aethereal

Yeah, I don't rant about it often because I don't get the impression that the HC staff is particularly interested in revisiting it as a design choice, but I think that it's been a big mistake to use differing target caps as an AT differentiation point. It's too large a balance point, it's artificial and gamey, and it creates very awkward distinctions between ST and AoE performance. If I were going to nerf Tanks, I'd keep the AoE area bonuses but drop them to normal target caps. If I felt like this left them at a significant deficit of aggro management compared to Brutes (and I'm far from convinced that tanks pre-buff had any problems with aggro management), then I might allow a higher target cap on Taunt -- but not on damage-dealing powers. (And similarly, I'd maybe give sentinels smaller AoEs, but normal caps for their AoEs). But as I said, it doesn't feel like this is a point worth trying to argue about.

idk if it's bugged or anything, but per CoD, it should only last 10.25 seconds.

Something that I'm always tempted to try on Claws/DB is to heavily slot Follow Up for accuracy (to land that initial hit) and then tank accuracy slotting for the rest of the powers. It never ends up feeling quite worth it, since it's generally so easy to build global accuracy and get accuracy slotting into even abbreviated sets. But it's an interesting idea, and someone more devoted to procs than I am might make it work.

I find that people are strangely unwilling to approach Brutes from a perspective of "what powersets really work well on a Brute"? Like, everyone's happy to say that the Brute is a marginal AT, but it seems like few people are willing to say, "Okay, so how do we play to its strengths?" Like, I see people recommend Energy Aura on a Brute. Energy Aura is of course a solid set anywhere, but it's like the number one example of, "You might as well make it on a Scrapper." It's defense-based, so the Brute higher resist cap is largely irrelevant on it. It retains its taunt aura on a Scrapper. It has Energize, which makes some use of Brute's higher hp, but honestly a Scrapper is going to be 99.5% as durable as a Brute in Energy Aura. Invulnerability is a little more tilted towards Brutes, but not much. I want to see several of these things checked on a Brute: 1. Armor set can reasonably get above 75% resistance in several different resists. 2. Damage aura (or two!) 3. Armor set leverages Brute hit points by having significant heals/regen. 4. Armor set has no taunt aura on a Scrapper. 5. Attack set has an advantage on a Brute vs a Scrapper You don't have to check all five of those boxes to tip the balance towards a Brute vs a Scrapper, but if you don't check at least two or three, you should be asking yourself why not a scrapper. Attack sets whose gimmick is a damage bonus should be avoided on Brutes: Claws, Dual Blades, Super Strength, maybe Kinetic Melee. Some armor sets that clearly work better on Brutes than Scrappers: Electric, Fire, Dark, maybe Willpower and Rad. And Regen, but Regen is pretty bad regardless. Probably the only attack sets that are clearly better on a Brute than a Scrapper are Savage and Spines, but Martial Arts, Rad Melee, Fire, and Energy Melee provide some upside to Brutes. On the flip side, why a Brute rather than a Tank, you again want to talk about damage auras, and having some kind of solid single-target chain, since it's going to be an uphill battle for a Brute to outperform a Tank solely in AoE.

I don't actually believe that this is true. There's no way they bothered to write code to inspect the damage types of characters (over how many powers? how would they determine which powers you actually use and which ones are just in your build as forced choices or mules?) before spawning a DE mob. Like, is it theoretically possible that this could be done? Sure. Would anyone have bothered to do it? Nah.

I think this is easy to overstate. Yes, top end scrappers do a ton of damage (honestly enough to need a nerf). But scrappers outdamage brutes only with very efficient use of the Superior ATO2. Before level 50, before perma-hasten, or with somewhat inefficient choices of where to put the ATO2, scrappers do equal or less damage than brutes. A good change would be to move some of the performance of the ATO2 into the ATO1 or into the base inherent of scrappers to both nerf very high end scrappers and buff all other scrappers.

I assure you that brutes benefit more from procs than any other melee AT, if you're just looking in isolation at how much more damage they get from slotting a proc. To the extent that tanks have a proc advantage, it's simply that they can throw away more set bonuses and still hit survivability goals, while Brutes (and Scrappers, and Stalkers) need to use many more set bonuses if they're going to survive solo at high difficulty. So it's easier for tanks to fit large numbers of procs into their build. But each proc benefits a brute mildly more.

CoH gets its random numbers with a system call to the O/S nonsecure random number generator. People's fantasies of persecution by the RNG are entirely in their own minds.

