_Uun_

That doesn't jibe with my understanding of the power, which is that the ticks are not independent. I think that the 50% tick is only considered if the 75% tick occurs. This matches all the player testing I have ever seen going back to I2 (when I rolled my En/En), which shows a 25% chance of 0 ticks, a 37.5% chance of 1 tick and a 37.5% chance of 2 ticks. If the probabilities were independent, it would be 12.5%/50%/37.5%.

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Nova with 3 damage SOs + Aim + Build Up + 1 small damage inspiration = 87.5% chance of killing a non-resistant +1 Lieutenant. I think this is a perfectly reasonable amount of damage for the drawbacks of the power. I don't think there should be a guaranteed one-shot AoE kill for +1 Lieuts; I think it should stay as a high chance of one-shot kill as it is currently.

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After thinking this over some more, I'm not sure I agree. I've run through the math and I don't see how nova w/ 3 SO's, BU, aim, and 1 small insp (1+0.95+1.00+0.65+0.25=3.85) defeats a +1 lieutenant if only the base ticks hit. At least the first optional tick needs to hit to defeat a lieutenant. That tick occurs only 75% of the time. So, in addition to a 5% chance to miss entirely (assuming capped tohit), you also have a 23.75% (0.25x0.95) chance that nova will hit but fail to defeat a given lieutenant. That suggests only a 71.25% chance of killing a +1 lieutenant, not 87.5%.

Code:[/color]

---

Level	Dmg_Mod	Scale	Dmg	Enh	Enh_Dmg	Lt_HP

33	43.84	3.0	131.5	3.85	506.4	650

40	50.90	3.0	152.7	3.85	587.9	780

50	55.61	3.0	166.8	3.85	642.3	860

 

---

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The thing about Nova is that the damage varies by mob. The 1st tick of smashing damage and 1st tick of energy damage are guaranteed. There is a 75% chance of a 2nd tick of energy damage, plus a 50% chance of a 3rd tick of energe damage (if the 2nd tick occurred). Based on my testing, these percentages are applied on a mob by mob basis - there is not a uniform test against all mobs in a spawn. It is quite possible for Nova to leave lieutenants alive if they only get hit by the initial ticks.

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And, am I right that Aim and Build-Up have lowered Accuracy buffs now?

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They don't have lowered buffs, however the correct values of the buffs are now known. And note, they are tohit buffs, not accuracy buffs. For blasters:
Aim: 37.5% +tohit / 62.5% +damage
BU: 15.0% +tohit / 100.0% +damage

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Probably the best way to answer this is to refer to comics -- When The Human Torch 'goes nova' he puts everything he has into it and pretty much knocks himself out. That's the 'feel' these powers are meant to reflect.


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I'm not questioning the conceptual validity of the crash, but rather whether they do enough damage given the crash.

I would suggest that this would represent the *lower* limit of how much damage nova should do: since a solo heroic mission can spawn a +1 LT, nova should be guaranteed to kill such a critter, if its designed to incapacitate the blaster completely.

Doesn't it seem reasonable, Castle, that if the big bangs are conceptually designed to incapacitate the blaster, at the very least they should be capable of delivering a *guaranteed* kill on a heroic solo spawn, assuming no extraordinary resistances? Extra damage beyond that would be extra damage beyond that: useful for people who run on invincible, for increasing the utility of the power in teams, etc.

Edit: assuming it hits at all: I'm not advocating for nova to be autohit

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By my calculations, at lvl 50 Nova+BU+Aim will not defeat a +0 lieutenant if only the guaranteed ticks go off. A lvl 50 lieutenant has 860 hit points. The guaranteed damage of Nova is 166.83. Assuming 3 even SO's, BU & Aim (0.95+1.00+0.625), 166.83 x 3.575 = 596. If the 2nd energy tick goes off (which I believe is 1.5 DS, not 1.75), you would get an additional 298 dmg for 895 total, defeating the lieutenant.

