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I realized I goofed on some of the proposed enhancement slotting: Epic Indomitable Will does not take Resistance pieces. This is not the first time I forgot this! As it takes Defense pieces, I'll have to make some adjustments.... and try to turn things to my advantage. With room for another (6th) defense power, I can opt to turn the franken-slotting of Unleash Potential into a 6xPreventive Maintenance for 8.75% global recharge. At this point I think I can sacrifice a LotG 7.5% global recharge (using a Defense slot to hold the Shield Wall global Resistance piece) and still have the margins to drop Expedient Reinforcement for Singularity. I kinda hate losing the Defense boosts from Unleash potential, so I am still thinking this trhough. I'm thinking about minimize some slotting on Singularity, leveraging HOs. EDIT: I had realized that I could skimp on Range for Wall of Force (to keep it closer to the range of Buckshot), and I could get better-ish enhancement values using an attuned 5-piece Decimation (even with a lower level cap) as the 3-piece Gladiator's Javelin in the Burst T1 attack... which allowed me to franken-slot the Singularity (and save another slot) more to my taste. The net Global recharge bonuses will scale lower; I lose a little on the Singularity's (slotted) recharge but I get it slotted with more control. I also get to keep my franken-slotting and Defense emphasis for Unleash Potential! Oh, BTW... the Singularity is showing a Boosted Soulbound Allegiance Accuracy/Recharge piece. That was just a placeholder. I'll be using a common Essence of Curare Accuracy/Recharge piece from the Hold category at level 50+5 instead. No need to burn INF on that.

I won't argue against trying to mechanically use Fury to directly increase damage in some way, except that is (to my eyes) always what its been... but in terms of gameplay I've only ever seen a Brute played the same as a Scrapper (probably 90%) or a Tanker (maybe 10%). Apologies for comparing against the original ATs from CoH, but the timeline is what it is. I don't think there is another way to play a Brute... as there is no mechanical reason to (EDIT) not push every character as fast as it can go. I don't think there *is* another way to play a Brute! I realize that it can be tempting to point at Scrappers and Stalkers, but those two AT have enough different powers in each primary that there is room for obvious variation, even if (by some arbitrarily chosen metrics an optimized-for-that-metric build of) each may be comparable. I'd prefer that Brutes got a role not filled by Scrappers or Tankers, and preserved their primaries and secondaries. I don't think it is productive to start from a place where the idea is that the AT has to be better than another AT. The Tanker buff (at least the AoE-related one that is sometimes called the 'Brute nerf') was to make Tankers better at tanking, which had the side effect of making them able to fit (and ultimately defeat) more enemies at once... again, this is a somewhat arbitrary metric. Ultimately this is just my way of saying that I'd prefer an AT that offered both a different sort of playstyle and not just "this one gets the same powers but at a different level" or "this one gets the same powers but has different caps". I'd rather not have wholesale changes to the powers or caps, even if they would have to be tweaked to accommodate whatever the Fury mechanic ends up doing.

Thanks! I'm still not 100% sure on my final slotting, as I am testing the different interactions of powers as I play. I'm a long way from perma-dom, and at least you can see from my proposed sets how I intend to get to it. If I could convince myself to NOT franken-slot Wall of Force, I'd end up with slightly more options of what sets to use where... I hate that this choice is restricting me, but I love the extra damage it brings at such a low level. Right now, I'm looking at my (current) choice to have the ATO 6-slotted in Wormhole. I absolutely love the stun effect that it applied to the grouped targets, but I'm not liking that the post-teleport scatter that sometimes occurs. So I'm considering using 5-slots of Absolute Amazement with a 6th slot for Sudden Acceleration KB->KD. This would have a sort of cascading effect on which sets I use to get five 10% Global recharge (I'd probably not use Ragnarok in Ignite) but I have to pick a good home for the ATO. Choices!

