Maelwys

No worries. I think we're on the same page regarding the Streakbreaker's irrelevancy anyway. Whenever I said it was more a point of clarification that this: shouldn't have mattered; because the aforementioned two examples were only looking at 7-8 attacks in a row. And then we started talking about attack sample sizes in the millions. Because of course that was where this conversation needed to go next. (and I'm still uncertain if it happened in reaction to the Streakbreaker comments or if it was just a continuation of one of the earlier tangents. This is why we can't have nice things.)

Marine is tight, certainly. You can drop either Shoal Rush (if you've other places for an Achilles Heel) or Soothing Wave; but that's about it. Water Blast though? Whirlpool is your AoE Scourgemonster; and you'll likely want Geyser and Tidal Forces for obvious reasons... but the ST attacks have wiggle room. The Instantaneous Water Jet lost its lockout timer a few pages ago (i27pg6?) so I think these days all you really "need" is Water Jet, Hydro Blast and Dehydrate plus a few filler attacks (like procbombed Shoal Rush or an Epic Blast) e.g. Water Jet [Regular] > Filler > Dehydrate >Hydro Blast > Water Jet [Instant] Depending on your filler blast timings + global recharge you could use Stream Spray in place of Dehydrate or stick another Hydro Blast in front of the Filler attack.

Guessing "a character that has all their enhancement slots filled with Attuned Set IO Enhancements" Many players exemplar down to play lower-level content again after they reach level 50. "Attuned" IO Enhancements keep their set bonuses whenever your level drops lower than -3 to the level of each enhancement... so if your build relies more on Set Bonuses than it does on raw % enhancement aspect and you like running low-level Taskforces or Story Arcs; then it can sometimes make more sense to fill your build up with Attuned IOs rather than Boosted IOs. For other people (like myself) merely attuning the important Global IOs is enough by itself, and the rest get Boosted. (Note that Procs and Purples and PVP IOs gain no benefit from attunement - so they can always be safely left as-is or boosted instead!)

Nah, not really. I just needed a brief mental degauss after poking at functions in Excel for the last 30mins 🤮 (why you still have to jerry rig functions like Median() just to perform a simple Clamp() operation is beyond me...)

@shortguy on indom - Hopefully after you correct the error in your AccMods clamping methodology (as mentioned in the other thread; AccMods only gets clamped *AFTER* you multiply it by the clamped product of that bracketed "BaseHitChance+ToHitMods-DefMods" bit on the right; not before!) then you should see that these lines: are a big glaring issue as they're indicative of a fundamental error in the current formula you're using; which in turn is impacting the logic within the spreadsheet you uploaded. The values for 45% Defense and 50% Defense should be identical here; providing that no other enemy ToHit buffs or player Defense debuffs are in play. HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) CLAMP() imposes a minimum boundary of 0.05 and a maximum boundary of 0.95 on anything within its brackets. So whenever the right hand side of the formula effectively reduces to CLAMP(0.5 - YourDefenceBuff) going beyond 0.45 (45%) defense will have zero effect. If it was me, I'd probably use the "Possible Losing Streak" column to give an idea of how many total attacks on average within a given sample size are likely to miss... so for example cell C7 might be something like ROUNDUP(MEDIAN(0.05,(MEDIAN(0.05,(0.5-B6),0.95)*ACCMODS),0.95)*C$3,0) instead of ROUND(LN(C$3)/LN(1-B7)*-1,0) CoX Forumites often (rightfully) argue about whether chasing 45% defense is worth it (because most PVE content doesn't require much mitigation in the first place and "killing stuff faster" is more fun; because hitting 45%+ defense solo on most toons inevitably requires some form of build compromise; and because without large swathes of Defense Debuff Resistance any defense you have can quickly be stripped off you just by a few unlucky hits from even-level mooks armed with swords or rifles, let alone an autohit Earthquake patch; etc. etc.) however if you can attain and keep 45% defense between yourself and the enemy after Defense Debuffs and ToHit Buffs have been factored in then you'll get the maximum level of mitigation from it and adding more defense on top simply won't matter.

Here; I even found the relevant bit in the code for you so that you don't think I'm merely taking a Developer's word and the HC Wiki's word for it: See that fAccuracyfactor compiled on the second line? That's your AccMods (both the power's and the attacking critter's) On the very next line it gets multiplied by fToHit (so that the fToHit variable now contains the attack's raw ToHit value after AccMods; just like in the formula) The clamping operations to impose minimum/maximum boundaries of 0.05/0.95 on that raw ToHit value take place afterwards.

