Omega-202

In my opinion, Musculature is the way to go. Lets lay out the main 4 options: - Agility and Spiritual: You would take these for recharge, which is always nice, and for the added boost to defense in Agility. However, you can get capped defenses without Agility, so more is overkill. For recharge, you can get a ton of recharge from set bonuses, hasten and FF procs. Once you hit perma-hasten levels, you're pretty much good, and on a Widow you have a ton of places to slot Gamblers. At a certain point, more recharge reduction hits a point of diminishing returns where, for example, going from 250% to 300% only gets you a 2 second reduction on a 60 second base cooldown. Plus, as discussed above, these hurt your proc rate. - Cardiac: Endurance shouldn't be an issue at lvl 50. If it is, slot up performance shifter, numina, miracle, and panacea, drop 2 end mods in Stamina and get Atlas Medallion and Portal Jockey. If you do all of that, you should never have end issues. - Musculature: Yes, its boring. Yes, its just more damage, but all of the above issues can be solved in other ways. Damage on the other hand can't be easily boosted on a Widow/Fort. You have Aim or BU and Assault, but those are short duration/small bonuses. Unlike the above endurance and recharge solutions, there isn't really a lot of IO ways to boost damage above the ED cap. By comparison, core musculature gets you an extra 30% boost, past ED, equal to double Assault. And if you go radial you also get End Mod there so you can help address any end issues while still getting a 22% boost over ED cap. Finally, there's no real diminishing returns on damage. With recharge, as I said, 50% boost can be as little as a 2 second benefit if you already have a lot. With end, its binary, either you're sustainable or you're not, and once you're infinitely sustainable, more doesn't matter. Same with survivabilty. With damage, more is always better. I think most people agree that Musculature is the optimal choice if the rest of your build is in order.

For future reference, how do you track damage from pseudo pets? I have no clue how to get my combat window to display pet and pseudo pet rolls and Google is being less than zero help.

My gut from just running Oblit + Scirrocco on LR with 20% recharge gives me the sinking feeling that its the latter. It seems closer to 25% than 90%.

Well that has some really major implications. It means procs are less effective than they could be in BoS and also means proc rate is probably recharge slotting agnostic. If its using the standard 10s pseudo pet refresh, then a 100% enhanced BoS would have the same proc rate as a 0% enhanced BoS. Now I am wondering if the same holds for Lightning Rod. If so, it may make more sense to slot for max recharge.

Sure, maybe not most relevant for Blasters, but I was more thinking of all of the other ATs. Literally every AT besides the Kheldians have access to electric blast attacks. How about making it so that 50% of End restored to the attacker also transfers to nearby allies in a 10' radius?

Off the top of my head: Burst of Speed, Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, Feral Charge and Savage Leap. My understanding is that the old gen 1 telenukes (LR and SC) use pseudo pets while SL and FC use the other mechanism. I have no idea what BoS uses. Its also possible that LR amd SC have changed since live.

I wouldn't say that actually. It hits the same bases as Mu, but whereas Mu has a secondary effect that is essentially "nothing" because end drain sucks, Mace has 20% chance of KD (0.7 mag KB) on Blast, 100% chance of Mag 2 KB on Beam and 10% chance of Mag 2 KB on Disruptor. The chance on Blast is unreliably low, the KB on Beam is likely to piss off teammates and the low chance coupled with high mag on Disruptor will definitely piss off teammates when it does happen. If you desperately want somewhere to drop another FF proc, sure, but add in the redraw, the long animations and the fact that the you may want to put a KB>KD in Beam or Disuptor, which wastes a slot, and I'd say Mace is an objective downgrade from the others. Also, no Devastation Hold proc in Web Cocoon for the 90% Mag 6 hold. You need to use the lower PPM Lockdown if you want one shot boss holding, which means you cant slot recharge in it. I don't think the math works for Mace in any way.

Also, in general, have you noticed any quirks with procs and similar tele-attack powers? So far, Obliteration+Scirocco in Lightning Rod seems to go off about how I'd expect, but I'm curious if you or anyone else has noticed anything weird about them being that they spawn a pseudo pet to do the attack portion. EDIT: Upon review I saw a comment in this thread about Savage Leap not using a pseudo pet and instead using a different power execution mechanism. But I seem to recall LR and SC actually using pseudo pets. Now I'm extra curious about the behind the scenes on the telenukes and how each may play with procs.

Personally, discounted for 2 reasons: - Aesthetics and redraw. - More importantly, Web Cocoon, Mace Blast, Fast Mace Beam and Disruptor Blast all have 2s animations. Compared to Mu and Blaze which are at 1 s or 1.17 s for Char, Ring, Bolts, Fireball, and BL and 1.67 for Fast Zapp and Fire Blast. Shackles in Mu is the only attack with a 2 s animation. You can fire Mu Bolts and Ball Lightning in the same time it takes to fire one Mace attack. You can fire three attacks in either set faster than you can fire two in Mace. If you plan on weaving in and out of melee to drop a quick AS or melee aoe, that extra animation really can add up. EDIT: also, at that point, just play a Bane Spider if you wanted to go with the Mace. They have better recharge and more options on their Mace attacks.

You can't. You can only get shard based ingredients from shards or from the appropriate endgame TF/raid/trial. Shards (and shard ingredients) can convert to threads but not the reverse.

I've had similar great results with Ball Lightning. Target beefiest enemy>Build Up>Lightning Rod>50% crit Ball Lightning>Chain and/or Thunderstrike leads to all dead minions and most Lts at +2.

