siolfir

There may not be one (with SOs) until after the second upgrade, if even then. As I said earlier, I don't remember how much endurance they go through from the last time I played Bots (which was a Bots/Traps over a decade ago); some pets are worse than others about constantly bottoming out their end. The best use of the extra slots isn't endurance reduction anyway, it's IO procs - either the pet auras to provide more defense and resistance or extra damage on the attacks. If you want to avoid IOs, whether due to preference or simply due to having insufficient liquid infamy (if you don't use the market at all this is bound to happen until the mid to late 30s, although even a small amount of time on the market will alleviate it), then you can get away with 4-5 slotting. If you're monitoring the pet to-hit chance and it's still at 95% all the time (Supremacy gives them some +tohit when they're nearby) then you can ignore the extra; I hate missing and tend to go with overkill, so I'd still go with 2 accuracy because of tohit debuffs, mobs with defense, and the level difference in the lower tier pets causing a fast drop-off as the difficulty slider increases.

Quickness from Super Reflexes and its Electric Armor clone Lightning Reflexes buff run and fly speed while resisting slows. What they don't offer is the jump height, jump speed, hold protection, or knockback protection part of your proposed changes, but they provide +20% recharge and don't cost any endurance.

As for damage scales, Corruptors get 0.75 for melee and ranged damage, Blasters get 1.0 melee and 1.125 ranged. Scourge allows a "critical" damage hit on mobs with low hit points; for most of the game it's limited use because the hits that are most likely to Scourge are most likely to kill the mob regardless. Someone a long time ago did some math I don't feel like looking for or duplicating and said it came out to roughly a +30% increase in effective damage. Defiance gives Blasters the ability to use their T1 and T2 blasts while mezzed and a bit of short-term +damage buff, but in reality the real boon for Blasters is strictly their modifiers. They get more hit points, more max hit points, more base damage, and with the exception of Kinetics can boost their own damage better because they get better modifiers for self +damage (better even than Defenders). If all you are looking for is more damage, the Blaster is likely going to be the one to go with, because even the Kinetic Corruptor has to have enough live targets to make Fulcrum Shift worthwhile. As far as synergy on teams - Corruptors lose ground for damage due to their lower damage modifier and don't even really make it up with Scourge on most large targets (AV/GM). Kinetics is an exception if you're target saturated because it can put everyone on the team at their damage cap fairly quickly, but that's also only if everyone in the team stays together. The Blaster isn't helping everyone else's damage, but they also are just doing that much to to start and if everyone on the team is spread out then Fulcrum Shift is only letting the Corruptor keep up with the Blaster. Where the Corruptor really shines is when the team isn't high end because they take middling teams and make them high end (much like Defenders, who suffer from a lower damage cap). As for Blizzard and its interaction with Scourge, it gets more chances because it's a rain power but most of the extra damage isn't there anymore: it used to have the same base damage as the Blaster version and Scourged for triple damage per tick. Now it Scourges for just over double per tick (4.4488 per Scourge tick vs a combined 3.7258 for the lethal and cold ticks at level 50). It certainly looks impressive when you see all the Scourge messages pop up, though.

The reason they suggest that is because the base defense (67.5%) for it is well beyond the softcap for defense, and until you start getting into serious level differences, to-hit debuffs, or +to-hit bonuses there's no point in any extra slots. The mobs will already have the lowest possible chance they have to hit you based on their accuracy multipliers for rank and level difference. Simply put, out of the box it's already maxed out.

True; I mostly ignore it since the KB protection was reduced from 100 to 7 + an enhanceable 2 because it's an extra power pick and costs endurance. Before IOs it was how I plugged the KB hole for nearly everyone, though, because it's not really a penalty to take Combat Jumping (which also provides 10 points of immobilize protection in addition to the defense) and then just use Super Jump for travel.

Power Surge offers 100 points and 1000% KB resistance, but nobody uses it because it's so superfluous. That said, I usually drop a -KB IO in Grounded to get 4 points while off the ground and 14 points on it, precisely because I don't take Power Surge and don't like being bounced around when I try to jump over something to get to another mob.

