Sovera

Turning DOs into the equivalent of white gear in another game is kinda ish dunno... I mean. I get the idea. Only the most abject newbling would equip white gear from drops when they can get green gear with bonuses tailored to their need (in another game this would be +stats for their given class, such as agility for a hunter). But in the end white gear is barely half a step above grey drops (whose sole purpose is filling the inventory so a player eventually has to stop and go sell). If I have a vote on the matter I would simply cut the extra step. There is room for DOs in the convoluted half steps other games like such as the white gear I mention that is maybe useful for the first ten levels and then just turns into vendor fodder. This is an old system. There is no particular reason to follow tradition just for the sake of it. Make drops SOs. Someone NEW to the game is leveling and will notice they got something that they could use, great, take it, slot it. With the new option they can then upgrade it and avoid the mid TF wail I am used of about their enhances having gone red. Someone who is NOT new will have no need for this. At level 5 they will go to the nearest vendor and stock up. I know I probably will until 22. One accuracy (plus the accuracy boost new characters get), three damage (this in particular) or how many it will be to reach ED, then recharge, will be a lot better than to level with empty slots. Even so for someone who knows about the game they might do what I do which is slotting Kinetic Combats straight at level 17, but even so it is much nicer to level with damage and recharge (recharge in the low levels is particularly welcome since we have few attacks and large gaps waiting for them). TL;DR Cut DOs from drops since they are meant to be vendor fodder. SOs a player can be happy at seeing and slotting (and upgrading) is a better option. The costs of upgrading will also be eased by the higher sale value of SOs.

A small bug HD has is that if we +3 an HO then ALL other enhancements we place afterwards will be +3. Nothing will fix this except placing an HO down to +0 which will then remove this behavior.

Achille's Heel -res is not unique in the sense that they can be slotted in multiple powers. BUT. They are unique in the sense that if anyone in the team has one and hits something and the -res kicks in, then if ANYONE in the team has another Achille's Heel, or if the same person had multiple Achille Heel's slotted, then they will not stack. This is why they matter when doing Pylon runs but not so much when in a team since there are seven chances in eight that someone will have one of the -res procs slotted in.

I'm still as active now as I used to be but I started a second account on a lark and found that I ended up migrating there, so I'm still running a million TFs for a million alts . I have to say that CoH is such a nice place that I think I have only three persons on ignore (two of which I don't even recall why), and one of them I did today. The person isn't even a bad person, and I don't hate them, and I have no ill wish towards them, but every once in a while there I am organizing my Nth TF for my Nth alt and I will get this from them: 'What difficulty?' 'Doing it at +1' 'Oh, okay, I'd join if it was harder.' 'Yeah, but few want to fo the early TFs with under slotted characters and whittle away at mobs' 'I understand, but I don't like to play in easy mode. Call me if you decide to go higher up'. So as you can see the guy is not being offensive. ...but it tires me to have this conversation over and over.. and over... and over... and over... Today it happened again and I decided not to answer him knowing that we had this talk so many times before. Instead of taking the hint he starts sending 'lol', then 'lmao', as I keep advertising. I ask what's up and he complained he sent me a message and I didn't answer. I was about to say we had that talk before, but instead did the same 'Running it at +1' which ended up with us having the almost verbatim conversation of usual, but now punctuated with some passive-agressive sprinkles of 'some people have become bored of only playing in easy mode'. So I decided to put the guy on ignore. But other than that, CoH is so nice. I have yet to meet all those people spouting racist crap (but then I only have LFG and Everlasting's TF channel open), and while I really dislike knockback and mass immobilize uses, and I will complain about it and ask to go easy on mass immobilizes or mention Sudden Acceleration for the knockbackers, I don't kick them or make a point in not inviting them again, or put them on ignore. There are not even trolls. You'd think Pocket D would be a haunt of PvE players spouting crap or spamming powers, but it's 99.99% only RPers in there. In other games, like WoW I needed a special addon to increase my ignore list. It's racist talk on the chat or people just saying dumb stuff to get a rise from others, it's the occasional gold seller that gets past the filters, it's the large quantity of trolls that come to bother RPers because they have no life. It's the PvErs, who are not purposefully being bad persons and I have no ill wishing towards them, but who will be in the RP spots talking about RL and the game, and I don't want them intruding in my LARP with it. What's this about stars? It makes a visible icon?

