Obitus

Glad you got a chance to fit in those extra AoEs. They really are very good. To be clear, I wasn't saying that ranged DEF is better on Fire/Energy in the other thread; I was saying that a single-target ranged build is better for Fire/Energy or (especially) Fire/Fire (because Ring of Fire is just that good).

If you take Psy Scream, then a Fire/Mental build can become a ranged AoE monster. It won't win any single-target ranged DPS awards, but it'll be competitive in that area, and will have Drain Psyche in its backpocket for a little extra virtual DPS.

I think you'll find that the ranged DEF build (with Hover and a +resist APP shield) is more survivable through most content than the melee/ranged hybrid S/L (and energy) DEF build, but it does limit your options somewhat, or at least make them a little less attractive. It's a difficult decision to make, so much so that I ended up using the (painfully extravagant) dual-build option for the first time on my Fire/Mental Blaster.

If I came off as rather too strident in this thread, I apologize. It wasn't my intention to say that you had no experience with the power sets in question; it just seemed to me like you were largely unsatisfied with previous iterations of your build until you hit upon your most recent one a few days ago, and that you were perhaps a little too enthused about its capabilities. If so, then that's understandable. It's always nice when an IO build comes together.

It's not cheating to use -regen debuffs (that was tongue-in-cheek), but it's also potentially misleading. If the purpose of the comparison is to say that Blasters are better than you thought relative to Scrappers, then you can't very well use the only Blaster power set with -regen and an unusually favorable-to-Pylon-tests damage type to justify your position vis-a-vis single-target DPS.

If, for instance, that same Fire/SR Scrapper were running a Drain Psyche analogue (as I had it slotted, which is about where yours is in terms of uptime), then you could add probably another 75-85 DPS to his total. If he were using an attack chain that was let's say 20% psi damage, then his (virtual) DPS would go up by another 10 or so. (All rough approximations.)

If you were to add the same conditions to one of the absurd 300ish DPS Scrappers using Soul Drain and/or AAO, then you'd be looking at something close to 400 (virtual) DPS.

None of which is to say that Blasters are incapable of matching Scrapper ST DPS on average. If I went pure offensive on my Fire/Mental (and practiced a few runs to find the best rhythm) I could probably get a good deal higher than 260, but then I wouldn't be able to survive the Pylon either.

I guess the bottom line is that the Pylon test doesn't really prove anything. The best times on that list last I checked belong to Cold Defenders/Controllers, and no one is going to argue that those are the best general-purpose damage dealers. Regen debuffs are only equivalent to DPS when you're soloing a single hard target, after all. (They are equivalent to DPS when you're teaming too, but only up to the point where the target's regen is turned off. In other words, they don't stack like DPS, and they're virtually useless against anything less than an Elite Boss.)

Ranged DEF Blasters get a bulk of their DEF from set bonuses, though having their toggles go down can cost them as much 10% DEF depending on the build.

The OP's build (as linked above) loses the better part of 25% DEF on mez. Scorpion Shield is the heavy lifter there. Even a split-second mez on that build can mean you lose your DEF for the remainder of the fight to cascading debuff failure.

Ah, my fault. I read you wrong.

They don't detoggle on mez, but their DEF does go away for the duration. Thus, certain builds do rely on their being up, but they aren't droppable.

Scorpion Shield, Weave, Combat Jumping, and Hover all qualify.

Technically true is technically true. The rest is subjective. If you don't feel that the technical truth is relevant to your gameplay, then that's great, but it doesn't mean that it's irrelevant to everyone else.

If we want to talk about technical truths that aren't truly relevant, then I'd have to say that your point on Defiance struck me as terribly over-optimistic. Yes, Defiance can't be turned off, even by ludicrously well-stacked mez effects. In that sense, it is technically true that Defiance has an advantage over other forms of mez protection. But it's a pointless observation; in practice, most any other form of bona-fide mez protection is better than Defiance.

