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Domination offers three benefits: The Controls are more powerful <- see comments above about which sets this makes a big difference for It offers resistance to controls It refills the Blue Bar Perma-dom is getting domination again, before it expires. If Domination expires, you must refill the domination bar to use it again. You probably know all this but I thought I'd mention it. To get the global recharge necessary for perma-dom, I believe the minimal value is 123%, rounded up, but because it is easy to get 'stuck' in an animation, every little bit above this is useful. Hasten IIRC offers 95% global recharge. Hasten doesn't need to be 'perma' for Dominators. I prefer to achieve perma-dom without Hasten, and also without FF +Recharge pieces, but mileage varies. The disadvantage of my approach is that the slots and set bonuses required to get global recharge for perma-dom aren't feasible until level 50... so taking Hasten while leveling is a reasonable compromise for me. One sly effect of getting high global recharge will be that it becomes easier to spam attacks/controls, which will burn the blue bar faster. Dominators tend to live on the edge of a knife.

^this^ is sort of my point about how the Kheldian non-human forms are effectively channeling and old-school manner of thinking. Specific to Dwarf form: my recollection from Live was that in some place like Bloody Bay, with the old/Live level requirements for power picks, was that a reasonably slotted (but not particularly heavily slotted) Dwarf could hold off entire teams in PVP... sort of like how a level 50 Tanker could do it in RV, but much easier. This is one of the memories that reminds me that for the level at which the forms unlock, the Kheldians are quite impressive. Dwarfs, with minimal (PB)AoE are never going to be as good at spawn-clearing as other ATs.... but the tricks they have in Dwarf form make them good (old-school) pocket tanks. My thinking is that the primary reason to leave the "changeling exploit" in place is to allow players who want to use it to feel like their Kheldians are keeping pace with other ATs to do so. Any potential revamp would be a LOT of effort, and whatever direction chosen to revamp isn't likely to be the one a majority of players are asking for.

Alternative read: ppl tried it and found it to be of relatively low value.

Is there a technical reason why the F10 Battle Cry is limited to 32 characters? I'm not asking for even as many as 64, but 32 is often too short to write a simple sentence.

I pass no judgement! I usually bridge those low levels with temporary attacks from START. They are also endurance hogs, but I feel like I have more agency. My comment was made more of a general observation on enemy-affecting PBAoE toggles. There are some that work for me, many more that do not (especially on squishier characters). Minimally I find that they need to be slotted for both Accuracy and Endurance Reduction before even considering whatever the actual effect of them is supposed to be!

w.r.t. Hot Feet... this is one of those PBAoE toggles that initially looks appealing to me, but in practice is something I find very hard to make work without a lot of slots (for the entire build, if not the PBAoE toggle itself). These sorts of powers have lots of theoretical uses, but in practice don't pan out well for me. YMMV. Once of the competing issues I've found with such powers is that enemy critters are often too spread out (by their nature and/or by application of controls) that their isn't as much return for the (Endurance, slots) choice to use the PBAoE toggle as opposed to investing in some other power. I've taken it, but it was never something I used semi-regularly until near end-build... by then I have the slots and I can turn up spawn sizes.

My advice is to try different things. Try different ATs, different powers, different pools, different slotting choice, different strategies, different content. Eventually, each of will land somewhere and think what we are doing (with respect to whatever) is "optimal"... but no matter whatever, that assessment, even if correct, is only true for the limited scope of yardsticks we have to apply. Even a question as simple as this has different possible answers, depending on many variables: Many players shoot through levels 1-20 so quickly such that the question might not even be relevant to them! There is a sort of "correct answer" with respect to relative enhancement values between slotting choices, but the 'best answer' might be informed by less abstract and more specific (to the character, to the player account) details.

Obviously we all have to declare the user with the most posts in the thread the winner, and then everyone will be satisfied.

