Maelwys

The good news is that you're ticked on 90% Fire Resistance and 45% Fire Defense. However you're only pulling around 21 HP/Sec regen when Consume is down (assuming you've gotten your Passive Accolades) so it likely won't survive meteor AFK farming. And your AoE damage slotting is very much lacking for clearing maps quickly in Active Farming (aside from Blazing Aura NONE of your attacks have a single damage proc; and you're missing other important things such as Hasten and a Gaussian Proc in Build Up). You're also missing the Steadfast Protection +Defence; the Reactive Defenses +Resistance, the Shield Wall +Resistance, and the Preventive Maintenance +Absorb Globals; as well as the Miracle +Recovery Proc... and I don't see any Performance Shifters and only one Preventative Maintenance +Healing Procs; at a quick glance. So as it stands your damage output is going to be poor; and you'll only be able to survive if you're Farming lower level enemies or you're actively clicking on Healing Flames. Check AA's post a few thread pages back here which contains example AFK and Active Builds for a Spines/Fire Brute. Note that both sample builds there are also Fire Resist Hardcapped + Fire Softcapped... but the AFK build has much greater passive damage buffs and regeneration; and the active build has far more AoE attacks plus Hasten. Both of them have considerable amounts of Global Recharge and most of their important AoEs are completely laden with damage procs. Ever since the aggro cap behaviour changes it's gotten much tougher for Brutes to survive AFK AE farming; and so realistically you're probably going to have to fork out a fair amount of Inf to get a top-tier Brute build that can manage it (at least with anything approaching acceptable speed - Stone's Granite Form is there as a bargain option!) It's also possible to make a Brute build that is viable in most PVE and can also AFK farm pretty well - but due to the Regeneration requirements your best option there will probably be (non Granite!) Stone Armor. The one I'm currently using on-and-off is Brute - Rad Melee - Stone Armor (Fold Space).mbd - it can handle AFK Fire Farming on meteor farms at +4x8 no problem; if a smidge more slowly than a dedicated AFK-farmer with Assault and procbombed damage auras. I completed it a few months back and it probably cost me ballpark 300m excluding the couple of Winter sets and Boosters - and the toon made that back the first day just by me throwing it into a meteor map every 10mins whilst I was supposed to be working. For ACTIVE farming - there's more leeway in terms of survivability because you're there to activate Heals and clicky buffs on demand. But in those cases you really want to load up on as many big-radius-many-target-cap AoEs as you can and proc them front+back+sideways. Tankers have the advantage there mainly due to Gauntlet's increased Target Cap buff (its radius buff is a smidge less important as it only affects certain AoEs + when farming your targets are usually tightly clustered) If you want to farm with a lower-cost build, honestly I'd go for a Tanker over a Brute any day of the week. It's much easier to hit the important survivability figures (90% res, 45% Def, >35HP/Sec Regen) on a Tanker, which gives a lot more wiggle room for slotting or power picks that aren't bleeding-edge min-maxxed. [EDIT: Updated the build to reflect what I'm currently actually using. Compared to the previously posted one it's putting out a bit more damage at the cost of a little additional endurance consumption. Atom Smasher has more local recharge and the slotting of Irradiated Ground and Mud Pots has been shuffled around]

The Defense Hardcap is different for different ATs. For Dominators it's 175% as long as you're over level 20. That said, in practice what you actually want to do here is to floor the ToHit chances of your enemies... and that's where the "softcap" idea comes in as a minimum spot to aim for which you can reach via Defense buffs and/or ToHit debuffs. 45% effective defense (regular content) and 58.75% effective defense (incarnate and Hard mode content) is the value in question - any excess you possess over and above that number will only matter whenever your foes are +ToHit buffed or you are -Defense debuffed. Note that there are some enemies that inflict -defence debuffs with every attack they make... and once you start facing them, unless you possess a decent chunk of excess defense (or a good deal of Defence Debuff Resistance) you'll very likely encounter Cascade Defense Failure (getting hit once causes you to be debuffed... which causes you to get hit more often... which debuffs you even more...). Thankfully most of the really dangerous ones are melee attacks - RANGED attacks that Debuff defence are few and far between, so a softcapped Ranged Dominator build is perfectly viable.

