Umbral

Having checked theoretical DPS calculations against in-game DPS for an attack string that actually had several steps of redraw in it, I'm pretty sure that redraw is only 1-2 clock intervals (clock interval = ~.132 secs). It's an incredibly tiny loss of dps, approaching maybe 4-5% if you're using only extremely fast attacks and alternating every time.

There is a very specific reason why I eschew +regen in all of my optimized */regen builds: it doesn't stack well with other forms of damage recovery. That's simply how all forms of damage recovery operate. Damage mitigation, on the other hand, is great because it stacks beautifully with itself, up until you reach the soft/cap.

Here's a quick thought experiment that demonstrates what I'm talking about:

Think of your survivability as the total area of a rectangle. Length represents your ability to recover from damage (+regen and heals). Width represents your ability to simply reduce the incoming damage (+res and +def). */Regen, having virtually no real damage mitigation but a boatload of damage recovery, is going to be arbitrarily assigned a length of 50 and a width of 5. You are then allowed to add a total of 10, divided any way you choose, to your length and width. Which will generate greater total area (survivability)? Adding to length (damage recovery) or width (damage mitigation). ((50 + 10) * (5+0)) = 300. ((50+0) * (5+10)) = 750.

No matter what I'm building, I operate under this idea. Damage mitigation is great, but, if you've seen any softcapped */sr without Aid Self or Health, you know they're going to die rather quickly. The inverse applies to */regen and */wp in the exact same way. The best way to ensure survivability is to stack both damage recovery and damage mitigation together as efficiently as possible in order to achieve as much survivability as possible. Since */regen is already dancing at the point where further damage recovery becomes redundant/severely diminished in effect without even considering IOs, it's better for overall survivability to get more damage mitigation (which is most effectively found via IOs in +def). With */sr, */sd, and */invuln (re: the mitigation based sets), once you cap out their mitigation capabilities (re: softcap defense), you're pretty much smoked unless you can actually find a mechanism to recover from what damage does come through.

Cursed name thieves!

Here's a quick rundown of it: redraw does effect activation time by adding a couple clock intervals to the animation time of a power. Before this (rather old) change, the animation time with redraw and without redraw were exactly the same (re: you paid for redraw with the animation time whether you actually drew the weapon or not). BABs then changed it so that redraw was a separate animation, thusly speeding up the weapon sets.

The best way to think of it is that, if you use attacks with the same weapon and don't cause any redraw, you get a small reduction in animation time for doing so. If you do generate redraw with your attack string, you're simply not getting the slight reduction and simply using the base animation times (since the attacks were balanced and designed around the animation time incorporating redraw automatically).

Yeah, I personally rate them as being roughly equal honestly, at least where */regen and */wp are concerned. For any other secondary, FA simply costs too friggin' much. For me, it's a bigger question of whether I have the power pool choice available to get leadership, since speed, leaping, fitness, and fighting are all nearly requisite for most Scrapper builds that I put together.

While FA doesn't provide as much +tohit, it provides 2 things that Tactics doesn't provide: 20% +acc and a boatload (re: 69.2% at 50) of +res(tohit). Honestly, the 20% +acc isn't all that great, especially when you consider just how much +acc you can get from IO sets, but the big factor that I've always seen is the tohit debuff resistance.

Either way, the endurance issue shouldn't really matter anyway. It's */regen for god's sake. You've got QR, Stamina, and MoG with a tiny amount of non-attack end drain. You can easily afford to burn a bit of that extra endurance on a power that's less end efficient than it has any right to be.

As to slotting, here's my recommendations:

IH, Recon, and Dull Pain get 5 piece Doctored Wounds (all but Heal/End). QR gets the Perf Shifter proc, Perf Shifter EndMod, and a level 50 common EndMod. Integration either gets 5 piece Doctored Wounds (all but end/rech) or 3 piece Numina (proc, Heal, Heal/End). Fast Healing gets either the Miracle or Regen Tissue proc. Revive gets ignored. Resilience gets the 3% +def procs. MoG gets LotG +rech, LotG def/rech, and 2 level 50 common rech IOs.

For your attacks, Storm Kick gets 5 piece Hecatomb (all but Dam), and, depending on how much +rech you're managing, a level 50 common rech IO. Crane Kick and CAK get 6 piece Touch of Death. Dragon's Tail gets 6 piece Obliteration. BU gets 3 rech IOs.

For everything else, Stamina gets the same slotting as QR except that it gets all of it's slots only after QR is finished. Anything that can take an LotG +rech gets one. All transport powers get 3 piece BotZ. FA gets 6 piece Gaussian's.

I love Brits...

