DSorrow

Yet, none out of Cold, Rad or Thermal can consistently double stack their -Regen solo so you'll need a teammate. You can also get -Regen in any build you want to, thanks to Interface. I'm not questioning the Rikti Pylon formula, I'm just saying the Pylon formula = DPS thinking is incredibly reductionist in a game where you have a vast number of modifiers that vary significantly between enemies: rank modifiers, typed damage resistances, regeneration rates, max HPs, etc. Flooring regen against AVs isn't trivial for most teams either. Why should we make a distinction between buffs/debuffs that multiply or just add (effective) DPS? So much of the Rikti Pylon test data is going to be situational anyway it doesn't make any sense to me that -Regen wouldn't be on the "official" list.

-Regen doesn't stack beyond a point either, but it does take a bit to floor an AV. If the wikis are up to date (https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Archvillain) even -500% isn't enough to floor an even level AV, let alone anything higher. If https://cityofheroes.fandom.com/wiki/Archvillain_Resistance is a separate effect for the applicable AVs, -Regen does piddly squat against them with the triangles up. Basically any levels of -Regen a non-debuffer can attain are completely meaningless against AVs which is why I think it's important to note how much -Regen you actually had in your time because it doesn't take much to reduce a Pylon's regeneration significantly, but it takes a whole lot to even dent an AV's. Just because it doesn't work with a formula is not enough to dismiss it, in my opinion. The DPS = Pylon formula and anything that somehow breaks it is not allowed line of thinking is way too reductionist to be valuable in most actual gameplay situations anyway. If we want to talk about actually meaningful DPS values we should include enemy Resistance distributions (sorry, S/L sets) and other such variables that can't really be represented in any sort of simple, standardized DPS test, which means any result we'd get out of one will be inherently biased. Then again, I think disallowing -Regen while allowing -Resistance is just stupid. It's easy to quantify the effects of both in the Pylon test and a smart player will have a pretty good idea where the -Res and -Regen will be useful and how much of their effect can be expected to carry over. Not allowing temp powers or anything with a "volatile" uptime (like Lore pets: 5mins up, 10mins down) is just obviously good practice when you're trying to evaluate the consistent maximum output of a powerset combination.

This appears to have gotten lost in the shuffle. I would ask people to keep it in mind - the fix isn't going away, so how can Rage/SS as a whole be made better, in your opinion? I'd primarily look at the -Def in Rage crash being made resistible. Currently it has a disproportionate effect on Defense based sets that could normally resist -Def thrown at them. If the -Def can be removed totally, I'd go for a global Endurance cost increase (reverse of Energize, basically) so that the increased damage/hit chance comes at a cost and still keep the -End/-DMG parts of the crash. Stacking Rage would severely increase the Endurance cost of everything you do which should be a pretty good opportunity cost to keep things in check. SS might need a slight base damage increase to offset the lack of perma Rage from lvl 18, though.

I was looking at Spectral for my illusionist, but the low chance combined with short immob duration seemed pretty pitiful. Does it actually happen often in gameplay when, I'd assume, Phantasm and PA can also trigger it?

As the new servers have become more known/popular, the misinformation has gathered at a similar rate. More people, more whacky misinformation. Funny and sad all at once. It's probably a combination of experienced and new people with CoX's somewhat quirky mechanics when it comes to enhancements. "Rule of 3" with standard enhancements is easy to mix with the "Rule of 5" of IO set bonuses while you're still kind of confused about whether you can still slot a Crushing Impact Acc/Dam in 10 different attacks if you want to but not 2 in the same attack. Compound this with people who knew a lot about the game back in the day, forgot a bunch over the 7 years it was gone but are still quite confident in their knowledge and spread misinformation with good intentions (I'm most likely guilty of this too).

I don't really take issue with -Regen being included in the times so long as it is acknowledged. For most intents and purposes -Regen = DPS and most -Regen abilities are up constantly enough not to be situational and its effect is pretty easy to quantify. Besides with /Bio (/Rad as well?) and Interface all melee ATs have access to it too so should any times with those be treated differently? Lore pets and Hybrid (besides the passive boost) should be left out though because of their limited uptime. With the proliferation of -Regen I'd say the "rules" of the pylon test could be no temporary powers and no situational powers outside of your primary/secondary. That should give a pretty good representation of the build's consistent output and any smart players already know that numbers with -Regen in them won't transfer 1-to-1 from a pylon to an AV.

