aethereal

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.

I haven't tried EA on brutes in a long time, but I have a 30s EA stalker right now, and it feels strong to me! I have north of 50 s/l defense, other defenses are 40+ (before any power sinks, and psi and neg energy are lower), okay resists, endurance tools and a heal. That's certainly with IOs, but obviously not level 50 modifiers, superior sets, incarnate, etc. I had a tough time with endurance management before power sink, and the heal not coming until 35 was a little brutal, but since about level 28, it's felt very strong. I imagine it'll feel stronger as I flesh out the slotting. The ease of getting S/L defense through sets is a really big deal, I think.

My loose understanding is that costume pieces attach to "bones." Each bone can attach a single costume piece, and then kinda can do either geometry or particle effects from there. You might be able to do a thing where selecting a weapon moved a new "weapon aura" bone to roughly the right place, but the aura would still not know the exact size/geometry of the weapon. This could all be wrong.

Correct, the P2W runs detoggle Combat Jumping. Do you actually play in any scenario where you care about accuracy/damage with CJ turned off? I get that it's not a huge deal to lose Kismet at low levels, but it also seems like it's not a huge deal to toggle CJ on when you're fighting.

That's strange, I'd have expected it to be global like LotG, but the aren't any click defense powers on your build besides Shadow Meld, are there? You could as easily put it on combat jumping.

Why do you want kismet in an auto-power? Just so it's not stealing slot space from something that could reduce endurance consumption/increase defense?

I haven't played an electric blaster, but one thing that was discouraging to me back on live with my elec/kin corruptor was my inability to end-frain AVs.

The minutiae of how procs work are a little confusing, but the general principle is easy. Longer recharge = greater proc rate. Single target = greater proc rate.

Overcapping that much seems pretty silly to me. You're 10% above incarnate defense softcap and I dunno how much over resist cap. Meanwhile, you're 9% under incarnate softcap and 16% under resist cap on energy. It seems clear that if you could knock 5-10% off your S/L numbers and add the same amount to your energy numbers, you'd drop incoming energy damage to less than 1/5th of its current value in incarnate content, and you would lose effectively no S/L durability. Now, sure, maybe that takes you from "who cares I'm unkillable" to "who cares lol I'm unkillable rofl." That's the life of a high-end level 50 tank. But if the thesis is that EA and Invul are pretty similar, then I'd prefer less S/L and more energy compared to an invul tank. I'll also note that Invul is a top-tier Tanker set, so saying that EA is very similar to it is a pretty high bar.

Right, so clearly that character would be better with lower S/L resists and higher energy resists. And somewhat more arguably lower S/L defense and higher energy defense. I mean, level 50 tankers are all fairly unkillable, so maybe who cares, but you have way past capped S/L mitigation (99%), even in incarnate environments, while your incarnate energy damage mitigation could get almost an order of magnitude better, and even in non- incarnate environments it could get more than 2.5 times better.

The Piecemeal arcs weren't perfect, but they were ambitious and a huge breath of fresh air. I'm super excited to see more.

Athletic run is a free P2W power that's in the game right now. It's ninja run minus the stance. There were no plans to make it possible to use CJ and ninja run stack together in i27p1. In fact, there was a whole bunch of making all kinds of minor movement powers that currently stack with CJ not stack with it. Those changes for rolled back. If i may editorialize, the idea that we need to avoid having minor movement bonuses from actual chosen powers (not P2W, but selected powers that take a slot) stack is nuts, and I hope the idea for permanently buried with i27p1.

Compared to invul, it's got endurance management, a heal that you can use tactically, and a bunch of regen, albeit none of the giant max hp buff. But also, it interacts well with the environment: invul on takers finds it easy to massively overcap s/l resistance and defense, while EA has better energy values, and you can get some of the prolific s/l resistance (tough plus sets), and defense (sets including kinetic combat and blistering cold).

As a utility thing, I like that BABs is pretty close to enemies. Makes it convenient to street-sweep for some of those early levels when DFB isn't happening, and it's just much more of a run to and from Ms Liberty from the enemy groups. A vendor would be fine as long as it doesn't push the bad guys farther away.

Yeah, the basic problem is EA is arguably overpowered on everyone, and with Tanker values would be crazy overpowered.