Yomo Kimyata

The only problem I have with this set combo is that Assassin's Strike is an elemental sword. Hard pass.

*whistles awkwardly* Ooh, look! A cloud!

War Mace is pretty endurance heavy so it helps to have a blue bar friendly secondary. But it’s certainly not necessary.

I'm always super interested in seeing build ideas -- I usually learn something and I'm always reminded of my own biases. @Nemu the triple Synapse in end mod powers is a real winner! I've been leveling a scrapper who just reached 44 and I'm pretty happy with the results, both now and what I expect at 50. No Darkest Night for us poor scrappers so I went with Leviathan for more chaotic goodness in Water Spout (and the only ff +recharge in the build!) and another Oh No! power in Hibernate. I may be over building for +to hit and +accuracy, but right now it's a lot lower than I feel comfortable with and when the +accuracy kicks in from the purple sets, maybe I can cut out Tactics. Current plans:

Every time I run missions in my 30s on blue side, Devouring Earth Guardians are the most dangerous game, since they drop Quartz eminators like crazy. Yet I've never seen a Quartz pet spawn after, say 40 or 45. Is this one of those things that "mysteriously" got cut off at a given level?

One of the reasons I'm enjoying this thread is because it has given me the opportunity to revisit some things I really never looked at much before. Let me be clear: I like Dark Melee (which I think is an incredible set when played well, and I'm only disappointed that it got dumbed down IMO) and I like Regen (partly because it is a more difficult/less forgiving set to play). I certainly don't want to come across as a naysayer, because that is exactly the opposite of my intention! I really enjoy the fact that something I built two years ago and did fine with can be improved so much more. Thanks to City of Data and my newfound usage of it (all hail Uberguy), I'm doing a deep dive on power sets and reconsidering everything I knew. For example: Instant Healing has 600% regen unenhanceable and 200% enhanceable. So with zero healing investment in enhancements, you get 800%, and with effective maxed out levels of healing (call it 100%, or something over 2 lvl 50 +5 IOs) you get 1000%. So my blind go-to has been to five slot it with Panacea or Doctored Wounds, but both of those choices are for +recharge and a few other minor bonuses. Let's say I would 5-slot Panacea normally. Now let's consider 4 slotting it with 2x lvl 50+5 healing and 2x lvl 50+5 recharge and move that extra slot to another power that expects to activate a FF +recharge once a minute. That's not a bad tradeoff. Now I may ask, well, am I really benefitting from slotting the healing, since I'm not sure that extra 200% regen is going to be the thing that saves me? So maybe I only two slot Instant Healing with +recharge IOs, and now I have some more slots to play with elsewhere. Instant Healing and Integration are the places I'm looking, and for my lvl 50 builds I'm looking at cutting them down to two slots each and putting in lvl 53 DSo R/H and lvl 53 goglis respectively. It's really enjoyable to look at things with fresh eyes a year or two later and understand, oh, I know why I went that way, but let me try something else. And the game is forgiving enough (even with regeneration!) that you never need an "optimal" build to succeed most of the time.

And here I was thinking that was you coming in to reclaim your space with a heavy hand! Maybe I'll ease up on selling into the space...

I'll tackle this, although I'm not an expert in the proc math. These numbers may not be exact but I hope you'll get the gist. Let's take Bitter Freeze Ray on a blaster. It's got a 15 second recharge. Without any recharge built in, my proc calculator says it has a 102.08% chance to proc, which we know maxes out at 90%. I believe the damage at lvl 50 would be 48.something. So if you hit an enemy, you will do your normal damage (let's call that 335) plus a 90% chance of an additional 48, and a 10% chance of nothing. Your expected average incremental damage is a little over 43. You will never do exactly 43 additional damage, but you will do 48 additional damage a bunch, and 0 additional damage a bit. Ok, now let's look at the same power with 100% recharge built in (that's 2 level 50+5 recharge IOs plus a bit). Your chance to proc drops to 58.33% and your recharge drops to 7.5 seconds. When you hit, almost 60% of the time you will do an incremental 48 damage, and a little more than 40% of the time you will do nothing additional. That's an average of 28 additional damage per shot. Wait, that's half the recharge time and more than half the expected incremental damage! That's great! But... I didn't work in animation/activation time. I'm not sure of the difference between Arcana time and normal time, so I'll use normal. Activation time is 2.5 seconds. Total activation and recharge time in the first case is 17.5 seconds, with expected incremental damage of 43, so roughly 2.5 expected additional damage per second. In the second case, total time for activation and recharge is 10 seconds, with incremental damage of 28, so roughly 2.8 expected additional damage per second. Now, I am absolutely certain that I didn't do this math exactly right, but those two numbers are awfully close to each other, and I would not be at all surprised to see that in truth they result in the exact same number. Which is how, I believe, they developed the PPM formula in the first place.

