UberGuy

Tactics benefits Dark Servant. He counts as a teammate for that purpose.

Dark Servant's pet "AT" and powers combine to mean that he has the same base accuracy that players do. That's to say that he has a 75% chance to hit even-level foes, 65% to hit +1, 56% to hit +2, and 48% to hit +3s. (Sorry, I'd have to go look up +4s, I committed that list to memory in days when they weren't as common in people's encounter list as I16 and the MA before it made them.) Those numbers are for foes with no defense - defense subtracts directly from those percentages.

I know that base accuracy level doesn't work well for me, especially when faced with +2 and +3 foes that people seem to face frequently in the upper-level game. Granted, his debuff aura is autohit, so he'll always be able to use that. I also like for him to be able to immobilize foes and potentially heal at least himself, and he can't do either of those if he can't hit well.

So I don't recommend him getting no accuracy without some toHit buffs. But you could probably make it work. In a team setting, I'm not sure how many people would notice if he was missing a lot.

To anser the original post, given six slots I think I would go for four Dark Watcher's Despair and two Endoplasms. It looks like the four DWD I would use are

• ToHitDebuff
• ToHitDebuff/Recharge/Endurance
• Recharge/Endurance
• ToHitDebuff/Endurance

My goal there was good endurance slotting for the reasons I gave in my last post. If you prefer to get him back sooner (useful if he dies early) or want to be sure to maximize your debuff slotting, you can change out either the Debuff/End or the Rech/End (respectively) for the ToHitDebuff/Recharge. Four slots of DWD gets you a 5% recharge bonus, some bonus HP and some extra recovery, none of which are bad for a Dark Miasmist. Alterntively, if you are looking for typed defense, you might prefer 5 slots of Siphon Insight. Four slots of Cloud Senses is better recharge for four slots, but lacks the +HP bonus and doesn't give as good total enhancement.

The Endos combine giving him good accuracy and duration on his immobilize and hold. I don't find a lot of value in boosting his healing as he doesn't tend to heal me that much.

I can't remember - was 19 the number of actual players, or did it include the people who were there on multiple accounts?

Granite's debuff is marked unresistable, so nothing should be able to reduce it.

But it doesn't cause you to resist run speed buffs.

I'm all sorts of there, next week and after.

They don't affect teammates, and in my experience never have. They count nearby allies for the effect they give you, but do not buff (or heal) those allies. The animation for the heal and endurance gifts in particular are visually misleading.

Also: CoD's errors and problems are mostly cosmetic. The only meaningful issue with the site is that it's not up to date with the most recent powersets and some changes to existing powers.

The reason I asked is that if you enable the no/min FX option for Hide, it stops making a sound. Personally I find this annoying - I wanted no visuals but want the hide sound because it's an indicator for when I've unhidden. I have non +Def stalkers, so I like the audible notice for having been unhidden by enemy attacks.

If you make a sound when you do hide though, I don't think that's the issue. The only thing I can think of is to see if other people with the same powerset experience the same thing, and bug it if so. Maybe they just screwed up that version of Hide.

I notice you have two purple sets. Is there a reason you didn't use more, such as an Apocalypse set in Gloom? If you did that you'd net a small amount of additional recharge.

You have Tenebrous Tentacles slotted as an attack, but you say you don't want to use Night Fall? You're seriously gimping your long-term damage potential. You'd do ridiculously more damage using Night Fall as often as you can than you will trying to Blackstar as often as you can, even if you have to move back and forth a lot to leverage Soul Drain and then your cones.

Why Dark Pit when you've got such low recharge slotting in Howling Twilight and you don't have Oppressive Gloom? Because Dark Pit has such low duration and high recharge, even at your high global recharge you're only able to stack the power on LTs and bosses after about 17 seconds into a fight. My advice is to either add recharge slots to HT or take OG, or both, so you can at least stack your mezzes. Personally, I think you'd be more effective mezzer in general by making Fearsome Stare better, even though it's a "soft" mez.

