aethereal

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.

I don't think this is correct. Here's, for example, Tanker Whirling Mace: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_melee.war_mace.whirling_mace&at=tanker Note no specific taunt effect, and no tags that key to Gauntlet's taunt effects (it does have stuff about Gauntlet's radius and target cap). The way that Gauntlet's taunt effects work is by adding a global proc to all your powers, so they don't need to be specifically tagged for it or to have an effect like, say, Scrapper criticals have on the power itself. Now, the exact ways that global procs work are slightly mysterious to me, so I wouldn't be totally shocked if there were some weird exception, but I think that the way Gauntlet works is that it'll affect any enemy-affecting power.

I'm not sure I fully understand the intricacies of global procs like Gauntlet, but I don't see anything obvious that would prevent it from proccing. I think it'll work, but don't take that as gospel. That said, Takeoff only has a 10' radius base, and a max targets of 10. Your taunt aura will have an 8' radius base, and max targets of 10. You probably won't taunt many enemies that you aren't already taunting with your aura.

Does the boss Mag 3 status protection that they get to most status effects also affect taunts? Not a huge deal if it does -- the Scrapper taunt auras will pulse twice and quickly overcome the status protection, and everything else is mag 4 -- but it might mean Scrapper Energy Aura and Willpower have a lot of difficulty taunting bosses at all, especially if they're purple-patched. Do purple triangles affect taunt? I don't think they do -- I've never noticed tanks/brutes losing aggro on AVs when the purple triangles come up. (EDIT: Wiki suggests it does not). Does AV resistance affect taunt duration? (EDIT: Wiki suggests it does not).

Taunt durations (and magnitudes): Scrapper Aura (Willpower): 1.25 seconds, mag 3 Scrapper Aura (Energy): 2.5 seconds, mag 3 Scrapper Auras (Invul, Rad, Bio, Shield): 13.6 seconds, mag 3 Brute: Inherent punchvoke & Auras (all, I think): 13.6 seconds, mag 4 Tanker: Inherent punchchvoke & Auras (all, I think): 14.96 seconds, mag 4 Scrapper Confront: 26.6 seconds, mag 4 Brute/Tank Taunt: 41 seconds, mag 4 Provoke from the Presence pool seems like it has a different duration per AT.

It's not really "many" aura powers -- it's one aura power per set for Brutes/Tanks, none for Stalkers/Sentinels, and the six sets mentioned above for Scrappers have one taunt aura each as well. The general mechanics of threat seem to be something like this: As long as you are within an enemy's perception range, you get an escalating amount of threat Targeting them or their spawn-mates with powers adds some threat as well, and the amount of threat depends on the damage or debuff caused And then: Taunt multiplies that threat And probably how far you are from them also multiplies the threat And your AT has an inherent threat multiplier If they don't currently have a target, they target the person with the highest modified threat. If they do have a target, there might be some level of resistance to changing target. But what we don't have is much in the way of a sense of the magnitude of these factors. People anecdotally feel like debuffs generate a lot of threat, but we don't know how you generate a number from either damage or debuffs, we don't know what the multipliers are, and I'm not even sure if we know how the magnitude of taunts plays in. As a result, we only really have some basic impressions of how it all works. My impression is: Taunt is strong. Taunted enemies very reliably change to target the taunter, albeit not necessarily for the entire duration of the taunt. In general, my impression is that if you're peeling aggro off a taunter, it's more likely that they have not recently hit the target with a taunt, than that you overcame the taunt (unless you have a taunt of your own). But I can't quantify that, and neither can anyone else.

I don't think anyone really categorically understands how threat works on a mathematical level, so it's hard to say for sure. Based on my understanding, the damage aura will in fact enhance the stickiness of enemies that are already in the taunt aura -- but for that to matter, you have to be in a situation in which they were in danger of being peeled off in the first place. Is that a realistic concern? A wiki page claims that an active taunt multiplies the threat of the originating character by 1,000 times the duration of the taunt, which seems like, uh, a lot (but is it? How much do threat levels ordinarily vary? As far as I can tell, nobody really knows). I generally do not see people peeling actively taunted enemies off the taunter. I could believe that in the case of multiple competing taunts (like, the Bio scrapper is on a team with a Brute or certainly another taunt-aura Scrapper), the Bio scrapper was meaningfully more sticky. But without competing taunts, it seems to me that the most likely way that a taunt-aura scrapper loses aggro is not "someone peels off an enemy who is within the taunt aura," but rather, "someone peels off an enemy who is not taunted at all, due to being more than 8' away or in excess of the target cap of the aura," in which case the damage aura is not going to help either, because it has the same radius and target cap as the taunt aura.