Watching this with interest. I've resurrected the very first build I ever made on Live: a Dark Melee/Regen scrapper who was an accountant whose software accidentally summoned a demon when working on the taxes of a Russian oligarch. I was so perturbed at the changes they made for Dark Melee in HC that I boycotted the set for a long time. I'm still in the early stages of this combination but a few thoughts so far: In general: -- Scrappers have a lot less leeway than brutes. Lower resist caps (really only coming into play with MoG), a little bit harder to build melee or S/L defenses due to ATOs, scrapper epic pools bite the big one. -- There are some things that this combo does very well. Lots of healing (Regen + Siphon Life). More endurance than you can shake a stick at with Quick Recovery and Dark Consumption (or even a Theft of Essence in Siphon Life). Possibly too much... Thoughts by Offense: -- What they did to Shadow Maul is an abomination. I skipped it on several previous builds. Changing the arc from 30 degrees to 120 degrees and neutering the damage because people couldn't figure out how to position themselves to hit more than one opponent was blatant pandering to the lowest common denominator. At this point, I'm looking at it as a proc delivery vehicle and a -to hit amplifier. Seven feet is a ridiculously small range for something that does as little damage as this power does. With no recharge, you've got about a 50% chance to proc a 3.5PPM, so I'm putting Siphon Insight +to hit proc in there, among others. -- Touch of Fear is now two powers in one. Don't waste your time putting in procs that only affect the single target. The AoE only takes melee procs. Six feet radius is even worse than seven feet! -- You may not need the endurance from Dark Consumption, but at 180 second base recharge it will max out proc chances no matter how much recharge you put in there. -- Soul Drain will also max out proc chances, but will be up more frequently. -- I really dislike tentacles. Thoughts by Defense: -- There's going to be a tradeoff between slot usage. Regen wants recharge, but is it always worth five slots of Panacea for 7.5% recharge? -- Reconstruction/Dull Pain are going to be as high as I can get them in terms of Healing and Recharge. -- I think of Fast Healing and Instant Healing as mules. IH is a great preventative weapon, but has it ever saved you when you activated it *after* you were in trouble? I'm a lot more interested in recharge than boosting the regeneration numbers. Integration is critical (and at 16 is really late for a mez resist power), but slotting it for regen maybe not critical? -- Revive seems identical to the Revive power you get in Hero/Winter packs. I'd rather not die at all, but for a no-slot power choice I could understand how it trumps a wakie. Other: -- not a lot of room for mitigation by knockdown/stun/fear. -- I'll look into the presence pool for this. Provoke for a scrapper helps with short radii, Invoke Panic, Unrelenting all would be useful. Look forward to seeing more from this thread!

Hey there Lippy-- @macskull (and others, but I use his) has a link to a proc calculator in his signature. If you open it (and save a copy so you can edit), you can play around with the parameters to get an idea of roughly how often a proc will activate. all those parameters are available in Mids or in game. In particular, I like to use procs when 1. they add functionality that I can't otherwise get in a power (like Avalanche knockdown); 2. they can be expected to activate a significant portion of the time; 3. I have an extra slot to add damage; 4. one or more of the above.

I doubt this outcome wasn't already a forgone conclusion to anyone, but at this point in the cycle, all I really care about is shaking the jar and seeing what happens. By making it so obvious, maybe more people will try it? Maybe there will be a run on converters? Maybe there will be a glut of LotG +rech? Who knows?!? Running experiments on the /AH keeps me warm at night.

