aethereal

Do you solo +4/x8 or play on a team? I don't have high level play experience with ice armor, so genuine question, but for example I have played a lot of /ninj high level solo at +4/x8, which has similar levels of DDR, and my experience is that it's a very noticeable problem. Not, mind you, an impossible problem -- you can, and I do, handle it, but I certainly notice it strongly when I'm dealing with def debuffing enemies.

Yeah, I've been leveling an EM brute since starting the thread and it's a good experience, compared favorably to the EM Stalkers and Scrappers that I've played. Of course, Scrappers generally lag Brutes until level 50, so we'll see where it ends up.

Ice patch is in Ice Melee, not Ice Armor. It's also max targets 5, and obviously it doesn't mitigate enemies with KB protection.

I mean, there's the T9 of course, but outside of that, I wouldn't call Ice Armor much of a layering of resists and defenses. S/L/E/N get a grand total of 3.75% damage resistance (unenhanced). F/C get the defense that all Stalkers get in hide, plus a totally nominal 0.75% Wet Ice, and a somewhat more meaningful amount in Energy Absorption. Note also big toxic and psi holes in Ice Armor. Icy Bastion is a really nice resistance bump, and will, with Tough, probably take you to capped S/L and not-capped-but-meaningful E/N resists, but it's not all the time.

Frost is bigger, Frozen Aura is not, if I'm reading CoD correctly. I think that Ice Melee has a single-target problem except on Stalkers, but it's still a solid set.

Er, but electric armor doesn't have a self rez?

I think the big holes in Ice are low DDR (like Ninjutsu, only 30ish percent) and this sort of awkward situation with fire and cold type damage. You get embarrassing levels of overcap cold resistance, but pretty bad fire resistance, and no defense for either. Building on your fire resistance has this thing that kinda bothered me where you're throwing away the child resistance that you get as well with set bonuses, but building defense (which would help versus cold as well) is hard because you're starting from zero. Which probably isn't a big deal objectively, but it was surprisingly annoying to me. The DDR is a big deal, though.

I mean, they didn't. Did you read the first post? The base damage on the powers in brute Energy Melee is exactly where the scalars say it should be -- it doesn't get any special tuning to be worse than you would expect. The weird tuning is on Scrappers/Stalkers, since Energy Transfer and Total Focus get much-less-than-full-strength crits (and, in return, some non-damage benefits for critting). But Brute Fury works like normal on ET and TF, and the base damage is, as I said, right where it's supposed to be.

Okay, great. So why is it nothing spectacular? It's perhaps the single-highest-ST damage set on Scrappers and Stalkers (maybe new Fiery Melee will give it a run for its money), and it seems like Brutes get versions of Energy Transfer and Total Focus that slightly surpass the damage that a Scrapper could get with a highly optimized crit rate. Like, I'm looking for someone who says, "Oh, yeah, I tried to run Brute EM for a high-end Pylon time, and here's what you're missing..."

It's not a bug report. I don't know why you're so confused about this, honestly. I am saying, "it seems from a basic look at things like a brute's ST damage with Energy Melee should rival a Scrappers. Does that actually bear out in play? If so, why aren't we talking more about that? If not, where does the reality diverge from the simple numbers?"

I don't really care if they should be or shouldn't be, my question is -- are they? If they aren't, why not? Where does the extra damage creep in?

Yes, but it's theory-crafting, and I assume that if someone was throwing down Scrapper-like numbers on pylons or whatever with Brute Energy Melee, I'd have heard about it.

But the point is, here they seem to be on-par damage output.

