Werner

Scrapperlock 🙂

<maths>...Practically, Dark Regen won't heal quite that much (you have to fire it early to account for reaction times, activation time, etc so it'll overheal). Theoretically, however, it takes an absurd amount of regen to match. It's... uh-mazing! Yeah, it has its limitations. It's active. I'm typically firing it off at maybe around 1/2 to 1/3 of my hit points. If you're soloing a single hard target, you're not going to get a full heal, and occasionally you'll get no heal. (Dark Regen minion fodder is an option if you're willing to turn off your damage aura.) It requires that you hit your target. If you're to-hit debuffed you might miss every target even in a big crowd, something that happened to me once. But it's still such a nice heal, even with its limitations. My normal approach to a large crowd of +4x8 debuffers - target a debuffer, jump in, Divine Avalanche, Gambler's Cut, Divine Avalanche, watch my defense like a hawk as I use my defensive chain, when the debuffs start to land, hit Barrier immediately, typically maybe five to fifteen seconds after jumping in. By the time it's up, I'll probably be in the red on defense and down to about 1/3 hit points. Hit Dark Regeneration. Now I'm back at full health with decent defense and 90% resistance, better off than when I started the fight. Ignore my defense going red again and just go to town with my offensive chain to kill debuffers until I start taking damage again, switch to defensive chain, be ready to hit Dark Regeneration again, might need to, might not, clean up the group. In a worst case scenario like being to-hit debuffed or slowed and unable to take down the debuffers, hit Melee Core when my resistance drops under 90%.

I have been known to have been disappointed at having survived on my /Fire Armor. RotP is so pretty! And strong! <ducks>

I'm pretty sure that I was missing Task Force Commander for every challenge I ever did. I have it on one of my characters now that any size group can start one. I'll pick it up on Alexei soon. I just never wanted to join a random group of eight or ask for help to start one. I did have all the other accolade powers.

Super Reflexes defense is close to a magical god mode defense in these terms. My build will have 94% DDR once complete. A 150% defense debuff like you mentioned is then just 9%,. That'll crack open my defenses and sting a bit, but only in incarnate content as I'll have 61% melee and 59% ranged/AoE defense. We'll see how it goes in practice, though, once the build is done. And of course Super Reflexes is somewhat lacking in resists and healing. Being a one-trick pony is a bad plan, even if that one trick is a really good trick. I buffed my resists to the extent I felt I could, and added Rebirth, but I still suspect my Katana/Dark Brute with no DDR at all will handle tough content better. Granted we were talking about sets without DDR or with limited DDR, for whom cascading defense debuffs are indeed a fact of life, and there's no magical god mode defense. Laughing at defense debuffs because you have 90% resistance is such a pleasure, and a good solution to the problem if you can pull it off. 🙂

You think Mot +4x8 Scrapper Challenge rules is masochism? Pffff. THIS is masochism, or at least an expression of pure, ornery stubbornness!

That's the spirit! 😄

I'm sure we'll be chatting about her kids before all this is over. 😉 I'll pretend like I'm a sensible person and turn down the difficulty on TF Commander at that point.

Thinking further... not a goal, but next steps. First, get my tier 4 cardiac. I think I'm missing a single uncommon, so that'll be done momentarily. Try soloing Task Force Commander to see how well the build copes with being exemplared. Probably not that well and I'll end up calling for help, but the attempts will be educational, and I'd like the extra hit points. Solo a pylon to check my DPS. If I have the DPS, find that map in AE that had a whole bunch of AVs outdoors with with Praetorian Clockwork and see how well I can Scrapper Challenge those AVs. Solo an ITF? I've probably run two or three ITFs in my life, so I can imagine that going poorly, but I'm curious since I know some people can do it. The intent isn't so much to rack up accomplishments as to expose my build's weaknesses so I knew what to do to make it better. I already have some ideas based on my very limited experience with the almost-complete build. I've had a few issues with to-hit debuffs or enemy defense buffs, so Build Up and/or Focused Accuracy would be nice to use situationally. I could drop Soul Transfer to make room. I took it because it's fun to get right back up and keep going rather than come back from the hospital. But if I'm not dying, that's not much of an issue, and it's an incentive to try harder to not die. Right now I'm sometimes like, "Eh, whatever. If I die I can be Vengeance bait, then Soul Transfer." Maybe Assault for the Taunt and Placate resistance, but it's not that great. Maybe pick up more recharge debuff resistance. It's all trade offs, though. Anyway, see what can kill me, and see if I can address it without letting something else kill me. Not survivability, but in quality of life terms, maybe add enough recharge to run Golden Dragonfly -> Gambler's Cut -> Soaring Dragon -> Gambler's cut gapless in normal content. I'm melee/smashing/lethal soft capped without Divine Avalanche, so relegating it to being entirely situational would be nice, particularly with it being slotted for defense over damage. On the other hand, it might take giving up that defense or something equivalent to get the recharge, defeating the point.