The formula to calculate the binomial distribution of a specific event is: where n is the number of trials, p is the probability of success on a single trial, and X is the number of successes. Substituting in the stated values for this test case [ n=100, p=0.05, and X=0 ] and we get: which reduces to: P(0)=0.005920529220334 = 0.592063% (a tiny smidge more than 0.56%; but close enough for government work) However the problem is that the Streakbreaker doesn't care that all 100 misses in a row were at that floored 5% hit chance. It cares that AT LEAST ONE of those attacks was at that floored 5% hit chance. Read Weirdbeard's entire statement; noting the last paragraph: "Because we do the lookup based on your worst to-hit in the series, the streak breaker is a bit less aggressive about breaking streaks than it might initially appear from the table. If you miss an ill-advised attack with a final to-hit of 0.15, you would in fact be allowed to continue the miss series for another 99 attacks, even if all the followup attacks are of capped to-hit, should you be unlucky enough." But I certainly wholeheartedly agree with the implication that the Streakbreaker hardly ever matters for enemy attacks against you if you have a high enough defense buff. ... All that said... I do however find it a bit dubious that in both this thread and the "new thread" @Shortguy is apparently repeatedly assuming that Enemy Hit Chance against you is always going to be reduced to 5%; because it's not. If whatever attacking you is of a rank higher than minion, a level higher than +0 or is using an attack that possesses an inherent accuracy higher than 1.0 then their AccMods rises above 1.0... which will cause that 5% Hit Chance figure to become substantially higher. Realistically if the HitChance of an attack before applying Accmods was 5% then after applying Accmods it'll still not get above about ~10%; but those few percentage points still matter quite a lot whenever you're modelling a row of 100 such attacks; let alone 2,000,000.

Exactly. The reason for this is that everything in computer code gets represented by Binary digits; and the most common allocation of storage for low numbers is 8 such digits... which means that (as long as that number is never going to be negative!) its upper limit is 255. It's a little more intuitive whenever you're dealing with Hex codes because they always use two Hexadecimal digits to represent those eight Binary digits... and FF in Hex is equal to 255 in base 10. Anyways, hopefully the new Hex code will work for you! 👍

Why are you clamping the AccMods before they get multiplied by the result of the ToHit-DefMods? You should be clamping (BaseHitChance +ToHitMods - DefMods) to get the first initial unadjusted HitChance; then multiplying that by AccMods before finally clamping the result again. AccMods doesn't get clamped at all before that final step. HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) The purpose of the two Clamping steps in the formula is to prevent the HitChances from going below 0.5% or above 0.95%. It's never to apply an arbitrary limit to whatever Accuracy Modifiers are currently affecting an Attack... because doing so would defeat the whole purpose of a creature being able to stack accuracy bonuses (it'd also become utterly pointless to have any attacks with an inherent accuracy above 1.0, because you'd just be clamping that accuracy at 0.95 all the time!!)

Sure! They match the curtains.

Let's try an explanation of sorts then... So you've got a high-Defense Permadom with a procced out ST attack chain? Great. But you've stated above that this toon is sourcing at least some of their defense via set bonuses from using Purple sets in your Control Powerset abilities... which means that those abilities could potentially be dealing more damage with the same level of Control Duration if you had frankenslotted them with procs and HOs instead of using those sets. Possibly even whilst maintaining Permadom; depending on the sets in question. So by definition your Dominator build has sacrificed additional damage in exchange for additional defence. I'm not saying that's not a worthwhile sacrifice (because I do exactly that sort of thing myself on many toons... and in many cases what I'm getting is far more valuable to me than whatever I'm giving up!) merely drawing attention to the fact that building an efficient powerful toon is a balancing act. Because to raise a toon's overall performance you will almost always have to give up some of its potential in more specific areas (and obviously the trick is to pick areas that you don't personally place much worth in - if you have a min/maxed ST attack chain already then more ST damage output will be mostly irrelevant to you!) Most of my own Doms end up with at least ~15% Defense; because stuff like Combat Jumping and Maneuvers and the two +3% Def Globals are low hanging fruit... but I rarely intentionally push it higher (unless I opt for a Defense based Epic rather than a Resistance one; which is almost never!) because achieving Permadom + Strong Controls + Strong Single Target Damage Output + Strong AOE Damage output simply doesn't leave me enough wiggle room on most builds.

Aye that looks about right. It says at the bottom "Make sure you add three numbers in the 0-255 range separated by commas" so it's definitely expecting 'maximum red' to be given as 255 not 100. Try using FF4557 as the Hex String in the bind instead of 641B22 and see if it looks more like what you're expecting.

