Frostweaver

Maybe it is anecdotal, but last night I teamed with my wife's db/ice scrapper to do the Cimerora Mot chain, AV's on. I was breaking +3/8 alphas vs 12-16 Elite bosses at a time. as well as two AV's and 6 EB's at one time at the end, incarnate-level attacks. No deaths. About half an hour total. I cannot think of a more... Challenging survival situation anywhere in the game. Not Hami, not LRSF or STF. It was BRUTAL. I was using a rad/regen hover sentinel. And I did NOT have any incarnates except level 1 musculature. No level shift. My wife had a level shift with 3 agility, degenerate 2, and Ageless 1 (we were there collecting incarnate components and finishing out the storyline). some of the survival was undoubtedly the Wife's Chilling embrace, but I was constantly flying in and taking the alpha personally while I nuked to screw up their defense and res. I don't know what people have decided as far as 'paper builds', but in play, Regen is... insanely durable. That content would have faceplanted and destroyed any of my tankers or Brutes. Well, Here... I will show my build instead of just bragging about it's tankiness. At this point, the only thing I am considering changing is swapping out neutron bomb for irradiate. I spend most of my time in the thick of things, and neutron bomb is so slow... And I have an Ice/SR sentinel as well, who is considerably more.... developed. even with Ice -recharge, and SR's +recharge, the rad/regen was vastly more survivable, So I have to disagree strongly with Kruunch's assessment of SR based on personal experience. Sentinel's version of Instant Regeneration is just that good. It seems to refresh about 50 HP every 4 seconds, but the nearly 200 HP absorption soaks a huge amount of damage. And, once I can, I will be getting the melee radial embodiment... which will dramatically increase my defense in melee as well as taunting 9 enemies. That is 'ranged tanking'

well, one thing you might want to consider... And I am considering this myself... is trying out a non-hasten version, with the Hasten replaced by concealment...not for any defensive purposes, but because concealment will allow you to slot a 5th LOTG proc. The extra slot can be used in health with a numina's +rec +reg proc. according to what I have been banging together, That wouldn't slow your build momentum by more than half a second, maybe less, give you a little more endurance 'padding'; and it will allow you to use your auto slot for ageless instead of hasten... something that could absolutely save your life. The fact that you have THREE force feedback +recharge in pre-global 10+sec recharge powers with an average of 153 global means you are breaking 2 PPM averages... your PPM is 5, rather than 2, on the force feedback procs. or +100 global recharge 150 out of every 60 seconds. I do not envy you figuring out your ideal attack chain, though, Mine is... weird.

I have a pretty good ss/ice build if you want it (rage crash hibernate FTW)

yeah, I cannot get 20 minutes... I mean, just putting Burn on auto and hopping from group to group shouldn't take you more than like 12. My wife's fire/fire tanker can do it in 14. 😛

I would like to point out that a 'purple IO' build is not neccessarily a good one. And winter sets are rarely useful unless you are specifically hurting in fire/cold resist and defense. Get your ato's. After that there are like 13 single IO's that make all the difference between a 'good' build and a crap one. 4-5 LOTG procs, steadfast +defense, Gladiator +defense, miracle unique, panacea unique, shield +res, a force feedback chance for recharge, a single performance shifter chance for end, and a fury -res or achilles -res. if you are lazy and buy them straight out of the AH, the lotg procs are gonna cost ya 40 million, the rest about 35 mil. about 75 mil total. The rest of the stuff? common IO's, uncommon sets, rare (but inexpensive) sets, those will increase your efficiency, decent slotting can crank you up a difficulty rank, or shave a little time off your kill speed with a greater margin of error, but in the end those are all you really need.

Go, read "Farm Fresh Builds" in the guides section of the forums. Not just the builds, but ESPECIALLY the section on macros/keybinds. I went from 7 minute clear times to 3.45 minute clear times. Once I made the macros. And it made my shoulder hurt less after playing (Not so much frantic mouseclicking) It's just that good. And BTW, if you are using a 'cheap' fire farming build while using the cash to equip other characters, you are wasting your time. Using the 'good' builds doubles or even triples your speed of earning. It pays for itself in an hour or two. And scirroco's dervish is part of a good build.

To be completely honest, I don't think I have even used healing flames in weeks. seriously, You can take a nap with autocast burn in comicon caves at +4/8, come back in a few hours and everything is dead. Yes, they are overkill. Lots and lots of overkill. The point is to try and get momentum to as short a recharge as physically possible... If momentum is not as close to perma as you can make it, tyour damage plumets dramatically... If your damage plummets, your kills are slower, your inspirations come in slower, your conversions to damage inspirations come in slower, and the time on the whole map drops hugely. In a very real way, you have two types of momentum.... Your superpower, and the actual momentum of clearing the map. Drop one, lose the other. Consume will be your God until you get Agility AND Ageless. You don't seem to understand exactly how great a sucking sieve of endurance TW+Hasten are 🙂 And speaking of momentum, that Recharge Overkill? It's what keeps your Consume going off constantly. I mean, you can do what you want. It's your character. You don't play the game my way. If you prefer ease or damage bonuses over pure clear speed, I totally get it. But if there is one suggestion I can make, go into the guides section and read 'farm fresh builds'. Especially the section on keybinds and macros. They literally cut my map clearing speeds in half.

