Umbral

I can provide two excellent builds that should fulfill exactly what you're looking for for Kat/Regen and DM/WP. The Kat/Regen build I've got on hand has taken out 4 AVs at once (build was made by me, fight credit to ValBlademaster). The DM/WP is pretty much along the same lines.

However, before I provide awesomeness. I demand a sacrifice: I want to see what you came up with first. Simply giving you a build won't really help you make new builds in the future, so, before I do the work for you, I'd like to see how well you did on your own.

So a single example makes your case for all of the accolades?

You're thinking of this post, wherein Castle said that making your attacks stronger the more you are hit is "on the right track". "On the right track" can mean all kinds of things, from all of the attacks having some kind of SR-resistance style base damage scaling to the damage bonus not being attached to you being hit but rather you hitting targets.

Yes, I have noticed this. I noticed it from the very beginning. This is why the "average damage" isn't reliable.

Except that you actually just said that it's not correct in the case of the Dual Pistols powers. Are you even paying attention to your own arguments?

Even though your observation was quite obviously wrong? The only case in which your numerical comparisons were correct (and you gauged them as "accurate") is in the case of Council robots. Not any of the other robots (such as the Nemesis robots which do not have any substantial resistance to lethal damage that would even remotely compare to the levels of resistance your were using). Council robots and that's it.

Yes, I went to the super secret school of empirical data collection wherein we don't count on human perception bias in order to collect our information. You may want to try this because I doubt any of the data you collected was anything but anecdotal and thereby unreliable. The very fact that you assumed that 50% resistance to lethal without commensurate resistance to any other damage type was normal pretty much invalidates any claim as such.

If someone is, legitimately, this ignorant of what they can do to figure out what's going on with the game, I seriously doubt they give much care to actually attempt to calculate power strength discrepancy. Number crunching is a pretty niche hobby, though, the Power Analyzer isn't the only way to check enemy combat attributes: if you've got a Blaster, you can quite easily get Surveillance (which is an awesome power to get nonetheless because -res is awesome).

First off, this is assuming that everyone's playstyle matches yours. Secondly, you're assuming that your outlier examples (more robots than normals) are standard examples. Third, you're operating under the assumption that all robots have the same resistance suite as the Council robots, which they don't. The Malta robots have balanced resistance suites, and the Nemesis robots have very low resistances to lethal damage.

Yes. It does. If you're using incorrect values, then the fundamental basis of your entire comparison is flawed. The validity of your fundamental assumptions is one of the very first things that you should ensure because the entire rest of your case is based around your assumptions being true. When they're not true, or, only true within a very limited sense, then the validity of the entire analysis is called into question unless it is analyzed within the explicit limited sense in which your assumptions are true.

First off, you can't use the information from a number of the Detailed Descriptions explicitly because they're wrong. I can reliably prove that those numbers are wrong. I can do it empirically. I can get 30 different people and prove it empirically. It has been proven that those numbers are wrong and that the correct numbers are those listed in the combat attributes rather than in the average damage.

Hypothetical examples aren't a problem when they're grounded in truth. Yours were not. You literally said...

Your assumption was that "many things heavily resist it". Unless your definition of "many" is "a specific subset of a specific enemy group for a specific level range", the basis of your entire "hypothetical argument" was fundamentally flawed.

Already been done. Already been done a couple times, in fact.

Because your paper analysis was not only flawed but horribly flawed.

And yet I'm still drawing the information from the in game information. Look at the combat attributes. Do you honestly believe that 3 times 75 is 150?

And yet, for some reason, you did. You even made these judgments explicitly to counter the judgments of people that actually have use the power. Are you a hypocrite, an idiot, or both?

This is because you're basing performance off of a single attribute that ignores animation time: raw damage. You're ignoring the substantially more important value of damage per activation second.

Also, you're completely wrong about Blazing Arrow having a longer animation time. Do you even bother checking your information? Blazing Arrow has a raw animation time of 1.83 seconds. Executioner's Shot has a raw animation time of 2.57 seconds. 1.83
Seriously, you can't even get that right.

