Sovera

I've had a resurgence of altitis and was trying to find something better than my FA/Claws... But it's not happening. As far as I am concerned FA/Claws is simply the gold standard. Tried FA/Fire. Slow animations, bad Combustion, mediocre ST. Tried FA/Psi. Good mitigation, bad damage, only having a cone until 38 is a no. Tried FA/Rad. Good Mids numbers, but, no AoE until 38. Ok, Irradiated ground at 28, but it's more of an aura than actual AoE (really should be at 20). Slooooooow aaaanimaaaaations. It's the combo I feel I should make an effort to like what with easy access to -res and fat 650 HP heals, but what are those Atom Smasher numbers? 100 damage less than Spin, and 3.1 animation to boot? That disorient tax is too high. Most of these exemp simply terribly (only one AoE and at 38, or important ST skills at 35 and 38 so what to use if lower than that?) and as someone who exemps a lot I'm not into looking at level 50 performance only. Looked at a bunch of others but I keep hurtling against no AoE until 28 or just being plain worse than Claws (3.4 sec animation Tremor 🙂 )

Is there even a point in testing without incarnates? Even 'just' Reactive/Degen can shave almost a minute off the time, not even including Musculature and such. I was pondering my next test to be Street Justice. On another any other combo of power sets it has an annoying 2 second gap while waiting for Crushing Uppercut to recharge, but 'lo, Burn fills that. Sadly it has bad downsides for me. Two ST skills one at 35 and another at 38 rob it from good examplaring, and being forced to take the T1 robs of the much better alternative of using the T2 that could fit a FF proc. And Spinning Strikes is at 28, ugh. A more interesting test might be Dual Blades which is nearly a carbon copy of Claws. We get a Follow-up clone with Feint, a nice PbAoE at 16 that recharges pretty damn fast, a good place for FF with Vengeful Slice at 28 (just like Focus), a -res with Ablating Strike (same as with Slash). But according to Mids all the numbers are better on the Claws. Twice the damage in Spin(!), faster animations (1.3 Focus VS 2.6 Vengeful Slice -and- Focus doing 50 damage more).

Another small test with a Fire/Psi variant. The good: - Very easy to achieve ST rotation with TK blow, Psi Blade and Psi Sweep. Burn when up. - Extremely good places to have FF procs that speed things enough to make chains of Burn, Mass Levitate and Psi Sweep with TK Blow sprinkled here and there. - Very good mitigation with Mass Levitate. Pretty easy to lock a pack of enemies until it dies. - Psi Sweep is ok with the tanker patch (about 100-ish degree angle cone). The bad: - Animation are slow-ish and stiff. Not too bad, but not too great. - Being forced to take Mental Strike messes exemplaring with me being forced to take Psi Blade at 28 instead of level 2. Not horrible horrible since lower level content doesn't need min max. - Very old school ST Tanker damage with a pylon at nearly half HP at the 3 minute mark, This seemed strange since Psi Melee had good Scrapper times with the same rotation (ignoring Greater Psi Sword) but a second test had the same result. The build I used:

I decided to try a Fire/Fire variant since Fiery Embrace + Fire Melee seems like a match in heaven. Edit: at the time of writing this I still believed that Fiery Embrace did a 100% boost to fire damage which is not true. The good: - Burst. Fiery Embrace + anything is chunky damage. I found I could Build-up for one pack, then FE for the next, then BU again for the next. Only the fourth pack would have these two both still recharging. This is pretty good to burst things down. And FE + BU can just liquefy things when high burst is needed. - Fire is not lethal. I could see I was putting the hurt on things like robots. - Pretty long AoE chains. In very high AoE situations I found I could Combustion, Fire Sword Circle, Burn, Combustion, gap filled with Fire Sword (for the ATO proc) and then pretty much resume. The bad: - Combustion sucks very hard. It should either have a very wide radius and then it does good damage but has a terribly long animation, or it has a wide radius but does low damage and has a fast animation. But low damage AND extremely slow animation is just horrible. It can't even kill the little gears that pop from a Clockwork boss and still costs 3.1 seconds to cast. - Who thought it was a good idea to make Fire Sword and Fire Sword Circle do a scream FX? Every time, every 3-4 seconds, using Fire Sword makes for a screaming sound. That's really terrible. - Incinerate is the best attack the set gets... with a long near 5 second DoT. While it does not sound like a lot it means we are going to be wasting Incinerate by hitting the enemy one or two times more while the ticks happen. - Combustion being so bad means there is hardly a point in using it. I found myself using it once when reaching a pack of enemies and then relying on Fire Sword Circle and Burn to AoE them once minions dead. This means if exemplaring down too much we are with only Burn to really do AoE damage once FSC is out of reach. - Fire Sword Circle comes too late at 28. This is a common complaint with many Tanker sets that could -really- do with the Axe and MA rework where they got their AoEs down to level 20. Fire Breath is even worse than Combustion and only good for thematic reasons. - Incinerate at 35 means leveling with Scorch and Fire Sword only for single target. Too much exemplaring brings this back. - At least two deaths from chaining long animations. 3.1s Combustion and 2.9s FSC is a good way to die if not on top of things. Fire Melee is not in a good place. Not just for the lack of CC to help mitigate in the set, but also no place to slot the more common -res procs and no place to slot a Force Feedback proc. One would expect for something with these many downsides that it would then explode in terms of damage, but... no. It has a very high Fiery Embrace tax. It means if the set is made to be good enough on its own then it will be highly buffed once FE is used, which means it won't. I did a quick and unscientific single pylon test and even with Fiery Embrace propping it it was 3:50 without clickies. Now that said: - Pylon times are not useful metrics though. Claws are lethal and suffer from enemies resisting them much more than it happens with Fire and this is not something a pylon shows since it resists all damage equally. Were it a lethal resist based test then Fire would have made a better showing of itself. - The burst of BU with Gaussian + FSC + Burn for one pack of enemies and then FE + Combustion + FSC + Burn for the next is something useful for the short fights that predominate in CoH. This is the build I was using:

I have a new quote (I'll add it when I finish the Fire/Fire guide): - Random person in my team, "Who is using a baby seal to hit the bad guys?'

I'm on Everlasting. As a rule I see these being used. And just like me people tire of having to answer what level it is so they tend to append the minimum level to it. There was a time I even added the usual time to finish it.

Just the desire to argue over the internet. It's a common thing to have this part of the forums with several knights in shining armor ready to defend the helpless suffering game from the big mean players who want to bully it. With, say, NPCs saying something when we get close, or asking for a P2W option to refuse salvage. In both cases some players will rear up with their staves and shout thou salt not pass!! And in both cases a variation of the mechanic already exists. If we are hunting a boss that needs to be arrested it will speak when we get close to it. AVs in missions, named bosses, etc, we get close and they spout a text blurb. In the case of refusing salvage the P2W already has that option but for recipes instead of salvage. In both cases players come to the rescue saying how this would dilute the experience. I'll tell you what experience would be diluted. It was me doing Moonfire with a team and suddenly getting -hit- by how before Ouro portals and base macros we were expected to be in Striga. Fly to the boat. Loading screen into Talos. Fly to the tram. Loading screen into Skyway. Fly to the NPC. FedEx a message to it. Fly back to the tram. Loading screen into Talos. Fly to the ship. Loading screen into Striga. Fly to mission. Don't get me started on Citadel's IP/Talos Ping-pong or Numina's lets-go-chase-grey-mobs-for-ten-missions-all-over-the-world.

The new SM is amazeballs though. At least IMO. Good enough to be the only AoE of the character even. I do wish this happened to all cones since as a rule they are so crap no meleer touches them when possible.

There are so few fire/claws tankers out there I was on my other account and someone says to me: 'You've Sovera over the forums, right?' 'Yeah. How did you guess?' 'You are playing a Fire/Claws and your guide was cheering about them' 😄

I remember starting over when HC came out after the big brouhaha of Leo's secret server came out. At the time I was very interested in Sentinels and the forums were so brand spanking new they had 1-2 pages, so, of course, no guides. After lots of dithering I was like, welp, I used to do these a decade ago so lets get back to it. And I was so rusty, god, of course I didn't remember all the tips and tricks and combos. Looking back at my first posted builds I cringe at the clunky way I threw things together 😄

