ClawsandEffect

Kat/DA handles burst damage better due to more varied resistances and ability to heal massive amounts at once. It also has more mitigation with some of the oddball powers in the set (Cloak of Fear, Oppresive Gloom). It's rez is better, but if you build right you can and should skip it.

Kat/WP is more consistent in survival, and doens't require your reflexes to be as good. In a crowd it's regeneration is better than anything but a Regen running Instant Healing. Ater picking up either Stamina or Physical Perfection it will never have endurance problems (Kat/DA has end issues until heavily slotted)

Kat/DA can softcap to all positions, Kat/WP can softcap melee and all TYPES. Kat/DA can come back from the brink of death where Kat/WP has to either eat greens or hope the RNG is on it's side.

They are both very solid sets.

Kat/WP is much easier to play, with stupid amounts of survivability out of the box. It is one of the most commonly suggested combinations for new players or players new to scrappers. Iggy Kamakaze did a Master of Imperious Task Force with one........solo.

Kat/DA has a steeper learning curve, but can be made just as, if not more survivable. It has just recently become a common combo (thanks in part to Werner and myself, I know of at least 6 people that made either a Kat/DA or BS/DA because of our constant suggesting of it). Werner soloed 11 AVs in a row with it, with no deaths, using no temps and no inspirations.

In short, they are both awesome combos. So far I prefer Sword/Dark, but my Kat/WP is only level 18, so I don't have a solid base for opinion yet. So far it seems very solid.

I can't open the build so I'll answer based on what *I* would do with a Kat/WP (which I'm leveling now actually)

1) I'm guessing here, without looking at the build, that Conserve Power was taken as a way to get to Physical Perfection that doesn't need to be slotted. Conserve Power will almost never be needed by a Kat/WP character, so just a single recharge in the default slot is enough. And, since I noticed another question relating to slotting Gaussian's in Build Up, taking Focused Accuracy to slot them in is unnecessary.

2) Again assuming here. If I recall correctly EN defense is the 3 slot bonus for Reactive Armor and the 4 slot bonus is SL defense, which is probably what it is slotted for. Also, Fire and Cold are less common than Energy, so slightly lower defense to it won't really hurt the build any.

3) IF he slotted his PBAoEs like *I* do, it is probably something like 4 Eradication and 2 Scirocco's Dervish. The actual enhancement values of Eradication kinda suck because it tops out at level 30. The 4 slot bonus is useful for a WP, the others...not so much. So the Scirocco's helps round out the enhancement of the power itself, while providing an extra 10% Regen, which is helpful for WP. (The 4 piece and proc of Eradication are also much more expensive than the rest of the set, so he might have been trying to save some money too, but I kind of doubt that one, Iggy's pretty loaded)

4) If you look at what he is getting for the slots he is spending it makes sense. You suggest slotting a set that gives you 1.26% to EN defense. Why do that when you can spend 3 more slots and get 1.25% to ALL types? You get the same amount to EN, AND you get 1.25% to Smashing, Lethal, Fire and Cold as well. You also get (IIRC) a recovery bonus, and a movement speed bonus (which is nice if you don't take a travel power), so everything you get out of the set is useful, not just the defense.

Also, Gaussian's includes the Chance for Build Up proc. *I* try to slot it in Build Up as well, so when it fires you actually USE it. Putting it in a toggle doesn't make much sense to me, since you will rarely ever get any benefit from it (I found my proc was mostly going off while I was standing at WW or something). The only thing you really lose is some recharge enhancement in Build Up, but I can live with it, and I'm guessing Iggy can too.

5) Putting a +Stealth IO in Sprint just makes sense. +Stealth is one of those IOs that will function as long as the power it is in is available. So if you put one in Sprint, you will ALWAYS have stealth ability, no matter how low you exemp. All it costs you is the cash to buy the IO, since Sprint already has a slot in it that is almost never used for anyuthing else.


All this is without looking at the build, so I could be mistaken on some of it. But...last I looked Iggy had a lot of the same slotting ideas for his Kat/WP that I was planning on doing with mine, so my guesses are probably pretty accurate.

No...It's a bug. It won't LET me adjust my camera for level flight. Every time I try to do so it reorients the camera at a slight downward angle automatically. It seems to be an exceptionally rare bug, I've only heard of a couple other people it's happened to.

I petitioned and /bugged the problem several times, so either no one ever looked into it, or they couldn't find the cause of it.

I have several other flying characters, including a sonic/devices hoverblaster, so I know it isn't user error here. None of them have any issues, just this one particular character. Even adjusting the camera with the right mouse button doesn't work, as soon as I let go of it it swivels downward again.

I'm absolutely positive it's a bug, so I just speced out of Flight to avoid the problem.

The answer you received was from a team that sucked.

