siolfir

I wasn't arguing against it, I was arguing against the point being made that "a single Kinetic isn't going to cap a Tanker", and specifically the screenshots showing a no-global-recharge screenshot of Fulcrum Shift with a 30 second recharge saying "it isn't going to stack". Also, bosses tend to die fairly quickly also, and can be picked off while chasing the tank as he runs to the next spawn. Because the taunt duration is longer than their lifespan.

I said it before (global recharge). That build doesn't have SOs slotted - my character does, though, because I haven't decided if I want to swap up the build. And then I realized it didn't really matter. Plus if I wanted to optimize my own damage I'd just end up splitting up sets to go for procs. As for considering a mob won't be there to Fulcrum Shift off of... I did say I hit it every other spawn. The second one dies too quickly. Trigger FS when you get to the spawn, and don't lag behind. I don't force the rest of the team to keep up, but I don't wait for them to keep up either. This was specifically a response about keeping the Tanker at or near the cap, and they're likely to be surrounded when they jump in and get a max buff. I usually run next to or just behind the tank for the team, which is why Clarion's mez protection helped so much, and while the animation is going - before the buff pseudopets spawn - the rest of the team catches up.

I've joined teams on my Rad/Elec Brute who has 25-35% defense to everything, resistances of 82-90% for S/L/F/C/E, 48% N, 56% Psi who kept asking saying that they "needed a Tank", meaning Tanker. So there are groups out there that think this way. I just let them get the Tanker, who was in their upper 20s and didn't have any set bonuses listed (vs my IO'd 50), so I ran ahead of said Tanker, and grouped everything around me for when they caught up. When the Tanker told me to stop because "I'm the tank and I need to be first", I did. And when he died taking the alpha two spawns later, I went back to running in first and letting him pull what aggro off of me that he could. Oddly enough, he didn't say anything about it after that.

But...but...what about peppers?

Nice cherry-picking on the screenshots for the power there... Fulcrum Shift routinely is permanently double-stacked because of global recharge. But you had to know that to be able to build that Blaster you posted totals for earlier, so you're being deliberately disingenuous. You also missed the +50% damage from around the Defender that can get you to +300% per stack in an ideal situation, because it's not on that tab in Pine's - but then, for a Controller or Corruptor it caps at +240% and those are the usual ATs I've seen with Kinetics because the Defender damage cap is so low. Here's a screenshot from Pine's where it's slotted with only 2 level 50 recharge IOs (not even boosted level 50s): Gee, that has it double-stacked all the time, and triple-stacked for a couple of seconds. I can keep my Corruptor at the +400% cap most of the time as the only Kin, and that's not even accounting for damage slotting. If a Tanker is running with me, they're going to get the same buffs. There's no arcane secret to do this, either... you hit Fulcrum Shift as the first thing you do in every other spawn, and that spawn and the next one usually dies before it's recharged. It doesn't take an uber build, and it doesn't take being softcapped to everything on defense and hardcapped to everything on resistance to survive doing it... my Corruptor is still running around with SOs slotted in half of her attacks because I couldn't decide what sets to take, and it didn't matter once I got Clarion. What it takes is prioritizing Fulcrum Shift before your AoEs, a bit of knockback protection, and moving through the mission quickly enough that it doesn't wear off.

So what I'm getting out of this is that you're capped to half the damage types, softcapped to almost all the damage types, and capped on hp on a Blaster. Just go kill more and stop interrupting threads for the lower damage ATs that would only get in your way.

Burst, from Kinetic Melee, is the 100% critical chance from hide. Spine Burst is 30%. Burst also has an 8' radius, so it's not really all that likely you're hitting 10 things.

Yes. It's only still on my build because I switched to a different Brute, using a different primary, rather than respec to get Tactics to keep the +to-hit and spread the end cost out as a toggle. Also, in response to the "the end crash goes away because the patch also gives extra endrance" post that I forgot to multiquote, keep in mind that only Tankers are getting the extra endurance, and there is another AT that has the powerset. One that gets less use out of it proportionally anyway due to a lower base damage and already having a reliable +damage.

It's not really a buff, though - no Brute powers were using their ranged modifier except maybe the attack in Sorcery(?). All of the melee ATs were using their melee damage modifiers for both melee and ranged attacks, which I always thought was silly. This fixes that, while adjusting the modifiers so that it's not nerfing anyone.

