Omega-202

The more updated iteration takes the Sorcery Pool for Ward to add another heal, on top of full Medicine, and Teleport Target. Bonus points for not taking Leadership. Extra bonus points for stocking up on revive and healing temp powers. SUPER bonus points if you get super offended when people try to give you constructive criticism on your build.

No, its too late for that character. Once you have selected any Crab powers on a Soldier, the backpack is there forever. Respecing out of the Crab build won't fix it. Unless something was changed very recently, you'll need to make a whole new character. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

FYI, this is completely incorrect.

Regarding Suppression, it's a pretty mediocre power. The DPA on it is pretty bad, but it partially makes up for it by being one of the largest cones in the game. Generally, if I'm running a Crab build at lvl 50 only, I skip it and take Ball Lightning or Dark Obliteration instead, alongside Frag and Venom Grenades. But generally, for exemplared content, Suppression is nice to have because it's always available. Regarding Crabs as a whole, they're an AT that is mediocre with SOs below 50 and monsters post 50 when kitted out with full IOs, especially with huge amounts of -Recharge for the pets and perma Serum. In that regard, I wouldn't judge the strength of the AT until you have hit 50 and kitted it out. If you still don't like the feel of the character after that, just strip it for parts and try something else. I have done that for so many builds (eg. my "naked" level 50 Dominators).

Bulky/Controlly Blappers or even Controlly Stalkers are pretty close.

No, not really. Especially since jetpacks are basically thrown at you from multiple sources and are super cheap at the P2W vendor. Take whatever travel power(s) you want and just make sure to have a spare jetpack temp power or two, in case you need it. Generally that goes for every character that doesn't take Fly/Mystic Flight. Some people recommend having flight for tanking Lord Recluse in the MLTF or fighting Hami, but tanking Recluse is a bit unnecessary in the current Incarnate meta (IE, handling the fight as a deathball works just as well as someone tanking him, and the fight can be done tank-less) and fighting Mitos goes real quick, even if a few people are just jumping to punch them.

Rune of Protection, high defense and high active mitigation/control. Rune is actually pretty easy to fit in a lot of my squishy builds. Spirit Ward is decent, but is also a great Preventative Medicine slot mule and Mystic Flight is a great Zephyr -KB mule and a very flexible travel power. If you're hard up for powers, the whole Sorcery pool is tougher to fit, but a lot of the time, I find that Corrs/Defs/Cons are more slot deficient than power deficient so I don't mind having two 1-slot wonders in order to get decent mez protection from lvl 20 onward.

Coyote is pretty on the ball here. The only addition is that the animation times are brutal on Dark Miasma. At endgame, animations are the main limiting factor to effectiveness, both for support and damage (ie DPA). If a team is steamrolling, a Dark Miasma player has no time to drop Fearsome Stare and Tar Patch and then start attacking before the enemies are mostly dead, let alone dropping Darkest Night. They're good solo or on unorganized teams but are innefficient on steamrolling teams outside of AV fights.

That's wrong on all accounts. 1) Blasters have a 1.125 scale damage on their primary and 500% cap. Scrappers have a 1.125 scale damage on their primary and 500% cap, same as Blasters. Stalkers have a 1.00 scale damage on their primary and 500% cap, less than Blasters. 2) Brutes have 0.75 scale damage and a 700% cap (max of 5.25 scale) and Blasters have 1.125 and 500% (max of 5.625). 3) Corruptors have 0.75 scale damage and a 500% cap, with Scourge doing an average theoretical boost of 30% (essentially 4.875 scale) compared to a Blaster's 5.625. Yes, with ~20% resist debuffs, they're in the same ballpark, but in a team, the Blaster is also benefiting from the Corruptor's debuffs and therefore would come out ahead. Guy, you are either a troll or unfortunately unintelligent. This is the 4th or 5th time you've tried this and you're still wrong. I can only hope you're a kid who will grow up and learn basic math, but if not, I sincerely hope you're not in a profession that requires thinking.

@Neiska (1) Yes the recharge on OM is probably too long, but when its up, it sound like you're using it completely wrong. You drop it into a mob to start a fight, not midway. It won't save your pets midfight, but it will soak the alpha, cluster enemies and then knock them on their butt. And while it's too long, you can still stagger OM and Judgement every other spawn usually, so you have a nuke to soften things up and open the fight. (2) The "knock them on their butt" part seems to be part of your pet survivability issues. With Ragnarok in VG, Frag Grenade and the Dominion Fear Proc in Suppression, you can. asically lockdown half of a mob with soft control. I can usually have bosses on their ass 50% of a fight, not attacking me or my pets. By the time minions and Lts are standing up from the initial volley, they're basically dead, even on +4/8. (3) You went Mace, so therefore you're probably in melee a lot. The pets don't survive as well in melee. By comparison, if you went Mu and stayed at range, the Spiderlings don't all clump up in the center of a spawn following you, and instead will stick to range for the first bit of the fight before diving in. Additionally, without Mu Lightning or Gloom, of course your single target DPS rotation feels bad. Shatter Armor is great, but for day to day DPS, the good patron blasts are much more useful (in my opinion), especially when procced out. I really think this is a L2P issue. No offense meant.

You can reliably keep the pets at or near the defense cap at level 50. I honestly have no problem keeping them alive with 75%+ up time solo at 4/8. This might be a "learn to play" issue.

I do not have the time today to go through this wishlist point by point, but I basically disagree with everything in the OP. There are a number of things that are just incorrect and some other things that, if changed as OP is suggesting, would just break the balance of the AT completely. Crabs are in a really solid place and I don't think they need any boosts.

