Sovera

People keep going back to the 600% damage as if mattered. Begging the pardon of Captain Powerhouse the 600% damage is almost troll and is taking too much attention off the changes as people zoom in on that particular thing. Spreadsheets come out, calculators come out, and omg, 600% means that blah blah! In practical terms, what? People are worried that teams that have two kins, and the nukers in the team are careful not to nuke and kill all minions, will manage to cap a Tanker's damage? How is this a consideration? I, personally, sort of want to /pat the poor kins I play with since they know their role and they want to give everyone omfgbbqsauce damage, but the first Blaster, or Sentinel, or anyone with a Judgement, that reaches the pack nukes it and the pack goes from 10-12 to 5-6 mobs.

Y'welcome, Jediseph. Perma Hasten is a tool like any other. You are within Perma Domination which is the more important part, and so close to perma Hasten that the +recharge proc in Bonfire will put you back there.

/Bio anything isn't as amazing as spreadsheets might make it seem. And for that neither does Beam Rifle. I don't know why this combo is being touted as extreme but I would like some empirical testing as opposed to looking at HD's numbers. All other suggestions are on point, but I don't see why a Sentinel *needs* to do party buffs. Scrappers are melee selfish damage and Sentinels are ranged selfish damage, seems about right. Despite the boohoo about Sentinel damage they have something that Scrappers do not and that's a *wide* radius T9 nuke backed by Aim which tends to kill all minions and leave lieutenants at half, and once the rest of the AoEs are fired while still under Aim and on CD those too tend to be near death. Teaming or solo this is too often discreetly swept under the rug. If we have an AoE cap of 10 and face a group of, say, 10 mobs (and it's usually not over over 10 mobs per pack outside of Council missions) then just the leading nuke already whittled the spawn in half and the following AoEs are now hurting the other half. While I would never say no to more Sentinel damage my uber procced up Rad/Ninjutsu kills a pylon in 4 minutes (not mentioning pylon times because they matter but as a metric) while my Fire/Atomic Blaster does it in three. Both do it in a full ranged rotation (ignoring the fact both the T9s are PbAoE) which is why their times are not better since including melee attacks improves those. A one minute difference isn't *that* bad even if both ATs have, in practical terms, the same toughness in the end game. But the one minute tax sentinels pay ends being that they achieve that same toughness much earlier, and much more cheaply, while the blaster needs to be level 50 and spend three fourths of a billion to have the same toughness but always have the one minute advantage. *Their* T9 is only up every two spawns too, so it's not like a Sentinel who nearly wipes a group on their own every 25 seconds. What they do need is a better inherent. A watered down Fury would be great IMO since they have all the tools to keep on fighting and rush from group to group with their fast recharging T9s. Sustain is also a lot of the Sentinel game while burst (Aim + Build-Up + T9) lays squarely in the Blaster's territory.

Clockwork and grey mobs are weak to KB, but not CoT. Still, it's not difficult to fix though. If it turns out that the KB was a fluke then switch the Sudden Acceleration for another Force Feedback. This is what I would do instead. Super Speed with the stealth IO grants you perfect stealth (except against Rikti drones and Nemesis sharpshootes, so no need for Stealth and Invis). Just turn it on when you want the stealth (like approaching a pack of NPCs to Flashfire them) and then turn it off while fighting to spare your endurance. Combat Jumping allows to eek a bit more defense for free since the toggle costs nothing compared to stealth/Invis (and you can hit the tailor and have Super Speed with no glowie feet FX). Making the whole build a lot more expensive puts everything with the exception of Negative and Psi at 40%. That means with Barrier you will be capped permanently. This *will* be a lot more expensive, but it's something you can work at one IO bit at a time. Your Hasten/Envenomed Blades will suffer a bit from this, but your Force Feedback proc ought to make it perma. You have one free power to do what you want with. Personally I would shuffle things around and pick Flight + Afterburner (Flight without Afterburner isn't worth it) because I love me some flying, and you're a smokey themed character, so flying fits you. You can even lose Super Speed and the stealth IO for perfect stealth and instead place the stealth IO in Sprint to be toggled on only when you want to stealth past something. It's not going to be perfect stealth like when it was in SS, but it's not something that is *really* necessary. Otherwise just keep your current setup and use Hover in combat or to go over obstacles when in Super Speed.

What is this 70x passive thingy?

