Edana
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Posts
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Joined
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One non-IO and non-power related answer.
All common "I'm squishy and get mezzed a lot" problems can be solved by making friends with a bubbler. -
Quote:On a controller combat jumping's immob protection scales from mag 4.08 at level 6 to 8.3 at level 50.Originally Posted by Panzerwaffen
There are powers that do provide some limited status protection.
Acrobatics provides mag 2 Hold protection.
Combat Jumping provides mag 8 Immobilize protection.
Acrobatics is a constant mag 2 all the way from 20 to 50.
The only other reliable status protection from pool powers would be tactics with mag 3.03 confuse protection at level 14 scaling up to 5.19 at 50. -
Quote:Originally Posted by RobertoLyon
I'm discovering that my ill/Kin troller has to be in the thick of things (up near the melee'ers) to be as effective as I want, but this is leaving me very vulnerable to AoE Mezes.They can mez what they can't see simply by using an AoE on someone nearby, which seems to be the entire problem.Quote:Originally Posted by Father Xmas
In short they can't mez what they don't see.
Interesting choice of quote btw, was that emphasis or disagreement? -
The 5 AoE attacks in AR have rather varying base accuracies and ranges, and accept different additional set types, so their best slotting will vary.
Buckshot and M30 can slot knockback sets, giving you two Recharge/Endurance IOs that I wish could be slotted in a lot more powers.
Flamethrower has higher base accuracy than those; requiring less accuracy slotting. Full Auto is even higher still.
Ignite may or may not. The accuracy on pseudopet powers often seems to refer to the chance of hitting the floor with the pet rather than the chance of the pet to actually hit anything.
The rather lacking state of the Targetted AoE sets does make frankenslotting hard though. It's something of an anomaly that even snipes have 5 available sets while T-AoE only scrapes 5 sets together using both purples and pvpIOs. -
Formulaic political response actually:
Restate question. Declaration of inflated personal ability.
Disregard all issues.
Tenuous link to question. State latest agenda. Optional "I'm one of you." localism.
Back on topic. Earthquake's -def is flagged unresistable, does that include AV resistances? -
No. No.
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The random number generator pulls floating point numbers between 0 and 100 out of a gerbil's intestines.
If you have no defence then only numbers below 50 cause a hit
If you have 40 defence then only numbers below 10 cause a hit.
If you have 45 defence then only numbers below 5 cause a hit.
Numbers are allotted evenly (Unless the gerbil has been eating fast food, when all the numbers are below 5 and your defence means nothing).
40 defence stops 80% of valid attacks (being ones that would otherwise have hit you). (i.e. ignoring numbers above 50 because they wouldn't hit you anyway.)
Since this means you only have 20% of attacks left hitting you, the next 5 defence cannot block the same number of attacks as the first 40. If it did you would be getting hit by -60% of attacks.
In case it isn't already obvious, that number is absurd.
However, at 40 defence you are being hit by 20% of valid attacks. At 45 defence you are being hit by 10% of valid attacks.
Half the number of hits does not mean double the number of misses. It does mean you are taking half as much damage.
If you die with 40 defence and are not being hit by enough damage to kill you twice over, 45 defence may have prevented your death.
Or you may need to take better care of your gerbil. -
As an Ill/Kin controller you do have the option of building for the frankly insane levels of +recharge bonus needed to make phantom army permanent and taking 'Indomitable Will', the mez protection click power from the psionic mastery epic pool. They have the same duration/recharge time ratios so when one is perma the other should be too.
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In short;
TOs are Training Origin and can be used by anyone. DOs are Dual Origin and can be used by someone of either of the origins named by the enhancement. SOs are Single Origin and have only one character origin they can be used by.
SOs are twice as effective as DOs, which in turn are twice as effective as TOs.
Their effectiveness scales with relative level, being best when they are +3 (the highest you can slot them) decreasing until -3, after which they cut out and stop giving any bonus at all.
IOs are "Invention Origin" and can be slotted by any character regardless of their starting origin. They are created by crafting recipes using salvage at a crafting desk. Desks are found in universities (and abandoned labs in the rogue isles) or in some supergroup bases.
