Muon_Neutrino

From the perspective of a mostly frankenslotted level 50 ice/ice:

Absolutely critical primary powers:
Block of ice, ice slick, arctic air, jack frost

Absolutely critical secondary powers:
All 3 blasts, ice sword

Useful to have:
Glacier, power boost, ice sword circle, frost breath, ice slash, chilblain, shiver

Not especially useful:
frostbite, flash freeze, chilling embrace

Most of these are self-explanatory. The reason you don't want both arctic air and chilling embrace is that chilling embrace is redundant. Arctic air by itself forces avoid behavior, so enemies are going to be (very slowly) trying to run out of range. This is good - it's a big part of the power's mitigation - but it means that they're not going to pack up tightly around you to actually get into chilling embrace's very small radius. Add that to the fact that arctic air by itself already does mondo gobs of slow, and that you'll be adding more slow onto things with your attacks, you don't really need chilling embrace. Plus it's another toggle to burden your already strained blue bar and turn back on if you get mezzed. I just never found it useful.

Shiver, on the other hand, is quite useful. While some call it redundant with arctic air, the fact that it's a click instead of a toggle allows it a nicely complementary role. You can toss it on a group you don't want to jump into melee with, you can use it to delay pursuit while you run if things go south, and you can use it to debuff a second group of foes from the ones you're currently engaging (or you can just use it to further debuff the group you're fighting, since its area is nice and big). It also can get away with less slots than AA (perhaps 1-2 acc, 1-2 rech instead of 5-6 slotting for end and confuse).

Power boost isn't useful for most of your powers - it doesn't help ice slick or recharge slows, and your movement slows are already fine. What power boost does is combine with glacier to give you a very solid backup *hard* control. This is more important for ice/ than some other primaries, since ice/ relies so heavily on *soft* control normally. This is why I think glacier and power boost are important powers for ice/ice. Glacier should get heavy slotting, but PB only needs 1 rech since you don't need to use it too often.

Frostbite is totally unimportant, as I'm sure you can tell, since so much of your mitigation comes from avoid behavior and KD. Chilblain, on the other hand, is pure gold for immobilizing pesky EBs and AVs. You won't use it often, but when you need it you'll be very glad you have it. Slot it with an acc and a couple of damages so that using it doesn't cut into your dps too much.

I don't have too much perspective on the ice ancillary since I only respecced into it an issue ago and I haven't really played my dom since then, but it looks *really* solid. Sleet will be the gem here - max the recharge on that bad boy. Ice storm should also be very good.

Gotta run, but I've posted on this topic previously on the dom forum a number of times. Try a search and see if any of those posts are still around.

EDIT: some threads where I've posted my thoughts about ice/ice doms, if they turn out to be of any use to you:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=1143708
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=1164314
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=1236989
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=2102411
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=2485708
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?p=2564683

My problem is basically one thing - it's just too much work to find an arc to play that's actually decent. It's just way easier to play dev content - sure, some of it is crap, too, but I can eventually learn which contacts are boring/annoying and avoid them. Obviously you can't do the same in the AE, and there is just such a ridiculous amount of pure crap clogging up the listings that I can't be arsed to wade through it all, especially since there's no real way to tell other than by loading it up (I mean, you can narrow it down some by carefully reading descriptions, but that doesn't help too much).

If there was a relatively easy way to sort the dreck from the actual stories, I would play it a lot more. I don't even need it to sort the good stories from the bad - I can decide that for myself. All I want is a way to find arcs where the author actually put in a bit of effort to make it a *story arc* - a way to avoid all the farms and pure junk.

Stuff like Policewoman's list is a great help, but I wish I didn't have to go outside the game to find things like that. For me it's the effort involved that's the annoyance - I *can* find decent arcs by using the forums and whatnot, but if I have to do that in the first place it makes it much more likely that I won't bother and just go off and do something else instead.

