group clearing speed, then I can't say it's a bad call. But just in general, AoE is a big advantage on Tankers due to the increased areas and target caps. Fault is good. But both is better. If I really had to choose between, them, I'd probably go with Tremor though as it's going to hit more targets more easily and it recharges a bit faster, making it that much more likely have full coverage on FF:rech procs along with the other two powers. Like a lot of things, it depends on what content you run most often. Since I mostly team and do so on teams where tanking actually helps, my goal is usually reaching the most targets the most often, to keep all that aggro. So I don't skip any AoEs. If you're mostly soloing, bosses and other tough enemies will be limiting your clear speed more than AoE will. As for the rest, you have plenty of recharge and it's easy to cap recharge debuff resistance on Rad Armor. I always go with Musc and Reactive. Barrier seems most often called for in Hard Modes and just in general seems to provide the most immediate relief to teammates in trouble. I don't think too hard on the others. I'll say that not having high defense or the means to protect any that you get from other sources, I often just ignore it. Which means I get hit a lot. Which means debuffs are a problem. As good as other Epics are, I always find myself leaning on Energy for Focused Accuracy so I don't get toHit floored by all the enemies that debuff, toHit... and they do seem rather common. Laser Eyes and Torrent aren't the best, but not terrible either if you want to add some ranged and more AoE. Laser Eyes are even a decent ranged Taunt given the tanker AoE gauntlet taunt and the fact LBE is autohit now. Just lacks the range debuff of the Taunt power itself. But you said you skipped Taunt anyway, so perhaps team tanking isn't really a goal for you.

"Adversely impacting" can be a fine line. The team is going to successfully complete the mission. But I've been on plenty of mid-level teams where a Scrapper, Stalker, Brute, or Blaster runs off to solo and found myself with the rest of the team whittling down some highly resistant boss thinking, "Gosh you know what we could have used right here....?" Yeah, if it's nukeball time, go nuts. Though if it's me, I'd still rather duo or trio than go off solo on a team. But on any "normal", i.e. not endgame, team... my personal etiquette is if you join the team, play with the team. Unless there's some specific goal to speed or stealth or hunt. Stick around. OP asked for opinions and that's mine.

Or those comments are coming from people who join teams that AREN'T rolling nuke balls all the time. This is one of the big reasons my favorite teams are leveling mission teams in the 20-40 range. The lack of Incarnates and level shifts makes a huge difference. You get something closer to the original intent of the game where teams actually can work together to defeat enemies instead of just being eight demi-gods face-rolling around soloing a map. I don't really because I keep hearing it's for the challenge and.... that doesn't add up. It has to be more than that because the same or greater challenge can be had solo. Which means the people doing this lone wolfing either want an audience for their greatness or they just want to benefit from the increased XP that a team gives them, which is somewhat ironic considering a few of the comments up-thread about not wanting to "carry" weaker teammates. I suppose it's also possible they think splitting away is better for the whole team, but that's very debatable. It would be a more interesting discussion to have than the one we've been having at least.

This has got to be one of the most tiresome repeated complaints on these forums. Just stop. Nobody is doing this. Nobody actually believes that they, some random player, have the authority to tell you, another random player, literally how they must play. If they say "you should go solo" they are just being concise and it IS just an opinion. They do not need a fucking legal disclaimer stating that everything in their post is solely the opinion of the person writing it and that they don't have the actual literal authority to MAKE you go solo. Stop being absurd (see... I just did it myself! That's an opinion! Please feel free to continue being absurd!) The OP asked for opinions and they are getting opinions. The only authority anyone has in game is the leader's star. I can tell you not to lone wolf on MY team. And then I can enforce that opinion if you ignore it. And you can do the same on your own teams. That's the extent of it.

It doesn't matter what you think the purpose of your AT is. If you're on a team that has agreed not to stealth objectives, you don't do it. If you never join such teams with your Stalker, great. It's never going to be a problem for you. Presumably, the person who was complaining about this was talking about kill-most or kill-all teams, not speed runs. Wouldn't make sense to complain about someone speeding on a speed run.

