Maelwys

I remember playing SS during the days when you could avoid the crash entirely by activating it again before the first stack wore off. Honestly, I didn't find it particularly overpowered back then. The current crashing version vastly favours procbombing; which is a very poor state of affairs. There are some other long-duration damage buffs out there which could serve as inspiration though - Peacebringer Inner Light (10s major buff followed by a 20s minor buff); and Warshade Sunless Mire and Dark Melee Soul Drain (30s duration and the more enemies around you, the bigger the buff). There is also some new tech in Regeneration's Reactive Regeneration which could be repurposed into a toggle "the more I get hit the bigger the damage buff I get" - a bit like a mini Fury.

What @Uun said. However; I'd urge caution in pairing some of those sets (particularly Battle Axe) with Dark Armor... as even with a Theft of Essence Proc in Dark Regeneration it's likely that you will end up starved for Endurance (at least until you're IOed-up and/or can grab Ageless!)

It averages out as mediocre. Footstomp is S tier. Rage is S tier. KO Blow is A tier. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Haymaker is about here. Maybe Taunt too, if that's your thing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The rest of the set is about a mile this way II II II II II II V

Epic pool Bonfire is still kinda sorta OK for damage purposes, assuming that you can keep foes from fleeing out of it via Slows/Immobilizes/Taunts/etc... ...but the Knockdown simply isn't reliable any more; and foes tend to run out of the (reduced) radius before they start flopping. Technically it will reduce incoming damage a bit; but that's more from causing mob scatter than from knocking things on their rears. (Caveat: if you can also immobilize a target via /Traps Web Grenade or /TA's Entangling Arrow etc. then Bonfire will have a 100% knockdown rate on them instead of 20%)

+ Spirit Ward becomes very good if the pet you're layering it on already possesses considerable amounts of Defence and Resistance. It can also take (and make good use out of) a Panacea Proc; so on powersets like /FF and /Cold it can work wonders... however if you have decent spot healing capability then it becomes much less useful. + Arcane Bolt is a reasonably useful filler attack; especially with its additional damage mechanic (as you can choose to do other things and wait until the buff activates before firing it) but most MMs don't bother blasting unless it's to keep buff/debuff stacks up. It's a nice place for a FF proc though and doesn't suffer from the MM Endurance tax. + Enflame IMO is only really useful (i) when fighting a bit sack of Hit Points like a Pylon (ii) if the pet you're anchoring it on has "Prefer Melee" AI; like a Thugs Bruiser. I personally don't enjoy juggling it otherwise. Be prepared for scatter unless you're layering down Immobilises and/or slows. + Rune of Protection is powerful; but typically unnecessary with Bodyguard mode to fall back on. I've only taken it on my Mercs/Marine MM (since it stacks so well with Toroidal Bubble allowing me to situationally hardcap myself to Smashing and Fire; and the on-demand mez protection lets me swap out Clarion for Barrier). + Agreed that the Mystic Flight's inherent Teleport is excellent for Melee toons (via teleport to target binds) but meh for MMs - I'm much more of a fan of Group Fly!! 😁 My MMs typically run [Leaping], [Leadership] and [Speed] plus either [Flight] or [Sorcery]. Occasionally I'll pick up Medicine or Teleportation instead of Speed/Flight/Sorcery. I've never felt the need to take the Fighting pool, not even on my original Bot/Traps "Tankermind" back in issue 7.

If you're sticking a single PBAoE on Autofire (e.g. Atom Smasher or Spine Burst) then Rad Melee wins handily over Spines. If not, they're roughly equal as Quills takes Slow set procs but Irradiated Ground takes Defense Debuff set procs (however Achilles Heel is important!). As for the Defensive set... if this is a thematic "I won't make any active attacks no matter what" situation then as MonteCarla mentions /Ice and /Dark will be pretty good... and also /Bio with its damage boost and -res debuff (plus slotting Taunt procs in Evolving Armor) and Psionic Armor with its -res debuff (plus slotting Taunt and Gaussian procs in Impose Presence). However if you're willing to place a single attack on Autofire then Stone Armor (non Granite!) will be the winner due to +Rech from Minerals and Brimstone damage procs.

