aethereal

City of Data doesn't show a target cap of 16 for Provoke, it shows 5.

The usual caveat that sets like Invul and Super Reflexes are clearly in good overall shape, don't need any more damage mitigation tools, and that their crashing T9s are important in PvP.

No, so... The confuse portion of Impassioned Serenade is coded onto a separate power that Impassioned Serenade redirects to, instead of being a straightforward effect of Impassioned Serenade. I think that the second LoS is a result of that, and yes, I agree it's a bug (and could probably be fixed by making the redirect power not require LoS). But my question is, why is there a redirect in the first place? Other Symphony Control powers don't redirect. Other confuse powers don't redirect. I assume that there's something that they're trying to accomplish with it being a redirect at all, but I don't understand what it is. Maybe @Bopper can see something about how it works that makes the redirect useful/necessary? https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=controller_control.symphony_control.impassioned_serenade&at=controller

The confuse being a separate redirect effect of the power is sketchy. Why is it coded like that? I'm pretty sure that's why there's a second, separate LoS check for just the confuse part of the power that can result in "no" when the main LoS check is "yes." I wouldn't be surprised if there was other weird behavior due to the redirect. What's the desired behavior that we get from having it be a redirect instead of a straightforward effect of the power?

Nope, they went through! Live patch notes here: The quick-and-dirty version is: the res debuffs were made partially non-stacking Cast time reductions for: Scream, Shout, Howl, Shockwave, and Siren's Song Damage buff for Shockwave and Siren's Song (and Screech, but not for Sentinels) But for Sentinels, all the cones went to 6 targets instead of 10

I think your comments on Sonic Blast refer to a now-outdated version of the set (both on Sentinels and on others). Siren's Song now does the most damage of the three cones, and Screech does good damage on all Sonic Blast characters, not just Sentinels. There were also some cast time adjustments. EDIT: There are some other errors here. You refer to Ice as a "mostly positional defense set," but it's typed defense, not positional. You also refer to the T9 as though Sentinels got Hibernate, but Sentinels (along with Stalkers and Scrappers) get Icy Bastion, a 30 second big +resistance-all clicky with no crash, not Hibernate (the heal yourself in a block of ice power that Brute and Tanks get).

But invulnerability, unlike rad, is a defense/resistance hybrid set. I don't think it makes sense to ignore defense on invul, unlike at least potentially rad. If you wanted another zero-defense build, how about electric?

Sir, this is a brute forum.

Generally feel like the -res proc is a mistake on AoE. I'd take FF instead of that and not sacrifice any damage. My reasoning is that -res is most useful against single hard targets, where you don't really want to be spamming AoE because of its low DPS (outside of specific cases where the AoE attack is weirdly high DPA and can be usefully used in ST attack chains, which I don't think Axe Cyclone is). Proccing a -20% res on some rando minion is low value.

I certainly agree that DB is awkward with the skippable combo system etc. I think you're underselling Blinding Feint, which maybe is somewhat awkward to use and certainly has constraints, but having a very easily achievable +25% damage and +6.6% to hit all the time is a thing. I don't really think that the lethal damage penalty should be addressed by buffing individual lethal damage sets of the very large number of them in play. But basically, DB right now has good ST damage (with very high recharge) and okay AoE damage because, as you said, of the really solid Sweeping Strike. If you buff 1k Cuts (or the PBAoE) to be quite good you get a set that's good ST and good AoE. If you make another ST attack quite good you dramatically open up the slotting choices of the powers by removing the requirement on extremely high recharge. If you improve the combo system, I dunno. My point is, there are actually a lot of vectors in which it would be easy to improve the overall power of DB without buffing BF, AS, or SS.

Seems difficult to justify? DB is a pretty good set already, albeit with a lot of skippable powers, not sure it needs to be better.

Hide in fact costs no endurance.

I don't have Mids (I'm on a Mac), but as far as I know it's always been a builder on every AT. That's what City of Data says, and it's also what my experience was on a Brute sav melee that I was playing a couple of weeks ago.