There are no cons I can think of other than Ice Melee not being super strong in terms of damage. But it's not terribad either (just avoid greater ice sword IMO 😄). Frost is a bit annoying in how it is a cone which is never very good for melee, but it is a -wide- cone so you can use Hover (or jump) and turn it an PbAoE by stint of aiming it down. Ice Patch is a great skill for a breather though you'll grown out of it by the 30s as your defenses solidify and soon realize you don't need it.... UNTIL YOU SUDDENLY DO! Being a one slot wonder there is zero reason not to grab it though. 90% of the time you won't need it, and then the last 10% you'll enjoy the breathing space the flopping provides. Your build seems solid but could do with refining. - You're chasing S/L resistance bonuses in Death Shroud despite already being overcapped by 8% with a single ATO stack (each stack is 6.7% and goes up to three stacks, but two stacks are the most reliable). - You don't have Frost slotted. Ow. It's your bread and butter AoE skill, man. - Freezing Touch is your hardest hitting skill bar none, and it can take -two- purple procs. You need to pamper it, not turn it into a mule. You basically open with this and everything else is a filler until it's back up. With the new slotting Mids shows it going from 369 to 494. - I tried not to touch your power choices too much but consider that Frozen Aura recharging in 6.5 seconds and Frost in 3.5 seconds you should be well off in the AoE without needing to dip into MU. You could go for Energy instead. You could also trade SS or SJ (or Taunt, blasphemy!) for Assault. - I just picked Musculature for the Alpha but you do you. You might want Ageless for your Destiny for endurance though I would prefer Barrier myself (finish softcaping S/L defense to 45%, another 5% resists also gives wiggle room, and in the end I just find Barrier a good panic button when things go sour) and just work the endurance woes with the core build (and P2W Recovery Serums if need be, they only cost 10k a charge). The build could do with better tweaks still but I'm off to lunch: - Freezing Touch is not the best place for the ATO proc since if you exemplar down too much that you can't use FT then you won't get use from it. But using a Kinetic Combat would be making FT a disservice. - More energy resists could be found. - There are still too much S/L resists.

Uber necro, but for those who read this, the last boss does a -HP debuff that stacks. So the trick to defeating it is monitoring your HP. Once it gets too low (I usually stop at 800 HP) break line of sight and bounce around until the debuff ends and your HP recovers. It's pretty much -the- reason people cannot pass this boss is not knowing this and continuing to face tank it until they get to something like 200 HP and then they get killed.

I feel like I am abusing your goodwill with this, but, have you found or are willing to find Fire Sword and Fire Sword Circle from the Tankers? It... it screams. Literally. Every three seconds I use the Fire Sword, and it screams, every three seconds. Who thought this was a good idea? And Fire Sword Circle does the same! Also, bless you for the Hasten change. So very welcomed.

It does not really matter. People who want to do it can do it. Using Lores against pylons or P2W buffs. Perfectly fine. The only thing that matters is not 'cheating' in the same way kids will use aimbots in an FPS game for... reasons (I tried asking my brother who extensively plays FPS games what is gained from using cheats that play the game, in a game that has no rewards and is played for the sake of playing. He said it was for the adulation and passing as a good player). As long as we don't have things like someone coming happy to say how they got a two minute run with a build, and someone else comes to brag how they did it in one minute, but does not mention they had amplifiers and clicked Hybrid, then that is fine. Basically just use amplifiers, and hybrids, and lores, but simply jot it down when putting down the times. It's not a competition, we're trying to learn from each other.

For once I have to agree. I may or may not agree with the rest, but this part yeah. P2W is nice though. Doing AE missions with mobs that feared I got through my emergency breakfrees and eventually bought an hour of the Defense Amplifier to get rid of it. But it's too expensive for me to use all the time. *sits on 1.3b raw inf not accounting for what is in the SG bins and slotted on other characters*

The only reason to use the Kismet is if the attacks don't have enough accuracy to hit +3 enemies. A quick glance shows that only Bone Smasher is at 87% to hit an enemy and everything else is over the 95% cap.

You bring back the 'nightmare' that was leveling my first MA Brute. Imagine going through well, everything, but mostly Synapse. And have to kill... everything... by ST... even the little clocks that spawn after defeating a boss.

I'd like to like Fire Melee on my Fire Armor tank. But A) Combustion does not compare to Spin (like lol), B) What is Fire Breath even doing in existence? Does anyone even use this? It's from a range set and not even the hop tactic makes its use palatable. Why isn't Greater Fire Circle in its place instead of 28? and C) it is in no way or shape an interesting set. No CC, no place to slot a FF proc without dipping into pools, lengthy animations, DoT attacks. Seriously, it seems to be fully accounted around the fact it is 'meant' to be played with Fire Armor in order to get Fiery Embrace boosting it. Which is its problem at the core. Since FE will boost it it cannot have speedy animations and 'good' attacks because FE will propel them. So like Psi Melee gets lower damage because Insight is not free damage but rather an equalizer, Fire Melee suffers from that FE tax.

Yes please. Spent 10 minutes with friend roaming the map looking for the guy. Even spamming a macro with his name didn't help. We ended killing the whole map clean of NPCs (fortunately we had it at -1 to speed it up since it was for the accolade) and we -finally- found the guy hiding in a corner of the map that somehow protected him from being noticed by the macro. Yes. I am sure this is the sort of riveting gameplay that makes the game fun for the naysayers above.

