Maelwys

I'm also of the considered opinion that: (i) Damage per Button Press is a daft performance metric. Especially when discussing Pylon times. Katana Brutes press more buttons than Super Strength Brutes ones do, but the latter inflict considerably more damage (both per hit and over time). You could however make a valid argument that it's a useful busyness metric. Like how Kinetics is more busy than Forcefield. And I certainly accept that Barflings (that's my preferred term for them, since IMO it most accurately describes the sheer magnitude of all the audible and visual vomit) press a lot of buttons. (ii) This one honestly should be self evident, but here goes: All primary powersets are not created equal when it comes to damage output. Neither are all secondary powersets. Characters, once created, cannot change their Primary and Secondary powersets. All KineticMelee/Willpower Scrappers do not have the potential to be as powerful as the best-built Scrapper... but all Peacebringers have the potential to be as powerful as the best-built Peacebringer. And all Warshades have the potential to be as powerful as the best-built Warshade. This means peak damage potential for Kheldians has two data points. One for Peacebringers, and one for Warshades. But peak damage potential for Scrappers has (21 primaries x 15 secondaries)=315 data points. And many of those combinations will SUCK, comparatively. Because Primaries like Kinetic Melee and Staff are substantially less damaging than ones like Fiery Melee and BattleAxe. And because Secondaries such as Willpower, Super Reflexes and Regeneration etc. bring very little to the damage output table whereas Radiation Armor, Bio Armor and Stone Armor all bring quite a lot. There have been a lot of threads comparing the damage output of different Scrapper Primaries, but even a quick glance down the Pylon times sheet suggests that most of them won't come anywhere close to the best Barfling Peacebringer time. ----------------------------- FWIW: I consider the Kheldian animation cancelling thing to be an exploit. Although I recognise that the Devs are both aware of it and have intentionally left it as-is temporarily until they have the time to properly rework the AT. I also recognise that Kheldians could do with being buffed in order to considerably raise the level of their damage output whenever they are not using the aforementioned exploit. However I do believe that Kheldian peak single target damage output should NOT be as high after the rework as it is currently. Frankly, I don't believe they should be comparable with Scrappers. Tankers, sure. Brutes, maybe. But not Scrappers or Stalkers. And my main argument for this belief boils down to two things: Survivability and Nukes. Kheldians have a resistance cap of 85% that is easily permanently attainable, plus Crashless Nukes. Therefore IMO if anything balancewise their overall damage output should theoretically be below Sentinels... however their lack of Mez protection (outside Dwarf and Light Form) is restrictive enough to offset that and place them a little higher. Maybe. But I guess we'll see where things finally land once all the dust settles.

*takes a quick glance through his stable of min-maxed toons for ones that aren't Magic Origin and yet have the Sorcery Pool* (Spirit Ward, Arcane Bolt, Mystic Flight, Enflame) Grav/Thermal Controller (Spirit Ward, Arcane Bolt, Rune of Protection) Illusion/Time Controller (Spirit Ward, Mystic Flight, Rune of Protection) Water/Cold Corruptor Storm/Dark Defender Elec/Sonic Dominator Arsenal/Psi Dominator (Spirit Ward, Mystic Flight) Sonic/Elec Defender (Mystic Flight) Bots/Marine MM Energy/Rad Scrapper Beam/Bio Sentinel Beam/Ninjitsu Sentinel Elec/Shield Stalker Yeah, nope. Spirit Ward is excellent as it is. With Defender numbers and minimal slotting investment (EndRed/Heal HO, Heal IO) it'll grant a +506.28 Absorb buffer (renews at +50.628 every 2s) which does not encounter MaxHP limits. if you throw in a Panacea proc then it can also give that ally a decent amount of +Endurance/+Healing. Really the only time it's superfluous is if you're a permanent soloist with no pets (including Lores) but even then it's useful for muling the Preventive Maintenance global. Also; most of the Sorcery Pool can be recoloured to hide the sigils (Arcane Bolt is a little iffy; but pure white is bearable IMO)