I don't have an issue with farming specifically, but I think there shouldn't be an activity that is several times faster than another at producing XP/inf/merits, especially inf and merits as those impact the economy = other players. People will always gravitate towards the most efficient XP/inf especially if the difference is huge. Just look at MSR: previously it was something like 5x merits/time compared to any other activity and they were going all the time and now that they're "only" about 1.5x as efficient, they still happen pretty often but people do other things too. Other than that, I don't think it's a problem if someone gets 1-50 in two hours by farming in the AE unless it's a completely new player. Still, no matter how much balancing is done some activities will still be more lucrative than others and I'm fine with that, so long as the difference isn't immense or if it's justified by the added challenge.

Pretty much the same picks here. Hasten, CJ/SJ or Hover/Fly, 2-3 out of the Leadership toggles depending on what my secondary offers/build needs, then Sorcery or Fighting depending on the build.

The way I see it, there's bad and good kind of random and the hit chance clamp goes into the bad random territory. I wouldn't mind at all if my attacks always did 90-100% of the listed damage for an average of 95%, but it's pretty irritating to have 1 out of 20 attacks forcibly do nothing at all for the same result over time. This especially irritating when you miss a long cooldown power or with powersets such as Titan Weapons or Dual Blades where the forced miss messes up momentum/combos. While I agree with some posters that the hit chance clamp isn't a critical issue in the game and doesn't warrant development time over more critical/useful things, I just don't see why the 5% forced chance to miss has to exist. From a balance point of view, going from 95% to 100% hit chance has a negligible impact on PvE so the only reasons I can come up with are that "it's an RPG mechanic" that has to exist because it's always been there or RP reasons that basically amount to "the Hellion just ducked to pick up a dime on the street and your fireball went over them" which doesn't really work with animation hitting the hellion square in the face. If completely getting rid of the hit chance cap is out of the question, as a more development intensive (and possible more immersive/realistic) middle ground, I'd at least like to see the cap removed for enemies that are stunned/held/slept. Sure, their power armor and other buffs can still benefit them, but that should remove the final 5% "immersive world aligning" because the opponent is by definition unable to act. PvP might be the only case where this has an actual impact. I'm not very qualified to discuss PvP balance, but doesn't PvP already use a separate hit chance formula that could still keep the clamp?

Wouldn't mind having one, but frankly it's not something I'd spend any development time on unless there was pretty much nothing else to work on. Generally DPS is a pretty worthless metric in CoX due to the abundance and sheer power of buffs/debuffs (adding anything with strong -Regen/-Res or +Dmg to a team in most cases generates more team damage than adding a strong DPSer) and the fact that basically whatever DPS your team can produce is enough to complete anything (are there even any actual DPS checks that can't be circumvented with debuffs/temp powers?). Besides, there's always the Rikti Pylon test you can use if you really want to know your DPS.

90% sure a low end set IO build will end up being, at worst, the same cost for much better enhancement values even if we disregard all set bonuses. Let's consider that a level 50 character has access to 26 powers (24 primary/secondary/power pool + health/stamina) and 67 slots for a total of 93 open spots for enhancements. A level 50 IO costs around 500-600k to craft (recipe+crafting costs) or about 200-300k to buy crafted so filling those 93 slots with generic IOs is going to cost somewhere around 20-30 million. If instead you go for lvl 30-40 uncommon set IOs you can often get each individual recipe for less than 100k, spend 50-100k on crafting for a total of 150-200k per enhancement, your max price for full low-end set IOs should be around the same as lvl 50 generic price bottom. Slightly more trouble to find the uncommon sets that aren't in demand, check which split IOs you want and then craft them, but any character should end up with significantly better enhancement values and an assortment of set bonuses for a smaller inf investment. I'd never go for a lvl 50 generic IO build.

