JusticeBowler

OK. I've been playing this build for a couple of days now Electric/Poison Controller. Here's my latest experiment in -END/-REC. It doesn't help where you need most of the help (the alpha strike). However, I will say that after a few seconds into the battle I do see an effect particularly in a place in the game I didn't expect. The high end. When people are running +4/x8 unless they are all floating Incarnate level damage it does take a minute to melt mobs and END is quicker to floor than health to zero. Folks might dip in health, but with the LTs and Bosses low-to-no END folks can concentrate on clean up. It feels a bit like how Empathy, Regen, and other "reactive" defenses work but it does work. I was hoping that Poison's Weaken (which I have maxed out for -TOHIT) would fill the gap, but it doesn't have the range to affect enough of the mobs (unlike Dark and Rad similar powers) and still takes a moment to have an effect, so I just can't provide that sort of mitigation. That's OK... there are other people on the team that can help with that. The real question is, is it more mitigation than say taking Fire instead of Electric would have been (mitigation by faster mob melting)? My argument is yes. The truth is, as awesome as a Fire controller can be they still do less damage than other ATs (say a Fire blaster). And the difference between a Fire and Electric controller is less than a Fire and Electric blaster. I'm simply not there for damage. Gremlins will help though, I'm sure. Most of the damage difference would probably be the difference between Gremlins and Fire Imps. Yes, I could have gone /Kin, but I think when I get Poison Trap at 38 I won't be sorry at all.

Groovy.

Procs are so confusing and the implementation is so strange. I mean, I can't see how Impeded Swiftness Chance for Smashing damage could possibly be better than just slotting a DMG IO in there. There's a lot of that sort of thing with slotting sets. Apart from the "overall effect" of getting all the sets to carefully line up so a character is at the DEF softcap, or to satisfy some RCHG hungry-crazy folks trying to get to 350+ global ... all of it seems not much of an improvement over straight slots. I'm sitting here thinking "can I improve over common IOs for anything I'm doing" and the answer is, not really. Getting Shield Breaker and Cloud Senses chance for damage into Envenom and Weaken is novel (hey they do damage now) but such minimal damage as to be unnoticable. It looks like procs (apart from some specific ... devs screwed up and missed this crazy idea) are primarily for people with some extra slots for powers otherwise already maxed out in utility.

So a Tank with Electric Melee could slot EM Chance to Disorient, Triumphant Insult Chance to Disorient, and Pounding Slugfest Chance to Disorient but I'm out of luck?

So, I built a Electric/Poison Controller and I'm having a bit of fun. But the truth is, I just can't quite slam the -END and -REC quickly enough across enough of the mobs to be terribly useful doing it. I mean, if someone else had the same effect (even unslotted) then together we could sap whole mob groups. But I got to thinking about EM:CtS... I mean, it isn't unique. Why can't I put 3 or even 5 of these in every one of my Electric attacks? Each one would fire off about every 30 seconds which would mean across 4 or 5 powers and 3-5 procs per power I could be a stun spamming nightmare. Tell me why this doesn't work a lot better than trying to sap the poor bastages.

I think the strange thing about any increase in interest in the player base for making real money in the AH is really just raising more folks into the range where they can afford the good stuff. Converters aren't ever going away due to merit farming and with all the AE tickets flowing the rare salvage being cheap means a lot of folks will probably craft those themselves keeping prices up. I see the medium term (weeks to months) price as pretty stable. We could have a rough time on a weekend if a few billionaires wanted to drop their bankrolls on friends and sundry, but I wonder if that would have a bigger effect on grapesets and Winter IOs more than on the upper end of the Rare market. Once that INF is back in the market it is going to wash all over the place though, which incentivizes more extractors. As long as there are plenty of Converters flowing from the Merit vendors (and the profit for dumping them on the market is fast-reliable money that's immediately spent on the market) the whole playerbase benefits from the ability (as a group) to move relatively unwanted IOs into more desirable sets. COMMODIFICATION => LIQUIDITY! Now that I've got the hang of making a little bit of cash, I'd certainly hate to see the spigot turn off entirely, but I suspect that no matter what the monetary rewards a good portion of the player base will be happy to pay us to make AH work well for them. It isn't a bad trade for them after all. It would be nice to get causal folks out of Single Origins and into the market though. They really are missing out, even with Common IOs and lesser sets. Heck, even "collecting" the sets is fun IMNHO.

