Frostweaver

Not at all sarcastic. If you can split off and do your own thing, you are welcome to do so... It's just that if you choose to do so, I stop taking any responsibility for your welfare. I take it personally when I am playing a team tanker and my teammates drop. It drives me to be a better tanker. It is MY FAULT. but I feel absolutely zero guilt for a blaster, widow, stalker, or mm that's trying to show off what a badass he is by playing against type. If he survives, great. If he doesn't, he's a braggart. Either way it is no longer my problem. Scrappers and Brutes I never feel responsibility for. Their job is to take care of themselves and their team... If they wander off someplace and die, it's not only their own fault, but they let down the team.

Not really until you have been a 50 fire farmer for a while. a lot of people EVENTUALLY drop consume and healing flames, but that's usually after you have been farming with it for some time. I didn't drop them myself, because consume is a decent enough mocking beratement mule... but I am not even sure if I have it on my powers bar anymore. And I use healing flames because my rad/fire is also a heck of a team brute for MSR's, ITF's, and incarnate trials, and with only 65% s/l resist (45% defense) sometimes a little extra is needed.

/ice is a really solid choice, as well as thematic, but ice is a pretty solid choice for just about any blaster. Not really any special synergy except a heck of a lot of survivability to get your water chains running well, and the time you need to soak health from opponents. energy is weird, especially when all of your knockdown suddenly turns into knockback again. but with dehydrate, you can fill a good chunk of your health bar.

You have chosen a hard row to hoe, my friend... fire armor is very challenging. Best tip, try to get 4 or 5 pool powers that you can slot with defense IO sets. Then grab some low-level orange or yellow defense set IO's, and use enhancement converters (about 90k each on the AH) to convert them 'as type' defense (2 converters each) until you get Luck of the gambler. Then use in-set conversion (3 converters each) to try to get defense/global recharge 7.5% fire doesn't have big resistance except fire, but it DOES have a great heal and enough resistance to stack meaningfully with defense. as long as you have decent recharge. and 30% recharge (+ maybe hasten?) can help you turn a few blasters green with envy as you lay out burn patches and actually SURVIVE the results of your damage. Don't try to seriously team tank and take heavy +3 alphas, though... It's not impossible, but it takes some serious build strength to do it, a lot of money, and usually a higher level. Or serious team buffs, so if you have a sonic bubbler and a soldier along, go for it. You can DEFINITELY hold aggro if you choose to (and don't have a tank along to soak it all) Next tip- always use atom smasher or proton sweep after fusion. That will contaminate multiple foes, and the damage bleed from hitting an opponent with siphon (to heal yourself) or smash (or eventually devastating blow)actually adds a significant amount to your aoe damage. It's a 5 target explosion that does 20% of the original damage in a short (7) radius around the target you hit. Knowing that you have a contaminated opponent to siphon will seriously improve your survivability against hard targets.

too bad we aren't talking about stalkers.

That depends, is he going to be a general-purpose or farming brute?

after testing through a bunch of rainbows (fast, I know) I have come to the conclusion that +3 is a LOT more efficient than +4. You lose about 12% of your exp and/or influence, but you stay much closer to your damage cap, and because of your clear speeds you can spend almost the entire run under your hybrid effect.... hybrid downtime is a BIG slowdown for me. I imagine that ageless or barrier being active almost the entire time might help other farmers out as well. Unlike some people, I don't actually LIKE farming. I do it to tweak the characters that I DO enjoy playing. So faster/more efficient farming is my ultimate goal, the most kills (The most chances for purple drops and converters/catalysts), fastest inf, and fastest exp being the ultimate goal. Most of my runs I do in cave because it's easier to keep PL's safe in there, unless I am loot farming, in which case it's pure rainbow. The biggest thing though is that the 'cleanup' phase of dealing with stray bosses is much, much shorter.... I cannot bring myself to abandon a map when there's still bosses on it. So yeah, it looks like the magic point is not +4, it's +3...at least for my builds.

See Werner, now you are starting to make me wonder about the wisdom of exclusively going against +4's... I mean, +3's might keep you damage capped and enable you to clear rainbow vastly faster, although obviously +1 was not the way to go.