I appreciate all the replies from folks talking about what they like about Brutes, and what they use in their builds. It is pretty easy to find posts about how "Brutes was nerfed" associated with some talking them down because, by some arbitrary benchmarks, "others are better." Fury is what *I* don't like about Brutes! That is to say: to me, building up that self-buff always felt like it was more effort than it was worth, given other build options. I'm also somewhat non-plussed about how I see many Brutes played on teams... where they just sort of assume they'll always have aggro... and when they don't they don't seem to perform as well and the squishier teammates can start to take a lot of grief... put another way "bad tanking" but I digress. I've played since launch, so I remember pre-CoV when Scrappers essentially made Tankers somewhat superfluous in most content. It came as no surprise to me that when Brutes could go/start blue-side that many folks would gravitate to them... my thinking may be wrong, but because it was so much easier (less investment) to make the Brutes "tougher" *and* for those willing to push the value caps, as tough as Tankers, it was kind of a no-brainer (especially for AFK-like play). I don't have a suggestion for Brutes, but I can suggest something different that would make me more interested in Brutes (with a Fury mechanic). I'd be interested if Fury wasn't tied to either making the Brute hit harder (the current damage buff) or survive better (as is sometimes suggested). I'd kinda like a melee class that applied an enemy debuff (in PBAoE) sort of complimenting how Sentinels (now) work. This sort of things ought to be somewhat acceptable to those seeking MOAR damage and would give Brutes a pretty good role on teams. Obviously if Fury was detatched from the damage buff, some rebalancing of offense is probably necessary.

I want to say that I think I've seen a reverse of this with certain PVP pieces, where I could slot the level 10 version at level 7 (similarly for a few other sets that don't start at level 10), but I had to wait until level 10 to slot an attuned version. Furthermore, I seem to recall that this isn't true of ALL PVP sets. I do know that I've had to wait until level 10 to slot ATOs. I rarely use Winter pieces at low level so I'm guessing they are like ATOs. My memory is a little fuzzy, because I don't always bother with slotting enhancements at those levels.

Hard agree. The initial thread about the lost player (and happened to include a commonly-made suggestion that hasn't really been implemented except in extreme circumstances, mostly dating back several years) is, by my reading, free of any sort of negativity. A second thread was started, by a different user, asking for some "official" clarity on the topic of NPC memorials, as this is something that hasn't been implemented (see above) despite many people asking for it over the years. In that thread an "official" response is laid out making it clear that the general attitude is that there won't be NPC memorials going forward, and that it is not focused at any individuals. A third thread is started that accuses the second thread of being a trollish invitation to dismiss the idea of the first thread, and that the "officials" are collaborating with trolls. That thread gets locked, with an explanation. A fourth (this) thread gets started with (I believe) the rationale being: (a) someone didn't get what I wanted from the first thread, (b) everybody got a reason why in the second thread, (c) somebody didn't get validation that the second thread was targeted directly at them by trolls in the third thread, and (d) there out to be a way for the reason to be changed (see second thread) so that what was wanted from the first thread happens and the validation never received in the third thread is achieved. Page 1 of this thread was textbook sealioning, including immediately after being asked to "give it a rest". I can understand some folks are upset, but it reads like some of them are just looking for reasons to be upset.

-Resistance applied to an enemy, is treated as unique-by-source (for most things I can think of, including %-Res from procs), so teh different sources can stack, but consecutive applications from the same source will simply 'reset' the clock on teh duration of the debuff. The debuff is coming from an applied %proc, not any given power, so different players all using the same proc is just extending duration (if the attack hits and the proc fires). AFAIK, the Fury of the Gladiator , Annihilation, and Achilles' Heel %-Resistance can all stack with each other. They'll also stack with -Resistance from powers. My experience has been that %-Resistance is a better force multiplier than it is for solo play. So my team-oriented characters and Masterminds (or characters with a LOT of pets that do damage) will often try to include at least two attacks with the Annihilation piece (it goes in ranged AoE powers) to try to 'sustain' some -Resistance for the allies/pets/henchmen.

Plants is IMO OP for a few reasons: Seeds of Confusion having a rather large AoE (plus target cap) on top of a base 1.0 accuracy is just crazy good for a low-tier control. Vines and Roots have the more-typical base values, but it is easy to shrug that off when (a) they are no different than other similar Control powers, (b) so much of the set kinda doesn't draw aggro to the character... a Sleep, the Confuse (kinda), Spirit Tree, Carrion Creepers and Fly Trap. As @Maelwys noted Marine Affinity's Shifting Tides does some great things depending on what else the player has in it (pets, pseduopets, henchmen, allies) and because of the way Plant Control works, it seemed like a no-brainer test case for me to try Marine Affinity. I hadn't planned to put %damage in it, but I almost always test... and I found that the %damage was still able to be applied after cast, including if the anchor was defeated. My Controllers are always looking for just a little more damage, so that's how I ended up with the slotting in Shiting Tides I shared above; it is weirdly similar to Carrion Creepers. Plant/Marine ended up being a lot more 'fire-and-forget' than I expected.