Smoke's -ToHit counts as defense if you think of it in that way. If you have 40% defenses and your enemy has a -5% To-Hit debuff its pretty much the same as 45% defense. But everything needs to be debuffed for that to happen. So between Smoke and Barrier you should have Energy sort of covered. It is a bit of a hassle though. On the other hand if you reach 40% defense Barrier will always give you at least 5% defense. As you noticed Hotfeet does not really do much for a Dom. No containment to double its power, super expensive, got to be in melee range, etc Remember to go to options, then Effects, and tick a few boxes like 'being hit' or 'activate damage skill' and such in order to see the real defense numbers that Stealth gives while in combat. You can save two slots, one from Haste and another From EB, just by +5 the two remaining ones on each power (click as if to choose an IO, then press + five time over it). Your EB has level 30 IOs btw, but at 50 and +5 it recharges in 43 seconds, so the first Bonfire you throw and Force Feedback proccing you'll have it perma. Strictly speaking you don't *really* need to buff up your defense like mad. You start the fight with Flashfire, go in, unleash your AoEs, then as they start recharging and before Flashfire wears off, you start Bonfire's glacial 3 second animation and the pack will be flopping between it and Caltops as you have them slotted, so you should be plenty fine and not really be hit back. A Panacea proc is better than a Numina for endurance. +5 both end mods in Stamina to eek out a bit more recovery and don't forget to hunt the accolades to indirectly increase your recovery (3.17 EPS without accolades, 3.53 EPS with).

Alright, done and tested. All in Offense adaptation. I only have Evolving Armor slotted with one 38 Res/End IO. - A 7.5% damage resistance debuff to all types of damage (so we are increasing the team's damage, w00t!) Unaffected by the number of enemies in range. - With about ten mobs, give or take some, 34% resistance to S/L went to 44% (so no relation to what HD says). But for Fire/Cold/Energy etc I went from -1% to 6%. With one enemy it was 5% S/L, and 3.25% Energy etc. So, yeah, definitely more than HD says. Listen to Seig, Darkness!

Yes. According to HD if surrounded by 10 mobs we get a total of 4.5% to all resistances. That's total, not per mob. I'm not going to spit on 4.5% but it takes being surrounded by ten mobs to get it. According to the info in-game being in Offensive gives it a damage resistance debuff (so we do more damage to enemies) and not recharge. Since HD doesn't show this since it does not show the Adaptation effects I don't know how much it increases, but according to HD, without the Offensive bonus, it's something like ... well, it's hard to tell. the tooltip says 7.5% extra damage we deal to those around us, but the numbers in Effects say something like 4.2% for L/S and 1.25% for fire, cold, energy, etc.

Just a bit of a troll answer. On a Brute/scrapper almost none can skipped. At most I'd probably say Parasitic Aura since it's a panic button and depending on what content you do you might never find use for it. For regular farming there is almost no need, and I would almost say for regular teaming the same. Extreme soloing might bring it more to fore, but respecs are cheap so pick it and see if you remembered to use it. If ten missions later it never got used then consider swapping for something else. The other would be Evolving Armor. The damage resistance and the +damage taken are such itty bitty numbers I doubt they really are perceptible. IMO that's about it though. But outside of a vacuum both those powers allow to slot more sets which makes incorporating them into the build more tempting despite their situational use.

I tried it on an Elec/Shield stalker. Softcapped defenses. Aid Self was not enough to keep me alive not to mention being an endurance hog *and* the interrupted heals. It works just fine either *after* defeating a pack, or against a single tough enemy where we can use the gaps in the attacks to heal up.

