Dixa

https://web.archive.org/web/20120905032911/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=255708

I just ran a test of my fully upgraded howler wolf attacking a practice dummy on the test server. Here's the combat log, for a one-minute timeframe (I removed the ticks of bleed damage from the log): 2019-06-29 11:12:16 Howler Wolf: HIT Howler Wolf! Your Wild Charge power is autohit. 2019-06-29 11:12:16 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf HITS you! Wild Charge power was autohit. 2019-06-29 11:12:16 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf begins a Wild Charge boosting their damage and movement speed. 2019-06-29 11:12:17 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Feral Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 68.09. 2019-06-29 11:12:17 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf bashes Practice Dummy with their Feral Charge for 0 points of Smashing damage and reduces their defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:18 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf knocks Practice Dummy off their feet with their Feral Charge! 2019-06-29 11:12:20 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 52.10. 2019-06-29 11:12:20 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:12:21 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf lets out an howl bolstering the damage of nearby beast allies! 2019-06-29 11:12:26 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Maiming Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 59.88. 2019-06-29 11:12:26 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Maiming Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage and reduces their movement speed and defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:29 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 89.35. 2019-06-29 11:12:29 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:12:31 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Feral Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 0.43. 2019-06-29 11:12:31 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf bashes Practice Dummy with their Feral Charge for 0 points of Smashing damage and reduces their defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:31 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf knocks Practice Dummy off their feet with their Feral Charge! 2019-06-29 11:12:33 Howler Wolf: MISSED Practice Dummy!! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 96.90. 2019-06-29 11:12:35 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Maiming Bite power was forced to hit by streakbreaker. 2019-06-29 11:12:35 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Maiming Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage and reduces their movement speed and defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:38 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 0.16. 2019-06-29 11:12:38 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:12:39 Howler Wolf: Your Vicious Bite causes Practice Dummy to bleed for 0 points of lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:12:41 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Feral Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 27.28. 2019-06-29 11:12:41 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf bashes Practice Dummy with their Feral Charge for 0 points of Smashing damage and reduces their defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:41 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf knocks Practice Dummy off their feet with their Feral Charge! 2019-06-29 11:12:44 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Maiming Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 53.07. 2019-06-29 11:12:44 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Maiming Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage and reduces their movement speed and defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:47 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 46.30. 2019-06-29 11:12:47 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:12:51 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Feral Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 3.88. 2019-06-29 11:12:51 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf bashes Practice Dummy with their Feral Charge for 0 points of Smashing damage and reduces their defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:51 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf knocks Practice Dummy off their feet with their Feral Charge! 2019-06-29 11:12:53 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Maiming Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 71.94. 2019-06-29 11:12:54 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Maiming Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage and reduces their movement speed and defense! 2019-06-29 11:12:56 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 87.11. 2019-06-29 11:12:56 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:13:01 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Feral Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 87.44. 2019-06-29 11:13:01 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf bashes Practice Dummy with their Feral Charge for 0 points of Smashing damage and reduces their defense! 2019-06-29 11:13:04 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Maiming Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 19.83. 2019-06-29 11:13:04 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Maiming Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage and reduces their movement speed and defense! 2019-06-29 11:13:06 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 77.65. 2019-06-29 11:13:06 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! 2019-06-29 11:13:11 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Feral Charge power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 19.21. 2019-06-29 11:13:11 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf bashes Practice Dummy with their Feral Charge for 0 points of Smashing damage and reduces their defense! 2019-06-29 11:13:13 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Maiming Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 77.09. 2019-06-29 11:13:13 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Maiming Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage and reduces their movement speed and defense! 2019-06-29 11:13:16 Howler Wolf: HIT Practice Dummy! Your Vicious Bite power had a 95.00% chance to hit, you rolled a 42.91. 2019-06-29 11:13:16 Howler Wolf: Howler Wolf shreds Practice Dummy with their Vicious Bite for 0 points of Lethal damage! In one minute, it does 21 things, so acting about every 2.8 seconds or so. There are some very odd patches of "dead time" where it's literally doing nothing, even though abilities aren't on cooldown. It looks like not so much like the pet is spending too much time casting buffs (because it's not), it's that there is some odd, baked-in downtime to its attack chain. Like bleed ticks prevent it from attacking again, or the animation cycle for the abilities is set to have several extra seconds where it has to wait for the "animation" to end before it can do anything else. Now I'm curious, and going to test some of the other pets, to see if they have this same oddity. i wasn't making that 30% number up. it's in the mastermind issues thread in the old forums. it was never addressed. none of the mm issues there have been.

the dot should do more damage with the lt's and the boss pet. i generally go with degenerative as reducing max hp also reduces regen rate. testing on a nasty +4 ghost widow in the oro arc it was night and day how fast she dropped between the resist interface and the degen.

