aethereal

I have not. This isn't impossible, but it's not likely, I think. What seems more plausible is that the specific flag that CoD checks for when it shows an effect group as "PvPOnly" is non-operative for child effects (ie, the parent effect group's flag supercedes the child flash), in which case it's not a CoD bug, but it's harmless (unless say someone ever copies that data out of the child effect and into a top level effect). But even if that is the case, it should probably still be fixed.

https://cod.uberguy.net./html/power.html?power=scrapper_melee.energy_melee.bone_smasher&at=scrapper In CoD, the crit line for "lieutenants and above," the one with the base chance of happening at 10% crit rate, is marked as PvP only. Not sure if that flag is actually respected for a child effect, but thought it was worth mentioning. Pretty sure it's not just a CoD problem: no other large crit line on a half dozen other powers I checked was flagged like that

I think you get a huge damage proc in that mission, though.

Claws, on the other hand, is better on scrappers than brutes.

Yes. Specifically, .75 * 7 = 5.25 while 1.125 * 5 = 5.625. So Scrappers at damage cap will do more damage than Brutes without crits, and then crits would take them to absurd heights. There's just no way that Brutes are even in this conversation -- the "rules" of this thread hugely disadvantage them. I looked at Blasters and as @nihilii says, their base damage lines are much lower than Scrappers', and they don't have anything like crit lines to leverage the increased damage caps. They're pretty out of the conversation as well. Corruptors miiiiiiiiight have something going on? Their scourge lines leverage the damage cap, and if their secondary gave them a big res debuff, that could multiply damage in a way that maybe could possibly lead to them pulling ahead of Scrappers? But probably not, they start off at like half of the Scrapper damage lines (before crits). I don't know about Masterminds, I can't even really think through what these things mean for a MM. Other than a MM, it's hard for me to see how these rules could lead to anyone challenging Scrapper supremacy. Crits are too good. And Scrappers can broker "+400% free recharge" into more crits much more efficiently than Stalkers can. So. Scrappers.

This isn't really true. For example, one of your highest performers is Claws. A big part of Claws' DPS comes from its ability to sustain +60-+90% damage bonus by spamming Follow Up. But in the situations that @nihilii is specifying, spamming Follow Up is super useless, because you're already capped on damage. Similarly, the ability of the Stalker to use Build Up very frequently is also useless in these conditions -- Build Up won't increase your damage one iota. More relevantly for everything, "maxxed global recharge" is a huge deal. There are sets that have one or two really strong performing attacks, but they're mixed in with the rest of the set being mediocre. If you get recharge divided by five for free, you can potentially do an entirely different ST attack chain that drops some of the mediocre attacks (because now the good attacks can be linked up into a seamless chain, while they can't under normal conditions). This is why I think it's likely that Energy Melee probably isn't the best performer in a recharge-capped situation -- I think that some of Energy Melee's normal dominance comes from having a bunch of strong attacks that can be chained together fairly well. A set like, I don't know, War Mace, might now be able to create an attack chain consisting solely of heavy hitters that get full crits instead of Energy Melee's heavy hitters that get anemic crits. That said, maybe 1s cast time Energy Transfer is just so dominant that it still comes out on top. Ultimately, to really answer this question, we'd have to have at least a few dozen people actually test it, and I think the issue is that it's hard to test (arranging these conditions is non-trivial), and the answer to the question is pretty academic (at basically no point in the "real" game will a build that's carefully optimized for "everything-capped" be useful), so it's hard to imagine that testing happening.

We perhaps have different definitions of "all the time." My brute would rest every three or four spawns (which I'd regard as "unacceptably a lot") at low levels (so basically it would go something like "do a spawn, be at half health, do the next spawn, use reconstruction and come out at 75-80% health, do the next spawn and be down at 25% health, rest," roughly). When I rested, I'd usually let Fury drop to about 20. It'd be back up above 60 by halfway through the next spawn. So you can try out your math on "enter two spawns out of three at solidly north of scrapper damage, enter one spawn at slightly below scrapper damage and exit it at solidly north of scrapper damage."

Just for the record, no. That is not in fact at all how my brute played. I did have to test relatively often. Not after every spawn, and no, you don't have to let your fury go to zero when you rest, and, just to be clear, to get above low level scrapper damage takes about five seconds, small fractions of one spawn. I mean, ET breaks the formula in such a way as to get more damage than its recharge would suggest, not less as you imply here. Maintaining fury is not hard, and fury builds very quickly. This idea that brutes are constantly struggling with low fury is pure cope.

You don't have to take more than one power from your secondary to level up. If for some insane reason you wanted to, you could literally skip every power in Regen except fast healing! Clearly in order to get a proper "baseline," we need to understand how each armor set performed when you get the T1 power and nothing else!

