Obitus

Consistency was another one of their complaints. Hamidon was probably the most cited example of the immortality you mention. Because Hamidon was basically untankable by anyone else (without support), it followed that Regen was more survivable than anything else.

Or so their argument went.

Regen was very very strong; no one's denying that. At least after Issue 1 though (when the you-can-heal-with-MoG-on bug was fixed), it wasn't so strong as to make all other options categorically inferior. Perma-Unstoppable was pretty sick too. Sicker, even, under the right circumstances. Alpha strikes would still kill Regen occasionally.

But again, perma-Unstoppable had a hole or two. Regen effectively treated all damage sources equally.

Frankly, I don't even know why you'd condescend to try to correct me on this point; it's self-evident even if you weren't there -- and I was there. Seems like you just want to bang the drum about how uber-strong Regen was back in the day, which is fine, but it's also not a point of contention here. Or do you disagree that Regen is now vulnerable to debuffs of all kinds?

Freezing Rain lasts 15 seconds. The debuffs from Freezing Rain are supposed to last 30 seconds, but there's a long-standing bug that makes that an iffy proposition.

Leaving that aside, you get two proc checks per rain, which means that it's not a great place to put procs unless you're just desperate for every possible extra bit of damage and you have nowhere else to put them.

The logic that governs attack chains is the very same logic that tells us to average the proc's value out over time.

As a long-time Ice Control devotee, this has been my Control-based pet peeve for years, so please excuse me if I seem inappropriately strident. I'm not aiming any of the following at any particular post or poster.

Ice and Earth were always analogous in terms of damage potential. Because they were so similar in terms of offense, I believe that players were prone to fall into the logical trap of assuming that the two sets were also tied in terms of control.

They weren't, and they aren't. On paper, sure, all the slows in Ice look very sexy. So does Arctic Air's confuse/avoid effect. Ice Slick is a great stand-alone power. But the (PvE) game fundamentally favors hard control where it's applicable. It favors controls that can consistently mitigate alpha strikes. It favors pets that don't get killed by an errant sneeze. It favors layered effects of all stripes (whether we're talking about layering DEF with RES or holds with stuns) -- the ability to pull out a second, third, fourth different trick to address unusually resilient opponents.

Earth is perhaps the best set in the entire game by the above standards. Earth deserves its low damage.

Ice isn't. It gets Earth's low damage with little or no practical pay off. In days past, you could argue that Ice's slow effects made it much better at PvP, but ever since Issue 13, PvP is a ghost town, and in any case we have Buff/Debuff diminished returns.

Scratch that. Ice gets worse than Earth's damage these days. Stoney is better both at surviving and dealing damage than Jack Frost. Earth's copious AoE powers take more procs. And as DrMike points out, Earth's -DEF adds at least a small amount to over-time DPS.

About the best thing I can say about Ice is that it looks cool (no pun intended). Oh, and having a bajillion redundant slows is arguably a good thing against AVs' 85% debuff resistance.

Doesn't mean that Ice can't be made to work; Controllers and Dominators* are among the stronger ATs in the game to begin with, and so it'd be a stretch to say that Ice Control's flaws constitute a pressing balance concern.

But there are flaws. Making Arctic Air cost less and giving it no-detoggle status would be a great start. Getting rid of the worthless tick of damage on Flash Freeze and giving it the Mass-Hypnosis no-aggro treatment would be an awesome move too.

(* - It's worth mentioning that Ice benefits almost not at all from Domination. Arctic Air's confusion isn't enhanced by it from what I can tell, and the only other hard area control worth mentioning is Glacier -- which is a PBAoE on the same four minute timer that all other AoE holds have.)

Dark/Invuln is a very strong choice for survivability. But you have to work Siphon Life into your attack chain, and work on getting some +DEF bonuses.

If you do both of those things, then you really can be Tanker-competitive on a Brute. The trade-off is that your AoE damage potential is comparatively low.

Again, there are exceptional cases going both ways. An SS Tanker will be competitive with an MA Scrapper; not so much with a Fire/Shield. Does that mean the MA Scrapper has bad damage, or that the Tanker has good damage?

There are also a number of practical considerations that can improve the Tanker by comparison. One of those is travel time, as noted earlier. Another is the increased room in a Tanker's build for offensive supplements. My Tanker has two PPP AoE attacks that a similar Brute wouldn't be able to afford while maintaining what I consider to be an acceptable amount of defense.

So the Tanker's third AoE ends up making up almost the entire damage advantage the Brute enjoys on the other two. That's just my personal thought process when evaluating builds I'd like to play.

