Hopeling

Right, slotting for endredux helps a lot; with sets, you can pretty easily have 60% or more endredux in every expensive power, which helps a ton compared to the 30-40% you get from SOs or commons. Chasing endredux set bonuses doesn't do a lot; you might pick up 10-15% total across your entire build. If you get one, great, but a build that focuses on those set bonuses isn't going to be a lot better off end-wise than a build that just slots the recovery/+end procs and then focuses on recharge or defense.

Frankly, I feel like it should be the other way around. Hibernate seems like a more suitable power for an AT that doesn't need to hold aggro and can reasonably drop out of the fight for a few seconds, while Icy Bastion seems more suited to a tank. With the history of the set, it obviously couldn't be the other way around, but in the current game it just feels strange. Frankly, I wouldn't mind if all melee ATs got Icy Bastion rather than Hibernate, but maybe that just means Ice/ Tankers aren't for me.

That's OK. Higher-tier Alpha powers enhance multiple things, but most builds are only really interested in one or two of those effects. Musculature Core Paragon enhances damage, -def, and immobilize, but it's worth taking just for the damage bonus. If you have some -def and immobilize too, great, but that's just gravy.

I'm not sure if that really affects the calculus, though? Rage doesn't boost the procs either, after all. If you're doing 300 DPS, of which 100 is from procs, Rage is going to add the same amount of damage it would for someone doing 200 DPS with no procs. Like, for some napkin math: say your attacks are slotted with +95% damage, and you average 6 enemies in range of AAO (+43%). That puts you at 238% of base damage. One stack of Rage brings it up to 318%. Two stacks of Rage puts you at 398%, but only for 50 seconds out of every 60, with basically no damage during the other ten seconds. But 60 seconds at 318% deals only very slightly less damage than 50 seconds at 398%: if you deal 50 DPS just from base damage, that's 50*3.18*60=9540 with one stack versus 50*3.98*50=9950, which is like a 5% increase in exchange for needing a lot of global recharge and dealing with the defense/resist crash. It probably works out better than that in practice; you're not going to waste a Shield Charge during a crash, so that really does get the full benefit (in exchange for having to wait slightly, sometimes). But at minimum, double Rage is much less attractive than it used to be, compared to single Rage.

But it literally is eliminated if you don't stack the power. I'm actually not sure that double Rage with a crash every 60 seconds even results in better damage overall than single Rage with no crash, never mind the durability hit. It's at least not enough better that I'll care to build for it. Shield/ is a beast of a set for Tankers, no question. With high DDR and easily over-capped defenses, surviving the crash should be a non-issue.

I agree that this is worth noting. When people say TW is strong, it's not because Defensive Sweep allows you to herd with low-end builds. The fact that TW is in front right now says more about the structure of our test than about the set, IMO. Without DS I was getting times a bit under 6:00, roughly middle of the pack. So on the one hand, it may stand to gain less from IOs in our test because it's already durable enough. On the other hand, conventional wisdom is that TW scales really well with IOs because it's so limited by endurance and recharge. I'm curious to see whether the gap closes.

I was thinking about this a while ago, and I think at least two tiers would be useful: a low-end and a high-end IO build. Maybe something like: Low-End: No ATOs, purples, or procs (except KB>KD, or something similarly critical). Frankenslotting or yellow/orange sets in attacks, 20% global recharge. Add Tough, Weave, and Hasten. Add recovery uniques (Miracle, Numina, Panacea). High-End: Allow ATOs and purples, aiming to get to perma-Hasten-ish levels of recharge. Add as much defense as you want (frankly, on +0/x3 there are going to be pretty hard ceiling effects on durability here, so I don't think the exact parameters matter). 20% global recharge may sound low for an IO build, but with 60-90% slotted recharge in attacks (up from 33%) plus Hasten, it's still a large jump up from SOs. The high-end condition is another large jump. Should we separate recharge/recovery/defense, or do you want to lump them together for now? Should we include epic/ancillary powers?

For a scrapper? I'd say /Rad, because it's the only one with a taunt aura. Damage auras are less exciting when they just make foes scatter. If you want a tanker or brute, they're all quite good sets, but there's no clear 'best'.

There are a few +end set bonuses, like on Decimation. Neither +end or +enddiscount nor +recovery can be obtained in large amounts, which makes all of them poor things to build toward deliberately. If your character has endurance issues that slotting and Miracle/Numina/Panacea/Performance Shifter can't resolve, you are better off going for Body Mastery, Cardiac/Vigor alpha, or Ageless Destiny.

It may not be for the specific attack chain comparison you're looking at. But it would be surprising if NO attack chain can be improved from the addition of an attack with 80 DPA before slotting, the loss of Focus notwithstanding. What math are you looking at that says otherwise? Also, a snipe is an opportunity to slot another category of sets, potentially including a purple damage proc.

A level 40+ blaster should comfortably be able to kill almost any EB within about 60 seconds, so popping four purple inspirations (plus maybe a Break Free, and any reds you have on hand) makes it very doable. At that point, you're no worse off than a Super Reflexes scrapper. If that doesn't work, load up on even more inspirations when you hit the hospital; you can carry twenty. Shivans work, but should be unnecessary except maybe for the ones that refuse to die, like Diabolique.

