Scientist

I do think some of the redside arcs are better written than blueside ones, but I agree for a lot you are working for someone else, and they are really getting the rewards for it. I'm playing one redside character for the arcs I liked (Vernon von Grun, for example, really any of the mad scientist ones). I also agree the Mayhem missions are more fun. I wouldn't play exclusively there with a highly team oriented character like a tank or defender, though, population just isn't high enough, and when you are actually reading stories it is hard to do that on a team anyway. I think it's a great place for a Mastermind, though, a lot more AVs in the arcs, and many MMs can actually deal with those. I was part of one VG that worked well, but it was with RL friends. Concept was kind of like the Paranoia game, we all had implanted cortex bombs to prevent disloyalty, called each other Comrade, and made threatening comments to report each other at any real or imagined infraction. "Oh, Comrade, what a pity you failed to survive that encounter. I'm sure the Supreme Command will be very forgiving, though, they have that reputation, do they not?" Add bad Russian accent for even more flavor. I actually found it fairly fertile RP potential compared to anything I saw blueside, where supportive comments and "Lets get'em!" action cries got a little hard to be creative with.

AVs as AVs at level 50 have 85% resistance to all debuffs but -resistance and -damage (it starts lower, at 60%, and scales up). That is one reason you see a lot of discussion in the defender forums about which sets can bring the most -resistance to AV fights. I wasn't sure if they retain that 85% resistance as downgraded EBs, but I'll take Vanden's word for it. Note that mobs which are higher level than you also "resist" everything, including damage, a +4 mob resists about half of everything you do to it. So a -30% tohit debuff becomes about -15%, the 100 damage hit you do to it becomes about 50, and so on. That is one reason +4 mobs are very slow to take down without a fairly powerful team. It is usually not even worth the effort to fight +5 mobs. Also, higher "rank" mobs like lieutenants and bosses have a built-in accuracy modifier, a boss has 34% bonus, so even if you floor them they hit you 6.4% of the time instead of 5%.

Just a note for any MMs looking at procs in secondaries, there is a thread on the Defender forum, "Proc Monsters, the New Offenders" where there is a lot of actual data on that, especially for Traps, which has a lot of odd "pet type" powers with unpredictable interactions with procs.

A friend of mine told me that many powers have their actual effect take place before the end of the animation, so perhaps the Venom Grenade takes effect at 1.65 sec, and the animation finishes and lets you do something else at 1.84 sec? For attack chaining purposes you might want to use the latter number, but for purposes of something not shooting back at you maybe the former. He said Suppression is especially pronounced this way, a long listed animation time but it starts doing damage pretty early in it.

Ignoring the Incarnate level mobs mentioned above and mob tohit buffs like Nemesis with Vengeance, the way the formula works out is that 45% defense floors the tohit of everything, Lts, Bosses, AVs. Higher rank foes floor out at higher than a 5% chance to hit, though, a +0 AV floors out at 6.5% to hit you, and a +4 AV floors out at 9.1% to hit. A +0 minion is 5%, a +4 minion is 7% to hit you.

For a set bonus, you always get it, which is why people occasionally slot "mule" powers like Brawl with sets. I saw a build that slotted it with purples, now THAT is dedication to recharge. 🙂 For a proc, it depends on the proc. The Stealth proc, for example, will only run for a short time (1 min?) after you stop using a power. Don't put it in Teleport, for example, as I did early after IOs came out, because it was much cheaper than the Runspeed stealth proc. Kismet I believe only works while the power is used, like that. Luck of the Gambler acts like a set bonus, on the other hand, and gives you +7.5% recharge even if you never use the power.

I have fought him, someone called him out in LFG and I managed to get there just in time, and I saw one other call-out since then. He was not super common even on live, though. Perhaps the theory about not killing his entourage is correct? I've also seen and participated in one Rikti invasion, but that was it. I'm hoping for more, still need the Bomb badge.

The spreadsheet is missing the -resist value from the Annihilation proc, and I've not been able to find it listed anywhere else, does anyone know what it is? Also, is Caltrops likely to work similarly to Distortion Field, with about a 20% chance of each normal proc firing each 10 sec? Trying to figure out if it is worth proc slotting that for Traps, assuming I can immobilize foes in it of course.

I rely heavily on the fact that many of the people on these forums (not me, btw) are very knowledgeable about computers and code, and would probably have spotted anything dangerous about programs like Pine's/Mids that are getting heavily used. As witness the fact that a subset of them turned passed-along I24 code into the game we are playing. 🙂 That said, if I see something new posted, I'll wait a few days for other people to check it out, just as I do for Microsoft updates, for example.

So does that mean the defense of Traps - FF generator, for example, is not boosted?

I assume the Venom Grenade you are testing is from the gun, right? Pines builder lists both the gun and Crab venom grenade as having a 1.848 sec animation, part way between the 1.65 you see and the 2.1 sec you measure. Same animation for WAWG from the gun, a Crab doesn't get that.

I was puzzling over how much slotting love to give Inexhaustible on my Bio tank, I don't have enough to 6-slot it for interesting set bonuses, should it get more than 1-2, and what should those be?

Good to know, I'm discussing this with a friend who is going to dual build Crab/Bane, it will change both my and his powers chosen. I actually kind of like the gun models, but Suppression is too awesome to give up. Do you happen to know if anyone has tested this for the VEAT powers, btw? Sometimes the devs did forget about HEATs and VEATs when rebalancing things. . .