Gah. You're right. Divided by 60 seconds rather than by 100 percent. Stupid math errors.

Just because you haven't seen them doesn't mean they don't exist. It doesn't matter that you don't believe in them. When you're in a PvP zone, I assure you, they will believe in you (and generally prove so by tapping you on the back as hard as possible).

Once every ~5.5 seconds, you can prevent incoming damage from up to 10 targets for roughly 1.75 seconds, assuming they're within the rather restrictive area of the 90* 30' cone and don't have any knockback protection. Assuming that you're hitting every target every time and using the power every time that it's up, that's ~32% mitigation. While it can only get lower (and it almost assuredly will get lower, especially when fighting higher level enemies or AVs), it's got the added benefit of being a normally untapped source of mitigation and therefore stacks with damage mitigation and damage recovery for survivability purposes.

Compare that to Siphon Life, which will increase the survivability of a DM/SR by roughly 200% by increasing their damage recovery from ~20 hp/sec (assuming IO build) to ~60 hp/sec, or DA/Parry, which will increase the survivability of a Kat/Regen by roughly 600% by increasing their melee defense from 20% to 45% (assuming only melee and lethal attacks).

Shockwave is a powerful power, but it's not nearly as powerful a tool of survivability as the previously mentioned powers within their specific situations of synergy (DA/Parry in the absence of large amounts of +def and Siphon Life in the absence of large amounts of damage recovery).

Is that actually taking into consideration the power effect delay? One of the reasons why I've been loathe to actually make any commentary on how much MoG eats into the duration of the effect is because I haven't actually gotten any information on how late in the animation the power actually begins taking place, yet I do know, from watching my real numbers, that the +res and +def apply after the power actually begins animating. The same applies to all of the other */regen powers as well, though I've still yet to actually get any hard information as to the delays (seeing as I'm too lazy to actually demorecord and do tick by tick analysis).

I agree completely that both of the tier 9s need to be viewed within the context of the powerset as a whole. MoG would be much less interesting within the confines of a set that has plenty of +res and +def to live off of all the time (re: Invuln), but I still think that MoG is, by far, the better power especially because of this.

Assuming no pool powers (which seems to be standard for powerset comparison) and SO slotting, SoW provides 29.3% +res(s/l) and 14.6 +res(all but s/l) with 40% uptime to a set that brings 35.1% +res(s/l) , 32.2% +res(psi), and 8.8% +res(other) to the table. That's an 82.3% increase in survivability against s/l damage, 27.4% increase against psi, and 19.1% increase against all other types (since SoW doesn't have any effect on defense, the def contributions are static and can therefore be ignored).

Under the same assumptions, MoG provides capped defense (45% functional contribution) to all but psi and 71.25% +res(all but psi), with a variable uptime ratio that's roughly 12% with SOs and no other +rech (15/125). */Regen brings only 8.8% +res(s/l) to the table. While it's up, that's a 3648% increase in survivability to s/l, a % increase in survivability to psi, and a 3478% increase to all others.

To me, it seems rather obvious that the power that increases your survivability by more than 2 orders of magnitude is better than the power that increases survivability by roughly 50% even if it's the other power is up nearly 3.5 times as often.

Of course, this completely ignores the crash that SoW has that you never have to deal with where MoG is concerned, nor does it bring up the fact that MoG has a 100% +recov buff and SoW only has 30% (considering the uptimes, the +recov is largely equal).

Honestly, my comment earlier on how often the powers get taken wasn't meant to be construed as "players do this". It was moreso meant to elaborate how important the powers are to the performance of the set. MoG adds a lot more survivability to */regen than SoW does to */wp, and, for those that pay attention to numbers rather than player perspective and expectations, MoG has a much greater positive effect upon survivability than SoW does.

I highly doubt they'll ever remove the minimum size requirements, simply because a number of TFs and trial actually have a reason for the minimum number of players. Just look at the Caverns of Transcendence trial.

CP is largely redundant on a */regen since you've already got QR and most likely Stamina. MA's end issues aren't so extreme as to require anything else, much less actually require Stamina even with FA or Targeting Drone turned on.

I generally take FA and LBE and that's it. FA is great for the Gaussian's set and LBE takes Apoc.

FA will only slightly reduce how much you need to slot acc into your powers. It adds only 20% acc, which isn't really much to go home about, and a pittance of +tohit (~7.5% enhanced). In SO terms, you could get away with only slotting a single acc rather than 2 (unless you're like me and go with a single acc anyway).

That's what I'm guessing. Hopefully they'll resolve the issue soon since the NA/EU tags are only supposed to be temporary.

Lost? You're a Scrapper. We've never had sanity.

Your link isn't working atm and everyone's titles got returned to the default.