The thing about Nova is that the damage varies by mob. The 1st tick of smashing damage and 1st tick of energy damage are guaranteed. There is a 75% chance of a 2nd tick of energy damage, plus a 50% chance of a 3rd tick of energe damage (if the 2nd tick occurred). Based on my testing, these percentages are applied on a mob by mob basis - there is not a uniform test against all mobs in a spawn. It is quite possible for Nova to leave lieutenants alive if they only get hit by the initial ticks.

The easiest way to tell there is a cairn is if your attacks are doing no damage. If you are running it with a grav controller I would recommend they dismiss their singularity while doing the walls - I suspect the repel field may knock foes through the wall. I have run Eden twice since the aborted attempt above and have not had issues with the GM's or the walls.

See link in my sig. For some reason it never got indexed in the Guide to Guides.

It depends on their level, but generally 3 or 4.

This one is pretty good for general decscriptive info: Gleepwurp's Task Force and Trial Guide
Here's a recent thread with some good info from Bungee:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....&PHPSESSID=

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I had to abandon a trial last week due to a Cairn behind the Rock Wall that couldn't be destroyed even with AoE's.

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Really? Did you petition a GM that you were stuck? In a TV trial my team once knocked a guard back through a closed door (that he had the key too), catching us in a 22: need the guard to open the door... need to open the door to get the guard. I petitioned a GM and one popped over and fixed the problem for us.

Also, empaths and rads aren't necessary, FMIST, IMO.

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Yea we petitioned, but after 15-20 minutes we got tired of waiting and quit. The GM response finally came 45 minutes or an hour after the petition was submitted.

Needs a lot of work and is quite misleading in sections. I suggest you read some of the other guides and posts specific to the trial.
- First mission is defeat 200 DE.
- You do not need to clear the DE up to the Quarry. And there are two of them you need to defeat.
- Its the Rock Wall where you have to worry about Cairns, not the Mold Wall. The Rock Wall spawns Sentries and Boulders. The Sentries drop the Cairns. I had to abandon a trial last week due to a Cairn behind the Rock Wall that couldn't be destroyed even with AoE's.
- Before attacking the Mold Wall you need to clear the Lichen colonies. These are the snipers, not the Fungi. They are not in the room with the Crystal Titan.
- In the final room you fight Sardonyx and Guardians. You need to clear all of these before attacking the Crystal Titan. If you herd them to the freed heroes they will help you.
- Ambrosia protects you from the Crystal Titan's UNTYPED damage. This will 1-shot anyone, tanks included. The Titan also has a footstomp which does smashing damage. The ambrosia does not protect you from this - you need shields/inspirations.

30 seconds

Great guide Sooner. A couple of added tidbits. First of all, the crystal explosion is not kheldian energy, its lethal/fire. The explosion is ridiculously overpowered. I was on a team last night where we fought several crystals. I was playing a /DA scrapper, so I had 35% resists to lethal and fire and 47% to negative energy. Had no real problem taking the damage from the nicti while fighting the crystal. But the explosion - even with my resists, a lvl 35 crystal did 954 points of damage (that's close to 1,500 unshielded unless the explosion bypasses shields). As I only have 1,046 hit points, I face planted. I was so intrigued by this I repeated it with the second crystal. So not only will the crystal explostion one shot a squishy, it will pretty much one shot a fully shielded scrapper.

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Just pointing out that obsidian shield is in FACT the only power in CoH that has psionic resistance. Stone has psionic defense (and general fort and such defense powers to all).

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Shadow Fall (Dark Miasma) and Mind Over Body (Psychic Mastery/Psionic Mastery) provide psionic resistance.

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Mass Hypnosis - Mind Control

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Very useful solo. Somewhat useful on teams. A no aggro sleep that allows you peel off a spawn, set up AoE containment or set your debuffs. Excellent for turning around a situation gone bad.

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Inertial Reduction - Kinetics (While it is useful as a personal travel power, there is no other effect. Just jumping.)

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Unsupressed Super Jump without opening up a power pool. Love it.

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Thunder Clap - Storm Summoning

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Not everyone's cup of tea, but hardly a worthless power in the hands of a storm defender.

