Sovera

That makes perfect sense. Conserve Power's 116% endurance reduction does not make a 10 endurance power cost 0, only 5 endurance. -100% range is bound to be something like you said, and then she must have a stupidly long range on top of that. Or she's just immune to Taunt. Either way taunting and immediately fleeing to force following does not work.

It says 100% in the power description though. I confess I'm pretty disappointed with Taunt. I took it to peel Battle Maiden from her blue circles and she simply ignores me and continues pew pewing despite the fact I taunt and immediately flee back. Not just that but she doesn't even focus on me. If she's pew pewing someone else she'll continue doing so. Same with other mobs like the giant robots in Apex. I taunt expecting them to follow me but they stop and shoot NPCs instead.

Let me know when you do and we'll pewpew together. THE WORLD WILL BURN! 😄

An alternative build that I am currently trying. I found that I was not using Shockwave enough to warrant have it picked up and slotted. While it was my bread and butter on my Scrapper I just have not found use for it partly because Burn wants me close to the ground where Shockwave I used to hover over the ball of clumped enemies in order to have it act as a ghetto PbAoE. This was a long deliberated decision since Shockwave has a very important soft CC component in it that allows to chew more than we should. But since respecs are cheap and it *was* gathering dust I'm trying this. - In exchange for the seldomly used Shockwave I picked up Assault. More damage for me and everyone else. - Used the now free slots to add things here and there. I was displeased at the low accuracy of FU and Slash and took the Kismet unique to make up for it. - Slightly changed the slotting around based on Bopper's advice. Bit less recharge means bit more chance of procs going off. - Removed the -res proc in Burn for an Eradication proc. On the long run this might mean less damage. On the short run (and most of CoH's fights are short runs) the double proc is pretty bursty and I can see the HP of things moving in chunks when Burn goes off, then the double procs do, then the pseudopet double procs as well. I'm not super fussed about the Fury -res proc since it does not stack and it is a common thing to have in teams. The extra recovery added from the new slots has been good at offsetting the cost of Assault. With absolutely no support endurance goes down, but slowly, and I have found that I still have a quarter of a bar by the time Consume has recharged. This is a delicate balance perturbed by any sort of endurance drain but I have Recovery Serums for those moments. Most of the time endurance is simple full since someone in the team throws an Ageless (pretty common incarnate due to said recovery but also recharge) or we have someone with an endurance boost. Seriously, endurance is a non worry. With Focus having to pick the slack for FF procs my usual ST rotation is Follow-up, Burn, Focus (fish boy, fish!), Follow-up, Slash, Focus, Follow-up, Burn. This is why I don't have the purple damage proc in Slash. For AoE it's still the same: Follow-up, Burn (star of the show), Spin (after Burn so the 2.5 animation happens while the recharge is ticking), Focus (fish, boy, fish!), Slash, Follow-up, Burn, Spin. Alternative build: I've also added a leveling build I made for a friend I convinced to play the game with me. It's a *lot* cheaper and still has 40% defenses (45% with Barrier) and the resistances are still capped with two ATO stacks and Barrier's 5%. So it has everything a Tanker needs to tank. The trade offs are a worse Hasten and less damage due to no procs in attacks but it will do just fine to burn the content until money is amassed.

Cardiac? Boo! Musculature FTW! ...seriously though, I'm running Focused Accuracy with no end red, and Assault, and living off Consume. Very occasionally I pop a Recovery Serum if either fumbling Consume or met with end drain. This lets me go Musculature 45%. Claws isn't EM though.

Now roll it on a Stalker to get a proper hard hitting skill 🙂

Only in the sense that you are not using Lotus Drops when doing single target. Fighting an AV or even a boss. Are you using your AoE? I think the answer is not, so the proc sits not used. Place it instead in something you will be using all the time. For me it was Avalanche. Be it ST or AoE I'd be spamming Avalanche.

I haven't died nearly as much as some people who play Blasters here. But my favorite is an Archery/TA Blaster so I : A) Am 100% range and never dive into melee where the real damage is received. B) Open every fight with RoA mini nuke which instantly kills minions and reduces a spawn size to half. Half a spawn size hurts half as much. As has been said it's fine to enjoy Sentinels. The game is made so nearly everything works. Taking a bit longer to kill stuff is not preventing people from advancing. The lower damage a Sentinel does is made up by the faster recharging nuke. Again, I believe some people mistake their Sentinel's toughness for their defenses and resists instead of the fact they open every fight with a nuke and kill half a spawn. This is not something the average Blaster does since theirs is up every two spawns and then they compound it by wandering around in melee range.

