Yomo Kimyata

I've spent some time recently getting my KM/Ice scrapper to 50, and I will eventually get my KM/Fire stalker there as well. I'm always one to look at "underpowered" sets and determine for myself if I think that it is true that they are actually underpowered. First of all, the animations. Initially I didn't like them, and I guess I still don't. But when I checked in Mids, the damage per animation values weren't any worse that the other sets I looked at. I think that it's a perceptual issue, at least I think it is for me. Some animations I hate, because they are clearly superfluous and there to add time so that the power can be made higher damage. Anything with a flip, like Ripper or Eviscerate. But I don't mind things like Guarded Spin or Eye of the Storm, because the length of the animation seems justified. Hey, hold your horses, I'm break dancing here! To me, a lot of the longer animations for KM seem unnecessary thematically. But heavens forbid we make them shorter and take away some of our damage! So I think this one is a push -- I don't love the animations, but I understand that they are long because they enable the balance that brings higher damage. Second, the damage. It *feels* like less damage than similar sets although I'm certainly not quantifying this by parsing combat logs. And again, I understand why this is because the entire nature of the KM gimmick is that a successful hit on an enemy lowers the damage they put out. Not just to you, but to everyone on your team. It's the counterpart to the -to hit debuffs of Dark Melee (which is also not the highest damage set). And as far as I know, the damage reduction isn't resistible. So, again this one makes sense to me. The problem is that in the current meta, the tradeoff between damage inflicted and survivability is extremely weighted towards damage. It's really difficult to get defeated at all unless you are pushing the envelope, either solo or on teams. And thanks to SCORE and HC there is virtually no penalty for being defeated. I don't even know if XP debt even exists anymore, there are a multitude of powers to resurrect you, and even getting back to the mission takes a push of a teleport power button. If damage gets increased, then this continues to undermine the damage/survivability trade off. So I'm inclined to call this working as intended, unless you want to change "intended" to "survivability is irrelevant". Third, the strategy. In a lot of ways this set is like Claws. Melee + PBAoE + ranged cone + ranged, and a non-Build Up Build Up power. But the bells and whistles take a little getting used to. I'm only going to speak from a scrapper perspective, since I don't have enough data otherwise. At first I actually avoided Concentrated Strike. The animation was so long that I felt I was probably getting more done by using shorter powers. And the nature of Power Siphon leads people to try to get as many levels of siphon mode as they can. But eventually I came around to a different playstyle. Hit Power Siphon whenever it is up, and use Concentrated Strike so long as it is not overkill for your given enemy. A normal Build Up is 10 seconds of +100% damage and +20% to hit for 90 seconds of cooldown (which of course can be cut dramatically, but as a scrapper you can't stack it). Power Siphon is 20 seconds with a variable amount of +damage and +7.5% to hit for 120 seconds of cooldown. Getting it to reactivate resets the timer, and appears to stack, so every once in a while I end up with over +200% damage and 22.5% tohit. You can't depend on that sure, but by my observation the 20% activation rate on Concentrated Strike matches my results, and that means roughly one our of every 25 times, you are going to reset PS twice in a row and those numbers are wow. Now of course, you can't depend on that, but overall do I want to trade off a 10 seconds of +100% damage and +20% to hit for lower +damage and lower +to hit for 20 seconds? Depends on your build, but yeah, sometimes. Also, the -damage gimmick is mostly a gimmick with the exception of Burst, which affects up to ten targets for twice as much reduction for 7 seconds. My builds are focusing on Burst, Concentrated Strike, and Power Siphon. It seems to me this power set is working as intended, but the problem is that currently players intend it to do more damage rather than to do more damage in relation to added survivability. I doubt I'll ever play this as a tank or a brute, but I'll definitely work on my stalker at some point.

Boo!

Follow up question: I have a character that I want to dedicate towards helping others get this . He is 50 and has completed most of Makos entire arc( not just the unlock mission but way beyond that, but not completed.) can this alt pick up other patron arcs without doing it through Ouro (which would required people being on my team from the beginning)?

I used this on Live to great effect.

I agree with this. I keep trying to like SR, but my playstyle just has too many attacks coming in, and 5% of attacks getting through is just too many without mitigation. If you are playing x3, or on a team with a taunter then sure, it's great! But for me it's a numbers game and the numbers on the other side are many and irrational. Possibly imaginary.

An oft repeated request is the ability to stop receiving threads from content, and that would solve some of the problems. In SCORE and HC, the powers that be wanted to make getting all incarnates extremely fast and easy. The problem, it appears, is that when you have quickly and easily gotten all the incarnate powers you want, you are still getting drops that are no longer useful to you. So by all means I support being able to turn off all threads and shards.

I have at least one character that was bitten by a radioactive straw. Broke her back.

I will build my characters strong from the very beginning, so I prefer to push the envelope. When I make a new alt, one of the first things I do is put settings to +1/x1, bosses, no AV. From there, it'll depend on the AT, but generally for melee characters I'm targeting +3/x8 sometime in the 40s but I'll hold off on +4 until I ding 50 and catalyze and respec in the HOs and purples. Sometimes I will +4 earlier, but as you know that results in +5s half the time, and I don't always build for accuracy that early. On an aside, this is one reason why I level like mad! I'll usually shift to AVs at some point, but it depends on the character and the AV. Usually my builds are good for +4/x8 mobs but not necessarily for +4 AVs, which is something I need to think about. If I'm soloing a TF/SF with AVs, I will probably downshift to +2/x8 for missions that I know will have AVs in them.

