aethereal

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.

Yes. And the odds of 100 misses in a row at floored 5% miss chance are... 0.56% On the off chance that any enemy actually makes 100 attacks against you, if the streakbreaker ever kicks in, it's because you've been extraordinarily lucky. Streakbreaker has never once been a reason not to build defense. Never. Once.

Any time someone mentions the Streakbreaker in a defense thread, you can safely assume they have no idea what they're talking about.

You have a misunderstanding. The reason why damage patches and rains are particularly susceptible is not that the summoning of the pseudopet adds more delay (it may or may not -- the game is perfectly capable of summoning a pseudopet quickly, or it can be delayed just like a normal effect does), it's that the pseudopet does a separate power execution, so the targets that were in range of the initial power are not fixed, as they are with a normal AoE that has a delay. So here's the situation: Targets are checked on the execution of the power. Even significantly delayed effects do not re-check range from the power, and apply to that target no matter what (though you are right that things like resistances are checked at time of the effect going off, not the initial targeting). But with a pseudopet power, the target of the initial power is the pseudopet. The pseudopet then checks targets for its own power at the time when the pseudopet is created, which may indeed be at a significant delay, and as a result if targets move between when the initial power is executed and the pseudopet's power is executed, they may now be out of range. But that interaction is unique to powers that have multiple powers executions within them (most prominently pseudopets, but also redirects), not to powers that merely have delayed effects.

I don't think this is how it works. I think you check eligible targets at the time of power activation, no matter how long a delay there is before the effect actually fires. If you're on a team, someone else may kill your enemy before your effect goes off, but enemies can't run away from your power during animation time.

I don't think that the game cheats, but you are correct that there's a big asymmetry here. Enemies do not generally have any toggles. They might have one. Resistance powers are often auto-powers rather than toggles. Getting detoggled is devastating for many players. Even if you have plenty of endurance to retoggle, you might gave 5+ toggles to turn back on, and just the cast time is prohibitive. It's very different for enemies.

While the "enemies can use any powers with just 1 endurance" idea is long-established, I don't think it's true. I paid fairly close attention to this when testing the electrical blast changes. What I think caused this misapprehension is that enemies got a recovery tick and then immediately used a power, which looked like using a power with insufficient endurance. There are a non-trivial number of enemies that have 0 endurance cost attacks. The recovery debuff you can apply to AVs and EBs is capped: they got a minimum recovery level in the same page that released the electric blast changes.

A lot of discussion on these fora is people saying, "I claim that there is a mysterious difference between powers that shows up nowhere in the descriptions of those powers." And, like... okay. Maybe there's some kind of weird bug going on. But I really implore people to consider: you may just be mistaken. Whenever I drill down into these things, I feel like about 80% of the time this kind of mysterious behavior that would have to be a very specific bug just... doesn't reproduce for me. If you haven't done rigorous testing where you're actually keeping everything else constant and also do it enough times to lower then chance of coincidence, it's much more likely that this apparent difference between Burst and the six other nearly-identically-coded Scrapper powers is something to do with your armor set, something to do with the particular mobs, something to do with your slotting, something to do with your team, or just plain bad luck, than that radius code is broken, but only for Burst.

This seems unlikely to be any more of a problem than it is with the many other Scrapper PBAoEs that also have an 8' radius. (Broad Sword, Claws, Dual Blades, Energy Melee, Katana, and War Mace also have 8' PBAoEs).

Burst has an 8' radius. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.kinetic_attack.burst&at=scrapper

Scrapper Primary powers with non-standard Crit Chances: Broadsword > Head Splitter: 15% Claws > Eviscerate: 15% Dual Blades > Sweeping Strike: 15% Electrical Melee > Lightning Rod: No crit Energy Melee > Total Focus: flat 10% instead of 5% chance for minions/10% for LTs or higher. Note also reduced crit damage Energy Melee > Energy Transfer: flat 10% instead of 5% chance for minions/10% for LTs or higher. Note also reduced crit damage Katana > Golden Dragonfly: 15% Kinetic Melee > Concentrated Strike: No crit (20% chance to recharge Power Siphon, but note that this is not tagged as a crit, so it won't be affected by Scrapper ATOs etc.) Martial Arts > Storm Kick: 10% minions/15% LTs and higher Martial Arts > Eagle's Claw: 15% chance to crit, plus applies a +33% chance to crit for 2 seconds Radiation Melee > Irradiated Ground: 10% chance to "crit," regardless of enemy rank, but not actually tagged for crits so will ignore crit chance modifiers Stone Melee > Seismic Smash: 20% chance to crit, note reduced crit damage but raising the Mag of the hold to 6 (this is a real crit, it's affected by crit modifiers) Titan Weapons > Arc of Destruction: 15% I think that's an exhaustive list, though it's based on a manual scan of City of Data and it's possible I missed things. Note that there are other powers with non-standard critical damages, this is just non-standard critical chances. This is pure theory-crafting, but I think that if you put the ATO2 into Eagle's Claw and it went off, then you stacked two of either Cobra Strike, Crippling Axe Kick, or Crane kick so that they fired with zero delay after Eagle's Claw and each other, you would have a 99% crit chance for the two secondary attacks (assuming you're attacking an LT or higher, and that you have the superior ATO1 (10% base, +50% for ATO2, +33% for Eagle's Claw, +6% for ATO1). I'm not totally sure that you can actually get both of the follow-up attacks into the window of the Eagle's Claw and ATO2 effects, though.

I don't know that the T9 is all that important to the set anyway, especially on a brute or tank. It gives a mild damage buff, but it has pretty bad DPA. The reason to play it is Storm Kick + Dragon Tail + some decent ST attacks on a Brute, so if you hate the T9 but otherwise like the set, I think you could feel good about playing it on a Brute.

Titan Weapons also provides a +defense power, Defensive Sweep (11.25% defense to melee and smashing). Martial Arts does for Brutes and Tankers, but not for Scrappers (or Stalkers, ironically, because man does Stalker MA need something).

Taunt auras do have explicit calls to taunt effects -- either a redirect to the inherent, a normal power effect, or, confusingly, both. I think (but am not sure) that this is because if they tried to operate through the global proc, it would follow proc rules: so it would pulse once every ten seconds in auto-powers and toggles. The desired behavior is for it to pulse every one second, so they explicitly call it rather than using the global proc.