PleaseRecycle

Confusingly, you could also argue that trolls are technology origin, since superadine is allegedly somehow integral to Dr. Brian Webb's fabulous portal technology, as those plaques have reminded me something like a thousand times. Doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me but there you have it. Who knows, they might even be natural origin if we are to assume that portals are a feature of the universe and not an invention.

You don't appear to know what weakened hamidon is. Suffice to say that if you're hitting it with blaze, it's hitting you with three mitos worth of untyped damage, and I'd like to see the fire/rad build that can stack mag 16 control in the first place.

I haven't listed every single thing a ranged fort can do because I feel that much of it is obvious. Apparently not. I'm still not going to make a comprehensive list, you can figure it out for yourself, or not. If you don't see the value of having a complete ranged chain in high level content, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you only play characters up to 50 and then stop? A melee fort that wants to be able to operate at range is taking and slotting at least three more attacks than a ranged fort. In actuality you're probably taking more than that because it would be foolish not to take spin. That's a huge dent in a character with as many great power options as forts have available to them. If we're talking about night widows I guess you may as well take whatever you want since they don't get any fantastic control powers, they're pretty much just scrappers.

Fifty percent more damage? I dispute that as in practice there are many* factors that will keep you from dealing your ideal damage at melee range that can be completely ignored from blasting range. Even were I to grant you a damage bonus that large, though, it wouldn't be worth it compared to the versatility that you sacrifice.

*Since I know you're not going to leave well enough alone, here are just a few of them: blue patches, pink patches, suffer in silence, essence duty, arrest mode et al, nova fist, almost anything Antimatter can do, mito damage and debuffs, famine debuffs for most secondaries, mag 30 stuns, overwhelming damage or debuffs in general (incarnate level cimerorans, et cetera). Need I go on? I could do this all day. All of those things neuter a melee fort while a ranged fort keeps on truckin', and all of those things are commonplace and becoming even more prevalent in high level content.

Really though someone who insists on being referred to as "lord" may as well call himself big man. Same effect. You think he's compensating for a small ovipositor?

I contemplated ditching that dork @xeaon to join your MoTPN tonight because I wanted to see your toxic jerk in action. My loyalty proved to be as thick as poutine gravy and I missed out. Regardless, congratulations on your obsessive compulsive disorder!

I'd also immediately notice a huge gulf in being alive when Mother Malaise cast a pbaoe that would shred anyone else in a single hit. I'd also notice that soloing malta kind of sucks, and PPD, and carnies, and IDF, and ... ... ... and freakshow if a lot of super stunners spawn! Pretend I said every other villain group in there.

As you know, the top fire attack chain requires radically more recharge than the top fort attack chain. Doesn't matter, eh? Plan on sharing how you intend to incarnate softcap this corr to all positions while achieving that? I'll give you a minute. Don't even bother trying to explain every other corruptor primary, that wouldn't look very good for you. Nothing you assume can change the fact that you're considering DPS in a vacuum and I'm considering what the character can actually do. Get back to me when a fire corruptor can solo weakened hamidon.

Store bought enhancements. Good news! They're completely broken, in terms of balance compared to existing procs. Check the most contentious threads in the beta forums for more exposition on this topic.

I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. Yes, a fire/ corr would do more damage if it had buffs that you aren't considering for the fort. Or perhaps you're giving it full scourge? Those numbers do not match in-game values in any other way. The fort chain is shorter than the fire chain and hits harder in reality. So, thank you for pointing out that a ranged fort is actually more damaging, and more capable of self buffing in the general case, than the absolute most damaging corruptor primary. Would you turn down a fire corr for any team? I wouldn't, most of the speed TFs I run contain several of them. The fact that my fort can keep up with them and then some is actually to be expected by one who plays the game rather than crafting bizarre, unbalanced hypotheticals.

It really does come down to play style and personal preference. I play every character like it's a scrapper and to me that means trying to cobble together as good of a single target chain as I can while still fulfilling competing goals. Someone else could easily agree that they play like a scrapper and to them that means subcontracting some of the shooting out to a wayward Arachnos recruit while they focus on the more strategic tasks. To them I would say, "get your hands dirtier!" before saying, "if it works, do it."