The above slotting is two Heal IOs and one EndMod IO; plus a Global (Preventive Maintenance), a Proc120s (Numina) and a regular Proc (Power Transfer). Frigid Protection gives a stacking absorb effect, +18 absorb (base) every 2 seconds that stacks with itself up to six times. That's about 108HP total, and the above slotting gets it to a little over 212HP. The Numina and the PT Proc help recover your regular health bar whilst FP recovers the Absorb buffer, and PM is there for emergencies. My offensively focused Fire/Ice Blaster's getting an effective ~45.462 HP/Sec health regeneration and the bulk of that comes from this single enhanced power. I did test offensive procs in it rather extensively, and the short answer is that they're not worth it. Same goes for Panacea.

Here's how mine looks:

The Two Slow Set Damage Procs; always. Lockdown "Chance for Hold" if I've room. On my 'Troller I also stuck the (crappy) Energy Font ATO in it. Recharge/Slow Aspect if I've got no other -movement powers to stack with it.

For Marine; look here and here. Shoal Rush is about the only skippable power in the set, and even then it's not "bad"; simply not as good as the others. Note that the heal (Soothing Wave) needs you to be facing the target(s) before you activate it in order to heal them reliably. There are binds that can help with this. IMO the mechanics of "Shifting Tides" is the main thing to be aware of - see here. And also how Brine interacts with target HP - see here. And then there's Whitecap... which ideally you'll want to slot in a very particular way - see here. As for Water Blast... IIRC the typical attack chain these days is 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. Geyser and Whirlpool are decent AoEs by themselves; but it might be worth picking up Thunder Strike from Electricity Mastery too (and proccing it up, similar to Whitecap). Some discussion on the Corruptor version of the same combo is linked below (just ignore the bits about Scourge!)

IIRC Willpower has one of the highest performance baselines, and one of the lowest performance ceilings. It's very hands-off and low maintenance and has good sustainability in prolonged encounters where the incoming damage is always under its passive immortality line... but it's not particularly good in harder encounters (unless you seriously supplement its toolkit via other abilities and set bonuses and Incarnates, and even then it suffers from low DDR)

Back on Live I mained a Sonic Defender for yonks, so I'm rather comfortable with its toolset. (And henchmen are considerably better behaved than those old-school PUGs ever were....) Its most oft-overlooked big trick these days is Liquefy. It used to be extremely long recharge; but HC quietly tweaked it some years back and you can now get it to a ~45s or less recharge time pretty easily. it lasts for 30s, so that's a decent uptime. Aside from a 25ft-radius "Knockdown" patch; it applies an autohit -21.4% base debuff to both Defense and ToHit (e.g. about -34% ToHit with enhancements) and has a capped (90%) activation rate for damage procs in the first "tick". Naturally it also boasts hefty +DamageResistance buffs (~42% with slotting - throw in the +35% from MM Aura IOs and that's only 13% shy of the hardcap!) and -DamageResistance debuffs (-22.5% AoE from Disruption Field; plus another -22.5% non-stacking Single target from Sonic Siphon) and it has a 90s "become immune to CC effects" button in Clarity (which to be fair can be annoying to keep up on 6 henchmen if you're not used to oldschool single-target bubbling). The ally-anchored AoE -res debuff ("Disruption Field") very much benefits from you being familiar with GOTO commands on ranged henchmen; but it's cruise-control on melee henchmen. Sonic Cage is useless. Sonic Repulsion is useless. Certain Primaries will benefit from taking Aid Other. It's not a top-tier set; but it's passable. IMO if you've got lots of +Rech and are leveraging Liquefy properly then it's better than Thermal and DEPENDING ON YOUR PRIMARY can be better than Elec Affinity. No -Regen debuffs and poor performance versus incoming Psi-typed damage (outside of Liquefy!) is the real headache IMO.

(And as a bonus:)

Post it in the Suggestions Subforum --> https://forums.homecomingservers.com/forum/45-suggestions-amp-feedback/ Although a fair few have beaten you to it.

