ZemX

That guy is paying? Sweet! I bet I can get someone to just give me the build, turn around, and sell it to that guy!

Don't try to make sense of it. I think it's all just an elaborate troll.

And you said MY analogy was bad? You're a loon.

Didn't say they were. A metaphor represents something but not literally. Driving a car and playing a video game are both examples of operating a machine. Neither is about building that machine or any part of it. Hell, you could even take a completed IO build for a "test drive" on the test server. How much closer did I need to get with this metaphor for you not to call it "clunky"? Didn't say this either. I said you didn't need to BUILD the car to know how to drive it. It's not a "clunky-ass metaphor" because you neither read nor understood it. It's simply saying you don't have to know how to build something to know how to operate it. Which is good because pretty much the entire world works this way. I doubt there is a single automotive engineer who can operate a Formula 1 race car as well as the professionals who race them do. The same is likely true of this game. The players are likely FAR more capable than any of the fine folks who created this game. And so I think the same is true of IO set builds. Driving one and creating one are two entirely different things. Is it handy to be proficient in mucking about in Mid's? Maybe. But you can get THAT experience by playing around with an existing build too. Maybe you'll find you like it and start creating your own. Maybe you'll find it a dull exercise and you'd rather spend more time playing the game than doodling in Mid's. Either is perfectly valid. It's not for you or me to say what someone else should find fun. But you ARE saying this. You are saying players must begin by at least trying to create their own IO builds from scratch. I'm saying they don't. If you believed people could play how they want you wouldn't be insisting they do IO builds YOUR way. You view this as begging and I view it as an efficient way to get started with a character. I don't know what your problem here is. You seem to be acting like people are benefitting from something they didn't "earn" when this isn't a competitive game. If someone else enjoys playing a pre-made build that another player was perfectly willing to give them what skin off your back is this exactly?

I'm being literal because your argument literally depends on these hypothetical ranged damage dealers being able to "melt" everything in a spawn before I can reach it and contribute meaningful damage. Look at it another way. What is the difference here between, say Blasters and Scrappers? Blasters do more damage and they do it at range. It's the range part that seems to be key to your argument since you're talking about the spawn being killed before you can reach it as a melee. My point is that you're exaggerating what a Blaster or even a group of them can do from range in this case. If we're being fair in this comparison and assume everyone starts towards the next spawn at the same time and at the same speed, the only real difference is that Blasters can stop and fire at around 60-80 feet while the Scrapper has to continue running into the spawn to launch their first attack. So what you're really going on about is Blasters making one more attack than the Scrapper. That's about all they will have time for in that situation. So what is this one attack made by 'n' blasters every time that lands before a Scrapper can do anything significant and which "kills all the minions and LTs"? Because that's what I don't buy. (a) Because I don't see this happening on real teams in the actual game. If the mission is absurdly easy, the difficulty gets raised and then it's not that quick anymore. and (b) Because I don't see anyone describing what attacks would even make this work in theory. Nobody is doing the homework here. And I'm saying that's necessary because melting whole spawns, at least ones worth attacking by a powerful team, is not as easy as is routinely described here on the forums. You will occasionally have a few blasters conspire to impressively wipe out a spawn with nukes, but then it's a while before they can do that again so... so what?

It can't happen at +0 either. Unless you're going to move to talking about teams small enough not to spawn bosses next. Feel free to work that out. Boss hit points are rather impressive. It would take multiple blaster nukes to AoE them in a single shot and then they wouldn't be available again for a minimum of 30 seconds. Seven blasters and one hapless melee could MAYBE keep that rolling on a +0 or -1 team. But that's about it. And like I said, if you're not running at the higher settings you're probably doing a speed run anyway which is beside the point of this thread which is about NOT running away on your own. On any realistic team, there is plenty of time for melee damage dealers to contribute even without running too far ahead or striking out solo.

