Hjarki

If you don't have any recharge slotted into your powers (which was the situation we were discussing), it'll fall apart.

This would work at perma-Hasten levels except when criticals occurred and the rotation would fall apart.

Ideally you're using Energy Transfer twice as often as Total Focus. The rotation I tend to use is EP, BS, EP, TF, ET, EP, BS, EP, ET. So you need 10 / (1.056 * 2 + 1.584) = 2.70 recharge reduction. This would require +170% recharge if you slotted none in the power. That's around perma-Hasten levels of recharge on a build that otherwise has no use for Hasten. Alternatively, you can simply skip Hasten and slot actual recharge into the power.

Archery is a 'Corruptor' set for a few reasons: Corruptors have an additional damage proc that Defenders don't. This is a big deal on a set where none of the single target attacks can take additional procs. The first attack (the one Defenders are forced to take) is awful and never used. It's one of only two sets with an Ultimate that can (realistically) Scourge. On a Defender, Rain of Arrows is crappy compared to the other ultimates. On a Corruptor, it's one of the best ultimates any set receives. Archery on a Sentinel is also strong: Rain of Arrows is the only 16 target Sentinel ultimate and its damage/recharge is normalized to match the other ultimates. While still not very proc'able, Archery receives an additional decent single target attack (although this creates a problematic rotation where you don't use either of your first two powers). The fast activating, Force Feedback'able Explosive Arrow is probably the best basic AE in any Blast Set.

The primary reason for a Tanker specifically is to tank the AV/GM at the end. Endless waves of minions are something a decent Scrapper can tank just fine because it's primarily about debuffs and defenses rather than being able to take a beating. In most cases, your secondary can handle the bulk of "what about the hordes?" problems. In terms of taking that beating, S/L/E resists are absolutely critical. F/T are mainly about reducing environmental damage and can generally be replaced by enough health regen. C/N/P are almost entirely about the debuffs they carry. Perhaps the biggest flaw I see in many players' estimation of armor sets for Tankers is ignoring 'Energy holes' - by which I mean all those armor sets without hard-capped Energy resist. I don't care how much Defense you have, you're eventually going to get hit with that massive Energy attack and be in deep trouble unless you can reduce it. Endurance management is also a critical issue. I always build with a no-incarnates/no-inspirations/no-temporary philosophy, so any problems with endurance need to be solved in the actual power sets. Secondaries such as Savage, Staff and Energy can help solve this problem, but this constrains your builds quite a bit. My top four (in no particular order): Stone. Stone has two modes. The first is a fairly comprehensive defense-based set with nice damage additions perfectly suited for those waves of minions. The second is the nearly indestructible Granite Armor. Ultimately, this tends to make Stone the clear leader for the tanking purist who just wants to be able to withstand any challenge. Radiation. The near perfect arrangement of resists (high S/L/E, decent F/T, 'holes' to C/N/P) coupled with recharge bonuses, an 'ultimate' nuke and even -hit/-regen debuffs puts this ahead of the other resist-based sets. Super Reflexes. The ability to run Granite-level Resist/Defense without Granite drawbacks (or, sadly, Granite health) makes this a strong choice for most of the game. While there are some rare circumstances where the defenses are completely worthless and it's challenging to build without any Resist or offensive abilities, Super Reflexs is a strong choice against 99% of what you'll face. Bio. Bio is not a particularly good 'tanking' set as outlined above. You're only going to be hard-capped against S/L and most of your soft-caps will be barely staggering across the finish line rather than heading towards Incarnate levels. Even in Defensive mode, you're generally going to be weaker than the very similar Willpower. However, the team-centric nature of Bio's debuffs means that even if you're not going to be all that effective in certain rare circumstances, you're going to bring more to the table in almost every other circumstance. That being said, Bio is probably a better choice for a Scrapper. The other armor sets tend to fall into "similar to, but not as good as" in comparison to one of the sets above.

The revision to Stone Armor removed the penalties from all powers except Granite Armor.