Of course! Because no one except for you has actually played around with the power. All of the players from closed and open beta that complained about the mediocre damage capabilities of the set didn't play around with it at all. All of the players that have already played a Dual Pistols toon up to 50 and complained about the mediocre damage capability didn't play around with it at all. The only person in the entire game that has tested out the power and come to an accurate conclusion is you, even though you can't even get basic information about the power correct.

Are you only looking at the numbers that pop up, because, if there are enough numbers popping up from a single application, more don't show up. Do you honestly believe that the enemies you're fighting only have 65 hit points because you only see one or two ticks from RoA? This is why empirical data collection is so much more effective than your anecdotal analysis. I can tell you right now that the entire reason you're only seeing one or two ticks is because of number appearance saturation. If you'd like other examples, try looking at your damage dealt rather than simply counting on the UI to tell you things.

No, I think this is what you've been missing. I've been harping on you about this from the very beginning. Those numbers are wrong.

Except that it isn't because you don't know how to accurately collect information.

Did you ever read what I told you about the other rain powers and how they have average damages that are explicit sums of the totals of their ticks even though they force enemies to leave the range of the power on their own? Honestly, do you not read anything except what you want to hear?

Do you honestly expect Blizzard to deal the 500 damage it lists in its average damage even though it deals that damage over 15 seconds and causes its enemies to run out? The only time you're going to get all of the damage from Blizzard is if you have all of the enemies in there immobilized, which will cause the exact same thing with RoA. Either every other power in the game is wrong or RoA (and you) are wrong.

Except that I explicitly stated that I was using base damage numbers. Good job reading that.

But you'll put out fundamentally flawed math and enter into a full on raging argument with someone that has used all of them, looked at all of the numbers on all of them, and done the math for all of them to outright prove that one of them is drastically underperforming?

I'm did not enter into this discussion ignorant of the capabilities of the powers in question. I have experienced each of them both first and secondhand. I have verified their damages and average performance levels. I actually know what I'm talking about. You have admitted you don't. Do you really want me to continually have to tell you all of the places that you're wrong and demonstrate to the few people still reading this just how little you comprehend about the topic at hand?

I know what I'm talking about. People I have never met ask me questions about this kind of stuff all the time because I know what I'm talking about. The devs care about what I say and the analysis I do because I know what I'm talking about. You don't even know how to read the detailed information correctly.

Except that it's obvious from reading the power entry that those numbers are wrong. Just because it's written in game doesn't mean it's correct. If you're going to assume that it's supposed to be "normal" to ignore ticks of a power, Blizzard is listed as having an average damage of 500.49 damage. It deals this damage with 152 separate ticks that each deal 3.34 damage. That damage is a simple multiplication (once again, rounding errors account for the tiny discrepancy) that includes all ticks even though the power itself deals the damage over 15 seconds while making enemies run out of it. The same thing applies to Ice Storm and Rain of Fire.

Hell, the animation times are listed as such but no one who does any valid number crunching actually trusts those values for the purposes of analysis since the game revolves around a discrete .132 second time frame.

You can't simply trust the derivative values given in the detailed information. RoA is an excellent example of why.

So you're anecdotally attempting to diagnose the various resistance levels of enemies and then attempting to apply those numbers in an unbiased manner to those damage types? Seriously, do some research first if you want to crunch some numbers in any kind of attempt to draw accurate conclusions.

If you actually checked (the Power Analyzer craftable temps are great for this), you'd realize that Warwolves have 35% resistance to smashing and lethal and 25% resistance to all other damage types. That doesn't grok with the numbers you used because, even with 35% resistance, in order to preserve that proportion of resisted damage, the target would need to have a 30% weakness to other damage types.