The ability to fire off first-tier attacks is nice when you're facing a single target or two, but those aren't, in my experience, the situations in which I care about being mezzed (or even the situations where I'm most likely to be mezzed). I care about mez protection when I'm getting 30-second stuns spammed at me by a full spawn of Malta, for instance. I ain't gonna kill my opponents with Flares before they kill me in that situation.

Blaster mez protection (or the lack thereof) is particularly of interest to high-end soft-capped builds, and especially those that lean on Ancillary/Patron armors. If you're soft-capped, then you're probably taking on more opponents than you would otherwise, which means that you're less likely to be saved by Defiance's little perk. It also means that those opponents will see a significant chunk of your DEF drop when you're mezzed. Even if you pop a break free a split second later, there's a chance that your DEF will have started a cascade failure.

So in an odd way, the lack of mez protection is both more relevant and more annoying for Blasters with more defenses.

Now is being mezzed an acceptable disadvantage for Blasters? Sure. Can you work around it through managing inspirations? Most of the time, sure. I never argued otherwise. The only point is that I believe the OP is painting a bit too rosy a picture of Blaster survivability relative to other ATs (specificially Scrappers). I probably wouldn't have blinked at his argument if I hadn't seen him post yesterday about his build, which (in combination with another thread about a week ago featuring a different Fire/Mental build) leads me to believe that he hasn't a firm basis on which to say that Blasters are awesome survivalists.

Even at the high end, Blasters are still probably the squishiest AT, and often by a lot. That's worth mentioning even if the trade offs are acceptable to the OP, to you, or even to me.

I imagine Paragon PD hurt much worse.

Man, those dudes are nasty without significant energy DEF/RES.

The Blaster version of Fire Blast is a relatively low-DPA attack. Mind Probe is a better filler between Flares and Blaze if all you're interested in the highest possible single-target DPS.

Blasters are still pretty squishy, even with soft-capped DEF -- given that you'll never cap to all positions, and given that you're still short on mez protection, which is available to almost every other AT in one form or another. Considering that you apparently finalized your current build only a handful of days ago, it's hard to take your claims vis-a-vis survivability with anything more than a grain of salt; obviously the matter is largely subjective, but my rather large body of experience with Fire/Mental builds (both ranged and S/L capped) is that you will occasionally run up against something that hands you your backside.

And especially if you're going to run at +2/x8. YMMV.

For what it's worth, running a very similar-to-yours Fire/Mental build against a Pylon, I ended up with (virtual) DPS in the 260 range. I probably could have improved that a little bit just through practice (tightening up the rhythm of attack chain and Aim/BU usage), but that was a good enough ballpark figure for me.

That included Mind Probe, though it was a little under the ED-cap for damage (using a set of Kinetic Combat and nothing else).

I say it was virtual DPS because Drain Psyche's regen debuff is obviously a large factor, as is the Pylon's lack of psionic resistance. Pylons resist all other types by 20%, so in a sense using any psi attacks in a one-for-one comparison with other characters' DPS scores is cheating.

You might be able to match 260ish DPS with your build given a tight rhythm, but I doubt you'll exceed it by very much. We can argue back and forth about whether herding mobs to saturate Against All Odds is a fair tactic, but it's worth noting that the highest Scrappers on the Pylon list get to 300+ DPS without regen debuffs or psionic damage.

You're also missing out severely on AoE damage by not taking Fire Breath. [Edit] Oh, and you don't have permanent Drain Psyche. You're 5 seconds short when Hasten's up, and you're going to have a good ~15 seconds of downtime on Hasten every cycle, assuming you're using the build in this thread.

Right you are. My fault.

For what it's worth, this is my Ice/Storm's current build (AFAIK; I can't log into the game right now to double-check every detail):

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.90
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Natural Controller
Primary Power Set: Ice Control
Secondary Power Set: Storm Summoning
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fighting
Ancillary Pool: Psionic Mastery

She's not what I'd call a high-damage build; I conceded that that wasn't a feasible goal for this character long ago. However, her single-target DPS under the right circumstances is pretty darn good. Basically (and as I'm sure you know) those favorable circumstances require that you're facing a singular target so that your pets will reliably focus on it.