Their effectiveness scales with the enhancement's level, at level 15 a common IO is approximately equal to a +3 DO, at 40 a +3 SO.
The maximum level IO you can slot is +3 to your level, but they never time out.
Set IOs follow the same usage as common IOs but can enhance more than one attribute each and slotting multiple IOs from the same set gives global bonuses.
For more, as always, check the wiki. -
For AoE sapping elec/cold; for single target elec/kin. Going soul mastery so you can powerboost the end drains you already have would be an alternative to picking up a third aoe sap from Mu.
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Or your defence based shields with resistance components. So while force field bubbles, manoeuvres, hover, combat jumping and weave work with it; cold domination shields don't, auras like shadowfall and arctic fog don't and scorpion shield won't (though you can only get both it and powerboost on a dominator anyway).
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Oh it's a useful point certainly, but when leveling the difference between 170 and 150dps fully slotted isn't going to be as important as that the 150 gets all the single target powers by 18 and an aoe from 6 onward, and the 170 set gets its aoe at 26 and only gets all the powers in its single target chain slotted past level 32. Being able to kill a boss a few seconds faster 14 levels later might not hold someone's interest long enough to get there.
After barely another 10 minutes forum browsing I found out that those dps threads were assuming brutes got a direct port of the scrapper claws set - which they didn't; so how useful those numbers are normally is irrelevant since in this particular case they aren't even right. -
Was looking very affordable until you hit the 4 HOs, 2 health uniques and a BotZ -KB.
Nice softcap, but until you get that sort of level of defence you're going to have no alpha mitigation ability at all since you've skipped flash arrow and poison gas arrow; and you won't be able to do anything about single troublesome targets since you're missing ice arrow.
Between missing those, the lack of archery AoEs below Rain and having OSA slotted for slow, you seem to be building something of a one trick pony; drop -resistance debuffs -> rain of arrows -> still be alive.
Cutting one slot of recharge out of disruption arrow ups the cycle time from 22.5 to 24 seconds, still fast enough to put out before each RoA, but gives you an extra slot to put in hover to fit another BotZ duo in along with a common defence IO. You can then slot Oil Slick Arrow for something a bit more useful than slow without losing your range softcap; or drop school of sharks entirely and pick up one of the regular AoEs, Either one of which doesn't need to take the full 6 slots so you could put the extra into tough, slot a cheaper -kb IO and have a spare power pick (instead of super speed) for a single accuracy slotted trick arrow. -
Unless I'm mistaken those numbers are for single target damage; useful if trying to solo AVs and pylons, not quite as important when trying to feel useful on a team or level quickly solo.
Advantages to claws: Since follow up gives you a constant +to-hit buff you don't need as much accuracy slotting to reliably hit +level mobs. Spin is a stupidly nice AoE to get at level 6. Having ranged knockdown in focus is very nice for dealing with troublesome stuff like sappers, as well as letting you keep bosses on their back when RttC isn't up to dealing with the damage they'd be doing upright (banes spring to mind here).
Disadvantages: Only aoe mitigation is a cone knockback that will make you a bit unpopular unless you've got a wall handy to smack the mob into. Follow up needs to hit something to give you any buff, so is useless for punching through high defense. Lethal damage is resisted more than most types.
Advantages to fire melee: Ridiculous amounts of damage.
Disadvantages: Has nothing but damage. Breath of fire and fire sword circle need drastically different positions to use optimally. DoTs are unreliable and can result in attacking stuff that would die anyway if you left it, wasting attacks on unecessary overkill (although as a brute you might not recognise that concept). -
I think it says somewhere further up in the thread that cycle times assume no global and 95% recharge slotting in the power. The AoE rankings also assumed 95% damage slotting so I could factor in rage, follow up, build up, fury, etc with approximately the right weightings.
I attempted to avoid having to account for positioning time at all by only using the single pbaoes and giving the 8' ones a 7 target limit to account for uncooperative mobs not being in the smaller radius. It seemed to fit in with what I was expecting from TF runs, which is why I didn't notice my maths was lacking in pi.
