Yomo Kimyata

Finally, we get to click and drag! I'm not exactly sure how the enhancements are grouped, but they are always grouped by set and in the order the set is listed in game, so if you have that kind of OCD you're set. You can drag the enhancements either to where you want them slotted, into your inventory, or just leave them in Unassigned. Back in the day, you used to get some reimbursement for SOs et al that were left unassigned and deleted, but now they just go away. Best practices for me are to move everything out of Unassigned into inventory unless you really don't care if it is deleted. I can vendor SOs or convert unneeded IOs, so I generally won't waste inf. Confirm that you are finished and ... All the powers you own now, even temps, are in your trays, and almost certainly not where you want them. You could just drag them where you want them or right click to remove from tray, but best practices call for the command /cleartray and Bob's your uncle. Open your powers and move what you want where you want it. Again, I start with the far right because it scrolls down and I don't want to miss anything.

We all make mistakes. I know this because I make mistakes and you Rikti monkeys are no better. So what do you do when you are in the middle of a TF and you run off to level and you hit the wrong power by mistake? Or you six-slot Stamina and later realize that may not be the best thing for you going forward? You fix your mistake! Anecdotally, people *HATE* to do this, and frankly it's because you are doing all the things you have done for (up to) 50 levels all at once, so it's a time-consuming ordeal. But don't fear the respec! I'm not going to give you any deep secrets here, but hopefully I can help you with some "best practices" in order to make the process easier. Also, we will discuss alternate builds and reasons you might consider them. As always, this guide is a function of my own experiences and opinions, and your mileage may vary. I'm always open to hear alternative ideas! R-E-S-P-E-C (no T!): A Power Respecification (click for the wiki article) is a way to change the powers you have chosen from your primary and secondary, to change the power pools and epic pools and the powers you have chosen there, and to change how you have allocated your slots. It is a complete process and you can't stop halfway through. If you are level 10 when you start a respec, you will be level 10 when you finish. If you are level 50 when you start, you will be level 50 when you finish. You know how every time you level up, you either pick a new power or add slots to your build? A respec is that entire process in one swell foop. What a respec is NOT: It is not a way to change ATs -- you were born a scrapper and you will die a scrapper. It is not a way to change your primary or secondary power sets. It is not a way to change your origin type. These all were baked in when you made your character and if you want to change them, you're going to have to make a new character. Quell domage. How do I get a respec?: Lots of ways. You get one for free every ten levels starting at level 10 and ending at 50. You can run a respec trial on either blue side or red side (usually with a team, but hey, you do you). When you run a Patron Arc on redside to unlock the Patron Pools (level 35 or later), you get a free respec. You can buy them on the /AH as recipes. You get them for rewards at some Veteran levels. You can get them as drops in super packs! There are all over the darned place! It is difficult for me to imagine that you will be unable to end up with as many respecs as you want or need. Why would I want to use a respec? There are a bunch of reasons, over and above simply making an error that you want to fix. A non-comprehensive list (and I'll add to this as per suggestions) includes: - taking an extra attack early on, and then respeccing out of it levels later for another power - realizing that the powers you have may be too endurance intensive, so wanting to add a slot or two to Stamina or Health - trying out a power to see what it does, then deciding you don't like it for some reason - hitting a milestone and discovering you may need less accuracy or endurance reduction in a power you already had - hitting level 50 and moving around slots because you want to Superiorize certain sets - gaining Incarnate powers that make some of your previous selections obsolete - trying out new power pools, or epic pools - etc. Best Practices: Listen, I'm not going to claim this is the easiest and fastest process in the world. If you have things about this you want changed, the Suggestions forum is right over there and there have been plenty of threads about this process. What I'm going to do is to try and help you make this easier on yourself. 1. Make sure you have plenty of time. It usually takes me no more than 10-15 minutes, but that's not nothing. Like I said, you are basically levelling up 49 times at once, so this is not going to be as instantaneous as clicking and dragging slots. Yes, it is a huge pain to want to move one slot from one power to another and to have to go through this entire process. For the most part, once you start the respec, you can't cancel out of it expect by quitting out, and your progress isn't saved. And it can be a pain to start and get halfway through because the only way to get out of it besides quitting is by pressing a bunch of back arrows. So plan ahead. I feel for the Soldiers of Arachnos who have a mandatory respec at level 24, because if you are in the middle of a team when you ding 24, you're going to have to take a time-out to do this process. So plan ahead. 2. It's really going to help if you have a character planner like Mids so you know what you are planning to do at each step. You can freehand it, but you're going to be less prone to make mistakes if it's planned out beforehand. 