Dixa, do you have more of a starter set build? Things like superior command of the MM, SBA etc are super rare, super expensive purple IO's. For a new 50, how would you slot with more affordable IO sets to start? Thank you Also, for demon/time which alpha slot would you suggest? for any fresh mm i always take one or two attacks from the primary until i get the level 26 pet, then i respec out of them to my final build - with or without set io's. prices are rather consistent for the ato's and any purple sets, so i do recommend you make a spines/fire farming brute. it power levels itself to 50 in about 15 hours of playtime with no io sets. alpha depends. time is end hungry and vulnerable to cc. if you are getting clarion, then get the alpha with the end reduction (NOT the one that increases the effectivness of end mods). if you are going agless, get the 45% dmg musculature.

It’s been my experience that any resist cap mm primary is less vulnerable to one shots than defense based. This is after testing almost 40 mm power set combos on Justin against the aoe’ng pylon and the Maria Jenkins av arc set to +3 and +4 Dead pets give nothing to bodyguard. The actual challenge is fitting in provoke without gimping your build in some way

All i will add here is that you don’t mention your goals. The above advice is solid, I will add that if your goal is near effortless av killing, traps is where it’s at.

There is a demons thermal thread titled demons thermal in this forum that will answer your question. Page 2

All I know is that of the mm primaries I threw at the pylon on Justin these guys had the worst performance and took the longest to drop the avs in the Maria Jenkins arc. I had to use lore pets far more often. Sure they get big hits now and then but their hits are so infrequent that their actual dps is low and like demons they struggle to all get on smaller targets however demons at least have ranged attacks

never plan on doing dark astoria or incarnate trials? cause unless you at 59% you ain't capped yet, cupcake. the damage on electric fences is pretty tiny even with damage procs. would like to see this resist capped build.

what are you tankerminding? before live went down, the most powerful tankermind I ever saw was a bots/time setup that tanked the av's in the incarnate trials. for general tankerminding it tends to be bots/traps, but honestly ANYTHING with provoke and cc immunity is a tankermind imo. find a way to wrestle your end use issues that nearly all mm secondaries have, grab clarion and provoke in any mm powerset combination and have at it.

Really? From what I've head it's Ninjas that are dead last. Why would you say it's Beasts? I mean, from this post about their innate resistances and traits, they all share the same speed boost. But the first two tiers of Beast minions have higher defense and resistance, and with Pack Mentality stacks, higher damage. what is your metric here? if overall then yeah, due to survivability issues ninja's tend to fall off. but by way of damage ninja's are the highest single target, followed by thugs then demons (depending on target). bots rock aoe if and ONLY IF you are using an aoe immob power so stuff doesn't run. beasts will spam no damage roars frequently to keep extremely short d uration buffs up. this means that nearly 30% of their attack cycle has no damage, and mm pets are not affected by recharge boosts. when they hit, they hit HARD, but the infrequent hits makes their dps rather poor.

for time it's always mace due to powerboosted farsight, and the aoe immob. in pve i am a strong believer that every mm should have an aoe immob to bring a little control to the chaos. as you are playing demon you will need powerboosted farsight since only the prince has any base defense to work with.

If you aren't hurting for end i would focus your incarnates on increasing your damage. 45% musculature, double hit assault, either -res or -maxhp interface. grab clarion so you no longer have to worry about cc

STAHP! i dont want to roll anymore thugs mm's i already have 4.

time stop is not skippable as it has the other half of your -regen the dmg buff is all but useless if not teaming regularly.

mm's have a harder time than most in dark astoria until you can get the +incarnate level tiers of powers, and even then still have a rough time of it. there is just a metric butt-ton of tohit and damage in that content. it can be discouraging until you get your incarnate abilities up.

bodyguard mode only works so long as your pets are alive. demons have no innate defense, only a large amount of resists except the prince who has a bit of both. if your goal is to maximize bodyguard for survival, then a defense based secondary for demons is not the way to go.

They make things easier FOR YOU. But for someone like me with manual dexterity issues, managing WASD is already a full-time job for my left hand. Asking me to try and hunt down a bunch of esoteric keyboard commands during the time crunch of combat (when everything I need to do is better handled by my dominant hand on the mouse interfacing with command buttons I can actually see on-screen) is a bit like asking me to walk the long way round to get to work when I have a car and a short, direct route. A lot of wasted time and effort for an ultimately inferior result when I already have a working system in place? No thank you. EDITED: for some reason my reply ended up in the middle there. i'm like you. i cant fathom how people can easily reach up and hit the function keys without looking at the keyboard. oh so long ago when i was training myself in the late 90's to move away from using the arrow keys to turn and clicking everything i still could not do much with my left hand other than wasd, and maybe q, e, shift, alt and ctrl. I recommend you look into a 7 button mouse. I use logitech mice and have for a very long time. three buttons on my thumb, two small buttons to the lower left of mouse button one and the mouse wheel clicks left and right for two more. there's an easy 7 hotkeys. if you are able to manage shift, ctrl and alt you can use those as modifiers with the 7 hotkeys, giving you 28 total.

this is why i no longer group with my defense based mm's. it's too frustrating the rate you have to replace pets. it's overall less of a problem when your pets are capped to lethal/smash/fire/cold/toxic resists, so i only group on my demon/thermal mm. still have to replace pets often, but nowhere near as often.

