Balanced

Because most of the defender community here is neither lazy nor inclined to enjoy periods of boredom interspersed with slightly-less-boring buffbot activity. It's not that the rest of us don't understand where you're coming from--it's that it's a place many of us have no desire to be.

Sure...but does it say how those waters get there, all the way from another zone?

(And that's assuming they actually know the secrets of the Kora--isn't that why we're gathering it for the researcher?)

Here's my Epileptic Tree theory on the Kora fruit:

Note that the Kora, although it appears to be a plant, apparently grows only in caves--dry, rocky caves, at that. Such a situation is not conducive to plant growth; there's little or no water, no sunlight, and very limited nutrients. Yet somehow they produce fruit so nutritious that it sustains the natives and noticeably increases the effectiveness of superpowers. Where does it get the means to do that?

I submit that the Kora is not a plant in itself; it is, instead, the fruiting body of the Hortha vines, those mysterious hyperdimensional plants that link distant parts of the Shard together. The fruiting bodies sprout in sheltered places, and receive nutrients via tiny, invisible dimensional channels from the main bodies of the vines, which in turn feed on energy currents between different regions of the Shard*.

The Soldiers guard and collect the fruit because they need mature fruit to plant to more Hortha vines, which they can cultivate to link in currently inaccessible areas, like the Garden of Memories and the Factory Cubes. Clearly it's possible for some creatures to reach those regions, since the Reflections and Wisps appear in the zones we know, but that doesn't mean it's easy. The sheer distance (physical or metaphysical) between the four Hortha-linked areas and the unlinked areas may be part of what's keeping Rularuu in check; the tenuous connections with the Aspects that dwell there make it more difficult for Rularuu to pull himself together.

In other words, the Kora is essential to Rularuu's eventual restoration, which would be a Bad Thing. So....

Go. Farm. Eat Kora.

*Edited to add: The portals added to link Firebase Zulu to the other zones are interfering with the Hortha vines' ecosystem, which is why current Kora fruit harvests are less potent than they once were.

IOs and difficulty settings make things quicker and easier, but are not strictly necessary. My emp/dark grew up before such things were added to the game. (Hami-Os were very nice once he could get them, though.) You, too, can solo +3 bosses. You might want to pack a lunch, though.
I would not object to a reduction in recharge time for the auras, but not at the cost of a significant reduction in their effectiveness--which would almost certainly be forthcoming if the recharge were reduced enough to make them perma with only enhancements. We would have to persuade the devs that the current recharge is actually broken, and that would be a major battle.

My emp/dark is actually fairly light on recharge bonuses, by the way, though he does have Hasten. As I've mentioned before, in high-level solo play, he very rarely needs the auras at normal difficulty levels. I usually use them for EBs and +2/+3 bosses, but not much else. They see more regular use on teams, if only because they make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, and I wouldn't mind having them more often for that.

It's actually possible to buff, blast, and heal at the same time, but the multitasking is a serious strain, and even the best empath player will have trouble keeping it up for extended periods. Playing a TF like that on my main is exhausting.

A little more damage would be nice, but the devs would have to dance around it carefully, to avoid stepping on Corruptor toes, because then the Corruptors would undoubtedly lurch back and stomp Blasters' delicate little piggies, and pretty soon everyone would be mad at everyone else again.

As long as the duration:recharge ratio on Fort was kept in line, so that I could maintain Fort on as many targets as I do now, I wouldn't object to increasing them. It would reduce the flexibility with Fort somewhat--I shift Fort around the team pretty often, depending on where I think it will do the most good. It would be worth losing a bit of that to reduce the clickfest, however.

Your proposed CM change is almost certainly not going to happen. We have begged Castle for changes to CM repeatedly, and he looked down and whispered, "No." Well, more specifically, he said that CM and similar powers are not intended for use as proactive buffs, but as release powers. I consider this pure, refined, high-grade yivshish for a number of reasons, but Castle has not been persuaded.

Or use Castanella and McKnight, as the accessible Midnighter contacts. You wouldn't even have to give the actual contacts anything new to say--a popup message from them would do. Something like this

"You may know who I am. You may not. It does not matter. What matters is that I have access to certain mystical information, which indicates that an inimical force is attempting to establish a foothold in this world. You have the power to stop it, for your own sake if not for others. Seek out the Banners. Defeat the creatures that defend them, and bring them down."

would help, even if it doesn't offer enough backstory for my taste.

