Duckbutler

I've been resisting this thread because it's troll bait and a half, and I see some posts that come across as very angry-because-I-want-to-be-angry, and very closed to any counterpoint no matter how reasonable. There seems to be a disconnect with what brutes are even supposed to be. Are they melee damage? Are they tanks? For my part, I pick brutes when I want a tank that plays aggressively. I think that's the common perception and in line with the original CoV design. When I picked up the game again in January and applied everything I've learned elsewhere over the last decade since shutdown, I was surprised that brute baseline durability isn't higher. Base AT hit points is higher than scrapper, but not by much. The benefit both ATs get from their secondary powersets is identical and brutes don't really pull ahead until they're either built out with IOs or receiving buffs from their teammates. It would make sense to me to try to push brutes to be more in line with tankers and not even competing with scrappers/stalkers. For that, I actually do like the scaling resist based on fury, at least in concept. It rewards the "turn brain off and plow into the next group" behavior that brutes are supposed to be known for. With fury's current implementation it might not work out that way in practice.

Could the concept work as a dominator without the shield powers? Fiery assault is pretty "fire melee without the swords."

I personally rarely take attack powers from the epic pools specifically because they're so limited in scope and theme they're often at odds with the primary attack set. For some characters like the wizard, he's an f'ing wizard and he should have a diverse range of abilities! My timecop, she's a brawler and the only thing supernatural about her is her place on the timeline has been distorted. It doesn't make sense for her to suddenly shoot fireballs or snipe. Some of the attacks are also just disappointing compared to their primary pool counterparts. Fireball is an amazing power from the blast set but from from the epic pools has twice the cooldown. Then there's stuff like Gloom and Ston leaning heavily on that for his tanker pylon tests. I get why, but it feels bad.

I didn't care for the look of the sword attacks either until I found a concept where they worked. And I feel like that should be easy if you're pairing it with shield! Your only AoE without Fire Sword Circle would be Breath of Fire. That attack has become my universally skipped power on all my fire attack sets because lining up the cone hasn't been worth the hassle. Feels good when it works but often ends up hitting like 1 guy. Here's what I had on the set from a tanker PoV, so it's plus one AoE attack and minus one ST attack. Enhancement slotting is kinda theoretical, trying to approximate what you might get from a set. I plug real numbers in once I'm looking at a real build. The ratio of the attacks within the set should be the same, though, and the missing ST attack (Cremate) fits in between Scorch and Fire Sword. Someone pulling this out of Mids would be better, I know I had an error and a deficiency in my calc for one of the DoTs, which are the attacks you'd be leaning into. I think you'd be cutting out your best attacks, one of which is the best by a mile. Might be okay if you're supplementing from the epic pools, I don't know. Edit: Oh. This cut out the line with the global recharge, which IS in these formulas and was at 70% for that particular character.

The Council revamp might have overdone it. It's hard for me to say, though, I don't know what precisely changed. I just know that all my characters I'm leveling are in that same boat. On topic, I really like my axe/shield scrapper and need to play him more. Very sturdy and I haven't found reason to complain about the AoE damage. Axe cyclone pulls everything in, against all odds spikes up your damage output, then you follow up with pendulum. If anything is still alive, cleave. Most of the time there isn't much left at that point even for cleave because the real value of cyclone's AoE is keeping the pack tightly bunched while the team AoEs. That'll matter less if you're solo. I have the scrapper's strike crit proc in cyclone and it's pretty great there for AoE. Sad that it's not part of the single target rotation, but at maybe 5+ targets it becomes practically guaranteed.

I didn't get any responses, so this is what I came up with! Data Chunk Summary Mastermind (Demon Summoning - Thermal Radiation).mbd