The build is only a for-instance to give you some ideas. If you don't want to go crazy with set bonuses then that's fine; the main thing is that you slot your single-target attacks as attacks, preferably with a proc or two. Cast Freezing Rain, Lightning Storm, and Tornado on Trapdoor as often as you can. Sic Jack on him.

If he spawns clones, then kill them as fast as you can. If all else fails, you can (or could, last I tried) Gale him into the lava below his platform. That lava offsets an awful lot of +regen.

Posting in-depth build critiques is usually a thankless job, as you yourself note above. It's also usually redundant; on any given forum I can usually find at least three separate threads requesting the same thing on the very first page -- or close enough to the same thing.

Doesn't mean I don't occasionally critique builds or even post example builds in response, but I can see why people shy away from it. It's one thing to post general advice about a given power set or combo; it's another thing to analyze a poster's specific build and then adjust it based on his specifications.

In this particular case, the OP doesn't give anyone much to work with. The budget-doesn't-matter-because-I'm-gonna-farm thing is a bit of a red flag too -- not because any build is out-of-reach to anyone who's determined enough to invest in a character, but rather, because the most expensive builds tend to take a little more dedication and focus than most people are willing to put into them (including me, most of the time). And if the OP's idea here is to make a farmer then at what point does the farmer build itself take up too many resources? If you have those resources before you roll the farmer, then why do you need the farmer? If not, then isn't it self-defeating to spend half a year outfitting a character whose only purpose is to outfit other characters?

Chicken, meet egg. Fairly or unfairly, farmer-build requests make me skeptical. If you take the request at face value and post some monstrously expensive build, then you can almost set your watch to the inevitable market-forum whine, or the inevitable request for a cheaper intermediate build.

Yup.

It's been years since I looked at the stats for a generic AV, but if we assume that the AV has 100% regeneration (the base rate), then his ticks come every 12 seconds, not every 15. You get a full bar of health every 4 minutes, or every 240 seconds. 240 / 20 = 12.

With a subtractive regen debuff of 75%, we go to 240 / 0.25 = 960, or one 5% tick of regen every 48 seconds.

If we assume that your HP number is correct (28,271), then the regen debuff drops the AV from ~118 HP/sec to ~29 HP/sec, or a net loss of 89 HP/sec.

That's a lot of virtual DPS. Is it competitive with resistance debuffs in a full team? Probably not, but then again you may not be facing a generic level 50 AV. And let's face it; a full team with good damage dealers isn't going to have much trouble with a generic level 50 AV anyway.

Suffice to say that -regen is a help, and potentially a very big help as opponent HP rises.

That said, I definitely agree with the general sentiment that -regen debuffs are overrated when people recruit for teams. Call it a hold-over from a time long past; call it an unconscious association of -regen with some of the better debuffing sets out there (Cold, Rad, etc). Whatever the case may be, a lot of people seem unwilling to leave home without copious -regen debuffs, when what they should really be looking for is general damage output (whether it comes through -regen or -resistance or just full-on Blaster/Scrapper carnage) and enough mitigation to survive (whether it comes from good aggro management or a bunch of buff support).

Either way, groups heavy on buff/debuff are unparalleled, so we're sort of splitting hairs here. People may very well have a flawed understanding of regen debuffs, and it's kinda annoying to be stuck with the no-regen-debuff stigma on a support character (like my Stormie), but at the end of the day, people aren't wrong for loving Rad and Cold and Traps.

Likewise, when you have no other mitigation, 50 hp/sec is better than 5% DEF under any conceivable situation where the choice is likely to matter. As early as the first thread, Bunny didn't care.

I believe he understands the math. He's shown on the Tanker forum that he knows how to make a good build. But he's also shown a desire to throw numbers around like an eighth-grade student flush from his first algebra class and determined to prove the adult world wrong. The rest of us aren't wrong, and his way of looking at mitigation is far from new. It's not like it's some great revelation.

