Sovera

At the risk to re-re-repeating myself, Fire Armor/Ice Melee. I parrot this so much people must be sick of it, but I find Fire Armor helps bridging the gap that Tanker damage has while Ice Melee (Ice Patch specifically) adds a layer of extra security. Ice Patch is like having another defensive toggle. Which is to say that all by itself it won't perform miracles, but then we have our actual toggles stacking their protective powers on top of it. Attack cycle is simple as well. Freezing Touch, Ice Sword, Frost, Ice Sword. Repeat. Add Burn when ever it is up. Ice Patch if in trouble or if foes are troublesome, or you just want to watch mobs breakdance over a field of napalm. There are tons of other good combos though and you will get good suggestions in this thread. Invulnerability and Shield Defense and such. In my particular case I have played those combos and the damage just turned me off. I can't deal with slowly whittling enemies down when in solo mode (in teams it does not matter since the team is helping). Which leads me to my other suggestion that is Fire Armor/Martial Arts since the two complement each other. So with all of that said only go for Fire Armor if killing speed matters, but if that was the case you would probably be over the Brute or Scrapper forums.

True. I may be out of the loop but refusing someone because they are FF seems an odd thing. Unless running HM TFs.

I haven't tried Seismic yet. Does it work at all with a flying character?

As someone who likes heroes I do dislike the easy glib way of assuming the worst. I would rather think when there are corrupt Longbow they are ousted,

But what does it mean. Mason?

All the new PPs who have capes take precedence. They either debuff resistances or defenses and I'm not waiting to check which. Cryo bosses are a nuisance but not dangerous. The.. I forget the name, the red armored ones, I try to take down before they bubble up since after bubbling they run off and while I don't care about their piddly damage they will taunt and prevent me from fighting until I go dash to them and put them out of their misery. There is someone who does confuse but I have not cared enough to pinpoint them (so many other targets to take care of) but they can spectacularly screw a soloer's alpha. I depend on the initial alpha to cull the enemies since the Crey can be dangerous in numbers and seeing it miss because they are suddenly 'friendly'.... Same thing Succubi do, but CoT go from being a very dangerous group in the teens to being pushovers in the 30s-50s (mostly due to Focused Accuracy becoming available), in numbers or not.

One of those off-the-meta builds slotted for taunt or CC instead of damage.

Psi Melee isn't great and on a Tanker you'll be doubly slowed down if you're mostly soloing. It gets better once you get Mass Levitate and have a Forcefeedback proc in it. It won't get much better on a Brute but at least you'll do more damage, but either way prepare to see yourself slowed once fighting psi resistant mobs like robots. Kinetic Melee -also- is not amazing at the moment Brute or not. I find it more useful paired with something like Fire Armor since a Force Feedback proc in Burst speeds up everything but it's a set that works best only using the first three attacks and nothing that does that will do good damage.

Scourge is nice, but if I recall correctly it's a chance (not 100%) to do double damage once mobs are at 30% 50% HP or lower. What this means is while it looks good in practice most mobs don't have much HP for this to have as much impact as it may look (it's still only a chance at 50% as per https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/Scourge 'Scourge is the Corruptor's Inherent Power. It is a random chance for bonus damage per attack, defined as granting a 2.5% chance for every 1% of an enemy's Hit Points below 50%. That is to say, if an enemy has 50% or more HP, Scourge will never trigger. But the lower the enemy's HP gets under 50%, the higher the chance of Scourge becomes until 10% HP, at which point and below Scourge is guaranteed to go off'). Corruptors damage may have a chance to shine more in hardmodes where mobs last longer. But Blasters' raw damage will not be matched.

Proc or offensive builds don't seem to make much sense for hardmodes. I predicted way back that all my tinkering with Fire Armor only worked thanks to Barrier as a panic button and would only keep on working until new content became harder. After that what is the point of running offense based tankerinos? It's still tanker damage and a Tanker is brought for the extreme survival it has. Even Fire/Martial Arts with its 45% melee/range/AoE and 90% resists to most all self buffed suffers from lack of DDR, even if managing to boost defense to softcap means that much as a buffer once staggered Barriers and shields are applied. Of course that at some point even four star will be speedrun and the chase for better times will birth a meta for offense base tanks. But not for PuGs.

