DSorrow

Finally got some more incarnate powers on my Rad/SD and had time to do a pylon run. 3:31 for 310 DPS. T3 Musculature Total Core Revamp T3 Degenerative Total Core Conversion T3 Assault Total Core Graft (only passive) No AAO fodder.

I had one slotted in Blind on my Ill/Cold along with the purple hold set. I can't really give any quantified answers on the orb, but here's some anecdotal observations: It was pretty common to have 2 or even 3 out at the same time. Proc chance seems decent and they probably last around 15 seconds. The radius of the aura seems to be quite small. I didn't observe them affecting enemies beyond their immediate vicinity. The damage is insignificant and from what I could tell it didn't have any actual attacks. Tick period seemed to be pretty long too. I didn't even know it could stun people until someone told me about that. After that I did notice some individual enemies being stunned by them every now and then. In summary, the orbs appear to be pretty crappy. They can and will be killed easily by any enemies with AoE and at least with no stun to stack with, they don't seem all that useful. If I ever roll another Controller with a Stun power I'll probably try them again, but at least on my Ill/Cold the proc is gone for good.

Oh, my mistake. I read the original post pretty carelessly and thought he was going to buy out all the listed converters rather than list enough converters to clear the bids. In that case the price is definitely going to go down as there are likely a large number of bids significantly below whatever the going price is or has been at some point. But I guess no matter which side he's taking on, it's pretty much impossible to accomplish this solo. I know I'll toss in hundreds of bids just to stock up if the converter prices crash and I assume many others would do that as well.

I would increase the flight speed cap, but not what the flight powers provide. Fly is already by far the most convenient travel power, so it makes sense you'd pay for it in speed or spending slots in the power (which is currently a waste because Fly + Swift and an SO in each already takes you to the speed cap).

I only use them in some cone attacks. They're probably useful in PvP, too, but besides those two I can't think of any consistent use case where you wouldn't be better served by Acc/Dam/End/Rech enhancements. If they enhanced the radius of PBAoEs or AoEs, I'd probably slot some in most builds.

No. It lasts 180 seconds and at the recharge cap it recharges in 200. With an amount of recharge that's feasible to attain solo without gimping your build, you're probably looking at something between 250 and 300 seconds recharge at best.

Given an acute scarcity of any material, the price should go up. Then again, it's pretty easy to generate new converters into the economy so I'd estimate the stronger the attempt to yank out all converters from the market, the stronger their influx into the market so it's most likely impossible to pull this off even with a couple of friends. As an anecdote, I have somewhere between 3k and 4k merits across my characters and I might be tempted to convert some of those into influence if the converter market shot up. Basically what I'm saying is there are probably other players besides me who could individually shower hundreds or thousands of converters into the market if there was an unusually good opportunity to profit from it. Besides the existing merit stashes, it's easy to get at least 1 merit/minute so I just can't see anyone being able to completely drain them.

The problem with this claim is it ignores the extreme amounts of defense debuff that are in the game. 20% defense might as well be 0% in high level content. On the other hand, the defense capped character is dodging all the debuffs. That's one thing most people tend to ignore in this comparison. This is a very good point. The way I see it, in high level content Defense without DDR is only reliable for mitigating an alpha strike, unless you're significantly above the applicable soft cap. My TW/Elec Brute is built for maximum Resistance (capped S/L/E/F/C), but I did get a good bunch of incidental S/L Def (just above 30%, IIRC) too. The few enemies I have issues with either deal heavy Toxic damage or they have a lot of debuffs, neither of which would be fixed by going for the S/L soft cap. If we consider an aggro cap's worth of enemies (16?) with 5% hit chance against me, the chance that at least one of them hits me in an alpha strike is 56%. More realistically, they'd have around 8% hit chance because I practically never play against +0s in which case the chance of at least one of them hitting me is 74%. As they continue attacking, it won't take many seconds until the likelihood that at least one attack has hit me is >90% and if that attack carries -Def (as many do), the cascade happens and then all that S/L Def is worth nothing. Basically I'm not convinced that going all in on Defense with Resistance builds that innately have none is the best way to build them, especially if stops you from maxing Resistance. That said, for maximum survivability I'd build a soft capped character with significant DDR and mediocre Resistances rather than the other way around (i.e. my Titan). To this end, I'm toying around with an Invuln Tanker build that's soft capped against all elements except Psi with 1 enemy in Invincibility, 90% S/L Res and ~60% Res to everything else including Psi. With the medium DDR from Invuln, the Def buffer from stacked Invincibility and the pretty high resists, the character should live up to the name of his primary set. Now if I could just decide on a primary, create a nice character concept, find the motivation to play a tank and the time for it... Anyways, sets like Elec Armor just don't really have the capability to build enough Def to consistently avoid all the different sources of -Def, let alone have a buffer to shrug it off. Sure, on paper 80% S/L Res and 45% S/L Def is much better than 90% S/L Res and 30% S/L Def, but the latter has double the mitigation two or three seconds into most fights.

