Laevateinn

I never said he was (and I apologize if I came off that way). I was just remarking generally.

This is great news - demand will skyrocket as people rush to slot out their powerlevelled characters. I kind of wish I'd invested a little in commons now.

It doesn't. The highest defense applicable (25% in this case) will be used.

Not Deceive, but seeing how Confuse is a clone of it...

I was playing my level 14 Mind/Emp controller in a group doing Invincible radio missions. At the end of the mission we came across a massive 14-16 strong enemy spawn. The team, which had been steamrolling nonstop until this point, stopped in their tracks.

Someone pointed out, "3 (Vahzilok) Embalmed (Abominations)."

I used Confuse.

A second later, someone else says, "Not anymore."

<without reading the thread>

NUUUUUUKE!

*presses the big red button*

Thanks for all your comments.

When we did it last week, the bug wasn't fixed. A friend on the team said she had done it successfully despite the bugged repairmen, which is why we decided to give it a try. In the end we could not complete, although we came really close - at one point all but the Yellow tower was down.

There was an Emp on the team. I thought I could get away without support, and for awhile it looked that way. Then I would promptly die without warning.

I did get into melee with him at once and he was in range of Invincibility at all times, and I didn't damage him either. I have no idea what caused him to spawn banes.

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on a side not, you can usually find 1-2 regular mobs after the hencmen AV's. You 'might' be able to taunt them over and use them for invincibility fodder to make your softcap defense even higher (though, I think that will only add 9% at most)

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It's a good idea and normally I would try that. However, with LR's banes around, Invincibility was saturated nearly all the time.

I hope they fix the bug soon, I want another go at this. I'll remember the bit about debuff toggles.

Last week, I tanked the STF for the first time. Since it was also my first and only tank, I was kind of nervous despite 90% SL res and softcapped S/L/E/N with 1 enemy in range.

Actually, that second point didn't matter - the moment he saw me he started spawning Bane Spider bosses, which I've never seen happen before and had no idea how to deal with. I had to tank him for a very long time (around 40 minutes), during which he killed me thrice. The second death happened when the Bane Spiders stunned me through mez protection. The 1st and 3rd times, I honestly have no idea: between Dull Pain and 300% regeneration, my health was full or held steady for very long periods, then all of a sudden he would start landing multiple hits in a row and kill me.

Looking at the logs, at some point his chance to hit jumped from ~10% to 55%. I can only assume some combination of buffs/inspirations/temp powers wore off, but I remember popping a large purple when it happened - it didn't seem to help.

How much defense should I maintain to floor his chance to hit? Between inspirations, buffs and temp powers, I hovered between 60% and 120% defense to all.

What inspiration loadout would you recommend for a Tanker without support?

Should I have attacked? I tanked him the way I've seen other Tankers do, not attacking and with Taunt on auto. I couldn't hit him, but Weaken/Sweep on the Bane Spider bosses might have helped.

In hindsight I should have swallowed my pride and asked for support, but the team had difficulty taking down the towers and I was worried that 1 less character on that side might turn the outcome. They were trying to kill towers while letting the flier shoot them - things were that desperate.

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Level 8: Fire Breath

[*] (A) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage[*] (19) Positron's Blast - Damage/Endurance[*] (19) Positron's Blast - Damage/Recharge[*] (21) Positron's Blast - Damage/Range[*] (21) Positron's Blast - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance[/list]
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6-slot it and add a Range common IO in the last slot. This lengthens the cone to ~55 feet (up from 40), which is quite large - I can hit nearly an entire line of Romans on the Cimeroran Wall with mine.


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Level 10: Hover
[*] (A) Flight Speed IO[/list]
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Swap your slotting for Hover and Fly. At level 50 + Swift, Fly is at the flyspeed cap with just 1 common IO, but Hover is not.


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Level 24: Blazing Aura
[*] (A) Scirocco's Dervish - Accuracy/Damage[*] (33) Scirocco's Dervish - Damage/Endurance[*] (33) Scirocco's Dervish - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance[/list]
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Badly underslotted. You want to ED-cap (or very nearly so) attacks and damage auras, and the 3.13% negative resistance bonus does nothing for you. At the minimum I would 4-slot Scirocco's Acc/Dam/Rech, Scirocco's Dam/End, Cleaving Blow Acc/Dam, Cleaving Blow Dam/End.


