Duckbutler

Monitoring damage boost helps, as well as playing it on a corruptor where you get greater participation in the damage boost when it's time to hit things. Watching the damage boost and seeing how often you can cap it is just a fun little minigame. Sorta on topic for this thread, I also found that relying on Transference to help with endurance management seems great in theory but in practice it's a two second cast and that's a long cast time to fix something and that should be mostly automatic.

I don't think I could separate "feel" and "be" effective because I measure that by watching how quickly the team is progressing through missions and clearing spawns as well as how stable everyone's health is. If I am buffing defense via force field and nobody is taking damage then mission accomplished! Unless it's a team full of tankers who are probably already defense capped, I will take credit for keeping everyone alive. Assuming the real question is whether people prefer an active vs passive playstyle, I will also not tolerate sitting around idly. If there is a button I could be hitting that could be doing something more, however small, I will probably hit it. My masterminds go ahead and take a single target attack and the AoE in their primary. My force fielder takes the single target knockback for the res debuff. Brawl doesn't get removed from my hot bar on melee until I have enough attacks to make a full, gapless attack chain without Temp powers. Things like that.

The character is now level 50. I gave him a costume makeover and a new name and I'm pretty happy with that part! I took some of the advice from this thread and added hasten. I can really see where, yeah, Thermal likes the recharge for Forge, Melt Armor, and Heat Exhaustion. I dropped Thaw to pick it up. I also went with Murky Cloud as a temporary placeholder until I got Scorpion Shield and I think I'm just going to leave it be. Most resistances are going to settle in somewhere in the 50-60% range while I have maybe 20%-ish positional defenses. I'm okay with this. The point of the character is to team and I wouldn't be playing Thermal otherwise. I'm not trying to tank, I'm just trying not to get (effectively) one-shot. Incarnates - Alpha: Musculature really helps fill out pets and make up for the uniques slotted in them. Lore: ??? (Demons are supposed to be bad. The Ravager from Banished Pantheon is a good mega-demon and Knives of Vengeance make good pseudo-angels). Interface: Reactive radial, more fire and -res. Totally willing to go a different route if someone says this is dumb. Destiny: Clarion core, see below Hybrid: Support core, seems obvious. Trying to take a queue from TheSpiritFox regarding mez being the real killer and pick up Clarion when the time comes. I looked into Rune of Protection and I had to sacrifice too many other power picks I wanted to make it happen. Spirit Ward is interesting in its own right and I'm already taking Fly so that's a no brainer swap for Mystic Flight. However, the absorb from Spirit Ward seems less useful on a healing focused set. I'd have to either drop both attacks I'm taking (which is sad, the whip is fun!) or have it cut into the personal defense toggles. Since I'm also dropping Thaw and don't have any mez protection for the team, I'm going to grab Clarion and then just cover everyone, self and pets included. I also made some macros to funnel inspirations into blues to help with endurance costs. Endurance seems fine... until I'm called on to heal a lot and also replace pets or shields. I based these macros on some from the brute forum. The advice there was to turn off large inspirations, mez prots, and rezzes, then convert everything but heals into damage. I wish I'd had these when I started the character so I am sharing them here: Level 1 /macro_image "Inspiration_Endurance_Lvl_1" "Blue" "inspcombine Sturdy Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Insight Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Luck Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Break_Free Catch_A_Breath$$inspcombine Enrage Catch_A_Breath" Level 2 /macro_image "Inspiration_Endurance_Lvl_2" "Bluer" "inspcombine Keen_Insight Take_A_Breather$$inspcombine Focused_Rage Take_A_Breather$$inspcombine Rugged Take_A_Breather$$inspcombine Good_Luck Take_A_Breather" Eat them: /macro_image "Inspiration_Endurance_Lvl_3" "Ahhh" "insp_exec_name Catch_A_Breath$$insp_exec_name Take_A_Breather$$insp_exec_name Righteous_Rage"

I think everyone's already covered it, but I'm going to say it again just to add one more voice to the chorus. Your buffs are doing something. You often cannot directly see the impact of your buffs. If you're only ever playing the buffer you don't see what happens to the team when you aren't there. You might see it if you have short term buffs and you can see the team slow down or start dying when you let those buffs lapse, but that takes time and some awareness to observe.

One of the issues many of my characters who would want Medicine run into is the fact that you're limited to 4 pool power sets. Medicine is most attractive (to me) on a mastermind or bubbler that does not have a heal, ie sets like sonic and force field. Those same characters are generally also considering leadership, fighting, leaping/flight, and hasten. This is a very minor and solvable problem, but it does create some opportunity cost. I was honestly confused at one point and thought Field Medic was an auto power, not a click. I haven't even considered the Medicine pool since I learned it was a click.