The entire point of the PPM system is that you're not supposed to have to worry that much about what the proc rate is for a power. It's higher on longer-recharge powers and lower on shorter-recharge powers and it ends up being the same. Some people get extremely neurotic about having high proc chance in their powers, and thus avoid it in short-recharge-time powers, but that doesn't (with some exceptions that I'll get to below) actually matter. It evens out. The exceptions: 1. If you have your power sit around off cooldown but unclicked for a long time, that means you get fewer procs per minute with it. Basically, the PPM system assumes that you click your power on cooldown. If you have a power that "wastes" cooldown by recharging much quicker than you actually want to use it, it would ceteris paribus be better to replace it with another power that does similar things but only recharges just in time for you to use it. 2. If a long-recharge power uses a pseudopet to accomplish its effects, you get a bad PPM rate despite your long recharge, which sucks. That's the origin of "don't put it in rain powers." 3. If the proc isn't just a scalar increase in something, but has a dramatic effect that you want to plan around, then obviously you can plan better if your proc rate is more reliable. But seriously think hard about does it actually matter if it goes off On This Activation, or does it just matter how often it goes off at all? 4. There are various complications that are one-off affairs unique to certain procs or certain power that you somehow just have to memorize all of. (PPM is a kinda terrible system). That said, the staff have quashed some of these unique things.

You can replace the "glowie sound" file with a louder version of the sound file, which will have the effect that you want. You have to do it as a process of replacing the sound file, not, like, through an in-game control.

So the deal is the costume effect of granite is part of the power effects, it's not either an animation or a particle effect of the power. The existing powers customization system has no way to change the effects of a power. Some kind of fairly serious code change would be necessary to either bring a complete costume replacement effect into the animation type of the power (which the customization code could then affect and swap into a different costume replacement) or else make the customization code be able to swap out some power effects. That's why this long-standing complaint has never been addressed.

Yes, of course, but not during the existence of Homecoming.

You don't, though.

By the way, about global recharge: It is of course true that global recharge drastically improves the efficiency of procs in your build. But that's far from the only reason to chase global recharge. People were building towards global recharge well before the PPM system was a twinkle in the eyes of the original devs. Indeed, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that chasing global recharge is the earliest recognizable "build goal" in CoH in any kind of modern sense -- dating back to six-slotting Hasten with recharge bonuses in the pre-invention, pre-ED days of CoH. It's wild that after recognizing that it was possible for everyone to have 70% global recharge with relatively minimal investment, and taming that beast with ED, they then said, "But what if we made it possible for everyone to have 180% global recharge with, admittedly, somewhat more investment?" But that's the world we live in, and, honestly, the albatross around the neck of CoH power design: you have to now contend with an environment in which everyone's powers will recharge in approximately 1/3rd of their listed time without any actual recharge slotting in that power. Beyond wild is that someone in issue 24 was like, "Okay, but now that we've had years of people obsessively building for global recharge as a general utility to everything, what if we now make global recharge be the key to efficient damage slotting with PPM mechanics." Crazy history aside, the point here is that global recharge is a swiss army knife of build awesomeness. Do you want to be more durable? Well, you can get Proton Therapy and Particle Shielding and Meltdown to much higher uptimes. Do you want to do more damage? You can drop your lower-damage powers out of your attack chain because your high-damage powers are all you need. You can ignore recharge slotting in your power and instead focus on maximizing their primary effects because once you have 180% recharge, additional local recharge isn't a big deal. Basically everything in your build that isn't served by toggle powers gets much better with global recharge. If you then want to stack way more damage, PPM abuse is there to be a cherry on top of your sundae, but you're likely going to find that you'll get more damage out of your build with global recharge than with global damage even if you straight up ignore procs and just use the primary benefit of "can use higher-damage powers more often." Global recharge is just stupidly good.

How does slow resistance work, anyway? Is it like mez resistance where "100% resistance" means that the duration of the slow is cut in half? Or is it like damage resistance where "100% resistance" means that you take no slow?

I don't care what AT you play, and teaming is easy in CoH unless you're chasing four star hard mode or Really Hard Way or whatever. Playing a slightly suboptimal build isn't going to ruin your team's experience, and you should do what's fun for you. The issue is that it's hard to give you advice when you have these kind of invisible restrictions in your mind. Like, why are you asking for build advice at all here? What is actually going wrong with your play experience such that you need to change your build? If you have a clear goal, people can help you build toward it, but I don't know what your goal is. You don't want to build towards soaking alpha. You don't want to build towards procs. You don't want to build towards global recharge. Like, sure, okay, but what do you want to do? Does your current build fail you at all?

So, look: if you exclusively team, and you aren't doing any kind of absorbing hits for the rest of the team (like taking alpha, really the only kind of "tanking" that a sentinel really can do), then, frankly, sentinels aren't a good AT for your style of play. Teaming with someone else playing an active tank is a very safe activity. Blasters should be able to be built plenty durable for the job. If you do want to play a sent for concept reasons, again looking exclusively at "teaming with someone else being a primary tank," then in general you should try to build your sentinel to as close to a blaster as you can -- ignore mitigation, focus on DPS. Of course the flip side of all this is that teaming in CoH is generally very easy, outside of a very small number of hard content types. So if you want to just build to concept, that'll probably be fine too.