They have, and Masterminds can occupy mobs and split aggro, either by having their pets taking aggro away from players or using bodyguard mode to split the damage that the Mastermind takes, which requires the Mastermind to dip into pool powers to hold aggro on themselves because they have no in-set ways of doing so. They don't collect aggro on a single target within their primary or secondary powersets. Brutes collect aggro just by being there and hitting things. This had to be intentional, because it had to be specifically added to all of their powers. The damage cap on Brutes is so much higher because originally Fury provided +3% damage per point and decayed much more quickly. Running at 70% Fury (+210%) with ED damage slotting (+95%) meant you would hit a 500% ("damage AT" +400%) cap with Build Up and +5% extra damage from any source. At +2% it's a lot harder to hit the cap than it used to be, but when it was changed they lowered the decay rate at lower levels of Fury, tweaked the gain formula at higher levels, and the cap remained where it was so that they could say it wasn't a straight-up nerf because it was "more consistent with the same peak". And yes, I realize that doesn't explain why Warshades are able to remain capped on damage (+300%) and resistance (85%) permanently with enough targets and recharge, but I guess they didn't want to have two ATs that were almost always capped on damage when they introduced CoV.

I thought about suggesting a small mez protection aura around Tankers earlier as well, since the killer of squishies is typically the inability to act rather than anything else. If it affects the Tanker as well, this could be another differentiator between them and Brutes, because you can lower the magnitude of protection in their primary to make up for them having it in an inherent by the magnitude of the protection provided, but the inherent wouldn't have the holes that the armor set would on a Brute/Scrapper/Stalker, it would just be easier to overload the magnitude on. As for the damage increase... meh. For me the problem with levelling a Tanker wasn't the damage modifier (I solo levelled a Dark/Cold Corruptor - the existing Tanker modifier is higher than the Corruptor modifier, and Cold has no damage increasing debuffs until level 35... the same level that Dominators get Sleet). It was the the long delays in getting powers to fill an attack chain because melee was the secondary powerset instead of the primary, so you had the same two relatively weak attacks to cycle through and wait for them to recharge. Yes, that means that my problem was still damage... but it was "damage per second" for the character, not "damage per attack".

So you just hate Scrappers? Because that's their niche - difficult to kill, not expected to hold aggro. Stalkers are even easier to kill with lower hit points, but they're not only not expected to hold aggro, they have powers to actively shed it. Brutes are supposed to hold aggro, that's why they get punchvoke. They were a mix of the Tanker and Scrapper ATs when City of Villains was a separate game, and you couldn't have those ATs.

One of those rare powers is Super Speed. If your build has end to spare, run it. Most of the time you hear Scrappers bragging about their ability to survive +4/x8 as well or better than Brutes, though, so I'm surprised to see a request to lower their threat level.

That's likely due to the increased target cap and double-sized AoEs making farming much easier; the damage at the cap is very close, and although the Tanker gets more out of the inspiration drops they have to make up ground for not having Fury. FWIW: count me in on having non-weapon options for the elemental attacks across the board.

Electric Armor, but be prepared to hate the grind to Power Sink when it comes to endurance management. You'll add some AoE damage with Lightning Field, and can pick up more AoEs from the Patron Pools; Mu Mastery works great for this since it also fits thematically. A side benefit of Mu Mastery, besides the extra AoE damage, is that you become a sapper - the -end and -recovery, combined with Power Sink for a quick drain and Lightning Field to tick the end that does recover away keeps the mobs close to you from doing a whole lot. A friend of mine loves the pairing, and put together a build with a touch under 2100 hp, capped S/L/E/F/C resistances, 71% Psi resistance, and I think 55% Negative... and yeah. Toxic hole. But that's what Seismic Smash is for, right?

In light of the above, I decided to explore a forgotten and much maligned set, Energy Melee. Upon a time, it was my main. Now, Scrappers dont GET Energy Melee, but Brutes DO.. and Brutes get Bioarmor, and Titan Weapons, and I had these Titan/Bio Brute times lying around. We all know the reputation Energy Melee gets... but does it live down to it? I set out to draw a crowd of fury buffers.. usually managed to start each timer with 70-80% Fury Bar. My rotation was dirt simple, which probably explains the consistent times. Lacking any held weapon, Energy Melee can easily 'duck out' of its pool to grab gloom. Gloom, amusingly, is better DPA than anything in the set but Energy Transfer, so it becomes a very straightforward Energy Transfer-Gloom-Total Focus-Gloom. Timing was just right so I could trigger Buildup right before the next Energy Transfer, right as gloom finished animating and Energy Transfer came off recharge. So whats energy melee got left in the tank, when you do everything you can to make it better, including going outside of the set to make it better? Time: 3:40 3:33 3:30 (315 DPS) ... Say gnite, gracie. But at least you can still kill yourself with Energy Transfer, so that's something unique to the set... right?

