Bill Z Bubba

If yall would like to see interesting uses of the existing tech to make missions more difficult, go look at the enemy spawns in AE arc 801.2 by @Linea There's a nice write up here:

Pretty sure after they saw how ridiculous SR was on tanks they went, "oops."

Unfortunately that's all countered when running solo which I do still the majority of the time. It's actually gotten to the point where I flag characters as "awesome on teams" vs "works solo." And I was very wrong earlier. My new Louis Cypher is indeed a fire/em tank and not an em/fire brute. I'm gonna go ahead with the plan to do ET/Bar/TF/Bar as his attack chain.

Great. Compound that by 70 alts that need to be T4ed. None are done til that happens.

The sudden and constant influx of Karen videos is proof of that.

While I've grown to mistrust all the numbers from in-game and Mids... arcanatime is something I literally spent years testing with attack chains and pylons. The lady was dead on and crazy smart.

Here's how it looks without arcanatime. https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/ArcanaTime EDIT: Then again, I'm not sure that gloom is using the right AT damage modifier for ranged attacks. Wasn't all that also reworked for the tank buffs?

I acknowledged that point mentally. If I neglected to do so in the thread, my bad. 🙂

Ohhh, you're not using arcanatime for your cast times are ya? Unsure how accurate mids is, but I've got arcanatime turned on and this is what it's now showing for DPA. EDIT: So IF Mids is right, best chain should be ET/BS/TF/BS. EDIT2: Or even ET/BS/TF/EP if you can swing the recharge. But gloom is definitely out. Sucks that I'm stuck with Barrage on this tank.

Being faceplanted drops DPS to zero. When solo that means zero XP gain. More mitigation means more up time which means more XP/rewards. It ALSO allows us to do stupid <insert AT> tricks here. Some of us are hung up on mitigation vs damage output and the balance of those amongst the ATs because that's how the game was supposed to be balanced. Granted, looking at everything that's been changed since the snap does seem to show that balance means precisely dick nowadays.

Before the snap, my mains were Bill Z Bubba (scrapper,) Louis Cypher (brute,) Celmor (pb,) and Melcor (ws.) I got the 1st three but not the last. 😞 So he became a she and is now Melcora.

Sorry for the confusion, @drbuzzard but I was just wondering whether if you're going to use energy melee, is et/gloom/tf/gloom still the best chain. You're right, of course, about EP, will have to do some number crunchin and see what's what.

So what I'm hearing is that I need to build a melee-centric earth/nrg dom....

Speaking of EM... is ET/Gloom/TF/Gloom still the best possible ST attack chain for a brute? Or a tank, apparently.

No. I remember original release Khels with their massive -damres if solo bullshit. I remember being one-shotted by quantums. I remember screaming on the forums for years. Sentinels are tankmages on their own. Compared to release date Khels they might as well be an "I Win" button.

I learned something new today! Had the arcanatime thing but knew nothing about the power graphs.

@Coyote Is TF the only way to build up stored nrg? My grav/dom is 100% ranged at I see that go off every now and then but don't understand the mechanism for building it.

Is EM 100% unique amongst all power sets for this? Or can empaths also kill themselves with Absorb Pain?

I enjoy them both for different reasons but I'd lean toward rad for all the extra AoE.

Great. Only takes a little over twice as long to use DA repeatable missions to PL an alt from 1 to 50.

Or just nerf the hell out of the existing values applied to said incarnate powers. Considering that people are now planning builds around the lowest values of powers like barrier, you're of course correct in that the gnashing of teeth and thread after thread of rage will no doubt be rather epic.

This. It's gonna happen. Doesn't matter what all the anti-farmers want.

I've got a rad/em tank. I've also got a bio/em tank. Are they gonna win any pylon damage awards? Nahh, hell no. But EM still has some of the best animations and sound effects in the game. Sometimes performance doesn't matter nearly as much as fun. Edit: Oh.. but wait, there's more. I just built another em/fire brute to take my main villain back to his original powerset combo instead of being a dm/inv brute. He's gonna suck so bad!

I've never wanted to hit my wife and she's only wanted to punch the shit outta me a couple times in almost 20 years... so we're doin good!

And for those calling for vet rewards nerfs on others, let's not forget that the HC team have already supplied us with two massive nerfs. One that cut base XP in half in AE and another that removed double inf when XP is disabled. When is it going to be enough for yall? Not until AE is removed from the game? By the by, alt door sitter hit lvl 30 in just under an hour farming DA repeatables. This includes travel time so my 2 hour to 38 may be overestimated by a bit. I'll finish that up later. Stuff to do. Should we get rid of the DA repeatables as well? Nerf level shifts? Nerf the incarnate powers themselves? Hell, at this point, the sidekick system itself seems awfully suspect! Mission 1 +3/x8 oops 1-14 7:23 Mission 2 +4/x8 14-18 15:52 Mission 3 +4/x8 18-22 28:06 Mission 4 +4/x8 22-25 35:14 Mission 5 +4/x8 25-28 44:41 Mission 6 +4/x8 28-30 57:22 LATE EDIT: Yup, right at 2 hours to PL an alt in DA at max diff to 38 vs 45 mins in AE.