... now do it with lore pets to see if you can destroy the pylon in 15 seconds.

Been leveling this through Posi 1 and 2, and then Synapse. It is absurdly sturdy. I usually quaff inspirations to solo spawns during these early leveling TFs but it's just been bouncing from spawn to spawn and Siphon Life keeping me up. Eventually as I am slowly overwhelmed and the clockwork think that they are about to win... I pop Radiation Therapy that only has four slots at the moment. This skill is pretty much Dark Regeneration's little cousin but it serves for HP, it serves for endurance, I basically have had no problem with my blue bar despite the clockwork. Fishing for the critical proc is still the best way. Smite first, then Shadow Maul for groups. While still without recharge Smite, Shadow Maul, Siphon Life, Shadow Punch, Smite, Shadow Maul. With minimal recharge Shadow Punch can be removed.

Things die too fast for prolonged agro holding to matter terribly. A Scrapper can off tank just as well as a Brute does because outside of spreadsheet situations things die fast and the same support that would support a Brute will support a Scrapper. IF no one attacked AND the fight lasted for 30+ seconds, then yeah, death. But we go in at whatever level, team unleashes AoEs, most things are dead and that's the kind of support that does not require a support. That said you're not going to out-tank a Brute or a Tanker, but why would you? It's not a competition, and if it really matters you should roll one. The only thing you should fuss about as a Scrapper is stealing the agro from and keeping your squishies safe (this can be read as your genitals or your support team members so take it as you will since both answers are correct) because nothing says you -need- to be hitting that boss over there while two lieutenants are hitting your low damage Controller buddy while he tries to whittle them down.

You will be swamped with choice. Scrapper is great and you can't go wrong with it. Claws and Dark Melee shine for starting very early, and nowadays Dark Melee went from being ugh to be a good low level choice since Shadow Maul turned into the sort of cone other sets envy (Psi Melee is looking at you). Both are good so personal taste and the flip of a coin might help. If you are going to flashback it is important to have a set that starts early. Katana is great but one ST attack at 26 and the other at 32 does not good examplaring make (though the cone and the +defense attack are acceptable for ST damage in the low levels). I'm going to say that for a secondary Rad Armor just because of Radiation Therapy at level 16. It completely negates Endurance problems while being a good heal with a fast recharge for AoE situations. Beta Decay also helps with low level recharge when LotGs aren't active.

