jack_nomind

Yes, outside of PvP, WP is a lot easier to bring to par. But any set can be made to work. It's unScrapperly to do things just because they're easy. The best alpha for regen is probably Spiritual; Regen wants as much recharge as it can get, and the +heal is helpful as well. If you're planning an incredibly expensive build there's an argument for Musculature -- even Musculature Radial, with DM/. For Destiny, Ageless is a net ~15% recharge and a bit of debuff resist; while that's helpful, you almost certainly don't need the endurance component and should skip the +recovery version. I'd go with Barrier over Ageless, though.

simplifying this thread that way seems... perverse. that's probably the right call. from what we've gotten here, taunt enhancements only go in your taunt power or (rarely) your aura. as long as you're using your taunt power, taunt enhancements anywhere else are wasted.

/rad also has better +recharge. I think tw/rad is probably the easier build; I'm not sure what the average difference in dps would be, but I'd be very surprised if it's terribly large.

You should respec at 50 with a build in mind, but you'll probably do it again. There's nothing wrong with getting (most) unique IOs or any attuned IOs early, but you should generally wait until 50 for others. IOs don't 'go grey,' but their effectiveness does depend on their level. Purple sets and most Attuned sets are Unique. Many sets have Unique special IOs. You can only have one of any Unique enhancement. Usually, when I plan an L50 build, I design the first 20 or so levels to be exemplar-friendly (contain a good mix of attack and other powers). It's almost always better to be able to attune enhancements in those sets. For enhancements in other powers, it kind of depends on your build and your intentions whether you should plan to boost them, attune them, or just leave them be.

Of course, but why those three? BS (non-Stalker) and BA are usually considered the worst melee power sets. (And what would be helpful to you for this?)

It's not. Y'know what else isn't very heroic? Trolls who find out there's a way they can fail an entire TF for their team. I'm all for failing hostages causing the TF to branch and require an extra warehouse slog defeat-all -- just a hammy 20 minute long funeral scene between two of the missions where you periodically have to fight off waves of Lost protesters -- but not for tf abortion.

The Reactive Defense IO starts immediately; you get 3 + (7 * ((100-HP%)/100)) resist from it (scaling smoothly from 3% at 100% health to 10% at dead). I don't know if/how the SR scaling resist was changed for Tankers vs Scrappers. For Scrappers, it starts at 50% and you get 0.333 per HP% lost per each of the three powers, simplifying to 1% per HP% under 50%. Since Tankers get 33% more resist than Scrappers, it should be ~1.33% per point under 50, capping at 66.5% when yous dead. At 33% health, you'd only be hitting ~27% resists, even assuming the higher scaling. You can (and probably should) push for capped S/L resist at around that level of health by abusing some set bonuses (particularly in PBAoEs). Alternatively you can go with Staff, which would (with your build) let you cap most of your resists at ~28-34% health depending on how willing to rely on the Tanker proc you are. I would strongly advise testing Tanker SR's behavior on Justin and/or with HeroStats.

oh for eff's sake hopeling, if you're just going to use purples anyway, go all-in and replace that stupid k-combat with blistering cold. i hate seeing that set in rotation attacks.

oh. well that was a silly non-argument. c'est das leben. (i still think destiny slot is sufficient to replace ios for an entire build.)

effective at what? speed clearing content, or keeping the team alive in difficult fights? in the first case, you're making the argument that you think 8 SO-only Defenders can clear content as quickly as 8x Judgment and Lore with 8 mixed ATs behind them (very likely including some corrs and trollers among them). if you're saying that organization clears content faster, i might bite. but what you seem to be saying, somewhat inadvertently, is that defenders do -- i realize your intended point is about force multiplication but when you try and hard-separate out all force multipliers from 'incarnate content' we're no longer discussing CoH. even scrappers do -regen these days. (or, jumping to a totally different way of framing the issue, let's pretend there's a defender who does -50% tohit on enemies all the time. that's great. now let's pretend that someone has an imaginary incarnate power that makes it so everyone on the team does a stacking -10% tohit on enemies. the defender at that point is still 'better,' but they aren't adding anything; the small force multiplication that everyone else is doing has swallowed the defender's effect to the point of irrelevance because they've already done more of that effect than will almost ever matter. this is obviously abstracted greatly, but perhaps illustrative. perhaps not so parenthesized.) in the second case, i really don't think incarnate characters regularly struggle to stay up. players who faceplant often tend to go with rebirth, barrier, melee hybrid, etc and bring up the rest of the team's survivability along with gapfilling their own.

DM's end costs are modest and it's got a self +end in the set. You don't particularly need to slot QR or Stamina. Body Master (with Physical Perfection) is probably not a great pick for regen.

I like your points and how you make them, but I'm not going to cede the "Destiny, specifically, is too stronk in a way IOs are not" point because each of those things -- as you point out, end goals an entire IO slotting strategies -- are accomplished with single Destiny powers for the entire team at once.

maybe a little reductive but agreed the true end-game build can shepard 7 noobs through the entire TF commander badge in 5hrs i have yet to find it. i think it might be a warshade.

depends on secondary, other incarnate choices, primary, and play style, roughly in that order. somewhere else. there are 286 different brute primary/secondary combinations, even assuming epp was irrelevant, and i'm not making 286 tier lists. anything else you get is going to be very circumstantial.