As it happens I agree; with high recharge activation time does get very significant. My only stone melee brute spends most of her life at around 160% global recharge simply from decent IO slotting, hasten and seeming to find it impossible to start a TF without at least one person bringing a kin. So theoretically I can get tremor off about every 7.9 seconds, with 3.4 seconds of that being the animation time... Alternating with fault looks suspiciously like a popcorn machine.
Once you start factoring in the patron aoes and other aoes you might have (burn or shield charge for instance) activation becomes more important still since you start to have aoes recharging faster than you have animation time to use them all. Some people are very dismissive of the single target damage you can do between AoEs; I find having time for a knockout blow/seismic smash/whatever in amongst my aoes reduces the amount of time I'm standing around after a mob is dead killing the remaining bosses. -
Quote:I think it's a little under a third actually, hence the missing pi. I'd set my formulae up to reference pi and then forgotten to define it. Oops.Originally Posted by Roderick
An 8' radius PBAoE has an area of (pi*r^2) approximately 201 sqare feet. If you're allotting 9 square feet (1 per 3' square box), that's room for 22 1/3 in the area, not "only 7".
It looks like you're merely squaring the radius, which gives you a little over a quarter of the actual area a PBAoE covers.
You do have to remove the area that you occupy at the centre, then take into account that targets are solid and the ai a bit dense so the area usage is anything but optimal. The maths on that bit might have gone totally wrong, but only hitting 7 targets doesn't seem like too unreasonable an assumption anyway. -
For speedy levelling the entire way, Claws/WP brute. The only problem there is that you'll hit 50, go to make your shiny new widow... oh look, more claws.
For fast, fun options that won't put you off playing with the best of the veats. Fire/Dark corruptor, Bots/Traps or Thugs/Traps mastermind, Plant/Fire Dominator.
I don't know what to suggest for heroes really; khelds don't really seem worth grinding for. Fire/Rad controllers work nicely, as does Ill/Rad, and you can earn your place on most teams post 12 with a Kinetics defender even if you do nothing but speedboost and heal.
The best thing about these options though is that even if you hit 50 and find you don't like khelds, they'll still be worth having. -
With no influence limits and strictly for personal damage numbers I think the answer to all of the above might be a fire/shield scrapper.
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There is something almost amusing about the idea of a /psi permadom with endurance problems.
My Ice/Psi runs superspeed, arctic air, scorpion shield, weave, manoeuvres and assault and only has endurance problems against the thorn tree since it's somehow not in drain psyche range even when standing right up on it's roots.
Hit a single target with drain psyche and you'll barely notice that numina unique in health.
If you can afford the 360ish extra merits you could even drop hurdle/health, put in stealth/grant invis and put lotgs in those and personal forcefield hitting the 5 cap for lotg7.5s. If you then 5 slot decimation rather than enfeebled operation in chilblain for the 5th 6.25% bonus you hit 125% global recharge and have domination perma even if you forget hasten or go afk. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Umbral
when you know how to manipulate enemy location so that the additional 5' of radius doesn't matter nearly as much.Quote:Originally Posted by Edana
as you said concerning frozen aura, if you know how to make enemies cluster up a little, that doesn't matter very much.Quote:Originally Posted by Siolfir
c. If Tremor is a good AoE power due to its cycle time, and you're ignoring AoE radius on Frozen Aura because "that doesn't matter"In conditions X, Y doesn't matter nearly as much...Quote:Originally Posted by Umbral
Edana was the one that said what you're attributing to me in an attempt to make it seem like I was ignoring it (I'm not), so don't try to put words into my mouth, much less words that someone already attempted to put in my mouth or draw out conclusions that are known contradictions.
In conditions X, Y doesn't matter very much...
Y doesn't matter...
I didn't say that she did...
You'd think considering it's there in plain text and half of us are using the quote feature we could avoid this game of chinese whispers.
I didn't say it didn't matter, I said if you knew how to get the enemy to group up it didn't matter very much.
You complain about being misquoted while at the same time claiming that the quote came from me when I'd said nothing that could be interpreted as such without just as much misreading as your original.