I never care about what a toon is like at the end game. I know that's what the boards are obsessed with, but it has never factored into my enjoyment of the game or the way I play it. This isn't just the alt-itis talking. It is also that builds at 50+ depend far more on your willingness to tweak it to its optimum design at enormous expense. I build toons to explore a character concept or far more likely a "play style" that would make trying to plan for maximum utility either PvE or PvP at the end game impossible to achieve. In this case, I was largely trying to avoid stupid mistakes and see if there was something statistically significant in playability at low levels Gold Side because that's all I'll probably ever play this toon to do. Once it hits lvl 20 it will probably be retired. I won't ever see single origins much less lvl 50, purplesets, and incarnate stuff.

Look - I don't intend to come off as harsh - but why wouldn't you simply stash the IOs in your very own sg base for your alts to come in and access them when needed. I do understand that some folks just don't bother with an sg base..but it's such a time saver over the long run. Or maybe you belong in one sg and your alt doesn't. Suggest you form your own, and make a coalition with your current one. This way, you have a big hassle removed from your game time. Just my .02 inf. Here's the thing, I completely get this! I assume a lot of people manage it this way. In fact, I assume that's how they deal with even the fiddling around with salvage which they probably bought in bulk for crafting stations in the base. The problem is, I'm actually shopping around for good SGs. I have several alts in different ones. I also have my characters on two different servers (my wife and kids play on Excelsior though they don't play much, and a bunch of people I've connected with online including some people I knew from live a long time ago are on Everlasting). But this is very much on my mind. So my plan is to set a main on Excelsior up with all the goodies, form an SG there and build a base (this is something I want to learn anyway, never did it live). Then add all the lowbies and such to it and make it easy to mess around there with crafting, etc. Then I'm thinking I'll do the same on Everlasting though as soon as my toons get setup with IOs and such, I'll think about shopping them around to SGs... at least I need to keep doing this until I find an SG home on Everlasting.

I've been playing a Kinetics/Shield Stalker. This is a side project so I'm not very far along (he's only level 8). I'm convinced that the most important thing about this project is that he's a Stalker! I'm stealthing a lot of content because I just don't need (and in fact don't want) the XP. Still, there have been some very ugly fights. I'm not sure that any combination of sets that folks have recommended would have given me an edge. I like the Praetorian setting, stories, and mobs, but I can't help but feel like this is level 10 or even level 15 content being pushed right out of the gate before I even have an attack chain. I have a feeling that after running a toon through all this, if I want to play Gold Side again I'll do it through Ouroborus, where a well outfitted toon can Exemplar down gracefully through it. That's sad, because it would be a heck of a lot of fun with teams over there, but maybe Gold Side is solo content by nature (every story ends with a solo "morality" mission). Still I'm glad I decided to do it and I look forward to the next time I play. He's fun.

Right now I'm thinking Psychic or Ice with Electric or Super Reflexes. I think that Psychic/Electric is stronger in straight sets, but I really love the increased effect protection from DEF and I might be willing to put up with the survivability problem to avoid all the secondary effects of attacks because mobs can't hit me in the first place. I'm thinking I might try Ice since DPS doesn't have to be the bleeding edge and I've always wanted to roll an Ice blaster. Also P/E doesn't have any sort of character concept. It's just thematically random.

OK. So I changed my approach and took a new look at how the market functions, especially with respect to converters. And I accepted the need to gamble, hard. If you are willing to set fire to INF, it will turn into something eventually. I think one of my chief problems in the past was not having enough money to spend to make the money, at least this way. As soon as I was willing to spend a lot of money (say around 25 million which scared the crap out of me, but I did it)... and focus in on exactly what I thought I could accomplish, I was able to almost double that over the course of an hour or so. The second hour I got lucky with a couple of sales and did more than double my investment. There are some limitations to what I'm doing. The supplies of the right recipes are a little lean and as soon as you grab up the few "at cost" (around what people are selling them for) you run quickly into people that want double or even triple the going rate for stuff and the profits drop like a stone. The other problem is, salvage. It just takes so friggin long to pull out what salvage I need in what numbers and fill up without overfilling my limited capacity. So what I'm doing won't ever scale beyond turning 25-30 into 45-50 in an hour or so, just in terms of how much clicking and sorting and stuff I have to do. 20+ million an hour is no joke. This is better than I've ever seen before. (usually I'm turning 5-6 million into 8-9 million) but that's still 50 hours of markettering to get to 1B INF... that's a lot of time doing some mind numbing sorting of salvage. But it still isn't the 100 million folks talk about casually making in an hour of markettering each day. So I'm a step closer, but the big time is still out of my league. I'm OK with that for now. The money I made is a welcomed relief. It certainly makes Farming (AE or otherwise) rather pointless, which is great because I sucked even worse at that!