Part of the fun in PuGs, for me at least, is trying to adjust to each new team I'm on. I tend to play a lot of Tankers so while I am mainly focused on controlling enemy aggro, I've got one eye on the team status. If someone is low health, there's a problem. Time to adjust. If things are fine however, my goal is keeping things rolling, so I absolutely will leave fights early to go piss off the next group before Stoney McStoneycages the Controller can get there with his 30ft radius immobilize, or what I like to refer to as, "His suicide button". Some stuff does annoy me though in the stragglers dept. Paragon Protectors who have punched their "you can't kill me" buttons. For the love of all that is unholy folks... LEAVE THEM! Half the team standing around whiffing isn't helping. Same goes for Freak rezzers. If it's not a Super Stunner, its rez is on a short delay. But not so short I'm willing to stare at the ground to be sure nobody is standing up again. I'm gone. If someone gets up, do not say in team chat, "Tank rezzed!" Just let him follow you. Drag him past me if he's on you. If we're up to an elevator or something, I'll wait. Otherwise, bring em along to the next party.

Who chained you to the floor? If "most of the team" leaves, then leave with them. You're not the maid. If it's a defeat-all and the DPS squirrels are leaving stuff behind, say so. If that has no effect then the team will get to deal with it five floors down when the little blue button fails to pop up. Then you can tell them you told them so (this is where I'd add "you assholes" for flavoring) and then teleport your own ass out of that team.

Just about every PuG controller/dom I've ever met does worse when they glue enemies to the floor while they're spread all over the damn place. Hell, Fold Space is one of the few things that can "fix" that problem if used properly. And it's massively useful in Praetorian maps where the devs saw fit to spread the mobs all over the place almost to the point you can't identify where one spawn ends and the other begins and THEN they gave them exclusively long range attacks so they've no incentive to gather up on a Tank. I'll take the occasional "poofgone" given the upsides. If someone really does yank a whole mob away from me, they can have it. I'll go get the next one ready.

It doesn't really. Yes, it appears to jump the timer back upward when the FF proc expires, but it does not really jump all the way back up to where it would have been had the FF proc never fired. If that were the case, the proc would be almost entirely useless.

Not true. Think of Hasten's recharge timer like an hourglass with sand running through it. And you've got a control knob that can widen or narrow the "waist" in the middle of the hourglass. FF:rech is like twisting that knob to widen that waist, at a random moment, and leaving it that way for 5 seconds, then putting it back where it was. That sand does not run back up the hourglass. While it was open wider, more sand ran through it. That's all. You are, for a short five seconds, speeding up that clock so that it runs down faster. There is now less sand in the top of the hourglass than there would have been if you hadn't turned that knob briefly. But I see where you're coming from. In game what you might see if you've changed your recharge timers to show numbers on each power, is that when FF:rech pops, that number changes suddenly to a lower number. Then when FF:rech drops, it might even appear to go up to a higher number. But here's what is happening: The recharge timers just show how much time is left to recharge that timer based on your total recharge buffs right now. There's no way for the timer to know that two seconds from now a +100% recharge buff will hit and last for 5 seconds. When it does happen, the game recalculates assuming that +100% buff is going to last forever. Key point here is that yes, the timer appears to jump back upwards, but it is not going back up to where it would have been at this moment, if the FF:rech had not fired off. It's still a lower timer value than it would have been without the proc firing 5 seconds ago. To put it another way, if you kept counting down in your head for those 5 seconds, you'd find that more than 5 seconds had been removed from the clock because the FF:rech fired. Mid's is the same way. If you check the little yellow bubble that says the proc is active, it adds +100% recharge and calculates all recharge times as if you had that +100% for the entire time the power was recharging. If you look at the window that shows totals for "misc buffs" you'll see you have an absurdly high global recharge rate. If you want to look at your real recharge rate, you have to uncheck all the proc bubbles for powers where you have FF:rech slotted. Mid's can't tell you how much benefit FF:Rech actually provides because it depends on too many variables.: How often will you activate that power during Hasten's effect? How many enemies will you hit with it each time so we can calculate how many procs to expect? What if one proc overlaps with itself, cancelling out some of its 5 second duration. This is why I said the math was a bit maddening before. What Mid's could do is ask you how many times per minute you expect all your FF:rech procs to fire and then calculate the effective constant rech boost just like I mentioned in previous posts. It still wouldn't be exact, but it would be more useful. This is why I say treat it like it's a rather decent but much smaller +recharge. Like 10% or 15% maybe. And then forget that it's even in there. Stop watching your buff bar like a hawk to see when it's icon is popping up there (I am guilty of this myself btw). Hasten's recharge will vary exactly by how successfully it procs, but it's not important WHEN it procs. It matters how many times and, like you said, whether it procs 3 times or 4 while Hasten is recharging has little practical effect except occasionally noticing a few seconds more gap in Hasten's uptime. There's nothing wrong with that. You still got the benefit of Hasten's boosted recharge for the last two minutes.

