Sarrate

Oh, but they absolutely do exist. All attacks are defined in terms of "damage scale," and then the AT modifier is what translates that's into final damage. It's what people mean when they Tankers have a damage mod of 0.8 and Scrappers have one of 1.125. Check out City of Data's Tanker Powers. Scroll down and look at the damage column. That's the raw scale damage. There is something similar for most things. Defensive buffs, offensive buffs, hold durations, etc. That's why Tankers get more defense out of the same powers than a Scrapper, why Defender buffs/debuffs are stronger than a Controller, etc. Note: Not all abilities need to follow the scales exactly. Look at Tankers' ranged damage mod, it's 0.5 - horrible! So, instead of ranged APP powers using the ranged damage mod, they use the melee one so they're actually usable.

The "threat modifier" is nothing more than a taunt effect (13.5s), it's not a special debuff / mechanic unique to Tankers. Even attack sets proliferated between ATs are basically a separate copy. For example, compare Energy Transfer for Tankers and Stalkers (Tankers have a radius & taunt effect while Stalkers have a chance not to take the self damage, Assassin's Focus, and a lower stun chance), or Concentrated Strike for Tankers vs Scrappers (Tanker's have a radius, taunt, while Scrappers have a 20% chance to recharge Power Siphon). I did find an example of a pool power in City of Data, though! (I wasn't paying close enough attention and just missed it. /facepalm) You can compare Air Superiority for Tankers and Scrappers. It's the same power, but it has a bunch of conditionals. (Why the damage is in conditionals when that should just be handled by damage scales, I don't know.) There you can see the various effects of all ATs (Scrapper crits, Stalker crits, Containment, Scourge, etc) as well as the taunt effect for Tankers. The caveat being the attack is still single target, so there is no Gauntlet AoE on it, just single target. (Interestingly, Brute do not get any taunt effect on it.) So I was wrong about it taunting at all, but right that it doesn't have an AoE taunt.

Gauntlet isn't actually a power or proc. (The icon in your status bar is a dummy that does nothing.) All powers are specifically modified to have a radius, with all single target effects having a setting that forces it only to affect the primary target. For example, look at Knockout Blow. It has a "radius" of 17ft, but everything except the taunt effect is set to be single target. I suspect pool powers don't have Gauntlet, as I'd expect them to be shared powers and not modified to have a taunt & radius. (I could be wrong on this.) I tried to lookup the pool powers in CoD, but I wasn't able to find it. It looks like the Wayback Machine didn't archive it.

I feel like "repositioning" is a little bit too generic, because that single line can have a lot of effects: * Make it harder for melee characters to keep enemies occupied. (eg: enemies are out of aggro aura range.) * Make some melee characters less survivable. (eg: An Invuln character losing minions feeding Invincibility.) * Spreading out enemies making AoEs less efficient. * Knocking enemies away from melee. (eg: Forces them to chase, potentially moving away from other grouped mobs.) * Knocking enemies out to debuffs. This can both make enemies more dangerous (no longer in range of to hit / dmg debuffs) and take less damage (out of resistance debuff range). There are just too many downsides to for a simple damage proc to solve. (A damage proc is also likely worth less than easier AoE and debuffs.) Given CoH's gameplay and mechanics, I'm really not sure how to make knockback more desirable in more situations. ----- I'd also add, the worst type of knockback is "X% chance knockback" in AoE powers. On single target (guaranteed or chance) you're only knocking around a single enemy and not affecting most mobs. If you have a guaranteed AoE knockback, you can at least reposition an entire group in the same direction. With AoE chance for knockback, you'll be splitting groups in two which is the worst of everything.

Out of curiosity, where are you seeing a 95 second cooldown on IH? I ask because it has a 650 second base cooldown, and the +recharge cap is 500%, so the fastest possible cooldown should be ~130 sec (650 / 5 = 130). Also, regen with 64% s/l resistance? That's around double what I remember Regen being able to achieve with Resilience + Tough. Man, set bonuses went bananas after I stopped playing!

