aethereal

Ninjitsu is a misspelling of Ninjutsu.

You can have any number of Sudden Accelerations. The rule of five is about set bonuses. If you were slotting 6 full sets of Sudden Acceleration, you'd only get five sets of set bonuses. But you can use the KB>KD any number of times.

Power Crash was what was the Stun power was made into during the EM revamp. It is indeed the case that pre-EM-revamp, EM wasn't very good on any AT, including Stalkers.

EM has one of its two AoE in Stalkers (power crash, the cone), and it gets a higher damage version of power crash than the other ATs. But, I mean, the other reason why people like EM on Stalkers is that it has truly exceptional ST damage in return for poor AoE. Martial Arts has a bunch of good-but-not-great ST attacks.

Nope, that's entirely your pathology. I enjoy the leveling process so much that I don't create arbitrary barriers for myself, like inability to slot IOs or take power pools, so that my characters can feel awesome from the start.

Repulsing torrent also gets a weak crit, which is insult to injury. It should get a full doubling of its damage.

I have never topped this bio: "What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?" Thank you Mr Yeats!

On the same note, Ninjutsu.

Yes, there are attacks that are real stinkers. Both the T1 and T2 (Nimble Slash and Power Slice) are both pretty bottom-tier in terms of ST damage for T1s/T2s. Vengeful Slice is unforgivably bad, I don't know why it's so terrible. It is somehow lower DPA than the T1/T2, and over time at that. You do get guaranteed knockdown. One Thousand Cuts is pretty bad too, and it has one of those "just walk away from the computer and make yourself a drink" animation times. Typhoon's Edge is an uninspiring PBAoE, but it is a PBAoE and people tend to like those. Really, a lot of the reason why people land on Blinding Feint, Sweeping Strike, and Ablating Strike is: Those Are The Three Good Attacks In Dual Blades.

Guys, for real, just buy some IOs.

I believe, but am not sure, that it works like damage resistance, so if you could have 100% regeneration resistance (as I said in my previous post, max appears to be 95%), it would eliminate all regeneration debuffs. If you're at say 60% regeneration debuff resistance and you get hit with a -500% regen debuff, it would reduce it by 60%, leaving you with a -200% regen debuff.

Regen Resistance Max appears to be 95%. Honestly, I think that the (Damage) Resistance Max not applying to resistance's property of resisting resistance debuffs is a borderline bug and it should also be capped, probably at 90 or 95% (but I expect that this may be a difficult-to-change element of how the game actually works on a low level). I think that this mentality that people have that obviously armors should be highly resistant to things that are intentionally supposed to cut through that particular mitigation type is conceptually weird. When are regen debuffs supposed to shine, other than, "When you're dealing with a regenerator"? What is the point of regeneration debuffs if they don't work on "people who depend mainly on regeneration"? But we have SR, and how resistance works (again, that's probably not so much a feature as an emergent property of the deep nature of the game), so people expect it.

So I looked it up. The "recharge power siphon" effect of Concentrated Strike is often described as the "crit" ability of CS, but it's actually not tagged with the scrapper crit tags. So it won't benefit from either ATO (or other things that increase the likelihood of scrapper crits, such as the Ninjutsu pseudo-stalker mechanic). It's just a flat 20% chance, not modifiable.

I mean, I'm not an expert in either RubyRed's parsing code or the underlying CoH codebase, and it's possible that I'm off base here. Perhaps @UberGuy can weigh in. But I spent ten minutes looking over the parsing code, and it looks to me like there are two underlying straightforward binary flags, one for "pvp only," one for "pve only," and all the parsing code does is collapse them into a synthetic ternary field (PvPOnly if one flag is set and the other isn't, PvEOnly of the other flag is set and the one isn't, and neither if no flag is set). I didn't see anything that suggests text parsing or the creation of a massively synthetic field here. Again, maybe I'm wrong: there's a limited amount of trying to work my way through an unfamiliar codebase that I'm going to do here. But I'll note that the corresponding "small" crit line (the one for minions and below) doesn't show the same data error, and it seems hard to explain that if you imagine that this is entirely a synthetic field issue in the intermediate json data format.

I checked and confirmed that you CAN crit against Lieutenants and above in PVE with Bone Smasher -- the flag is ignored. Should still be fixed! I don't really know anything about the native format of powers data, but in the JSON that CoD uses as an intermediate format names the key for this particular data item as is_pvp and the possible values are PVP_ONLY, PVE_ONLY, and EITHER. This effect (the one with tag CritLarge) is value PVP_ONLY, and regardless of the fact that the code is currently ignoring the flag, it's clearly wrong and should be corrected!

I have not. This isn't impossible, but it's not likely, I think. What seems more plausible is that the specific flag that CoD checks for when it shows an effect group as "PvPOnly" is non-operative for child effects (ie, the parent effect group's flag supercedes the child flash), in which case it's not a CoD bug, but it's harmless (unless say someone ever copies that data out of the child effect and into a top level effect). But even if that is the case, it should probably still be fixed.

https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.energy_melee.bone_smasher&at=scrapper In CoD, the crit line for "lieutenants and above," the one with the base chance of happening at 10% crit rate, is marked as PvP only. Not sure if that flag is actually respected for a child effect, but thought it was worth mentioning. Pretty sure it's not just a CoD problem: no other large crit line on a half dozen other powers I checked was flagged like that

I think you get a huge damage proc in that mission, though.

Claws, on the other hand, is better on scrappers than brutes.