Whether his arguments were made in good faith or not, all he's managed to do here (over and over again) is to provide the exceptions that prove the rule. Not a single one of the counter-examples he's so contemptuously supplied is instructive in any kind of gameplay-relevant way. And as was noted earlier, his model breaks in hilarious ways when we plug in 100% mitigation.

And so the theory built on cherry picking finds itself cherry picked to death. C'est la vie.

Regen is a subtractive debuff, AFAIK. So that 75% (really 500 * 0.15) is cutting the AV's regen by three quarters, unless the AV in question has some sort of additional regen buff.

It makes a pretty massive difference, either solo or teamed. The only caveat about team play is that regen debuffs only stack up to a point, whereas you're unlikely to have your resistance debuffs entirely marginalized by teammates.

Both debuffs are extremely useful against hard targets.

It would almost have to be a Cardiac-boost build given the endurance consumption versus recovery (it has a little less recovery than yours does), but then you could also shut off Tough most of the time.

I took Mu Mastery, but that's a matter of preference. Anyway, this build maintains comparable levels of DEF to the important attack types (soft-capped to S/L and within a small Luck of the soft cap for E/N) and it has +68% in global recharge bonuses. In return, it loses 0.15 in recovery, but also consumes 0.14 less end per second through toggle use.

A casual glance at attack slotting indicates that you'll also consume less end from attacking.

You also lose a couple points of RES across the board, and about 2% of max HP with Dull Pain active -- though DP will be available more often, too.

Obviously, the Hecatomb in KO and the Apocalypse in Mu Lightning are best-case. Mostly I just like to plan for certain purple sets only to assure myself that I can fit them in at some point -- maintaining the desired amount of DEF even without the extra Kinetic Combat (for instance) in KO Blow. Come to think of it, actually, the Hecatomb proc should go in Haymaker instead of Punch, because you should be using Haymaker more often.

Attack chain with presented slotting is -> KO Blow, Mu Lightning, Haymaker, Punch, Mu Lightning, Haymaker --> 0.1 second pause, then repeat. That should work most of the time based on a back-of-the-napkin calc, but won't be infinitely sustainable because Hasten isn't permanent. And if you sub out the purples, you'll lose recharge enhancement in your two best attacks, so you'd need a different chain. Even with cheaper sets, though, you shouldn't need Air Superiority.

Which brings up another point: I like Fly. I take it almost every time I build a character. If you don't want Fly and no longer need Air Superiority, then you could fit in another pool, maybe Concealment for a couple of LoTG mules (I used Hover as one at the end of the build).

YMMV and all that jazz. Just thought I'd post something for you to look over.

First, I had posted in this thread before the issue even came up. Second, you brought it up:

Go ahead and report me if you like. Censorship is the last refuge of a weak mind. Of course, there's no guarantee that the Mods will agree with you in this case. You opened the door.

Also, if you truly believed I were griefing you, you could simply put me on ignore. But that's not what bothers you, is it? It bothers you that I'm allowed to voice my disagreement at all. Look at the post above yours. Where is the griefing?

Look, Blue, I don't have anything personal against you, but you're misrepresenting the whole flap over your build a couple of weeks ago. It's a functional build; no one said that you couldn't kill a grey lietenant with it. The issues were that:

• You went out of your way to cram expensive recharge bonuses into the build, even to the build's detriment -- and then you whined that the build was too expensive and that therefore the Market is unfair.
  
• When it became clear that you weren't interested in listening to arguments about the Market's fairness or unfairness, several people offered to help you with your build, to make it perform better at lower cost -- because, generally, the extreme high-end of IOs don't provide the bulk of the performance increase; the yellow/orange IOs do that.
  
• Then you posted your build on the Brute forum and it turned out that you were hell-bent on slotting +recharge bonuses but you wouldn't take Hasten. On top of that, some of your slotting choices were not just extravagant; they were self-defeating. Panacea in Siphon Life. Gravitational Anchor in Midnight Grasp.

