Sancerre

yea i get you on that. the procalypse has been looming for how many years now? mostly come to accept that the procs are the game -- so build around them.

i agree with you that -resistance is powerful and that is entirely the reason i suggested the change: to allow for more -resistance. im pretty certain the math is different than what you have laid out but the general prospect is that -resistance is quite valuable all the same. the -damage part on a single target ability is really not that impactful however... in my opinion. during the general gameplay loop, im not slappin enzymes on everything. i would mostly reserve it for an incidental boss that happened to be outside the AoE zone or explicitly AVs. AVs have something like 85% debuff resistance though. playing a corruptor and using corrosive enzymes against an AV reduces their damage by 4% and it gets worse if they are higher level than you. yes 4% is better than nothing but it is not likely going to make or break whoever is getting hit by the AV. city of heroes is an AoE game. single target abilities, especially non damaging ones, are far less valuable in general gameplay.

Curious -- i personally rate cold and time VERY highly and i thought people really liked kinetics... as like the big 3. I have viewed nature as more middle of the pack i guess -- good but not great. different perspectives i suppose. yea idk maybe i jumped the gun with the suggestion at corrosive enzymes. was just looking to speed up the some of the 'oomph' while using the set. enzymes feels kind of lousy to use for incidental boss spawns every 20 feet. enzymes feels OK to use on an AV but kinda just OK -- and i suppose that should just be fine for a T1 power. spore cloud is probably the better target for better gameplay on Nature. speed up the anchor animation to 2s

first comment -- i am actually a fairly shocked to hear that you dont use achilles' heel on any of your heroes/villains. dont know if that stems from some sort of personal refusal on your end or just a coincidental lack of -defense powers in the powersets you gravitate towards. you seem to recognize the proc has value. i was looking at nature from a 'where does it make sense to help out nature across the set' perspective. didnt really do my homework on adjacent t1 powers -- there are even worse t1 powers (sonic siphon, for example). in that vein, it does make my suggestion for corrosive enzyme a -very- strong button. Admittedly, i do not personally value -foe damage% debuff very much -- maybe i should. regarding collective synergies with 1 other power in the nature powerset... throwing down debuff numbers that are substantially away from poison / trick arrow / cold dom does not particularly have me imagining the proposal would suddenly shift the meta into Nature Affinity over Cold Dom. bit of apples and oranges for me to compare debuff oriented sets to healing oriented sets anyways, i get that. The initial thought was: Time Manipulation (in my opinion) is a very close parallel to Nature Affinity and i was looking to achieve a similar feat with corrosive enzymes that slowed response does (single target vs AoE) -- so i thought, if Time can do it... why not Nature. i could very well be reaching too far here though. side note -- spore cloud feels awful to use as a 3.1 second cast anchor toggle (all the same as darkest night)... Nature feels kinda sluggish overall.

Nature Affinity (defender primary) Corrosive Enzymes - Tier 1 power Spray a single target with toxic, corrosive enzymes reducing the damage they deal as well as their damage resistance. Single Target Damage Debuff: 31.25% (25% corruptor) Resistance Reduction: 25% (18.75% corruptor) Writing for a small but notable change -- please add some percentage of Defense Debuff to this, it can be even be -1% (the actual amount literally doesn't matter). Why? The obvious Achilles' Heel resistance reduction proc... and a few others if you would choose to proc it out i guess. You may ask why this is needed -- I will note that no, it is not needed. I would mostly justify the change as a quality of life. everybody and their mom has achilles' heel slotted into their kit somewhere these days and it doesn't stack. That in mind, this is a relatively low impact change for party play and a nice subtle change for Nature enjoyers to give a better sense that pressing the Corrosive Enzymes button feels impactful (there is literally nothing else to slot in this thing). **good discussion in the thread -- i dont really like this suggestion anymore**

look i dont really care to make this a topic about min-maxing parties or having the bost possible solo character or something along those lines. i already noted sentinels are quite good at solo play and function perfectly fine in parties. obfuscating is trying to glow up sentinels to be better than they literally perform. is your platform that sentinel is somehow more beneficial than either blaster or scrapper on a team? what does a sentinel offer the team other than self-contained damage (reasonably a margin lower than scrapper and blaster) and a (very) small debuff for AV killing? they offer less aoe (via the 10 target cap) than blasters. they offer substantially less single target DPS than scrappers (not even stalkers win here ironically) what is this party buff/utility that you think is so valuable? go ahead and make your case. maybe you just like arguing for the sake of arguing -- i dont know what your game is. if you are looking to point out that it is a ranged scrapper for semantics sake, that is all well and good but IOs and incarnates have broken the ceiling of what is 'necessary' to be self-contained. to me, a sentinel is a more defensive blaster -- despite whatever the initial intentions were. apparently my opinion is invalid to you though, thanks for that.

