aethereal

The reason that people don't use defensive mode is that defensive mode is bad, not that offensive mode is so great. Anything that will kill you in offensive mode is going to also kill you in defensive mode -- a little slower, but your ability to kill them first drops so much that they have plenty of time for it. This might be different if defensive mode closed major holes in bio, like giving it DDR as someone was suggesting.

Honestly, I think people get very wrapped up in kill speed differences that don't seem to me to be a big deal in play. Like, yes, if you're farming and are all about optimizing playtime/reward, you should care about this. If you're in it for pylon speeds, totally. But when I compare my /bio characters in ordinary mission play with other armor sets, it doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to me. I like bio, I enjoy soloing AVs, and it's a good set for that. Other than that, we're saying the same thing. Bio is significantly squishier than other armor sets, but you have to seek out particularly dangerous voluntary challenges to have that really matter. That's just the state of the game. Bio is plenty survivable. Fiery Aura is plenty survivable, and blasters are plenty survivable. I don't think that it's a good idea to make there be no offense/defense tradeoff among the armor sets, but as long as there is some offense/defense tradeoff, people are going to complain that the most offensively-oriented sets are "best."

So, for example on Praetorian Clockworks, I generally have to be below +4/x8 on Bio, at least until considerable incarnate, while on Ninjutsu I don't do anything special. They debuff regen and defense and use energy attacks, so in my experience Bio goes, "Click shield oh shit it's gone, click heal okay now I'm dead." It seems uncontroversial to me that Bio is significantly less tough than, say, Invul, SR, Rad, Energy Aura, and, on brutes/tanks, Electric Armor. It's just that we're currently in a game in which blasters can build tough enough to do +4/x8, and of course bio armor is tougher than blasters.

Bio enjoys a defense and resistance debuff when it gets its offensive boost, in addition to having no DDR in a set that relies on defense for its mainline damage mitigation to non-S/L damage. It is noticeably squishier than other armor sets. The environment right now is that it's relatively easy to build strong damage mitigation through sets and power pools, so you can generally build Bio to acceptable levels of toughness, but there are definitely a variety of situations where my Ninjutsu character, for example, is much more durable than my Bio character.

Rad has high-end resistances (and one of its major holes, cold, is really easy to accidentally fix just by getting winter/purple sets for other reasons, plus a generally low number of cold-damage dealing enemies), plus really solid heals/absorbs, plus a T9 that gives you an offensive bonus instead of a useless-in-PvE godmode. I'm not sure that it needs a nerf, but I think it's a really good armor set for tanks/brutes, combining highend mitigation with okayish offensive potential and hey, a little team support too. I think people are overstating the impact of proc-bombing its clicks, and it would remain a quite good set even if you couldn't proc-bomb them. If it had a damage aura, it would almost certainly be overtuned.

Maybe make there be one toggle and the other powers add capabilities to it? Edit: So, the toggle would still be turned off, but you'd just have a single toggle to turn back on when you resumed human form.

This seems not true to me. Yes, Rad Armor has two proc-bomb-able AoE powers. But Burn gets like triple-duty out of procs and has a base cooldown of 25 seconds as opposed to the 60 and 90 second cooldown of Rad Armor's PBAoE. Fiery Aura also has a damage aura and fwiw fiery embrace. What's the evidence that Rad Armor has similar offensive firepower to Fiery Aura? We don't see Rad Armor on farmers, we don't see it getting particularly fast pylon times. I think people are mixing up Rad Melee's high offensive potential through proccing Irradiated Ground with Rad Armor's offensive potential.

I think it'd be nice to have a whole different set with its own plusses and minuses. I expect that some players would be willing to alter concept slightly on characters between DB and DS depending on which set of mechanics appealed to them more, and DB is a somewhat polarizing set. Plus it's always nice when the game mechanics reflect aesthetics (so your clubs do smashing rather than lethal damage, etc).