But sure, all else being equal, you're right. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), there doesn't appear to be any good reason to pump up the relative level of solo missions. (The number of mobs yes, the level -- no.)

And in group missions, the Tanker's damage disadvantage is usually moot. Running an LGTF the other day, I was struck again just how silly a lot of these Scrapper-versus-Brute-versus-Tanker discussions are in most high-end teams: Mobs were melting so fast that it wouldn't have mattered if I had 300% of max Scrapper damage.

As an aside, and by the same token, there's a very small middle ground in terms of team composition where a Brute will have a noticeable advantage over either Tanker or Scrapper. The group has to have enough buff support that the Brute can take advantage of its higher caps. The group also can't have so much buff support that the content is trivialized. In my experience, those teams basically don't exist once you're past about level 30. The team is either scraping by or rolling.

And the Tanker is generally better for groups that are scraping by.

All of the above isn't meant to criticize anyone for rolling a Scrapper or Brute, or to deny that those ATs are generally better at damage by some significant amount than Tankers. It's just to point out that Tanker damage isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination.

Hey, more power to you. There is merit in trying to find a balance too though.

Personally, I have a Tanker which is now about as tough as I can reasonably make him and his offense is very nearly at its potential. I also have a Fire Blaster with soft-capped S/L DEF for when I want to play huge offense.

Given those two extremes, it's hard not to look at everything in the middle and pine for either more offense or more defense.

It's not irrelevant for a number of reasons that distinguish this game from real-life investment. For one thing, more DEF decreases the odds that you'll get hit with a DEF debuff and go into cascade failure, which means that each subsequent point of DEF makes the prior point more resilient (more valuable).

If you wanna say that all DEF mitigates the same amount of damage on paper, that's fine. You're absolutely right. But if I tell you that the last 5% cuts your chance of being debuffed in half, then that clearly means something.

If I'm plotting out a build that's sitting at 3% DEF and I have the opportunity to add 3% more, I may or may not bother. If I'm sitting at 42% DEF and I have the opportunity to get 3% more, then I'll definitely go for it. There's a reason that the PvP DEF IO is so highly valued, and it ain't because it mitigates a flat 6% of the opponent's damage output. Your own impressive WP Tanker build, if I'm not mistaken, places a high premium on the soft-cap to all non-psi attack types.

In comparison with your regen rate? The regen/healing rate is precisely the reason that people tend to use the IRR model for rating DEF/RES investment. DEF/RES multiply your HP/regen/healing, and thus the net proportion of damage mitigated is what really matters.

Example:

If I regenerate 50 HP/sec, and I have 0% DEF, then adding 10% DEF will increase my regeneration to an effective 50 / (1 - (0.1 * 2)) = 62.5 HP/sec.

By contrast, if that same character adds 10% DEF onto an existing 35%, then his effective regeneration goes from ~166 HP/sec to 500 HP/sec.

To use your analogy, the DEF/RES is an investment; the regen rate is your base income, let's say a salary. The absolute value of the return on the investment is obviously important, but it's also important to understand how much that number means to the individual -- how much that investment means in proportion to the money he'd be making otherwise. One investment can give you an extra 25% in income. The other investment more than triples your salary.

Now, certainly there are flaws with the infinite survivability metric. The ubiquity of debuffs and special effects is one of them -- but that's a discussion that's been hashed and rehashed endlessly and isn't worth going through again. But avoidance is definitely, especially, valuable as you get more of it -- qualitatively if not quantitatively. Just ask your neighborhood Blaster how much he'd like to reduce the chance that a mez will hit.

From casual observation, I haven't noticed any crash, but then I haven't checked every recipe. (Sold a Ragnarok a few hours ago; bought a Hecatomb for my Tanker.)

Anyway, the supply will definitely go up, but the effect on the prices is probably blunted by the sudden and widespread respec craze. Whether people who grind out Incarnate components on their 50s will be more interested in buying purples in the long term is another question.

And then there's inflation.

Will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Even if the number remains more or less constant over the coming weeks, though, given all of the above I think that's a clear sign that the monkey-exploit fix did its work.

Wasn't really disagreeing with your point; I was just using your post (probably unfairly) as a place from which to leap into a long-pent quasi-rant.

I don't have a problem with click IH in principle. It could stand a little improvement I guess, but I don't believe that's Regen's problem in the age of IOs and Inherent Fitness. Regen's problem is that its former strength at the low end (smooth leveling curve) has been indirectly diminished, and it doesn't gain as much as most other sets at the high end.