I struggled a lot to get all the numbers juuuuuust right while preserving certain goodies (numbers with Barrier's 5%): - Capped resists to all except Cold (38%) and Psi (30%). For those OCDing about the slight fraction of a percent lacking just remember that at 90% HP the Scaling Resist IO goes from 3% to 4%. - 45% S/L defense. - Theft Essence in Radiation Therapy turns a good heal with a minor Endurance refill into a good heal with a great Endurance refill. - One damage proc in each attack, I just hadda have it. - Pretty darn decent 132 seconds Hasten with one enemy in range of Beta Decay and that will go further down with being surrounded. - Two heals, one of them a barrier shield, plus Siphon Life, who on a Scrapper only heals an anemic 13% but it's there to top us off which is important on a resistance based character who will keep on taking damage. - Slow/Recharge debuff at 91%. - No Performance Shifters slotted in feels weird with them being a staple of any build, but I needed the slots. It was a choice between two Performance Shifters or 20% Slow/Recharge. I felt that the build swims in endurance as it is. Currently at 3.1 EPS (with accolades), Gamma Boost does not seem to work on HD but in game triple slotted it gives 1.17 EPS at full HP, so 4.18 EPS. Then Particle Shielding (which is perma) adds another 1.1, so 5.28. And finally right away at level 16 with a super fast recharge Radiation Therapy which is harder to quantify since it is not Recovery it grants but Endurance at 5 endurance per activation plus 2.5 per enemy in range. This barely pays for the cost (6.27 once all slotted in) with only one enemy, but the Theft of Essence adds 10% if it procs, so 11 points, so with one enemy in range, assuming proc goes off, 18.5 - 6.27 = 12.23 endurance. This is more of an AoE use skill though but for regular content this skill alone ensures the bar is topped. The build has a cost of 1.74 endurance per second so all in all I feel that the endurance part of the build did not warrant the Performance Shifters. Certain PvP considerations were taken since I do minor RP-PvP and these were: - Tactics. Not needed since all accuracy was purpose made to hit +3 mobs without it. - Super Speed. My one RP-PvP with a Blaster that bounced around was hilarious as I tried to follow them with Hover 🙂 - Confront. To hinder ranged characters. In conclusion anyone not interested in PvP has these three powers to remove and do what they like with though do mind the slotting. Observations. This is the first character I have played with Super Speed since Live. I love flying too much, but I needed the extra room and since I was going to take Super Speed anyway I decided to try it. I found SS satisfactory as a travel power though. It does suffer from every pebble bump making my character explode into the drifting meme complete with soundtrack while inertia carries me off into the distance. Anyone who cares can substitute Hover for Combat Jumping to partly avoid this. But. Hover makes for a decent low level travel power and is very very very good to maneuver in combat, either it be chasing fliers or moving around the multi-layered rooms we are sometimes confronted with. If we hover above mobs it also uses Shadow Maul's wide cone to turn it into a ghetto PbAoE (this works very well). But, what makes Hover work is @Bopper's simply extraordinary work that he did here. That was a complete game changer for me. Thanks to having Steam Jump/Jump Pack Hover moves at capped Fly speeds (and it only costs 100k to have both. Just toggle one up, and once it runs out toggle the other while the first recharges. This makes for a permanent effect) which is why I only have that as a travel power while under level 22. It is also a much better option to get around obstacles than trying to jump over them with Steam Jump since the slightest bump will make us lose inertia and slowly move to the ground. It is much better to turn on SS, Sprint, and then one of the jump packs, and when in need to travel over something quickly tag Hover, move at Fly capped speed, then detoggle and keep running. As I spend 5% of my time moving around between missions and the other 95% in the mission this has been an acceptable trade-off, but only thanks to Hover moving at capped speed which is also a very nice QoL while in missions. If there is a desire for it I can whip a leveling build.

Hello and thanks for the hard work o/ I wanted to point out, if it has not, that the fire proc in Bombardment has not had the damage added in.

So, not just me then.

Oh, my bad then. I'm not savvy with SR. Let me edit the OP.

I wanted to give this thing a try so I made one. - I gave myself an arbitrary 'health down to 45%' so SR's scaling resists could kick in at a nice round number (5% each). WITH health down to 45%, AND three ATO stacks, AND Barrier's 5%, the build caps S/L and N/E to 90%. - This is arbitrary since allowing the HP to lower further would further kick in the scaling resists, but the sooner capped the better, yes? Because of this arbitrary decision there is some weird slotting going on which can be shifted according to taste, like the extra slot in SS, So we cap at 43% instead of 45%. This is a very slippery slope though and I've tried to shy away from it while keeping everything slotted as high as possible, accuracy capped without Tactics, etc. Hasten is down to an okay-ish 131 seconds instead of the usual perma Super Reflexes users are used to with their freedom in slotting. - The piece of resistance is Siphon Life healing just shy of 1/4th HP every 4 seconds. It is not quite Dark Regeneration, but still. Currently it heals for 644HP and the builds has 2684 HP so 24% of the green bar. - Slow resists are at 95% as well. - 3.54 EPS not counting Performance Shifter and Panaceia. - Easily modified to run Incarnate content. Just remove Tactics, grab Weave, shift slotting on Tough for both +defense uniques and voila. - ST rotation should be something like Siphon Life, Shadow Punch, Smite, Shadow Punch, Siphon Life. This will have something like a 0.2 gap while Hasten is up. - AoE rotation is just Shadow Maul, Smite (keep the stacks up), Siphon Life (heal up), Shadow Maul (HD hasn't updated SM but it is now at 11 seconds, not 8, and so it recharges in 3.2 seconds). I feel SM is pretty good right now and more so on a tanker so the build doesn't really need more AoE when Smite for stacks and Siphon Life to recoup HP already fill SM's recharge. - I would not fall under the lazyness of not hitting Siphon Life when ever possible since its the only heal the build gets. Having the HP always topped is a much better long term plan than waiting until being at half HP to start using it even if with the current slotting Siphon life -would- heal to full in two uses in that scenario (but dat 5% chance of missing does come up at the worse of times). - I would keep Barrier as a panic button instead of using on CD. Toxic, psi, etc, are still weak points after all. There might be something to be said about using Rebirth instead but Siphon Life is frankly OP as it is now. - Without all the faffing around of stacks of ATO and Barrier's 5% and HP at 85% the native resists are at 49% S/L and 49% N/E at full health.

