PleaseRecycle

I pretty much only use ninja run and two slotted hurdle so the expert slope is pretty hard. I mean, silver and bronze no sweat, but I am amazingly proficient at getting 50:50 over and over and over. One thing that can help is The Fool. If you get this, tell your team you just remembered you're having your foot removed and you have to leave at once. Teleport to Pocket D and try your luck. Another thing that can help, and by "can help" I mean "guarantees gold as long as you can aim your mouse along the course," is inertial reduction. Antagonize a kin until she can no longer tolerate your pathetic bleatings and get her to sit up at the gate until you manage to get to the bottom. It should only take a few minutes.

I'll go a bit further and say that the only interface powers that are even worth taking are the radial damage ones. It doesn't matter how good any of the debuffs are because one thing the debuffs will never do is matter in aoes. The damage procs, on the other hand, can and will foreshorten engagements considerably by finishing off minions that would otherwise have required another aoe or a single target attack to defeat. The fact that the damage procs are the only ones not specifically resisted by AVs is simply salt in the wound.

Why don't we go ahead and stop the "aoe began with issue 12" train in its tracks? I seem to recall that it was issue zero where ar/dev blasters were wiping out colossal swaths of Dark Astoria with impunity. Seems to me it was issue one that allowed fire tankers to herd entire maps and then wipe them out in less than thirty seconds. By the time CoV came out, the bulldozing potential of corruptors and brutes had already been thoroughly explored in the beta. The prevailing wisdom in CoH has never been that single target was all that mattered. EM was simply so far beyond reason that it was worth it anyway.

I have it on good authority that some of the devs, you know the ones I mean, don't feel that tankers deserve claws.

True enough, I've spent slots on goofier things than 3.7% recharge. Lately though, rare is the build where I'm not agonizing over each and every slot all the way up to 50. There are so many ways now to make each slot count, especially when one is as addicted to defense as to recharge. I most prefer it when a slot does multiple things for me. Not only is a lotg global a very powerful recharge boost, it also produces an extra quarter of a percent of defense to all in combat jumping, for instance.

That's one thing that annoys me about hasten, to the point where more often than not I try to accomplish my goals without taking it in the first place; it is totally one dimensional and uninteresting. It may be an influence saver and it certainly helps if you're aiming to push a particular limit that relies on gigantor recharge, but once you decide that you need it you're never getting those slots back and the closer to perma it is the more often you'll display your orange mittens of shame.

An AT&PGD thread about the obvious necessity of sweeping buffs? Am I late?

Without even beginning to consider the potential numerical value of two or four additional slots added to every character across the board, this is a bad idea simply because it makes building good characters that much easier. It's already really dang easy, fellows. You may have noticed that last issue they made it easier still by bumping 41, 44 and 47 powers down to 35, 41 and 44. Now you can take travel powers basically any time you want. You get fitness for free. How easy do you want this game to be?

But wait, there's more. Not happy with the enhancement values you were getting before issue 19? Buck up, friend, because here's the alpha slot which can give you an effective thirty thousand extra enhancements worth of value. Oh you couldn't fit in all the attacks you wanted? Good thing judgement is like having a twelve slotted nuke, one of whose enhancements simply reads "AND IT DONT CRASH NO MORE." You get pets, you get buffs, you get a better-than-purple damage proc added to every single one of your attacks as well as many non-attacks all at the cost of zero slots. This game is really easy!

So here we are. We need more. This game is too hard. I want a lollie.

Please tell me you're all joking.

I may have been slightly hyperbolic in my first post there, partly because as Eldagore said most of the responses had been absolutely vile to the OP. In any case, however, I'm satisfied with my later elaboration that I simply don't believe that difference matters very much in practice for most builds, especially if you consider that this was put into a melee archetype forum.

How would that make you want to use it in combat? It would be worse than any stalker's tier 1 attack but cost a lot more endurance. Would you aim it at the guy standing next to you or would you use it to give a paper cut to a minion two spawns away? All this proposal would do is make snipes suck in two ways rather than just one.

