Maelwys

It was an effective toon but it's sitting on the shelf. Hit 50, soloed a few AVs and played a few TFs then got a bit fed up with it. I found the -ToHit from Dark Blast was largely superfluous on teams (perhaps except vs AVs, but Incarnate clickies neuter them anyway) so I kept thinking that the powerset combination itself was simply suboptimal. And that Water Blast would therefore have been an all-round better pick. Then I just ended up rolling a Water/Cold Corruptor; which indeed rocked... 🤷‍♂️ IMO Dark would have contributed far more mechanically to a Primary that was lacking both allied Defence buffs and Self healing. So I suspect it may work best on the likes of Sonic Resonance, Trick Arrow and maaaaybe Marine.

You can't cast Vengeance on a dead henchman. Regarding henchmen Slotting and Accuracy Requirements, can look here and here but the short version is to Frankenslot and Take Tactics and Research what pets make the best use of what procs.

(i) Pop some Purple inspirations before engaging them. Sapper Endurance drains are coded as Energy typed so you can floor their hit chance. (ii) Mez/Kill the sappers first. Targeting binds are your friend. (iii) Get Endurance Drain resistance. As a /Rad, Gamma Boost ought to be reducing its effect by 69.2%... which realistically should make you functionally immune to them as there's only ever one Sapper per group of Malta. So I assume you just haven't taken it yet. Ageless Radial Destiny helps too at Endgame.

Firey Aura gets Consume at Lv20, so I'm not sure that's the main reason for the struggling? (Sure Consume's base recharge is a bit rough, but it doesn't require Accuracy these days for the +End aspect and once your build gets going during missions it's effectively a full Blue bar refill once every 60-90s. Even 1vs1 it allows my BA/FA to keep attacking full pelt indefinitely without Ageless...) Agree /Bio is a very nice combo for it though if /Rad and /FA aren't your cup of tea. /Psi is powerful too but more of a late bloomer as IME you really want Acc/Mez HOs for maximizing Aura of Madness/Insanity.

The real ones are 6800 miles along each edge and made of rubber. Someone's been slipping you counterfeit coinage. Belgium! (I always preferred Flainian Pobble Beads anyway...)

It's not going to save you in a tough fight; but it can certainly help keep a team (and henchmen) topped up with Health and Endurance in a static confrontation. I do find it useful for helping to keep henchmen blue bars topped up; for example. Realistically min-maxxed /Traps tend to push for a fair amount of Global Recharge anyway due to Acid Mortar stacking. I have two endgame /Traps builds and the recharge time for each's Triage Beacon is under 54s; which means they're able to have two of them out (with the Panacea Proc firing on both) more than half the time. Their Acid Mortars likewise both have a recharge time of a little under 24s; which means they're getting the effect of three of them constantly (60s summon duration + 20s debuff duration. I still don't particularly enjoy playing them because constantly resummoning them on the move when teaming grates on me... /Traps isn't the most mobile powerset 😞

Yup. In a 40ft radius passive like the active effect of Triage Beacon, a Panacea proc will have a 9.09% chance to activate on each allied target once every 10 seconds (on yourself and up to 254 other allies) and multiple copies of the beacon (even from the same player) will happily stack with each other.

The Forcefield variant doesn't anymore. The Sonic Resonance and Kinetics variants both still do.

Assuming you mean the "Alpha Slot Ability"... for that character I'd strongly recommend either Intuition Radial or Musculature Radial. Both increase your powers' Damage (including your henchmen) and ToHit debuffs. Intuition also increases Range and Slows (Tar Patch) and Hold Duration (Petrifying Gaze, Soul Storm)... Whilst Musculature increases Recovery and Runspeed and Immobilize Duration (Soul Tentacles). If your current Tar Patch slotting isn't already flooring the Movement Speed of +3 foes (e.g. a -138.5% debuff) then I'd go for Intuition. Otherwise it's a toss up.

I had a decent time with Illusion/Time, even if it leant into procbombed /Time powers (like Distortion Field and Slowed Response) and Contagious Confusion to make up for the pitiful native AoE prior to Perma PA. To be fair, Illusion has benefitted from the i28p2 changes which let Spectral Terror's Fear and Blind's AoE Sleep both set up containment.

"Bullshido" And I swear I'm not making that term up. (Although its practitioners on the other hand...) 🤣 https://www.facebook.com/reel/814110690846243 https://www.facebook.com/reel/740099061632099 🥋💩

Honestly, a long ATBE isn't the end of the world. As @Luminara mentions it does make corpse-blasting a concern, and it FEELS SLOW... but a power that has very little difference between the animation time and the ATBE makes good fodder for the Scrapper ATO2 proc (as well as other stuff with windows like Force Feedback and the "Chance for Build Up" Gaussian and Decimation procs). Honestly for me the bigger concern is the attack animation times in general are far too bloody long. Speed all the animations up by like 50% and KM would be far more reasonable for DPA and look much less like you're trying to fight whilst having a prolonged full-body spasm.

