Omega-202

Just FYI on where I got the "the powers cost more". Sorry, it was someone else. As to why they're played less, I agree there are issues on Banes and some aspects of the Widow kit could use some help. Don't get me wrong. But to say that the issue is endurance is tantamount to saying that half of the power sets combinations in the game have endurance issues. Yes, VEATs don't get any endurance management powers, but neither does a SS/Inv/Mu Brute. Do they need buffs too? VEATs are no worse off on the endurance front than most other builds. As to why they're not played as much, I think a large part of it is the "flavor" of them. I still have the occasional person in a pick up team say they thought Crabs had to be villain side only. People don't know what they can do, don't like the lack of power customization and don't like the cosmetics of VEATs. If you need proof of how little people understand what VEATs can do, see the below thread, which I believe you cited in a different thread. Is it any wonder why people don't play VEATs when so many people in that thread thought that they did similar damage to Defenders? For the sake of comparison, VEATs are scale 1, Defenders are scale 0.65, or in other words, VEATs do over 1.5x the damage of a Defender. You can't fight that level of ignorance.

That's an issue with the combine binds, not with using inspirations. I know exactly what you're talking about. If you're in a pinch, manually click them or use the F# keys to use that column. Alternatively, I've found that using a single bind for both combine and use yields worse results than having separate combine and use binds. I bind numpad 1, 2 and 3 to combine small, medium and large insps respectively and numpad 0 to use any reds. There's way less of a hiccup that way and its nearly as easy. The combines never fail and the numpad 0 use bind is much more reliable (but still not perfect) compared to a dual use combine/use set up. But back to the topic, you may want to specify the actual issue in the OP. The truth is its not response time in using insps, its the jankiness of a complex bind that has never worked right that's the real issue.

Your information on the tohit is out of date. Powers: Snipes General Changes ToHit is no longer required to achieve fast-snipe. Now, combat status determines if snipes are fast or slow, and ToHit buffs increase how much damage fast-snipe inflicts. The snipe will be fast if you have attacked or been attacked in the last 8 seconds; this is the same time as Stalker's Hide. Note that PvP scale is based only around the PvP damage formula. ToHit buffs and debuffs do not change quick snipe damage in PvP. The following fast snipe animations have been synced with their FX, no cast time changes: Moonbeam, Zapp, Sniper Blast, Proton Volley (they all remain at their original 1.33 second duration.) Added a new PVP IO Snipe set "Experienced Marksman"; includes proc that will always turn your Snipes into the fast version. Blaster/Defender/Corruptor Snipes 12 second recharge and 14.352 end cost. Base 2.28 scale damage in their "quick" form, down from 2.76 scale. Every point of ToHit buffing the player has will increase or decrease this damage, up to a cap of 2.76 scale damage with +22% ToHit buff. Slow form will do 4.5 scale damage. Dominator Snipes 20 second recharge and 18.512 end cost. Base 2.67 scale damage in their "quick" form, down from 3.56 scale. Every point of ToHit buffing the player has will increase or decrease this damage, up to a cap of 3.56 scale damage with +22% ToHit buff. Slow form will do 4.5 scale damage. Epic Snipes Will now have a base 1.75 scale damage in their quick form. Every point of ToHit buffing the player has will increase or decrease this damage, up to a cap of 2.3 scale damage with +22% ToHit buff. Slow form will do 3.56 scale damage Slow form crits will do 3.56 + 1.78 scale damage. Scrappers should now properly crit 10% of the time, instead of using Stalker requirements.

I've recently got a set for 15 mil on an alt, you just need a bit of patience. But either way, that's kind of how the whole game is currently balanced. VEATs are better off than half of the power combos in the game due to their inherent. And the other half of the combos need to use power picks to address endurance concerns. To give VEATs a freebie fix to endurance issues feel like a bit much. And to your comment about VEAT powers costing more than similar powers on other sets: that's not true. They follow the same ~5.2 end/1 scalar damage unit for single target attacks. If anything, some powers are better than their counterparts (Frag does more scalar damage than M30 from the AR set with the same end cost, but a bit of a smaller AoE).

