aethereal

EM is among the best ST damage sets, but not like "the uncontested first." Really high-end pylon times only truly predict pylon times. Like, if someone gets a really amazing pylon time, you know they have very good ST damage, but you don't really know if they have better ST damage than someone who gets a few seconds less. The -res procs are the main offenders: having them go off against an even-level opponent and not be reduced by the purple patch makes them way more impactful, when essentially any other hard target that a very high-end scrapper faces will be +3.

Some Protectors have Unstoppable, not Moment of Glory.

It gives you recharge and recovery (EDIT: actually not recovery but endurance discount), but no extra damage.

No, most US cities are pretty straightforward grids, except as dictated otherwise by geography. Visual interest.

Neat! I honestly missed the Mark & Recall power because it's behind Labyrinth content that I ignore. I also note that that topic you linked had zero replies and zero reactions. I'm not like... one hundred percent sure that it actually causally resulted in the mark & recall accolade power, though the same naming certainly implies a linkage. So I guess a slight modification to my claim: My understanding is that the threads in Suggestions & Feedback that get very heated are the ones where someone is like, "Okay, here is my detailed critique of power set X and how I think it should be revamped," or the ones where someone says, "Okay, here's a fundamental modification to a core subsystem of City of Heroes," or one where someone says, "I think the direction of development should be [going further down the incarnate path|focusing on such-and-such a subplot|whatever]" I continue to see zero sign that those topics are ever, at all, impactful on the development of the game. Little one-off micro-suggestions -- I still don't know if they are worthwhile, but even if they aren't, they don't result in big blow-ups and mod actions. Certainly there's no harm to them. Side note here: one of the reasons why I'm dubious that the devs actually pay attention to the Suggestions forum is that they never say, "Hey, look, this kind of suggestion is just... be aware that we're never going to take one of your 5 hours of effort mega-posts on a powerset revamp and actually use it. What would be more helpful is this kind of post instead: [blah blah]." Like, if the devs are interested in the Suggestions forum as a tool, they sure don't do anything to aim the tool where they want.

But you could do both. You could put another slot into Gravity Distortion Field, put a proc into that slot, and you'd have a power that was up more often (due to the higher global recharge) and which did more damage (albeit not a ton more), without giving up anything. Or hey. You love your current build? Okay. Drop Aid Other. Add Hasten. Take two slots away from Lift, put one in Hasten and one in Health. Put the Preventative Medicine proc in the extra Health slot, two Slot Hasten with 50+5 Recharge. For Lift, reslot with Hami-O's or 50+5 Acc/Dam/Rech enhancements. End result? You have basically exactly the same build you have today, +64% global recharge. Like, again: I get that you're satisfied with your build as-is, and that's fine. I doubt that any of these minor tweaks that I'm suggesting are huge winners, but tearing your entire build apart and redoing it, while potentially having more upside, seems not worth it for something that you won't use, and also probably is beyond my skills anyway. But just as a general principle, what you're espousing here doesn't really make sense. 50-60% global recharge is not a small amount! You can go through every place you have local recharge slotting and see if there's a different enhancement you could put in that would give you more of some desired trait, and still have more uptime on that power. You can go through every place where you chose a set for its having a recharge bonus and contemplate a different set that gives you something else instead. There are a lot of degrees of freedom here, and it's just not really plausible that literally none of them result in a better build. To the extent that we're talking about just your character, like, you're happy with it, that's the end of the story. But to the extent that we're giving people advice about how to slot other builds, what I'd say is: "If you are already slotting for lots and lots of global recharge, Hasten just clearly adds versatility. If you hate Hasten, cool, don't use it. If you hate managing the Hasten clicky as well as the Domination clicky, cool, don't use it. But purely mechanically, it is clearly the higher-power, higher-versatility move."

