aethereal

All Savage powers crit. Shield Charge doesn't crit. The ATO1 can be anywhere; it's a global effect. For max dps, you'd probably mule it in an unused power since it doesn't contribute damage or other desired attributes to the power it's slotted in. The ATO2 is probably best in either vicious slash or maiming slash if you want to use it for sustained DPS.

With respect to routine use of inspirations, it's also just, like... not a lot of fun to commit to all that inspiration management, for me. If you want to keep inspirations of very particular types (probably orange/purple, maybe breakfrees, maybe red) constantly available, it's clearly possible. People do it. But you need to fill your inspiration tray initially, then as you use inspirations keep it clear enough to get drops of your favored types and either combine or delete inspirations to make space continuously. That's just not gameplay I enjoy. In the same way that some people hate hate hate clicky armor sets or demand taunt auras on their melee characters, I think it's just not a ton of fun to spend my time and attention on that management. I tried it recently with a blaster and breakfrees plus some defense insps, and it just wasn't enjoyable. No shade on people who like that. But consider it as a style-of-play thing.

This might be good advice for the OP as a newbie, but be aware that the -to-hit from Dark eventually becomes largely redundant on a dedicated defense set, as you hit softcap without needing to rely on Dark. That said, if you're at a point in your play where you aren't going deep on set bonuses, the synergy is real.

Sorry, you are of course correct, I turned the 9 into a 6 when looking at the number and transcribing it. The odds of 100 misses in a row are even astronomically smaller if any of those attacks were at a higher hit chance than 5%. The calculation of them being at a heterogeneous hit chance gets very complicated, but just to be clear, the odds of 100 misses in a row at 6% miss chance are 0.2%, so if there are some number of 6%s and some number of 5%s in the mix, then the odds are between 0.59% and 0.2%. This is all in a kind of insane world in which someone actually makes 100 attacks against you: I don't think that basically any enemy in the game attacks more than one time every two seconds for a long streak of attacks, so we're talking like more than three minutes of continuous battling -- plausible if you're say a tank fighting an AV solo, but almost no other situation. This is true, but makes the streak breaker even less relevant.

Yes. And the odds of 100 misses in a row at floored 5% miss chance are... 0.56% On the off chance that any enemy actually makes 100 attacks against you, if the streakbreaker ever kicks in, it's because you've been extraordinarily lucky. Streakbreaker has never once been a reason not to build defense. Never. Once.

Any time someone mentions the Streakbreaker in a defense thread, you can safely assume they have no idea what they're talking about.

You have a misunderstanding. The reason why damage patches and rains are particularly susceptible is not that the summoning of the pseudopet adds more delay (it may or may not -- the game is perfectly capable of summoning a pseudopet quickly, or it can be delayed just like a normal effect does), it's that the pseudopet does a separate power execution, so the targets that were in range of the initial power are not fixed, as they are with a normal AoE that has a delay. So here's the situation: Targets are checked on the execution of the power. Even significantly delayed effects do not re-check range from the power, and apply to that target no matter what (though you are right that things like resistances are checked at time of the effect going off, not the initial targeting). But with a pseudopet power, the target of the initial power is the pseudopet. The pseudopet then checks targets for its own power at the time when the pseudopet is created, which may indeed be at a significant delay, and as a result if targets move between when the initial power is executed and the pseudopet's power is executed, they may now be out of range. But that interaction is unique to powers that have multiple powers executions within them (most prominently pseudopets, but also redirects), not to powers that merely have delayed effects.

I don't think this is how it works. I think you check eligible targets at the time of power activation, no matter how long a delay there is before the effect actually fires. If you're on a team, someone else may kill your enemy before your effect goes off, but enemies can't run away from your power during animation time.

I don't think that the game cheats, but you are correct that there's a big asymmetry here. Enemies do not generally have any toggles. They might have one. Resistance powers are often auto-powers rather than toggles. Getting detoggled is devastating for many players. Even if you have plenty of endurance to retoggle, you might gave 5+ toggles to turn back on, and just the cast time is prohibitive. It's very different for enemies.