My Claws/Regen wears his MoSTF badge proudly.

There were a couple times I almost killed the attempt, but I've been playing that character a LONG time, so my reflexes and timing are almost always spot on.

It's a difficult badge for a /Regen to get, but by no means impossible. My advice: Find a better team.

The problem with MoSTF in particular is the fact that there are several enemies in it that can hit for more than scrapper HP cap (Dr. Aeon once hit me for over 2900 damage). Since /Regen doesn't have much in the way of native defense or resistance you will probably take a lot of hits, and some of them can and will kill you before you can react with a heal.

I got my badge on a team that included both a Cold Domination and a Force Fielder, with an Emp and Stone tank leading the way. If there is no one on the team that can buff your defense/resistance, your odds of dropping on a regen are pretty good.

It sounds like what you encountered was a not-exactly-optimal team making the attempt. On my run my Claws/Regen and a Spines/Willpower both got their Master badge. That's not just one, but TWO characters prone to burst damage death that got their badge on the same run, so it CAN be done.

Clarification request here:

Are you suggesting a chance to have the Zero IO do nothing, or a chance to lose the IO you're trying to remove?

In the first case I can go along with it. The second, not so much.

I'm not exactly swimming in influence here, so losing that Regenerative Tissue unique I mentioned before would hit me pretty hard. Last I checked they are going for 140 million blue side (probably at least twice that red side). That is a significant investment for me, as I don't farm or play the market.

I got it as a drop, that's the only reason I have it (in fact that's the only reason I have ANY expensive IOs), so having a chance to lose something I would be hard pressed to replace would deter me from using this feature at all.

On the other hand, if the IO has a chance to do nothing at all it would be mildly annoying, but wouldn't be a major deterrent if I had the money to spend on the IO.

A chance to lose the IO you're trying to remove would be a very bad thing for people in my situation. That Gladiator's Armor unique that you got as a lucky drop? Yeah....it's gone now, and you won't be able to replace it unless you have 2 billion influence to spend on it. It would just be another way that the people who have influence to burn have an advantage over the "casual" player. If you have 30 billion influence sitting in the market, losing a 2 billion influence IO isn't that big of a deal. If you have 500 million across ALL your characters it's an entirely different story.

So, in short: Chance to do nothing at all, yes. Chance to lose the expensive IO you can't replace, no.

Quick hint for you:

Don't hit the Spam button when the "From" field says "empty". The "empty" means that account has already been banned, so just delete them, otherwise you're just filling up your ignore list with people you will never hear from again anyway.

I almost feel bad for some of the actual names I see on those emails, as opposed to "akjfhbgsdnkfushank", since they are hijacked accounts used for spamming purposes. I said I "almost" feel bad because they were stupid enough to do business with an RMT site and got their account jacked. tends to water down my sympathy level.

Not really. Then people would just avoid the entire zone while the banners are up instead of just ignoring the banners like they do now.

And penalizing the ONE person that is in the zone for not completing a zone event isn't fair.

If they pop up in the Hollows at 2 AM on a Tuesday, that one level 9 character in the zone isn't going to stand a chance in hell of completing the event alone, and shouldn't be penalized for failing at an impossible task.

That is the base value. Slotted it gives you close to 3.5%.

And if you're already sitting at 40.5% that 3.5% will get you within 1% of softcap. You'd probably never even notice the difference, since you'd need to pore over a spreadsheet for quite a while to figure out how often that 1% is the difference between being hit or not.

I know. My snark toward you was just leftovers from still being annoyed with the tone of the post before. If I hadn't responded to both of them at once I would have been more polite about it.

I may revise my build to try and achieve at least 35% to all types, which with blaster damage output should raise my survivability quite a bit. And I can see just by looking at my current build is definitely possible...though I may have to do some other strange things to pull it off.

I don't need to survive indefinitely, just long enough to defeat my enemy.

It's way higher than that. I've seen 115 people in AP at once before, I used the search window set to ONLY show AP, and it said "115 matches, this list was truncated" at the bottom of the window. And that WASN'T showing anyone who may have been on hide.

It was during the first Zombie Apocalypse event. It nearly hit that number when i14 was released as well. My display was a slideshow for most of it. In order to even be able to MOVE during those events I have to set my graphics down to "barely better than Pong" levels.

Reports from the first 1 billion inf costume contest on Freedom had something like 250 people in each zone the contest was in.

So the zone limit is MUCH higher than 50. The Hive is the only zone I am aware of that has a limit that low.

I wasn't beng defensive, it was an honest question.

I never found that not using Aim and Build Up slowed me down to any great degree when I ran into a boss.

It's not that I have a proble using the powers, it's just that I forget to use them. A lot of times I'm blasting away and realize after everything is dead that Aim and Build Up would have made it go faster, but I forgot to hit them.