The Hex code "641B22" is just the same as the original RGB codes "100"=64, "27"=1B, "34"=22. Generally to make a colour 'lighter' you want to increase all the numbers so there's "more white"... so I'd increase each number by ~10 in stages until it looks right. Or looky here if you'd rather eyeball it: https://htmlcolorcodes.com/color-chart/ EDIT: After rereading... one thing worth pointing out might be that "100 red" doesn't necessarily mean "100% red". Generally the code for "as much Red as you can get" would be 255 (FF in Hex!) so that may be why your numbers are off... maybe try multiplying each of them by 2.55? (I think that'd work out at a Hex code of FF4557...)

So a toon with 10% defense versus 10 incoming single target attacks in a row... can expect 22 of those 10 attacks to hit them? OK. If we'd picked a slightly more sane traditional method: HitChance = Clamp( AccMods × Clamp( BaseHitChance + ToHitMods – DefMods ) ) If the attacker is a +3 AV then their AccMods would be (1.0 [Attack base Accuracy] x 1.3 [Attacker is +3 to you] x 1.5 [Attacker is an AV]) = 1.95 And their BaseHitChance would be 50% [for a regular unbuffed PVE foe attacking a player] Without any Defense Buffs, ToHit buffs or Defense Debuffs in play at all then that'd work out at: Clamp (1.95 x Clamp (0.5 + 0 - 0)) = Clamp (0.975) = 0.95 = 95% chance to hit for each attack. If the player they're attacking had 10% Defense then that'd instead work out at: Clamp(1.95 x Clamp (0.5 - 0.1)) = Clamp(0.78) = 0.78 = 78% chance to hit for each attack. So with 10% Defense; against a stream of 10 identical such attacks the likelihood of being hit by at least one of them would be: 1-((1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)*(1-0.78)) = 0.999999734 = 99.999% And the likelihood of being hit by ALL of them would be: ((0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)*(0.78)) = 0.083357758 = 8.336% And the individual probability for each particular number of hits peaks at 8. And like most theoretical estimations of cumulative probability; in practice it's about as useful as a fart in a hurricane. But most people can understand that the attack has a 78% chance to hit them each time + they can be "lucky" or "unlucky".

I mean; the Devs outright told us exactly how it works twenty years ago. WeirdBeard (original Dev team) was the one who gave us the full breakdown of exactly how it functions: And these days you can even see this for yourself in the code (it's within entity/character_combat.c) The Streakbreaker does indeed allow up to 100 misses in a row if an attack has <20% hit chance. Sure; it's a bit wonky in practice because LOTS of things generate HitChecks and so sometimes it might actually make more sense to turn off your damage aura and queue up big splatty attacks. But most of the time it's not something the players need to be overly concerned about. Those first two numbers on the 6th line of code and the paragraph at the bottom of Weirdbeard's quote are the most important bits IMO.

Planning a build is almost always an exercise in compromising (A, B, or C... pick any two!). Pinpointing the level where adding "more recovery" or "more global recharge" becomes largely irrelevant is fairly straightforward. However the same isn't true for damage output or damage mitigation; as that'll depend on the content you're doing. If someone is choosing to chase Damage Resistance; then going over the hardcap for their AT (75%, 85% or 90%) largely won't matter unless they're up against resistance debuffs (in which case they'll want 100%). And if someone is choosing to chase Defense; then going over the softcap for the content they're doing (e.g. 45% or 59%) largely won't matter unless they're up against defense debuffs (in which case Debuff resistance and/or a sizable Defence buffer becomes useful). For most toons; running at 45% Defence and/or 90% Resistance constantly is going to be major overkill. The vast majority of my own characters don't bother with either; although most will have a means of situationally temporarily raising their survivability via short-duration clicky powers. IMO the only ones that actually need maximum survivability will be toons that know they'll be up against lots of incoming damage and unable to take other steps to avoid/mitigate it... such as AE Farmers or dedicated self-sufficient "I don't need no stinking teammate assistance" Tankers.

Sure... but in the defense of the believers, that's only because it's been true since June 6, 2006. There's certainly an argument to be made that aiming for 45% Defense is something of a trap for newbies who haven't yet learned about Defense Debuffs and whatnot; but as long as you end up with at least 45% Defence over and above after the enemies ToHit buffs are taken into account then adding extra defence is irrelevant. And that's why it's always referred to as a Softcap rather than a Hardcap. I'm really not... the formula and examples referenced above works for Single Target attack(s) just fine. In fact they work for ANY attack that isn't autohit. The only thing that'll really matter is that what flavour(s) of defense buff(s) the defender possesses - because it'll need to match whatever the incoming attack is flagged as for either Type (Smashing/Lethal/Fire/whatever) or Position (Melee/Ranged/AoE) to be counted for -DefMod. Also; the streakbreaker is largely irrelevant providing the final ToHitChance is 20% or below; as it'll only kick in after 100 misses as confirmed by Pohsyb and Castle years ago.

