Maelwys

Whilst I completely agree that debuffs are great, the problem with using -Tohit in your defcap calculations is that its effectiveness differs greatly depending on what you're fighting. +Defense is difficult to negate: very few foes have noteworthy +Tohit buffs or Autohit attacks (lategame it's mainly Nemesis, Rularuu and Incarnate content) so packing some Defense Debuff Resistance will be sufficient most of the time. However -ToHit debuffs get affected by enemy debuff resistances and level difference. So all your powers that inflict -ToHit tend to operate between 30% an

You can hardcap S/L resists and Softcap positionals fairly easily with /Shield; and the Panacea and Power transfer Healing Procs do a good job of keeping your health topped up. Energy Melee is also one of the lowest cost sets in terms of endurance consumption, so you can get away without Ageless if you prefer taking Barrier etc. Here's an example that hits the magic numbers regardless of your incarnate picks (although I'd still recommend picking up Musculature Alpha, Degenerative Interface and Assault Hybrid!)

Look again. Bot/Traps is all about powerset synergy: + Caltrops keeping things from fleeing out of your Assault Bot's Incendiary Missile patches. + Triage Beacon providing top-up healing for you and your entire team of henchmen. + Forcefield Generator stacking with your Protector Bot Bubbles, and providing Mez protection (again, for you and all your henchmen). + Acid Mortar buffing the damage of you and all your henchmen. + Poison Trap causing everything to be mezzed and have their Regeneration rate halted. To combine with Acid Mortar, Incendiary Missiles, Bot's inherent -Regen blas

That proc is only 1PPM, so a 32s clicky with a 1.32s arcanatime activation is never going to get a capped activation chance. The highest you can get (0% recharge slotting) is 55.53% activation chance. At 50% recharge slotting it becomes a 37.76% activation chance. At 100% recharge slotting it's a 28.87% activation chance. Using the build up proc in there is fine, but its performance will greatly depend on what other powers you're able to activate within its remaining effect time: 5.25-1.32 = 3.93 seconds plus a maximum of another 0.5 seconds (due to the additional "Animation Time Be

My first Blaster on live was a Fire/Ice because of Ice Patch and Shiver. Those two powers basically let him survive the aggro of nuking everything with Firebreath and Fireball (and corner pulling was a thing too). When he hit 50 he was by far my favourite toon to just hop on and enjoy a TF or some missions with friends. However by then he was never using Ice Patch and Shiver for damage mitigation; but to stop enemies running out of the effect of Rain of Fire. His attack plan was essentially: Locate the biggest nearby mob he can find --> Jump into the middle of it --&

There's no need to drop them. Aim for 45% S/L Defence (including a Protector Bot Bubble) and as much +Recharge as you can, with a secondary concern being +MaxHP. Getting your HP above 1100 or so (including accolades) should be doable. Don't worry too much about damage resistance or positional (Ranged/AoE/etc) defence. Softcapping your positional defences is difficult with the Mace Mastery Patron (particularly if you're aiming for +Recharge to get those Regen and Recovery Auras to maximum uptime!) and personally I'd just as soon not bother: you shouldn't need to to raise the mitigation of

No worries! You could easily swap RS for Contaminated Strike if you prefer - or even pick up Cross Punch from the Fighting Pool and swap the "Brute's Fury" set into Proton Sweep instead. RS deals decent damage, but it's much more useful on a character that lacks other self-heals. A /FA Brute won't overly miss it. Regarding Fusion: The Gaussian "Chance to Build up" Proc is rated at 1PPM (Proc Per Minute). All of the "Build Up" type powers (including Fusion) have a 90s base recharge with 1.32s "Arcanatime" animation time, so you can slot anything below 70.85% recharge into them and still h

Capping your Smashing/Lethal resistances and getting as close to the 45% Defence softcap as possible (mainly looking at Melee Defence) is the usual method to improve your survivability in PvE. Recharge is fairly important for getting power recharges back ASAP (including Healing Flames) but it's not usually worth pursuing "above all else". Your resistance to Defence Debuffs is going to be extremely low (likely non-existent) so you'll suffer a bit from the 'snowball effect' - if an enemy group has an attack that debuffs your Defence then as soon as one of those foes get a lucky hit in against

