Sovera

The only thing you can do is go over the softcap by a good chunk and then kill fast. The soft remains 45%, but if the first hit takes a 7% off then you're going to be hit more and lose more and more defense. But if you are at 45% and eat an insp and shoot to 57%, and then get hit and lose 7% then you are still at 50% and still softcapped. This is how I combat it. A defense buffer and then kill fast. Again, if every hit takes a chunk of 7%, then quickly killing all minions and lieutenants ensures less 7% strikes landing. As Hopeling mentioned moving out of range is a definite strategy. Once we lost enough defense to be down to the middle 20s there is no point in staying there since we'll be insta gibbed by a spawn still large enough (the 60% S/L resists, she does notheeng!). Hovering out of range is a DPS loss (lookit us talking like WoW raiders!) but staying in melee and be killed serves zero purpose. If I am in a team I just zoom out and then zoom back in right away to test if the mobs got distracted and started hitting someone else.

I had that thing as well. Logging off completely fixed it.

I return to add one more: The relic that is 5% chance of failing to hit. It's terrible. I hate it. Point me to all the tests and math but when I'm at 95% and miss three times in a row I question the odds of it happening. The 5% chance plays miserably with all the combo building sets too.

I tell you. Back in the age of plenty when MMOs came out and I blithely jumped from one to the other and was super picky (it's fun? it's good? But it has no RP community? UNTHINKABLE!) I had left CoH since I had nothing really to do. This was when they had just begun murmuring about Incarnates so I believe I joined at I6 and left at I14. At one point I came back to CoH, paid a month, logged in, and went eeeew, the old models, god, no fingers! And didn't even play. I logged that half hour and didn't return for the rest of my paid month. Now CoH returns and I have been ADDICTED. Like, holy crap, I've not been addicted to a game this hard at least since GW2. Talk about waking at 6 AM on a week-end (I tend to always wake at around then, but then I roll around and continue sleeping) and consider getting up to go play. And sometimes I actually did so! It's been eight or nine months and only now am I losing steam. And I say this but I just re-rolled the same character four times with different combos and gave myself iron man rules to not transfer cash or play the market. Even then the losing steam is mostly the fact the RP server is US based and as an EU I'm missing out on the majority of the community. While I agree with everything you've said this here is very important. I remember trying to coax friends to come play with this line, 'You can play a tank from level 1! A healer from level 1! You can TANK STRAIGHT AWAY! HEAL STRAIGHT AWAY! You don't need to slog solo all the way to max level on a DPS spec despite having rolled a tank because you wanted to tank! You get -more- XP if you team up You're encouraged to team up from level 1 on!" You have to understand my other game at the time was WoW, before double builds, before uber XP from dungeons and cross realm LFG allowing (having allowed, it's been nerfed since) to level solely via dungeons and in groups. At the time leveling together was -slow-. The killing speed increased but the XP was cut by a good amount and in many cases quests were not even made to be duoed with all sorts of problems involved. So this was completely novel to me. Imagine this! Playing together since level 1! Tanking from level 1! Even now this is my call to friends. Unfortunately zero have taken the bait. At most they play 2-3 minutes, promise to return, and I never see them again.

To me it's increasing the waist. If it's not maxed it doesn't look right to me. I have a friend with whom we play a game of 'spot the thirsty guy' by pointing characters with min slider waist and max slider breasts.

People usually take random powers like stealth just to mule a LotG, so taking Hover (which I want anyway for the mobility in combat and the +defense) to slot one, then Afterburner to slot another I also get a free speed boost \o/ Seriously though, check the Guides section, Booper made a guide on Travel powers which was a game changer for me. I now move nearly as fast as Super Speed, and faster if they need to jump or travel around something. Annoying things for me is the well known click-on-things-and-they-don't-work-so-click-twice-but-now-I-get-sent-to-some-random-place-since-this-time-it-opened-the-menu-as-it-should. Other than that, I guess not much. Oh, perhaps being annoyed at people being annoyed by other people's power choices or the level at which they take them? Edit: wait, I lie. I'm pretty annoyed at Ruin Mages throwing bubbles up when we are low level and don't get to have accuracy slotted in. Annoyed enough I always run two DFBs nowadays. One for the Recovery buff and the second for the Accuracy.