When my TA/A was a lowbie, I played him when I specifically wanted slow, methodical gameplay--more like a Thief-style game. Sneaking around, picking off mobs one at a time, usually by 'porting them away from their spawns; I got really good at using Teleport Foe in the process. It took me several evenings of play to solo the Posi TF that way, though that was back when TA was new, and hadn't gotten any buffs yet.

D3=Dark/Dark Defender. A Dark Miasma/Dark Blast/Dark Mastery Defender would be a D4 (which I've tried, but found that Dark Mastery doesn't synergize as well with the secondary as I'd like).

These are interesting builds, as thought experiments. I would never actually build either one, though. As Siphon pointed out, the damage is terrible--slotting Tentacles and Night Fall for immobilize or debuff? I can sense my D3 cringing in her logged-out sleep at the thought. (Also, why take Blackstar if you're not going to slot it? Do you just hate your endurance bar that much? )

The other big factor is that there generally doesn't seem to be much point in building a D3 specifically for defense. Sure, a little helps against things that slip past or resist your debuffs, or for alpha strikes, but a D3 has other ways of handling those cases. For everything else, you're generally going to have mobs' to-hit chance floored regardless. I suppose the defense could be valuable in PVP; I wouldn't know, since I don't PVP myself, but I understand that to-hit debuffs are much less effective against other players. Is that the intent?

According to his sig, he's at 39.

Cloud Senses offers about the same recharge and ranged defense bonuses (slightly better defense), as well as other minor bonuses that are about as good as the Stupefy set. To get the defense bonus from the Stupefy set, however, you have to slot the knockback proc, which isn't something I really want in a pet with the Traps set, especially not a pet that's going to be soaking the alpha for me--I want things bunched up, not thrown out of my trap zone. If I'm going to slot a proc in the power, I'd rather have a damage proc than knockback, and the Cloud proc is for negative energy damage.

In terms of enhancement values, the recharge and endurance reduction are pretty much a wash. Cloud gets your Seekers recharged a couple of seconds faster, and Stupefy makes the power about 1 end cheaper--neither a big deal in a power that's up about every 35 seconds.

So, bonuses and proc preferences aside, it comes down to whether you want to slot the stun, or the to-hit debuff. Stupefy gets you a pretty nice stun duration (13-16 seconds, depending on enhancement level). Cloud gets you -19% to-hit, which is also pretty nice. The stuns from two seekers going off can potentially stack with each other; I'm not sure if the to-hit debuffs stack--they may, if the seekers count as different casters.


One seeker debuff, fully slotted, offers fairly reliable 19.1% mitigation for 40s against most mobs; one fully-slotted seeker stun (assuming you're not fighting any bosses), offers an average 25% mitigation for 16 seconds. I've done some casual calculations, assuming a steady rate of incoming damage (since the seekers absorb the alpha for you) from mobs hit by a seeker.

Average mitigation in a 1-minute fight:
To-hit debuff slotted, stun unslotted: 16.48%
Stun slotted, to-hit debuff unslotted: 15.53%
Neither slotted: 12.62%

Average mitigation in a 30-second fight:
To-hit debuff slotted, stun unslotted: 26.60%
Stun slotted, to-hit debuff unslotted: 26.63%
Neither slotted: 20.80%

Average mitigation in a 20-second fight:
To-hit debuff slotted, stun unslotted: 30.35%
Stun slotted, to-hit debuff unslotted: 33.30%
Neither slotted: 24.55%

(This doesn't include the damage debuff, which offers significant mitigation independent of these values.)

So, on the average, stun has an advantage in very short fights, and the debuff has the edge in longer ones. For the most part, they're pretty even. The thing that really puts me off enhancing the stun is that it's unreliable. Sure, it will sometimes offer much greater mitigation, but sometimes it won't offer any at all. I'd much rather push the relatively reliable mitigation from the debuff, especially since it effectively stacks with the defense from my FFG and set bonuses.

You can slot whichever you like, and the power will still be quite useful, above and beyond its alpha-soak and bonuses. I just prefer Cloud Senses.

I'd say you'll eventually want the Cloud Senses accurate to-hit debuff set, which offers excellent enhancement as well as good bonuses (particularly the ranged defense bonus). Cloud Senses only goes up to level 30, so you could plausibly have it all slotted by then, but I imagine it would be relatively expensive.

In the meantime, the main things to slot it for are accuracy, to-hit debuff, and recharge. You can slot it pretty effectively with 1-2 Accuracy, 1 To-Hit Debuff, and 3 Dampened Spirits (Recharge, To-Hit Debuff/Recharge, To-Hit Debuff/Recharge/Endurance). The set bonuses are very minor, but this should get you good enhancement values on the cheap.

