Arcanaville

Actually, now that I redo those calculations in an actual spreadsheet, you're right: I computed the recharge required for SK-CS-CAK but somehow flipped the chain into SK-CS-SK-CAK. That actually reduces the chain to 177.5, which is significantly lower. Hmm, going to have to go back to the drawing board on that one.

The stone armor issue is not the same thing. That's not a question of performance.

To calibrate your average player performance prediction skill, what percentage of the playerbase would you have guessed would be unable to play blasters correctly prior to I11, insofar as we judge correctly to be "able to level at a rate at least within tens of percentage points within the average which included them in it in the first place? 5%? 10%? 15%?

Keep going. 50%? Probably not close yet.

Players won't really have to complain about SR tanker performance. If there is a problem, it will show up in datamining. And the devs will be forced to address it. And I use the word "forced" deliberately. That's basically a no-choice situation as I understand it.

If you think the problem won't happen, well, I'm not 100% certain it will either. I believe, though, that there's a better than 50% chance of it (the problem is not the weakness, which I'm 100% certain exists, but rather the degree to which players can adjust to them), and I would thus slam the devs very very hard for proliferating SR and not having a backup plan for tweaking it to address such issues, when they were the most probable outcome. That would be stupid. And if I thought it was solvable by simple numerical tweaks, I'd write them up and send it to them. In fact, proliferation to tankers was one of the things on my mind when I reiterated my suggestion after I9 to add +health to Practiced Brawler.


By the way, one more thing about SR tankers. Unlike scrappers, they don't always get to pick their targets. They have to tank whatever the team and the mission throws at them, most or all of the time. So what happens when the SR tanker ends up having to tank something with a significant amount of non-positional psi? Even Invuln is not defenseless to non-positional psi: it has both the +Health and +Heal of Dull Pain. Its not much, but its something. No tanker has literally *zero* protection to an entire class of attacks. SR would: the scaling resistances don't protect against toxic or psi. Even if you could work around that problem, I consider that to be a serious design glitch for SR Tankers (less so for SR scrappers and brutes). Tankers can certainly have strengths and weaknesses, but I think "zero" is going a bit too far on the weakness scale.

True story: in I14 beta I discovered the blades were selectable, so I made a mission full of them, and some bosses that were packing them as their entourage. And then the devs removed them immediately afterwards, sigh.

Oh, and they were untargetable but killable (with untargeted AoEs). Nasty, nasty little guys.


They took all my cool toys away: the character-eating Herc, the untargetable blades, Hamidon. I never got the chance to make my Hamidon guarded by unrooted mitos surrounded by EB-class untargetable flying blades and triple damage fire ninjas. Man that would have been awesome.

I wouldn't characterize it that way. I believe when it comes to the base powersets of the core archetypes, the devs have an obligation to make them work in the way the archetype intends when average players play them. That is fundamentally their job. Giving players like us extra game play options that won't work for the average player is a secondary goal, and usually one satisfied only by coincidence.

I don't believe, in this game, in the alternate viewpoint: that proliferation is about adding as many options as possible, and its up the players to figure out which ones they can actually make work. The ship sailed on that design decision back in beta, and its not coming back in this game.


But even setting that aside, how would you handle the complaints from players that they can't make SR work for themselves as a Tanker? Would you tell them that if they can't make SR work as a Tanking set, they just need to play and build better? Because there has to be a line drawn between what the devs can expect from their players, and what the devs have to accept as the capabilities of their players. Its how they judge if they've hit an acceptable performance target with any powerset. Without that line drawn, almost no powerset could be claimed to be underpowered or incorrectly designed.

I'm at work and can't see the build until I get home, but it sounds similar to the all-out recharge build I posted up above. Does it have something like +182.5% recharge, plus Hasten? Also, I had to slot a recharge IO into CAK to make that chain work even with perma-hasten in my build, because it was just a fraction of a second too slow in recharging.

Sometimes those freebee Claws discounts make me wanna climb the walls.

