aethereal

I made a little spreadsheet comparing (Brute) Energy Melee to War Mace and Martial arts. I transcribed the info from the JSON power files that someone created in the tools section, hopefully I avoided any transcription errors. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Wzj1VBlH9NGqAO01Y8QSz4DBBVLzqkQ6aENtaF9bYnI/edit?usp=sharing You can play around with stuff yourself to get a comparison, but here are some highlights: Energy Melee's best DPA attack is Energy Transfer, at 71.23, its second best is Energy Punch at 50.25, and its third is Bone Smasher at 45.60. Total focus comes in fourth, and honestly it needs a lot more help than Energy Transfer does. Clobber destroys the DPA of Energy Transfer (Clobber is 99.02!), though then War Mace has Jawbreaker and Pulverize both around 45. Of course, War Mace has three AoEs, all of them better than Whirling Hands. Martial Arts doesn't have any single attack that has the DPA of Energy Transfer, but it does have Storm Kick at 66.33, Crippling Axe Kick at 55.26, and both Cobra Strike and Crane Kick at 48.95. Its single PBAoE attack has almost twice the DPA of Whirling Hands. Nowadays, you have to look at the procability of attacks to get a real sense of things, but with Stun not having a damage proc, I don't think this really is a big advantage for Energy Melee. It has several 20s recharge attacks, so they're reliably procable, but probably that's overkill -- other melee sets usually have 12-16s recharge times which are still pretty reliable for getting a proc off (if you don't slot for recharge) and mean you need fewer attacks in the attack chain to get them off. If Energy Transfer were to get a 1s animation time, its DPA would be positively stupid -- 190! It's hard for me to argue that a one attack should be that much of an outlier. Total Focus is really disappointing and could in my opinion use a drop to a 2s animation time, which would give Energy Melee at least some claim to fame in having two different notably high-DPA attacks. One ultra-high DPA attack on a 20s cooldown doesn't salvage the set, for me. Giving stun the "cobra strike" treatment has always seemed nonsensical to me, and continues to. Total Focus should be better than it is. If we cut it to a 2s animation time, then we have Total Focus, Energy Transfer, and Energy Punch already better DPA than Cobra Strike is, and Bone Smasher just barely inferior to Cobra Strike. At very reasonable recharge levels, we can have a seamless attack chain consisting of Energy Transfer, Total Focus, Bone Smasher, and Energy Punch. If we replace Bone Smasher with a Cobra-Strike-like Stun, then we are, first of all, only microscopic amounts higher damage, and second, we've now obviated Bone Smasher. Power players would probably just reach for higher levels of global recharge and drop Stun or Bone Smasher anyway. Improving Stun makes some sense if we continue to have Total Focus be an arguably useless attack, but why would we do that? Energy Melee's AoE is dismal. It's not just that it has one AoE, it's that it has one bad AoE. Making Stun do something to help out AoE makes a lot more sense than trying to crowd another single-target attack into a set with five other single-target attacks. Stun should either be AoE or else it should up its mitigation game in some way (it doesn't really make sense for this set to have another single-target stun when it, again, already has a ton of other single-target stuns). If Whirling Hands continues to be the only AoE in Energy Melee, it should probably get some mild help. Improving its DPA to 20-ish would still make it way less than Dragon's Tail, Shatter, or Crowd Control, but would at least throw some kind of bone to this set. It certainly would not change the set to be "a good AoE set."

2 HOs and 4 procs will be higher damage, I would expect (especially if two of those procs are purple procs). But more expensive, and 5-piecing Hecatomb gets you a 10% global recharge bonus plus whatever other bonuses.

So Genetic Corruption seems pretty solid to me. If your resistance to S/L is 75%, then it's the equivalent of an additional 2.5% or so resistance, and much more than that to your less-resisted damage types (assuming that your opponents are in range of it). And with Freezing Aura, the sleep effect is pretty noticeable. I'm actually thinking of just going ahead and enhancing it with a 50+5 sleep IO to increase mitigation/chances of overlap with freezing aura.

RubyRed's tool looks like exactly what I'm looking for, thanks!

Is there a spreadsheet or database floating around that includes a listing for power recharge time, animation time (or Arcana time), damage, and other factors? Something to play around with to put numbers to suggestions for this forum?

Does anyone know the numbers for Genetic Corryption? The detailed info is literally completely blank. To answer my own question, per the JSON powers data that someone on the forums created: It's a 66% chance of mag 2.0 sleep, auto-hit, for 7.5 seconds, that grows to an 85% chance with offensive adaptation 30% regen if in efficient adaptation (no regen bonus in other adaptations) -11.25% to strength of all damage, auto-hit, growing to -14.96% with defensive adaptation

Very few do, as far as I know. The one I'm aware of is the burning forest that is used for the Kronos titan in regular missions. Does anyone have a list of maps that can take GMs? Is there a way to filter maps down to ones that allow certain details?

Southeast, not southwest.

If you're at Ms Liberty facing south, it's towards the southeast, and vaguely visible. It's a building with a slightly domed glassed-in roof, and there are doors that let you go up some steps into the glassed in section, which is a small park.

