Nihilii

Thanks.

Post edited - making attack chains at a quick glance leads to stupid mistakes !

Not only it is very impressive but even more amazing is you're doing this as fast as most builds do the regular RWZ challenge.

Congrats !

0%.

Every bit of defense helps, so Weave by itself will help without any other defense. As a DM, your attacks also do tohit debuffs, so in fact you've got more "defense" than you'd believe against the foe(s) you're hitting, through tohit debuffs.

That being said, an effective difference isn't always obvious. With nothing but unslotted CJ (which is half as much as Weave), I've seen deflected messages pop up about once every two missions on average. The general consensus on the topic is usually that you need about 20-25% total defense for it to make a noticeable difference.

How many trial accounts now, 11, 12? It's getting hard to keep track.

Ignore my post. I'm obviously a rambling madman and what I am saying is obviously totally unrelated to the topic or the person who started it !

It's scaled down to AV level in the TF.

Seeing as a level 50 AV gives 67000 influence (or 33500 influence and X prestige, as it's a 50/50 split), seeing as your level 52 AV gave you 30000 influence and 300 prestige, I think it's safe to assume someone else did a significant part of the damage, be it an AE ally or rogue mob.

That, and I don't think it's mathematically possible for Spines to do the minimum ~200-210 DPS it should do to beat a level 52 LR (between his 50% res and regen) without outside help.

Regardless, being able to kill an AV is irrelevant to Spizzie's point. You can be the weakest at taking down hard targets and still be able to kill AVs. It just means others will kill AVs faster.

Hide gives that kind of defense unsuppressed, but as soon as you attack or are attacked it drops to ~2%.

As for CB vs Havoc, I believe most stalkers don't care about DPS or soloing anything bigger than an EB, hence they go for burst over anything else. That's purely conjecture, though.

Frankly, I think fighting a bunch of different EBs is a better survivability test than a RWZ challenge.

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I found the idea of “you can't mount an appreciable amount of defense” to be a bit off.

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Agreed.

I focused on the ceiling part and didn't pay enough attention to that part. Considering the whole thing, you are indeed right.

A SD/DM tanker can solo most AVs. Having tanker survivability makes it easy in most cases to keep 11-12* lieutenants** around you.

* It's best to have more than 10 foes in range to ensure a 100% tohit chance. The maximum tohit chance is 95%, but if you have more than the target cap in range for your AoE, the game will roll tohit checks for every mob in range and use the successfull ones until your power hits the target cap. Seeing as it is very unlikely with a 5% chance to miss to miss more than 2 foes at once, you end up with maximum Soul Drain buffs at all times.

** Minions die during the fight unless they have significant negative resistances, but lieutenants have enough regen to take it for a long time.

While I'm not sure Claws/Regen has the lowest high end survivability of all Claws combos, and regardless of my usual rants about the RWZ challenge as a metric - ah, who I am kidding. I'll rant anyway.

With the Mentalists/Mesmerists, it's one of the few situations where positional defense is less valuable than usual. There's also no defense debuffs and lots of psi damage ; defense debuffs are usually harsher on regen than some other secondaries, and regen doesn't care about psi damage (except for mental blast slowing down their rech, but that's one power).

I'd also argue just because people haven't done swipe challenges on other secondaries doesn't mean it can't be done ; although, honestly, I doubt we'll ever see this from a Claws/Inv or Claws/Fire. Between scrapper ceilings being so high and game situations being so different (the RWZ challenge being, in my opinion, more forgiving for regen users than some other game situations) it doesn't seem far fetched to me to believe that the weakest combo in survivability could still do a Swipe challenge, if played by a great player with a great build. Bringing me to my next point : Iggy is Iggy, using him to discuss a build power level is basically cheating.

Granted, this rant could be summed up with "while I feel you are most likely correct, one anecdotal evidence doesn't seem like a good enough basis for a counterpoint in this discussion". I guess I'm enjoying this too much.

Here's what I'd change for general play :

Unless you'd like to keep Stealth for concept, I'd replace it with Conserve Power. It does wonder about your endurance management, allowing you to switch the Impervium sets for Aegis sets and significantly increase your fire/cold def. As for the stealth part, with a stealth IO in sprint you can have the same effect (save for the 2% defboost and lotg).

The Kinetic Combat proc in Vengeful Slice is, in my opinion, useless. When it procs, it turns VS' knockdown into a knockback, which isn't much better in terms of mitigation and will force you to run after your target.

Ablating Strike could use the Achilles Heel -res proc. It's a great boost to the offensive capabilities of your whole team against EBs, AVs and GMs.