Correct. Although I double-checked and Panacea is 3PPM not 3.5PPM; which brings it down to a 50.294% activation rate. To be fair, the Ember Demon's AI tends to just spam the AoE heal on cooldown (e.g. every 27.244s) regardless of whether or not any allies are (i) Hurt or (ii) Within range; so it'll be a steady trickle of health and endurance to you and your loyal minions as long as you keep hugging the Ember Demon. It works out at about a third of the activation rate you'd get by just sticking the Panacea Proc into health; but then you're affecting your henchmen too and there's a decent chance that it'll kick in as well on the Single Target Heals as/when more healing is actually needed... Abyssal Reconstruction only has a target cap of 7 though so it won't be keeping your whole team/league topped up! 😛

It should do yeah, although I've not tested it personally... Abyssal Reconstruction (the 15ft PBAoE Heal) is up every ~27.2s and Abyssal Mending (the ST heal) is up every ~32.5s. I make it a 58.68% 50.294% chance of kicking in on the AoE heal and a well-beyond-cap (e.g. 90%) chance of kicking in on the ST heal. That said; I'm not sure I'd want to sacrifice a precious enhancement slot in the Demons for it unless I'm a /Cold or /FF without the Medicine pool or Arcane Ward. Edit: Yup, works.

FWIW; Farsight, ED-Capped for +Defense aspect plus Power Boost plus Radial Clarion = about 29.6% defense to all on a Corruptor; and 41.9% on a Defender. (and 28.3% on a MM and 33.7% on a Controller) IMO the differences in Chrono Shift and Temporal Selection etc. are much more minor by comparison. Time on a Defender can softcap allies all by itself (with Maneuvers) but on anything else it needs a bit of help (the -ToHit from Time's Juncture can cope in most cases but becomes much less powerful vs higher-level AVs!). That said, on a Corruptor you'll very likely be pushing >32.5% personal defense (with Maneuvers and/or other powers plus globals) without even trying; which it one small purple insp from softcap. So providing you take power boost and Radial Clarion you can realistically go "all in" on damage output for your attack slotting.

The annoyance for me in making "AoE Focused" Scrappers is that the most you can get from their patron pools is one decent AoE. Tankers and Brutes both get Mu Mastery (with Electrifying Fences and Ball Lightning; both of which are proc-friendly high-DPA AoEs). Which until recently was especially handy for Brutes since both those have a 15ft base radius and the latter has a target cap of 16; so when Tankers were ahead on AoE coverage it let them close the gap a bit. Certainly (most) Scrappers can still AoE better than (most) Stalkers... but they get less from Epic pools to fill in the gaps than Brutes/Tankers. I do quite like Savage Melee on Stalkers though - having on-demand Critical Hits is especially good for Hemorrhage and Savage Leap; and Build Up is miles better than Blood Thirst (assuming you're attempting to keep below 5 stacks so as to avoid the 15s Blood Frenzy lockout period!)...