For power picks, I've found that melee tends to like an equal ratio of attacks to defenses. This usually results in brutes and scrappers getting their secondary powers as soon as they become available. Tanks, if you wanna be a super tank, might want to stick with fewer attacks and aim to get their primary source of mitigation fully in place by the mid game. The tank I just leveled only had 4 attacks including taunt up through maybe 26, but had the full fighting pool and everything but tier 8/9 defense powers For enhancements I always prioritize getting endurance fixed. The first 3 enhancement slots I get, I put into health and stamina. Then I forget about them and only ever have to worry about it when I'm actually buying enhancements. If I don't do that I'll also forget about them and eventually find I don't have them slotted at all, and it comes up because I'm having endurance problems. After that, each attack power gets 1 accuracy, 1 damage, 1 endurance. A second pass adds accuracy and a third pass adds damage. Most recently I did the +to-hit kismet and recharge instead of the second accuracy and it worked amazingly well. I wouldn't do that on a character I didn't have a high level of confidence I'd keep, though. Run the first DFB, pick up the to-hit buff, find you're only level 7 so you can't do Posi 1 yet, do a second DFB and you may as well grab the recovery buff. Posi 1 into Posi 2 and you're probably level 20-ish, but maybe 22 if you're lucky. I might do this differently, with the 6 slotting on the attacks, if I were going to add an ATO or Winter set to that attack long term and then I could see the lower tier filler attack that recharges quickly being a relatively huge source of damage. Then again, this post probably took as long to write as it takes to get to level 15.

You know, I was actually trying to dust off my fire/kin controller this weekend and wondering if I'd like it better on a corruptor... but maybe as electric. If you look at Voltak's fire/kin corruptor post, page 2 has some tips for adapting it to electric blast. At some point I'll find a kineticist that works for me!

I'm trying to get out of my melee/tank wheelhouse a little bit and pick up something else that's more support oriented. I had a thermal corruptor back in the day and she was pretty great (if sadly team dependent) so I thought I would give it a whirl on mastermind. So far this character is pretty great! Right now it's in the early 30's and riding common IOs with 2 pet unique passives. My question is more looking for general mastermind build advice/strategy/theory. I look across both sets together and I see a bunch of stuff in the mastermind primary I probably want to 6 slot. Which is fine on slots, a lot of the secondary looks like it'll be okay with 4 or fewer slots except maybe the heals. In this particular case I think I want to push the pet resists up as much as I can. That makes it tempting to start frankenslotting the pets to get as many of the pet globals as possible, but then I get concerned I'm going to lose out on set bonuses and the MM themself isn't going to be as durable as I'd like. Plus hey, the pets need the accuracy/damage/endurance from the normal enhancements. So then I wonder if Hell on Earth should be muling passives from the sets I don't want to use. It loses some efficacy as a power in its own right, but maybe that's okay because it doesn't seem great anyway. Does this all seem like sound build logic? Am I silly for worrying about the set bonuses or personal durability on the MM? Silly for other reasons?

Okay, this is pretty cool! This made me laugh. This is the damage taken by my Electric armor tanker on a Synapse task force this morning, so all clockwork the whole way through. The tanker is naturally capped on energy resist and spent most of the TF capped on S/L thanks to a kinetics buffer who was pretty diligent with increase density. What smashing damage I did take was from charged brawl. I knew it would be lopsided because it's clockwork, but it's a lot more lopsided than I expected! (God, clockwork is such an awful low level villain group. Endurance drain on lowbies is just mean.)

Awesome! Thank you.

There's a bunch that can be said on all this side conversation that is also very worthy of discussion. What I would like to say about it, though, is that this is the deconstructionist MMO. We don't rely on the trinity system of tanks/heals/DPS that most MMOs do. Pieces of it are present and available and they work very well together, but they're not required. Most teams are thrown together with a random grab bag of whomever is interested and available. Instead I think it would be a better comparison to approach the game more like something like Diablo. Everyone is better when they work together there, too, but they also need to be able to stand on their own just like we do. When you start looking at Diablo 2 or 3 builds (I haven't even touched 4, so no comment there) you start getting a lot of "main stat only to wear gear, then pump HP and resists."

I'm looking at this a little before work today. I'm wondering if this could be used to measure damage intake. Specifically I want to look at the ratio of S/L damage to other damage types from various villain groups. It might also be faster to just, you know, ask around. I know S/L damage is the most common and think most of the time it's the majority of the damage you take. I'd like a better feel for how often this is true and to what extent.