BF is underslotted if you're planning to chain the AV combo.

The two additional slots spent in Power Slice could be used for a Zephyr set in CJ, replacing one LoTG as well. It'd give a bigger bonus to energy and additional F/C defense.


As for AV soloing :

If you're willing to use inspirations, the only thing you'd need (well, not "need" per se, but really, really want to) change for the task would be Blinding Feint's slotting.

Without inspirations, I believe it'd take lots of changes to have a decent success rate against anything non S/L ; most if not all of the advice above, additional slots in Health, possibly Aid Self and Conserve Power (hence dropping three powers).

In my opinion, WP is the easiest to play and Invul is the strongest. That being said, both are very easy to play and very strong.

I'm very fond of soloing the ITF. Cool boss fights, great maps, challenging.

Granted, it's not efficient for merit farming !

I've survived it on my inv by hitting DP right when the Soulstorm went off (actually before, and with the lag it went off right when SS hit, it was luck) or having DP up and not getting hit at all by her following hits.

I'm not sure I understand the question, so let me try to clarify what I meant : the Achilles Heel and Fury of Gladiator -res IOs are two different sources of -res, if both procs go off at the same time your target is debuffed by 40%.

They stack.

Redside ? Blueside ? People still stick to sides for AVs, after the AE? That is so 2008...

I consider GC to be superior than either fort or RA. So, yes, I treat scrappers without GC exactly like I treat emps without fort or RA : I shrug and resume killing.

Dark sucks.

Damn cloak of darkness hiding my costume.

Damn me being too weak and number-obsessed to just skip the damn power.

I don't see WP being able to take the same amount of punishment against S/L foes or defense debuffs, it shouldn't be even close (and rightfully so). It might be weaker against F/C/E/N too. Against psi/toxic, WP will be better.

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Any other [Dual Blade] combo lowers your DPS.

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Despite the stacking bug, Empower->SS is higher DPS than BF->AV. That was before I14, I suspect it pulls ahead a bit more now with the new -res proc (both combos use it, but empower->SS chains attacks faster meaning procs go off more often).

I don't subscribe to the notion you have to use all the attacks in DB to be efficient, either. In my opinion, people tend to value combos too much. It is shiny and noticeable, what with the words showing up and all - and I don't say this in a derogatory way, psychologically it feels great to see combos go off.

Regardless of my feelings on the issue, from a pure performance point of view, 3 out of the 4 combos are selfsufficient. Empower->SS and BF->AV deal respectable ST damage, BF->Sweep->SS does good AoE damage. You don't need to have all 3 or even more than one, in fact I believe you're actually hurting your performance by having them all as you're limited by animation times.

A case can be made for having both Sweep and one of the ST combos to be able to switch between ST and AoE situations. I'd argue even the ST combos have some AoE damage, and there's the option of dual builds, but I understand it's not for everyone.

Still, you could say the same thing about, for example, Fire Melee. Fire Melee has the option to build a good attack chain with Fire Sword, Incinerate and GFS, and the option to have awesome AoE damage with Combustion, Breath of Fire and FSC. Scorch is a mandatory attack, leaving BU and Taunt. Yet I see plenty of FM builds lacking two, three or more FM powers.

Finally, something I haven't seen mentioned : DB can take up to 2 -res procs in fast recharging attacks. This is, in my experience, quite significant against tough targets such as AVs/GMs, especially for a team player as resistance debuffs buff everyone's damage, not just your own.

Edit : all this is a bit offtopic, because on the "WM against DB" debate, I think both sets are close enough in both ST and AoE performance the only concern should be, do you prefer slow and strong animations or quick and nimble ones ?

SR would indeed be a better option for an AV killer, in my opinion. It's not the focus of my character, though, just something I enjoy doing sometimes.

I like WP for an all purpose toon ; it's not going to be the best at anything, but the performance is steady in all situations.

SR is close to that, and has better performance in many situations, but still has a few holes I wanted to avoid. Specifically :

- Lack of heal/regen. I'm fed up with Aid Self, despite it fitting my concept ; and 300-400% regen isn't good enough by itself with about 1800hp, in my opinion.
- No typed psi defense, no fear protection.
- Low HP and no resistances except for scaling res. Sometimes I'm slow to react, I like having good HP or resistances to take more than two hits.
- Practiced Brawler forcing a redraw every 2 minutes.


In a nutshell, I chose quality of life over maximum performance.

You can outdamage lower level GMs without -regen, if you have access to strong external +dam. It's not so much about damage scaling as it is about HP scaling. Mob HP tend to be a lot lower at low levels, and giant monsters are no exception.