Bosstone

'Treadmill' needs to be retired as a derogatory word. MMOs are treadmills. That is a fact. City is one giant treadmill, and it's more of one than many other MMOs. For all that people complain about treadmills, games do worse when they don't incorporate treadmill elements.

Whether it's a treadmill or not isn't the question. It's whether it's a fun treadmill or not. City is one of the most repetitive games I've ever played, but mowing through hordes of enemies with AOE powers never fails to entertain me.

I'm not sure I could call myself a minmaxer, but I built my Blaster assuming Cardiac. Turns out that build still has enough endurance reduction without Cardiac to make it through a fast-paced TF, but if I slot Spiritual I bottom out due to firing off my powers too quickly. So I wound up with Musculature, and having the Rare slotted gets me a solid 125% damage in every attack. Works very well.

Reasonable analysis. I've been finding similar issues on my characters. When planning my level 50 Crab, I only focused on Defense set bonuses, and I still wound up with something like 35% global accuracy. Take that, plus the fact that many Defense set bonuses need all 6 IOs in a set (and thus incorporating all the accuracy in the set), plus TT: Leadership, and I'm already past 95% to-hit even when fighting +4s. Nerve is simply not a useful option, even though it would squeeze out an extra 3% to defenses. I'd get more survivability through Musculature or Spiritual.

It's been observed before that the Alpha boosts are more helpful the less you plan out your build. Someone working on just SOs or common IOs can throw 2 Recharge, 2 Damage, and 2 End Redux or whatever in their attacks, use Nerve, and be happy, but the minute you start incorporating set IOs you run into trouble.

It would be neat if wasted to-hit converted to something useful. The idea I had recently was critical chance. Say for every 10% or 20% over 100%, you'd get a 1% chance to crit. So if your final to-hit before clamp was 120%, you'd have a 2% chance to crit on that attack. That may be overpowered, but it would certainly make more Accuracy useful.

Kinetic Melee.

Solo:
vvvPOWvvPOWvvvvPOWvvvvvvvPOW

Team:
vvvPOWvvPOWvvvvPOWvvvvvv-oh, never mind, it's dead already. Moving on.

Good luck to you. I've been doing the same thing with Accuracy on a few characters that have to-hit powers. With a few cheap IO sets, it's possible to leave off slotting for Accuracy entirely until you start running into +1 and +2 enemies regularly.

If it helps, a single Endurance SO (or the equivalent if you're doing IOs) for each power is probably going to be enough to ease your pain significantly. Heck, a single Dam/End IO would probably do the trick.

Couple of observations:

1) End reduction matters far more in attacks than toggles. When you calculate the EPS of attacks, you usually end up with somewhere between 0.75-1.5 end/sec. Looking at Energy Melee without enhancements:

Barrage: Attack cycle 7.33 seconds, End cost 6.864 = 0.9364/s
Energy Punch: Attack cycle 4.83 seconds, End cost 5.2 = 1.0766/s
Bone Smasher: Attack cycle 9.5 seconds, End cost 8.528 = 0.8977/s

You get the idea. Those are way more expensive than toggles, and recharge raises the EPS significantly. Conversely, end reduction also chops off a LOT more EPS than it would for toggles.

2) In addition to attack EPS, I've been running a WP scrapper myself, and the toggles have been choking me. I've got the WP toggles all running plus Tough/Weave plus Maneuvers, 5-6 End Mod slots between Stamina and Quick Recovery, Numina's +/+ in Health, and I'm just barely straddling the breakeven line for recovery. Granted, if I leave off the pool powers, I'm fine for endurance, but where's the fun in that?

I am...NICTUS!

I am...NICTUS!

I am...NICTUS!

I am...HEADON!

I am...NICTUS!

...Put...a...Run...enhancement...in...Swift? ...Maybe?

Honestly? I'm curious how any of the Manipulation sets would handle the Holtz/Honoree fight in Mender Ramiel's arc. A Devices Blaster can lay down a huge stack of Trip Mines, pull one of the EBs, summon a Gun Drone, lay down Caltrops around the Mines, and the EB is half dead before it's even within fighting range.

The Manips all have Immobilizes, but both EBs still have ranged attacks and you still have to take them out from 100% health. Ice has Ice Patch, Mental has Drain Psyche and TK Thrust, and Energy has Power Thrust, although I can't remember how much resistance EBs have to various status effects. I imagine Elec and Fire would have the worst time of it.

The downside is you can only ever run this mission once on any character. Makes it tough to do comparisons.

Odd diversion, but...

I don't think there's any question that a character IOed intelligently is more powerful than a character SOed intelligently. IOs simply offer more power, even discounting set bonuses.

What matters is that content is tuned for SOs. That means an SOed character is still capable and competent. Only a fool rejects someone in SOs, provided that someone is competent.

And yes, given that an SOed character doesn't have access to stealth procs and global accuracy bonuses, Devices does offer them more than it offers IOed characters.

Auto Turret is fast, yes, but it can be interrupted. You just have to hit the Engineer immediately, and if the entire spawn is Engineers (not unusual at 0/x1), that can be tricky.