Edit: Duh, this thread isn't just about stalker snipes! My mistake. However I still don't see why blasters would be any more likely to use sniper attacks if they were like sub-par tier 1s!

Why would a snipe become faster in combat though, thematically? It works for assassin's strike pretty well, and calling the new mechanic "assassin's focus" really cements what they're trying to imply. I can't think of any examples of someone pulling out a sniper rifle in the middle of a brawl for an extra quick shot in fiction (or real life). Well, yes I can, Counterstrike 1.6, but I'm not sure that's an appropriate image to evoke in CoH.

I like MK's idea. Focus on the strengths of snipes by making them even more unwieldy and powerful. I actually do have a snipe on my old, no longer played stalker and basically it was useful for taking out an Immunes engineer or surgeon in one hit before going for a spawn. That kind of thing. Why should it only work on minions, though? Maybe back under Jack's old vision for the game lieutenants were meant to be non-trivial threats to players but at this point they simply aren't, and stalkers can already one-shot them with assassin's strike in the first place in much less time than the snipe takes. If anything the fact that the snipe is long range is a penalty for stalkers because it means that if you had hit build up before sniping, even if you could fire off another attack before it wore off you won't actually be able to since you're so far away. It seems like it'd take a lot more than tripled damage to make stalker snipes overpowered.

Thanks for checking that out, glad I haven't completely lost my mind yet.

When you bring up perma-PA that's a very different issue and in that case, as with perma-dom, I agree that it can make sense to chase after every last crumblet of recharge. If one second's gap is the difference between definitely losing something's aggro or not, or avoiding a big crash or not, then by all means close that gap.

With something like dull pain, and indeed hasten itself, you don't actually lose anything by having a gap in its permanence. The only way for a two second dull pain gap to matter is if it would have recharged less than two seconds after you died or if in those two seconds you take just over your normal max hp's proportion of your health bar. The likelihood of that seems just shy of itty-bitty unless you're specifically tailoring your character for a silly task such as soloing ten specific AVs at once in AE. For dull pain, most of the time I find myself not using it when it comes up in the first place as rare are the situations where a decked out meleer is under that level of pressure non-stop for minutes on end.

Thank you for eloquently phrasing what I've been trying to get at. There is never a reason to "just need hasten up." Hasten doesn't do anything at all besides provide a recharge buff. Wait, that's wrong, it also hits you with an endurance penalty. But in terms of its benefits, all it is is a global bonus that happens to have different mechanics than global bonuses from lotgs and sets. There is no other benefit in hasten in and of itself. This is why a couple seconds less uptime hardly matters: five seconds of extra hasten time is going to translate to something like two seconds better uptime for dull pain or whatever. For low recharge things like attacks the difference is radically less significant, and instead the advantage of having hasten up for an additional five seconds is that once in a blue moon you might encounter a tiny gap in an attack chain that is otherwise gapless while hasten is up. What is preventing that worth to you?

By the way, lotgs are 7.5% global bonuses, you only need two of them to exceed the value of the third slot in hasten for hasten itself. Mocking beratement is something I assume tankers tend to four slot anyway as its four slot bonus is s/l defense, the fifth slot is f/c, and the sixth is 7.5 recharge. Those are excellent bonuses all around and hardly scoffable-at for tankers.

And, if you bother with the super packs at all, you'll be swimming in enhancement boosters whether you like it or not.

Seems to me that even incarnate system shunners should be pretty happy these days, with new powersets pelting us like sexy hail. I like the incarnate content and I haven't bothered with it in a few months because there just isn't any time for that when I could be leveling up a street justice brute, a beam blaster, a titan weapon scrapper... Goodness me, dark control is just around the corner. I believe I'm getting the vapors.