Ninjutsu is an overall strong armor that will go well with lots of things. Its two big problems are: 1. It's a very defense-based armor set with low DDR 2. Its offense boost is on the weak side, just an increased chance to crit once per combat. Ice is this very feast or famine set: it has one of the strongest ST attacks in the game (Frozen Touch), it has good-to-great AoE in Frost and Frozen Aura, and it has good additional mitigation in Ice Patch, but Frozen Fists is dire, Ice Sword is weak, and Greater Ice Sword is mediocre, so you don't have much single target beyond just Frozen Touch. Energy is one of the stronger ST sets in the game, but has weak AoE. Electric is not a great set. Lightning Rod is good and fun, but other than that it has extremely mediocre ST and its AoE is like.... fine but not great. Street Justice has strong ST, mediocre AoE, and is overall a pretty good set. I don't think any of them have incredible synergy with Ninjutsu, but again Ninjutsu is a solid armor set that goes well with most stuff.

I mean, what's "obviously" going on is probably that you just have developed an incorrect impression. People develop anecdotal impressions that are incorrect all the time. Did you actually hold everything constant besides the scrapper armor? Maybe the rest of the team in the case of your Shield scrapper was just better at generating threat! Maybe they did a variety of things that took aggro from you before those enemies closed into the (short!) range of your taunt aura, so the enemies were never taunted. Maybe you did it yourself: to the extent that shield charge knocks down a bunch of enemies, that gives them a window of time in which they aren't getting close to you and thus aren't taunted. Maybe the Shield scrapper's group was less good at immediately winnowing a group down to 10 or fewer enemies, which is the target cap for the taunt aura. Maybe some members of the Shield scrapper's group generated taunt themselves. Brutes and Tanks generate actual taunt with every attack, so when they jump in with their AoEs, they continuously taunt enemies repeatedly and heavily push them to get into the range of their taunt auras. Scrappers do not, and an 8' range 10 target cap taunt aura is a fragile way to tank. City of Data means that we can see "under the hood" what is going on with powers with a high degree of fidelity. There is no taunt in Bio besides the 8' range, 10 target cap aura. Does the damage aura make a difference? I don't think it is very likely to make a serious difference: it just generates threat, not taunt, and it won't generate a particularly overwhelming amount of threat, and it will overwhelmingly only generate threat on people who are already being taunted by your taunt aura. Bio does of course have two wide-area AoEs (DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura), that can help generate initial threat, but again it's threat, not taunt -- it'll be relatively easy to peel enemies off of you if they don't get in close and get taunted by your aura.

Nope! Bio, Invulnerability, Radiation, and Shield all provide the same level of taunt (13.6 seconds base pulsed every one second). Energy Aura and Willpower provide a lower level of taunt (energy does 2.5 seconds of base taunt pulsed every 2 seconds, willpower does 1.25 seconds of taunt pulsed every second. Both might provide gaps in taunting against higher level opponents if their taunt is not enhanced). All scrapper taunt auras are mag 3.

