Yomo Kimyata

Now that I got my math cleared up (I hope), this is a short cut way to think about it. If you are at 100% damage (unslotted), then a 30% damage bonus is equivalent to a -30% resistance debuff. But if you are at, say 200% damage (slotted with +100% damage), then the damage bonus that is equivalent to a -30% resistance debuff is +60%. The higher your damage bonus already is, the more value is gained from debuff, since it works on the total damage while the +damage is only incremental. And of course, damage is going to run into a cap at some point.

I stand corrected, the formula should be 200.0718 * (1 - 0.325) - 135.

Let's see if I can math it up: Overgrowth provides a +82.5% damage buff for 60 seconds. Freezing Rain provides a -35% damage resistance for 30 seconds. Example 1: You are attacking an even level Blood Brother Brawler with unslotted Chop. Chop does base 102.6009 lethal damage, and Blood Brother Brawler has no resistance to Lethal damage. Overgrowth means you do 187.2466 = (102.6009*(1+0.825)) damage. Freezing Rain means you do 157.8475 = (102.6009/(1-.35)) damage Example 2: You are attacking an even level Zeus Class Titan with Chop slotted for 95% damage. chop does base 102.6009 lethal, Zeus has 50% lethal resist. Before buffs/debuffs you would do 200.0718 damage which is resisted 50% for net 100.0359 damage. Overgrowth means your base damage goes up to 102.6009*(1+0.95+0.825) = 284.7175 which is resisted 50% doing net 142.3587. Freezing Rain applies a 35% debuff, which is resisted by 50% for a net 17.5% debuff. Is that additive with damage resistance? If so then their effective resistance is 32.5%. Your damage is 200.0718/(1.325) = 150.9976. 200.0718 * (1 - 0.325) - 135. There are a lot of factors that go into the equation, and I may not be getting the equation right! Generally, the lower your damage enhancement the better off you are with +damage, but the higher your damage enhancement the better off you are with -damage resistance.

Three things I learned today: 1. If your email box is full, you cannot send a reply email. I've never had a full email box before! If you were trying to send me a message and it bounced, try again later. I'm not on every day any more but I'll get there. 2. About 2/3 of the requests are incredulous that such a giveaway is happening, and they are sorry if some nincompoop named @snarky is trolling me but they are shouting out in Broadcast and on the off chance it is true can I haz sum? 3. It would actually be a pretty good way to troll an enemy. Kind of like ordering 50 pizzas sent to their house.

As many of you know, lots of people like to benchmark their endgame builds on DPS standards. One is 'How long does it take to get to the middle of a Rikti pylon?" which is a pretty straightforward single target dps challenge. Another standard has been timing yourself on the Trapdoor mission from Mendel Ramiel's arc "Power Overwhelming" at +4/x8 (which you can through mission flashback in Ouro). That mission is a pretty straight forward kill all (that's not a mission objective but that's how people measure it) that has a set number of Council and Arachnos mobs, and then ends with a defeat of an EB. With the upgrade of late-game Council soon to hit live, there are some enemies that will last a lot longer, and random allocation of bosses will mean that you cannot rely on the consistency of mobs, so its value as a benchmark will be reduced. Min maxxers gotta min max, and so I'm sure that people will look for a new benchmark. I was hoping this thread could serve as a sounding board for ideas. My contribution: the final battle of the Heather Townsend arc "Burdens of the Past" at +4/x8. I'll put my reasoning in spoiler in case someone is not familiar with the mission

And I thought I was insane with this! No deaths = no thank you. No /AH = no thank you!

Friendly reminder that I'm "officially" discontinuing this giveaway in about two weeks. Y'all have done a great job of communicating it to people who may not read the forum, and I say keep it up! People tell me that they read about it on Discord, Reddit, the Wall Street Journal, and numerous chats on PUGs. This is open to ANYbody who would like a one-time inf(usion) of inf. Party on.

I guess it's time to find a spare alt and put in another thousand bids at 1...

What year are we in? You there, what year is this? 2010? IT WORKED!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA

I'm going with Doc Buzzsaw

A three-legged dire wolf walked into a bar and said, "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw."

For the most part, the new folks are lovely. However, there does seem to be a significantly higher percentage of them who strike me as an AI answer to the request "Design an MMO player as if they were the child of Dunning and Kruger, and then were abandoned by their parents and left to be raised by a pack of 4chan."

I feel that anything outside, i.e., not in a mission instance, is fair game. If someone is running away, I'd feel free to eliminate their pursuit and not think twice about it. The ONLY exception would be if they were fighting an enemy group that they may be fighting for a mission (defeat xx circle of thorns) and that group is difficult to find in the particular zone you are in. Example: Carnies in Peregrine Island. At level 11, that's probably not going to be the case, unless it's Lost in Kings Row. I hate to bring this up, but kvetchers are gonna kvetch. Some people really hate the visuals of some of the buffs, and the default armor from cold domination can be pretty ugly. If The Wife is really concerned about not bugging anyone, she might want to go to a trainer or Icon and change the visuals for her buffs to something as inobtrusive as possible. I've been yelled at in the past for not doing this, which is frankly madness, but I thought I would pass it on.