I'd call maxing out individual powers basic min/maxing. It seems to me that the more advanced route is maxing out the total value of your available resources. A truly zen builder shouldn't even fear underslotting useful powers, which I'm not convinced going with only two slots in hasten can even be called, as long as the overall impact is positive. I'm talking 75% damage slotting in a non-mule attack if the average single target dps loss would be exceeded by the average aoe dps gain when one considers the average actual utility of the character's single target and aoe dps. Woah.

I'm with O_T. Are you sure you really want to sit at the doors? Having the teams spread out on the paths is practically foolproof. Yeah you can't maximize the effectiveness of a power like burn, but you also don't get those agonizing minute long periods where nothing is deciding to come out of your doors for some reason. My vote is plant/storm controller and don't even bother with the doors.

All right, I confess it has been a while since I built anything that needed to worry about permaing dull pain. I might have been including spiritual or something. My point remains however that two to five seconds of hasten is not going to have an impact on something like that in practical circumstances. This is particularly true when you consider the cost of that third slot. Assuming level 50 common IOs, it's giving you something like 15% recharge just in hasten. If you don't have five lotgs already, that slot would be far better spent on another one of those.

Even if you can't translate it directly into another lotg, I wonder if you couldn't shave a few more extraneous slots from the average build that does things like three slotting hasten, since it seems to me that the person who thinks two to five extra seconds of hasten is mandatory may also find .05% extra EPS appealing and have stamina three slotted, for instance. Being the tanker forum, another option most builds here could probably integrate is taking mocking beratement from four to six slots, gaining a lotg sized bonus in the process. 15% recharge in one power, even hasten, is worth a damn sight less than that.

I agree that willpower and shield getting complete status protection wasn't the best way to do it. Maybe willpower because I can kind of see it conceptually? From a balance perspective though it should have at least one hole. Why? Precisely because, as you say, the way they did it sets an unfortunate precedent that holes are something bad, something to be fixed.

In fact they are something to be fixed, but the player should be involved in that. One ought to have to use their noggin on their own behalf at least once in a blue moon. The KB hole that most possible character combinations share is an example of weakness done right since now there are so many different ways to guard oneself, even if many of them are just different varieties of one flavor of IO. Their original balance metric for defense sets was idiotic (one toggle at a time, some sets don't get to move), but after GDN they did most of their best work in that area.

I'd call it pretty different since for knockback there are IOs to take. You can also take hover if you don't like leaping, even post-change that still leaves you immobile for less time than being knocked to the floor does. The point about immobilize is that the only option is CJ if there's nothing in the set itself. Feel free to hover all you want but you still won't be going anywhere. Having mentioned unyielding stance, teleport also comes to mind but typically if you're trying to escape from a group of NPCs you need to be able to duck around corners, precisely the kind of thing teleport cannot do.

Ah, I didn't even notice the steadfast -KB you had. I thought you only had the two which is why I suggested eliminating one. I have no experience with more than one -KB IO but people say three is the magic number if you're going with more than one so you were probably right in the first place.

I agree with your selection of cardiac. Endurance management is not a foregone conclusion when you have a single good power for it on a three minute base timer. Clearly /FA is also a resistance heavy set, so really it's good all around for this combination. If this were a scrapper perhaps musculature would be a slightly tempting alternative but on a brute? Why not shore up defenses instead? The damage boost would be maybe half as potent.

Deus or anyone else, would you please explain the situation where an extra two to five seconds of hasten will make a substantial difference in a build? I have never seen anyone post a build where it mattered a whit since the old days when it was actually a challenge to make domination permanent, and even then obviously only dominators needed apply.

Take the claim that several extra seconds of hasten could make the difference between permanent dull pain or not. This is laughable on several levels. It takes something like 102% global recharge plus ED capped slotting to make hasten permanent. It takes 55% global recharge plus ED capped slotting to make dull pain permanent if you don't even have hasten. DP is incredibly easy to make permanent, hasten is in an entirely different league. If you have perma hasten or hasten close to perma, you would have to leave DP completely unslotted for recharge to get it close to not being permanent, and you'd fail. If you have low global recharge and slot hasten and dull pain adequately by themselves, you would have to tune your build exquisitely tightly for the express purpose of making DP fall just short of being perma.