They are definitely dropping, but I don't think the drop rates are any worse than what they used to be. For reference, I've received 1 or 2 purples on each of my 4 50s, they have around 30 veteran levels combined and I do most of my gaming in teams.

I agree with most points Zolgar made. Maneuvers > Tactics > Assault >> Vengeance >> Victory Rush, in my opinion. Tactics is maybe slightly more useful than he gives credit for as I'd add 5) enemies with significant +Def/-ToHit to the list (Carnies, Rikti drones, Banished Pantheon, etc.), as those can drop you from 95% hit chance even if you do have a bunch of +Acc bonuses going on. As for Victory Rush, I tried that on my Fire/Time Corruptor and found it incredibly lackluster. The buff is pretty much meaningless used on anything lower rank than a boss, and when you most need it in drawn out AV fights, you can't activate it until the fight is over. You also can't modify its recharge value, so it has a lot of downtime. In the lower levels where Endurance is more of an issue, I find myself often in smaller teams that are not running x8 so we don't necessarily run into bosses at all which makes Victory Rush almost completely useless. In the higher levels when x8 is the standard, people already have a bunch of IOs, better slotting in general and ultimately access to stuff like Ageless which blow VR out of the water. 1/5 wouldn't spend a power pick on it again.

For primaries, I'd go with Cold > Traps > Dark / Storm for the top three. Cold and Traps are pretty obvious, so I'll go through Dark and Storm a bit more in detail. Dark can stack Tar Patch for pretty heavy -Res and it provides enough -ToHit to impact AVs. There's also a bunch of -Regen between Twilight Grasp, Fluffy and Howling Twilight. However, Dark Miasma is probably better on Controllers. Storm also has great potential with stacked Freezing Rain, Tornadoes and Lightning Storms but with high recharge it becomes extremely Endurance intensive. One note for Traps, though, even if it excels in drawn out fights against AVs, it's going to feel clunky in fast paced teams because setting up your powers takes a while and besides FFG they don't follow you around. Secondary is obviously Sonic Blast. Beam Rifle might also be competitive (it has some -Res and -Regen, right), but I have to admit I'm not familiar with the set.

Wouldn't mind having a "special enemies" type of difficulty setting that spawned stuff like Cysts.

Nice! I tried pulling Nictified Romulus a couple of times on my run, but didn't really have success with that. I'll put it down to not having used that strategy in almost a decade so I just straight up couldn't remember where you're supposed to pull him to stop the Nictus from following. Using Poisonous Ray and the Tarantula from Mace is a good call from an optimizing point of view. Initially I had those on my build back on the officlal servers and I'd most likely have them here too if the two powers fit my concept and the mace redraw didn't drive me crazy.

Another interesting feature I'd really look at giving Tanks: across the board debuff resistance in PvE. In the high-end enemy groups the most troublesome enemies are the ones with strong debuffs and I feel like it would make sense for tanks to be less susceptible to those than Brutes. The magnitude of most debuffs is also big enough that you can most of the time effectively counter it only by buffs so it doesn't matter whether your tank is a Tanker or a Brute. Having a Tank require less buffs to counter the debuffs would incentivize playing one, and it would make several powersets with mediocre Debuff Resistances much stronger on a Tanker than a Brute. This is also a neat power gap a Brute couldn't effectively bridge with IOs. Having unstackable Bruising in all attacks would be pretty cool, too.

I wouldn't remove the aggro caps, but I'm not opposed to looking at increasing them for Tankers (let's say, up to 24 from 16). I really don't want the game to go back to a place where you wait for one person to round up the whole map. A slight increase from 16 for Tankers wouldn't get us that far, but it would differentiate Tankers from the other melee ATs.

What the other guys said. PA is wildly inconsistent when dealing with large packs especially if you toss in area of effect attacks/debuffs that might draw the attention of anything that wasn't very recently hit in the face by a decoy.

Seems like procs are worth it in CC then.