Absorb is great against alpha strikes when you have a power like Ablative Carapace in Bio Armor that can give a big absorb shield at the start of a fight. Blaster absorb powers don't do that; they give a small tick of absorb every two seconds. Regen and absorb from Sustain powers are both good for longer battles and weak against alpha strikes. The difference is that regen fills up your health bar continuously, while absorb ticks just go to waste if they're not used before the next tick. Absorb powers can prevent more total damage than regen powers heal (for comparison, Cauterizing Aura heals about 36 per tick with slotting, against the 85 absorb per tick that @Uun mentions), so if you get full use out of the absorb, it's significantly stronger. If you take one big hit every ten seconds instead of one small hit every two seconds, absorb is significantly weaker. Regen also helps you recover between fights. For soloing, I'd give the nod to absorb overall since you're the only thing around for enemies to attack. Regen powers are still quite good though - +300% regen is nothing to sneeze at - so I wouldn't stress over it if you really want to play /Tactical or something.

I'm going to say Scrappers. Stalkers lose Follow Up, which is a bummer. Brutes don't benefit as much from it due to their lower damage scale. But for Scrappers, it's a great power.

You can use a [Power Analyzer] from the P2W vendor.

The demon axe is kind of a scythe, but otherwise this seems to be a popular request. A regular hammer or mace would also be nice.

They don't. Brutes and tankers can have 90% resists, and have more HP than scrappers or stalkers do. 90% resistance is 2.5x tougher than 75% resistance. That said, scrappers and stalkers can still be incredibly tough, far beyond "meh". What they cannot do well is tank, because tanking is not just a question of durability, but also aggro management. Brutes and tankers have [Taunt] and taunt effects on all their attacks; Scrappers and Stalkers do not. Because scrappers have higher base damage. Specifically, scrappers do 1/8 more damage with all attacks. Scale 1 damage with a 31% crit rate comes out to 1.31 average; scale 1.125 damage with a 10% crit rate comes out to 1.24 average, which is pretty close. Without a team, the scrapper has the same crit rate and deals more damage. Stalker primaries all have Assassin Strike in place of some other attack, usually an AoE attack.

Yes. It gives +70% recharge for the first ten seconds, +30% for the next 20 seconds, +20% for the next thirty seconds, and +10% for the last sixty seconds.

Yep, don't worry about it. As a mitigation tool, it's not great: you can't use it on command since it takes three powers in a row to set up, and using it effectively means you're committed to taking and slotting 1K Cuts and Power Slice, which you could otherwise do without. If you want to take those powers anyway, it's not an awful combo, but the knockdown isn't enough of a perk to be worth 6-10 slots and a power choice.

Yes, but a 6-foot sphere is comparable to a pretty wide melee cone. It's a targeted AoE, not a PBAoE, so you can aim it where that sphere will contain the most enemies rather than just hoping they cluster around you tight enough. I agree that StJ is a bit lacking in AoE, at least until you add in something like a damage aura, Burn, or Fireball. Not cripplingly bad like Dark Melee or Energy Melee, but not great.

Basically any combination of those powersets can meet your stated goals.

I don't believe so.

What?? Where? I'll go yell at them, haha.

The Flavour of the Month data only counts live characters, I think. Unless you played on Justin quite a lot, I'm not sure it would count as "true experience overall" though.

Other nukes already don't follow the damage formula: with a 145s recharge and a 25-foot radius, you would expect a power like Nova to deal scale 4.96 damage, but instead it's scale 4.00. That said, I still don't see any reason for Thunderous Blast to have a longer recharge. Neither its damage nor its secondary effects are better than various other nukes with 145s recharge.

It's worth pointing out that we only have eight data points for TW, all of them mine. Moreover, the TW average so far is split between two different approaches: five runs without Defensive Sweep (averaging 5:41, similar to Claws), and three with (averaging 5:04, far and away better than any other set). Parry-type buffs are really really powerful in this test, because they allow you to herd a ton of enemies safely, and TW has enough AoE to really take advantage of herding. That's also why Broadsword is doing so well; without Parry, I got times around 7:00, with one unusually good run at 6:27. In real play, Parry buffs are not as useful as they look here - any set can get a similar effect by using inspirations, and not all incoming damage is flagged Melee. I'm tempted to say we should keep two entries for each of TW/Broadsword/Katana, one with their parry power and one without. (I don't think the same concern applies to eg Dark Melee with Siphon Life, since that's a strong attack that is worth using even when you don't need the heal.) Without Defensive Sweep (which lots of builds don't take), it looks like TW is "only" a top-tier set on SOs, rather than in a tier of its own. So far, TW does seem to be the only primary that is limited by endurance in this test, and very frequently has gaps when all its attacks are recharging. So it does look like it stands to benefit more from IOs than other sets - most sets take advantage of high recharge by replacing weak attacks with strong attacks, but TW will replace dead time with strong attacks, which seems like it should give a larger improvement in performance. We'll see though.