aethereal

No. The Brute I tested with has the ATO slotted, she did not get over 90 even when overcapped on aggro.

I think the list you're looking for is Bio, Stone, and Shield, but let me go through one-by-one: Bio: Has a damage aura, +global damage, and an added proc to all your powers, and powers that can be proc-bombed Dark: Has a damage aura Electric: Has a damage aura, and +20% global recharge, which improves your procs and lets you use your most damaging attacks more Energy: Has +20% global recharge, which improves your procs and lets you use your most damaging attacks more Fiery Aura: Has two directly damaging powers, plus a damage aura and Fiery Embrace, which directly adds to your damage, but isn't a toggle, it's a low-uptime clicky Ice Armor: Has a damage aura Invulnerability: Invincibility adds +to-hit, which I guess increases your damage by making you hit more often/do more proccing/less accuracy enhancement Ninjutsu: Has a crit-from-hide deal which does increase your damage, once or so per spawn Radiation: Has proc-bombable abilities, plus Meltdown which directly adds to your damage, but isn't a toggle, it's a low-uptime clicky Regeneration: Literally no offensive adds by any description Shield: Directly damaging power and +global damage Stone: +global damage, and an added proc to all your powers Super Reflexes: Has +20% global recharge, which improves your procs and lets you use your most damaging attacks more Willpower: Literally no offensive adds by any description So in summary: Bio, Stone, and Shield all gives +global damage 100% of the time, and Bio and Stone also add a damage proc to all your powers. Fiery Aura and Radiation have +damage, but not as a 100% of the time toggle, just as intermittent clickies. Ninjutsu adds critical hit chance, but again not with every attack, which is not I think what you're looking for. Most armors have something that gives some kind of bonus to your damage if you construe that very broadly.

I'd personally take the view that aesthetics triumph here and if your claws are at the end of your fingers (as are most of the images that you posted), you're savage, not claws. I think you're leaning more like whether they feel more stylistically like a frenzied animal vs a more controlled weapon-user? Edit to add: it's a little disappointing how few claws options there are. There's not even an option for classic Wolverine-style claws that doesn't clearly have an attached mechanical base on your hand! You can't color fury claws, widow blades, or rularuu's talon. This is an area where HC, in my opinion, consistently does itself a disservice. They don't seem to have anyone who creates new models for costumes, and while the game has a great base of models/costume pieces, there are gaps.

I mean, you do you, man. But if you're fighting really tough enemies, they'll hit you past softcap defenses quite a bit. And regardless of whether you get interrupted, you're: 1. Getting probably spend two fewer chance to hides per minute than you could have. 2. Not able to increase your chance to crit on your AoEs. 3. You've got kind of a weird pause in launching your third AoE for the group there as you wait for your glacial AS to go off. 4. Not sure about this, haven't done the math, but if you are in a ST situation against a hard target, is the chance to hides reliable if you use Savage Leap against a single target? I could imagine it is because of its extremely long recharge time, despite the area factor, but not sure. If we go back to scrappers: having your +50% crit proc in savage leap has some similarities and some differences. You don't have the same concerns about forcing an attack into a slow version, since none of that applies. But the scrapper proc doesn't have the same internal cooldown that the stalker proc does. It's fundamentally impossible to get your chance to hide proc to fire more than once per 10.25 seconds. So savage leap doesn't "waste" that many activations -- you can get SL's recharge down to around 15 seconds and have four chance-to-hides per minute. Scrappers on the other hand can pretty easily achieve 8-10 procs per minute with their ATO, and you're just not going to get SL's recharge down to 6-8 seconds. So you're wasting more potential activations.

If you are hidden after savage leap, assassin's stroke will be the sliw, interruptible version. A serious mob will hit you and interrupt the power. Perhaps you meant that you put the chance-to-hide proc in assassin's strike, which would make sense (savage leap, then assassin's strike, then hidden, then rending flurry for 50% chance to crit). But you said that you put the proc in savage leap.

If you're interested in a defense set that goes well with natural origin and has a heal, there's always Ninjutsu. Now, unfortunately, I think the Stalker version of Ninjutsu is just straight up inferior to the Scrapper/Sentinel version, which includes an endurance tool as well. To some extent, if you want to make a ninjutsu stalker, I like... sort of endorse making a /ninjutsu scrapper instead -- you get a lite version of Stalker hide mechanics, you get some stealth in Ninjutsu (though not full invisibility like a Stalker), and you get a typed defense set with a heal and an end tool. But I've taken a /ninj stalker to 50 and it was fine too.