Mentioning how powers don't have cooldowns reminded how my builds there were always just one ST attack and one AoE. At one time I just played with their equivalent of our KO Blow. And lets face it, it hits like a truck, it does KU, it has no cooldown, why wouldn't we do a build that is nothing more than slamming it? ...which wasn't as fun as all that. 1111111111111111111 until thing is dead. 222222222222222 until everything has been AoEd down. Possibly 333333333333 to recover HP if having worked in a leech power that did damage while it also healed. I tried coming back to it, and I would really really like the more complete models (ACTUAL FINGERS!) but the community and game weren't interesting, and the nickel and diming, the thumbing of noses for F2P players to collect 8k of currency if they wasted two hours doing dailies while things cost 100k was just nah.

Has someone figured out how to make stacks work with IOs? Tankers have the +res that stacks three times, Brutes have the regen and end discount that stacks five times. I've messed with the editor and found the enhancments and changed them from non stacking to stacking, but this had no effect I could perceive.

MA/Bio. Easier slotting thanks to Storm Kick allows shenanigans usually forbidden to /Bio's tight slotting. Also, it hits hard as a train.

The MA/Bio brute is being better than I expected. The 7.5% defense in Storm Kick is huge for a /Bio but to my surprise I'm one shotting even level minions with Crane and Crippling Kick. Reaching 26 for Dragon Tail was a huge pain. God, never again doing Posi and killing every little gear.. one... by... one... The AoE is pretty satisfying too. Fast animation (fastest PbAoE even that I've seen for melee characters), KB. Incidentally both the 100% KB in Crane and Dragon Tail make for some much welcome Force Feedback proc triggering. Overall not the fastest animations but not the slowest either, 1.8 , 1, 1.8 is very acceptable. This seems like a keeper.

I'm going to try MA/Bio next. /Bio has a hard time pushing S/L up, and 'lo, Ma gives a stupendous 7.5% to -all- defenses. This completely changes the slotting. While Katana, Broadsword, TW and Staff also have defense raising moves they are limited to two types only (smash and melee, for example) and are usually not part of the rotation, where Storm Kick very much is.

This is so true. You'd think there would be widespread attempts at stiffling things, but while I'm not saying everyone has some niche they are not advertising on a whole I've seen that marketeers just want everyone to share some of the cake.

I have difficulty in sitting down and using the base editor after having played with Rift's and Wildstar partly because of this. Oh you placed a wall down? And you're placing an item on the wall? And you want to click on the item? Be prepared to have the item ignore the fact your cursor is over it to instead grab the wall behind it. Over and over and over. The thing where we -always- grab an item by the middle of it is also incredibly aggravating when trying to carefully place down large objects. Want to slightly move a thing a centimeter to the side? Well, now you clicked on it the whole shebang moved to africa so that its middle can be over where the cursor it. Now to try to guess where it was and slightly move that centimeter. Good luck!

The idea of going Fire Armor is for Burn. Burn on Scrappers makes mobs run away. Your friend might find more enjoyment out of playing this combo as a Brute. Claws also has a gapless AoE rotation out of claws alone and does not need Burn, so it's a bit of a waste.

I was leveling one of those but eventually got bored in the late thirties. DM starts strong and fun but paradoxically gets stronger and less fun as I leveled. The buzzsaw aspect diminishes as Soul Drain and it's 4.3 animation is introduced, and then Midnight's Grasp's 2.3 was kind of the death knell for me. Now I'm doing 4.3, 2.3, 1, 2.1, 1, animations and it stopped being fun. But, paradoxically, mein gott, the damage! Talk about tearing chunks out of enemies between Fury up, Soul Drain, and then two damage procs in each attack. I could see a boss' HP simply jumping down. ...but it wasn't fun anymore. It just went from being fast greased lightning to Super Strength levels of ponderousness. Trying to wrangle a decent number of enemies for Soul Drain but the team rolling the enemies over also wasn't rewarding. The Fire Armor Brute was also pretty squishy though Burn patched the AoE hole nicely. Too many plates to juggle and no OP Tanker proc to prop things up meant I had something like 65% resistances. I'm sure it would have worked out fine in the end with softcapped melee and S/L and about 70% resistances to S/L and such, but it would not have handled debuffs at all.

I'd like to test a few builds and this is throwing the numbers. Maybe I need match to calculate how much time would have been shaved were Degenerative up and running as it should.