Fortunatas have fantastic defensive numbers and status protection... for squishies. Squishy is what they are and what they will always be until we discover that the Genesis slot gives you a reconstruction-like slottable heal. Rebirth is fantastic, I love it on my fort, but if you say forts don't get into enough trouble to need more healing than that I say you don't push your fort hard enough. Keep in mind, this is a ranged fort. A ranged, incarnate softcapped fort that happily takes alphas on DDs.

The only way to say that dominate-gloom-subdue is inferior DPS is to compare it to scrappers, stalkers and VEAT melee attacks. Next to anything else it looks great. Would you invite a blaster to a trial? Presumably you would also invite a character that does basically the same damage as the average one-o'-them, is never going to die and brings massive team defense, psi resist, damage, and tohit buffs to anyone within a large radius. That can be the meleers, as if they require your protection you can hang with them in melee, but it can also be the other squishies who are hanging back and blasting. You can wail on hard targets as much as you want and they'll frequently be unable to even try to hit you if you take a flight power. I value all of this far beyond simply being yet another melee-dependent source of moderately-better DPS.

Unfortunately pets are too stupid be to useful in many trial situations. On a MoDD you straight up can't use them for half of the trial or you may well cause failure. Even in less catastrophic circumstances pets don't know whether they're supposed to focus on Nightstar or Siege for example. There's also the issue of recharge - your pet sat in a pink patch and died? Well, you've lost that damage for a phase or two of MoM. In these cases, a single target blast is absolutely superior to any PPP pet and most of the time on trials I don't bother summoning my even-more-damaging umbra beast either.

I find time to blast on dark/time with perma chrono shift and I pretty much hit all of my buffs and debuffs as they come up, with the exception of time crawl which I find too marginal to bother with and temporal selection which doesn't really do a lot of heavy lifting in a trial environment. So yes, farsight is refreshed every 120 seconds, chrono shift every 90, heals as needed, distortion field every 20-ish and shadow field every 50-ish for damage, and haunt every 60 if it's safe to use pets. Dark/dark might be sliiiightly busier than dark/time but I'd say that after all that is done I still have more than fifty percent of my time free to blast, why not make it more effective blasting than would be just spamming my hold?

Have you seen his old henchman costumes? Class isn't the word that comes to mind. In fact, it's about two letters too long.

I'm not sure they'd revise it if they were to look at it again. Compare to other chain powers: Synaptic overload, like ion judgement, uses multiple pseudopets per jump to ensure propagation. In SO's case that is because it's a long recharge control power that doesn't even do damage and was performing pretty poorly when it only used one pet. I think it's true in ion's case because it's meant to be an over the top spawn clearer.

The power most similar to chain induction (almost typed chain injunction, every barrister's dream) is jolting chain, which only uses one pseudopet but doesn't require target survival because the damage is delayed until after the next pet has spawned. They could easily do that with CI, but would they want to? Its current behavior more closely resembles typical "missy" attack behavior. If they added a delay on the damage, that aspect would essentially be autohit. CI's jumps do two and a half times as much base damage as JC's, and I think it would be atypical for controllers and doms to be slotting it and buffing it as though it were an attack.

I'm not saying it would be wildly overpowered for CI to be improved, just that there are considerations that may preclude dev interest in doing so.

Actually, double checking it, JC does use two pseudopets but they somehow always target only the same target. Odd. CI, however, has its jump delayed until well after its damage by comparison. My interpretation of this is that it is meant to break upon target defeat, but I guess it could be an oversight.

Are you sure that was the intent Microcosm? It happens literally every time. If the target of the power dies the chain usually activates, if a target of the chain dies there are no further jumps. I was thinking that was working as intended, myself.

Also Rintera already posted in that thread! Sometimes I need to pay attention a bit better...

I don't really consider that level of damage deficit to be a deal breaker when the ranged fort gets so much more than just damage. It's an essentially unique role: something akin to a mind/psi dom but with better damage, huge buffs and better status protection in exchange for slightly worse control. Melee forts and widows remind me more of a quite good claws/sr scrapper. Sure there isn't anything wrong with it and overall they're probably a bit better than that, but what's their milieu? It seems the main differences are that you can't customize their claws but you get an additional costume at level 10.