Yes. Specifically, .75 * 7 = 5.25 while 1.125 * 5 = 5.625. So Scrappers at damage cap will do more damage than Brutes without crits, and then crits would take them to absurd heights. There's just no way that Brutes are even in this conversation -- the "rules" of this thread hugely disadvantage them. I looked at Blasters and as @nihilii says, their base damage lines are much lower than Scrappers', and they don't have anything like crit lines to leverage the increased damage caps. They're pretty out of the conversation as well. Corruptors miiiiiiiiight have something going on? Their scourge lines leverage the damage cap, and if their secondary gave them a big res debuff, that could multiply damage in a way that maybe could possibly lead to them pulling ahead of Scrappers? But probably not, they start off at like half of the Scrapper damage lines (before crits). I don't know about Masterminds, I can't even really think through what these things mean for a MM. Other than a MM, it's hard for me to see how these rules could lead to anyone challenging Scrapper supremacy. Crits are too good. And Scrappers can broker "+400% free recharge" into more crits much more efficiently than Stalkers can. So. Scrappers.

This isn't really true. For example, one of your highest performers is Claws. A big part of Claws' DPS comes from its ability to sustain +60-+90% damage bonus by spamming Follow Up. But in the situations that @nihilii is specifying, spamming Follow Up is super useless, because you're already capped on damage. Similarly, the ability of the Stalker to use Build Up very frequently is also useless in these conditions -- Build Up won't increase your damage one iota. More relevantly for everything, "maxxed global recharge" is a huge deal. There are sets that have one or two really strong performing attacks, but they're mixed in with the rest of the set being mediocre. If you get recharge divided by five for free, you can potentially do an entirely different ST attack chain that drops some of the mediocre attacks (because now the good attacks can be linked up into a seamless chain, while they can't under normal conditions). This is why I think it's likely that Energy Melee probably isn't the best performer in a recharge-capped situation -- I think that some of Energy Melee's normal dominance comes from having a bunch of strong attacks that can be chained together fairly well. A set like, I don't know, War Mace, might now be able to create an attack chain consisting solely of heavy hitters that get full crits instead of Energy Melee's heavy hitters that get anemic crits. That said, maybe 1s cast time Energy Transfer is just so dominant that it still comes out on top. Ultimately, to really answer this question, we'd have to have at least a few dozen people actually test it, and I think the issue is that it's hard to test (arranging these conditions is non-trivial), and the answer to the question is pretty academic (at basically no point in the "real" game will a build that's carefully optimized for "everything-capped" be useful), so it's hard to imagine that testing happening.

We perhaps have different definitions of "all the time." My brute would rest every three or four spawns (which I'd regard as "unacceptably a lot") at low levels (so basically it would go something like "do a spawn, be at half health, do the next spawn, use reconstruction and come out at 75-80% health, do the next spawn and be down at 25% health, rest," roughly). When I rested, I'd usually let Fury drop to about 20. It'd be back up above 60 by halfway through the next spawn. So you can try out your math on "enter two spawns out of three at solidly north of scrapper damage, enter one spawn at slightly below scrapper damage and exit it at solidly north of scrapper damage."

Just for the record, no. That is not in fact at all how my brute played. I did have to test relatively often. Not after every spawn, and no, you don't have to let your fury go to zero when you rest, and, just to be clear, to get above low level scrapper damage takes about five seconds, small fractions of one spawn. I mean, ET breaks the formula in such a way as to get more damage than its recharge would suggest, not less as you imply here. Maintaining fury is not hard, and fury builds very quickly. This idea that brutes are constantly struggling with low fury is pure cope.

You don't have to take more than one power from your secondary to level up. If for some insane reason you wanted to, you could literally skip every power in Regen except fast healing! Clearly in order to get a proper "baseline," we need to understand how each armor set performed when you get the T1 power and nothing else!

Power pools don't, uh, you know... cost inf. You can in fact get them whenever you think it's helpful! This is not to say that there's some secret magic to getting Tough and Weave as early as possible: there's not. In general, you want them somewhere in the late 20's to late 30's when you have slots to spare. But this whole thing of, "Oh, well, I use the set without power pools" is a totally artificial constraint. There is nothing about solo leveling that makes you need to have a highly cost-constrained build! Like, I get that people don't necessarily want to spend billions on a character as they go, for a variety of reasons including that they may abandon the character and it can in fact be kinda hard to make billions of inf (not truly hard, but enough of an inconvenience that you might say, "well, this isn't why I play the game"). But making high tens/low hundreds of millions of inf is a simple matter of "spend your merits that you get from ordinary solo play on enhancement converters, sell them," and making mid-to-high hundreds of millions of inf is a matter of "spend your merits that you get from ordinary solo play on enhancement converters, buy recipes, craft them, then use the converters to turn them into salable orange IOs, sell them." The former is about one total minute of activity per let's say 3 to 5 hours of play. The latter is about 15 minutes of activity per 3 to 5 hours of play, plus spending 30 minutes once in your life to understand how to do it. And I say this with absolutely due respect to everyone's playstyle: If you prefer to make common IO or, for some godforsaken reason, SO builds, then cool, go you. But if you're like, "Oh man it's so hard to play almost every armor set because I can't afford a Performance Shifter proc and also have low endurance reduction slotting," and that's frustrating or you can't understand why everyone else doesn't seem to have these problems, then my brothers and sisters, my message for you here today is that you do not have to be 50 to be able to afford IOs that cost a few million inf, you do not have to farm or have a farmer, you do not have to spend hours doing weird cornering-the-market shenanigans, you do not have to mentally track the fluctuations in supply and demand of dozens of items. You need to, at the low end, spend merits on converters and sell them, or at the high end learn a simple procedure to craft IOs that you can sell for 1-2M inf a pop. That's it! Also: Regen does not have the best endurance economy, even at low levels, even with low-cost builds! It just doesn't. Try out Bio or Ninjutsu. If you don't mind working a little harder in levels 1-20 but care a lot about levels 30-49, try Energy or Electric.