Casual observation, based on lower/mid 20's content and the second build progression posted above. For solo -1x3, I'm finding a pretty reliable "opening move" to be: Power Up Wormhole (5-slotted with the ATO) The cone AoE attacks and/or controls. I use this as a Wormhole macro to group the enemies where the cones will hit them (modulo knockback): /macro_image "IceBlast_Aim" "WORM" "powexec_location forward:25 Wormhole" Damage dealing is a little slow at these levels solo (with fewer slots available), so often both Power Up and Wormhole are available when I get to the next spawn. Even with minimal slotting in the Targeting Drone (and the -1 enemies) the ToHit chances are pretty healthy.

All true, but... ...If a power's effect is going to apply any sort of net buff (to damage, to control) then it needs to get a "balance pass" which sometimes means that the power that could be granting the buff gets 'gimped', relative to similar powers. For this sort of proposed interaction with Wet, it would me more trouble than it is worth. I mentioned the "Fire attacks may do less damage to Wet-affected critters", because once the game started to include such interactions like "Wet allows for Hold/Slow/Immob/KD/whatever when used with XXX, from anybody" players would naturally start asking for all sorts of other effects based on attack types... because Pokemon. Ultimately my opinion was that it was a cute idea, but not a sustainable one to implement... unless TPTB were ok with a straight-up buff for (some combination of) characters.

IMO: Below level 20, you shouldn't have to worry too much about whatever +Res or +Absorb you are getting from the ATO. If you can tank rooms of Vahzilok in Posi 2, you should be fine for everything else at low level. When I want to slot nearly complete sets of the Tanker ATO, I use the first two attacks I take for them. When I want to %proc, I pick one of them (usually Might of the Taker's %+Res) to go into the AoE attack as a franken-slot that I'll be using a lot and also has a reasonable chance to proc). There are still 5 other pieces in that set can be used to get the 5% Melee positional defense. This is just my take: I won't argue that +Absorb isn't good for Tankers, but I do think that %+Absorb is not the kind of choice that should make a Tanker build. As Tankers have generally few powers to slot their ATOs, this is why I generally use the weakest attack power to hold it. (If the build was also going to chase Winter ATO 5-slot bonuses, I suppose I might make a different set of choices, but I digress). Tankers are probably better served by having more Regeneration (which tends to be a constant, across levels) than %+Absorb. The %+Resistance is (again IMO) the kind of thing that is really useful, but it shouldn't be relied upon for most content. Something as simple as bad timing can mean you don't get it! As I wrote above, I usually franken-slot that piece into an AoE so that when I'm facing multiple enemies in melee I stand a good chance of getting some more Resistance, because there is no such things as 'cascading Resistance failures'.

So a couple of reactions: I'd like more enhancement options that span the entire range of levels. I kinda like that the level ranges exist, for converter roulette.

Some more testing at -1x3 in the late 20s has convinced me to replace Crush with Lift. Lift Crush was doing very little (control, damage) Another single-target attack that does reliable damage (with or without Impact!) compliments the rest of the build better, As part of the 'complimenting', my earlier point about the RNG (and the floor 1-in-20 chance to miss, no matter the final ToHit) means that the character plays better when I have more than two lower-level single-target (ranged) attacks for damage. This is just me, but against a Held enemy, I can toss Weaken Resolve and Lift in succession, if either one of those is the (effectively) force miss, It's not the end of the world... nor is it a meltdown if one of my single-target damage attacks miss (when I have multiples). If I miss on a rando ST Immob, that's effectively not even trying to use it... so no big loss to never have it! At these levels, -1x3 was pretty slow for Stephanie Peebles and the Bloody Bay door missions. But they were doable. The Singularity is a big help when a little too much is coming after me. Screenshot of the updated planned build follows. I realized that the Damage/Mezz piece in Singularity was effectively only improving the Mezz... so I'm going to drop that which frees up one slot for me. I also realized I wanted some Range on Buckshot, so moving the Positron's Blast set to that short cone seems to make more sense.

^ I think this is the closest to my take. ^ I think it is especially true if the rest of the team has made build choices knowing in advance what a specific Defender is going to bring. I think there is some content where one pulls ahead of the other, assuming both have reasonably smart builds... for example, a low level TF/SF is much easier with some Defenders than most Controllers... if the Defender has team buffs. I was on a recent Posi 1 where the Defender made all the difference, and the (exemplared) Controllers didn't die, but at that level they weren't bringing that much to the team. For some builds I have, within play it might be pretty hard to know if the character was a Defender or a Controller if the observer wasn't familiar with the primary/secondary.

The zoning trick doesn't fix the Rest/Walk issue. It persists. Obviously /cleartray is a thing, that isn't relevant to the bug report.

