Hjarki

As players level up, they increasingly address problems like recharge, healing, defense, etc. As a result, it's fairly common for your buffs to be superfluous when used on high level players. They may not be at some 'cap', but they are effectively at the limits of what they can use. This means that the majority of a Defender's buffs are really just self-buffs - you design your character around them in a way other players cannot.

A good rule of thumb is when you see people start throwing around insults rather than engaging in reasonable debate, it's because they've realized they can't win on the merits of this argument. I think most reasonable people who look over the threads you've contributed to, keeping this rule in mind, will understand precisely where you're coming from.

No, it isn't. When your proc chance is over-cap, you are getting fewer ppm than you would with a power that has an uncapped proc chance. This is true even if you slot internal recharge sufficient to bring it below cap. With a 20s sniper attack, you'll be doing 71.75 * 90% / 20 = 3.23 dps. With a 12s sniper attack, you'll be doing 71.75 * 77.76% / 12 = 4.65 dps. This advantageous ratio (for the 12s attack) is retained with global recharge but becomes even better if you start slotting internal recharge into the powers.

I think Masterminds are probably the best 'Straggler killers'. However, Blasters, Corruptors and Dominators are all strong choices because they've got ranged attacks so they don't need to bother chasing enemies all over the place like Stalkers. My observation is that having effective ranged attacks on Stalkers eliminates most of that wasted time running around. Likewise, having AE attacks that can be used over a wide area rather than the Stalker's immediate vicinity means that they can hit a bunch of lieutenants/bosses at once for more than they could do with the same amount of time spent on single target attacks. In terms of EB/AV/GM, most of the fight is actually solving the problem of not dying. Once you've solved that problem, you need a fairly low amount of dps to beat their regen and you'll win. The speed at which you win is generally irrelevant because the time spent fighting those EB/AV/GM is a tiny fraction of the time you spent chewing through endless trash on the way to them. Even then, the disparity between Stalker and another dps AT is almost meaningless compared to what your support AT bring to the table when you're talking about that final fight where the entire team/league is focused on a single target. A team of the right 8 Defenders will shred an EB/AV/GM faster than any set of 8 Stalkers/Blasters/Scrappers you can muster.

The value you've listed for Power Burst is only in Energy Focus mode. The likelihood of this is hard to calculate since we don't know what the chance is for the various attacks, but you need to either set it up with low damage attacks or tie it to the longer recharge on Total Focus. Also, the longer recharges aren't actually a plus. In the abstract sense, a power with a 5s recharge and a power with a 10s recharge with the same proc will create the same dps from that proc because the former will fire the proc twice as often with half the chance. However, when you have powers with a base recharge longer than ~16 sec, you've already capped 3.5 ppm procs (~12 sec for 4.5 ppm). So you need to lower the recharge to get them back below cap or you're wasting some of the potential of the proc. But doing so also diminishes the value of your global recharge. Let's say we ignore activation time and we've got a 32 sec recharge power. We want to slot 100% internal recharge so we drop the recharge of the power down to 16 sec. Our power is approximately at cap now. If we add another 100% global recharge, this would mean that our power has near-cap proc rate with an effective recharge of ~10.5. If we had simply started with a 16 sec power and had 100% global recharge, we'd have a near-cap proc rate with an effective recharge of ~8 sec.

I think this is one of the problems I have with Stalker that others either (a) have yet to fully recognize or (b) don't care about. The generic Stalker is essentially worthless on every fight until that final AV/GM. Tankers and Brutes do useful AE because they're the center of the battle. They've got taunt auras and can nicely compress spawns around themselves. But our generic Stalker isn't the center of the battle - his friend the Tanker/Brute is. Even if he's tough enough to do the 'tanking' thing, he doesn't have the taunt to keep those spawns on him. That leaves him trying to pick off individual targets. But Blast sets are significantly better at that task because you don't need to be constantly chasing enemies. That's why I mentioned Claws earlier. It's a relatively good "fight an AV/GM" set with standard Assassiante and a slow/heavy single target attack to exploit Hide. But it's also got one of the best Ranged attacks available to Stalkers plus a fast-activating massive radius/arc KB Cone so you can operate in 'Blaster mode' in a team setting where you're not the center of attention for the mobs. In some sort of Platonic Ideal of a Stalker, I get the notion that you're a single target guy. But so much of the game isn't single target - or involves non-melee single target - that going with this notion of a Stalker tends to lead to a hero/villain who just isn't very useful most of the time.

I tend to agree. It's a significant investment for a 'trick' that doesn't have all that much practical value. It's the sort of thing you do to make the 'uber pylon build', but I can't see much reason to use such a tactic in a play build.

As I pointed out, enemies don't slice through DDR on +M/L or +S/L secondaries either. However, Invulnerability tends to have a lot of trouble with Toxic/Psi, end drain, etc. There are plenty of enemy groups that go after these weaknesses. I get the impression a lot of people are looking at Council or similar groups as their standard for 'effective tanking' and not paying any attention to the enemy groups that people really worry about.