3. Followthrough is good damage against bosses. Except in a fire farm I have yet to need an ST attack for bosses. Burns and AOES melt bosses incredibly fast, and if there's a leftover boss or two let them follow you to the next spawn or ball lightning the next spawn while the boss is beating on you. It's not like you'll notice. Using it as a mule is not a problem, except he only 5 slotted mocking beratement. ouch. 4. Patron pools are fantastic, except he's already got burn. Considering 3 decent and 1 crappy aoe's already in the set, interrupting momentum with another 2 aoe's doesn't really seem that neccessary. But still, it does make for a decent filler while you wait the last few seconds for build momentum to pop. 6. Firey Embrace affects all attacks, not just burn. It's simply less effective on non-fire powers. It's good to start your first group with, pop it, hit burn, and then immediately pop momentum to get your run started, and then forget about it completely until the level is cleared or you have a slow moment running to another set of spawns. 10. I try to slot 2 sets of mocking beratement wherever. FULL sets. 5 slotting mocking beratement is... ow. Again. Painful, throwing away 7.5% recharge. He should have 5 slotted it with adjusted targetting plus guassian buildup or simply 2 slotted it for 50+4 IO recharge. build momentum is INSANELY important, needs to be up every 20-25 seconds if there's any way to pull it off. My own feedback: ditch the energy mastery pool completely. NOTHING it has offers you ANYTHING. Build it like a farmer. you are not fighting s/l enemies. You have it built a lot more like a 'general content' toon. You have no need of that much s/l resist. Now, if I may be so bold, please allow me to draw your attention to my TW/FA Farming Brute that I occasional double-box with. Please bear in mind that I am NOT pleased with TW farming. It is fairly quick, but it's not rad, and it feels clunky and low damage even though I am quite well aware it does decent damage. It usually comes in under 5 minutes on a comicon farm, and that is sort of the 'gold standard' for farming utility. This is NOT a general-purpose build. General builds usually suffer from a number of lacks in Fire farming, in favor of being able to polish off AV's and survive heavy s/l environments. Let's just say you can shut down your fire shield, turn burn on auto, and take a nap.

naww, cause if you did that you could negative players too, and that would make sappers ten times as much of a nightmare as they are now.

Well, now's the time. Slot the PVP unique permanent fast snipe in Zapp, slot a Kismet +6% to-hit and to-hit bonuses into the leadership pool, and get reasonable ST damage from electric for the first time ever.

beam, water, ar, and archery/ta are all extremely synergistic. It's hard to explain unless you have actually played them.

As far as I can tell from extensive testing, AV's often have resistance of one sort or another (usually thematic) just like bosses and EB's, But GM's don't seem to have much, if any. However, they have a ton of HP and regen that more than makes up for it. Oddly though, they DO seem to take MORE damage if they are a higher-level GM than you are. I think it has something to do with the way that full purple con GM's get exemplared. Of course, if you are lower level your attacks do lower damage, but I have noticed that Babbage actually takes less damage, per attack, from a level 40 compared to your 'damage per attack' rating then he does from someone exemplared down to do posi.

That or just giving it some real damage like a PBAOE.

There are several sets that directly reward -defense, -to-hit, and 'accurate' healing, and these are NOT the most common effects found in sets. what is so out of line about being interested in an 'accurate' endurance modification set?

Who said anything about OP? I said 'not suck'.

It would stop stuff from wandering around drunkenly quite so much when you hit them with stun procs and your nuke.

actually I was thinking of enemy HP, which are in fact affected by +cons

Don't get me wrong, I still think it needs to get buffed, but if you are willing to just...ignore the end drain as the crap it is, it can be turned into a useable damage set.

So is damage and to-hit.

if endurance modification sets did not suck, it would not be so much of an issue.

I have been experimenting at great length with electrical Blast and the new snipe changes. I can confidentally assure people now, that with correct slotting (meaning slotting the experienced marksman-Range, fast snipe) and 22% or more accuracy, electric has graduated from "Bad, do not take" to 'very bottom of all blast sets", primarily due to the elevation of all snipe sets compared to sets that do not offer a sniper blast (water, sonic) This is a significant boost to electric blast. It is still in last place, but SOMEONE has to be in last place, and Zapp with a >1 second animation and an average of 3 second recharge on an IO'd out build, was never a sub-par snipe. It literally elevates the entire set's ST chain to only slightly below average. And on defenders and sentinels, who have always had a vastly better pacing for exploiting things like -end, electric Blast's snipe changes have fared even better, shifting it from rock bottom to squarely middle of the pack.

Update!- Ironically, the snipe changes actually have put electric blast in a better place than it was previously. After figuring out how to reliably build around the 22% to-hit bonus, and the new 'quick snipe' proc, it actually boosted Electric's damage in comparison to several other sets. Of course, the 'high performer' sets are now even HIGHER performers than previously, but Electric seems to have graduated from 'complete crap' to 'lowest performer'. this is a BIG step up, since every AT HAS to have a 'lowest performer'. It's still rock bottom, but that rock bottom is no longer nearly as far to fall as it was.

yes, I know, the minimum resistance is -300. But the effective floored resistance is 90%, and at anything more than -35% resistance, the debuffer is doing more damage than the 20% damage buff that fire gets, and at more than -45% resistance, the damage advantage of fast snipe +22% to-hit damage assuming a total recharge of 175% disappears. Sonic stacks -13% for each attack (not including reactive) for an average of 4 rotating attacks plus a nuke, which means that you will have, on average, -52% with spikes of -65%. Adding in gladiator and annihilation means spikes of up to -100%. Fire's spikes assuming similar slotting are -35%. But, by all means nitpick my accidentally using the word 'hardcap' instead of 'soft floor'. I am sure that the intarweb points you win can net you MANY valuable prizes.

Hibernate is amazing for weathering a rage crash. That's about it. Bio is pretty awesome.

It's not funny, it's a completely normal response to Tankers and controllers being made obsolete.