On a Brute, Regeneration (alone - without any pool/primary powers slotted) will give about 2700 HP and 600% Regeneration outside Instant Healing. With Instant Healing, add another 1000% Regen. Realistically, Instant Healing is only available 50% of the time. Willpower will give about 2250 HP and 600% Regeneration with a single target, 1050% Regeneration with 10 targets. Bio Armor will give about 2050 HP and 600% Regeneration (in Efficient). If you have 10 targets, you'll get to around 2100% Regeneration with both DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura (Parasitic Aura has a slightly better uptime than Instant Healing but not by much). Regeneration gives no meaningful debuff protection beyond a bit of -regen protection. Willpower protects against blinds, regen and defense debuffing. Bio protects against end drain and slow movement. Willpower is one of the few sets that gives status protection against everything (most sets don't cover effects like Fear and Confuse). However, you might also consider that Pain and Empathy Defenders can both give +1000% Regeneratiion to a single target and Cold Domination Defenders can give +1000 health to a single target. You also have to recognize that regeneration is an additive damage reduction while resists/defense are multiplicative ones. If you've got 90% resists, you're only taking 10% of the incoming damage regardless of how much there is. With regeneration, there's a level of incoming damage below which you're unkillable but once you pass that level, the value of regeneration rapidly diminishes. As a result, Regeneration tends to be one of the worst sets for how most people play the game. It provides essentially no offensive bonuses while providing mitigation that's useless beyond a relatively low level.

Endurance drain - despite all the buffs - still isn't all that great a tactic. As implemented, Electric Blast is terrible for Corruptors (the additional damage can't Scourge) and not all that great on Defenders (the additional damage is a percentage rather than a fixed proc and Electric Blast powers aren't very proc-friendly). If you want to do Electric Blast, I think Blaster (or even Sentinel) is a far better choice. Even in ideal circumstances, you're really only getting the "Shocked!" on major single target enemies and it's incredibly tricky to pull it off for your ultimate (you need something like ESD Arrow to toss ahead of your blast). Electric Affinity also isn't all that synergistic with Electric Blast since its endurance drain tends to be a slow, steady reduction than Bam!-Zero-End effects. In terms of Electric Affinity, it's a mixed bag. Faraday Cage is a tremendous power but the QoL on it is problematic since you have to be constantly replacing it as you move. Almost nothing in the set is the kind of fire-and-forget power you can use to buff teammates so they can go off and wreck havoc elsewhere. The powers aren't self-stacking, so they tend to be a bit limited. It's heavily focused on recharge and recharge is normally something that fully developed heroes/villains can't really use. The self-recharge it provides requires an enormous investment of your own time, minimizing the value. Most of the time, I tend to relegate Electric Affinity to Masterminds since it's great for the kind of static solo fights they like and it's arguably the best 'Tankermind' secondary.

Er... kinda. Pylon tests are useful for putting a sanity check on the theory. However, there's such a thing as "teaching to the test". If you've got a 600+ dps pylon test build that build probably sucks. By which I mean you've made choices that don't translate very well into performance in the actual game. All those Mastermind builds that shred pylons? In the actual game, their pets tend to get annihilated - when they're not lagging behind as you dash through a mission or getting hobbled when the difficulty dial moves off +0. Your support set? Virtually all of the debuffs become irrelevant when you're fighting harder enemies and a lot of your buffs aren't terribly relevant because your teammates already have that covered. How about that Scrapper? You've probably got Achilles' Heel slotted into an attack. But that's not particularly useful in normal play because you don't need it on random minion/lt/boss (you would have been better off with a straight damage proc) and it won't stack with the rest of your team on the final AV/GM. You probably slotted Gaussian's into Build Up. An actual 'game play' character probably wouldn't even take Build Up on a Scrapper and would slot Gaussian's into Tactics. It's entirely possible to make a pylon build that will faceplant even against Council - much less Rularuu or Carnival. Even then, what the pylon tests tell isn't the whole story. Sacrificing everything so you can maximize sustained dps against a +0 target without AV/GM resistances doesn't make much sense when the only time that will ever be useful is if you're trying to solo a mothership raid (and, even then, killing the pylons isn't what you should be optimizing for). So while going for the perfect pylon build can be an interesting intellectual exercise and it's certainly something to compete over in a game that has no objective 'end game', I wouldn't take it for more than it is.

