Sovera

We will have too agree to disagree. After a few years of putting builds together I can say I have no character who casually has perma hasten, perma 300% damage (who can still use Build-up afterwards. Was BU perma too?), perma softcap and probably perma capped resistances. The only thing that does not make me insist is that I did not play pre-ED so I'm just going on what I have read. And from what I have read is that pre-ED players had double the current Incarnate AND the IO power we now have. Which is already considered too much until new difficulty levels are placed in.

I feel you're overexaggerating a bit, Wavicle. I didn't play before the big nerf. I actually started in Issue 6 and people were still reeling from ED. But from what I've heard then no, incarnates are not as powerful as pre ED. Just to start with Regen is garbage and no incarnates and IOs makes it survive without playing the piano with the Regen clickies. And even then one small slip and it dies. We don't nearly get Hasten perma 'out of the box' by just adding more slots and we certainly don't go around with the equivalent of triple perma BU by having things six slotted for damage. We also don't get softcap defense. I can just barely get 40% by squeezing a ton of IOs and sacrificing things like recharge. I could push it to 45%, MAYBE, and it would mean even more sacrifices. No, Incarnates and IOs certainly give a lot of power but pre-ED was nutty by everything I read and jolly good riddance. The game was not sustainable. It sounds like it was as much fun as playing with cheats on, which is a very short term thing before boredom comes in.

It is. As the first post says the usual test for how much damage a build does involves going to the Rikti Warzone and then try to put one of the pylons down and check how long it took. You can see this in a thread a bit further down from this one. This is also a test for damage but involves clearing everything including the final boss.

I can imagine those ghosts being a problem with all the debuffing and being ghosts so they float and ignore the ice patch. I was doing redside and fighting ghost pirates and ghost arachnos and they were being annoying with all the fleeing and becoming invisible. I rush Focused Accuracy at 35 to avoid the -tohit. It saves from Banished Pantheon, from CoT, from Tsoo, from Cabal, and of course from Arachnos and the smoke Grenades. But until 35 (30 exemp) we gotta work with bursting the problematic mobs with BU. Not having it properly slotted might be a disfavor. To be honest I don't fear Malta because going full damage means bursting things dead but a slower approach would give them more time to fight back. This was a thing back in Guild Wars 2 where the meta was going full on damage and I stubbornly refused because I didn't want to be squishy. It took a while of wearing more armor with defensive stats instead of full damage stats to realize a 30 second fight might extend to 45-60 seconds, which gave more time to get hurt once we ran out of dodges and had to kite. This does not mean it is the appropriate method to use here, or the appropriate method for every person in a one size fits all, but it might explain a bit your woes as you try to straddle the fence. Fortunately respecs are simple and cheap so you can keep on testing stuff. Your problems with sapping seem weird though. Consume gives a 98% protection against sapping and no sapper can get through that, but Consume does need to be slotted otherwise the protection is just 50% (if I recall correctly). With a two minute CD on the sapping protection and a one minute recharge I found difficult to be caught with my trousers down. Do remember pre-emptive Consume needs to hit something for the buff though. Ah yes, I took a peek at your build. That Consume slotting might explain your sapping woes. Both it six slotted with Synapse's Shock and six slotted Bombardment will push your E/N up. Bombardment has all around great bonuses unlike Ragnorok. An unslotted Heal is also not going to do you favors, but as you've already noticed the game is not that demanding that you can't handle things with your own spin of the build and you did a good job cranking up psi and toxic so high. Once all three stacks and Barrier's 5% are going you got both pretty close to the cap.

I was leveling an EM brute but I gave myself a break since the damage was being definitely hindered by me being too shy to use TF. If it was not at full HP I'd rather not use it so there was more time with Energy Punch and Bonesmasher in use than TF outside of finding a lieut or picking out the initial bosses. But just for the heck of it I'll keep leveling it again. I know on the Tanker it was a bit better without Gloom (something like 3:20 without -res, so not a huge improvement on things like Claws or MA without -res who do it in 4 minutes) but between being forced to take Barrage and the awkward recharge of TF (and me not wanting to use slow ET (TF is quite enough on slowness, thank you very much)) maybe I could have improved it further. Gloom just messes up anything it touches though. The time went down to 2:30 with it so it's a powerhouse all on its own.