God. And rest had a cooldown! My OG blaster would do a fight, rest, do another fight, then go AFK for 5-10 minutes because he was trashed and out of endurance.

I'm circling back around to this character. I could probably take my inspiration manipulation macros for melee damage to funnel everything into damage boost and use them to create more hold protection if that's a real concern. Just getting two more of the pet resist/defense uniques made the pets much more durable, but yeah there was a point where they all ran off for some reason and I didn't know just how far the pets had gone and I really felt that squishiness. It's still better solo than my old fire/thermal corruptor on the live servers, though!

I think the question of the brute identity is that they're the middle road. Not the best melee damage, not the best defenses, but well rounded. It doesn't make a strong statement even though it can provide a very good experience provided that both aspects of the character are actually sufficient for the content you're trying to do. I suspect that's part of their enduring popularity in game despite the forum complaints. This is an extremely sensible solution.

I'm going to have to redo the order I take the powers. I ran Synapse this afternoon and really missed having taunt for pulling everything together. We'll see! The damage is sad times, and I say that lovingly.

I like having a concept that's tabletop RPG worthy. IE, detailed enough to feel really unique but not so set it's inflexible. Then I also want to experiment with the sets almost every time I sit down to play and that's the part that gets me in trouble! It's been neat seeing how the characters have evolved over time, though. The concept changes a bit each time and the costumes may get some color tweaks.

That evens out the defenses a bit, too. My resist numbers aren't quite coming out the same as yours, but they're enough better I feel like this should be sturdier. With the ATO and staff bonus I should be capping E/N and coming up to 85% F/C. I can live with the recharge loss in exchange for that! To pick up Innocuous I swapped Physical Perfection. I took out the kismet and gaussian's proc to get the slots. With tactics and invincibility, they were cute but overkill. Innocuous and Precise Strike feel under slotted at 4 slots each so I just found some level 50 IOs to use for the extra enhancement bonus. I had Innocuous Strikes in the original build as I was leveling and I do miss it. What the set does well is AoE, so I may as well lean into that strength. ST is poor, but I suspect it's not as poor as people think. Sky Splitter's big problem is that it's slow and the damage lands in 3 pieces. If the target dies from the first hit you don't even see the second two. I think it just needs to be faster. Same damage, just speed up the animation a bit. Aladriel - Tanker Uun's tweaks(Invulnerability - Staff Fighting).mbd

I am trying to get some feedback on my invuln/staff build. I decided it was time to revisit this and commit to this particular version of my tanker after playing with a few other options. My shields build, which I love and would be happy with, was just too close to my scrapper who is also shields. When I put them side by side, the staff build just looks weaker, and I feel like my resists should be higher. In actual gameplay they might be, thanks to the bonus resist from staff and the tanker ATO, but not without some wind-up. Not sure what I might be missing. As a bonus, I've noticed that the tooltip for Sky Splitter in game is completely broken. I think it's broken in Mids, too. The actual damage per cast should be closer to double that of Precise Strike, and then the Perfection 3 bonus damage on top of that. Aladriel - Tanker (Invulnerability - Staff Fighting).mbd Why am I not playing this - Tanker (Shield Defense - Fiery Melee).mbd

I did this combo way back on the live servers. The thing I will say in its defense, it shredded minions/LTs in the mid 30's the way a half incarnate team popping judgements does now. I had many problems with that character but AoE damage was never one of them.

I've been throwing roman numerals on the inactive versions since I can only play one at a time and I want to keep the name. 😁

I'm just curious to see if anyone else does this, too. Creating an identity is the hardest part of making a new alt. Since it's so easy to rename characters and we have so many alt slots, I just create one identity and then make different versions of that same character with different power sets. All the versions of one character identity share a commonality - a specific theme and usually their mode of gameplay. My tanker has like 3 different variations I seriously considered, invuln/staff, shield/fire, and willpower/fire, and then a TW/elec brute variant I briefly considered. All versions of this character are meant to be played as a tank, even the brute. My scrapper was similarly built as "melee damage" and had a few iterations before I settled on one I liked best. The only weird one is the demon who is a mastermind, a brute, and possibly a controller in the near future. Do other people do this? Take a character concept and recycle/refine it while they tinker with power sets?

This was helpful, and unfortunately I didn't discover this until the last day of the event. It should be included as a graphics option in the menus if it isn't already. I can say that I participated in and took advantage of the event. I cannot say that I enjoyed the event. After a few rounds it became "put a PBAoE on autocast and watch TV" and even then, the autocast didn't work great.

So really it's a trophy room. I would emphasize that part to try to sell the idea. An alternate name suggestion would be "lair" to get it further differentiated from bases. I think there's room in a game for something like this and the SG bases to coexist, though the idea might need to be refined.