Rib Cracker increases dps on the target by 7.5%. You also can't use Assassin's Strike as a 1-on-1 replacement due to the difference in their recharge. The result is that the Stalker rotation spends most of its time using relatively low damage basic attacks while the Scrapper rotation focuses exclusively on the high damage ones.

Street Justice on a Stalker loses Rib Cracker. This isn't quite as bad as losing Follow Up, but it still reduces the overall dps of the rotation.

This is the same way I do it - and I'm pretty sure it's slightly wrong both from my observations in game and my general understanding of how servers tend to be implemented. CoH appears to run on a 0.132 sec tick. That is, everything which requires server communication can happen with no more granular of time than 0.132s. That's why you get arcanatime. You send a message to the server saying "I want to activate this power". On the next tick, it recognizes the message and starts counting one per tick until it's counted the right number of ticks - at which point the power activates. Because you can never hit the tick exactly, there's always a 'dead tick' between powers. So if your power takes 1.0 sec to activate, that's means the server has to count at least roundup(1.0 / 0.132) = 8 ticks before it will let the power activate. Add a 'dead tick' between power activations that occurs because you can never precisely hit the exact moment when a tick occurs and you've got your arcanatime. However, this would also apply to durations and recharges. So let's say you have a power with a 1.0 sec activation and a 10.0 sec recharge. You'd see something like: 0 tick: Before you activate power 1 tick: The first tick after you activate power and we start counting 8 tick: You finish the count and start your recharge count 9..83 ticks: Counting down the recharge 84 tick: Recharge up and power is ready if you want to use it (same spot as our 0 tick above) This entire sequence takes 11.088 sec. The sequence where we just use arcanatime for activation (but not recharge) would be 11.188 sec (a tenth of a second longer). If we're waiting to activate our power, it would be 11.22 sec. Essentially, we're double-counting that 'dead tick' by assuming recharge/duration are continuous while activation is discrete. The reason I think it works this way is that I've noticed that you don't need to fully close rotations to make them work. If you miss by a little bit, you're still activating powers as quickly as they can possibly activate. Moreover, it makes sense that they're using the same tick-based timekeeping for everything (not just activation). Note: Some powers activate midway through the animation. I assume this activation is also impacted by arcanatime but has no impact on when the recharge starts counting, only when the duration starts counting.

What it does is summon a pseudo pet. That pseudo pet will, every 0.2 sec for 15 sec, pick its favorite 16 enemies within 30 yards. If you drop it on 50 enemies, it will keep picking new enemies as the old ones die. Every one of those ticks has a chance to Scourge based on the health total when the tick lands (rather than, as with most other ultimates, when the power was activated). Moreover, the power itself ticks for 3.7258 damage but it Scourges for 4.488 damage. To make this even better, you can drop -resist fields into the Blizzard. So you can run a sequence like Aim (with Gaussian's), Blizzard (which mightily debuffs the enemies' to hit and other features making it difficult for them to strike back), Sleet (which will increase the damage by about 30% due to the -resist). In terms of secondary, I'm not a big fan of Time Manipulation. It tends to solve problems you don't really need solving in the clunkiest way possible (long recharge group clickies) while not delivering the goods on the high impact powers (like -resist) that you really want. Between Storm and Cold, it's a tough call. Storm will have serious end issues without Incarnates but it will generally do more damage. Storm is also really hard to manage without AE knockback suppression powers (like Controller Immobilizes). Cold is a better buffing spec if you're running with people who can benefit from +defense or +max hp. I'd probably give the edge to Cold on a Corruptor.

The reason you slot it for Hold is because you've already got far more resist than you could ever hope to use and Hold sets are really, really good.

Tankers have 400 more base health than Brutes. While SR builds don't focus exclusively on health, they do tend to put a considerable emphasis on it despite receiving none from the armor set itself. So you can probably expect that disparity to grow by 30% or more even with identical slotting - and the slotting isn't identical because Tankers have to devote a lot less effort into hitting defensive breakpoints.