Wouldn't it be 74% because the Incarnate softcap is higher? Or are these TFs not considered incarnate content for the extra base mob to-hit? Genuine question since I rarely look at the combat log for hit chances unless I feel something is seriously out of whack.

I'm aware. My response was to someone who was saying he thought that the bots took resistance or defense slotting, and I was suggesting that may be what he was thinking of as a bot that took defense slots. I didn't want to comment on the actual slotting (you play how you play) but slotting endurance reduction in MM pets also reduces the cost for them to use their powers. It's been a while since I ran bots to remember if they're one of the ones that bottoms endurance quickly, but some pets run through endurance and then are stuck using their weak attacks as their end recovers. Without adjusting slotting at all I would try to push mobs into a corner with Force Bolt and Repulsion Field, then juggle using Air Superiority with all bots set to focus on Calystix (I don't think he has any special knockback protection). Since you focused on personal defense, this will get some use of that while also preventing a lot of the attacks through the one non-defense thing that Force Fields offers: knockback. Also, replace that Tech/Science DO in the Assault Bot - that's not a slotting issue as much as a "wth is that doing there" issue.

Protector Bots can slot defense, that might be what you're thinking of?

Someone else would have to answer why they would use a macro over a bind, but I think one instance would be for popmenus and also a macro has a visible indicator while you can easily forget a bind since there isn't a UI indication that, for example, pressing numpad0 activates whichever Destiny power I have slotted.

I like the idea as a concept. It would be a nightmare of horrible AI choices, but that would be more than half the fun, right? This thread might belong in Feedback & Suggestions, though.

Wouldn't that depend on where in the tray your macro is? After all, anything in that first power tray is also just a single button press away... And this is from someone who almost never makes macros and typically has no fewer than a dozen binds above and beyond the standard keymapping active at any point.

A lot of replies have already given you answers, but if I was picking out what was wrong with your current bind, I would suggest that - if this was a copy/paste - you have a space after each underscore, which breaks the command. I changed the font in the quote so that the spaces show up more easily. Since the underscores are superfluous and the command works with or without them, I typically leave them out.

Yes, but slotting being included in the +damage that counts towards the cap is true of every AT and if you want to figure out what the damage is at the cap you multiply the base by 5 for Tankers, not 4 (like you used to have to). Not everyone slots powers that do damage for damage, and when they do it can be slotted with wildly varying numbers, but you know that no matter how much slotting or +damage from other buffs you get, it's not doing more than 5 times the base (unslotted) damage on a Tanker. I even stated that it was the exception. If you cherry-pick situations you can show a Tanker doing more damage than a Brute, but I even used a mostly-optimal situation for the Tanker, pointed out that it was heavily weighted towards the Tanker, and then showed the Brute doing more damage at 50% Fury, which is a number that's trivial to maintain and always has been, even when Fury decayed constantly but was +3% damage per point with an 850% Brute damage cap.

Tanker primaries would be the damage auras. The secondary powersets are the melee sets. Mostly true, but there are some powers that were flagged to ignore the AoE buff and/or didn't get a target cap increase. I think those are listed in the patch notes, though, so people could report if powers not on that list were showing incorrect information (posting rushed or I'd check).

It largely depends on both powersets chosen and spawn composition, with more boss class or larger mobs and primaries with fewer AoEs favoring the Brutes, but maps will get cleared quickly either way. Ranged epic/Patron attacks also heavily favor Brutes since their ranged modifier (0.75) is much closer to the Tanker modifier (0.8) than their melee modifier is. Also keep in mind the example I used heavily favored the Tanker, and they were still doing less per target. But if you're really trying to clear spawns that quickly you bring a lot of Blasters.