3. Know when and how to start it. Back in the day, you had to go to specific NPCs (check the wiki for details) in order to respec but now all you have to do is use the command "/respec". Do not do this until level 3 or later -- if you want to respec your level 2, just delete it and start anew! Do not start a respec while on a TF/SF/Ouro mission -- this may lead to failure for various reasons I am not clear about. If you haven't already levelled up to your current level, i.e., you dinged a level but haven't gone to a trainer yet, you are best off going to the trainer and levelling up before starting the respec, as the respec might fail. I've heard tell that very crowded zones might lead to failure as well, so don't try it during a Mothership raid. Usually I will do a respec in Ouro, or Pocket D, but any non-crowded zone will do. You can do it in your base, but then you cannot access the /AH, and you will often need to sell IOs afterwards. I like to be near a vendor as well, in case I'm buying or selling SOs. 4. Clear your enhancement tray of all extra enhancements. Every enhancement in your tray will join every enhancement you already have slotted in the pool once you start the process, and it makes it hard to see everything that you may want to slot or reslot. If the enhancements are sets that you want to slot but aren't currently slotted, fine. If the enhancements are DO and SO drops from mob defeats, you are better off vendoring them before starting. I usually use my enhancement tray to store IOs that I haven't gotten around to doing something with yet, so before I start a respec I will open up the /AH interface and (if there is transaction room) move all those IOs into the /AH to keep my trays clear. 5. This is optional, but I try to have most, if not all, of the enhancements I will want to slot available beforehand. Buy them, make them, pull them out of storage, whatever. It's totally fine if you want to respec into a blank slate with no enhancements slotted, but I usually want to get started right away. The respec process (with pictures!): The respec itself has three parts: power selection, slot selection, enhancement allocation. Once you start this process, you either need to finish it, back arrow out of it, or quit (which will leave you where you were before the respec started.) The post-respec process is either reallocating powers in your interface trays, or clearing your trays and then allocating your powers -- since this is pretty much cleaning up it's not considered "officially" a part of the respec process. I've got a level 15 Stone Melee/Bio Armor scrapper sitting in Pocket D : Why do I want to respec him? Well, mainly for an example, but I made him a while ago and one of his mandatory powers was Inexhaustible, and I don't need that so early (or maybe at all!). I'm level 15 so I know I have one free respec from levels. I've got a bunch of respecs in my Character Items from opening Super Packs as well, so I'm going to claim a Character Respec from there and type /respec. The top center tells me where I am in the process: On level 0 making my selection for level 1. Since the recent revamp, you no longer need to take the first power of your secondary, so your first selection will be your level 1 secondary. I'm going to take Hardened Carapace, and then Stone Mallet and Heavy Mallet. After each selection, the Next button in the lower right will light up and you will press it to continue. This is exactly like the levelling process at the trainers, except the first part is just power selection instead of power selection alternating with slot selection. The top center tells us we are on level 3 to select our level 4 power, and all available powers are clickable (and unavailable ones are greyed out). The bottom center tells us how many powers we have already selected and how many are left to go. At level 4, you can start to select power pools. I'm not going to do that at 4, since I want Environmental Modification at 4, but then I'll pick Combat Jumping at 6. Now here is something that's kind of a pain -- when you select a pool or an epic pool power, you select it, and then you have to hit the next button. To me that feels like double selecting, but whatever. Note that if I wanted to get out of this process now, I could click the Back button a bunch of times, or I could just close the program. Here I have finished my power selections and click Next to continue. The top middle tells us we are at current level 14, which isn't quite right since we are at 15, but it seems that for the power selection it considers us at level 14 going on level 16. No biggie. Now we get to allocate our slots. Now, I just picked Tough at level 14, and normally that means I could only have a max of 3 slots for Tough (the base selection at 14 and then adding two at 15). The respec process allows you to allocate slots to ANY power in ANY amount up to six total no matter when the power was selected, so I could six-slot Tough if I wanted to. But I don't. For more best practices, I always start my allocations on the right column which has all the inherent powers and pool powers. I do this because it is so much longer than the other two columns, and I worry about missing a power I may not see. So I generally scroll down to the bottom and start allocating powers there. The bottom middle tells you how many slots are remaining. Click Next and we get to allocate our enhancements:

My problem has been that I'm not able to get the sparks out of the way before they get absorbed and kill me indirectly, but now that I've actually looked it up (all hail Uberguy) I understand better: My scrappers are generally pretty heavy on the AoE and that's not doing me a lick of good on getting rid of the sparks. Unfortunately, that's going to include "fake" AoEs like Headsplitter and Cleave, so I may have to make a purely solo target build as well. Great point on the MM macros! I hadn't thought of that and it would certainly help. I seem to recall that Ripplesurge summons more sparks the more pets you have, so my plans of summoning Lore pets and Shivan and other summonables really bit me on the butt before. I've give it another shot one of these days, thank you!