Dark's resist game plays out pretty well. On my Katana/Dark, I intentionally stopped at about 65% resistance to smashing/lethal/energy/fire/cold (90% negative, 73% psi) as I was counting on Barrier or Melee to get me to 90% when really necessary, giving me the freedom to focus on defense as well. High defense is great most of the time, but with no DDR, it can evaporate quickly, and you have to count on other things. Ageless is definitely one answer, but I'm happy with the results of going the Barrier route. But Barrier and Melee don't get you 100% uptime on that 90% resistance, so my approach might have trouble on any true tanking in fights lasting much over a minute and a half. My recharge is nothing exciting, just Hasten and five Luck of the Gamblers. But with my other tools in place, Dark Regeneration is almost always up when I need it. So yes, anyway, as @Psyonicosays, if you want to try a different approach, consider building primarily for resist and defense and using either Ageless or Barrier/Melee to cope with defense debuffs.

I'm mostly agreeing with others. Ageless offers DDR and may be the best choice in many cases. Also worth considering is Barrier, which offers a very big initial defense and resistance buff. Either fades with time, so kill your enemies quickly while prioritizing the debuffers. On my Katana/Dark Brute, I use Barrier then Dark Regeneration as my primary defense against severe defense debuffs, with Melee Core as my backup, leaning into the Brute's higher 90% resistance cap to try to survive without defense. Unless they're lethal or melee, in which case my primary defense is stacking Divine Avalanche. But it's slotted for defense over damage and stacks fast to well over 100% defense if needed. Being a smaller amount over the softcap may work OK for minor debuffing, but it'll only buy you a little bit of time against major debuffing. But a little bit of time may be all you need as long as you prioritize killing the debuffers. I haven't set it up on my current heroes, but in the old game I had target priority macros for my tab key based on which enemies needed to die first to keep me alive. In the absence of that, I try to sort it out quickly during the fight. (Edit: and on my Katana/Dark I monitor melee and energy defense, and pay close attention to them when fighting debuffers. An option would be to monitor base defense, as it'll turn red on the first debuff, hopefully catching your attention, particularly if you increase the font size.)

The 90% vs. 75% cap on damage resistance, hands down. My traditional kryptonite has been defense debuffs. My solution is Barrier, then Melee once that starts dropping if I'm still defense debuffed. Either will cap most of my resistances, though I only monitor energy resistance. But when you're sitting at -50% defense, even 75% resistance plus a full heal every 10 or 15 seconds are going to have a very hard time keeping you alive. 90% allows for a slower reaction time, allows for being animation locked into a long attack, and gives Dark Regeneration a much better chance of being recharged by the time you need it again. In the run, I don't remember there ever being a time when I needed Dark Regeneration and it wasn't recharged. Well, sometimes I was down to maybe 20% health and getting pretty scared, but it always popped back up before I died. (Edit: On a Katana/Dark Scrapper, maybe Ageless would do a better job than Barrier. I'm fairly confident it's better than Barrier for maintaining some defense, and Dark Armor is getting close to Scrapper resistance caps already. Ageless would also most likely solve any remaining problems with endurance drains. I'm guessing Barrier is better on a Brute, though, and then handle endurance drains a different way.)