The only enemies that have a 50% resistance to lethal without some similar level of resistance to a large number of other damage types are the Council robots, I'll cede that. Though I don't think you can legitimately make the claim that the Council robots form such a large portion of the population of enemies that you could logically use them as a point of comparison with the other crashless nukes. You might as well start attempting to claim that Invuln has no survivability because it dies incredibly quickly when forced to fight enemies that use psychic damage (a similar small portion of enemies compared to the Council robots).

Here is a link to a thread that has a compiled list of all enemy resistances. That will show you just how off base your resistance number is.

So you stated those values purely for illustration and then attempted to use those values when applying math to them to determine whether a power is underpowered? As I have been saying since the very beginning, if you're going to try to use math in an attempt to validate your opinions about a power, make sure you actually get your information right.

Don't make me beat you upside the head with numbers and existing precedent. I've already given you a link to the post where I definitively proved that HoB is underpowered. Do you want me to repost it right here, just for you, because you are under some kind of delusion that your terribly flawed attempt at analysis was correct?

In its current incarnation, HoB is substantially weaker than it should be. It's provable. Just because you're too ignorant to realize this and you attempt to validate your concerns with math that has more holes in it than Marxist Communism doesn't make it untrue. Next time you try to do anything with numbers, make sure those numbers are right. Just because you did math doesn't make the results even remotely close to correct.

If you can hit more than 3 targets with Piercing Rounds, I will give you 5 billion influence.

Piercing Rounds doesn't get to claim legitimate AoE status for the simple reason that it is target capped to be so limiting. Headsplitter and Golden Dragonfly are functionally ST attacks for the exact same reason.

The problem with this point of view is that it is similarly simply to just get a Celerity or Unbounded Leap +Stealth IO and just use that. You can just put that in Sprint and, amazingly enough, you've got permanent Stealth now!

As I said before, the Stealth aspects of Stealth are easy to replicate. The only time that you might actually want to get Stealth is if you are forgoing IOs completely and want to get the benefits of the Stealth. With IOs, Stealth useless. Without IOs, Stealth moderately less useless.

I'm 24, and I'm not sure if my existence supports or refutes your claim!

The problem is that you can't prove this. It's impossible.

If anything, analysis will demonstrate that you have more reason to take Combat Jumping than Stealth.

CJ has an endurance cost of .075 end/sec. Stealth has an endurance cost of .325 end/sec.

CJ and Stealth provide the exact same in combat defense bonuses.

CJ provides additional mobility and immobilization protection, neither of which are easily replicable with IOs (+spd doesn't give you additional turning or height). SJ provides stealth, which is incredibly easy to replicate with IOs (Celerity and/or Unbounded Leap Stealth proc).

CJ can accept defense buff, jumping, and universal movement IO sets. Stealth can only accept defense buff sets.

CJ trumps Stealth in every aspect.

Gah. >.

Well, it's a question of 2.5% +rech global (since Doctored Wounds provides 5% +recharge for the equivalent cost) or 15% +rech in Reconstruction. I erred on the side of getting more Reconstruction. I switched out Doc Wounds for Panacea in DP because I didn't need more +rech there in order to keep it perma. I left Recon and IH alone because I wanted the additional recharge in there.

Yes.

Facepalm isn't for a hurting head. It's for ideas that are so bad that it is impossible to otherwise elucidate ones utter disgust with the inability of another to properly comprehend what is going on.

Obviously you didn't read the entirety of this thread. Otherwise you would have seen this thread which quite obviously point out that, even using existing precedents for powers of a kind, HoB is drastically underpowered.

Except that it's not. You're using the wrong value for Rain of Arrows. 3 ticks of 75.07 damage does not equal 150.15 damage. Simple math tells you that it's equal to 225.21 damage (rounding errors account for small indiscrepancies). Ask anyone that uses archery: you'll get 3 ticks of damage virtually every time.

And this is where you fail. "Heavily resisted" in CoX refers, in a vast majority of situations, to roughly 25-30% resistance to a specific damage type is "heavy resistance", and, even then, only if you assume that the damage resistance isn't general resistance for the target. 50% resistance without similar levels of resistance to all damage types is virtually unheard of.

