tidge

A few things. 1) There is effectively a "no player tributes via NPC" policy in place (for HC-created content); this would extend to making enemies from PCs. 2) Players that don't want to go to red side will not go to red side. Some players cannot be drawn to red side (or gold side) by any incentive, some players only go reluctantly. I don't want to be too critical of players that make that choice, but I'd prefer to not read the umpteenth version of "The buildings are ugly" and "But I have no agency!" reasons. I get it, some folks just want to stay blueside... it's a valid choice but it is one that prevents them from seeing a lot more of the game.

My thoughts/experiences on Skyway City Troll Raves: Currently, there is only a narrow window for when it is possible for characters to handle the Supa Trolls *and* also get XP from them. The times I've used Supa Trolls for XP (reasonably often for blue side!) I tend to level up from them PDQ. If they were level-less, I'm neither sure it would make sense for characters below level 12 to be "hunting" them, not that above level 16 they should just be anything but fast(ish) defeats for badges seekers. The SupaTrolls are basically threading the needle of level ranges in the zone, just like the ghost freighter spawns.

Setting aside any potential secondary effects due to enemies in melee range; I have a hard time noticing if (some) taunt auras make a significant difference. On teams... I feel like they help when I also have a Scrapper with (PB)AoE attacks if no one else is trying to get aggro. Solo... I can occasionally see that if *I* move away from certain types of enemies that I've been engaged with, those enemies sometimes decide to come with me. The main lesson that Scrapper 'taunt auras' have reinforced is that "just running past" an enemy with an aura toggled on is not actually any good for "grabbing aggro". Solo... yeah, an enemy will pay attention to the ONE PC they notice... but on teams that does not mean that the same critter is going to pay MORE attention to someone that sped past them than a teammate attacking them.

I don't have access to minitab or JASP, but I can back-of-the-envelope offer these numbers for sample sizes, to give you an idea of how much data you would have to collect to tell the difference between 95% ToHits (H0) and an alternative hypothesis of 95.2% ToHits (H1). For 80% Confidence and 50% Power, you would have to see something like 7927 hits out of 8329 attempts. For something like 95% Confidence and 80% power, I think the necessary number of swings would have to be on the order of 145.5 million. This of course isn't the test I would do: I would try to count "misses", where the null hypothesis (H0) is 0.05 and the alternative hypothesis is something like 0.055 (H1, honestly this is just a guess). I think the numbers for 95% confidence and 80% power are only 12251 "swings", and if 653 (or more) "misses" occur that would reject the 0.050 miss rate in favor of the 0.055 miss rate. I don't know that I believe the miss rate to be 0.055% (or higher!) but for the frequency at which I see a MISS floaty when targeting con-grey spawn sizes smaller than 10 with AoEs, makes me feel that the miss rate is greater than 0.050. For example, for 80% Confidence and 50% Power, it would only take a minimum of 78 misses from 1412 swings to reject 5% in favor of 5.5%. "Science" doesn't like such low Confidence and abhors such low Power... but the low power is a type II error about accepting the 5.5% miss rate as true, not an assessment about that the 5% miss rate. I feel that 80/50 is fine for "gut checks" that something isn't right about the null hypothesis.

I have no comments on any specific build, but I feel like adding this: Endurance burn/Recovery (on a pre-incarnate level 50 build with accolades) is something I try to remember(*1) to evaluate. It isn't unusual for me to discover that a particular character doesn't need all the +Recovery that it may have needed while leveling up. Sometimes this is from set bonuses, sometimes it is because of Enhancement's boosting Endurance reduction. [Also note: I rarely use Hasten, so I typically neither have the eventual Endurance payment nor the faster cycling through certain powers.] If @KaizenSoze says Endurance isn't an issue, I have no reason to doubt it. (*1) My evaluation is typically as simple as using an unslotter and running though a variety of content. Sometimes I'll notice Endurance spend is more of an issue at lower levels, but not always... especially once Accolades are in the build and if powers used at lower-levels have Endurance reduction.