One thing I really wish could be added would be some way to get arc recommendations from people who have similar tastes. I.e. if I decide I like Policewoman's taste in arcs, something I could do where I could 'subscribe' to her arc ratings and the system would show me arcs that she rated high. Or maybe when I finish an arc, it could give a few random suggestions along the lines of 'other people who rated this arc 4 stars also rated these other arcs highly'. Just *anything* so that when I decide I want to play some AE, I don't have to sit down and wade through page after page of dreck (or else play one of the good arcs from the pool of arcs I've already played, which partly defeats the purpose of the AE for me).

Going from 45% defense to 40% defense *doubles* the total damage that gets through. I wouldn't consider getting aid self to be a worthwhile exchange for that - aid self is dang handy on a high-def SR or shields build, mind, but not so much as to be worth sacrificing the softcap.

That said, if you post your build someone might be able to figure out if you could get aid self while still keeping the softcap. The scrapper forum *is* host to some of the best min-max builders on the forums, after all.

As for the prereq, I'd personally take stimulant. You aren't going to be using either one very often, but stimulant is at least useful without slotting - you can unstun someone after a wakie or pop it on an important squishy before a tough fight. Unslotted aid other, on the other hand, just restores an absolutely pathetic amount of health that isn't going to make a shred of difference in any situation that involves actual danger.

BunnyAnomaly, if absolutely everyone in the entire thread tells you you're misinterpreting what they're saying, don't you think it might be wise to consider even for a moment that they might be right? Because, once again, you've taken a explanation of the disagreement with your approach and interpreted it in a manner completely contrary to the intent.

For the bleeding-edge performance oriented characters here, they generally aren't going up against some static level of DPS and simply computing their survivability against it. That's just not the point. The question isn't "how long can I last against a certain level of DPS?" as you assumed in your last post, it's "what is the highest level of DPS I can survive long-term?" The players making use of these metrics are in the business of finding the absolute toughest things they can take on while still winning. If a character who can survive at most 300 DPS improves his survivability by adding more defense or regen, he's going to go out and *increase the DPS he faces* until he once again hits the limit of what he can survive. It's in *this sense* that adding 50% additional regen is a 50% boost in survivability, because it increases the maximum sustainable incoming DPS by 50% (assuming you are currently at base regen, as Arcanaville noted). Let me present a few numbers to explain this:

Base scrapper HP at level 50: 1338.6
Base scrapper regen:5.578 hp/s

The damage received will then be equal to (base incoming damage)*(.5 - defense). Assume that the scrapper will seek out the toughest enemies he can survive, so average long term damage taken is equal to regen. In that case, the maximum sustainable base incoming damage will be equal to (regen)/(0.5 - defense).

Assume 40% defense and base regen. In this case, the maximum sustainable average damage intake will be 5.578 / (0.5 - 0.4) = 55.78 dps. Any more, and the scrapper will eventually die as damage taken outpaces regen.

Imagine the scrapper increases his defense to 45%. Now, the maximum sustainable average damage intake will be 5.578 / (0.5 - 0.45) = 111.56 dps.

Now imagine the scrapper instead adds 50% bonus regen, for a regen rate of 8.367 hp/s. The maximum sustainable average damage intake will be 8.367 / (0.5 - 0.4) = 83.67 dps.

Initial maximum sustainable damage intake was 55.78 dps. Adding 5% extra defense increases this to 111.56, an increase of 100% over the initial value. Adding 50% regen instead of 5% defense changed this to 83.67, an improvement of 50% over the inital value. *This* is the sense in which adding 5% defense doubles your survivability and 50% regen increases it by 50% - adding 5% defense allows you to take twice as much incoming damage without dying, while adding 50% regen only allows you to take an extra 50% incoming damage.