It only took one attempt. (edit: one attempt at the final arc, but I probably averaged several attempts each on the others? It's been too long and I can't remember.) I'm honestly not sure how hard or easy it is, and it's different from most Scrapper challenges, which tend to be single fights, or maybe a handful of fights. I didn't count, but this was maybe a hundred? Two hundred? Most fights were a cakewalk with my build. They had to be, after all, or surviving one or two hundred of them in a row would be impossible. But a number of the fights were quite difficult. The most difficult enemies for my build are Banished Pantheon, particularly if they can combine the right debuffers into a single group - defense, to-hit, and endurance drain. My build has significantly more endurance recovery than typically needed, plus almost 70% resistance to endurance drains, but I still found myself worried in several fights that I was going to zero out and detoggle. Tier 4 cardiac will help in that regard, I'm unclear how much. I have no resistance to defense debuffs, and those can get incredibly ugly, huge negative defense numbers. To get through those I used Barrier and Melee, leaning heavily into resistance and Dark Regeneration. But the resistance buffs eventually run out, and that's where to-hit debuffs come into play. I'm mostly single target, and if I can't hit them, I could run out of resistance before I'm out of the defense debuffs. It's possible some other primary/secondary would do better. Super Reflexes, for instance, can easily remain incarnate soft-capped under the debuffs that utterly destroyed my normally-great defense. But SR has no heal, lower resistance, and no protection from endurance drains, so maybe not. Anyway, there's probably an enemy somewhere in all those arcs that will be everyone's kryptonite, but maybe I'm wrong. I didn't pick a primary/secondary specifically for the challenge, I ran what had been my favorite combination from the old game. OK, that was much more than you asked. Next goal? I don't know. Retirement? LOL. I've not really been doing challenges in the current game, just casually playing with friends. OK, we run at +4x8 all the time, and several of us have top end builds, but we don't sweat it if we die, we chug inspirations, we don't care. We're just out there laughing and having fun. Have I even soloed an AV? Yeah, OK, I remember doing so on a different character. I was curious one day, so I took a few down, and ran scared from a few others after it was clear there was no way. But that was on my farmer. Well, my general purpose AoE damage build.

Today I finally completed an 8-year project in City of Heroes - to solo all of the Mot arcs on +4x8 using Scrapper Challenge rules - no inspirations, no temporary powers, no disengaging the enemy, no deaths. My Katana/Dark Scrapper in the old game was tough enough to complete the first five of six arcs that way, but was not tough enough to get through the final arc, dying not even halfway through. So back then I'd leveled up a Katana/Dark Brute to take a stab at the final arc, but hadn't finished his build by the time the servers shut down. I realize that's a strange and petty thing to have as one of your life's regrets, but it was, and it makes me unreasonably happy to finally finish the job I started so many years ago. I realize it would have been easier on a Tanker. Perhaps even easy. But somehow that felt like a step too far, where a Brute did not. I realize this is the Scrapper forum, but the Scrapper forum was always my home, and five of the six arcs were completed on my old Scrapper, so I just... I wanted to post it here. I was still missing my tier 4 Cardiac, and struggled for endurance on a couple occasions when being attacked by more than one Ancient of Storms. I didn't expect to complete the arc, honestly. I was just taking what I figured would be the first of several practice runs. That actually made it harder, because I treated most of the missions as kill alls for practice, despite having invisibility to stealth to objectives. On the final mission I may have done more than a kill all - I killed most on the outdoor map, but apparently a couple minions got trapped in geometry, as with the upper terrace clear and thoroughly searched, I was still missing two of the Ravagers. So I had to restart that mission. I only killed what I had to on the second pass, but I'm pretty sure it was more than I'd left alive on the first pass. Build below.

The 3-slot bonus for Superior Brute's Fury is a highly-prized +5% melee defense, so splitting gives you +10% melee defense, and you might not need the 6-slot bonus of +6% smashing/lethal resistance on Invuln. The other I wouldn't split on most Brutes, as I'd usually be more interested in its 6-slot bonus of +6% energy/negative resistance. But splitting it gets you +32% regeneration, so it's pretty good either way, at least on a Primary/Secondary that's mostly lacking in heals, and a little weak in energy/negative resistance.

Roughly the same strategy while I leveled: Offensive by default. Efficient if I'm running out of blue and still fighting, or the enemies drain my endurance. Defensive if I'm running out of green and still fighting, or the enemies are generally too tough. Switch back to Offensive as soon as my blue and/or green bars have sufficiently recovered. If I'm Efficient too often, I focus on improving my build's endurance management. If I'm Defensive too often, I focus on improving my build's survivability, or turn down the difficulty. If I'm never Defensive, I turn up the difficulty.

That does look like a good one.

Heh, while I do usually have Hasten, I hate Super Speed, but different people like different travel powers, and probably for many people, they're one of the pleasures of the game. I also usually take Combat Jumping or Hover, so if I take a travel power, I go with Super Jump or Fly. But I mostly take them if I need somewhere to slot something. Knockback protection on Dark Armor, for instance. Otherwise I usually go with a jet pack and no travel power. I can confirm from in-game that Cloak of Darkness and Celerity +stealth are additive and make you completely invisible to normal perception. I was stealthing missions that way this morning. (edit: Though most of the time, I'd think Scrappers would be like, "Stealth? We don't need no frickin' stealth!" I'm just grinding out some incarnate salvage. I would normally crank up the difficulty and kill all. Vertical enemies offend my sensitive aesthetic sensibilities.)

