aethereal

This would be in a redesign that removes Opportunity. I am honestly... pretty doubtful that this level of ambitious redesign of Sentinels is going to actually... happen. I mean, it's been more than six months to redesign Energy Melee. I don't think there's any suggestion that a Sent revamp would happen in page 6. The thing that CP has been talking about -- completely changing the inherent of Sentinels -- seems like a bigger lift than anything that has so far happened in Homecoming.

Because when you have a totally permissive set, you quickly end up going 1, 2, 3, 1, 4 repeat for a lot of gameplay. Having something that adds some tension to your decisions of what power to cast next, where you MIGHT want to press 2 but also you MIGHT want to press 3 is more engaging. Now, I'd argue that in general CoH has had difficulty actualizing that idea, but it's a good idea at base. Classes like defender/controller/corruptor/dom have some of that anyway because their powers are much more diverse than the melee sets, so there's just generally more of, "Should I fire off this mez or this debuff or this heal" going on in combat, but classes that mostly have a choice between "damage, more damage, and aoe damage" have a harder time staying interesting.

Per the powers api, it's 1.33 seconds nominal cast time, and thus presumably 1.584 seconds arcanatime.

I dearly, dearly hope that Page 6 is way past the point where they're still looking for fundamental philosophical approaches about how to change Energy Melee.

Sentinels do about 150% defender damage based on scalar (before resist debuffs or opportunities). This whole idea that sentinels barely outdamage defenders is just wrong. Now, some defenders can get big damage boosts out of their primary. But that's different.

Yeah, I was thinking something where it's more pronounced than that, but also without the high bar of mag resist to get over from the start. So you could hold an AV with just your normal T2 hold, but just for a very short period of time. Could potentially use it strategically to give someone a chance to fire off a heal or whatever. But, again, we aren't going to scrap mag resists as the primary defense against mezzes at this stage in the game.

I kinda wish that AV resistance to status effects was more based on shortening the duration than being flat-out protected from it. It feels like being able to hold an AV for 2 seconds every 12 or so wouldn't be out-of-control powerful. Maybe with then a 2 second period afterward of mag 1000 protection so multiple controllers couldn't statue an AV by working together. But too big a change for the game as-is.

Just checked Rubi's powers API, assuming I'm interpreting it correctly (which is never guaranteed), here are the relevant effects of Ball Lightning: 1. 16.68 energy damage 2. 4 ticks of 10.01 energy damage 3. 7% chance of 56.72 energy damage if NOT hidden 4. 50% chance of 56.72 energy damage if hidden So, basically, it's a totally normal Stalker AoE attack in this respect: 50% chance critical out of hide, critical damage is the sum of all the DoT in one up-front package.

So for example my build can't run your attack chain, I think, because it has less recharge in Assassin's Strike than is needed for your two-AS's-in-one-12-second-or-so chain. Conversely, my build doesn't go crazy on proccing Moonbeam, but if your attack chain doesn't use Moonbeam (or Zapp, whichever) at all (as Croax's attack chain did not), at least one slot is going completely wasted in my build, since it's going to carry a proc which isn't giving a set bonus in Moonbeam. And honestly maybe the power pick is going wasted too, it's mostly providing some global recharge that I think none of these builds really need. My build uses tactics, which I don't think is necessary to hit things, but I chose to try to improve the damage of Moonbeam. My build 5-slots HB with Superior Blistering Cold for the S/L defense, because it doesn't use HB in its attack chain, but your attack chain uses HB. Build and attack chain just can't be separated from each other. I definitely think that my build needs work -- it is really hard to try to wring all the juice out of a build without Mids. Doing stuff through the respec tool, even on test where everything is free, is just much, much, much more clumsy than doing it in Mids.

