Hjarki

Debuffs intended to protect players aren't really all that useful - even on Defenders. In general, the more you need them, the less effective they become. That -5% hit or -8% damage is fine against even con minions. Against a four star AV/GM? They might as well not even exist. Status effects, on the other hand, can be useful. Stone Melee is arguably a better Control set than actual Control sets, with an easily stackable AE Disorient and Mag 4 ST Hold. And, of course, the status effect all Tankers have: Taunt.

I play this combo, albeit in a very different fashion. From Staff Mastery, I take Staff Mastery and set it to Mind. Then I do: Precise Strike (Superior Might of Tanker 4p; Hecatomb proc; another proc) Guarded Spin (Fury of the Gladiator A/D, proc; Obliteration D, proc; Armageddon proc; LotG recharge) Serpent's Reach (Gladiator's Javelin A/D, proc; Apocalypse D, proc; Explosive Strike proc; Perfect Zinger proc) Innocuous Strikes (Armageddon 5p; another proc) I don't take any of the spenders or Mercurial Strike. In a ST fight, I can go PS->GS->PS->SR. For multi-target, I can just rotate the two Cones. Since I Hover, this generally allows me to blanket most spawns. For Bio, I skip Parasitic Aura. I use 2xEradication 3p and 2xMocking Beratement 6p to get enough F/C/E/N to reach incarnate soft-cap in Defensive (and obviously well above regular soft-cap in Offensive). I hard-cap S/L and don't worry much about other resists. 6p Preventative Medicine in Ablative for some more recharge - between my two purple sets, the ATO 4p, Preventative Medicine, the two Mocking Beratement, 5xLotG and Mind, I've got enough recharge for the build. For pools, I take Fighting, Leadership (Maneuvers/Assault), Leaping (Combat Jumping) and Flying (Hover/Fly). I use Psi Mastery (Dominate w/Unbreakable Constraint and Harmonic Mind). While this obviously isn't the maximum possible dps out of the build, it will generally deliver a lot more dps than straight-slotting the offensive powers for damage. Since the AF of melee cones is relatively low, those procs don't perform all that much worse than they would in ST powers (and certainly better than in a PBAoE aura).

For ST, I tend to go AB->HB->AB->WJ->WJ, with Water Jet as heavily proc'd as possible. Dehydrate instead of Hydro Blast is also an option.

You consider asking if you care about perma-PA. perma-PA is primarily of concern for builds that intend on solo'ing AV/GM. They need perma-PA because they don't want gaps in taunt coverage that might expose them to attacks from those AV/GM. However, for most builds, this isn't actually all that important because Phantom Army is simply a damage cooldown.

It also appears he's running a sub-optimal rotation where he's only using ET once (rather than twice). I suspect he also didn't split the ATO minimize the internal recharge on Assassinate (and thus get the maximum proc rate on Hide before TF). In terms of raw non-proc/non-pet ST damage, my experience is that EM Stalkers are in a class all their own.

Dual Blades may be thematically cool but it's one of the weakest overall melee sets in terms of either damage or utility. It is almost directly inferior to the similar Claws. Stone Melee, on the other hand, is one of the strongest melee sets. It has incredibly effective controls - a self-stacking AE Disorient and a Mag 4 Hold - coupled with very strong single target damage.

Generally, the balance tilts towards Corruptors. Vigilance is perhaps the most useless inherent in the game. The damage bonus is largely a way to make Defenders suck less while solo and it isn't even very good at that job because give +damage to the AT with the lowest damage scale in the game isn't very good. I can see why the endurance reduction might seem a good idea - but only if you're thinking about games like WoW rather than CoH. In WoW, the highest resource expenditure for support specs comes when you're healing a lot. In CoH, the highest resource expenditure for support specs comes from their normal blasting rotation. So you're actually get endurance reduction when you need it least. The ATOs are also terrible. The Defender versions get two worthlessly small AE heal/absorb effects on an AT that could already do much better if it chose to do so. In contrast, Corruptors get a purple damage proc and a proc that can help with endurance issues - both useful to have as a regular part of your rotation. There's also the issue that the primary value of the support sets isn't really 'support' so much as a clunky form of armor set for the player themselves. Support affects applied to unknown allies tend to be very inefficient because they so often over-shoot the mark and apply buffs the target doesn't actually need. So having slightly better values so you can over-shoot even more isn't very good while having a lot more damage (50% more damage against an AV/GM) is.