I'm not going to join the crowd and for that I apologize since you are seeking confirmation. Your daughter *should* grow thicker skin. I don't get upset at the endless flood of mocking at how the french only know how to surrender and how their flag is the white one out from people who never opened an history book in their life. People *will* be pigs over the internet. It's the well known anonymity factor that dehumanizes persons and reduces them to words on the screen. The same persons who would be upset at seeing a young girl insulted in RL may very well join in an internet bashing. What I mean by this is that it was a good harmless bashing. Wait until the truly terrible things come of asking to show her tits or to go back to the kitchen because her opinion has no value. This is harmless enough if upsetting since she is a normal human person who was confronted by dumbies who were requested to stop and did not. Used to RL and our society's rules yes, I imagine it was a shock and an upsetting one. Now is the moment to tell her about all of this and how normal people who behave normally in RL are turned into parodies of themselves (I once met someone whose argument was that he was an alpha and he was entitled to things, and everyone else was a beta to him. I cringe thinking of him saying these things in RL, but he won't, no one would, but over the internet it's acceptable). Introduce her to the ignore button. Introduce her to the concept of 'don't feed the troll'. Ask someone to stop bad behavior once. They don't? Put them on ignore. They will not change their behavior by being argued with. In fact, the whole incident escalated once she started arguing back and this is my own experience at seeing it (not something I've been a target of myself). Arguing against someone who is saying or doing trollish things (the act of saying or doing upsetting for the sake of causing a reaction) does *not* work no matter what anecdotal examples are brought forth. Subjecting ourselves to the trollish acts as a form of moral high ground... well, okay, people do what people want to do. If they feel superior for it then it's fine for me. Me, I just put people on ignore. Anyone who does that sort of thing is not someone I care to interact with. P.S. Please stop selling communities as 'safe' and 'everyone is super nice'. Please, god. Nostalgia is fine and good but CoH live or HC is not an utopia. If 5% of 3000 are bottom feeders that's still 150 persons roaming around. All it takes is one or two in a team.

If you can trust HD is *seems* to be that way, but I've been caught in the trap of blindly trusting HD in the past.

Why should the level 50s lose out because under level 50s joined? They could just as easily have made a team for their own level but prefered to join a level 50 team so those could pew pew for them. Lets be honest here that under 50s joining 50 teams are not there to do pew pew but to collect XP. I hate it but I force myself to do it once in a while. There is nothing more miserable than to be using my strongest attack and see it plink for 40 damage against a +5.

You're thinking Stalkers. Stalkers have zero stay-close agro abilities and once at 20% HP mobs will just "$%&-off to the africas and maybe decide to return, or not. Scrappers do have a few agro grabbing auras. Bioarmor and Radiation Armor, Willpower, Shield, Invulnerability, etc. Not all secondaries have one, but several do, and enemies do not wander off with those sets who do.

You Fire Armor pros out there, what have you felt as the best slotting for Burn? With the pseudo-pet adding a second chance to hit with a proc is the -20% res chance (won't stack with the pseudo-pet if it goes off as well) better damage than a plain Eradication: chance for energy damage? There are two chances for the damage proc to go off and stacking (both alone or in teams) won't be a problem, but does 71 damage overcome -20% res (with the caveats of non-stacking with itself)?

I have the same reaction with Controllers. Why push a button to CC something when I could be pushing a button to kill it. It counts as CC if it's dead and not shooting back, right? And then there's MM. Surround myself with a fragile herd of cats that does whatever and tends to crumble when taking a hit. But where on another AT I would either eat an insp or hover out of range for my regen to kick in I instead click to summon a new minion, then click to upgrade, then click to upgrade it a second time. Sometimes another one dies before this sequence is over. Overall I find Blasters the most efficient. Annoying Tsoo lieut with Hurricane? Shoot it from afar. Starting a fight? Use the nuke, most things will be dead. While I love my Scrappers and Tankers they do suffer from 'Oh, you're doing level 25 content? I'll help! Oh golly... Gee... That's.. that's four Tsoo Sorcerers... It's a lot of Hurricane... Yep... I'm at 8% chance of hitting... I'll have to wait until they choose to detoggle (blessed be that they detoggle Hurricane on their own after a certain period of time, otherwise they would keep me debuffed for half an hour and relying on lucky hits to whittle them)'.

Hmm.. I come out of this enlightened but not decided. On one hand the +12% final -res chance on Burn still appears to me superior than a damage proc. On the other hand the -res proc does not stack and if anyone else is using it then mine won't do much. Double the chance of a second damage procs would help burst down.... Yep, still as undecided as when I began! I feel that the Gaussian would work better if I were to throw it into Tactics since I'm always teaming anyway. Apparently it's a 50% to go off every ten seconds with a full team around.