The flight bug only really affects me because I play strictly with the keyboard. I use the arrow keys for movement and the number keys to activate powers. If I steered a flyer with the mouse it wouldn't be a problem. The bug seems to be related to camera positioning more than anything else. When I activate a flight power it re-orients the camera to be behind and slightly above my character, causing a downward slope when I try to fly forward. And adjusting the camera with the mouse doesn't seem to work.

My issue with crowds isn't just that I don't like them.

My computer cannot handle them. Why would I continue playing a game that has a 50/50 chance of mapserving me any time I try to zone to a populated area?

Not everyone is going to be in a mission at all times. If everyone was all lumped together there would be dozens, if not hundreds of people traveling through zones, standing around talking, dancing, etc. When you zone in somewhere your computer has to know what's going on in the entire zone all at once. If there are 90 people in that zone....I'm going to lag and possibly crash. And just because it isn't rendering them doesn't mean your computer doesn't know they are there. It has to in order to know whether or not it NEEDS to render them.

On Pinnacle, the population is low enough I don't have that issue. If it were merged, or we went serverless, I would have that issue all the time, basically forcing me to leave the game due to very real hardware limitations.

Merging or going serverless would have the net effect of forcing a lot of people to play in a way they don't want to, in a place they don't want to play in. Or in my case, it would force me to play in a place I litterally CANNOT play in.

I tried playing on Freedom, just to see for myself what the big deal was. My character there is level 4, and will never get any higher, because I lagged the whole time and got mapserved leaving missions 6 times. Even if I WANTED to play there I couldn't.

The anger is at being told that my preferences and limitations don't MATTER, if it makes it convenient for other people to find a team. Notice I didn't say "possible" or even "easier", finding teams is both possible and easy pretty much anywhere you go (I won't speak for the EU servers because I don't have firsthand knowledge), I said "convenient" because that is all it would do.

If I'm angry at being told those things don't matter, doesn't it stand to reason that others would be as well? You would end up having the population draining away because people can no longer play the way they want to.

"You like playing on less populated servers? Too bad." isn't a very good way to treat people you want to keep paying subscription fees.

*facepalm*

Ocean liner = cruise ship

Well, I don't know. How long does it take you to kill one when Aim and Build Up are recharging?

I assume you don't wait until they're back up before attacking a boss, so how would not having them be any different than when they're not up?

I forget to use Aim and Build Up all the time as it is now, so I dropped them. No sense in keeping a power you never remember to use.

I'm not looking to start a new character here. I already HAVE the blaster in question at level 50, I'm just looking into getting more survivability out of him, because he is by far the most faceplant prone character in my roster. Saying "play an ice/fire tank or fire/sr scrapper" is fine......except that would require me to create and level one, which isn't what I'm trying to do here.

As I mentioned before, hoverblasting isn't an option for this character because he is bugged by flight powers not working properly. When I try to fly (even with a jet pack) I am constantly flying downward. I petitioned it and sent bug reports several times and it was never fixed, so I solved it by just not taking flight powers.

Okay with all but Regen for brutes.

I know it's one of the last things they need, but it would be pretty overpowered with brute HP numbers. That and the fact that it would just never stop.

Willpower gets Quick Recovery, but it has 4 toggles within the set to run. Regen has ONE toggle. You could easily get by with just that one toggle and have insane passive regeneration numbers. One of the balancing points of Fury is that you can't just keep going indefinitely without some IO investment on most of the sets currently available to brutes, and the ones you CAN do it on don't get that ability until the later levels. Regen would kinda break that balance point by having gobs of end recovery by level 20 and no toggles eating into it.

If brutes ever DO get Regen, expect it to be changed from the scrapper version. A straight port would probably be overpowered enough to not happen.

Ice would be kinda cool on scrappers.

They may decide that Scrappers and Tanks get Ice while Brutes and Stalkers get Energy Aura. They play kind of similar, and with Going Rogue right around the corner you can just switch side if you really want to play on the other side with each set.

I got a little defensive because, instead of simply pointing out that I had a borked version of Mid's (which I was unaware of) you made fun of me for it. I thought I really HAD done what I claimed.

I mean, really, would it have been so hard to just say "Hey, that version of Mid's is screwed up, the numbers don't match up"?

Instead the first thing in your post was "this one doesn't fail as much". You were kinda being a jerk for no real reason. Hence my defensiveness. If it had been more clear that you were kidding about it, I wouldn't have reacted the way I did.

It's just perception. So many people say the kind of stuff you did and are dead serious about it, I just kind of figured you were too.

As far as power choices go: I took Burn because I frequently team with my wife's Plant/Kin controller, and Burn is a nice power when the mob can't go anywhere.