The "rebalance a while back" was thirteen years ago. Homecoming has never done a Lore balance pass, and it shows. Banished Pantheon Radial and Talons are head and shoulders above the rest unless you need a very specific buff/Debuff (like Longbow for -Regen, Arachnos for Defence or Carnies for +damage) Resistance debuffs will always multiply your existing damage output by the same percentage, regardless of the enemies damage resistance. This is because resistance buffs resist damage resistance debuffs proportionally; so applying a -10% resistance debuff to an enemy with 0% damage resistance results in you going from dealing 100 damage to them to dealing 110 (+10%) and applying the same Debuff to an enemy with 50% damage resistance results in going from 50 to 55 damage (+10%). Meaning that Resistance debuffs act as a direct multiplier to your damage output (including Procs and pets) and are therefore always useful unless you're hitting the Debuff caps (VERY unlikely)

Interface slot abilities are "always on", there's no lengthy cooldown or risk of attacking the wrong target. Their effects are set purposely low in terms of both Activation Rate and Magnitude/Duration so that it's beneficial to have more than one person on a team slotting the same flavour. However MMs get exceptionally good milage out of them because having 6 henchmen lets you make a lot more attacks in the same space of time. The main issue I have with the Cognitive and Spectral effects is that whenever you're fighting +3 foes, due to Purple Patch the duration becomes just ~2.8s per stack. Realistically keeping two or more stacks up is extremely unlikely unless you have multiple sources focus firing on one single target. And even then, with a 25% proc rate ("best case" with a T4 Core Spectral) you'd need 15 separate attacks landing within a 2.8s period in order to attain a >90% likelihood of inflicting at least two Mag2 Immobilize effects. So it's almost impossible for it to reliability affect anything other than minions. Personally I think a lot of the Incarnate abilities need a rebalance pass. Lore Pets in particular are ridiculously imbalanced. I'd certainly not be opposed to the Interface abilities all getting a standardized DoT plus one secondary effect, however keeping the damage types different for flavour purposes seems perfectly fine. AFAIK the Devs have never balanced abilities around how commonly restricted a particular damage type is.

There's no need to report it because it's working as intended. As shown up thread, the Spectral Procs inflict a 4.3s base duration Mag 2 Immobilize and can stack up to four times. And to successfully Immobilize Rommy you need at least a Mag7 effect, meaning four stacks. 8 teammates shooting at him would still need to be landing an awful lot of hits every 4.3s to keep the stacks fully saturated, even if they chose Core Spectral (25%) instead of Radial Spectral (12.5%). (Spectral and Cognitive mez effects have a much lower activation rate than the secondary effects of other Interface Procs!!)

Yeah that tracks. No Immobilize resistance (100% base) but they're getting Mag3 protection from their critter rank (AV) plus another Mag3 protection from the shield, for a grand total of Mag 6 protection. So your Mag12 Immobilize effect from stacking WAWG still has half of it's original kick left after reductions (that red "-6") and so will work just fine... but even stacking Mag7+ should work.

It's protection. It might be phrased as a percentage instead of as a Mag... but it's still "(-3.0 * Melee_Ones)% Immobilized" rather than "(-3.0 * Melee_Ones)% Resistance (Immobilized)" To be fair, the protection it grants might be quite low; but consider its impact on a Mag2 4.3 second base duration Spectral Interface Proc. Even without a 35% Purple Patch reduction it's unlikely for those to stack up beyond Mag6 or so, and I think it'd require a Mag7 or above effect to affect Rommy.

This. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=romans.romulus_base.energized_shield&at=boss_praetorianarchvillain

Caltrops can hit the Slow Movement cap by itself (it's -90%; which means you need -148.5 vs +3s. Caltrops inflicts -80% base, so you need at least 85.625% Slow Enhancement in it including Set Bonuses and Alpha) and you have Web Envelope and the forced root vomit animation of Poison Trap available too. The Arsonist's Firebomb is only up once every 17.584 seconds, which is more than enough time for your other CC abilities to recharge... so personally I'd consider Spectral's immobilize effect to be very superfluous. Simply put, you're choosing between an increased opportunity to inflict Immobilize and an additional -10% resistance debuff on the very things your henchmen are currently attacking. From a build efficiency point of view IMO the latter is the clear winner.