You should cut the mohel jokes!

How much do you need?

I've now spent a handful of +4/x8 lvl 50 paper missions on both the new Council and the new CoT with two of my better built incarnates, and I'll cut and paste this in both subforums. Overall, change is good! Council are a bit tougher, harder to clear out, slower clear speeds. They don't seem to change my strategy at all, but do make the experience a bit more challenging. CoT are a different animal. On the one hand, I didn't notice getting my to hit debuffed down to single digits which happens currently when you get a handful of Death Mages stacking on you. On the other hand, I got my clock cleaned repeatedly out of nowhere. Guess I will have to do my research on which new enemies are the "kill first" and treat them like the DA Banished Pantheon (set targetname macro to "sorrow"). Two overall points: I tend to avoid CoT missions in general, both paper/radio and story arcs, because of cave maps and especially Oregano maps. This gives me (and others) additional incentive to avoid this missions. I'm not complaining about a higher difficulty gradient, not at all. But it's a very big shift for an enemy group that was already avoided. I think that the devs should be cognizant that adding challenge at 36+ or 41+ really disproportionally affects sub-50 characters and encourages players to jump up to 50 asap. We really saw this with the Crey revamp. I'd consider shifting some of the challenge that would apply to sub-50 to 50+ content. My two cents.

I've now spent a handful of +4/x8 lvl 50 paper missions on both the new Council and the new CoT with two of my better built incarnates, and I'll cut and paste this in both subforums. Overall, change is good! Council are a bit tougher, harder to clear out, slower clear speeds. They don't seem to change my strategy at all, but do make the experience a bit more challenging. CoT are a different animal. On the one hand, I didn't notice getting my to hit debuffed down to single digits which happens currently when you get a handful of Death Mages stacking on you. On the other hand, I got my clock cleaned repeatedly out of nowhere. Guess I will have to do my research on which new enemies are the "kill first" and treat them like the DA Banished Pantheon (set targetname macro to "sorrow"). Two overall points: I tend to avoid CoT missions in general, both paper/radio and story arcs, because of cave maps and especially Oregano maps. This gives me (and others) additional incentive to avoid this missions. I'm not complaining about a higher difficulty gradient, not at all. But it's a very big shift for an enemy group that was already avoided. I think that the devs should be cognizant that adding challenge at 36+ or 41+ really disproportionally affects sub-50 characters and encourages players to jump up to 50 asap. We really saw this with the Crey revamp. I'd consider shifting some of the challenge that would apply to sub-50 to 50+ content. My two cents.

I've mentioned this before, but I usually pick up Kick over Boxing from the Fighting pool, and I like to single slot it with the FF +recharge. It's certainly a waste of a million+ in inf, but when I use Kick to knock off the last sliver of a tough boss and the proc activates, it's like finding money in a pair of pants you haven't worn in a while. Nice little rush!

I'm generally of the mindset that 1. more recharge is always better, but 2. I'm not going to be chasing for specific numbers to achieve perma-anything or really short attack chains. I generally can find something else to do for the 0.23 seconds I have to wait. The proc is 2PPM, it does last for 5 seconds, it does not stack (although I think Mids might still show it as stacking) and a fresh application resets the timer to 5 seconds. Since this is a proc that affects you and not the target, putting it in an AoE is much more effective than putting it in a single target attack. If you attack 5 enemies, it has a chance to proc on each one of those enemies, and so your overall % chance of activation can be over 90%. In practice, I will always put it in AoEs that take it, but I usually won't slot more than two in a build. For Battle Axe there are three Aoes that will take it, but I'll skip putting it in Cleave.

I just picked up Out of Control Rod on two servers for staff/rad (scrapper and stalker).

My criteria change over time. I really enjoy pulling out an old 50 and say to myself, "What the hell was I thinking back then?!?" I don't mind doing respecs so if something seems off I'll fix it as soon as I see something wrong. My first focus is always going to be endurance, and if I need more I'll move heaven and earth for it. It's funny you mention stamina, because I think I only have one character with 3-slotted stamina and that's a war mace//dark armor. I'm probably always overslotted with accuracy, because there are -to hit debuffs out there.

Is it privilege if anyone can do it?

I love Ice Melee on scrappers. Thanks to Ice Patch it adds an incredible amount of mitigation that lets you focus on doing damage. I really do not like the ice (or fire) sword animations, but with ice melee it's not a deal breaker to take Frozen Fists over Ice Sword, and a lot of people end up skipping Greater Ice Sword as well. I find that FF or Ice Sword, Frost, Freezing Touch, Frozen Aura are sufficient for attacks, although it is really nice to be able to get some additional offensive from your secondary/pool/epics. I've run Ice/Radiation, Ice/Bio, and Ice/Stone on scrappers to 50, and I'd rank them in that order. At 50 and well equipped, the first two are pretty godly.