Brute Fury enhances Savage's DoTs, Scrapper crits do not. As a result, Brute damage is ahead of Scrapper damage in Savage until like highly late-game 50, at which point they're mostly at parity (Scrapper can probably pull mildly ahead with a really good build). I don't really worry about building Brutes as tanks, personally.

Shred is a builder, not a spender. Savage only has two spenders: hemorrhage and rending flurry.

Personally, I'd play Savage Melee as a Brute, not a scrapper. Hemorrhage is a very skippable power in Savage. The cone attack, Shred, is a fine cone attack, but some people just don't like relatively long-animating melee cones and would skip it. As is typical for most attack sets, while you'll want both the T1 and T2 early on, you'll probably eventually get to the point where you can drop one of them once your global recharge gets high enough. EDIT: As Oysterhead says below, Confront is always skippable.

This build takes both the T1 and T2 ranged attack powers. I don't know much about Beam Rifle in particular, but I'd generally be inclined to wonder if that isn't overkill. Lots of people liked to take both powers with the old Sent inherent where you triggered the two different kinds of opportunity with them, but under the new system, you should only take both T1 and T2 if you either want one as a useful mule or you need them both in order to manage a ST attack chain.

It's a pretty bad approximation. I'm taking about something that's specifically designed to be as seamless as possible.

One of the things that's a little out-of-step with modern fashion in the CoH costume designer is that chest pieces almost all come down to a sharp end at the border between the chest piece and the leg piece. It would be great if we could make it look like we were wearing shirts or sweathirts that were untucked from our pants. I think this could be done with the addition of a couple of belts. A belt that smoothly continued the "Baggy 1" pattern for a top but went down a couple of inches would give us a lot of power to create sweatshirts/hoodies. Another that matched the female Cyberpunk 1 (and related) patterns would give us a nice way to create some subtle differences in a popular top option. One that extended the Dress Shirt pattern would perhaps be tougher to get right, but also valuable. Oh, and one that continued the Retro Scifi 6 shirt would really help complete a number of choices for representing ordinary clothing.

I mean, up to you. Lots of people do put it on autofire. For the clicky-mez-protect armors, personally, I try to just develop some discipline about checking whether they're available between spawns, rather than keep them on auto. It's easy to get all of them to greatly-more-than-permanent, so I generally think that clicking them on cooldown is a bit of a waste, and if you do let their coverage drop and get mezzed, it's generally not that hard to recover, but that's a matter of personal taste.

Shield gets Knockback protection/resistance in Active Defense, you shouldn't need to slot for it.

The idea that claws could possibly be considered the weakest melee set is flatly crazy. SR and Ice are both good armor sets, though again, there isn't an obvious bad choice there.

This is a persistent myth. Streakbreaker is irrelevant to the performance of SR or other defense sets. If your enemy's adjusted chance to hit you is less than 20%, which it should be for even high-rank opponents with a built out defense set, then in order for streakbreaker to kick in, a single opponent must miss you 100 times in a row. In practice, streakbreaker never kicks in for two reasons: 1. Almost no fights last long enough for any opponent to attack 100 times at all. 2. If for some reason someone does get 100 attacks on you, it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all miss. If streakbreaker does ever kick in, that's a sign of huge durability, not a problem. It would mean you literally took zero damage from an AV for several minutes.

I'm not sure that Tankers really have any "bad" primaries. I'm not that enthused about Willpower or Dark, but you should be able to build a solidly tough Tank with anything. Kinetic Melee is probably the worst melee set now? Broadsword isn't terrible, but it's outshone by all the other weapons in my opinion. Martial arts has one big saving grace, which is its massive defense bonus. I wouldn't say it's bad, but if you pair it with a defense set as an armor, especially on tanks, you're left with a set that's very short on AoE, has fine but not amazing ST, and its big advantage is superfluous.

Its (crashing) T9 has 70% toxic resistance base (Tanker numbers). It doesn't have any toxic resistance in its non-T9 powers, and it doesn't have any defense at all to anything, but it does of course have healing and regen in Energize and sapping in Power Sink, which are mitigation against all damage types. (Weirdly, I found that despite offering no Defense, Electric Armor has DDR in Static Shield. ??? )