Excidium

ES is pretty average, but you might have overlooked this part of my original post: Properly slotted, I think it would do better than the Malaise proc, but can't say just yet. I was mostly posting the numbers to show how surprisingly strong Trick Shot was, sorry if that wasn't clearer. In that run, ES was cast 24 times with an average damage of 61.8. Though you would perhaps like another finding. I tinkered with the log parser code a bit today to add cast totals as you suggested, and found some other minor damage sources that I'd overlooked previously. The smallest of them all was this: Shuriken's Explosion: 58 (0.1%), 30 hits, 1.9 avg dmg. Shuriken's Explosion is the name used in the logs for the ES splash damage effect. 58 points of damage across an evening's play - so yeah, I wouldn't be taking Explosive Shuriken for its AoE properties.

It's some Python code I wrote for analysing log files. Unfortunately it's not available anywhere because it was written rather casually and uses a couple of other CoH API and library files to collate skill names, so it's not really portable in its current form.

Ah, good catch. It's 2 secs in Mids, 1.67 in game. Assuming the dmg is correct, or at least equally broken as everything else, that brings Power Burst's DPA to 82.3, not counting Energy Release. I also played the Belladonna Vetrano arc on my mind/martial at +4/x8 with a team, and ran the resulting logs through the parser. Here's the resulting damage breakdown: Trick Shot: 25624 (34.4%), Masterful Throw: 9001 (12.1%), Dragon's Tail: 7884 (10.6%), Terrify: 7655 (10.3%), Spinning Kick: 5413 (7.3%), Thunder Kick: 4499 (6.0%), Shuriken Throw: 4429 (6.0%), Malaise's Illusions: Chance for Psionic Damage: 4209 (5.7%), Dominate: 2204 (3.0%), Sting of the Manticore: Chance for Toxic Damage: 1902 (2.6%), Explosive Shuriken: 1483 (2.0%), Mesmerize: 103 (0.1%) So the takeaway is that Trick Shot is doing almost three times the damage of any other skill in /martial, and over a third of all damage done. I had thought it would be best or second-best, but not that it would dominate quite so much. My Trick Shot is also only 5 slotted atm with Decimation, and doesn't have a proc IO slotted at all yet. (I have an Apocalypse: %Neg Dmg waiting for lvl 50.) So properly slotted at 50 with a proc IO, it should be even more effective. Some caveats - this was at +4/x8, so ranged skills are over-represented, since there were rather a lot of enemies that could mulch me in one hit. Also, my Explosive Shuriken was only 1-slotted, so the low number here is not an accurate representation of its performance. But I don't expect even with full slotting it would do any better than 3rd place.

I think Trick Shot is an under-valued power - apart from the snipe, possibly the best in the set. It's fast animating, comes at a low level, recharges at around 3 seconds on a typical permadom build, and supposedly has a higher than usual proc rate. Most critically, it's an AoE that works from any position with no movement or re-targeting required. A cone, especially the pathetically narrow ones like Night Fall, needs both the correct position and the correct target to hit much of anything, and you can easily waste a second or two in a fight getting both right. Trick Shot doesn't care, and will hit its 5 targets from any range, from point blank up to 70 feet. I rather miss it when playing other dom secondary sets. Explosive Shuriken, on the other hand...well, your ranged ST chain needs it, and it's nice to have a non-Lethal dmg type in the toolkit, but it's pretty uninspiring, especially compared to insta-snipe. I had a quick look at Mid's powerset comparison numbers for DPA, was surprised at the disparity between ES and Blaze - 152.4 DPA vs 68.8 for ES. Okay, so comparing to the best T3 in dom secondaries is a bit unfair, but even Bitter Ice Blast scores 95.1. However, /energy's Power Burst scored almost identically to ES at 68.7 and nobody seems to complain about that. Though Power Burst has a nice knockdown effect, which ES doesn't. A while back I wrote a log parser to track total damage numbers for various powers, to get an idea of their real-world DPS output. Unfortunately, my mind/martial doesn't have Shuriken fully slotted atm, so I can't properly quantify how TS and ES compare to the rest of /martial and each other just yet - maybe in a few more levels.

Yeah, the LotGs are always active. If you build your character the right way, you won't need the Force Feedback procs in any case. A typical build can hit about 170% recharge without relying on procs, just by using Hasten, LotGs and accumulated set bonuses. Those bonuses will work all the time, in combat or not, unlike the FF procs. That in turn frees up the slots you are now using for FF procs and lets you slot something more useful, like damage procs or whatever.

