Yomo Kimyata

Absolutely not. Not even if you wanted to make this game "winnable" by toddlers. Ice Melee is already a top if not the top performer.

Endurance is going to be your bottleneck.

same as for everyone else, Snarky. 100mm inf per account!

The one thing that I try to do is avoid having only one type of damage across primary/secondary/pool/epic. Other than that, yes I will spend hours hacking at a Zeus Class titan with a broadsword

Well slap my belly and call me “Shirley”! Good to know that.

damage debuffs and damage resistance debuffs are two different things. Damage resistance resists damage resistance debuffs: if you have 50% smashing resistance, and you get hit with a 10% damage resistance debuff, that 10% is 50% resisted so you get hit with -5% smashing resistance for 45% smashing resistance. if you have 25% cold resistance then you get hit with -7.5% cold resistance for 18.75% cold resistance. I do not think -damage buffs are resistable.

Phi is a magic number. Yes it is; it's a magic number.

One thing I will say is that DNA Siphon can be an utterly fantastic offensive weapon, and I six slot it on every bio character. It's even a great place for the Crit Strikes proc on a scrapper. For an EM/Bio scrapper I would probably go with: Fury of the Glad -res proc, Superior Avalanche knockdown proc OR Overwhelming Force knockdown proc, 50+5 Armageddon A/R, Armageddon damage proc, lvl 53 D-Sync Drain (Acc/End Mod), lvl 53 D-Sync Reconstruction (Healing/Recharge). I never got around to making a scrapper, but my Bio/EM tank is probably my godliest character.

I've been culling as well. Mostly challenge characters that I was bored with the challenge.

Only one has a cocktail named after him. Et tu, Brute?

I'm complex. And irrational.

C'mon, I can't even pick my best scrapper!

(7^0.5) - 2i

Can you point me towards evidence in the code? Again, I'd love to hear that I'm incorrect.

I do not believe that is true. I believe that the critical strikes window needs to be active by the time the effect is applied. Let's imagine that you can hit Seismic twice in a row (you can't, but let's assume it's an identical power because I don't want to post two pictures.) When you activate this power, it will take a total of 1.716 seconds before any other power will begin (Arcanatime). So you activate the power and then there is a certain amount of time that elapses before effects take place. In this case, that is 0.833 seconds (Animation Time before Effect). Lots of things happen at that effect time, including damage and checking to see if procs activate. That's when the Critical Strike proc is checked to see if it activates. If it does, then you get 3.25 seconds of enhanced critical probability. Some of that time is wasted, since the power needs to completely execute animation and prepare for the next power, even if you have it cued up. In this case, your "dead time" is 1.716 - 0.833 = 0.883 seconds (which is really pretty low) leaving you 3.25 - 0.883 = 2.367 seconds of remaining active proc time. Now we activate the next power, which we are pretending is identical to this one. Is there enough active time left on the proc? Yes! all we need for the proc to be effective is for it to still be active in 0.833 seconds! So making sure that there is enough time for the proc to be active for the next power is satisfied. you'd think that would always be the case, but it isn't. there are a (relatively small) number of combinations that will never pass on the crit strikes proc to the second power because the animation time before effect is greater than the remaining active proc time. Now, how about getting more than one power in the window? In that case, you need to execute the entire second power and have enough time left on the proc to reach the animation time before effect on the third power. So let's say we can hit Seismic three times in a row. It activates the proc and you have 2.367 seconds or remaining active proc time. the second power execution takes a total of 1.716 seconds (again, Arcanatime) which means after the second power we have 0.651 seconds of remaining time in the proc window. Since the activation time before effect is greater than that remaining time, the proc window will not be open for that one. I'm quite sure that this is how it works, and I've had verification from others on this board, but I'm absolutely open to hearing otherwise. Without delving into the code you really won't know because the combat log doesn't tell you the probability of a crit, so if there is a crit on the third execution you really don't know if that was a boosted crit chance or just a regular one. Anyway, there are cases when you can get three attacks off with enhanced crit. But for the most part, I assume I'll only get one and I'll check to see if a particular combo is even possible.