I wish I could give you an answer, but I really don't know. I wasn't playing Tankers when Provoke tanking was a thing, but also the devs held their cards much closer to their chest than Paragon Studios did later in the game. I do remember taunt effects being really wonky for a long time, though. I recently was going over old demos and I found one where I was in a team with an Invuln/ Tanker on my DM/Invuln against Infernal. He killed the Tanker, then swapped to me. The Tanker was ressed, and proceeded to Taunt and attack constantly. Infernal didn't swap back to him until I was defeated. One thing that definitely happened, though, is taunt effects became far more prolific. Previously Invuln was the only Scrapper armor with a taunt aura. Now there is Shield as well (did a quick check on Mids, it didn't look like any other had taunts, surprisingly), not to mention the elephant in the room - Brutes. Sorry, you already know that part, though. "Well, actually" Kruunch, 17 mobs. ;) /waves back

There have been a lot of good replies already, but there were some topics that haven't been addressed yet. Full disclaimer: I'm not an expert in DA, but I am currently playing a Rad/Dark Brute (lvl29). (Different beasts, I know.) Second disclaimer: I don't know how much you know about how CoH's game mechanics work, so I'm being very verbose with my explanations. I mean no offense, but I'd rather over explain to someone who already knows than gloss over key facts for people who are unaware. A few things in here stick out. 1) Slotting When you say "literally nothing but end reducs" slotted, do you mean that in the absolute literal sense (all attacks are nothing but end reduc), or is that hyperbole? I ask because, while yes, it's good that you're slotting end reduc in your attacks (they consume considerably more endurance than your toggles), you still need to deal damage if you're solo. Consider you have an attack that deals 100 damage and costs 10 endurance. If you're fighting a +0 enemy with no defense or resistance, you can expect it to do, on average 75 damage, or 7.5 dmg / end. (You only have 75% base to hit, so 25% of the time you miss. Okay, how does this change when you slot end reduc? End Red To-Hit Dmg End Dmg/End 0 0.75 100 10 7.5 1 0.75 100 7.50 9.99975 2 0.75 100 6.00 12.4995 3 0.75 100 5.12 14.625 With up to 3 end reduc, you're basically doubling your end efficiency, which is great! However, end reduction isn't the only way to increase efficiency. Consider what happens when you slot a single accuracy: Acc To-Hit Dmg End Dmg/End 0 0.75 100 10 7.5 1 0.95 100 10 9.5 * More acc would help only help against higher level mobs, and mobs with defense/tohit debuffs. * This is slightly skewed since BS has def debuffs, increasing your chance to hit after you hit. So that single accuracy is almost as much of an efficiency boost as 1 end reduc, but it also means you'd hit more often, which means less misses, which also means fewer attacks, which mean fewer alive mobs. Now take a look at what happens when you start slotting for damage (keeping the 1x acc, since you'll want at least that): Dmg To-Hit Dmg End Dmg/End 0 0.95 100 10 9.5 1 0.95 133.33 10 12.66635 2 0.95 166.66 10 15.8327 3 0.95 195 10 18.525 * Note: 1x Acc and 3x Dmg is 1 slot more than the 3 end recuc above Again, similar gains to to end efficiency, but more killing power in less time. As an added bonus, this means killing mobs faster, which means taking less hits, which means less damage taken, less healing needed, and less time for a mob (esp bosses) to regen health. That's all great, but I wouldn't recommend a pure damage slotting if you're sucking wind as hard as you are. Try mixing the slotting up a bit. 1 acc, 1 dmg, 2 end reduc? 1 acc, 2 dmg, 1 end reduc? (I don't know how many slots your attacks have, but without IOs, 1 acc, 3x dmg, 2x end reduc would probably serve well for a 6 slotted attack.) I'd also adjust my slotting based on your activity. The more you solo, the more you should worry about offense, where-as the more you group, the lighter you can be on attack slotting, focusing more on keeping aggro and staying alive. 2) Mission Difficulty Something else that comes into play is mission difficulty. I generally prefer to increase the spawn size faster than I increase the level. For one, higher level mobs are harder to hit (requiring more accuracy), take less damage, resist debuffs, have higher accuracy, and have more health. If you're already having trouble dealing damage / killing mobs, these are all huge negatives. You might look into increasing the spawn size first. The mobs will be easier to kill, there will be more of them (you can leverage AoEs more), and since you'll be killing more mobs, you'll get more insp drops, which will help keep the pace up. Faster killing = more insp drops / minute = using more insps = faster killing (more dmg/tohit, more free healing/end, more free defense to reduce the need of toggles / need to heal). The only caveat is when fighting debuff heavy mobs. If you're running at +0 / x8, you'll have a lot more debuffs heading your way. So where a defense debuff here or there isn't bad at x0, it adds up quick. As mentioned before, save Dark Regen for when you need healing. It's an absolutely phenomenal heal, but not so great at dealing damage, and costs way too much endurance to use for damage. This makes me want to mention: 3) AoE efficiency Try to maximize your AoEs, especially if you're running at higher spawn counts. An AoE attack costs just as much to hit a single enemy as it does to hit its target cap (usually 5-10). So if you need to jockey for positioning to line up more than 1 mob in Slice, do it. Sometimes this might mean pulling spread out mobs around the corner. Additionally, keep in mind that AoEs are actually more expensive than a single target attack, so using them against a single target will hit the blue bar harder. I'm not saying never to do it, just keep that in mind that - rather than finishing off that solo mob with Slice, maybe wait for Hack or Death Shroud. (Btw, Death Shroud is expensive, but the more targets it hits, the more efficient it is.) One thing you haven't mentioned yet is Parry. If you're having problems with survivability, you should take and use Parry. It's defense buff no joke. On a Scrapper, it yields +15% defense (that's more than an SR toggle!) to melee and lethal unslotted - and it stacks. Take it, love it, use liberally. (If you're not in danger of dying, probably don't use it, as you'd probably be slotting it for defense and end reduc, so it'd deal crumby damage.) The most important IOs you can slot are (no particular order): * Numina's +regen/recovery * Miracle: +recovery * Theft of Essence: Chance for +end * A single Knockback Protection IO (Karma for defense, Steadfast for resistance, Zephyr for travel power) Extra recovery is pretty self explanatory, Theft of the Essence - as mentioned by marcussmythe - helps offset the cost, and a single Knockback IO will stop the majority (but not all) knockbacks from affecting you. Btw, make sure Dark Regen is well slotted. It was actually my Brute's first 6 slotted power (2 acc, 2 end reduc, 1 recharge, 1 Theft of Essence). ----- Okay, I knew I had a lot to say, but that was a bit more long winded than I expected. Hopefully you found some of that helpful. :) (Geeze, my session actually timed out while typing this, and I hit preview multiple times explicitly to avoid that. :o Luckily, Back button had my back... Whew.)