See, there's more than one way to skin a cat!* * No cats were skinned in the making of this metaphor.

Counter-offer: add a -25% damage modifier for every power that does NOT slot it.

"I wonder how the Passive Aggressor is doing?" I'm sure you were wondering. Great! In fact, I improved the build! Having spent a bit of time at post-50, running +4/x8 content, I realized that I could optimize things a bit more. First, mitigation. Initial build relied on knockdown, fear (and attendant -to hit), and a little bit of stun. Having been exploring stun on other builds, I decided that I would probably be better off in focusing more on the stun aspect, and less on the fear aspect. So Oppressive Gloom enters the build a lot earlier and gets three slots, including a Triumphant insult proc (mag 1). I swapped out a damage proc in Cloak of Fear for the stun proc (mag 2) from Unspeakable Terror. And I cut the Presence pool entirely. I've come to realize that that entire pool could probably use a bit of help to make it more useful to the rank and file, and I'll be exploring more fear in other builds, but here I'm going to focus more on stun. And it helps a bit, but what puzzles me still is that I rarely see bosses stunned (or even lieutenants). And when I do, it's only for a second or two. I'm starting to wonder if bosses have significant stun status resistance. The wandering is a little annoying, and I may look into ways to add an AoE immobilize in here, but for now stun seems to be almost exclusively to neuter the minions until my auras destroy them. Second, single target damage. It's awful, and I need a better path in order to take down a pylon or even one of 3-5 healing lieutenants in reasonable order. So with a fresh pool available, I'm adding Weaken Resolve. Three damage proc, an Achilles Heal, and two A/R IOs. That should be maxed out proc chances, and I always like having -res on demand. Remember that -res increases the effective damage of procs as well as base damage. Mighty Leap makes the cut as a power choice now, and that's where a BotZ -kb goes (also one in Super Speed, as well as a Winter's Gift slow resist. Finally some rejiggering of slots and IO picks. Aid Self stays with two slots, but both are interrupt reduction now. The power is up every ten seconds or so now, so being able to get that off in times of need is more important to me. I added Field Medic as my last power as well. In and of itself it increases your healing and gives you resistance to healing debuffs (which I don't have any idea who inflicts these), but it gives a +20 endurance bonus to Aid Self, which is really useful in long battles. And let's face it, with the Passive Aggressor, every battle is a long one. I cut Whirlwind down by a slot and took out the knockback to knockdown proc. Now it's really an effective "oh sit" button which almost always gives enough breathing room to pull off an Aid Self. I took some set bonuses away from Irradiated Ground and went with some more traditional proc choices. I really enjoy this build, and it certainly helps me with some build ideas on my less constrained alts! No defense debuff resistance/no to hit debuff resist means that some enemies are really nasty. I'm not so proud that I don't pick off the edges of a mob if, for example, they have a plethora of Arachnoid Mistresses/Queens. But it mostly gets the job done. This is not a DPS build, and I don't think I will ever be able to take down a pylon. My Trapdoor times are over 30 minutes, but that depends a lot on how lucky I get with knocking him down before he spawns a regenerating pal. 10/10. Would play again. Current build:

Thanks @Andreah for doing the computational work I didn't feel like doing! Also, I made about 500mm by actually doing it, so I've got that going for me. Which is nice.

Yeah, the reason why I target guaranteed conversion from uncommon to rare is that it costs more. It drives me nuts to convert from one uncommon to another, then back again. It’s also trivial to demonstrate that a guaranteed path is cheaper.

The Mission Transporter will not work if the mission chosen doesn't have a door entrance. Example: talk to Joe Blow. Otherwise it should work just fine. Also, if you haven't specifically chosen a mission, it will default to the first mission in your mission list. I mess that up all the time.

