marcussmythe

The default is the Reactive, Dot-heavy version. More damage is always useful. If you like hunting GMs, the -Regen MAY have value, not all GMs seem to get AV resistances, but the general choice for hard targets is -HP. Note that on AVs/GMs its not a percentage, but a flat value -1000... this helps rather a lot, as the dot stacks to 4, and 4000 less HP max and associated regen makes them easier to wear down. Ive not heard good about the CC based procs. The Res debuff focus is... okay... 10% res debuff at best.

Had a Dark/TW. Proc in your lifedrain, all the END IOs you can budget, and patience. Also, I teamed a lot. That helped.

A quick plummet test from max height suggests for Tankers the scaling start from 60%. 465.2/1372.5=33.89% .3389 + 0.26 = .5989 or 59.89% Toss in Reactive Defense: Scaling Damage Resistance and that gives 3-13% more. Tough seems like a no-brainer to want to add on top of that. Hunh. When I plummet-tested on test, Id have sworn that it didnt kick in till 50%, but your math adds up. Hrm.

I didnt remember that! I always cleared the Nictus and then Rommy. Ill try that... just drop Romulus 4 times, jumping off each time.

I dont see any problems soloing +4/x8 ITF. Not so sure about Master Run - I was using big purple candy (TM!) to carry me through the 'dead Nictus autostuns everything'. Ill have to cudgel my brain to figure out how I would pull Imperious away from his Nictus buddies, or vice-versa. (Aside - is ITF considered particularly difficult? It gave me much less trouble than the one Shard Task Force I tried and failed - but that may be a difference of incarnates/purples/etc, and the fact that the longer you live with a character and the more you push them the better you get at playing them. One very, very minor lament about modern CoH and double xp/accelerated xp/AE/whatever - despite being at Vet 60 or so, I dont -know- Ramayael the way I did HERO (Invuln/EM) back on live. I dont play Ramayael as well as I did Hero. Ive not spent as much time with her, in as many places and at as many levels... RE: 'Bettered' - I mean as in 'Something clearly more impressive'. Ive no doubt the time could be gotten down, the characters further tuned and turned into STF-Seeking-Missiles with the entire build leveraged to that purpose. But I more mean 'Im not sure there are task forces, which are harder, which may still be duoed' and 'I do not believe that the STF, having been duoed, could be soloed in the game as it exists'. Unless someone can find a way to burn pylons WHILE running away from Lord Recluse before turning on him and killing him... Hmm...

Upon a time, there were threads and discussion of 'Stupid Scrapper Tricks' - hauling our pet AT out and doing things that really shouldnt be doable. We are all far more capable now than we were once upon a time, so the bar is rather higher - but we should still look for standouts. Id like to see that started again, and maybe kept in one place. I know we have a pair here (names lost, I am sorry!) who managed to duo the STF - an achievement unlikely to be bettered (or, for that matter, equalled any time soon). I am curious to hear what other people have to report. For my own part: TW/Bio (Solo, at least +1, temp powers and inspirations and the like all used liberally) Imperious Task Force Kronos Titan (GM and AV versions) Praetorian AVs (All) Kraken Jurassic Things I Cant Do Yet: Apex (This may not be doable, at least by me) Lanarru the Mad (This should be doable, and other have done so!)