The Mace is essentially necessary for a lot of what the Hunstman/Bane does best(*1), once you get to the madatory respec I *think* you can replace all of the 'gun' attacks with an equivalent 'mace' attack.... I'm not entirely certain because for my most recent Bane I preferred gun attacks over mace attacks for flavor. (*1) "best" is somewhat flexible... as the team-buffs (and Surveillance) are very good and don't rely on the weapon choice. I'm referring to the self-boosts (Build Up) and high-DPS melee attacks (Shatter, Crowd Control) which will always use the Mace. As for team toggles, my most recent build uses CT: Defensive, TT: Maneuvers, TT: Leadership (all by level 20) and the after level 38 has CT: Offensive and TT: Assault, as well as Maneuvers (Leadership pool, as a mule for Karma's KB protection). I didn't bother with a patron pool for this most recent build, but Mace Mastery is a sort-of no-brainer. If Wide Area Web Grenade requires a gun that you don't want to use, the Mace Mastery pool offers an alternative using the Mace with Web Envelope. I rather like having the low-level AoE immobilize, I'm not sure how I'd feel about it as a patrol pool choice. If you are going for the stealth aspect, obviously Cloaking Device is a must, and I think Placate will greatly improve performance. I ended up with 3 pieces of Mocking Beratement in Placate: Accuracy/Recharge, Threat/Recharge, Threat/Range. I recommend taking those two powers in succession... which one is taken first is up to you if you delay the choice.

For concept, and what it offers, I think Earth. You should be able to recolor some of the Earth powers to fit. with a Marine secondary, Leviathan mastery is pretty reasonable IMO. With some slots, both Bile Spray and Water Spout can be made to work for Controllers, Hibernate can mule the %Absorb piece and Shark Skin can mule Resistance pieces. Typically: My Controllers don't have many slots available for powers when the Epic/Patrons become available. As a result, I usually consider those for what powers offer me the chance to mule enhancements and/or enhancement sets. Psionic often gets tapped for these on my builds for this reason.

The unique Overwhelming Force set IIR has a proc that also contains a Damage Enhancing component, as well as a piece that is a rare combination of Endurance Reduction/Recharge.

It's been a while since I did that mission, but I very recently had the Capture Eukrisal and his research mission where Eukrisal (who was in the last spawn I needed to clear) vanished from the map. The map did one other weird thing: it showed me red markers (for CoT things still on the map, like crystals and cage doors) for a split-second, and then stopped showing them. I spent about 20 minutes trying to find anything else to defeat/destroy but he never re-appeared. I ended up auto-completing that one. I did submit a ticket but the response ended up being much later, so the debugging opportunity was lost.

I'd be happy to be wrong! Although it means I'm taking too long to do what should only take an hour!

The ones I typically use only last 60 minutes... and by selecting several different ones I see all sorts of different durations! EDIT: As a practical matter, I regularly grab about 5 different SG boosts at the same time, and those all expire at almost exactly the same time (1 hour). Maybe "time flies when you are having fun"?

I am ignoring the "changeling exploit" for what follows. As I have written before: the general issue I see with Kheldians is that for reasons the multiforms aren't very good to play across all (levels of) content... and without multi-forms, we players will miss what is supposed to make them fun an unique. The reasons? #1 Nova form gets a "full suite" of blaster-like attacks, but they all pretty much scale like low-level Blaster attacks. On the one hand, this is to be expected. Nova form is pretty OP between levels 4 and 16... it has a 'complete' attack chain, and can fly... these things were not common in the early days of Live for low level characters! But imagine how poorly Blasters would perform if they only could use their first four or five primary powers. #2 Dwarf form get A+ resistances, as well as mechanisms to "tank", but very little in the way of offense to clear enemies. Dwarf form comes later, so it scales better (as a sort of Tank), but it never really gets any "better" at clearing spawns. Yes, we have found ways to work around this... but an always-Dwarf is going to be pretty bad at map clearing. #3 The Human form don't get trivial access to some of the important things Dwarf and Nova bring: Mezz protection (Dwarf) is a big one, but so is +ToHit from Nova. The end result is that it becomes necessary to swap forms to cover obvious gaps in whatever toolbox we need for the moment... and that some of those tools (namely the Nova attacks) generally aren't up to higher level content. There are many ways to address these issues, but at their core, I think the Kheldians are more of a unique story-mode AT designed to allow players to do different things, but to not excel. Again, I am not saying they can't be excellent... more that if a player wants a better Blaster/Tanker then picking a Kheldian is not going to be the first best choice. Personally? I find non-changeling-exploit defeat times to be a real mood killer solo. On teams, I have the luxury to swap forms and playstyles as needed.