Parasitic Aura doesn't debuff Regen; I think you're confusing it with DNA Siphon, which does.

I played an Ice/Bio stalker to 50 and T4 incarnates, mostly solo, mostly without 2x XP, mostly at high difficulty modifiers where there were large groups, and I gotta say that all this angst about taunt auras strikes me as extremely overblown. I've been playing a Brute recently and there are still runners with the taunt aura/punchvoke, and usually it doesn't matter.

Uh, what's an "infinity inspiration"?

@twozerofoxtrot are you looking at this? https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=incarnate.hybrid.melee_genome_7 I see it as 10.2 "points" of taunt, not 13.6, with scrapper modifiers. I strongly think that "points" of taunt means mag of the taunt -- it already has a duration listed. It kinda seems like this is an error, since that high-mag taunt is unprecedented in usual taunt powers. Here's how I assume that taunt works, though I am liberally guessing here and not doing anything based on real data. I assume that taunt is a status effect (hence being listed in mag with duration). I assume that there is a fork in the target selection code that basically says, "If the taunt condition is currently active, then choose the taunter to attack (unless the taunter is at aggro cap), else use threat." I also assume -- with even less evidence -- that if there are multiple taunt conditions applied to a single target, it marks target priority based on which is the higher mag. All of this could be wrong! I'm basically just guessing. Taunt duration enhancement doesn't make a ton of sense for auras (where the taunt is universally re-applied long before its natural duration), but makes good clean sense for the actual taunt powers or other attacks with a taunt component -- it lets you not need to re-apply the taunt for longer, allowing you to do other things (including potentially taunt other targets) before needing to re-apply. In general, there's lots of stuff that the game could do with mag protection or resistance from taunt, that would potentially make tanking much challenging, but which it seems to eschew, I think largely for legibility reasons -- that is, I think the devs think it would be very confusing to try to apply a largely invisible status condition to enemies if the enemies had highly diverse reactions to the application of taunt.

Attuning a purple is useless, but the only "bad" thing it does is prevent you from boosting them. If you weren't going to boost the purple, there's no reason to trade them in for unattuned ones (well... there's my OCD about having one circular enhancement surrounded by four hexagonal ones). I generally buy things attuned and have a couple of times by habit bought my purples attuned. It's a little annoying, but NBD. In general, the angst people have about attuning things is way too high. Boosting is a huge amount of resources for a very marginal benefit in most cases. I'm not saying that there aren't some people who have money to burn and only play at level 50 and will get some benefit from boosting everything, but I think the vast majority of more casual players are best-served by attuning almost everything. (But not purples, there's no point in attuning purples. But also it's not a huge problem if you buy them attuned by accident).

Or just get your IOs. I feel like we often get this mentality of "I'm not satisfied with my character, what should I do, PS: I don't want to slot it with IOs." Like, if you're just farming up to 50, don't slot! But if you're playing single-player and enjoying the experience except that your character is underpowered, then, like, my dude. Just start buying your IOs!

I've played a lot of Bio and while I agree it isn't super strong defensively, it feels like you're underselling it here. You might want to just tune up your existing character's mitigation. While I don't personally like to proc bomb DNA Siphon, it also can help you with AoE. If you want a solid set for mitigation with some AoE punch, there's always shield. The epics can also shore up your AoE. Probably the power move is Mu Mastery for ball lighting while retaining access to a snipe, but Fireball from fire mastery is obviously satisfying for a fire character.

What? Both sides give merits for completing story arcs, at any level. I don't know what you mean by "if you get to the point where they offer them to you," but, I mean, of you do the arc, you get the merits. Older content on blueside has this annoying deal where the contact won't offer you a story arc until the second mission -- first you have to do a one-off mission for them. And a few contacts don't offer arcs at all. But on the other hand, new content gives you arcs right away.

This doesn't really make sense? If you Savage Leap and then chance-to-hide, presumably you do not want to then try to use Assassin's Frenzy on the now-alerted spawn that you're in the middle of, and just get interrupted out of it. If you want to use chance-to-hide on SL, that sounds like your plan is to do Savage Leap > Rending Flurry. You, uh, can't slot either Scrapper ATO into build up. The problem with slotting either the Scrapper +50% ATO or the Stalker Chance for Hide proc into Savage Leap is that Savage Leap's core cooldown is 40 seconds and thus you're wasting a lot of potential activations of those rather critical procs every minute. You want them in 20ish second core cooldown powers.