And in all the stores...
And in the train stations...
And in the restrooms of the existing locations...

(Sorry, I'm particularly anti-Starbucks at the moment. I had a work assignment that left me stuck in one for the better part of the week...and I hate coffee. It smells like burnt skunk.)

Oy. 1-(1-p)^n. Sorry, I've apparently been having a severe probabilistic brain fart, and you're absolutely right.

As to the accuracy enhancements, yes it's possible that it has an effect. I'm just saying that--based on responses from the devs on similar cases in the past--it's not supposed to. Perhaps "intended to" would be a better way to put it. We ran into this with HOs, I believe. (I think it was someone discovering that you could slot Ribos into resistance debuff powers to enhance the debuff, but I'm not sure.) An early version of Acid Arrow allowed damage enhancements slotted in it to enhance the resistance debuff, too, as I recall. These cases were not working as intended, and the devs made changes. Apparently, they haven't felt the need to tweak Mind Link to prevent the slotting you describe, so maybe they don't object to such things now, but I would not want to assume that acc enhancements in the PGT work or (if they do) that they will continue to work.

All that aside, Lockdown is still a good set--probably the best set--to slot in the power now that proc-monstering it isn't so brokenly powerful.

I wouldn't read too much into a field being blank, but I'll concede that it's possible. I haven't been able to verify whether or not it affects every mob caught in the initial blast, but I will be keeping an eye on that as I play with the power more. Whether it actually is autohit or not, its accuracy is unenhanceable, which means that the accuracy component of an IO (or HO) isn't supposed to affect it.

The 2% value for the secondary chance to hold is out of date. That was the value before the devs decreased the tick-rate and made the power stop spawning a separate gas pet for every mob in range, so that people couldn't make a proc-nuke out of it. When they changed the ticks to 1-second intervals, they increased the chance to hold so that the change wouldn't nerf the intended effects of the power so much. I don't know what they changed it to, but my guess is that it's around 4-5%. It could be as high as 8% (which would have been a logical value), but I don't think it is.

Hm. Good point. Since it's not activating a separate hold power, it would use the auto-power/toggle rules for proccing. It should get 4 chances to fire, for a 60% chance overall for each mob that stays in it for the full duration. (The Lockdown proc has a 15% chance to fire, not 20%.) I'm not sure the proc would stack with itself even if it did double-fire when the trap is triggered, but it would be nice if it did; I know the Achilles Heel proc has some stacking limitations, but I don't know how that would apply here, since it would technically be coming from two separate powers.

On the whole, Lockdown looks pretty good for the power, even if the acc is wasted.

Lockdown looks good for PGT on paper, and certainly the bonuses are nice. I've indulged in some geeky analysis of the combination below, if anyone is interested. This is based on my understanding of the power and the proc, which could be flawed.

To review what Poison Gas does, we start off with the fact that the Poison Gas entity has two powers that affect other targets (it also has a resist-everything power and a despawn power):

The first power applies a 6-second Mag3 hold to all mobs caught in the AoE. A full L50 Lockdown set will enhance this to nearly 12 seconds, which is nothing to sneeze at. The Lockdown proc has a 15% chance of applying an additional 8-second Mag2 hold to any target caught in the initial burst, so it gives you a 15% chance to hold a boss for up to 8 seconds right off.

The second power is an ongoing effect that ticks once per second. It applies the -regen and -recharge, and has a fairly small chance of triggering another 6-second Mag3 hold. It used to be 2% per tick, but that was when it ticked 4 times/second; the devs increased the chance when they reduced the tick rate. I don't know what the new rate is, but say they bumped it to 5%. You get another 10 ticks before the initial hold wears off, so that would give you about a 5% chance of holding a boss for 10 seconds, and the chance increases in 5% increments to about 50% for a 1-second hold. This effectively resets every time a tick triggers a hold on the boss.

For the tick power, the proc only has a chance to fire when the hold effect triggers, so there's about a 0.75% chance of the proc firing on a given target on a given tick. That's about a 22.5% chance of it triggering on a given mob during the full duration of the gas--not too bad, but not overwhelming. It is, at least, higher than the chance of the effect triggering on a single hold.

There is enough recharge in Lockdown to make the gas near-perma without any further recharge buffs, which is nice.

All of the effects of the gas are autohit, and the power does not accept accuracy enhancements. That means the accuracy component of the Lockdown IOs is wasted.

