siolfir

The problem is that the range for melee attacks is specifically set to ignore buffs - otherwise it would be affected by an alpha slot, for example. And not that anyone likely cares, but melee range has already been extended 40% once (from 5' to 7'); I think the older melee cones are all invalid per the design formulas in part because of this but there were already outliers (case in point: Slice is scale 1.23 and should be 1.12 with a 7' radius, but at a 5' radius the math works with some rounding, but Head Splitter is just treated as a single target attack by the formula).

Before the difficulty slider changes to allow +4/x8 - and for a while afterwards before people got used to it - you would often find tanks (both Brutes and Tankers) in smaller teams gather up two or three spawns together to get more use out of the AoEs. When people realized you could set to x8 and all you had to do was collapse one spawn into an AoE-sized-group that became a lot less common.

To echo @Lazarillo: Specifically this part (emphasis mine):

Wait, so it doesn't rhyme with tough? This has been your "it's not specifically British English, it's just English that's weird" segment for the day. ..and sniped by @KC4800 while I was writing this.

It's probably something like this, with an exception added so that any time you have a short, single-room mission in Nerva (like the Rob the Chum Bucket, for example) you will be sent to Thorn Isle.

Thought about this one, went with this instead:

It doesn't get nothing in return - yes, the defense values are the same but it comes as an auto power and Hide, neither of which have endurance costs. Sure, it's only the cost of a single toggle, but Cloak of Darkness is the second most expensive toggle in Dark Armor. Now is it really a fair tradeoff? No, but that's because Shadow Dweller is also weaker than Cloak of Darkness with lower values on +perception, immobilize resistance, and immobilize protection - the justification for that is that as an auto power it should be weaker than a toggle, combined with the fact that it was ported at a time when the devs felt that Stalkers needed to give up a lot for Hide. Just to make it even sillier, the stealth from Hide suppresses during combat but the stealth from Cloak of Darkness does not, so a Stalker fighting near another spawn will cause them to aggro and a Scrapper, Brute, or Tanker won't. But despite that, Dark Armor as a whole is a good set where the only holes are knockback protection (easily solved through IOs) and endurance costs (making the reduced cost a little easier to swallow).

Nitpick/correction: it's the last mission of the opening arc, and anyone on the team long enough to get mission rewards gets the badge so you can get it earlier than level 35 if you tag along while someone else is running the mission, allowing you to immediately go to patron pools when you hit level 35. If you want to unlock the Recluse Strike Force, you have to be the mission holder because the last mission that grants Usurper is where you talk to Recluse, which only the mission holder can do; however, you can just run any one of the four Time After Time arcs in Ouroboros, which are treated as strike forces and so everyone on the team counts as the "mission holder," and everyone on the team will get it.

Blatantly stolen: Assault Bot: I AM PROGRAMMED TO LIKE MAKING INTRUDERS SORRY. Battle Drone: WHAT ABOUT THE AIR DUCTS? Assault Bot: WATCH THE AIR DUCTS! Battle Drone: I AM PROGRAMMED TO LIKE PIE. Battle Drone: WHY? Battle Drone: THIS QUESTION HAUNTS MY EVERY ACTIVE MEMORY CYCLE. Battle Drone: I DO NOT EVEN HAVE A MOUTH TO EAT PIE. Battle Drone: WHY ME?

Context. Go back to the beginning of what I was replying to.

An IO'd out Blaster can absorb the alpha, and a team of 7 of them means that there isn't an alpha, because the mobs are gone before they get a chance to return fire.

Petless Demons I could at least understand that they wanted the whip. My Demon Summoning MMs were the first ones that I frequently used the attacks on; usually I was better off micromanaging the pets and using my secondary over the (rather bad) attacks in the primary. Also, if you're going with Burnout, Hell on Earth > Gang War IMO. Sure it's fewer pets, but they're way too cute.

Unless they went out of their way to disable them, they're still getting recipe drops which they could sell for inf. If the person they're door-sitting with is level 50 the vendor price will still get them around 1m per hour just on the commons. Did you even read what you quoted? Here, let me highlight it for you: They're pretty much doing the opposite of what you're claiming. They want people to be able to have more options to get similar amounts of inf.

Now, now, let's not get carried away. Fiery Aura can be built to be very sturdy - more than most Blasters, even!

First off, I completely agree with the first sentence. Now, the nitpick: you take down Recluse and towers in the MLTF (formerly STF), not the LRSF. Edit to try to not have a completely off-topic post: I think that inf drops at low levels should be looked at; if nothing else it will make it more painful to just use 2xp until you hit 50, and inflation is mostly capped by the merit vendor conversion rate.

They did that already, it's called Radiation Melee. It uses the same damage types and has attack animations shared with Energy Punch (Contaminated Strike), Bone Smasher (Radioactive Smash), and (new) Energy Transfer (Devastating Blow). That parenthetical note is really key there - it's a huge change since when it was on the 1 second animation, half of the animation was pulling your hand back after you hit them and it dealt damage. I also dislike weapon sets, and I'm hoping something comes from looking at the elemental sets referenced in this post from months ago: As for Brutes? They're in a good spot. Changes to individual powersets would be appreciated, which is why I addressed my responses the way that I did earlier in this post, but since the powersets cross AT boundaries I think that it's not really what this thread is about. As for favorites... I don't really have one. My first Brute when I got on Homecoming was a SS/Bio; I picked Bio Armor because I was waiting for it to go live when the shutdown notice occurred and never got to play one outside of a brief stint on beta (during which I played a Stalker!), and paired it with Super Strength because it was a common set that I knew (and knew I could skip a lot of) so I would just be playing a new secondary. It's the same reason that I went with Electric Armor when I wanted to try out Rad Melee. They're both good, they both play differently, and neither makes me feel as if I need to abandon other characters to play them like my Fortunata does at times.

And here I thought the thread was going to be about the relatively abysmal rate of inf gain at lower levels (outside of getting seed money and playing the market, per your last categorization) compared to running content as a level 50.

I think it was patched to not allow the -regen in Drain Psyche to accept enhancements so it's not potentially the highest single-activation source of -regen in a powerset anymore. For what it's worth Rad gets both Lingering Radiation's -500% and EM Pulse's -1000%, if you're not talking about sources that could be made permanent; however, since Poison Trap uses a pseudopet to apply the effect, Traps can still surpass by placing multiple traps to stack -1000% debuffs.

Hello? Is it me you're looking for?

Thunderstruck is too obvious, so...

Ablative Carapace and Parasitic Aura have "growing crap" for a couple of seconds each during the animations, while Genetic Contamination and each of the adapatations have a persistent aura. Here's my SS/Bio with all toggles running: Using Ablative Carapace (this lasts for about 2 seconds): And using Parasitic Aura (also lasts about two seconds): Yes, the effects are ugly but they aren't there for very long, or very often.