Some brief notes, based on my lvl 42 Mind/Martial. For my epic pool I went with the Mace, for a couple of reasons. The Scorpion Shield gives a nice +defense power (as opposed to +resist, which isn't as useful for Doms with their low hit point pools). Mace also gives Disruptor Blast, a targeted AoE. I really wanted some more AoE power that wasn't melee ranged, but I'm not very impressed with Disruptor (long cast time, mediocre dmg, some knockback) so this choice might not stay. Mace also gives Personal Force Field, an okay panic button and LotG +7.5% recharge mule. The minmaxers will probably say you should take the Ice epic pool instead, as it has an equally good defense power and the awesomeness of Sleet, but that didn't work for my character's concept. But, it may for yours. Otherwise, avoiding expensive set IOs is reasonable if you're starting out, but they really do give an enormous boost to your character's power, so I'd suggest looking at this non-set build as a temporary expedient rather than an end goal. You have double the amount of +accuracy IOs and more +endredux than you'd ever need, and not enough +damage IOs slotted. You're also using a couple of rather expensive purple proc IOs when you could probably buy an entire cheap IO set for the price of each one. For power choices, I'd suggest Domination or Mesmerize over Levitate for the much better ST control they give. I'd also strongly recommend picking up Trick Shot. It's a great power, works from any range, and doesn't need you to stand in the right place to work the way a cone power does. To make room for it, I'd drop Caltrops - if you want CC, you have much better tools, and if you want to damage enemies you have much better tools for that as well, so Caltrops isn't really doing much. Also, you could probably drop Invisibility altogether by replacing it with a Celerity +Stealth IO in Super Speed, which combined with Stealth should make you invisible enough for most purposes. Regarding permadom, this is unfortunately something you will need IO set bonuses to reach. 5 of the LotG +7.5% recharge IOs I mentioned earlier, slotted into defensive powers like Steath/Invis/Weave, would be a big help, though they are pricey. There's a fair number of other sets (Basilisk's Gaze, Posi's Blast, Obliteration, Sting of the Manticore, etc etc) which will also give +recharge. You'll need a bare minimum of 123% recharge to get permadom, plus whatever buffer you're comfortable with on top as a safety margin - typically 80-100% global recharge + hasten's 70%. As for def/res values, it depends on what you're running and who you're with. My (unfinished) mind/martial is building for soft-capped ranged/smash/lethal/energy defense, but other players feel that's far too cautious and your controls should be your main defense. It just depends on your personal playstyle.

As requested, here's a new file detailing community slotting for all pool powers and the inherent fitness pool. Unlike the other power summaries, which were only collected from each class's subforums, these pool powers were collated from all posts on the old and the new forums respectively. The main file in the first post has also been updated with pools powers data. I also rewrote part of the code dealing with IO names, so there should be fewer collisions between names like 'Heal-I', 'Heal-', and 'Heal.' The other primary and secondary power lists have been recompiled accordingly, so some numbers may have changed slightly. It also occurs to me that this collected data could be handy for Mids itself. It could offer something like 'show top 5 community slottings' for a power to help people who were looking for slotting suggestions. CoH-Pool Powers-All Sets-All Forums.htm

When faced with slotting an uncommon power, it's often a bit hard to know what to go for. Searching the forums can help, and what guides you can find are often useful too, but it would be handy to have some idea of community consensus on slotting choices for a power. Any sensible person would just spend 5 minutes doing a search, but I thought it'd be interesting to solve the problem more thoroughly by compiling all available data from offline copies of both the old and new community forums. (The Paragon forums have many more builds, but are older and thus missing both newer powersets and newer set IOs. Homecoming has all these and the benefits of new approaches to slotting, but is a much smaller corpus to work from.) This approach also generates data not just on what set IOs people put in powers, but also on how many slots are typically assigned to each power. The result is something like this: Blaster Primaries > Assault Rifle > Flamethrower > Homecoming Forums Found 41 times. 5.46 mean slots, 5 median slots. Most common slot layouts (top 25%): 10: Rgn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg, Rgn-Acc/Rchg, Rgn-Dmg, Rgn-Dmg/EndRdx, Rgn-Dmg/Rchg 8: Artl-Acc/Dam, Artl-Acc/Dam/Rech, Artl-Acc/Rech/Rng, Artl-Dam/End, Artl-Dam/Rech, Artl-End/Rech/Rng 5: SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg, SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx, SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg, SprBlsWrt-Acc/Dmg/Rchg, SprBlsWrt-Dmg/Rchg, SprBlsWrt-Rchg/Dmg% Most common individual IOs: 14: Rgn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg 14: Rgn-Dmg/EndRdx 14: Rgn-Dmg/Rchg 13: Rgn-Acc/Rchg 11: Rgn-Dmg 10: PstBls-Dmg/EndRdx Some caveats: obviously, this doesn't catch all builds. When Mids exports to the forums, it can be in any of three formats - long, short, or data chunk form. This code only recognizes short form, and imperfectly at that. Doing all three would be nice, but long form needs more fiddly/slower parsing than I've played with so far (and uses different IO names to boot), and I have no idea how to extract data from a data chunk. Fortunately, some quick checking shows short form exports are 3-4 times more common than long form on the forums, so it's a decent starting point. Secondly, this just finds the most common community slottings for each power in each archetype's subforum. Nobody is claiming these are the best, just the ones most often seen on the forums when people share their builds. Also note that it's not uncommon for related classes to post builds on each other's forums. So you'll sometimes see defender and corruptor builds on each other's forums. Same with tanks/brutes/scrappers. This doesn't seem a major problem to me because it's fairly uncommon, and the slotting is usually pretty similar so it shouldn't throw things off too much. There's also a few repeated IOs where Mids tweaked IO set names or fixed misspellings over time, like EndRd vs EndRdx. Anyway, the upshot of all this is the attached .zip file, which contains HTML pages for each class compiling slotting choices for every primary and secondary skill in the game. Pool sets aren't included, because I figured there's no real need, but can be added if people want. (Update: the data set now contains pool and epic/patron powers.) Otherwise, I hope this can be useful as a general guide to anyone wondering how a power is usually slotted. Edit: Updated zip file with compiled Pools power data. Edit 2: Updated with epic/patron power pools. One problem was that there are multiple different epic/patron pools with the same names, each with slightly different skills. (For example, there are 8 or 9 different Ice/Flame/Soul Mastery pools, each for different classes.) To make it easier to find powers, I've merged all powers that share a pool name together into that pool, instead of splitting them up by class or something. This looks a bit odd - Soul Mastery ends up with 18 powers - but makes it much easier to find the power you're after. CoH Collated Community Power Slotting v1.2.zip