Prioritizing soft capping or extra damage with your Alpha

[Griffin]

I am wondering what the general consensus is around prioritizing hitting the soft cap for defense or extra damage when making incarnate picks?  If you are nearly at the soft cap, let’s say 40-43%, should you go agility or musculature for the extra damage?

[CaptTastic]

I tend to go Agility because it offers both. Greater recharge is, after all, greater damage in a roundabout kind of a way?

[Griffin]

The build I am toying with this idea I already have 190% global recharge, so hasten is perma. I also just switched some slotting and hit the soft cap after making this post haha.

[Hjarki]

In my mind, soft-capping is your #1 priority. Soft-capped builds are the ones who can survive catastrophes to pull off an unexpected win. Soft-capped builds are the ones that can take the lead when they're 50+3 and their groupmates are 49s. When people look at a build and say "wow! I've never seen anyone do that", 99% of the time they're talking about your soft-capping.

 

Compared to this, eeking out another 5% dps isn't particularly important.

 

In terms of incarnate abilities, this is normally an inefficient way to go about soft-capping defenses. On most builds, half or more of your defenses come from set bonuses (which aren't improved by alpha). Many of the rest of your bonuses are already pushed to ED, so that +20% is more like +15%. Take together, that means you're getting about the same defensive bonus from alpha that you'd get from another set bonus. If you re-arranged your build, you could probably hit soft-cap without using your alpha - and be able to use your alpha to push the capabilities of your build even further.

 

Likewise, the various temporary boosts available via the other incarnate abilities work much better for offense than defense because intermittent boosts to offense are useful while intermittent boosts to defense just mean that you'll have times when you need to step back because your defenses aren't sufficient.

[Griffin]

Thanks for the input, Hjarki. That said, is s/l still a good way to go for corruptors? this was the standard once upon a time, but a lot has changed and new IO sets have been introduced. I understand positional defenses leave fewer holes in your defense, but I haven’t been able to rebuild for positional defense without sacrificing a lot of global recharge.

[oedipus_tex]

I have shifted my thinking quite a bit on build priorities after having more experience with how procs work after i24.

 

The major change is that powers with long recharges are much more likely to cause a proc to fire than previously. The math for this is fairly complicated, but what it means in practice is powers with relatively long recharges (16 seconds or so and up, but even powers with 12 or 8 second recharges) are extremely good places for extra effects. Sometimes the effect is so extreme that the proc damage makes sets that seem lackluster, like Dual Pistols, into beasts (see recent discussions in Defender forums on this topic).

 

Because of this, I now value soft capping much less than before. Sure, it's nice. But often getting close to soft cap (say around 35-40%) and counting on bonuses for the rest can help. Of course, it depends a bit on the sets in question. Sets like Storm or Energy Blast with lots of mitigation, or Dark with its extra -ToHit can probably squeeze by more easily.

 

Global Recharge, on the other hand, has drastically increased in value, because Global Recharge does not count against the proc chance to fire calculation. That makes powers like Hasten, Alphas like Agility, and +Recharge from sets extra incredible. Also, you can find Purple inspirations for defense but not inspirations for Recharge. So, Recharge to me is the most valuable, and at least theoretically competitive with extra raw Damage.

 

 

[subbacultchas]

On 7/14/2019 at 7:07 PM, oedipus_tex said:

Global Recharge, on the other hand, has drastically increased in value, because Global Recharge does not count against the proc chance to fire calculation. That makes powers like Hasten, Alphas like Agility, and +Recharge from sets extra incredible. Also, you can find Purple inspirations for defense but not inspirations for Recharge. So, Recharge to me is the most valuable, and at least theoretically competitive with extra raw Damage. 

I am not 100% sure this is correct anymore, given some of the more recent proc testing. I was under the assumption now that Alpha *does* affect your procs in the way slotting for recharge does. I have since been skipping it for proc insanity.

[oedipus_tex]

2 minutes ago, subbacultchas said:

I am not 100% sure this is correct anymore, given some of the more recent proc testing. I was under the assumption now that Alpha *does* affect your procs in the way slotting for recharge does. I have since been skipping it for proc insanity.

 

I believe you are correct that the Alpha slot does impact proc chances, since the Alpha slot is like adding a 'free' enhancement slot to a power. It therefor functions like adding a Recharge directly in the power.

 

Global recharge does not affect proc chances.

Edited August 13, 2019 by oedipus_tex

[subbacultchas]

Yeah, it's a shame because it used to be my goto alpha. But then again, it's let me try out some of the others I might not have otherwise, and I do kind of like Vigor for some builds now.