DSorrow

Just a few quick things:

1) I'd swap that Thunderstrike triple from Flares to Blaze. It'll help your damage more that way.

2) Drop Rain of Fire, take Assault at 38 and Vengeance at 49 (another LotG +Rech). It'll most likely be more useful than 1 slotted RoF.

I agree with the Life Drain change. The only thing that's keeping me from playing Dark Blast is the low ST damage.

Torrent could be changed to KD with high KB available through minimal slotting. If it were given two attributes along these lines (if negative KB is possible...):
* Mag 10.67 KB (enhanceable)
* -Mag 10 KB (unenhanceable)
The net effect would be mag 0.67 KB unenhanced while it being over 1 with any KB enhancement at all.

I find it funny that Rath thinks spewing utter nonsense is going to help him at all. I tip my hat off to anyone who actually bothered to try and decipher any of his posts. My 13 year old sister writes better English, and English isn't our first or even second language...

I got a few builds in my guide (link in sig).

I'll update it once I19 hits and probably post some cheap builds as well. Even if your budget isn't as high as I had it, you should get an idea of what bonuses you want and which sets provide them.

1. Depending on AT, I'd say yes. Lower HP characters benefit much more from Defense, because even with high Resistance a few hits are enough to take them down, so it's better not to be hit in the first place.

2. Nope, I think there is an issue with the hard limit of Resistance on most ATs. I understand the devs' desire to keep people from getting Tanker levels of Resistance, but how many sets can actually do that and how often? For instance, a Scrapper's Resistance hard cap is 75% while a Tanker's is 90%. At their respective caps the Scrapper will be taking 150% more damage than the tank. This is one of the reasons Resistance based godmodes (Unstoppable, Power Surge) aren't that good on Scrappers.

3. I'm not sure, really, because both Resistance and Defense have their advantages. While high Defense avoids secondary effects on top of damage, it is still susceptible to "unlucky streaks" which are something that never happen to high Resistance. With high Resistance you pretty much know if you can take on the spawn in front of you or not. With Defense it's a lottery where higher Defense results in higher chance to win, but it's still a lottery. Defense is also much easier to nullify than Resistance (+ToHit vs +Dmg). Then there's also the thing about Resistance being its own Resistance Debuff Resistance and Resistance Debuffs being rare... I guess they're quite evenly balanced, in the end.

4. In a way, yes, but I understand why the devs chose to make it possible to only stack one of them and I'm happy they did that. As to which of them is better to be stacked, I don't know from a dev viewpoint.

5. Yes. Much like it's currently useful to get Defense on Resistance based sets (Elec Armor, Fiery Armor, etc.), it'd be very useful to get Resistance on Defense based sets (SR, Ice Armor, etc.), and maybe a mix of both on mixed sets like Invuln and WP, depending on how much Resistance we could actually get.

6. Not really.

7. Nope, I like the differences between those two.

8. Nope, as I said, I think they're quite evenly balanced. It is a fact, though, that it is VERY much easier to get high Defense than it is to get high Resistance, which I think is the important thing to notice.

9. None whatsoever. I'm not even sure I'd like to try and wrap my head around all the possible powerset balance problems a change could create.

10. I'll edit this post if I can think of something you missed.

If I need to sacrifice too much offense (i.e. a working attack chain or all AoE) for defense, I won't use the build / powerset combination. While the primary objective is to be as close to immortal as possible, it just isn't enjoyable for me if I can't deal good damage.

Both of my tanks (Ice/SS/Soul and SD/DM/Soul) have good damage, they're as indestructable as is needed and also provide good team utility (AoE -ToHit and -DMG, SD also provides +Def while Ice provides more -DMG and -Slow).

The biggest reason servers might seem dead is that most of our missions are instanced, so you won't see too many people running around the city.

Join some of the busier channels (Union Chat and sals badgehunters, for example) and have fun! IIRC, the command to join channels is /chanjoin <channel name>, without the brackets.

I can't think of any reason why you wouldn't like it at lvl 50. I like my DB/Elec mostly because she's a bit different than my other Scrappers and puts out very nice DPS.

Pros and cons, well, you'll pretty much have infinite endurance at your disposal. This also works the other way around, when played correctly, your enemies will have no endurance at all to use unless they resist end drain. Elec also has very nice Resistances and a good self heal. The +Rech from an autopower is also a welcome bonus. Finally, you are pretty much immune to endurance drain and -recovery (something like 95% resistance, or whatever the cap is). You should also be able to pump out great ST DPS and good AoE.

The only con I can think of is that you don't have any Defense from the secondary so building for it can be a bit tricky especially if you want to get to the soft cap.

I built my DB/Elec to have around 30% S/L Defense on top of her Resistances. It's more than enough in most cases, because I also picked Shadow Meld and use End Drain defensively. The strategy I use is first popping Shadow Meld, then jumping into the spawn, firing off Power Sink and then letting Lightning Field (frankenslotted for Dam and EndMod) drain the little Endurance they have left. This lets me finish the fight in relative safety, because the rate at which the enemies are able to attack is hindered, and I have a very nice combination of Defense and Resistance backed up by a self heal to keep me standing.