That melee fort chain looks especially bothersome to me because it redraws constantly. Maybe some people are into that but I'd deem that odd. At least it does take advantage of the fact that you have access to an amazing controlling attack in dominate as well as gloom.

I'm sorry you don't know the formula for the volume of a sphere. Google could probably help. What I'm saying is that spines is a top aoe set for stalkers, in response to you saying it is bad for aoe. You are mistaken, feel free to try again. Be sure to post your protips for causing chain lightning to never jump to something that is nearly dead for bonus points.

I was curious so I checked how many times CI can even jump: turns out it's five times. The best case scenario for CI is dealing less than half as much damage as saturated spine burst. It does it in more than twice as much time, but CI also does not apply any procs off the jumps. Add interface and procs and spine burst is superior aoe to CI in every important way. Spines is better than elec for aoe, QED. Whoops, silly me: CI can crit off its first hit, not on any of the jumps. Spine burst can crit on each hit, 50% from hide. It is radically superior to CI for aoe. Lightning rod can't crit at all, throw spines has 50% crit from hide. Spines actually makes elec look like garbage for aoe. Your thoughts, Reppu? I'm sure they'll be relevant.

Chain induction is a great attack but to call it reliable aoe would be wrong. Incredibly common scenario for my elec/ice: bu-lr-ci: most of the minions are a sliver away from dead, the first jump kills one, that's all the aoe it does. Who cares, it's up again in three seconds, but the point is that at any given moment you cannot count on it to produce good aoe damage. You definitely can't count it as equal to spine burst in an overall comparison of elec and spines if ripper is jacob's ladder's big brother and throw spines is comparable to lightning rod, which it is. Spine burst may be slow as heck but if you hit ten targets it is entirely worth using, something that is easy to do compared to most other stalker aoes. You like burst, huh? Spine burst hits an area seven times as large as burst. Have fun with those 100% crits.

Reppu, spine burst may be pretty crap DPA but that isn't the only aoe spines gets. Ripper is analogous to but better than jacob's ladder, a very good attack, and throw spines is a top tier stalker aoe. It's basically shockwave but without your team yelling at you for using it. Elec probably does beat spines for aoe but I'm not so sure anything else will until staff. Really I'm not even that sure about elec.

Check out the AAAAAAAGH forts thread in the VEAT forum for a recent discussion of melee versus ranged forts. I make a case for going ranged, but melee has its defenders as well. It really depends what you want. Widows in melee are going to do more damage than forts at range, but ranged forts absolutely do not have to do bad damage. I've never actually run the numbers on a widow build but it seems to me that one of the main advantages is that you'd be able to effectively leverage spin and eviscerate for fantastic close range aoe.

Honestly overall, looking at it now, it seems like widows are the best option if you're on a limited budget and forts are something to consider if inf is no object. Especially on the defensive side the only bone widows really get compared to forts is that their mind link is much easier to perma. If you can perma it on a fort that is suddenly no longer an issue. Beauregard's chain, which looks mighty sexy, works equally well on a fort as it does on a widow and if you've already got more recharge for mind link you need less for lunge and follow up.

I don't know about your preferences but I get a lot more use out of a single target blast than an aoe blast on my dark/time. Obviously it's best to have both, of course. That pretty much made fire and ice the only real options for me, and fire blast's superiority to ice blast combined with the fact that it only take one prereq to get fire's aoe put it easily over the top. Fireball and dark oblit are decent aoes but they pale in comparison to my procced out distortion field and even shadow field whose only proc is the superior WotC for aoe damage. Fire blast, however, means I can actually contribute good single target damage when the situation calls for it, which is as often as every spawn depending on the mission.

Well, many oft-requested models, such as Rikti or PPD armor or until recently carnie masks, weren't even set up as costume parts. The model was just one inseparable chunk. It would have been easier for them to simply design Mot-infused Diabolique as a one-piece model, that her costume is made of parts at all to me says "this could hit the store some day."