aethereal

At least in the character creator itself, in Titan Weapons (Scrapper, if that makes a difference, female body) the VK-99 Event Horizon and the PX-17N Supernova have their particle effects still turned ON while sheathed. So does the Plasma Sword. So does the Concrete Mallet.

That's not true. DoT secondary effects, as from Savage Melee or Fiery Melee, get nothing from crits. DoTs that are part of the main effect of the power typically have crits that sum up the total damage from the DoT and do it as a lump sum all up front. For example: Scrapper Freezing Touch does 16.5788 damage every 0.25 seconds for 2.6 seconds, so 11 ticks, for a total of 182.3668 damage If it crits, it does 182.6796 damage up front. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.ice_melee.freezing_touch&at=scrapper Scrapper 1,000 Cuts does 9.4468 points of Lethal damage (all affected targets) every 0.2s for 2.05s (100% chance) after 0.1s. So that's 11 ticks for 103.9148 damage, plus 43.7931 in one shot at 2.1 seconds, so that's a total of 147.7079 damage, and when it crits it does... 138.2609 damage up front. Slightly less than doubling everything, but obviously not just doubling the non-DoT component. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.dual_blades.high_low&at=scrapper

To hit bonuses, not accuracy bonuses. Defense-beyond-softcap doesn't give you any more mitigation to high-accuracy enemies. And because of that, you need to be fighting +6 enemies before they start getting +to-hit through the purple patch (at which point being overcap would help you, but also man are you real sure you want to fight +6 enemies?).

Btw, with Scrapper ATOs, crits get vastly more likely than 10%. It is now the case that at level 50, with good slotting of ATO2 and PPM abuse, scrappers solidly outdamage brutes.

So if you both have 95% damage enhancement in your powers, then: 1.125 * 1.95 = 2.19375 scale damage for scrappers, excluding crits. Brutes: .75 * (1 + .95 + X) = 2.19375 1 + .95 + X = 2.925 X = .975 When your fury gives you 97.5% damage, you should outdamage a scrapper with similar slotting, excluding crits. So that's when Fury is at 49%.

I extensively roleplayed on Everlasting for years with short, uninformative, "witty" lines or snatches of poetry in my bio. What you put in there is just your style, it's not like there's a requirement.

Everything's additive, not multiplicative. There are as far as I can recall no cases in city of heroes where you get 10% bonus and another 10% bonus and the result is 121%, it's always 120%. (I guess there are some cases where bonuses to two different stats end up being multiplicative to a final result in the system, like to hit and accuracy, or damage and resist damage. But no case where each bonus is multiplied by an arbitrary number of other bonuses).

An extremely strict reading of the 5e stat block for a Rust Monster suggests that the Rust Monster can only voluntarily rust a ferrous metal object with its antennae, but any metal object (not just ferrous) which hits the rust monster is vulnerable to rusting. But that's fairly crazy, and presumably the ferrous qualifier is meant to be applied. Brass is non-ferrous. It does oxidize (to a greenish color, like copper), which I guess isn't technically rust. So, to this obviously extremely relevant topic, I'd say that Nemesis is largely immune to Rust Monsters.

There are a lot of widely divergent Elec sets in this game: Electric Blast (with a significantly different Elec Blast set for Sentinels than Blasters/Corruptors/Defenders) Electrical Manipulation Electric Melee (with a significantly different Elec Melee set for Stalkers than for Scrappers/Brutes/Tanks) Electric Armor Electric Control Electrical Affinity Electricity Assault So because of that, almost every Archetype can have an elec/elec powerset. (Masterminds can't, the epics can't, I think everyone else can). I haven't played Electric Control, Affinity, Assault, or Manipulation beyond lowbie levels and can't really comment on them. Electric Melee is generally considered an AoE set. It has the powerful Lightning Rod mini-nuke attack, which gives sit a very strong once-per-spawn-or-so AoE, then it has Jacob's Ladder (narrow cone, not generally loved), Chain Induction (chain attack, fun, not going to hit the entire spawn or anything), and Thunderstrike (strong AoE to a very small area, weak AoE to a large area, plus knockdown). It lacks much in the way of good ST attacks, though of course Stalkers get an assassin's strike variant. Electric Armor is a pure resist set, and is much better on Tankers/Brutes, with their higher resist caps, than Scrappers/Sentinels/Stalkers. It's known for having a pretty easy time hitting 90% resists to major damage types. It also has near-immunity to endurance drain, good endurance management, a good heal, and a damage aura. I've found it a little painful in early levels, when it has endurance problems, but that's not uncommon for armor sets. Electric Blast was usually considered somewhat weak until the most recent page, when it got some buffs. I'd consider it a good performer but not one of the stand out best blast sets, now. It's unusual, with a toggle pet which can be somewhat frustrating until you get good mez protect by either being level 50 or being a Sentinel.