I hate how you've slotted Dark Servant. First, if you're going to slot him like that, use a Cloud Senses proc. The way you have him slotted he'll only ever have the chance to do negative damage with Twilight Grasp. Cloud Senses will have a chance to go off in TG, his aura and Tenebrous Tentacles. Mine has no sets in him, just Hami-Os. Slotting more of the Cloud Senses set is probably the best choice if you must get +rech out of slotting him.

Your slotting on Twilight Grasp seems not strong to me. The recharge slotting is pretty low, but I guess that's OK with your levels of global recharge. Mainly it's not slotted very well for heal. What was the goal of going with the Theft of Essence here? +HP?

Is the Scirocco's chance for lethal proc in Soul Drain really worth it? You're going to activate that power every 30's seconds or so. That's a slot you might get more mileage out of elsewhere.

Beyond that, I agree with all the advice that Deacon offered above. I really don't feel like you've optimized either how fast you can get Fearsome Starte back or how long it lasts here - the problem is that the Glimpse set lacks good total enhancement values even at 6 slots. (My Fearsome Stare has four Dark Watcher's and two Lysos in it.) You could get much better recharge in Tar Patch, which lets you stack it longer. Use a common IO for that one slot in Stamina, or add 2 more slots. I don't understand why the Gift of the Ancients set is used in Shadow Fall. If you want to conserve your global recharge bonus, use Red Fortunes in Shadow Fall, then steal slots from Combat Jumping for other powers and/or slot Blessing of the Zephyr in it.

This build feels to me like it's too focused on casting Blackstar all the time, and not on doing what a DDD is really good at. I feel like you've made sacrifices in your access to a lot of the things people want a DDD for - strong DR debuffing, fairly frequent -Regen from HT (and TG) and strong -toHit and fear. If I was on a team that wanted more damage, I wouldn't ask a DDD along for that - I'd get a Blaster or at least a Kinetics Defender instead. Instead, I'd want the DDD to have strong recharge focused on getting things like Howling Twilight, Fearsome Stare and Twilight Grasp back as fast as possible.

And /unsigned on the people who are making all these claims about how godawful slow Fly is. I just don't have these problems. I used to slot two fly speeds in it, now I slot two BotZ in it, and I just don't arrive that much later. The only time where people with other travel powers significantly outpace me are where we have a nice flat straight shot at the destination. If there's any meaningful terrain jigging, I usually get there seconds after most of them, and sometimes I still beat them in really broken or urban terrain. I think it's worth pointing out that the above is based on play with a regular crew of people who speed run TFs, practically every of whom has SS+CJ, SJ+CJ or SS+SJ, because they want SS's stealth. (I have other ways to get it on my fliers.)

I take Fly because I want Hover and I don't want to consume another power pool for a travel power from a different pool. I take Fly because I hate Super Speed and don't always want SJ or even CJ. I take Fly because it's just not as bad as people in this thread are suggesting unless I try to drag race a SSer or SJer.

Are you somehow exemplared down to where you don't have them, or on an Ouroboros arc with the option to disable non-AT powers set or something? Because otherwise, no, there's nothing that should do that. I also can't explain why your patron pool wouldn't be available if you already had one.

ToHit debuff translates directly into defense. One point of effective toHit debuff is identical to one point of defense.

However...foes can resist toHit debuffs. First, foes resist debuffs based on level due to the so called "purple patch". A +2 mob reduces your debuffs to 80% of their listed value. Also, to reduce the degree to which stacked toHit debuffs could trivialize encounters, LTs and bosses have progressively higher additional resistances to toHit debuffs. Finally, AVs and GMs have very extreme resistance to a whole category of debuffs which include toHit.

So every point of -toHit that you can actually achieve on your foes is the same as one point of defense. But because foes resist debuffs, this is you almost never can convert the listed debuffs on your powers as the debuff you can actually achieve, and the actual value you get is highly conditional.

My opinion on this pool is, sadly, take Pyre Mastery instead unless you really want a specific effect or Pyre mastery is too far outside your character concept.

Torrent: Skip this power even if you take this pool. It's a pretty massive KB cone, which most melees aren't fond of. Even if you want the mitigaion, it's on a 15s base recharge, costs an epic 17.9 endurance, and deals only token damage. I don't even take this on Dark Blast characters.

