aethereal

Pet classes have a big unearned benefit in pylon runs specifically, which is that the level deficit of pets doesn't apply to Pylons (which are always even-level to everyone). It's similar to, but much more dramatic than, the overperformance of -res procs (and -res in general) in Pylon runs. So it would be similar for this: if you talked about an "everything-capped" run against a pylon, then pets classes would do amazingly. If you talked about everything-capped stuff against a +3 opponent, then pets classes would have much less of an advantage.

So, important Bio tip: DNA Siphon gives you endurance and health for every living enemy it hits, but recovery and regeneration for every dead enemy it hits. Getting the most out of Bio, in my experience, means using DNA Siphon carefully, when you have a good mix of alive and dead enemies for it to hit. If you hit only alive enemies in a large spawn, you easily fill up your endurance and health bars fully, but then you've got a long time before you get any more use out of it. If you hit a mix of alive and dead enemies, you still refill both bars, but then you get a bunch of regen and recovery to tide you over until it comes off of cooldown. I do not suggest proc-bombing DNA Siphon unless you largely work in big groups in unchallenging content. It's a powerful survivability tool, you need it on the relatively fragile Bio armor.

Yes, you can activate Active Defense through mez. In the case of Super Reflexes and Ninjutsu, I wholly endorse not worrying that much about clicking your mez protection power with absolute infallibility, since you can activate through mez if you screw up a little it's NBD. For Shield Defense, a lot (all?) of your DDR is tied up in the click protection, and there's MUCH more value in double-stacking it than there is for SR or Ninj, so it's probably the one get a little more religious about than the other click-mez-prots. Honestly, some people really, really, really seem to be bothered by click mez protection. Energy Aura and Stone (or Ice!) are fine defense-oriented sets that have toggle mez protection.

Yeah, the way it works is that powers have a "time before effect." That's the difference between when you start the cast and when the first mechanical effects start to resolve. Procs will go off at that point. But each effect of the power can optionally have a further delay between when the effects start and this particular effect goes off, and it's possible for damage to be delayed further. But proc damage won't be, because procs have no idea what each individual effect group does, or what one they "should" go with -- they just go off at the start of effects.

So, to be clear: I said that you'd get a 58% proc rate with a power that had animation plus cooldown including local recharge of 10 seconds. You, in contrast, said that a power that had a 30 seconds cooldown would have a proc rate of 35-50%. You then used a power that had animation plus cooldown of 7.5 seconds, and got a proc rate of 44%. And you are claiming that this proves you right?

AoE attacks get a penalty to the proc rate based on the size of their area. Since Axe Cyclone has quite a large radius, it takes a pretty hefty penalty to rates, but I haven't done the math on it to figure out what it'd be. It also depends on the PPM of the proc! EDIT: My spreadsheet says that the proc rate of a 3.5 PPM proc in Axe Cyclone with no local recharge should be 42.9%

What? No, this is seriously wrong. With a typical damage proc (3.5 PPM), and a single target power, then if the power's cooldown including local recharge + animation time is: 5 seconds, proc rate is: 29% 10 seconds, proc rate is: 58% 15 seconds, proc rate is: 87.5% Higher: maxed out at 90%

Blizzard (on Sents) looks like it has a 90 second cooldown and an 8 second duration, so at maxed recharge it'd be 18 seconds of recharge, so basically about 40% on, 60% off. That's with maxed recharge, usually impossible to achieve without a pocket Kin or something. Ice Storm has a 60 second cooldown and a 15 second duration (and about a 2 second cast time), so it's theoretically possible to perma it.

Yes, it's true, and yes, it does have other bonuses. For a comprehensive look at the mechanics of the Electric Blast set, you'll want to look at the patch notes from the issue where it was overhauled.

...and has had a heal for like 10 years.

Ninjitsu is a misspelling of Ninjutsu.

You can have any number of Sudden Accelerations. The rule of five is about set bonuses. If you were slotting 6 full sets of Sudden Acceleration, you'd only get five sets of set bonuses. But you can use the KB>KD any number of times.

Power Crash was what was the Stun power was made into during the EM revamp. It is indeed the case that pre-EM-revamp, EM wasn't very good on any AT, including Stalkers.