Power Boost will just be affecting your raw healing numbers. It's nowhere near as beneficial for /Nature as it is for /FF or /Time. Don't drop Corrosive Enzymes unless you never plan on fighting AVs/GMs.

For AFK Farming, you definitely need two damage auras and any additional passive Global Recharge is extra useful (to buff the one single clicky PBAoE attack that you get to put on autofire) - so Elec has the edge there. And it's also got a few extra places in those passive powers to stick useful self-buffing procs (e.g power transfer) For Active Farming, Rad wins but Beta Decay's Recharge buff is almost an afterthought. The main draw is Radiation Decay and Ground Zero because when procced up those two clickies can take out entire spawns by themselves; and you simply never need to worry about Regeneration or Recovery.

More force of habit since it means I get to slot it early (and it's engrained in my hindbrain that only the PVP and Purple set IOs are "auto attuned"). I typically just buy an attuned version of each proc off the AH - as since it pools all the copies of the same enhancement together, buying an attuned copy is no more expensive than buying a levelled copy.

It does indeed, but the debuffs from Beta Decay (the PBAoE Toggle) won't always actually kick in on a target before your first hit (or two) land. Especially if you're barrelling from one group to the next like a rabid werebadger.

Since we're really on a roll here... I know some folk don't use Mids (either by choice or circumstance); but I do find it very useful for ballparking average damage per attack; including damage procs. If your attack uses any procs, then often if an enhancement within it contains any +recharge% you'll get better return by lowering its level (either by purposely picking it up at a lower-level, or by not boosting it). However if that enhancement also contains +damage% (or Damage AND Accuracy AND Endurance reduction!) then there's a balancing act. You typically want each of your attacks to have at least a 95% HitRate versus +3s; and unless an attack's base damage is pitiful then it usually pays to enhance it a bit instead of sticking yet another extra 3.5PPM damage proc in there. And Mids can perform those calculations on the fly for you when it comes to damage output (drop enhancement level by 1; check average damage figure) - and it's usually pretty accurate providing you ensure you detoggle any guff like Build Up and Gaussian Procs and Scrapper Criticals OFF first... 🙂 Sometimes an attack will need to contain some "special" procs which don't fit in anywhere else; or there are set bonuses that you desperately need which sometimes take precedence over "optimal" damage slotting... but there's often still some room for improvement with specific enhancement level tweaks. Let's take a few examples: Pretty easy to see what is trying to be accomplished here - a +10% Global Recharge set bonus plus the 4.5 PPM purple proc and an Achille's Heel -Res proc. Because Purple sets contain +Recharge% the proc activation rate won't be wonderful, but it's a trade off between raw damage output and a useful set bonus... however you can stack the deck a little in your favour by not taking the Dam/Rech purple, and only boosting the DAMAGE and DAMAGE/END Purples to +5; but leaving the Acc/Dam/Rech and Acc/Rech alone. This is a ranged variant of the above (this was the only place in the build capable of slotting a Decimation proc). The Rech/Acc is not boosted; but the Dam/Rech/Acc is actually Lv50+3 because as it turns out that is the "sweet spot" for maximum average damage with a 4.5PPM damage proc in this particular case. Mids is great here for showing you the results of small level tweaks in realtime... as long as you ensure it's using accurate values for the power's recharge time - many of the Epic Powers had their stats tweaked a few pages ago and the Mids database guys can be a bit slow to include those changes! For this one, we're going for the +3.75% Melee Defence set bonus plus a 3.5PPM Damage Proc. The Touch of Death set only contains a few IOs with "Recharge" - so those are taken at the lowest possible level and not boosted in order to buff Proc activation rate. The Proc itself gets attuned; and the other IOs in the set are all Boosted to +5. Similar to the one above - this is going for a 6-piece set bonus but we want to make best use of the damage proc. As almost all the pieces in the Obliteration IO set contain "Recharge"; only the first (Damage-only) gets taken at Lv50 and boosted. This one only cares about Set Bonuses, not about Procs. So we don't even bother 6-slotting it. This one mainly cares about maximised raw damage output. Note the Lv53 Acc/Dam HO and the 50+5 Damage Obliteration; then the rest are all Procs. As a small concession to Set Bonuses; it goes for a 2-set Obliteration over a second Acc/Dam HO in order to gain a bit of extra S/L Damage Resistance. Single-Target and Targeted AoE ranged variants of the one above - once again, maximised raw damage is the main aim here with a small concession for a useful 2-piece set bonus. This is one case where Mids will NOT directly help you figure out the optimum enhancement level tweaks because the proc you're going for isn't a damage proc - so you'll need to calculate the optimal recharge enhancement figure manually and then repeatedly tweak the IO levels in Mids until you get as close to that number as possible. Spoiler Alert: "Aim" and "Build Up" powers can take ~70.35% local recharge before a Gaussian Proc's activation chance drops below 90%. So this is my typical basic slotting. And this is the "maximum damage" variant where I don't need any additional +Perception. That's a Lv50+5 Rech/EndRed/ToHit plus a Lv50+1 Rech. This is the start of what I'd call true balancing acts - where you want a very specific set bonus as well as ED-capped damage and sufficient accuracy... then you utilise the remaining slots to boost the power in other ways via utility or damage procs. This is multiple-plates-spinning-simultaneously levels of slotting. Where you've worked out precisely how much Accuracy and Endurance reduction the power requires in order for the relevant pet to end up with a capped hit rate vs +3 foes and not run out of endurance with all-guns-blazing; and are utilising all the slots to achieve that whilst simultaneously also ED-capping their damage, transforming any knockback-into-knockdown; including a damage proc that actually applies to multiple sub powers of each pet and fitting in some necessary utility IOs (Pet Aura Globals). Plus useful Set Bonuses. And also *just* softcapping your Defense. 😅 Obviously there are many, many more other possible slotting combinations... but the above should give a rough idea of some of the tweaking I actually do on each of my builds.