Thanks a lot for this post, it has given me a lot to think about that I wasn't previously considering. It's exactly the kind of response I was hoping for. I understand what you're saying when it comes to CS missing being very high impact, but on the flip side, by doing 2.x attacks in the same window, you have more chances to miss in the middle of the chain. The more frequent attacks have a smoother dps curve than one with CS, but over a big enough window, that alone should average out. (You could argue that most enemies don't last long enough for that to happen, and that's also a valid point. On the flip side, it means that CS could yield higher dps if it never misses, ignoring other factors.) Your point about procs is also very interesting, because I never really played proc heavy builds, but that is additional damage CS wouldn't have. On the flip side, with the PPM system in place, the short recharges of the powers would leave them with a very low chance to proc... *does some math* Or, those procs would have a higher proc rate than I expected. (A 3 PPM proc in QS without recharge would have a ~20% proc rate. Of course, if you did have recharge in it, say 40%, that would still be ~16%.) As for Power Siphon, if you can can cast CS 4 times in PS's duration, then (assuming I'm not botching the probability calculation), you'd have a ~59% chance to refresh it. (0.8 ^ 4 = 0.4096 chance to not proc, or 1 - 0.4096 to proc). Not guaranteed, but more likely than not. On the flip side, every cast of CS is 2.x attacks that won't have a chance to proc. Additionally, the more recharge you have, the less value the reset has. PS with just 3 slots has a modified recharge of ~60s. If it procs early, you probably wouldn't want to cast it (spend more animation time on PS and not attacking), but if you get it too late, it could only save seconds of recharge. I'm starting to understand what you're saying, and that's a bummer. In the future, I was thinking of making a KM Scrapper specifically because I figured the PS recharge would make it far more valuable than on other ATs (because PS lasts 20s, with the ~10s of ramp down as stacks fall off). Just chaining 3 attacks gets boring, too.