You're desperately wrong, but even if you were right that it's "foolish" to balance sets, not powers (and it is very much the opposite of foolish), they do in fact balance sets, not powers. If you want to go yell at the clouds regarding how it should be cool for let's say Claws to get Frozen Touch because powers should be balanced atomically, feel free. But recognize the fact that despite your preferences here, your preferences are not being followed. To go back to the (correct) point that you had at the beginning, regardless of the reason for things, facts are facts. ~100% of all Bio Armor characters have a taunt and a damage aura surrounding them. What actual difference would it make to anyone's actual play experience if those two effects were colocated into a single power versus being effects of separate powers? For sure! You said, "It's not a coincidence, it's by design," where the antecedent of "it" was "scrapper damage auras don't taunt." The wrong part is suggesting that there is a design principle for scrapper damage auras not to taunt. As we both agree, they don't (besides Bio), but it's not a design principle. Yes, I know. Jesus christ, trying to follow the conversation. You said, "[scrappers get] single target Confront vs AoE Taunt." I used that as an example of one of the things that you said that was straightforwardly correct, because you later asked why I was laser-focused on the thing about Scrapper damage aura/taunt as a design principle. I'm laser focused on things we disagree about. When you say things that are straightforwardly correct, I don't argue with you about them. Are you caught up now? You! Quoted above. Taunt auras are one-per-set. You don't get separate multiple taunts in any set in the game. Again, if you want, you can shout at clouds that sets are designed and balanced as wholes, nobody can stop you from having bad opinions. But the clear fact is that sets are balanced as wholes. So the question is, do sets get taunt auras, and do sets get damage auras. Scrappers usually don't get both, with one exception, Bio. But this is not because there is a design principle forbidding Scrappers from getting both, it's because taunt auras are only given to Scrappers in certain somewhat narrow circumstances, and it just happens that Dark, Fire, Stone, and Electric don't have that circumstance.

This is a distinction without a difference. Bio has a damage aura and a taunt aura. It doesn't matter if they're in the same power or not. Nor do you need multiple taunts in one armor set. It's really important for people to understand that sets are balaned as sets, not as powers. Because that's what you said that was wrong, or at least somewhat wrong. I'm not arguing with you about, for example, "Tanks get Taunt and not Confront" because, you know... you're right! It is a fact that Scrappers have only one armor set that has both a taunt aura and a damage aura. Which I agreed with, and said, in my original message, was a useful thing to note! But things like, "Under what circumstances do Scrappers get taunt auras" are interesting things to know about the game, and I don't think that you're correctly presenting the way the design works here. You decided to spend a lot of time telling me what I should or should not say, and didn't really seem to spend a lot of time actually thinking about what I did say. Think about the term "buff aura." What's a "buff aura"? There are all kinds of Scrapper sets that get toggles that buff the scrapper -- that's so unexceptional that we don't even have a name for it. Look at the Stalker version of Invincibility: it's a toggle that gives the Stalker +to-hit and +defense. Nice, simple, straightforward power. For something to be a buff "aura," it pretty much has to be a scaling power, because you don't need to count enemies in range of a buff power unless you're giving a scaling benefit. "Debuff auras" are different, and indeed Scrappers get plenty of debuff auras that don't come with taunt. Cloak of Fear in Dark Armor debuffs to-hit. Lightning Field gives end-drain. Mud Pots slows. Chilling Embrace gives slow and -damage. But none of those offer a scaling bonus to the scrapper. There could be various design reasons why some Scrappers get taunts, but there aren't! There's one. It's about whether that armor set as a whole gets scaling benefits from close enemies. It's not about debuffs, and relevantly, it's not about damage auras.

I totally missed the scaling recharge buff! Thanks for calling it out. This is again to the main point: Scrappers get taunt auras when their armor set is such that it's actively beneficial for enemies to stick close to them -- not just that the enemies' effectiveness is lower (as when their damage or to-hit is debuffed), but where you get a benefit against other enemies if this enemy stays close to you.