I think the overall distaste for Agility comes from two things: 1. You can get a LOT of global recharge from sets and of course Hasten (+87.5% recharge just from LotG and five +10% bonuses from ATOs/Purples, and that gets you most of the way to perma-hasten in and of itself). You can not reasonably get +20% to +45% damage from sets. So why not use sets to get your recharge and free up your alpha for something only it can get. 2. Agility potentially reduces the efficacy of proc builds. I think #2 is pretty overstated, honestly. First, there's a fairly narrow range of powers that are going to be hurt in their procability by Agility (like your telenukes wouldn't, though they won't be great at proccing anyway). Second, most people don't end up having build space for real proc-heavy builds anyway. Third, on stalkers at least, proc-heavy builds aren't obviously super powerful anyway. See for example the StJ Attack Chain thread also up towards the top of the forum right now -- I've been building with a real eye towards maximizing proc value and, like, maybe it's mildly useful? Or maybe it's actually disadvantageous to DPS.

Wait, this doesn't make sense. Attack chains and builds are interrelated, not independent. A given build might not even take a power used in a given attack chain, or might take it but slot it as a mule or whatever. A build designed for a given attack chain might push for far more recharge for a power than it needs for another attack chain. An attack chain might not be gapless on build A, but is on build B. I also just did another round of testing and did an 88 second time on the first pylon with my attack rotation (with assault hybrid toggled on -- I agree it should be off, but just apples-to-apples comparison since we've been doing it on). I don't understand why Croax and I are getting such different results. Okay, and here are my first two pylon results with my rotation, assault hybrid OFF: 113 seconds 119 seconds Then I accidentally got killed by the dropship. 😛

Huh. I've had way better results than that. Like, even with my kind of clumsy setup in which I'm pretty sure I lose at least 5 seconds just starting and stopping the timer, and where I have several times self-sabotaged by imagining I can jump to the end of the thing and use my heavy attacks out-of-order to get the last few percent of health and then had my cooldowns get screwed up, I've never gone above 97 seconds. But thanks for trying it out!

Sniper attacks are instant in-combat, you no longer need to get +22% to-hit. Instead, your damage will increase as you go from +0% to hit to +22% to hit. Base recharge of Moonbeam is 24 seconds, so getting it down to 8 seconds is pretty trivial and to 6 seconds is doable with effort, especially since you're using Agility. It's unlikely that your attack chain is less than 8 seconds, so using it once per rotation is pretty simple. Meanwhile, the long base recharge helps in terms of damage and procs. It's expensive in terms of endurance, for sure. There are lots of different strategies for handling your endurance economy in CoH, but thinking about how to get there is important, especially for Stalkers who also have the relatively chonky Assassin's Strike in their attack chain.

Looks decent!

It's not really about moonbeam, zapp is basically as good. I didn't proc it out to the point where I needed the extra damage proc for moonbeam. Okay, so basically this: Initial Strike: 3 slot with Superior Stalker's Guile: Dam/Rech, Acc/Dam/Rech, Dam/End/Rech Heavy Blow: 5 slot with Superior Blistering Cold Sweeping Cross: 5 slot with Armageddon + Fury of the Gladiator Proc Assassin's Strike: 3 slot with Super Stalker's Guile: Acc/Dam, Proc, Acc/Dam/End/Rech, plus 50+5 common damage enh, plus touch of death proc + mako's proc Build Up: 1-slot with Gaussian's proc Shin Breaker: 50+5 Crushing Impact Acc/Dam, 50+5 Mako's Acc/Dam, Achilles heel proc, Mako's proc, Touch of Death proc, Hecatomb proc. Crushing Uppercut: 5-slot with Hecatomb (minus the proc) + Unbreakable Constraint proc Spinning Strike: 6-slot with Superior Assassin's Mark. Moonbeam or Zapp: 5-slot with Apocalype (not the pure damage one) + Sting of the Manticore proc I got Assault. Probably would've been a good idea to get Tactics for a bit more Moonbeam damage, but I failed to. For everything else, just, you know, two-slot hasten and work on survivability and global recharge. I didn't have to touch a defensive clicky during the pylon fights. Musculature, Degenerative, Ageless, Assault, all Core/left side. Make sure you use Spinning Strike on some trash mob in the zone before engaging to engage the global proc. I'm not sure about the Crushing Uppercut slotting. I wanted the recharge, but you could pretty easily marginally improve its damage by slotting it for acc/dam and then a bunch of procs.