Since leveling a meleer is a new experience I'll make a quick summary of how it has been. The character is meant to tank but do good-ish damage in the process. 1-8: A single DfB. Brutes shine at this level since Fury is omfgbbq damage. Gap in the attack chain is taken by the inherent attack skill (Charm, or Mutagen, or Taser, whatever). A slot is spared for Hardened Carapace for an early slotting of the 3% + 3% defense uniques. No deaths since no AoEs nor AoE taunt punchvoke as Tankers have. 8-15: Posi 1. No real problem again. Can't tank since no tank tools. Damage is still decent but i notice its going down from the 1-8 range. 15-22: Posi 2. At 16 I got Ablative. At 17 I slotted Kinetic Combat and Force Feedback. At 18 I got Irradiated Ground. *Now* we're starting to cook with gas! Finally an AoE, which incidentally serves to cause agro. ..which explains why the deaths start happening. Too much agro and not enough defenses in place yet. Ablative can't keep up, but it does a pretty good job of shoring things up between the regen and the absorb shield. Stance dancing between Defensive and Offensive Adaption is tried, and it seemed like it helped but it might have been a placebo effect. It did grant about 2% more defense while in Defensive and some under the hood help. Too may deaths here, but mostly wipes as it was a nightmare of a Posi 2 (instead of 45-50 minutes it took us 1:40 hours). 22-27: Synapse. I am definitely into tank territory. Between the two 3% uniques, an early slotting of Environmental Modification, Maneuvers, and Weave I am in the early 30% defense and a single small purple nearly caps me. Synapse being predominantly energy I'm puttering along nicely and grabbing agro without much of a hassle. Deaths stop happening. 27-30: Yin. Again, mostly electrical attacks means I'm pretty much impervious. S/L defenses are only in their 20%s though, so even a small purple is not quite enough, but Ablative is there, and now DNA Siphon as well. Clamor took 3/4 of my life in one hit though, so overconfidence VS debuffing enemies rears its head. One death to Clamor. 31-35: Citadel. Nothing much to be said. Even unslotted Atom Smasher is a big boom of a beast. Even with a bar of Fury it's not quite at a Blaster's T9 but it's also able to be used much more often. Endurance problems start creeping up with too many toggles up. Slotting Miracle and one extra endurance in Inexhaustible makes no discernible difference. Depending on what team buffs I have I turn off Tactics and Tough for long fights, or otherwise rely in DNA Siphon-ing corpses after each spawn to replenish my endurance. This works fine in regular play since we are always on the move, just not on long fights against a lone enemy. No deaths. 35-39: LGTF. No problem. Dra'gon took half my HP using his T9 but it all went well. No big hassle and even the psi hole wasn't a problem when the clockwork ambushes started. Genetic Contamination is finally getting me *real* agro, mobs no longer peel away. It is still not properly slotted but when facing bosses I see their HP whittling at a good pace. Unfortunately the LGTF bugged with Hamidon spawning at 50 while we were doing it as level 39 (same bug that Posi 1 and Doc Buzzsaw has). Leveling is now on hold to run red side to open the patron pools.

I do not usually play melee. Like, EVER. I just dislike being in the thick of it and having to chase mobs when they decide to run, ugh. I dislike it so much that this happened: That said I'm getting into a rut and wanted to try something new. So overall the build feels pretty elegant if I can say so myself. I tested it on Justin against the usual, then soloed a +4/8 ITF up to middle of the cyst mission to see if I could take them (can, np). Damage seemed pretty decent but what do I know? Unfortunately with the change to the pylons I can't test to see the metric we are used to. - ST chain of Contaminated Strike and Kick. This is gapless the moment we get to level 17 and slot Kinetic Combat. CS, Kick, CS, Kick, no pauses. Kick was picked because it has KB and can slot a Force Feedback to accelerate the build. At level 35 Kick can be replaced by Radioactive Smash. More damage than Kick, slightly shorter animation, same Force Feedback proc in it, Contaminated splash effect, but much larger recharge that messes the nice gapless chain that allowed to build Fury quickly. I say 35 because then we can alternate Chain Fences and Lightning Ball to fill in the second and a half ish gap that is introduced. Contaminated, Radiactive, Contaminated, Chain Fences, Contaminated, Radioactive, Contaminated, Lightning Ball, Contaminated, makes the ST chain a lot more EPS expensive to include Chain Fences/Lightning Ball. But, tbh, I'm content with Contaminated Strikes and Kick making a viable attack chain straight from level 17 though it's not going to win Pylon prizes. - 40% defenses to use Barrier for the last 5%. - Chain Fences is only slightly less damage than Lightning Ball (70 damage VS 84) and once empowered by Fury we have a nice AoE blending machine with two damage auras, Atom Smasher, Chain Fences and Lightning Ball. - Small endurance woes for long ST combat. Turning off some toggles helps, as might dismantling DNA Siphon to place a couple more slots in Inexhaustible and Stamina. DNA Siphon works great as a heal, and it even works great as an endurance recovery tool, but solely when applied to the corpses. Which is fine. But does not help when fighting a single tough enemy. DNA Siphon either grants endurance if used on a live NPC or Recovery if used on corpses. In my testing using against live enemies barely pays the use of it. Using on corpses works fine and hardly needs the endurance slotting since the extra Recvoery is spread over 30 seconds. Something to consider if someone wants to chime in. Any visible tweaks or ideas? The ST damage is decent since the attack chain is fast and both damage auras are there to help, but as I mentioned I have no metrics to compare until the pylons are reverted (or times on the new changes are brought in). I would like to include damage procs in the ST attacks but I'm a bit short on slots.