Yes. 100% chance and stacks with existing effect. Have a look here for the RechargeTime effect on the right side of the page. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=pool.fighting.cross_punch FF:rech is a small burst of speed whereas LotG:rech is a constant speed increase. But what we know is the total amount of constant speed improvement we need to make Hasten recharge in 120s thus making it "perma". So converting FF:rech's small speed bursts into the equivalent long-term constant speed boost lets us add it together with all other sources of +recharge to arrive at the required amount of recharge you need. But it's tricky. Think of your base 100% recharge speed then assume you get one FF:recharge every minute. It lasts for 5 seconds. So now, instead of a constant 100% recharge over that minute you now have 5 seconds of 200% recharge followed by 55 seconds of normal 100% recharge. (5x200 + 55x100) / 60 gives us the weighted average of 108.33. In other words, that one proc was the same as a +8.3% constant recharge boost would be over the same one minute time period. So 1ppm for FF:Recharge is slightly better than a single LotG:+rech IO. But you can almost certainly do better than one FF:Rech per minute, even in one power and especially in an AoE. The proc doesn't stack, ever, but it replaces itself if it occurs while already in effect refreshing the duration. So that makes it tricky again to precisely calculate its overall effect. But you don't really need to be that precise. So thinking of a single FF:rech as being close to a single LotG:Rech is probably underestimating its effects by quite a bit. The key really is trying to determine how many times in the two minutes Hasten is up and running, do you get those 5 second bursts of speed from FF:rech. Then yoiu can calculate how much those FF:Rech procs are "worth" compared to all the other recharge you need to make Hasten perma. Hopefully that made more sense. It's not all that straightforward, I'm afraid.

Without delving too deep into maddening math, the short answer you can find with a little searching for perma-hasten is that you need +275% recharge to make Hasten permanent. 70% of that can come from Hasten itself IF it is perma, so let's just assume that and work from there. You now need +205%. If you slot roughly 100% recharge enhancement in Hasten, then this number drops to 105%. That's the amount you need to add to your build with global recharge via set bonuses, Incarnates, buffs, whatever. Force Feedback is an odd duck to account for though because of its unreliable nature. But I recall seeing someone once claim that you can use, as a rule of thumb, the notion that a single FF:Recharge IO is often about equivalent to a single LotG:+recharge IO. In other words, about 7.5% global recharge, give or take. That's assuming you regularly use in an attack chain, whatever power you have the FF:rech IO (or IOs) slotted in. So tally each FF:rech and multiply by 7.5%. Same for each LotG:+rech. Then all your set bonuses. As for Cross Punch, yes, it's +10% for 6 seconds. While it CAN self-stack, you have to ask yourself how much you're really going to be using it. Are you even going to be able to use it once per 6 seconds? Then count it as a +10% global recharge. Once per 12 seconds? Figure just 5% then towards your perma-hasten goal. This is rough, but it will get you close enough to take it for a spin and see how you are doing.