Yomo Kimyata

You all keep talking about horses, but I'm not seeing any horses.

I also hate to bring this up, but with no inherent recharge, a Call of the Sandman proc has a 45% chance to give you a 15% heal. That's no joke.

To this point, I guess you need to role play a little in your head. Would Luke Cage be a part of stopping Rikti invasions? Heck yeah! On the other hand, there really isn't a ton of level 50 content that isn't specifically incarnate related. Looking at story arcs, you've got Vanguard and the RWZ, which is good stuff. But blue side you've only got five contacts who will give you story arcs at 50. Red side has a lot more, and patron missions as well, but most of those will come through Quro. I get it that passing on incarnate powers is an individual choice, and it is hard to imagine a significant portion of the 50s out there to do so willingly. I've always thought that it would be great to limit each account to a certain number of incarnates, and that is partly due to the fact that it's exhausting seeing all-powerful god-like heroes named Captain Fartknocker and the like.

My style of playing scrappers is mainly through non-defense based secondaries, and by surviving in part through non-standard mitigation. Someday I might write a guide, but this post is going to be my love letter to Radiation Armor, from worst to best. Alpha Barrier; Proton Armor -- these are the two worst powers in the set, because all they do is what's on the label: provide resistance. Particle Shielding -- the third worst power. Provides absorb, regeneration, and unenhanceable recovery. Boo hoo. Fallout Shelter -- mez protection, damage resistance, YAWN. Oh wait, slow resistance!!! Ground Zero -- Understandable to skip if you have enough AoE attacks, MAYBE! 90 second recharge means you can expect to have it up every 30 seconds or so. Slot it with Achilles Heel for softening up the crowd before your next AoE. Slot it with Glad Armor proc for the same purpose. Slot it with Overwhelming Force proc to put them on their asses while you are doing it. Your proc chances will be very favorable, if not maxed. As you can see, I generally use this as a debuff power rather than an attack. What? It heals your friends? Boo! Who cares about them?!? Gamma Boost -- Regeneration AND recovery, and more of whatever you have least of? Debuff resistance?!? Beta Decay -- Are you kidding me? Auto-hit defense and to hit debuff on your enemies. Periodic resistance debuff from the Achilles Heel you put in there. Scalable recharge for you AND a taunt aura? Why don't they just throw in some unresistable damage as well? Meltdown -- Not only does this do a lot of great things, but on a scrapper you will be resistance capped to most things with just the base slot (although I just slot it with 2x 50+5 recharge IOs). Its "crash" is minor. Radiation Therapy -- I don't know where to start with this, or where to stop. There are so many ways to slot this that I wish I could ten slot it. Just don't bother with accuracy, because it has an inherent 300% accuracy!!! You can put your Crit Strikes proc here for activation every 15-20 seconds. And the Avalanche proc for more knockdown. And regeneration for 60 seconds that is enhanceable but, oh no, does not stack three times. Crap! This set is a power user's wet dream, and the only two downsides are the graphics, and that there are so many good powers that you may neglect your primary.

I went with Kilgore Trout.

More or less. It's not a double-your-money kind of play, but it's useful.

I think Cloak of Fear is way underslotted. The inherent accuracy is wicked low and the inherent endurance cost is wicked high, and if I'm going to bother with Cloak of Fear, I'm going to invest in it. Oppressive Gloom is well worth having in conjunction with Cloak of Fear, and you can get away with scarce slotting if need be. Going back to Cloak of Fear, pop an Unspeakable Terror proc in there as well, and you will periodically lay down mag 4 stuns. It's good stuff. I'd also try to invest more in Invoke Panic. It's well worth to get that thing recharging as quickly as possible!

You don't have to be an advanced user to work with superpacks, but it helps. It is generally not a good idea to buy a few packs, then convert the ATOs you get into the ones that you want for your character -- you can certainly do it, but it's significantly more cost efficient to sell what you have and buy what you want. I will generally buy superpacks on new characters, and convert the ATOs I don't need or aren't good selling items (like Kheldian) into something that will move quickly and at a good price. The real value of superpacks is that they put the goodies in your Character Items menu, which is accessible by every character on your account, at all times, even in missions or your base. You'll never need to buy one-off unslotters or catalysts again, and being able to access inspirations is a leeeeetle cheaty!

I heard on good authority that they are replacing the T9 for Empathy with Emote Bomb. 💣💣💣💣💣

It is indeed a hungry hungry hippo. Most of my axe scrappers were started before they made axe into a top set, so my attitude is a little different! I've leaned into the knockdown as a form of mitigation, and don't think I've even softcapped all my defenses. I will put a FF +recharge into Axe Cylcone and Pendulum and I don't bother with Hasten, but it's a set where I will need generally to add some slotting to Health and Stamina. For my Energy Aura, I don't have any problem with my blue bar, but I use Energy Drain often (and have a stun proc in it to further neuter the low level drone of sector 7G).

