Starsman

Stone armor is draconian on it's build requirements. If you want a build that can tank on every day situations without falling back to granite you will need to take every power and, at minimum, 3 slot them all. At this point, you are just marginally better taking alphas than a Fire tanker and marginally weaker than a fire tanker at surviving sustained dps.

Unlike all other defensive oriented tankers, Stone has no tool that scales their survival based on surrounding foes (even dark gets one with their heal) and you lack any utility (unless you consider some perception and end drain resistance to be utility, you get no fun toys like Shields or Fire.)

I was thinking about this one a while ago, a Hide that worked similar to the MA critter one with no defense (provides strong damage buff while hidden) could do the trick. Then again, I think a more fair thing would just be to port Ninjitsu as is (with endurance in hide, off course) and simply revisit SR. I still think that set has design issues that should be addressed, although it may require the devs to finally cave into merging powers and adding new powers to the set.

Edit:
If i was to edit SR, I would off course follow my own feel of the set. While many see SR as a "martial arts defense" (and this would be the biggest roadblock for my revamp, it may "break" that feel for many) I see SR as Super Speed Defense. I mean, come on... look at the quickness!!!

As noted above, I would merge the passives, all 3 into a single passive giving us room for 2 new powers.
Then I'd add an invincibility like toggle that grants the caster a recharge buff for every foe in melee (and an equal endurance cost buff, the idea is you act faster but at similar end cost)
For the second power I'd add an in-set super speed. Stalker version would get similar treatment only they would get just the super speed, no recharge aura.

In theory, people can play the set just as they been playing so far. Only "drawback" would be the sudden loss of 2 powers to slot defense invention sets into but we can make that recharge aura grant 0.1 enhanceable defense that would be there only so you can slot sets, same for the in-set super speed.

At this point you can play the set as you always played it by ignoring these two powers, if you dont like them.

The only other issue I see is that the new aura would had made the aura-fication of a toggle in the brute set a bit redundant, but seeing how Dark Armor and Ice Armor both have multiple taunt auras, I don't think this would be a balance issue.

After all this it all comes down to fear of cottage rules, even if all numbers stayed the same due to power mergers.

Clarification: it strengthens the strength. For almost all powers, this means how strong the effect is (heal strength, def strength, etc) for mezes, though, it means duration.

Basically the following are affected by duration (+98.34%):

• Stun,
• Sleep,
• Confused,
• Terrorized,
• Immobilize,
• Held

The following are affected by strength (+98.34%):

• RunSpeed,
• FlySpeed,
• Heal,
• ToHit,
• Endurance,
• Def

Also keep in mind this does not really means doubled. If you already have +~95% held enhancement in your hold, Powerboost wont double the total, it will double the base. a 10s base hold would be turned 20ish by enhancements and then 30ish by powerboost on top of enhancements.

People miss what other things does Powerboost does for you. Specially dominators forget. Lets say you have combat jumping and weave and scorpion shield on your build. On their own, with 3 def SOs on Scorpion and Weave, plus one def in Combat Jumping, you would achieve 29.1 defense to smash/lethal and 22.4 energy the three most common damage types in the game. That's equivalent to 58.2%/44.8% resistance. Now thats not too impressive but activate power boost and all those defense powers get boosted to 47.9/37.1 defense (unfortunatedly scorpion shield is not affected by powerboost, long story as to why) that is past the defense cap for smash/lethal and not too bad for energy.

Sure, it's only up for 15 seconds out of every 60 (once properly enhanced for recharge) but it's can work wonders in a tight situation or for plain alpha strikes using those PBAoE mezes.


If you use tactics, this is also boost by powerboost, and the same goes for many things. -def and -tohit in Earthquake, tohit in Soul Drain, etc etc.

In short, when you take this power as a dom you should not be thinking about it's effect on mezes, thats what Domination is for, but all other things it can strengthen.

The only issue i had with Voltaic Sentinel is that the damage of VS is being enhanced by Build Up (build up is averaged up) meaning that VS is slightly overstated, not under-stated.