Maybe these thoughts will help to narrow the selection? I'd ignore any Scrapper (primary) that includes damage-over-time as a significant portion of the damage dealt. This is based on my own experience with a Savage Melee Scrapper... the Criticals don't occur with DoT, so something liek a Brute would be better because Fury does boost that damage (I realize Brutes were not in the ask, just saying). This wasn't directly mentioned, but sometimes there is a sort of obsession with %damage from procs. Scrapper combos should do 'better' than Tankers where %damage isn't the end-all-be-all. In other words, trying to leverage %damage instead of improving damage (and other attributes) from Scrapper attacks is probably tilting the advantage to Tankers. In order to get the most out of the Critical Strikes ATO %+Critical Hit proc, you want to have attacks to use that have favorable "arcana-time minus animation-time-before-effect". See this post for the explanation and some examples.

This. Just vendor those enhancement drops. As a practical matter, unless a player is playing a somewhat peculiar corner of the game (e.g. low levels with a high spawn size and NoXP) the enhancement inventory shouldn't be filling up with DO/SO drops faster than they can be sold.

It wasn't what the OP wrote, but @Rudra is correct that the ask is (indirectly) to be able to 'street sweep' whatever enemies, in whatever zone, in order to: Never face higher-con opponents, and Get drops (including XP and Inf) from all enemies This outcome isn't really isn't really ideal IMO, because we've already repeatedly seen, over-and-over-again, multiple times, repeatedly, that players will always flock to content where they can get the most reward for the least effort, and if 'street sweeping level-less Skulls in Perez Park' (for example) became the new hotness, we'd see a LOT of players migrate to that kind of content (as opposed to AE farms, PI radio missions, whatever FOTM). One of the core aspects of the CoX model is that the open-world zones really are, for the most part, tied to player level. In old-school terms: players don't continue running Keep on the Borderlands for their entire D&D career! Generally, the level-less spawns serve two purposes in-game: Zone events, which can happen in (almost) any zone. Critters are level-less to attract interest across entire player base. These enemies self-clear when the event ends. GM add-ons, which have to be defeated in order for the GM event to respawn (also Zig Breakout). These critters are level-less to offer rewards for resetting the event (and these crtitters are somewhat easy to find)

This was from a long-ago thread where IIRC a player was not accounting for something that wasn't logged.

Sometimes when I've decided I don't want that 50+5 IO I'll convert it (if it is a set piece) to a piece I do want, or I just save it.

Winter (and other Event) pieces, level 50 PVP Recipes, and Purple Recipes are 100 merits at merit vendors. Those items cane be sold (and/or crafted and then sold) on the AH. 1 Booster requires 5 Merits, 1 converter requires (effectively) one-third of a merit. Catalysts require 20 merits each, but lets ignore those since they regularly drop(*1) The 'rosetta stone' for merits->inf is probably converters, since they are in high demand. So if a converter is 50 kInf on the AH (or 150k-per-merit), the "100 merit items" would have to cost more than 15 MInf (not counting the 10% charge at the AH for selling) to yield better return than converters, the 20 Merit items would have to be selling for more than 3 Minf to be a better deal than converters (for selling).

pRNG is not truly random, it flatly populates the result space [0, 1] So let's say without Streakbreaker the ToHit rolls for a character ToHit > 0.90 are: 0.06, 0.16, 0.26, 0.36, 0.46, 0.56, 0.66, 0.76, 0.86, 0.96 (yes this is weird, but it is an example of a flat distribution on pRNG result space chosen to show the 'decades' of possibly results) The final result (0.96) is a miss, so we have a 9-of-10 hits. The next (11th) is ignored [pRNG doesn't "not roll"] and treated as a hit no matter the actual result. *IF* the exact same 'decade' set of results occured, then (and only then) would streakbreaker be 'honoring' the 9-of-10 hits. If at any time the pRNG returns a 'missed' result EARLIER than the 1(skipped)+9(more) then the player will be missing more often than 9-in-10 times. In the case of the ToHit ceiling: Having a streakbreaker for 0.95 is basically assuming that after a roll >0.95 that there was a 100% chance of the next roll missing... but really the chance was only 5%. The flat pRNG means that clumping in the regime [0.95, 1] is discouraged (but not impossible). We know that pRNG prefers to anti-clump from actual data.