THANK YOU. This would go a long way to explain my observations. If GMs are assigned AV Resistance, but at some scale based on an invisible level for the Giant Monster, it would explain why Kraken was sporting -10% Regen (rather than -15%) from the Diamagnetic Debuff, assuming Kraken is coded as about lvl 13. It would also explain why I saw ambush spawn Kronos as having 'full AV resistance' or something near it to debuffs when I was using Envenomed Daggers on it -if Kronos is coded at about 'Level Equivalent 50', then it would have the 65% debuff resistance of a lvl 50 AV. I will also anticipate that Giant Monsters and Monsters have about the same hit points, but Giant Monsters have the 'no level/level adjustment' code, and have AV resistances, while Monsters have fixed levels, and do not carry AV resistances. Assuming the above is the case, then the -Regen in Diamagentic will have no significant value against most GMs or AVs, but may be of great value against Monsters. This does open the question as to which proc if any is of value - the stacking HP debuff is capped at 4000 HP, a loss a GM or AV wont notice (The HP Debuff Proc probably shows better on Pylons than it does on AVs - Pylons probably lack the AV resistance). The -2.5% Resist Proc is worth a total of 10% Resist Debuff - which is good for a straight 10% more damage. The typical AV has (according to the wiki) 28K HP at lvl 50 - such that -4000 Max HP would lower its effective HP to 24K, effectively increasing both our damage against it and its regeneration by about 16%. Against a Giant Monster class enemy, with ~70K HP, the -4000 HP is similar in effect to a 5% Debuff to both enemy resist and enemy regeneration. The -RES proc tops out at 10%, but will be difficult to stack.. and -RES is easier to come across than -Regen. Additional damage is always additional damage, but the DOT procs probably do not match the value given by the HP debuff as against GM class enemies. They certainly dont match its value as against AV level enemies. Conclusions: -Regen sources other than very, very large ones (Defender Primary, Corruptor/Mastermind/Controller Secondary, Beam Rifle, Envenomed Dagger) have no significant impact against AVs or (high end) GMs. Lesser Regen Debuffs may have value against low level hard targets (low level AVs and GMs), or against things like Pylons that (presumably!) lack AV resists. Envenomed Daggers are powerful and broadly available, and assuming AV Resist Scaling and GM HP, worth about 1300 damage in regen that did not happen - though make sure your still doing damage and dont let the debuff fall off. You will still be better off with a -Regen set above, where you cna keep the debuff up without interrupting your DPS cycle. AVs will be SIGNIFICANTLY easier to deal with than GMs, due to the much lower HP (and thus much lower regen) The Interface -HP Incarnate ability will likely remain the 'least bad' choice for help in dropping very hard targets, but its contribution is limited against GMs (much larger against AVs - but if you are even considering soloing GMs, AVs have long since stopped impressing you) A -Regen interface may help against things like Kraken or Pylons, but as noted before - if your concern is Ambush Kronos, Kraken, Pylons, and lvl 13 Archvillians stopped being a problem long ago. External -Regen sources that do not consume activation cycles (Certain lore pets) may have a special value here. I am told the Longbow Robots have a -Regen component in their attacks and prefer to attack from range (I have not tested this). Buff providing pets are also an option, but even the very large buffs from things like the Knives of Artemis will likely expire before the largest of GMs go down. As always, a panoply of temporary powers, from minor (Call for Backup!) through serious (Shivan Shards) to slightly obsessive (10 Million INF summon Heroes form PtW) exist, and may make the difference. If anyone looks at you funny for using a temp power to take down a Giant Monster, point out that earning power by doing missions or earning (and paying) influence to a vendor is no different than earning power by doing missions (for XP/Shards/etc) or earning (and paying) influence to the AH. Or just make a ~phhhbbt~ sound at them and have calamari sushi.

Kraken does not appear to. Neither do Lusca’s Tentacles. I want to say that Kronos (the ambush version, not the missions version) -did-, but I was somewhat busy at the time and failed to take notes. The Mission version was classed Monster rather than Giant Monster and did not appear to boast AV resistances, though it seemed to have -some debuff resist. I ask as ‘Can I solo X?’ is a hobby of mine. Dimagnetic’s -regen is meaningless as against AVs... when i tested it, it appeared to be 10% (rather than 15% as per the wiki) and stack to 5 (rather than 4). This was trivialized by AV debuff resistance, but may have value as against GMs if they do not recieve the same debuff resistance. Envenomed Daggers are a useful stopgap as against AVs, but require going all in, eating up much casting time due to the need to stack the debuff. Its also possible that various monster and giant monster class entities have some, varying, debuff resistances and that is why I cannot get consistent numbers.

At this point (given that most enemy groups are level-capped ANYWAY), nothing would please me more than simply removing 'outleveling contacts' as a thing in CoH. Sure, the Songcrystal of Ice and Flashback is there for most formal storyarcs, but its.. clunky. Immersion breaking. And well, wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey. I dont want to travel back in time to that time in the past where I did this thing I forgot. I want to go visit the contact that I had to stop helping because an arbitrary level dinged cause I forgot to turn off XP, and finish helping them out. Why not simply allow Bob the Lvl 50 Incarnate Deathgod to revist his starter contact that he outleveled, or the hollows contact he outleveled, or whatever.. and make friends with that contact. Experience the story. Its not like the game will be giving us lvl 50 Skulls to get lvl 50 loot off of (or as if, in the presence of AE, theres really an issue even if they were)

This is actually a huge mistake that I see Elec/Shield stalkers making all the time. It's actually not good to open with a teleport attack because of this issue if you are using shield defense. Against All Odds won't kick in until your hide is suppressed, which means you're doing a LOT less damage. You should open with a crit first, then use your teleport attacks so that your AAO is boosting them. Using your teleports on an alphastrike while hidden will essentially waste their potential. This. Stealth into pack. Unload large crit on Boss. Telefrag twice. Begin single target rotation on whatever remains standing, throwing in AOE as necessary to pick off trailers.