it is mostly non sequitur and wasnt really a highlight of my post... a bit of a shower thought -- dominators are already a mez protected melee/ranged hybrid. what is the purpose of proliferating assault sets by pairing with armor sets?

sentinels are fine solo. team environment they are less optimal than having a collection of corruptors and blasters. i dont know why people really love obfuscating the truth... platitudes of play it your way or as long as you are trying your best then its all fun......... yes sentinels can slap fingers on the keyboard and everybody can win at the game. you can complete a task force with 7 people instead of 8. sentinels do not have good aggro draw tools, do less damage than blaster and have a lower target cap (10). there is no mindset here of being a 'ranged scrapper' here. it is a -less useful- blaster because a blaster with team buffs will make the entire secondary tree that sentinel has worthless. sentinel's passive is... functionally better than its inception but still a farcry from tanker gauntlet or scrapper crits -- yes it is 'useful' but 99% of the party content will be annihilating anything less than an AV before it serves any functional purpose. even on an AV, it is... very tiny. all the other -res procs do not stack -- a sentinel does not need to be the one to apply them all (and likely someone else is already). outside of hard-mode and especially solo content, sentinel is great. i think the concept overall of sentinel is fine. no real changes needed (or maybe a look at power pool options?) also -- dominators exist.

for solo play you will not really be seeing much of a difference between defender and corruptor. in fact, defender probably does more damage solo. corruptor does more damage in teams when defender's passive vigilance is removed and corruptor can potentially benefit from more +damage party buffs. where you WILL see a difference is with perma-soul drain builds (really only viable with XX/Time/Dark) and /kinetics builds as both of them will blow past defender's damage cap during aim/build up but corruptor will be able to continue climbing. if you are trying to play hover/ranged builds, that doesnt really mesh with soul drain builds... so ignore that i guess. there is otherwise not a great reason to run solo corruptor over defender on anything else except kinetics IMO (party play is entirely separate conversation). as for your primary damage powerset... there isnt going to be much variance here if you want to follow 'best' -- fire is the guy. ice is quite good all the same on corruptor with double rains and a nice exotic damage type. most other powersets can serve you well enough, but your mileage will vary... especially against certain enemy types.

yea i agree overall. Both RoP & UP also lock out 1 of 4 power pools though. power pools would mostly be setup as: 1) speed / hasten 2) fighting / tough+weave 3) leaping / combat jumping (generic 2% defense with virtually no end cost... and mystic flight sucks without it) **CJ is skippable but it is incredibly efficient to have. 4) -- FLEX -- **Leadership for maneuvers would typically be a go-to here to bump out 3% defense to all for self (and party) (would not recommend Leadership Assault on scrapper, not worth end cost) shield defense as a powerset kind of softly demands you take every single power -- just gets tough to fit everything. also -- special shout-out to teleport/fold space. if you are willing to 'sacrifice' power slots, i think fold space more fun and practical than RoP and UP both. especially because energy melee's AoE is incredibly TINY.

shield defense alongside standard global IOs, weave, and combat jumping slotted up gets you _most_ of the way to softcap. you can do some clever slotting for scrappers strike set 3 pc to get the 2.5% melee defense twice but you'll lose out on proc damage. makos bite (melee single target) is good for ranged defense but you lose proc damage. blessing of the zephyr (universal travel) has good positional defense bonuses and can be often forgotten about. winter sets are otherwise your go-to for big defense gains. generally speaking, you'll need to make a decision... do you want to focus on set bonuses to get self soft-capped or let team-mates and/or barrier incarnate fill the void and go for proc damage instead. crit proc goes into total focus. **** ENERGY TRANSFER*** (bone smasher is also viable if you prefer it there) true grit can be odd to slot, but would recommend at least getting near ED% on the heal (2x raw heal will do that) and you can make your own assessment of 'value' on the resistance or global IO muling from there. active defense is fine with 1 recharge IO period, but you might want 2 slots UNTIL you get to perma-hasten levels of global recharge. the defense debuff resistance can be double stacked and is very valuable to do so where needed... dont skip over grant cover. its good for a lotg mule and provides valuable defense debuff resistance to you otherwise. one with the shield is solid as a one-off and the crash is manageable -- the T9 is worth taking even if you do not invest much slotting into it. you can do some interesting chains with melee hybrid and rune of protection, BUT it is not infinite anyways and you 'waste' 2 power choices getting to rune of prot... i would personally recommend staying away from rune of protection shenanigans. melee hybrid > one with shield > melee hybrid is a 6 minute chain in its own right which is nice for AVs or something, BUT you are playing a scrapper so probably stick with the fundamental role of DAMAGE --> assault hybrid.

very nice write-ups. i would have advised to reserve a bunch of posts at the front of your topic such that replies wouldnt break up the flow of your powerset reviews, but appreciated content all the same!