You can't activate inspirations while a power is animating. It has always been that way and I don't believe anything has ever changed in that regard. If you're stuck in the middle of Total Focus's animation with low health, it can totally screw you over, but that's just how it has always been. Do you have any specific examples of when you feel its lagging?

I honestly don't think that VEATs have any more of an endurance issue than any other AT, and definitely don't see it as anything that needs addressing over so many other balance issues in the game. If you have the big 4 slotted (Performance Shift, Miracle, Numina and Panacea) some decent end redux in your attacks and toggles and a slot or 2 of End Mod in Stamina, you should be fine. If you're huffing and puffing, drop one of the Leadership toggles. You shouldn't need to run 5 of them at a time, and for a lot of team content, dropping one or both Assaults can be the difference between end drain and end recovery.

Reinforced replaces Invincibility for Stalkers, which, as you noted does not have the scaling with mobs around you / doesn't roll hit checks around you. You can still slot Gaussian's in Reinforced, but I wouldn't because it won't scale with targets like it does for Scrappers, Brutes and Tanks. You definitely want to put Gaussian's in BU, especially since the ATO makes BU come back so often. @LockpickYes, slotting 2-3 Hamis (+ the obligatory Gamblers) is great in Reinforced as long as you don't need the power for a specific set bonus. I ran it with LotG + 2 Cytos for a while, but recently swapped to LotG + 4 from Shield Wall for the 4.5% E/N res. The loss from the +ToHit isn't ideal, especially for my snipe bonus, but with BU having so much uptime, it doesn't really matter much.

It is totally doable. Arm Lash and Slice have solid DPA, better than Channelgun and Longfang at least, and I've also made a concept build that went all melee with the Fighting pool attacks. My "Iron-Spider" tribute was very usable, very durable, but definitely not optimal from a pure damage perspective. Even still, it was better than a lot of other builds in the game. The things to consider/watch out for: - Frag and Venom Grenade are still your best AoE attacks from a DPA perspective, beating out Frenzy, so you'll still want to take those, and you'll probably want to slot a KB>KD proc in Frag to cancel its scatter effect. - Melee and Crabbermind don't blend that well together. At range, the Spiderlings and Disruptors will mostly stay put, but if you're consistently in the middle of a spawn, they take a lot of crossfire and go down a lot quicker. You can still take them, but trying to keep them alive will be harder. - You will want to find room for additional Melee Def bonuses in your IO sets. Crab/Soldier Defensive training gives 7.5% defense to Ranged attacks only, so ranged Crabs are usually a bit safer. It's still very possible (if not easy) to hit the melee and AoE softcaps, but it takes some more effort than softcapping range. - Procs are your friend. Arm Lash and Slice can take the various -Def procs, including Achilles Heel -Res proc, and Arm Lash can take the Fury of the Gladiator -Res proc. Those in combination with Venom Grenade make it so that you're going to chew through hard targets, boosting your damage and your whole team's damage. - If you want to take ranged attacks, your best single target options are either Mu Lightning or Gloom. Yeah...the best Crab ranged attacks that don't cause weapon redraw are in the Patron Pools. Both are great AND both pools also have targeted AoEs(Ball Lightning and Electrifying Fences in Mu and Dark Obliteration on Soul) that work great at point blank range. That's not to say Channelgun and Longfang are garbage...but they're not the greatest. If you have a Mids build you're bandying around, feel free to post it up and I'm sure you'll get a lot of great feedback on how to fine tune it.

That's a nice thought, but that notion falls apart when those Scrappers and Tanks and Brutes are built to handle the content being played solo. I know this from both sides of the equation. If I know that I can stand face to face with Romulus SOLO, then the support isn't invisible, its negligible. If I'm accidentally face tanking Marauder solo because I ran off and didn't realize the team split off, then the support really isn't doing anything to help. EDIT: Actual anecdote from a recent lvl 54 LRSF. In the final battle, the team lost track of Synapse. It took me about a minute to notice he was just wailing on my Stalker just out of frame and I didn't even notice. We had no support ATs on the run. He just couldn't dent me through my natural defenses and the active Destinies. AGAIN, we had no support. We finished it in less than 35 mins. At the same time, I've played support ATs through content where I stopped myself from using any survival increasing abilities (no heals, no to hit debuffs, hovering out of range for auras) and saw that it really didn't matter, the armor classes were not budging, and the squishies knew how to stay out of the fire. I was just another DPS with some buffs that weren't all that consequential. I really, truly understand the sentiment from a lot of people in this thread trying to rationalize the effect of supports (how could you not try and rationalize it? who wants to accept the idea that they're useless?) but its not reflected in the reality of the current endgame. It's like the stages of grief. A lot of people are in the denial or bargaining stages.