Its not really a question of what the set *can* do, but rather what it has a *right* to do. Brutes aren't tankers. If you *think* they are tankers and you can play them like tankers, then that's fine. There's wide range of character performance and player performance so there will be players that can build and play a brute just as well as any tanker out there in tanking situations.

The problems comes when lesser skilled players roll an SR tanker and run into problems under normal tanking conditions. They have the *right* for that tanker, if built reasonably well, and if they aren't complete idiots, to have a certain performance. If someone rolls an SR brute and complains they can't tank like a tanker, they get filled into the circular file. But if someone rolls an SR tanker and complains they can't tank like a tanker, that's a legitimate problem the devs will have to investigate.

In other words, its not so much a question of whether or not SR can tank, but whether or not its good enough to be effective for the average player. Brutes have no such right. Tankers do. For SR to be a valid tanker set, it has to be effective when played by the average player. And the average player is several orders of magnitude lower on the performance and skill tree as anything the forums normally acknowledge.


To put it another way, Blasters didn't need a buff in I11 because they couldn't perform well. It was because they weren't performing well. And while many blasters didn't need or deserve a buff, the archetype as a whole did because its the average player that is the balancing pivot. Similarly, I'm sure SR would make a fine tanker in the hands of many players. Heck: I'd play one. My concern is that its insufficient for the average player the game is balanced around.

Especially because it teaches the wrong lessons to a beginning player. In the early going he's going to be almost indestructible if he just takes some pointers from the many, many people that will encourage him or her to go for the cap right off the bat. Then one day the bad luck streaks that are almost impossible to see at low levels start to become reality when he starts tanking higher task forces or level 40 critters or things with higher burst damage. And he or she won't have the tools to deal with that sudden shift in gameplay, because SR doesn't give them any easy way out: its options are limited and focused, except for taking aid self (which at least will be easier after I19) and maybe tough.

At the moment no Tanker doesn't have at least resistance (to most damage types) or +health, and many have both. Without either, SR is far more burst-vulnerable than any other tanker set. That's worrisome when the devs acknowledged that even with Dull Pain Ice Armor was lacking in this area in I6 and Ice isn't even as slanted towards defense as SR is.


And if the devs have to respond to the lower performance players and rebalance SR for them for tankers, its really, really hard to buff SR in a way that will grant lower performance SR Tankers better protection that won't make the higher performance SR tankers overpowered. If you're going to do it, you should think that problem through now.

I used to think momentary pulsing confuse would be interesting. Conceptually it would be sort of a combination between deflection and actual confusion. But that doesn't directly address the burst damage issue head on.

Its hard to make -DMG without actually using -DMG or +RES. One weird possibility I toyed with was pulsing +Health. Basically, the toggle would grant a +Health buff for a brief period of time, and then expire. And then repeat. So attacks that land during the uptime would effectively be attenuated, while others would land at full strength. By flickering this, random numbers of attacks incoming would be essentially reduced.

It seemed too gimmicky though and I had no good explanation for why SR should have such an effect. A less gimmicky alternative was to convert Evasion from a toggle to a click +Health (i.e. Dull Pain with no heal) that you could use at the start of a fight to attenuate the alpha strike but couldn't keep perma. Maybe even something with Build Up's uptime. Although, haha, my original name for this power was "Willpower."

Soft-cap is good to a point, but it starts behaving discretely differently under many tanking conditions where its statistical nature stops behaving in a way the averages might imply superficially.

Let me just toss out an obvious dramatic example to illustrate the overall point. If you're tanking LR, he's designed to deliver enough damage in one attack to kill you if you have no resistances, and in a DoT so the one-shot code doesn't help you. If you have 90% res, you can take a couple of those before you die. If you are soft-capped you will probably make him miss a lot before he hits you and then you die. The difference between the two is that the resistance character can heal in between hits. The soft-capped character will just be at full health, and then suddenly dead.

That burstiness doesn't show up in most parts of the game most players play in, but in certain situations like tanking, it can start to show up, particularly when tanking (large numbers of) bosses or AVs.