There are quite a few reasons: Taunt Provoke Duration 41 sec 16.4 sec Tohit Auto-hit Required Range 70ft 60ft Range Debuff -75% N/A Taunt blows Provoke out of the water in absolutely every way, with the taunt duration alone making it the clear winner. (Provoke is barely stronger than Gauntlet's 13.5 sec duration.) If you need more taunt, slot Taunt, invest in more recharge, and/or get Hasten to have it (and everything else) recharge faster. There is also the fact that Taunt is part of Tanker secondaries while Provoke requires burning one of your 4 power pool slots.

So you did, I apologize. I clearly didn't RTFM. I was looking at the info section and not the chain section. I worry that displaying a non-AT DPA could allow people to make incorrect assumptions, just like I did. Not trying to dis the work you've put into this at all, mind you. The spreadsheet and rotation calculator are really cool.

It doesn't look like you're calculating ArcanaTime in the spreadsheet. Without it, very fast attacks are disproportionately powerful. It also throws attack chains out of whack, fitting more attacks into a given time slice than you can actually accomplish.

I tried that, but I still had it swap values on me. :\ From the IOs I've sold, I don't think I've seen any (non-bugged) sell for more than ~8 million. I'm inclined to assume anytime I see bunch of 15-20+ million (esp if it's alternating between two histories) that it's bugged and I should ignore the high values .

Aside from Concentrated Strike having a long cast time and the problems that come with it (being rooted and unable to respond), it still looks like a strong power. I grabbed the raw scale damage from City of Data, and then calculated the DPA of the powers two ways, first by just dividing damage by cast time (DPA (wrong)) and again by factoring in ArcanaTime (DPA (AT)). Here are the results: Name Dmg Cast DPA (wrong) ArcanaTime DPA (AT) Quick Strike 0.882 0.83 1.06265060240964 1.056 0.835227272727273 Body Blow 1.218 1.07 1.13831775700935 1.32 0.922727272727273 Smashing Blow 1.554 1.2 1.295 1.452 1.0702479338843 Concentrated Strike 3.56 2.83 1.25795053003534 3.036 1.17259552042161 Concentrated Strike's DPA is competitive with Smashing Blow when naively calculating it, but when factoring in ArcanaTime, it is higher. That's not even counting the 20% change to recharge Power Siphon. I know people hate long cast times, but that power looks like gravy.

Btw, there is a similar check in entaiEvent.c, specifically aiEventHandleAttacked(...) (which looks like it gets called when an entity it affected by a power) where it won't set the taunt duration if it's not greater than double the current taunt. So even if you taunt something and its target dies, it still won't know you taunted it (if the target dies between aiCritterFindTarget() calls, so that doesn't zero it out). This jives with my experience that, if you want to hold aggro, you want to 1) be the first one to apply taunts (eg: rush ahead of the group while they're mopping up the current spawn) and 2) have the longest Taunt so other's can't easily override yours and 3) use it often to make sure it's near impossible for someone else to Taunt while your duration is getting low.

I'm not sure how much enhancement you have in Hasten, but (assuming +95%, or 3 SOs worth) it looks like you'd have Hasten up for 120s then down for ~21s. It's not perma, but it would be up 85% of the time.

Hasten has a base recharge of 450s and a duration of 120s, so it would take 375% total recharge. Removing base (100%) and Hasten's own effect (70%), that leaves 205% recharge. Presumably you'd be getting around 80-100% from slots (3x SOs is 95%). So, with 3 SOs, that leaves around 110% recharge left to make up between global bonuses, Incarnate/primary/secondary powers.

