Chaos_String

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I'm actually looking for a chain for pvp, but a DPS question isn't quite a pvp question. Should i even use Eagles claw?

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You're right. First, DPS chains rarely have any place in PvP.

Firstly, DPS in PvP is nearly meaningless, and so are attack chains. You'll rarely get to string more than a couple of attacks together, as your foe will be moving around, and trying to kite you if he has ranged attacks. Therefore, BURST damage is much more important.

Also, in PvP, the damage done by an attack is a direct function of the time the attack takes to animate. Whereas in PvE, you look for attacks with high damage and short animation times, building a DPS chain around those.

What this all means is that in PvP you will DEFINITELY want Eagle's Claw, for the burst damage (high because of the long animation time) and the stun effect.

For a DPS chain in PvE, you're going to want to avoid EC and try to run SK > CK > SK > CAK, patching gaps with TK if you don't have enough recharge to run that chain seamlessly.

The upshot of this is that you'll need to prioritize different attacks in PvE and PvP.

I just played "Blight" and thought it was very good.

For those of you who recommended "Blight" you might try a couple stories by @The Cheshire Cat, "Astoria in D Minor" (41565) and "The Beating Heart of Astoria: a Play in Five Acts" (170547).

No, no. The best possible use of Force Bubble is to execute the Skulburst.

To do this, you get on your lvl 50 FF toon, turn on PFF and Force Bubble.

Now, jog into the middle of a big pack of Skulls in Perez Park. Get ready for a screenshot, and then turn off PFF.

Voila, the Skulburst. It's a true classic.

It's an AoE centered around the target, and it has a pretty short range, so you have to get pretty close to the target to activate it. Hence Close (Targeted AoE).

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Speaking of ITFs though, lets be honest, any time on an ITF above 40minutes just isn't all that good, and any decent Scrapper should be able to solo it, especially with a billion inf added.

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Well, that's my point. Last night my ITF PUG had some good players on it including a SS/WP brute and a Fire/Fire blaster who were rocking it with me, and we finished up in 27min. The one I did over the weekend I think was 32-33 min with a less damaging team. 40 minutes and below accounts for those cases where I get virtually no help and have to free all the sybylls, destroy all the cysts, and kill all the generals myself. I can even do the computer and AVs myself, and I'm pretty sure I could solo the final encounter, but even the worst teams are able to help me with those.

I consider anything 28min or lower to be a good time. That's 1 merit per minute.

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now is 235 second recharge for Conserve power ok with a 2.21/sec recovery rate with toggles on? or is that too slow?

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It's too slow. And you've gimped the accuracy in Hack.

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speaking about regen recovery, my BS/SD has just a smidge more in terms of regen, (so at that 20per sec mark) and what I've found is that in a prolonged fight, say against an AV, that it will easily cope with one or two lucky hits getting through, but the moment they get three lucky hits in a row through, I'm toast. And an AV fight goes long enough that they will ALWAYS get 3 lucky strikes in a row at some point.
So yeah you're going to want a tray full of greens for AV soloing.

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He has reworked his build to fit in Aid Self, so he should be good to go on that front.


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I'd suggest throwing in a Parry instead (not Slice) yes, it does limit the DPS, but it also gives you the needed Def bonus, it's amazing how many enemies pack def debuffs in this game.
I'd go as far to set monitor your melee defense and spam Parry if it starts to drop, I know it might sound obsessive, but the moment you do your first ITF, you're going to understand why.

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My BS/Shield is actually my favorite ITF toon, and I run 2-3 a week with him, always finishing in under 40 minutes no matter how bad the PUG I'm with may be. And I don't have Parry; I worked up decent defense debuff resistance to the point where cascade failure isn't a real issue. And if I do take a few hits in rapid succession, I pop a purple to patch it.

Having said that, Parry actually doesn't lower single-target DPS any more than Slice; I'd prefer Slice because it gives you that much more AoE capability (which is good), but using Parry as insurance against defense debuffs is valid, too.