Stone is an excellent, excellent set. Seismic has a high proc activation rate, but you're not going to get both mallets into the window. By my calculations, you'll have 2.367 seconds of active proc time and you'd need 2.648 seconds to get off both mallets. One mallet and Stone fists, yes. But I generally put crit strikes in Fault and count on getting just one power off in the window.

I *believe* that Power Transfer proc only works once per activation, i.e., you're not going to see it proc on ten opponents and get 50% of your health back. I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong. My experience with it is that 5% is a really small amount to actively notice. This is more of a commentary on what and how we observe things, but since it is relatively small compared to, say, the 15% of the Sleep proc or even an active heal that gets you 50%+, it's more of a background/regeneration type of effect.

Especially when a power set has been revamped since the original got 50ed. I do this a lot with other strategies as well -- what happens when I go from defensive to offensive and swap out Force of Will for Experimentation?

Ditto. Just because I'm slotted to the nines doesn't mean I'm not still trying to solo Bride of Hamidon.

Kin Melee gets a lot of hate, because people don't think it generates as much damage per xxx as other sets. That is, in part, due to the fact that most attacks in the set have -damage (which I *think* is not resistible?) so the intended tradeoff was less damage for more survivability. That said, if you are zerging content with teams in today's meta, many people only care about the almighty dps. Solo, you'll probably notice the extra survivability (Burst is your real friend, an PBAoE that drops damage 12.75% for 7 seconds. That's in addition to any damage resist you have.) I would think that KM and EA would match relatively well together. the -dam is functionally equivalent to +resist, which layers with the mostly defense-based Energy Aura. That said, the KM gimmick works better in my mind on scrappers and stalkers, since getting a crit on Concentrated Strike instantly recharges Power siphon instead of doing bonus damage. You lack that mechanic on Brutes and Tanks.

Kin Melee is a lot better than people give it credit for, since part of its bonus is added survivability in the form of damage reduction (and KD). But you've got all the survivability in the world with SR.

In my case, inf is short for infinite.

Two comments on email. First, please send it to @Yomo not @Yomo Kimyata. Second, sometimes the email system is really screwed up. Like occasionally I will log on and receive an email that was apparently sent over a year prior. Maybe this is a server issue, since I notice it when I log on a shard I rarely use? Dunno, but if I don't respond rapidly I'm not ignoring you. In fact, if you send me another email a few days later because you haven't received anything yet, I won't mind at all.

Undoubtedly Jingo Updog Esquire (and to a lesser extent, his daughter, Jingo Updog Esq. Jr (titles are apparently inherited strangely in their universe) ). He is a hyper-patriotic broadsword/regen brute and he is very effective at what he does. The roleplaying is almost entirely just in my own head, but it's as bombastic as it gets.

I entirely agree with most/all of your observations, in terms of how the game has been changed to make it easy to acquire (almost) all of the goodies that the game has to offer. But I'm not sure how that leads to the implication that the game is now broken because of it. I'm not sure how the game is broken because everyone can now easily achieve, for example, a Shield Wall +res on every one of their alts. Someone else being stronger in no way weakens me. I will say, I play very differently than I did in Live. I rarely team nowadays, and that's not because I can run +4/x8 content solo whenever and wherever I choose. It's because my life is very different now than it was then, and my time constraints are erratic and inflexible. So if I am able to solo a TF myself over a few days 10-15 minutes at a time rather than spend six hours organizing a team who all want to do exactly what I want to do when I want to do it for an hour, heck yes I'll do that. Part of it is also that my understanding of the mechanics of the game is so much better than it was on Live, thanks in large part to City of Data (all hail @UberGuy). Part of it is due to the fact that the current devs made a bunch of conscious decisions, like offer 200 market slots on each character, and up to 5000 character slots on each account, and a theoretically infinite number of accounts. (THIS is what I think breaks the system, literally, since our relatively tiny population has the ability to eat up several magnitudes more strain on things like the /AH and the Character Items menu). The djinni has been out of the bottle from day one on HC, and although it can be fun to play with various personal constraints, it's impossible to enforce them on anyone else with the exception of playing in various hard modes. At this late point in the game, I personally wouldn't care if they made every item freely available like on Test. With few exceptions, anyone with a working knowledge of how the systems work can create pretty much whatever they want just by playing the game. And no, y'all can't have any of my 53 Provocations.