Werner

The only two ways I know are to either teleport in to where they spawn so that you show up as the cut scene ends before the actual npcs spawn, so that they agro onto you 1st instead of Rommie or use super speed to achieve the same effect but it's a lot harder than teleporting in. I'm hoping someone knows an easier way. I can only pull off the TP maybe 1 try in 5. The super speed I've got to work once. I have the most luck with the TP version on my mystic flight toons. You can fly to the top of the map to fly above the spawn point and use the built in TP to zap straight down. This isn't technically getting him away from the fluffies, and I'm not sure if it's easier, but if you head in while already at the aggro cap, it's possible to fight one AV at a time while the others just hang out and watch. Very civil of them. It worked for me once, not as well the other time I tried it. I'll have to try to figure out the saying hello after the cutscene approach. It sounds interesting.

Repeating some of what was said, and generalizing away from your specific build, and recognizing that you probably wouldn't do every one of these on a single character... Play a primary or secondary with endurance tools like resistance or recovery or drains of their own. Go Energy Mastery for your epic to pick up Conserve Power and Physical Perfection. Performance Shifter anywhere you can. Calculate how much endurance your attacks will use when attacking without pause, add to your toggles, and tune your build so that you don't just have sustainable endurance while fighting, but net positive. Be aware of what toggles you need and don't need against which enemies, or even within a specific fight. When under serious pressure, I will be detoggling and retoggling powers as necessary in addition to everything else I'm doing. For instance leave Tactics off, but monitor your last hit chance and to hit bonus. If you get blinded or see your hit chance drop, toggle up. If you're hitting fine and not blinded and there's no to hit debuff, but your endurance is dropping, turn it back off. Ageless Core or Ageless Radial. I've never taken Core, but Radial gives you full endurance immediately, which lets you recover from a nasty drain, and then gives you debuff resistance, which helps you weather recovery debuffs. High defense so that drains don't hit you. Recovery serum. Blues. Base empowerment buffs.

No, because it doesn't matter if a target starts with 90% resistance, 50% resistance, or 0% resistance - a 20% resistance debuff will result in them taking 20% more damage. That's because damage resistance resists damage resistance debuffs.

Shield Defense/Martial Arts/Soul Mastery Tanker Storm Kick -> Crippling Axe Kick -> Storm Kick -> Gloom -> Thunder Kick T4 Assault Core (used) T4 Reactive Radial T4 Cardiac Core no Lore saturated Against All Odds 3:35 3:33 3:24 3:36 4:07 3:34 3:50 3:49 3:51 3:34 2213 total seconds 221.3 average seconds 301 DPS Testing done on beta. Currently leveling the character.

I think between the benefits of double build up and using it to help burst damage at the start of a fight, I’m changing my answer to taking it on a Brute if I could fit it in. DPS generally takes second fiddle to burst AoE, and double build up likely helps DPS too. And I’m guessing that you can hit Paragon Protectors with +80% to hit.

Do not +5 procs. Do +5 purple and PvP sets and basic IOs if beneficial enough that you feel it justifies the cost. Either +5 or attune other sets depending on the relative benefit you’d get from each. In attacks, it may sometimes be valuable to not +5 IOs with recharge you don’t need so as to improve the chance of procs in the same attack.

Ah! So maybe an archetype accuracy multiplier, just like the rank accuracy multiplier. So soft cap defense would still floor their chance to hit you, but maybe they have a 1.3x accuracy multiplier because you're a Scrapper, but would have a 1x accuracy multiplier for a Tanker, and 1.1x accuracy multiplier for a Brute, say. You're right, not a bad idea necessarily if balanced with everything else, and probably easily implemented. Easy to test if there is such a thing. Take a Scrapper, a Brute, and a Tanker sitting at the soft cap, and track how often they're hit by an even-level minion. If it's not 5% for all three (no to hit modifier, no rank accuracy multiplier), there's something interesting going on. Edit: Though even if all are 5% now, maybe there were accuracy multipliers before the stealth nerf, but in the opposite direction. So a Scrapper was 0.8x, Brute was 0.9x, Tanker was 1x say. So a Scrapper was harder to hit than a Tanker when they had the same defense. And everything was balanced around that multiplier, like the higher hit points and caps. So then when the game became what we think it is today, with no archetype accuracy multiplier, that was a Scrapper nerf. It seems implausible, but that would perhaps be in line with what was being claimed.