That's not an assumption. That's an impossibility. At least if we are talking about +4x8 missions. And if we're not.. then that's the problem. Outside of low level teams or speed-runs, people are playing at the higher settings, if not maxed out. And the math, particularly due to the purple patch, does not allow a single blaster, or even several, to nuke every spawn in one-shot such that a melee never gets to lay a finger on it. This sort of thing only happens on the forums.

Non-attuned builds are a thing for people who never do anything but level 50 content. But yeah, most people would have an attuned build for exemplaring. I suppose if you were an incorrigible min/maxer (and rich) you might make a build explicitly for L44 challenges where all the IOs topped out at 47+5.

No trick. You just need, at minimum, one person who has stopped XP at 44 to host the TF. Then everyone else is exemplared to 44, shutting off their Incarnates, including the alpha shift and ensuring enemies can be more than 3 levels above the team. It's a nice level to be exemped to, of course, because you still get access to all the powers in your level 50 build (minus incarnates, of course). You just need to be sure you don't have any level 48-50 IOs you're counting on for set bonuses is all. The team lead, of course, loses out on a couple powers and a LOT of slots. Easier probably to just stick to TFs that top out at 40 or less.

You definitely won't have end issues with Rad Armor. Between Particle Shielding, Gamma Boost, and Rad Therapy, you don't even really need Physical Perfection. I'd replace it with Taunt or another one-slot wonder of your choice. You might consider Tactics, since yet more toHit/+percep is never a bad thing and Rad Armor doesn't otherwise have any Confuse protection. I don't know how much you exemplar, but I do... so I pushed Maneuvers/Tactics earlier and Kick/Tough/Weave later. I found I had more trouble hitting than I did with having a bit of extra S/L resist earlier. I generally built in as much debuff resistance as I could find because everything hits me. Movement/Recharge resist. Perception. ToHit. etc. One thing I can't get anywhere outside of Incarnates is DDR... so I kind of didn't bother trying to stack too much defense. It's so often stripped anyway. Recharge is more important. If they can't kill you before Particle Shielding recharges... they can't kill you.

People will stay if they are having fun. They will leave if they are not. Sorry if that's another "obvious" statement, but you don't seem to be demonstrating that you understand this or that telling people they are lazy isn't a great way to convince them to stay or that the community is "awesome". You don't need to know how to build a fully IOd character from scratch anymore than you need to be able to build a car from spare parts in order to know how to drive it. You can understand the game just fine on a basic SO or common IO build. Playing a character is how you gain understanding of it. Not doodling in Mid's. In any case, learning by example is a perfectly sound way to learn. There is absolutely nothing wrong with starting from a complete build and then tweaking it to your liking. It's not "better" than starting from scratch. People will learn by playing. You don't need to be concerned that they missed out on something because they skipped the laborious process of finding the set bonuses they want and slotting them in powers. If they aren't interested in doing that, you can't make them interested. You sure as hell can't do that by insulting them.

Not wanting to put in the work at work is lazy. This is a video game. A leisure activity. How much effort anyone is willing to put into this is up to them and is, really, none of your business. If no one was willing to help then they'd either quit or do the work themselves. But as people ARE willing to help them, even if that's not YOU, then why not? Have you thought about choosing not to be upset by it?

If people are willing to hand out builds, then why not ask? It seems to work. Your being annoyed by it is, quite frankly, YOUR problem. Not everyone enjoys starting from scratch. The "game" of finding the right IOs to slot in a power isn't all that much fun for some. I've done builds from scratch but I've also taken endgame builds and worked backwards from them and had great success there too. I occasionally find some odd slotting I hadn't or wouldn't likely have thought of. Interesting franken-slotting combos. That sort of thing. Hell, until a few months ago, I had completely missed that Performance Shifter:+end WASN'T unique until I'd seen a few builds go by that had multiple of them. Was happy to learn that one.