Like I said, I can't use Mids, it doesn't run on Mac Catalina. Closest I could do is screenshot the enhancement interface.

99.3 average compared to 92.1 and 96 average doesn't seem awful to me. I did a modified build and tested out, and got numbers more like averaging a bit over 90, but I didn't see any step-change function better than your previous tests. I suspect I'm just not as good at doing these tests compared to you, though. My differences: Hecatomb proc in shin breaker, not crushing uppercut. Kismet proc for increased accuracy. Moonbeam 50-slotted with the ranged Purple + some other proc. Assassin's strike has just three of the ATO (including the proc of course), a damage enhancement, and two damage procs, with very minimal local recharge to improve proccing. Sorry, I'm on a mac with Catalina so I can't run mids and just share a build. Doing these tests with Assault hybrid turned on is a nightmare, it slows it way down, since you have to wait for Assault hybrid to come off cooldown between every pylon.

You can tell Mids to show you your combat values. I forget the exact way to do this. Options and then a bunch of checkboxes for like "has attacked" and "has taken damage."

Proc rate for it is kinda dismal, though, since it's an area attack. But I think you're right, SC is a necessary evil. If you wanna test something, I'd be interested in you testing: Assassin's Strike > Crushing Uppercut > Shin Breaker > Moonbeam > Sweeping Cross > Shin Breaker. If you don't, I will eventually.

AS does build 2 combo points, so CU will be maxed if both AS and SB hit, but that means that 10% of the time it won't be maxed (assuming max chance to hit), and 5% of the time it will be at combo level 1 instead of 2, which is a little brutal. If you can build some redundancy in without losing much, that's nice. If there was an attack that didn't burn combo that you could use in place of the relatively low-value sweeping cross, it'd feel good to have it in. But there just isn't anything. In terms of using AS more often, the issue with using it every 6 seconds is: 1. If you do have a miss with AS (either the attack missing altogether or the proc failing to fire, so combined 14.5% chance per AS), you get "off-cycle" with your hide proc and you can spend substantial amounts of time wasting your auto-crit on something else -- including potentially sweeping cross in some of these attack chains, which is awful, because sweeping cross from hide doesn't even auto-crit. 2. This also means that wherever you crit, whether you crit on CU or elsewhere, you're getting that crit every 12 seconds instead of every 10. 3. You also have to build attack chains that are longer and use more "bad" attacks to do this. 4. You then use CU less than you could, as well -- it's easy to get CU's recharge down well below 12 seconds, and it's the second-highest DPA attack in StJ. So, I dunno. Maybe it's a DPS loss and maybe it's not. The point about AS being the best attack is well taken. But if you lose about 40% of an AS in order to gain 20% of a CU plus 50% of a CU crit plus just not having another 2 seconds worth of "bad" attack in the attack chain altogether, is that worth it? It's not obvious to me what the answer is. EDIT: If you could get the recharge of AS down to the point where you could fit two of them into a 10s or so attack chain, that would be amazing, but that takes you back up to heroic levels of recharge, like 200%+ global plus 100% local.