My stalker's ST attacks were pretty much Frozen Touch, Assassin's Ice Sword, and Moonbeam with occasional Ice Sword (but ideally its place in the rotation was eaten by Build Up or my Bio clickies). Frozen Fists is hot garbage, Ice Sword is mediocre, Greater Ice Sword (for non-Stalkers) is mediocre. The set does have a problem with ST attacks, especially if you aren't really hammering global recharge hard. Frost takes Range enhancements, so you can make its area quite large by slotting a couple of damage/range enhancements in there.

Ice Melee has an awesomely damaging power in Frozen Touch, but non-Stalker versions of it lack another compelling single target attack. Obviously, stalkers get the always reliable assassin's strike. Frost and frozen aura are great area attacks. I soloed around twenty AVs and GMs with an Ice/Bio stalker. They do good damage.

You can't make enemies bow. That bind executes an emote on your character and says, "Your powers are weak, <target name>"

And one real quick addendum that I don't think is super material, but also biases towards Brutes instead of Scrappers. The least-known effect of Blood Thirst, the Build Up replacement for Savage, is that it changes the DoTs from Savage from "75% chance, cancel on miss" to "all four ticks guaranteed." Since Brutes get Fury onto their DoTs, this advantages Brutes over Scrappers.

This is a somewhat random post, but I thought people might be interested in Brute vs Scrapper damage and why Savage is a better Brute set than a Scrapper set. I'm going to focus on Vicious Slash, but the same basic lessons redound throughout the Savage set. Baseline for Comparisons So the thing about Savage is it has this DoT component that's unusual. To understand how unusual it is, let's first compare Scrappers and Brutes for a power somewhat similar to Vicious Slash, but without the DoT component. I'll use Soaring Dragon from the Katana set. On a Brute, at level 50, Soaring Dragon does a base 75.0739 damage. It has a 1.584 second arcanatime cast, so its Arcana DPA is 47.4 base. It seems reasonably commonly accepted that Brutes can fairly easily attain and maintain an 80 Fury, so that's +160% damage, and you can get +95% damage enhancement fairly easily on a power, so call it a total of +255% damage and you get 266.5123 damage and 168.2527 DPA. Scrappers are more complicated. On a Scrapper, Soaring Dragon does a base 112.6107 damage. Same cast time, so its Arcana DPA is 71.1 base. Per assumptions above, we give it +95% damage enhancement and get 219.5909 damage and 138.6305 DPA, but that's before crits. Back in the old days, before ATOs, you could fairly reasonably say, "Okay, well, you have a 10% crit rate (against non-minions), so basically scrapper damage averages 10% higher." (ie, if 90% of the time you do X damage and 10% of the time you do 2X damage, then your total damage is .9X + .1 * 2X = 1.1 X). Soaring Dragon has "normal" crits (that is to say, they do double damage), so in the pre-ATO days, it was reasonable to call their expected damage 241.5500 and DPA 152.4937. You will note that that means that their damage is slightly under the Brute damage that we note above, and this is why there was a long period of time on Live where Scrappers were considered just basically inferior to Brutes: lower damage, lower hp, lower resist cap, and Brutes get taunt auras in every armor. But ATOs changed things. Okay, first of all the ATO1, this is simple. It (with the Superior version) raises the non-minion crit rate of Scrappers to 16% instead of 10%. If you only slot ATO1, then we just redo the same calculation above with a 16% crit rate instead of a 10% crit rate. So now your total damage is .84X + .16 * 2X = 1.16X. That means expected damage is 254.7254 and DPA 160.8114. This still leaves you behind Brutes, but erases more than half of the deficit. ATO2 isn't simple. The Superior ATO2 gives you a 3 PPM chance to 3.25 seconds of +50% crit rate (we'll assume you're also slotting ATO1). Ooof. Okay, so first of all let's pretend that PPM worked the