If you actually applied a realistic level of "heavy resistance", you'd see that the damage is actually still under par by a significant degree.

What you don't seem to realize about Rain of Arrows is that the ticks of damage don't take as long to apply as a normal rain. There is less than a second of time in between the first and final tick of damage. The chances of someone leaving the area while the pseudo pet is down are almost entirely negligible. Of course, you're similarly ignoring the fact that, because it's a rain rather than a single application of a power, if another target leaves or a target dies, then it will hit another target if one is available. RoA and Blizzard are the only nukes that can actually hit damage more targets than the target cap because of this.

Yet the secondary effects alone don't make up for the fact that it takes twice as long to recharge, deals less damage than it should considering it's a melee PbAoE rather than a ranged AoE (of which there is strong precedent that it should deal more damage to account for the added level of danger), and doesn't have properly accounted for variable damage. The secondary effects provide some functionality, but they don't make up for all of the other problems with HoB.

So your argument is that EU should get something for free simply because they have fewer servers to choose from, and your counter to the argument that it's not fair is simply saying that it is in fact fair? You're not doing all that good of a job of convincing anyone or anything or the need for it. Just because you say it's fair (and operating under the assumption that any significant portion of the people that no longer play will be operating at max character slot capacity so that they would actually have some use for the extra character slots) doesn't mean that it's even remotely true.

Something else you should ask yourself is, if this is going to benefit the EU servers, why not just do the exact same thing to the American servers as well? If you honestly believe that it's going to bring back that many people to the game, why not do it to the larger market as well (which would actually make it fair because both sides are getting the same thing), especially since you can reasonably assume that the proportion of people that sign back up are probably equal on both sides.

Honestly, I don't see much reason. A vast majority of the people I know don't even use up the existing slots on one of their servers. The only people I know of that have filled up the slots on the servers are those that have been playing forever, so they already know what the game is getting. You can't simply assume that those slots will actually be used by someone that stopped playing, especially when you're attempting to draw back players that stopped playing a while ago and likely didn't use up their existing slots when they were playing.

Honestly, I'm not sure it would take reworking the math. It would probably require fixing the back end to separate debuffs from buffs to be completely separate enhanceable attributes. Of course, if they really wanted to go that direction, they could simply place defense debuffs on schedule B rather than schedule A and simply be done with it. I've never been quite sure why tohit debuffs, defense buffs, and tohit buffs are all schedule B but defense debuffs remained schedule A: it's the functional equivalent of a +tohit buff only they're affected by debuff resistance and the purple patch but tohit debuffs got stuck with schedule B even though they're in the same situation.

Eh, infinite endurance sustainability isn't really all that complicated on a Scrapper. Body Mastery is pretty much designed to give you sustainable blue bar thanks to Physical Perfection (i.e. another place to put a Perf Shifter proc) and Conserve Power. Even a DA isn't all that hard to make infinitely sustainable thanks to the ToE proc.

Half of what Stamina does and half of what Health does. Also known as 20% +regen and 12.5% +recov base values.

It's a strange artifact of how the game sees certain power effects. Defense debuffs and defense buffs are considered to be the exact same effect except that one of them has a negative sign in front of it. Because of those, +def and -def are both enhanced by the exact same enhancement type. While it normally doesn't come into play because no powers in the game have -def while simultaneously having +def, it can come into play when you start slotting HOs because they can be put into any power wherein one of the enhancement values of the HO is effective. The defense debuff just kind of "bleeds through" to provide defense enhancement along with the acc.

I build for the infinite endurance sustainability, yo.

This is pretty much it.

Where BotZ is concerned, while I still like the set, I'm no longer going to be going out of my way to slot it. This doesn't mean it's no longer a good set. It simply means that it's no longer a set that you're going to want to go out of your way to slot for.