Total Focus is significantly lower dpat than either Blaze or Blazing Bolt (and so is Power Burst). While they have a decent dpa, this is really just big numbers without any mechanics that favor large, slow attacks.

This actually just counterbalances the basic discrepancy between the two AT. So Dominators only do a smidge less damage per Sniper attack than a Blaster rather than a lot less damage. Moreover, recharge does matter - the Blaster can use their high damage Sniper attack 66% more often (not even accounting for the fact that Dominators get no recharge bonuses while many Blaster secondaries provide 20%+ recharge bonuses). It's +102% for non-Defenders, +140% for Defenders. Blasters can also get the same power in secondary, except they can make theirs perma- while Dominators only get 50% uptime even with massive recharge. Blasters also generally have Aim in primary and some form of Build Up in secondary (Soul Drain is the example in Dark, but there are others). Blasters (albeit not ones with Soul Drain) can get Build Up for +100% damage on top of Aim. You also have to consider that Dominators are one of the only AT where their primary doesn't really bring any meaningful damage. In theory, the pet can potentially push Dominators over what a Blaster can do, but that's a sketchy comparison give the inability of Dominators to do much to keep the pet alive.

The goal was to demonstrate the principle, not to debate over specific numbers. The origin of the entire debate was the note that surviving defense debuffs with secondary is actually quite a bit easier than surviving it with primary. This means the relative value of DDR in primary is lower than the value of other debuff resistances in most cases. Likewise, Defense in general is a less comprehensive way to mitigate damage than Resistances because there are so many situations where enemies can slice through even exceptional defenses while there really aren't many (beyond, I suppose, Hamidon) where they slice through Resistance in the same manner. If you're making the "I can blindly charge into any situation" Tanker, Radiation is probably your first choice. Invulnerability might make the top 5, but it's questionable. Moreover, even if you could make an argument that it should be #4 or #5, it's still not a particularly strong basis for the rest of the build since it lacks recharge, damaging attacks/auras, +damage or other useful features like endurance management.

Unless you're counting damage from a Control set pet, I'm not seeing it. Blasters will run +30% damage or so (from Defiance) over a Dominator as well as having better damage scales and lower recharges on the harder hitting powers (12s vs. 20s on Sniper attacks, for example). Blasters also get accuracy/hit/recharge/defense buffs in their Assault sets that Dominators don't, making it easier to build towards raw damage. Even Blaster melee attacks hit harder than Dominator melee attacks (although not by nearly as much as ranged attacks).

I think this tends to be 'bad advice' in the sense that virtually all builds are incarnated level 50 builds that cost 250+ billion influence or more. They're not very accessible to the average player. Moreover, many of those builds 'peak' at different levels and may be brutally difficult to level up or exemplar very badly. I think a better strategy is to find something you look and study the build. Try to figure out why someone did what they did and if it doesn't make sense to you, ask. Even if the original build designer isn't around, most of the decent ones know perfectly well why power X was slotted with enhancements Y and can answer your questions about builds they've never seen before.

I posted the (correct) unenhanced values. What you're comparing them against are enhanced values. I didn't post anything about ToHit bonuses whatsoever. Except I haven't. Bopper even had to step in and include charts before the 'experts' realized they were wrong about how defense works.

Which means you're not looking at 'unslotted' values. What exactly do you think I got wrong in that comparison?

I don't really agree with your analysis for two reasons. Let's look at the basics for Invulnerability: 20% Defense S/L/F/C/E/N 45% S/L Resist 20% F/C/E/N/T Resist 140% Regeneration 140% Max HP 125% EndRec 50% DDR 25% End/Rec Resist 20% Rech/Slow Resist Contrast with Radiation: 0% Defense (some -hit, but we'll ignore that for right now) 30% S/L Resist 35% F/N Resist 50% Toxic Resist 15% Psi Resist 7.5% Cold Resist 272% Regeneration 100% Max HP 175% End Rec 86.5% End/Rec Resist 45.4% Rech/Slow Resist You'll notice that Radiation has significantly better resists than Invulnerability everywhere except S/L (which is easily hard-capped with Toughness) and Cold (which isn't very important). Even with better Max HP, Invulnerability has lower Regeneration - and that's not even accounting for the massive healing advantage Radiation possesses. Radiation can virtually ignore End/Rec debuffs and has double the protection for Rech/Slow debuffs. So Invulnerability is pretty far behind in every respect except Defense/DDR. But that's not a particularly big deal since the bulk of defense debuffs are melee - and there are secondaries that can (as I pointed out) put your Melee Defense so far off the charts that you're effectively immune to Defense Debuff. Radiation just has a much stronger baseline than Invulnerability does for raw survival - and that's on top of recharge bonuses, damage abilities, better endurance management and a no-crash T9 power. In terms of Super Reflexes, the main issue is that it's nearly impervious to harm... until it's not. There are some encounters where Super Reflexes just catastrophically fails and there isn't a whole lot you can do about it.

No, I didn't. I meant to say 50% DDR because this isn't about Super Reflexes - it's about Invulnerability vs. Radiation. Also, as you later noted, it's a relevant distinction because there are melee sets where you can get upwards of 45% Melee Defense from the melee set.