The last iteration of your build that I saw was not built "to tank." It was built as a kind of mini-monument to wanton profligacy. You have no +DEF to speak of, and any bonuses you might have to regeneration and/or +HP are incidental to your quest for recharge, which is a great thing to stack, but it isn't an end in itself.

Again, yours is a functional build, but it could be better and it could be cheaper. As Werner says (as I said to you in the Tanker forum), DM/INV happens to be a very tanky power-set combination, but it requires that you use Siphon Life regularly (not as a situational burst heal, as you were intent to do), and you really need some amount of +DEF to make the build shine. It doesn't have to be soft-capped to all attack types with one foe in range, but if you could get soft-capped at least to S/L you'd be a lot better off. A few seconds here or there on Dull Pain and Soul Drain isn't going to make or break you at the level of recharge you have.

Yes, it depends, and the whole concept of "purpled" as a distinct category of build strikes me as pointless and artificial. I have characters that would benefit very little from slotting the one or two purple sets that I could reasonably fit into their builds. I also have a couple of builds for which a few purple sets would allow me to re-arrange everything such that I'd get a significant boost in performance.

I also have a couple of builds that have very cheap purple sets slotted (like Coercive Persuasion). Almost all of my so-called mature builds have a purple proc IO or two. Do those even count as purpled?

Mostly, I have builds that could theoretically benefit from purples, but I'd need something else that's massively expensive even to allow myself to clear the space for them (namely, the PvP +DEF IO). In these cases, I'm looking at (based on prices from a week or so ago) probably 8-13 billion influence for a fairly small proportional performance gain. It's nice to think about, but I'm probably never gonna be comfortable committing so much to any one character build.

That said, to answer the spirit of the question posed by the OP -- in most cases, it's not even close. A well-planned IO build (whether it features purples or not) will tend to out-perform a generic-IO build with the Uncommon Incarnate boost. That may change as more of the Incarnate system is unveiled, but so far, we're talking (mostly) incidental bonuses for Alpha. I'm sure there are cases where a given slot unduly favors a given build, or cases where a player doesn't care about exemplaring and can thus retool his entire build around the alpha slot, but those strike me as exceptions.

The good part (if the OP's aim is to ask about over-arching balance) is that Alpha probably gives a higher proportional gain to non-IOed characters. But I doubt very much that anyone who's gone to the trouble to plan and equip an expensive IO build isn't also going to (try to) get all the Incarnate boosts for that build. Even if it takes some time

Yeah, it's been going on since basically the beginning, with varying degrees of success given all the changes to AV regen and whatnot somewhere in the middle there. Probably the first major shot fired in the never-ending Tanker-versus-Scrapper debate was a video posted by TheConfessor just after Issue 1 (IIRC) that showed him soloing Marauder on a perma-Unstoppable Scrapper.

I remember personally soloing Dominatrix on an MA Scrapper in like Issue 1 (maybe 2, a little foggy). Took like 50 minutes because of her Smash resistance.

In any case, as fun as it is to set up a character to be as self-sufficient as possible -- and Scrappers/Brutes are probably the most well-suited to that particular standard -- if you want a specialized AV soloer, then you're better off with a buff/debuff build (like Cold/Sonic on a Defender, or Cold or Rad paired with Illusion on a Controller) than you are with a Scrapper. Some AVs are just impossible to solo for Scrappers.

Exactly right, but that's the fallacy that Bunny (endlessly) tried to bait everyone in the other thread into falling into. You can't draw an equivalence between an arbitrary amount of incoming DPS and the survivability line when the former is unknowable in practical terms and the latter is known just by looking at Mids'.

Sure, if you want to say that for some reason we don't know the character's starting regen/healing/HP then you might as well pick the opponent's DPS number out of a hat -- but we do know the character's starting values for all of the above. We don't know how relevant a given hat-picked DPS number is.

It wasn't my intention to correct you on a point you didn't understand; clearly you do understand. I was just trying to clarify why it serves no useful purpose to indulge Bunny by admitting that the opponent's DPS is crucial.

