Berzerker_NA

I'm not mistaken, taunt is an auto hit power in PVE, so you always hit all 5 if there are five in the area of its effect. It's true you're only 67% likely to do damage any one time you fire it, but over the course of a lot of firings, you'll still average hitting one per shot.

I guess that makes it about as effective as brawl, so ...yeah.... I guess it's not much of an addition to their arsenal. ;-(

That's why, then, isn't it? Your pets don't benefit from set bonuses like you do. Otherwise, I would totally want my pets taking all the aggro, because they're expendable. I can get more of them, but if they kill my MM the battle is over - time to hosp.

I get the impression that the 2 level gap between you and your tier 1 pets factors in as well, doesn't it? I guess that, even at maxed out defense, being two levels lower can hurt your survivability sometimes.

How many were you fighting? Gauntlet only affects 5 opponents. We like to hope it will be a different 5 every time it fires, but I think it just hits the 5 closest, which means the same 5 again and again usually.

Yeah. It's best if you're comfortable toggling it on and off. If your play style is to just turn on all your shields, and leave them on, then I could see this power becoming very frustrating for you.

Also, sometimes aggro is a bad thing. It's always nice to be able to scale it back a little bit if you're starting to get in over your head. Sometimes I like to build a tank with the Concealment pool, so I can ethereal shift my way out of sticky situations. Everything has its time and place.

I would have wanted to go the other way. I'm very disappointed that the set doesn't have an AOE ice sword attack. (If only for the sake of style.) The only AOE Ice sword in the whole game is the Dominator set, so that's the only Ice Melee set I enjoy playing.

I wonder why people build scrankers? Is it for the ability to soft cap resistances, or just to gain access to Ice, Stone, Mace, and Axe power sets? I mean: honestly: if you're going to play a tank like a scrapper, why not just make a scrapper? Your missions will go faster, and there's a whole lot less frustration in general.

Or just leave the mission sitting until you're about 3 or 4 levels higher, and then come back and kill all the enemies as greens and blues. I do that to solo banks sometimes.

Besides, if the battle lasts long enough, there's nothing stopping him from summoning another one. The big frustration with singularities is that you can't do anything to mez or otherwise mitigate them. The Bots Knockback effect does nothing to it.

I've only fought him a few times, but the knockbacks do work on him, don't they? I bet having the force field generator is really nice too, as hold mitigation.

I think the question is whether you're going to follow it up with other stuff. If you're taunting, then probably most of your enemies will be in melee distance of you, so you can stack Cloak of Fear with it. (It's their location that matters, not the question of whether they're actually using melee attacks or not, so you can always just move closer if a particular enemy is hurting you more than the others.)

Then, what will your travel be? Are you adding a few percentage points by taking Combat Jumping? Finally, the last question is: What will your attack set be? If it's Dual Blades or Dark Melee, then you're going to plan on debuffing enemy attack even more.

IO's are really not my expertise just yet, so I'm not sure what would happen if we factor those in.

This is why I always keep the (default) henchmen attack button on my primary power bar, usually at power number 4 (right by my index finger on the keyboard). You can cancel any chaotic activity you want just by telling all of your bots to attack a single target together. They have to drop what they're doing.

It helps that I give my MM a personal attack, so there's usually an enemy already selected for me to send them all after.

Yeah. It's too bad it doesn't fit, but I guess it doesn't add much in your particular case. Used as an attack, it's very end-hungry too.

Darn. I was thinking a merks/ff would be the ideal build for serum. Just pop it on your Commando during a tough fight, then use your personal force field and wait while he kills everybody.

If it's not even useful on /ff, then I guess I'll have to accept the consensus and not bother trying to take it. (Either that, or take it as my last power.)

Good point. I don't know why I didn't notice this sooner, but why don't you give up gloom or Dark Blast for it instead, and then just slot it with the same things you had planned to put on the power you give up? I noticed you take Soothe at level 8, so you could move it up, and take it at level 2 or 4 instead, then take Life Drain at level 8.

I'm sure it has a slower recharge and less damage, but .... it's healing you every time you use it. Here's for comparison:

Dark Blast: End 6.50, Rech 4 seconds, damage 30.59 (at 50), debuff 5.63/6 seconds.
Gloom: End 10.66, Rech 8 seconds, damage 53.84 (at 50), debuff 5.63/10 seconds.
Life Drain: End 19.50, Rech 15 seconds,damage 30.59 (at 50), debuff 5.63/10 seconds.

As a pure attack, it's quite a bit worse than either of the other two, so it depends on whether you're trying to deal all the damage yourself, or let your pets do it. I guess I can see why someone would drop it. It just seems like such a waste, because necro is the only set that gives you something like that, so perfect for the tanker mind.

It's not even quite half as powerful as your Nullify Pain, though.