In case you were not aware, nothing was skipped for the Stalker version of Ninjitsu - the other versions didn't exist on any live server prior to the NCSoft shutdown, and Scrappers had Caltrops in one of their epic pools already so it made sense as the power to remove when porting it. The only deliberate "screw you" for Stalkers was not plugging the KB hole for them when fixing it for the other ATs that get the secondary; it's not like they plugged the Psi hole in EA or Inv when porting either of those sets, so the holes in the set should have remained or been fixed for all ATs sharing it.

Nitpick: the Numina's unique is 20% regeneration, 10% recovery - so it's a touch better than what you list above. Not that I think it will make a difference in the rankings for people looking at them, but since the numbers for it weren't listed earlier in the thread, I thought it might help the few people who manage to find the forums and this thread title and think that there's a bug with the in-game numbers.

I started with i7, so can't speak for what it was at CoV launch; both have had the reduced/no-damage critical for as long as I've played. On top of that, Stalkers got a version of EM with nerfed stun percentages compared to every other version. It was just much better for Brutes, where Fury meant that ET was hitting nearly as hard as an AS crit anyway, plus you had more hp (and the higher regen that comes with more hp) to absorb the self-damage, and you could stack stuns easily. But to answer the question about the set being appealing... with the old animation and no critical damage, I enjoyed EM on both ATs because the set hit fast (outside of TF, which I rarely used), and hit hard. There was just something satisfying about "push button, kill mob".

To get past the pom-poms, use power customization - you can't get rid of them but you can just make it look like your hands are glowing with the right colors. That said, don't bother with EM if the idea is critical damage from Energy Transfer: it doesn't do extra damage, it just doesn't do the self-damage when it crits. Until Crushing Uppercut, there was a design concept from Cryptic/Paragon that seemed to be to prevent anything from doing more than an Assassin's Strike crit from hidden status, so hard hitters from other sets had reduced damage criticals just to keep them less than AS. Energy Melee has two of those powers that had their criticals reduced: Total Focus (where a crit does ET damage) and Energy Transfer (no self-damage).

How detrimental would you say this is? Would I absolutely choke for power constantly? Also, I've played both to 15 now (not exactly endgame, I know) and I've found something weird, despite similar slotting I do both less damage AND feel squishier as a Scrapper than I do as a Stalker. Is this something that would continue on through the game or does Scrapper bloom a bit later on? Scrappers have more hit points, both base and max, and the same base defense and resistance modifiers - the higher hit point pool increases their regen as well, and Scrappers can wade in and survive more simply because it actually takes more incoming damage to kill them with all else being equal. The same argument goes for Brutes vs Scrappers - more hit points, leading to more regen with the same resistance and defense numbers, leading to a better chance to survive with the same amount of incoming damage. But Stalkers actively affect the amount of incoming damage. It's already been mentioned that as a Stalker you get to define when the fight starts with almost everything you fight (some exceptions are Rikti drones and Knives of Artemis... probably more that I'm forgetting at the moment), so that provides a limited form of defense at the beginning. On top of that, Assassin's Strike from hide adds an AoE ToHit debuff and fear effect around your target if they survive, providing you additional help with what defense you have in your secondary when you lead off by crippling a mob. In addition burst damage is a great form of defense, especially at low levels - there is a shift in the mid-levels once mobs get enough hit points to survive the initial burst and it becomes less of a benefit and more of a necessity, and eventually you're fighting enemy groups where there are one or two things you have to take out immediately or the fight gets to be crazy. That said, once you get IO sets and fully-slotted powers, you either crank the difficulty up or every AT has enough survivability: before the first shutdown I tanked Recluse for an STF while everyone else took down the towers with an Ice/Rad Corruptor with minimal buffs and a lot of IO sets and AI manipulation (the same Corruptor soloed him as an AV at the end of the Patron arc before IOs - there's a lot to be said about abusing mob AI to stay alive in this game). On the damage end, you probably feel as though you're doing more damage because you actually are doing more (single target) damage: Assassin's Strike is a strong attack that Stalkers get at level 6, where most melee sets for the other ATs (Scrapper, Brute, and especially Tanker) have to wait a while to get something that hits that hard - you simply have a better attack chain at low levels, at the cost of chewing through your endurance faster. Since you can recover after each spawn it's not an issue as long as you can make it through each group. And all of this is based on solo play: on teams you just extra criticals anytime someone is nearby (I forget the radius, it's 10% base out of hide + 3% per teammate within I think 30'?), and your don't have as many incoming attacks because your Threat level (a multiplier value used by mob AI that's combined with damage and other flags and factors to determine who to attack) is lower than a Scrapper's. Stalkers (generally) have fewer AoEs and take out their single targets quickly, so they don't get a lot of mob attention on teams unless they run ahead.

I might have played on Infinity for a while using a variety of alts - and even got to play emp (poorly) for dUmb in an arena league. And no, I still don't have a headset for my computer. :P Nice to see some familiar faces in the thread here. :)