Interestingly, the set that used to send Tankers into a tizzy because it was so very consistent -- oblivious to the opposition's damage or attack type -- is now perhaps the most consistently vulnerable. Regen and Recharge debuffs are only the most obvious weaknesses.

More power to you. If there's anyone who can make the set sing, I'm sure you can. My issue is mine alone, a combination of being burnt out on my Regen character and a dissatisfaction with what I can do to improve it with IOs. Maybe with a little touch of spoiling nostalgia.

YMMV and all the usual jazz. It's not like Regen is so terribly weak that it absolutely must be buffed yesterday.

If they have the purple triangles, then in my experience they're downgraded AVs.

To stretch the analogy -- we're all bound by the speed limit. The practical performance difference between the Lamborghini and the Hummer isn't all that big a deal in a game where the most commonly applicable standard for damage output is, "How many hits does it take to kill this (spawn of) minion(s)."

My Scrapper two or three shots minions (depending on the difficulty level and which part of my attack chain I'm using). My Tanker two or three shots minions. And my Tanker has better sustained AoE damage output.

So what if the Scrapper isn't using optimal powersets. The point is that Tanker damage is more than decent. Then we can factor in travel times -- between missions, between spawns, between targets -- and the proportional time advantage for having Scrapper-level damage dwindles. A generic Scrapper may kill that boss 40% faster than I can (in reality it depends on the specific build), but I'm still finishing missions within 10-15% of a Scrapper's time.

Are there scenarios where a Scrapper's damage advantage will be felt? Of course there are -- just as there are scenarios where a Tanker's survivability advantage will dominate the player's experience. The grass is always greener. There's certainly nothing wrong with having an offensively slanted Tanker build. And with IOs and Incarnate content, now you can pretty well have your cake and eat it too.

Preach on, Comrade!

There are a few things to keep in mind when you're deciding where to slot procs of all types:

• How often do I use the power?
• At what level is the power available, and how much do I care about my performance when I exemp below that level?
• What's the base value of the power in question, and how important is it to me to enhance it? Can I save slots by putting that proc in a power with a lesser base value? (Because procs don't enhance the power itself and don't care what the power's value is.)

With all of that said, I'd say the answer to your question in I-19 is almost definitely Health, unless there are extenuating circumstances. Health will be added to your build at level 2, so no matter what level your proc is, you'll get full benefit from it no matter how far you exemp.

Health also has a lower base value than Fast Healing, so it's less important to enhance the power itself.

Given that you're unlikely to turn RttC off for more than two minutes at a time, though, there's no good reason not to slot the full six Miracle in it if that's what you want to do.

Heh, I can design an Invuln Tanker with that much passive regeneration -- before accounting for resistance and defense. I don't mean to be snarky or nitpicky here, but it is worth mentioning.

The real problem with Regen is that it's a debuff pinata. The lack of mitigation and the high requirement for active maintenance are important too, but not as much.

The days of toggle IH are irrelevant in more ways than one. A lot of people like to talk about how super powerful Regen was back then -- and they're right, but they're also over-simplifying. The game's high-end content is far more varied than it used to be. Every build will have weaknesses, no matter how well-planned, no matter how expensive -- and that goes double for Regen, because it's highly vulnerable to debuffs of all stripes.

Our ability (our incentive) to cherry-pick our opponents is very much reduced these days, too. Fine if you want to farm, but just running tip missions will tend to give you a less than optimal matchup -- whether your kryptonite is Carnies, Malta, Paragon PD, Devouring Earth, CoT, Longbow, Arachnos; even Rularuu make at least a couple of appearances in high-level Tip missions. And you can bet that Incarnate content won't be a wolf farm.

And in the age of IOs, one of the few holes you really can't fill is debuff vulnerability. You can blunt their over-time effect indirectly by pumping your DEF, but Regen is perhaps the least well-suited among Scrapper secondaries to stack DEF bonuses.

My first character -- my only character for almost the first full year I played CoH -- was an MA/Regen Scrapper. I spent a long time campaigning to have MA's animations fixed. It was my baby, and I'm proud to see it much improved, but that's neither here nor there. Regen was stupidly overpowered at first (before Issue 1, you could stack perma-MoG with IH; now that was funny), then just overpowered, then progressively worse until what we have today is a set that competes reasonably well on paper, assuming the player does everything just right.

In practice, not so much. And doubly not so much if you don't have a Primary with significant amounts of (preferably passive or AoE) mitigation. What's kind of amusing to me is that after all that time, and after all of the much-deserved improvements to Martial Arts, it's my formerly overpowered secondary that is now the problem. In the age of IOs, almost every character concept I can conceive is more appealing to build than ever before. My Scrapper?

