Frosticus

If you make confront similar to feral charge in movement ability that is more than enough of a buff. Taunt plus instant movement. If anyone has actually played savage assault they would know that feral charge completely changes the melee experience and makes combat considerably faster. It doesnt turn it up to 11, it turns it up to 15. I'd say that combat teleport is more at home on stalkers but I get why scrappers would desire instant combat movement on a short cool down. It is amazing. also lol @ tw instantly moving around and not having to chase and lose momentum.

There are a number of AVs that will flee far and wide. Nosferatu is an example that will run no matter how many times PA hits him. Tohit debuffs are of very little value against AVs. Even less so against +level AVs. to the point that manuevers may become better protection than your tohit debuff. Keep in mind that storm has limited survivability if PA doesnt take all of the attention. Many other sets provide significant -dam debuffing so if they get loose their damage is much more manageable until PA can require them.

dark, rad (except AM), poison, storm, ta no one expects you to buff others when you have those.

I think mez is a pretty bad mechanic personally. Over half the ATs completely ignore the mechanic in 99.9% of game play. For the ATs that actually have to deal with mez for many builds it is just an annoyance and a time out. For some that need to be in the fray to function it is a death sentence that must be countered. At least with something like slows, blindness, or grounding (-jump/fly) powers they affect every AT to a similar degree. Finally it seems like the original devs gave up on the mez system too and just gave everyone mez protection via clarion league wide buff. I guess I'd be fine with 15 min CM. Melee ATs are already dealing way more damage than squishies in most situations and teams are moving so fast now that mez has no real purpose beyond leaving a teammate stuck behind while everyone moves on. Unless they moved to a more pvp like system where everyone can get mezzed (for much shorter durations) but rather than mez resistance in pvp if buffs still allowed anti mez to provide hard counters.

Of the 3 I've tried (stj, sav, nin) they are all remarkably close. the nin uses 2 -res procs in the chain the stj uses 1 -res proc the sav uses none.

yes, the snipes are really strong. for many sets they are the best follow up to AS

I agree 100%. It has some potentially decent uses as mitigation in a crowd, but that isnt really what I want it to do most of the time. I just want a good sustain like most sets get without the drawbacks.

Epic aoes are a great opening choice. They are large, have 16 targets and 50% base crit from hide. Then munch down a boss or two. Your contribution will be decent.

I like sav/shield for solo as a stalker. Lots of aoe for x8 settings. Stalker st dps for AV's. Shield is very robust I personally don't consider it a "solo" unless it is no insp/temp/lore given how strong those aids are. But if you are willing to use them there isn't much a sav/shield would falter against. no insp/temp/lore 4x8 ITF 0x8 Katie Hannon 54 goliath warwalker 54 director 11 52 silver mantis lots of 54 AV's I haven't taken down crimson prototype with it yet (without insp). And dr Aeon stomped me bad. I was slowly making headway on Reichsman, but there would be no way when he uses dull pain.

if you or your singy use grav distortion on a target then they will be flagged to receive impact damage for a short while. lift and propel do bonus damage . You can get the impact damage whether the target is contained (held) or not, they just have to be under the effect of your hold.

ha! I did say a few though. Although I will freely admit that I think a power that at least carries some risk attached should be allowed to be stronger than powers that have zero risk attached. Where that places fulcrum? dunno. But we'll see how everything shakes out.

If your intent is confuse stacking to solo multiple AV's then mind is a much better choice than dark because mind can reset them with sleep if/when something goes wrong. In addition to having a faster cast time and an aoe confuse to layer. Dark can do it, that aspect has been raised in the past, but you may encounter issues with that tactic vs +3 or higher AV's. Or you may not. ymmv.

Ultimately it likely won't be as simple as tracing back lineage. But if we did: dark started on defenders - so 30% is correct. 22.5% is now correct for secondaries cold started on corrs so 30% is correct? but sleet was a direct copy/paste of freezing rain, which was NOT correctly adjusted between defs and trollers (35%/30%). So the argument that cold should be 30% for secondaries only stands up if we pretend that the power didn't already exist in a different secondary which was never adjusted correctly to begin with. I'm guessing storm was designed for defenders and given to trollers, so the 35% of freezing rain is probably intended. But that would have been decisions from decade(s) ago and for me doesn't really create a strong foundation of an argument. Long story short, the lineage argument ultimately doesn't matter that much beyond evoking passion.

that's been my position the whole time. And exactly why I'm saying tarpatch doesn't need a substantial buff for defenders right now.

exactly. And tar patch is 30% on defenders. You bump tarpatch up by 33% "just cause" you should bump up other -res powers by 33% too to maintain parity. Or does dark deserve a special exemption due to it being a t2 huge aoe, excellent control, perma with SO's power?