A low level soft-capped tanker is probably going to outperform everything in sight. But soft-capping alone will start to create problems in the late thirties or early forties in my opinion. True, when we build them, we build soft-capped scrappers with a ton of offense and a lot of other invention-bolstered additions, and often aid self. But I don't think an SR tanker should have to rely on aid self: its the taunt problem all over again.

Plus, when we're playing high-end SR scrappers, they usually aren't totally indestructible. We'll boost our difficulty into the stratosphere and sail along happily destroying everything and then suddenly, blam, we'll get unlucky and die. And we'll write it off as the rare occasional price of admission, and rez and move on. Dying once or twice every so many missions isn't a big deal for a scrapper, but that unpredictable nature is more problematic for tankers, especially beginning players and less skilled ones. Tankers can get into trouble, but it should be trouble their teams can help them out of at least in theory. Resistance equals time: time for team mates to recover from a problem. Defense (and in a different way Regeneration) doesn't have that time: mistakes have much smaller windows of time to react to, and that makes them problematic for Tankers if you're balancing for the average player.

Duh. Alt slotting. I was playing around with Dragon's Tail and I had two slotting configurations in it. I was looking at one but exported the other. For the record, this is the alternate slotting I was looking at: it uses a full set of Armageddons in Dragon's tail, but in doing so it sacrifices some AoE defense: AoE drops to 45.1% with almost no margin for error on debuffing. But it picks up 10% global recharge and a much faster cycling DT. At the cost of some regen I could shift a slot from Aid Self to Lucky or Evasion to pick up a little more AoE defense to compensate. Sorry about the confusion.

And (for secondaries that can use it, which SR isn't one of them) it also buffed +health (like regular Heal enhancements do too) and +heal. My DM/Regen is going to love the Alpha slot.

Still, it will probably edge my hypothetical SR build close to 400% regen, and none of my powers are near the ED soft cap on recharge except dragon's tail. I could get close to the full +45% if the numbers remain unchanged from I18 beta except for DT. I'm thinking Spirituals (Rech/Heal) might end up being my "burst offensive stance" (increasing bursty damage and aid self) and Cardiac (End/Res) might end up being my "marathon stance" (increasing endurance management and Tough).

Rapid-fire Dragon's tail knockdown is, I will admit, one of the few things that tempts me to play a recharge-optimized build. The super-duper recharge build I posted has the cycle time of Dragon's Tail *approaching* the perma-knockdown mark (unfortunately I would need about +80% more recharge to hit it - just under the recharge cap actualy - and +80% more recharge just doesn't exist for the taking in the invention system).

But yours seems to have a recharge time of 5.139s according to Mids and mine has 5.44s recharge, a difference of only 0.3 seconds. Have I imported your build incorrectly?

3.671 seconds vs 4.74 seconds according to my numbers (1.069 seconds). Sounds like there's something wonky going on with recharge somewhere: can you double check your recharge numbers for CS and DT please?


Not bad at all for MA.

Actually, except for the PvPIOs and swapping CS for CK, it looks kinda like my current build. Not exactly, but similar in many ways.

One thing your build reminds me is that the performance shifter isn't unique (although Santorican's build also exploits that fact also and I just didn't notice it). It nets to about 0.2 eps that Mids currently doesn't recognize. If I'm willing to knock out 25.1 health and 0.4 h/s of regeneration, I could swap one into PP and get another 0.2 eps. That would put my net endurance after toggles at 2.85 eps while tough is running and 3.12 eps when Tough is off. That's starting to get interesting.


I normally like to slot PB with at least one endred if I can, but my build got too tight for that and if I swap the recharge for endred the recharge cuts too close for comfort.

Mine too. But its about as fast as fast goes for MA/SR: its reaching the limits of the invention system's recharge buffs and also starting to asymptotically approach the recharge cap, and running into diminishing returns on recharge due to cast time. But it does illustrate what is probably the best attack chain possible with MA using just the MA attacks: SK/CAK/SK/CS. I don't think that's compressible because there's no way to reduce CAK or CS's recharge down to SK's ArcanaTime duration even at the recharge cap. Under *ideal* circumstances the build can get close to 190dps. So anything that can consistently do near that under non-deal conditions is probably doing ok on the offensive front, because there's just not that much more offense to squeeze out of MA.