You can certainly achieve that with a single button (using button PRESS to trigger one thing and button RELEASE to trigger a second thing) but it'll require keybinds rather than macros. The other benefit of binding stuff like this to a key is that you can just keep the original ability in the power tray to display its recharge time properly.

The T4 has "75% chance for X plus 25% for Y". The T3 has "75% chance for X" or "50% chance for X plus 25% chance for Y". Since MM henchmen make an awful lot of attacks in a short space of time, the Debuff stacks will become saturated even with just a 25% activation chance. Hence the T4 Radial "75% chance of DoT plus 25% chance of Debuff". The Debuffs can stack up to 4 times, the DoTs up to 8 (with a "Chance To Cancel" so they often don't reach full duration). Reactive and Spectral and Preemptive deal 13.3862 per tick, Degenerative and Cognitive deal 10.709 per tick (power short descriptions are often misleading at best - terms like "moderate" and "minor" don't tell the full picture so you really need to check the detailed effects and CoDv2) The secondary effects make the difference: -10% res for Reactive is effective against everything, but -4000 MaxHP from Degenerative is much better vs a big bag of hit points (anything over Elite Boss gets -1000 per stack instead of -3.5%). Spectral is fine if you're after Immobilize rather than Killspeed. But the effect is only Mag2 (minions) and due to Purple Patch that 4.3s duration per stack will become 2.8s vs anything worth fighting so it's less reliable at rooting LTs and Bosses. However with access to Web Grenade, Web Envelope and Caltrops... I can't really picture a viable use case.

Foes in Incarnate and baseline Advanced Difficulty content have 63.75% Base hit chance instead of 50%. 0.95-(1-0.6375)= 0.5875; so 58.75% Defense. However as soon as you start playing anything above 1-star they gain additional +ToHit (+10% in 2-star, +20% in 3-star, +30% in 4-star) And Defense Debuffs are very much a thing in that sort of content (and /Traps has zero Defense Debuff Resistance). But all that also discounts buffs from Teammates and Incarnates - on teams it is very common to have a few copies of Maneuvers running and/or Barriers cycling. In fact; most of the min/max builders out there will not even bother hitting 45% Defence unless their character has close to 100% Defence Debuff Resistance. Instead, stacking damage output becomes the main goal; with perhaps 15-25% Defence gained from low-hanging fruit like Combat Jumping and the +3% Def Globals. However on a Thug/Traps MM both you and your henchmen will be gaining a fair amount of +Defence whether you choose to stack it or not; so there is much less of a performance tradeoff from pushing it up to the 45% mark. Pushing it higher is largely pointless given that typing "/AH" and the global email system exists - just email yourself a bunch of these or these for those extremely few occasions when you want to solo an incarnate AV or a roaming GM and popping Barrer Core Destiny + Support Core Hybrid for some reason isn't good enough. So in most cases aiming for "45% def for both you and your henchmen, before Destiny and Hybrid" is going to be the way to go on a Thugs/Traps. That will mean you will be softcapped in regular content (at least until you encounter Defense Debuffs; which aren't as worrisome on a MM with Bodyguard Mode; let alone on a /Traps with both Mez protection and oodles of CC) and more importantly it also allows you to focus much less on stacking +defense and much more on stacking -res debuffs and damage output. Even if you don't subscribe to the "faster cleartimes are better" meta... dead mobs can't hurt you! 😉 FWIW the only Interface procs worth a damn (especially on MMs!) are the ones that inflict a DoT. Spectral Radial isn't too bad; but most efficient is Reactive Radial for regular mobs; and Degenerative Radial for AVs and GMs. Damage Proc mechanics have changed a LOT since shutdown; Caltrops and Poison Trap used to be insane... but they're a lot tamer now. Slotting the henchmen up for damage procs (after figuring out how many of their attacks can inherit the enhancement set that each proc belongs to!) tends to give much better results.