The highlighted part is not true; Brutes and Tankers have the same damage resistance cap of 90%; Kheldians, Arachnos Soldiers, and Arachnos Widows have a cap of 85%, and everyone else is capped at 75%. Damage Comparison The Brute +damage cap was reduced (to +600%, or 700% total) with the Tanker buff that increased theirs to +400% (500% total); the stated reason for this was to bring Tanker damage to approximately 80% of Brute damage when both were at caps, and lowering the Brute damage cap instead of a further increase of the Tanker cap was because the existing Brute cap allowed them to hit harder per attack scale than a Blaster (775% [old Brute cap] * 0.75 [AT modifier] = 5.8125; 500% [Blaster/Scrapper cap] * 1.125 [best modifier for each] = 5.625; 700% [new Brute cap] * 0.75 = 5.25). Tankers can do more theoretical total damage with AoE attacks due to higher target caps and larger areas making them more likely to hit more targets, while the Brute will usually do more damage per target. Because of the difference in base damage there are situations when the Tanker will do more damage per target and have higher target caps and larger areas, but these are mostly limited to +damage sets (particularly Super Strength with stacked Rage) and low Brute Fury (<50%) but these are the exception. Example So let's look at a common scenario, Super Strength with stacked Rage (+160% damage) which would favor the Tanker in many ways due to their base damage scale being higher (0.95 vs 0.75), and give the Brute 50%, 75%, and 90% Fury. To simplify things, I'm just going to use 100% damage slotting. Knockout Blow (scale 3.56 attack, single target): Tanker: 55.61 damage (scale 1 damage) * 0.95 (AT scale) * (1 [base damage] + 1 [slotting] + 1.6 [stacked Rage]) * 3.56 (scale of attack) = 677.06 damage Brute (50% Fury): 55.61 damage (scale 1 damage) * 0.75 (AT scale) * (1 [base damage] + 1 [slotting] + 1 [Fury] + 1.6 [stacked Rage]) * 3.56 (scale of attack) = 683.00 damage Brute (75% Fury): 55.61 damage (scale 1 damage) * 0.75 (AT scale) * (1 [base damage] + 1 [slotting] + 1.5 [Fury] + 1.6 [stacked Rage]) * 3.56 (scale of attack) = 757.24 damage Brute (90% Fury): 55.61 damage (scale 1 damage) * 0.75 (AT scale) * (1 [base damage] + 1 [slotting] + 1.8 [Fury] + 1.6 [stacked Rage]) * 3.56 (scale of attack) = 801.78 damage Foot Stomp (scale 1.42, saturated AoE): Tanker: 55.61 * 0.95 * (1 + 1 + 1.6) * 1.42 = 270.06 damage per target, * 16 targets (max) = 4321.03 total damage to all targets Brute (50% Fury): 55.61 * 0.75 * (1 + 1 + 1 + 1.6) * 1.42 = 272.43 damage per target, * 10 targets (max) = 2724.33 total damage to all targets Brute (75% Fury): 55.61 * 0.75 * (1 + 1 + 1.5 + 1.6) * 1.42 = 302.05 damage per target, * 10 targets (max) = 3020.46 total damage to all targets Brute (90% Fury): 55.61 * 0.75 * (1 + 1 + 1.8 + 1.6) * 1.42 = 319.81 damage per target, * 10 targets (max) = 3198.13 total damage to all targets ...and while I've been typing this out a bunch of other replies have come in, so I'll just wrap this wall of text up now.

I originally had 4-6 down instead of 6-8 but thought about the prevalence of mez in the 30s and on meaning that you probably wanted to cover at least 2 applications. I agree that 4 is usually more than enough, but have had times where 10 points would still get me mezzed even with IO mez resistance bonuses on a Brute. Nitpick: the mez protection wasn't added until after issue 7, and given that it was an add-on and lesser magnitude than armor secondary ATs (Brutes and Stalkers, since at the time they were the only "armored" ATs available) I think it would be pushing it to say that the intent was to make them impossible to mez. Yes, they had better mez protection than other squishies - temporarily, without multiple +recharge buffs on teams until IOs came along and gave Dominators the ability to boost their own recharge (which is why it also acts as a Break Free).