FWIW: The text of some of the SG buffs says 90 minutes, but I don't think I've used one yet that lasts longer than 60 minutes... at least not for many years (if ever the durations were different).

There were a series of posts, still there, that directly insulted Captain Powerhouse (because of a 2020 post in a different thread). Also within that series of posts was some dancing around direct insults by insulting the expressed ideas motivating the thinking from the CP post, which *might* have been acceptable (even if the particular representation of the criticism was *childish*), but several posts in a row making direct insults wasn't necessary to the discussion.

I plead "guilty" to the charges. I can only offer this as my defense: I think it is mean-spirited, simplistic, and possibly the signs of an evil mutant power(*1) to be able to bluntly proclaim what other people are thinking (and/or that certain categories of people are irredeemable) and then use those proclamations to make all sorts of arguments that (I suppose) seem to be irrefutable (in some minds). (*1) I use the word "evil" because if this is a mutant power, it only seems to trigger when somebody is doing something that the possessor of the power doesn't like.

"Getting reported" was literally the predicate condition stated in the post I responded to!

I had fun getting this build to level 50, and I thought I'd share the (current) level 50 build. I was able to run it solo through a lot of content pre-level 50. Both the primary and secondary were new to me, so I wanted to share my observations and solicit ideas on what I've missed. This combo was chosen mostly for concept, but also to try something new. As always, I don't MIDS, so all you get is a graphical image of the build. I show global recharge bonus, because that is always high on my mind. General thoughts: This build (with a +Stealth piece in Sprint, not shown above) is very "stalkery" for a Scrapper. I went Scrapper partly because I didn't want to rely on Hide and partly because I preferred the Scrapper's combo chains (from first glance). It has all the same issues non-Tankers have with melee attacks against large spawns that aren't quite positioned close enough to each other. This build has no (slottable) ranged attack other than Blinding Powder... see below for more impressions. My choice of Travel power and when I took it has no real affect on the build, except for a little more Ranged/AoE defenses. Combat Teleport is somewhat key to being able to (a) get to distant targets and (b) making the next attack in a combo-chain. The RNG more-or-less has me missing an attack on every other combo chain, which is less annoying against large spawns but is quite the grief on single-target combat. This isn't unusal, but I find it bothersome on this build because the self-buff and enemy debuff relies on hitting with (particular) attacks. The end-build choices are a sort of hodge-podge. I focused on positional Defenses Melee > AoE > Range. I went deeper into some set bonuses than I usually do, as much/more could be done with fewer slots if the set bonuses are of minimal interest. Thoughts on Dual Blades: The "all Lethal" damage is quite annoying. It took this build 17 minutes to solo the Penny Yin TF (0x1), which I think is long for a Scrapper even considering I had several unlucky rezzes/transformations. The animations are fine, and the only one that I don't really like (of what I took) is Vengeful Slice. I usually open with Blinding Feint, as it is my only 'Build Up". (+1 to Dual Blade Stalkers I suppose?) I'm not crazy about combo mechanics, but the attacks are quick enough that I ended up not minding so much. At low levels, I alternate between Nimble Slash -> Ablating Strike -> Blinding Feint/Typhoon's Edge for "Empower" and "Weaken". At higher levels, I generally open with Blinding Feint -> Typhoon's Edge (because of the %BuildUp and %-Resistance) and then: Ablating Strike -> Vengeful Slice -> Sweeping Strike for "Attack Vitals" following up with Typhoon's Edge (%-Res) and Blinding Feint, then repeat. One Thousand Cuts is basically there to be used as an attack of opportunity, and for when I break a combo chain (intentionally or not). It is essentially a single-target attack on my Scrapper despite being an AoE, I could see a Tanker maybe making better use of it (and all the AoEs). I skipped Power Slice, I didn't need/want another early level attack and I felt like trying to have the "Sweep" combo available on a Scrapper was going to force too many other compromises on my build. The build has other potential sources of Knockdown anyway. Thoughts on Ninjistu: I rather like that it has so much (positional) Defense front-loaded. It has been a long time since I've taken all nine powers in any set! I have Kuji-In Rin on auto. Obviously I have it slotted for some set bonuses which may not be to everyone's taste. The recharge time is overkill at high levels, but "about right" for lower level content. Seishintekei Kyoyo and Kui-In Sha are roughly on the same recharge times; I click when needed, or when I have a slight pause in a combo chain. Blinding Powder is the weakest choice in the set IMO. It has too small of an AoE, with too long of a base recharge to be really useful... and it is usually targeting enemies that I'm going to be hitting with melee attacks anyway. If not for the enhancement set bonuses I would make radical changes (likely including dropping it) with respect to Blinding Powder. I rather like Kuji-In Retsu (when it is available), but I can't motivate myself to invest slots in it. An Incarnate Barrier would be better I think. Alternate Considerations: The build could benefit from a pool attack(s) that don't break combo chains from the primary. Normally I like to get Wall of Force on melee, but I'd have to make some compromises... likely delaying/dropping Kuji-In Sha (to be taken late in the build or replaced with Unleash Potential) to take Weaken Resolve and replacing Blinding Powder with Wall of Force. Ultimately I'll investigate this, but I feel like the change/loss of potential set bonuses require some deeper investigation before I commit. There is a potential for +4% recovery with alternate slotting of Blinding Feint using the Critical Strikes set, as I left one piece "on the table". I'm not really seeing much of an issue with Endurance/Recovery but other choices I made are making this picture somewhat cloudy. Extra mezz/KB protection was (so far!) unnecessary. The little bit of extra KB protection from Blessing of the Zephyr is getting me a little more ranged Defense. Global recharge is pretty good, I could probably give up one of the LotG +Recharge mules and add in Tactics for team play.