That's pretty cool. Good job on using a different clip for the big guy!

I was trying to make Rad Melee work without the use of Devastating Blow.. and it kinda not really works. It's great for leveling since +1 mobs are pretty squishy, but I could notice it was not really brilliant in the ST department despite melting enemies just fine while handling a boss. I took it to the test server and it's as I thought. Even with incarnates and purples it was still a 4:40 time. Overall not -terribly- worse than the standard 4 minutes of other sets and I could have slotted both -res procs into Irradiated Ground for better pylon times, but since I don't find them useful for gameplay I kept the slotting as if for regular playing. Devastating Blow is needed for better damage. Or is it? Respecing out of Contaminated Strike for Devastating... gave about the same time. A bit worse actually but the pylon was almost dead then I whiffed and it regenerated so I'm not holding it considering it was one try only. Still, 4:55. Devastating Blow lacks the oomph to merit using it outside of a build that has room to maneuver a lot of damage procs because it's a great carrier for them. In the meanwhile I leave the Contaminated Strike build since it's still a great little thing to passively murderize a spawn while we hit a boss. I messed with the previous build of this combo to reduce the EPS imprint since the build drinks endurance and it now has the almost free Combat Jumping instead of Maneuvers, got rid of Assault for more -slow in Temperature Control, and now no Tough is needed to be toggled to reach 90%. I ran out of interesting powers to take and in the name of helping the endurance guzzling Conserve Power got picked.

We were specifically talking about the fear effect in Burn and how it was rolled back.

You make a good point. I'm so used to my own testing I just looked at the numbers at face value.

I suggested using it since I remembered other posts about the combo which in turns has different slotting ideas (mine for example always revolve about using Barrier to finish capping defenses and resistances which isn't for everyone) -and- offered a build for your question about the combo you were asking about. As a '44yo' myself I will say that you have a remarkably thin skin for a '53yo'.

Actually I was typing it and thinking of WoW's thing of giving the offense cooldowns (our version of Build-up) a global cooldown. A very very very very badly received decision that generated pages and pages of complaints to no avail. While not on the level of the Fire Tank nerf I believe some more voting with the wallet would help devs realize things are not all quantifiable as spreadsheets may make them believe.

Voting with the wallet is the best thing. Not long forum diatribes which are then ignored even after reaching 20 pages of protests.

Scrapper and Tanker only 😛

I'm just part way leveling an EM/Fire Brute and I got to say that the joy of playing the Rad/Fire is just gone. It may certainly do more damage in ST but I'd rather be punching a boss in the face and have triple DoT action chewing a spawn. On the EM I'm throwing Whirling Hands on CD but eeeeeeh. Gently Caressing Hands even after the tuning patch. On the Rad I was having so much fun I soloed everything, even Synapse (and finished on a respectable 1h36 which is times I've had with full teams) and Manticore. Kinda pondering dropping the EM and go mess with a Claws/Fire. I know Brute is not the best to leverage Claws but it does not magically make Claws bad. It's still slicing and dicing fury with a full attack chain by level 18. And Spin.

It's easy to be biased against Ice due to Greater Ice Sword being the third attack that should finish the attack chain, but it sucks. This leaves the second rate option of using Frost or persevere with Greater Ice Sword. But, once we are actually playing the game using Frost neatly on CD between Freezing Touches and Ice Sword it all coalesces together. It just does not do the best single target damage, but I call it the Ice Patch tax.

Yeah, it was that confused me 😄

What makes Electric Armor do more damage than Fire Armor? You'd think a second BU and Burn would handilly tip the balance.

Dem some nutty times. Good show on collecting all the data. It's pretty interesting how the uber damage EM was very much in tune with oldie Claws despite all the praise EM collect. I'm leveling an EM Brute atm and not feeling inspired. It is only going to take off once Energy Transfer comes online and though Total Focus hits like a truck it takes so long to animate I actually shy away from using it since it has a good chance to just hit a corpse.

