ZemX

Despite indulging in some math nonsense up there I think I am with @lemming. Stick with just the AT, primary, and secondary combos. Everything else after that is just build variation you can mix, match, and respec at will. And there are effectively an infinite number of build variations because all of us together will never try all of them or even more than a fraction of them.

Aaand I did. Forgot one last line: 7. Fours pools AND one epic/patron (line 5 in my previous post times 10 epic/patron choices = 4500 more options). So total of 7875 pool/epic combos times 289 pri/sec combos = 2,275,875... wow... so many Scrappers! Minimum six. You have 24 power picks to make and can only fill 18 of them with primary and secondary if you choose all of those. Max is actually 21 though since your first pool is picked at level 4, hence 3 picks to make before that (2 at creation and one at level 2). But I'll let someone crazier than myself prove it. Read this old thread by @Spaghetti Betty... and despair! (and yes, it reads in the thumbnail as "Show me your poo..." to me too).

Must... resist... can't... okay, we're doing this: If you really want to count standard pools, it's a bit more complicated. You can't choose zero standard pools. You have 24 powers to pick and can only fill 18 of them by taking all primary and secondary powers. That leaves six, as @lemming has also noted. This means two pools must be chosen, one of which or neither of which can be an epic/patron. So you have one of these cases: 1. Two pools. (12 choose 2 is 66 but 3 of these are illegal combinations of two specialized travel pools, so 63) 2. One pool and one epic. (12 times 10 choices = 120) 3. Three pools (12 choose 3 is 220 but this time there are 9x3 illegal combos of one standard and two specialized pools, and one illegal combo of all three spec pools, so 220-28 = 192). 4. Two pools and one epic (line 1 times 10 = 630). 5. Four pools (12 choose 4 is 495 but again more illegal combos. We'll need a footnote here!(a). Total = 495 - 45 = 450. 6. Three pools and one epic (line 3 times 10 = 1920. whew! Sum of all these is 63+120+192+630+450+1920 = 3375 (but I'll be shocked if I didn't make a mistake in here somewhere). This 3375 is what you'd multiply by primary and secondary choices you have from your post. So 289 times 3375 = 975,375. Almost a million scrappers combos! And you thought ONE on the team was trouble! Footnote (a): Illegal combos of two specialized pools is 3 combined with two choices of the other 9 (9 choose 2 = 36. Illegal combos of all 3 spec pools is 1 times a choice of the other 9. So 9. Total is the sum of 36 + 9 = 45. What was that you posted while I was in the middle of all this @Snarky? Tooooo laaaaate!

I know that, but as I explained, I am not counting standard power pools as a "powerset combination". As such, your pedantry on top of my pedantry is denied!

To be serious about this (unlike my other reply) the useful answer here is the simplest one (number of primary choices multiplied by number of secondary choices) summed across all ATs. If you think about how we most often talk about what characters we are playing, we tend to just give the pri/sec combo. e.g. "I am playing a Katana/Regen Brute!" Less often, people will throw in that epic/patron pick and say they are playing a Dark/Dark/Dark Blaster, so that's fair game too, I think. Pools are much less differentiating, however. It's not that the powers themselves are unimportant. Just that nobody introduces themselves as a Fire/Fire/Flying/Speed/Concealment/Mace Blaster. As such I declare @Snarky the winner of this thread: And I declare myself the thread's Pedant in Chief for reminding him that it's 11 epic/patron choices... since "none" is a choice. *pushes up glasses*

Ooo.. party in the reactor room again? I might have to take my Rad/Rad out of storage for that. Wasn't that much fun trying to scratch those +6 bosses at the end with a sword. And Cold would be even worse.

What? No Incarnates?! *runs away*

I think I've only ever had trouble with Posi 1 when the difficulty was set at +2 or more. Maybe also the team has too many sub-15 level characters who are then -1 to the +2 content. At that level, it makes a huge difference. I had a similar team setup with a couple Marines and an MM but at +2 and the simulacra team, could zero my level 50, fully IOd and purpled, Rad Tanker's health in about six seconds flat. THROUGH inspirations. We rocked literally every other part of the TF up to that point like it was easy mode, despite being +2. It was like hitting a brick wall at the end.

Not exactly, but I'm probably splitting hairs here. SS suffers poor DPA because of the general problem of powers not being balanced around animation times. Rage, however, is better than Build Up at adding damage, especially double-stacked, so in that way SS can solve some of that "original sin" problem of poor DPA by itself... but only if you take Rage and really only if you double-stack it (or get close enough to it).

Yeah, it's a shame. The Minimal FX options needs to get around to some more powers and powersets. The original devs were really too fond of particle effects and that just doesn't fit a whole lot of comic book genre super powers. Rad Armor would be a good fit for this character too, but similar problem. It has flying "ping pong balls" on one of the armor toggles that I suppose are meant to suggest electrons flying around a nucleus but you can only tone them down with certain color customizations. Can't get rid of them. Same with the taunt aura. I get it to where it's just a subtle smoke effect near the floor surrounding the character but you can still see it.

Oh if I were to do it, I'd definitely do it as a secondary build. Not gonna destroy the main way I play but if I ever do get curious about HM+'s, that's how I'll go. But I'd have to do a lot more research before I bother. I'd have to know first if you even really want a tank for that.

Embrace the chaos! 😈

That Simulacrum fight has to be the most variable thing in the whole game. Just based on who is on the team it can be anything from a light breeze to a total nightmare multiple-team-wipe-fest. Especially when the game gets "creative" with the clones when it can't deal with non-original powersets. I bring a Rad Armor tanker and it pits me against a clone that has Radiation Emission powers like Enervating Field... but is also a tank. Recently ran a +2 posi with that tanker and there were a couple marine affinity folks on the team as well. The debuffs were absolutely crippling. We wiped maybe four or five times and had to resort to single-pulling like straight out of old school Everquest or something, just to get by... ourselves.