This thread reminds me, I should update the thing to show Earth Assault... been having too much fun playing it and entirely forgot about the charts myself

That's an unfairness, yes, but you got to ponder if it's a good idea to go spreading that amount of resistance around just because they already made the same sin with defense. One wrong does not justify another, after all.

The only resist bonus you see handed out like candy is Psi resistance, and this is somethng nearly no one has natively AND is also a very rare damage type to encounter in PvE. This leads me to think that should the devs ever start handing more resistance they will not hand out smash/lethal resistance too freely as it's way too common of a damage type and also is available to all in a pool power making it even more dangerous to hand out. At least when they hand defense they know all pools that grant defense do so for all damage types so all defenses are at the same risk margin.

OK went back and looked through it all and see what I did... no clue how I did it, my brain was thinking 1 def = 2 res and my brain kept telling me you wrote the opposite to that... long day at work i guess...

But the reason they are higher is not because they think they are worth more, but instead because they think it was not so dangerous to spread defense and gave the larger defense bonuses more often than the larger resist bonuses.

It is important to know the distinction of what the base values are because when the devs assign these things they tend to think in magnitudes not final values (they balance the final values but thats not what they think)

First they define what a small defense bonus is. then they define what a small resist bonus is. Then they do tiny versions of these.

Once all these are created they start handing them out but they hand them out based on what they understand or think is less risky to hand out, the fact that they give the small defense more often than the small resist, and almost always hand out tiny resists, is because they just think it's not a good idea to be giving away so much resist and figure the penalties of handing defense everywhere will make it not such a bad idea to hand that out.

Again, why does this matter? Because you have two battles to fight, one would be whether or not it's ok to hand out more resist bonuses, the other is that the existing resist bonuses are too weak in value compared to the defense ones. You could in theory aim for the second goal and may get lucky and get a global resist bonus buff as a result.

To be honest, though, if I was to make things "fair" I'd just go out and turn every single primary/secondary/epic/ppp defense granting power and convert it into an elusivity equivalent power. Elusivity does not stack on top of defense, it is not weak to -def although has equal weakness against -elusivity (that is nowhere in PvE) and it's not vulnerable to tohit buffs.

The result is that your only sources of defense will be pool powers, external buffs and set bonuses. At this point it's not so easy to softcap defense and defense stacking is equally beneficial to both, resist and "defense" (now elusive) sets.

It would be considered a nerf by many, but it would be a bit more fair and balanced.

And why is that? Because there are more defensive pools available to stack all that defense on top. Off course, lack of resist bonuses help. Caps are an issue, true, but even if they did not exist the issue would still be there.

Not sure why you say that, set bonuses were designed on a fashion that assumes 1 def = 1 resist.

The amount of distributed defense, though, shows that whoever designed it (it may not necessarily be Castle) also figured that handing out defense was less dangerous than handing out resistance.

To an extent it's true. If a blaster caps defense, but gets hit by a single -def attack, the cascading failure will likely negate it all. A foe with any to-hit buffs also would eat through that defense as if it was not there.

With resistance, well, it's an inherent nature of resistance to resist resistance debuffs and other than irresistible damage nothing pierces through resist.

In the other hand, resistance tends to cover for part of mixed attacks, while defense can mitigate the full attack if it just happens to contain the type. But it does sound less dangerous to hand out a lot of def bonuses than hand out resist bonuses.

The problem really comes when builds that already relied on defense and therefore had defense debuff resistance, stack all this extra defense on top of their defenses. The entire defense debuff hole is null against these builds.

There are other reasons the devs hand out more def than resist when they do, example being in inspirations. The reason is that extremely low amounts of defense may amount to an intangible difference while even 5% resistance will make a tangible (albeit insignificant) difference on every blow. This was an old logic the devs used, though, and after GDN seemed to have been abandoned (look how weak pool defenses are.)

No matter how you paint it fact is that defense benefits defense sets much more than it will ever benefit a resist or heal based set.

Invuln is mostly a defense set. It has some resistance (specially for smash/lethal) but it's mostly defense.

You got it the wrong way, it's 1 Res = 2 Def (25 def is like having 50% resist, 45 def is like having 90% resist, etc.)