TBH the only MM Secondary I consider utterly irredeemable is Poison. And if MMs got Venomous Gas instead of Noxious Gas then even that might become workable. Some combos are definitely weaker than others; but I'd play most of them and at worst I'd consider them "poor" rather than "utterly useless". Beast/ anything is pretty meh and you couldn't pay me to play a Beast/Poison. Sonic Resonance is a bit iffy on anything other than Bots (because you don't need +Def from your secondary when Protector Bots + Radial Clarion exists) or Thugs (as Enforcer Maneuvers help and the Bruiser is tailor made for the ally-anchored -res debuff)... but I'm pretty sure I could make a Ninja/Sonic work with a bit of effort (although it'd likely need to lean heavily into Incarnates...). Traps is great with anything; except perhaps Bots (it's great with SOs; but a decent IO'ed build will typically end up with a lot of superfluous +Def and -Regen). Mercs/Traps and Ninja/Traps are both perfectly fine IMO. I've heard people complain that Kinetics is bad on Ranged Primaries; which just plain isn't true. My Bots/Kin MM is my most effective Kinetics toon by a country mile. As for the others... Marine is top tier on everything and Time is close behind. Electrical, Dark, Pain and Nature are all very solid. Cold and Thermal are fine too (if rather reliant on Global +Recharge to really shine). FF (Powerboosted with Procbombed Forcebomb) is fine. That leaves Radiation Emission, Storm Summoning, Trick Arrow and Empathy. The first three of which probably work best with specific primaries like Bots, Necro and Demons... but IMO they're still perfectly playable on the rest with a bit of care (and full IOed builds with specific Epic/Incarnate power selections)... Empathy though? Empathy is awful... but it's awful on every AT; and at least on Masterminds when you're soloing you can stack enough +recharge to keep a Fortitude up on most of your henchmen simultaneously. Meh. Necro/Cold, incidentally; wasn't half bad whenever I tried it. The Bubbles plus the Aura IOs plus Maneuvers is about ~32% defense to all. Arctic Fog is another ~6%; for ~38% Total. I found I didn't even need to run Barrier since the pets churn out rather a lot of -ToHit (and between a Panacea proc in Dark Empowerment plus their own Siphons/Lifedrains they reliably self-heal...). Sure; whilst levelling up it got rough a few times, but if I kept a few team +Def insps on hand it was perfectly fine; and at endgame it was a powerhouse.

Build up with Gaussian Proc window, surely? Which (after accounting for Build Up's ATBE) is just under 5.458s. Subtracting 1.188s (from the first ET) leaves 4.27s. Therefore as long as your ET has a ~4s recharge you can fit two of them within the Gaussian buff window, regardless of whether the second ET is Fast or Slow. Fast AS is 1.188s Power crash is 1.98s Bonesmasher is 1.452s Energy Punch is 1.056s Fast Snipes are 1.584s So after a Build Up you could technically just about fit in Fast ET > Fast AS > Fast Snipe > Bonesmasher (5.412s) before queueing up another ET and still have them all (including the second ET) be Gaussian buffed. But that leaves only 0.046s wiggle room in the buff window; and the less wiggle room the less margin for error you'll have regarding lag etc. I've encountered issues getting chains with 0.064s of wiggle room to consistently work (see here). A more reliable spike chain would be substituting Bonesmasher for Energy Punch (5.016s) or a low-Arcanatime Epic Blast like MuBolts/BallLightning/DarkBlast/IceBolt. If your ET comes back up fast enough to let you skip that last attack (2.772s recharge time or less), fantastic... although then that second ET has to be Fast or you'll miss out on your next attack getting the effect of the Gaussian buff. ⚖️

That can work, assuming TF is cycling at just over the 10s mark rather than just under it (e.g. if it cycles every 9.9s then you'll regularly encounter streaks where the proc is only half as effective as it could be). But don't immediately follow TF with ET (use the snipe instead!) otherwise the Hidden Crits will be wasted. You could also keep the proc itself in AS and just drop some of the other superfluous set IOs. The main thing is to look carefully at your attack chain timings so that the Chance-for-Hidden ATO's 10 lockout period isn't having a needlessly harsh impact on you. This can be especially tricky on Energy Melee as your chain timings will differ depending on whether or not TF Crits (when ET becomes fast twice in a row and you lose nearly 2s from your chain's cycle time!)