The one I'd want would be to take Demon Summoning, remove all the pet stuff and expand it into a full melee set.

Energy Melee is an interesting set from the standpoint of trying to optimize its output. The best scheme I've found is: Assassin's Strike (Superior Blistering Cold all but proc; Superior Stalker's Guile proc) Total Focus (Superior Stalker's Guile all but proc) Energy Transfer (Hecatomb all but D) Energy Punch (Superior Assassin's Mark) Sniper Attack (Superior Winter's Bite all but proc) Energy Punch Energy Transfer Assassin's Strike is effectively auto-crit (at least on the second and subsequent rotations) because both Energy Transfer and Total Focus have a 100% Focus chance. While Blistering Cold has a bit too much recharge, it still delivers a ~77% proc chance on Hide (which is better than the 67% you'd get from straight-slotting). This gives you almost an 80% chance to generate double Energy Store stacks (making both Energy Transfers the fast version). The hardest part of the rotation is the 315% recharge needed for Energy Punch, but Superior Assassin's Mark provides about 100% of this so you only really need +115% global recharge (not that hard with +20% from secondary). Obviously, additional procs can go into the Sniper Attack (such as Apocalypse) and Energy Transfer. You can also reverse the order on Assassin's Strike and Total Focus if you want one of your Energy Transfer to heal rather than damage. Power Crash can take Armageddon and does a fair bit of damage (it has longer recharge and higher damage for Stalkers). However, you can't really run a double Energy Store rotation very effectively with just the above attacks unless you don't mind standing around doing nothing for various periods of time. That being said, the Energy Store version of Power Crash isn't all that much better than the regular version due to the difficulty of lining up effective Cones (especially without a taunt aura). Energy Aura should be fairly straightforward. You slot uniques, pump up your defenses, etc. Disrupt is a good place to park the 5th purple set for recharge but I don't think it's a very good power. Note that the 'fast' version of the rotation is a bit over 10 secs and will eat a bit over 20 health/sec. Since this about 4x the health regeneration of an unenhanced Stalker, this is not a minor challenge.

Scourge averages out to around 30% more damage against an arbitrarily large health pool. In practice, it varies from a bit less efficient than that to a lot less efficient than that. The issue is that you calculate whether an attack will Scourge before the damage lands. So if you had some hypothetical attack that did 50% of an enemy's health pool, it would never (usefully) Scourge. On the other hand, Rains are famously good with Scourge because each tick is so tiny and you'll get nearly perfect performance. However, as with all such effects, additional effects from set mechanics, DoT and procs cannot Scourge. A Scrapper will generally get about 10% - 15% (depending on ATO and set) additional damage from criticals. However, they get this regardless of the size of attacks or the opponent's health pool so they're going to get generally better performance on non-AV/GM. They're also working off of a much higher base damage scale and melee sets tend to hit a bit harder than blast sets. Stalkers, between the progressive critical chance stacking on Assassinate and periodic hides from ATO, probably get around the same 'crit rate' as idealized Corruptors with, again, a high damage scale and melee sets. In terms of the overall notion of Corruptors (and support AT in general), it's important to remember that CoH is not a competitive game. Even against the most difficult content, you're going to find a lot of 'sub-optimal' play. If I were tasked with putting together an optimal team to deal with the hardest content in the game, it would probably be almost entirely Tankers using sets like Bio, Radiation and Shield. You get great values on the stacking Leadership pools as well as the stacking effects of those armor sets. While no individual player on your team could debuff/buff like an individual support AT, the cumulative effect would be similar without taking the damage hit from the low damage scale AT. However, if you're just recruiting random people from world chat to join your adventure in four-star, you probably want all those support AT to deal with the fact that you don't have that sort of optimized team.