Resistance = damage taken, Defense = hit chance. Resistance reduces the amount of damage you take from an attack. So if you have 90% resistance, the brute/tanker cap, you only take 10 damage from a 100 damage attack. Defense is trickier. Critters have a base chance to hit of 50% and cannot be reduced below a base chance of 5% to hit, thus making the softcap 45% (worry about tier shifts and incarnate caps later). This cap is going to effect all ATs equally because it's more about the critter hit chance. So you have 100 attacks coming in each doing 100 damage each. You should take 10,000 if they all hit. However, baseline, only 50% of those attacks were likely to hit anyway, so 50 attacks hitting for 100 damage, 5000 damage. Now let's say you have capped resistance to their damage type. 50 attacks hit for 10, that's 500. Working it from defense instead and no resistance, you would have 100 attacks coming in, 50 would normally hit. Instead you're defense capped so 5 hit. You get to the same 500 damage. If you were to put them together and cap both, then yeah, you would be taking 50 damage from that original base 5000. Absurdly good, but also not super relevant because you're not often under that kind of pressure where you actually need that. This is where more experienced players need to chime in (and have, see Snarky) because while I love working theory, I just don't have the time for hard modes at the moment. Back to your original question of how important 1-2 percent can be, imagine something that is actually threatening to someone at 90% resistance. Now drop their resistance to 88%, it's only 2% of the raw damage but instead of taking 10 per theoretical 100 damage hit, they're taking 12. That's a relative 20% increase and something that was threatening becomes lethal. But to reiterate, that's just theoretical. I don't think I've ever been under that much pressure in game where it actually mattered and I didn't also have time to respond. My invuln/staff tanker didn't take toughness until 44, common IOs only up to that point, and she was still a rock.

Invuln/Staff is really easy to cap S/L resistance and is definitely a contender in the brick wall category. Cheap in that regard, too. I shelved mine initially just to get a chance to observe other tankers more. Now I think she's just done because I'd rather play something more aggressive. Great starter tank though!

I find it helpful to look at mitigation in terms of damage taken. Out of 100 damage or 100 attacks, how many/much do you take?

This thread took a weird turn.

Thanks. Yeah, that was kinda what I was seeing on Sunday when I was playing with it. I could get roughly 3-4 attacks if everything was ready. I wasn't entirely sure if it was due to my own latency or if it was arcana time or what, but quite often I would be at the end of the momentum window thinking I was good for one more, hit the button, and get the slow attack. Just doing quick math, most attacks in the set are 2-3 seconds when slow, 1-2 seconds when fast, so that tracks and hence the suggestion of 3 charges. I don't think this would take away from the "always be swinging" aspect because that thought process applies in general, anyway. Every other character I play (game too, for that matter) I always have the next attack queued up so it goes off with as little gap as possible. The only time I'm not doing that is when I know the attack is going to ghost because the mob is going to die before the attack lands.

Well, sorry. I was going to respond and then decided it wasn't worth it. But the stupid quote box wouldn't delete for some reason and somehow trying to delete it made the post instead. 🙄 I don't really buy the real world argument. The current system also arbitrarily stops momentum you would expect to have once you got started. I do, however, understand limited dev resources and that a niche QoL change may be low priority. I'm kinda assuming a numbers pass is more feasible than other changes that might require new art assets or animations. Maybe I'm wrong on that!

I admittedly have spent too little time with this set to be suggesting such a change, however! I think this would be a good idea. What if the momentum mechanic of titan weapons worked off charges like a reverse combo system instead of off a flat duration as it currently does? So you'd hit an initial attack, get probably 3 charges of momentum, spend them on the next three swings, and then start over with a slow attack. I make this suggestion because the current version of momentum doesn't make much sense on an intuitive level. Momentum doesn't refresh with each swing, instead it seemingly (to a novice, picking up the set because it looks cool) randomly drops off. I'm not entirely sure how experienced players use the set, guessing they just know their static rotation well enough they know what they can fit in a momentum window.

I don't think there are radio missions in any other level 50 zones, unless you're looking for the villain side equivalent. I think the radio just returns static if you try. And I do see Grandville paper mission teams sometimes, just less common than PI because it's red side.

How easily could this be adapted for a brute? I'm messing around on one today. I'm using the same character concept as as my invuln/staff tanker. That character has been sidelined because she's such a defensive shootout I was just kinda meh on continuing to build it out. Hoping the TW/Elec brute is more exciting offensively.

Eh, no thanks. Any MMO veteran can tell you that finding something of value to other players and leveraging that is the way to go. It's literally just "participate in the market." You can start earning merits at level 1 and IOs are cheaper than SOs. SOs are essentially a luxury good for well established players who are happy to burn the influence.

Steadfast Protection, Resistance/Defense. It slots into a resistance power just like the other defense global.