So it sounds like what I might gain in animation time by using the gun ST attacks in place of the Crab ST attacks, I'm likely to lose in redraw time. I'm not willing to give up the huge Suppression cone from Crab, which is also energy damage, so back to Crab attacks it is. Thanks for the info!

In the 3 months since the game came out the markets have definitely changed due to this. The OP mentions Decimation, for example, as only selling for "several million" when in short supply. In the first couple of weeks of the game, they were selling for well over 5M. More people have learned how to do the conversion process to efficiently turn low demand goods into high demand goods, so the market has "flattened". Numinas have also dropped in price, I know because I still have a memorial one listed for over 8M. Also, as Boogaloo said, even if you generate your own IOs, to get them attuned for free you have to buy them on the market, so you would want to sell yours and buy someone else's (or maybe your own, not sure if that is possible?). There are a few procs that may be exceptions, where if you made the low level one to sell, you can just slot it since it is level invariant.

I definitely like the Destiny 120 sec Clarion mezz protection for a Rad/ defender, getting mezzed can be death in a lot of TFs and trials since your AoE debuffs have been generating aggro all this time. As a Rad/ I don't tend to need more End, between the "you are on a team" defender inherent and perma-Accelerate Metabolism, so I didn't bother with Ageless.

So when I was setting up my Crab build back on Live, a goal was to avoid any Soldier gun attacks, because the redraw animation slowed things down in a rotation. My understanding is that late in the game, there was an animation pass by BABs so that redraws would not slow down animations, but I never revised the build. Does it now make sense to use the first two Gun attacks, which are faster animations, in place of Channelgun and Longfang? The AoEs (Venom Grenade, etc.) seem to be equivalent, though Suppression on the Crab of course has double the arc. I realize Channelgun has energy damage, which is less resisted than the lethal of Single Shot, but Single Shot is also 1 sec instead of 1.6 sec, for example. Also, does anyone happen to know if the gun redraw animation is one of the ones that can be turned off at the Tailor?

I believe they did bump up damage resist values in set bonuses in multiple sets with the code that went into Homecoming, because nobody ever built for resist, just defense. I think actual damage resistance got added in as well to some sets where it was previously only "mezz resist", which wasn't of much use to anyone. A few defense bonuses may have been mucked with as well.

I didn't manage to make the donation window, but did want to make a suggestion to the devs that they make their contingency fund a full month's expenses. As they saw this time, it is not hard for something unexpected (Paypal issues, changing server companies, etc.) to require an extra month's worth of fees "up front", just like when you are changing rental apartments some extra money is needed for deposits and such. I've been involved with several nonprofits, and I'm sure the IRS does not have a problem even with a nonprofit to have a months worth of expenses in the bank at any one time.

I tend to plan out my characters way in advance, so as I level up I look at powers I can put the same attuned sets in that I want at 50. That way I get to start benefiting a bit from the recharge, defense, etc. even before 50. That might mean I 5 slot something earlier than otherwise, for example, to get a set bonus. Other powers will just have generic level 25 or 30 IOs for a long time. At 50 I'll typically respec anyway to make sure all my powers are available at the levels I may want to exemp to, and ditch anything I was experimenting with (goodbye Long Range Teleport!), so I can pull out anything I changed my mind on at that point and reuse it on someone else.

That explains why a friend of mine who had one listed at 10M for weeks from before the price dropped down to the 5-6M range finally had it sell, I'll pass along his thanks to whoever tried this doomed attempt to manipulate the market! :)

I believe you are correct that they have to be slotted to upgrade, so I suspect it is a mix of buying and using unslotters, and people who are respecing and pull out the old ones to sell because they want something else in that power. It is pretty easy to recycle IOs now that you have dozens of enhancement slots instead of just 10. Neither of those produces a lot, which is why I think the superior ATOs turn over a lot slower than the regular ones.

I would say a lot of wealth in this game is a lot less than it was on live on the original game. There, a fairly high end build was 1-2B, here as someone said earlier around 300M, give or take, will do it. A high recharge build, a bit more, high defense is not as expensive. I'm not working quite as hard on my marketing since I cleared 1B, since I only have one level 50 character so far, and at my rate of play I'll be lucky to get 1 additional every couple of months. Then again, after getting my first 50 I now spend a lot of play time doing things like running arcs to open TF contacts, collecting badges for useful accolades, and so on rather than joining PI radio teams for fast leveling. Really optimizing a character takes longer than getting them to 50 these days, and there are not many additional shortcuts you can buy with Inf once you have your IO build. :) To those wondering where the 1% cutoff lies, I would bet my 1B is well within it. There were a LOT of people even in the live game who never had 1B inf in the entire game, and it was considerably easier to earn Inf then since there were a lot more things you could flip profitably. I had several friends with multiple 50s who probably didn't have 200M between all their characters, let alone a purple IO.

Does your base teleporter take you to the Chantry in the Shadow Shard? Thanks for the guide, I didn't realize LFG worked this way.

Sonic has - by far - the worst (inherent) single target dps of any Blast set. The stacking -resist debuffs merely bring that up to 'adequate'. Fire Blast will still do more damage solo. Sonic Defenders also tend to 'de-optimize' their single target damage rotation by taking Screech rather than Shout since it boosts the resist debuffing. Good to know, I hadn't done a dpa analysis of Fire versus Sonic. I've never really seen any reason to optimize my dps on a defender, I'm rolling a defender for teaming, I've got other ATs for soloing. While I definitely want to contribute dps on a defender, if I want to fight an AV as an AV I'll recruit someone to help to make it tolerably fast.