I feel like all the elec/shield energy went to Stalkers.

In my mind the advantage of -damage is not that it adds up with resistance to reach the normal damage mitigation cap of resistance, it's that it can take you overcap. Get 90% resistance and 30% -damage and enjoy 93% mitigation.

I'd probably use it. Not for leveling all the way to 50. But an hour's worth to get to level 20 or so? Sure.

Guys, you are literally killing me. @EmperorSteele there is no realistic scenario in CoH as it stands where an enemy hits a Def 0 character 95% of the time and hits a "soft-capped" character 5% of the time. Like, that's theoretically possible within the mechanics -- for an enemy who has normal (1.0) Accuracy and +45% to-hit, and where your "soft-capped" character has 90% defense (not 45%). But there are no enemies with +45% to hit and no accuracy, and 90 defense is an insane bar. @Troo streakbreaker is irrelevant to high-defense characters. It would only kick in after 99 consecutive misses from the same opponent. That's a vanishingly rare proposition -- the hits you get from normal probability are much more common than a streakbreaker hit. The basic deal is that 45% defense mitigates 90% damage in ordinary content. Not 95%. 90%. Yes, there are exceptions and caveats. But if the level of nuance that you're looking for is "one sentence," then here it is: "In ordinary content, 45% mitigates 90% of damage, just like 90% resistance."

Some scattershot further thoughts on Defense, To-Hit, and mitigation. Something that I got wrong earlier in the thread, and which is... maybe important here is that the total mitigation that can be provided by Defense scales to the base to-hit of your opponent -- in the opposite direction from what you may expect. Though the amount of Defense required to get that mitigation scales the way you'd intuitively imagine. So, imagine an opponent with an Incarnate-style 63.75% base chance to hit, and no Accuracy bonus. Against a Defense 0 character, it hits... 63.75% of the time. Against a Defense 58.75% character, it hits 5% of the time. This allows the Defense character to get to greater than 90% mitigation (92.2% mitigation, specifically). That's... kinda weird. The ways that Accuracy and To Hit interplay are confusing. If an enemy had the standard 50% chance to hit, and sufficient Accuracy to bring their total chance to hit up to 63.75%, then 45 Defense would softcap you to them, and their floored to-hit chance would be 6.375%, and you'd have 90% mitigation. If on the other hand an enemy had 63.75% chance to hit and 1.0 Accuracy, then you need more Defense to floor their to-hit chance (58.75%), but that Defense would result in a lower chance to hit (5% instead of 6.375%), and thus a greater total mitigation (92.16%). (Note that 92% mitigation is significantly greater mitigation than 90%! You're talking about taking 20% less damage). Wacky. In an environment where that Defense level is relatively easy to achieve (full teams, for example), the thing where Incarnate enemies get a bunch of to-hit but no greater accuracy is actually a disadvantage to them. In HM content, where I believe (?) you're locked into +4 enemies (and thus high Accuracy) and the to-hit bonus is that much greater, this prooooobably doesn't cash out to a super big deal? That is, unlike at least some Incarnate content, you will have a hard time reaching Defense values that effectively mitigate you. It also seems like on some level the answer for Hard Mode mitigation has to be "both Defense and Resistance." It's also the case that enemies with below normal chance to hit can't be fully mitigated by Defense. Like, if something has a 40% base chance to hit you, well, sorry, the smallest a to hit chance can be is 5%, no matter what. That's only 87.5% mitigation. I don't think this actually actually matters all that much? Like, if something has a 40% base chance to hit you, it's almost certainly a pretty minor threat no matter what, so who cares that your mitigation is a little less effective. But it's theoretically possible that something could be added to the game that did ferocious levels of damage but only had a 25% base chance to hit, and then you'd find that Defense is a notably weaker mitigation strategy against it than Resistance. What does all this cash out to? Like, is this number-juggling for the hell of it? If something has like a 5% to 10.5% chance to hit you when its to-hit rating is floored, does it actually matter whether that's 90% of its damage to a theoretical 0 Defense character, or 87.5%, or 92.5%? Maybe we shouldn't pay much attention to "how much mitigation is it," versus "what is its actual chance to hit?" I think there's some validity there, but it does inform Resistance/Defense tradeoffs. Though again, in the hardest content, I think it's reasonable to question how much of a tradeoff there actually is. It's not resistance or defense, it's both. TL;DR: Defensive damage mitigation is crazily nuanced in CoH.

