PleaseRecycle

I'm continuing the digression here I suppose but this reminds me of the I22 beta discussion of incarnate tohit in Dark Astoria: most people felt that the tohit bonus was unfairly punitive to defense sets. Since it went live, though, that sentiment seems to have died down almost completely. Any thoughts on that? For my part, the only character I've soloed all the way through DA so far has been a fortunata and at level 52 set on +3x5 I typically didn't even feel the need to hit mind link and incarnate softcap. It seems that DA's enemies are either not as mean as advertised or the softcap really is a little overestimated on the forums.

Excellent points. Though it has been willfully ignored earlier in the thread, it bears repeating that pylon times have never and will never be factors in set balance considerations as the entire point of them is to demonstrate the maximum capability of a full build with every available advantage in one extremely limited circumstance.
Here you're at your very wrongest, for reasons I've explained and for the reasons O_T has brought up. You utterly fail to understand that in being forced to take all of these pools to shore up aoe other sets pay a high opportunity cost. We've already been over the fact that the staff fighter need do nothing extraordinary to have excellent aoe, so what I find more interesting now is the fact that in actual gameplay single target chains are irrelevant so long as it is possible to acquire more targets. Earlier you tried to claim that it is almost never useful to have an aoe chain, I assume due to a recent blow to the head. By now you've presumably had a chance to recuperate and should find it easy to see that the exact opposite of that is true: there are very few situations in the game where it is impossible to take advantage of an aoe chain.

If you can be hitting more than one target, you shouldn't be using a single target chain at all (with vanishingly few exceptions such as the Dilemma Diabolique finale). Staff has the built in ability to scale its attacking to however many targets are available, innocuous strikes in particular being nearly a single target attack for DPA except that it's a cone on a very short recharge. Here's what I mean: while your super duper SS/FA/Mu is either in full farm aoe mode or doing zero aoe, the staff fighter can use as much aoe as is relevant to the situation. At the alpha this probably means wiping out the minions with a cone or two followed by eye. Now lieutenants and bosses remain: stop using eye, use the cones to damage everyone and fill gaps with single target attacks on the bosses. When only bosses remain, the cones are still efficiently contributing damage. At this point the SS/FA/Mu is going to look like quite the nimrod if he's trying to keep up on aoe by using 19 endurance scale 1 attacks on two or three bosses.

Even within the context of your bias staff looks great. Now we go back to what Arcanaville and I have been saying: that doesn't even matter, because as soon as you add extra pools you're no longer discussing power set balance.

Having now played the set substantially more than I had when I made that comment on the forms, I retract it. I didn't realize how efficient the set was before considering soul. Soul is still my go-to form while leveling up; at 33 my scrapper has maybe four slots total allocated to secondary powers apart from lightning field and it works very well. It now seems that it will be useful at 50 but not necessary in all cases even with a build that is fairly slapdash about endurance reduction.

Does not compute. Irony detected.

It isn't zero to 15% though. It's going from 90% to 81% chance to successfully proc. Right now it's very, very possible for either AS or the subsequent attack to miss. And, as you note, a reasonable attack chain is shorter than ten seconds so it's only relevant half of the time in the first place. It's a minor reduction to something that is honestly a much more minor factor in current stalker builds than most people realize.

You're the one who told me earlier in the thread that you could think of exactly three places in the entire game where you fight more than one boss at once and one of the ones that apparently sprung to mind was in Mercedes "Who?" Sheldon's arc. The thing I find hard to believe here is that you actually care as much about peak performance as you've been saying you do. If you're mainly running content where having sustained aoe isn't meaningful, how can you turn around and say you care deeply about a 10% reduction in stalker's guile's proc rate? You won't need to respec at all, just put the procs where they'll be best, double check with the PPM formula if you're really concerned, and there you are. One of them will some day become marginally less effective while most of them will probably be moderately buffed. It's a wash.

Maybe we're very different, you and I, but when I play my old characters it is for variety as my builds have steadily gotten better over time. If I don't even remember my slotting rationale for some dusty old defender yet I'm bringing it out anyway for a task force, I don't expect its performance to be already optimized for the current issue. That doesn't make it less fun to play.

You'd also get 6+ months of continued enjoyment of a character you claim to like, with no guarantee that it will actually be any worse after that time. Isn't that the point of the game? It seems odd to me to consider whether a character will be "worth it in the long run" since the only value you can possibly derive from a city of heroes character is the fun you have playing it.

Care to share with the class what the SS/FA/Mu's chain costs? It isn't pretty!

4.5 EPS for an attack chain would be cheap if we were talking about single target. For aoe it is peerless both because few sets can even muster an aoe chain at all and because none of those that can can match staff's rates. I may not have gotten my wish for expensive perma toggle hybrid but I'm sure you can think of things to do with endurance apart from that.

Perhaps my view is slightly warped seeing as my time manipulator is a dark/time with permanent chrono shift and softcapped defense but in my view -regen can go fly a kite. Who needs it? Slowed response all by itself is better than the totality of what many support sets get in terms of hard target crunching. You're entirely right that the single target -regen powers aren't remotely worth the time you'd spend using them on any target, but time is so amazing that it just doesn't matter. I mean this in the nicest way but this kind of reminds me of the many occasions where SS fans have complained that hand clap is lame and needs buffs.

For an anecdote on this topic, consider my staff/elec scrapper that I've unfortunately only had the occasion to get to 27 today. Picked up Mercedes Sheldon's third arc while level 25, I ran a couple TFs reaching 27 and continued the arc surprised to find that despite the contact theoretically expiring at 25 the missions continued to be of my actual level. To make a long story short, on one of her missions you get ambushed by six or seven warrior bosses at once. They pretty much all went down at the same time, and it was before a single medium luck wore off. As you said in practice it is most often wise to mix aoe and single target, but it isn't outlandish to run into legitimately aoe-focused scenarios in all corners of the game's content.

On that note, it seems likely that my finished build will typically require neither form of the soul nor power sink in the general case for the full aoe chain. The patron-augmented SS build argued for earlier burns more than twice as much endurance to be competitive with staff's damage before you even consider the constant drains from rage and hasten's crashes. How interesting is that? It doesn't have an additional low-endurance mode to fall back on if the situation were to call for it, either.

More specifically you're trying to trade in its "extra stuff," which you've repeatedly valued at exactly zero, for more of one particular sort of number. It ain't going down like that.

By the by, not once did I say people should ignore performance for fun. I said staff's performance is great and you're trying to talk people out of having fun with essentially no justification whatsoever.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with the scientific method, but here's how it typically doesn't work: you don't start from a position that you're sure is true and try to produce evidence to that effect. When an experiment falsifies your hypothesis you check the experiment and then modify your hypothesis. This continual drive to find new ways in which you can claim staff is terrible is more akin to a Monsanto EIS: E-Z-Gro can't be responsible for this sorghum blight because our fourteenth attempt to exonerate it looks pretty good if you squint.

Not sure what you mean here, mace only has one attack that hits harder than headsplitter. Its DPA is substantially better of course.

Drink it in, pal, that's how failure tastes!

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I wonder whether it's going to have just the two sets or instead perhaps have two pairs of two sets, as the EATs do? Or maybe even more! It sure sounds cool just based on the existing descriptions though.