You get mez protection with Master Brawler -- it gets included into one of your toggles, I forget which one.

It's not 3 vs 6 values, since everything that you get outside of your actual armor powers that builds resistance will build two resistances simultaneously (S/L or F/C or E/N or P/T), while set bonuses build only one positional defense at a time. Set bonuses are also mildly higher for resistances than defenses, though not to such magnitudes that it makes up for the lower defense caps if starting from zero (resistance set bonuses are 1.5% * rarity, while defense set bonuses are 1.25% * rarity). However, the OP's point is that you're not starting from zero -- he says build resistance if your armor set gives you starting resistances, at which point it will almost certainly be less effort than building from zero. Your overall point that there are a lot of powerful options to build good defenses and fewer to build resistances holds (it's certainly a big deal that you can pick up five different defense-all toggles from pool powers, and only one S/L-only resistance power). It shouldn't be underestimated how much defense building is eased by the availability of big S/L defense bonuses in ATO sets, too. What pushes the meta of defense vs resistance is a combination of a few things: Most players want defense powers anyway to build global recharge, still one of the most powerful attributes in the game, especially with PPM mechanics. Lower resist caps than defense caps for non-Tankers/Brutes Lack of pool powers that can be taken to give you +20% or so enhanceable resist-all the way that you can get +10% or so enhanceable defense-all. Set bonuses for resistance proportionately lower than defense compared to caps. With the combination of positional and typed defenses, you still get broader mitigation coverage from defense than from resistance (this used to be a bigger deal before they stripped second type tags from attacks). A few sets like ATOs and Kinetic Combat/Touch of Death provide very attractive big adds to Melee/S/L defense that has broad coverage, no equivalently broad coverage for resistance. That all stands against this thread's (correct) overall point that if you've already got resistances from your armor set, you get increased return from the resists if you double down on resists instead of pivoting to defense.

Procs do a lot of damage. I'm not totally sure how procs work in Tesla Cage, with its conditional chaining. But if it were a single-target power that did as much damage as it does on base (ie, without the chains), a standard 3.5 PPM damage proc would be worth 42% damage enhancement in it, if it had no local recharge. The reason that people who are interested in min-maxing DPS fill up attacks with 4-6 procs is that each proc is worth a lot of damage enhancement (and of course doesn't have ED concerns). Whether that's worth the loss of set bonuses is of course a judgment call and conditional on the rest of the build.

Do not skip Grounded. Look, Electricity isn't a great armor set on the 75% resist-cap ATs, but one of its true joys is near immunity to endurance drain. The most fun you can have on an electric armor character is roleplaying. Follow this script: SOMEONE ELSE: God I hate sappers. YOU: What are sappers? SE: I thought you said you fight Malta? YOU: Yes, I fight them all the time. I'm always coming for their falcons. SE: So the sappers. YOU: Not ringing any bells. SE: The ones who drain your energy? YOU: Nope. SE: They shoot a wavy beam of light at you and then you lose all your energy and die? YOU: Oh, you mean the funny little men who have a gun that doesn't do anything? They're weird.

Both defense and resistance have an increasing marginal returns curve followed by an inflection point at cap where they convert to massively decreased returns. It is better to add defense to a defense set when you are near-but-below defense cap, and better to add resist to a resist set when you are near-but-below resist cap, and then once you hit cap it flips and is better to add the opposite polarity mitigation strategy.

Brutes get Energy Aura and Regeneration, neither of which is available to Tankers.

No. ATO1 increases passive crit chance by 2% (minions/underlings) or 4% (lieutenants and up) for the Standard version, and 3% (minions/underlings) or 6% (lieutenants and up) for the Superior version. The PPM increase isn't "slight"! It improves the uptime of the proc by 50%! It's a very common pattern to increase the PPM by 1 for the superior version of an ATO proc. For example: Blaster's Wrath is 4PPM standard/5PPM superior. Defiant Barrage is 3PPM standard/4PPM superior. Might of the Tanker is 5PPM standard/6PPM superior. There are a bunch of other examples. But 2PPM -> 3PPM is a much, much bigger difference than 5PPM -> 6PPM in a way that makes me think that the original devs didn't think very hard about this pattern of "+1 for superior version," and part of the current deal with the highest-end Scrappers being probably overpowered is the fact that the 3PPM version of Critical Strikes is a huge deal. In contrast, Scrappers are probably underpowered for everyone who's not doing a PPM-optimized version of Superior Critical Strikes.

Tactics, not assault.