While the "enemies can use any powers with just 1 endurance" idea is long-established, I don't think it's true. I paid fairly close attention to this when testing the electrical blast changes. What I think caused this misapprehension is that enemies got a recovery tick and then immediately used a power, which looked like using a power with insufficient endurance. There are a non-trivial number of enemies that have 0 endurance cost attacks. The recovery debuff you can apply to AVs and EBs is capped: they got a minimum recovery level in the same page that released the electric blast changes.

A lot of discussion on these fora is people saying, "I claim that there is a mysterious difference between powers that shows up nowhere in the descriptions of those powers." And, like... okay. Maybe there's some kind of weird bug going on. But I really implore people to consider: you may just be mistaken. Whenever I drill down into these things, I feel like about 80% of the time this kind of mysterious behavior that would have to be a very specific bug just... doesn't reproduce for me. If you haven't done rigorous testing where you're actually keeping everything else constant and also do it enough times to lower then chance of coincidence, it's much more likely that this apparent difference between Burst and the six other nearly-identically-coded Scrapper powers is something to do with your armor set, something to do with the particular mobs, something to do with your slotting, something to do with your team, or just plain bad luck, than that radius code is broken, but only for Burst.

This seems unlikely to be any more of a problem than it is with the many other Scrapper PBAoEs that also have an 8' radius. (Broad Sword, Claws, Dual Blades, Energy Melee, Katana, and War Mace also have 8' PBAoEs).

Burst has an 8' radius. https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.kinetic_attack.burst&at=scrapper

Scrapper Primary powers with non-standard Crit Chances: Broadsword > Head Splitter: 15% Claws > Eviscerate: 15% Dual Blades > Sweeping Strike: 15% Electrical Melee > Lightning Rod: No crit Energy Melee > Total Focus: flat 10% instead of 5% chance for minions/10% for LTs or higher. Note also reduced crit damage Energy Melee > Energy Transfer: flat 10% instead of 5% chance for minions/10% for LTs or higher. Note also reduced crit damage Katana > Golden Dragonfly: 15% Kinetic Melee > Concentrated Strike: No crit (20% chance to recharge Power Siphon, but note that this is not tagged as a crit, so it won't be affected by Scrapper ATOs etc.) Martial Arts > Storm Kick: 10% minions/15% LTs and higher Martial Arts > Eagle's Claw: 15% chance to crit, plus applies a +33% chance to crit for 2 seconds Radiation Melee > Irradiated Ground: 10% chance to "crit," regardless of enemy rank, but not actually tagged for crits so will ignore crit chance modifiers Stone Melee > Seismic Smash: 20% chance to crit, note reduced crit damage but raising the Mag of the hold to 6 (this is a real crit, it's affected by crit modifiers) Titan Weapons > Arc of Destruction: 15% I think that's an exhaustive list, though it's based on a manual scan of City of Data and it's possible I missed things. Note that there are other powers with non-standard critical damages, this is just non-standard critical chances. This is pure theory-crafting, but I think that if you put the ATO2 into Eagle's Claw and it went off, then you stacked two of either Cobra Strike, Crippling Axe Kick, or Crane kick so that they fired with zero delay after Eagle's Claw and each other, you would have a 99% crit chance for the two secondary attacks (assuming you're attacking an LT or higher, and that you have the superior ATO1 (10% base, +50% for ATO2, +33% for Eagle's Claw, +6% for ATO1). I'm not totally sure that you can actually get both of the follow-up attacks into the window of the Eagle's Claw and ATO2 effects, though.

I don't know that the T9 is all that important to the set anyway, especially on a brute or tank. It gives a mild damage buff, but it has pretty bad DPA. The reason to play it is Storm Kick + Dragon Tail + some decent ST attacks on a Brute, so if you hate the T9 but otherwise like the set, I think you could feel good about playing it on a Brute.