I make that 46.2% S/L Defense for you and 55.2% Def for your henchmen; without Agility Core or Barrier up. So you're waaaaaaaay overshooting. I mained a Bot/Traps redside for years. /Traps is most definitely not an Endurance Heavy set unless you're purposely spamming Web Grenade and Toebombing TripMine. On the above build; using Acid Mortar and Poison Trap on Cooldown will be costing you only 0.535+0.732=1.267 End/Sec so is not a major drain. The additional EndMod you're gaining from Agility Core (and even then you could be using Musculature RADIAL) is granting you a mere +0.17 End/Sec so you'd be much better off just grabbing your passive +End accolades and occasionally standing in your own Triage Beacon (for Panacea procs) if needed. Without swapping the power picks around; personally I'd go with something like this instead: Super Punx 3a.mbd Poison Trap from /Traps doesn't proc well either; and TripMine can't activate damage procs before it self destructs. Currently the only power it has that is even slightly worth considering procbombing is Caltrops; and even then on a MM personally I'd rather go with -MovementSpeed in Caltrops and proc up the henchmen instead.

I make that about 27.6s recharge; so a 30.5 cycle time. Each Acid Mortar stays out for 60s; and their attack has a 5.5s cycle time and its debuff lasts for 20s; so best case each mortar will be inflicting -20% res for ~75s. 75/30.5 = 2.46; so as it is against a single tough target (like an GM/Pylon) you'll be inflicting an average of -49.2% res debuff over time. My own (long since shelved) Bots/Traps has the slotting I posted above in Acid Mortar, plus 182.5% Global Recharge = 23.82s recharge time and 26.724s cycle time. 75/26.724 = 2.81; so against a single tough target (like an GM/Pylon) they'll be inflicting an average of -56.2% res debuff over time. Personally I'd rate an extra -7% average res over an extra few DPS from damage procs. However much more concerning to me would be the fact that you're apparently getting "74.4% recharge with enhancements" in Acid Mortar with just a single Acc/Rech enhancement; as that indicates you're not using a Musculature Alpha but rather something with +33% rech like Spiritual Radial. Which is not exactly optimal, especially on a MM. Go Musculature Core and slot an extra Lv50+5 Rech IO in Acid Mortar (e.g. Ragnarok 50+5 Acc/Rech, 50+5 Rech, Achilles' Heel Proc) and use the saved slots elsewhere.

Yes; but one of the other replies asked if there was something going on which made an Annihilation proc less effective than an Achilles' Heel. It's worth an Achilles' Heel certainly... but you really want to get Acid Mortar ED capped for Recharge Aspect in order to have as many simultaneous mortars out as possible (since the -20% base resistance debuff stacks from different copies of the pet!). So procbombing it is not an efficient use of slots. Personally I'd go with at Endgame. Each Damage Proc will end up inflicting an average of just over 2.2 damage per second before Purple Patch to 16 foes within a 8ft radius; which IMO is a bit more dubious given that you can't control what the Mortar shoots at. If you have plenty of spare slots? Sure, go for it. Just be aware that you need ACCURACY ENHANCEMENT ASPECT SLOTTED INTO ACID MORTAR ITSELF for damage procs to actually have a decent chance of hitting anything; despite the fact that AM inflicts -def. Your own +accuracy Set Bonuses and Tactics and Kismet will only apply to the very first shot/tick.

Each Acid Mortar pet you have summoned (typically 1-3 of them) should have a 16.89% chance for each 3.5PPM Proc to activate per target hit, per shot fired (every ~5.5s). It's 14.47% for 3.0 PPM Procs; and 12.06% for 2.5PPM Procs. Note that Achilles Heel is a 3.5PPM Proc which inflicts -20% res for 10s, and Annihilation is a 3.0PPM Proc which inflicts -12.5% res for 10s.

See: Also; I suspect that it's not going to stay as-is for too long. They were trialling another change to RT on test a few weeks back; but it's been put on-hold until the next balance pass.