Oh I beg your pardon, I misinterpreted your original post. I thought you were saying "maybe it's selling so fast the range is actively changing a lot." That's an interesting point. I was originally thinking it was a bug where I was accidentally getting the history for a different IO instead of the one I was searching for. Instead, what it could be is the game retrieving a history from further back than the most recent 5. It also got me thinking "if there are multiple instances of "AH caches," and each of the caches has a different snapshot of the price history, I could be intermittently getting data any of the caches, which don't agree. (That's just spitballing, though.)

Bummer. Okay, given that it's bugged, is there any way for me to determine which range is the correct one? I'd hate to either sell it for less than it's worth or price it way too high such that it never sells and waste money on posting fees. Possible, but I don't think that's the case. I have screenshots over the course of 4 minutes, and the bids on them are all the same. The low range and high ranges are exactly the same, including that very specific 18,123,455 bid. If it was super high volume, then I'd expect every screenshot to have a different price history.

I wasn't playing when Attuned and Boosted IOs were a thing, but from what I've gathered: * Normal IOs can be slotted only when they're no more than 3 levels above you. Their enhancement strength is fixed. If you exemplar, set bonuses will only persist up to 3 levels below the level of the IO. This means if you use lvl 50 IOs then exemplar down to 40, you'll lose all your set bonuses. If you use lower level IOs so you can exemplar w/o losing your set bonuses, then the enhancements won't be as strong. A lvl 30 IO has lower enhancement strength than a lvl50, afterall. It was a tradeoff. * Attuned IOs can be slotted at any level, and their enhancement strength increases and decreases as you level up or exemplar down. Additionally, the set bonuses will be active for the entire lvl range of the set. A set that goes from 20-50 will provide set bonuses at any lvl in that range. (I think it might also work up to 3 levels below, so lvl17 in this example.) They're basically a (mostly) no compromise version of the IO. * Regular IOs (not attuned) can be boosted. Boosted IOs allow you to increase their enhancement strength even further. This would be most useful for things like generic (no bonuses) & purple (even though they're lvl50, their bonuses persist even when exemplared). As for pricing: * The AH buckets things. This is a little bit confusing, but the basic gist is that the AH allows a seller to sell any IO to a buyer of that same IO of any level / type. For example, if I craft a lvl30 Crushing Impact and someone is trying to buy a lvl 50 Crushing Impact, the market can take my lvl30, convert it to a lvl50, and give it to the buyer. This works for attuned IOs, too. So that same lvl30 Crushing Impact would sell exactly the same to a buyer of an attuned Crushing Impact. * This means if you want to buy something, buy the exact version of the IO you want, and the market will do the rest. Don't settle for a lvl30 Crushing Impact when you could get an attuned / lvl50 of the same type for the same price. * The process used to attune an IO costs ~4 million inf, from what I've read. So people suggest that if you have an IO that you want to use but isn't attuned, you should just sell it and buy another from the AH to get it attuned "for free." (Sans market fees, but that's unlikely to be 4 million.) * This is the case for recipes and salvage, too. All salvage of the same type (common, uncommon, and rare) are all in the same bucket. So all salvage in a single category sells for the same price. It took me a bit piece all this together, so I hope this makes sense. (To anyone else, if I've mucked any of that up, please set me straight.)

While following the wisdom of crafting uncommons, converting to rare, then selling, I've stumbled upon a pretty vexing problem... I can't tell what the going rate for this IO is: Is it selling for 5-10m or 18-30m? I was able to swap all the displays between these two ranges (clicking on the attuned / stored IO I got both ranges, and by clicking between the different crafted IOs the price alternated, too. While it's inconsistent which of the two ranges gets displayed, it's consistent in showing only these two ranges. I really don't know what to make of this besides it being very concerning. Has anyone else run into this? Or, better yet, have an explanation as to what the heck is going on? This is the second time I've run into this bug, but the first time I've taken screenshots. (Well, last time I did take screenshots - with UI hidden, oops.)