The normal methodology for attempting to min/max single target damage output has always had a nagging flaw to me, and that is that optimized attack chains are easily disrupted by a variety of factors. Some of them are so optimized that they cannot even account for switching targets without inducing sizable disruption to them. Some have ramp-up costs that are incurred on spawn switching. Some are brittle against recharge debuffing.

Having as many single target attacks as my original build above provides a buffer to many of those effects. Rather than just in time attacking, there's usually multiple powers approaching recharge-ready in rapid succession. Gaps open under recharge but usually in a less dramatic fashion. Having EC means it can be used to boost critical on DT when DT is used a lot and its impact on single target chains when used is minimal.


To be honest, in the back of my mind I'm also thinking about flexibility when it comes to slotting Alpha. Based solely on the information from the beta test that is no longer embargoed, this build easily benefits from three of the four Alphas (focusing either on Damage/Recovery, Recharge/Regen, or to a lesser extend End/Resistance). In the traditional ironic kick to the teeth that SR often gets out of game enhancements, I think it won't be as worth it to go Accuracy/Defense.

That was the intent anyway. I honestly didn't think that in the scrapper forum of all places there'd be a lot of controversy about what the One True Goal of Min/Maxing would be or that there would be people out there in 2010 telling me to lrn2ply.

I keep forgetting the two unwritten rules of the forums:

1. Arcana is not allowed to demonstrate a sense of humor without ample warning.

2. Arcana is not allowed to post numbers and ask questions in the same post.

For some reason, both of these pretty consistently get me into trouble.



Actually, I did miss that: I glossed over the build and looked at the totals first as I was going through them. It does suggest, from looking at a few of mine and both of yours, that inherent fitness is creating some options for buff even with strongly optimized building. Going to study those two a bit more carefully today.

You're "one of the most recognized min/maxers" on the forums and you don't know what my opinion on optimized attack chains is?

The statement "more recharge is always better" isn't actually always true for a variety of reasons having to do with how attacks work in CoH on a fundamental level. But it does help even in situations where it might not improve the optimal attack chain, in circumstances where the optimal attack chain isn't the governing factors. I've said that many times. But optimized attack chains are still the recognized proxy for offensive comparison, which is why I posted one. Any min/maxer on these forums would know this.

Most of them would also know that only two posters on the forums has ever seriously attempted to make a metric that attempted to capture a non-optimized attack chain metric of offense that specifically attempted to target valuing recharge in a non-standard way, and you're talking to one of them (PeakDR). Since its not generally accepted, I didn't post PeakDR comparisons.

Its one thing among many. Given that you don't see too many MA scrappers outside of AAO-saturated MA/Shield scrappers pushing far past about 190dps, I don't think generating about 169 means I flushed my offense down the toilet.

But I suppose if I don't post my hasten build, I'm going to have to deal with the notion that I don't understand how they work. Very well: this is an updated version of the last "speed build" I was playing with to compare to the one I posted.

Still more than 46% defense to all positions, but sacrifices heavily on health and regen (health down to 1802.5, regen down to 280% or 21.1 h/s). But it has true perma-hasten (meaning, it has enough global recharge to turn Hasten itself perma with plenty to spare) so Hasten has no downtime, and the build itself has a permanent +182.5% global recharge. With special slotting in CAK, this build can do: SK->CAK->SK->CS, and generate 186.3 dps. It also has Dragon's tail recharging in 3.68 seconds and Fireball recharging in only 9.18 seconds. And to top it off it has 25.3 second Build Up and fits Assault in there as the cherry on the top. It doesn't get much more offensive than that for MA/SR.

Of course, it can't sustain that AoE output for any length of time, which is a problem with most AoE-heavy builds built around powersets without an efficient means of generating AoE. And you aren't really going to get the benefit from BU you might think with 25s recharge. And with the lower regeneration and no Aid Self something luckier than you is probably going to tap you on the shoulder at some point and make you run for the hills or empty your insp tray.