Some small things. - You've killed 10% recharge in Focus in order to grab 1.5% resistances to E/N but you are already overcapped anyway. In the process you've removed a very good FF proc that would accelerate your build. - You could kill a few procs and push your defenses higher (not strictly necessary, but, something you can consider). 40% on melee and S/L can do wonders and Barrier would give the last 5%. - I'm not sure if the power picks really were going to take in that order or not, but if so if you examplar down you lose several good powers that ought to have been taken much earlier. - You're Rad Armor. You sweat endurance. You don't need to chase endurance bonuses. - You've gone for Rebirth. Which is fair, you do you. But you're Rad Armor. You have a good short recharge heal + a heal/shield. On the other hand you did not raise your defense which will be your weak point. If you took Barrier you'd fix your defense hole and also be able to play with your IOs accounting for that perma extra 5% in defense and resistances. - Which speaking of you have too much of. The ATO gives near 7% and it stacks three times. Two is perfectly achievable so that's 14%. Mids only accounts for 7%. So 70% in Psi, for example, becomes 77%, and if you were to use Barrier it would be 82%, and a third ATO stack would be 89%. I've made some small changes here and there and lowered the resists a bit to take in account the ATO procs. See if there's something worth incorporating in your build.

Did some small changes to slotting. Bit more recharge, changing things around to be available sooner if exemplaring down, etc. Things to consider though: - Fire and Cold defense aren't terrible useful or important and you can save slots here and there to pick damage procs. - Agility is not really terribly useful (IMO). As an Elec Armor you're swimming in endurance and shouldn't need the endurance boost, and the defense/recharge boost isn't adding much. I'm musculature all the way (though it's only a 15% damage if already at ED) - In the same vein Ageless with recharge and endurance isn't adding much either. Barrier serves the same purpose and you can add 5% defense and resists permanently for content that matters. - I did not want to mess with the slotting too much but remember you can account for 14% in resistances with two stacks of the ATO (Mids only shows 7%, so another 7% needs to be accounted for) which lets you mess with the slotting. Instead of 90% you can aim for 76%, for example. Or since Mids shows one stack, aiming for 83%. If you decide to change to Barrier you can add another 5%, so aiming for 78%.. Three stacks of the IO can be hit and miss, but two stacks is fine. - Greater Fire Sword looks nice, but it's such a slow animation it's damage is actually meh once we account for 2.5 seconds of being rooted in place. You could grab the regular Fire Sword and make a shorter rotation that will still output more damage long term. Incinerate is your biggo damage skill and deserves the best slotting. - Same as above Energy mastery does not add much to someone who swims in endurance like an Elec Armor. I didn't want to mess with your power picks though. In any case Focused Accuracy makes for a nice mule and can be turned on to face Arachnos and their blinds or Tsoo or whatever (I'd take FA at 35 though). - Your accuracy is already enough to overcap hitting +3 enemies (with the sole exception of Lightning Field at 'only' 91%) so the Kismet was not useful. I replaced it for a LotG.

Diabetus Levios-ah! Or, more likely, they have their inspirations set already. For example, in my case instead of a big bag of random inspirations there are two neat rows of greens for emergency healing, one row of purples to combat defense debuffs, one row of accuracy (I do low level content a lot and Tsoo/Circle of Thorns are painful to whittle while ToHit debuffed to the gills), one emergency blue if sapped, two breakfrees for emergency CC break (DAMN YOU FEARS!) and one emergency orange. I have tried the macros to combine insps into making reds but found that in a group I don't get enough insps to keep up with the expenditure. It's still good practice when soloing though.

I do, I do, but it's what I said. If tankyness is a desired trait then there are Tankers over there. Now I'm thinking I ought to try duplicating a Claws/Fire Brute without bothering to make a full build with all the frills just to see how much faster it downs a pylon compared to its Tanker mirror.

I try not to nitpick decisions others have made for their builds. I loathed how such an easy and simple game as GW2 had people who did that. CoH is on the same level (more even) of easy so go, be fruitful and multiply, it won't be a bit more or less of damage that will be noticed as long as fun is had.

I'm pretty much the same. I do pay attention to look around and jump in if I see someone's HP going down, but to be honest? I already did that on my Scrapper. I can't imagine anyone looking at HP bars going down and not going to help. So to me nothing changed. I even introduce myself as a damage character, not a tank 😄