It depends on what I'm building. For 90% hard cap AT, I'm normally building to tank. That means a combination of hard-capped resists, debuff resistance and healing/regen while my defenses are largely just whatever happens between offensive set, pool toggles and enhancement bonuses. For 75% hard cap melee, I'm probably playing a Defense set that soft-caps most typed or all positional and not caring all that much about resists. For squishies, I'm normally looking at either soft-cap Ranged (for purely ranged builds), S/L/E/R or S/L/E (for builds that need to be in melee range from time to time) or R/A positional (almost exclusively on Defenders since they're the only ones who can do this normally). Again, not concerning myself much with resists.

It really depends on the power sets you're looking to play.

Both Blazing Arrow and Explosive Arrow do Fire damage.

Not really, no. However, +10% Recharge and +5% Ranged Defense is fantastic.

While accurate in the abstract, this is not a very useful list in the specific. For example, I'd never prioritize Max HP on a Bio Tanker because you can't. The general method for optimization is to create a cost function that relates the value of various attributes. So you might write 1.7a + 1.2b + 2.9c + 3.2d = optimization parameter. Those weights let you counter-balance the actual impacts rather than simply saying d > a. So let's consider Bio vs. Invulnerability. On an Invulnerability Tanker, I'd almost certainly slot Dull Pain with Preventative Medicine. On a Bio Tanker, I'd rarely ever add a slot to Inexhaustible. While I'd like to maximize Max HP on every Tanker, the reality is that Inexhaustible doesn't return enough value to justify slotting while Dull Pain (about 4 times more effective) does. So when you say to prioritize Max HP on a Bio Tanker, my response is: you can't, so don't bother. The Accolades and Unbreakable Constraint unique that every build takes will be the lion's share of your Max HP because Bio is only marginally better than Super Reflexes at buffing Max HP. Likewise, when you say to prioritize Regen, I'm not going to slot the pair of +regen uniques (or, as noted above, Inexhaustible) because the return on investment for those slots is so small. On the other hand, I'm almost certainly going to slot Ablative Carapace and DNA Siphon because the return is very large for my investment there. But it's not like I'm going to make some sort of radical compromise that hurts my build. I'll go to ID levels using sets that otherwise improve my build. When I look at Bio armor, I'm not inventing a priority list based on what I wish it provided but based on what it - and the various sets - actually provide. So my build goals are more along the lines of reaching F/C/E/N soft-cap (normally just a byproduct of slotting LotG mules and pushing Environmental Modification to ED) and S/L hard-cap (not all that hard but still requires some effort). I'm not thinking about Max HP or Regen at all because those are just simply byproducts of slotting powers in a fairly normal way. I'm not thinking about recharge all that much because most builds land in the 80% - 110% range unless you're really trying to push them for some reason - and going out of that range normally requires some serious compromises. Ultimately, I think the key is to not try to force a build to be something it's not. The almost inevitable result is highly un-optimized build where you sacrifice all sorts of critical elements in single-minded pursuit of something you probably didn't need in the first place.