Soothing Wave is still useful for healing you and non-henchmen allies... but it's not like Shoal Rush is a bad power. If you're not taking anything else that can slot an Achilles' Heel proc (like Weaken Resolve)? Sure.

Woof, that's definitely an important point! That reduces the chances of that being the power choice I go with, substantially. His flight is a big part of the idea... Don't worry too much about getting knocked back whilst flying. I know in DnD when most flying creatures get knocked prone they plummet and take falling damage, but here they merely do a quick mid-air flip. Plus, you can start slotting global Knockback Protection IO enhancements from as low as level 7. Plenty of -KB IOs and Set Bonuses exist and realistically unless you're intending to Tank whole maps of Council you'll only ever need about 4-12 points of protection (so 1-4 IOs/Set Bonuses). I'd throw one more in: an Elec Blast/Elec Armor/Elec Mastery Sentinel. Aim to take the Fighting, Speed, Leaping and Flight pools for Tough, Hasten, Hover, Combat Jumping and Fly. When starting out prior to level 35; you'll have Electrical Blasts available plus Ball Lightning (which you could treat as a 'minor damage' breath attack) and the option of picking up Cross Punch from the Fighting Pool as a melee attack (and you could potentially reflavour Elec Blast's Short Circuit PBAoE as another one). At level 26, you'll gain access to Thunderous Blast (which you could treat as a 'high damage' Breath Attack). At level 35, you'll gain access to Havoc Punch which is a very hard hitting melee attack (Claws?). At level 41; you'll gain access to Shocking Field which is an Electrical damage aura. At level 44, you'll gain access to Rehabilitating Circuit which is an Allied AoE 'Chain' Heal. At level 50; you'll get access to incarnate abilities. Choose Reactive Interface (additional Fire damage on most of your attacks) and Mighty Judgement (a big stompy melee AoE- perhaps a Tail/Wing Swipe?) and whatever Lore Pets you like the look of - see here - Banished Pantheon might work. Whilst the effects of Electric Armor's "Grounded" ability is partially negated whilst in the air; that can be easily remedied. Combat Jumping provides decent Immobilise Protection (and also drastically increases your fine movement control whilst flying/jumping; reducing your "inertia" and stopping distance); and even a single IO (for example: a Blessing of the Zephyr in Fly) provides reasonable levels of Knockback Protection. Also; don't forget that the test server is there to let you build a character in minutes + try builds out.

Outside of custom AE critters Enemy ToHit buffs aren't that frequent (presumably intentionally!) and the main one will be Incarnate/Hardmode content which gains them an extra 13.75% base ToHit. So rather than aiming for 45% there you'll want 58.75%. Defense Debuffs however are very frequent; and "cascading defense failure" (when being hit with one attack drops your defense so results in you being hit by another attack which also drops your defense etc etc) can be absolutely crippling without Defense Debuff Resistance and/or a "buffer" of Defense over the softcap. Whilst things like Earthquake patches certainly exist, most of the Defense debuffs in regular PVE will be coming at you from Lethal typed Melee or Ranged attacks (hits from a bladed weapon or bullets) which tend to each inflict a 10% Base Debuff that rises to 13.33% if the attacker is 3 levels above you... so in order to ignore one copy of those debuffs you'd want to aim for 58.33% Defense against those attacks, which is effectively the same as you'd want for Incarnate/Hardmode content. Personally I only really bother doing that on a few of my frontline Tankers/Brutes that have zero/low Defense Debuff Resistance; on the rest merely preemptively popping a Big Purple Inspiration works wonders. Where this all falls apart is on 4 Star Hardmode Content runs. Whilst technically the enemies there have the extra 13.75% base ToHit plus lots of buffs/debuffs... in practice your team will be rotating Barrier Destiny Incarnate clickies which will completely cap out your damage resistance and defense without you needing to do anything else.

100% agree with you on this one. The OP here appears very keen to replicate a much beloved character concept, therefore recommending powersets or even ATs based on their mechanical performance isn't going to matter if it doesn't match that concept. I'm a card carrying powergamer, but my preferred method of playing RPGs (particularly tabletop ones) is to pick a fun concept first, often involving Class/Subclass/Race/Background/Feat options that are traditionally considered weak, and then seeing just how far I can push that character mechanically. In HC that translates to me occasionally even playing Brutes... 😜

For me, the all-round most mechanically effective MM has to be Bots/Marine. Marine works well with any MM Primary due to Shifting Tide procs and Power of the Depths... about the only thing it's lacking is noteworthy -Regen debuffs and ST healing. Bots/ provides -600% Regen and reliable henchmen ST spot healing. (Also Whitecap, Brine and Shifting Tides more than cover for Bot's Single Target DPS issues... plus Barrier Reef + Protector Bot Bubbles + the usual culprits will hit the softcap...)