But yeah, anyone who normally plays staccato spawn snuffing and doesn't mind collecting blues can probably burst themselves happily along with this build.

You seem to be operating under a couple of misconceptions that I should clear up. First of all, I'm not specifically looking for someone to help me build an MA/SR scrapper. I've been playing MA/SR since practically the beginning. Its not my main, but its my second character to 50. Its not my only scrapper, I have tons of those. But whenever I think about a balance, performance, or just general scrapperish problem, unless the issue is tied to a specific power set or situation, Violet is the character I think about. She's been the test bed for some really funky ideas (try that with no inventions and no fitness).

I'm extremely well aware of the mechanics of offense and defense. So don't worry, I understand things like AoEs and how to take down AVs vs how to take down numerically large spawns. This whole exercise started off as a way for me to investigate the claim that getting inherent fitness without more discretionary slots would have only a minimal effect on min/maxing. I didn't think that was the case, so I dug up some of my older builds, tweaked them a bit, then went back to the drawing board and rethought them with inherent fitness. This build was the result.

Now, if you have a build that you think beats this build, or even better have a build that doesn't presume inherent fitness and still beats this build, and you can articulate why you believe that build is better, I'm all ears. But if you're going to try to explain to me why you think my understanding of how the game works is faulty, I would suggest sending me a PM to take that particular conversation offline.

Fair warning: if you're one of those people that thinks I'm primarily informed by paper analysis, and not, say, several thousand hours of scrapper play (and scrappers are not the only thing I play either), I would suggest reevaluating.

For example:

Actually, the paper analysis tends to *overestimate* the value of Build Up. Unless you're soloing a sparse mission where you are spending a lot of time moving between spawns, and less time actually fighting them, Build Up tends to be worth even less than my numbers state. Its measurable. I know because I wrote a program to analyze my combat logs and actually measure, several years ago. A modified version of that script is what I used to demonstrate that with one modification, Kinetic Melee's siphon power actually behaves exactly as theory predicts, under virtually all combat conditions from sparse to highly dense missions.

And probably more critically:

The reason why you're the only one asking me this question is that I think most of the scrapper builders here know that building for defense significantly above the soft cap on SR *isn't* for AVs or for "paper survivability." Its actually for things like going up against large spawns of Cims up on the walls, something that was at one time a scrapper torture test. Its for going up against high-density spawns of debuffers. That defense would be almost worthless against most of the single hard targets in the game. That makes this more of a general purpose torture test build capable of multi-purpose sustained activity against a spectrum of foes from AVs to large spawns.

Now, if I wanted to roll something from scratch and wanted a farming build, I'd make something like, say, Claws, or a /Shield. Or I would just respec one of those that I already have. I know how to make an AoE build. MA isn't an AoE-powerhouse. Its never going to have superior, or even average AoE. Given that, sacrificing AoE for single target damage on a build intended to be more general purpose and isn't ever going to win an AoE contest is actually rather pointless.


But as I said, if you have a build, I'm more than happy to look at it to see if it contains some build concepts I haven't seen before. And I would like to see where you would place the "balance" between offense and defense in a real build with real numbers that can be critiqued objectively. But if you're just concerned about my apparent lack of knowledge of gameplay, rest assured your worries are unfounded.

I thought about that one. I would lose 0.38% health (like, 5 points) and gain 4% regen (at these health levels, about 0.32 h/s). I'd also lose about +6% accuracy.

The health and regen changes seemed to be sufficiently minor (and slightly offsetting) that I decided to keep the +Accuracy. Its kind of a toss up there.

Yeah, totally forgot about that. A gimme - and actually, I have one slotted in many of my characters.


If it wasn't going to alter survivability or offense at all, I didn't really bother, but the HO seems to be the way to go there. For that matter, there seems to be a very tiny improvement when replacing the non-proc Glad from Weave with a Ribo now that I think about it and try it. Also probably a ton cheaper.

Well, I still have 1.0 health/sec better regen, nyah nyah. Otherwise, hmm, all that extra endurance looks attractive. Although 45.4% defense to AoE is cutting it close for a debuff cushion. Also, it would probably take me ten years to build it.

