Umbral

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I'll be honest, my only reason for even SELECTING touch of fear is that the Invention Set I stuck in it gives a 6% recharge bonus instead of 5%, so it provides just a little bit more recharge while I'm trying to get my Dull Pain to a permanent status.

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Considering how many slots you're wasting just to get that 6.25% +recharge bonus, you'd be better served taking some more slot efficient +recharge bonuses, like Stealth, Invisibility, Hover, Combat Jumping, etc. You don't even have to bother using them but you can simply have them in your build to provide 7.5% +recharge from the LotG +recharge IO. You'll get significantly more bang for your buck from them than you will from Touch of Fear.

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However, it's worth noting that I have done an AAO-saturated pylon test in 5:53, which calculates to 236DPS. So I'm not sure what it is that you're trying to illustrate, here.

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Hmm... I was going to say he's probably ignoring procs... but can they really add ~33 dps?

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The 2 separate -res procs could easily add that much dps, especially factoring in the speed of the gapped attack chain. The mentioned attack chain generates 3 proc chances every 8.156 seconds. Doing the math (the simple version that doesn't account for redundant procs), you're probably going to get ~14.7% -res over time. 1.147*(203.6 + proc benefit) = 233.53 + (1.147 * proc contribution). I'm pretty sure that the damage procs are going to contribute more than 2.15 dps.

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Ok, I'm really new to scrappers and was wondering if anyone can give me some tips on katana/ will power build. I have searched the forums and haven't found anything.

thanks!

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You need an SO or IO build?

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Is there any redraw for Stone Melee's hammer?

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No, those are part and parcel with the animations.

And my mighty fists enshrouded in destructive energy!

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It's a common claim, but I disagree with it strongly on anything with at least a Tanker's damage output. Anything below that and it starts to feel pretty painful. One of the last things you want to be is a lethal/smashing dealer on Defender or Dominator (out of Domination). It's viable, but I don't enjoy it very much.

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Whenever Castle gets his Dominator changes in, Dominators will have a very nice base scalar, meaning better DPE. The only ATs that will be at a disadvantage somehow are Tankers and Defenders, because they have lower scalars and no extra damage capability from their inherent.

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Nicro,
I think I'm ignoring spines as I'm ignoring claws. There's no way those two will make the cut. Just like axe and mace.

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You'd be amazed at what a high enough recharge claws build can manage, just like Dual Blades. Follow Up and Blinding Feint are incredible tools for increasing damage while simultaneously dealing respectable DPA. Calculating the damage for them is a bit more complicated of course (you have to figure out which powers in there activate with FU/BF up whenever you have partial stacking), but the actual damage contribution is amazing.

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Hero1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7l250E5uM4

Don't call it a comeback...

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Hero 1 isn't Freedom Phalanx yo.

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with 0 enemies in range

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Don't you mean allies?

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I'd be up for supporting it if, rather having it be a clone of the Radio/Newspapers, it were something more like micro story arcs. For heroes, you go on a 3 mission arc following a simple pattern for the 3 missions (discover, investigate, defeat) that is similar to the Radio missions. Villains have the same thing but with a villainous feel (re: they're doing steal, kidnap, beat up the hero trying to stop you). The big difference however would be that the missions send you around to different zones after you start the first (which is always in the zone you chose it in) and that you always fight an EB or AV at the end of it. The reward would probably need to be commensurately larger as well. Probably one of a series of temp powers randomly chosen for you, a merit or 2, or something similar. It'd simply be an upgraded and more interesting version of the existing radio/newspaper missions.

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Exactly. I also envisioned an EB or AV at the end (along with the occasional GM) - I just failed to mention it. These missions should always feel *BIG*, and give corresponding rewards...

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I wouldn't put a GM in the mish (they don't really look right except in some very few door mishes). GMs are also designed for significantly larger groups of players than 8. AVs and EBs would be best.

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By the way, just finished getting my 2nd blaster to 50. In order to finish rounding out my collection, my next toon is gonna be a troller. Any suggestions? I refuse to play FotMs or replay powersets which means no */FF, */rad, */kin, or earth/*.

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I recently rolled a grav/storm. Not a whole lot of damage, so this is definitely a toon you will have to play with in a team.

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I decided on Fire/Thermal. I've always been a fan of shield support sets and everyone keeps telling me to make a Fire/* toon. The fact that */Thermal also has some nice damage and other utility buffs that aren't expensive made it flesh out pretty well build wise. */Sonic was just too expensive on the blue bar to have it be fun...