On other ATs, Staff (with its END reducing form), or sets that provide END siphon effects (Dark Melee's Dark Consumption) are popular choices for pairing with Dark. Neither of those is available on the stalker version. Claws is an excellent choice for END Efficiency, running about 40% better Damage Per Endurance than other sets. When using Dark, it is important to look at the END cost of your individual toggles, and (especially in the early levels) only use the ones necessary. Note that your real large end costs come from your attacks, not your toggles (barring a few high cost toggles) Your amazingly powerful Dark Regeneration should be slotted ASAP with the Theft of Essence Chance for +END Proc IO, and then slotted for a little bit of accuracy and as much healing, recharge, and endurance reduction as you can manage. Once that END cost comes down some it, in company with the proc and when used in large crowds, goes from being END-painful to END-wash or even END recovery (You may, if you get a massive amount of global recharge, consider putting LESS recharge in the power late game to improve the endurance recovery due to increased procs per minute with less recharge built into the power, but this is an endgame concern - by then, youll know better than I what you need)

ATTUNED IS SO MUCH PRETTIER, WHY CAN'T WE BOOST ATTUNED ;w; I may have been known to attune things that math says would be .125% better enhanced for.. reasons.

At release, you could permaunstoppable. The overlap helped mitigate the crash. The inability to bith move and have mezz prot required it - and at the time, Unyielding was Unyielding Stance, and rooted you - and any hold dropped your toggles. The game has changed enough that even perma-unstoppable would not be worth the crash, now, and one can hope the ‘suicide button’ T9s will get some attention. Invuln, in particular, could probably use some ‘kick’ in a reworked tier 9, as invuln lacks the regen/rechg/dambuff/etc. that better, later-released sets boast.

I would be curious as to your thoughts on the pro/con of EA vs Invuln for a 'tough as possible' BR Sentinel. Ive got an EA Sentinel (and I find Sentinel EA to be amazeballs) but as I look at the chart, I -also- find Sentinel Invuln to be very impressive.

You're more than welcome, Sunsette! You've helped me a lot with your posts and the great guide for Energy Sentinels. I'm considering a Beam Rifle Sentinel -- maybe SR, maybe Invuln. What do you think? I am not Sunsette. :) That said, Beam Rifle has a reputation as a 'giant killer' on Blasters, due to the presence of -Regen (one of the only non-debuff powersets in the game to posses this). As Justin was down last I looked, I have not tested it, but I anticipate that a particularly tanky set like Sentinvuln, when coupled with Beam Rifle, might well be able to show halcyon service in the anti-av, anti-gm role. Hover-shooting cuts down on incoming damage against most GMs/AVs, and with Invuln I would anticipate survival against such being pretty straightforward. If your offense set can stop all regen (as Ive said, Ive not tested it), then you might have a content-solo-capable monster on part with the Controller/Defender/Sentinel crowd. And of course, given the presence of a heavy armor set, and an exotic tech blasty weapon, you have no excuse not to build some flavor of Space Marine/Starship Trooper/Samus Aran, which I consider a bonus.

Titan Weapon has sufficient AOE that even without using the first two cones, the minions do not outlive the bosses, and the bosses do not live long.

You can be tough enough. You can have good enough aggro management. You can -never- have too much damage - especially because endgame mobs make a mockery of toughness, suggesting a 'kill it fast before its debuffs kill you' strategy. A Tank is very tough. It has very good aggro management. It has mediocre damage. A brute is tough enough. A brute has good enough aggro management. A brute has really pretty good damage, which is handy because the IDF, Banished, etc. will kill both the tank and the brute rather quickly no matter HOW tough they are - so better to kill them fast. IOs and Incarnates are very good at adding survival. They are poor at adding damage. You can buff a Brute (or a Scrapper, or really almost anything) to levels of resilience that meet or exceed what is needed to 'tank'. No set of IOs or Incarnates will allow a tank to match a Brute or a Scrappers damage out. This is because IOs and Incarnates are very good at adding toughness, and because effective toughness has a ceiling beyond which there is little added value.

