aethereal

If you feel like you want to use green insps for immediate breathing room, you can still do that. But if you want to use insps defensively, purples and oranges are probably better, and in either case Reconstruction (about the equivalent of a large green once every 15-20 seconds) reduces pressure on your insp usage.

I would agree that recharge protection would be more valuable than regen protection, and I also thought that the revamp was tepid.

Sure. Sappers annoy everyone. But @SomeGuy made the claim that "lack of debuff resistance was part of what made the set horrible before." I read a lot of Regen threads, I never once heard someone say, "The problem with Regen is it doesn't offer recovery debuff resistance, just like almost all armors." And, conversely, if you skip Quick Recovery, you'll still have most of your recovery debuff resistance (there's also up to 30% resistance in Reactive Regen if you max out stacks, I believe). Regen debuffs just aren't that common, and the problem with Fast Healing is that it contributes very little to the 95% of the mobs in the game that don't debuff your regen, they just try to kill you. Reconstruction and Second Wind are in fact useful to stay alive most of the time (Second Wind maybe less so if you already have all the max HP you need through Ailment Resistance and accolades). To be clear: I think that Fast Healing and Quick Recovery are skippable. I don't mean, "These are actively bad powers that you should never consider," like, I don't know, SR's T9 power or something. Stuff that's not worth its cast time. I mean, if you're looking at your build and you're like, "Jesus, I just need to find something to drop," then Fast Healing makes you minorly worse in a small minority of cases where you probably are fine. Quick Recovery's utility will depend on what your endurance economy needs are, but lots of builds just don't need another recovery power. Sure, you may put a slightly higher premium on targeting sappers -- just like, again, most people do.

Lack of regen debuff was never what made the set bad, it was just people pattern matching Super Reflexes onto Regeneration. And 20% unenhanceable regen debuff resistance is not going to actually move the needle on regen debuffs. Recovery debuff resistance was never even remotely on anyone's complaint card about Regen. I mean, is it cool that they added some? Sure! But nobody before the revamp was saying, "Man, if this set had recovery debuff resistance, I'd be excited about it."

I'm with @Yomo Kimyata. Regeneration remains a clicky, active set. I get that some people really, really, really don't want Regen to be a clicky, active set and want a passive regen set, but Regeneration is not that, even with the Instant Healing -> Reactive Regeneration change. Reconstruction is mandatory. What isn't mandatory is Fast Healing or Quick Recovery.

Valuable point, thanks. Still, that would mean you need to exceed 100% slotting, which seems tough with ED. Does purple patch affect mag for powers where enhancements affect mag? It doesn't ordinarily affect mag.

I would expect that Scrappers would do worse than Stalkers and similar to Brutes, without the ATO2. With possible exceptions for DB and Claws which can really leverage the Scrapper scalar with their large +damage. But I'd be interested to find out for real.

Can it? I don't feel like I understand the new magnitude enhancement thing very much at all, but CoD claims that it has a mag 1 unenhanceable effect and a mag 1 enhanceable effect. Can you in fact enhance that up to mag 4?

This is all just incorrect to a greater or lesser degree. Like, I don't know that that really makes a difference for your overall point, but to be clear, both Stalkers and Scrappers have better sustained DPS in long fights than Brutes do, and the days of Brutes needing a longer fight in order to build fury are over. Team performance is hard to judge, but my general feeling is that with the crit chance bonus, at least some Stalkers are perfectly capable of being highly contributory in an AoE-heavy team environment (but one should realize that in a lot of team situations, no melee is going to beat out a nuke-using ranged AT).

Scrappers should in fact get some baseline bonus in exchange for reducing the power of the +50% crit rate ATO. Lower the power of the tip top of Scrapper builds and increase the power of less optimized ones. For people who argue that Scrapper doesn't depend on the ATO to hit benchmarks, I would genuinely enjoy seeing some tests without it slotted. My guess is that Trapdoor times would be worse but not catastrophically so, but pylon times would crater. People could also see what they get from a non-superior ATO to split the difference between using it and not slotting it at all.

Energy Focus makes Barrage do a guaranteed stun instead of a chance to stun (and also some -regen which won't be relevant unless you're fighting a GM or AV, and some -special which is unlikely to be very noticeable). It can also be consumed by Power Crash (increases possible number of target), and most notably by Energy Transfer (reduces the cast time from 3 seconds to 1 second).

I remember an early play experience with a Brute (like... back on live, I can't remember when but probably 2010 or so) where I really felt like I was killing it but I was pushed into the next group early in order to keep my fury high. It was distinctive and fun. But the much faster overall pace of play means that's not accessible now. Everyone careens from group to group without pause. Brutes need a new identity because their old one has been overtaken by the state of the game.

You just don't like the animation or something? Shin Breaker is the best combo-builder attack in the set. Can you get by without it? Sure. You can use Initial Strike, Heavy Blow, and Rib Cracker to build your combos and everything will be fine. You probably won't be able to get by without Initial Strike if you don't take Shin Breaker. You will be weaker than if you took it. But like... if you just want "viable," and not "high performance," I'm sure it'd be fine.