A partial list: Martial Arts. Storm Kick grants universal defense on Brutes/Tankers but not Stalkers/Scrappers (it doesn't even grant AE on Stalkers). Dark Melee/Claws. These grant +damage special benefits that don't exist on Stalkers (Stalkers get generic Build Up). Dark Melee/Street Justice. These have AE with incredibly small radius that the Tanker innate fixes. Radiation Melee/Spines. These have damage auras, which can neither crit (negative for Scrappers) nor benefit from Tanker innate. Stalkers don't even get the damage auras, which are a major reason players tend to take these sets in the first place. Fiery Melee. Tankers get a second PBAoE. Everyone else gets another single target attack. Kinetic Melee. Stalkers get standard Build Up. Everyone else gets a damage-increasing mechanic that is widely viewed as useless. Staff Fighting. While non-Stalkers all get the same set, Tankers doubling the target cap is a big deal for the large radius Cones from this set. The armor sets deviate in more predictable ways: Scrappers. Scrappers only receive taunt auras on non-damaging powers - and not even all of them (Super Reflexes has a taunt aura for Brutes/Tankers but not Scrappers). Playing a melee AT without a taunt aura is often difficult as you spend far too much time chasing runners, leading many Scrapper players to automatically write off about half the armor sets. Stalkers. Every Stalker armor set has at least one defense toggle (although it doesn't provide much actual defense) and none have damage/taunt auras. The ATOs also provide different bonuses. Scrappers/Stalkers get +10% recharge from both ATO sets, meaning they need less offensive diversity (controls, melee, ranged, etc.) than Tankers/Brutes.

Target Drone also has an additional +60% buff that occurs with your first attack. This makes the alpha strike with your ultimate convenient while also giving you a constant boost to damage during the fight itself. In theory, if you can drop the recharge on Build Up enough, you'll eek out slightly more damage - you lose the activation time of Build Up but gain the larger average bonus. Given the choice, I'd take Targeting Drone over Build Up.

DDR is less of an issue than many make it out to be. Cascading defense failures are a feature of large spawns rather than single tough opponents, so there are plenty of options for melee to deal with it in primary. Consider that Bio (a primarily defense-based set) has both low S/L (L is the primary delivery mechanism for most -def) and no DDR. But people are happy to play it. Debuffs are also a concern. Being 90% immune to every type of damage is nice, but if you're getting hit 100% of the time with Negative damage you probably can't hit the broad side of a barn. Likewise, getting hit 100% of the time with Psi damage means you can't realistically use any of your abilities more than once. Blinds are bad and if even one Endurance Drain from the right kind of Sapper hits, you can get de-toggled (and dead). While resist-based sets are normally better with debuff resistance than Defense-based sets, they're not that much better. The larger issue is that Defense powers are simply more useful to a build than Resist powers. With a single Resist power, you can slot every Resist set unique in the game while still improving the power itself to the ED cap. Resist sets give bonuses like F/C Defense, Melee Def and Psi Def which, while nice, generally aren't what you want. On the other hand, you need five Defense powers to slot all your LotG +recharge. Having additional ones to mule the other Defense uniques can come in handy as well. You can two-slot most Defense powers just fine. Or, if you want to invest a bit, you can get a pretty hefty bonus to E/N Resist (which is lot harder for most builds to raise than S/L or F/C). Defense powers are incredibly efficient in terms of powers/slots compared to Resist powers due to the peculiarities of the various IO sets. You also have to consider the value of over-cap Resist vs. over-cap Defense. If I just barely stagger to 90% resist, that's all I'll ever need. No matter how you ramp up the difficulty, go into Incarnate content, etc., 90% resist is the cap. Having over 90% resist is only valuable if you're facing significant amounts of -resist debuffing. In contrast, hitting 45% Defense doesn't mean you're done. In incarnate content, the soft-cap rises to 59%. There are a variety of mechanics out there that give special +hit bonuses that require higher defense as well. A set like Stone or Super Reflexes that blows right past the soft-cap without even trying will be able to handle such issues a lot better than a build where you were barely able to hit soft-cap with some very clever slotting. Lastly, there's a perceptual issue. When your Resist-based build goes down under a flurry of blows, it's fairly obvious that the build wasn't good enough for that content. Resist-based builds tend to die to large swarms of enemies that are not individually very dangerous. In contrast, when your Defense-based build goes down, it's because you were 'unlucky'. Defense-based builds tend to be nearly impervious to large swarms but can struggle against that AV because they just can't repel firepower of that magnitude if they do end up getting hit. Even then, most AV deal primarily S/L damage and Defense-based sets tend to build for S/L Resist cap even if they're vulnerable to everything else.