It took me 32 levels to realize that my Savage Melee / Radiation Brute really wanted to be a War Mace / Shield brute. *sigh* Oh well... that's why they call it alt-itis.

Staff on my Dark Tank made the build. Being able to get that stacking DEF in there along with the END efficiency just made playing him a dream... as a tank. But I've completely given up on the idea that he's going to do any damage to speak of. I tried going back through Ouroborus to pick up a few badges and some merits... even on -1 and a build completely focused on maximizing his offensive potential, I felt like I was being punished for taking Staff offensively. Scrapper base numbers are much better, so maybe it wouldn't play out that way, but I'd have a hard time not playing Staff/Fire or something that could give staff a real kick in the DPS butt. I like the animations. I like the style. But the DPS just isn't there.

I've always assumed that the Bubbles stack. Bots + Bubbles is slow going sometimes but feels nigh unkillable outside overwhelming threats.

Yes, Sentinels should get shields. I was actually wanting to make one and really disappointed that it wasn't available. But Blasters? That's what Sentinels are for.

I'm really happy for folks making END drain work for them. I've always wanted to make that happen. I've made several variations over the years and never once have I been able to SOLO kill END on anything other than one target. AoE -END as damage mitigation has always required someone else to help. The big problem isn't just the challenge of zero END, but just how little END the mobs need for their attacks. They attack so slowly and their attacks take so little END that they appear to have zero END but are still able to attack. The mechanics of how they are built make END not really an issue for them. In PvP it can be quite ugly (again that's largely one-on-one). Now, the -RECOVERY is great but can't be slotted so you have to figure out where that is and how to make sure it is there when you need it. Don't expect a mobs toggles to ever drop. Doesn't work that way, they don't have them. And don't expect it to help vs AVs. Though I seem to remember dropping Babbage out of END one time with my El/El blaster and help from a Kin Defender. That was a long time ago so I don't know of GMs are still built the same way.

Regen is great. There's no doubt. Usually people snark on regen because: 1. the topsy turvy health bar that makes them feel like they are about to die all the time 2. no mitigation means alphas suck, always (sans MoG) 3. Sentinel low total HP means all the regen powers aren't as awesome as they would be with a higher pool 4. there's a lot of clicking, animation times, whatever, so that defense is taking time away from offensive powers being clicked 5. all the powers need lots of slotting 6. no base RES or DEF for other teammates to boost/synergise with (such boosts are most effective when they are close to the cap) even tough and weave are less effective than with other builds I think it might be fun with a /Regen to stio 5 sets of Entropic Chaos on the Sentinel Primary and see what happens. That's 50% extra regen, plus 10% more endurance, 32% global recharge plus every attack has a chance to heal. All of that available as low as lvl 20. You will need a global accuracy boost somewhere else or some tactics when fighting +3 or higher, but otherwise it would be quite spiffy. Still... I do worry about a couple of things in that list above myself. If someone can show me how to do it though, I'm not writing anything off.

So I've done some poking around the secondaries... some of them don't really shine until the late game, but have some tremendous possibilities once there. I know everyone craps on the late auras in Dark, but I've got a Dark tank and you can do some crazy tank tricks with them. The problem in this case is that the range won't work unless I drop the Hover late game, but that might not be a bad idea. (Hover will cover the Immobilization and KB protection Dark lacks up to that point.) Anyway in combination with the Cloak of Darkness ... I could run in, stun/fear ten mobs without ever taking a proper alpha and Soul Transfer is up fast enough that a few mistakes will easily fix themselves... a little debt never hurt anyone as long as the team doesn't wipe. The real problem is, while still doing Hover in the early levels, the heal is unusable, again because of the range. Energy Aura is compelling, but still has more toggles than I was hoping early on. It turns out that none of these sets have status protection early (lvl 16) so that'll mean I might want to DFB at least that far? who knows. Powersink is out unless I drop Hover and I don't think that's enough of a payoff ... at least not like I might do with Dark. Still, I could get close to soft cap on DEF plus plenty of RES. Now Electric Aura is very similar to Energy, but late game with some global recharge happening, hasten and lightning reflexes.. Power Surge could be perma and crazy making! The crash would be almost immaterial. And it looks like early on I get more protection out of the box for fewer slots than with Energy Aura. Super Reflexes would save me a ton of trouble since maxing focused senses would cover almost all of what I'm worried about in the early game. But wow, when I got hit I would surely know it. Getting a bit of resist in there with set bonuses and Tough a little later would help a little but be a hard-expensive path... But what I don't know is how much Enduring and Dodge will give me Resist when I do get hit. I can probably get close to perma Elude too. I might have to invoke Redlynne's name to ask about NO GET HITSU! as a Sentinel. I honestly don't know what to say about BIO. It seems like the answer to everything is BIO because BIO is broken. On top of being one of the best overall sets depending on slotting it can adjust so when there is plenty of melee-meat around I can turn up the Offense and maximize my utility depending on the team. Adaptation comes early (10)! Absorb is a big help on those alphas. There's even a range bonus for Offensive + Genomic ... looks like it isn't that hard to get Parasitic Leech perma as well.

