Heraclea

While we're on the subject of kilts......

I have four tankers that really clicked and one that didn't but probably wants revisited. The greats: Invuln/Dark Melee. Tough as Granite with none of the disadvantages. Matchless synergy between attack and defense sets. Bio/Spines. My first offensive tanker. Just shows up and mobs die. Shield/Fire. Another offense oriented build, but quite tough. Plenty of AOE. Willpower/Mace. I used to be a big fan of Willpower until the rise of other endurance friendly armor sets like Bio and Radiation. Now that's fixed on HC and I need to give it a second look. Did not quite click: Reflexes/Katana. I presume Reflexes is not disadvantaged at holding aggro now. Needs a second look.

Somehow I have awakened into a Paradise where meetings are banned, social gatherings are also gone, and all sports are cancelled. What good and generous god gave me this wondrous gift?

The problem I find with click heals is that when you are in the middle of a fight and you click them, nothing happens.

The human capacity for gallows humor is one of the things that gives me hope for its future.

Buzzsaw builds were enjoyable, but don't work like they used to. Unkillable melee gods are also enjoyable. I'm not saying to slot everything exclusively for -tohit. What I am saying is that adding a proc to several attacks that does -rech gives both extra toughness and team utility to the character. But I definitely do slot up Siphon Life with accurate heal sets. (Heraclea has hers frankenslotted with 5 Touch of Nictus and one Crushing Impact Acc/Dam.) And brutes don't really need to slot damage so much, given their ability to buff their damage.

Dark Melee remains one of the strongest melee attack sets that can enhance the survivability of any character. You get an extra self heal that does damage, and fairly hard single target control. Where it falls a bit flat is in AoE damage, and there is apparently a move on Test to improve that as well. Electric armor also does well. It is close to immune to the omnipresent endurance drains you face everywhere from Clockwork to Market Crash. Enjoy the content other players avoid, like Carnie and Malta arcs. I would stop trying to recreate a damage proc based 'buzzsaw' build and work instead towards sustainable damage and leveraging the debuffs you do consistently. The constant -tohit of Dark Melee should be improved on. With procs, consistency - multiple procs that do the same thing - is more valuable than just having a bunch. Put as many Dark Watchers' Despair recharge slow procs in the attacks that accept them, and that will be most. That will reduce your incoming damage burden noticeably. When you have multiple recharge slow procs firing, the cumulative effect is better than simply adding a bunch of joy buzzer damage procs. Use your Rage to lift your damage. You may just need to put the character aside for a while and take him up again when you're ready for a new approach.

My Beasts MM has Theseus, Heracles, and Achilles for the wolves, Antiope and Hippolyta for the lionesses, and Athena for the big wolf. Maybe my lore pets are more interesting: Siouxsie Sioux and Patti Smith; Ron Jeremy and Stormy Daniels; Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe; Britney and Shania; Pompeius Magnus and Helius Parvus.

I am sure I am not the only one who did not scroll down and see the threads based recipes for Alpha components, and used the shards and inf method exclusively, on my first Homecoming character. This mistake is one I have not repeated, especially since I dislike playing for inf. I gerenally consider a character finished when they have all their unlocks and slotted with t3 incarnates, since the slog to t4 is as long as the one to t3 all over again and then some.

The definition of metal seems to have shifted since the 1970s, but Jungle Jenny here is from an Alex Harvey song that was metal back when it was invented.... She is but one of several music related characters in my roster; others are Plaster Caster (is Kiss still metal?), Janitor of Lunacy, Mary of Silence, and Whiskey Woman. Then again, there's the look picked out by Grandma Gnosis for her Phantom Army......

Note that one of the Perf. Shifter buttons, the straight EndMod, is only an Uncommon. This means that rather than buying the recipe outright as a 50 merit Rare, it may be more effective to buy the 20 merit Uncommon, craft it, and do 3 merit same-set converter gambles until it lands on the Chance for End. The odds are five to one. There also is no reason to prefer the level 50 version of this to the level 21, they do the same thing. The recipes, though Uncommon, require one piece of Rare salvage. High level Efficiency Adapter recipes are fairly frequent drops. At level 50 a two merit same type conversion is guaranteed to land on Perf. Shifter, that's all there is, Easier than getting them with inf.