Depends on how far back you go. It depends pretty heavily on whether you consider the beginning of Dragonball to be the equivalent to level 1 of the character (or consider him to already have been at a reasonable level at that point) or considering Dragonball Z to be the starting point. Even so, the fact that you would call the Kamehameha a special attack indicated that it wouldn't be one of his low tier attacks because it doesn't form the foundation of his combat style. Those attacks would be his normal punches and kicks.

Ask and ye shall receive. Softcapped with a single application of Parry. Also capable of Headsplitter>Hack>Dis>(Wait .396)>Hack attack chain for those times you don't need to be softcapped (which should push your DPS to ~250). Just a tad bit short of perma-Hasten. Fully endurance sustainable thanks to Conserve Power.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.621
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Magic Scrapper
Primary Power Set: Broad Sword
Secondary Power Set: Regeneration
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Body Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Hack -- Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg(A), Hectmb-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(3), Hectmb-Acc/Rchg(3), Hectmb-Dmg/EndRdx(5), Hectmb-Dam%(5), Achilles-ResDeb%(7)
Level 1: Fast Healing -- Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(50)
Level 2: Reconstruction -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(7), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(9), Dct'dW-Heal(9), Dct'dW-Rchg(11)
Level 4: Quick Recovery -- P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(11), EndMod-I(13)
Level 6: Build Up -- AdjTgt-Rchg(A), AdjTgt-ToHit/Rchg(13), RechRdx-I(15)
Level 8: Parry -- C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg(A), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx(15), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg(17), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(17), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(19), LkGmblr-Rchg+(19)
Level 10: Dull Pain -- Panac-Heal/EndRedux(A), Panac-EndRdx/Rchg(21), Panac-Heal/Rchg(21), Panac-Heal/EndRedux/Rchg(23), Panac-Heal(23)
Level 12: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def(25)
Level 14: Super Jump -- Jump-I(A)
Level 16: Integration -- Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(25), Panac-Heal(34), Panac-Heal/+End(36)
Level 18: Whirling Sword -- Oblit-Dmg(A), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(36), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(36), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(37), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(37), Oblit-%Dam(37)
Level 20: Boxing -- Empty(A)
Level 22: Tough -- Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(39), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(39), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(50)
Level 24: Weave -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(39), GftotA-Run+(40), GftotA-Def/EndRdx(40)
Level 26: Disembowel -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(27), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(27), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(29), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(29), T'Death-Dam%(31)
Level 28: Instant Healing -- Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(40), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(42), Dct'dW-Heal(42), Dct'dW-Rchg(42)
Level 30: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(31), RechRdx-I(31)
Level 32: Head Splitter -- Armgdn-Dmg/Rchg(A), Armgdn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(33), Armgdn-Acc/Rchg(33), Armgdn-Dmg/EndRdx(33), Armgdn-Dam%(34), FotG-ResDeb%(34)
Level 35: Maneuvers -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(43), GftotA-Run+(43), GftotA-Def/EndRdx(43)
Level 38: Moment of Glory -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/Rchg(45), RechRdx-I(45), RechRdx-I(45)
Level 41: Tactics -- GSFC-ToHit(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(46), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(46), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(46), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(48), GSFC-Build%(48)
Level 44: Conserve Power -- RechRdx-I(A)
Level 47: Physical Perfection -- P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(48), RgnTis-Regen+(50)
Level 49: Resilience -- GA-3defTpProc(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Critical Hit
Level 4: Ninja Run

Actually, this is wrong. Attack powers with long animations but good DPAs have higher recharge requirements because they have proportionately longer cycle times than short animation powers with high DPAs thanks to the standardization of the dam/rech/end formula. If two powers had the same DPA but one took twice as long to animate, the shorter power of the two would be on less than half of the cycle time of the longer one because, while the proportions of the recharge are reducing at the same rate, the proportion of the animation time doesn't, which means that the cycle time of the shorter animation power decreases faster than the cycle time of the longer animation power, allowing the shorter animation power to generate a more recharge efficient attack string.