I'm looking at the whole set, not the individual powers. In Bio, the taunt is separated from the scaling powers, but the set as a whole is what matters. True! Again, whole set. Beta Decay debuffs foe defense and to-hit, but doesn't give scaling benefits. With, say, Invincibility, if you imagine having a foe that can do little or nothing to you, it standing next to you actually helps you -- it provides you mitigation and, as you say, to-hit against all of the other mobs. Beta Decay there's no benefit to having a foe stand near you... but there is with Radiation Therapy. True, but doesn't scale -- it only debuffs its own damage. If you didn't taunt it and it walked away, there's no disadvantage to you in terms of its own damage debuff, but there is in terms of your own damage buff. Similar to above -- true but not a scaling advantage. All true! This is why I think that Shield is kinda weird -- like, one gets why you might say, "Okay, Rise to the Challenge is central to the mitigation of Willpower, and Invincibility to Invulnerability. We need enemies to stick close in order for these sets to function, so they get taunt auras." In contrast, the +end from Power Sink is, like, nice. Nobody thinks that Electricity doesn't function if Power Sink fails to hit the maximum number of enemies. I'd argue that Shield's Against All Odds being saturated is hardly crucial to the set, and it's weird that it gets a taunt aura out of it. Let's take them one at a time: Dark Regen -- I think it's slightly odd that this doesn't get a taunt aura, since I think Dark Regen is pretty central to Dark Armor (and also because Dark Armor kinda sucks on Scrappers). That said, I guess the argument is that the heal on Dark Regen is so high it's really easy to get a full-heal out of it without needing to saturate opponents. Energy Absorption -- Notably compared to the very similar Energy Drain in Energy Aura, Energy Absorption gets a vastly better static Defense bonus (3.375% vs 0.75%) and then half as much scaling defense (0.188% vs 0.375%). I think that this difference was intended to make it less critical for Ice to saturate Energy Absorption and thus they didn't feel the need to give it a Taunt aura. Power Sink -- Easy to get a full energy refresh without saturating, and +end is more of a QoL bonus than a central feature of the set, especially given that it has another endurance tool in Energize. Consume -- Again, it's just +end, not central to the set.

So it is certainly the case that Brutes and Tanks are supposed to get lots more aggro tools than Scrappers, but the specific correlation of damage aura and taunt aura is I think basically a coincidence or to some extent a second-order effect of a couple of design principles. The design principles for taunt auras are: Brutes/Tanks -- Get them in every armor set Scrappers -- Get them in armor sets that have scaling mitigation/bonuses based on number of nearby enemies Stalkers -- Don't get them (and don't get scaling mitigation based on number of nearby enemies) So just to walk through the Scrapper taunt auras: Bio -- scaling healing, endurance, and absorb based on nearby enemies in DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura Energy Aura -- scaling defense and recharge time based on nearby enemies in Energy Drain and Entropic Aura Invulnerability -- scaling defense based on nearby enemies in Invincibility Radiation -- scaling healing and endurance based on nearby enemies in Radiation Therapy Shield -- slightly weird scaling damage bonus based on nearby enemies in Against All Odds Willpower -- scaling regeneration based on nearby enemies in Rise to the Challenge It more-or-less just happens that the damage aura armor sets (besides Bio) do not have a "scaling bonus based on number of nearby enemies" mechanic. This isn't really a design principle per se, though you can make the case that armors only get a certain number of goodies, and a damage aura counts as a "goodie" and so does a scaling bonus, so they do sort of push against each other that way. But, also, it is clearly the case that this isn't an inviolable principle: Bio exists. I'll also note that your characterization of Scrapper taunt auras as "debuff auras" is slightly incorrect: Invincibility has no debuff component and is nevertheless a taunt aura. A final note: design principles evolve over time. I think that if Shield were being made from scratch today, it probably wouldn't get a taunt aura -- it's the only scrapper armor set that gets no mitigation, only an offensive buff from nearby enemies, and I don't think that the Homecoming devs would consider that worthy of a taunt aura. Possibly Radiation would also lose taunt if it were being remade today, as its mitigation isn't super dependent on Radiation Therapy. And looking backwards, it might've been the case that much earlier in the history of the game the devs wanted to more tightly link damage auras and taunt auras than is now the case -- not sure, I didn't play early in the game.

I think Naraka's framing of the point is a little strange, but it seems valid to say, "Scrappers generally don't get both a taunt aura and a damage aura in their armor, with bio as the lone exception." I take Uun's point to be that that's somewhat coincidental: there was no design principle that forbade scrappers from having damage and taunt auras, it's just how it worked out. But, bio aside, it did work out that way.

Maybe describe what your build goals are. What play are you trying to support? Solo? Group? Do you want to exemp well? Normal content/TFs, or incarnate trials, or hard mode? Do you aspire to solo hard targets like AVs?

