Laevateinn

How much lower do you think will the ST damage be, compared to e.g. Scorch > Cremate > Scorch > Incinerate, and how significant will it be considering I can mix in fireblast to improve ST damage?

(the optimal choice would be Gloom, but I'm willing to settle for Pyre based on concept provided other advantages, mainly the additional survivability, are large enough.)

The survivability is really a big draw for me. Having 45% defense instead of 59% in trials is like having 31% defense rather than 45% defense in normal content. It knocks the character back down to pre-IO levels of survivability, and characters without IOs may as well be unslotted.

I was going to say that always assumed you're fighting only one member of the security team, but now I like uberschveinen's interpretation better!

I play Keyes simply because lots of people find it hard. Routinely doing stuff that others consider difficult makes me feel powerful. Keyes is a good example of what incarnate content should be like - stuff that only the strongest heroes and heroines can take on and have a good chance of winning.

I'm against any increase in rewards (especially any guaranteed increase) which further trivializes the cost of getting incarnate powers. I'd rather BAF rewards be nerfed.

Cimerorans are a clear winner for single-target DPS. That said, they are pure lethal, the worst damage type to have (Vicky's melee attacks are half lethal, half energy, and the ranged Warworks attacks are all energy).

There are quite a few worthwhile choices when you consider the radial pets. Some characters are going to need survivability more than damage, after all. Storm elementals have the huge -30 tohit aura and decent AoE. The Longbow Cataphract can floor regen. Phantoms do good damage - they are close to Warworks based on pylon times - and the support pet has AB, which may be good for characters that have lots of mitigation and no/little healing. They also fly, so the support pet keeps up with you easier.

A- Anything is useful. Some things are more useful than others.
B- Since you have the Ice APP shield, you could softcap S/L def and solo pylons and AVs for a start. With the right Lore pet, you could solo GMs.
C- No idea.
D- See A.

Ice Blast is actually one of the better blast sets. But as you've experienced, Blasters in general aren't anywhere near the high end of the power spectrum. The best brutes, scrappers and even some tankers do roughly the same damage and have better defenses; corruptors, controllers and defenders usually do less damage but have a much bigger impact in endgame TFs and trials. There's only so much you can do about this, even with IOs.

Some things in recent content can be interpreted as trying to make ranged damage more relevant by interfering with the ability of melee damage characters to perform (Apex blue patches, hydra tentacles' toxic damage aura, BAF prisoners, Nova Strike, entanglement, etc in addition to the general trend of unresistable/autohit damage). If this goes on far enough, Blasters may move up in the hierarchy again, although really all I suspect it'll do is make the controller/corruptor/defender advantage even bigger.

Thanks for sharing your experience; I hadn't thought of rage crash as a chance to refresh clickies. And with interface and Judgement, there's certainly more to do during rage crashes.

There is a solo incarnate path - it's called converting shards.

The begging for 'solo incarnate paths' reminds me of the begging for IO recipes to be buyable at fixed prices, even though this has already been implemented for years... through merit vendors.

Playing my Fire/SD scrapper on trials today, I noticed how little the primary contributes to the build. Except for Incinerate, and to some degree FSC, most of the really good attacks - fireblast/ball, shield charge - come from the secondary and APP. It strikes me that an SD/SS tanker would offer a lot more advantages, including:

• gets shield charge earlier
• better radius on footstomp vs FSC
• better aggro control (particularly, reducing the ability of tankers to interfere with my pulls)
• better soft control
• much better survivability outside of Keyes
• capped defdebuff resistance without using membranes (important to me, since I expect a fix to the various Hami-O exploits soon)

Above all else, what makes me seriously consider the tanker is that it could be built to nearly softcap vs trial enemies while maintaining roughly the same recharge and other set bonuses on the scrapper. This means no wasting incarnate slots on Diamagnetic Interface or radial Lore pets, which further increases the offensive power of the build.

Potential problems are having to work Jab into the attack chain and dealing with the rage crash. I got used to the fluid, mobile, 'go anywhere kill anything' style of the scrapper and I'm wondering if being forced to timeout for 10 seconds every minute will ruin it.

Is my analysis correct? For those of you who play both, how do the builds compare?

This is a comparatively cheap perma-hasten, perma-AM, perma-Lingering radiation, no defense build, keeping most of your power choices. All attacks cap hitchance vs. +3 enemies with Tactics on but without amplify. It also has better endurance recovery (0.25 end/sec more recovery with all toggles on). Note that I gave you siren's song in place of dreadful wail. Since your build has no defense, an AoE sleep lets you pick things off at your leisure. It's also a potential slot for a cheap purple set.

I also gave you a Lockdown proc in choking cloud and moved your build up proc to Shriek, which recharges more quickly, and one of the devastation procs from Shout into Scream. This way, the procs are all in your fastest-animating and recharging attacks.

Outside of the uniques, the most expensive piece on this one will be the Oblit quad. Expect to spend 70-100m.

Some things to think about for a future build: I don't have any experience with the PPP summons, but I doubt they do much good on their own. You might want to think about dropping the fortunata and taking Dark Mastery instead. Soul drain from dark mastery recharges faster (it is actually permable) and has a larger radius.

No defense? Ranged defense on a rad is nice - it prevents you getting sniped while you are standing in your debuff toggle or speeding past enemies.

Hold purple's recharge is wasted in choking cloud. Put it in EM Pulse instead.

