Arbegla

Ya know, i just realized that..I was typing it out on my GFs laptop, and totally forgot the difference between siphon life and gloom's animation time. I'll have to rework that last attack, or just drop it completely.

Maybe shadow maul would be a decent enough replacement. B_C isn't giving me much to work with.

You are correct that 1 application of Dull Pain will not cap your hit points, and having a 78% heal of base hit points available every 2 minutes may be useful, but I'd say having a 10% heal of base hit points available every 3 seconds would be much better.

The healing over time of dull pain is actually pretty bad. Pretty much the only reason it heals is to offset the bonus in hit points it gives, or else it would just do what frostwork does for cold, boosts the cap hit points, but doesn't actually let you use those boosted hit points.

While it doesn't at all hurt, the second application of dull pain is only boosting your hit points by about 370, while the first application boosts your hit points by 874.9. So your really only using about 42% of the effective bonus hit points that the second application of dull pain gives.

Now, either way it'll heal about 1174.1 hit points, which with your boosted hit points is only about 41% heal every 120 seconds, which translates to about .341% heal/second or 9.784 hit points/second healing.

Now, with 1 application of dull pain, Siphon life (from my build mind you) heals about 155.92 which with your boosted hit points is about 5.4% every 3.078 seconds. This translates to about 1.754% heal/second or 50.656 hit points/second healing.

Compared to Dull Pains numbers, Siphon life does 1.413% more heal/second, or about 40.872 more hit points/second healing. This is about a 514% increase in effective healing.

So, which is better to keep you alive? Dull Pain, or Siphon life?

I'm not sure if you even looked at the build or not, but dropping a panacea set into Siphon life is generally a bad idea. i can see slotting an impervious skins into the toggle, but Your going to really destroy what makes you a brute if you do that (your about doing damage.)

Its already been discussed that once you perma dull pain, there's not much point to doing anything else with it, and siphon life, does more damage then smite. the DPS might be lower, but the added bonus of the healing offset the lower DPA.

Its not possible to perma Soul Drain solo. It just really isn't. You can get close, but lowering its recharge any a fraction of a few seconds isn't going to be noticed, and lag and player error pretty much means you won't be using it much more then you are now.

While having a ranged attack is nice for runner, and gloom has pretty nice DPA, its DPE is awful, and if your already having endurance issues, spamming patron arc attacks isn't going to help that.

Also, Impervious skin will give you MUCH lower values for resistance and endurance reduction, thus lowering your survivability without giving anything to offset it. Higher recharge on dull pain isn't going to save you when things are hitting for 10 - 15% more then they were before, especially with the strain on your blue bar trying to keep up with sub par slotting.

My advice would be to stop after 1 swap. Swap out the doc wounds from dull pain with the panaceas, and swap out Tough for Impervious, and then stop there. You'll have more then enough recharge, and if you add any more, the built itself will crumble.

Its not just diminishing returns that will hurt you on having high recharge, it'll be the mobs overwhelming your sub par slotting. Invuln can take a beating, but Dull pain isnt your life saver, and if you don't use siphon life effectively, you will drop. and drop fast.

It has exactly the same amount of recharge you have now, without destroying your attacks to do it. Hasten is also perma, with that amount of recharge.

You gain about 7% defense to lethal/smash/energy/neg about 4% to fire/cold, slightly less psi def, but higher melee/range/AoE then what you have (5% melee/range, 3% AoE)

Your resistance are lowered, but only slightly, and if you factor in that 1% def = 2% res, your actually survive more.

You gain 30% regeneration, about 7% max hitpoints (translates to about 90 more hitpoints), you also gain about 38% more recovery, putting your total to 3.39EPS recovery (compared to your 2.62) Now, factoring in the new toggles my build runs, your remaining recovery is 1.898EPS, while your build only has 1.567EPS remaining after your toggles.

My build has more global accuracy then your build (+25% difference) which will allow you to pretty much smack up to +3s 95% of the time, and due to running assault, my build has 25% damage, while yours only has 10.5%. without assault those numbers are 14.5% vs 10.5%.

I also kept all of your original powers, except for hover, as having combat jumping and hover is counter productive for movement sake, and i figured you'd be using ninja run to run around, as neither build has a travel power.

To account for issue 19, i added Assault, replaced hover with maneuvers, added hasten, and adding in Soul Tentacles. This allows you to slot the immobilize purple set in that, while getting more damage out of Midnight Grasp.

I feel whichever attack chain you decide you run will be effective, but at lest now all your attacks are actually slotted for damage and accuracy. Siphon Life also has a +end proc slotted in it, so in the off chance you use that power, you have a chance to get some endurance back as well, which will definitely help out with any end issues you might have.