I read an old spreadsheet saying how SM does not mechanically work well with crits. Is this a thing? Aren't DoTs calculated and attributed to the upfront damage of a crit? Does anyone have some numbers? Edit: went for a quick spin over the test server and it is so. T2 did 73 damage plus a few ticks of 13 damage. Crit did 73 damage x2, and then did the regular 13 damage ticks.

Of course you're involved in this fiasco. I am not surprised. Carry on challenging the 6% DPS loss, forum knight.

The justification has been given, you just decided to ignore it and all subsequent posts. You're not after an argument, you just want an echo chamber because your mind is set. This thread is a waste of time, carry on without me.

Yes. And that's what these ten pages have been about. Not that it is an insignificant nerf (and a bug fix rather than a nerf at that), but nerf, omg. I'm all for a bit of forum drama if I have popcorn and the patience to wade through ten pages of 'gut feelings' and 'think of the children' and 'these devs will KILL COH IF THEY CONTINUE DOWN THIS PATH!' but lets at least listen to Bopper and his math. 6%, and now the devs have things clean behind the scenes to ease their work. Lets please move on.

All this DRAMA over a 7.5%. All this DRAMATIC arguing over SPREADSHEET DPS. I'm amused. In practical terms 90% of the game is melted under 10 seconds with or without a Tar Patch. I suppose that with a Tar Patch it would go down to 7 seconds. With a 'nerfed' Tar Patch it goes to 8 seconds. (THE HUMANITY! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?) A 'hard' target that takes a minute to kill without Tar Patch goes down in 40-ish seconds with it. With a nerfed Tar Patch about 45 seconds? THE HU-... nvm. I can assure -everyone- in this thread that in actual game play no one will even notice the difference. On a long run, with DPS meters running that tally the total damage and kill times, with 5 minute long boss kills and DPS checks, yeah, sure, 7.5% would be noticeable by theorycrafters min maxing a static comp. But here?

Sonic/Bio Sentinel. Amazing fun. Only tarnished because cones really -need- to work without targets and where the camera is faced. 2.6 second animations need to be throw to an open fire as well. Currently a Dark Melee/Fire Brute. DM has the buzzsaw aspect with each attack having two damage procs, on top of Fury, on top of Fiery Embrace, on top of Soul Drain. Fire Armor fixes Dark Melee's lack of AoE with a Fury + Soul Drain + Fiery Embrace empowered Burn, Shadow Maul taken and slotted but not used until the changes to DM come in. I've gone ham on endurance recovery tools (Physical Perfection, Consume, Superior Conditioning) and I feel I should drop them since the build has.... Dark Consumption and Consume... which, incidentally, do noice AoE damage even slotted just for endurance and recharge once empowered by Fury + Soul Drain. I'll test some more. I've just replaced Shadow Punch for Midnight Grasp and will be testing if the loss of buzzsaw will be annoying or not but it is difficult to argue replacing a 50 damage attack for a 186 one.

Still considering the question in the topic, the Rad Armor has something like 86% resistance to recovery and endurance debuffs. As well as 75% defense against recharge and slow movements. A Bio Armor Tanker has 86% resistance to endurance debuffs, but 0 to Recovery (which, like Super Stunner revives and Carnival deaths is an auto-hit effect anyway) and 60% resistance to recharge and slows. Overall I would still lean towards Rad Armor.

The best must have been a Rad/Bio Brute to a Rad/Bio Scrapper. Devastating Blow was pretty uninspired on a Brute having no special synergy. On a Scraper it has extra crit chance and the Critical Strikes proc (which I -still- don't have a clear idea if it fires when the power fires, thus the power is included in the proc time, or if it fires -after- the animation and thus the power it is used on is not included in the proc) made using it more palatable. Ultimately the uber long animations on the set turned me off something fierce. I'm currently trying a Rad/Ice Brute but the long animations are definitely working against me once more despite having decided not to take Devastating Blow this time around. It's level 29 and I'm already ugh. Ice is incredibly end hungry to the point Energy Absorption is part of my rotation, which works fine since it recharges fast, and Rad is super slow and hungry as well (-another- toggle, why not?). I'm thinking of re-rolling to DM/Ice Brute instead since my peeve with Ice is the lack of a reliable self-heal. Until the DM changes hit I'm probably just shelving the idea along with my first DM/Shield. Leveling with an AoE that only hits two enemies is not fun.

Agreed. What is exactly the balance meaning of making activating toggles such a long affair? I have no idea what the original devs were thinking when they made it so. A toggle is something thrown once at the start of the session and then ignored until the next death or the next session.