The critical point you're missing is that, in general, nobody is interested in seeing what the effects are of incrementally improving your mitigation/regen against static amounts of DPS. You can calculate this all you like, mind, the problem is it's simply not relevant. A performance-oriented scrapper is almost always going to attempt to fight the most difficult enemies he can survive. If he can survive at most X DPS long-term and he then improves he survivability, he's not going to keep fighting things which do X dps. He's going to seek out tougher targets until he once again hits the limit of his survivability. If at 40% defense he can survive X DPS, going from 40% defense to 45% defense allows him to fight things which deal 2*X DPS, and that's what he's going to do. If he instead adds 50% regen to his 40% defense, he can now fight things which deal 1.5*X DPS, and *that's* what he will go do. Adding 5% defense allows him to fight things which are twice as nasty, while adding 50% regen only allows him to fight things which are 1.5 times as nasty.

*This* is why we say that the last 5% defense is a 100% boost in survivability, while 50% regen is only a 50% boost in survivability. To us, 'survivability' is 'what are the most dangerous possible things we can survive?' What you are doing is taking calculations that are based on *THIS* definition of survivability, changing the definition, and then claiming the calculations are wrong. They're not wrong, you are simply approaching the issue from a different set of assumptions. You can do that all you like, but it doesn't make what you are doing any more relevant to the issues we're actually talking about. Again, the problem is is *NOT* that Arcanaville, of all people, doesn't know what she's talking about, but that you are applying a different set of definitions and assumptions to the problem than everyone else is. You're arguing against a position that *nobody is actually taking*.

Edit: hmm, we cross-posted. About the first power, though - I don't think the name sounds very warshade-y. 'Astral' sounds like a peacebringer power to me. And were you thinking it'd work like fulcrum where it gets stronger based on the number of foes? That sounds a bit iffy to me, since to keep it from being overpowered the base values would have to be extremely small to the point where they'd be nearly useless when not saturated.

The peacebringer ones are really nice, I think. I especially like Bow Shock, both the name and the idea. I'm not too enthused on the warshade ones, though.

Fold space is ok, I guess - not super amazing, but at least it's potentially useful. Although I'd really like something to further differentiate between it and shadow recall (which, remember, every warshade gets for free) - is the ability to recall everyone at once worth a power pick when I automatically have the ability to do the same thing with a bit more time investment? Perhaps give it a very long recharge but have it give some sort of moderate duration buff to the recalled teammates (so if you're stealthing to the AV, when you recall your friends they get a buff to help beat him down)?

Vengeance is something you can already get from a pool. The devs don't usually like the ability to duplicate powers, and honestly it's a bit boring - I'd rather have something new and unique. Apart from the 'cast veng on self' idea (which would be fine if you don't want to change this power too much), if we want to keep to the 'dead bodies' theme but involve teammates in some way, perhaps something along the lines of a team-affecting mashup of mire and a rez? Drain the energy of enemies to rez your friends, each affected foe making them get up with more health/end along with some sort of debuff on the foes (maybe slow plus -damage and -tohit, sorta like a reverse mire)?

Power boost seems useful at first, but then you have to ask, 'what would I actually use this on?' The human powers it would affect would be: grav well's hold and grav snare's immob, grav em's stun, essence drain's small heal, stygan's heal and end boost, unchain's minor stun, mire's tohit boost, inky aspect's stun, and the movement slows in various powers. Unless I've missed any powers, I don't see anything in that list that would actually be usefully boosted by power boost with the exception of grav em. Everything else is either a relatively minor effect like the movement slows, already overkill like stygan or mire's tohit, or not significantly affected by power boost like inky. I honestly don't see much actual use in taking up an ancillary pool slot with power boost.

The problem is, like you said, what else can you buff? I'm not sure, really. One thing that comes to mind, though, is to make it a combination self-buff and foe debuff like something out of kin (like siphon speed), in keeping with the warshade's vampiric theme. Maybe foe -special, -end, slow, warshade +special, +end, +slow resistance? Stygan is great for filling up after fights, but not during them, so combined with the -special and the slow resistance this would be more useful. Give it a fairly long recharge and short duration on the (de)buffs, though, so it doesn't step on the toes of stuff like benumb or that poison debuff. (maybe 120s rech, 15s duration on everything except the slow resist and 30-45s duration on that?)