Yeah, that matches with what I get (Binomial calcs give a 53.1441% chance for all six Procs to fire on a single test) Therefore (leaving aside the Interface Slot which needlessly complicates things) I'd expect just over half of Ground Zero's targets to be affected by all six procs. And given it has a Target Cap of 30? that's not bad... ...at least until you consider that you can increase the average damage contribution from that particular power over time by slotting fewer procs but more regular set IOs that contain Damage% and Recharge%. Everything's a balancing act! 😀

AFAIK that's only true for Pseudopet powers (and as mentioned previously it's due to "boosts" like Global Accuracy Set Bonuses and the Kismet IO being copied to the pet, then expiring after a second or two). The new Arsenal powersets in particular are riddled with multiple overlapping pseudopet effects; there was a thread that touched on this a few months back.

Slotting is in my OP: All of those are 3.5PPM except for the Armageddon which is 4.5PPM. The Interface Slot is a flat 75% chance (not PPM) Chance of each proc should be capped at 90% due to Ground Zero's extremely long recharge time. (Note that this power could be ED-capped for recharge rate reduction and still have >90% unclamped 3.5PPM proc chance!)

I'm saying that it's definitely possible to six-slot a power with procs and see all six of those procs hit 🙂 In practice however, personally I very rarely slot more than 3-4 procs in something. I almost always want to boost the power's Accuracy a bit (notable exception: SuperStrength Brutes, because Rage) and often slotting a level 53 Acc/Dam HO or two (or a two-piece Acc/Dam/EndRed + Acc/Dam Superior Winter set) will simply give more practical benefit than a few extra procs. Especially if I'm scraping the barrel and all that's left are the Psychic or Lethal Damage ones...