I slot a Celerity +stealth IO in Sprint for that purpose. Saves a power pick.

I fear it may not be possible to solo Giant Monsters with a Dark Melee/Super Reflexes Scrapper. I need to refresh my memory on the DPS required to take down a GM, but I think it's in the neighborhood of 350 DPS. The only Dark Melee Scrapper I saw on a quick look at the Pylon Damage Thread was around 380 DPS, but Bio has Offensive Adaptation. You may have to settle for only AVs, or pick another Primary and/or Secondary better suited to soloing Giant Monsters. Somebody may have a build that can do it, though, and prove me wrong.

And if 50, incarnate content (59% defense) or no incarnate content (45% defense)? And GMs may be a problem. Not for your survivability, that'll be a cakewalk. But for your DPS.

Yeah, I planned my SR build out and bought all my IOs before I even started leveling, and I'm slotting as I level. That made it bloom early rather than late. That's the only toon I've ever done that on. I might not do it again, but my friends and I had agreed these were going to be our "slowbies", no double XP booster, stopping XP every few levels to keep from outleveling content and try to run all the interesting arcs. I think we did that to level 12, and then we all were like, "yeah, screw that, double XP charge!!!"

Whoops. Sorry for the miscalculation on required overall recharge. Thank you for the correction. Hopefully the below calculations aren't also flawed. Ablating has +123.53%, global is +132.5%, so a factor of 3.5603 + Ageless. And I'm pretty sure gaps follow Arcanatime as well since it's based on some sort of server tick? So here are the gaps over the course of an Ageless cycle. First 10: 6/(3.5603+.7)=1.408, gapless Next 20: 6/(3.5603+.3)=1.554, one-tick gap, 0.132 seconds Next 30: 6/(3.5603+.2)=1.596, two-tick gap, 0.264 seconds Next 60: 6/(3.5603+.1)=1.639, two-tick gap, 0.264 seconds And you get two of those gaps since you're using Ablating twice. I'd want to get that down to the first 30 gapless, next 90 one-tick. Factor of 2.2353+x. So for the first 30 I want 6/(2.5353+x)=1.452, 6=4.0159152+1.452x, 1.452x=1.9840848, x=1.3664..., so we need 137% global recharge instead of 132.5%. Need to check the next 90 seconds too, 6/(2.3353+x)=1.584, 6=3.6991152+1.584x, 1.584x=2.3008848, x=1.452..., so +146% recharge. Tougher. OK, so what does the 137% buy us after the first 30? Factor is 2.2353+1.37=3.6053. Next 30 seconds is 6/(3.6053+.2)=1.576 is still a one-tick gap, but the two ticks for the next 60 seconds. Anyway, I'd probably target 137% or 146%. But all that said, and maybe I should have done this math instead, I suspect it's still the best chain, even with the current gaps. But it's easy to test in the actual build rather than all this theorycraft. Use an unslotter to swap in an Achilles heel. Run Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals on a pylon. Run the proposed chain on a pylon. See which is faster. And if you can handle all the "still recharging" sounds. 😉

Give the above chain a try. Get an unslotter, stick in an Achilles' Heel, and see how it works for you. You probably don't want to give up 6% smashing/lethal resistance, but it's an easy way to try it out since you have the recharge. If you like it enough better, then fiddle with the build until you're back to where you want to be.

Necroing since I just noticed my name. That is indeed a solid chain, what I might even call the standard DPS chain for Dual Blades, but yes, there is better: Blinding Feint -> Ablating Strike -> Sweeping Strike -> Ablating Strike You need Blinding Feint to recharge in 3.828 seconds, which takes +214% recharge (edit: +314% due to Ablating Strike, thank you @Redlynne). Put an Achilles' Heel resistance debuff in Ablating Strike. I believe credit goes to @Shred Monkey as the first person to figure it out? Hopefully my old fart memory isn't failing me, but this is what I think I remember. It was back before we knew about Arcanatime, and so this chain would have been thought to require an impossible amount of recharge. But he trusted that the tiny delays he was seeing in attacks firing off was something real, part of the game mechanics. He made a guess about how that would affect required recharge, making an "impossible" recharge chain actually possible. Then he proceeded to solo AVs faster than anyone thought Dual Blades was capable of, and by not publishing the build, we were left to wonder how it was possible for him to pull off that chain. Not to mention that it was some of the very first AV soloing using Scrapper Challenge rules. Very impressive stuff.