"Situationally nice" is a great way to describe it. Tankers have Gauntlet (a.k.a. "punch-voke") that taunts everybody in a 10 foot radius around anything you hit. And you've got the taunt aura that is constantly taunting everything in a 12ft radius around YOU. So that's a lot of aggro control. But mostly it isn't ranged aggro control. Sure, you can throw yourself around and taunt things by hitting them or touching them with the taunt aura, but if you're controlling a big pack of enemies and notice some stragglers are about to pounce on someone else in the team, it's really nice to just be able to kick out a "Get over here!" taunt at them without leaving the pocket. The only things you might consider trading for it in your build are Lightning Clap and One with the Shield. I'd drop Lightning Clap myself, but maybe I just don't appreciate it's uses. Yeah, it knocks stuff down. It's a big AoE so it's also another good way to taunt. But you have no shortage of AoEs. And you don't really need it's KD and stun effects. Taunt needs no additional slotting either, so you have a slot to place somewhere else in this trade. One with the Shield is probably more useful, but again maybe only rarely. Once you're fully built, it's something you'll only break out if the shit really hits the fan. And it really shouldn't in a good build.

Okay, I took a look. The tentacles are 3D. I am pretty sure of that. They are a ways out past the blue mission barriers but flying from one end to the other it's possible to look at them from slightly different angles and tell they are not 2D sprites against the background. But that's about it. You can rise above the treetops but the haze prevents you from seeing any body, if there is one. All you can see against the sky is the outline of the tentacles. Not even any texture or shading on them. I doubt there is a head or a body. If there is, the devs decided it didn't look good enough to show because they were careful not to allow it to be visible from within the mission bounds. Most likely it is five separate animated 3D tentacles only.

Maybe I just never took a good look around, but all I remember seeing in that mission was the Avatars and Seeds in the distance and then individual tentacles rising up over the tree-tops way out beyond the sonic fences. Not sure there's a Hamidon "body" to see there even if you could noclip around.

Psst.. @Erratic1 you have Boxing and Kick in that build. 🤪 You probably meant to take Tough and slot another Impervium:+res(psi) right? Aaaanyway. Here's my take based on a Rad/Staff I have. I switched into Elec Melee and ended up with this: You might think it's overkill to have Build Up, Tactics, and Focused Accuracy but they each provide some different things that address holes in Rad Armor. Build Up, of course, does +tohit and +dmg, but... it only lasts ten seconds. Still the best place for the Gauss proc tho. It will go off 90% of the time and give your Build Up extra oompf. Tactics also does +tohit, a little, and it provides that to your team too, which will make you popular on CoT missions. BUT, bigger news for the debuff-magnet that Rad Armor is... perception, fear, and confuse resistance, as well as some confuse mag protection. Resist the temptations of Succubi (if you want)! And stop taunting your friends just because they told you to. Focused Accuracy. +5% toHit... sucks right? WRONG! It provides 69.2% resistance to toHit debuffs. So while you are evading the charms of the succubi, you can punch their mage friends in the teeth without missing. Also yet more preception resist to avoid being blinded by carnies, widows, etc. Maneuvers, I keep here to slot another LotG and pick up some more Tox/Psi res from Gift of the Ancients, but overall you'll notice my build kind of lacks in defense. Here's why: You've got no Defense Debuff Resistance and can't get any outside of Incarnate powers. Having some defense is only of use when you receive team defense buffs that put you over the soft-cap by a wide margin such that you can avoid being defense debuff stacked. It's not worthless... but it's not great. If you want more defense, dump Meltdown and take Weave. But I left Meltdown in here to host another Psi res proc and because it's got next to no crash. Use it when you're in trouble. Use it when you're not in trouble and just want to punch a little harder for 30 seconds. Makes no difference. Edit: Oh, forgot to mention Recharge. Recharge is important on a Rad Armor. Really important. Why? Particle Shielding. The absorb doesn't stack on itself but it refreshes every time this power goes off. There's also a big 100% boost to regeneration in there that only lasts for 30 seconds out of the power's 60s up time. Basically, this puppy is giving you a 1100+ point absorb shield every ~40s in my build. Can be faster if those FF:rech procs fire often enough. And you're going to want every bit of that when your defense is stripped and a mob of angry Cimerorans has you surrounded. Do note that I have two FF:rech in the build and Mid's will show you an unrealistic recharge time for powers unless you toggle off the proc (yellow dot) on the powers that have it. Tho when you do, you also lose 6% res from Might of the Tanker in my build. You can usually count on 6-12% resistance in a fight because of it.