Not really game breaking, but it would be really nice to get a fix of the no lieutenants in solo missions bug. I keep hearing a fix is in the queue, but I'm very tired of minion-only missions. Also appears to be happening on 2-person teams, at least at the normal spawn size difficulties (heroic/rugged/invincible).

A simple MS Excel spreadsheet which allows you to look up the defense value of pool powers by AT.

Power Pool Defense Calculator

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Great post. I saw a post recently that stated the longest range you could get out of flight would be to slot 2 endredux 1 flight speed. This coalesces with that. You don't get there the fastest but, you can go the farthest. Such is the way of end.

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Depends if you have stamina and if you use flight in combat. If you have stamina and don't use flight in combat, you should be pretty safe just slotting flight for speed (unless you keep A LOT of toggles running).

Here is Statesman's original explanation of stealth and supression from August 2005:

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Basic stealth Powers (Pools, temp powers, and Powers not in a Defense set like Blaster Cloaking Device, Controller Illusion Invisibilities):

Toggles:
If you Attack, or are Hit - Critters see you. You loose half your defense buff (and your PvP stealth) for 10 seconds. Your translucency is reduced to indicate this change.

Clicks
If you Attack, or are Hit - All enemies will see you. You loose half your defense buff. Your translucency is reduced to indicate this change.

Primary stealth Powers (Those in a defense set like Dark Armor/Cloak of Darkness, Dark Miasma/Shadow Fall, Storm Summoning/Steamy Mist, Warshade/Shadow Cloak)

Toggles:
If you Attack, or are Hit - Critters see you. (You loose your PvP stealth for 10 seconds). Your translucency is reduced to indicate this change. No Defense is Suppressed

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What was changed in I7:

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Stealth and Phase Shift Powers will suppress (for self buffs or toggles) or cancel (for external buffs) when a player interacts with Interactive Objects, such as Plaques or Mission Objective Objects. Suppression of this type has a duration of 10 seconds.

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As near as I can tell, there was no change to the defense supression - except for primary stealth powers, 1/2 the defense supresses if you attack or are hit. I believe this applies to invisibility as well.

Powers: 24 [every 2nd level to 32, then every 3rd level to 47, plus 1 at 49]
Slots: 91 (24+67) [2 slots every non-power level to 29, 3 thereafter]
Power Pools: up to 4 regular plus 1 epic

This is not a guide. You present power selections in a questionable order and slotting that is not ED compliant and offer no justification for either. For example:

- Deferring invincibility to 35 yet taking resist energies at 30.
- Why slot only 2 damres in armors, not 3? I could see it for the passives (of even not slotting them), but you're giving up a lot of damage resistance not fully slotting TI.
- 4 damres in unstoppable is a complete waste. With the passives you're over the cap with 2 even if you shut off your toggles.
- With the 10 target maximum, 6 def in invincibility will provide 1.35% more defense than 3 slots. With 3 targets the difference is 0.64%.
- 6 slots in health will allow you to regenerate 46.0% of your hit points per minute as compared to 44.5% with 3 slots. At level 50 you're talking about 20 hit points per minute.
- 6 slotting stamina will give you 3.75 extra endurance per minute as compared to 3 slots.
- I don't see any endred. Even with 6 slotted stamina you will be sucking wind alot.
- Based on the slotting you describe, you only have 1 slot remaining to devote to the epics. Even if you only put 1 slot in the passives that would only leave you 5 to spread among the 3 epics.

Its your $15. If you're happy playing this build, great. But don't post it without explanation and call it a guide.

Looks Like This Is The End…A Short Guide To Endurance Management

Nobody needs endurance for endurance sake. Endurance is needed in order to use your powers effectively – with no endurance you can’t do anything (as anyone familiar with Sappers can attest). Endurance is affected by two factors: how much you use and the rate at which it is recovered. If your usage is greater than your recovery rate over any period of time, you will have to rest (i.e., stop using) until you recover. Management is designed to prevent this from occurring at inconvenient times. How do you know you have an endurance problem? To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, you’ll know it when you see it.