Generally what I'd do: Until 22 I make do with whatever drops for me. At level 22 I craft myself a full set of (or as many as I can afford) lvl 25 IOs. This costs maybe 2-3 million inf, but you should have a couple of rare salvage drops at this point that will fund most of it. Post 22 I keep making new 25 IOs for any slots I couldn't fill at 22 or new slots that I get as I level up. Level 25 IOs are, in my opinion, the best returns for inf spent as they cost roughly half of lvl 30 IOs but are only ~2 percentage points worse. If you're rich and have a good idea about your final build start getting attuned IO sets early on. I did this with my Ill/Cold controller just now and it was pretty fun to play a character that had 70%+ global recharge by lvl 30. I ended up using all these IOs in my final build too so not only is it now more exemp friendly, I didn't waste any of the enhancements I bought and had a better leveling up experience. While the last point may not be relevant to most players, I still did the no sugar daddy slog on my first 50 on who used lvl 25 generic IOs until level 50. I funded all of those IOs by selling random drops I had accumulated by lvl 25 (a few pieces of rare salvage and some ~100k recipes), then followed some very generic marketing practices (find an enhancement whose price is 500k more than the recipe+salvage+crafting cost, make those and build a bankroll) to fund the rest of the IOs on the way to 50 and most of my set IO build.

you probably used lingering radiation too ? I mean, it's within my powerset and I use it on AVs as well, so yeah can you try without it, so we can have an idea of the effectiveness of -500% regen debuff ? (not sure how it works on Objects like pylon, only 1/6th of its value like GM ?) It's probably going to cut the DPS by roughly 127.8 as that's the regen rate of a pylon and they don't have any -Regen resistance AFAIK.

All buffs apparently stack between zone changes. It seems like the game "forgets" who gave you the buff when you load in and then allows you to get a second casting because the new buff's caster is known while the previous isn't. Sometimes pretty nifty with longer lasting buffs such as ice shields, if you cast them at the end of a mission, cast them again on the outside and have a short transit to the next one, you can get a couple of minutes of triple stacked buffs.

That's what was called ArcanaTime back in the day, it can be toggled on for calculations in Pine's options. Basically it's actual animations adjusted for the number of frames they occupy, i.e. if the animation length only took 8.5 frames, the game still wouldn't allow you to start another action until the beginning of the 9th frame so the 0.5 gets added to the animation time. It could also be that the requirement was 1 empty frame between actions (so in this example, 8.5 frames becomes 10 frames actual animation time), but I don't really trust myself to remember these kind of details accurately after so long.

Lag and really short recharge/activation powers make it pretty difficult to track during gameplay, but I guess way to empirically test it would be to find a sturdy target such as a Rikti Pylon, set the attack on autofire and check how many activations you can get within one minute or something similar. Then just divide 60 by the number of activations to get time per activation and see if that corresponds to recharge or recharge+animation. As far as I know about effect stacking, a majority of buffs/debuffs don't stack from the same caster with the one consistent exception being pseudopets such as Sleet because then it's technically the pseudopet "casting" the power and several pseudopets count as different entities. This could also be checked during the same test for the recharging question: just note if your damage ramps up more than once, if not then the debuff only applies once.

I think nihilii already got the most important points out there: the overkill +Def at the cost of everything else is probably not optimal for most content. On the other hand, not everyone builds for Def and a force fielder with Maneuvers and power boost can soft cap the whole team from 0 on their own, which is actually a pretty spectacular feat. Also teammates who do build for defense still appreciate the extra buffer against -Def opponents (pretty much all factions) and enemies with +ToHit (any incarnate content, Nemesis, Arachnos, etc).

For me the biggest realization of the new market was that volume trumps quality, a fully tricked out build costs less than 1 billion inf and that you can drastically improve a new character by buying attuned IO sets as soon as possible. I've been doing marketing probably 3-5 days a week depending on how much time I have to play and if I want to dedicate 15-30mins of the day's playtime to set up 50-100 things for sale. So far I've finished three builds (well, the Ill/Cold needs 1 more purple and leveling to 50 and a final respec to slot a lot of the stuff) while constantly ramping up the price: Fire/Time was somewhere around 250-300 million, TW/Elec ended up being around 500-600 and I'm estimating the Ill/Cold is slightly higher than the TW/Elec. Despite having a "total build value" of around 1.5 billion, I've stocked up around 2.5 billion inf plus an unknown amount in useful enhancements (random purples, LotG +Rech, etc) without farming at all. Farming probably generates more income if you want to put in the time, but I find it extremely boring so I've decided to do large volume sales on the AH instead as that eats up less of my total playtime and allows me to focus on content that I actually enjoy. Plus, with the current prices of items I can still generate more influence than I need for a completely tricked out character in the time it takes me to level said character to 50, which is why I've already cut down from refreshing my marketer every session. Then again, someone who gets to 50 much faster needs a quicker source of income to kit out characters as fast as possible.