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Level 38: Hot Feet
[*] (A) Tempered Readiness - Accuracy/Slow[*] (43) Tempered Readiness - Damage/Slow[*] (45) Tempered Readiness - Accuracy/Endurance[*] (50) Tempered Readiness - Range/Slow[*] (50) Tempered Readiness - Endurance/Recharge/Slow[*] (50) Tempered Readiness - Accuracy/Damage/Slow[/list]
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Bad. Hot Feet is a damage aura, so it should be slotted like one: Damage, Accuracy, Endurance. Also don't forget that you have the slow from Rain of Fire to stack with it. I would frankenslot this Scirocco's Acc/Dam/End, Scirocco's Dam/End, Tempered Readiness Dam/Slow, Tempered Readiness Acc/Dam/Slow, 1x Level 50 EndRdx. This comes close to ED-capping the damage and end reduction while giving you the equivalent of 1 Level 50 common IO's worth of Accuracy and Slow for only 5 slots.


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Level 41: Bonfire
[*] (A) Force Feedback - Damage/Knockback[*] (46) Force Feedback - Accuracy/Knockback[*] (46) Force Feedback - Recharge/Endurance[*] (46) Force Feedback - Recharge/Knockback[*] (48) Force Feedback - Damage/Endurance/Knockback[/list]
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Bonfire is very situational. It does insignificant damage, the slow 3s animation makes it difficult to use as a panic button, and it's primary mitigation function (keeping things out of melee) is already served by Hover. It does have some uses - I use mine to block ambushes on speed ITFs and make portable firebases for squishies to stand in. It's thematic and a nice Lv49 power but not one that I would slot heavily, if at all.

I'd recommend dropping this and picking up Char, which you can slot with Devastation if it's the Damage bonus you want from Force Feedback.


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Level 44: Fire Shield
[*] (A) Aegis - Resistance[*] (45) Aegis - Resistance/Endurance[*] (45) Aegis - Resistance/Endurance/Recharge[/list]
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The defense bonus from Aegis won't do much on its own without other sources of defense to stack if with (and even then, Fire/Cold damage is the rarest in the game). I would replace this with 3x Titanium Coating for the +1.5% HP bonus.

Some general comments on your build: You missed Aim. Despite the misleading power description, Aim is a massive +62.5% damage buff for Blasters, and you shouldn't skip it if you're concerned about performance at all.

You took 6 attacks before level 20. If you're levelling up with this build, you won't have enough slots to effectively slot them, and will run out of endurance very fast. Fewer well-slotted attacks > more poorly-slotted attacks. You should delay 2 of them till after 20 (I recommend Rain of Fire and Combustion) and pick up Aim instead. If you can, I'd also try to take Blaze at level 18 since it's the best single-target attack Blasters get, delaying Stamina to 22 instead.

You can't use Burn while flying - for that reason alone I'd recommend dropping it on a flying /Fire blaster. You can't toggle on Hot Feet while flying, but you can land, toggle it on and fly and it will work normally.

My philosophy is that attacks should be 6-slotted where possible, rounding out the enhancement values (most sets overshoot or undershoot in some areas - PosiBlast has anemic recharge, Obliteration has crippled EndRdx, etc). I feel uncomfortable looking at attacks that only have 40%-60% accuracy, recharge or endredux in them. There is just so much you want in an attack, without even getting into adding damage procs to boost your effective damage beyond the ED cap.

Great work. I sometimes do this as well, although I admit my motivation is selfish. Throwing about vast sums of influence makes me feel powerful, and everyone benefits if it means that people are less uptight with their wallets on the market.

I'm semi-seriously considering a project to give away 200 Miracle uniques this Christmas. At ~70m each, the total cost would be about 15bn - only 3bn/month with 5 months left to go till Dec 25. I wonder if I can make it...

Even non-softcapped ranged defense is valuable. My Rad has 27% ranged defense, and hasn't died since she respecced into her new build, and this is with me trying not to use Radiant Aura so I can get my teammates to die.