I'd be up for supporting it if, rather having it be a clone of the Radio/Newspapers, it were something more like micro story arcs. For heroes, you go on a 3 mission arc following a simple pattern for the 3 missions (discover, investigate, defeat) that is similar to the Radio missions. Villains have the same thing but with a villainous feel (re: they're doing steal, kidnap, beat up the hero trying to stop you). The big difference however would be that the missions send you around to different zones after you start the first (which is always in the zone you chose it in) and that you always fight an EB or AV at the end of it. The reward would probably need to be commensurately larger as well. Probably one of a series of temp powers randomly chosen for you, a merit or 2, or something similar. It'd simply be an upgraded and more interesting version of the existing radio/newspaper missions.

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Thanks. I wanted to say something like this, but I was too lazy (and late for work) to do the math and write a big post. I had looked into Touch of Fear for my AV soloing, but ultimately decided against it.

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Way back when (re: I13 boofs), I ran with Touch of Fear for AV situations. It worked out decently, but completely killed my damage dealing capabilities. I could tank an AV with little to no effort, but it didn't contribute to tanking large groups or soloing AVs. I decided to ditch it because I'm a Scrapper. I'm supposed to go crazy and break stuff.

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Watching an AV cower would be awesome, though.

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It's hilarious. I've done it to numerous Praetorians (Tyrant included) and a number of the other AVs as well. Seeing Vandal cower in fear of my 5'4" physically unimposing Scrapper was hilarious, especially since all I was doing was waving my hand in front of him.

For Citadel, Everybody Need a Robot. No love for the non-biological members of the Phalanx...

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I disagree about Touch of Fear.

As a power I find it indispensable fo taking on Bosses, EBs and AVs.

The ability to quickly stack up fear effects means that you can essentially lock them down after a few seconds and once you have overcome their resistance you can effectively shut down their damage output.

Of course they can and will still hit you in retaliation but this gives you the option of just stopping damage and keeping them in the fear animation for a few seconds if you need to give your hit points time to regenerate after a few lucky hits on their part. The -tohit doesn't hurt either.

I find few things more amusing than watching an AV I am soloing do the "I'm so scared" animations.



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If you need Touch of Fear to take on bosses or EBs, you need some help. They're cakewalk baddies.

The problem with it in AV situations is twofold: PToD and AV Resistance. The first means that you'll only notice the benefit of the effect for a third of the fight (and, even then, the AV is still going to be beating your face when you attack meaning that the mitigation is really only ~40%) and the second means that you're going to need to generate huge debuff numbers to see any meaningful benefit from it.

Number time!
Touch of Fear slotted for redzone tohit debuff (60%), each application is going to be worth 18.08% -tohit. With 180% recharge, you're going to be able to use it every 4.18 seconds (2.86 enhanced recharge + 1.32 Arcanatime activation). This means that, if you use the power and always hit, you're going to get an up time percent of 478%. The total sustainable debuff would then be 86.42% -tohit. That might seem like a lot, but level 50 AVs (the general AV soloing metric) have 87% debuff resistance, so the real contribution value of all of that debuffing is only 11.23% -tohit.

Either of these methods is going to severely decrease your damage dealing capability while applying it, which is why I say that it looks great, but the costs are oftentimes to great to outweigh the actual usefulness of it. Losing one-third of your attack string for a partial mez that is only even effective for 25 seconds every 75 and 11% -tohit isn't all great of a deal.

You calculated the Arcanatimes wrong there Billz.

The method is (roundUp(base/.132)+1)*.132.

Incinerate has an Arcanatime activation of 1.848, Cremate of 1.716, and GFS of 2.508. Plug those numbers into your calculation, and you'll get the right numbers.

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You can manage to red zone both healing and damage with frankenslotting, but more people nowadays are more interested in the extra 3.75% defense from the 6 piece damage set bonuses than they are from eking an extra 21 hp/sec from Siphon Life.

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They are? Seems to me that there aren't many situations where an extra 3.75% defense to one position is going to do more for you than healing an extra 21 hit points per second.

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Well let's calculate it up a bit. 3.75% +def(melee) is equal to 7.5% reduction in incoming melee damage. To make the 2 quantities equal, there needs to be 280 dps coming at you. That's a reasonably small quantity, considering. Just a little something to think about.

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Question for everyone:

When considering IOed out builds, how much total recharge should I be comfortably allowing for?

Right now I'm shooting for around 200% from hasten, setIOs and power enhancements.

Is that too low? Too high? Thoughts?

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95% from enhancements, 65% from Hasten (don't assume perma), 70% from IO set bonuses. */SR gets and extra 20%. That'd put the expectable allowance at 230% or 250% for */SR.