Never played cold but it looks busy and mm have end issues in general.

if you are using tequila the test server is already installed. it's the 2nd option in the launcher. you can find details on the commands to create sets and boost your character on the beta forum here.

Snowstorm and Sleet not enough? Seemed ok (albeit briefly) on Justin, I'm at 24 now on Everlasting. If you recommend an immobilize Dixa, which would you lean torward? I edited my post.

not building to take on av's but with no aoe immob clearly not building to take on groups, either? just gonna play on 4/0? i try to build my bots to not rely on the shield from protectors. get rid of the hammi-o's and slot the ato's. You have no end reduction in your pets and are playing a secondary that does not provide end t your pets and did not state if you are taking ageless or not. Your pets will run dry quickly and you are missing out on 30% recharge get rid of the defense io's in bots. you don't need them as cold, ff, traps or time if using the unique io's. proper efficient slotting for your pets is 4 of each mm ato set in assault bot and protector bots. which you do which with is up to you. the last two of each set in the tier 1 bots. from here fill out the other 4 unique io's, and kb to kd, damage procs, build up in the tier 1's something like this has you softcapped in pve without bot shield, 3 points shy of incarnate cap with bot shield, an aoe immob and your pets doing a LOT more damage while having end recovery and with ageless - perma hasten. | Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1500;701;1402;HEX;| |78DA65944D6F126110C79F85A59437A1A5484BA1144AA1144A41BD9BD837A32569A| |C563D3508DB7613601168A247BF416D343DE807F062B55E34C6189B585F62BC7BD5| |8BF1E0CB411363D2E064E72F6076C3E6F7ECCC33F3FC676697FCB559E7EEC28D934| |2F2CC940B8DC66ABED0682AF58A5A2D59F28575B568167459E90E743CABCB9B958A| |56CD9CD3AE684DB5D80877B94E6DAEAD6566B4726975562343A1A96A55E15AD2B47| |226AF94D4A25A551CFAD37C595DDF68DAF5F5724D514A6E7DB9A8144A4ABDB1A1D6| |827335B598E94A9D2F1415E8BB3E488A92743FB5085C2D8BB8200B919385E922786| |0D629BF04674C3A7BBED0F6842CCAC976AC244CB427248BE91E66857C12FB4C9247| |E2B80166AF8F19A2B698B1C73C27E9397B4F33EDF3CC67A48F25B6842522F4381BC| |559258EB322570EB973384BA3F36DC86D83CD8E3D4EC43CA7C40ED4EEB8CC353BCF| |338FAC8097989E4F54BB97F8937B10260D2EE47741FB00B40F2C30ABA4C18DFCEEF| |B7CE6D15DF00133F69039B507FD8F980ECADF87BAFB0ED97695F279B96E8B7784CF| |188C821166E018CF2AE197F4394C86D9BE352E840FF97CE86394CEF0A38FFE14DB0| |2E034F8827A34841A86DE72EEE06BF01573E40DF88B63463EF2739DF40E73AC3C1C| |60DFE83FA6FE67049AFA4853089A42985304738B608EFBA4298C5AC2886BD05951E| |88CBEE3198D1D8038636C9F67187BCFF6D867D6D9A4D871C48EEF71DFE298531C73| |8A634E09CC3181393DA61413A871628B6DC99BE06D709B39798BF98462525CA39C4| |28D69D498468DE943A1EB98FACDF4525F32F8D63277B98EE93B4C27F9B2E847F60F| |C707E5F6B7493FBAC4A4C19235587206CB7183E584C1B268B0E43B96D692DCFE271| |092EEB579DADF7DEBAB9DBC52B7F77BC7629256D0B933FC164F457862DF0C513FBA| |A34679DEFDDB3CE7FE1DE6592F81F7B476BAD6F7A29DF5872EFB5F2DB8F220| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|

even if you stand still always, during momentum TW is the fastest animating set in the game.

if you are going dark or time medicine is a waste of power choices. both sets have a very strong heal. the extra pet in dark is extremely helpful vengeance can't be used on a dead pet. victory rush is only worthwhile on Eb's and AV's and is replaced by incarnates entirely. it also has an unenhanceable stupidly long recharge time. the -tohit in dark (and the pbaoe in time) are affected by mob level difference. google city of heroes purple patch for more details. you only need three binds two of which you start with - follow defensive, attack defensive, goto defensive. right click and edit the two attack and follow macros you start out with from aggressive to defensive. if you are really on the fence as to which secondary, make both on justin boost to 50 and try them both. i am finding justin to be a godsend because quite often builds on paper don't work out in practice.