(I) The Chance for Hidden proc has a ten second lockout period. This means that to get the full benefit of it, whatever attack you stick it into should be cycling at just over once every ten seconds. (ii) AS is typically one of your best attacks, so using it as a 6 piece set bonus mule is incredibly inefficient. Work out what the bare minimum recharge is for your chosen attack chain, then get that plus ED capped damage aspect and fill the remaining slots with damage procs.

Their PC doesn't have the recharge for it (6.43s it looks like); and their BS isn't procced at all so I make using it to push for 3x stacks to be a net loss in average DPS. (Team Crits will factor too I guess, and at least with the "chance for hide" in AS their TF will be getting a Crit a smidge more often; which will allow for a few more Fast ETs... but the lack of a Snipe and all that recharge aspect in Build up gives me the Jeebies) 😛

And I'd advise against doing this: or this: That said, at present since your Total Focus is currently recharging in 8.02s and you don't have any Snipes; it looks like your attack chain is going to be something like: TF > ET (Fast) > AS > PC > ET (Slow) > AS ...which is workable; if not optimal. However if TF crits then the second ET will be fast and you'll need to fill in with Fireball before/after it otherwise the second AS and next TF won't be recharged in time.

The "inertial drift" that accompanies Hoverless flight can also be partially mitigated by Toggling on Combat Jumping or Athletic Run. Personally on the (few) characters I have which take the Fly pool over the Sorcery pool, the only real draw is the extra one-slot wonders for LotGs. Mystic Flight's Translocation teleport ability is excellent at reducing main map travel speed, enabling me to bypass geometry to appear at a target's feet, and getting me the hell out of dodge quickly.

That's kinda what /Devices is for, TBH... although Trick Arrow works fantastically as an always-ranged secondary set too. Beam Rifle or Archery are probably the best standalone sniper sets (due to the ranged Nuke) than AR. Elec is decent too but lacks a weapon (may break immersion). I've got both a Ranged-Defence Softcapped Archery/TA Blaster and a BeamRifle/Ninjitsu Sentinel that use this sort of playstyle.

Also "/showfps 1" will give an indication of how well the graphics element of things is doing. Whilst it's unlikely to be your CPU or video card that's the issue, it's always a good idea to rule it out (healthy is anything from about 30 FPS up to whatever your monitor's VSync rate is - typically 60 on non bleeding edge kit)

Recipe and Salvage drops certainly add up. Purple Recipe drops are definitely "big ticket items"; and I'll usually average a little over 1 of those per hour (my best is six in one run). However most will want to maximize inf/hr from BOTH enemy defeats and gain of high-profit drops. If it was purely (or even one-sidedly) about the drops, then we'd all be running at +1x8 instead of +4x8. Ultimately the aim is to defeat mapfuls of enemies as quickly as possible; which translates to "maximum AoE damage output whilst staying upright". Everything else is just efficiency tweaks... 😉

issue 28 Page 1 was the previous major patch (landed in July 2024) Issue 28 Page 2 is what we're on currently (landed in June 2025) The OP was last updated in June 2024, so it predates both those patches. Since then there have been plenty of changes, most notably to how Tankers deal AoE damage (which lowered both raw damage vs large numbers of foes and proc rate)

10m plus a Panacea proc (typically attuned so as they get exposed to the idea of attuned Set IOs) is fair IMO. That's enough that they'll not have to worry about SOs until they're high enough level to have built up a merit stash. If you throw another zero on, you tend to either get more "that's far too much" protests and/or they'll pester you again once they've blown it all on winter packs and Pocket D lapdances. Gifting them more IOs instead (especially globals/Procs like LotGs and Miracles) feels like it has a higher chance of producing a more engaged newbie, even if it takes a bit more time.