aethereal

Were you running a damage aura? What may have happened is the sequence actually went: BU > attack1 > aura rolls to hit > attack2 Streakbreaker hits the aura attack roll and so then it's just a 1/400 chance of getting two 5% attacks independently -- which is certainly rare, but not so rare that one won't see it.

BU > attack1 > attack2, and both attack1 and attack2 missed? Should be literally impossible due to streakbreaker as long as your adjusted chance to hit with attack1 is > 90%. It's hard to imagine having less than a 90% chance to hit right after BU unless you're either: 1. Under a to-hit debuff of some kind 2. Attacking a high-defense enemy 3. Literally not enhancing right As a result, my suspicion is that when it happened, you were under a to-hit debuff that you didn't know about, or you were attacking a high-defense enemy and didn't realize they were high defense.

No, that makes sense. It'll be as though it were on a 10 second recharge timer instead of whatever the actual recharge of the power is.

In terms of manually moving your cursor, you can bind keys to powexeclocation target to mostly get the experience of a targeted aoe. Won't change proc rates, and not as good against moving enemies. In general, I think about half of the systemic, nuts-and-bolts problems in this game could be resolved by de-clevering PPM significantly. It's such a frankenstein of a system, filled with gotchas and bullshit.

I ran it as an En/En stalker, level like 31 or something (not exemped down), with build-as-you go sets, so like I had the full set of ATOs (non-superior, obviously), but in some cases had sort of random slotting. I ran it at whatever difficulty I normally had set, which I think was like +1/x3 or something like that, and didn't feel the need to turn it down. I did die a couple of times! Once to Cortex, I think, once in the Rikti room, and I think I just fucked up at one point and died to normal enemies. But it was always clearly like, "Just go back and do it more carefully, maybe eat some insps." In contrast, I've run the Graveyard shift with a couple of characters, including the same stalker back when she was in the appropriate level range, and also with I think two different blasters, and I've had a ton more difficulty with it (though I still like the arc).

Not to invalidate the other person's opinion, but I found the Freakish Lab both fun and considerably less swingy in difficulty than the Graveyard Shift.

I thought about this a while ago, but it feels like it's a lot of slots to give up for an already quite durable Sent. If they make Electric Blast a little better on Blasters, it feels like it might be a fun move there, where you give up something you're quite well-supplied-with (damage) in order to enhance durability. But hard to make the case when you're already giving up a ton of damage (as with Sents or, honestly, right now, Blaster Electric Blast). EDIT: Might also be interesting to do a normal EB Sent and just double-proc Lightning Bolt with the heals. Use Zapping Bolt and Tesla Cage normally as your high-damage blasts, but sacrifice a bit of damage from your already-weakest ST damage power in order to add some additional healing to yourself.

So okay, stats in this game have a host of derivative values. So, Slow, for example, has a derivative value called Slow Resistance (which you can get with like winter IOs and so forth). This is actually codified into the game engine, it's not like there are two stats that are completely separate that happen to be both looked at in the context of determining slows. In fact, before any effect is applied to you, the game system knows that all effects have an associated Resistance stat, and checks the resistance stat before it applies the effect to you. Damage Resistance is, er, the resistance derived stat of the Damage stat. It's not its own thing. So, Enhancement is another derived stat of main stats. Every main stat (Slow, Fly Speed, Damage, Healing, whatever) has an associated derived stat called X-Enhancement (so Slow Enhancement, etc). Enhancements enhance other derived stats on the main stat -- so if you had enhanceable Damage Resistance, every time you enhanced Damage, you'd also enhance the Damage Resistance, because Damage and Damage Resistance aren't really separate things. Beyond that, I'm out of my depth in talking about the system. EDIT: Actually, I'm even more out of my depth. You obviously can enhance resist damage powers (think: mainline armors for resistance sets). It's debuffs that you can't allow to be enhanceable. I think this is due to a system called Strength to X (where X is a stat), which I think in turn has to do with how you give people global bonuses that affect multiple powers (like, say, the damage bonus you get from build up or a red insp, which doesn't just affect a single power but all of them). Because these are all various derived stats from the damage attribute, I think the deal is that they all share a strength sub-attribute, so red insps would help your debuffs or something like that. Ultimately, beyond the details, the issue is that these aren't independent stats, they have a codified relationship within a generic way that CoH Deals With Stats and that isn't very amenable to changing without changing every other stat or substantially rewriting the engine.

Yeah, I don't really get it. Like, why does this thing need a lockout? It's got PPM. It doesn't stack with itself. If they're worried it'll happen too often, reduce the PPM, don't put the lockout on it.