😕

It's not a combat manga, so a bit harder to figure out. But Street Justice for the rough and tumble punching and kicking, or Warmace with one of the wrench skins. Super Strenght if wanting to lean on the power side, but the manga is more about being smart and sneaky than obliterating and face tanking enemies. My suggestion: Stalker/Scrapper. Super Reflexes/Willpower. Dual Blades (as small weapons as you can, knives preferablty)/War Mace (with appropriate skin as to be less of an actual mace).

For healing I used to go with two +3 acc/dmg Hamis, then two +3 heal/endurace Hamis, and finally two damage procs: This maximizes proc chance leaving them at : One of the procs can be turned into an dmg/end to finish EDing the stats instead: But there is a damage loss. The no recharge approach needs to take in consideration your attack chain. As a Stalker you have AS which will help, but if there are gaps then recharge at the cost of damage IMO. Midnight Grasp should be recharging in about 5 seconds, same as SL with no recharge, AS in 5 seconds as well and Smite in about 2 seconds. SL animates in 2.1 seconds, MG in 2.3, so that's 4.4 seconds accounted for, which means it should be fine once adding AS and Smite to the mix. If not wanting the heal then replace the end/heal for damage procs as long as endurance can take it. Or add one slot for +5 endurance and the other one becomes a damage proc.

WTB patch notes.

'Someone lock this thread'.

The good news? Up to six months ago there would not be much to do other than form smaller teams. But now there are hard modes! And those are hard but also granular. Don't skip straight to four stars because that's the hardest of the hard. Anything you can imagine but multiply it by ten. Doing one of those and the team coming out with a hundred deaths is common. So start with one or two stars and work up. The rest of the game outside niche content is too easy for the power creep that came from IOs and Incarnates. As noticed things just explode from a touch, though an easier solution is to form smaller teams as mentioned above. Say on /lfg you will be forming a trio to run a TF and see who bites. But don't necessarily expect the game to become harder as it might just become slower. I solo a lot while leveling and it's rare the time I think that soloing made things harder, it just makes clearing everything slower but my HP is not in any more particular risk. P.S. Stay out of speedruns in the future until you are much further ahead in the game (I never run those). It is all about TFs ran at +0, skipping mobs, someone running ahead in stealth and teleporting others in, etc etc. Really not much fun except those into it.

Ok? 👍

'Sure'. Dunno what you expected.

Yep, and I agree, but that's where I mention the static group thing. If player isn't even building their accuracy to 95% what are the odds of bringing Maneuvers or having IOs giving defense?

Tactics don't matter much (IMO). Everyone ought to be building for 95% against +3 anyway. Places it matters is the ITF with the +defense shouts. Prior to hardmodes it still made no difference since a team without stacked Tactics would still kill those mobs with +defense shouts, it would just take a bit longer. Now with more and tougher mobs there might be a use for Tactics on top of everything else. Maneuvers is the same. While on paper it's great in practice the added 24%-ish(?) of a full team stacking Maneuvers only matters statistically (again, IMO). If a build is defense based then it probably is already at softcap since that's their goal. If not working towards defense by themselves then builds would have 24% ish from everyone. I find around 35% is where I start noticing defense doing its thing. What this means is that, IMO, yes, stacking at least Maneuvers has worth on a static group (hey 24% is over half point to softcap) that plays together and whose builds complement each other. 24% then both uniques and that's 30%, most people will have Hover or Combat Jumping so that's another 2.5% ish. Suddenly we are in the realm of those 35% ish I mentioned. But a single person bringing another 3% team wide defense is nothing that will make a difference. Even two will only bring 6%. If a static group it is more common to just have one person who provides defense shields. P.S. The endurance cost is also a valid point. I've swapped from Maneuvers to Combat Jumping on all builds since one of those is tiny defense dip while being basically free. Full teaming does not really matter since there is always someone using Ageless which takes care of that.