Mockingbird, Nightwing, Daredevil sometimes/sorta, there are several fairly prominent comics characters who fight with paired sticks/short staves/clubs. Making a weapon for this would be easy: it's just a short featureless rod. You could also use a few of the smaller war mace weapons, and potentially the sai and hook swords weapons from DB. The animations could mostly/entirely be reused DB animations. While War Mace can potentially be used to sort of hit the same thematic elements, War Mace seems pretty clearly to be principally aimed at simulating super-strong characters who fight with a blunt weapon, with its slow-paced, high-impact strikes. There are a class of martial-arts-oriented superheroes that are clearly more "fast and agile" than "strong and tough" that use sticks, and the DB animations are a good match for this conceptually. So I think that there's a niche here and compared to many other "create a powerset" suggestions, there aren't big blockers on the art side of thing.

Everyone sees enhancements to reduce interrupt time and imagines that they will, you know, reduce the time you spend sitting around waiting to cast your interruptible power. They don't. They just reduce how much of that time is interruptible. So if there's ordinarily a 3 second interrupt period, with 100% interrupt enhancement, it's still a 3 second period, but one half of it is interruptible (the first 1.5 seconds) and the second half still happens, but if you get hit during it your power isn't interrupted (the second 1.5 seconds). With Assassin's Strikes and Snipes now mostly skipping the interrupt period in combat situations, it feels like we should make it do what people expect: actually reduce the amount of time you spend waiting around. This would help make Snipe sets, which include interrupt time reduction, feel a little less like a waste of an enhancement bonus. Not a LOT less, because it's still meaningless in combat, but at least you get something from it. Alternately: Replace all the interrupt-time-reduction components of snipe sets with range eenhancement.

Global recharge is definitely better than local recharge for procs. If slotting some local recharge and lowering the proc rate is what it takes to use an attack twice in an attack chain instead of once, it's usually the right decision to slot the local recharge. Very long recharge powers (>20 seconds for ST, >30 seconds for AoE) can generally absorb some recharge without meaningfully lowering proc rate. Doesn't appear to be a real thing, you can ignore, except maybe specifically in Burn. Reactive's DoT is I believe the best in terms of flat damage. The -max hp (Degenerative) is better for working on Archvillains or GMs (or Pylons), but not normal opponents.

I thought it was around 70 too. 18 seems too low. I will say, if your concern is specifically tanking MLTF as a tanker who doesn't have access to KB resistance, you can stock up on Escapes (the T3 breakfree inspiration). Each one lasts 90 seconds and adds 10 to your KB protection. You can eat 7 of them and have 70 + your normal KB protection for a minute and a half, then do it again for the next minute and a half with just your normal tray of insps at level 50 (ie, no email shenanigans). IDK how far three minutes of immunity to Recluse's KB will take you, but it's something. If you're an electric tanker with 15 KB Prot natively, you can probably do 3x6 for 4.5 minutes and tank his KB.

What is the mag of KB that Recluse does in MLTF? Most versions of his Spider Smash have a base mag of 18, but I think it's higher in MLTF?

For anyone unclear: most armor sets have both (VERY HIGH) KB resist and KB protection. KB resist divides mag of KB, and then the resulting KB mag has your protection subtracted from it, and you're knocked if the final result is above 0. So if you get hit with a mag 10 KB, and you have 100% KB resist and 4 KB protection, you do get knocked with mag 1: 10 / 2 - 4 = 1. But most armor sets have KB resist of 10000%, and then 10 points of KB protection on top of that, meaning that they are theoretically only knocked by a mag 1000 KB (which does not exist in game). Electric Armor has (in Grounded), KB protection (15.something mag on tanks), but no KB resist. That means that it's immune to KBs 15 and under, but vulnerable to a few very high KBs in the game. You get KB protection from the common IO sources (BotZ, Overwhelming Force etc), but not resist. I think Evasive Maneuvers provides some KB resist? The result is that most Tank armors are immune to all KB, Electric is vulnerable to high-mag KB but not other ones, and fire/dark have to build it from scratch and are thus potentially vulnerable to more KB.

It's listed three times so that it improves your crit chance vs minions, vs lieutenant+, and vs players.

Yep, guess that's true.

On the one hand, it may be cheaper to buy SOs. On the other, if there was a relatively robust market for them, people might sell them instead of vendoring them, and that would reduce the inf addition to the game. In both cases, I don't think it's material. Does any character spend more on SOs than one farmer makes in one run of one map?

