Uncle Shags

Eh, not sure what that would mean. Pretty sure there's just a hard cap at 75% for blasters. 45% is for defense and is usually referred to as a soft cap.

I get your point about wanting the unique early. Makes sense. But the other part I think might be a misunderstanding. The resistance cap for blasters is 75%.

I think they should include psi and toxic in the damage reduction effect.

Could you move the reactive unique from hover to weave? You could either leave it at 3, lose a little defense, and gain a slot. Or just put it there and get the 4th slot bonus.

I just want to clarify, because there's been a few references here to "double rage crash". People are just referring to crash twice as often, not double the penalties, correct? Because the way I understand it double stacked rage just gives the 10 second crash every 60 seconds instead of 120. There is no doubled up -40% defense crash. Maybe no one has suggested that, but that's the way it read to me.

Try it out on the test server before you commit.

It's a good question. The answer is: it depends. Some things would transfer exactly: Always take this power and always slot it this way. Other times it's more like: Always take this power but you'd slot it differently depending on a number of factors such as how it synergizes with aspects of the secondary or how your enhancement sets and bonuses change due to different secondaries. For instance, you'd get a lot of defensive set bonuses from SR that are different from the healing set bonuses you'd get from willpower, so you may have to change your claws enhancement sets to reach your build goals. Other times you may or may not take a power at all based on the synergy with the secondary. You may also find one secondary has more or less wiggle room when I comes to total powers needed that could influence how you pick powers from your primary. Sorry this may seem vague, but "it depends" answers usually are. =P

I saw this quote below posted in the General section in a thread addressing armor toggle costs. OP caught flack for the data not being robust enough. I found this sarcastic response to the criticism hilarious, and it reminding me of the work here you've done here. Your data is friggin awesome, and way, way, way beyond anything I've seen here. Holy shit I joked early on about requesting a statistician....ummmm...that's you! LOL. But hey, could your sample size be bigger? Sure. But who's got time for that?! This is for fun in a video game forum! You're obviously already putting in a ton of time and effort. Jeezus I hope you enjoy doing it! That's one point: this isn't a peer reviewed publication, so we can chill out. But I am also making another point that I think is more important. If all you were doing was showing numbers, that would be great, but then the sample size criticism would be pretty valid. But that's not all you're doing! To me, you've dealt with that issue by including serious and well thought out QUALitative data and analysis. Sure, there are the numbers, but what are the observations, what are hypothesis we can draw from these observations? You've done that in spades. It's friggin awesome. You're a bad ass. We live in a world of numbers and data and sometimes think that's the pinnacle of knowledge. HARD SCIENCE RAWR! And of course a bunch of video game geeks love to focus on that (no offense, I include myself in this group). But there is a whole lot of value that can be gained by combining quantitative and qualitative data. Where would we be without the Jane Goodalls of the world?! I hope people haven't dismissed this work you've done because of the sample size issue. I think it's a distraction from all the great things happening here. I also hope you haven't found it discouraging. That would be a damn shame... I do feel bad because I haven't personally gotten into this and engaged with you. My excuse is I'm mostly a melee guy, and the few defender/controller powers I've gotten into haven't been covered. So much of this is greek to me. But I will give you the collegial slap on the back! Good work! A++.

Out of curiosity I just pulled up my poison build to see just how cranked the stats were. Surprisingly they aren't that high: I think it becomes tanky when you add in the venemous gas debuffs: Added them together gives the equivalent of over 45% m/r/aoe and 92% S/L res. Adding Weaken on top of that adds another -30% tohit and -37.5% damage. Not too shabby!

FF doesn't work that way in practice. Mids display of FF - recharge is wrong. The most it can be, even if it's constantly refreshed, is 100%. Which is why someone would suggest to turn it off in mids.

This is how I built my poison defender. Cranked up defense and resistances so I can stand in melee. The irony is that once you can survive in melee venemous gas makes it even easier to survive because of the debuffs. I love my poison. Super tanky, super support. Don't need a tank, that's me! I agree that both are awesome. Rad is great buffs and debuffs, a bit slow on the toggle debuff application. Poison doesn't buff, but its debuffs are fast and furious.