Unless something has been changed / I misremember things / haven't properly paid attention to what's happening in-game, powers only start recharging after their animation is finished so it's impossible to have a gapless single attack chain. Also I'm not sure if Shriek's -Res stacks from the same caster (most debuffs don't stack that way), so in order to stack -Res you'd want the other blasts too. Shriek > Scream > Shout has a 100% uptime on each of the -Res effects and you can toss in Screech every 20 seconds to refresh that for constant -80%.

I generally just send half a billion to an alt every time I reach 1.5B on my marketeer. The long lowballs I've set in move so slowly I don't really need to hold on to more than a billion in cash at a time as a couple of hundred million is enough to run the day to day operations. Consequently my active alts hold at least 500M each which makes it convenient to grab an IO set or whatever else I might want without having to transfer it over.

I run my TW/Elec with perma Hasten/Energize and capped S/L/E/F/C resistances. It's great against anything that isn't predominantly negative energy, toxic or psionic damage, and in a team environment toxic is the only thing that's actually dangerous because you usually have buffs/debuffs/heals/firepower available to shore up the relative weakness against NE and psi. The build does have some incidental S/L Def (~32%) but building up Defense was never a goal of the build due to the lack of -Def resistance.

I went with Thermal/Sonic on my new Defender. Debated Rad as a primary, but ended up with Thermal for the following reasons: 30% Resistance to most damage types for the whole team all the time is really good. Rad gets similar mitigation from Enervating Field but only if the enemies actually sit in it. Forge is double perma out of the box and with SOs it's quad perma so even the most basic level 50 build can keep it on all of the damage dealers in your team. Heat Exhaustion offers same -Regen as Radiation (only on one target, though) with a hefty -DMG which combined with the shields is more mitigation than Rad can cough up. The longer cooldown can be offset by IO investment. Melt Armor isn't quite as great as RI + EF due to the higher recharge, but again with enough +Recharge it can be made perma and then your -Res equals what Rad gives at least in AV fights where it matters the most. The clicky nature may or may not be more useful in fast paced teams against regular mobs. Thermal has better heals which, admittedly is the smallest thing it has over Rad. Then again, Rad offers +Rech and +Recovery for the whole team at the click of a button (also allows you to skip some +Rech bonuses in favor of something else) and the +DMG from AM is less cumbersome to keep up than juggling Forge. Radiation also has less "mandatory" powers and it's less active so it's a better fit for tighter builds or any powerset that requires you to manage things like Water Blast. Both are great sets, though, so I wouldn't stress too much about it.

I'm fairly sure that cooldown refreshes if you switch zones, but undoubtedly someone will correct me if I'm wrong. As far as I know, the mechanic is there to stop you from freely switching between incarnate abilities within a piece of content to match each individual encounter.

I don't expect anyone to give a rat's ass about my veteran status. That said, I do have a lot of experience with most things in the game and I've spent quite a bit of time learning about different mechanics so I'm probably more qualified to help people than someone who's new to the game. Still, there are a bunch of things especially when it comes to the last year of CoX I'm unfamiliar with because military didn't provide me ample time to play back then, but I like to look at that as an opportunity to still learn something.

All the secondary effects are pretty crap in my opinion due to their incredibly low magnitude. For example, I was looking at Spectral for the immobilization to set up containment on my Illusion controller, but at least according to Pine's it's just 12.5% chance for a 4 second mag 2 immob. The NE damage over time is pretty good to diversify my damage types so I might still go for it, but the pick doesn't seem to be a game changer. I typically pick a rarely resisted damage type or whatever seems to fit my character concept the best. Also picking some of the more common interfaces (Reactive) makes them pretty useless in a team environment as they only stack up so many times so the third guy with the same interface doesn't really add anything.