I'm not a coder, and in any case I'm not in front of CoH's code. Obviously it cannot be a simple answer or it would have been done already. I mean, it seems obvious that if removing Brawl is bad, then create a basic attack with Braw's endurance, recharge time, active time, and substitute that for the MM pets. But *because* it is is so obvious there must be something under the hood stopping it from happening.

You guys really need to read the thread before rehashing questions that were already asked, and answered, and asked again, and asked again, and asked again, and now asked again.

There is one over the Guides part of the forum. Farm Builds.

It adds burst in actual gameplay. Throw a blast and instead of doing 100 damage it suddenly does 250 (100 from the blast, then two procs go off usually at 70 damage a piece). In pylon terms changing from 'normal' slotting to triple procs on my Sentinel shaved two minutes. That's a lot of extra damage.

No need for a screenie but I'll accept a data chunk. I suppose alternating Rune of Protection with something else then.

... you do realize he popped his T9 to take that screenshot... right?

A respec costs 200k in the AH, so not exactly a big problem. It might be a bigger problem if they want the old T1 because it does something special or the recharge/animation fits their needs and now they need to find a power to discard so that they can fit the old T1 back in. Also, 30 minutes? My man, hyperbole much? 5 minutes, tops? A one time thing?

Well, thank you forums for not letting me know people were replying to my posts 😛 Archery is cheapo in endurance. It's a matter of trying and seeing how you feel the endurance drain to be a problem or not. 3 seconds to cast Bonfire is glacial. We could make good use of it even so but the mass Hold arrow achieves the same end result of holding everything still while we pewpew, *without* losing defense or 3 second long animations. Personal taste though, and we could argue for your case that 45 seconds of mobs flopping helplessly beats the need for defense 😄 Intuition.

I tried making that build on Justin since I'm not used to making melee. Turns out I had some ass-umptions going. Parasitic Aura is not a toggle for example 😅 Yep, I'm a noob. Hero Designer just treats Bio as it having all adaptations running at the same time. So, to achieve the numbers it requires: be in Efficient, use DNA on ten corpses, run to the next pack, use Parasitic on ten living bodies. My best ended up being 124 HP per second when I tried this. It went to 159 HPS with Ablative, Efficient Adaptation, and Parasitic Aura. Doing that with Offensive Adaption gave 100 HPS and 9 EPS. But since Parasitic Aura isn't always available, and we will most likely be in Offensive all the time and, say, we are not bothering with stance dancing, then in Offensive, using DNA Siphon on a *dead* pack while we have Ablative running it, we reach 75 HPS. remember the caveat of being used on corpses. So, yeah, don't expect to run around all the time with 100 HP per second but for regular play you can use it on a dead pack and bounce to the next pack and have 15-20 seconds of regenerating while mad. This is with me running with base 21 HPS, 40 HPS with Ablative running. Ultimately I did not find all of this necessary or having an impact in the gameplay. Things I learned (as a br00t newbie): - DNA Siphon grants Regen and Recovery if it eats *corpses*, not if it hits live bodies. Hitting live bodies it heals and grants endurance, hitting corpses it grants regen and recovery. It also grants more HP&Endurance if using defensive, and more Regen&Recovery from eating corpses while in Efficient. Stance dancing before DNA Siphon has its worth, but in the end not really mattering. - I don't like to rely on defensive T9s so I dismantled Parasitic aura and added the slots to DNA Siphon and Inexhaustible . - Started a +4x8 ITF to test the build and it handled the romans just fine after a few false starts. Barrier giving a ton of defense serves as an absorb shield to the romans and kheldian's debuffing defense. - I was simply unable to cope with the ambush after saving the oracle. I had to restart the TF and then skip killing the first spawn at the ramp that triggers the ambush when we reach the oracle. - On the other hand destroying the cysts went fine. Using Barrier before each pack of kheldians ensured I was not debuffed to death. - Despite poopooing about defensive T9s I found it worthy to keep Parasitic Aura even with just a single +5 recharge slotted for the kheldians pack where Barrier had not yet recharged - A few endurance problems in long fights with only one enemy. - No point in using Barrier for the last 5% with regular non debuffing mobs since they couldn't get past the regen. Ablative Armor, Barrier, Parasitic Aura, and DNA Siphon ended up being used only when needed or as panic buttons and not used on CD.