The problem with moving nukes to T1 isn't that it'd be overpowered, it's that it'd be a bad leveling experience! You don't want to have a character who has a nuke but nothing else at level 1. You'd have multi-minute pauses between each action. Like, look, I'm not saying that there is absolutely nothing to having some exciting powers as the capstone to a set (though plenty of sets really don't have exciting capstones). But, empirically, I'm sorry, the game does not put very much weight at all to what tier the power is in terms of the overall strength of that power. Especially like "T4 vs T8." Placing a power in a tier is almost entirely about not the strength of the power, but laddering the character into a play experience.

Tier of power is just not a big factor in the balance of the power, sorry. Tier is mainly a consideration in terms of how to have a relatively smooth leveling expy.

Totally agree. That was why I brought it up. I think that Stalkers are, numerically, as bad off as Brutes are or worse, but they play differently than Scrappers, while Brutes play largely the same as Tanks and Scrappers, and I think that makes all the difference in terms of people's overall satisfaction with the AT.

First of all, a note of self-correction: there are "only" 49 Scrappers whose times are better than the best Stalker on your list. Second: There are 55 Stalkers on your list, from a wide variety of players. It's not like there was zero interest in validating Stalkers. And again, people here are claiming that Stalkers have strongly superior ST DPS to Scrappers -- of 55 tries from dozens of players we are saying that despite Stalkers actually being strongly better than Scrappers at this, none of them could get into the top, say, 20? Does this actually pass the sniff test? Third: What actual affirmative evidence does anyone have that Stalkers have better ST DPS than Scrappers? Like, I think that the pylon times are pretty good evidence. I'll also say that my own experiences with Stalkers -- I like Stalkers and have played a bunch of them -- have never suggested to me that holistically they had superior ST DPS than an equivalently-optimized Scrapper (I have also played a bunch of Scrappers). I'm seeing a lot of people assert that Stalkers outclass Scrappers here, cite no evidence, and then try to come up with elaborate theories for why the other evidence shouldn't count. But is there any affirmative evidence that Stalkers in fact have better ST DPS than Scrappers? Fourth: I think the relatively larger number of people interested in optimizing Scrappers for pylons than Stalkers is a pretty straightforward story: people tried both, found that Scrappers were superior, and then the kind of player who wanted to post a really good pylon time focused their efforts on the AT that was best for the job. Fifth: I mean, are you willing to apply this kind of logic to any other combo of ATs? Maybe Brutes actually outclass Scrappers in ST DPS! Yes, okay, Scrappers post better pylon times than Brutes, but aren't all of your above arguments equally valid if you plug in the word "Brute" for Stalker?

a. I mean, this feels to me like you're reaching. Your claim is that stalkers do "much better" ST DPS than Scrapper. But nobody can actually demonstrate this? b. I'm not comparing Stalkers to Crabberminds or Masterminds. If there's some reason to believe that Pylons are a bad comparison for, very specifically, scrappers vs stalkers ST DPS, I think you need to point out what that reason is, because I'm not seeing it. There are certainly limitations to Pylons as a test, but I think they're a good test for this specific thing that we're talking about.

Your spreadsheet has about 80 scrapper times below the lowest stalker time.

Why do you think Stalkers consistently perform much worse than Scrappers on Pylon tests if they do far better ST damage than Scrappers?

Yellow insps will indeed improve your accuracy (so will global accuracy bonuses, tactics, the kismet to-hit unique, etc. Global recharge (including Hasten) should improve the recharge time of the temp power. What you can't improve on the temp power is its damage: red insps etc won't affect it.

Okay, so Battle Axe is endurance-heavy. Bio is an overall strong set that gets an early Recovery power (Inexhaustible at level 1), then Efficient mode and at 24 can get DNA siphons which is another endurance tool. It also has a damage aura (albeit not until level 28) which is strong on Brutes and just generally a good set. Its hole is dealing with debuffs/controls: it has holes in its mez protection to exotic mezzes and and has no debuff resistance. Psi is a new set so you aren't sick of it yet, and it gets what's reported to be a pretty powerful endurance tool in Consume Psyche at level 10. I've never played it and some people I think don't love it, but you might want to try it out. Other sets with endurance tools are Willpower (overall simple set, I think it lacks some performance ceiling but comes together fine) and Regeneration (I think still weak unless you pair it with very specific pools and incarnate choices, but better than it was). Electrical, Energy Aura, Ice, and to some extent Dark have good endurance tools eventually, but not by the 20s.

The concept that I believe the OP has is that this enables people to cover defense holes in their builds with high-end inspirations. You open AH between every mission and fill your insp tray with purple/orange insps, and if you run out you grab more from your email even in the middle of a mission.

You're just gonna love the new update where all enhancement values listed in the games are lies. And so are the power descriptions.

Just to be clear, Blinding Powder doesn't work on lieutenants (without stacking). And has only a 50% chance to confuse (and the sleep is only mag 2 as well). Having it be mag 4 ("works on bosses") would clearly be a stretch for an armor power, but working only on minions makes it a not great power IMO. This isn't an indictment of the set, just the power. I have extensively played level 50 /Ninj scrapper, stalker, and sentinel toons.