Red side missions have some of the most interesting writing, and despite that: Some players will rationalize not wanting to play redside, no matter what (artwork, agency, whatever) Some players only want to go where there are not other players Vigilantes and Rogues already get a sort of what is being asked for by doing the Villain/Hero alignment missions on the opposite side. Atlas Park isn't particularly interesting, it just happens to be an original zone that often contains doors/contacts for older arcs. Red side isn't free of missions that send players "back" to Mercy Island, but it isn't nearly as prevalent in Red content.

I think you have this backwards, because of the way the pRNG flatly populates the space [0, 1] (or if you prefer [0.95, 1] vs. [0, 0.95] A reasonably straightfoward way to test is to use the same AoE attack against a large number of con grey for which all the enemies are in the AoE. The number of multiple misses in those spawns (pick a low level hazard zone) doesn't jive with a 95.24% hit rate. Again, for hypothesis testing it doesn't take much data for high confidence, but it does take a lot for high power (to discriminate between 95% and 95.24%).

This isn't a prima facie bad idea IMO, but this isn't likely to end up with a Tanker that is very good at this. What follows isn't me pooh-poohing the idea, it is more of a list of things that I would focus on if attempting a more "support" Tanker that isn't focusing on more classic approach to Taunting, punchvoking, AoE to grab aggro and survive the aggro. 0) As noted: I think it would be necessary to lean into the secondary effects of primary/secondary, as there isn't much in the way of pool powers. The better pools for the task are IMO: Presence, for layered Fears Leadership, for team toggles Force of Will, for knockdowns (AoE cone is a fast recharge, PBAoE Takeoff) and a ST debuff 1) Most of the secondary effects are marginal. We can have different opinions about how wide those margins are, but many debuff effects are smallish, and the enhancement potential for the most common debuffs are also small. 2) Many secondary effects require accuracy (ehem, see the base accuracy of some of the Dark armor toggles), so this cannot be ignored if going this route. 3) Many of the 'auras' may be smallish... so for example Radiation's Ground Zero can heal teammates, but only those that are relatively close by. Prior to (several rounds of) Energy Melee changes, I felt that it was a very good Tanker secondary for the disorientation. It isn't bad at this today, but it isn't as good at it as it once was IMO.

I've never felt that I ran out of content in Mercy Island playing a villain, even without an XP booster. When my red-siders are feeling in a lull I often will Ouro through one or more of the arcs I missed.

For all my characters with Combat Teleport: /macro_image "StaffFighting_StaffMastery" "BAMF" "powexec_location target Combat Teleport" /bind shift+lbutton "powexec_name Combat Teleport" For ones that are squishier and/or have ranged attacks /macro_image "StaffFighting_AssassinsStaff" "BACK" "powexec_location Back:25 Combat Teleport"

With no Defense enhancement, Divine Avalanche should be +15%, but only to Melee (and IIRC Lethal). I don't think it stacks on Tankers, but it stacks on Scrappers. I wouldn't be so quick to short-sell Force of Will. Weaken Resolve is another -7.5% Damage Resistance (but for 15 seconds) at range. Wall of Force is a reliable %damage (+knockdown) ranged AoE power that is going to be available LONG before any similar ranged attacks from Epic Pools... and if all you would be doing with such powers is %proc anyway, you may as well take it early. Since this is the sort of character that will be taking a lot of damage (if you challenge it), I think Unleash Potential is a reasonable addition. Note that build I showed above delayed Wall of Force because of the primary/secondary choices were (I felt) more important. As a practical matter, I'd probably drop it and take either Hasten (because of self-survival, as noted above) or Combat Teleport (although that is another power I prefer to have early for melee characters).