Let me see. If I've counted correctly (and someone certainly should double check me): There are 52 different uncommon IO sets at level 25. There are 66 different rare IO sets. There are 3 uncommon defense sets. There are 4 rare defense sets. There are 9 categories that will guarantee a rare from an uncommon with one conversion. So, starting with a random non-defense uncommon IO, a conversion by rarity has a probability of 3/51 of rolling to a defense set, a 9/51 chance of rolling to a set that will have a guaranteed rare conversion (none of the recipes I bought were in those categories), and a 39/51 chance of rerolling. Once you have a non-defense rare, you have a 4/65 chance of rolling a defense and a 61/65 chance of rerolling. That defense has a 1/7 chance of being a LotG (and from there, a 1/6 chance of being a +recharge). Once you have a non-LotG defense, you have a 1/6 chance of rolling a LotG (and a 1/6 chance of being a +recharge) and a 5/6 chance of rerolling. Once you have a non +recharge LotG, you have a 1/5 chance of rolling the proc and a 4/5 chance of rerolling. Based on a post by @UberGuy (all hail UberGuy), the conversion process entails creating a list of possible sets, picking a set randomly, and then picking a member of the set randomly, so this seems pretty straight forward to program. I just don't feel like doing it!

I've been working on ice builds that don't use ice swords. A little light on damage, but doable. I also have some sweet stone melee builds without hammers (until I just discovered there is a hammer free hammer animation available). Fire melee is a lost cause. Jury is out on Psionic Melee.

What if I told you that there was a piece of salvage that could let you convert by rarity? What if I told you there was one that would let you convert by category? And what if I told you there was one that lets you convert in set? Of course, all these things come from the same wonderful, magical animal that we know and love as the enhancement converter. At this point in our program I decided to try to answer the question that nobody is asking: how many licks does it take to can I make all of my IOs into Luck of the Gambler +rech and make a profit? To begin, I put in bids on level 25 uncommon recipes at 5 inf each, hoping to be able to pick up a hundred of them within a week. Why level 25? Well, I figured that was probably the sweet spot where the number of uncommon/rare defense IOs had the highest ratio when compared to the entire pool, and it was the lowest level so therefore the cheapest crafting cost. Why uncommon? Didn't want to pony up for the rare salvage. Now, I know that there probably aren't many/any recipes just sitting around for sale there, so I put in bids of 5 on blocks of ten in likely areas. I think it took a day or two to get filled, which was the first lesson: people continue to dump their stuff on the /AH for the sake of convenience. I also found a few recipes that converted directly into rares at that level, and I put those aside for other purposes. I bought all my salvage at vendor levels, so 250 inf each for two commons and 1000 for one uncommon. Tack on the crafting fee of 37,400 and my all-in cost basis of each IO was 38,905. To be honest, this number isn't really that important. But it adds up. Next, I wanted to develop a crafting strategy. I decided to eyeball it instead of actually crunching the numbers because I felt pretty confident that it was a good method that would minimize the number of converters used. The procedure was as follows: 1. Start with a level 25 uncommon IO. 2. Convert by rarity (so "uncommon") until either: a. I rolled an uncommon defense IO (Karma, Serendipity, Red Fortune); or b. I rolled an uncommon that was guaranteed to convert to a rare if converted by category. 3. If a. then convert by category ("defense") until Luck of the Gambler, then if necessary convert in set until the +recharge piece. End. 4. If b. then convert once by category to get a rare IO. 5. Convert by rarity ("rare") until rolling a rare defense IO (Kismet, Gift of the Ancients, Reactive Defenses, Luck of the Gambler). 6. If not LotG, convert by category ("defense") until Luck of the Gambler, then if necessary convert in set until the +rech. End. Honestly, I could have made a Monte Carlo process to simulate this, because the probabilities are relatively straightforward, but I'm a glutton for punishment. So I loaded up with 100 uncommon IOs and went to town. Much clicking ensued. At the end of the day, I ended with a data set that I will share with you here: But I anticipate that this graph may prove more informative: The mean was 40.3, median of 35.0, standard deviation of 26.0. You may draw your own conclusions from this. I have to go ice my clicking finger.

“Do you think this ‘A’ stands for ‘France’?!?”

Suicide express was a enormous time saver.

Howard the Duck

Sometimes on my "support" characters I'll make a solo build and a team build.