Well, if you're not getting the 2.5-second recharge on Hack, then you may as well go for a Hack > Headsplitter > Disembowel > Slice chain which doesn't require Hasten; that'll let you put CJ/SJ back into the build, which makes softcapping easy. The DPS is less (a lot less), but still probably 160ish. And you'll have solid defense, resistance, HP, and Aid Self.

Something like this would be a very solid build (just tweaked from yours): EDIT: tweaked again.

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Yeah, I got mine when it was 300mil and thought I was paying a premium for a "new" recipe.

As a teaming build, Fire/Kin is potentially as strong as any other controller combo. Very solid controls, excellent buffs, a good heal, and superior damage output. Good players will play it to those stengths, because goodplayers are good.

Unfortunately, the actual function of most fire/kins on a pre-lvl-30 Task Force team seems to be simply immobilizing the enemies as far apart as humanly possible, dying horribly, and begging inspirations to make a wakie.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that 20hp/sec is a goal to shoot for without Aid Self. I'd just noticed that both your builds were below that line and didn't have a self-heal.

Basically I don't have a good baseline passive regen figure to shoot for without Aid Self. My Katana/WP scrapper does fine with 65ish hp/sec regen and no self-heal, and his exotic defenses are a bit below softcap. But he has SoW to give him a big resistance boost when he's hurt, and can handle the end crash without issue.

I imagine a softcapped Shield scrapper doing quite well with 40ish hp/sec regen and no Aid Self, especially if you could work in OwtS and make sure that your Endurance could handle the crash (harder for Shield scrappers because they don't have QR).

Anyhow, in your case I'd consider trying to get Aid Self by softcapping without CJ/SJ.

Alternatively: if you're not going to shoot for 2.5sec recharge on Hack anyway, then you almost might as well do without Hasten/SS and just chain Hack &gt; Headsplitter &gt; Disembowel &gt; Slice. It's not a great DPS chain honestly, but with the right procs and a decent global +dam boost it's enough to take down many AVs.

Sorry if this advice is all over the place and confusing, just trying to present you with a variety of options.

Well, a couple hp/sec regen isn't going to make much difference quite frankly. If I were you, I'd look at trying to hit softcaps without CJ/SJ and work in Aid Self.

It's not bad... the concerns I'd have are:

1) No Aid Self and &lt;20hp/sec regeneration. You'd better have some green inspirations for when you take hits.

2) With just a little bit more recharge in Hack, you could chain Hack &gt; Headsplitter &gt; Hack &gt; Disembowel &gt; (0.52sec) for very strong DPS. To do that, you need Hack to recharge in 2.5sec or less. The Hecatomb set (all but Dam/End, with Achilles Heel proc in 6th slot) would get you there, and give you a very nice damage proc twice in your attack chain.

Other than those things, the builds look strong. The one with Grant Cover will have better debuff resistance, but the one with Super Speed will get around much faster.

Of course. There are a number of enhancement strategies that should work. In fact, my thugs/dark soloed AVs with just SOs back in the day. But the strategies I used wouldn't work well for a Bots/Dark, and the changes to pet upgrade powers would make my old strategy very painful nowadays, anyhow.

Still, there should be more than one way to skin a cat.

That said, you may want to check a little further down in the list of special enhancements for the HOs you want; although the regular HOs are indeed quite rare since everybody chooses merits nowadays after a Hami raid, the SYNTHETIC versions of them are much more common. They're often chosen in lieu of merits after LRSF's.

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In my completely subjective opinion... People love Shield Charge for a few reasons...

First, it is perhaps the most visually dynamic power that you'll see on a Scrapper. You click the power and your character crouches back a moment then... BAM! You blur into pure kinetic energy that crosses the gap in an instant and explodes in a burst that blows the spawn apart, knocking them off their feet and clearing the immediate area around you. For me, that animation has the whole "comic book super-hero" vibe to it nailed down cold. With other AoEs, you spin around in place, stomp the ground, clap your hands, etc. With this one, it's a dynamic whole-body motion that just conveys boundless energy and focused intensity.