Briefly: After respec, the Rest power (icon) will not be placed back into a power tray. In its place will be Walk. Walk will also be added to another power tray, although this may depend on where the Rest power icon was in a tray. (I usually have it at slot '0'). Perhaps this is due to an indexing issue within a database? For example: they could share the same index key, or both are NUL. I suppose it could also be an issue like Rest not being keyed such that it doesn't appear in a tray after Respec (for example: the 'inherent' Prestige Power Slide does not appear like temp powers will get auto-added.)

I went Plants/Marine. How it worked for the (pseudo)pets is what has convinced me that Marine is very likely the top tier Secondary for Masterminds. I'm not saying that other secondaries aren't good, just that a well-played MM with another secondary could probably get better results using Marine. It isn't a no-brainer to use, but it is extremely potent.

From here, I can't offer any potential solutions... but I'd begin backing up anything and everything you wouldn't want to lose from any local storage on that machine. It may be that there is something akin to a bad physical memory location (on a storage device) that is used for a system reason, and the physical media is showing the earliest signs of wear. Over-heating *is* a possibility, but my experience has been that aside from video cards themselves systems which haven't been tampered with (overclocked, whatever) are generally tolerant of heat... until they aren't and then no amount of dust removal is going to repair any damage done. I can't remember what the symptoms were when my two-cards-ago video card died, but they weren't BSOD-like. The replacement card (a brand new AMD Radeon) DID NOT play well with most things, including CoX and it would overheat and crash regularly. I don't mean to start a jihad against AMD, but I kept the box of that card (RX560) so that I'd never forget which brand performed so poorly. There was no amount of effort possible using all of AMD's own software to keep that thing from heating. I even checked to make sure the fans were mounted correctly. It rendered things just fine, but its temps would go nuclear for no known reason.

IMO... Coercive Persuasion is a great set to 6-slot. World of Confusion is hot garbage. The advantage of the %Contagious Confusion piece in a single-target Confuse is that occasionally you will get multiple targets confused. The advantage of the %Contagious Confusion piece in an AoE Confuse (attack, not WoC) is that a side-effect of the RNG is that even targets missed by the initial AoE are very likely to get hit with the Contagious Confusion. The disadvantage of slotting the entire Coercive Persuasion set in an AoE confuse is that you can't include any %damage pieces, and even a little %damage done via the initial AoE gets you on the chance to get drops, even if those %damaged enemies get 'one shotted' by their confused allies. Trade-offs!

Here is an update after some more play time (with the powers taken as in my post above). I played on a Posi 1 + 2, this was pretty typical: a few level 50s, some folks in the 20s+, and a few of us at lower levels. This went pretty smoothly, with elevated difficulty mostly (IMO) because of a Defender buffing the team. I was playing somewhat conservatively using my Domination and controls in the sorts of areas where things can go pear-shaped. I felt useful! After that, I was in the mid 20s, so I set difficulty to -1x3 and started doing tips. These were fine. Nothing much to report. Then at level 24 I started the (blue) Midnighter's Club intro arc. This was much more difficult at -1x3... I will attribute this to close to one-half of the spawns were at even-level, the map/spawn construction puts several spawns close to one another (for large spawn sizes), and the controls/debuffs used by the Lost, Rikti, and Circle of Thorns. I ended up with three personal defeats... one was 100% on me for forgetting to use a power, and two I will blame on the RNG... because at this level I don't have much to fall back on if a control or attack misses at an important point. When Domination was up, opposing controls didn't really phase me... but the naked defenses are an issue.

There is quite a lot that could be done to the "enhancement handling during respec" interface, I'm not sure where I'd even begin. I've embraced the "need to drag" as a mechanism for sorting the not-to-be-used-after-the-respec pieces for whatever comes next for them (placement in a SG bin, auction house, dumpster, whatever). Obviously 'double-clicking' could do this too, I only mention it because sometimes I find myself dragging Enhancements to not the next available open slot... even if the inventory ultimately gets telescoped in the trays after the respec. The one thing I can think of that might work against a 'double-click to do a thing' here: IIRC the respec screen is one of those "full screen UI" that isn't guaranteed to play nicely with everything else that might be happening, such as interacting with storage devices, what not. In practice, I've never observed such a problem during a respec, but my respecs usually take place somewhere like a zone where there is a badge for spending time in the zone, because multi-tasking!

The world is depressingly short of Sportsmaster GIFs.