That is incredibly true. If ever there was a CoH2, step 1 would be to take animation times into consideration much more heavily, as compared to the "no consideration at all" that the original devs had. Imagine how much of a difference it would make if you gave Sonic Blast's attacks 0.8-1.5 s animations instead of the 2-3 seconds they all have. Or made all of the 3s support power animations just 1s. Or upped nuke animations to 4s. So many logical things they could have done, but the fact that we got what we got shows they really had no idea what they were doing with animation times at the start, and never really learned by game close (see Energy Transfer's complete neutering).

Another option is to skip Leadership and go Sorcery for Mystic Flight and Rune of Protection. That would get you the "Neo flavor" of flying and give you 50% up time mez protection in Rune. CJ gives you great ground maneuverability and the +jump control it grants is also +flight control, making Mystic Flight start and stop almost as tight as Hover. That way you have the option of either. Mystic Ward is also a great single slot power pick to drop the Preventative Medicine proc into. There's also the added benefit of additional combat teleportation for dipping in and out of melee when Burst of Speed is on cooldown:

Czis is wrong. There are no ninja star attacks in /MC for Blasters. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Martial_Combat @czis Why give completely wrong info?

That's what I feel like it comes down to. My maxed out Controllers and Corruptors can take on pretty much everything that my maxed out Stalker, Crab and Tank can, but they just do it so much slower. I think the part that kills it is the stupid long animation times on so many of the useful support powers in the current metagame. Why do Sleet and Freezing Rain need a 2.03 s animation? Why does Tar Patch need a 3.1 s animation? Fulcrum Shift = 2s, Poison Trap (Traps) = 2.77s, Radiation Infection = 3s, Lingering Rad and Enervating Field = 1.5s, Twilight Grasp = 2.37s, Howling Twilight and Darkest Night = 3.17s. Some of the best support powers for the current metagame take forever to actually use and by the time they're done animating, two Judgements, a Blaster Nuke and a Lightning Rod have gone off and decimated the spawn, so who cares about the support?

I think the issue is that's not always gospel truth. The way I see it, there are 3 scenarios: 1) Your scenario, where a "support" can be swapped out with a damage dealer and there's really no difference in survival or completion rate. This assumes a "support" that deals damage and has support features that aid in dealing damage. 2) A scenario where a support is dead weight compared to another damage dealer because they contribute sub par damage, any survival benefits are superfluous and their damage force multiplication is too slow/does not make up for their lower damage. 3) A scenario where the support is the lynchpin to team survival and/or damage force multiplication (eg. -Regen and -Res in AV fights) and contributes more than another damage dealer. The current endgame meta is such that scenarios 1 and 2 are way more common than 3, and scenario 2 probably outnumbers scenario 1. So while its nice to think "the team would do fine without the support, but also fine without X", its not really true a lot of the time. An Apex run that loses an Emp/Energy Defender is going to suffer way less than one that loses a TW/Bio Brute.

Placate is useless too. As Nihili said, the ATO lets you get the Hide effect of Placate in one of your attacks (preferably AS) 3-4 times per minute. By comparison, Placate has a ~1.5 s animation, a base 60s recharge and does no damage. As to the aggro-dump aspect of Placate and Smoke Flash, in the current IO metagame, most Stalkers have no use for it because its trivial to build in absurd levels of +Def and +Res from IOs. It's pretty easy to get a lot of Stalker secondaries to the defense softcap and/or 50%+ resists, often with healing, absorb or other passive survival benefits. Ninjitsu can be built to the defense softcap pretty easily, with some decent resists from Tough and IO bonuses, a fast recharging heal in K I-Sha and whatever active mitigation your primary provides. That's not to mention Incarnates (Barrier, Rebirth, Melee etc.). If things are going poor enough that you need to hit Smoke, you're probably better off just running and resetting the fight.