The tl;dr version about it was already posted, so here's the feedback discussion thread from the beta if anyone wants to look into it more:

I could see the first one, but really every AT that doesn't already have it would benefit greatly from mez protection. I also wouldn't take it as far as "all but impossible to mezz" and instead make it 6-8 points of protection to all (with KB resistance to go with protection) as an auto. This is similar to what Arachnos Soldiers have their auto-power armors only slightly stronger since it's not also being attached to resistance (7.5% resistance to all in the case of Bane Spider Armor Upgrade). Then, if you wanted to be tricky you could let it accept outside buffs - which I think would mean that the +special powers in many of the Assault sets would boost your mez protection during the duration of the buff also. As for the second, I think that a lot of the issue with the Assault sets is the insistence of adding ranged attacks or melee attacks just so they aren't "melee damage" or "ranged damage" and so you end up with Shuriken Assault instead Martial Assault or the token Incinerate and Combustion in Fiery Assault; some of the repurposing seems to fit the theme (Earth Assault was the example I used in another thread for a melee Assault set) but most of it is just a kludge of mixed-bag powers that all share a damage type and calling that a theme.

I'm aware. But Stone Mallet (scale 1.64, tied with Hurl Boulder), Heavy Mallet (2.28), and Seismic Smash (3.56) are the hardest hitting attacks in Stone Melee, and Dominators get a damage scale boost on their versions of Heavy Mallet (2.76) and Hurl Boulder (2.28 instead of 1.64) compared to Stone Melee, so if anything the argument supports it even further. More to the point of what I was getting at: Earth Assault has 5 of 9 powers in Stone Melee, and almost all of the replacements are very close alternatives: Fault -> Fissure (damage AoE instead of stun, same range and animation, likely a balance decision not to provide another fast-recharging AoE stun to control AT), Stone Fist -> Stone Spears (same damage but at long range, slightly longer animation), Build Up -> Power Up (adds less +dam, adds +special instead of +tohit), Taunt-> Mud Pots (doesn't line up as well, but Mud Pots is a taunt aura for Tankers/Brutes). Similar changes could be made to other melee powersets to provide more Assault sets.

To answer the question: no, there's no reason (beyond "that's how it's always been done"), especially for Dominators (who have a scale 1.05 melee modifier). I'll even point to Earth Assault as an example of an Assault set with more melee attacks than ranged with 3 melee attacks (SM, HM, SS), 1 PBAoE click (Tremor), 1 PBAoE damage aura (Mud Pots), 2 80' ranged attacks (Stone Spears and Hurl Boulder), and a 20' "ranged" AoE (Fissure) that barely reaches outside of the damage aura... so someone else has clearly thought of this before.

They buffed Dominators as many different times as they did Stalkers, and a well-built and well-played Dominator is great. I don't have the patience for the "everything's a click" part of that style, but I don't think they're any better or worse off than Controllers or Corruptors. Ah, yes, the "l2p n00b" argument that is so original and endearing, and adds so much to the conversation. Thank you for providing your immeasurably valuable input.

I'm guessing you might know this already, but the specific mission of rounding up citizens and handing them to the Vahzilok is one of Dmitri Krylov's missions (Cap, 10-14), but it's probably his only one that I'd categorize that way and the rest of his missions are the exact type of grunt work for someone else that you said in the other thread you don't really care for. Most of the others I know off the top of my head were already mentioned.

Truly vile! At least the one trying to destroy the world in nuclear fire isn't trying to torture everyone. Going back to AT selection, the Defender inherent seems far more "evil" - or at least encourages selfish behavior - to me than the Corruptor inherent. Scourge takes someone that's seriously injured and puts them out of their misery as quickly as possible. Vigilance, on the other hand, encourages the Defender to let their teammates suffer to get an endurance discount, and as a later add-on was updated to even give the Defender more damage when they don't have around portable meatshields to soak up extra damage for them. They also are better at corrupting things (debuffing) than anyone else.