Sailboat

Not to keep arguing, but to clarify something that some readers may not be aware of: for some purposes, knockdown is weaker than knockback.

Foes take much longer to get up and shoot back when they are ragdolled by knockback than when they are simply knocked down where they stand. As mitigation, knockback is much superior. Squishy ATs feel this difference very keenly.

And to put it bluntly, all knockback mitigates -- even knockback somebody else does. That Peacbringer's knockback is keeping my Blaster alive longer; if he shuts it off at Null the Gull, my survivability will decrease somewhat. YOUR knockback helps me, sometimes, just like your holds and debuffs help me.

I will grant that area knockback can in theory also be bad for survivability under certain conditions, most notably by knocking a bunch of enemies off a placed control (like Ice Slick). But generally, knockback is helpful to ranged squishies -- and of course they don't have to chase enemies, they can just shoot them where they landed.

You know, knockback is a BIG part of comics lore. Removing it is antithetical to the feel of superheroing. It would make the game better for DPS-bots and worse for supers. Are you a DPS-bot or a super?

So I'm gritting my teeth for 150 hit points per second? :P

tl/dr: I'm having a terrible time deciding on which Alpha Incarnate power to slot for my Claws/WP Scrapper.

He's pretty well-slotted by my standards, with few obvious holes of the sort the Alpha slot can fix...soft-capped for s/l/e/n typed damage, with medium global recharge (47.5%), decent accuracy, almost-capped hit points, and high regen.

The obvious choices are

• Spiritual for hit points, regen, and recharge
• Musculature for damage

Spiritual would seem like the clear winner, except that:

1. It's a truism that "more regen" is the least effective improvement you can make on WP
2. WP benefits not at all from +recharge, and, although I am no attack chain guru, my attacks already have high recharge (Spin every 3.79 seconds)
3. The hit point difference would be (only) 2204 vs 2236 at tier 4

Also, I typically find that very often, the enemy is a sliver away from defeat. Claws hits fast and I'm not complaining, but it occurs to me that Musculature might make up that sliver and enable me to move on to the next target, which cumulatively would add up to a long0term time savings.

So that might argue for Musculature. Now, it is true that my attack chain is not optimized (I even have Swipe instead of Strike, knowing that Strike is part of the optimal attack chain, because I prefer the look of Swipe on an animal-themed character). I only get 2 attacks off with double-stacked Follow-Up if I am very alert. But I don't think even tier 4 Spiritual Alpha would improve THAT part -- the difference in its recharge is 5.22 seconds vs 4.42 seconds, or 8/10ths of a second.

I ran on a Sutter today, and although the character felt strong (he exemplars acceptably), I often felt like I was still finishing off stragglers as the team moved on. Ah, I thought, Musculature!

But then I got waxed a few times (once by psy enemies despite my middling-good psi protection, and a couple of times by defense-debuffing Sky Skiffs, I think, causing cascading defense failure). Ah, I thought, Spiritual!

(I know neither Alpha will actually work during the Sutter TF, I'm just giving examples of perceived areas for improvement that occurred to me.

I have a good bit of Incarnate salvage piling up on this guy while I overthink things (33 Shards and a few components); obviously I could build something if I ever I make up my mind.

I've compared both choices in Mids, and run searches on the forum and read a bunch of threads on Alpha choices for both my powersets, and I'm STILL not decided.

Thanks for reading, I welcome your thoughts, analysis, or suggestions.

Why does my Willpower Scrapper have to pay anything for Regenerating Flesh? Can't he just carve a slice out and keep crafting?

Are you sure people aren't just avoiding you? Not everybody wants to be seen hanging out with Someone Crazy.

Ah, I usually just make do with Lunge/Impale/Ripper for single-target stabbiness. On a side note, your Build Up is not ED-capped for recharge; I like to get it there because I want it as often as possible.