Just as long as you're not mistaking MMO mechanics with respawning mobs as an actual canon thing. Even then it does not differ from random mooks actually trying to rob banks or purses in Metropolis, the city of MFing Superman. What goes through their minds? What does a random mook think when he points a gun at someone and asks for their money in the city of a sun god? MMO mechanics and comics suffer from the same problem which is continuity. Other than a small minority of super powered villains every other crime (other than white collar crime, and even then) would be rousted to jail in minutes and stay there. But plot demands the criminals break free because people do not pay for comics where Superman does his job as a reporter because there is no crime, where Batman's proteges take up being a dentist because there is no more crime. Same reason we arrest mobs in Peregrine Island and they show back up a minute after. Personally regarding the last bit I'd like to think it would be like Invincible. A more credible, less sanitized, version of heroes. They try to help, they help, but sometimes they fail and have flaws, and they get mad. The Boys plays to the extreme of gore and snuff porn made to shock, not to be realistic.

It's worth mentioning that the high damage cap is one of those useless perks to an AT. This was my take back during the Tanker buff patch and it remains. A Kin is unable to hit FS fast enough before a nuke or a Judgement goes off and has killed half the spawn. Heck, one of my Fire Armor tanks might kill part of the minions by dropping BU + Gaussian + Burn + AoEs. The probability of managing to stack FS' to the point where damage caps are reached is, IMO, dim outside of spreadsheets.

On a Brute at least the squishy depends. I was doubtful but a friend showed me how their Bio character plunged into two groups of +4 ITF spawns and it took a minute for them to be killed while surviving solely on over 100 HP per second, not fighting back, no clickies used.

I'm going to say it should be closer to Axe than to Katana. In fact you could pretty much copy Axe's slotting onto Broadsword though some scrounging of slots would be called for in order to slot Parry as well. And Fire Armor would carry it hard as it does. But does it help Fire Armor? It does have a place for FF in Disembowel and Slice is pretty spamable. Burn would give an AoE until Whirling Sword comes. Quickly cobbled something together though it's unrefined and untested but it should be a decent base to build based on your tastes:

Since it's the combo I'm currently leveling here's mine. 40% to S/L defenses, 85% to S/L resistances, 62% to E/N. I intend to use Barrier to give myself the last 5% to both S/L. I have not finished leveling it to see if I should take Cardiac or not, but leveling has been very very endurance heavy, and on the Tanker Consume could not keep up with the demands, but I have made some modifications by adding Superior Conditioning that adds a bit more EPS while being another Performance Shifter proc slot. Also replaced Maneuvers for the near free Combat Jumping which saved EPS some more. So it may be that Musculature 33% that also adds more EPS will be enough. More leveling and testing will tell but Cardiac is the safe option for now. The damage loss is not tremendous since Musculature 45% is more of a 15% damage increase which is a drop. With the endurance guzzling having much better endurance control seems to be the better option. Tbh it will be my first time taking Cardiac and I'm very damage oriented so I'm not yet sold on the idea. Also because I hate long animations I did not take Devastating Blow and it's 2.9 seconds of being rooted. I just go around melting stuff with the triple DoT action and spamming Contaminated, Radioactive Smash, Contaminated, and then in the gap either squeeze in Burn or Radioactive Siphon. It's a pretty forgiving rotation even early on and on a Brute it doesn't feel bad. Devastating Blow would be more damage though.

Yeah, I know, but I'm talking level 25 with Yin and watching the Freak tanks sometimes dying before they got a chance to heal. And this while still poorly slotted and no damage procs in attacks. Even in Citadel I barely had to bother switching targets once I killed th boss in a spawn. But it's just fun, it's not like it is hugely overperforming to do the AoE passively or actually use an AoE skill.

I just started a Rad/Fire Armor and I must say this combo slays on a Brute. I got to a point I sometimes killed Freak tanks in Yin before they even healed. Soloed a Synapse at +1x8 in 1h36 which as good as some full teams I have done it in the past. All those DoTs play really well with Fury. I suppose it will slow down once at +3. I'll make a post for it once I level it and test some more if I really need Cardiac or not since it is very endurance guzzly.