Titan Weapons also provides a +defense power, Defensive Sweep (11.25% defense to melee and smashing). Martial Arts does for Brutes and Tankers, but not for Scrappers (or Stalkers, ironically, because man does Stalker MA need something).

Taunt auras do have explicit calls to taunt effects -- either a redirect to the inherent, a normal power effect, or, confusingly, both. I think (but am not sure) that this is because if they tried to operate through the global proc, it would follow proc rules: so it would pulse once every ten seconds in auto-powers and toggles. The desired behavior is for it to pulse every one second, so they explicitly call it rather than using the global proc.

I don't think this is correct. Here's, for example, Tanker Whirling Mace: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=tanker_melee.war_mace.whirling_mace&at=tanker Note no specific taunt effect, and no tags that key to Gauntlet's taunt effects (it does have stuff about Gauntlet's radius and target cap). The way that Gauntlet's taunt effects work is by adding a global proc to all your powers, so they don't need to be specifically tagged for it or to have an effect like, say, Scrapper criticals have on the power itself. Now, the exact ways that global procs work are slightly mysterious to me, so I wouldn't be totally shocked if there were some weird exception, but I think that the way Gauntlet works is that it'll affect any enemy-affecting power.

I'm not sure I fully understand the intricacies of global procs like Gauntlet, but I don't see anything obvious that would prevent it from proccing. I think it'll work, but don't take that as gospel. That said, Takeoff only has a 10' radius base, and a max targets of 10. Your taunt aura will have an 8' radius base, and max targets of 10. You probably won't taunt many enemies that you aren't already taunting with your aura.

Does the boss Mag 3 status protection that they get to most status effects also affect taunts? Not a huge deal if it does -- the Scrapper taunt auras will pulse twice and quickly overcome the status protection, and everything else is mag 4 -- but it might mean Scrapper Energy Aura and Willpower have a lot of difficulty taunting bosses at all, especially if they're purple-patched. Do purple triangles affect taunt? I don't think they do -- I've never noticed tanks/brutes losing aggro on AVs when the purple triangles come up. (EDIT: Wiki suggests it does not). Does AV resistance affect taunt duration? (EDIT: Wiki suggests it does not).

Taunt durations (and magnitudes): Scrapper Aura (Willpower): 1.25 seconds, mag 3 Scrapper Aura (Energy): 2.5 seconds, mag 3 Scrapper Auras (Invul, Rad, Bio, Shield): 13.6 seconds, mag 3 Brute: Inherent punchvoke & Auras (all, I think): 13.6 seconds, mag 4 Tanker: Inherent punchchvoke & Auras (all, I think): 14.96 seconds, mag 4 Scrapper Confront: 26.6 seconds, mag 4 Brute/Tank Taunt: 41 seconds, mag 4 Provoke from the Presence pool seems like it has a different duration per AT.

It's not really "many" aura powers -- it's one aura power per set for Brutes/Tanks, none for Stalkers/Sentinels, and the six sets mentioned above for Scrappers have one taunt aura each as well. The general mechanics of threat seem to be something like this: As long as you are within an enemy's perception range, you get an escalating amount of threat Targeting them or their spawn-mates with powers adds some threat as well, and the amount of threat depends on the damage or debuff caused And then: Taunt multiplies that threat And probably how far you are from them also multiplies the threat And your AT has an inherent threat multiplier If they don't currently have a target, they target the person with the highest modified threat. If they do have a target, there might be some level of resistance to changing target. But what we don't have is much in the way of a sense of the magnitude of these factors. People anecdotally feel like debuffs generate a lot of threat, but we don't know how you generate a number from either damage or debuffs, we don't know what the multipliers are, and I'm not even sure if we know how the magnitude of taunts plays in. As a result, we only really have some basic impressions of how it all works. My impression is: Taunt is strong. Taunted enemies very reliably change to target the taunter, albeit not necessarily for the entire duration of the taunt. In general, my impression is that if you're peeling aggro off a taunter, it's more likely that they have not recently hit the target with a taunt, than that you overcame the taunt (unless you have a taunt of your own). But I can't quantify that, and neither can anyone else.