Pick "Going Rogue" at the character creation screen when it gives you a choice between that and CoH/CoV.

It's a compounded effect. As I stated before, Archetype homogenisation is a similar effect to power creep. Remember, set bonuses happened many Issues (content patches) before incarnate powers. This is no way contradicts what I said. Maybe... but only if what you said was irrelevant. If we pretend the argument is about big numbers, then the argument you're objecting to is something like, "100 x 100 is too large a number," with you responding, "well, 100 is a big number, too." We're concerned with the ten thousand here; so you might not be wrong if the point you're making is just that it has factors, but it's also not responsive to the point. re other points, set bonuses specifically distorted three areas disproportionately: recharge, endurance, and Defense. there's a reason why there is less mez protection available from sets than from pool powers. and yes, people have and still do suggest those three things should be managed/mitigated/nerfed. i personally think the game can absorb the 'broken' endurance and Defense just fine. recharge is... a bigger discussion. Look, all the anecdotes are great but that's not really what the balance discussion is about. I've made or revised builds for plenty of players better than myself, and cheered for everyone pushing the limits of what any AT can do. I'm thrilled when possibilities open up because of new mechanics or interactions. The concern isn't that X build is too strong, or that an AT can perform a slightly different role than it was designed for. Instead, it's a problem with and for content, more like the "superman problem." Bear with me for a sec. Writing a good Superman story is hard because he's canonically only worried about three things: kryptonite, his friends/family, and the literal end of the world (which ties into 2). (Canonically, magic also hurts him but this comes up rarely.) There are no other challenges that phase him, so basically every superman story is one of: Lex Luthor gets ahold of some Kryptonite; Lois Lane (or Ma Kent or etc) gets kidnapped; Braniac (or Darkseid or etc) threatens the world. It's almost hard to say at this point which is the worse Superman story: Superman shows up and beats up the bad guys because nothing was a threat; or Lois Lane gets kidnapped. They are dull to the point of tears. In order to solve this, the writers either write Superman out of his own stories (off saving the galaxy, gets sick, red kryptonite, etc etc); or they nerf him directly or relatively (e.g., "What if there's a monster so tough even SUPERMAN can't punch it hard enough!" -- despite "can punch hard enough" being one of the core Superman powers until it suddenly isn't); or they make the problem complex enough that being fast and punching just isn't the solution (and for the last one, you have to remember that e.g., global thermonuclear war is solvable by being fast enough and punching hard enough); or they make Superman the villain. (Edit: I realized after writing this that Batman v Superman literally rapid-fires all of these problems. Geez that was a terrible story. Pretty dream sequence though.) The point we're... at, really, or anyway right up next to... in City of Heroes is "everyone's Superman." And that's great until you realize that it means new missions all have to be Superman stories. Either they're all on timers, or all of the sudden Incarnate powers don't work (or they hit like wet noodles against these specific bad guys for some reason), or they work but don't affect the actual mission (there's no 'find all the clickies which were deliberately hidden in obnoxious corners' Incarnate power). Or, somehow, they're evil or something... I'm sure there's a way for that to work. But for a long time, the best Superman stories have been Justice League stories; stories about big, complex problems Superman can't solve as a blunt force. And this thread is literally about not being able to do that anymore in CoH. This is why I don't understand folks defending the 'it's fine everyone's Superman' position. It is, I mean we can all have a blast with that for a few hours, but it's deadly to the story. Even the cool high concept stuff like Battalion becomes "8-40 Supermans get in a fight with bad guys and then win." All of the planned Incarnate content was based around the idea of making Incarnate powers functionally irrelevant to the Incarnate story -- we were literally never supposed to be powerful enough to fight Battalion on our own -- and that just seems... small.

see signature

And uh, other than that one line -- which if you took it perfectly literally would just be 'blaster again' -- what exactly have you been able to gather? and where do you think the Sentinel came from?

It was a ranged or assault primary and an armor secondary. We have it. It's the Sentinel.