And those supposed 'experts' are incorrect. The soft-cap is applied as part of the final calculation. That's why going over the cap helps against +hit boosted mobs. If you receive a -defense debuff, it is applied to total defense - not some arbitrarily cut-down defense like you seem to think it is. So if you're at 59% defense and receive a -5% defense, you are now at 54% defense... not 40% defense like you seem to think. So let's say you're at 59% defense/0% DDR and receive a -5% defense attack. The expected value of this attack is -5% * 0.05 = -0.25%. It will remain at this level until you drop below 45% Defense, so you can suffer (59 - 45) / 0.25 = 56 such attacks before your defense starts to drop. However, if you're 45% defense/50% DDR and receive the same sort of attack, you're immediately 56 attacks behind the 59% Tanker. While the 0 attacks 45% Defense Tanker will have their Defense drop more slowly from this point than the 56 attacks 59% Defense Tanker, they have a long way to go to catch up. There is no simple distribution that models the behavior at this point, but you can easily check for yourself with a basic Monte Carlo simulation. Since most -defense debuffs have durations about as long as their recharge, this means that 56 attacks active at the same is nearly impossible. Indeed, you might check the source you're citing: Emphasis mine. Defense debuffs are not calculated based on your soft-cap value. They are calculated before your soft-cap value, so having more Defense than necessary protects against Defense debuffs. I've done the math. I've observed in game. Your supposed 'experts' have apparently done neither.

For the numbers I cited - 59% defense/0% DDR vs. 45% defense/50% DDR - my statements are absolutely true. You can experience this in game or you can model it mathematically. I'm not sure why you're introducing numbers that aren't relevant to the conversation.

Two -5% attacks on 59% Defense with no DDR takes their effective Defense from 45% to 45%. Two -5% on 45% Defense and 50% DDR takes you from 45% to 40%. The result is the DDR version enters a cascading defense failure much sooner than the 'raw defense' version. Moreover, it takes a hell of lot more than 4/5 attacks for 'things to balance out' because those attacks have to hit - and it's significantly harder to hit the over-capped Defense than the Defense-with-DDR. If you either look at the probability distributions or model it, you'll see that Defense-over-cap is better than capped-Defense-with-DDR under virtually any reasonable assumptions for dealing with defense debuffs. Super Reflexes has both. But if it didn't have DDR at all, it would still almost never fear a catastrophic defense failure (at least on a Tanker) due to its over-capped defenses.

I think for every AT, the first three powers of primary and first two powers of secondary should be available at level 1. There are simply too many 'dead powers' that result from the peculiarities of how the sets are laid out. Beyond that: Domination shouldn't be affected by global recharge. While I understand why people like perma-Dom, I think the current implementation simply warps the AT too much. Having Domination as a temporary boost rather than a permanent condition gives builds a lot more flexibility and seems more in line with the original intent. No pets. The pet powers in Control sets should be replaced by something else - probably some sort of mitigation ability taken from similar armor sets. Pets are necessary for Controllers but superfluous for Dominators. Clearer delineation between 'melee' and 'ranged' Dominators. Assault sets were tacitly acknowledged as a mistake with the later Blaster sets. Having an entire AT dependent on sets that don't really 'work' in this fashion is simply a bad idea. Maybe 1 - 2 of the sets should retain the ranged/melee hybrid flavor while the rest should be focused on either ranged or melee but not both. Ultimately, I see Dominator as an object lesson in how not to design an AT. Control sets are notoriously late-developing. When you combine them with Assault sets that are also late-developing due to their unnecessary hybrid ranged/melee nature and zero defenses until Epic/Patron pools, you end up with an AT that just isn't very playable except at max level. The must-have-Hasten nature of the innate just compounds these problems.

Most Tanker builds do. My primary Tanker is a Rad/Staff that is built for survivability rather than damage and I still generally get sub-5 minute times.

If you only have 122% Global Recharge, then you don't 'really' have perma-dom. The problem is that your pool empties whenever Domination wears off. So you need a buffer between when Domination is recharged and when it wears off to activate it again. Then when your Domination actually wears off, you'll hopefully have enough time to rebuild before the next activation.

Ice Melee's basic attacks are low damage and its Assassinate is unusually slow to counterbalance Freezing Touch. So it's not quite as strong as you might initially think.

It lives and dies with Spin/Follow Up on a Scrapper. But Spin is effectively worthless if you're not the center of the battle - which your taunt-less Stalker won't be. It's radius is far too small. Likewise, Follow Up is superfluous given a Stalker's constant Build Up. On the other hand, being the periphery-of-the-battle-guy with your major non-Assassinate attack also being a ranged attack is a huge advantage. Shockwave is a fast-activating AE that can blanket an entire spawn that's yet to be compressed and proc Force Feedback while doing it. Stalkers also get a single target version of Eviscerate that works well with the Hide-and-crit dynamic of the AT. Essentially, Claws allows you to be a Blaster when it's better to be a Blaster and be a Stalker when it's better to be a Stalker.