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this is actually incorrect, though it was the way i was hopeing it'd be, it sadly is not... you do not just click the power and crouch BAM!, the power is a Location AoE and not a Target AoE, and there for, you click the power and it creates a Location recticle on your cursor which you must then manually place by looking arround to where you want it to go, moveing your cursor icon to that location and then clicking the mouse button to designate that location and then BAM.
doesnt quite fit the standard play of scrappers with it as it is, so it takes some getting use to within the chaos of scrapper-lock, but it is very much worth it once you get use to it...
also another point of why it's so great is, not only is it another attack at your disposal, but it's an AoE, which helps to compliment primaries lacking in the AoE areas.

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It's very easy to skip the whole aiming reticle step by use of a teleport bind for Shield Charge:

/bind shift+lbutton "powexecname Shield Charge"

You don't click on Shield Charge in your tray and there's no aiming reticle. You just hold shift, point and click where you want SC to land, and BAM.

You can even use this bind while your current attack is animating and SC will queue up and go off as soon as it's done.

EDIT: And what's not to love about Shield Charge? Big burst damage, a huge AoE, and knockdown? It's like Foot Stomp with a teleport.

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Oh ok Doom, thats what I thought you were talking but I guess I got it confused. Although I did it wrong, it may help out in the end. As for Tru Grit having 2 special uses, Adding Defense for Smashing/Leathal and +max Hp, I really was leaning more towards the resistance of smashing and leathal dmg. Then again... whats yalls take on True Grit? load it up with Defense or Max HP or both?

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First of all, you're confusing defense and resistance; True Grit will give you resistance (not defense) and +MaxHP. And there's no reason not to enhance it for both. But between the two, MaxHP is more valuable.

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Im not a big fan of Aid Self. I tried it before on the build but respect'd out of it becuase I was always gettin interuptted when trying to use it,

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No offense, but it was getting interrupted because you had lousy defense in your build. To put it in perspective, the build you posted will get hit about four times as often as the softcapped builds that others have posted here to help you.

When you get your defense numbers up to 45% or more to Melee, Ranged and AoE positions (as some of those other builds do), you will find that enemies hit you a lot less, so they will rarely interrupt your Aid Self.

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Instead of the rude or l33t sp34k comments how about posting your so called valuable information if you think Im doing it so wrong, for all I know you lucked up and designed a good enhancment set up?

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First, let me say that I too play a Broadsword/Shield scrapper, and although I don't PvP with it, it's simply one of the most overpowered characters I've made for PvE.

It isn't about "lucking up" and designing a good IO build. If it were, then literally dozens of us have "lucked up" to the point of being able to solo pylons and AVs without inspirations or temp powers, using Shield Defense. I am one of them. And I can tell you, without hesitation, that you are way off-base saying Shield Defense needs help. Although Shield Defense is fairly weak defensively out-of-the-box, if you design an IO build properly, it is simply one of the toughest to kill, while also giving you a huge boost in offensive power.

Why don't you post your build, since you're the one having trouble with the set? If you do this, and behave respectfully, people such as myself might help you.

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Sure if I pop enough of the right kind of insperations at the right times I could take down a AV, but Im trying to build my set up to where I dont have to use Insperations.

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Like I said, my Broadsword/Shield scrapper can solo AVs just fine without inspirations, temp powers, buffs from anyone else, or anything. I've even soloed 2 AVs at once, and could definitely handle more. If you can't do this, then ask for help. That's literally all you have to do.

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I feel the power taunts a little to much. When you start pouring on the dmg + this power activated it can be rough. They are not designed to take damage like tanks but can when the pressure's on, thus u pop the uber power in your 2ndary. One with shield doesnt do that.

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OK. I get that OwtS doesn't do what you want it to do. But let me ask you this: what are your defense numbers? From the Combat Attibutes window, under the Defense tab, in the game? If they're not all at or above 45%, then you've got a lot of room for improving your survivability.