Start here and tack on w/e else you need. With some adjusting you can take this build to softcap S/L or whatever you want. Villain Plan by Mids' Villain Designer 2.22 http://www.cohplanner.com/ Click this DataLink to open the build! Level 49 Magic Brute Primary Power Set: Titan Weapons Secondary Power Set: Willpower Power Pool: Leaping Power Pool: Fighting Power Pool: Speed Villain Profile: Level 1: Crushing Blow -- Empty(A), Empty(3), Empty(3), Empty(5), Empty(5) Level 1: High Pain Tolerance -- UnbGrd-Max HP%(A), UnbGrd-ResDam(7), NmnCnv-Heal(46), NmnCnv-Heal/EndRdx(46), StdPrt-ResDam/Def+(48), GldArm-3defTpProc(48) Level 2: Titan Sweep -- Obl-Dmg(A), Obl-Acc/Rchg(7), Obl-Dmg/Rchg(13), Obl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(15), Obl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(15) Level 4: Mind Over Body -- RctArm-ResDam(A), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx(17), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(17), RctArm-ResDam/Rchg(36) Level 6: Fast Healing -- NmnCnv-Heal/Rchg(A), NmnCnv-Heal(36), NmnCnv-Heal/EndRdx(37) Level 8: Follow Through -- SprBrtFur-Acc/Dmg(A), SprBrtFur-Dmg/Rchg(9), SprBrtFur-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(9), SprBrtFur-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(11), SprBrtFur-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(11), SprBrtFur-Rech/Fury(13) Level 10: Indomitable Will -- LucoftheG-Rchg+(A), LucoftheG-Def(39) Level 12: Combat Jumping -- LucoftheG-Rchg+(A), ShlWal-ResDam/Re TP(37), Ksm-ToHit+(39), LucoftheG-Def(45) Level 14: Kick -- Empty(A) Level 16: Rise to the Challenge -- Prv-Absorb%(A), Prv-Heal(40), Prv-Heal/EndRdx(40), Prv-EndRdx/Rchg(42), Prv-Heal/Rchg(42), Prv-Heal/Rchg/EndRdx(42) Level 18: Rend Armor -- SprUnrFur-Acc/Dmg(A), SprUnrFur-Dmg/Rchg(19), SprUnrFur-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(19), SprUnrFur-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(21), SprUnrFur-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(21), SprUnrFur-Rchg/+Regen/+End(36) Level 20: Quick Recovery -- PrfShf-End%(A), PrfShf-EndMod(37) Level 22: Tough -- RctArm-ResDam(A), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx(23), RctArm-ResDam/Rchg(23), RctArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(25) Level 24: Weave -- Rct-ResDam%(A), Rct-Def(27), Rct-Def/EndRdx(27), Rct-EndRdx/Rchg(39), Rct-Def/Rchg(43), Rct-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(45) Level 26: Whirling Smash -- Obl-Dmg(A), Obl-Acc/Rchg(31), Obl-Dmg/Rchg(31), Obl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(34), Obl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(34) Level 28: Heightened Senses -- LucoftheG-Rchg+(A), LucoftheG-Def(29), LucoftheG-Def/EndRdx(29) Level 30: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(31) Level 32: Arc of Destruction -- SprAvl-Acc/Dmg(A), SprAvl-Dmg/EndRdx(33), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(33), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(33), SprAvl-Rchg/KDProc(34), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(46) Level 35: Build Momentum -- RctRtc-ToHit/Rchg(A), RctRtc-ToHit(45) Level 38: [Empty] Level 41: [Empty] Level 44: [Empty] Level 47: [Empty] Level 49: [Empty] Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Dash -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Slide -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Quick -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Rush -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Surge -- Empty(A) Level 1: Fury Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A) Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A) Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift -- Empty(A) Level 2: Health -- NmnCnv-Regen/Rcvry+(A), NmnCnv-Heal(25), Pnc-Heal/+End(40) Level 2: Hurdle -- Empty(A) Level 2: Stamina -- PrfShf-End%(A) Level 1: Momentum ------------

Insofar as TW is 'balanced,' it's by needing ~7/9 of its moves (with Taunt and Defensive Sweep skippable depending on build). You can technically skip Titan Sweep and still put out solid AoE damage, but there's not a reasonably achievable AoE attack chain that doesn't want it. You have 24 power picks. That gives you plenty of room for your 19 main powers 7/9 TW + 7/9 WP + Fighting (3) + Speed (1) + Leaping (1). You're probably trying to do too much -- whatever else you have, pare it down to Unstoppable and the self-rez, one travel power, and either two Leadership or EPP picks (or no travel power, only one other WP power, and both Leadership and an EPP).

It would be difficult for new players to understand since Regen works very differently than other kits, and it might disrupt PvP. Since I'm okay with both of those things (we have the forums and Discord to explain CoH's weirdnesses to players, and PvP could stand some disrupting), I'd say go for it. It's not like that can of worms wasn't already opened with Rebirth Destiny anyway.

You know, I absolutely remember there being a handful of top-tier builds in PoE when I played. Specifically one with some kind of like, thrown axe spamming spell build, or something. But that was a while ago, so I went to look it up and find that not only did they move towards a more class-based system by limiting certain skills to certain Ascendancies, but there even isn't that much diversity in which classes end up at top tier. I think PoE behaves exactly as predicted. And while I know next to nothing about the Pathfinder or Occultist, I'm willing to bet that Grinding Gear improves diversity by restricting or trivializing over-performing combinations.

I like starting from Winter's Bite and Blistering Cold, and then seeing what I can get with Eradication, Rectified Reticle, Taunt sets, Reactive Armor, etc.

In this proposal, 4/7 attacks are cones (two very narrow, one narrow, one very wide); 1/7 is a PBAoE; and 2/7 are single target. Swoop is single target because it's amazing (you don't need to make it a cone to sell it) and Beheader's single target because... hmm. Actually I'm not sure why I left that one single-target. I was originally envisioning cutting its cast time down even further, but in its current state it's kind of just a random albatross on Tankers. I think I'm going to update the proposal, thanks!