Of course earlier you managed to take my comments on the difference rage makes being partly mitigated on brutes by fury and ice being full of slows that tend to prevent you building fury; and turned it into me saying "Brutes don't get it, thusly it sucks"...
Moving past that and back to these AoEs.
Let us assume that it's relatively easy to get targets to about 1 per 3' square box. Arbitrary yes, also seems to fit reasonably with observation.
In this case we can fit 10 enemies into the 15' footstomp and tremor without any worry and 10 into the 10' fire sword circle and frozen aura with minimal delays. In the same time/effort we can only fit 7 targets into any of our 8' aoes and only 5.4 targets in thunderstrike. I'll let it have 6 anyway since it seems to need all the help it can get.
Taking the DPS as targets hit * base damage / cycle time the order goes:
Fire Sword Circle - 59.27 (using mean damage from DoT)
Spin - 56.17
Footstomp - 47.36
Frozen Aura - 47.36
Tremor - 39.30
Typhoon's Edge - 38.39 (not including possible sweep combo bonus)
Whirling Mace - 32.42
Whirling Hands - 29.73
Whirling Axe - 28.95
Thunderstrike - 22.25 (including the extra damage done to the primary target)
Add 80% fury, 95% damage enhancement and the average bonuses from build up (80% for 10 seconds in 45), rage (80% for 110 seconds, 10 second crash), follow up (60%, 95% of the time to allow for misses) and blinding feint (same as follow up).
Spin - 231.44
FSC - 220.94
Footstomp - 188.84
Frozen Aura - 176.54
Typhoon's Edge - 158.15
Tremor - 146.49
Whirling Mace - 120.85
Whirling Hands - 110.81
Whirling Axe - 107.91
Thunderstrike - 82.93
(If you were to somehow manage to double stack blinding feint and still pull off the sweep combo every time, typhoon's edge pulls into the lead with 237.43, a more plausible single feint gives 221.01.)
Spin is making me want to roll a claws brute again; Fire is right up near the top as it should be; Footstomp is where expected with a bit less damage but a lot more mitigation and positional laziness; Frozen Aura is making me wonder whether an Ice brute would be such a bad idea and Tremor is sitting in the middle of the pack with Typhoon. I wish I could be surprised by Thunderstrike, but after more than 1000 hours logged on my elec/wp... I'm not. -
They also seem to have a bit of a price drop during/after halloween and rikti invasion weeks from the increase in level 30 drops.
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Quote:I found this most noticable when I tried to make an ae farm using the winter event snowmen. Damn do those things have a large footprint. On the other hand I've seen normal size units stack up in strange barrel like formations and hit the target cap with the innermost radius of lightning rod. (Which being a psuedopet only reports on the pet damage channel, took ages to work out the different damage pulse radii.)Originally Posted by Bionic_Flea
Another factor to consider in grouping or herding mobs is that sometimes, there just isn't enough room to get all the NPCs following you inside your aoe. They start bouncing around each other and moving left and right trying to get a lick in.
Base damage divided by activation time corrected for arcanatime. (0.132*(1+roundup(activation/0.132)))Quote:Originally Posted by Deus_Otiosus
Out of curiosity, where did you pull these numbers from? -
Quote:Yes. I'm pulling the numbers off the top of my head so I'll check later and might be out by a little, but AVs resist endurance drain by somewhere around 85%.Originally Posted by evil_tim
Can even an AV stand up to that?
You're not the only one. I prefer to think of it as strategically holding back so you've got another gear to switch into if things look a little tight. Really I just often forget the power's even there.Quote:Originally Posted by evil_tim
... I know that one of my weaknesses as a player is that I tend not to use Hasten because I know it's not even close to perma.
You could stick another end mod in here with that spare slot; spent a while playing with the second build on my ss/elec last night and it's given me a new appreciation for sapping tactics.Quote:Originally Posted by evil_tim
I changed Lightning Field slotting to reflect my planned sapper attacks with the corrupter...//... I'm left with 1 slot I'm not sure what to do with.