Agreed. Tin/Pex, ITF, (well run) LGTF and a lot of other endgame TFs give about that level of merit reward/minute WITH the benefit of also getting drops and appreciable influence. I don't see why there's anything wrong with someone wanting to farm Scrapyard.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but taking both TTL and Tactics is overkill. You really shouldn't need both.

You both should take Increase Density. Its great mez protection for the whole team and makes a solid IO mule for any of the +Res IOs. It's a solid spot to put the Unbreakable Guard +HP or Gladiator's Armor +Def IOs, or Steadfast's -KB if you aren't taking a travel power to slot a Zephyr.

A) You're insane...in a good way? You really did squeeze a lot of resistance from basically nothing. B) No real suggestions at first glance besides putting a Winter's Gift in Mystic Flight for the slow resist. The flight IO isn't really doing anything there. Edit: I'm also curious how well this could hold aggro. Tanks and Brutes have a threat modifier of 4 while VEATs are at 2, meaning every bit of damage done by a T/B counts double compared to this Widow. For comparison, Scrappers are at 3, Stalkers and MMs are 2 also and the squishies are at 1. Even with Provoke, I feel like this would peel aggro to T/B, most Scrappers and some Stalkers because of damage output. Might also lose aggro to a high damage Blaster with a debuffing secondary effect. So you'd be able to survive but I wouldn't rely on this to "Tank" in a classic sense. Case in point, I was playing my Crab on a team rolling Hero's Epic at 54/8 last night. There was a half wipe in the final room and I was able to face tank the Praetorian Guard AV while people rezzed. But the moment the wiped Tanker got back in the fight, the AV ignored me completely, even without the Tanker using a taunt or having a Taunt Aura up (SR tank).

Recovery serum is also pretty cheap at P2W, in a pinch. But to the topic at hand, yes, +recovery bonuses are unnecessarily weak. On the other hand, +End bonuses are pretty darn strong and compound with all of your +recovery and +end procs. 2 slots of Annhilation or 4 slots of Decimation are pretty easy to work into a lot of builds, especially with great procs in both sets and the 6.25% recharge at 5 slots for Decimation. I see + recovery bonuses as "cool, that helps a little" in sets I take for other things. If I need more endurance, I build towards the +End bonuses.

As someone mentioned above, end redux in your attacks goes a long way, so it's quite possible all of your end problems will be addressed by the time you're IOd out. That's part of the reason I build my characters on Mids and try them at 50 with IOs on the test server before committing to Incarnate choices. In principle, it helps me feel confident in my first Alpha choice, but in practice, basically every character I have ends up going with Musculature Core or sometimes Radial.

Two immediate outcomes I see: - lower power teams would stop using AoEs for fear of hurting each other; - higher power teams would build to be more independent and the trend of splitting up in missions would accelerate. Basically, it would be regressive, harming the lowest performers and having a negligible effect on the highest performers.

You can address a lot of your end issues by investing in the +End procs. Performance Shifter, Panacea, Miracle, Numinas. Also, none of your attacks have any end redux. Is there any reason you haven't put set IOs in most things? They are much more effective than generic IOs.

That's completely correct. With no recharge slotted, it should be at ~42% on the snipes. 25.33 / 60 = 42.2% At 42.2%, assuming you can still cycle it every 10 s, which you might not be able to without any recharge slotting any more, it averages 16.88% damage boost. You basically have to give up a lot of set bonus opportunity though in order to avoid recharge slotting. And it makes you other procs way over the 90% cap. If Decimation is at 42%, Sting is at 3.5 x that, meaning you could slot recharge and maintain 90% capped Sting proc chance. The reason not everyone slots is because it really only finds use on high base damage ATs, on ranged attacks that you don't slot recharge in. It's a bit of a niche scenario. Edit: By comparison, slotting 5 piece Apocalypse gives you 10% recharge, 16% regen, 3% health and 4% damage, with a faster recharge time, better accuracy, more slotted damage boost (that can crit), and still lets you have one additional proc. Personally, I prefer the consistency in 4% global damage, and a bunch more damage slotting with 10% recharge.

EDIT: Retest Complete - see posts above. Aethereal is correct. Not sure what changed, but I may have done my original testing in Summer 2019 before the snipe update.