Noted with thanks! I'm here for the long haul (fingers crossed that the servers will be). All the toons I play regularly will end up with at least what I've invested in my main even if it takes months and months to pull in that off. It isn't like I have no money at all and as I said, you can get plenty of money to play this game maxed out with Common IOs, no problem. That isn't so bad as it sounds. I'll give it another go. I just checked all my toons for recipes and merits, collected them up on my main to see what I might pull off. I'll take that as seed money (once I use the merits for converters and work on the raw drops for something better) for an actual market purchase which will be a little more targeted to what I think I should be working with.

I'd rather be more dependable than pill popping can pull off. I want to push through beyond that scrappers can do at a similar level into a gimped (loosely slotted) tank/brute zone. I think Ice and Psychic primaries also have some very compelling options. I've never figured the exact mitigation of -RCHG but whatever that mitigation is, it is going to be considerably more valuable if the mobs can't cycle between melee and ranged attacks. If all they have is ranged I see -RCHG as effective as Dark with some potentially helpful other side effects like Ice's -SPD -JMP and Psychic's KD and Stun. I do think one of the three is probably the way to go. Going Dark would have higher potential mitigation if you actually slotted for -TOHIT, but that would cost more precious slots early. Ice comes up a little short on DMG, but Psychic probably does the most of the three. Some of the painful things to tank early on (Lost big blades and some other melee hitters) really don't do much ranged. Also while hovering, things like burn patches and slows are zeroed out. Probably the first big problems would be Clockwork (who can fly and shoot energy right off the bat) and then similar issues when Freakshow finally show up. CoT ghosts will suck. I'm not sure what the range on Vaz Vomit is, but the big barf is very short. You'll probably be just out of range of things like Sorcerer's hurricanes. But the smaller cave tilesets (CoT blue and Council brown) are going to be no go zones. Now the point of this is to take the alpha and hope the rest of the team can work things out from there, but not being able to keep the attention of some Lts and Bosses even after the alpha is going to cause squishie-wipes. So I think we have to fit the Presence Power Pool in there at least for that as early as slotting allows. That's also something squishies popping pills can't do. This makes me think I need as much protection as I can get in as few toggles as possible early on. There are just too many things to fit in too quickly. So the secondary needs to be lean fast. Maybe even get by without some typed damage protection for a bit (because we definitely cannot pass up status protection by Positron TF or so (if I'm not powerleveling to 22). I'll have to take another look at the secondaries to see what looks like it fits.

Yeah, I can see your point. At 27 you have just a little more breathing room to slip that Hover somewhere in there as well. I've been surprised just how much mitigation I get on my Keld-squid flying around. I don't usually make that sort of build and I'm a little concerned about just how short the range on Sentinel blasts are, but that has the added appeal of "appearing to tank" more by flying over the mob group to lead off. This is a good first step. I look forward to other comments to build on the idea.

This is a thought experiment that would be an actual experiment if I had the INF to spend on it. If I get some interesting responses I might give it a go. I want to know if folks think it is possible to burn a Sentinel up to 22 using DFB and then spend some cold hard cash on sets available in the mid-levels at the Auction House and "tank" enough at least for alpha/opening salvo with teams in that range. I'm not talking about whether you can build a tank-mage at 50 with Incarnates and Purples. But I have noticed that a lot of teams "barely need a tank" and the tanker forums are full of "nobody needs us anymore." I'm just thinking with status protection and some creative slotting all it would take is a Dom or a Controller on the team to keep most of the mobs at range (where the damage is much lower) and Bob's your uncle... Sent-tank. What say you all? I'm willing to spend some cold cash if someone thinks there are options here, but I don't know enough about the subtleties of that to make a pass at it. My big suspicion is that the low HP pool might be the deal breaker no matter how clever we get.

When my slots were tight on my Traps Defender I just had three recharges in it and I was never disappointed. But I avoided Radio teams like the plague. In regular play, and things like TFs the thing does its job straight up and there's always a bit of tactics buffs floating around anyway. Now that I've done Numina and all the content going forward is being playing by people who want to run at least +2 and prefer +4 if they can pull it off, I've got to put ACC otherwise it isn't going to cut it, especially has an "AV killer" power.