I suspect that an unanticipated problem was overuse. Given that hero/winter packs were primarily pay-for, I don't think the programming of the system was geared up for massive usage. So when SCORE and HC decided to make the goodies available to everyone, it may have overloaded the system? This is conjecture on my part, but opening packs and claiming items from Character Items went from easy and cheerful to broken. I think that the current workaround is some sort of timer on claims, but that's enough to keep me from opening a hundred packs in a session. Then again, I'm not delving into the code, so what do I know?!?

I would love it if there were an additional/different option to randomize that would allow you set certain parameters and then randomize within those parameters. Hats, trenchcoat, no back items, no aura for example.

Allow customization of fire and ice swords. That would change everything at such a low cost!

I read this and instantly thought that the problem was not enough character slots on the server. Damned altitis!

In that case, Fire Melee is your huckleberry. No specific mitigation inherent to the set. Kill them before they kill you.

I don't blame anyone who doesn't want to use the tools available, like IO sets, but I have a hard time rationalizing setting balance around SOs, for example. It's like travelling to Madrid for vacation, but you don't speak Spanish so you can't ask around or read about about the best things to see and do. "That's ok, we can teach you Spanish!" "Nope, I don't wanna learn Spanish." "Ok, how about we translate for you into English?" "No, I don't wanna do that either." It's totally ok if you don't want to, but I'm pretty glad I've learned Spanish! But, and I cannot emphasize this enough, to each their own.

Emphasis mine, and I agree with you. Or even put packs of spectrals which will debuff you to single digit to hit numbers when you are 10. But it also demonstrates to me that the only real challenge for a well built character at or near 50 is defense debuffs or other such things (like auto-hit enervating field). You probably could have gone AFK again many different enemy groups with the same outcome!

I don't remember exactly when I joined Live -- it was sometime before I6 but not long before since I was neither surprised nor outraged at ED being enacted. But the change that caused me the most joy was when they first instituted ragdoll physics. Again, no idea when that was. But watching your opponents crumble and fold up and swing in completely unexpected and literally broken ways brought me a LOT of amusement. Still does, even though they made it much more "realistic".

Well, it seems to me that different builds are going to have different hurdles. If you have to hit debuff resistance and confuse resistance, then yes, CoT are roughly Council difficulty at +4/x8 at 40+. Now what we *could* do is replace all CoT with Crey, who really got buffed up recently, at level 40+. Then we'd really be cooking!

I also have played this on all four melee ATs, and stalker seemed the best overall (and scrapper the worst). Keep in mind this was back when I first came to HC and I didn't know as much as I know now about the mechanics of this game (all hail Uberguy), so initially I didn't even use ATOs. Stalker is a great set for this combo for a couple of reasons. Getting Form of the Body for free is great (saves you a power pick) and you probably would never miss the other forms at all. I can't recall ever using any other forms on the other ATs. AS gives you more single target damage, which is sorely needed since Sky Splitter is in my opinion sadly subpar. Genetic Corruption is in my opinion better than Genetic Contamination since you can get some good purple bonuses from the sleep set, although it's not as taunt-y. I haven't played this alt for some time, but I think a current build would go something like this. You can certainly cut the Force of Will pool if you wish and move in a different direction, either with a different power pool like Teleport or epic pool. Mids screws up HO/DSO so the export link will be more informative than the text.

I often take Tough at 14. Often it is my first resistance power, and the first two slots go towards giving me 6% defense to all. Next two slots go towards getting decent S&L resistance/endurance and a 2.5% discount on all my powers that use endurance. It's good stuff at level 15, and I generally respec it later. Weave, on the other hand, gets postponed until I need it.

Yes it is, which brings me to an oddity. You can slot an attuned when you are 3 levels below the minimum, but I never bothered to see what the effective level is. I assumed that an attuned would give you +3, but instead it gives you your level even if it is below the minimum for the set. Interesting. So I just looked at an Obliteration lvl 30, and the enhancement is lower for the attuned (which is using lvl 29) than for the fixed 30.

Let's find out! I'm on a lvl 29 defender, and I have a level 28 Serendipity Def: That should increase defense by 20.5%, which I presume is the level 28 value for Schedule B for defense. Slotting that shows: Ok, now what happens when I catalyze it? The enhancement has increased, not by much (about 1%). Is that working as intended? No idea. But attuning has, indeed, had an effect. Note: I had no trouble unslotting it afterwards.

You are missing some AT distinctions, like ATOs and, um, this beauty of an epic power: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=epic.brute_soul_mastery.darkest_night&at=brute

If inf is no object, and frankly why should it be an object?, don't just +5 boost your purples and pvps. If there is a set bonus you are chasing, buy fixed level at your target and +5 them. Use SOs otherwise.

A long while back, I made a few unicorns according to the March 2020 thread and eventually soloed them to 50. Sonic Resonance/Assault Rifle defender was the most awful of the bunch. I'm still trying to figure out some, any!, synergy across those sets.

Attuned IOs are in the same "pool" as crafted (leveled) IOs, so you can buy and sell them at the same price (or even sell them to yourself on a different character!). There are some IOs that are only attuned (like ATOs). Attuned IOs will act like they are your level+3, within the limits of the underlying set. An attuned Kinetic Combat will max out at lvl 35. You cannot boost an attuned IO (or unattune an attuned IO). In general, I will slot attuned IOs until I hit my final level (usually 50). Then I will swap out all pvp IOs that are not procs and boost them to +5, since the set bonuses on them (and on purples) will exemp all the way down. I generally will not boost non-pvp or non-purples unless I plan on not exemping down on that character.