This is my Bio/Stone/Psi: Hardened Carapace (Aegis R, R/E, R/E/R, +psi; Steadfast Protection +def) Inexhaustible (Panacea +health/end) Environmental Modification (LotG +recharge; Reactive Defenses D, +resist; Shield Wall D, +resist) Ablative Carapace (Preventative Medicine full set) Evolving Armor (Unbreakable Constraint R, R/E, R/E/R, +hp) DNA Siphon (Eradication A/R, A/D/R, proc; Preventative Medicine H, H/R, H/R/E) Genetic Contamination (Eradication D, A/R, proc; Superior Gauntleted Fist A/D, D/R, proc) Stone Fist (Superior Might of the Tanker full set) Stone Mallet (D-Sync Empowerment+3 A/D; Damage+5; Touch of Death proc; Gladiator's Strike proc; Perfect Zinger proc; Force Feedback proc) Heavy Mallet (Superior Gauntleted Fist A/D/R, D/E/R, A/D/E/R; Gladiator's Strike D/R, proc; Force Feedback proc) Taunt (Mocking Beratement full set) Fault (Absolute Amazement all but proc; Force Feedback proc) Tremor (Armageddon all but D; Force Feedback proc) Seismic Smash (Hecatomb all but D; Unbreakable Constraint proc) Boxing Toughness (Gladiator's Armor R, R/E, R/E/R, +def) Weave (LotG D, +recharge) Combat Jumping (LotG +recharge) Maneuvers (LotG +recharge) Assault (EndRed) Stealth (LotG +recharge) Dominate (Neuronic Shutdown A/E, A/R) Harmonic Mind (Power Transfer +heal) Health (Miracle +recovery; Numina's Convalescence +Regen/Recovery) Stamina (Performance Shifter +recovery) It's designed to hard-cap S/L (with at least one enemy in melee range) while Incarnate soft-capping E/N/F/C in Defensive (which obviously means well exceeding the normal soft-cap in Offensive). A basic rotation of Fist -> Stone Mallet -> Fist -> Heavy Mallet with Seismic Smash thrown whenever it recharges does decent single target damage. AE damage is weaker since I use Fault for CC and DNA Siphon for healing. Due to the Mag 4 Hold in the ST rotation and the self-stacking Disorient from Fault, enemies can rarely strike back all that effectively (at least in melee range). Psi attacks are a weakness. From a damage perspective, the major hurdle would be that if no one else on your team brings Achilles Heel and FotG, you don't either.

With any melee set, you need to start by figuring out what rotation you'll be running, how recharge will be necessary for that rotation and how much internal recharge (and thus how many procs) each attack can take. In my experience, Energy Melee is a lot worse than it looks on paper because it requires an abnormally large number of melee attacks (limiting the diversity of sets you can use) and it doesn't function well except at extreme levels of recharge.

There's only a single proc available for Smoke Flash (Perfect Zinger), so it can't really be a 'proc bomb'. Putting that proc into Smoke Flash would invalidate the Placate. However, the Placate is a Mag 3 placate (doesn't affect Bosses and above) I almost universally 6-slot Mocking Beratement into this power. It gives a smidegen of S/L defense (most */Ninja Blasters are going for S/L/E/R defenses) and 7.5% recharge. It's a nice set up for many PBAoE ultimates since it provides a no-notify resistance debuff and protects against enemies that see through your weak stealth. And, of course, it can be used as a panic button to prevent getting overwhelmed by a large crowd.

All of these mathematical tools are dependent on independence of your random variables - which isn't the case here. What you're attempting to do is akin to feeding a large number of chess matches into a statistical analysis to see which piece is most popular to move on a given turn - and expecting this analysis to help you win chess games. While the graph of Chess has far more rigid connectivity than CoH, your confidence in your results is misplaced.

Sentinel versions of Aim have +33% Range attached.

Blinding Powder is (somewhat) useful for stealth'ing mission objectives (although less so on a Sentinel without Aim). More importantly, it permits slotting Coercive Persuasion (10% recharge and 5% Ranged Defense), which is one of the best sets in the game.

A major selling point of CoH is how it lets you customize your look without being a slave to game mechanics as it is in other games. So when you're talking about visual effects linked to game mechanics, players are generally willing to tolerate particle effects and glowing hands - but they start to get upset when you make it impossible to see the actual costume underneath the avalanche of power effects. The basic principle here is that you shouldn't need to choose powers based on how you want your character to look standing around in the plaza.