I've got one toon, my main lvl 50 with ~120 million invested in him, some expensive one offs but mostly lesser sets that still deliver buffs I'm looking for, with a little frankenslotting. He doesn't have a single offensive set yet, except 6 slotted taunt (I can't remember which one). I spent too much because I was often impatient during market surges were happening and I didn't understand how to convert stuff. If I were clever and patient I could have done it for a lot less (especially wasting a lot on unslotting and attuning them manually and all the stuff I dumped on the market rather than converting it to sets I could actually use). About 20-30 million in common IOs across another 10 alts. This is getting a lot less expensive since my main toon crafts all the 25s and 30s IO for reduce prices... it is a SUCKY PAIN IN THE @$% to mail them all to myself, but whatever. I've probably blown another 10 million on SOs for characters I was experimenting with and then largely abandoned. And last I checked I had about 60 million in cash and about 500 merits floating around. So, forgetting the merits, I've seen about 200 million in my hands and frankly I feel poor. I mean, my wife thinks it is awesome that I can drop whatever cash on a new alt at 22 and 27 to basically suit them up for the rest of the game if I still want to play them. And it is nice to occasionally send my son a "set" of something fun in the mail for a gift. But whenever I see something I want for 2-5 million per IO in a set I want at least 4 of 6 in... man... I get penny pinching fast. I'm really protective of that 60 million I'm sitting on right now. I don't feel like I can spend it even though I have it. Too close to real life! (Sure I'd love to take one of my mid range blaster-alts and put Entropic Chaos on five attacks. Right now that would wipe half my fund assuming there were enough on the market to not spike the price.) Something in-between... Thankly, I wish there was another tier of wealth in this game that was obtainable without market shenanigans. I've tried several of the techniques folks have posted about on the boards, but my profit margins always turn out way below theirs and I've even had some sessions where I flat out lost money. I remember burning through so many converters one session I went briefly broke and ended up having to sell the lesser crap that fate had handed to me just to have operating funds. The thing that has made me the most money? Saved me from poverty when the market thrust it upon me? Burning through as many MSRs as the server would support for a few days. I think I was on three or four per day for several days in a row once. All with the XP turned off (because I NEVER see the Vmerits other people claim to get during MSRs.. I'm always around 800 and other folks always talk about 1400 or so) I could make just over 10 million in cash for each run. It would be nice to "shop" in the market rather than "beg bid" in a hope to get lucky. It would be nice to sell stuff for what I see stuff selling for rather than always 60-70% of that (even after letting the stuff sit over a weekend on the market). The good news... The good news is anyone with a 35+ level toon can do all sorts of content that gets INF flowing while still enjoying playing the game. It isn't hard to spend one night a week burning through some of the shorter TFs or some Ouroborus options at grabbing a few merits to supplement that. Anyone who plays the game regularly can outfit their toons with common IOs of their choice on as many toons as they'd like and maybe pick up a cool set or two along the way if they are patent just because they like it. But then there is a huge gap between covering all your playing costs and tricking out a toon even with uncommon mid-range sets, not even talking about rares and purples. Someone will say that at the very least I can turn that 60 million into 300 million in just a few days probably buying up crap IO recipes and converting them and selling them. But I've tried and never see the sorts of returns others have seen. As i've said, I've even had a few sessions of losing money doing that. I suppose this is a rant... I don't mean it to be. But I feel like I've missed out on something. I feel like a strong-regular-dedicated player. When I look at my post count on the boards I'm not in the PK range, but I'm here. I feel like I'm on as much as the folks in some of the supergroups I've tried out, but the mid-to-big money continues to elude me. I do wonder what all the 2 billion plus hordes of stuff stashed in base storage type folks are going to do with themselves next month. If there are people out there already spreading a 10 billion INF fortune across several toons to avoid the cap... that's mind-blowing.

That's not how MM's work as Tanks (if you play one that way). You are supposed to put your pets in defensive mode so they share your damage. The problem is that with the necessary buffs to pets to make them survive even the most trivial of late game AoEs they had to nerf MM's own pool so low that even with the defenses you can patch together, most MMs can't tank because they can't take the alpha and generally have no status protection. I'm not sure they meant for Brutes not to be tanks though, they gave them taunt, status protection, and not MMs. But CoV was supposed to take CoH innovations (from bending the holy trinity to outright breaking it). And they succeeded. Many people think they broke it dead in a bad way. I'm not editorializing on that here. But it is "different." I'm not defending Jack. I've roasted him plenty of times in plenty of posts. I'm just talking about the mechanics of what it looks like when MM's tank.