I would increase the +end refund on electric powers to help balance things out. Right now, most powers have a 30% chance of refunding 50% of the power's end cost. I would up that to at least 30/100 or 50/80. That would allow electric users to focus more attention on doing damage whereas other sets may have to allot more build resources to end management.

I kind of wish that Soul PPP got Dark Obliteration like Brutes/Tanks. If it did, it would be a straight upgrade to Mu. Similar with Blaze APP. If it had Blazing Bolt over Melt Armor or Ring of Fire (seriousl, who wants RoF?) it would make a great set. Seems there are three options for ranged Stalkering: Mu - has snipe and aoe, bad secondary effect Soul - has snipe, good secondary effect and Meld, no aoe Blaze - has many ranged attacks, great aoe attack, no snipe

Slight correction regarding my build that you posted. In the tags, it says "30% defense" which is underselling it. When stealth is supressed, with all of the other toggles up, I have about 40%/45%/40% to m/r/a. With Support Hybrid running, its 48%/53%/48%.

Yes, it stacks. I can safely confirm this after running Electric Shackles on my Stalker with the Devastation proc. A single application will take a boss out of the fight when the proc fires (90% of the time as the PPP holds have a 32 s recharge).

Alright, yes it sounds crazy, but hear me out. Has anyone tried running Mu PPP or Blaze APP to make a ranged Stalker? I haven't given it a full go yet, but my Electric/Invuln/Mu just hit 50 and I am running Zapp, Ball lightning and Shackles. With 5 purples each in Zapp and BL with slot 6 in each having another damage proc and Shackles slotted with quad damage procs, I can throw out some nasty ranged damage in a quick burst. I am wondering what it could be like to add Mu Bolts as a filler to help make a full ranged chain. Obviously not as much DPS as a melee chain taking advantage of AS, but to me, it seems like even with those 4 attacks + Lightning Rod for a psuedo nuke, you've basically got something thats's objectively better than a Sentinel. Higher damage scale than Sentinels, higher target cap on BL and LR than Sentinels, better inherent than Sentinels, same defenses, built in stealth and the option of switching to melee mode for more damage on single targets. Anyone tried this? For me, my halfway foray into ranged Stalkering just highlights how undertuned Sentinels are.

It's not a good power. Totally skippable on a top tier build. The animation is way too long and the "rehide" mechanic is better accomplished with the ATO proc.

Two points: - In no way is this an easy fix. You seriously have no idea what you're talking about or how difficult it is to work with the attack animations in this ancient and poorly programmed game. - Bane Huntsman loses out on very little in comparison to a full Crab. You lose some bulk, Suppression and Spiderlings. You still have access to Disruptors and the PPP pet so I have no idea what you're talking about when you're complaining about the lack of pets. Spiderlings are easily skippable, even on Crabs. To make up for it, you have built in stealth and Surveillance. The best power in the whole AT, Venom Grenade is also still available from the base gun tree. So in summary, this is an objectively bad thread posted in the wrong sub-forum.

Yin, ITF, Apex and Tin Mage can be run back to back and net you 128 merits in less than two hours. That's 1 and a quarter purples of merits, and it can be which ever one you want. You can easily have 5 purples in 4 play sessions and you can probably call it 6 because all of that will get you at least 30 mil inf from kills and random drops. So that's an entire power slotted up with purples in less than a week of play. That seems plenty reasonable to me.

It sounds like you may have an addictive personality/addictive tendencies. I do not like to judge people I don't know, but I think that some self relection outside of the context of this game may be wise. That kind of feeling of needing a dopamine rush just from seeing a progress bar scroll across a screen isn't what most people would consider normal.

It has to do with how Mez resist and all other "reductions" are calculated. What is actually happening is that you get 20% reduction, which is then calculated as: 1 ÷ (1 + 0.2) = 0.83333... or in other words a 16.7% overall reduction All other reduction enhancements work the same. 200% recharge reduction is equivalent to 1 ÷ (1+2) = 1/3.

That's not how the preventative medicine proc works, or you're not being clear for those who haven't used it. No matter what, the proc only affects you. It's more of a one-piece set bonus, akin to Gambler than a proc. You can put it in anything that takes a heal and it gives you a chance of triggering a bit of absorb when you get low on health, but it never transfers to allies. Have you actually had a chance to play this build? It seems great on paper but to me you also seem way overloaded on trying to do too many things at once. What does an attack chain look like? I feel like with Infrigidate you can drop one of you single target blasts because at that level of recharge, you won't want to use one of the lower DPA attacks.

I don't believe thats's true. Please provide the thread showing this. Are you confusing it with these threads? Bopper et al. showed that the proc rate FOR YOU increases per person in the aura. There doesn't appear to be anything in there suggesting that other people are getting the boost and I've never witnessed any such thing. In fact, Unknown Magi specifically noted that it wasn't granting the proc to his MM pets, so I don't think it works that way.

Thanks. I think I'll see how my durability feels without it or Rune. I feel like once I hit 50 and can fully slot out and grab the extra def/resist from Barrier, I'll probably be fine.

Does anyone have experience with Unstoppable on Stalkers? I'm in the middle of leveling an Electric/Invulnerability Stalker and am coming up on Unstoppable and am uncertain as to whether its worth taking. The capped resists seem tempting, but the crash is putting me off. Without it, I'm sitting at ~50%/30%/30% resists (sl/fc/en) and about 38% damage type defense (not psy). Once I'm fully slotted out and level 50, my recharge should be enough that Unstoppable has a 220ish recharge with 180 duration. But does the crash make it so I wouldn't want to use it on cooldown? The other option is to re-do my travel pool and work towards Rune of Protection, which has half the resist value but no crash.