The debuff portion and (potentially) the +damage% per enemy hit aren't auto-hit. Only the flat +damage% applied to your allies within 20 yards is auto-hit.

Some thoughts: Stone Mallet is lower dpa than Stone Fist so they only time you should be taking Stone Mallet is if you can't work the rotation any other way. Hurl Boulder is terrible dpa, so it doesn't belong in any decent rotation. Stone Melee rotations are tricky because the recharge on Seismic Mallet is simply too long. Seismic Smash is nerfed in Scrapper form (the higher critical rate doesn't offset the lower critical value). It might be easier to build this as a Tanker, where you can include Gloom in the rotation with a perma-Hasten build.

For a stock level 54 AV with Incarnate Shift, we've got: 5% regen every 15 sec 30,677.2 total health 87% resistance to debuffs from level 65% due to purple patch So our AV regenerates 30,677.2 * 0.05 / 15 = 102.26 health/sec. -500% regen would be -500 * 0.13 * 0.65 = -42.25%. So that -500% regen debuff should translate into 102.26 * 0.4225 = 42.20 dps presuming I've got the mechanics correct above.

I've done this as a Tanker, but a Brute is a bit trickier. Some concerns: SR Tankers/Brutes ideally want 40%+ resists before the scaling kicks in. On a Tanker, the ATO proc can account for almost a third of this. Staff AE is primarily cones. Going from a 10 target cap to a 5 target cap on 90 degree arc/10 foot range cones is a big deal. Tankers have substantially more health than Brutes and health has an unusually strong impact on SR survivability. The single target attacks for Staff are Mercurial (29.49 dpa), Precise (41.71 dpa), Reach (37.92 dpa) and Skysplitter (49.29 dpa w/mechanic). Given redraw/set mechanics limiting the value of epic/patron nukes, probably the best rotation at achievable levels of recharge would be Precise/Reach/Precise/Skysplitter. The following would be a decent starting place: However, be aware that this build is almost 1000 health short of what a similar Tanker build would be, so it will be far more vulnerable to massive single hits from AV/GM. Either Soul or Body should work - Soul for the Regen/Recovery, Body to put you over 40% resists.

Effectively, we're describing a probability distribution only by the mean and the extremes. So while we can guess that it's a normal distribution (sum of independent events), we don't know how tall/narrow that distribution is without going into a lot more details - details that would narrow the generality of what we're discussing. I would argue that the "Defense for AE, Resist for AV" rule applies though. If you're fighting a large number of foes, they must necessarily have a lower damage per hit for that encounter to be survivable. Likewise, the more trials you have, the taller/narrower the probability distribution will be.

In terms of the one-shot, you're effectively making the argument that there exists a meaningful body of content which includes enemies that have unmitigated S/L damage above 4219 damage but below 6667 damage. It's more justifiable - and perhaps better to talk about - when you're saying 9450 vs. 3480 or considering the impact of a single Thermal Shield. But I don't see much content threading the needle on single large hits like this - especially when you consider that a comparable Invulnerability (or similar resist-based set) build would have 3400 health at 90% S/L for 34,000 effective health. Not every set can be good at everything and soaking massive hits isn't really in SR's wheelhouse. In terms of the multiple hits, effective health isn't important. Rather the rate of incoming damage vs. regen/healing is. But this is the same for both Toughness and non-Toughness - the only difference is that the non-Toughness build is stable at a lower health total. Ultimately, this is what it boils down to: in 99% of content, Toughness is useless. If you even have it, you should turn it off to save endurance. In the remaining 1% (against extremely hard-hitting AV), it might be useful due to the effective health issue. But you have to hit a very narrow band of usefulness. I understand why people think it's weird to not take the Fighting pool - it's so ingrained in their heads that it's a 'must have'. However, it just doesn't help all that much with SR due to the way scaling resists work - and it might not even help at all. I can't recall any situation where it did.

What you're not grasping is that nothing you wrote makes any sense within the context of what you're replying to. You're inventing all sorts of objections to claims never made. It's fairly clear that you either didn't read what I wrote or you didn't understand it. The build info I provided is not necessary to understand what I wrote. With or without the build info, you're arguing against straw men.