I don't do the spines/fire builds, but lots of other people have them here. But this claws/fire sort of shows you how they roll. you focus on your two primary attacks (burn, pbaoe) and then have a third attack to 'fill in the gaps' between the fire buildups, burn, and your pbaoe, with lots of extra recharge. In this case I decided to go for concealment for an extra LOTG rather than having hasten on auto, because Claws is generally very fast and I needed the auto slot for follow-up anyway. It uses shockwave instead of taunt for pulling extra enemy groups, and clears stuff quickly enough that when i shockwave one spawn, I am generally done murdering the spawn I am on before they even pick themselves up off the ground and start running towards me. (very efficient on both cave and rainbow). He is exclusively a fire farmer, and not built for other content, but his clear speed slightly edges out the rad below it... he is a rich man's toy. This rad/fire is a slightly different philosophy. It focuses on the standard two (burn pbaoe) but since you NEVER need to jostle for position, (unlike spines and claws) and has the slot free for hasten, I focused on getting some stuff to be able to stealth missions on ouro a little bit, and it has every bit as much utility OUTSIDE of a fire farm (msr, trials, incarnate) as it has on the rainbow map. You might notice some lack of damage adds in some of the powers, but between 'free' damage enhancements from musculature, fury, and other bonuses the difference only seems to be a few points here and there. Also, the build is far less expensive than some. It's a really weird build, but it is extremely fast at farm clearing (as fast if not faster than most spines builds) and incredibly hard to kill... and it can really hold some aggro.

I second both of those suggestions. Bio (because I love Bio with everything) and shield defense both make excellent pairings, as does radiation armor.... all three tend to add to DM's layered defense potential, and help shore up it's aoe weakness.

Widows feel slightly more fragile, although they tend to be slightly better on teams due to their leadership buffs, Their spin has, by default, better DPA and their buffs increase that, but they lack crit capacity but the addition of buildup can make a big difference. More of your attack chain will be devoted to building your damage than using it compared to a scrapper, though. On the whole I think that they could potentially outdamage claws/sr scrappers, but I couldn't be sure without building both and then doing extensive real-world farm testing, Something I am just not ready to spend the time on Sunday morning doing.

I remember Claws/sr was retarded powerful and fun to play. I had to set up a keyboard Macro for auto-followup, but nothing lived long enough to really be a threat.

You can turn off all insp but damage, or there are some converter macros out there you can use to turn stuff into reds. There are spikes and ebbs all the time, especially if you have a Gaussian's in the right place, but anyone that claims that they consistently average 600% damage (especially considering that alpha spikes the attack's damage directly, rather than adding to your damage%) without keeping scads of giant reds in the AH to refill between runs on bloody rainbow, is pulling your leg. Yes, on bloody rainbow, with careful planning, I can go from start to finish on a single mission at 600%, But unless I head to the base insp storage between every mission or stash them all in the AH between missions. rage can double-stack for +160, plus the default 160-170 for Fury, plus spikes of 60 and 80, respectively, plus (maybe) another 40 for IO sets. that means that you can HIT 600% for about 8 seconds, with a lucky gaussian's proc of cap. but as for it being....well... average? No way. Then again, bloody rainbow is designed specifically to exploit a tray full of reds.

do you need some farming builds? You probably cannot quite afford them yet, but I have a couple that should get you an idea about how the hrdcases fire farm. And if you need a couple hundred mil on excelsior to get you started, or some ATO's, let me know. You can pay me back when you are falling asleep because the aggro cap on +4/8 is too low. Note that with exp doublers, completing a cave fire farm will pl a character from 1-38 in a single run... in my case a little over half an hour. Of course, after that, the exp slows way down, usually taking two more full caves to get a character to 50

You run ahead of the tanker or brute, you have decided to solo. I will intentionally choose a different path and let you fend for yourself. After all, that's what you want, right?

And this happens more often with Masterminds than nearly any other AT, because there is so much more to learn to be 'competent'. Other AT's have troubling powersets that require much learning... force fields, energy blast, storm, but only masterminds have such a steep learning curve for the entire AT, except, perhaps, Kheldians... and again, they only tend to get themselves killed. Most scrappers and brutes only get themselves killed.

Huh. you are right. I always thought focus was 100%, but after testing it on a bunch of croatoa numbskulls, it seems closer to 3 of 4. with my tier2 attack, and Parry only applies it about half the time. Big Daddy Headsplitter has yet to NOT apply it after 40 hits, and the same is true of disembowel.

Yeah, we all know AV's resist debuffs. Romulus with a big friggin mushroom growing out of the side of his head is funny as hell, though. another vote for thugs/nature. The Resist and healing layer nicely with Thug's innate defense, and with attention even that idiot pyro stays alive. It's much less of a healbot than emp, and that healing cone, while not providing the most hit points, seems to give phenomenally more control over catching your whole team than radius stuff.