I have two Rad/ brutes, and the set is a solidly fun set. Never felt that excited with the Kin/ I had on live, and Elec/ was fun. But I didn't want EM because of the pom pom's of doom (as cool as they looked and all). I liked the set because of the niche it had as the boss killer. It filled a good spot on teams. Most everyone's melting whole groups away at a time, and I enjoyed killing the boss while they cleared the rest. Fast. Powerful. And with a specific role to fill. It was good like that. Now it's just... there. Thats why in part I suggested Stalker with Radiation - single target boss killer. You can combine with something like Invuln for a suprisingly 'tanky' stalker. Though I do miss seeing my costume. Mind you, EM is available to Stalkers, but thats a trap - due to decisions made at the time, Stalker EM does not allow full crits for TF, nor crits at all for ET. Later added sets with ultra-high damage attacks (I'm looking at you, StJ - but Rad also has a world wrecker to hang crits off of) managed to miss the 'must make sure doesnt work right' that they rolled out for EM and KM.

If you want to get your glowy-fist-punch on, Kinetic, Rad, and Elec both offer glowy fistpunch. Elec is a known good AOE set, Rad is a late release set with all the new hotness that goes with it, and Kinetic Melee has fun animations and a built-in blast. Now, none of the above are known for their single-target DPS chops, but Electric Melee on a Stalker would seem to offer the best of both worlds. Glowy fists, good AOE, good single target. Combine with Bio or Shield and sprinkle lightly with awesome.

I would guess the biggest challenge in creating challenging enemies in CoH is that most ways to do that would be pretty obnoxious, especially if applied across the whole enemy groups like they did with the debuffs. Enemies that are heavily resistant to damage? Annoying. Enemies that have high defense? Also annoying. Protection to mez? That just makes Controllers useless because of the binary way mez works. High damage? Many squishies would like to have a word with the designer. Debuff parade? Doesn't really make a difference to squishies, doesn't make the enemies the enemies glorified punching bags with extremely high effective HP, doesn't hard counter controls and they can at least partially be countered by strong buffs. In my opinion a better way could have been a mix of all of these. Malta Sappers were a good starting direction for this, the idea just could have been elaborated. For example, an end game enemy group could have some enemies that have high resists and taunts, enemies that are mez or taunt resistant, enemies that debuff and some enemies with particularly high damage, so that each mob would sort of mimic a hero team. Basically give a bunch of potential priority targets and potential counters depending on your team's composition: mez the taunters so you can focus fire the other enemies, taunt the mez resistant ones so they don't bust up your Controller buddy after they lock down the rest of the spawn, debuff the spike damagers so they can't destroy the tank, and so on. Currently the design is just pretty bland: either hard control or nuke the whole spawn, else they'll just stack up enough debuffs on you that it doesn't matter what class / powersets you have because you'll die in 2-3 hits regardless. Bigthink: There are only a couple of kinds of 'Hard' in CoH. There is '+Lots/xLots against Endgame Foes' hard, there is 'Can I take down this AV/GM/TF Boss' Hard, and there is in theory 'can we do this Itrial' hard - but the few ITrials I have been on never felt in danger of failing, so lets focus on the first two. So we will focus on 'solo hard' - nothing is really hard when you bring 8 Purpled Incarnates. For +4/x8 Debuff Mobs, you need damage and some way to control or survive long enough for the spawn to go down under your firepower. Nothing can tank this spawn indefinitely, and sooner or later they get too tough to kill fast - consider the waves of high level debuff boss robots at the start of Apex. For AVs/GMs, you need heavy to massive sustained damage, and/or -Regen, and some way to not die from return fire. You wont be holding Purple Triangles long, so control is out - though they are easily tankable. Your ability to debuff them is limited. Proposition: The 'Right' character for modern CoH, for handling both kinds of hard, needs either -Regen, High Damage, or both. It needs as much survival as possible - but some spawns are simply unsurviable for long, so we cant get there with defensive powersets. Is the 'right' character for CoH content, as implemented, an Illusion/Rad (or Cold, or Dark, or similar) Controller? Indestructible pets for tanking, control and debuff to go with against the big bad debuff spawns, -Regen for the AVs/GMs, decent damage once you bring in the various lore pets (that you are better able to keep alive because your a team support character by design?)