Again, not so much. It's true I may have been spoiled by previous godhood (at least defensively, because offensively the old MA was less than impressive), but it's also true that many current IO builds are no less qualitatively impressive to play than old-school Regen. They just take a lot more investment and planning to get there.

Your reply is self-contradictory: On the one hand, you want to redefine Uber's playstyle as farming; on the other hand you want to say it's less effective than farming, even going so far as to criticize him for not maximizing his farming potential.

The point is that you don't have to farm to make lots of influence. He purposely used an example that was less effective than farming. A single-target-specialized build (Dark Melee) running door missions normally is not a farmer.

By your definition, almost any combat can be described as farming. Or not, when it suits you. I notice that nowhere -- despite your rush to dismiss Uber's data -- do you address the fact that he's making more than enough influence to outfit just about any build you can imagine in a matter of weeks. That was the point of contention, was it not?

Posted previously:

I think your suggestion would be self-defeating, frankly. If the idea is to make IO builds more exemp-friendly, then it seems to me that I'd be worse off, not better, if I had to rely on only the set bonuses from available powers.

If I misunderstand you, then I apologize, but that was my gut reaction. I've managed to make every single one of my IO builds exemp-compliant down to about level 30 without undue extra effort or build sacrifice. Much below that and (again, in my view) you shouldn't expect to keep the bulk of your high-level effectiveness, especially when we're talking about bonuses like soft-capped DEF.

It's true that mid and lower-level recipes are more difficult to find on the Market, but if that's a problem worth addressing, then it should probably be addressed through readjustment of the drop rate. It's also true that some of the exemp rules are counter-intuitive, like the distinction between procs and global effects. (It's counter-intuitive at least to the extent that some procs aren't obviously procs and vice-versa.)

But I don't know that the devs are even willing to address long-standing flaws (or quirks, if you prefer) with the IO system. It seems pretty clear that Castle isn't entirely happy with the state of +DEF bonuses, but thus far to my recollection, he's only ever nerfed one set (Blessing of the Zephyr), and that was clearly the most obviously abusable +DEF set out there. So we can reasonably guess that the devs are especially wary (rightly or wrongly) of making dramatic changes to items in which players have invested countless hundreds of millions of inf.

If you're dead-set on the Gladiator's Armor proc, I'd recommend buying up LoTGs with A-Merits instead, because they give you roughly the same influence value per unit time, and they allow you to cash out a lot faster if you change your mind. That once-per-day limit on A-Merit spending is a real bizatch if you have more than a couple saved up, and especially if you decide you want to switch alignment in the middle. (You lose all banked A-Merits when you switch alignments.)

As an inveterate build perfectionist, color me jealous. Not of your riches (great job, by the way), but of your calm in the face of such fabulous wealth. Even given unlimited money, I'd be paralysed by all the options available.

May I suggest coming to the dark side? Feel like picking a favorite character so we can all live through you for a bit tweaking it?

Oh, and I'm with you; it seems like now's the best time to sell purples. It could turn out that all the extra incentive to play 50s in I-19 will increase demand too, though.

If it's at all possible, I think everyone who uses Footstomp regularly should find a way to fit a Force Feedback +recharge proc in there somewhere. That proc was made for Footstomp.

Yeah, and the vast majority of the DEF debuffs thrown around are typed as S/L attacks. So you could be sitting there admiring your beautiful 45% E/N/F/C DEF and some random dudes with machine guns will whittle it down to nothing. Against mixed opponents, that can screw you up pretty fast.

There's a reason that even Invuln Tankers usually go for the S/L soft cap first. On paper, they're already massively strong against those damage types (~70 to 90% RES depending on whether you take Tough). In practice, the S/L DEF isn't really there to protect against S/L damage, per se.

If there's a typed defense to skimp on, it's Fire/Cold, IMO. Many of the dangerous Fire/Cold attacks in the game are also typed as S/L for the purpose of opposing defense. The F/C attacks that are purely classed as such are a good deal rarer than even psionics.

It all depends on your point of view. I can't know exactly what Sailboat was talking about, but I gather that he makes a distinction between specialized damage dealers (Blasters, Scrappers) and everything else. It is worth pointing out that Tankers have the third highest native damage potential among hero-side ATs.

The complaints that Tanker damage sucks are greatly exaggerated.

It's hard to imagine why Tankers here would break you of a long-held satisfaction with meatshield characters, given that other games tend to give you far less survivability on tank builds and far less comparative damage output. But like I said, it's all in the eye of the beholder.