There is also who seems to have picked quite a following. No heals or endurance recovery in the set is a bit iffy for me, but BS/Shield would fit you like a tee, methinks. Energy Aura, on the other hand, would provide for both said heal and said endurance recovery.

I see where the bug is. Placing the proc in the Heavy Blow did zero (as the above test showed) but once I placed it in Shin Breaker it started working as a global.

I need to try it again then. But I had it Heavy Blow and Spinning Strike did not make it go off after several attempts hitting x8 packs. Once I put it in Spinning Strike it was refreshing. I'll do another round of tests. I return. One minute test surrounded by enemies with the proc in Heavy Blow and BU did not refresh while using Spinning Strike. Immediate refreshing when slotted back in Spinning and refreshing kept on happening once in a while. At this point I might ask if you could give it a test over the AE or such. Use BU, use skills that don't have the proc in. It might be the fact I'm using the normal version of the proc instead of the superior?

You've made me doubt myself because when I went to look in-game the proc says It does not say global, but, it does say 'most of the stalker's damaging attacks' which is worded as if it was global. But after testing by removing the proc from Spinning Strikes to Heavy Blow and only using Spinning Strikes and BU BU never once recharged. Placing it back in Spinning Strikes BU refreshed several times as I tested. It was not an in-depth test so I could still be wrong, but it seems to support what I experienced with Stalkers.

One thing I feel that people sleep on a bit is that Stalkers are actually pretty damn good AoE machines. But the trick lays in placing the BU refresh proc in one of the AoEs. It only has 5% chance to proc, but in an AoE it has multiple chances to go off which means lots and lots of BUs and Gaussians coming up. This is another reason why StJ shines since due to the awkwardly high recharge in Crushing Uppercut we need something to fill until it comes back up and Spinning Strike hits decently, takes an Annihilation -res, AND can take the BU refresh proc. Other sets will not usually use their AoE in their ST rotation, but with StJ and Spinning Strike filler the proc gets to be used in AoE and ST situations. The rotation is a bit more awkward when including Spinning since it pushes AS for later due to charge generation, but with my StJ/EA: (In hide) Crushing Uppercut, Spinning (eats all charges, but no charges are up after Crushing, chance for BU refresh and -res), Shin Breaker (chance for -res), Heavy Blow, (if Spinning refreshed BU use it now) AS (fish for Hide to empower Crushing), Crushing (empowered by three charges plus possibly Hide plus possibly BU plus possibly Gaussian plus possibly Annihilation -res plus possibly Achille's Heel -res), continue. If using AS after Crushing then Spinning will eat the charges and by the time Crushing is back only two charges will be available. Starting with AS is the best option for more burst though we need to contend with slow animation AS. This rotation takes about ish 6.18 seconds and Crushing recharges in 7.08 ish something, so about a one second gap if no BU was used, but between two FFs and anyone in the team who pops an Ageless it is not much of a worry. Try harding would be adding another Heavy Blow but when I tried doing this I kept being thrown off by said uses of Ageless and said FF procs (or SB, or accelerated metabolism, or now the new Electric Affinity mini SB) so I decided to just be less dynamic about it. This is just for an AV/pylon. Bouncing around from spawn to spawn we just hit our hardest skills when they are up and in most cases the charges are going towards Spinning anyway.

