UberGuy

Yeah. I play "completed" 50s the majority of my play time. That's just what I do. I surely wouldn't stop just because I got my rare boosts.

I was pretty amused recently by someone in another sub-forum who basically mocked "half measures" in creating an exemplar build. Like you, I don't see much point - as long as one has strong acc/toHit, endurance management and overall enhancement, lower-level TF content tends to be a breeze, IMO. I am not concerned about soloing a level 30 TF on +4/x8 or something. I'm happy to reserve those levels of performance for 50 and still be able to waltz through most non-50 TFs on the base settings.

All signs, including various comments by the devs on the matter, point to "no".

The entire Incarnate system is specifically a "post-50" progression mechanism that doesn't increase the level cap.

That's a big hurt on one's blue bar, though, without other compensating changes.

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something obvious, but my brain is mushy today. What's the intent of the reference to the number of activations in the debuff duration?

Also, something to think about... I would be completely unsurprised to learn that there is a clock tick in between the granting of the temp power and the application of the debuff. That probably doesn't affect the next attack, since no one would be able to get their next attack in during one clock cycle, but it might have a small affect on chains by moving when the debuff ends.

That specific test case was used to show that it does not, in fact, stack from any caster.

Read the power information on the RedTomax page carefully.

Target: Caster
Grant "Set_Bonus.Set_Bonus.AchillesHeel" (10 seconds) (20% chance) If target is not caster [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs] [Non-resistable]

Let's look up that granted power.

Target: Caster
RES(All Types) -0.20000 Melee_Ones% for 10.25s [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]
Effect does not stack from same caster

Now contrast what the proc does with a standard power that applies -DR. I'm going to pick Defender/Sonic Attack/Shriek. This is just the debuff portion.

Target: Foe
RES(All Types) -20% for 5s [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]

Note that there is an additional level of indirection in the proc compared to Shriek. The Achilles Heel proc is granting its owner a power that grants another power to the target. The target becomes the caster of the DR debuff, which cannot stack from the same caster. Thus, no matter how many attackers grant the target that temp power, the target of the temp power can only apply the -DR affect to itself once.

That's also evident in his treatment of SL vs DP. He's using DP as his regular heal and SL as a panic button. That ... so makes no sense to me.

Yep. Remember, I didn't describe how I buy salvage. That said, I almost never pay over 20k for common, high-level salvage. Whatever I was going to do with it, it's extremely uncommon that I need to do it right then, so if something I usually buy for 55 won't buy for 20k, I just leave the bid and come back later. I usually have it by the next mission unless something long-term is going on, like trick-or-treat this year.

My target for listing the way I do isn't most posters in this forum, really including even me. Hell, I don't even know for sure that my target buyers exist as a category the way I imagine them. But the way my stuff gets bought can be seen to reinforce the notion that they're out there, so I stick with it.

This is exactly how I list my salvage. I am aiming specifically to overshoot the price flippers might be sweeping at and undershoot the current peak prices.

Note that I spend very little brainpower in this. If prices have been under 1000, I usually list for a very low price, but over 10 inf. If prices are "high", I list for some pseudo-standard price I think might be over what flippers are buying at.

Probably about 1/3 of the time, I still sell at the "high" price. Maybe about 1/6 of the time, I still sell to what might be a flipper, based on multiple sales at unusual, "fingerprint-y" prices like 1367. Probably about 1/2 of the time I sell at some "round" or easily typed number just above what I listed at. This last case is actually what I'm shooting for.

I just like the idea of seeding the market with deals for people who are interested in looking for a good (but not crazy good) deal. If I list super low, my "deals" are too easily eaten, and if I list too high, they aren't really a "deal".

And to reinforce the larger point, the most +recharge you're allowed to have, period, regardless of source, is +400%. So not only is 330% outside what you're ever going to get solo, even at the max you're allowed you won't get to the recharge you're targeting.

If you're interested in the most healing per time you can get, you're back to needing to frankenslot Siphon Life and get it back in your attack chain.

People don't always go for them, but they are willing to pay a premium for the low level ones to slot in low-level characters.

I don't think I would slot most damage procs and the like in a low-level character, but I slot low-level Performance Shifters and Stealth, Miracle and Numina uniques in low-level characters frequently. (Numina and Miracle uniques follow the same rules as procs - they're functionally procs with a 100% chance to trigger and no suppression.)

Yep, I sure did. I blame posting right out of bed. (I stayed home sick today, and actually laid back down after posting that.)

Properly including activation and Arcanatime, the DPA would be:

Smite: appox 242
Siphon Life: approx 151 (based on my slotting)

The real irony in me leaving that out is that I have an Excel spreadsheet with the calculations in it on my desktop, used for building attack chains for my DM/Regen.

It's worth using as an attack whether you're hurt or not.