There is *always* a cheapest way to create something. That said, in the grand scheme of things it's not particularly relevant if one way saves you a little inf or effort over another UNLESS: 1. you are doing this in bulk, or 2. it is important to you. An extra million inf which can be made up in a few minutes playing the game isn't make or break, so no hand wringing is necessary! In my mind, this goes for those who get snippy when someone uses merits to buy something that would have been cheaper to acquire some other way. It's ok if you don't follow the absolute minimum cost path. This is so true for me as well! Nods.

In scrapper-land, I don't actually have a battle axe/radiation armor which I actually find sort of surprising. It should be amazing, and you should hardly need to worry about defenses with all that knockdown. I have two different axe/ninjas due to scheduling error. I'm making one into a thematic hover blaster which is unfairly effective, but yeah, the hide aura is annoying. I want to see my outfit! I don't think I have mastered the art of ninjitsu at high levels of performance yet -- I would appreciate a little more spot healing. I have a lvl 50 axe/energy who is a Carnival nemesis. It's an incredibly strong build. Also for your consideration, how about Axe/Ice? They come for the Axe Cyclone; they stay for the Chilling Embrace!

In my experience, 1-15 goes very quickly. It goes even more quickly when you have three or more attacks. If you can afford SOs, then I will generally slot: accuracy, damage, recharge, damage or endurance. If you need more than four slots to absolutely destroy content that was designed against characters that are either unslotted or have training enhancements in them, well then you may be playing a different game of checkers than I am.

And that, my friends, is a stone cold drag.

This is an incredibly valid point. I also *believe* (i.e., haven't wasted enough time getting data) that the Critical Strikes ATO does not affect Concentrated Strike crit chances (and therefore resetting Power Siphon). I will be happy to be proven wrong, but anecdotally I get about 20% when the CS proc is active as opposed to 70%.

I find it interesting that 80% of your points are literally about power creep of other sets, not about the mechanics or playability of Kinetic Melee itself.

Yobo? YOBO?!? My answer is generally always going to be scrappers, because that’s how I roll. But in general I’d say play something you like and figure out how to make it work. Soloing an AV becomes easier if you throw the kitchen sink of the P2W vendor at them!

I don't know if it is bug or not, but I rarely get more than a second or two out of Geode before it pops, so I respeced out of it.

Can you do us a favor and talk about how you are slotting your character as you go along? Clearly at this time you can afford SOs if you want them. When do you like to add staples like Steadfast Protection or ATOs? I think that additional commentary would help a lot of recent returnees who are having trouble with funding while they level.

It sounds like you are geared towards doing TFs/SFs. Depending on what you mean by "default settings" then there are two primary goals for a build and then for me an important secondary one. 1. Defeat all the cannon fodder. Generally, TFs are going to have a lot of opponents, although generally not particularly difficult ones. In this case you are going to want to focus on AoE damage and surviving the waves of cannon fodder. Of course, this is where your choice of how many heroes you want to fight as becomes important -- by endgame I'm running x8 but I'm not going to run a Synapse at x8. 2. Defeat the end AV/AVs. Now you need a build capable of defeating an AV. Not all AVs are alike, and a +0 AV is significantly easier than a +4 AV. In this case you are going to want to focus on ST damage, some debuff (particularly -regeneration), and maybe some crowd control, like immob. There are some AVs you will spank at +0 and you will find "unbeatable" at +4. 3. For a long while, this game has been modified to make it easier for players to build extremely powerful characters, and the devs have responded by making tougher enemy groups. To me, my third characteristic for soloing story arcs at a high level means I need to be prepared for massive debuffs. My game play is to play pretty much whatever until 50, and then I will run the characters I like at +4/x8 through the endgame arcs I like. In lots of those arcs, you are dealing with enemies who are going to crush you with sheer numbers of debuffs unless you are able to assess your threats. A mission of +4/x8 Crey nowadays is no cakewalk, and in comparison someone like Countess Crey is a welcome diversion.

We should be coming up to right around the point where it gets interesting. Based on some completely anecdotal evidence, players who started earlier this year post-announcement should be hitting 50 on one or more characters right about now. Do they make new alts and equip them, which is good for higher demand? Do they dip into marketing themselves which is good for higher supply? There should be an on-staff economist making predictions! "Economist" is a job title where you can be wrong 75% of the time, and yet still not get fired.

T9: Sarcasm. Oooh, THAT'S a useful superpower...

Sigh Blast is the T5 attack from the upcoming Passive Aggressive Blast set.

Do you mean 10mm or more profit each (which would be very impressive!) or 10mm in capital each? Don't forget the /AH vig; if you buy something at 12mm and sell it for 15mm you are only clearing 1.5mm a trade. Don't get me wrong, that's not a bad profit, but you can make something for under 300k and sell it for 2mm for the same profit with a lot more volume and a lot less risk.

I'd like to see you add Paper Missions in Grandville as well. I'd like to see possible enemy types for each location, and probable map types. For example, I never select CoT in PI because I just assume they will be in a cave. What percentage of their missions are actually in buildings?