Short summary from ParagonWiki: The basic gist is that, against a +0 minion and you have no defense, the formula (for an NPC) would look like this: HitChance = Clamp( 1.0 * Clamp(0.5 + 0 - 0) = 0.5 = 50% If you're fighting a Boss, that would be: HitChance = Clamp( 1.3 * Clamp(0.5 + 0 - 0) = 0.65 = 65% Now, if you add 10% defense to both: Minion: Clamp( 1.0 * Clamp(0.5 + 0 - 0.1) = 0.4 = 40% Boss = Clamp( 1.3 * Clamp(0.5 + 0 - 0.1) = 0.52 = 52% Let's go all the way up to 45%: Minion: Clamp( 1.0 * Clamp(0.5 + 0 - 0.45) = 0.05 = 5% Boss = Clamp( 1.3 * Clamp(0.5 + 0 - 0.45) = 0.065 = 6.5% If you add any more defense on top of that (or add tohit debuffs to the mobs), they will still have a 5% and 6.5% chance to hit you, respectively. This is why people talk about the 45% defense soft cap, above that (in normal situations) it does not improve survivability. Defense / ToHit are additive (within the clamp) while accuracy is multiplicative outside. A few quirks: - Accuracy will always help the final chance to hit. It may not be huge (the boss's +30% accuracy yielded +1.5% final to hit), but it's there. This also raises the lowest chance to hit. - ToHit / Defense can both have the largest impact, and the least. If you have 45% defense, and an enemy has +5% tohit, they basically doubled their final to hit. (A minion would go from 5% to 10%, an a boss would go from 6.5% to 13%.) On the other hand, if you have +100% defense, their +5 tohit wouldn't be enough to raise the clamp above 5%, leaving their final to hit chance unchanged. What helps me is to play with numbers and see what happens when I start changing things. Maybe create an Excel spreadsheet or something with the formula and just start changing values and observe what happens.

Are you talking about regular Elite Bosses or Archvillains/Heroes reduced to Elite Bosses? The former I believe have 6 points of status protection (so double that of a normal boss) which already make them inherently hard to control. The latter have Archvillain Resistance as well as Purple Triangles. Archvillain Resistance means all debuffs are less effective against them (87% at lvl50). Purple triangles basically means you're not hard controlling them while they're up (50s up, 25s down). (It looks like fear isn't protected by Purple Triangles? Seems hard to believe, but if so, that's a pretty big plus for Dark Melee.) So, depending on your intent, controlling Elite Bosses is pretty darn tough. Another potential option would be Kinetic Melee, as all its attacks have a damage debuff which isn't affected by Purple Triangles. The con being they don't last very long, so you probably couldn't stack the effect too high. (Never played KM, myself.) For controlling normal bosses, Heraclea brings up a good point with knockdown. I was actually going to suggest Stone Melee for regular bosses. It can hold a boss in one shot (Seismic Smash), has pretty reliable knockdowns in its core single target abilities (Stone Mallet - 50%, Heavy Mallet - 75%), has AoE knockdowns (Tremor - 80%, Fault - 100%), and an AoE stun, that with slotting can be stacked to stun bosses (Fault).

Full disclosure: I've never used Burnout, I'm reading its description from Mids. I tend to agree with EggKookoo. The recharge is incredibly long (30 mins, with a floor of 6 mins at the recharge cap), it costs a crap ton of endurance (48.75 base), and reduces max end by 25 for 60. That last bit is significant as it directly decreases end/sec for those 60s. (You recover 5% max end per tick, and +recovery just decreases the time between ticks. So if you have less max end, you'll get less end per tick.) It might be useful for some very specific situations, but I'd rather have a power that I can use more frequently than every 6 minutes at best. It doesn't look like you can even use it as a set mule, either.

There is actually a post on the Badge forum titled VidiotMaps for Issue 24 and Beyond, in case you hadn't found it yourself.

I wasn't really active at by sunset, so I missed that change. Thanks for the heads up! Part of the reason I cross-referenced two places was to try to make sure it wasn't just me looking at stale data, too. D'oh!