Petrifying Gaze: In its native Dark Miasma powersets, this power is the least effective hold in the game in terms of duration/recharge ratio. All the epic holds for melee ATs are given a consistent 32s base recharge, but Pet Gaze still has its poor base duration, just a tad over 1/2 that of similar holds, including Char. This can perhaps be defended in Dark Miasma, which is a powerset rich in other effects that make the a strong hold less necessary. Transplanted out of that powerset and left to compete directly with holds in other epic pool sets, its performance is abysmal.

Dark Blast: There's nothing really wrong with this power. Fire Blast does outperform it on DPA, but not outrageously. The time of flight is a lot lower on Fire Blast, which is generally more satisfying to me, but not a big performance issue. No real complaints.

Night Fall: I believe this power is actively bugged. It appears to use the Scrapper ranged damage scale, which means it deals like 1/2 the damage it should. No other melee AT's ranged AoE uses that scale - the rest all use the melee scale. Even if its damage was correct, Fireball is probably a better fit with most melee characters, since you can freely fire it at point blank range, unlike Night Fall's cone which you have to fall back to hit multiple targets with. For its place in the order you can pick the powers, Night Fall might be better than Melt Armor, just because that power has a pretty epic base recharge time, and Scrappers lack impressive debuff scale modifiers.

Tenebrous Tentacles: this power is only really interesting if you need to AoE immobilize stuff. I suppose that might be interesting if you're a /FA with burn, but IMO it's not that worthwhile. The damage is passable, but like Night Fall it's a ranged cone. (A clear indicator that something is wrong with Night Fall is that this power deals more damage than it, which isn't true in their native powersets.) If Night Fall had what I think is the correct damage, it would be a much better cone than TT for damage dealing. As matters stand, I'd rather have Fireball than either of these.

In short, the only reason to choose Darkness Mastery is concept. Personally, I really wanted that concept for my own Dark/Regen Scrapper, but the seemingly bugged Night Fall and the abysmal relative performance of Petrifying Gaze meant I went Pyre instead.

Yeah, I mentioned that. Brutes would be nuts.

Under a strictly linear normalized DPE scheme, any powerset with significant, constant damage boosts would really stand out for DPE efficiency not just in their AT, but across the board. Super Strength (Rage), Claws (Follow Up), and of course, the entire Brute AT.

Of course, one could choose some sort of non-linear scheme. What to choose, of course, is the $64k question.

What powerset? That's not going on with my Stalkers (MA and DM).

As far as I know, and bearing in mind that there are powers which deviate from "standard" equations, there are common ways the devs calculate damage scale per point of endurance. The aforementioned AT modifiers then convert these damage scales into damage points, and from there we calculate DPE. Defenders deal, with otherwise analgous powers (and after level 20 or so) 58% as much damage with their ranged attacks as a Blaster would for the same attack, because they have a 0.65 AT ranged damage scale compared to a 1.125 scale for Blasters. That means their DPE is also 58% of a Blaster's.

I know Arcanaville has posted about this in the past, and has referred to those posts in this thread. I only somewhat remember the thesis, but I seem to recall (and think the posts here support) that Arcana didn't think this state of affairs was so hot.

I'm not sure why its considered good balance for characters in lower damage ATs to be both less efficient in damage per time and in terms of damage per point of endurance. Especially in this game, given the relatively high HP regen rates of player characters and NPCs alike, this is a definite double whammy. It's not a Defender-specific situation, but one that's true for all ATs with "low" damage scales. It just hits Defenders hardest, because they have the lowest AT damage mods that aren't accompanied by an inherent means to boost damage (such as Containment or Scourge). I'm not saying I think it needs to be changed, but I'm not sure of good arguments for it, beyond the obvious one that we've already got it, and it doesn't seem to be at a level that makes Defenders unplayable. (Which see: evidence in this thread.)

Of course, we have to be careful what we ask for here - if endurance costs were to go down as AT damage modifier does, making endurance costs reflect actual damage and not damage scales, then endurance costs could be increased for higher modifier ATs like Scrappers or Blasters. I don't think that would be very popular. It all depends on what scale is taken as the Damage Scale per Endurance baseline. (Such a change would probably give Brutes insanely attractive DPE unless they were given a modified version of the formula.)