Leadership

[Waypoint]

Do not listen to people who say vengeance is skippable (if you have the ability to get it, that is). All you need in it is an LOTG proc and you just got an extra 7.5% recharge.

 

Victory Rush, imo, is the most skippable. I'd pair Assault with it, too, if you have a competent team. Damage is already gonna make things melt.

[Konru]

There is a weakness to relying on accuracy enhancements.  Accuracy multipliers happen after the base hit chance, to-hit modifiers, and defense modifiers are totaled up.  So while the net result still tends to remain positive, defense bonuses and to-hit penalties tend to get multiplied as well.  Using sky raiders as an example, Your base 39% to-hit will drop to 15% if just one NPC force field generator drops into the area.  Even with a 2.0X accuracy multiplier, that gets to 30%.  Two generators get dropped in the area in as low as +2 over your level and suddenly it is the enemy who is defense capped with the same result as a defense-capped player.  Everybody misses constantly even with high accuracy.  That's most likely to happen only if you run an instanced vs. Sky Raider mission with a large team.  But when it does happen, your team's attackers are probably going to need to use their Aim power or pop inspirations to continue to fight, or somehow get creative in luring the opponents away from the generators. 

 

I'm sure you Incarnates are thinking you'll never see another Sky Raider again outside of an Oroboros flashback.  But, I'm not sure the Sky Raiders are the only ones to worry about.  Smoke Grenades and Dark based opponents seem to be rare, but present at any level and are quite capable of messing with your to-hit negatively.

 

Tactics and other +to-hit powers are strong counters because they work before that accuracy multiplier.  In my Sky Raider example above.  That 15% to-hit inside the force bubble becomes a 25% to hit with one ally with a properly slotted Tactics.  And if you have a 2X accuracy, that becomes 50%, which is a lot more workable than 30% without help.  Three or four Tactics users on the team and these defense generators and to-hit debuff attacks just aren't threatening.  Setting the mission difficulty to 0 or -1 also renders these defense and to-hit debuff attacks nearly useless because the base to-hit is just that high.  Although fighting +3 or +4 does pay out significantly better rewards if you are able to efficiently.

 

There are alternatives to Tactics out there.  But they seem to be tied to specific power sets, while Tactics is available to everyone.  Accuracy enhancements do help, but do not feel like a true alternative to Tactics to me.

[Zolgar]

<snip>

 

In my experience rare enough that if I am soloing, or on a team where no one has decided that they like Tactics, I can pop a yellow and hit Build Up and destroy whatever is hurting my accuracy, and go back about my life.

 

I'm not saying people shouldn't take tactics, I've just had too many people basically trying to tell me that tactics is like the best power in the game and everyone should take it and... yeah, it's got it's place, and when it's useful it's amazingly useful. I just find that for most builds, the situations where it's needed are rare enough that you can get away with just popping a yellow insp. instead.

[TheOtherTed]

I just find that for most builds, the situations where it's needed are rare enough that you can get away with just popping a yellow insp. instead.

Could that not be said for just about anything in the Leadership pool, though?

 

One thing that we're all sort of forgetting is that the OP is dipping into Leadership for RP purposes and has already said he/she/it isn't aiming for an optimal build.  Maybe he/she/it would be better served if we offer RP interpretations of each of the powers?

[Zolgar]

I just find that for most builds, the situations where it's needed are rare enough that you can get away with just popping a yellow insp. instead.

Could that not be said for just about anything in the Leadership pool, though?

 

One thing that we're all sort of forgetting is that the OP is dipping into Leadership for RP purposes and has already said he/she/it isn't aiming for an optimal build.  Maybe he/she/it would be better served if we offer RP interpretations of each of the powers?

 

"Are there any skippable powers in the pool that don't do much for the team?" is literally what the OP asked.

 

I broke down, mechanically, how valuable each one tends to be to a team. We can't really answer that question from an RP stance due to the fact that RP could mean literally anything.

 

And yes, literally the entire leadership pool is situational. I mean, I think Tactics is the second best power in the pool. I also just think it doesn't offer that much benefit most of the time. :p

[Obitus]

<snip>

 

In my experience rare enough that if I am soloing, or on a team where no one has decided that they like Tactics, I can pop a yellow and hit Build Up and destroy whatever is hurting my accuracy, and go back about my life.

 

I'm not saying people shouldn't take tactics, I've just had too many people basically trying to tell me that tactics is like the best power in the game and everyone should take it and... yeah, it's got it's place, and when it's useful it's amazingly useful. I just find that for most builds, the situations where it's needed are rare enough that you can get away with just popping a yellow insp. instead.

 

Agreed.  Konru gave us a great write-up on the benefits of +ToHit.  Everything he said is valid, but there are very few builds that don't have access to Aim and/or Build Up and/or some sort of DEF debuff.  All builds have access to Yellow Inspirations, and anyone with a few million INF has access to the Kismet unique.

 

And IO builds tend to give loads of accuracy to multiply all of the above.

 

I'm actually gonna go against the grain here, and say that Assault is more generally useful than Tactics.  Sure, it costs a fair bit of endurance for what it does (in a vacuum), and sure, Tactics offers a lot more in niche situations - but Assault's benefit, humble though it may be, is context-independent.  On support toons especially, it's a good pick if you already took Maneuvers and want access to Vengeance for the extra LoTG mule.  I have yet to design a non-melee build that doesn't take Assault in our beautiful 2019 version of City of Heroes.

 

Eight Defenders running Assault will have a staggering 18.75 * 8 = 150% global damage buff, passively, for the whole team.  (For eight Corruptors/Controllers, this drops to a piddly 120%.)  Eight Defenders running Tactics will have ... just about the same practical performance as if they only had one.

 

These days, with the PPM change to procs, Tactics isn't even a particularly good Gaussian's mule.  Aim/BU blow it out of the water in that regard.