way it was originally imagined to. So you got three activations of it per minute. That means each minute you'd have 9.75 seconds of +50% PPM, and the other 50.25 seconds would be normal crit rate. So that's roughly this, if X is your damage: 9.75 * 1.66 * X / 60 + 50.25 * 1.16 * X / 60 = 1.24125X damage. So if we plug that in with Soaring Dragon, we get 272.5671 damage and 172.0752 DPA. We are now mildly ahead of Brutes. But we all know that you can do better than 3 procs per minute. Since PPM ignores global recharge, it's simple enough to get much better than 3 PPM. It gets pretty complicated to calculate the actual uptime of the ATO2. A really optimal build might have it fire 7 or 8 times per minute, and also try to time it so that some of its non-uptime is a no-op, eaten by the animation time of powers. Getting super into this is overly complicated, let's just say that you can get 6 procs per minute and calculate it by how much of the minute you're in its effect: 19.5 seconds in effect and 40.5 seconds out of it yields a blended damage multiplier of 1.3225, which in turn means that our damage becomes 290.4089 and our DPA is 183.3389. And that's roughly the current situation: Scrappers have a significant damage advantage over Brutes. Basically, they reach parity with/very slight superiority to Brute damage if they slot both superior ATOs at all, and their damage advantage increases significantly as they use global recharge to improve PPM on their ATO. But Getting Back to Savage Now instead of Soaring Dragon, let's look at Vicious Slash. Vicious Slash has the same base damage as Soaring Dragon (75.0739 on Brutes, 112.6107 on Scrappers), but it does up to 4 ticks of DoT that do 13.5133 damage (for Brutes) or 20.2699 (for Scrappers). This DoT damage is not doubled for Scrapper crits, but it is affected by Fury. So for Brutes: Damage including average performance from the DoTs is 102.7867, DPA is 55.6. Assuming 95% damage enhancement and 80 fury, we get 364.8928 damage and 197.4528 DPA. You will note that the DoTs are significant! Vicious Slash does a lot more damage than Soaring Eagle! For Scrappers, our non-crit damage is 154.1798 (base) and DPA is 83.4. Our crit damage is 266.7905 and crit DPA is 144.367 (note that it's not double what the base damage is). With 95% damage enhancement, we get 300.6506 damage and 162.6897 DPA (non-crit) and 520.2405 damage and 281.5154 DPA (crit). Okay, so our four Scrapper scenarios: 1. No ATOs: 10% crit rate: .9 * 300.6506 + .1 * 520.2405 = 322.6096 damage and 174.5722 DPA (worse than Brutes) 2. Just ATO1: 16% crit rate: .84 * 300.6506 + .16 * 520.2405 = 335.7850 damage and 181.7018 DPA (worse than Brutes) 3. AT01 + 3 procs per minute of ATO2: 24.125% crit rate: .75875 * 300.6506 + .24125 * 520.2405 = 353.6267 damage and 191.3564 DPA (still worse than Brutes) 4. ATO1 + 6 procs per minute of ATO2: 32.225% crit rate: .67775 * 300.6506 + .32225 * 520.2405 = 371.4134 damage and 200.9813 DPA (essentially the same as Brutes) So to sum up: With Savage Melee, the damage advantage that Scrappers usually enjoy over Brutes is substantially diminished shading to non-existent. Way way way TL;DR With other sets, Scrappers, at level 50 and with the ATOs slotted, enjoy a substantial damage advantage over Brutes. With Savage, they don't. Brutes have better HP, better resist caps, and taunt auras in every armor. They also get better damage from damage auras. They're a better choice for Savage.

Ah, the difference in our calculations was that I was doing three DoT ticks, not four. I think you're right. I always forget how this works, I was interpreting "every 1.0s for 3.1s (75%t chance) after 1.0s." I always want the "after 1.0 seconds" to eat one of the seconds of the duration (that is, for it to start the duration immediately, but not to do anything until 1s of the duration to have passed). But I believe what it actually means is "don't start the 3.1s duration for a second, then do ticks at 0, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0," so you're correct.