I've been trying to create an attack chain that's just slightly more than 10 seconds for a full rotation to maximize the use of the hide proc, and, weirdly, what this set could really would be "if Heavy Blow were half a fuckin' second longer to animate." There's no really good way using just the powers in the set + Moonbeam to create this attack rotation. What I want is: Assassin's Strike > Crushing Uppercut > Shin Breaker > Moonbeam > ?? > Shin Breaker > repeat Where ?? is a 1.5 second activation time attack with a good DPA. Sweeping Cross ain't it, because it will only be at combo level 1, and it has pretty garbage DPA at combo level 1. Spinning Strike always has garbage DPA. So what about Cross Punch? Did you know that Cross Punch, according to Rubi's API, has a 20% chance to apply a minor critical damage effect if the caster is a stalker and the target is sleeping or held? What? What the hell? What even is that? And Crushing Uppercut holds targets, and Cross Punch's DPA goes from garbage to not-entirely-garbage if this effect is included. But, ultimately, I rejected this because Crushing Uppercut won't hold the EB-and-above targets that are the only conceivably important targets of a high-end stalker single-target attack chain. So I don't know. EDIT: This sounds crazy, and hard-or-impossible to put into action, but the right thing to do might honestly be AS > CU > SB > MB > HB > SB > pause for 0.25 seconds > repeat. Or build in a small gap in MB's activation time such that it eats a 0.25s gap. That's crazy, right? Intentionally have a two-arcana-time-ticks gap in your chain? But it's only 2.5% of your total attack chain, and if it maximizes the chances of critting CU... maybe? EDIT2: Probably I should just suck it up and do AS > CU > SB > MB > SC > SB. Sweeping Cross doesn't have that bad DPA. I just hate that it's chewing up combo that could profitably be going to CU, limiting the chance that a miss means a non-level-3 combo CU. But even so, that attack chain has a 10.2 second repeat time, so it should clear CU up for reliable crits every cycle, you can put Hecatomb proc into Shin Breaker for twice-per-cycle chance to activate, and you can do the whole thing at completely reasonable levels of global recharge.

I through together a first attempt at it on test, and it was disappointing. Now, my build was not very refined, and it's possible that it just didn't come together in some way, but i think the problem was not that i was missing damage procs (I sacrificed survivability, not procs), but the hidden ten second cooldown on the hide proc. The entire attack chain is less than ten seconds, so I think I created a situation where despite taking great pains to get better uptime on CU, I'm not really getting the benefit of that uptime. EDIT: Actually, this is a pretty important thing. So, look, it's super easy to get your CU to have a total cooldown of less than 10 seconds. It has a 25 second base cooldown, so 150% total recharge gets you to 10 seconds. If you have perma-hasten, your global recharge alone will get CU down to less than 10 seconds. But if you want to get most of your CUs to be crits, you need to use CU slightly less often than every 10 seconds. This in turn means that you shouldn't really put any local recharge in CU (or very little, incidentally due to other advantageous slotting), giving you 90% proc rates with any proc that you might conceivably put in it (rather than my lower proc rates because I had 100% local recharge). Some other notes: If you're in some kind of attack chain where you fire Heavy Blow, Shin Breaker, and Assassin's strike twice and then CU and something else once each (like: shin breaker > heavy blow > assassin's strike > crushing uppercut > shin breaker > heavy blow > assassin's strike > sweeping cross or whatever), then the Hecatomb proc will give you more power in either shin breaker or assassin's strike than in CU. It's probably ideally in assassin's strike in that case, where (assuming no local recharge) it has a 90% proc rate, but even if you have to put it in shin breaker, where it has a 70% proc rate, it's better to have two 70% procs per cycle than one 90% proc per cycle, by obviously a considerable margin. I think this creates some build tension, because I think a lot of people are slotting CU as "five hecatomb + unbreakable constraint proc," but do note that that's a somewhat "bad" slotting. Obviously, it can otherwise be tough to get the 10% recharge from Hecatomb.

Scrappers get fireball and ball lightning in their epics. And the procs in their ATOs radically boost their damage. Brute ATO procs are mediocre.

I think you lose the bonus if you lose access to the power, it's just that if you slot the set in a power that you keep until low level, you keep the set bonuses. But I'm not sure.

I took one to 50. Seemed solid for an AoE focused brute. Haven't tried the combo on a scrapper.