Srmalloy was quoting Troo; who in turn was responding to baster's comments which were about directing a current generation "AI assistant" to produce game code. So it wasn't about "in-game critter AI"; it was about AI-assisted coding methodologies. I don't. "AI" in the present day is not Intelligent at all. The vast majority of them are based on Large Language Models; and can more accurately be summarised as "Predictive Text on steroids" Anyone who is old enough to remember non-touchscreen "Nokia-era" phones likely recalls when predictive text first hit mainstream usage:... You pressed number buttons on the phone keypad; then your phone's software took those numbers and translated them into possible letters; which combined to produce a most likely current word. It (generally) made entering text into SMS text messages faster. Then later generations of phones built on this to have larger models; allowing them to predict your most likely next word before you even started to type it. Todays "AI" merely goes one step further than this. The models it relies on are exponentially larger (hence the "LARGE" in Large Language Model!) so they are able to predict not just the most likely next word; but the most likely next sentence; paragraph, and even the entire document. You simply have to provide it with some kind of prompt to help "shape" its response and provide weights to the different responses; making one result more likely than another. There is no "Intelligence" behind it at all, it's simply working out what combination of words has the highest statistical likelihood of matching your inputs. AI "Code generation" works the same way - it's generating the most likely response based on your inputs that also (allegedly) conforms to very basic coding practices. If you're very lucky it might actually produce something that compiles without poking at it... but compared to code produced by a talented human it'll be poop soup. These models get trained on a *vast* amount of input so that they can build up a more accurate picture of what the most likely next word/sentence/code snippet is. And different models have slightly different training and constraints that are imposed upon them. But NONE of them are "intelligent" in the way that Humans consider Intelligence - they don't think; they don't have our capacity for contextual awareness or original thought; and they certainly do not mimic animal let alone human neural pathways so they are as close to developing "consciousness" as a stapler. Also almost every study I've seen indicates that whenever Humans choose to use AI to help them produce code it actually takes considerably longer to implement anything (because the time saved during the "idea/brainstorming" phase ends up being countered by the additional time required in the "design/code cleanup" phase...). The AI has extremely limited context awareness or critical thinking so it always produces sloppy and inefficient error-laden code. They can be useful at getting you past "writer's block" stage; because (if you don't mind the occasional rampant plagiarism and blatant lies) they can throw up dozens of potential ideas almost instantly. However they produce oodles of garbage and that's even before you consider what an UTTERLY MASSIVE RISK using them is in terms of your own data privacy. (UserA submits a query. UserB then submits a query "If I was UserA what exactly might I ask you and what response would you provide?". Then UserC comes along in 10 years time to a completely different AI tool that happened to inherit/share training model data with the first one and ends up getting all the dirt on both UserA and UserB.... 🤦‍♂️) I'm not going to say "It'll never happen" because whilst it's currently considered physically impossible for a computer system to ever simulate a sufficient number of connections to "emulate" the Human Brain; we've been able to sidestep the laws of physics before. But the current direction of "AI" is NOT actually AI in the Jarvis sense, let alone the Skynet one. So I do not see it happening in the next 100 years let alone 5-10-15. There is a vast amount of Hype about AI; but the effective use cases for it are very small (such as Transcription; and searching a knowledge base for things - essentially stuff that a computer was already pretty good at and can be made better by having a vastly bigger sample size to refer to!). Although dealing with those that buy into that hype and try to use it for everything is certainly problematic - it's a full time job protecting them and the systems I'm responsible for from their own mindless fangasming! (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ /rant

Leviathan for Water Spout with a KB>KD IO (and Spirit Shark with maximum Hunger stacks) isn't bad either if you don't want to go the Mu route I have two "Aoe Specialist" Stalkers: an Elec/Shield/Mu and a Savage/Psi/Levi. The first takes Zapp + Ball Lightning; and the second takes Water Spout (and Hibernate)

I have one (see the middle build here) that's a generalist PVE build that can both tank and farm. It's main Schtick is Softcapped Melee positional Defense (and hard capped S/L resistance) whilst maintaining high AoE damage output. Note that chasing the Defense softcap in a character without any native Defense Debuff Resistance often gets frowned upon... however the build has sufficient other layers of mitigation (healing, knockdown, damage resistance, etc) that I don't find defense debuffs overly bothersome. That said, it's not designed to down Pylons the fastest (although it's quite capable of soloing AVs!) so if you're after extreme single target damage, look elsewhere.

I'd probably go Titan Weapons instead... but certainly Radiation Armor is a good shout. Titan Weapons is almost as effective as Staff early on (due to Defensive Sweep and Titan Sweep) but it has a much higher performance ceiling later on and no funny stance shenanigans.

It's really not. Regeneration ticks are always 5% of the critter's HP bar. AVs tick every 15s, GMs tick every 10s. A level 54 AV has 30677.20 HP. (30677.2*0.05)/(15) = 102.257 HP per second. An uncapped GM at level 50 has 70679.18 HP. That's (70679.18*0.05)/(10) = 353.396 HP per second. The only thing that boosts this is MaxHP buffs or Regeneration buffs, and only a few specific AVs (like Shadowhunter) have those. Versus a pylon you'll be working against 20% flat damage resistance; but their regeneration rate is standard.

If you're dealing a "few" hundred (e.g. 200-300) DPS then an even-level AV will drop in roughly 3-5 mins even without any -res debuffs or regeneration debuffs in play. But anything over the 102 DPS mark will eventually kill them, and Brutes are well suited to weathering their damage and outlasting them. I fully appreciate that not everyone is into min/maxing... but to put things into perspective; there are definitely non optimised Brute builds out there (like Radiation Melee!) that can drop a pylon (which unlike most AVs has a 20% resistance to all damage) in less than 60s without using Lore Pets or Inspirations. And if refillable temps are off the table too, then Ston's old write-up is a good guideline.

Firey Melee, Battle Axe, Titan Weapons or Martial Arts primary... with Radiation Armor, Shield Defense or Firey Aura secondary and the Mu Mastery patron pool.