I don't think anyone really categorically understands how threat works on a mathematical level, so it's hard to say for sure. Based on my understanding, the damage aura will in fact enhance the stickiness of enemies that are already in the taunt aura -- but for that to matter, you have to be in a situation in which they were in danger of being peeled off in the first place. Is that a realistic concern? A wiki page claims that an active taunt multiplies the threat of the originating character by 1,000 times the duration of the taunt, which seems like, uh, a lot (but is it? How much do threat levels ordinarily vary? As far as I can tell, nobody really knows). I generally do not see people peeling actively taunted enemies off the taunter. I could believe that in the case of multiple competing taunts (like, the Bio scrapper is on a team with a Brute or certainly another taunt-aura Scrapper), the Bio scrapper was meaningfully more sticky. But without competing taunts, it seems to me that the most likely way that a taunt-aura scrapper loses aggro is not "someone peels off an enemy who is within the taunt aura," but rather, "someone peels off an enemy who is not taunted at all, due to being more than 8' away or in excess of the target cap of the aura," in which case the damage aura is not going to help either, because it has the same radius and target cap as the taunt aura.

Ninjutsu is an overall strong armor that will go well with lots of things. Its two big problems are: 1. It's a very defense-based armor set with low DDR 2. Its offense boost is on the weak side, just an increased chance to crit once per combat. Ice is this very feast or famine set: it has one of the strongest ST attacks in the game (Frozen Touch), it has good-to-great AoE in Frost and Frozen Aura, and it has good additional mitigation in Ice Patch, but Frozen Fists is dire, Ice Sword is weak, and Greater Ice Sword is mediocre, so you don't have much single target beyond just Frozen Touch. Energy is one of the stronger ST sets in the game, but has weak AoE. Electric is not a great set. Lightning Rod is good and fun, but other than that it has extremely mediocre ST and its AoE is like.... fine but not great. Street Justice has strong ST, mediocre AoE, and is overall a pretty good set. I don't think any of them have incredible synergy with Ninjutsu, but again Ninjutsu is a solid armor set that goes well with most stuff.

I mean, what's "obviously" going on is probably that you just have developed an incorrect impression. People develop anecdotal impressions that are incorrect all the time. Did you actually hold everything constant besides the scrapper armor? Maybe the rest of the team in the case of your Shield scrapper was just better at generating threat! Maybe they did a variety of things that took aggro from you before those enemies closed into the (short!) range of your taunt aura, so the enemies were never taunted. Maybe you did it yourself: to the extent that shield charge knocks down a bunch of enemies, that gives them a window of time in which they aren't getting close to you and thus aren't taunted. Maybe the Shield scrapper's group was less good at immediately winnowing a group down to 10 or fewer enemies, which is the target cap for the taunt aura. Maybe some members of the Shield scrapper's group generated taunt themselves. Brutes and Tanks generate actual taunt with every attack, so when they jump in with their AoEs, they continuously taunt enemies repeatedly and heavily push them to get into the range of their taunt auras. Scrappers do not, and an 8' range 10 target cap taunt aura is a fragile way to tank. City of Data means that we can see "under the hood" what is going on with powers with a high degree of fidelity. There is no taunt in Bio besides the 8' range, 10 target cap aura. Does the damage aura make a difference? I don't think it is very likely to make a serious difference: it just generates threat, not taunt, and it won't generate a particularly overwhelming amount of threat, and it will overwhelmingly only generate threat on people who are already being taunted by your taunt aura. Bio does of course have two wide-area AoEs (DNA Siphon and Parasitic Aura), that can help generate initial threat, but again it's threat, not taunt -- it'll be relatively easy to peel enemies off of you if they don't get in close and get taunted by your aura.