This is, of course, a good point. Then again, defense debuffs are not the only debuffs that are overabundant in the 35+ game. My regen scrapper is my Citadel, Synapse, and Trad Sister Psyche farmer. Trying to make her fun to play while running ITFs or incarnate content would require expenses that ain't cost-effective. She buys the recipes my mains need. She will eventually make it to 50, but now that she's 36 she can run all the content she's made for. I've considered turning off her XPs to make her farm inf as well, now that the value of inf has an effective floor. I still think that the long range trend at the AH is inflationary and that inf will be a poorer store of value than merits. The defense also reduces the incidence of other crap like -recharge, which also tends to kill regen and resistance based scrappers, since most of them are relying on self heals and other click powers. This also hurts Shield and Reflexes characters (and maybe Ninjutsu, which looks to me like renamed Reflexes) before they achieve the softcap and then some, since their mezz defense is a click power, pointlessly so since most players just set it to autofire. It's just an inconvenience for players of those sets. If you enjoy New Faultline, you likely want to run the Lost missions on a different character with a regular mezz resist toggle. By level 50 you probably have enough overlap, fortunately. Why this wretched excess of debuffs exists to penalize certain content choices is something of a mystery to me. Your best defense, as usual, is to do something else, a discretion I exercise on just about all of my melees. If you chose to run it, it's solo only; teaming just makes it worse. The intent, based on reading the old AMAs, was purely to increase the challenge. And that is good. The fact that they did so in a way that has a targeted effect of increasing the challenge for characters that rely on surviving incoming attacks, with little to no impact on characters that rely on preventing attacks from coming in via their own control, debuffs, or damage, is unfortunate. I do know that after struggling with ‘endgame’ villain groups on my tanks and brutes, I took a page from a blaster SG mate (who had noted that he saw no difference between Arachnos/IDF/Banished and any other gillian group - he kills them equally quickly, and that is his mitigation), I started focusing on damage output rather than survivability - bringing up a damage focused, mitigation second TW/Bio Scrapper - and found that it performs much better against endgame villains than did my Tank or Brute - the level of incoming debuffs was such that my defense powerset only mattered during the early stage of a fight, so better to end the fight quickly than try to survive it.

1.) You cant. 2.) You would not want to if you could. 3.) Do not take this power. It will get you killed far more often than it will save you. If the crash was mitigated to perform like Peacebringer’s light form (set HP to 50% at end), you probably still would not take it, but -might- for the END recovery. Proposition: If you replace ‘resist’ with ‘debuff resist’ and ameliorate the crash, it becomes a desirable power. If made into a toggle with a penalty of some kind (high END cost, ACC penalty, etc) that provides debuff resistance suitable to its name, it becomes at end game a very valuable capstone.

I will note in passing that a recent discussion of ‘What powers to take for my EM Brute’ turned quicjly into a discussion of the relative merits of using the fighting and leaping pool powers to fill out your attack chain and give some AOE capability. At least one poster also suggested skipping Total Focus entirely, and this seems reasonable.

I went with Soul. I ise the Snipe to pick off runners or for tough pulls (though it doesnt pull just one out of the crowd, the target I hit usually starts running -first-, and the long distance they have to run seems to break the crowd up some. I can single-target down the ones in front and then geometry gather the rest for AOE. Helps with Banished, Arachnos, IDF - the tough groups) Similarly, I took the short duration +DEF to push my DEF well past softcap for bursts - usually to mitigate an alpha strike DEF debuff situation. By the time the bonus wears off, I have usually cut the amount of incoming debuff to a survivable point.

Indeed, you get the same bonus as stalkers: invincibility turns into unconditionally high +def +tohit. On top of that, you get a sizeable bonus to your overall recovery, including set bonuses and procs, through Durability giving +10 max end, *base*. Those levels of mitigation while sitting at range make for an exceptionally sturdy character. Im a fan of 'exceptionally sturdy'. I wonder, given that 'exceptionally sturdy', can we bootstrap in enough damage to hunt AVs? Id think yes? Most AVs sit about 150 HPS Regen, which a Sentinel should be able to break, even a 'no bonus damage' sentinel like Invuln.