Their best option for the time being is the staus quo. Keep pretending to engage with HC, thereby keeping their distance, avoiding any ties to the project, while at the same time not acknowledging their legitimacy. They can argue that they are engaging in a good faith attempt to defend their IP, but avoid sending out C&Ds and playing whack-a-mole with 50 random servers popping up. Until that no longer suits their needs and they decide to kill it. Which they absolutely can do, to a effective degree. They won't snuff it out completely, but they can force it back underground. EDIT: I love this "outside the box thinking" stuff. It's like all those people who start suggesting random stuff to Covid researchers. Yeah, you have a solution that experts didn't think of and already dismissed...

Because its a giant liability. They would be entering into a business deal with people in possession of stolen IP, legitimizing a criminal act and setting a precedent on bad behaviour. They would also be entering a deal with a completely amateur operation with no corporate business structure and no oversight. What happens if it turns out that someone on the HC team is caught doing some really shady and/or illegal things? If that happened with a real business, the person is fired, the company handles the PR fallout and takes the heat. But in this situation? Who's IP would be smattered all over the news if shit hit the fan, especially with how rushed most reporting is these days? Is a few thousand bucks worth all of that risk? Hell no. It also locks down the franchise IP for a period of time. Even if its a non exclusive license, NCSoft won't revive the franchise while a third party outside of their control is involved with part of it. Is that worth couch cushion money to them?

So then why does anyone believe that any deal would ever happen? These kinds of deals don't happen based on hopes and dreams. If NCSoft wanted high 8-figures for the rights to the IP in the past, what makes you think that a deal will ever be struck when you and others admit that the budget is miniscule?

In this situation, the ass backwards thing would be to strike a licensing deal with HC. They stand to gain basically nothing, while also tying their IP to an amateur entity that could cause them a number of issues. I'll leave it there though because Ironblade doesn't want discussion to happen on a forum. If its not concrete facts, we're all supposed to shut up and defer to their optimistic outlook based in fantasy land.

If someone offered you pennies for an old car you had but didn't use (one that technically still runs and could be refurbished if you ever needed it), would you take that offer? Anything NCSoft had to gain would be less than pocket change to them. In just the last quarter, they had over half a BILLION in revenue. What could the HC team offer to even make it worth their consideration? This isn't speculation, its just realism.

May 2012 when CoH closed, NCSoft's stock price was 233,500 KRW / $215 in today's USD. Today, NCSoft's stock price is 867,000 KRW / $800 in today's USD. With a market cap of about $17 billion. Yeah, they really suffered from the bad publicity. They totally need this deal. /s

Yeah. So why does anyone think a deal will ever be struck?

Excuse me if I don't have much confidence in this team setting future precedent for a new category of non profit. Without legislation, they're not going to be rewriting any books that suddenly make them qualify. And based on their publicly disclosed legal costs, they're not working with the caliber of legal teams that would be writing the books on anything. Their legal budgets wouldn't be enough for an hour at my billing rate and wouldn't get you 10 minutes of my supervising partner's time. So again, I don't think any of this is a good sign.

If they can't come to terms at this point, and there isn't some external factor, then it's unlikely they will be able to hash things out. I've seen $250 mil pharma aquisitions get completed in 3-6 months, without issue. I've seen big companies license out entire therapeutic divisions worth of IP in 6 weeks, complete with full portfolio due diligence. By comparison, carrying out diligence and hashing out a license on a dead asset like CoH shouldn't take this long. In the grand scheme it is trivial.

The non-profit status was done ages ago in order to clear the way for donations. Also, that sort of thing takes no time at all. My group has overseen the formation of 7 startups in the same time window, one of them from conception to buy out. The incorporation paperwork and approval timelines are not too different from the non-profit org formation, from what I have experienced. The whole "government beaurocracy can take years" thing is more of a meme than a reality most of the time.

As a legal professional, this isn't really accurate. You're correct that the court systems are backed up and mostly suspended globally, but the NCsoft/HC situation has nothing to do with the courts. Big time litigation has dropped off due to budget cuts and court delays, but contract negotiations should not be significantly stalled. Meetings are definitely happening and if anything are easier than ever because of the increased adoption of video conferencing. I work in international pharma IP and most firms I work alongside have transitioned to work-from-home like it was nothing. I have had more "face time" with my Chinese and Japanese counterparts in recent months than prior in my career because we've all had to accept that the semi annual all day in person conferences aren't going to happen, so we might as well hop on Zoom. These things take time, but I am going to be brutally honest and say (Covid or not), the fact that we're 18+ months in on a deal this trivial is a very bad sign.

I would generally echo @tidge here. To me, the sets chosen look like they're a smattering of "what is the most expensive set I can slot" without a particular goal. From the general concept, it looks like you're attempting to make a psuedo tank, but every time I've tried to make a Crab do that, I lose aggro to Tanks and Brutes who aren't even trying to taunt off of me. It's hard to fight the lower threat modifier using only Provoke. You'll only succeed in the role on teams lacking a Tank or Brute. I also question the value in Single Shot. With redraw factored in, the DPA is about on par with Mu Lightning, and lower than Gloom. You might as well take one of those instead. Also, the general "slot full expensive sets" strategy means you're under proccing your attacks. Not having an Achilles in Longfang is a cardinal sin in my books. Generally, your build would probably survive most content no problem and would be an asset to the team, but I can't tell what the goal is. EDIT: Also, you absolutely need at least one -KB IO. That is non negotiable. If you can't find an extra slot, I'd just swap the IO in Fly.

Lol, nope. I never suggested any such things. Back during live, I had way too much time on my hands and never minded how grindy it was. And do you think I was somehow involved in the secret server streamlining process? That's where most of the grind was removed, after the game got shut down. I wouldn't have kept my mouth shut if I was aware of that server and would have been booted in a day. Guy, you need to get some fresh air. Go for a stroll and cool off. You're just lashing out at this point.