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(QR)

So tanker attacks should cost less because they do less damage than scrappers.

Yet, nobody is arguing scrapper shields should cost less because they give less protection than tankers.

Tanker bias, anyone ?

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Uhh... That's been the basis of my entire argument, Nihili.

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So, if I understood your advice correctly, you think it should look more like this?

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Vaguely, but you're overslotting some powers and using pointless slotting elsewhere. You're better off putting the 5 pc Doctored Wounds into Dull Pain than Integration. Integration doesn't need all of that slotting. Put 3 Numina's into it. Smite and Shadow Maul don't need the 6th slot. Those set bonuses are [censored]. You'll also want the 6th slot in Dark Consumption and Soul Drain. Those 6 pc set bonuses are awesome. Also, if you're going expensive, you don't really need Shadow Punch. If you tweak your slotting (switch the slotting on MG and Smite to give MG a bit more recharge), you can manage the "most desired" attack chain of Smite>MG>Smite>Siphon. As it stands, you're going to need to drop some less effective Shadow Punches in there. I'd also switch out Revive for Combat Jumping or Hover at the least. The ability to slot LotG +recharges is awesome. You also vastly over slotted MoG's defense. Give it the LotG +rech, LotG def/rech, and 2 common recharge IOs. That's your optimal slotting.

Personally, I've found Touch of Fear to be less stellar than you'd actually think, especially considering that most of the time it just sits there unused. You could easily get another few points of defense by putting those slots elsewhere for other set bonuses. +Hp is also less than needed for */Regen. If you get the +hp accolades, you're only 32 hp shy of the cap and you can easily get that just from tangential set bonuses.

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It's actually Damage Per Activation time. It's the damage dealt divided by the number of seconds the animation is (usually modified for Arcanatime). The dimension is damage/second.

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Yeah, the DPA reported by the game is per activation time. I use DPA to mean damage per Arcanatime.

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The most accurate term would be Damage per Activation/Arcanatime Second. It's a derived value based on both concepts of damage per second and damage per activation.

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You make a very good point about midnight grasp. I just got distracted by the idea of another 10% bonus to recharge time. I should go back and fix that.

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I forgot to mention it, but the same logic should be applied to Siphon Life. It's much more important as an attack than it is as a heal, especially since you're already */regen, so you've got more than a bit of +heal and +regen (which a constant small heal like Siphon Life is more akin to). You can manage to red zone both healing and damage with frankenslotting, but more people nowadays are more interested in the extra 3.75% defense from the 6 piece damage set bonuses than they are from eking an extra 21 hp/sec from Siphon Life.

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(QR)

Anything on a ST BS attack chain? I'm rolling a BS/Regen (First scrapper ever!) and I would really appreciate this info.

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Last time I did the numbers for someone, Hack>Slash>Disembowel>Headsplitter and Hack>Parry>Disembowel>Headsplitter were the optimal attack ST chains.

Headsplitter requires 172% +recharge.
Disembowel requires 77% +recharge.
Hack requires 32% +recharge.
Slash and Parry require nothing.

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what's your favorite scrapper build? i'm thinking of playing as a scrapper. i want to know from ppl who have played as a screapper what their favorite build for a scrapper is. then i'm gonna pick a design for a scrapper that sounds best to/for me.

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DM/Regen for me. I love the single target specialization and the skill based reactive survivability design.

I've posted my basic "this is the build you should aim for" build here. I'm not feeling particularly catty because I just woke up so I'm not going to rip into you about creating a new thread when there's already one on the same topic on the same page.

Anyways, as to advice, depending on how deep your pockets are, I'd definitely suggest the Fighting and Speed pools, either the Leaping or Flight pools, and either Fitness or Stealth. If you've got the money to dump a lot of influence, follow the build I gave you. If you don't, take a few lessons to heart:

1. Recharge is awesome.
2. More recharge is even more awesome.
3. Even more recharge is even more, even more awesome.
4. Positional and global defense is great.
5. Resistance isn't too bad.

As to basic suggestions, Doctored Wounds sets are generally more useful than Numina's sets. The 5% +recharge is the entire reason. Touch of Death and Obliteration are awesome. Mako's Bite is pretty good too, but it gives you ranged defense which isn't as great as melee, since you're spending most of your time in melee anyway. The Steadfast Protection 3% +def IO and the Shield Wall 3% +def IO (the second is currently not in Mids, but is in game) is better for Resilience than the Aegis unique. The Aegis unique is just kinda special.

And, dear god, Midnight Grasp is an attack, not an immobilize or a set mule. You want to slot it as such. The fact that it can accept immobilize sets should never act upon your slotting.