I am in love with my axe/shield scrapper and a shield tank is on my "to-do" list. Along with about 3 others that I power leveled to the mid levels via the MS event (which still sounds like a public awareness campaign to me). My thought is to aim for incarnate capped defenses, get resists "good enough" and then for the Destiny slot pick up Rebirth for the heal. My shield scrapper is generally fine just using inspiration macros to filter all inspirations to either damage or health and then when he needs healing, a few inspirations are good enough. I feel like a tanker might want the retroactive tanking CD of an actual heal.

I don't think Hjarki is wrong about the limits and usefulness of buffs. Yeah, there will be wastage. Yes, if you're slow you're going to miss your opportunity to fully leverage those buffs. What's wrong is the conclusion and what's really making me comment is that I use a very similar logic to argue for altruism. Not necessarily here in game, I mean in general. In life. You are the only true constant in your world. Whatever you put out there into the world will follow you wherever you go. So build the world that you want to live in! Then at least your one, tiny corner of it will be worth living in! And if that corner happens to be here, playing video games, running a TF for the millionth time, treat each other with kindness because surely you would want someone to do the same for you and, at some point, you needed it. Don't think of the excess buffs as waste, think of them as a margin of safety. Understand that, yeah, buffs/debuffs like Fulcrum shift aren't always going to be at full up time or efficiency and that's why you have a margin of safety. If your team is moving so fast you don't need all your buffs? Smile cause you're doing great, and try to keep up. And maybe learn to rotate your debuffs rather than stacking them all.

My scrapper in the ages long past was MA/Regen. It took work to get her to a good place, but I was pretty happy with her once I got her there! I haven't played the set on Homecoming. What I remember is Reconstruction (the single shot instant heal) was basically pissing in the wind most of the time and a lot of the rest was about getting at least some minimal baseline mit from other sources and competently rotating your other clicks, not over stacking them. I think I skipped the rez. I would be curious to see how it works on a brute here on Homecoming.

I made my elec/kin corruptor this week and all I can say is... hot damn! This is the first character I've truly pampered, giving myself a budget of 100 mil to start and pretty much skipping the common IO phase. Instead I took care of my globals and then I went straight to 6 slotting attacks. I'm sure that's helping, but it's a really great combo, too. Between the damage buffs from kin and the sapping from elec, I'm getting lots of love from my teams. I did wonder if it would be better as a defender, the sapping is weaker than I'd like, but I did it for the damage and that past has been amazing!

That, or it's so good everyone else's AoE needs to be brought up to tanker levels. Sentinels would say thank you, or they might if not for target caps. The outlier is tanks and I think the conservative approach is to partially revert the change that overtuned them. On other parts of this discussion: I think that's a good argument for adding a little extra durability to brutes. Most of my brutes get abandoned somewhere in that 20-40 range. It might be something they need regardless of the tanker changes. The first one where I really said "F this" was running a Moonfire task force and getting killed because of the punch-voke pulling threat on bosses while I was single targeting them. There was certainly more going on there, but I think the base point is sound. Someone with automatic, baked in extra threat might need a little extra durability. Regarding the validity of the proc bombed tests... I would consider that a high end build. You need the best balance to be on the high end because there's a lot of other variables throughout the low end of the player spectrum. There's player skill, limited resources to put into builds, and late blooming builds to consider. The low to mid levels just need to not suck. The pylon tests are very artificial because it's rarer to spend that much time on a sustained single target. Trapdoor tests probably need to be given more weight because it's probably closer to simulating actual gameplay. If you look at @Ston's tests it shows a few weird things. I'm pinging him so he can correct what I'm getting wrong here. It seems like the tests really demonstrate which sets take best advantage of the invention system and which sets fall under the floor created by pool and epic powers. This seems to be a bigger problem for tankers and brutes than it is for scrappers and stalkers. His is a very rational approach. Procs, pools, and epics do exist and even if they get adjusted they aren't getting deleted so they will continue to need to be accounted for and included in any comparison. I suspect that changes to the proc system would bring the various power sets available to an AT more in line rather than changing the relationship between two ATs that both favor leveraging the procs.

Some of the in game tooltips are massively F'ed up. Take a look at Sky Splitter (from the staff fighting set) on a tanker. The game thinks it has something like 450 DPA because it's adding the damage from all three stances as well as fiery embrace, and you may not even be a fiery aura tanker.

No worries, thanks for the reply! I will take a look when I circle back to this character.

I don't doubt you. Masterminds as the tank replacement would have been a huge mistake... and back in the day, mistakes were definitely made. I think the community made do and it, surprisingly, worked. Villains were always individually weaker and had to work more as a team to stay alive. That was honestly part of what made the game fun, I originally played more red side than I did blue. I had a willpower brute back when that set came out and finally having something tank adjacent was a huge relief. It took many iterations before I found something that worked for me and more still to make that character something approaching durable.