Power pools don't, uh, you know... cost inf. You can in fact get them whenever you think it's helpful! This is not to say that there's some secret magic to getting Tough and Weave as early as possible: there's not. In general, you want them somewhere in the late 20's to late 30's when you have slots to spare. But this whole thing of, "Oh, well, I use the set without power pools" is a totally artificial constraint. There is nothing about solo leveling that makes you need to have a highly cost-constrained build! Like, I get that people don't necessarily want to spend billions on a character as they go, for a variety of reasons including that they may abandon the character and it can in fact be kinda hard to make billions of inf (not truly hard, but enough of an inconvenience that you might say, "well, this isn't why I play the game"). But making high tens/low hundreds of millions of inf is a simple matter of "spend your merits that you get from ordinary solo play on enhancement converters, sell them," and making mid-to-high hundreds of millions of inf is a matter of "spend your merits that you get from ordinary solo play on enhancement converters, buy recipes, craft them, then use the converters to turn them into salable orange IOs, sell them." The former is about one total minute of activity per let's say 3 to 5 hours of play. The latter is about 15 minutes of activity per 3 to 5 hours of play, plus spending 30 minutes once in your life to understand how to do it. And I say this with absolutely due respect to everyone's playstyle: If you prefer to make common IO or, for some godforsaken reason, SO builds, then cool, go you. But if you're like, "Oh man it's so hard to play almost every armor set because I can't afford a Performance Shifter proc and also have low endurance reduction slotting," and that's frustrating or you can't understand why everyone else doesn't seem to have these problems, then my brothers and sisters, my message for you here today is that you do not have to be 50 to be able to afford IOs that cost a few million inf, you do not have to farm or have a farmer, you do not have to spend hours doing weird cornering-the-market shenanigans, you do not have to mentally track the fluctuations in supply and demand of dozens of items. You need to, at the low end, spend merits on converters and sell them, or at the high end learn a simple procedure to craft IOs that you can sell for 1-2M inf a pop. That's it! Also: Regen does not have the best endurance economy, even at low levels, even with low-cost builds! It just doesn't. Try out Bio or Ninjutsu. If you don't mind working a little harder in levels 1-20 but care a lot about levels 30-49, try Energy or Electric.

Not at low levels it doesn't! People really underestimate how garbage Scrappers are at low levels. 10% crit rate (5% against minions, and you're fighting lots of minions here) is terrible, and there are going to be substantial fights in which you just never crit. It takes a matter of five to ten seconds to get your Fury up high enough to match low-level Scrapper damage. This is dumb. There is no "what the set can do" in isolation from the rest of the game. I mean, we can say, "I want to see what a set can do (exclusively as it relates to doing negative energy daamage)," and, I mean, cool, you'll find that Dark sets are the best at everything -- as long as by "everything" you mean "this highly arbitrary benchmark that's unrelated to the actual game." Not that Tough and Weave are hugely game changing at these levels, but I wish we could just excise this whole type of discourse of these fora which is like, "I have fifteen invisible rules in my head and as long as you play with these totally arbitrary limitations, all of my weird claims are true." I'm sure that Blackjoy can find some set of restrictions which makes his experience valid. They are his experience, after all. But what I'm saying is if you are playing with these restrictions and you find that under those restrictions Shield is inferior to Regen, the solution is not "roll Regen," it's "relax whichever of those restrictions is leading to your character being so bad." (Or do roll regen! I did, it was fun, good experience. But don't kid yourself about what you're doing there.) In general, we now see some huffing and puffing about well, how dare you, my arbitrary restrictions are extremely important, they're only natural. But they aren't. You can make Shield (or Rad, or Bio, or Invul, or EA, or whatever) better than Regen without using the amplifiers, without having a dedicated AFK farmer and a billion inf, without PLing up to 50 and then going back and doing all your content through Ouro, without anything particularly onerous. If you choose not to do that, then hey, cool, you do you. But you could have.

This subthread is about the low level experience, and @Erratic1 specified "defensively."

Go wild man.

I actually played an Energy Melee/Regen brute, just recently. I was resting all the time with it. Mostly due to health concerns, not endurance, but endurance wasn't great either until I, you know, got a couple of Performance Shifter procs and so forth -- all the things that you claim Regen is good at. Regen is not as awful as you might think given the forum memes -- I mean, it's an easy enough game, it's not like there isn't plenty of slack to play somewhat suboptimal sets. I enjoyed my /regen brute. But Regen had a mildly worse 1-30 experience and a much worse 30+ experience than any other armor set I've played.