I got interested enough to test, as I happen to have a level 50 Archery sentinel. I went around in Peregrine Island and tried to snipe at small spawns with bosses in them to make it easy to see the numbers. It's a bit frustrating since the pseudopet indirection hides all the to-hit rolls from you in the combat window, so you just have to go by eyeballing the orange numbers. For reasons passing understanding, Sentinel Rain of Arrows does its damage in two packets of lethal damage. So for each "tick" that hits, you expect to see two orange numbers. My experience was: Most of the time, I saw 3 ticks of damage (six total numbers) A non-trivial amount of time, I saw 2 ticks of damage, in a way that does suggest to me that something might be off, here. Especially, in one case, I was shooting two different Warhulks and I did 2 ticks to each of them. Once, I saw only one tick of damage Based on City of Data, these are pulses of damage from a pseudopet autopower. Each one will roll to hit separately, so it wouldn't be crazy for one to miss. But I did think it was weird that as far as I noticed, I always saw the same number of ticks for everyone in the group. That seems unlikely if it's just a to-hit roll situation. So, contra @drbuzzard, I did not see a majority case of only one tick happening, but with @drbuzzard, I did see enough here to make me suspicious that there might be a bug. My understanding of the correct behavior is: All three ticks are guaranteed to go off (for targets that remain in the area of effect -- and they happen quickly, so I never saw anyone move significantly in the 0.8 seconds that it takes for the ticks to all go). They do roll to hit, so it is possible for some ticks to hit and some to miss, but that should be unlikely in the case of high chance-to-hit, and particularly unlikely for two targets to simultaneously get the same two ticks hitting.

I think it pulses two or three times, 0.4 seconds apart, but there's no conditionality on it that I can see. I don't think that your description of it is accurate unless there's something about the power coding that I'm fundamentally misunderstanding (which is always possible).

Huh, what makes you say that it's supposed to do 1, 2, or 3 hits? Both Blaster and Sentinel Rain of Arrows creates a pseudopet for 1 second (1.8 seconds after casting). Both pets have an auto-power that does damage, that has an activate period of 0.4 seconds (and an animation time of 1.167 seconds and an animation time before effect of 0.5 seconds, but I don't know if these actually do anything for auto-powers). Neither have any kind of rolled chance for effect groups within the autopower. I don't see anything that suggests that there's supposed to be variability in how much damage it does, nor that Sentinel Rain of Arrows functions meaningfully differently than Blaster Rain of Arrows (I mean, they do different damage and so forth, but they seem to deliver the damage in the same way).

200% status resistance would reduce a hold with a base duration to 10 seconds to 3.33 seconds. Duration = base duration / (1 + status resistance). So if status resistance is 100% (ie, 1.00), it's 10 / (1 + 1) = 10 / 2 = 5 If status resistance is 200% (ie, 2.00), it's 10 / (1 + 2) = 10 / 3 = 3.33 If status resistance is 300% (ie, 3.00), it's 10 / (1 + 3) = 10 / 4 = 2.5 There is a very strong decreasing returns trend here.

So: You can't minimize the stone effect on granite, just to be clear. You're going to be a big rock monster in Granite. Lots of people now just don't use Granite, or use it occasionally as a panic button. If you do want to move around in Granite, teleport (or just Combat Teleport) is probably your most straightforward option. I think you can, with effort, stack up speed bonuses to counteract the speed penalty for Granite, but not to my understanding the jump penalty Your characterization of the armor as resistance plus S/L defense is a little weird. In Granite, it's resist-all+defense-all. Otherwise, it's defense to S/L/E/N/P, resist to F/C/T

So like, here's the thing: If you're doing an 8 person team with high level characters on normal (non-hard-mode) content, yes, agreed, building defense/resistance isn't very necessary. And sure, I guess, if you proc out your attacks maybe each spawn will go from taking 3.2 seconds to 2.7 seconds. But non-hard-mode grouped, high level content is very easy. Honestly I don't really get why this would be your build target. Anything you do will be Just Fine. I just can't really see who will be bothered to care if you are less than perfectly optimized for faceroll content. Hard Mode was designed specifically to devalue defense, and as far as I can tell succeeded. If hard mode is your build target, that makes plenty of sense.