*cough* primary *cough*

Never read your old posts.... 🤪 For this I was looking at the actual combat log and comparing the damage done by the proc to the damage done by my damage enhanced shield charge. It's more proper to compare the damage a proc does to the base damage of a power. In the case of Shield Charge on a Stalker, the base damage to most enemies if 100 at level 50, with an extra 41 in a 5ft inner radius around the point of impact. But just looking at the damage done to most enemies in the 20ft radius of the power, the Obliteration proc I was talking about would do 71 damage, which is 71% of the base damage... not 33%. So 71% multiplied by the 18% is 12.8% damage. Still not great. The reason to look at this way is it more directly compares the damage added by a proc to the damage added by, say, a damage enhancement IO. Because you are giving up slots, potentially, in a power to put in procs, you might be trading off damage from enhancements. In the above example where I am six-slotting Obliteration, however, I am at the ED cap for damage. I wouldn't have been able to add even 12.8% more damage with that last slot, so the proc does result in more damage. It's just not a lot more. So the comparison to do in my case is to weigh that six-slot bonus vs the damage vs wherever else in my build I might use that one slot to get something better. Sometimes people will put an FF:+rech IO in Shield Charge because it's a proc buff that doesn't stack. If it fires even once out of all the targets you hit, you get the same benefit as if it hit all of them. So you take 100% minus the proc chance and raise it to the power of the number of targets you hit. That's the odds you hit nobody. 100% minus that is the odds you hit one or more. Now, it's a 2PPM proc, so doing the math works out to 10% proc chance per target. 0.9 raised to the power 16 (target cap) is 0.185... or an 81.5% chance you get that FF recharge bonus whenever you use Shield Charge. Of course, it only lasts 5 seconds. But the strategy with FF:Rech is often to put it wherever you can in the hopes it procs as often as possible. So you may think it's worth it. Depends on where else you can slot it. Also in #Corrections.... Now I think of it... I don't know if this is true. What I'm saying here about procs only applies to procs that have a %chance to fire when the power is used. IOs that represent set bonuses or other global benefits still give those benefits even when the power they are slotted in becomes inactive due to exemplaring provided one does not exemplar more than 3 levels below the level of the IO in question (or the minimum level of the set if it is attuned). Assassin's Mark might be such a global benefit. I've never slotted it in a high level power and tested it with exemplaring. Maybe someone else here has and can say. Otherwise if I think of it some time I am in-game I may try a quick test (at the cost of a few unslotters... for science!)

This. Assuming you don't have issues with it, CoD is really the go-to site for understanding what a power does. It uses the same data the game client uses to display power info in-game, except it does so with much more detail. For instance, if you look at the origin attacks in CoD you can actually see what that "special" damage line is. It's a sliding scale of damage that starts out high at level 1 and drops to almost nothing by level 15 where it stays. In other words, it's mostly only meant to be used very early on until you replace it with real attack powers. Although I've heard Taser Dart or Apprentice Charm can be used to ignite an Oil Slick. 🤪

