Blue_Fenix

I'm currently working on a Willpower/Street Justice tank that I want to build for lead tanking on trials. I'm really not sure about Patron/Epic pools, but I stumbled across Darkest Night...

On paper, it looks like this would be great to toggle up on any trial AV for a significant -Damage Debuff. I know the -to-hit will mostly get resisted away into oblivion, but the -Damage is still good, right? City of Data shows it as -21% Damage.

Anyone else used this for trial tanking? Does it cause Endurance problems for you at all?

Any other comments on Soul Master in general?

Note that recharge bonuses from the Alpha slot do not affect Dominaton, though they will help Hasten. Personally, I feel that Spirtual Alpha is not worth it if you've got perma-dom global recharge already. (Though Ageless Destiny can be good - its recharge DOES affect Domination and it comes with an endurance/recovery boost too).

I'd consider any of the following:

Cardiac, if you're NOT going for Ageless Destiny and hate hate hate running out of Endurance.

Intuition, which boosts Hold Duration, and on the Radial path also boosts Damage and Range (which is sweet for cones like Seeds of Confusion). My Dark/Dark dom loves Intuition because he gets all that, plus -To-Hit Debuffs!

Musculature Core for max Damage (Musculature Radial is worse than Intuition Radial - same damage, but Intuition boosts Hold instead of Immob).

Nerve Radial to boost both Hold and Confuse duration (realistically, the Accuracy isn't very needed assuming you've got good IO sets with good Accuracy values and global Accuracy bonuses). If you hate hate hate missing with a passion, that'd also be a reason to go with this.

And, strangely enough Vigor Radial could be an option - Confuse + Sleep Duration, Heal for your Spirit Tree, and Accuracy and Endurance for everything, assuming you use Spirit Tree and Spore Burst enough to value those enhancements.

Currently, I believe most trials offer a drop rate of

40% Common
30% Uncommon
20% Rare
10% Very Rare

Plus, a free Uncommon for each badge, and a free Rare for each "Master of..." badge. EDIT TO ADD: Also, some trials such as Undergound offer an even better chance of a Rare or Very Rare, to reward you for sticking it out on a long trial.

The drop rate for the arc reward table, however, is something more like

70%-ish Common
19%-ish Uncommon
4%-ish Rare
2%-ish Very Rare

(Exact numbers are still unknown for these).

As far as I know, difficulty has no effect on the reward table. In fact, getting all 3 level shifts and running at -1/x8 currently appears to be the fastest solo option for farming thread drops and other non-Component rewards after you've done your Repeatable Mission + Repeatable Arc for the day. I continue to get threads, Converters, Catalysts, and Very Rare IO Recipies running in DA at -1/x8 while shifted to 53.

The devs have pretty much flat-out said that trials are supposed to be a faster way to get your Incarnate stuff. The solo stuff does have one advantage though - if you have a whole bunch of incarnate characters, you can log on to each one, speed run a mission for 10 threads, speed run an arc for 1 component, then switch characters. Doing this for several characters gets pretty good total of threads and components, but unfortunately spread out over several characters.

Alternatively, choose Component drops on your main, and Astral/Emp merit drops on your alts. Then go to Ouro Incarnate Vendors and buy the threads that get emailed to your account, so you can get even more threads on your main that way. (This assumes you only care about slotting up your main).

The important thing to understand is that Taskmaster Gabriel only counts arcs you did AFTER you accepted his "Complete all arcs" mission, regardless of whether they were first runs or through Ouro.

Open up Task Manager and make sure all instances of the game AND launcher are killed before you try repairing the game again. Sometimes a process will hang, and the repair can't change the files because the files are already open in another process.

Rebooting may help as well.

Obviously, Incarnate powers are a pretty big deal. Tier 3 in particular is important due to the level shift that three of the five slots have to offer. I also find Tier 3 to be relatively easy to grind for - you get tons of uncommons from the easier badges on trials, 8 Emps for a guaranteed rare isn't too bad if you're unlucky with rolls, we've got DA arcs and repeatables to solo for those last few threads or some extra component rolls, etc. etc.