Haven't noticed this, but from your story I can point out two possible causes:

1) A tank can only hold 16 enemies. That's the aggro cap, if there are any more enemies they'll attack someone else.

2) Enemies with +perception. These will see straight through your invisibility and also attack you from further away if you have no stealth effects. This together with condition one could cause heaps of enemies attacking you and your team even though there was a tank.

I'm hoping Ultimo doesn't have self rez in his build or any awakens at hand, because if he does, William's one-hit-kill won't stop this madness

I'm very happy with Inherent Fitness, mostly because of the following two things:

1) I no longer have to choose between Swift and Hurdle. Most of the time I'd pick Hurdle because SJ is my favourite travel. CJ + Hurdle is also great for combat maneuvering. Bad thing is that without Swift trying to catch runners was a bit annoying. Now I will have both!

2) My builds will get some variety. Currently most of my builds have Fitness/Speed/Travel/Utility as pools, where Travel is either Flying or Leaping and Utility is either Fighting, Leadership or nothing, depending on how many power slots I have available. Now I can add Concealment, Teleportation or Medicine to many builds and also take concept powers I currently wouldn't pick because of my habit of min/max first, concept later.

It's funny how not one of my characters have problems with endurance. Maybe it's because I bother with the 5-10 minutes of effort to plan their builds before playing so that I don't have to spend 5 mins every mission resting. Oh wait, but that's not possible, because resting 5 minutes every mission is so much more fun than planning for 10 minutes.

I'm not sure why you think it's unbalanced that Defenders deal less damage for the same Endurance than Blasters or Corruptors. DPE (damage per endurance) is what matters early on in the game because most builds will run out of endurance eventually. Usually quite soon. This balances high damage ATs with low damage ATs early on, because this way high damage ATs get to deal more damage when the constraint is endurance rather than time.

In the end-game when you can build characters to be more sustainable even with SOs only due to the higher number of slots and possibly available utility powers, DPS is what matters. Again, high damage ATs get to deal more damage than low damage ATs.

Balanced as I see it.

One thing worth noting: because the patrol xp is 1.5x, the blue bars empty faster than the pink bars fill, so it may seem you're losing patrol xp even when you aren't.

I'll most likely edit it for I19. As for PPPs, I could only think of getting Soul Mastery for Shadow Meld or maybe even Leviathan for Hibernate, but for most purposes I still think Body Mastery is the best pick.

GC > GD > GC > SD if you want top DPS. I use this on my Kat/Inv with a ~0.2 second gap when Hasten is up.

GC > GD > GC > SD > GC > DA for a combination of survivability and DPS. You'll have a bit lower DPS but one application of DA going at all times unless it misses.

The first chain could be a bit difficult to get gapless on a Kat/Inv, but we don't know how the Incarnate slots will change this. Second chain is easy with IOs.

EDIT: Edited the 2nd attack chain to what it should've been. Thanks Werner!

TL;DR one-liner before the quote.

You are most likely talking to a bunch of guys here, but I'll tell you a secret: not everyone is like the "cocky guys in the U.S military" you seem familiar with. I sincerely hope you don't expect everyone to be like that.

Part of my soul dies every time a native English speaker cannot use their own language. I'm not English and no one in my family is English and yet even I can accomplish good grammar, so I'd think someone who speaks the language natively would find it even easier.

I'd like to think you could "fix it" by being good at maths and sports, but to be honest, it won't do it. I'm good at maths, too. I also play an instrument well enough to be happy with my own skills even though I'm not an expert. I can also do most sports at least decently. See where I'm getting to? Anything you grow up with (music, sports, a language etc.) should inherently be at least a decent level. I grew up in a family where intellect was looked up to so that's what I'm good at, but it doesn't mean my physical prowess "sux".

Being annoyed by someone's cocky attitude doesn't mean we're thin skinned either: we're used to people who don't think they're head and shoulders above other people. That's just the effect this community has had on us. See, if you come in with the attitude "lol im da best i dont care about ur feeble attempts at builds" you won't see many posts trying to make the build better.

In short, we're just returning the favour: we don't care.

I think it basically boils down to whether you have the time and motivation to get expensive IO sets or not.

If you do, pick /Invuln. With big investments it will be more survivable than /SR while being able to put out comparable DPS. I don't know how the Incarnate slots will affect this, but I'd guess they'll skew it into /Invuln's favour when talking about large investments in IOs. Invuln could be easier to level up thanks to its very high S/L mitigation, but Kat/SR will have access to Melee soft cap early on.

/SR is a better choice if you are only going to get fewer IOs. Kat/SR can easily soft cap Melee defense from lvl 8 which should make you close to immortal in melee combat. It is also very easy to get soft capped against all positional attack vectors.

Both will be good choices.

Contradicting yourself doesn't help you make a case. Really.

As a note for future forum usage, accusing people of trolling is forbidden just like crossposting.