aethereal

It's ideal to not use it purely reactively, because then you do spend some time mezzed and thus more vulnerable to damage, etc. If you're using anything like a normal build, you'll have practiced brawler way more than perma just though your global recharge, and you can easily reapply it between fights such that it's very unlikely that you'll ever have a gap in your protection. If you do end up with a small gap, it's not the end of the world, though. People get freaked out that it's not a toggle and put it on auto, but that ends up applying it way too often for most play -- then they get irritated that it's messing up their dps.

I promise you that you do not need to put practiced brawler on auto or cast it on cooldown. Just train yourself to tap it while you're moving between mobs. If you do end up with a small period of vulnerability to mez, then, well, first, about 90-95% of mezzes are going to miss you, and if one does hit, you can cast practiced brawler through a mez.

If we imagine that powers are somewhat loosely interpreted, for one power probably Willpower: extreme healing seems like it would be useful for things like illness, and having a strong mind feels useful for a variety of stuff. And a rez! If we're taking the power effects more literally, such that all that the strong mindedness of willpower is actually good for is psi defense and the are no psi attacks, maybe invulnerability instead. Probably kinetics for the other power set, that's got a heal, some buffs that seem like they'd be useful in non-combat situations, and people would love getting the superjump power. Teleportation is probably the best choice for travel powers but maybe you need to take flight instead just for the coolness. Is Mystic Flight an option?

You're correct. Also, the odds of missing 100 attacks in row even with floored to hit chance are negligible (about 0.6%), so even if you let someone attack you 100 times in a row, steak breaker will almost certainly not kick in.

RDR should probably be capped at 90% or 95%.

There's no cap in terms of the multiplicative chance that a proc activates on at least one of the targets in a multi-target power. The proc chance cap is the cap of the chance to proc on a given target. If you have a Call if the Sandman in frozen aura and you hit ten targets with it, there's a roughly 99% chance it will fire.

Obviously it depends on a lot of things. But my experience is that at high difficulty settings, the heals and absorbs aren't enough to deal with incoming damage. Defense, resistance, and regeneration are the primary mitigation of Bio, and the heals and absorbs don't keep you up through their cooldowns without those mitigation layers. This may be somewhat less true on tanks -- I have brought a Bio tank to 50, but more of my experience is on brutes, stalkers, and scrappers.

It has no DDR and I think no regen debuff resistance. A large variety of high-level enemies are a real PITA due to that.

I know that this is months old, but the Super Stunner rez is autohit.

I played a Spines/Bio brute to 50. It's fun, though obviously your ST damage is less-than-amazing and Bio has a fairly large number of holes in it.

Are you suggesting that a single character can get all four of those attacks? How did you get a sonic attack? Fire melee for fire, leviathan mastery for cold and toxic.

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).