All in all, I think my build will have the same feel as your build, while just typically being better then what you had previously posted.

Thing is, Siphon life Isn't just a heal. Its a really hard hitting attack at well. If your using it as only a heal, your doing it wrong. Its just that simple. It hits harder the Smite, and actually i think its the second hardest hitting single target attack in dark melee (behind midnight grasp)

Different or not, its the optimal chain. Smite, by design, does less damage then Siphon life, at base numbers, yet they both animate VERY quickly that's why BOTH are included in that chain.

Siphon life isn't a reconstruction, it isn't a end all be all heal, and neither is dull pain. But using them effectively is what keeps you alive. From what your telling me, Your not using them effectively. Soul mastery attacks don't follow the same damage/end/recharge scale that primary attacks do. Especially the AoEs. So including them in your attack chain will drain your endurance MUCH quicker, which means your purposely causing your own end issues, to fit a concept, that needs more recharge, so that you can limit your own end issues that your causing on purpose..

Ow.. my brain hurts now.

Ya know, once you perma Energize, it really isn't that bad. a burst heal every 30 seconds, decent enough regen to stack with your already high resistance to keep you alive while you wait on the burst, and a endurance discount addon? yeah.. its nice.

Base, it kinda sucks a lot though.

Quoted For Truth.

If your going to get a optimal build, people then expect you to use it Optimally. If you don't, then there is 0(zero) reason to have such an optimal build. Mathematically speaking, the things you want to do, in the way you want to do them, just don't work. And that's just factoring in your play style vs your build choice.

Yeah, I mean, doesn't everyone know that Aid Self is the best heal for a brute? I mean really?

^/sarcasm

Siphon life will do more to keep him alive then perma Dull Pain would.. getting him to realize that is that hard part.

I wasn't presenting assumptions about your play experience, nor style. I was merely pointing out what a top tier dark melee/invuln would do.

MG->Smite->Siphon life->Smite is the highest DPS chain a dark melee can put together, based on damage per activation. It would actually be very possible to hit with the recharge numbers your looking at.

I'm sorry for assuming you were going to use your top end (as in top 1%) build to actually follow what top end (again, top 1%) players have stated to be factual evidence on how it should run. That's all I was using to state.

Speaking of which, got a screenie of how high the crazy 88s are getting? hit top 5 yet?

While i'll agree that most of the set bonuses suck for MMs, things like +HP, +regen, +recovery, +end, +rech, and the aura IOs are very much useful. even +acc is ok, as it'll affect most of your secondary. +dam is pretty much wasted, as is some of the other things

No insults, as thats what a normal, casual player does. Runs TFs just to do it, and most people like playing 1 AT over another. Yours is brutes, nothing wrong with that. Your playstyle matches a normal, casual, to high end player.

The problem lies in the loot you want. Which is Very high end. Take that other game, with orcs and humans, and what your basically doing, is wanting to run the high end raids, without getting the required gear score, then complaining because you have to run other things first. Its the way the game is designed.

Actually, with dark melee you have an attack, that, even slotted like an attack, will heal more over time then dull pain will. Dark consumption, while nice, shouldn't be the end all fix for your build. Enhancing up stamina, or just putting in the performance shifter +end proc will help ALOT in management of your endurance. You only need Dark consumption up as often as your blue bar starts to waver, which with invuln, shouldn't be all to often, as you have 3 toggles, (five if you include the fighting power pool)

While gloom is very nice, and slotting the purple in that is probably your best use of the gain, Midnight Grasp is one of your hardest hitting attacks, and is included in the highest damaging attack chain Dark melee can dish out (which actually also include siphon life, so as your rocking that massive damage, your also healing yourself)

Invuln Craves defense. Once you get to the point where you can softcap at lest lethal/smash defense with 1 or even 2 guys in range of invincibility, your tohit debuffs from Dark Melee will do the rest, and you'll never have to rely on healing again. If you slot in a +end proc into siphon life, then you'll also be gaining endurance while you beat the snot out of everything in range.

Dark obliteration is again, probably your best bet for AOE damage as well, so i can see wanting that up as often as possible, but with Soul drain feeding your high recharge single target attack chain, and doing some pretty nice AOE damage on itself due to fury feeding its damage, you may not need dark obliteration up as much as possible, because you'll just eat everything in your wake.

I know you want to aim for high recharge, but on a dark Melee/invuln its just not worth it.

To perma Soul Drain, you would need to get its recharge to 25.644secs, to make up for the cast time. Which would mean you need to have about 368% recharge, which I'm not sure is possible, with all the +rech you can possibly slot. You'll get close, but I don't think you'll hit perma.