I think it's easy to outsmart yourself here. If BU recharges, you can wait a few seconds to use it at the best time in your attack chain. You can nominate a spot in your attack chain and always use BU there if it's available, and never other times. But yeah, I've been doing pylons and BU recharges and been like, "SHIT! CLICK! WAIT, WHERE AM I IN MY CHAIN?"

That sounds obviously wrong to me. You use your build-up in front of your Assassin's Strike, and you use your biggest non-AS hitter right after AS. Both will easily be in the time-frame of both BU and the Gaussian's. That's 160% of the base damage of your two best powers, for the cost a 1.32s animation time, plus likely 160% of the base damage of a third power, plus 80% of the base damage of the entire rest of your attack chain? In what world do you have a better option than that? In the classic StJ Stalker attack chain of SB > AS > CU > SB > MB > SC, for example, replacing SC with Build Up, you get something like 800 damage over the course of the next 10 seconds. (you get 90% chance of 80% of the base damage of SB, AS, CU, then 80% of the base damage of SB, AS, CU, SB, MB), assuming that nothing crits. Somehow. Due to the fact that you're constrained by a 10 second+ attack chain, these doesn't feel like a serious constraints either. The attack chain I mentioned above has one 100% chance of AF attack (Crushing Uppercut), and three 90% chances (Shin Breaker twice and Sweeping Cross once). (Based on a monte carlo simulation over 1,000,000 runs, AS will crit 88.6% of the time for that attack chain). This, on the other hand, is a real and brutal problem. The fact that if your natural attack chain comes in at 9.5 seconds, you only get your "guaranteed" from-hide crit every other attack chain is brutal. I don't really see the reason for the long lockout on chance-to-hide. None of this is to say that nihilii is wrong from a high level -- he's a very accomplished build creator and makes amazing pylon times, and is dialed into other people who do the same. If stalkers underperform scrappers overall in ST damage at the very high end, he'd know. But I don't think he's correctly identified the reasons why stalkers are underperforming, here, except the last one.

You have to take either Initial Strike or Heavy Blow as your level 1 power, there's no choice, but both of them are not optimal to use in a ST attack chain, so people will often use them to mule important set bonuses. Note that nihili's build probably will have trouble hitting things without tactics -- high end builds underslot accuracy in their powers by using tactics/kismet/global accuracy bonuses that allows them to pack more damage and procs into their attack powers. I assume that nihili's attack chain is about as good as you can get -- he's one of the people who consistently produces very high-end builds. There won't be any ST attack chain that's very good that uses Spinning Strike.

AoEs generally do a lot less damage (to each target) than ST attacks. Spinning Strike does about half the damage that Shin Kick does (at combo 0) with a longer animation time. If you replace Shin Kick with Spinning Strike in a single target attack chain, it will absolutely result in much, much lower DPS. Also, Spinning Strike is a combo consumer, not a combo builder. If you just used nihili's attack chain with spinning strike subbed in for shin kick (so: CU > SS > RC > MB > SS > RC > repeat), you'd typically be at combo 1 or 0 for Crushing Uppercut, not combo 3. Which would be sad. If you drop a single-target attack to get Spinning Strike, I'd suggest dropping Rib Cracker, not Shin Breaker, and you'd need to sub in heavy blow in the ST attack chain, don't use Spinning Strike there. And yes, it would lower your ST DPS. (This, by the way, is the problem that Stalker StJ faces: it doesn't have rib cracker, which can lead to some awkwardness around one attack in your attack chain. In general, you're going to want an attack chain that has Assassin's Strike, Crushing Uppercut, and Moonbeam, plus Shin Breaker for filler, but, due to Stalker mechanics you need Crushing Uppercut to immediately follow Assassin's Strike, and then you need your attack chain to be at least 10.25 seconds long to avoid the lockout on the chance-to-hide proc. AS, CU, and MB together only have 5.28s worth of arcanatime, so you need to add another five seconds of powers in there and get to combo 3 for CU. As far as I can tell, the best chain is AS > CU > SB > MB > SC > SB > repeat, but stupid Sweeping Cross eats one of your combo. AS builds 2 combo, so you're fine if both the second SB and AS hit, but it's a little less guaranteed that it all comes together. Obviously, it's particularly disastrous if your AS misses, as you then do a combo 1 CU without guaranteed crit and that really ruins the damage of that cycle.)

If the proc didn't come with recharge, it'd probably be better in shin breaker. The proc rate for 8 seconds recharge, 1.33s cast, 3PPM is 46%, so you'd expect to see essentially the same number of activations (since you use shin breaker twice as often as CU), and the effect would be better since it would get rib cracker and one of CU or Moonbeam, not rib cracker and shin breaker. But the recharge component kills it. This is the real problem with StJ -- it could really use a medium-hitter power with like a 10 or 12 second recharge time. (And it's the problem with PPM: we're so strongly incented to want powers with very narrow ranges of recharge times. Like everything below 10 seconds is useless, everything above 20 seconds is useless.)