I realize I've been sidestepping the impact of Impact! In an IO-only world, or one in which a chosen Controller secondary offers little potential for damage (direct or via %procs) I'd never skip Lift or Propel... even for a team-oriented Controller. Gravity Control has the reputation of being the damage-oriented primary for a reason. As you note, most Dominator secondaries offer more attacks, plus the Dominator damage scales (ranged and melee) are pretty much twice that of Controllers. My gut tells me that the damage scale and having just one more attack (single-target or AoE) probably eliminates any advantage a Controller would have from Impact! over the Dominator. Personally, I run colder on Dominators than I do for Controllers. I don't have any negative feels about Dominators except that the Domination mechanic is so good that I feel obligated to chase perma-Dom. I usually find more personal liberty when building Controllers because I don't feel obligated to chase global Recharge bonuses. This particular combo offered me the gun (important for concept!) and the chance to ignore three primary (and a couple of secondary) powers without feeling like the build was missing much. I wouldn't fault anyone for taking Propel, it could even be a more useful/comfortable attack than Elbow Strike (in the power picks I showed above). Propel has the nifty chance to damage nearby foes, even though I always think of it as a single-target attack.

My initial look at it will be to slot Lift for a global Recharge bonus, and after that everything else is secondary... but that doesn't mean those other effects will be ignored. My instinct is to 6-slot it with Sudden Acceleration, as I like its set bonuses (in aggregate) slightly more than Kinetic Crash. There is the 5-slot Entropic Chaos, but that is a set that maximizes at level 35 values, and the final recharge bonus is slightly less. Using 6-slots here means that I'd lose the 6th slot bonus from Ascendency of the Dominator, but I feel like I could lose one slot in the travel power (as I've often 2-slotted such a power with no major losses to the Quality of Life). As for non-enhancement bonus effects of Lift v. Crush. The one thing Crush is giving me that I like is damage-over-time. At low levels, I like that I can toss it and (if it hits) I can sort of ignore trying to damage that one single enemy. This is going to be less important as I level up and get AoE, and the damage is small enough that I expect it won't make much of a difference for enemies like Fake Nemesis. Damage-over-time is something I find useful against enemies that summon things (e.g. Rikti Communication Officers, Raider Engineers), but again, this is a single-target attack that has to hit! A miss doesn't do anything for me in that circumstance. There is another subtle issue with the single-target immobilize: There are a LOT of enemies that resist Immobilize, or otherwise have protection against it. I get the sense that the Live devs handed out resistance/protection to Immob (and Slow) as a sort of "HAR HAR, gotcha"... because I find it personally weird that Immob is a common low-level power for players yet these sorts of enemies start appearing at low levels and never really go away. Obviously I am somewhat ignoring what Domination provides for controls... but again, I'm specifically thinking about dropping a single-target immobilize for a character that will still have an AoE immobilize and a pair of Holds. This is just my PoV, but the really annoying late-game enemies aren't really affected by Immob but are affected by Holds (Sorcerors, Illusionists, other teleporters/phasers). There are some corner cases of AVs/GMs, but I've become so used to fighting those using characters without any sort of controls that I'm probably at the "I don't know what I'm missing" stage. Lift OTOH is Knock-up, which pretty much affects most every commonly encountered enemy.... and damage does too! I'll be spamming the single-target hold anyway, so any extra damage from Gravity Distortion synergy is gravy. As noted above, I'm mostly relying on Crush for damage, so it won't be a huge departure for me to add the (sometimes funny) attack in its place. EDIT: After looking at my first pass and crunching some numbers, my current thoughts about what I'd do with Lift in the build (instead of Crush) is to 3-slot Lift with Winter's Bite (getting Slow resistance, which I like for PermaDom) and moving the slots to Wormhole which should be able to take the ATO. I'll probably just keep the 5-slots of Gladiator's Net in the AoE Hold, but drop the %damage and boost all those pieces to 50+5. The AoE hold has a somewhat small radius, and the recharge won't be that great to really worry about the %Lethal damage. The enhancement values are slightly inferior to 6-slots of the Superior ATO, but shouldn't be that noticeable (because of the inherently long recharge time, and eventual global set bonuses).

I may end up swapping into Lift for this character... Part of the final reason may be that eventually the single-target immob is unlikely to be that noticeable once controls are being spammed, part of it may be that in order to move out the ATO (hopefully to the AoE Hold) and find a replacement source of Global Recharge after that swap I may need to leverage Lift. Immob sets don't have many great options (for recharge) so I'd sort of be constrained to swap the slotting on the single-target and AoE Immobilizes... except that the AoE Crushing Field also does not need slotted Recharge. From my recollection, it takes some getting used to the delayed damage from Lift. %damage from procs will be applied right away, but that won't be how I slot this character. Perma-Dom is a puzzle, but I can sort of see a few different paths.