Copied from the 'knockbad, amiright?" thread, in response to a 'maybe a post was reported': ----- I don't know that someone-else-reporting-a-post is always the reason for a 'warning'; I have it on good authority that occasionally warnings are given to 'both sides' of certain arguments almost entirely because of a sense of 'fairness'. FWIW I don't think I've every 'reported' a post. I have had an entire thread(*1) deleted/hidden, presumably because it made certain people uncomfortable, and based on the user who posted in that thread (rather than contacting me directly) I can guess that the user reached out to a moderator because passive-aggressive open requests to lock threads seems to be their MO. In (the 'knockbad') thread? I do think that a couple of the posts went past the point of 'snark', into rather direct insults of a specific individual... and (again IMO) it was multiple times. Based on what *I've* gotten warnings for? I am not at all surprised. ----- (*1) Frankly, IMO that thread should have just been locked if discussion was past the point of utility... because my request/suggestion was one that could come up again in a slightly different context... and the specific context for why I brought that up in the first place has only gotten more sour with age, so it isn't as if it wouldn't be on nobody's mind.

I don't know that someone-else-reporting-a-post is always the reason for a 'warning'; I have it on good authority that occasionally warnings are given to 'both sides' of certain arguments almost entirely because of a sense of 'fairness'. FWIW I don't think I've every 'reported' a post. I have had an entire thread deleted/hidden, presumably because it made certain people uncomfortable, and based on the user who posted in that thread (rather than contacting me directly) I can guess that the user reached out to a moderator because passive-aggressive open requests to lock threads seems to be their MO. In this thread? I do think that a couple of the posts went past the point of 'snark', into rather direct insults of a specific individual... and (again IMO) it was multiple times. Based on what *I've* gotten warnings for? I am not at all surprised.

There is a pretty large level gap between when a T9 can be chosen/slotted and a Destiny Incarnate power being available!

I have a Dark/Temporal, I'll embed my page 5 build in spoilers for completeness. This is an older character. Some of the secondary power synergize very well with this primary, some do not. Chronos fires every 22 seconds with an almost guaranteed %BuildUp. The melee (single target and PBAOE) are rarely used. I should note that this character was intended to be "mystical", this is the reason for the Arcane Bolt.