This is why it bears testing, because anecdote is not the singular form of data. I know that (on Live) it was very common for players to not quite understand the debuffs from something like common Circle of Thorns.

I don't use MIDS, but here is a quickie snapshot of what I'd use as a starting point for consideration of a Radiation/Katana tanker. Both the primary and secondary are full of goodness, so what I have below is an effort to include all the powers, sort of as early as possible... with some personal opinion as to when they are needed for what content. I wouldn't consider attack slotting fixed, but I did try to put the %damage pieces where I think they would go "best". Depending on a variety of factors, sometimes I delay resistance toggles. Some places I'd probably tweak: The Recharge/%Absorb Guantleted fist would probably replace one of the %damage in Ground Zero... saving a slot. I'm not sure the build needs two Power Transfer %Heals, I'd probably pull one from Gamma Boost to save a second slot. Those two slots would add a Shield Wall: Defense and a D-S Heal/recharge to Unleash Potential. (I want the HP boost and better recharge here) I included Wall of Force because (a) it is a great ranged attack for Tankers, (b) it seems like "moar %damage plz" was the assignment. This shouldn't really be necessary, and would be the power I'd drop to include Hasten, and allow some slot-shuffling. This is not a recharge-focused build, but there is enough going on that you won't have a shortage of clicks. For harder/high-end content Hasten certainly helps with the clicks for survivability.

Here is a question: Does anyone know if the Panacea %+HP/+End piece in Ground Zero would affect both the Tanker and any allies within range? I ask, because often on Tankers I like to add benefits/powers that will support any allies standing close.

/agreed. Missing "four times in a row" at the ToHit ceiling would be highly improbable with a truly random set of rolls, but it is even less likely with the (flatly populating) pseudo-RNG. This is because the (pseudo)RNG explicitly tries to "fill" the possible result space evenly. I'll repeat: "Streakbreaking" is inherent to this sort of pseudo-RNG. At the low end (a 1-in-20 chance ToHit) streakbreaker only kicks in on the 101st roll, so it would also be weird (given the flat nature of the results) that RNG simply wouldn't have given a result in [0, 0.05] by then. The ONLY non-feels reason I can think of to kluge in Streakbreaker that I can think of is if there really is something wrong with the RNG under specific circumstances. We can't see ALL the calls to RNG (for example, for drop rewards or %proc rolls) but the ones we do see have completely flat results in the [0, 1] probability space.

I have a different take: I pretty much think it should be tested if removing Streakbreaker would have any noticeable change on the game. Hear me out. We know that the pseudo-RNG is incredibly flat in populating results between [0,1]; this is by design. This has been repeatedly demonstrated by multiple players. This means that there really isn't anything like "streaks" (lucky or unlucky). The streakbreaker was added, as near as I can tell, to offer a "good feels" to players who don't understand what the RNG is doing, and/or players who feel like "I should be due for a hit, gorramit." It was sold as a "help players with floored ToHit" but it is almost certainly hurting results where players have a ceiling ToHit. I am convinced that Streakbreaker doesn't prevent a call of RNG, just that it ignores RNG results (for some 'rolls'... ToHit checks), so that Streakbreaker is actually muddying the waters. The ur-example is if a player (or critter) has a 19-in-20 chance of hitting, but misses, Streakbreaker ignores the next roll and makes it an auto-hit. However, because of the flat RNG, there was (at worst) only a 5% chance that the followup roll was going to miss... so 95% of the time streakbreaker is just tossing out rolls.

Radiation has an early Recovery power too, so the need for more %+End should be minimized. This sort of thing is very hard for me to judge without playing the character, but as I've been leveling up the Katana/Radiation Scrapper (without Hasten) I haven't needed to slot as many +Recovery pieces as I have with other characters.