Endurance Recovery

Every character starts with 100 endurance. This amount does not scale with level, although it can be increased with certain accolades. Base end recovery is 100/min, so if you have nothing running you can go from 0 to full in one minute. Stamina adds 25/min to your base end recovery. This can be enhanced to 49/min with 3 SO’s, allowing you to go from 0 to full in 40 seconds. Do you have to get Stamina? No. You need to decide whether it is better to have access to more powers or to be able to enhance your powers for other attributes than EndRed. Adding Stamina effectively reduces the number of EndRed enhancements you need – you are trading powers for slots.

There are also buffs available that enhance endurance recovery or provide one-shot bursts of endurance. Access to these buffs, whether self-provided or by a teammate, should be considered in your decision to take Stamina or not.

Self: Conserve Power (Energy Manipulation/Luminous Aura/4 APP’s), Consume (Fiery Aura/Fire Manipulation/Fire Mastery), Quick Recovery (Regeneration), Dark Consumption (Dark Melee/Dark Mastery), Power Sink (Electricity Manipulation/Electricity Mastery), Energy Absorption (Ice Armor), Stygian Circle (Umbral Aura)
Other: Adrenalin Boost (Empathy), Speed Boost (Kinetics)
Self & Other: Recovery Aura (Empathy), Transference (Kinetics), Accelerate Metabolism (Radiation Emission)

Enhancements

One of the most important aspect of managing endurance usage is understanding how endurance reduction enhancements function. Like recharge reduction enhancements (and any others which reduce some aspect of a power), EndRed enhancement operation is not self evident. Relative to their base value they have a smaller effect than the enhancement schedule would suggest, plus the incremental amount of absolute endurance reduction diminishes with each successive enhancement to a power.

Say you slot an EndRed SO. EndRed is on Schedule A, so one would assume that raw endurance usage is reduced by 33.33%. Its not that simple. The problem is that enhancements always apply to the base value so that multiple enhancements do not compound. Think about what would happen if you slotted three enhancements. You obviously can’t reduce endurance by 99.99%. Here’s what the system does:

1/(1+Total Enhancement Value)
1 SO: 1/(1+0.3333) = 0.75 (25% reduction)
2 SO: 1/(1+0.6666) = 0.60 (15% reduction)
3 SO: 1+(1+0.9500) = 0.51 (9% reduction)

For example, if you have a power which uses 24 endurance to activate, you will save 6 endurance for the first SO, 3.6 for the second SO, and a mere 2.1 for the third SO. You save less endurance from the second and third slots combined than you save from the first. Understanding this mechanic will help you determine whether to slot a second EndRed in one power or the first in another.

Wait you say, I’m being cheated. Not so. Assume a fictitious attack chain with 5 attacks where each attack uses 8 endurance and has a 2 second activation. That’s 240 end/min. Excluding end recovery you can attack at that rate for 25 seconds. Say you slot 1 EndRed SO in each attack – now you’re saving 60 end/min and you can attack for 33 seconds, a 33.33% improvement [(33-25)/25]. Slot a 2nd EndRed SO and you can fight for 41 seconds, a 66.67% improvement over the base value [(41-25)/25]. As you can see, the percentage improvement matches Schedule A. You do get the full value of the SO, just not the way you would think.

Slotting/Toggles

It seems like one of the first articles of CoX dogma is that the best way to reduce endurance usage is to slot endurance reduction in your toggles. Only problem is that most of the time your toggles aren’t what’s eating your endurance. Over time, your attacks and other click powers use far more endurance than do your toggles.

Lets take something common like the Leadership pool. Each of those toggles uses 23 end/min (46 end/min if you run two). Armors are not as expensive as you would think. To run all three Invulnerability toggles costs 43 end/min. The three Dark Armor armors cost a total of 37 end/min. The two Fiery Aura armors cost a total of 34 end/min. Damage auras are more expensive - running Death Shroud or Blazing Aura alone costs 31 end/min. Compare these figures to the fictitious attack chain above – each attack uses 48 end/min. In this case, an EndRed enhancement in any attack would save more endurance than one in each toggle. (There are exceptions - some toggles are notorious hogs.)