I'm now oddly tempted to try and buy up all the luck charms on the market.

Not as impressive an amount, but during last double XP weekend I noticed at one point that there were 0 Scientific Theories for sale. I listed all the ones I had at 1m apiece. Pre-i14, it was the easiest 20m I ever made.

I rarely do this because it's not sustainable: someone will notice and dump their stock to try and soak up the profits. But price gouging is so much fun when one does get away with it.

This is pretty common; most people who think they know something about game mechanics actually know nothing about game mechanics. Recently I read a post in another forum where the poster was trying to calculate attack chain DPS without factoring in Arcanatime - or knowing what it was.

I wonder how many Tankers know there's an aggro cap, and how many Defenders can accurately state how much resistance a target with 0% resist to all has after 3x Enervating Field is put on it. (Actually, I'm not 100% sure about that one, either. )

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You're talking about how it's hard to take down an AV, but when two AV's take on each other...

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...They wouldn't get anywhere for a long time.

AVs don't do much damage relative to their toughness.

I remember being level 15 and waiting outside a mission door with my PuG. One of the scrappers got bored and went to kill a nearby boss, which dropped a BotZ -KB in my inventory.

People go on and on about the healer Nictus, but when your team is dying fast enough that you can't deal any damage, the real problem is usually the Nictus with the PBAoE Mire attack. It is autohit and will quickly kill any defense-based melee characters. You can try to kill it with ranged attacks from outside its range, get someone to aggro it and kite it about in a circle, or get the support squishies to stack -Dam debuffs on it if they can.

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3x Lv50 Common IO

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+49.8% Recovery.


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1x Lv50 Common IO
Performance Shifter: EndMod
Performance Shifter: Chance for +End

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+45.8% Recovery. You lose 4% Recovery, but the proc is around 0.2 EPS. This is what I tend to use.


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Performance Shifter: EndMod
Performance Shifter: EndMod/Accuracy
Performance Shifter: Chance for +End

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Only +42.2% Recovery, but +1.87% HP. This is down 7.7% Recovery from ED-capped Stamina, though it isn't that bad considering you're still getting the proc. I used this slotting on my Controller and Defender, whose builds were both very tight on slots and had enough recovery from other sources that the lower enhancement values mattered less than the extra HP buffer.


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Performance Shifter: EndMod
Performance Shifter: EndMod/Accuracy
Performance Shifter: EndMod/Recharge
Performance Shifter: Chance for +End

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+50.4% recovery (including 2.5% set bonus), another 0.2 from the proc and +1.87% HP, at the cost of 1 extra slot.

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Fights are more dramatic and entertaining when they LAST a while.

Back in the day, when I made foes for my players in Champions (pen and paper), I usually built them with attacks of around the same power as the players, but much, much more defense (usually in the form of stun, which is like health in CoH - the heroes still have to be able to HURT the villain). Neither the heroes nor the villains should be anywhere near capable of defeating a foe in one attack.

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I enjoy one-shotting enemies; it feels dramatic and powerful when you clear a screenful of enemies with a Blaster nuke or annihilate a boss with Headsplitter. I think the old trope of adding durability to enemies in order to artificially drag out a fight and make it more "epic" doesn't always work. When the enemy is predictable it just ends up making the fight tedious, yet it's popular since it takes little work and less imagination. See: Reichsman.

I also like that characters can get one-shotted by enemies, because my Fallout is 6-slotted.

6 million is only barely acceptable for me; I typically expect 8m-10m after market fees before I consider a niche worthwhile.

For top-end IO builds, I like to build for 95% hit chance against +4 enemies. This takes +143% accuracy in powers with normal 75% base ToHit, less if you have Kismet, Tactics or other sources of ToHitBuff.

For SO-only builds, I'm usually content with 2 even-level SOs worth of accuracy, which is the minimum I'd need to feel comfortable.

Grats on the windfall.

You have no Panaceas, or I would buy one.

QR

I actually tend to get more excited to play once I get close to 50, since I know my purpled-out build is waiting for me once I get there.

For me the hardest stretch was always 15-22, where enemies start to ramp up in power but just before SO range.