Ben_Arizona

I slot them for recharge because I fight rushing bums often enough to warrant it.

As for more complicated trip mine stunts, they're basically that: stunts. It's the same kind of pastime as slotting Power Thrust for KB and seeing how many blocks you can launch a Hellion. Every so often I get the urge to set up a little trip mine laser-light rave on the floor and teleport an enemy onto it, but it's not a standard practice. Fun when you're in the mood, though.

Well, specifically what you said was "make sure defense from primary/secondary powers includes defense resistance" (which they do) and "Enemies with -def against players with defense resistance (Super Reflexes, for example) can't really do much."

The latter is untrue for sets other than Super Reflexes, and led me not to read into your first statement the added clause "...in sufficiently drastic amounts that those are not prone to cascading defense failure". With that clause added, more -def isn't a completely terrible idea but is still not, I feel, as good a solution as either reducing the amount of total defense bonus you can get from IOs or adding readily-available competitive options.

One idea I wouldn't mind seeing: boost the IO bonus for resists and such, then cap the total available IO bonus to global values at a point where a defense set can softcap defense or a resist set can cap resists but someone without such a set will just be "better than he was before". Obviously, give out a respec with the change so that the enraged hordes can adjust their slotting to suit.

Toebombing in my experience is a better trick for a /traps mastermind, who is likely not to have much else for direct attacks. Against a sufficiently beefy enemy my bots/traps will frequently toebomb once her other traps are set up.

For a /devices blaster, my experience is that it's best to place it right next to your edge of the caltrop patch, then take a step back and unload, which more or less matches your analysis (I don't have a hoverblasting /dev, myself.)

Nitpick: the "common" sets are actually uncommon IOs. Common IOs are things like "Invention: Healing" which belong to no set, and sets that can softcap with those are rare.

The rest of the point mostly holds. I would say that it's fairly cheap to get a variety of miscellaneous "nice to have bonuses" like recharge, recovery, regeneration, global accuracy, etc. and that these things are visibly useful in much lower amounts than the amount of defense needed to be visibly useful. Two sets' worth of good recharge bonus will be felt much more firmly by many players than two sets' worth of good defense bonus, for example.

However, when you decide to "get serious" about something, high defense (softcapping an element or a position) is cheaper to get spectacular results with than high recharge (perma just about anything you'd make a serious effort to perma).

Shield Defense has something like 50% defense resistance before you start involving high-recharge shenanigans to multistack Active Defense. Council regularly drop my (SOed, late-20s) shield scrapper into the deep negatives with their assault rifles, as do Warriors with their blades. I live with it, but saying that increasing defense debuffs won't affect defense sets indicates a misunderstanding of just how effective defense resistance is.

I agree once you have Transference, but Stamina is nice in the levels leading up to it. I would tend to take Stamina while leveling up a kin and then respec out of it, although that of course depends on the character's other play circumstances.

Villains are more self-reliant but less specialized. A dominator has superior killing power to a controller, but for someone like me who actually enjoys supporting a team it can't match a controller - I keep looking for buffs and debuffs that just aren't there. I just find the buff/debuff sets more interesting than the assault sets, generally speaking.

Similarly, I have a kin corrupter and a kin defender; the corrupter's values for the buffs just seem halfhearted and his damage never feels like it's sufficiently better to make up for it. I might feel the difference if I was soloing them or playing with groups that never bother to work together (functionally soloing) but it always feels a little like I'm playing a half-baked blaster and a half-baked defender glued to each other instead of a solid AT.

As for scrappers and brutes, it feels like asking whether you'd rather your enemies be trod on by a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros. They're both absolute beasts, and with GR I expect the key factor in which one I play to be set availability more than anything else.

I guess what it comes down to with controllers and defenders is that I have different play moods. With heroes, the ATs play differently enough to suit my different moods. Corrupters and dominators are both "blaster with a side-order of (other AT)" and so don't satisfy my mood whether I'm in a blaster mood, a controller mood, or a defender mood.

If you aren't using your powers less often, and aren't slotting extra end redux, I'm not sure what you mean by "managing your endurance", then. Could you share that rather than just adding extra caps lock and multiple exclamation points?

Except when you choose not to, so as to manage your endurance efficiently. In that case, you are contributing a wider variety of things, but contributing anything at all less often.

Unless what you meant by "managing your endurance well" was slotting more end redux, which is another perfectly respectable choice. In that case, you are contributing a wide variety of things equally often, but with each instance contributing a lesser effect.