OK, no more toggle slotting for me - I’ll just slot EndRed in my attacks. Not so fast. The problem is you only have 6 slots per attack. If your preferred slotting is 1 Acc/3 Dmg/1 RechRed/1 EndRed, then you’re golden. But what if you want 2 Acc (for PVP, or if you regularly fight +2’s and +3’s). Now you’re faced with a tradeoff – do you drop Dmg, RechRed or EndRed? If you drop Dmg it will take you longer to defeat your foe (using more endurance and risking your health). On the other hand, toggles often don’t have enough attributes to require 6 slots, making them ready candidates for EndRed slots, particularly in the late game when you have more slots than you know what to do with. It may not be the most end efficient route, but as long as your effectiveness is not impaired it may not matter.

Where should I slot then? The first task is to figure out where you are using your end. Calculate the end cost per minute for your powers and rank them. There are a variety of ways to do this. Toggles are easy since they’re always on. For attacks, you could take your attack chain and estimate how often you use each attack over a minute and multiply that by each power’s end cost. Or you could run a program like HeroStats to determine how many times each power was used over some period of time and multiply that rate by each power’s end cost. Since each power uses end at a different rate and is used in varying frequency, it should be readily apparent which are using the most endurance. This exercise should allow you to determine the relative benefit of slotting EndRed in different powers, as well as the relative merit of a second slot in one power compared to a first in another. EndRed enhancements are somewhat unique in that they are fungible – you care more about the cumulative effect than the effect on the power(s) slotted.

Consider our fictitious attack chain. With 2 EndRed SO’s in each attack your usage drops from 240 end/min to 144 end/min. Without Stamina you would still have a net loss of 44 end/min and you still could only attack for 2½ minutes before running out of endurance. But if you had Stamina 3-slotted with SO’s you would have a net surplus of almost 5 end/min (assuming no toggles running) and could fight indefinitely. The reality is that you don’t need to build your character to fight indefinitely (and you do run toggles). There is usually a balance point which allows you to fight comfortably for the duration of a battle. Getting there may involve a bit of trial and error.

Obvious Stuff

I haven’t really touched on it, but there are some obvious things you can do to save endurance. Turn travel powers off in combat. For example, Super Speed and Super Jump use 27 end/min. Fly uses 120 end/min. Even Sprint uses almost 18 end/min. Don’t use AoE attacks on single targets. AoE’s, and to a lesser extent cones, use far more endurance per unit of damage than do single target attacks. Don’t use your big heavy-hitting attack to take the last sliver of health from a foe.

Data

All endurance cost data presented comes from: http://www.nofuture.org.uk/coh/powers/ (Pool power figures are here: http://www.nofuture.org.uk/coh/power...php?cat=Pool). The numbers listed are not estimates, they are the real numbers used in-game.

Recap

• EndRed enhancements have a diminishing absolute return (although the percentage return is constant). You get less effect from the second and very little value from the third. All things being equal, it is often better to add the first EndRed enhancement to something else than the second to an already enhanced power.
• Toggles generally do not use as much endurance over time as do attacks and other click powers. Other than very heavy users, such as damage auras and toggle debuffs, you often get a better return slotting EndRed in your click powers. However, this needs to be balanced with your need to slot powers for other attributes.
• Endurance management doesn’t have to be a scientific exercise. Don’t get hung up on the math. You slot some EndRed, and if you’re still sucking wind you slot some more. But if you understand the mechanics you can get better value out of those slots and potentially reduce the number of slots devoted to EndRed.

Confirmed via PM from _Castle_:

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Darkest Night has:
Damage Debuff Scale 3 (critters)
Damage Debuff Scale 4 (players) [Defenders only]
To Hit Debuff Scale 1.5

Radiation Infection has:
To Hit Debuff Scale 2.5
Defense Debuff Scale 2.5

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Defender modifier is 0.125, making DN 18.75% (1.5x0.125) and RI 31.25% (2.5x0.125) for defenders. Controller and corrupter modifier is 0.100, making RI 25% (2.5x0.100) for controllers and corrupters.

Was experiencing much greater lag in PVP than PVE. After activating a power there would be a 2-3 second pause before it animated.

at least you haven't put your site up for sale