AFAIK it's affected by the power's listed "Radius" and "Arc". It definitely doesn't factor in any Global buffs so stuff like Tanker Gauntlet or /Energy Blaster's "Boost Range" won't reduce your chances. I've not personally tested if adding "Range" enhancements to a power actually matters or not... but I'd not be surprised if it did (like local +recharge% slotting)

Pretty sure that's from the Dominator/Controller/Defender/Corruptor Epic pools... 8ft AoE Toggle with a smidge of damage and a Mag2 Confuse? Damage Procs from sets other than "pure damage" (such as the various CC sets like Holds, Confuses, Knockback, etc) can be a bit funky in some powers. So if you were using any of the Confuse Procs here (e.g. from the Cacophony and Malaise's Illusions sets) then I wouldn't be surprised if those particular procs were only getting a chance to apply whenever the Confuse effect itself actually successfully kicked in on each foe. Therefore if you were testing versus LTs or higher then that may have skewed the results. You could maybe try retesting just using Procs from the regular damage sets? Should be able to stick a Fury of the Gladiator "-Res" Proc and a Superior Avalanche "Chance for KD" proc if needed in the last two slots to achieve a full set of six... EDIT: Also, it's worth pointing out that a TOGGLE with 8ft radius is going to have a 3.5PPM activation chance of 30.70%. Binomial Probability suggests that your average chance of seeing ALL SIX Procs activate simultaneously is 0.083720199172025% - therefore you'd need to make many, many thousands of trials in order to achieve a decent likelihood of seeing all them trigger. So in a toggle which will only get one opportunity for any procs to trigger once every 10 seconds and likely isn't reaching the 95% ToHit rate? Yeah; you're definitely going to be there for a while even with "pure damage" set procs... I'd probably swap to a long-recharge clicky and try that instead.

I've tested it a few times now on different ATs so I'm not sure what was happening in your checks. I can't see any sign that Damage Procs are currently doing anything other than inheriting the ToHit checks of their parent power... although if the parent power doesn't HAVE a ToHit check (e.g. it's autohit) then it definitely seems that they're forced to make one; as I've seen far too many instances of Procs in stuff like Caltrops and Burn patches etc. "missing" to be explained any other way. Those built-in checks do seem to obey the usual rule for Pseudopet ToHit rolls though - e.g. if it's still within a few seconds of the power initially triggering then the ToHit check will still be affected by most of the player's Global Accuracy/ToHit Set Bonuses (because those bonuses are coded with a refreshing duration of a few seconds)... otherwise they expire and you're stuck with the power's own base accuracy - which is typically rubbish unless you've purposely slotted it for accuracy AND the power itself actually accepts accuracy enhancement buffs (e.g. caltrops doesn't but bonfire does) Yep it's 1.2 Base instead of the typical 1.0 - not wild but nice enough that my slotting on the main servers for that character only includes a single Acc/Dam/Rech IO (an Obliteration) and the power still has >95% ToHit chance versus +3s! 😀

Yups. See here: Mids even has a function to export your current build to a popup menu on the Beta Server + you can semi-automatically grant yourself all the enhancements ("File --> Export to Beta Server")

Oh I know whose thread it was, they specifically hid it. Nonono, I meant buggered if I can find my testing. In any case, just reproduced it on Brainstorm with a quick Scrapper explosion in an AE farm: 13 mobs hit; and of those 13, 8 of them got hit by all six "slotted" damage procs plus the Interface proc.

I distinctly recall testing that theory pretty recently, with an Arsenal Control AOE slotted with six procs plus an interface slot. There were multiple screenshots with colour coded arrows annotated via MSPaint, highlighting several instances where all seven "chance for additional damage" sources triggered on the same enemy. Buggered if I can actually find it now though... In any case AFAIK procs only require a separate ToHit check in Autohit abilities (like Taunts or Debuffs patches) but if the parent power already needs to pass a ToHit check then the procs will effectively just use it's check.

Worth clarifying that this bit is true in terms of survivability (due to their larger damage resistance cap and MaxHP), but not damage output. The Brute damage cap being 200% higher gets negated by their lower base damage (and Fury). A Buffed Scrapper (or Stalker) will deal more damage than a Buffed Brute because of Crits. As each AT approaches their respective damage caps there isn't a huge amount of difference in damage as long as you ignore "random" Crits (Stalker AS Forced-Crits are fine since that's a core part of their gameplay mechanic)... but unfortunately ATOs skyrocket Scrapper Crit rate; and Stalker Crit chance scales with Team size. If they'd just sort the Brute ATOs out it'd all be a much prettier picture. (and yes, I'm referring to level 50 min/maxxed twinked builds here. Personally I'm still of the opinion that pre-IOs and incarnates Brutes have a major advantage than Scrappers/Stalkers due to their larger HP pool and not having as much need to slot their attacks for raw damage%; which allows them far more leeway in the rest of their build!)