80.32 points of healing every 15 seconds vs. 94.24 points every 8 seconds. .....So maybe it's not worth it.... :-Z

Yeah, I'm kind of the opposite play style. I take a minimal number of traps, just cause most of them don't fit into my plans. Then I go for stamina. The thing about personal attacks is that they do more damage than your pets' attacks and are more likely to hit, except maybe your tier 3 pet. I still don't use my personal attack much, but it's nice when I'm up against an enemy that's just taking too long to go down. (Or when I get impatient for enemies to die.)

It certainly sounds like you're not doing anything wrong, lol. I might have to take a lesson from you.

I like to manage my henchmen too. I usually have them all focus on one mob until he goes down, then move on to the next, then the next, etc. That exposes them to the least damage over the course of a fight, so I can do higher diffs. I'm also kind of lazy about enhancing, so I end up doing a lot of re-summoning.

Oh you "don't take the personal attack" guys....... I always take one. It's partly for boredom, and partly for style. The costume is just as important to me as the ability to kick ***. No point choosing and customizing my laser rifle, plus maybe trying to unlock costume options for it, if nobody is ever going to see it.

Hmm... never thought of it that way. I'm working on a /pain MM right now. Maybe I'll give it a try and see how I like it.

She could keep them both perhaps by giving up Maneuvers. It's only like a 5% def bonus, even fully slotted. Personally, I'd rather have the additional heal, and the def debuff on Life Drain will be more than 5% worth of the enemy's attack anyway.




From the sounds of things, she's focusing on directional defense instead (ranged/melee/AOE), so she might do better to take the damage resistance power from Mu Mastery, since it will stack with the resistance she's already getting from World of Pain.

Un-enhanced, her damage resistance vs. smashing/lethal would be 26% + 11% = 37%, which is not bad.

[/quote]
My current plan is to pick up dark embrace to stack with WoP, oppressive gloom to reduce the alpha from minions and get both WoP and anguishing cry up as often as possible, which means slotting for recharge bonuses. Except for a few sets it is hard to slot for both recharge and defense. Since pain domination doesn't offer any def powers as a base it is going to be even harder to build up enough def unless you take scorpion shield - and to build on that you have to slot for smashing/lethal def, not ranged which is going to be hard without melee attacks to slot kinetic combat or smashing haymaker.[/QUOTE]

Can always slot Siphon Insight to your attack debuff powers. Same bonus as kinetic combat, except you need 5 from the set instead of just 4.

This hasn't been mentioned yet, and so I feel it must be:

Reason #7: The taunt animations for Mace and Axe are silly looking.

Stylistically, I can't stand taking them. They just bug me too much, so I try my best to work around them, or find a way not to need them, or at least take them as late as I can get away with.

It does when you're solo, at least. If you don't want each mission to take about 2 hours, then AOE powers are your best friends. On a team, though, it might be better to take a single enemy and clobber them. You can challenge the boss and solo him/her, while your teammates mop up all the weaker mobs.


It's because you never run out of end, I think. Single target is rad when you can just keep going and not need to keep popping blues.

As for me, though. I certainly prefer AOE on a tank, because I tend to play in the late late evenings and you can't always count on finding a team that late. I just taunt all the mobs into surrounding me, and then AOE the hell out of them. It's great.

The strategy 4 speed just posted has a zero chance of causing the effect you are complaining about. In the first place, it doesn't work very well on invention sets. In the second place, it has no chance of ever driving the price higher than what an in-game store would be willing to pay for it. Once that price is reached, nobody will continue using this strategy on that item.



Yeah. That answers my question. I'm wondering if I find say... a level 50 Luck of the Gambler Defense, and notice that there are zero people selling right now, and about 50 people bidding, and the price has been about 50 million for the last 5 sales, do I need to bother raising 2.5 million inf so I can post the recipe at 50 million, or can I list it at 5 inf, and be pretty sure it sells for at least 20 million?

I was worried that the low bidder would get it. Like maybe there'd be one bidder bidding 30 million, and another bidding 200 thousand, and I'd end up selling to the bidder who was trying to low ball me instead of the high bidder. This puts a lot of my fears to rest. I'm sure it was still wise of me to list at 50 million, in case the high bidder were bidding less than that, but it seems I would still have gotten a good bundle of inf either way.

Right, but you'd think you would count as a target whenever a portion of the end you just sapped is transferred to you. I must simply say: thank goodness for respecs.

The target of the lightning bolt shows up in the combat log as having received a transfusion, but if you watch their end bar, it doesn't look like it's moved at all, so I don't worry about giving end to my enemies. It's just unfortunate it doesn't give end to me. (I guess it would kind of break the game if it did, though, since I'd put it on all my attacks and never run out of end.)


So, the proc does work on you, just not your teammates?

I've been curious about this: do medics heal your MM too, or just the other henchmen? I'm debating whether to do a Merks/Thermal build, but I like to make sure my MM has good survivability in case he draws too much aggro.