I only have one issue with the Aeon SF and that is I have no idea how to solo Ripplesurge in 1star+ content. I'm most definitely not a speedster, and I'd hate to recruit for and wrangle a team that *gasp* played at slower than record breaking speeds.

Firstly and mostly, thank you for the time and effort it took to execute and (more importantly) document this! Some questions I have: did you run multiple samples for each run, and if so what was your sample size? This is going to be much more relevant for the Trapdoor trials, since you could get runners or Trapdoor himself gets a few regen clones off. Were there any defeats and if so did you count the rez time or did you just scrap the trial? I think in one of your earlier data analyses you mentioned using some inspirations. One of the things I'm watchful for in these set rankings is that, frankly, they are all more than adequate, so personal style is of utmost priority. Sets like Kinetic Melee (-damage), Dark Melee (-to hit), Psionic Melee (-recharge), etc., all help your survivability. But in today's game, survivability really isn't an issue anymore, even at +4/x8 difficulty, so it's really just a ranking of straight dps. Which is useful to know!

Your post is valid, and worthy of being deemed a philippic. I'm slowly working on the final guide anyone will ever need on how to get the items you want, but I'm kind of tied up with some other things nowadays and it's pretty comprehensive. Until then, I think this one is pretty specific and entertaining to read. It sure was entertaining to write!

That's a drag. If there were someone who was a volunteer for both Mids and HC, perhaps they could facilitate the communication process? I love the volunteer work that people have done on both projects and it seems to me that a large majority of the Mids users are on HC? And maybe the HC folks, who seem to be flexible on their forum software, could keep that in mind? The Mids software seems to be made by very knowledgeable developers, but the export options are possibly far more flexible than the user base needs? I dunno, just spitballing here.

Do you ever pick these powers? If so, why and which ones? How do they synergize with your build? How many slots do you give them and how do you slot them? Inquiring minds want to know.

There are very few on these forums who are more (and probably unnecessarily) vigilant against power creep, but I'm with the group here in saying that the Presence Pool could really use a little love for the first three powers. These all seem more than reasonable to me.

You are absolutely correct -- I totally spaced on the recharge aspect of Savage. Thank you for correcting me! But here I disagree and I actually feel that it's the opposite. Willpower is great at set and forget, but once you start getting at the high end of the difficulty slider, you are going to need an oh shit button or two or four, and that's where Willpower falls apart in my book. Speaking of oh shit buttons, I feel that Regeneration has 2 1/2 built in (Instant Healing but you have to use it as a preemptive move, Moment of Glory, Dull Pain if you use it as a spot heal counts as the 1/2). From the epics, Shadow Meld is a fan favorite, partly because you also end up with Moonbeam, and I actually like Hibernate because you get endurance recovery too (which clearly is not an issue for a regen). But Unleash Potential from Force of Will pool is the real winner in my books. I think I have one DM/regen scrapper that has Shadow Meld and Unleash Potential, and 99% of the time the extra oh shit button goes unused and wasted. But that 1%!

Over the years, I have come up with the following phrase: "I like being alone, but with people."

I had to go radiation for theme:

Now with extra knockback!

Savage Melee and Regeneration don't have any particular synergy together -- they are both good sets but don't work particularly well together. I would look at the power and epic pools closely (I think Force of Will would be a good choice). Also, I would try to put a knockdown proc in your AoE attacks -- that will give you a little bit more of breathing room for defensive healing!

A toddler doesn't have to understand physics to catch a ball. If you play one way for awhile, then play another way (and remember objectively how it went the first time), you can figure out what works best for you without one lick of mathematics.