Not being a lore hound, I wasn't aware there was anything unique about them other than being robots. Nemesis Warhulk obviously has a person inside the tank. But what's the deal with Titans?

You have to dig a little to find the actual power used by the pseudo-pet (pseudo-jet?): https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=pets.team_transport.team_transport_powers&at=minion_unkillablenpc And this is the relevant part: Not sure why its radius is that small. The max targets hit is obviously just a max 8-bit integer, so they didn't care to restrict how many targets can be hit, but were somehow concerned that it wasn't too wide an area? eh...

The Sky Splitter finisher in Form of Body stance can also add +13% res(All) on Tankers. +10% res(All) on Brutes. Granted, Sky Splitter is a pretty bad attack otherwise in terms of DPA, but if you care much about DPA, you shouldn't be using Staff Fighting in the first place. 🤪 Sky Splitter + 2 x Might of the Tanker procs = +26.7% res(All). That's pretty amazing on an SR. Though most of the time, probably overkill. Handy though, in situations where you are facing auto-hit damage sources. It will allow scaling resistances to cap that much sooner as you lose health.

Why is it possible to go through some doors/hatches when they are open, and others you must wait for them to close before you can click them again? Yeah, the obvious answer is different people worked on them, but I'm curious at the inner-workings. Is the clickable area something that is attached to the door itself or is it some bounding volume that covers the whole doorway and door frame? Because clicking the open door rather than the empty door frame doesn't seem to work either. It's like the trigger area you can click on disappears when the door is open. Possibly related: At tram stations, a few seconds before the gate closes and the train leaves, the ability to click the open door to the tram car disappears and you have to wait for the next car even though the tram hasn't left yet. You'd think this is do you don't see an animation of your hero dashing into the tram car when the doors have already closed, but this happens in reverse when you're waiting for the next car. If you've clicked the door, your hero will often appear to enter the car before the doors have opened. Asking the big questions, I know.

Pretty sure this is going in circles but it's also being made way more complicated than it needs to be. 1. Purely on SOs, which is the supposed balance point around which this game is designed, I don't think it's ever been explicitly or implicitly promised that literally every AT, powerset, and level should be soloable in all content or even just in mission story arcs. And I don't think it should be. All of those missions STILL tell you to bring friends whenever they're about to throw an AV (or downgraded to EB) at you. 2. When we open the field up to IOs and Incarnates and everything else, there is clearly nothing in normal content that probably cannot be soloed by any AT or powerset combo, at least by somebody skilled enough and given enough time.

That's the point. DB and Katana are waaaaay closer in pylon/trapdoor tests and yet people still talk about "underperforming" same as they do when speaking of Kinetic Melee, which is notably farther down the scale.

Yeah, don't worry. There's no willingness to believe him. I was just clarifying his point about "invulnerability" in AE. As I said, he's still barking up the wrong tree on soloability. Even if he adjusts his "Testing" back to +0 difficulty, he's still going to run at the AV with no armor, no insps, and no plan probably, achieving the same results. Mostly this argument is for the benefit of others reading. I'd hate for some newcomer to the game to happen upon this and actually believe any of it. And as far as that goes, we've probably all made the points we intended to make. Until next time!

Edgy! But I already have a "robot that became self aware" concept. The Clockwork Mime! Imagine becoming self-aware only to realize your entire purpose in this world was to stand on sidewalks in Imperial City entertaining passers-by with a mime act. Obviously, he went Crusader so he could see that world burn. He was Martial Arts but now I think of it, Kinetic Melee is probably much better aligned with the mime concept.

See also the "what does 'underpowered' mean?" thread in General. Basically, we are quibbling over some percentage of DPS that will bother a min/max gamer... and nobody else. And I think some of Katana's fame is almost certainly down to said min/max builds with -RES and damage procs. You'd think its lethal damage would hamper it, but it ends up pretty highly ranked for DPS when you IO it out. I've done Rad/Kat on a tanker and it's fun. I posted a Rad/BS variation of the build in the recent Broadsword thread here. But it's not one of those damage-tweaked proc-monster builds either. I like it, but for a basic tanky build, I prefer something with larger AoE like Ice Melee or Battle Axe. Possibly the only reason I haven't dipped into DB myself is that I find the animations to be a bit robotic and the sound effects... weird, somehow. Maybe I just need a robot tanker concept. 🤪

It sounds good for DPS roles but it's kind of disappointing for everyone else, in my opinion. "Oh, for the game's most elite content, I need a build for my tank that's less... uh... tanky?" Pass.

Wrong. Nobody NEEDS to fight anything in this game solo. The one exception is new story missions at the ends of some arcs, but these are designed to be soloed and CAN be, by anybody. Soloing is otherwise a choice, not a requirement. It has never been, and hopefully never will be, a design requirement of this game that literally every character must be able to solo all content equally well, let alone at the +4 difficulty level with zero mitigation you're doing your so-called "testing" at. The entire point of having different Archetypes is to present players with different strengths and weaknesses. There are literally support powersets in this game that offer practically no benefit to the player themselves. They are entirely team-focused. Soloists don't use them. Your testing isn't revealing any problem. The game is tested every day by thousands of players. It works. And yes, even for soloists. Though the people who are serious about soloing difficult content don't run up to an AV with a naked Defender or Mastermind... just sayin'