Since you can't use mids, here's a screenshot. This gets you enough recharge for double stacked rage and perma hasten, over 65% m/r/aoe defense to handle the crash, and good resists across the board. Also gets Darkest Night which is great for survival. Hand Clap for mitigation and Elude in case you need an Oh S*@t button (toggle drop from sapper or something). The endurance ratio isn't great but it's not horrible. You could pick up Agility and/or Ageless Incarnates to fix that. Also, no travel power, but you could drop Hand Clap if you want. I wouldn't, because it's great and sprint, ninja, quickness is pretty fast.

I'd say it'll be tricky because Rage from SS causes - 20% defense for 10s every 2 minutes (every minute of your double stacked). Other armors can deal with it easier with resistance, heals, or click powers, but losing 20% defense on SR would be tough. But hey, maybe someone around here has figured out how to make it work! Good luck.

Being a critic but not a contributor is lame, so here's a build I threw together. I'm not a MM guy and have never played Necro, so there's no doubt some mistakes (I couldn't fit sovereign unique in for instance), but this one I think hits the marks pretty well: Perma Chrono Shift, Farsight, and Hasten. Soft capped Melee and Ranged Defense. It's just shy on aoe, but with Agility Incarnate you'd softcap that too. 50-64% SLENFC resistance. Endurance seems manageable (+4.1/-1.87). -Recharge at 217%. It's got no travel power, but you could drop something and pick up SJ if you want. Mastermind (Necromancy - Time Manipulation).mbd

Oh jeez, I wouldn't put too much faith in that. That individual focuses on quantity over quality, and the title "random builds" seems to apply in that the builds look like they were derived from the throwing "spaghetti against the wall" process - chuck in a bunch of random sets and powers and whatever sticks is the final product.

Great to hear! Sad I missed it. Maybe next time.

Did anything happen with this? I've got a support/tank crab that I wanted to bring, but 8 on a Saturday night in my house is a busy time.

If only we had someone who was a specialist in this issue...

You came into their thread, strawmaned them, promoted a false dichotomy (you're either an unquestioning sycophant or an ungrateful hater), accused them of not enjoying the game, gave ridiculous unsolicited advice, and said they were overthinking because they were hesitant to post because of the EXACT thing you are currently doing to them. And the complaint about wall of text coming from you is...rich... Not all of us need blind loyalty to enjoy this game. It's possible to be critical and appreciative at the same time. In fact, I'd argue that's way better than fanboi platitudes.

Here's my Rad/SS story. I've made lots of tanks but never a rad armor. Curiousity strikes. So I got on mids, cranked out a pretty fancy build based on Zect's template above and got on the test server. The damage is amazing. I did some quick, ballpark tests on Cinemora wall groups of 2 bosses and a big pack of minions. My tanky Inv/SS clears them in about 80s. My test server tricked out max damage Inv/SS does it in 45s. Rad/SS procbomber does it in 30s or less. I was really impressed. But then I went to go try out some durability. This is where I think I ran into an issue that may be a deal breaker for me. I got a 54x8 radio carnie mission and gathered multiple groups at once. The build I made has 65% psi resist. I quickly figured out this isn't a stand there and soak up damage type of build - you've got to end it quick with all that extra damage you have. I can deal with that. Fast and furious! It worked, for a little while... But the real issue was stacks of mezz. I was sent to the hospital multiple times after stacked holds broke through Fallout Shelter which led to an immediate melting. I respecced and added a few 6th slots in purple sets to get more Mez resist (got it to 108%) but it didn't seem to make a difference. I think it's an issue of pure resistance tanking with no defense? Everything hits, so mez and debuffs stack. I looked at my Invuln tank and it has the exact same status protection and resistance, but he never gets held. The only difference I can think of is no defense. All of the other tanks I've ever built had at least some defense. Is this a risk of pure resistance tanking? Now granted, I was purposely gathering as many carnies as I could, and was being targeted by multiple dark ring mistresses and master illusionists at once. But hey, that's not that unrealistic. And IMO isn't that what a tank is for? At least one version of tank, I guess - the "soak up the hits for the team no matter what" version. Maybe this is a known issue and I'd just not heard of it before? Is this a thing? How do you deal with it? Breakfrees? Clarion? Avoiding mezzers?

Ha! Yes, not the best mix of metaphors...

Gravity/Poison to tank and make tight packs of debuffed sardines, fire/kin to damage cap, sb, and BBQ.

And thanks for the win just now!

It's official! Snarky has been formally recognized by the authorities for...... drumroll....being snarky! Do you get a badge for that?

Maybe Poison/Sonic! I think there's a mod that allows you to change the sounds of powers. That would be hilarious.