I'm sure that at some point in the thousands of posts on the Suggestions board, someone has suggested something that at least loosely is similar to what actually happened -- I just have some serious doubts that the relationship is causal. Like, if a dev wants to come here and say, "Oh yes, I read the Suggestions board religiously, and while there is very little that makes it 1:1 into the game as suggested, I find it an invaluable tool for springboarding into the changes that we actually do make, and a lot of what makes it into the game owes some amount to the suggestions board," then cool, I'd be happy to take them at their word for that. But honestly I think it's very likely that most or all the devs either don't read Suggestions or read it from a sense of obligation and then ignore it.

I mean, it's at least a little funny for you to say, "I don't see what I'd get from 60% more recharge," and also, "My AoE hold is up too infrequently to be worth slotting for damage." Like, look, you mentioned that you rarely used Lift and so didn't mind slotting it with level 30 IOs largely to chase one recharge bonus. You can just steal the three slots from it, put one slot into Hasten, and then take some of your 5-slotted powers and add one more slot to two of them and pick up either a damage proc there or get one more set bonus, whichever seems more valuable. And the improved recharge of every other power can almost certainly take you from "rarely use Lift" to "always use one of my other powers which is more available." Is that the best possible way to use Hasten in this build? Probably not, it's your build, I don't know too much about it. Look, again, you're happy with your build, that's fine with me. I don't want to dive deep deep deep into how to rearrange your build because you're happy with it, and also you're probably overall a better Dom builder than me. But building to 136% global recharge with set bonuses alone is a huge commitment, and it's just obviously opens up a lot of choice for you if you can drop 20% of those global recharge bonuses and slot for literally anything else.

Do they in fact? I think they add 0% of what is suggested. Like, literally 0%. I think it'd be really hard to find even one specific suggestion that was clearly added to the game due to a post in the Suggestions forum. Certainly, I think they add 0% of the kind of complex, controversial suggestions that draw arguments. I like arguments. I even just sometimes like spitballing about game design in a way that will never have any impact of anything. If the suggestions board was adding value, I think it'd be easily worth whatever controversy it contains. But it is genuinely not clear to me that it is adding literally any value.

I mean, you can "find a slot" by giving up any one of the slots that's giving you say 6.25% or 7.5% global recharge and instead get 70% global recharge. I get that people get bored of building around Hasten. I think it's boring too! And if you want to build heavily for global recharge while skipping Hasten, that doesn't upset or bother me. This is a game, we should be doing what we enjoy. Shield is a great armor set that I almost never use because I think it looks dumb 98% of the time. But this build would clearly be able to slot more flexibly for other goals (whether they be procs, defense/resistance, or whatever else) while also achieving vastly better global recharge if you put Hasten in.

Note that the global recharge slotting above uses 63 slots, assuming all the superior ATOs/purples are five-slotted. You get 67 assignable slots in a level 50 build. Plus the inherent 1 slot of powers that slottable powers get (so, if all your chosen powers are slottable, then 24 chosen powers plus a slot in sprint/health/stamina/etc). Like, it's doable! But again, it becomes overwhelmingly the singular major goal you can have in your build. And you end up with about 50% less global recharge than you would have with perma-hasten.

Hasten gives +70% global recharge while active. To be clear about perma-Hasten: perma-Hasten requires 90% slotting local recharge in Hasten + 180% global recharge, including the recharge from Hasten itself. So 110% global recharge outside of Hasten. Perma-dom is, as you say, minimally 123% and probably to avoid fairly frequent drops you want more like 130% recharge. It is in general tough to get 130% global recharge without either Hasten or some other power support for adding global recharge. Doing it purely with set bonuses runs into this problem: Okay, say you have 5 +10% global recharge bonuses from purples/superior ATOs, and another 5 Luck of the Gamblers. That's 87.5% global recharge. Where are you getting another 37.5 - 42.5% recharge from, if not Force Feedbacks, Hasten, or other powers? 5% recharge bonuses are fairly available in sets, but you can only get 5 of them of course, so that's 25% of your remaining. Then you have to scrounge up 6.25% or 7.5% bonuses, but those are both rare bonuses not easily crammed into most builds in quantity -- and you need at least two 7.5%'s in order to get to 125% global recharge. Now, Doms do offer the possibility of getting both snipes and holds, which can help getting 7.5% recharge bonuses. I'm sure that people can manage 125% or even 130% global recharge purely on set bonuses if they want to. But do note that you're talking about trying to get more than 17 different recharge bonuses from sets, most of them deep in sets. It's almost your entire build. In contrast, if you fall a little short of perma-Hasten, say you're at 95% global recharge without hasten, so 165% while it's up, that will average out to more than enough recharge to have perma-Dom fairly comfortably.