EM has one of its two AoE in Stalkers (power crash, the cone), and it gets a higher damage version of power crash than the other ATs. But, I mean, the other reason why people like EM on Stalkers is that it has truly exceptional ST damage in return for poor AoE. Martial Arts has a bunch of good-but-not-great ST attacks.

Nope, that's entirely your pathology. I enjoy the leveling process so much that I don't create arbitrary barriers for myself, like inability to slot IOs or take power pools, so that my characters can feel awesome from the start.

Repulsing torrent also gets a weak crit, which is insult to injury. It should get a full doubling of its damage.

I have never topped this bio: "What could have made her peaceful with a mind That nobleness made simple as a fire, With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind That is not natural in an age like this, Being high and solitary and most stern? Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?" Thank you Mr Yeats!

On the same note, Ninjutsu.

Yes, there are attacks that are real stinkers. Both the T1 and T2 (Nimble Slash and Power Slice) are both pretty bottom-tier in terms of ST damage for T1s/T2s. Vengeful Slice is unforgivably bad, I don't know why it's so terrible. It is somehow lower DPA than the T1/T2, and over time at that. You do get guaranteed knockdown. One Thousand Cuts is pretty bad too, and it has one of those "just walk away from the computer and make yourself a drink" animation times. Typhoon's Edge is an uninspiring PBAoE, but it is a PBAoE and people tend to like those. Really, a lot of the reason why people land on Blinding Feint, Sweeping Strike, and Ablating Strike is: Those Are The Three Good Attacks In Dual Blades.

Guys, for real, just buy some IOs.

I believe, but am not sure, that it works like damage resistance, so if you could have 100% regeneration resistance (as I said in my previous post, max appears to be 95%), it would eliminate all regeneration debuffs. If you're at say 60% regeneration debuff resistance and you get hit with a -500% regen debuff, it would reduce it by 60%, leaving you with a -200% regen debuff.

Regen Resistance Max appears to be 95%. Honestly, I think that the (Damage) Resistance Max not applying to resistance's property of resisting resistance debuffs is a borderline bug and it should also be capped, probably at 90 or 95% (but I expect that this may be a difficult-to-change element of how the game actually works on a low level). I think that this mentality that people have that obviously armors should be highly resistant to things that are intentionally supposed to cut through that particular mitigation type is conceptually weird. When are regen debuffs supposed to shine, other than, "When you're dealing with a regenerator"? What is the point of regeneration debuffs if they don't work on "people who depend mainly on regeneration"? But we have SR, and how resistance works (again, that's probably not so much a feature as an emergent property of the deep nature of the game), so people expect it.

So I looked it up. The "recharge power siphon" effect of Concentrated Strike is often described as the "crit" ability of CS, but it's actually not tagged with the scrapper crit tags. So it won't benefit from either ATO (or other things that increase the likelihood of scrapper crits, such as the Ninjutsu pseudo-stalker mechanic). It's just a flat 20% chance, not modifiable.

I mean, I'm not an expert in either RubyRed's parsing code or the underlying CoH codebase, and it's possible that I'm off base here. Perhaps @UberGuy can weigh in. But I spent ten minutes looking over the parsing code, and it looks to me like there are two underlying straightforward binary flags, one for "pvp only," one for "pve only," and all the parsing code does is collapse them into a synthetic ternary field (PvPOnly if one flag is set and the other isn't, PvEOnly of the other flag is set and the one isn't, and neither if no flag is set). I didn't see anything that suggests text parsing or the creation of a massively synthetic field here. Again, maybe I'm wrong: there's a limited amount of trying to work my way through an unfamiliar codebase that I'm going to do here. But I'll note that the corresponding "small" crit line (the one for minions and below) doesn't show the same data error, and it seems hard to explain that if you imagine that this is entirely a synthetic field issue in the intermediate json data format.

I checked and confirmed that you CAN crit against Lieutenants and above in PVE with Bone Smasher -- the flag is ignored. Should still be fixed! I don't really know anything about the native format of powers data, but in the JSON that CoD uses as an intermediate format names the key for this particular data item as is_pvp and the possible values are PVP_ONLY, PVE_ONLY, and EITHER. This effect (the one with tag CritLarge) is value PVP_ONLY, and regardless of the fact that the code is currently ignoring the flag, it's clearly wrong and should be corrected!