They are. The AH is potentially quite a bit cheaper. (Not that the store cost of SOs is all that meaningful, but for example my level 12 corruptor was having some endurance problems, and I could pick up a few AH EndRdx SOs for cheap, to tide me over until sets start being available. But I couldn't buy many, because there's no liquidity on the market. So I had to transfer to another character, send over a few million, and go from there. Not the biggest deal in the world, but also... if we think it's okay for someone to sell a level 12 IO and for another character to buy that IO at level 50, or level attuned, why should it not be okay to do the same with SOs?)

It seems a little weird to me that invention-origin enhancements are fungible across all levels, and even attuned, on the AH, while SOs are kept rigidly segregated in single-level buckets. This means that there is very little liquidity in SO enhancements -- I was just trying to buy some endurance reduction enhancements for Tech, and there were 0-3 enhancements offered for sale for each of the levels that I was able to slot. There's now a meaningful niche for low-level slotting of SOs, when they provide considerably better enhancement values than below-level-25 common IOs, and you can't slot most sets, and it would be cool if we could get these things on the market. So I'm proposing that for a given Origin/Enhancement Type combination (so for example Tech/Endurance Reduction), the market provides fungibility across all levels for that enhancement. So someone can sell a level 33 Tech Endurance Reduction enhancement and someone else can buy it as a level 15 Tech Endurance Reduction enhancement). (Alternately, I suppose it would also be reasonable to provide fungibility across origin types (so I could sell a Science SO and someone could buy it as a Tech SO), instead of or in addition to fungibility across level ranges.)

This is a complicated power definition. The base damage if the chains is indeed 1.25, but I think they're affected by a magnitude expression. Does anyone have the power in-game and see what damage numbers the chains show when they happen? Edit: also fwiw CoD claims that the chain effects recovery debuff is -40%, not -10%. Though I agree that even if the recovery debuff is 40%, an uncontrolled random recovery debuff is an uncompelling effect for a blaster.

I'm on the first mission of the Unity Plague, Lou Pasterelli, character level 31, +0/x2. Geodes are (appropriately) spawning at 31/32, conning white/yellow. But when I kill them, they spawn their on-death Geode Shard underlings at level 35/36, conning red/purple. I don't think this should happen? I don't know if that's the min level for Geode Shards, but if it is, they just shouldn't spawn at all for this low-level. Other Devouring Earth on-death spawns such as Rubbles are spawning at the normal 31/32.

For all like seven mobs that terrorize?

For single target, it's easy: the game is trying to get you the advertised PPM, assuming the power is used as much as possible. So if you have a power that has a recharge + animation time of 15 seconds, you can use that power four times per minute, right? A PPM of 3.5 is going to be near max. A PPM of 4.5 is safely over max (it's trying to make the proc fire 4.5 times per minute, it can only ever achieve 4 times per minute, so it maxes proc rate). AoE lowers the chance of proccing, but also breaks this nice easy intuitive thing, which is a shame. That said, the math here is not too hard for anyone. Come on, it's addition, multiplication, and division. You just plug the numbers into the formula. Nobody's asking you to do the calculation in your head, your phone or computer is easily able to the computation, and the formulas have already been derived/found.

Yeah, my question was whether the OP intended the toggles to be mez protection or mez resistance. While, of course, mez resistance is not mez protection, I think that the way that the game usually shorthand-describes mez-protection toggles is the way the OP describes them. For example, the short description of Indomitable Will (from Willpower) is "Toggle: Self Res (Disorient, Hold, Immobilize, Sleep, Fear, Confuse, Repel, Knockback). DEF(Psionics)". But obviously that power grants protection from disorient/hold/immob/sleep/fear/repel/kb, not just resistance to them. Even if he does envision protection, I don't think this set would necessarily be overpowered. It doesn't grant any hold protection, nor exotics like fear/confuse, and running two toggles for protection from KB/Repel/Stun/Sleep doesn't necessarily seem overpowered.

Parasitic aura makes a (smaller) carapace too. I know you don't include it in your build, but for those who do.