I understand. Despite the name of that option, it opens the menu includes both the "trade prismatics for costumes" and "convert monstrous to prismatic."

It's under the third option, exchange prismatic aethers for costume rewards.

So, according to chatter from over the years, the issue with anything like "whip melee" is that the animations for the whip powers are a beast. They are apparently like five times the size of other animations, and also the claim was that the fire on the whip covers up some real problems in how the whip actually animates and connects. In order to do an actual whip melee set, you'd need at least 2-3 more whip animations, and that's a very tall cliff to climb for any animators out there. In addition to all the pain of actually creating a new set in general. I've long felt that instead of going full whip melee, they should make "Hellfire manipulation/assault" sets that are blaster/dominator secondaries that use the existing whip animations plus some fire blast or melee animations to fill out the sets. Broaden whips to blasters and doms and you can make do with just the three whip animations that we have already, and a lot of people who don't like Masterminds would get access to them.

DoT has no effect on procs.

+80% damage is good even on a brute, the Guassian's Build Up proc makes it even better. I mean, look, the game's not very hard, you don't need to do anything, but if you care about performance in terms of burst damage at all, I think that getting the power is a no-brainer.

Cool! Well, if damage procs go off at 90% in Spring Attack, that certainly makes it a lot more compelling as an attack.

What procs did you try with? Enemy-affecting ones like damage procs or self-affecting ones like say Force Feedback? I'm pretty sure that there are some cases where different procs look at different powers for their PPM. (Reason number 9,482 why PPM is a terrible system that should be destroyed). By the way, more nattering on copies boosts flag: We were focused on global bonuses like fury, which I continue to think do not need a flag in order to apply to an executed power. But the other kind of boost that does need to be copied to both a pseudopet and an executed power are local powers enhancement: ie, if you put a damage enhancement in the Lightning Rod (using a pseudopet) or the Spring Attack (using execute power) power, you want that damage enhancement to affect the power use that actually damages someone. In the case of a pseudopet, it's all the same: both Fury and damage enhancement need to somehow get moved over to the pet in order to work. In the case of an execute power, you (probably?) don't need any special flagging to get Fury to work, but you still (probably?) do need special flagging to say, "the damage enhancement from this power should affect this other power that actually does the damage."