I think we all got excited when Energy Melee was simultaneously revamped and proliferated to Scrappers (and Stalkers were given some kind of AoE). And of course Scrappers/Stalkers got the weird bells and whistles for crits -- but they don't get full crit damage on the two lynchpin Energy Melee attacks. Brutes, of course, get full benefit of fury to Energy Melee. Here are the numbers: Energy Transfer Scrapper: 285 damage normal, 365 damage crit If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, 612 damage normal, 784 damage crit Brute: 190 damage base If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, + 160% damage from fury: 712 damage. A Scrapper will have to crit 58% of the time to equal Brute damage with Energy Transfer. Total Focus Scrapper: 223 damage normal, 285 damage crit If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, 479 damage normal, 612 damage crit Brute: 148 damage base If 95% damage enhanced + 20% additional damage from Alpha or whatever, + 160% damage from fury: 555 damage A Scrapper will have to crit 57% of the time to equal Brute damage with Total Focus Now, okay, Scrappers will enjoy their usual benefits on the rest of the attack chain compared to Brutes, but TF and ET are the three best DPA attacks in Energy Melee (it goes fast ET, slow ET, then TF), and are central to the attack chain, and it feels like scrappers are pretty unlikely to equal Brute DPS with those attacks (you might get slightly north of 58% crit chance on one of your Energy Transfers (at best 90% chance of the ATO2 proc going off, so that's like 45% crit chance plus 16% base crit chance), but not on both of these attacks). How does this all fall apart? Obviously, you have to deal with damage from Energy Transfer, not "fairly likely to heal you instead of damage you," but that doesn't feel like a deal-breaker. You don't get the chance of two fast ETs per chain, but it doesn't feel like scrappers build towards that anyway?

I compared-and-contrasted with Brute Energy Aura > Energy Cloak, and certainly the stealth in Dark is coded differently from the stealth in Energy Cloak (which does suppress for 10 seconds after attack etc for both PvE and PvP). https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=brute_defense.energy_aura.energy_cloak&at=brute I don't have enough knowledge of the minutiae of how Stealth works/what exactly happens when you trigger a power's "cancel" condition, how notifying spreads between members of a spawn to understand exactly what behavior to expect from this difference, but Dark Armor's stealth really is different from other powers' stealth.

Hmmm. The PvE stealth definitely cancelled when you attack or are hit, but unlike the PvP stealth, it doesn't suppress for 10 seconds -- I think it's reestablished on the next pulse of the power. Not sure of this, could be misinterpreting.

And you probably should slot for recharge. Sentinels need to work to get their damage up.

Dual blades doesn't have a strong AT bias. It's an overall solid set and you should feel comfortable choosing the AT based on the armor set or your overall enjoyment of the dynamics of the AT rather than any particular synergy of Dual Blades.

He said two different things: 1. That some attacks lack positional tags. This is true. 2. That he didn't know if the recent defense changes stripped any possible tags from attacks the previously had positional tags. These changes did not (intentionally) render any attacks newly positionless.

Nope! Attacks with multiple types got collapsed to one type, but nothing should've lost a position in the recent defense changes.

Here's my shot-in-the-dark, untested hypothesis for the inconsistent behavior that @WindDemon21 is seeing: Impassioned Serenade executes its confuse after a 0.25 second delay. I'm not aware of other redirects that redirect after a delay, and I wonder if, in addition to the LoS issue, there may be circumstances where the redirected power gets preempted by another power that might execute in the same tick as it. If that is the issue, it might be better to put the delay on the effect group within the redirected power (so the redirect happens immediately, but the effect of the redirected power has a 0.25 second delay on it).

This is almost pretty easily explicable, with a huge caveat. The way that the power accomplishes the "DoT for up to 30 seconds while confused" is it gives a 30 second DoT that suppresses if you're not confused. But the power still ticks on. So if you are confused, then unconfused, then confused again before 30 seconds is up, you'll start getting damage from the original DoT again. (This would happen even if you were confused from some other source). So what's happening is: T=0: You hit them with impassioned serenade. They start getting DoT T=10 or so: The confuse wears off, and they stop taking damage. T=20 or so: You hit them with another impassioned serenade. Now they take damage from the second impassioned serenade's DoT and the first impassioned serenade's DoT. EXCEPT: The DoT is marked not to stack with itself. It's supposed to replace existing effect, not apply a second DoT. Conceivable that that's failing to work somehow?

When you look back at the levelling progression of your 50+3 Sentinel and from levels 27 to 38 you see only one set of footprints, it was then that Underfyre carried you.

Tidge asserted that Provoke had a target cap of 16 in City of Data.

At launch, I think much of Archery's draw was a non-crashing, long-distance T9. That advantage has obviously been significantly degraded now that all T9s are non-crashing, and its shorter recharge is at least arguably a disadvantage in a context of 180% global recharge for all builds that really, you know, try.