That's what it comes down to, really. You have a triangle of ways you can improve what you give to the team: variety of effect (more powers), quantity of effect (use powers more often), and quality of effect (powers' effectiveness per use). If you try to keep all of these at maximum output, you will floor your blue bar, so you trade them off with Stamina, reduced activity, or end redux slots respectively. Any of them is an option which can be argued for, but nobody gets the moral high ground for choosing one. The prevailing opinion seems to be that the most effective contribution is to do some things very well, but I don't have any beef with someone who dilutes his powers with end redux or a less effective/more efficient attack chain, as long as it's within reason.

(This leaves aside the option of compensating with a tray full of blue or massive IO bonuses, of course. If you take these then you are a more patient man than I or a much, much richer man than I, respectively.)

I wasn't actually talking about any game-structural change, just a narrative one. For any player who hasn't done the "conquer Arachnos" arc, the game world would be as it is now - Arachnos is run by Lord Recluse, and the player is scheming to overthrow him. The difference would only be for a player who has done it; when he talks to Lord Recluse he gets "You have humiliated me and bent Arachnos to your ends. Why do you come to torment me further?" or whatever. This is why I suggested having LR stay on as figurehead through some excuse; that way there's no narrative dissonance with the big statue in Grandville and so on.

This is the way all current storylines work. Each player who works his way up the story arcs discovers the secret of the Lost, the secret of Countess Crey, and so on, and yet the contacts are just as surprised each time.

You do get those; sometimes it's someone reacting to his own PUG experiences of blasters who can't handle themselves and don't get that the tank can keep them alive longer, and sometimes it really is just force of MMO habit (tank takes point, DPS fires when aggro is held, healer spams the heals). On the other hand, I don't find it any more annoying than brutes who think they're God's gift to teams and, at the same time, that slowing down for even a moment is an offense too vile for even a villain to contemplate.

It works as well as I say it does - it keeps you from panting for breath after a casual fight. It does not work as well as some people claim it does, which is as an endless fountain of blue bar.

I don't like my superheroes panting for breath after a casual fight. It's nice that wanting that makes you feel morally superior, though.

Please do not assume that I am leaving Sprint on. Chugging blues is an option, but I do not like it as a long-term solution.

I am not talking about spamming every attack to kingdom come here, I am talking about going at a steady pace from spawn to spawn and using mainly basic attacks with defensive toggles on. I feel that it is a problem that doing this requires either end redux slotting, Stamina, frequent breaks or chugging blues, because this is a typical pacing for superheroes. I am particularly displeased at the notion that people who take Stamina because they want to be able to maintain such a pace are somehow "undermining their character concept".

As I said, leaving aside the epic ATs. Kheldians are likewise different from this "general rule".

This doesn't happen on every toon, but those with toggles do have issues.

What, pray tell, constitutes "playing smarter" in this context? Your post comes off to me as rather smug and uninformative.

I exaggerated with narcolepsy, but when Green Arrow crashes into a warehouse full of thugs, he doesn't stop to catch his breath after each group - he moves on towards his objective, takes down the thugs as soon as he gets to them, and doesn't stop for a breather until he's outside the warehouse unless something extraordinary happens to exhaust him.

I'm not saying there should be an endless endurance fountain for constant nukes or for chewing down x8 spawns without pausing for breath, because those aren't part of a superhero's normal "flow"; they're the aforementioned "something extraordinary". However, without Stamina or significant end-slotting you can floor out using your normal toggles and tier 1-2 attacks, not even being mobbed by thugs but just going from one group to the next at the same sort of pace that a superhero typically does.

When was the last time you saw a superhero in a comic book "stop for breath" in the middle of a standard sort of warehouse raid or secret-lab takeout? There are three circumstances in which it happens: the character has been swarmed by an extraordinary number of goons (unusually large spawns, which require an extended constant stream of attacks), the character has been attacked by unusually strong enemies (bosses/EBs/AVs, which require more use of expensive powers and so run you down faster in addition to taking longer) or the writer is emphasizing the character's frailty, illness, or other internal problems.

What this boils down to is that if my character requires oxygen devices or a cybernetic heart to keep him from gasping for breath at an "ordinary" superheroic pace, the concept has been impinged upon because he doesn't play like that kind of concept character "should" - he plays like the way the genre treats a superhero who's caught a severe flu. Unless my character concept is "Captain Has-A-Severe-Flu", that hurts the character's concept-feel much more than having the "wrong" entry on his written-out power list does.

I would love to do that but so far none of my character concepts involves taking a nap every few fights. I guess I should roll up the Narcoleptic Avenger like I've been meaning to.

The suggestion here was to make the bonus exactly identical to what Stamina already gives. If this is an endless fountain of Endurance, why are Speed Boost, Performance Shifter procs, and blue insps still so popular?

Stamina gives about enough endurance to turn end management from a massive frustration into a reasonable limiting factor, which is about where I think end management should be. Unfortunately, it comes with an attached three-power tax. You can choose to pay the tax either in power picks or gametime frustration, and frustration is not a good balancing feature.