The way I see it, your best options for final power are:

• Hasten, 2-slotted, last 2 slots finish Quills. This may be too hard on your end usage; I don't have Mids on this computer to check it out. This would make the most dramatic difference for a single power pick with no prerequisites.
  
• Unstoppable, if you can stand the crash. Again, 2-slotted for recharge, last 2 slots finish Quills. This will give you on-call durability if you can get used to the crash.
  
• Resist Energies. Possibly only the default slot, finish Quills, stick a free slot somewhere. This doesn't give you much resistance, really, but it does give -recharge and slow movement protection that may make your life easier when facing caltrops and quicksand and the like. If you find the first two options less to your liking, this choice at least gives you something nice without taking any endurance or attention.

You can afford more than you think you can. I don't know if you've had other 50s or not, but at 50 your earning potential jumps, and Scrappers, according to the last time I saw a post of the datamining, are the richest AT in the game. Knocking out your tip missions every day will rapidly bring you the IOs you want, even the priciest ones, and you should be able to run against large numbers of enemies on a Spines/Inv and rack up drops and tickets.

Might as well run the Incarnate arc first so you're getting Shard drops while you're getting the rest, too.

If money is a huge concern, bid dramatically low and hope to get lucky (which works for me every once in a while.) Meanwhile slot out plain SOs -- they're not going to expire now that you're 50 -- and get started earning goodies and cash.

Are you sure you're spelling it correctly? Maybe that's the problem.

Well, the build is kind of a mess. For starters, a lot of the defense and resistance powers are either unslotted or have "gimmick" IOs in them, like the Gift of the Ancients run sped IO in Tough Hide, but little defense enhancement.

Slot out all the main defense and resistance powers to the ED cap (56% or so) and the little ones (RPD, Unyielding) should at least have what you can give them. If possible, get close to the 75% s/l resistance cap.

The classic slotting for Dull Pain is 5 level 50 Doctored Wounds, which gets you ED-capped on Heal value and almost ED-capped on recharge, or vice-versa, depending on which of the 5 IOs you choose. If that looks costly, it's possible to cheaply 5-slot it by frankenslotting heal/recharge and heal/end/recharge IOs from mid-30s sets...three of those you've already got, anyway (and you have the pricier ones already too). That'll get ED-capped recharge and healing. You can move up to the DW set when you have more money.

Depending on how much change you can stand, there's more; you've 2-slotted things (like Conserve Power and Assault) that I would have left at one, not because one is better, but because I desperately needed the slot elsewhere. And are you using Boxing, or is it just a set mule for the Crushing Impact?

I'd at least six-slot all the attacks (Lunge and Quills). Generally, with Inv you want to go for typed defense bonuses, not positional defense, but that may involve more money than you want to spend right now. Ultimately, for example, I prefer 3 Erads and 3 Crushing Blows in your PBAoEs for good typed defense and better endurance management than the Oblits, which are primarily a positional defense set with notoriously bad endurance enhancement. But the Oblits are giving you some value for now, so replacing them can be a longer-term project.

Well, any Scrapper is a solid character, so it's not like you're underperforming. I believe that some supergroups occasionally run "everybody get the accolade" teams to speed up the process a bit, but other than that, I can't offer any suggestions.

Although the animation time is slow, one of the advantages of Tanker Fiery Melee (as opposed to the Scrapper version) is that Combustion gives you another AoE to cycle in crowds. My Fire/Fire/Pyre uses Fire Sword Circle, Combustion, Burn, and Fireball as an AoE "chain" and I like the results.

I play some (not all) characters in "hardcore" mode, where any defeat means the character "dies" and is deleted or at least kicked out of the hardcore supergroup.

Yes, it's crazy. But I have a character who just got to Frostwork level and plans to use it as much as possible -- extra life in hardcore play is just awesome.

You know, I'm sure a market outside COH/V exists for technology that would enable users to accurately model a broad range of human body types at high resolution and control their movements onscreen.