But Tier 4. Seriously. Getting the Very Rare, ok, I understand, it takes a while - either you wait to get lucky on component rolls or you save up tons of lesser components, threads, or Emp Merits. I don't have a problem with the Very Rare.

What gets to me is the fact that Tier 4 powers require you to build ANOTHER Tier 3 all over again. So, if getting to Tier 3 in all slots takes X time, getting Tier 4 takes another full X plus Y (the time to get a Very Rare component).

All that jazz, and honestly, the Tier 4 powers don't feel like that much of an improvement over T3. Yeah, sure, Destiny lasts longer, Interface procs a bit more often, etc. But is it really worth double the time for an incremental boost?

What do you folks think? I just hit T3 in all slots on my current main, and I'm really tempted to just run the 1 or 2 Trials I haven't beat yet, maybe try a couple "Master of" badges, and then shelve him until whenever the next slot comes out.

Also, this is exactly why the devs added the "Complete the current mission from this contact" option - you can skip any bugged or difficult mission once every three days, and you get all the mission complete rewards as if you'd done it.

It's possible you're just not stealthing quite as well as you think. Even if you get into perception range and fire off Fearsome Stare 0.1 seconds after the enemies notice you, they'll get to do their entire attack animation and hit you, because they already started it.

I actually have Stealth running all the time on my Dominator, plus Super Speed sometimes, and that substantially improves my chances of locking down a group before I know I'm there.

Also, if you've got Umbra Beast out, he'll often cone-howl at the group around the same time you're doing Fearsome Stare, triggering return fire with his damage.

I find it depends a lot on the exact character. There are definitely some builds where the Epic power pools just don't feel very epic at all, or there aren't any that fit my concept. I've also had builds where I would LOVE to have one to three MORE power picks to cram in everything I want.

Posters above me in the thread have pretty much answered the "what to do about it" question, though - take Epics, take pools, and take set mules. Also, you can take situational powers that only get used once in a blue moon and only use the default slot. Some of these can save your *** that one time it gets used.

Life Drain, I went for 3 pieces of Thunderstrike (emphasizing acc, end, and dam) and 2 Touch of the Nictus (the pure heal, which I boosted to +5, and one other heal/something I don't recall which). This gets some good values and Thunderstrike provides a little E/N/Range defense.

Engulfing Darkness and Midnight Grasp I have no clue - both are 6-slotted on my build, ED with Oblit, and MG with 5 pieces of Crushing Impact, I think (5% rech), plus the ATO proc (superior, woo!).

Are you really so slot-heavy you can't pull out 2 more to get ED and MG to 6?

Then again, I was perfectly happy to end up with Ranged defense somewhat over 30% and 20% to Melee and AoE, with no purple sets, just a Glad 3% that I got lucky buying for 'cheap'.

I think the devs did try to scale our expectations for the incarnate system, though, way back at the beginning.

Remember Mender Ramiel's story arc? There was this big deal about the difference between becoming an Incarnate all at once like Statesman and many others did, and the so-called "slow path". That's the explanation for why we have to grind Incarnate XP and Incarnate components - we're incrementally moving ourselves closer and closer to godhood, but we're still incredibly far away.

That's a little odd, but it's not too terribly unlikely that someone, somewhere, would get that unlucky with the RNG; i.e. if there's a 1-in-100,000 chance of failing to get tips after so many kills, and the game has 100,000 characters, odds are pretty good ONE of them has experienced this.

I'd say if she still hasn't seen a tip by level 24 or 25, send a petition and/or bug report. Since she's not quite 22 yet, and tips start at 20, she could easily have gotten a large amount of XP off of a relatively low number of enemy kills, such as by teaming with a full group running level 50 or 50+ missions.

Finally, I believe tips do not drop when you have all 5 fame bubbles filled. She could have gotten on a tips team that got 5 fame really quickly (getting no tip drops of her own due to bad luck), then continued to play within the following 20 hours, during which she would be guaranteed to get no tips.