Are there any places that are potentially neat spots to visit/rolepay that are... maybe not secrets, but not the obvious places? Some that I know of: The Monkey Fight Club in Sharkhead Paragon Dance Party in Talos and I forget where else The rooftop park in Atlas The floating islands around Ouroborus Anything similar? Ideally with few or no enemy spawns and featuring some kind of interesting element to them. Not supergroup bases. Not that they aren't great, but they're a separate topic.

Yeah, I've seen it used as an RP thing.

I totally believe that. I just don't really know what else to put in the default slot for gen corruption.

I'm not sure I understand the objection to sandman in genetic corruption due to bio already being heavy on healing/regen.

I see that both builds listed on this thread use the Fortunata's Hypnosis Placate proc in genetic corruption. I was kind of vaguely thinking of the heal proc from call of the sandman. I haven't used any placate in the homecoming era. Is the thought here just that it's a bit more damage mitigation from people not attacking you? Or are you trying to set up more crits?

So in terms of should moonbeam (or zapp) be part of the ST rotation -- do stalker epic snipes get damage bonuses from +to-hit the way that Blaster snipes do? If so, are people making the comparison with that in mind? It seems like with offensive adaptation, the uptime of build-up for a stalker, and potentially things like the kismet +to-hit special enhancement, or tactics or something, it could make a noticeable difference.

Five-slotting Boundless Energy with a set that includes lots of things it doesn't need (end/recharge) seems like... a lot. It's got the 7.5% recharge, obviously. But you could get the same things minus the set bonuses by dropping two slots and doing the panacea proc + two common heal IOs, I think.

I run on a Mac, on Catalina, so I don't have access to Mids. So I'm looking for a build, but more so, I'm looking for like... philosophy. Approach, and maybe some discussion. Some questions on my mind: 1. What should I take and slot in bio? Is Genetic Corruption any good? The sleep component seems obviously not great, but what about the damage debuff (damage debuff plus sandman proc for a bit more survivability)? How about Parasitic Aura? 2. With a bio armor brute, I slotted DNA Siphon as a proc-bomb, but I'm wondering if, with the lower HP pool and resist caps of a stalker, should I do it more as a pure defensive power? 3. What's the overall approach to maximizing survivability as a bio stalker? S/L defense? non-S/L resists? Just lots of recharge to keep your clickies at the highest uptime? Shadow Meld as a panic button? I've never had Shadow Meld, I understand it has a very long (3s) animation time. When does the defense actually kick in during that animation time? 4. In terms of attacks, how possible is it to get to almost entirely assassin's strike/freezing touch/moonbeam ST rotation? Not entirely, right? I'm gonna need ice sword to be fairly in there as a filler? With stalker base damage/crits, I want to get my attacks to 90% damage enhancement before worrying about procs, right? 5. It seems like this character is not going to generate a lot of stacks of assassin's focus. Do we worry about trying to get auto-crits on assassin's strike, or just use it on cooldown? 6. I've got Frost five-slotted with Positron's Blast plus one more dam/range enhancement from a yellow set. I was thinking that once I'm 50, I'd +5 boost the orphan damage/range. Not sure where that will leave me in terms of total frost range, I'm at 12.68 feet now at level 32. Is there value in chasing more range enhancement here? 7. Any particular comments about actually playing this combo?

It sounds very unlikely that there are existing hooks in the code for a power's PPM calculations to be generated separately for different procs.

Well, killing you doesn't do anything other than waste your time, either. On some level, the challenge of CoH is efficiently achieving rewards. If someone can blast through Nemesis groups without paying the tax for waiting out the PFFs, and someone else does, then the person who can finesse the PFF is getting a reward for their skill (or for their character having like good holds, or whatever).

You make a pretty strong point. I will say that there's a challenge bar to trying to avoid it, on some characters at least (time a knockdown to give you a chance to kill them before they can activate, for example), so it to some extent rewards play skill with faster progress. But probably it's a minority of characters who can actually do that?

Just out of curiosity, does that 95.02% of attacks hitting not count streakbreaker attacks? Because the true rate of hitting should be higher than 95% due to streakbreaker. Basically, to get 100 attack rolls, you should get 105 attacks, since about 5 attacks should miss, triggering streakbreaker next. So you should have about 100 hits from 105 attacks (95 normal hits, 5 misses, 5 streakbreaker hits), 95.24% of all attacks hit, including streakbreaker. So 95.02% would be a little low.

No stun damage procs, right?

This is similar enough to the Rad Melee AoE mechanic that I think it's not a fruitful approach. If you want your ST attacks to become AoE attacks in a fists-energy-based melee set, I mean... Rad melee is a good set.

Yeah, I've never really bought the whole argument that Doms can't have Illusion Control because it doesn't benefit enough from Domination. I mean, that'd be fine if Illusion weren't the basis for some obviously extremely powerful characters. And if it didn't strongly benefit from high global recharge, just like Domination. Does Illusion Control, of all control sets, really need to synergize super, super well with Domination in order to be good?

Is there a significant hurdle to getting Scorpion Shield? You can change your alignment in zero minutes, and Black Scorpion's patron arc can be easily run in an afternoon. My understanding is that even in ATs that have access to Ice Armor, Scorpion Shield is still the meta. So it doesn't feel like adding ice armor to Defenders/Corruptors would be increasing max powerlevel significantly. This seems a pretty unobjectionable suggestion from a minmax/power creep perspective.