aethereal

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.

It depends on the mission, but in a lot of cases you don't need the tank to defend you. If the rest of the team is tough enough that they aren't seeing their health budge, I'm gonna push ahead. In that case, a lot of the value of the tank becomes getting it so that there's a nice tight ball of enemies on the next group so that we can more efficiently AoE them out. That's hard to accomplish if you're moving with the pack and the pack is going nuts on each spawn, so you move ahead of the pack, let them come to the next spawn to find it clustered around you, and let them kill most of it, and then move on to repeat while they burn down the stragglers. That's obviously inappropriate to your role if people are dying or close-to as you do it. But the fact is, in lots of content, people don't need tanks to control aggro, and trying to behave as though you have a super important aggro control job when nobody cares if they pick up a little aggro is dumb.

So if you can pull together a 230% global recharge (which obviously is very, very high), and 100% local recharge in CU, then you can have an attack chain of: Shin Breaker > Heavy Blow > Assassin's Strike > Crushing Uppercut > Moonbeam > repeat. Shin Breaker has 90% chance to build AF, CU has 100%, Heavy Blow only 75%, so that means you certainly won't guarantee crits on AS all the time, but you'll have the orange ring about 2/3rds of the time and the rest of it you'll almost always have 2/3rds chance to crit. You can miss with either Shin Breaker or Heavy Blow and still be at Combo 3 for Crushing Uppercut, and with the chance-to-hide in Assassin's Strike you'll mostly crit CU. When Build Up is up, you can use it instead of Heavy Blow and get all three of Assassin's Strike, Crushing Uppercut, and Moonbeam in the 5 seconds of 160% damage from Gaussian's (and still be at combo 3 assuming you hit with both shin breaker and assassin's strike). Now, 230% global recharge is a frankly insane amount of global recharge. Is it possible? I think it is, at least in a set with a +20% recharge bonus: +20% recharge from armor set, +70% recharge from hasten, +10% recharge from Ageless Destiny = 100%. +37.5% recharge from 5 LotGs, +20% recharge from ATOs, +30% recharge from purples = 187.5% Find a 7.5% recharge bonus, 5 +5% recharge bonuses from sets = 220% So then you need like two 6.25% recharge bonuses, and you're there. That's a lot of recharge. You'd probably have to throw your entire build at it. Is it worth it? I dunno, probably not. But that's a pretty sexy attack chain.

I guess I was wondering what happens if you sacrifice the "vastly" tougher part. Like, what kind of def/res numbers were you posting for your tanker? I was thinking a really minimal investment in SR, the 8 powers of course, but probably with the toggles four-slotted or even three-slotted and the passives one or two-slotted. At most one power pool defense power.

Why do you think that? You had a situation where 17 people were attacking your tank/brute and 13 people were attacking less durable characters, and that led to an occasional death, but you think that 30 people attacking the tank would have led to a wipe? What is the mechanism that you imagine would cause this?

For people saying that the aggro cap should be higher but not eliminated, what are the beneficial effects that you expect to see from this? Like, let's say aggro cap is 30 instead of 17. What does that get us? In terms of first-order effects, not your expectations about the changes of behavior of teams (that is, not about whether people would or would not start to herd). Farming is easier. It becomes possible to get yourself in more trouble while soloing if you accidentally aggro multiple spawns. It becomes less possible to get yourself in trouble while grouping if you accidentally aggro multiple spawns. People I guess feel mildly better about the in-world plausibility of NPC mob actions. Is there something else that people expect to happen?

So I'm being lazy about trying this out, but I kinda want to see a SR/whatever tanker that utilizes the fact that SR requires so little investment in order to make sort of a tank-brute build. Like, don't try to make something with top-end tank durability, aim for like 50% or so to all three positionals, tough, the usual durability-related procs and globals, the accolades, and whatever random resist bonuses you get from slotting, plus your scaling resists and tanker hit points, and I think you can get durability equal to high-end scrapper or brute builds without really trying. You have obvious spots for all 5 LotG globals plus you get 20% recharge for free, so getting to perma-hasten shouldn't be hard, and get assault and tactics to shore up a really all-in proccing of your attacks. And just see like if you can make a better version of a SR brute? Like, can you get your damage output up to brute standards (I assume scrap/stalk standards are out of reach) with proccing, plus slightly better durability plus bigger AoEs? I don't know if this would actually pan out, but it seems interesting.

Well, those are powers that you may not feel like investing a ton of slotting into, and Cloak of Fear has low base accuracy.

ET still has by far the best DPA of any attack in Energy Melee, despite the long animation time. Total Focus is quite a bit worse off than Energy Transfer, though its arcanatime DPA is slightly better than Bonesmasher. Here's a spreadsheet showing displayed and true DPA for Energy Melee, Martial Arts, and War Mace: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wzj1VBlH9NGqAO01Y8QSz4DBBVLzqkQ6aENtaF9bYnI/edit?usp=sharing

It has a taunt aura. All tanker armor sets have a taunt aura. In SR, it's rolled into Evasion.

Though I think it's overkill to do so. My SR tank feels unkillable in the 20s with softcapped melee and like 37% ranged defense, I'm fine with pursuing attack powers/slotting and letting my ranged/aoe softcaps land in the late 20's.

Level based to-hit bonuses don't kick in until +6 opponents. I don't think that your experience of needing the T9 to tank ITF is a universal one. Instead of trying to finesse the T9 crash, maybe concentrate on building a bit of defense buffer to keep yourself at soft-cap with one or two debuffs on you, or build resistances higher. Eating an orange or purple preemptively can really help. Your heal is strong. It's hard to say what going on with your build without more details. That said, if you're determined to use the T9, my understanding is that it is possible to start the power-sink cast just before the crash, and have the endurance heal kick in just after the crash and ride it out.

I mean. You could just give brutes higher +dam than the other classes. But also, if KM was good on Tankers, Scrappers, and Stalkers, but bad on brutes, that seems better than the status quo.

This is less than perfect, but you can compact down a little faster by putting the enhancements in the AH (not listed, just stored), then taking them back out, at which point they move to the lowest available space in your trays. I'd also like a one button solution.

Claws and Kin Melee also have nonstandard build-ups. I'd expect claws to be a pretty good Tank set partially because of that. Kin Melee seems like it suffers in trying to find a place anywhere.

You have to use the power that the FF proc is in, and it's not a guaranteed activation (also, it only lasts 5 seconds after activation). Whether it's worthwhile in Ripper probably depends on a ton of other stuff, hard to say in isolation. You might get more of a response on this thread if you spent some more time talking about what you're looking for in this build, where the things are that you focused on, and what, if anything, you're unhappy with about the build.

Sents are noticeably lower-DPS than Blasters at level 50, especially in the case of naive builds (Sents can close some of the distance between them and Blasters by proccing out and making heavy use of ancillary power pools). They're still FINE, though. I mean, especially on high-level teams, it is arguably the case that all ATs underperform blasters. If every team was an 8-blaster level 50 fully incarnated group and every spawn got 6-8 T9 nukes and 2-3 Judgments, well. Okay. But as a sent, you'll do okay damage and be a little hardier in the rare circumstances where everything isn't instantly dead.

It's broadly considered the weakest armor set. There are always those who disagree, but opinion on this is as close to consensus as anything in CoH seems to get.

Per Rubi's powers API, swipe does indeed have two effects in the effect-group for criticals (normal % chance critical, not separate crit-from-hide). 58.95 damage each, at 50, before enhancement. They don't change your chance to crit -- the percentage chance to fire is on the effect-group, not the individual effects, so you either get both crits or nothing.