A wormhole-esque power at 47 is great. I agree that a carbon copy of wormhole would overlap a bit too much with grav em, though, and think a -KB immob is a good alternate version. However, removing the stun and KB leaves it with an amplified version of the same problem wormhole has - you'll get your face shot off using it. I would personally suggest having it inflict KD simultaneously with the teleport (so the KB protection would have to kick in a fraction of a second after that, but no biggie), and giving it a ~30-40% chance for a ~5s mag 2 hold. This doesn't completely negate incoming damage like a mez, but it would delay and stagger the alpha and give you time to hit a mire or grav em.

One thing I would definitely suggest is that all of these powers should have short animations. This opens up possibilities like 'recover from a wipe by grav em'ing baddies into a corner, team recall all the bodies on top of you/the baddies and then hit the rez', or 'recover from a wipe where you managed to finish off the enemy spawn by wormholing a fresh spawn in and then hitting the rez', or 'wormhole + grav em + mire', or 'use the power/end boost as a mid-fight refill', or whatever.

(Also, an aside - is it just me, or are both sets of icons the same color? Shouldn't the peacebringer ones be bluer?)

Because it's a relatively new powerset and there haven't been any comprehensive guides written for it yet?

If you're interested in the set, why not play a dual pistols character or two and write up your thoughts on it? You could be famous!

(Or, alternatively, read the guide linked to in the post right above yours.)

On my ice/ice, I'm gonna pick up combat jumping for a -KB proc, assault for the damage bonus, and pick back up hasten after I dropped it to fit in 4 powers from the ice epic. Since I don't bother to spend the $$$ to get super recharge builds, concealment isn't especially attractive to me.

If I didn't already have a travel power and everything from my prim/sec except for the AoE immob, the sleep, and chilling embrace, I'd be taking those. I don't usually skip good prim/sec powers, but sometimes I didn't have any choice, and I did find myself sacrificing travel powers fairly often, so on a lot of my characters those are the sort of things I'm picking up.

On the topic of cleaning up the program and making it work better, are there any plans to get the database editor working more stably? Ever since the switch to the more complicated database system a while back to accomodate VEATs, it has been extremely difficult to use, as it loves to throw out error messages and refuse changes for no apparent reason. Back before the change, I liked to copy powersets between ATs in order to speculate on proliferation, but since then I haven't been able to get it to work.

I'm gonna be respecing every last one of them. I don't have a single character whose build doesn't include at least one fitness power - even my triform warshade and regen scrapper have swift, just because I can't stand the base runspeed. Even when I'm unsure which power(s) I'd want to replace the fitness ones, I can still use it to move interesting powers earlier in the build. I won't be doing it all at once, of course, but slowly over the next few months as I play my many alts, they'll get respec'd. The only ones who would escape are those who were low enough level that they hadn't taken their quota of fitness powers yet, and I don't even remember off the top of my head if I currently have any like that.

However, it does give you a better chance to keep the debuff active. Since it only has a 20% chance to go off, slotting more than one gives you extra chances to activate it and therefore means that it's more likely to be active a larger fraction of the time. Whether that's worth the slots, though, is up to you.

Yup, I think I spent about 40 mil on my shield/mace - total build would be worth more because I bought the recovery uniques with merits, but aside from those splurges the build is almost entirely pool a/b recipes. Multistrike, red fortune, crushing impact, oh how do I love thee...

~50% positional defenses, ~45% S/L res, and boosted HP is nothing to sneer at. I don't have membranes in AD or lots of recharge so my DDR is only in the 60s, but that's still enough for my 5% cushon to absorb a couple hits. The 25% global recharge might not be enough for significant stacking of AD, but it nicely makes up for the lesser recharge of the multistrikes. It's a hell of a tank once you get it up there.

Can't play right now, least until I get internet at my apartment, but I wouldn't mind taking part. I probably could make money on the market if I tried (doesn't seem *that* hard), but just never been interested in putting forth the effort. If you'd still be open to takers in a few weeks, I could put in about 100m or so.

