marcussmythe

When the return on investment (xps, etc.) for killing AVs balances with that for killing mass spawns of minions, you may see some interest in single target performance. When a mission spawns 3 Elite Bosses and no Bosses, Minions, or LTs, you may see some interest in single target performance. At the same time, you HAVE to look at villian regen. You cant have meaningful hard targets if hard targets regen so fast that noone but the tweakiest of DPS builds and the random Regen Debuffing Powerset can fight them.

Cynical post deleted.

I agree that these things should be optional. OTOH, Its been 'City of AOE' for so incredibly long that giving single-target damage some value seems just delightful.

I'll own that one.

Sorry to belabor the point and distract. TLDR: Please leave PPM effects as they are, for various reasons outlined above. Thank you.

Slotting the power with a set is absolutely better if you want 10% Recharge and 6% Resist to Psy/Toxic and so on and so on and so on. Its just not better for raw damage, and you make your choices and take your chances.

And if the Scrapper can match the tanks survival (at least as far as 'good enough to solo Incarnate Trials'), while doing more damage than an equally survivable tank, despite the fact that the tank is pouring its extra headroom into more damage output... Then yes, Virginia, there IS a balance problem. But its not with procs or defensive powersets. (Caveat- I like exemplar play, and the SR tank will still be a demigod in early task forces, where the SR scrapper is largely reduced to being a melee only blaster - and so I'm not giving up on the heavier end of the spectrum. But boy, howdy, the endgame is utterly whacked by Sets and Incarnates...)

Winter Sets are silly, and amusingly slanted in their coverage. I dearly wish there was a 'Summer' set which held the same obsession with E/N resist and defense. For that matter, maybe a Spring set that gave +DAM in amounts that actually MATTER or something in a 'basically make you immune to Debuffs' Fall line (the fact that all endgame mobs make their bones by simply turning your character off as soon as you draw aggro annoys me to no end). I think its still somewhat slanted trade space - I've not run it side by side, but it would be amusing to compare the damage output of an incarnate softcapped War Mace/SR Scrapper (who pays a price to get to incarnate softcap) vs. the damage output of an incarnate softcapped SR/Warmace Tank (which gets incarnate softcap fairly easily, and thus can lean on procs to try to chase the scrapeprs damage). That would actually be a very interesting examination - the tank will still be tougher at any given level of def (due to greater HP, etc), but it would give us a baseline of comparison. Anyone good and quick with builds willing to look at it?

Im going to have to vote against ‘Procs are Broken’ Or more to the point, maybe they are - but they are probably less broken (and in the opposite direction) of the rest of the Invention System. Invention Sets handed softcap defenses, once the halcyon of defense based survival sets, to essentially -everyone-, mostly via massive set bonuses, or sometimes by cutting the recharge on things that never should have been recharging that fast. Ever hear ‘why play X, when Y can be if not -as- tough, at least equally tough/tough enough to be unkillable, while dealing more damage by the bucket‘? Inventions are why. Procmongering gives back with the other hand. You lose set bonuses, and gain damage. This is a major leg up to ATs that dont push a lot of damage, but already have solid survival tools built in (Controllers, Defenders, Tanks all leap to mind) - and restore some of the parity that is lost when blasters are just high damage sentinels (cause their tough enough) and when scrappers have enough survival (and DPS!) to solo Tinpex. Now; if you think Defenders should be buffbots with no real secondary and tanks should be grunting lumps so other people can be superstars - then yes, procs are broken.

Im actually mentally responding by making a third build. I promised myself that sooner or later I would do 'Incarnate Softcap at 1 foe in range' on my invuln, for utterly tough fights - but nothing in the game really threatened the survival of my 'Exemplar General Play' or 'Lvl 50 Max DPS' Builds - and the few things that do require a team to DPS down, so Im getting buffs anyway. 801 has stuff that you can kill alone, but the trouble is surviving (thank you for leaning on EBs, rather than going up into the continual DPS check of AVs). So now Ive finally got an excuse to sacrifice everything in the name of unkillable! Thank you. The below is what I'm playing with for a pure survival build. I doubt it will get built until after Issue 6 - Ive decided to stop fiddling and save up money until we see where Energy Melee is going - but I do enjoy hypotheticals. Its probably going to be leaning on recovery serum and using Ageless Radial to refill its end every 2 minutes... but I fear debuffs more than anything, anyway. Wish Energy/Toxic/Psi were higher, but that was the cost of incarnate cap.

Im not Linea - but given that the thing is intended to be a challenge at 'every tool in the toolkit full contact play', including incarnates, crafted powers, temporary powers, prestige powers, base buffs, and inspirations - I anticipate that for +4/x8 play everything up to and including 'run out the door while under fire, fill tray with purple candy, come back as many times as necessary' is all fair play. For a 'no inspirations' (and one assumes equally no tempts, prestige, crafted, yadda - just you and maybe your incarnates).. Hmm. Maybe +1 or +2? Im not sure. As was pointed out upstream, the big multiplier is the x8 more than the +whatever.. so Id try to keep x8 and just go down to +1 and see how you do there.

Its amazing how we come full circle. About a zillion years ago (Issue 4) I was PvPing on the original version of this character. Worked well enough, but the massive debuffs a defender could put out could basically turn the character off at will. To mitigate this, I leaned on Unstoppable, and phase shift, to deal with the problem. This got a lot of hate - but it worked. I wonder if one solution might be to build for straight damage (and unstoppable) and then lean on phase shift to cover the gaps. Go in, deal as much damage as possible for about 1:50 - then phase and heal through the crash. Even without unstoppable, phase shift plus a self heal would be a hand ‘ahem, lets start this over’ approach - on an invuln thats two pools, though. Hmm. Might be overthinking this, but Im trying to find a way to make Invuln survivable in here while retaining offense (SR or Rad would probably be easier...)

Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant!

This is the sort of thing that I tend to respond to by either digging really deep, tearing everything apart, and overcoming - or by throwing up my hands, deciding my character sucks, and walking away for a year. 🙂 So.. important to remember that this is the most outlier of outlier, the madness is real, and when in doubt, exemp down and go punch Frostfire.

SR Tanker seems the right answer - depending on how common 'autohit' mobs are in there - my lower level SRs think the game is easymode until they hit Rularuu Eyeballs, DE Quartz, and Nemesis LTs - at which point the game just points and laughs. As for Radiation - I think the idea is that your not going to get hit with ENOUGH -RES to any given type fast ENOUGH, when your resisting 90% of the first one that comes in. Your basically laughing at DEF Debuffs, because you wont have DEF, and didnt waste your build space building for something that the 801 series is going to take away from you - and you have enough RES and Absorb to just bounce everything that hits - because everything hits. You might want to overcap your RES some, just for safety's sake, particularly energy resist. One thing I struggle with is that I tend to fall in love with characters, rather than builds, and powersets as attached to those characters - and this sort of extreme performance run has no room for 'characters' or 'preferred powersets', and pushing the powers this far outside the normal run of the game, in the specific ways we have available to push it, is going to create some real winner and loser choices.

Layers are still good - but I think that you have to pick at least one of DEF or RES to be as high as possible, due to the way debuffs multiply themselves. 80% Res falls apart where 90 goes AFK. 45% Defense is quickly a joke where 59% goes AFK. So probably the easy answer (inasmuch as anything in there is easy!) is going to be SR or Rad (Dark seems interesting for the CC and Heal, but suffers from a huge hole to Energy - and Energy js the endgame ‘Smashing and Lethal’) That said, despite choosing Dark and Invuln as personal faves, SR and Radiation seem to be brilliant for this sort of challenge, compared to older sets. Ill have to fiddle with some stuff on test - I wont be happy now until 801.3 is in the box.

59% with one in range? Yeah, that would help. I suppose that my first thought, have lots of tools to deal with the bad guys , is amusing but false here - probably a ‘play to your strengths and specialize hard’ situation.

Ill look at that - its a live build, but its just money and respecs. Hmm. Drop Total Focus, Tactics, Manuvers. Gonna cost me the set bonuses Im currently enjoying in Energy Punch (assuming I Proc up Cross Punch and Energy Punch). Crafting another Incarnate T4 will take while, but was on my to-do list anyway. Thanks for the advice. Ill fiddle with it on test and see if it gives enough to justify the respec. Or I may just call ‘good enough’, since its all getting rebuilt when Page 6 hits, most likely. 🙂 Thanks for the idea!

Linea - I would love to see how you build Invuln to survive 801.2. My experience has been that layers of incoming def and res debuffs melt me in a salvo or two. I supposed if I rebuilt for softcap with noone in range (using crowds to get headroom) and found a way to resist cap Energy (anything less than resist cap doesnt resist the resist debuffs enough, I would think). Of course, once you do that, there is precious little offense left. But then, you noted that your invuln can tank a lot more than they can clear! I cant imagine what your scrappers look like if they can exist in that cauldron of hell. Double spawns at the door, no room to run - my Tinpex Titan/Bio scrap walked in, the crowd turned, and she fell over dead in a single salvo of 801.2 Of course, you built the thing. I imagine knowing each name in each spawn and its exact power list goes a long way! Impressive as all heck. Love this stuff.

Invuln/EM T4 Degen Core,T4 Musculature, T4 Assault Radial (Active) 3:18, 3:26, 3:30 Leaning hard on lining up a Gloom-Energy Transfer-Bone Smasher-Total Focus cycle behind a Gausians Buildup and a Buildup Procced Gloom. With luck, they both line up and you can carry two build-ups through the entire cycle - with three for the first few attacks. Like most things, if it were even a little faster, it would be a LOT faster - the whole thing stumbles when the buffs have to be recast at 2 minutes. The set suffers badly from the lack of Force Feedback and -RES - Energy Melee does not offer good proc opportunities.

Well, its equally possible that Im just very very bad at building characters in CoH. 🙂

Its looking like DEF is >>> Res in this setting - which makes sense, given the focus on debuffing.

Thats not in line with what I've seen over on the DPS Spreadsheets - Kael, etc - where WM tends to be a very high performer. May go to the level of recharge used/assumed? High global recharge will send War Mace through the roof, as it gets to use that high DPA attack more and more.

Without guessing, and without anything incarnated to test it, I can only imagine confuse would be aggressively hilarious in that debuff fest. I anticipate any form of hard CC would go a long way - like most 'endgame' content, theres a focus on debuff that makes a mockery of any sort of survival approach other than 'dont let the other team act'

1:20 here on an Invuln/EM. 5 Deaths. This thing definitely would reward range and CC, I think. Confuse or other powerful CC effects would seem ideal here - like most 'hard endgame content', much of the focus is turning off defense and resist. If I didnt have CC tools on my tank, it would have been impossible. My approach involved a lot of hit and run and let the debuffs fall off, leaning on immob and stun effects. That thing is brutal.