If you're planning on sapping that will depend on whether you find you take 18 seconds to kill a spawn an move on or 21; you'll be able to tell whether you need it when you get there. I would point out that putting hasten off until 44 you've got a good few levels to get through before you'd be below 26 seconds with the 3 slot option.Quote:Originally Posted by evil_tim
Right now, with hasten running power sink is up every 17.9 seconds. If I 3 slot it instead, that would move back to 20.3 seconds, doing the same amount of endurance drain. Is that slot worth it?
If you're going to put the numi unique in health, swapping one of those heal IOs for the numi straight heal will get a bonus 12% regen for no cost other than yet more inf.
One option is the black market. If you're going to be evil you might as well be ebil too.Quote:At this point, the build is probably more expensive than I can afford, but I guess there are ways to make that kind of infamy.
I'll have a look at the corruptor build properly a bit later, first impressions though are that some of the frankenslotting has kind of strange results; not capping the shields is an unusual choice to start with; and six slotting two powers on nuke recharges then not having any damage at all in short circuit that you're planning on using every spawn seems a bit off balance. -
Quote:14 second base recharge and 3.3 second animation; cut recharge in half or more for decent slotting and the animation is a third of the cycle time. It's a nice power, and if you want to keep a large area on its back it's as good as you can get; but the damage is as low as a melee pbaoe goes and the cycle time is unavoidably longer than most. The larger radius is the only benefit it's got and as you said concerning frozen aura, if you know how to make enemies cluster up a little, that doesn't matter very much.Originally Posted by Umbral
Considering how much additional space you're getting out of that 7 extra feet and how little animation time actually has to do with the effectiveness of AoE attacks, I'm going to stick with Tremor being quite the nice power.
I was noting the lack of fury on tanks primarily because losing 80% on top of 195% is worse than losing 80% from on top of around 355%. So on the AT that can take Frozen Aura the difference from losing rage is more noticable. Port the set across to brutes and the difference is still there, it's just masked a bit by the high damage buffs inherent to having fury.Quote:Originally Posted by Umbral
Considering we're arguing the traits of the power rather than the AT that the power exists in, I'm still going to argue that Frozen Aura nearly as good as Footstomp. All of the powers listed would be subject to AT mods, just like every other power under the auspices of cross-AT comparison, so simply saying "Brutes don't get it, thusly it sucks" isn't a valid argument. I'm not going to say that Frozen Aura is better than Footstomp, but the difference isn't particularly vast, especially when you know how to manipulate enemy location so that the additional 5' of radius doesn't matter nearly as much.
It does occur to me however that you're right, we are comparing the power; I was comparing the damage of footstomp+rage to just frozen aura, which isn't really fair. If I'm going to include rage on the behalf of superstrength I've got to include that ice melee also has a pure cold damage cone to pick up at what would be level 2 on a brute.
Isolating them we're left with two powers, one that has a big aoe and knockdown, one has a medium aoe and an often pointless sleep. Add in fire sword circle with the radius confined to almost melee range but more damage and it's looking like the 20 second recharge aoes are pretty well balanced, footstomp pulls ahead slightly from the extra area and nicer secondary effect, but there isn't as much in it as I'd implied. So on this point I'll conceed; I was wrong. -
Quote:The 14 second recharge and the damage is identical to whirling hands/axe, and the damage is a little lower than whirling mace; you then trade off a ~0.7 second longer animation for 7 foot extra radius.Originally Posted by Umbral
And, you know, that 14 second recharge time so that it can be used ~25% more often than any of the other powers mentioned.
In isolation and once everything is clustered up a bit yes, it is as good, possibly better in some cases since cold isn't widely resisted. Losing that 5 foot of aoe radius can't just be ignored though, and being down by the 80-160% you can get from rage is a very big difference, especially since at the moment the only AT that can take this power doesn't have fury. If they ever get over the 'slows aren't good on brutes' thing it'll be worth revisiting.Quote:Originally Posted by Umbral
Frozen Aura (as a lone power) is actually quite good. It's functionally identical to Super Strength except for the fact that it has a smaller radius (which is still larger than the minimum size) and uses the best player damage type in the game (Cold). There is a reason it is lauded as the Frozen Footstomp. It's pretty much just as good.