So given that the "detailed info" screens in game and CoDv2 exist and we've danced this exact same dance before... ...what exactly are your couple of questions?

I'm pretty sure this was back in issue 7; so City of Villains was still brand new and the closest thing we had to "challenging content" was fighting enemies with unusual damage types (particularly Toxic or Psychic) like Arachnos, and everyone avoided Carnies and Malta like the plague. I seem to recall Regens were particularly good versus all of those enemy types (except sappers) plus the dreaded Rularuu eyeballs and DE quartzes. Oh, and the inherent regeneration rate of AVs and GMs was still negligible so you could kill them with Brawl given sufficient time. Inventions were not even a glint in the Dev's eyes... https://forumarchive.cityofheroes.dev/topic/115310?page_no=1

Regen providing almost exclusively "Flat" damage mitigation to the others "Scaling" is very old hat. Back whenever Arcanaville wrote that we didn't have much in the way of Regeneration and Maximum HP debuffs flying around. Some of the more recently designed tough encounters will simply eat them for breakfast. Performance I'd take a well-IOed out INV or SR over a well-IOed out Regen any day of the week, let alone a Dark Armor (which only ever really lacked Knockback Protection and a smidge of Energy Resistance) or one of the more modern powersets. Regen is passable, sure. And I have a lot of rose tinted nostalgia for it because a Regen Scrapper was the very first CoH toon I ever played. But it still takes nearly an entire powerset to provide less than what a well built Bio Armor toon gets with a single button click.

Also worth pointing out that whilst Stalkers and Scrappers have a substantially lower Resistance cap than Brutes, they do get access to a few different tools (such as Shadow Meld) which can let them situationally "turtle up" more easily than Brutes whilst still maintaining a *lot* of build wiggle room. As an example: I have a built-for-damage-output EnergyMelee/RadArmor Scrapper - aside from a 6th SCS IO in Barrage; all of their slotting is focused on damage procs and +Global Recharge rather than on providing any additional mitigation. They constantly sit at the 75% S/L Resistance hardcap and they aren't hugely far off cap to many of the other types (easy enough for RadArmor, so nothing to get overly excited about!) plus ~13.5% Defence to Melee/Ranged/AoE (again, pretty poor... although at least it stacks with the ~8.5 -ToHit from Beta Decay). However they can choose to temporarily Softcap all their Defenses by popping Shadow Meld (duration of 15s; recharge + animation time less than 30s so 50% uptime). As a result, even with their ordinarily-sub-par mitigation they can still wade into any huge +4/x8 spawn of critters + pop Whirling Hands > Ground Zero > Radiation Therapy > Whirling Hands and come out smelling like roses. All without touching incarnates.

The post you quoted was by VenetiaSilver (not me! 🙂) I agree with your point that Tankers don't need extra buffage to shine. My followup was just pointing out that even the "Katana" powerset contains multiple useful AoE attacks; and so in practice even a WP/Katana Tanker should still have some advantages over a Katana/WP Brute. (In my experience it's a rare toon that doesn't take an AoE or two?!?) To restate my stance: honestly Brutes currently seem to be the "middle of the road" melee AT (more survivable than a Scrapper/Stalker but worse at Single Target damage; and less survivable than a Tanker but better at Single Target damage). And that might be fine from a design standpoint, but it's bad from an efficiency and desirability standpoint. Especially once you factor in Inventions and Incarnates and acknowledge that Stalkers/Scrappers can be made more than survivable enough to go toe-to-toe with just about any single target in the game (and Tanks are miles better at AoE damage....)

Even on Katana, Flashing Steel and The Lotus Drops and Golden Dragonfly all benefit drastically from Gauntlet. (Back on Live my old Kat/Regen Scrapper would have given their right arm to be able to reliably land Golden Dragonfly on multiple targets...)