That's pretty odd, but it doesn't seem to be the same thing the others here are talking about. Most of the data collected seems to point to salvage drop rates being normal, but recipe drop rates being significantly lower than they should be. It could be something peculiar to that character--how many recipes drops did you get, and are your other characters coming up short on salvage?

I finally got your build loaded (Mids keeps breaking on me, for some reason), and looked over it. It's not really a bad build, but there are some design choices in it that I wouldn't have made. What follows is just my opinion, of course--build however you like--but I think some changes would make the build significantly more effective.

I would never willingly skip Tenebrous Tentacles on any build with Dark Blast. It's a major part of your AoE damage, it's an excellent immobilize, and it's even easy to turn into a proc-monster. Tentacles + Night Fall is the minion melter combo. It should go particularly well with Traps, since--as RiverOcean pointed out--it can be used to keep the mobs in your trapzone when they would otherwise run away.

I can understand taking Life Drain, as it offers a little healing to cover damage that gets past your traps, but I have never liked the power. You may decide it's worthwhile, but I would drop it in favor of Tentacles.

Night Fall is underslotted. It will provide most of your overall damage, so you should enhance its damage to the break point. I would suggest adding the Posi Damage/Recharge, at least. The Posi proc is pretty nice in it as well, and would give you a 9% accuracy bonus for the set. I actually slot 5 Posi IOs (skipping damage/range to make it easier to use with Tentacles), which gets me the recharge bonus as well.

In your primary, you skipped Trip Mine. I really, really recommend finding a place in your build for this. Trip Mines will provide a major chunk of your damage in the later levels, I believe, whether you toe-bomb with them or set up minefields and pull mobs into them.

You took Stealth, which I avoid these days. Stealthy play works well with Traps, I find, but you already have Super Speed, which provides half of what you need. I would recommend slotting a stealth IO in Super Speed or Sprint instead. It doesn't cost extra endurance, doesn't debuff your speed, and it doesn't tie up a power and pool choice. The only things you lose are the defense buff (half of which suppresses with your stealth) and a place to slot Red Fortune IOs for bonuses; the first three RF bonuses are pretty minor, and you can get the two good ones (recharge and ranged defense) back by moving two of those slots to FFG.

Slotting Performance Shifter in Stamina for bonuses isn't very efficient. The accuracy and recharge components are wasted, and the bonuses aren't that good to start with. Two level 50 generic EndMod IOs will get you fairly close to the ED soft cap. You could slot a third to get the last 16%, save the slot for something else, or slot the PerfShifter proc in the third spot.

That's probably more than enough to consider for now.

How I mine for compliment?

Street hunts that require you to defeat mobs in a specific area in which those mobs don't spawn. I'm looking at (or through) you, Kelly Nemmers.

She gives you three hunts that require you to defeat mobs specifically in the Misty Woods area. The Tuatha are easy, since they actually spawn heavily all through the area. The Fir Bolg and Red Caps, not so much--you might find one or two right at the edges that qualify, or that wandered in. To complete the hunts, you have to pull them in before you finish them off. That's particularly screwed up in the case of the Fir Bolg hunt, as the ostensible purpose of the mission is to keep them out of the Woods.

The sleeps have to hit you first, and the defense from multiple FFGs should keep most of them off of you. I got hit once or twice with sleeps, as I recall, but it didn't matter much--our defenses stayed up, so I just waited the mez out with stuff whiffing around us.

As to solo or 1-to-a-team defenders being irrelevant...no. I find defenders quite soloable; they often require more patience and strategy, but they can get the job done--I soloed the Posi TF with my TA/A back when they were new. A single defender can turn a team around, too, although they won't usually turn a perma-teamwipe PUG into a juggernaut alone. It's just the contrast with the outrageous power of an all-defender team that makes lower concentrations of defenders look weak.

Thanks to a really boneheaded decision from the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, Novell has had to file for an en banc review to get this confirmed. The Tenth Circuit panel that SCO appealed to ordered a jury trial to determine if the vague maunderings of the contract somehow conveyed unspecified copyrights--which is flatly contradictory to the letter of the law and to established law from every other circuit that has touched the subject. If the Tenth doesn't overturn that on review, it could well go to the Supreme Court. Such foolishness can't be allowed to stand.

I've noticed some Vahz zombies doing the classic monster movie shamble--the stiff-legged, arms-forward zombie walk--instead of their usual walking around emote. I'm not sure when that started, but I don't recall seeing it before I15. I think it's great.