I assume that's the best option, you're no slouch at this kind of thing, but it seems like a shame to not get your increased critical chances on the hardest hitting attack in your chain. Does the proc last long enough to crit Moonbeam? Is there a lockout period on the scrapper ATO the way there is on the stalker chance to hide one?

If Crushing Uppercut had the 20 second recharge rate that it's "supposed" to, what proc rate would you lose? A 3.5PPM damage proc in a 20 second recharge power with a 2.17s cast time is well over the cap (it's 129%). I guess you can get a better proc rate out of Force Feedback (90% vs 74%), but what else has a low enough PPM that you don't "waste" that 5 seconds of recharge time? Shin breaker takes the same enhancements in every AT, and you'll use it twice per attack cycle pretty much no matter what. Rib Cracker's -res is nice, but it's the lowest DPS component of the attack chain and you have to use it twice in every rotation. That rotation also feels awkward for your ATO proc. Where are you putting it?

There's a few things mixed in here that I'm trying to separate, though. Bio is better on scrappers than stalkers: you get a larger damage bonus on to of a higher base damage, and you get a damage (and yes, taunt) aura. The mechanics of scrapper high-damage ST chains vs stalker ones are another thing, sure. I'd certainly be fine with stalker epic snipes giving AF and having the cooldown on the chance to hide proc reduced to like six seconds. But StJ, in isolation, doesn't seem like a great scrapper set. It has a bad build up -- anyone think it's a particularly great one? Its one high damage attack is encumbered by combo mechanics and a longer recharge than it "should" have. Stalkers get way more efficient combo building with AS. Now, I'll take your at your word that the advantages of bio armor and perhaps ATOs end up tipping the balance slightly in the other direction, but StJ is a great stalker set and an underwhelming scrapper set.

I think Stalker StJ has obviously higher sustained AND burst damage. Bio is fairly clearly better on a scrapper than a stalker, but StJ is fairly clearly better on a stalker than a scrapper. (Stalker StJ gets: Assassin's Strike instead of Rib Cracker, with AS doing 2 combo instead of 1. And Build Up instead of whatever it's called for StJ. Since you can build to 3 combo with just Shin Breaker > Assassin's Strike, you can use a much higher density of harder-hitting attacks in your ST attack chain. You can also get to roughly 85% chance of every CU critting, instead of 50%.)

Electric seems like a broadly great armor set on tanks & brutes. It might need a little help on scraps/stalks (and sentinels? Haven't checked if it gets some bonus already on sents).

No, you can't do conditionals in binds.

Actually, maybe instead of fixing group fly, they should just give mastermind pets an inherent power that relaxes their flight speed cap.

It's slightly awkward to do this. Mastermind pets are lower-level than their owner, and thus have lower flight-speed caps. This stuff is pretty baked into the system. I think that basically the reason they haven't done this already is it's a lot of mechanical surgery to try to fix it in order to rescue a marginal power choice. You could imagine that group fly could massively increase flight-speed caps and then not actually grant capped flight speed (it's kinda mysterious why all the travel flight powers grant capped speed in the first place), but then you start to have shenanigans where group fly becomes better than Afterburner at both of their nominal niches... Not to say this isn't a worthy goal. Just it's harder than you might think.

It takes accuracy enhancements and is 1.0 (normal) base accuracy. So yes, you can do that, and it will benefit from it unless you have enough global accuracy/to-hit that it already has capped chance to hit.

Thunder Strike is like a fireball. It hits a circular radius around its primary target (not a circular radius centered on you, like PBAoEs such as Whirling Hands). It's a small fireball, only 7'. In practice, yes, that means it won't likely hit people behind you, because you're between them and the primary target, and that means they aren't within 7' of the primary target. But it's not a cone. It's a circle, centered on the primary target.

So, compared to the other melee ATs, Tankers get a bunch less S/L defense from their ATOs than the others do (stalkers and scrappers get either 5% or 10% from their ATOs, brutes get either 7.5% or 12.5% (depending on whether they split), Tankers get 2.5%). But they get a huge amount of resists -- 12% S/L, 6% all others (including psi/tox) from their set bonuses and then 8%+ resist-all from their proc. Note that S/L defense is also plentifully available to melee classes through Kinetic Combat and Blistering Cold. If we're comparing EA to Invul, on tanks, I think this generally works to the advantage of EA. They won't have difficulty hitting overcap S/L defense even with their lower ATO numbers, they'll benefit from have lower base resists because Invul wastes S/L resist on the vast majority of high-end tank builds, and it helps them close their Psi/Tox holes. However, the higher S/L defense numbers that you get mostly "for free" in other ATs may make EA seem like a more powerful set there -- especially during leveling -- than it really is.