big item to note with sentinel is that max targets is TEN (10) instead of SIXTEEN (16)... and especially for the big t9 nuke. it is a substantial difference. may or may not be a deal breaker, but something to consider.

not intending to steer you in a massively different direction but ice/ice (both primary and secondary) are IMO much better for stalker. the big decision to me for scrapper vs stalker is how well controlled the scrapper crit strikes proc can function and whether or not you get a taunt aura. ice armor does _not_ have taunt aura (to my knowledge) and the crit strikes proc just does not have a great home in ice melee (best served in freezing touch but also sucks to put it there -- greater ice sword recharges too fast to be reliable proc but is otherwise your next best option). stalker trades greater ice sword for assassins strike (big win) and icicles for hide, which helps buffer out more +defense. ice melee is top tier regardless anyways (stalker and scrapper). ice armor is a bit of an oddball though because it doesnt end up specializing hard enough into particularly anything defensively (except the T9 when it is available)... i personally feel like it needs _SUBSTANTIAL_ investment into the expensive winter sets to get a lot of fire/cold defense added in that is mysteriously missing from the power set otherwise. there are other ways to get fire/cold defense set bonuses but winter sets are like the fast lane i guess. anyways... it can feel like a bit of a problem for surviving solo without making creative use of your ice melee holds/ice patch against toxic/psionic/fire damage types before you make the big IO set investments.

thanks for all the feedback about my comments btw regarding the /nin t9 -- is that just because of the +end self clicky effectively removing the need to work around ageless and/or carry blues? or is there other hidden tech there?

awesome thanks for the reference. a few things in here pop out to me as something i wouldnt have moved towards but the results in your video speak for itself. chance to hide proc... i have read that most people just dump it in assassins strike so you dont accidentally use the free crit on assassins strike. i guess with total focus you almost always follow into energy transfer or power crash here so that makes sense for energy melee. do you end up using weaken resolve at all? seems like a waste of time unless achilles heel procs... and its not even a capped proc per minute at 30s. understandably you probably just have the proc in there as a why not scenario really surprised to see you slotting in so much recharge on energy transfer and total focus ON TOP of procs... counter-intuitive to me as far as proc math is concerned placate slotting initially is really surprising but has quite nice set bonuses for typed defenses heavy favor towards chance to heal procs on endurance auto powers instead of stamina procs -- presuming end is just not a concern with perma-energize focused accuracy slotting on top of having kismet already seems excessive but this just looks like an area where i can flex slots around so all good. i honestly never considered energy torrent before seeing your build, but it is quite a nice power and fills in a much needed void for force feedback recharge proc that energy melee doesnt have otherwise... incidentally the focused accuracy is just kinda needed anyways. also energy melee doesnt have PBAoE so its already typically in positions for cones (with power crash in mind). DPA is serviceable even as a single target attack with all the procs in mind anyways. i might opt for javelin's toxic proc instead of the annihilation smaller -res proc (only 12%) and the big one... agility core paragon. really hard for me to look at playing stalker and not immediately gravitate towards musculature. i do see the major impact being on overload here which is the hallmark of the build... 15 seconds longer gap in cooldown. ill have to walk that one down a bit and see what feels right for me. really appreciate you posting this.

yea the +special at the start of clarion (i think about 15 seconds?) is almost exactly the same as power boost... and they do stack if you wanted to go that route (unnecessary though). as far as the overlap vs duration problem... it is something you learn to deal with -- the cooldown matches duration EXACTLY so dont dally if you are in the middle of a bunch of baddies (Q it up as it is coming off cooldown)... that said i have never had a problem refreshing clarion + farsight in the middle of baddies... be it lag or whatever tolerance... there seems to be some 2 second-ish buffer/tolerance before you actually lose all your defense. it also means that your big buffs (far sight and chrono shift) have de-synced re-applications... far sight at 2 minutes, chrono shift at 1 minute 30. again just something to deal with. special note that i am sure you are aware of all the same -- you can overwrite the boosted farsight with a non-boosted farsight... so you do need to be careful about that. power boost can be available more often to fix that mistake. conversely you get 1 chance every 2 minutes to do it right with clarion. i think the decision for power boost should be more tailored to your power sets and what level content you enjoy running anyways. for example electrical blast has the end sapping amplified substantially. for fire blast... well i just want to do more damage and power boost doesnt help that in any way directly. as far as the gaussian proc -- i personally run fire/time corruptor with gaussian in Aim. stacked with on top of big soul drains, i can very easily get near damage cap especially for big t9 nukes. i could be wrong here, but i do not believe proc duration/length increases based on what skill it is slotted in... just proc chance. global recharge is very valuable here to maintain very high proc chance while also having the buttons available more often. proc chance math is an entirely different rabbit hole anyways.