There are quite a few subtle differences that give specific builds for Sentinel a raison d'etre. Consider Vulnerability. While this is often viewed as a standard -resist debuff, it actually debuffs resistances to debuffs as well. So when you combine it with Beam's -regen or Electric's -end, it makes these effects hit much harder - especially on AV/GM. Cones for Sentinels are often subtly better or worse. The shorter range on Cones like Piercing Beam and Piercing Shot mean that your Annihilation -res (and others) proc will hit much more often than it would for a Blaster due to the better area factor. Likewise, Sentinels have an easier time piling on +range from ATOs and secondaries, so their standard Cones (which generally do not suffer a range penalty) often hit larger areas. Ultimates like Thunderous Blast and Category Five where damage isn't the primary purpose of the ultimate benefit greatly from the reduced recharge, enabling them to be used every spawn or with much higher uptime than Blasters. Conventional ultimates perform much better with procs than standard Blaster ultimates due to higher cyclic rate without penalizing proc chance (the Blaster ultimates are normally way over-max for proc chance). That Armageddon + Unbreakable Constraint Atomic Blast is about 50% more dps on a Sentinel vs. a Blaster. The Sentinel secondaries also vary a great deal in what they provide for your primary. For example, Stone Armor provides a boost of about 23 dps to your single target rotation - which will normally be a lot better than what you'd get from something like Devices +20% damage. With that being said, normally you're not building a Sentinel to maximize pylon dps. You're building them because they allow you some useful utility better than what you'd likely receive from a Blaster or Scrapper.

Fire's DoT doesn't Scourge. In terms of a secondary to pair with Thermal, I'd recommend Electrical Blast. It's a purely ranged set that, once you drain an opponent's Endurance, is as hard-hitting as any secondary. Drained enemies are also almost completely neutered (AV/GM still get their special abilities), making it a fantastic set from a defensive perspective. Also, while Heat Exhaustion inexplicably can't take EndMod sets, it's an end/recovery debuff. Lastly, Electrical Blast exemplars well because it gets the complete single target rotation by level 20.

Yes and no. As an area effect attack it is, like most Cones, of somewhat limited value due to the need to line up the spawn. While Tankers have the benefit of taunt auras (to compress packs) and wider arcs, they have the disadvantage of normally not wanting to re-position to optimize cones because their movement disrupts that nicely packed spawn. As a single target attack,Tanker cones of this sort are often a decent choice due to their low area factors (1.24 for Proton Sweep). Such attacks can slot Fury of the Gladiator and Armageddon - neither of which would be available in a conventional single target rotation. Cones also tend to have the right levels of recharge for inclusion into single target rotations and, if their activation is amenable (1.848 is decent but not ideal for Radiation Melee), can form a part of a strong rotation. If you run: Contaminated Strike (Gladiator's Strike A/D, proc; Damage Enhancement; proc, proc, proc) Radioactive Smash (Gladiator's Strike A/D, proc; Hecatomb D, proc; proc, proc) Proton Sweep (Fury of the Gladiator A/D, proc; Armageddon D, proc; proc, proc) Then you'll be dealing about 185 dps against a single target @ +125% damage. With a 65% uptime on FotG, that would rise to 209 dps. It would rise further if you replaced a proc in one of the single target powers with Achilles Heel. Unfortunately, there are two problems you'll encounter with Radiation Melee: Lack of an opportunistic attack. This sort of rotation is fantastic for Tankers because it arrives very early in the level progression so you can retain even when exemplar'd to low levels (and it's a lot easier to level). However, the best such rotations have some longer recharge attack down in the tree that will be thrown on recharge to boost your dps. Radiation does have Devastating Blow, but it would constitute a dps loss in this sort of rotation. Lack of set mechanics to offset the costs. Sets like Savage and Staff work with this methodology because they have innate mechanics that ameliorate the problem of not slotting your offensive powers for set bonuses. If you're just slotting Scrapper-style with 5-set Hecatomb, 5-set Armegeddon, etc., you're getting a significant amount of recharge/accuracy that this sort of proc slotting doesn't provide. Since Radiation Melee itself doesn't provide it either, it's a struggle to make this sort of build work.