Well, if I recall correctly the siphon life change was from 20s recharge to 10s, and some smaller amount of damage to scale 1.96 - in other words, it now has the damage that a normal 10s recharge attack does, and effectively gets the heal effect for free. I could definitely understand being a little hesitant about buffing life drain/tesla cage so much.

At the moment, life drain does scale 1 damage (equivalent to a 4s recharge attack) with a 15s recharge and a 10% heal. Tesla cage does a trivial scale 0.15 damage with a 10s recharge and a scale 8 hold (which, strangely enough, is on the 'ranged ones' table instead of the usual mez table, giving it a fixed 8s duration instead of scaling up to ~11s at higher levels).

If life drain were to directly follow the siphon life pattern, it would get scale 1.96 damage with a 10s recharge. If tesla cage were just to get its recharge in damage, it would also end up at scale 1.96. Those are probably a bit too good. Personally, I would lower life drain's recharge to 10s, and set both powers at scale 1.32 damage (appropriate to a 6s recharge attack, in between the damage of dark blast/charged bolts and lightning bolt/gloom).

When I first heard about MMOs, I couldn't figure out how you could justify 'paying for a game over and over'. I always swore to myself that I'd never play one, being perfectly content with diablo II on b-net for my online coop gaming fix.

Then I came home from school for fall break to find that my brother had been convinced by my cousin to sign up for one of those (*gasp*) pay to play MMOs, called city of heroes. I had never even known there was such a thing as a non-fantasy MMO, and a few days of looking over his shoulder was enough to show me the difference between a more or less non-supported online multiplayer game and the sort of content-rich continuously updated game the MMO model makes possible. And, of course, like many I was hooked by the customization possible. (You mean I don't have to wear a fugly purple mask if I want a good set for my sorceress? And I won't look like everyone else? Sold!) When I returned to school I signed up, and although my brother eventually moved on, I've been here ever since. It was quite a while before I realized the degree to which I'd lucked out in my choice of MMO - I would never have been nearly as happy in a more traditional game, but I'd probably never have known what I was missing.

To be even more specific, fulcrum shift actually consists of a series of pseudopets summoned by the main power. Some of the effects are autohit, and some are not.

The main fulcrum shift power is autohit. This is actually a single target power, and it has two effects. First, it summons one buff pseudopet to radiate a buff around the caster. Second, it summons the main debuff pseudopet at the target.

The debuff pseudopet casts a single 30 foot radius PBAoE, which is *not* autohit. This PBAoE power debuffs enemy damage and summons another buff pseudopet at each target hit.

So the power won't ever *completely* miss, since the initial power that summons the debuff pseudopet is autohit. This means that you will also always get one buff radiating from the caster. However, the debuff pseudopet needs to hit its targets in order to summon the buff pseudopets from them, so if you're up against high level or high defense foes with no acc slotted in fulcrum, you won't get nearly as large a damage buff as you might expect since the debuff pet will miss most of the enemies.

Eh, in terms of the actual bruising effect, there's very little difference between tier 1s. Since the duration doesn't stack and is reasonably long (10s I think?), all that you really need is to be able to toss your tier 1 at least every 10 seconds, and that's possible out of the box for all of them.

What actually makes a tier 1 good for using this effect is that the tier 1 is otherwise worth using, so that you don't lower your damage too much just to lay the debuff on the target. Jab is probably one of the worst for this, actually, since its DPA is so horrible. I'd guess you'd still see a net damage increase by rotating jab in every 10s or so, but it'd definitely not be as much of an increase as it would be for a set whose tier one is actually otherwise worth using in an attack chain.

Which set would take advantage of it the best? Probably whatever set has the highest ST damage at whatever level of recharge you're considering (since you're then multiplying a bigger number), as long as it's also a set where it's feasable to use the tier one in those chains. You'd have to ask one of the people well versed in attack chain number crunching for that, though, that's not an area I have much experience in.

