Microcosm

If you want to squeeze into higher damaging attack chains you will need hasten at some point. Talking AS SR PS MB; AS needs to be down to 4.488 seconds to do that seamlessly, which is going to be next to impossible without hasten (might actually be impossible without it without totally gimping yourself). But that's one of the highest damage chains achievable, so if you're ok with a little less damage, you'll be fine.

I think they've always been intended to be worse than your set powers. They were generally taken to unlock a later power in the pool and didn't have a full attack chain yet or wanted them thematically. This has somewhat changed with the new fighting pool, since the damage increases if you start taking more of them and they get extra benefits (plus recharge on cross punch is nice). If you take both boxing and kick, suddenly cross punch is not that bad in terms of dpa on some classes. Of course that takes up three power choices.

This was one of my favorite characters on live. I can't give you much advice until you graduate to super expensive io builds, but I would say take a look at Leviathan mastery. Waterspout is a great power all around for aoe and single target, and hibernate is a fantastic "oh crap" button, plus it fits thematically for you.

This. Db and stj pulled ahead later on, and eventually stalkers and night widows started to top everything else. Now that there's no redraw options, I would guess the numbers change again a bit. Also, it wasn't always shield at the top. The recharge in Sr, ea, and elec was helpful. In the current world I think bio armor and rad are promising.

On live toward the end I'm pretty sure I used Agility to also boost my defense in human form. You lose very little recharge as opposed to Spiritual, which was the go-to for Warshades then.

I had a staff ice on live and it was great. One of the combos I am redoing now. I always told people to go stalker with it because they got assassin's strike to round out the set better and automatically had the body form active anyway. You lose access to the least useful of the aoes for the best sigle target attack in the game.

Should we start to move those guides over to this forum? Or maybe get this thread stickied at the top so it's just easier for people to find what they're looking for?

Just FYI, ice was a fantastic set on stalkers with some io investment. Lots of layers of protection.

I loved my db/elec. Extremely good damage and very well rounded survivability. It had no holes, if you were willing to rely on the t9 for the occasional toxic damage and took tactics. Now I'm thinking rad armor might provide more damage with that -regen, but it doesn't look as rounded as elec. Might roll one and see.

What is your intended budget, and did you pick will power specifically or just because of the endurance thing? I never played wp, but I did a lot with a staff/ice that was awesome; that requires significant investment. The caps thing is 45% for defense (referred to as soft cap because you could get more but it won't do any good unless debuffed or against certain foes with extra tohit) and 75% for resistance (on stalkers and most other ats). If you reach one of these caps your survivability will be extremely high. People often chased the defense cap because it was easier to achieve with set bonuses, and technically better survival than the resist cap unless you're on a tank or brute. Defense was also considered better on most stalkers because if you try to placate a foe for an extra critical, other foes will still attack you and can remove your hidden status and therefore the critical. If those foes were missing, you wouldn't lose that hidden status. You can achieve the defense cap in some sets early and cheaply, especially Sr, but you lose the benefit of layered protection. Choosing a resist based set and hitting the soft cap was difficult and expensive, but gave you much stronger survival assuming you didn't gimp yourself in so doing. Edit: sorry, forgot to mention, on the defense caps you could either try to get the positional defense (melee, aoe, ranged), or the damage types defense. When an attack was thrown at you, whatever that attack was tagged with ( say melee/smashing) that you had the highest for would count. Because nearly every attack in the game had a smashing or lethal tag in it, most people tried to get smash/lethal defense to the cap and call it a day. That could occasionally leave you in a bad way against certain psi and toxic attacks, but it was pretty rare. Resistances were all calculated individually, so you needed resist to basically everything, but smash and lethal again we're usually most important.

Honestly you should just go read the kheldian bind sticky on the old forums. It's got almost everything you'd ever want. Perhaps we can get Smiling Joe to repost it here and have a mod sticky it for us. I will also try to repost the inspiration maker guides over here when I'm back in the States (in Japan atm without computer). Give me a few I'll drop a link to Joe's old post. Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20120904200253/http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=190418

You'll need an extra macro or bind to detoggle the forms and go back to human. Luckily you can detoggle both at the same time: /bind h "powexectoggleoff black dwarf$$powexectoggleoff dark nova$$gototray 1" You can combine several toggle offs in one command, just can't toggle on multiple powers with one command (you can technically do two through some special tricks though).

I'm fairly certain that's just a mids thing from memory. It should still affect the forms.

For me, as someone who goes for monster io builds, I prefer the PB as human or mayyybee dual form, and the warshade definitely triform. Some people will argue for human form warshade, but it seems like missed opportunities to me. Once you get perma light form on a PB, there is almost no reason to use dwarf again, but warshades still want the mire and might need situational resistance. If human toggles didnt drop when switching forms but just stopped functioning/costing endurance, I would say never skip nova on either, but retoggling a bunch of stuff on my PB means I just don't use it. The PB seems to have better human attacks and more frequent clicks, whereas the warshade spends less time dropping to human so it lends itself to using the forms more.

I don't think you need the quotes around the individual power names, maybe that's what's throwing it. I know for binds I had /bind f "powexectoggleon Black Dwarf$$gototray 5". Only one set of quotes around the body of the command.

Just FYI, any placate other than the one in your primary powerset won't put you in a hidden state, it just removed your threat from the enemy. In other words, don't expect to get an extra crit after a pool placate.

Sr will get you more defense faster, making it cheaper and easier to soft cap. It also has tons of ddr, so when you're hit with defense debuffs you're still fine. If you want to put in the investment in another set for soft cap, you'll get a better final result elsewhere because of the other tools other sets have, though the ddr elsewhere isn't as good as sr's. My personal opinion is that ice is the best armor set if you're going to put a large investment into it because of all the layers of protection it uses, but I never messed with bio.

I don't want to hijack your thread, but there is one more change that was always requested but never a priority enough, and that was to keep toggled powers on while shape shifted, but remove their affects/ endurance cost while in a form. As is, retoggling is a big downside for using forms, and a warshade, for example, is usually going to completely skip things like orbiting death if they use forms at all. This is lower on the list than the kb thing, but if we're talking about fixing the issues with the at from the beginning, we can't forget that.

I'll sign, with the caveat that gravitic emanation should remain superior in some way because it is a cone instead of pbaoe and harder to use. There are more kbs than there should be on the waeshade side too, but pbs are definitely worse off.

You have reached purple enlightenment. Welcome to the dance.

If the translations are lost, as long as localization is a toggle somewhere in game then I'm sure there would be a group of people willing to help translate over some things.

It works for me. Not using underscores, but also not using quotes around the rest of it.

Hold control and left click it. It will get a little green ring around it and become autofire.

I feel like that's either a bug or an addition by the score people to round out the nova attack chain. FYI, the warshade version also allows ebon eye.

Just to add, the last patch note of i24 said it changed the khelds nukes to match the blaster nukes l, so lower damage but faster recharge and no end crash. Wondering if anyone has seen that yet.