Looking at IOs magnitudes, I think the issue is precisely that this was not accounted for. If you look at a Tiny Smash/Lethal resist bonus is magnitude .0063 and a Tiny Smash/Lethal defense bonus is also .0063. Both use the Ones multiplier, though, and I think thats the biggest issue.

For all we know about balance, to be fair, the resist bonuses should be twice as strong as the defensive equivalent.

That is besides the point that they handed over way more def bonuses than resist bonuses.

I think he just wanted to make sure people know he is not planning on nerfing IO defense.

I would not be so sure about GR content being loaded with ToHit and -def, though.

Example: Manticore's Teleport Arrow (may be wrong but I think the knockback and damage are both non-resistible)

OH NO!!! You sir are not allowed to go on and tease us with that info and then not telling us what was wrong!!!! Spill the beans even if it makes no sense to us!!!

As some one that has only one brute and it happens to be energy aura, i say: I dont care.

I want Energy Cloak to get a opaque body theme!!!

Define good. I rarely aim for the extreme recharge builds or for the endurance ones. I find that simply getting smart 4 set bonuses and frankenslotting those final 2 slots gives me so much end redux that, once slotted up, I don't need the endurance increase.

Everyone has the right to do their builds whatever way they want but I actually attempt to make my builds exemplar friendly. I do my best to even retain as many set bonuses as I can by level 35, recent SK rules means I may go further and keep stuff all the way to 30 if I keep up the same approach.

Side advantage of this is that I get to start my IOing relatively early with lower cost IOs.

Despite this I still did not Exemp down unless I had to help some one. It was mostly about the XP, though, I always felt I may as well be leveling up a different character. I rarely play my 50s once they get there, rarely aim for much IOing at that point.

You may had been lucky before. I never been fond of exemplaring due to lost powers and no XP (on pre-50s)

A character is considered a "specific work", the name can't be copyrighted on it's own but just like a song gets copyrighted and it's title is part of the copyright the name of a character will be part of a character copyright.

I think the entire point here is you undermine what a "character design" consists off. If you don't take them seriously and just think about what you can do with the character designer, then we can say you are right. You can't copyright that design. However, go ALL the way through the designer and there is more than just a costume design. You have name field, you have biography field, you have origin field, and you have power selections.

The compilation of: Name, Origin, Biography and abilities are the real character design here. The costume is just an extension that visualizes said character and off course, you can stamp a trademark on the name itself for further protection (and this protection is not copy protection but to avoid confusing the consumer.)

Seeker Drones do -20% damage and -5% tohit (enhanceable to -7.8%)

Both drones can do this so thats a total of -40% damage and -10 tohit (enhanceable to -15.6 and equivalent to 31.2% less damage)

Against even level foes, if both drones do their job on the same foes, you may get about 58% less damage. This is using mastermind/corruptor mods and not counting the 25% chance to mag 2 stun that may not be too effective against non-minions.

This post is full of win!

Yes, actually you can do.

Here, some homework: link

And a highlight:

As for:

I think the one confused is you. Here, another quote from that link above:

For example, lets say Hotel Marriot. That on it's own has no value and although there is a trademark, the mark is specific in relation to hotels. I can make a phone tomorrow and call it Hotel Marriot (although it would be a bit confusing) but I cant make a hotel as Hotel Marriot, as it relates to Hotels, is protected.

As the article notes, you can trademark a character name in relationship to a character, but from everything I gather it's actually harder to do this as the character must first develop secondary meaning.

Trademark does not stop me from using the name for other character's though. If I so want, I can make a character called Batman as long as he cant be confused with Batman. I can make a super hero with baseball uniform and bat in hand and call him Batman and DC would not be able to do anything as anyone that sees this character would not ever think it's the same Batman.

Emphasis mine.

My most recent numbers note that the most dominant attack type is smashing with lethal being 20% less common (basically 80% of smashing) and energy being 30% less common than smashing (basically 70% of smashing)

I'd have to go back to my compiled data and so some querying to see how many attacks in average you would cover up if just focused on smash/lethal (don't have access to it right now,) but smash/lethal and energy are the 3 most common damage types. The next most common damage type would be Fire and that sits at -70% of smashing or 30% of smashing. Its very rare outside of the CoT, really.