I'm talking about it as a heal because you claimed you wanted the heal from Dull Pain back faster. If you care about the heal from Dull Pain, you should care about the heal from Siphon Life more. If you don't care about heals from Siphon Life, then getting massive recharge for Dull Pain cannot be an imperative.

I am totally fine with you having concept stuff that isn't optimal. But you keep making objective statements in defense of your choices or builds, and that stuff contains factual errors. If you really don't care at all about the performance stuff, that's fine, but don't try to use incorrect statements of what's optimal to defend it, or people will try and correct you.

In terms of average DPA, it's nearly impossible for me to see how Smite could do more damage than Siphon Life, unless you're understlotting SL as an attack.

Smite's base damage @50 is 82.6. If you call its slotted value double, that's doing to do 165.2 points of damage.

Siphon Life has a base damage of 122.6. Mine is slotted 95% Heal, 90% damage, 60% recharge, so lets use my numbers*. That would be 232.94.

But your Smite probably has a purple proc in it. That's 107.1 damage 33% of the time. That averages out to 200.5 damage.

So yeah, if your purple proc went off every time, Smite would do more damage. But it won't. And when you have enough recharge to keep your attack chain saturated with activating attacks, DPA is the primary attribute of the attacks you care about. The average DPA on SL can be better than that even on purpled Smite.

* If you're curious, that's slotted like so: 2x Nucleous, 2x Golgi, Hecatomb: Dam/Rech, Doctored Wounds: Heal/Rech

B_C, you need to recognize that how you, personally play is not what people are going to use as a metric when they talk about optimal build and optimal power use. They're going to talk about how to play that approaches mathematically calculable benefits.

If that is how you are using Siphon Life, then you are not using it in a mathematically optimal way. It is an excellent attack and a far, far higher HP/sec heal than Dull Pain. At absolutely maximum levels of recharge - +400% (which you could never attain on your own) - well-slotted SL fired as often as possible would average out to healing 0.2% of your base HP every second. Well-slotted Dull Pain would average out to healing 0.04% of your HP every second.

In other words, maxing out both, SL is 5x as strong as DP in terms of maximum healing rate.

Don't treat Dull Pain like a heal. Yes, it applies a heal, and that is nice. It's biggest benefit is the +HP buff it applies. You get the biggest bang out of that once it's "perma". You get it to that level at 200% total recharge, including slotting, so need around +100% global recharge.

On a Brute you could go for more overlap, so that you could stack the +HP buff. (On a Scrapper, running DP with the +HP accolades will cap you, but one application won't cap a Brute or Tanker.) But even at around +200% global recharge you're going to get 30s of that out of every 120s, or have double stacked +HP 25% of the time. That doesn't suck, but getting to 200% recharge on that build is almost certainly going to cost you in other areas. Germane to this thread, it's at least going to cost you hardcore in the wallet.

Circling back to Siphon Life, if you're only using SL once every 30s or so, I have to wonder how hard you're fighting, and if you aren't fighting that hard, why do you need such an expensive build? When I do builds like this, I then play them hard. My characters who have Siphon Life live off of its benefits.

I think you may be suffering from a lack of exposure to the fact that a lot of 50s are off finding and forming teams via other measures. Zone broadcast is not where the action is at these days, because most people are not spending time in open zones. If you aren't already in them, ask around for the popular global chat channels for your server; you can ask about them in the server-specific forums. Honestly, even more team forming probably happens in more private/specific channels or in super-group chat, but looking for people to team with in the more public global channels is a good way to meet people who may end up inviting you to a private channel or a SG.

I can tell you that, for the people I hang out with, it's possible that playing at 50 is where most of the teaming and playing is done.

I'm pretty sure original HOs were 50% across the board, irrespective of "schedule". So you got 50% enhancement even on stuff that normally gets 20% from SOs today.

As Sarrate points out, pre ED was also pre GDN, so base values for pretty much everything were around double what they are now for most things - more for some. Some stuff offered defense that no longer does. Hasten, for example.

You could get a lot more defense from pools even on ATs that did not get any before, and there were Blaster builds with very high defense. However, defense mechanics were very different back then, so there was no clean equivalent to hitting today's "soft cap" - the higher the level and rank of your foes, the less able you were to overcome their toHit.

The ability to cap at their 90% DR was the main reason I conceded that if anyone was better off in the old days, I could believe it was Tankers. With their lower DR caps (assuming we aren't talking about before anyone had DR caps, which is going pretty far back), Scrappers and other ATs in general weren't quite as glorious.

I've been poking a fairly fascinating book I picked up off of a bargain shelf at a local Borders that talks about this in the context of corporate management and how this psychological reality interacts with efforts at feedback and reward systems for employees. It talks about recent discoveries in the science of brain function explain why some traditional and seemingly logical approaches to delivering incentive to employees frequently backfire in unexpected ways.

That's definitely interesting. I wonder how people are theorizing about what purpose that would serve leading to it as an evolutionary development.

They downsized and he got the axe. He didn't leave on his own.