Tankers have a higher AT damage mod than Brutes (0.8 versus 0.75). The first punch your Brute throws in a given mission will likely deliver less damage than the first punch your Tanker throws. Not that the base AT mod is all that important in the grand scheme, but you do have a knack for getting yourself in a frenzy about mechanics you don't appear to understand fully.

Tankers also recently got Bruising to offset their single-target-damage disadvantage. That change came at the same time that Brutes got their peak Fury damage lowered. (And incidentally, Tankers got a hefty boost to their max HP.)

The net result is that Tankers are a lot closer to Brutes in terms of damage output than they were pre-GR. And Brutes are less competitive with Scrappers.

Well, it's a tough thing to balance. Brutes are theoretically the best all-around meleers, given a certain level of buff support. Before the Fury changes, I could easily have said that Scrappers didn't get enough of an offensive advantage relative to Brutes. At first, a lot of people did say that, in fact.

The thing is that if you like playing in groups, then you're more likely to be drawn to Tankers -- because Tankers have a decidedly team-oriented set of tools that aren't dependent on this-or-that team composition to function well. Your survivability or your aggro control might be overkill in a given team, but you're not worried too much about whether any team has the right buffs.

Likewise, if you're a solo-oriented player, then more damage is always better, all else being more or less equal. Scrappers are the obvious choice because they don't give up much of anything relative to Brutes for their superior stand-alone damage.

Brutes are a mechanically solid middle ground on paper, and they're certainly not gimpy in practice, even solo. I'm just not sure that melee in this game really needed a middle ground. Heck, ever since before Brutes even existed, we've had endless debates on these forums about whether Scrappers were too survivable relative to Tankers, or Tankers too damaging relative to Scrappers.

Why an AT that splits that relatively small difference should be considered unreservedly better than one or the other is beyond me. But hey, different strokes.

It will depend on your defensive set, certainly. I'm no expert on Shield Defense, but it seems uniquely to favor the Brute in the comparison. If you're talking INV or Willpower, all of the layering tends to give the Tanker a larger advantage at least with respect to stand-alone survivability.

33% higher resistance and 33% higher DEF and 25% higher hitpoints (which makes for 25% higher regeneration). All of those things multiply one another. Now if we're going to assume that both characters have used IOs to get to the DEF soft cap, then yeah, sure, that's a bit of a wash -- but then we also have to understand that the Tanker had to sacrifice less to get there.

It's possible to get perma-Hasten with only two slots in the power. For a Tanker it's not anywhere near easy, though. You're losing ~16% recharge enhancement from Hasten by ditching the third slot (assuming level 50 generic Recharge IOs). In order to make that up through global recharge bonuses, you'd need a purple set and a 6.25% bonus from somewhere (usually from ranged/control powers).

It ain't exactly easy to get perma-Hasten with three slots, frankly. You need another ~101% in global recharge after you account for Hasten itself and the ~99% you'll get from three generic IOs (@ level 50). That's a lot, particularly for a melee character, because melee characters generally don't have easy access to 6.25% bonuses, and because melee characters generally try to enhance DEF.

So the short answer is yes, it's possible. The longer answer is that there's almost no plausible scenario where saving that one slot on Hasten will be the most efficient option, unless you don't care about Hasten's uptime. Obviously, you do care.

I have to say, your numbers are impressive. I can't know how much time you spent playing in that span (unless I missed your saying it), but your results are certainly credible. Playing about an hour a day just running tip missions on a 50 prolly nets me about 50 million per day on average.

Which is about 40 days to get to the per-character influence cap at a pretty darn casual pace.

Leaving that aside, and just to reinforce a point you made -- the 20 billion you quote far exceeds what I would consider to be any reasonable or even practically useful goal for any one character build. By my count, you need about 12-13 billion to make a character about as tricked out as anyone should expect to be. That's four purple sets @ 400 billion per piece (in other words, the more expensive purples), a Gladiator's Armor proc @ 2-3 billion, and an extra 2-3 billion for whatever's leftover.

Anything much beyond that, and you'd basically have to go to the Blue_Centurion school of spending money for its own sake. In other words, paying no attention to what your influence is actually doing for you.

What would that sort of build even compare with, in that giant fantasy MMO everyone always talks about? How much hardcore raiding would it take to get there? Why is it that so many people complain about not having enough long-term goals for high-level characters (the elusive end-game content) when apparently they're not interested in spending some time to reach them?

In any case, the price of purples should fall at least appreciably when I-19 comes out, encouraging people to play outside of the AE with their 50s.