Fiery Aura is interesting. 180 second base recharge on Fiery Embrace, 20 second duration. That means an uptime under constant maxed recharge conditions of more than 50% (20 seconds on, 16 seconds off, repeat), and unlike most things that would conditionally add damage, Fiery Embrace is operative (since it doesn't add a damage bonus, but rather adds another effect to a power, which is then enhanced by your +all-the-damage). I actually wonder if the answer here isn't something weird like a Sonic Blast Blaster (or maybe Corruptor?), since probably what you're looking to do is find ways to leverage the +damage in all kinds of ways. Though the Scrapper's crit lines are obviously a good way to leverage the +damage. I kiiiiiinda doubt that Energy Melee is the right set, though I don't know what is. Is there a melee set that gets some longer-recharge powers than Energy Melee does? A world where all your recharges are costlessly divided by five is a weird world.

-Res is a good point! As with all -res, it opens up the question of "what level shift are we assuming here." But that's under normal circumstances, where Bio gives you a +31.25% global damage bonus. Under the assumptions of this thread, that (big!) bonus is non-operative for Bio, 'cause you're already at damage cap.

This isn't true -- Regen has lots of downtime. It's a poor mitigation set, so you're more likely to need to rest after a battle, a lot of its mitigation is in long-cooldown panic buttons, so you're more likely to need to wait out some of those cooldowns, and its endurance tool, which was impressive back in Issue 0, is not impressive now. To the extent that anyone needs to care about endurance issues (ie, mostly before level 40), you'll have a rougher ride with Regen than with many other armor sets. In modern CoH, sets with low downtime are like Ninjutsu or Bio, which give you refill-your-end-on-demand and layered mitigation such that resting is rarely necessary. To a great extent, in high level modern CoH, nobody has downtime.

Okay, but your major endurance drains aren't toggles, they're attack powers. I like Regen's one-toggle approach! And Rad is certainly not the end-all, be-all of endurance tools. Try Bio if you want a set that gets great endurance efficiency early and then gets a second tranche of endurance later. This is going to turn into one of these weird conversations where someone packs a ton of assumptions into their post about "the right way to play," isn't it? For whatever it's worth: I sometimes fund alts and sometimes don't. I don't use "full time temp power buffs," unless we mean 2x XP. It's easy to fund any character from what they can afford by "just playing," as long as you are willing to use your merits to buy enhancement converters and then convert enhancements and sell them (not just sell the converters). And levels 1-20 go by very fast. If you're soloing to 50 (which I almost exclusively do, doing regular missions), the majority of your time is spent 20-50, not 1-20. It's not by level 50, though. With lots of sets, you'll get your endurance problems straightened out by level 25 or so. And a problem with Regen is while yes, its endurance tool is available very low, so if you like turn off XP and spend a lot of time in levels 10-20, you may appreciate that, it doesn't have a very strong endurance tool, so you do in fact need lots of help after that, while sets like Electric or Energy struggle until the 30s, but then have limitless endurance forever.

It's weird to act like Regen has some kind of great endurance management that's a big advantage. That was once the case, but it hasn't been true for a long time. Bio gets Inexhaustible as its second-tier power, which is more +recovery than Regen gets if you're in Efficient mode. It also gets DNA Siphon at level 24. Electric gets Energize at 20 and Power Sink at 28 Energy Aura gets Energize at 24 and Energy Drain at 28 Fiery Aura gets Consume at 20 Ice Armor gets Energy Absorption at 20 Ninjutsu gets Seishinteki Kyoyo at 16 Radiation Armor gets Gamma Boost at level 1 (and Meltdown at 30) Stone Armor gets Crystal Armor at 20 (and Geode at 30) Willpower gets Quick Recovery at 20 Armor sets that don't have endurance tools are vastly outnumbered by those that do (just SR, Invul, Dark, and Shield don't), and many of the armor sets have significantly better endurance tools than Quick Recovery. Most (but not all!) armors get their endurance tools a little later than Regen, but in return they get better tools and with the latest page, they get them a bunch of levels earlier than they used to.

The value of Bio seems like it's significantly less in a world where you're damage-capped. Then it's just the global proc and the damage aura, right? Might as well do Stone instead of Bio, get a global proc that crits. Fire is also a distinct possibility. Scrapper seems to me to be way better than Stalker in this case, because Scrapper can broker all of that free global recharge into their ATO2, and a Stalker remains restrained by the 10.25 second internal timer on their ATO-chance-to-hide.

It's actually the middle managers who are dragging the group down. Upper management and rank and file are good!

I mean, it would presumably allow you to stack taunts and up the mag that way.

Fiery Embrace only adds to fire damage in PvP. In PvE, it just "turns on" the Fiery Embrace line for melee powers. However, it looks like Fiery Melee does get special bonus DoT when using Fiery Embrace, so it does remain true that Fiery Melee gets a little more from Fiery Aura than other melee sets do. Just, the mechanism of that "little extra" is other than you described.

Beast Run (like Athletic Run and Ninja Run) does not have slots.

Did you copy and paste it verbatim? It has the word "key" where you'd actually want the key you're trying to bind. So if you want to make the "y" key trigger the power, it would be: /bind y powexeclocation target teleport Obviously you actually need the teleport power as well.