I had a Sonic/Elec Blapper many moons ago on Live who was softcapped to S/L. At the time it was both fun and very effective; since back then Blasters had no sustains (and consistent mez protection via Clarion etc. wasn't a thing) and a lot more attacks were S/L typed so softcapped S/L defense plus Aid Self drastically increased their survivability and let them hang in melee range to "blap" things almost indefinitely. And it wasn't a hugely difficult or expensive endeavour - in fact, I still have their original non-optimised build from ~2008 (empty slots are where the non-inherent Fitness Pool was: Hurdle with 2x Jump IOs, Health with a Miracle proc, and Stamina with 2x Efficacy Adaptors and a regular EndMod). Their playstyle essentially just involved closing to melee range (firing off Scream and Shriek on the way) then whacking away with Charged brawl, Havoc Punch, Shocking Grasp and Thunder Strike. Their Health was just over the 1600 mark; so they had a fair bit of leeway for a streak of unlucky hits; but Snow Storm and Siren's Song could be used to split up and/or mitigate damage from a particularly tough spawn; and Hibernate worked well as an emergency button. Power Sink kept their Blue Bar looking healthy (oh the days before Blaster sustains and crashless nukes!) They weren't my first choice for bringing on non-PUG TFs; but they were a good choice in PUGs and smaller groups. These days I only have one Blaster who is softcapped; and they're an Archery/TA. Their playstyle is almost the exact opposite of my old Sonic/Elec Blapper - they try to stay at very long range (up to ~150 feet away) whilst churning out a constant stream of AoEs (e.g. Snipe + Oil Slick + Explosive Arrow + Repulsion Force Bomb + Rain of Arrows + Fistful of Arrows) with the recharge rate of the two "nukes" being maximise via Hasten and FF procs (plus Ageless, if desired). Ranged Softcap plus passively three Heal Procs and regenerating ~40 HP/Sec keeps them healthy; and they have Repulsion Field, Force of Nature and PFF to fall back on in an emergency. Whilst at first glance it might look like most of their AoEs have been gutted to use them as set bonus mules; neither Oil Slick nor Rain of Arrows proc well (Pseudopets) so they're losing hardly anything; and Repulsion Force Bomb is appropriately frankenslotted + procced. So Explosive and Fistful are the only ones that are lacking; and they're essentially "fillers". The result is an effective AoE-focused Long-Ranged Blaster which is very self-sufficient. They're not quite as much of a rolling AoE engine of destruction as my Fire/Ice Blaster; but they're holding comparatively little back by building for the Ranged Softcap. (and yes, they struggle a bit more on cave maps; but they're decent on most other indoor maps and very good when "outdoors") I wouldn't bring this build to a 4 star team; but then optimal 4 star builds require very different approaches to general content builds anyway. I enjoy tweaking builds; and I like to hit arbitrary thresholds (like "round numbers" of Maximum HP - it irks me no end if a toon is sitting at 1592 instead of >1600!) but I also believe that having at least some level of mitigation is always desirable in CoX for general content... the trick is finding the balance - sufficient levels of mitigation; then ramping up damage output (typically via procs; but occasionally through other things like -res stacking and/or pet summons etc). And certain powersets (like Archery and TA) gain less benefit from having their core abilities procbombed, so on those sets you have much more leeway to chase "superfluous" set bonuses (like +Def; or +Rech; or whatever). So I think it's important to note that there are some occasions where you can "have your cake and eat it too"... even if they're in the (vast) minority. And I 100% agree that a lot of builds posted here (whether they're chasing +Def or not) are not remotely optimised.

It was faked, sadly. (but hey; at least I have chicken...) 🐔 🍽️

Oh I'm sure all those -1 endurance drains every ~6 seconds (-0.167 end/sec) were contributing. I'm just not so sure that they (or "the Endurance System in General") were the primary issue. A /Shield would be dodging at least three quarters of those blasts and just 3 enhancements (a Panacea, a Miracle and a Performance Shifter) can grant >0.875 end/sec. Choosing not to use all the tools available to you is an option, certainly, but if/when you subsequently start struggling there aren't that many directions to start pointing fingers.