I prefer when possible to put slots on powers I use. I really loathe muling and its an unfortunate almost divorce reason between me and Bio. So for me the slots in Brawl would serve no purpose other than the muling (cheaper in slots as you rightfully pointed) but the slots in stamina/Physical Perfection/Dark Consumption would feed more endurance mitigating uses of Dark Consumption and for exemping and etc. Just an idea though.

Consider 3 Synapse Shock in Stamina and or Dark Consumption/Physical Perfection for the 10% res slow. 30% res slow might end up being tastier than 10% recharge in Boxing.

This is one of the reasons combo power sets don't work too well with the precious relic of the past that is 5% chance of missing. You remind me of when I tried the Water Blast set and would grit my teeth at seeing my rotation tossed out of the window because instead of T1 T2 T3 AoE finisher, it would turn into T1, miss, T3, AoE builds instead of finishes. T1 T2 T3 eats the combo, AoE has no combo now. Or having both T1 and T2 on a Sentinel, want t2 for the endurance recovery, press button, misses, T1 already queued and eats the charge.

It takes me an hour and a half to reach 22, and about two days to reach level 50 just cruising through the TFs. The 'gimping' is more than paid by not having to go and shop for new stuff every few levels. Maybe if someone was leveling slowly by solo I could see it trying to get the most of their enhancements, but if trying for the most then most will do as I do which is slotting normal ATOs and event IOs like Avalanche from level ten onwards. I am finding it funny you call IO users gimping themselves when you are in favor of, say, at 25, having, +3 boosted, 38% accuracy, 98% damage, with four slots, or have 20% accuracy, 75% damage, 36% recharge and 36% endurance discount, 1.5% res to fire/cold, 1.5% HP, and 3.75% S/L defense from four Kinetic Combat. Which one is gimped I'll leave it to the mathmagicians to math it out. Regarding the second part of your comment, I remember you posting your findings. You don't seem to have understood that when people 'almost open mocked you' was because even without double XP single digit levels fly past too quickly to be something of a concern. You remind me of the people complaining bitterly how characters were stronger when low level as they entered WoW's last expansion, BfA, because the devs had put in a mechanic that boosts the power of lowbies so they could get past the fact they might not have gear to tackle the new content, but by level 115-117 that boost disappeared making a character go slower... until 120 where they started accumulating real gear. Their complaint was based on how their farm characters were so much stronger if they A) got twink gear, B) froze XP to stay 115 forever. This is not something that ought to be worried about, just like your worry that a character's half hour at single digit levels might be hurt by the buffs that DM otherwise received.

The change to SOs is very appreciated. I still won't be using them, of course, once I'm at 22 (because IOs are a one time purchase). But depending on the raw numbers I can see myself stuffing every character with accuracy (because /Bio with baked in To-Hit in offensive, + a kismet + probably Tactics still isn't enough to reliably hit through Ruin Mages. That said it really depends on the raw numbers offered because I can/could do the same with level 10 IOs at level 7 and have it be a one time purchase until 22. Last time I did this level 10 IOs were 5k for a one time purchase. SOs really need to be competitive to beat this.

Go to options, windows, and change Hide Auto Powers. Then click Apply.

On a tangent I was messing with a SR Tanker and found that at 90% HP I could have it at 90% S/L resistances (and about 61% to E/N) assuming all three ATO stacks were on, plus Barrier's 5%. Barrier is not very useful in any way for SR though, except minimizing slotting for the 59% cap. The beautiful thing about a SR Tanker is that at around 24-25 we can be softcapped and then it is a matter of carrying oranges instead of purple insps.