The survivability line acts as a proxy for the incoming DPS. That's the point.

All you need to know is the character's HP, DEF/RES, and expected healing/regeneration rate and you can figure out what incoming DPS you can survive for X amount of time (or forever). If you want to choose between two different build options, then you just take the appropriate figures and compare.

Bunny would have us act on a number that's divorced from practical context. "Ok, you're better off with the regen when incoming DPS falls beneath [for example] 100 DPS." That's great, except that as a player I have no way of knowing what 100 DPS actually represents in gameplay terms. Would I be able to go AFK indefinitely under 100 DPS regardless of my choice? In the alternative case (where DEF outstrips regen at some massive number) would I be screwed either way at the numerically-approved level of incoming damage?

He's giving us a correct (more correct, he argues) version of the same number that the survivability-line method gives us, but he fails to take into account that number's relevance.

And then he's telling us all we've been misguided to seek the more relevant number.

You keep saying that the math in this thread is appalling, but you also acknowledge in your first post in the other thread that DEF has a non-linear effect on survivability (I think your exact word was, "exponential").

The math is correct; you just prefer a different approach to the same problem. An impractial approach, as it happens. You never did address that.

And your blog is worthless, but thanks.

Yes, exactly. We're measuring survivability. Bunny's measuring mitigation.

Neither approach is fundamentally wrong. The problem is that Bunny's method requires you to have the opponent's DPS, whereas the survivability method uses the character's immortality line -- or 60-second-survivability line, or 30-second-survivability line -- to approximate the opponent's DPS.

Why? Because knowing the theoretical breakpoint (what Bunny calls the indifference point) where DEF outpaces regen (and vice-versa) isn't instructive unless you have an exhaustive and implausible knowledge of what DPS you're likely to face, and under what circumstances your build decisions are likely to matter.

The survivability analysis takes care of that for you. It tells you what to choose for the situations where your build decision (in this case, X DEF versus Y Regen) is likely to matter. The survivability doesn't care what the opponent's DPS, because it already knows what DPS your build can survive.

All the rest is just amusing posturing on Bunny's part. He flat-out admits here that the non-linear effect of DEf on survivability is not a point of contention, but in the original thread he spent several pages saying that everyone who prefers the survivability method can't do simple arithmetic -- over and over again. His arithmetic was never at issue; the practical usefulness of it was.

We're all measuring the same thing. Saying that 10 / 10 = 1 doesn't disprove that 10 / 1 = 10. This spreadsheet is yet another attempt to prove a correct number wrong by asserting another correct number.

If anyone's curious, here's the original thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=245914

Yes, the only real difference is that Bunny is pulling the opponent's DPS number out of thin air, whereas Werner (and most everyone else) is using the immortality line to approximate the opponent's DPS. That's why it's so amusing to see Bunny continue to insist that the rest of us can't do simple arithmetic.

At best, Bunny can argue that all the rest of us are bad at interpreting what the math is telling us, but he hasn't met that burden, nor even really tried. He just keeps setting up examples to disprove that a given amount of regen always outpaces a given amount of DEF (or vice-versa), on paper -- which has thus far proven self-defeating, because every single one of the counter-examples he's cited in this thread is practically irrelevant (featuring an opponent DPS either way below the infinite AFK survivability point, or one way above what any character could reasonably survive without so much buff support that his build decisions are rendered moot).

Screaming over and over again that 10 / 10 = 1 doesn't disprove that 10 / 1 = 10.

Likewise, simply invoking Internal Rate of Return doesn't prove that proportional gains are entirely irrelevant. If you compare, say, baseball players' batting averages, you don't look at a 300 hitter and conclude that he's only marginally more valuable than a 250 hitter on the basis that he hits 0.5 more times per 10 plate appearances (the absolute return). You look at him and realize that he hits 20% more often than the 250 hitter (the proportional return).

That's why 300 hitters make millions of dollars more per year.