I decided to forgo tough/weave so that helps. The only area I struggle is the range that I have access to my epics, but no incarnates. They suck down end a fair amount (dominate, armor, wold of confusion). Below that is fine, above that is generally fine. I went musculature radial as that benefits most of what poison does and helps a bit with recovery. I have ageless, but I don't really need it and may switch to barrier for better survival. With ageless you can fight indefinitely of course. Without I'm good for 2-3 min. It took me a bit to get over the notion that I needed high defense to make this build work. But layering good resistances, with good -damage debuffs, moderate defenses+tohit debuffing and a bit of absorb/healing has proven surprisingly robust*. With poison trap briefly holding spawns until world of confusion does it's magic I actually feel pretty safe in most situations. *I just dropped lvl 50 silver mantis AV (found in the nemesis arc) and my health never dropped below 95%. It's a very layered approach and you need to stay aggressive to keep it flowing. That said, the issue starts to arise when facing +3 or higher AV's as the debuffs start to drastically lose effectiveness due to the purple patch. Solo'ing them gets progressively harder than a pure defense approach which is less impacted by the purple patch.

That makes this proc a worthwhile consideration in a lot of circumstances. Any chance entropic chaos could get a smidgen of a bump in heal strength or up the PPM of it so it is a bit more reliable for characters that have limited healing ability?

You'd want to look at his resistances in addition to getting his -regen under control. I think he has a big ole psy hole. As mentioned poison-poison trap doesn't do -regen. Though that doesn't necessarily eliminate it from contention.

I get that corrs had /cold first. It was my favorite set on live by a landslide. As we've pointed out elsewhere no one can even remember when HL was dropped down to 24% for corrs as it used to be 30%. My vote is 35% for sleet on defenders. and corrs/trolls/mm/doms take a small hit on theirs. Cold still retains tremendous "spike" -res with sleet+HL and they aren't removing stacking ability of psuedo pets, so it is still more or less the king of -res (although that should probably go to poison or sonic imo).

My crystal ball tells me that once all the AT modifiers are respected they will likely do a deep dive into some of the sets that are really struggling (TA, some aspects of poison, sonic, maybe FF) and a once over of the good sets to spruce up some things (powers like frostworks for example). I'd also expect a few powers to be trimmed down (rhymes with bar-light). That seems to be the direction they are moving in to me at least. FWIW they are also moving way faster than the old devs imo. But everything still takes time. As for bumping tarpatch up to 40% for fenders? I'd say "where's my bump?" as a poison player. But I also don't really want envenom bumped up, it is already a super strong debuff with very real limitations.

Nothing wrong with possess. But 2 second cast single target confuse becomes a lot less important in the higher levels once you have good recharge and some defenses in place. Purple confuse proc in it is decent, but you can generally just fearsome stare and attack easier groups, or aoe stun tougher groups to similar effect. I find I rarely use it on my dark/sav once i hit the late 30's. Very rarely as soon as I slotted out perma dom.

It's not the direction I'd have gone, but it looks like a solid build. I lvl'd poison/rad for awhile, but ultimately switched to poison/fire. I don't see a huge difference between the two blast sets other than fire does a bit faster damage and rad offers quite a bit more control. That said, rad blast really needs procs to put out good damage. Rad can take a lot of good procs in each attack. I'd take a fairly significant hit to ranged def to get those procs in as they make a very large difference. In particular cosmic burst and proton volley turn into a very heavy 1-2 punch and really become the workhorse of your attacks along with proc'd char. Paralytic poison is ok, it does ok damage with procs, but I'd focus on getting proton volley and char fully slotted out before I look to paralytic as it is quite slow. On the note of char, if you aren't married to the epic choice I'd look at /psy. World of confusion w/ purple proc is actually really good on a poison. I know the defender ATO's "seem" like throw aways but for poison they are actually fantastic. I have one in blaze and one in blazing bolt (ie cosmic burst and proton volley). They help massively with keeping you healed up. My build made a lot of sacrifices and only has 28% ranged (15% ish everything else), but poison + the 2 ATO's have me breezing through the Maria Jenkins AV's (set to 50) without insp. I usually have 300+ absorb and heal every attack rotation (I have entomb in dominate as well). Last but not least, you may want to consider some sort of mez protection. When my poison gets mezzed in a group I usually die. Vs a couple targets it isn't so bad as weaken keeps the duration super short, so other than the detoggle it is ok. I alternate between rune of protection and melee hybrid. That isn't 100% uptime, but most of the time is covered. They both add good resistances so mix well with poison.

It seems like you guys are doing an awful lot of work. Regardless of whether every change is agreed upon, the effort is really appreciated. VEATs (banes in particular) and thorny doms thank you far in advance as they are redraw nightmares to play.

Trick arrow says it is ok waiting while you buff dark after these changes...

You should be able to use antidote on yourself too. Not necessarily with the mez protection, but some regen, slow protection, etc would make sense.