Willpower does have a taunt aura (rise to the challenge), but it's significantly worse than other taunt auras. Most taunt auras have mag 4 taunt for 13.5 seconds, rise to the challenge is mag 3 for 1.25 seconds. As far as I know the mag doesn't actually make a difference, but the duration definitely does. The total threat generated is proportional to the *remaining* taunt duration on the target, so RTTC's short duration means you're generating *much* less threat than normal aggro auras. On top of that, the duration is short enough that it might expire between pulses on higher level foes, so it's really quite bad at keeping the attention of mobs focused on you.

The extremely weak taunt aura is more or less unique to willpower, however. All the other sets have at least one aura with a taunt duration of 13.5 seconds or more, so any other set will hold aggro much more easily than willpower. If you're really going for hard-core aggro management, though, the best set is generally accepted to be ice. Ice actually has *two* aggro auras - chilling embrace and icicles - and chilling embrace ticks faster and has a larger radius than normal. Chilling embrace also carries a strong debuff effect, and those sorts of effects seem to have a pretty significant impact on the threat totals.

That's only if you really have to have the absolute best aggro management, though. Anything besides willpower will also work well.

Unfortunately, no. That would be nice, but it'd really be overpowered.

The way procs work is that they have a certain chance of going off (for some procs, this is 100%). The way that chance is rolled then depends on the type of power it's slotted into.

If it's a click power, the chance will be rolled each time the power is used. So a proc with a 20% chance to deal some damage slotted into a melee attack will roll the 20% chance each time the attack is used. (Or, in your case, if you slotted the gaussian's BU proc into something like build up, it would roll the 5% chance when build up was used, so 5% of the time you'd get a double powered buildup).

If it's slotted into a toggle or auto power, the proc checks every 10 seconds. Note that it is still subject to the random roll to see if it goes off. So in your case, if you put the BU proc into invincibility, every 10 seconds it will roll the 5% chance. So, on average, about once every 200 seconds (3 and a third minutes) you'll get a short build up effect applied to your character (of course since it's random it won't be *exactly* every 200 seconds like clockwork, in fact it could go off twice in a row if you're really lucky, but it'll average to once every 200s). So it will be nowhere near a permanent buff.

Honestly, the gaussian's BU proc is more or less useless, in my opinion. It might very occasionally help out, but the proc chance is so small that I don't think it's worth the slot unless you're going for the 6th slot defense set bonus.

At least the right posts got nuked this time.

As to the actual topic, my personal opinion is that the usefulness of choking cloud varies widely depending on your personal preferences and what other powers you've got to go along with it. If you prefer to avoid melee, then I wouldn't think the end cost worth it. But if you've got other PBAoEs (especially auras) or spend lots of time jumping in and out of melee, I'd definitely consider it.

One potential issue to watch out for is that, even though it doesn't take accuracy enhancements, it is *not* auto-hit and in fact only has base accuracy. Thus, if you actually want to use it you'll need to do something to ensure it can hit its targets. It doesn't accept accuracy enhancements, but anything that boosts your tohit (such as tactics or the kismet +6% tohit IO) will affect it. Also, although I haven't tested this myself, both accuracy set bonuses and multi-aspect hold set IOs with accuracy components *should* work.

Of course, that's an extra slotting burden on a power that already needs significant slotting, but that's just the kind of power it is - one that needs lots of slots. It can definitely be useful, though. (definitely consider the +2 mag proc, also)

Yeah, ditto on the ignore thing, it's just way too funny to read his lunatic rants. Plus if I didn't see his posts I wouldn't be able to tell exactly what he's wrong about this time and thus refute it, although it seems there's enough people doing so that I hardly need to bother.

Well, I swapped my ice/ice from lev to the ice app, and it's been quite nice. Still have hibernate, and swapped out shark skin and waterspout for sleet, hoarfrost, and ice storm. Hoarfrost is helpful for soloing, and ice storm/sleet really up my contribution on teams. I do miss shark skin and waterspout a bit, but no way would I go back. Sleet alone is worth the change, and ice storm's extra dose of AoE death fills in a hole I never really realized I had.