What do you have the damage of that build clocking out at? Mine's running a slightly different and longer chain (due to having less recharge strength probably) of SK->CS->CK->SK->EC->CAK (or if you prefer, SK->EC->CAK->SK->CS->CK). I seem to be getting 168.7dps from that one (counting everything: EC crit bonus, procs, and assuming the baseline crit chance of 5% for most attacks, 10% for SK and 15% for EC).

I'm definitely swapping focused accuracy for conserve power in my build after looking more carefully at the endurance burn rates. It can't be made perma, but its probably of greater benefit than focused accuracy (which honestly I just tossed in there to get PP).

You might want to check out Lord Cyclones build.

This one seems to be another example of trading a little bit of regen for endurance, although this one doesn't sacrifice regeneration itself but just a tiny bit of health. And it loses a little positional defense, but not too much. Its an interesting trade.

Question: what do you think the extra recharge brings to the table? Do you have a feel for how much improvement it might make to the build overall? Also, do you think the gain in recharge and damage strength in Storm Kick compensates for the loss of the damage proc overall? Ok, that's three questions.

With regard to Hasten, setting aside the AoE question for a moment, the attack chain I had in mind for this build was:

SK->CS->CK->SK->EC->CAK

If my back of the envelope calculations are correct, this chain generates about 168.7dps without Build Up, counting the procs, and counting the 0.33 crit increase from EC. Not bad for MA.

Factoring in ArcanaTime, and also the base crit chance in all cases (5%, 10% for Storm Kick, 15% for EC) I get DPA for each power (again, including the procs) of:

Storm Kick: 194.7
Cobra Strike: 154.6
Crane Kick: 157.0
CAK: 169.2
Eagle's Claw: 131.9
CAK (special): 219.9

The special CAK is when it follows EC. Now, EC is the poor performer in there but its also buffing CAK strongly. Hasten could compress EC out but it would also nullify the buff on CAK. So the question is what is the average DPA of the EC->CAK sequence: its 167.1. Notice how close it is to the DPA of the other powers. Stork Kick and CAK beat that combo, but CS and CK don't. So actually, removing EC can't increase DPA by very much on its own: you'd have to stack enough recharge to take out not just EC but also one of CS or CK (at least part of the time) or else the two effects will seem to largely offset. So recharge won't help this build unless its *a lot* more recharge, I would think (but I haven't done extensive attack chain calculations to prove it).


Its true that having Hasten will speed up Dragon's Tail which would speed up AoE output. But that's sort of a secondary issue: its a bit one-dimensional to focus solely on AoE damage. And to be honest, its mostly uninteresting. It devolves to pure recharge (and the endurance to power it) for most powerset combinations.


The question of Build Up is more interesting. Build Up's effect on average damage over time is not as strong as commonly believed. Of course, I've been saying that since I5. I don't want to do an attack-chain analysis of BU, so I'm just going to do the average calculations for now. My build's BU has a total cycle time of 40.07 seconds (pending the recharge analysis still ongoing ). That means its up for 10, down for 28.9, and idle for about 1.17 (meaning you can't attack during that interval). All my powers have different damage strength buffs, so I'm just going to average them to about +100%, which is about right for the slotting and set bonuses. In that case, BU's over-time performance looks like this:

10s * (200% + 100%) + 28.9s * (200%) + 1.17s * (zero) = 8780%s
Averaged over the 40.07s cycle time, we get: 8780%s/40.07s = 219%

In other words, BU is acting like a +19% damage buff over time. What happens if I add Hasten. Well, Hasten won't be up perma, but lets assume it is just for fun. In that case, BU's recharge drops to 29.87s and its cycle time drops to about 31.04s. BU's performance then becomes:

[10s * (200% + 100%) + 19.87s * (200%) + 1.17s * (zero)] / 31.04 = 224.7%.

In other words, adding perma-hasten to Build Up increases its damage buffing effect from +19% to +24.7%, and increase of 5.7 percentage points. Meaning: you could get the same result adding two +3% damage set bonuses to the build somehow.