In general, the OP is correct. The third slot is wasteful if your build is tight. If your build isn't tight, do whatever you want, it hardly matters.

Why, excellent choice of power sets, my good man!

Two things I'll note without commenting as much on the defense as it has been ages since I've built for positional defense on a meleer.

Consider dropping the botz from super speed and putting the winter's gift there instead. You save a slot and you lose four points of -KB. In my experience the first four points you get do 99% of the lifting from there on out. In a build where you're trying to squeeze out every bit of goodness you can, that kind of sacrifice can be well worth it.

On a similar note, the last two IOs of mocking beratement are a tough sell. In terms of hasten's permanence, that last 7.5% bonus is barely worth one second. Obviously it has an impact on your other powers as well but when you have hasten nine seconds off perma the diminishing returns are already hitting you hard. I don't feel that perma hasten is worth it unless it's almost incidental to the number of recharge bonuses you have. A gap in hasten when you're already swimming in global recharge does not realistically matter for a meleer. Thus, if you save two slots there too, you now have three discretionary slots.

Also, you have so much global acc I'd drop the endmod/acc/rech from consume and replace it with another endmod/rech. Crap, this is more than two things.

I thought of another thing: Something other than reactive for interface would probably be good since there are plenty of options now. Reactive is in no way bad, but since you already do loads of fire damage, why not make it negative or toxic or something instead?

I just got my SJ/EA to 38 today so I'd say I have a fair amount of experience with the combination. My verdict? It is stellar. New EA seems tailor made for scrappers in that it has no advantages when used by a brute instead, plus it's a really powerful defensive set. The endurance situation is a tad painful until level 35 but once you're there you're golden. SR is easier to use but weaker in the end and I find shield distasteful by comparison as well. No specific reason I guess, it just doesn't have as interesting a tool kit.

SJ, for its part, is equally versatile. Very solid single target, very solid aoe, very interesting gimmick. Unlike traditional sets there isn't a clear best chain and in practice this means that you won't feel as constrained when you're in unusual circumstances. Sweeping cross, for example, makes a perfectly good single target finisher before you get crushing uppercut. Once you have it, though, SC remains viable on occasions when you want to save your big hit for a more strategic target but need the combo level 3 damage boost to finish off the current object of your lack of affection. Oh, and the set is loaded with reliable control and debuffs.

Let me close by putting it this way: Titan weapons, how cool is that set? It's ridiculous, really. Amazing aoe combined with fiendish single target and great controls and debuffs. I just ran a manti today with a team full of titan weaponists, a couple of whom had spent a few billion more than I had even though we were all high 30s, and I had no trouble leading the charge and wrecking up spawns by myself when the kill alls encouraged us to split up for efficiency. Awesome sets that go very well together, particularly on a scrapper.

Rooted is nothing like an immobilize. It's like being web grenaded all the time for a variety of benefits. Unyielding Stance was like an immobilize, because it was one. That was one of the earliest major defense set do-overs because it sucked.

Why is having to take CJ bad? Because if you have to do it it isn't a choice. It would mean willpower players get three power pool selections instead of four. It would mean they get one less power pick to choose from. That isn't what this game is about when it's at its best. That said, of course CJ is a great power. I take it on literally every character I make. The difference between feeling like a shrewd builder and a patronized follower is the presence of compulsion.

I don't find knockback to be all that dangerous even when I'm playing a squishy who for some reason does not yet have a -KB IO. It is the most transient status effect that can be inflicted on a player character. It is a common effect, but it virtually always occurs as a chance to proc rather than a guarantee. In any case, by the time it becomes really prevalent you've had many levels to find some way to protect yourself against it.

That's also a funny comment from one of the guys saying dark armor needs buffs because it uses so much end. Blues drop a lot more frequently than breakfrees.