Bopper to the rrrrrrescue! The build is up there. I'm considering respeccing out of Shockwave and grab Assault instead since I find myself not using Shockwave *nearly* as much as on my Scrapper. Spin and Burn has been good enough. Plus I could use those slots and Assault would pump me up some more with just the one slot. The rotation, with a small gap, is Follow-up, Slash, Focus. Burn replaces Slash when it is up. On my own it's not enough to be gapless but in a team with recharge buffs it works fine. For AoE I Follow-Up, Burn, Spin, Focus (fishing for FF procs) and whack-a-mole with Burn and Spin given priority and Follow-Up for the buff, and Focus for the FF proc, down the list. What's your impression of Gaussian in Follow-up? The chance of it coming out seems pretty low, though when it does I nearly always am throwing Burn right after.

I've been pondering how to min-max my procs. The Gaussian BU proc in Follow-Up seems dubious to me between the ton of slotted recharge in the power, the low native recharge, and also the fast animation. I'm shy about placing the Fury of the Gladiator on the aura since @Boppermathed it at a -6% over time. It's ok, but not amazing. On the other hand with the fast pace of things do I really want to place it on Burn? Much better chance for it to go off there, but the burst damage of Eradication: chance for energy would just help killing things dead instead of debuffing them. That said anything soft will die in the first volley and anything a bit meatier would then be taking extra damage. 20% extra damage VS 71 damage proc. Does Burn still call upon multiple pseudo-pets who then apply procs? That would shift things towards the damage proc instead of the -res proc since that one would not stack. Arrrgh, decisions! Halp, @Bopper wan kenobi!

Depends on the team. If they are doing Tinpex they are incarnates. Good runs for me are 15 minutes, 20 for normal. And a couple of times doing horribly and be unable to kill the Maiden since the controllers CC her on the blue or the Tankers don't have Taunt to pull her off those. On a side thing I must say that I love people who play Controllers, really, I wish them no ill, but I love a team without Controllers even more. Everything goes so much faster and cleanly than having to scoop up mobs Feared or Immobilized out in Australia.

I confess this hasn't been my experience. Different servers, maybe, or different timezone people logging in at different hours? Who knows. But the general consensus has been: people finish assembling, we look at each others levels and vet levels, and we pipe in, for example, 'We only have two incarnates and the rest are underleveled. I suggest we +2 this'. Or 'We have five incarnates, we can easily +4 this', and as a rule the whole team agrees on these assessments. That said 90% of the time I'm the leader. Someone more gun-ho might ignore all such things and just set themselves at +4 and force the team to go at it.

You should correct misinformation. No need to make it a crusade, just inform them. You've done your part then and don't need to do more. I had a friend with an Achilles' Heel -res in each attack. I told them they did not stack. They insisted it did. I told them no, but to purchase the power analyser from the P2W and give it a test. They did and came back to tell me I was right. I also happily wanted to use the Tanker ATO proc in a damage aura and insisted it worked super well. I was corrected, tested, and they were right. Or trusted Mids about the uber heal Siphon Life showed on Mids, was corrected about its correct values in game, went to test, and they were right. Knowing these things is good, it's how we build up on what we know.

...but EM *is* bad. If someone asks my opinion on sets I'll be honest with them. Why should I lie to maintain political correctness? 'Is Titan Weapons good? Yes, but I would not advise you to take it as a first character since it involves complicated IO builds, it will never exemplar decently. On the upside it's the most powerful thing we have.' ' What about Energy Melee? Man, I would not advise you to take it. The last two skills hit hard as nuclear bombs, but animate *so* slowly you'll get annoyed. But, they *do* hit super hard so if you're into that....' ' What about Radiation Melee? Great damage, good heal, but it also animates pretty slowly in general and you might find yourself annoyed with it. The heal is pretty good but it will very rarely come up if you're rushing through missions with a steam roll team so I wouldn't tell you to trust it.' 'What about Kinetic Melee? Play it on a Stalker. I advise you not to take the T9. Get prepared to do low damage at a fast pace which evens out but does not make for biggo numbers. You can combat this by throwing three and four damage procs into each attack and not slot in recharge.'