It's too late. He gave up on us. Sorry, "with" us. Now I'll never know what "the elude effect" is, what "evade states" are, and what sort of "base stat modifyers" were changed. And I guess there's no point looking for understanding in the patch notes since the nerf "was not announced". If only I'd been "pushing the Scrapper to its limits", maybe I'd have "noticed those effects", but unfortunately at the time I was just a casual player soloing AVs and the RWZ challenge using Scrapper challenge rules. Ah, well. I suppose I don't need to understand an 11-year old stealth nerf.

It starts at 3% at full health and scales linearly to 13% the moment before death. Source is personal testing in May on a DM/SR Brute watching HP and the buff in combat attributes while turning toggles on and off to adjust my HP while a Pylon shot at me.

For timing I use a custom AV with no resistances so it’s fair across all my characters. Most of the praetorian AVs have some resistances. But I like that mission too.

Yep. 🙂 I actually do most of my DPS testing on level 54 AVs, caring only about relative times between build options and not calculating DPS. I usually only go to the pylons later to get an “official” DPS of whatever seems best.

I guess with the rest of your build in good shape, and with the incarnate levels, they still can’t kill you since they’re just +1. I never tried it at lower defense. Since it’s “easy” to get to 59%, and it means getting hit less than 1/2 as often, it would probably still be my target. Nice to know it can be done with less, though.

For leveling, I would probably try to get to 45% by maybe my mid 30s or by 40, because it makes such a difference. I'd use the two defense uniques, Weave, either Combat Jumping or Hover, maybe Maneuvers. I wouldn't worry much about resists or healing. Other than defense, I'd mostly focus on damage. Then I'd adjust the difficulty settings to match what my build was capable of, slowly increasing them as I leveled. For mostly solo play on a finished build: If I avoided incarnate content, and took it easy on my difficulty settings, or at least picked easy groups if running +4x8, I'd do similar to the leveling build, just at a higher price point, giving me more of everything. If I avoided incarnate content, but liked to run +4x8, and wanted to be able to dive into any enemy group, and wanted to be able to do it even if for some reason I was out of purples, I might shoot for 48% to 50% defense to make it extremely difficult to be debuffed even a little under 45%, then get fairly serious with resists and healing of some sort. If I did sometimes do incarnate content, but only on big teams, I'd amend the above two to maybe 55% defense, figuring someone's going to get me the rest of the way to the incarnate soft cap, and there will be other buffs and heals keeping me alive. If I liked soloing Dark Astoria arcs, I'd shoot for the incarnate soft cap at 59%. With all the incarnate powers, that makes them only run of the mill +1s at max settings, so the build can then mostly focus on damage. Unless I also liked soloing normal content at max difficulty settings, since they'd be +3, and would hit me just as easily as the incarnate enemies. If I liked soloing Dark Astoria arcs on +4x8 without inspirations, I'd want to be in the neighborhood of 62% defenses for defense debuffs, and probably take survivability in the rest of the build reasonably seriously. I'd want some way to handle endurance debuffs and drains, which can be an issue with some enemies without using blues. If I wanted to do it all, I'd build like my actual build. Though looking at it now, I'd probably make tweaks, like picking up more recharge debuff resistance. Not sure. It's fine as is though. So my approach would be based on solo vs. team, incarnate vs. regular, how much I like cranking up the game difficulty, and if I go even farther and apply restrictions to myself like no inspirations.