Lingering radiation needs accuracy to hit.

No APP? Dark is very nice for the soul drain (which actually does decent damage too), since you you say you will be in the middle of the spawn. Scorpion shield offers S/L/E defense if you decide to cap that instead.

That's all I can say with no datachunk/datalink to work with.

That's not what I'm saying at all. That's what you are saying, to try and portray me as some sort of build nazi. I'm saying: rather than staying the course with something that is already causing you frustration, with little hope of improvement in the near future, why not consider rerolling the character with the same name and concept, but using different powersets that will provide a more effective (and hence enjoyable) character?

It's good advice, though perhaps a little hard to swallow for people who hate hearing that their computer game characters aren't the best. And should they decide not to reroll, there are still ways to try and improve effectiveness - as I mentioned in my post above.

I have an elf knight tanker using Dual Blades at the moment. I'll reroll her into titan weapons if it turns out to be a top-tier melee set, on par with superstrength; the idea of a girly elf swinging around a sword the size of a traffic post sounds stylish to me.

I wouldn't take it personally. The trial is very hetic, most people will be struggling to survive themselves, and it is kind of hard to type when leading an AV along on a leash. They may not even have noticed you were dead most of the time, because in trials death is inevitable, even for the toughest characters. I assume that anyone obviously having trouble and wanting help would ask for it (did you?) and anyone having a condition that might affect them would say so beforehand. Not saying anything may not always be a sign of callousness.

You have to remember, most of them will not know about your condition. If you have a condition that makes things difficult for you, you should speak up and people will generally be happy to accomodate.

Liking trials has nothing to do with competition, or greed, or heartlessness or anything you allege, and trials do not induce this mentality. I know because I do them often.

My honest advice is to reroll. With some imagination, you can usually find other, more effective powersets to represent the same concept. If you don't want to reroll, you'll have to find all the niche ways your character can contribute; interface will increase your damage (make sure to get the 75% chance for DoT reactive), bubbles are useful for keeping your Lore pets alive, you can stop minion-class escaping prisoners with force bubble and help teams save time by knocking warworks away from terminals on Keyes. You won't be as powerful as most characters, but you'll still be able to contribute.

P.S. Psi damage is not so bad now, actually. Warworks don't have the huge psi resist that other robots have, and IIRC, War Walkers' lowest resistance is Psi.

So many armor sets have been buffed, it's kind of hard to pick out one that's obviously subpar. They're all relatively balanced now. For an unusual choice, consider Elec armor. With creative slotting and Cardiac alpha, it can actually cap resistance to S/L/E, will be immune to end drain, and comes with some tasty stuff like +Rech.

Empathy is still lackluster compared to the powerhouse buff/debuff sets (the likes of rad, dark, cold, traps etc - all versatile powersets that protect the team, significantly increase the damage it does, and benefit you more when solo). That said, I think it gained back some ground with the iTrials, since the prevalence of autohit/unresistable damage means that def and res are not as superior to healing as they are in older content. Your empath will like Keyes a lot - mine did.

We know that the dev team does not seem to like clicky buffs that can be made permanent. So, chances are that the really powerful buffs/debuffs in the set will be immune to recharge or gradually decay over time the way Destiny buffs do. Combined with the fact that you need to apply your basic buff/debuff power first to get the full effect (i.e. an animation time/endurance penalty), the set is very likely to be subpar.

-Res.

Reasons are that once your chance to hit is capped vs enemies, further -Def does nothing (on the other hand, it's really, really hard for a team to get enemies down to the -Res cap); and that there are other, arguably more reliable ways to cap your chance to hit vs enemies (accuracy buffs, tohit buffs).

As others have said, the abundance of defense from multiple sources and the ease of affording IOs mean that modern builds benefit from forcefields to a much less degree. The more mobile style of modern CoH makes it hard to keep squishies under the dispersion bubble, and the prevalence of autohit attacks and massive defense debuffs in newer content negate the huge amount of +Def it brings to the table.

Forcefields is too specialized, and this game has never rewarded crippling overspecialization. In most situations, it has very little way to boost the team's damage and its mitigation largely hangs on +Def and mez protection. Compare a much more well-designed set, Dark Miasma, which uses a combination of -ToHit, -Dmg, mezzes, heals and minor +Def/+Res to protect the team, and debuffs resistance on top of that, increasing your own and your team's damage. Compared to other sets that offer less potential +Def but are more versatile (e.g. Cold Dom, VEATs), FF has little going for it other than subjective personal preference.

Forcefields should be buffed to make it more versatile and relevant throughout the level range, whether solo or teamed, and in a wide variety of content. I would make the following changes:

a) Make the shields grant debuff resistance. I would probably add recharge and tohit debuff resistance to Insulation Shield, and defense debuff and regeneration debuff resistance to Deflection shield. This gives Forcefields more unique tricks of its own, and may make the shields valuable even in situations where defense (or passive mitigation as a whole) do not work.

b) increase the radius of the dispersion bubble to 60ft, as suggested above;

c) increase the damage and recharge of Force Bolt to match that of a T3 blast (e.g. Blaze) from blast powersets. This makes up for the fact that the rest of the powerset does nothing, outside of highly situational cases, to boost your damage or the team's damage. Turning force bolt into a valuable attack also makes it worth using other than for the KB alone and will go some way to making the set more active.