I dabbled in PvP. I remember a few EU users (Can't remember exactly who it was, but Archy and Xanthus ring a faint bell?) tried to get myself and a few of my PVE SG friends into Arena 3v3 PVP fights back in the pre-invention days. This was before Travel suppression; whenever an Empath + a /Energy Blaster blapper duo basically won everything. I brought a Sonic/Elec Defender along and could take someone permanently out of the fight with Force Cage... but there just wasn't enough damage output to focus fire the others down. Most PVE-specced characters just weren't set up for burst damage. The

There are long threads somewhere testing this; but to briefly sum it up: Reactive is a stacking -2.5% Resistance debuff. Degenerative is a stacking -3.5% MaxHP debuff. Both can stack up to 4 times. Lets say you're a level 50 Minion, with 430.80 HP: With 1 stacks = you can either take 2.5% more damage (effective HP becomes 420.2927) or you lose 3.5% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 415.722) With 2 stacks = you can either take 5.0% more damage (effective HP becomes 410.2857) or you lose 3.5% of your Hit Points (effective HP becomes 400.644) With 3 stacks = you can either take

I don't have a Robot/Empathy MM, but I've played an awful lot of Robot MMs (/Traps and /Dark and /Kin and /Thermal and /Time; all extensively at level 50) and I'd a level 50 Ill/Emp Controller back on Live that I ran as a main for a little while. Robots have not got anywhere near Phantom Army's level of Invincibility by any stretch of the imagination, but they deal a good bit more damage and are a very "easy to play" MM set. They were fairly well behaved even back before HC's pet AI changes; because they're basically purely ranged damage dealers; and they bubble themselves for defence. Ther

For me it's pidgeonholing. There are certain Incarnate abilities that simply eclipse others 99% of the time (Musculature Alpha and Degenerative Interface spring to mind). The Hybrid slots are almost as bad (Assault being better on basically everything except Pet Classes). The Destiny slots at least require a bit of thought in terms of picking whatever's more useful to you - Ageless for Recovery, Barrier or Rebirth for mitigation depending on whether you're already Defence capped, Clarion for Mez Protection. I tend to have more than one of those available at T4 and swap them depending on

I completely get that. I started playing CoH in Issue 6, just after "Enhancement Diversification" hit. Although there was certainly an outcry over ED, back in those days leveling up was very straightforward. There were no Invention Enhancements, no "Pay to Win" powers, no veteran abilities and no Incarnate stuff. There was no Auction house and very little trading of enhancements went on. So once you got to level 50, that was it unless you did the occasional Hamidon Raid and decided to manually set up a trade to swap your Dam/Mez HO with someone else's Acc/Dam HO. There was even no "real

No worries 🙂 Regarding #1, yeah I can understand that. If you're just in it for the run between 1 and 50, then don't worry too much about getting the IOs perfect. Basic "good slotting" will be the equivalent of 1-2x Accuracy IOs and 2-3x Damage IOs in each of the Summons. Battle Drones needs a bit more since they're two levels under you (at least until very late game and Incarnate stuff) Assault Bot can cope with less. The Protector Bots main purpose is to Bubble things, so you can go lower on damage slotting in favour of Defence and Endurance reduction. Once you hit level 32, your A

You can use the Pet Powers button, but stuff like this is not straightforward in Mids (needs a little database tweaking to fix the Protector Bot bubbles, for example) and I usually prefer to use a calculator + a notepad. That said, if you look in City of Data then it'll give you the raw values of things like Henchmen resistances and buffs - see https://cod.uberguy.net./html/powerset.html?pset=mastermind_summon.robotics&at=mastermind (check the stats/powers of each entity within each of the three henchmen summons plus the Equip Robot / Upgrade Robot abilities!) 👍