The thing that improved my Bio play was understanding DNA Siphon (which was thanks to some kind-forgotten individual on this board). DNA Siphon gives you healing per live enemy, but Regeneration per dead enemy in its effect. It's easy to overcap the healing it can give -- at risk of starting the obvious, you can't heal above 100% health. But the Regen is a gift that keeps on giving. So you want to pop DNA Siphon at the right time, after you've killed a bunch of, but not all of, the minions in a given spawn. You'll still go up to full health, but you'll get a nice chunk of ongoing mitigation through your Regen. Parasitic Aura is for the beginning moments of attacking a spawn, when most everything is still alive. Ablative carapace is for towards the end when you don't have many targets for DNA Siphon or Parasitic Aura.

My version of this was soloing Manticore on what was in retrospect a pretty shoddy archery/ninjutsu sentinel build. I just baaaaarely had the DPS to do it, so it took forever. Sentinel Archery's highest DPA attack is stunning shot, which leaves a discarded arrow on the ground, and at the end of the fight I was surrounded by a circle of probably 200+ discarded arrow. Sorry, it was a long time ago, no screenshots.

I did way back on Live, in a very different environment from today. I abandoned the character because it felt too fragile. But this was in an environment where I had much greater difficulty affording IOs. I think the big issue with all the various thoughts about ramping up healing/regeneration through whichever strategy is that unlike resistance and defense, you don't go through an increasing-returns curve with healing/regen. So the deal with defense/resistance is it gets harder and harder to build as you stack more and more of it (you exhaust the easy things like for example the +def/res-all unique IOs, and the powers, and you start having to go 5 or 6 deep in sets to get a bonus to two def/res types), but on the other hand you also get more and more return for that deeper investment. With heal/regen, you have a similar thing of exhausting the low-hanging fruit and relatively powerful options and have to give up more and more from the rest of your build to get another heal or regen bonus, but you get linear returns instead of increasing returns. And, I mean, on some level maybe that's how defense and resistance should've worked from the start, maybe the increasing returns curve there was a mistake. It certainly deforms the meta. But as long as that's the comparison, I think it's going to feel frustrating to, for example, sacrifice a ton of damage in your powers by slotting the +chance for self heals from Power Transfer in all your attacks. (Of course, per a point I think you made earlier in the thread, we could imagine the devs tuning the linear return on healing to be so high that despite the lack of increasing returns, characters were able to reach the kind of mitigation levels that are obtainable with softcapped def/hardcapped res. Or even more! Nothing stops them from making Regen heal you back to full health every second! But, I mean, in practice they aren't going to do that. So that's why I generally focus on the beaten path, established by Willpower and Bio, that getting Regen up to being a well-performing mitigation set will involve some substantial increase in layering in either Resistance or Defense.)

I didn't realize that Accuracy (uniquely among stats in CoH to the best of my knowledge) stacks multiplicatively with itself instead of additively. But I see that that's correct. I stand corrected on the amounts, I was assuming it was 1 + 0.2 + 0.3 + 0.4 = 1.9 for the boss example. Mea culpa! It's still not common to exceed Accuracy 1.9 all told outside of AV fights (assuming no +to-hit). A normal +4 boss is 1.3 * 1.4 = 1.82 accuracy -- it needs a high-accuracy power to breach 1.9. A +4 lieutenant is 1.61 Accuracy, although with a 1.2 accuracy power, it gets to very barely above 1.9 Accuracy (1.92 -- the mitigation of 45% defense drops from 90% to 89.83%).

Your post gives the strong impression that any amount of Accuracy reduces the mitigation provided by Defense. You never at any point in your first post mention that Accuracy equal to or below 1.9 (for enemies without ToHit bonuses) do not result in mitigation reduction for Defense. And 1.9 Accuracy is a pretty high bar -- a +4 Boss with a 1.2 base accuracy power would reach 1.9 Accuracy, but not exceed it. A +4 AV with a 1.0 base accuracy power reaches but doesn't exceed 1.9 Accuracy -- so you either need a +4 AV with a higher-than-usual accuracy power, or a +4 Boss with a higher-than-"normal high"-accuracy power, or whatever. So yes, I was disagreeing with what you wrote. I don't claim to know what was in your head when you wrote it, but the text that you wrote does a bad job of explaining the reality of the situation. In contrast, the text I wrote was careful to explain the caveats, and it seems like you didn't read it or didn't understand it.