It definitely doesn't require it. But it means you can get there with less investment in powers and/or set bonuses. That allows you to focus on other aspects of the build. Other approaches may be better depending on your build goals and play style. That is part of why I asked the question. What is the right goal? /SR gives you choices about what to aim for... The right goal depends on how you play. On finished builds, I almost only play +4x8 without inspirations, about 50/50 incarnate and regular content, and about 50/50 solo and grouped. So I'm going to be soloing +4x8 incarnate content without inspirations quite often. If you're going to be doing that with SR, you're going to want to hit the incarnate soft cap, and with all the defense debuffs flying around, ideally a few percent more. In groups, there are usually defense buffs of some sort, so you can relax that a bit. And if you stick to non-incarnate content, hitting 59%+ defense becomes very wasteful.

I have two SR Brutes and no SR Tankers, but I'll at least praise the virtues of the Tanker version. The extra defense means you can devote almost all your set bonus resources to other things. With the Tanker ATO boosting your resists, plus Tough and some of those set bonuses, the scaling resists can potentially get you to the hard cap on resistance while still having almost 1000 hit points in the bank, plus absorb. Combined with "undebuffable" incarnate defense and healing from secondary or incarnates, it can be a very solid Tanker primary. Not my top choice for a Tanker, but solid.

Here's how I approached it - hit the incarnate soft cap with the help of Agility Core to save on required set bonuses, with a slight margin to help keep from dropping below the incarnate soft cap when debuffed, Agility Core also helps manage endurance, use high regeneration, Siphon Life and Rebirth for healing, get enough recharge for the top chain, crank up the hit points to help manage the big hits, focus on SLEN resists to stack with your scaling resists to make you difficult to put down even if your hit points have to be low for it. Seems to work pretty well.

Thanks! He was originally a Dwarven Shield/Mace, and I kept fiddling with costumes for him, and then at some point in all the fiddling he picked up some cyborg parts, and then I decided to just make him a robot instead. Then I decided I wanted the extra defense of Martial Arts. So that’s how I ended up with a big-bearded Dwarven robot with a horned “helmet” and shield, kicking enemy faces in instead of smashing them in with a mace. Still a level 18 lowbie on live, and still fiddling with and testing endgame builds on beta.

I thought I might be able to beat your time with the Shield/MA Tanker I'm currently testing on beta. Nope. But it's a smooth, easy build for this. Much easier and faster than my Katana/Dark Brute or my Dark/MA Tanker. To be fair, I was using P2W this time and didn't on those. I'm confident I could do it without, but not confident I could get under two hours unless there's a secret to defeating Rommy quickly. I can plow through the purple fluffies at a reasonable clip going healing, autohit, other, but I have trouble with Rommy getting defense buffs, and wasting time on the ambushes, allowing him to partially heal. Oh, no Lore, but I doubt they're much help anyway. I never got the knack of keeping them from charging into melee and getting wiped out. If I could still survive, I wonder how much it would improve my speed if I swapped from Cardiac Core and Ageless Radial to Musculature Core and Ageless Core. I only touched Ageless Radial a few times, and only to help with endurance.

I would guess that it's there as a buffer for defense debuffs. If you're 10% over the incarnate soft cap with 65% defense dubuff resistance, you have a buffer of almost 30% before you drop below the incarnate soft cap.

I don’t know how I read Fire when you said Rad. Somehow I got fire on the brain.

The game has gotten nuts. 340 DPS can now be dismissed as Tanker DPS. 🤪 But if I hit 360 DPS on a Katana/Dark Brute running Cardiac, I’m sure a Katana/Fire Scrapper can put that to shame. 🙂

Wait, even though I can’t slot defense in it, I can slot Membranes and they’ll buff the DDR? Works in Mids, and you confirmed works in game. Wow! OK! Thanks!

Very nice! I took the Invuln/MA I was working on through the first 2.5 missions like that on beta. Then I was pounding on Rommy, realized it was going to take half an hour, so the final AVs would be somewhere between painfully slow and impossible, and I bailed. I added more DPS later, but yeah, a good Invuln is great on a maxed buffed enemies ITF. 👍

Heh, thanks, except that I just spent maybe three weeks in Mids and on beta polishing up the perfect Shield/MA build (for my preferences), and half of that probably goes out the window now because I forgot one basic fact. Silver lining - the build can be even better now. 👍

I... am... an idiot! With a box and a screwdriver. Passing through. “Helping” out. Learning.