I don't think you're calculating this right. It looks like you've got something mildly wrong with the base damage (I calculate 80 DPA for Vicious Slash), but then you're doubling the damage for the crit, and the crits don't fully double the damage because they don't double the bleed damage. So I get 140.987 DPA for Vicious Slash on crit. Hemo potentially has the highest DPA of Savage Melee attacks, but to get it above Vicious, you have to blow your blood frenzy wad and suffer through lockout, which means you don't get that damage very often, and there's an opportunity cost in terms of using your AoE. And of course it's over a five second DoT. Meanwhile, use it with less than 5 blood frenzy and you don't get particularly great damage, you still have to rebuild your blood frenzy from zero, and it's still over five seconds. As a Stalker, you can at least use your mostly-controllable crits to be very likely to crit with hemo and thus get your crit damage all up front instead of over the DoT. But a scrapper can't predictably do that. It's not like... the worst attack in the world. But it's awkward and even if you use it optimally you aren't that much better off than using your ordinary three ST attacks.

Hemorrhage isn't broken -- it was broken on Stalkers for a while, and that made it good for Stalkers. Now it's just pretty bad for everyone.

Savage is pretty high damage on a brute. It's mediocre on a scrapper. This is one of those cases where the DoT being affected by fury, but not multiplied by a crit, makes a big difference.

I'm deeply uninterested in arguing it with you, I'm just saying that those are the stakes at play here. People who feel that taunt auras are already overly accessible to scrappers are not likely to want to give everyone a taunt aura at the cost of just one slot.

It is technically possible, yes. I very much doubt that they would make it. Basically, I think that the difference of opinion here is between "people who think that a taunt aura is the natural right of every character who wants it/thinks that it's a quality-of-life thing that just makes the game fun" and "people who think that taunt auras are a powerful ability that you should have to pay a significant opportunity cost to get." People who are concerned that taunt auras are already too accessible to scrappers are not going to want to make the "cost" of a taunt aura be only one slot.

I believe you can set the arena to disable incarnates (you might want to double-check), just the default is that it allows them.

Vengeful Slice and 1,000 Cuts both do knock"down," which is to say low-magnitude (0.67, in this case) knockback. Basically it's knockback with no actual distance, so they immediately cut to the end-of-knockback animation where they fall down and then get back up again. Knockup is a relatively rare power effect. The power that immediately comes to mind that has it is Air Superiority from the Flight powerpool. Superstrength's Knockout Blow has it as well, plus Crushing Uppercut from Street Justice and Jawbreaker from War Mace. I'm sure there are other examples, but most knocks in the game are back/down. What the dev in this thread is talking about should be basically unchanged in terms of the effects that you see on screen. Maybe very subtle differences. But they aren't talking about removing knock effects from powers, they're talking about making changes in the way that the game represents the same or very similar effects.

Correct, mob rank (ie minion, lt, boss, av etc) is not part of the purple patch, just mob level. Rank affects other things that can accumulate with the people patch (eg you get some bonus accuracy from being a boss and some more bonus accuracy from the purple patch), but rank does not increase your effective level.

Did she say she was going to do zone PvP? The arena allows incarnate powers. To the OP: I think it's worth asking yourself, "Do I want to hilariously destroy my husband in PvP, where it's not even a match-up and he can't do anything I could win 20 times in a row? Or do I want to go in for a real fight, but maybe the odds are in my favor." Assuming your husband is not an experienced PvPer and is not building specifically for PvP in mind, some of the suggestions you're getting here are going to bias towards the first scenario. Like if you hover-blast him and use web grenade to keep him grounded and Poison to debuff the hell out of him, I mean... Unless he is himself pretty experienced with PvP, you won't really be fighting any more than you're fighting if you attack a gray-conn opponent.

Your bit about the purple patch doesn't really make sense and I'm wondering if you typoed it, but: No, AVs do not have any special resistance to resistance debuffs (as they do to most other debuffs) Yes, Resistance debuffs are affected by the purple patch, so they will be reduced against higher-level foes