Gonna steal that screenshot and post it on most suggestion debates where players are heatedly protecting the devs. A bit unrelated, or perhaps related, but once in a while I would poke fun at Linea when they were forming a team over /b for the 801 series. They would mention how it was 'not a farm', and I'd mention 'you do it 4-5 times a day 6-7 days a week, how is it not a farm?'. Just poking fun because, you know, semantics, spirit of the law, letter of the law. It may not -be- a farm, but it sure as heck is being farmed.

This might not be what you envisioned and I'm not a Scrapper player, but since it's the test server give this a try against the same enemies if possible and let me know if you felt any difference. Try and keep Particle shielding up 24/7, don't wait until you need it and just use it on CD. When in trouble use Barrier 120 seconds as your panic button (Meltdown does not particularly add anything and the animation is super slow even for the damage buff) and it will finish capping your resists and defences for the full duration after having helped survive whatever tight spot you found yourself in. In theory you could keep it up 24/7 to be at 45% S/L and 75% resists all the time but I find most of the game does not need so much finnicky game style. If the enemies -are- problematic you will naturally be using Barrier in the first place, and if they are not then the extra 5% were not needed anyway. I terminated Ground Zero since it's an investment you did not have the slots for. When using a 3 second animation you'd better have all six slots with damage procs which is not the case. Again, it's just a test server build to check changes and you might miss GZ, or might not notice a difference. For now the emphasis is survival since that's what seemed to be a problem (even though there is worth in the kill first approach but as a Scrapper that should already be your thing). If you would rather turn Radiation Therapy into a proc bomb you have the slots for it now, but since survival seemed to be the problem I went for heals and recharge. In the same vein you can leave RT with just a base slot (I would suggest the Theft of Essence proc) and take GZ for that empty power and then transfer the slots and six damage proc it to help with AoE damage. The free power I have no particular clue what to take since the basics are taken care of. Whatever choice you make should be fine including the slot transfer.

And that's where the 'they will work'. When I was introduced to the simile in my youth I immediately started thinking of ways to make it work. Even though they were never put to practice I'm fairly certain I could eat jello with knitting needles. Just like farming with a Sentinel.

90% and 75% is a lot of difference. Sentinels are really not the best choice to farm with though, like most things, they will work. They just won't work very well. Much like eating jello with knitting needles.

The idea that ATOs should not fix the AT because they are separate things is fine on the surface, but flawed when looking at ATOs in a critical fashion. I imagine at the early stages ATOs were a lot rarer and lot more expensive than they became. It is no longer a case of the lucky dog who got a good drop that either was the ATO or allowed to buy the ATO, but rather do an half hour TF and have enough to buy (I mean Yin, but I might be slightly hyperbolic since the merits sold would be closer to 6 million and change where the ATOs would be closer to 8 mill. But, case in point, anyone who cares for TFs merit rewarding content while leveling can obtain the ATO procs before level 20). At this point it is no longer a point of talking about ATOs as something separate from the AT except that instead of leveling and obtaining that progression we simply buy it. In either case it is an integral part of the AT and might as well be baked in for the ease of which it is obtained, but if not desiring to bake it in for progression reasons, it still remains an easy to acquire integral part of a build and not a rare % drop off a final raid boss (trinkets and set pieces with their set bonuses in games like WoW) or super expensive (like the live CoH IO market was). While it seems I digress a bit what I try to say in my rambling manner is that increases in damage or survival from the ATO are not for the lucky few but should be considered that they will affect the entirety of the AT playing population and at this should just be considered as part of the AT's balance instead of an extra or a bonus that it gets. I like several of the ideas that have been put out. Some I do not (damage being tied to less HP no, but survival tied to HP while sounding great does affect the entire AT where SR only gets scaling resists). Having a dev chime in would be great to herd the suggestions away from places the devs will not go to keep this constructive.