If they are at 45% and you're still railing at your tier 9, then frankly, I don't know what to say. I enjoy being able to play "poor man's tank" on task forces, by virtue of my taunt aura and massive AoE damage. But that's because I don't have trouble with survival. And although I liked OwtS while leveling up, and found it really did help me survive, once I kitted out with IOs, I knew I wouldn't need it. My lvl 50 build doesn't have OwtS and doesn't need it.

Listen, you can post a build and ask for help, and you'll get it. Like a dojo, this forum is filled with real experts at kicking [censored] and should be approached with a modicum of respect and humility.

Just railing away at our FotM defense set in ignorance won't get you any help at all.

The choice is yours.

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My guess:

1 - Propel Rocks (Ranged Moderate Smashing, like the Legacy Chain minions)
2 - Stone Fist
4 - Gravel Spray (Ranged Cone Smashing, like the Minions of Igneous lieutenants)
10 - Stone Mallet
16 - Build Up
20 - Heavy Stone Mallet
28 - Propel Boulder (Ranged High Smashing, KB)
35 - Fissure
38 - Seismic Smash

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They might exchange build-up for some other gimmicky power.

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16. Throw Another Rock: this is a ranged attack which, like Blinding Feint or Follow Up, gives you a small +ToHit, +Dam boost if it connects.

So, all together:

1) Throw a Rock
2) Hit Guy with a Rock
4) Throw a Bunch of Rocks
10) Hit Guy with a Big Rock
16) Throw Another Rock
20) Hit Guy with a Big, Huge Rock
28) Catapult Rock
35) World Rocker
38) Drop 16-Ton Rock

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Thanks for the reply. I was under the impression you couldn't lower a bot's end consumption, only the end cost in casting the bots. Do the hamis actually help the bots use less end?

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When endurance reduction is slotted into a pet summon power, it reduces both the cost of summoning and the costs of the powers used by the summoned pet(s).

Either way, my point was simply that there's no reason why Shield Charge has to be a two-step process that takes longer to execute than any other attack.

Oh, ok. My apologies, I didn't bother reading the link carefully.

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Isn't that exactly the same thing ?

I.e., if Shield Charge is the power number 7 on your hotkey bar, you'd press 7 and click the location. Here you press shift and click the locationn. I don't see much difference.

(I'm just asking because I've seen this bind used for teleport too, yet I don't understand what makes it different than using the hotkey bar.)

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I don't use the hotkeys, so I can't really answer that.

For me, it's essentially a single stroke, not two. It's like typing a capital "A." You don't hit Shift and THEN select A; you just grab Shift with your pinky as you type the A.

So, rather than select the power and then select the target, I simply grab Shift with my pinky as I point to where I want Shield Charge to land. I can do this during another attack's animation, which queues up the Shield Charge without ever showing a reticle; and unlike using the aiming reticle, it doesn't suffer at all when I'm lagging.

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However, in practice, you have to get that target on the ground before it activates. That adds a little time. I wonder where the break even point is with other attacks. Looks like maybe around half a second. If you can click, target and click in half a second, it will add DPS.

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My Shield Charge bind:

/bind shift+lbutton "powexecname Shield Charge"

You just shift-click the location. You don't select the power and then place the targeting reticle. It is much faster, and can be queued up while a prior attack is animating.

That's the Monster/AV class version of Adamastor, not the GM version. My BS/SD scrapper has soloed that one, too, but it's not a GM.

Agreed. And also, to echo PF's original post, the prevailing spirit here is to help one another, or as Werner put it elsewhere, to play a modified game of king of the mountain where we try to see how many people we can fit at the top.

I always check this forum first, because although it has its foibles, the nasty attitudes and flame wars present elsewhere in the forums usually get checked at the door to this one. And that's a breath of fresh air for sure.

Also I'd like to echo PF's sentiments and say that I, too, am very grateful for the information I've been able to discover here. Good on all you lads and lasses, you've brought honor to yourselves and to CoX.