De rota cotidiana tracto. Maximae duriores pugnant usque ad catalytici inveniendum. Tunc minores incursionem aut rogant aut incipiunt. Post omnis incursio praedam raram in castra ponunt et receptas inventas faciunt si adsit praedam necessariam. Post hac, Amazones quae ad maximo gradu recentiores procedebant in incursionibus largioribus adiungunt. I discuss the daily duty roster. Those of maximum level fight until they find a catalyst. Then those of lower level either seek a task force or start one. After every task force, rare salvage is stored at the camp, and recipes that were obtained get crafted if the salvage is present. After that, the Amazons who have newly reached maximum level go join larger raids.

Tried to run Barracuda SF yesterday. Abandoned it because the Reichsman fight seemed to be unfinishable. Nothing we did was able to stop the AV from regenerating. Apparently the temp power that stops that is given only to masterminds and defenders. We had neither on the team. Kept trying though four 13-minute cycles of Lore pets. Sounds to me like it isn't worth trying.

Lene Lovich - Home

AE tickets are your friends.

I can see that working quite well. Fiery Aura relies a lot on its self heal, so adding another adds value. And being resistance based, all the -tohit you are doing is the moral equivalent of defense, so you are also adding layers.

I will go with the obvious, then: The Doors - Universal Mind

My thought is that scrappers ought to bring more value to teams than they do. When running material that is actually difficult - say Ms. Liberty master runs - team leaders are often quite upfront about preferring anything other than a scrapper. There are scrapper secondaries that do bring value to teams - Shield, Radiation, and Electric come to mind - but anything a scrapper can do with them, a tanker can do better, and do at a lower level. It's usually a scrapper that leaves the team to go solo different spawns in the mission. Nobody minds, it's sort of expected, but most importantly the team doesn't benefit from having the scrapper beside them, so nobody cares. Maybe have the scrapper's critical chance be shareable by teammates within 20' of the scrapper. Give them a small but stacking chance for the other player's attacks to do critical damage.

Hawkwind - Master of the Universe

Here is the tale of the tape. First up is Omphale of Torchbearer, the staff/regen. full incarnate brute I made and invested rather heavily in to see if regen was viable to be ported to tankers. Resistance: Defense: Next up is Penthesilea of Torchbearer, a Street Justice/Willpower brute that hasn't been played all that extensively (still working on hybrid unlock) but who has also been built for toughness: Resistance: Defense: So the Regen brute built for survival has around 62% resistance, of which 12% is actually from the secondary, with the rest from pool powers and IOs. At best, she gets 32% defense, but she gets 0% defense from the secondary. The Willpower brute by contrast has around 71% resistance, of which 32% is from the secondary. She has around 27% defense across the board, of which anywhere from 4% to 15% comes from the secondary. So choosing Regen automatically puts you in a 15 to 20% hole across the board compared to Willpower. As I was saying, "Regen, with heavy investment in defense and resistance set IOs, and pool powers to boost defense, gets to be where Willpower is out of the box."

Prince - When Doves Cry

Utah Phillips - The Preacher and the Slave

My characters function as a commune. They share their drops: converters, catalysts, salvage, crafted enhancements, even inspirations. If there was a sharing storage rack for recipes they'd be shared too. When a character gets a desirable recipe some other character can use, the odds are excellent that the uncommon and rare salvage needed to make it are already in the base. Inf, by contrast, is greasy kid stuff. In the old game I learned not to have confidence in it as a store of value. It serves very few purposes. I will buy salvage with it, mostly white salvage a character does not have, or when a memorizer needs to craft a batch of lowbie IOs: again, the uncommons and rares are probably sitting at the base. I spend inf at the P2W store. And I make sure characters have enough to craft their drops. And when a character starts to get too much inf I will buy pre-catalyzed enhancements at the AH. But I wash my hands for twenty seconds afterwards.

This is what I was trying to say earlier. Regen, with heavy investment in defense and resistance set IOs, and pool powers to boost defense, gets to be where Willpower is out of the box, without those pools or sets. To me this suggests that it lags far behind. It needs more base resistance, more always-on and fast acting regeneration, or relief from the artificial lag of animation times, to enable its repertoire of self heals and trouble buttons to be actually effective in live game play.

Led Zeppelin - When the Levee Breaks.