Yup, and then a Bug, defriender, or corpsetupper came along and did everything you just did, without all of the target and movement-blocking pets, noiseness, and uncontrolled KB Masterminds can be amazing, yes... but considering how many really BAD masterminds there are out there (which seems to be the default state...I had a level 46 MM ask me what the hell I meant bodyguard mode?) it comes down to risk vs reward... much like stormies. even if only half of all masterminds/stormies were bad, do you really want to take a 50/50 chance on your team getting wrecked by one player when you could invite another AT that, while perhaps less powerful, is guaranteed to be, if not a net asset, at least Neutral? I have made peace with the fact that when I play my Thugs/Plants mastermind, I am going to have to convince the team leader that I, at least, know what I am doing. I have to sell myself, and usually walk away with several people friending me after each PUG... I cannot just be 'competent' like the blaster or brute, I need to be flipping brilliant, and prove it every single time I team. And an MM can ABSOLUTELY be brilliant. But I have been convinced since CoV came out that Masterminds should have been a Veteran Archetype. Other AT's can make bad pulls, but an inexperienced mastermind can WRECK a team. We really, really need bounding-box free (To other players) pets. and more 'default' buttons with things like bodyguard and guard location preset. and maybe 'guard this target'.

Yah, cept I play thugs, and when you leave your pyro at home you are blowing over half your DPS. Then again, I am guessing thugs don't block as much as bots or demons. Except when I throw in a gang war.

No. stalker hide + a stealth IO allows you to pass rikti drones. Rularuu eyeballs and knives, however, can still see through it.

Just slot a set to try and max damage (before ED cap) and recharge, if it's an important attack. slot End reduction and accuracy as needed. ed cap for damage is usually around 90% bonus, defenses and resistances around 45%. An interesting point is that the 'very rare' sets usually have to% global recharge bonus at 5 enhancements from the set, and the 6th set bonus is psionic/toxic resistance... because psi/toxic is so rare, many people skip the 6th very rare enhancement (damage. all the others in the set are good, but the damage enhancement blows WAY past the ED cap and thus is mostly useless) and either don't 6 slot the power, or slot in a useful proc like change for recharge bonus or chance for damage. Some sets have their best bonuses for your needs at 3, 4, or 5 slots rather than 6 slots. Some, like luck of the gambler defense/global recharge 7.5% or sudden acceleration knockback to knockdown, don't tend to give very good set bonuses, but have an outstanding proc. In general, just learn about ED caps for your slotting, and know what you want out of your build... or ask for specific help. general 'what kind of build should I make?" questions don't help. generalists, Street Boss Farmers, ouro stealthers, PVP monkeys, and MSR Raiders all have somewhat different builds... Figure out what you want, then build towards it.

'can' means 'does'. 1 in-set attack, 1 charge of stalker's focus. first one gives 33% chance of critical with AS, 2nd one gives 66% chance, 3rd one gives 100% chance of critical AS. regardless of whether or not it crits, using assassin's strike as a regular melee attack expends all focus charges. in set attacks are attacks that come from your primary. attacks from the secondary and pol attacks do not count. I don't think epic attacks count either, but I could be wrong.

Fire Melee is decent enough, but loses a little on stalkers, about middle of the road. It's signature aoe is sorta less, and it's 'burn' damage adds, like spine toxin, do not get multiplied by criticals. But it's not bad by any means... It's simply more of a thematic choice and less of a top tier performer.

Bear in mind, that when people talk about defensive flaws on a stalker, they really aren't talking about stalkers... with their 75% resist cap and lower defaults, They play more like melee blasters than Tankers. Killing things more quickly IS their best defense. The secondary 'toolset' that helps you kill more quickly IS their best defense. That's why Bio and electric are so powerful.... increasing your already-insane damage by 20% or so hugely increases your survivability compared to an extra 10% resist or 5% defense. That being said, though, /nin does indeed have huge problems because it's 'toolset' simply doesn't work anymore. EA, Electric, and SR's increased recharge DO work, however, and extremely well. DPS always loses to DPA, though... which is why claws stalkers, with some of the best DPE and DPS in any set, perform extremely poorly compared to sets with multiple Big-DPA attacks. It's because you can control your crits, and doubling those gigantic DPA attack's damage almost at-will and not having to engage the next spawn until everything is recharged and you WANT to pushes your ST damage to incredible levels.