We can think of it as early game VS end game, but keeping in mind defense works perfectly fine most of the time. This is purely min-max talk. The important thing here is that you're looking at the ease of becoming tough in the early levels as more valuable on the long run. Taking two or three days to reach end game is pretty normal simply doing TFs. I do one TF of each and by Manticore I'm just a couple bars short. No repeats. That makes 'tougher early' not a very valuable metric unless leveling rrrrreally sloooooowly. One thing to consider are inspirations. They make leveling easy. With a base macro instead of clicking to exit the mission once it is over we can just use the macro and replenish insps and then move to the next mission. And we don't need to hit 45% to be safe. We are in a team and the team will obliterate everything. 30-35% while leveling is enough, and one small purple is 12% of that. If you don't want to use them that's fine too, but I can say leveling my Fire Armor and Rad Armor was very easy (especially rad armor) and more so than the defense armors since a small purple gives 12.5% to reach 45%, but a small orange gives 10% to reach 90%. So a resist based character can have 6% from both uniques, 2.5% from Hover or Combat jumping, another 2.5% from Maneuvers, buy Kinetic Combats for their melee attacks (this is all stuff that I do) and end with 20ish% or more to S/L. Add ATOs (I have a full set of both normal and superior that I transfer when I stop playing an alt) and by level 35-ish I can about 28-32% defense to S/L. That makes a big difference. Now, things you really need to be less shy about: buying both 3% defense uniques. Even though they cost 4-5 mill one and 10-12 million the other that's a fat 6% defense. Kinetic Combat are pretty decent to level with (throw a Kismet 6% into Hover or Combat Jumping to compensate for the low accuracy) and give 3.75% S/L defense . The Shield Wall and Reactive Defenses uniques add to another 8% to all resists. All of these are expensive but you can, should, transfer them between characters. A respec recipe costs 1-2 mill, unslotters cost 150k. Don't leave expensive stuff laying around. I have in my signature how to easily transfer stuff between characters. This is a heap of words that don't really matter. Since defense works well and you like defense, then sticking to defense will work just fine. You don't need to force yourself to play a resistance based character. If you do want I can throw a level 41 build for you to try if you want to respec into it (you do get four free respecs by then).

I've noticed this with Ball Lighting. Throw it, use AS, Hide procs. Hide breaks from the DoT of the Ball Lightning.

You're correct here. Against content that does DD. Not all factions do DD though, so while defense will not help against those (it will will for a few hits at least) every other faction in the book that does not DD will have that extra layer of protection. For the ones who do, well, 90% resists will have to do. I don't find Toxic to be present in enough quantity to matter. Low level content is ran at +1 tops and eight people will demolish it anyway. High level content has Toxic, but not in the barbaric quantities that Vhaz has where every minion will spit it. High level is more... what? Toxic Spiders from the Arachnos faction I think? No, wait, there's the hydra in the Tinpex sewers. There I notice the HP being dented though I use Barrier before entering it so it's mitigated. ATO two stacking has not been a problem for me. Or perhaps I just consider it okay. It might be like when I thought throwing the proc in the aura was the bee's knees and it turned out not to be so. But when I glance at my monitor I see the nice blue 90% more often than not. I'll make an honest effort at tracking its uptime and will report on it. As for Barrier what is hard to understand? A metric ton of defense *and* resist (Psi/Toxic/Cold which is what's lacking) makes for a good panic button. It makes a for a *great* pre-emptive team savior where we know hard moments will come (sewers in Tinpex, ambush on top of the hill in ITF), and at minimum it's 5% defense and resists added to reach (soft)cap. I mean, what else? Ageless? It's not like we're starving for recharge or endurance. Same thing that I had. Stacking yellows and breakfrees (I mistakenly said oranges back there) would have helped a lot, but my friend was half AFK and I did not feel like pushing the envelope.

All but cold, toxic and psi are at 90%. Two stacks of the ATO and Barrier ensure it. I could decide to get hardcapped resistances without accounting for the ATO + Barrier, but then the ATO stacks and Barrier are useless. I prefer not to follow that course and instead use those tools. S/L, for example. With one stack it's at 83.9%. With Barrier it's at 88.9%. With a second ATO stack it's overcapped. Energy and Negative are at 79.3% turn into 84.3% with Barrier, then a second stack (barely) overcaps. Two stacks are much easier to get and maintain than three where PPM and misses thanks to RNG can mess it up. And then there's the harsh wake-up call like I had 😄 I had been duoing/trioing TFs with friends (this build has been fricking amazing for such) and we decide to do Posi 1. Yeah, that didn't go well. Between the huge toxic hole, losing a ton of protection from set bonuses being gone AND running it at +2x8 (told you I was getting 100% cocky 😄) I got *annihilated* by the CoT with their massive spam of -ACC, -defense, and immobilizes. In any other content it is as you've said it yourself. Go in, Burn, AoE, boom, melting pack and damage is immediately cut. With the astounding amount of -acc from the ghosts plus the bosses' FF bubble plus my friend half AFK I missed missed missed and they survived and spammed CC until they ate me alive. That said it's not a stain on the build. I don't think many builds can run such early content with so many toggles and IO bonuses cut off on +2x8 and not suffer from the same. Even so swapping most of my insps for yellows and oranges might have been enough but it was going to be too slow and painful just to drag someone half AFK.