Build Up's damage over time effect is one of the most consistently overestimated effects in the game. It is a great burst damage tool, but actually the effect of adding Hasten's buff to build up (at these levels of recharge) is lower than the effect you'd get from taking Assault.


Well, this MA/SR has pretty much done everything, for every iteration of MA or SR that has ever existed. Not going to stop now.

Its very strongly implied that the Fitness powers themselves are being made inherent (or rather, inherent copies of them are being made) without other modification.

Just FYI, I have no requirement to keep all of the power choices identical. I already know there are hyperfast builds with better offense that discard a lot of the attacks, but I'm not rejecting such builds out of hand. I'm looking for new tricks using this build as a benchmark.


Like that, for example. That's the new "trick" in this build that hasn't existed in any of my other on-paper builds. That, and the opportunities that the Glad+3% offers.

Anyway, this build has some interesting things going for it. Its even more generous with endurance: net endurance with all toggles running 3.0eps, which is a lot more than my piddly 2.37eps. And it has even more recharge than Santorican's build: +92.5%. It has less defense, but that's not a deal breaker since every position is still comfortably above the soft cap (46.8% or better). Its main weakness is that it has significantly lower +health and recharge: 133.7% to 145.5% +health and 317% regen to my 388% regen. That translates to a difference of 23.72 h/s vs 31.5 h/s, which is actually 25% less total health recovery. Given that both sets have Aid self, maybe that isn't a problem.

It probably comes down to offense. If this build can put out substantially more offense, then you could rightly argue it has an edge on my build. Right now, I can't say.

That's two in a row going for more recharge and more endurance and sacrificing regen and health. I wonder if I've basically dinged the bell at the top of regen and health, and all other credible builds are really going to have to spend some of that to get anything else. Given the fact that if it wasn't for the rule of 5 I would have even more regen, that seems like a distinct possibility.


I'm wondering if anyone will take up the meta challenge of trying to beat my build *without* inherent fitness. A question right now is what's the real net benefit of inherent fitness. This would be an interesting data point: how much better is a build with inherent fitness than one without. This build is noticeably stronger than any build I've put together without inherent fitness, because it can leverage the fighting pool more effectively, which means it doesn't have to scramble for set bonuses to get to and past the soft cap, which actually puts options back into the build, which actually returns slots to me that I can put into, among other things, ironically, fitness.


Bah. The universe will still be working in exactly the same way tomorrow.

Just to elaborate on this point, the DDR cap is 95%. Which means basically slotted highly enough (which both our builds are) incoming debuffs get reduced by a factor of 20. But with defense debuffs generally being in the -7.5% to -20% range, that means through DDR those debuffs would be between -0.375% and -1% defense. So I think an SR build that really wants to go for soft-cap based high-level survivability should have at least 1% insurance against debuffs. By going all the way up to 48% I have a build that can tolerate a bit more than -60% resistable defense debuffs. That puts me into Cim and Vanguard territory.

Now, granted these builds both don't rely purely on defense: both have basically perma-dull Pain (the old school version that wasn't enhanceable for +health) and almost as much regen as a regen scrapper, but I still think the debuff buffer is important especially for a build that specifically builds for survivability, which these do.

Having said that, recovery is, as high as my version goes, a definite weakness of both builds. Not just because of the burn rate, but also because the attacks themselves are not highly slotted for endurance reduction. And where my build might close the gap with yours a little is with Storm Kick. Most MA builds will be cycling Storm Kick about as often as possible. Yours burns 5.3 end per cast, mine burns 4.21 per cast (the burn rate for the other attacks are not too different from each other). Because yours has higher recharge, its hard to compare straight across but if we assume Storm Kick is used about once every five seconds or so, mine ends up burning about 0.2 eps less than yours. That's 40% of the 0.5eps edge your build has on mine in a straight up recovery/toggle burn comparison.

The only thing that will take more time than I have at the moment to analyze are the attack chain differences which could be significant because your build has +25% more recharge. That may or may not create a material offensive gap. Maybe some other number cruncher with a bit more time will answer that question for us.