aethereal

Does it in fact do this? @macskull earlier asserted that the overcap mechanic scales down punchvoke in the same way it scales down damage. I'm not honestly sure how that plays out in practice. What does "punchvoke * 0.58^2" or ^3 cash out to in terms of keeping aggro? It'd be interesting to hear reports on the holistic experience of tanking in a group with these changes: do people notice a difference in aggro control?

Well, tanker proc rates in AoE powers are going down, right?

No. The max damage bonus you can get is capped, you don't get additional damage if you extend the range.

The challenge settings are in the game, it's not like it's something that players thought up totally separately of anything. And, again, if we're going to take a coldly rational look at all this, you can make billions of inf in hours marketing and buy any of the rewards that you'd get from any other mode (besides badges, I suppose, but if you want to get into 'the only real players are the ones who have every badge,' go for it). As soon as you aren't doing that, you're talking about how you like to play, not "what the game rewards." Which is great! People should want to play the game! Like, seriously, this is a very un-challenging 20 year old game. Nobody gives a shit about anyone's e-penis here. If you want to try to parlay "I'm so great at a video game" into... anything... other than personal satisfaction, then go play Mobile Legends or League of Legends or whatever.

But characters built for that fight fail at other challenges. Like none of these "all offense" builds can do the kinds of things that people considered hard challenges a few years ago. Go solo an all-the-optional-challenges-turned-on +4/x8 ITF with it. If you can do Omega K'ong and you can't solo an ITF, and another build can't do Omega K'ong and can solo an ITF, let me suggest that these are just... different build goals. There's no ranking to them. (There is easy content. Clearly either build could do fine in say an 8-person PI radios team.) Nothing wrong with caring about the Omega K'ong fight to the exclusion of all else. But these are just divergent build goals, and the idea that one if inherently the "right goal" and others aren't. The "build lots of mitigation" approach comes from a time when solo content was about the only challenging content in the game. Now they've built team challenging content, which is great and everything, and which rewards very different builds. But it's boring to go to these threads with, "Well, different builds do different things," so instead people try to pretend that their goals are the only ones that matter. If we really want to be very mechanical about this, the thing in the game that gives the greatest rewards is marketing. The thing in the game that gives the second best rewards is farming. If you're doing something other than those, you're doing it because your personal tastes are that that thing is more fun than a different style of play.

Boring subtext of this thread: "People differ in what they consider 'hard content' to be."

Well, specifically you were suggesting that Savage Strike might be a better place than either Maiming Slash or Vicious Slash. But Savage Strike is almost certainly inferior to Maiming Slash. You're only looking at half of the story. Yes, getting enough window to launch two attacks is important, but so is maximizing the number of procs -- like, trivially, if you have half as many times that the window activates, then even if you're getting two attacks compared to one, you don't come out ahead. Maximizing the number of procs means using the attack on cooldown. If it's sitting fully recharged, you're wasting proc opportunities. In an environment in which you'll probably have north of 200% recharge, that means that Savage Strike recharges in 0.83 seconds and Maiming Slash recharges in 1.67 seconds. That means that in general you'll have a lot of time sitting around with those powers off recharge. Does that fully compensate for the reduced window that you'd get from putting the proc in Vicious Strike, and the fact that a your harder-hitting attack would definitionally not be in the proc window? Well... I don't know. It depends on what else is in your attack chain, and exactly how much recharge you have, etc. There's no one generic answer. I think that Maiming Slash is plausibly the best place for the ATO2 in many Savage builds. I think Vicious Slash might be a good place in others, especially if you're using Hemorrhage and en epic snipe, so Vicious Slash is only your third heaviest hitter. I think that a downside of Savage is that it doesn't have a super great place for the ATO2 where you're just like, "Oh yeah that's obviously the right spot for it" (largely because Hemorrhage is underwhelming).

Vicious Slash has a cast arcanatime of 1.848 seconds, there's no reason to imagine that following a successful proc of Critical Strikes in Maiming Slash, you couldn't Vicious Slash then do whatever other attack you're running (Hemorrhage if you run it, or like an epic snipe or whatever) within the window. It shouldn't even be hard. In contrast, if you put it in Savage Strike and then activate two attacks afterward, you're probably cutting your effective proc rate by 50% (in addition to lowering your overall DPS by very heavily using a low-DPA attack).

Savage Strike is a pretty low-DPA filler attack, and its 2.5 second base recharge time means that it probably won't be able to be used on cooldown. I think this more-than-counteracts its 0.4 second advantage in animation-time-after-effect. Honestly, the 5 second base recharge time of Maiming Slash is also pretty easy to exceed (especially on a set that gets a large native global recharge bonus), and it might be a good idea to go to Vicious Slash instead.

It's clearly the case that the devs are reacting to the overly homogenous environment of high defense by adding more things that lower the utility of defense. It kinda blows my mind that their most-high-profile attempt to do so resulted in an even more homogeneous environment of rolling Barrier usage and that people don't call that out as a problem with the basic concept.

You will take approximately 9% more damage than if you had 45% defense (assuming that you are facing opponents with no +to-hit and your defense is not debuffed).

All Savage powers crit. Shield Charge doesn't crit. The ATO1 can be anywhere; it's a global effect. For max dps, you'd probably mule it in an unused power since it doesn't contribute damage or other desired attributes to the power it's slotted in. The ATO2 is probably best in either vicious slash or maiming slash if you want to use it for sustained DPS.

With respect to routine use of inspirations, it's also just, like... not a lot of fun to commit to all that inspiration management, for me. If you want to keep inspirations of very particular types (probably orange/purple, maybe breakfrees, maybe red) constantly available, it's clearly possible. People do it. But you need to fill your inspiration tray initially, then as you use inspirations keep it clear enough to get drops of your favored types and either combine or delete inspirations to make space continuously. That's just not gameplay I enjoy. In the same way that some people hate hate hate clicky armor sets or demand taunt auras on their melee characters, I think it's just not a ton of fun to spend my time and attention on that management. I tried it recently with a blaster and breakfrees plus some defense insps, and it just wasn't enjoyable. No shade on people who like that. But consider it as a style-of-play thing.

This might be good advice for the OP as a newbie, but be aware that the -to-hit from Dark eventually becomes largely redundant on a dedicated defense set, as you hit softcap without needing to rely on Dark. That said, if you're at a point in your play where you aren't going deep on set bonuses, the synergy is real.

Sorry, you are of course correct, I turned the 9 into a 6 when looking at the number and transcribing it. The odds of 100 misses in a row are even astronomically smaller if any of those attacks were at a higher hit chance than 5%. The calculation of them being at a heterogeneous hit chance gets very complicated, but just to be clear, the odds of 100 misses in a row at 6% miss chance are 0.2%, so if there are some number of 6%s and some number of 5%s in the mix, then the odds are between 0.59% and 0.2%. This is all in a kind of insane world in which someone actually makes 100 attacks against you: I don't think that basically any enemy in the game attacks more than one time every two seconds for a long streak of attacks, so we're talking like more than three minutes of continuous battling -- plausible if you're say a tank fighting an AV solo, but almost no other situation. This is true, but makes the streak breaker even less relevant.