This isn't as big a difference as you might think. Proc rates in LR and SC are abysmal because they are pseudopets. i.e. They use 10 seconds as the activate time, just like a toggle or autopower instead of using the very long base recharge time of the power itself. Then too, they are largish 20ft radius AoEs. All that reduces the proc rate. Your purple proc has a 25% chance and the others are 18%. In total, you are adding 63.3 average damage (of varying types) per target hit if we multiply the proc damages by the %chance and add them up. This is about 50% more than the LR base damage (not counting the inner radius bonus damage which is typically only going to hit one or a couple targets) to which you're adding another 60% with your two Armageddon set IOs. So 110% added damage. Croax slotted a full set of Obliteration meaning he's at or above the ED cap for damage and has one 3.5 PPM proc. So around 100% +dmg on the power himself and he does have one proc giving him about 10% added damage. I'd call that pretty even (unless I screwed up the math somewhere) and on top of that Croax's build is getting set bonuses in LR. The proc differences you listed in the other powers might be more significant differences because their proc chances are likely higher. Just wanted to point out that Lightning Rod and Shield Charge are both poor candidates for proccing. If I ever put a proc in either it's to get a sixth-slot bonus, just like Croax did.

General takes: Stamina is over-slotted. That's not buying you a whole lot in terms of set bonuses or recovery. Put one perf shifter +end and (optionally) one perf shifter:endmod. Then consider spending those slots in other powers. At least have a look at the set bonuses you could have weighed against the small increase in recovery those slots provided in Stamina. Also keep in mind that Mid's can't show you the recovery or healing benefits of procs like Panacea, Perf Shifter, or Power Transfer because these are like mini-heals for health and endurance. They don't actually buff regeneration or recovery. Look for "Endurance Cheat Sheet" on the forums for a run-down of the recovery equivalents for the procs. You can see how they stack up to adding endmods to Stamina. Short version: The procs add a whole lot more than endmods per slot. Move Preventive Medicine:+Absorb to Health and Power Transfer:Heal from Physical Perfection to Health. Unless you never exemplar, it's better to have them in a lower level power. Procs need to be in a power that's available when you exemplar. This is different from set bonuses, which you still get, even on powers that gray out with exemplaring, as long as you don't go more than 3 levels below the IO level (or more than 3 below the minimum for attuned IOs). Drop the second slot of Phalanx Fighting. The base 5% defense it provides is unenhanceable. Only the 3% per teammate is enhanced and it tops out at three teammates. But they all have to be within 8 feet of you (maybe 12ft on a tanker with AoE radius buff from inherent). Consider how often that happens, but even if it did, losing the slot loses you about 2% defense. Not a good use of a slot, especially when you're this far over soft-cap already. Tanker ATOs. You have both sets in your longest recharge powers: Lightning Rod and Shield Charge. Nice to have them in AoEs to help stack up procs, but their effects are short lived. You want them in lower recharge powers. Consider putting them in Thunder Strike and Chain Induction. e.g. Five-slot MoT in TS and keep the FF:rech in the sixth slot. Consider spending one of those slots from Stamina on a second +5 recharge IO. You want Active Defense to double-stack as much as you can. It adds more defense debuff resistance. Get it as close to 60s recharge as you can. Course this depends how much you think you can count on FF:rech IOs boosting your long recharge powers. Monitor Defense Debuff Resistance for awhile and if you're happy with it being stacked most of the time, you don't need the extra recharge. Lightning Clap... you're gonna want a knockback to knockdown IO in there probably. Drop the Def/End in Combat Jumping. It doesn't add much defense for a single slot and CJ uses almost no endurance. Yeah, you were getting a tiny regen boost from the two-slot LotG bonus in a couple places, but it's not the kind of regen that really makes a noticeable difference. Overall, the defense you had was great... the resists? Not so great. If I was looking to improve, I'd angle for more E/N/T/P resists than you have here at the expense of a few percentage points defense. Negative in particular is important on the ITF when it comes to all the nictus enemies, especially the autohit one at the end with Romulus.

Oh you'll be letting others know something about you alright. I just doubt it's what you think.

Noob trap? I'm fairly sure the only controllers/doms I've met who don't spam their AoE immobs are the ones who don't HAVE AoE immobs.

You're taking Whirlwind tho... right? And Mu Mastery so you can Whirlwind and then Zapp? You're not a real Flash knockoff speedster unless you do!