clarion radial (destiny incarnate) is an alternative to power boost (the +special is virtually identical)... or you can use both before farsight i suppose. the potential benefit here is running dark mastery over soul mastery. the soul drain from dark mastery is half the cooldown allowing you to have PERMANENT soul drain (and mostly aligned with t9 nuke cooldown). a power boost build is going to be better where you exemplar down and dont have access to incarnate... or if you otherwise dont value your personal damage as much. dark mastery's dark consumption is also helpful if you run tough/weave and leadership toggles (you will run out of end eventually)... typically though you would run ageless incarnate with power boost so you get end recovery there... just ends up being a bit of an inverted approach.

your build takes a very unique approach that i am very interested in --- possible to clip it into mids? general question -- non level cap stuff, does the build operates just fine not needing to cycle overload? presuming it would be so long as no psionic mobs.

nin gets 34.6% DDR baseline. shield with double stack active defense gets 70% DDR. you can in fact maintain 100% uptime on double active defense with 2 recharge IOs and standard (near) perma-hasten level global recharge. ageless radial has a -persistent- 21.25% additional DDR (the first minute of ageless has a lot more debuff resistance). so with ageless radial, nin can maintain a MINIMUM DDR of 56%, but shield can maintain a MINIMUM DDR of 91%. the difference is very much night and day when you -need- DDR, but there is also plenty of content that it wont even matter. if you decide on barrier instead, you should look to use it for emergencies instead of just pressing it to maintain the constant 5% defense/resistance (for NIN specifically) again i think /nin is a fairly strong set, but it has a clear weakness there... just as shield has a weakness with no endurance/heal tools. find ways to patch up what you can through incarnates, IOs, ancillary pools, epic pools, etc.

what you are missing is that even if you spam ageless radial on CD, you only have a persistent ~55% DDR... not particularly 'close to immune'. after one minute you only keep something like 21% debuff resistance for the last minute. shield defense and super reflexes are 'close to immune', both being able to maintain 90%++ on scrapper. also the crit from stealth is kinda meaningless but nice fluff when it happens. nin is still pretty good overall anyways, but vulnerable cascading defense failure. also there are no offensive attributes in the set (+dmg or +recharge)

i made a thread about a month back asking for GiS to get some love... had no negative feedback. just need to wait for the next patch cycle and try to bump it up for attention i guess.

GiS is good for scrapper to hold the crit proc if you want to lead into freezing touch. otherwise you can put the crit ATO in freezing touch to be a much more consistent proc... but you can never use the bonus crit chance on freezing touch itself. if you dont want to do GiS crit proc, then you should either utilize frost in single target chain or pick up cross punch. GiS is worth using, but it is definitely underwhelming. the animation time on it is perfectly fine to fit the ice melee rotation, but the damage is just not where it should be.

the concept of fire/ice is great thematically and the ice patch synergizes well with burn as well as providing a ton of CC for squishy fire armor but the lack of FF recharge is rough. MA and claws really shine in this aspect comparatively... cause burn feels like its just always available and burn is such a foundational piece of fire armor tanker. its a bit frustrating cause i feel like ice melee is so close to being a top tier set... and its not even so much the buttons themselves, but rather that nothing accepts FF recharge! cross punch is really the only thing that can elevate ice melee, but the proc rate isnt all that great and the cone/range sucks. its rough to fit the power in as a tanker though cause you are already forced to take frozen fists and, while not necessary, cross punch feels a lot better fully synergized with kick/boxing.

brute has higher damage resistances and still has acceptable damage output for bosses+. if you dont see the value in 90% damage cap vs 75% damage cap then you are entirely ignorant of the math. also larger HP pool to compliment rad's high regen and absorb. anyways, there is plenty of content where the 75% damage resistance is perfectly acceptable and easily more than acceptable to get by with however. i dont think i was hiding anything when i said that but you chopped out my entire post and highlighted one line. as for rad therapy -on claw scrapper-, of course you would still use rad therapy for healing and endurance. spin and shockwave both cooldown fast enough (especially with force feedback recharge procs) to be spamming them a ton whereas rad therapy has a much longer cooldown. also they both will be doing as much or MORE damage than rad therapy. the better question here is why do you think it has value in slotting damage procs -on claw scrapper-. What function is it serving that spin/shockwave isnt? i would say, additionally, ground zero is kinda skippable but it is nice for aoe -res procs and it also hits a much higher target cap. the DPA isnt much different than spin otherwise. if this was playing in something like energy melee scrapper instead, where the AoE is... lacking... i would have a different opinion on slotting rad therapy. in case my opinion wasnt clear in my first post -- the combination of claw/rad for tanker, brute, and scrapper are -ALL- strong. you just need to choose what ratio of offense/defense you prefer between the 3. also inspirations/p2w buffs will give the largest benefit (relatively) to scrappers so you can hide a lot of defensive under-comings it has through that.