I have many, many, (too) many alts. Most of them were made for one purpose or another and got shelved for one reason or another. But sometimes I come back to this game after a break and find myself looking at things with fresh eyes. For example, I've been looking back into Force Fields lately. I'm a melee player for the most part, but I've put together a few characters that thematically worked with the powerset and whatever vision was in my mind's eye at the time. All of them well predate the FF set boost and the power creep that allows us to get powers earlier and skip the T1 of our secondary. Nemesis Interrobang (lvl 47 FF/Energy Blast Defender): Was always a solid solo play, but since I never wasted time or inf on Sudden Acceleration procs, it was mostly a very fun knockback build. Super tanky, and with some quirky power choices (I generally like to try out every power in a set at one point or another. Yes, I used Detention Field!) So I dusted Nemesis?! off and gave him?! another shot. On the revamp, it's significantly more damage-dealing with the -35% damage resistance from Repulsion Bolt and Force Bomb. The Damping Bubble debuff resistances are crazy overkill, imo, and has me re-examining my pool choices. I expect this build to solo +4/x8 content handily by 50 just like my melee alts, although I'm still feeling out the differences in build strategies for a defender v. .scrapper. ?! Heir Apparent (lvl 18 Water Blast/FF Corruptor): This was a solo challenge toon that I was playing on Reunion. It was a mixture of Ironman and no /AH -- Heir Apparent could only store and use anything he or she found or made in a base that was headed by Estate Executor (lvl 7 Time/Dark Defender), but if Heir Apparent was defeated, they were deleted (along with everything they were carrying at the time, including slotted IOs), I'd make a new alt named Heir Apparent and Estate Executor would give them access to the vault. I think this was my third or fourth attempt by the time I got distracted. They were all **/FF corruptors for the Personal Force Field, because so many of my defeats occur when I am AFK and that helped a lot! But I got bored and moved on -- doubtful I will replay but I'm thinking about making a new corruptor or two without the ironman restriction. Brush With Divinity (lvl 24 Fire/FF Controller): Part of a themed villain group. I've actually spent some time on her lately because the damage resistance debuffs will make leveling trivial. I really enjoyed controllers on Live but I'm kind of "meh" about them so far here. The fun part has been developing a strategy: "Hmm, this power's mez effect provides knockback prevention, but that one doesn't. Where do I have to use procs for -kb and so on?" Right now, slow offense with 6-slotted Hot Feet and not nearly enough endurance reduction! At some point I'll come back to the TA builds I have, also from before the TA set boost. The anticipation is terrible; I hope it lasts.

Absolutely. It's the reason I almost always go for Radial Paragon Musculature rather than Core. A free SO in every endurance recovery power? Yes please; well worth giving up 12% damage. The Run Speed may not be particularly useful, but getting some to hit debuff help with anything dark is nice. Not to mention free defense debuff for any radiation or many handheld weapons.

Love theme builds! Broad Sword remains one of my favorite sets, maybe from nostalgia. Paired with Dark Armor, you are going to have to focus your build around endurance management, which actually fits in nicely with the Elric concept since he frequently tired. One thing to keep in mind is whether you want your character to be wielding with one hand (BS) or two hands (Katana).

Sounds like the solution is to cut the number of merits from Adamastor to zero then.

The Woodsman Trial, if run as "intended" is tremendous fun. However, it's design was gamed very early on and speed runs were taking ?10-15minutes? and that is why the merit rewards are so low. The devs could try to reprogram it to eliminate the speed runs (which speedsters would hate) but I doubt that will happen. For now I consider it a "fun" Trial but it's really difficult (at least for me) to try to put together a full team to just run it without speed.

While we are at it, let's make every item character specific. That way there's no danger that ebil marketers, or anyone else who possesses rudimentary knowledge of math, or anyone else with a tiny bit of sticktuitiveness, can exploit any other players.

I get kind of a kick when I team with one of my very small number of tanks. Some have taunt, some don't. I'm an awful tank, insofar as I don't run around tracking seeing which idiots are aggroing whom; I just smash and tanks have the absolute best damage to survivability ratio out there and it's not even close. Someone actually asked me, "Why are you such a good tank?" and when I was done smashing enough to reply I asked, "What the hell are the other tanks you play with doing?"

Are we talking about fresh outta Breakout, figuring out what DOs and SOs are and whether or not to 6-slot accuracy? Or stepping into IOs and wondering if a 5% recharge rate is worth an extra slot? Or advanced tips and tricks like how to get enhancements from the Secret Cow Level?

I'm not going to claim that the salvage section is the best part of the guide, but if you can buy and sell salvage at a profit, you can probably do it for everything else listed on the /AH! So, you are saying it tickles your funny bone?

I'd be surprised if this works, since I think there are different flags for endurance powers that affect allies v. those that affect enemies, but sometimes I'm surprised! That said, for Endurance Mod powers that are designed to affect enemy mobs, this is a great proc in my book. In and of itself, a 2PPM proc for an 8 second mag 2 stun is not useful. But if you are able to match it with other stun powers, you're cooking with gas. Boss stunning gas.