You're right that Savage Leap never used a pseudopet. I nevertheless think that the "copy boosts to entity" thing is irrelevant on a power that you execute yourself: it was probably copied there somewhat extraneously because people used older pseudopet power effects as a template. It's possible that that's not true! The powers code is complicated, and maybe an "execute power" thing normally cuts you off from your own global effects, but that seems very complicated and unnecessary, so I suspect that it's not what happens. Just because I love nattering about this: The Reason for Pseudopets The basic powers code for City of Heroes contemplates two origination points for area-of-effect powers: the caster (a "point blank AoE" like say Fire Sword Circle), or a target entity (a "targeted AoE" like say Fireball). There is no concept of an AoE emanating from a point on the grid, it has to come from an entity (again, the caster or a target). So when they wanted "location-targeted AoEs," the powers code did not support that. In order to simulate the idea of an AoE emanating from an arbitrary point on the map, what you do is target a point on the map, summon an invisible, untargetable entity on that point, and then that entity executes a point blank AoE power, then destroys itself. Boom, location-targeted AoEs. At the time that pseudopets were created, there was no way to execute another power on demand, so the way that the pseudopet worked was that it had an auto-power that was the PBAoE, so it just fired as soon as the pet was created. This approach worked, but as you might imagine for a fairly complicated scheme, there were a variety of little bits of strangeness about it. For our purposes, the two big ones are: 1. it's a different entity, so if you have some global effect on you, the pseudopet didn't have that global effect on it 2. because what you think of as the "location targeted AoE" is an autopower, it procs like an autopower (also: it has different max values than you, it doesn't do things like break Stalker stealth, etc). So they created the "copy boosts to entity" flag to solve the first problem, where basically when they create the pseudopet, it goes through and copies all global effects that are on you onto the pet as well. Teleport Attack Powers and Power Execution You may be looking at the above and saying, "hang on, there's nothing there that requires teleport attack powers to use pseudopets. They're PBAoEs that emanate from the person using the power." But if you naively make a power with two effects: a PBAoE attack and a teleport, what will happen is that you will do a PBAoE from where you START, not where you LAND, which wasn't the effect they wanted from Lightning Rod, the original teleport attack. A power checks all of its targets at the time that it executes. That means that it finds targets who are X distance from you at the point when you activate the power, ie, from your original location. This is true even if you apply a delay to the PBAoE effect, so that it happens after you land -- it still checks targeting at the time when you activate the power, not when the effect happens. So their solution with Lightning Rod was to code it as a location-targeted AoE (with a pseudopet) and a teleport. But then they invented the power execution effect. When the effect of one power is to execute another power, it is importantly the case that that's a separate power, with a separate activation time, and separate targeting criteria. So this allows the modern implementation of Spring Attack and at least some other teleport attacks: instead of teleporting you to a grid location and creating a pseudopet that attacks at the same location, they teleport you to the location, wait long enough for the teleport to happen, and then execute a PBAoE power on you as well. Since the PBAoE is separately activated, it checks targets from your position at the time it activates, not the place where the first power activates, and thus you get the desired "PBAoE at destination" effect. Part of the reason to get this effect is exactly to remove the pseudopet indirection. You don't need to copy boosts, you use your AT's inherent maxes and scalars and everything, secondary effects like breaking stealth work normally. I generally believe that the "copies boosts to entities" flag does nothing here, though again I could be wrong. But the entire point of coding the power like this is to not need things like "copies boosts to entity."

There is no entity, now. Maybe this power was once implemented as a pseudopet? I believe that Fury should work normally because your character is still the originator of the power, it's not indirected through another entity, so there's no reason that all of your global effects wouldn't work as normal. The "boosts copied to entity" stuff with pseudopets (for other powers that do in fact have a pseudopet) works pretty well, but the big thing about it is that it's a one-time copy, which can sometimes lead to strangeness for pseudopets that have some duration. But Spring Attack is not a pseudopet and you are directly the entity that executes the effect, so I don't see a reason to imagine that it wouldn't work like you'd expect. I have not tested, however.

In general, pseudopet powers proc poorly. Basically, they proc as if their recharge time + cast time were 10 seconds instead of the usually longer recharge time of the "real power." Spring Attack is not actually a pseudopet. It has a redirect instead, which will have different proccing characteristics, and potentially more attractive ones. I'm honestly not sure how procs work through Spring Attack. I suspect but am not sure that they are still much reduced from what they "should" be for a 120s recharge power.

SOs are not budget friendly, and you don't need to farm (or do complex marketing schemes) in order to afford much better than SOs.

Well, I mean, it was two years ago. FWIW, DB/Inv is a good example of a powerset combo that doesn't really make a ton of sense to do as a Brute. You'll almost certainly have a better build as either a Scrapper or a Tanker. That is: It's an armor set that doesn't have a damage aura (damage auras go well with Brute fury). It's an armor set that does have a taunt aura on a Scrapper. It's an armor set that has a heavy defense component so Scrappers don't give up a lot of durability on it. It's an armor set that really can take advantage of high Tanker base values since you want to bid up both defense and resistance on it. It's a melee set that heavily features a damage add, which is better on Tanks than Brutes and MUCH better on Scrappers than both.

In fairness, recharge enhancement, both local and global, are very much a thing. I don't think it's that meaningful to talk about the unenhanced recharge values of bio clicks. But I agree with the overall point that it's not super hard to give a "click heavy" set (even one that's substantially more click-heavy than bio) enough offensive boost that it makes up for the lost cast time.