I think that a +3 Captain Mako just happens to be a particularly unsuitable AV for my build. As a +3 AV he resists all the -Def, Slow and -Regen I do to such a degree that they might as well not be there so I don't really have anything in my toolkit to counter his Elude, make him use it less frequently or prevent him from regenerating while it's active, so basically it seems we're locked: I get him down to whatever the threshold is for Elude activation, he pops that and regens back to some point, rinse and repeat. That said, large yellow insps or Lore pets just might make the difference, so I'm going to try and find the time to try those this weekend. I do feel like Lore pets are maybe a little bit cheaty, but then again if that's what it takes to solo Mako I might be compelled to do it. The /Storm idea sounds quite interesting and I'm not sure if /Storm actually would be much more frail than /Cold if built similarly for Defense. Steamy Mist = Arctic Fog for the most case and besides Benumb, /Cold doesn't have any other significant survivability tools. Against large groups /Storm is definitely going to be better with the stacked Tornadoes and Lightning Storms just knocking everything over constantly. I kinda want to try a fully kitted out Ill/Storm now...

After some thinking on this, I propose the following changes to Rage: Make it a Hybrid like toggle, but with a fixed 10 second cooldown. Something like -5% Def and -10% Res when active along with the +DMG and +ToHit it currently does, and the Endurance crash when it either toggles itself off after 120 seconds or is toggled off by the user prematurely. Basically this would change Rage to a stance: toggle it on for an offensive boost at the cost of defense when it fits the situation and have it off for when you can't afford the hit in defense. Constantly switching back and forth would be less feasible due to the Endurance crashes and cooldown so you'd have to think ahead about its usage. Finally we have the 10 seconds of cooldown which would give you reduced damage because you're lacking the damage buff, but nothing quite as extreme as what we have now.

Update on two of my times: Cursebreaker Brute TW/Elec 197s/317 DPS RA>FT>AoD>CD>FT T3 Agility, T3 Degenerative (75% damage proc), 80% fury before starting Mythoclast Scrapper Rad/Shield 245s/280 DPS DB > RS > Siphon > RS Other notes: no AAO fuel, only T3 Musculature Alpha

I'm in no particular hurry to get to 50, but that doesn't mean I won't try to get there in an efficient manner. I have a couple of characters at varying levels and I'm mainly leveling them through TFs with DXP and this way it takes me roughly 2-3 weeks to get from 1 to 50. A rushed pace to some, slow to others but a pretty good middle ground between taking forever and not PLing to me. That said, I'm probably not too far off from PLing my characters into the 20s rather than doing the whole 1 to 50 thing, and if I were to recreate more of my original 50s I'd probably be tempted to skip all the way.

I'd say it depends on your playstyle. It seems that 2-3 weeks is the time it takes for me to get 50, so basically I only need ~250-300mil per week in income to stay neutral. Two to three months worth of expenses stashed up sounds like a good definition for wealthy. For me anything beyond a couple of billion is a point when I stop actively amassing more money because that's enough to get any build at buy it now prices + buffer to easily replace that spend by the time I get another char to 50. For someone who gets a new 50 every couple of days the standards would obviously be different.

True. Still, even if we consider "objectively OP" equivalent to being almost indestructible, I want to emphasize that there's a really big distance from "being essentially immune against conventional guns and blades or a particular element" to "being only weak to one specific thing", and our +4/x8 soloers are closer to the former, which isn't all that uncommon when you look at comic books. There are several enemy groups I'd be pretty confident to claim can't be consistently soloed at +4/x8: Vanguard, Banished Pantheon, many Praetorian enemy groups, etc., so there's a variety of enemies that in high level mobs can overcome our most powerful heroes. We don't need nerfs or Kryptonite just yet because no builds are that powerful.

Yes, at least according to Paragonwiki. I don't know of any actual tests, but as far as I know nobody has contested this info either.

I figured it had to be something to do with her offense, but PA doesn't indeed care about that. Speaking of Dr. Aeon, I contemplated trying a solo STF but currently it seems that Captain Mako is pretty effective at stonewalling me. I set up an AE mission with all 4 signature villains and LR at lvl 54 to test things out before actually committing, and here's what I found out: Ghost Widow is annoying. She has quite high resistance to Psionic damage so beating her took forever. Scirocco and Black Scorpion didn't really put up much of a fight, it took a while to beat them because of the level difference, but it was much shorter than GW. Mako's Elude spamming stonewalled me. With the floored hit chance, I just can't deal enough damage to beat him between the Eludes. The fight also becomes more down to luck as PA can't hit him either and consequently they can't hold his aggro. I might revisit this thing with big yellows and Lore pets later on and see if they're the missing piece. Didn't try Lord Recluse or Dr. Aeon, but they might prove to be a pain in the butt because of their summons. I remember trying and failing against LR back in the day, but I can't remember if my build was Ranged soft capped at that point or not so this might be worth a try. The pylons in the actual TF, though, might make it impossible because he's going to hit me and probably kill me in one hit every time I resummon PA if there's any residual damage left on me from his minions or previous attacks. Doesn't he also have some kind of DoT in some attacks? Ugh, maybe a solo STF just isn't in the books.