I tried making that build on Justin since I'm not used to making melee. Turns out I had some ass-umptions going. Parasitic Aura is not a toggle for example 😅 Yep, I'm a noob. Hero Designer just treats Bio as it having all adaptations running at the same time. So, to achieve the numbers it requires: be in Efficient, use DNA on ten corpses, run to the next pack, use Parasitic on ten living bodies. My best ended up being 124 HP per second when I tried this. It went to 159 HPS with Ablative, Efficient Adaptation, and Parasitic Aura. Doing that with Offensive Adaption gave 100 HPS and 9 EPS. But since Parasitic Aura isn't always available, and we will most likely be in Offensive all the time and, say, we are not bothering with stance dancing, then in Offensive, using DNA Siphon on a *dead* pack while we have Ablative running it, we reach 75 HPS. Remember the caveat of being used on corpses. So, yeah, don't expect to run around all the time with 100 HP per second but for regular play you can use it on a dead pack and bounce to the next pack and have 15-20 seconds of regenerating while mad. This is with me running with base 21 HPS, 40 HPS with Ablative running. Ultimately I did not find any of this having an impact in the gameplay. Regenerating or using DNA to heal up to max is the same if our bar is full, and when we would like to regenerate is when mobs are alive and kicking us and that's when they are, well, alive, so DNA Siphon does not trigger regen.

Other than what Knottewe said the biggest thing he did not mention is the heal. The absorb shield is nice, but it's not a heal, and I, at least, noticed its lack in gameplay since Aid-Self could not keep up. That said it's personal choice

You're assuming to be man-YEARS! Lets not forget once upon a time we were given a hard NO about coloring powers because colors were hard coded into the spaghetti code. So there was nothing that could be done, sorry guys. One or two issues later we could color our powers.

I've just finished making a build for one. It's meant for brute, but with the incoming changes I'm considering tanker. But because it's brute it favors quick animations (Contaminated Fists, Radioactive Smash, Gloom) instead of big attacks, though it's a mater of simply changing power picks and placing the same slotting on them. It only has two AoEs in Atom Smasher and Dark Obliteration, but plays with the br00t's strength in pumping the two damage toggles. On the br00t it has native 40% defenses and then relying on Barrier for the last 5%. With both DNA Siphon and parasitic aura it has 4.68 recovery (not accounting for Panaceia&Performance procs) with just one target, as well as 569% regen with Ablative Shield. The numbers turn completely idiotic the moment we ignore that single target scenario and go into normal play of jumping into a spawn. Then hitting 10 mobs with the generous 20y radius of DNA Siphon turns into a 30 second buff that pushes regen to 800% and recovery to 7 per second. And it can be made perma. But wait, since we have Parasitic Aura this shoots up to 1700% regen (or 152 HP per second) and 9 .20 EPS even though this does not last as mobs start dying. Good luck killing the guy through the softcap. The build feels a bit basic still. No fancy footwork or lots of procs slotted. It might be smarter to replace one of the damage procs, maybe in Radioactive Smash, for an Achiles Heel -res. I just don't play melers to really be more aware of the nuances. Edit: Since I was considering making it a tank build I made the tanker version. Almost the same deal. Endurance with one enemy in range is lowered to 4 EPS not counting procs. If this isn't good enough take the Kismet and throw it somewhere for the Miracle unique, or a +5 end mod on Stamina. But for regular play hitting a spawn with the 20y (larger radius even depending on what changes come through for tankers) DNA Siphon makes for 800% regen and 7 EPS. With Parasitic Aura and the same ten mobs in range it goes up to 1693% regen and 8.63 EPS (more, if the 20 endurance bonus in the new tank changes come through, but moot once we reach these numbers). Said increase in radius will affect Proton Sweep which makes it a lot more interesting for tankers and thus it was picked.