aethereal

Purse melee also increases your salvage carry capacity by one.

But Everyrose was a Spines/Bio brute.

The thing with Energy Blast is that KB is at best a mixed blessing. People get really hung up on whether it's Good, Actually or Bad, Actually, but we don't super need to weigh it into an overall assessment. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. And it's also inconsistent. So if you're in a situation where it's good, you can't rely on it. If you're in a situation where it's bad, you have to do the work to mitigate it (maneuver, apply only to immobilized targets, whatever) even when it's not going to happen. If you turn it to KD, you get short-duration CC that's very inconsistent, at the price of a slot. It's hard to plan around. In comparison, all the other sets give you consistently useful buffs. Dark gives you -to-hit on every hit. Rad gives you -defense on every hit (and has some holds mixed in). Fire gives more damage. Ice has slow and holds. Etc. What does Energy get in return for a side effect that's inconsistent, and also an active detriment that must be played around some of the time? Is KB when it does activate and when it's not a negative super great? I don't think it's so amazing that we need to pay this cost for it. Does Energy have any other benefits? Not that I can see. It has the template for average power types (T1/T2/Heavy Hitter/Snipe/Cone/TAoE/PBAoE T9/soft mez/Aim). It has a fine damage type but not an amazing one. It has average-ish DPAs.

Shield Charge does get a damage buff from Fury. Like most pseudo (rather than actual) pets, it's set to copy bonuses from its caster. The reason why Shield Charge may not work great on a Brute is that pseudo-pets have low damage caps (I think 400%, which is to say +300% over normal), making it easy with normal slotting + fury to be right at cap (~+275% with full fury + normal damage enhancement) and then you waste additional buffs (from teammembers or for example Build Up).

By the way, the tanker bonus to arc doesn't show up in in game info, because it's applied by a global proc (this is one of several reasons that I think HC overuses global procs). I don't know how to tell if frost is exempted from the bonus, and don't care to go back to try to find the patch notes, but it *probably* has a wider effective arc on tanks. EDIT: Actually, I think I do understand how to tell if it's exempted. Powers that are exempted have "Strength Disallowed: Arc." Frost does not have this; it should be affected by the Tanker Cone Arc Bonus.

...no? Dominator secondaries are not blast sets.

Don't we just call this "Farsight"?

Fury is just a global damage buff, basically like eating a red insp. It will generally affect the damage of (almost) all powers. The only really common source of damage not affected by fury is procs.

I think it would. Spiritual Alpha is a "strength to ToHit" effect. Both to-hit buffs and debuffs are ToHit effects, with, as you say, positive or negative values. I can't quite see how they would prevent Strength to ToHit from affecting both (obviously, you can code an effect to ignore outside buffs/debuffs). Haven't tested, don't claim to have expert knowledge here. One thing that does speak against the idea that ToHit buffs and debuffs would be equally affected is that there are two different categories of enhancement -- ToHit Buff and ToHitDebuff. Contrast with, say, Endurance Modification, which clearly is affected by the same thing regardless of sign and has only one enhancement type, not an Endurance Mod Buff and Endurance Mod Debuff. EDIT: That said, CoD at least seems to think that ToHit Buff and ToHitDebuff enhancements are the same thing: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=boosts.crafted_deflated_ego_a.crafted_deflated_ego_a https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=boosts.attuned_encouraged_accuracy_a.attuned_encouraged_accuracy_a EDIT2: This raises an interesting question. If there were a power that gave both +to-hit and -to-hit (to different targets), and both were enhanceable, and you could slot both To Hit Buff and To Hit Debuff sets in it, probably each effect would be enhanced by both enhancement types. So my question is, how is Enhancement Diversification calculated? Would you hit ED by slotting three total of To Hit Buff and To Hit Debuff SO-level enhancements in any combination? Or could you cheat ED by having ED-limit to-hit buffing and ED-limit to-hit debuffing, and have each component reaching twice ED limit? I think this is purely theoretical, since I don't think any power exists that fits these requirements.

It's very easy for me to build without enchantments. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I've never used enchantments in CoH at all. Enhancements are a different story.

For whatever it's worth, it's "sow" the seed of doubt. Sew is what you do with needle and thread, sow is what you do with seeds.

No. It just calls urandom to get a random number. The CoH devs did not roll their own random number generator.

The kinds of biases that people imagine in the RNG would actually be really hard to put in. We've seen what happened when the original devs wanted to bias the random number generator: they developed streakbreaker. They didn't build subtle hidden biases into the RNG. Like, why would you? What would the point be? (And CoH uses for the basis of its random number generator the random seed of the operating system, and besides that, basic straightforward methods of turning the random seed into numbers in a particular range. There is very little possibility that there is any meaningful bias in it that the devs didn't intentionally build in.)

Stalkers also specifically get much less of a damage boost out of Bio than Scrappers do, as they get +31.25% damage from offensive adaptation on a 1.125 scalar while Stalkers get a +25% damage on a 1.0 scalar. (And no damage aura, of course).

5% chance base for minions and below, 10% chance base for lieutenants and above. Note, though, that stalkers are just 10% for everyone. Obviously, having a 10% chance for critting against minions does not "waste" anything -- you're no more or less likely to crit that boss having critted the minion you just attacked.

I roll to disbelieve that a blaster in the era of sustains has an endurance problem.

Terrible news: it won't work. The proc checks for "isFriend" and won't fire if the target is a friend. The good news is that you can't sub your buddies or pets if you happen to have an endmod power that targets both allies and enemies, the bad news is you can't stun yourself.

Stalkers are barely less durable than scrappers. But on the other hand Scrappers who are built to take advantage of PPM and the ATO proc crit more than stalkers.

It seems really backward to me to say that the problem with the current meta is that blasters and scrappers need help.

My guess is that's an oversight. It's not just SR toggles, sentinel armor values are generally lower than scrappers/stalkers/brutes.

Nope, they're slightly lower. So for example, focused fighting (the first toggle in super reflexes) gives 13.875% melee defense to scrappers and 12.950% to sentinels. (Though I don't think that sentinels have any real durability problems.)

Sentinels have a ranged damage scalar of 0.95. Defenders have 0.65. Corruptors have 0.75. Obviously, Defender and Corruptors have access to buff/debuff sets, and certain of those can result in massive increases in personal damage. And they have higher AoE caps. But some people have the impression that Sentinels' base damage is much lower than it actually is.

There's no additional death penalty.

Also, it turns out that if you do get massively unlucky and a PvPer does notice you and kill you -- and I've ventured into PvP zones before, and let me tell you it's much harder to find a PvPer to kill you than the reverse -- it turns out you don't scream, "I'M MELTING, I'M MELTING" and turn into a puddle of gross fluids on the floor near your computer. You just, like... go do something else for ten minutes and then try again.

If you're concerned with getting exploration badges specifically, it might be helpful to take a second build and get the Concealment pool to minimize the chances that anyone will see you while you're running around. (Obviously, stealth is not perfect in PvP, but it's pretty helpful if you aren't even intending to attack.)