ClawsandEffect

The interesting thing is that Max HP affects your regen, but regen does not affect your max HP.

By which I mean when you get more HP, your regen is automatically improved, but getting more regen does not give you more HP.

I'll buy high if I'm in a hurry to get logged off and want to finish something before I do.

It's probably part of why I'm broke most of the time, but the amount of money I have in the game is meaningless to me anyway. I can't pay my real life bills with it, so it only exists to make my gaming time more fun. Therefore, it has no intrinsic value to me and I don't mind blowing through hundreds of millions in one sitting when patience would have let me spend half that.

I don't understand why people are so set on getting a good deal with fictional currency. I'll happily spend a couple million more than I need to with the knowledge that I'll make it back in 15 minutes just playing a level 50 character normally.

I know full well what I'm doing, and I don't complain about being broke because of it. It's play money, have fun with it and stop acting like your real life bank account suffers when you spend too much. That's just my opinion, but I have a lot less angst about the game once I came to the conclusion that I don't care abouth the money that exists in it.

For IOs on a Spines/Fire, I would focus on defense and recharge.

The general rule I follow, which is usually a good plan is this: If your build has typed defense in it already or has no defense at all, slot for typed defense. Your build would fall into this category. If your build has positional defense in it already, slot for positional defense. There are exceptions to that one, but they don't apply to your build. A good exception would be any secondary paired with Katana or Broadsword, they can go either way, and you usually get more mileage out of slotting those builds for positional defense if you have none to begin with.

Priority wise, I consider recharge and defense about equally important for a Spines/Fire. You want your AoEs, Fiery Embrace, and your heal recharging as quickly as possible. And you want to have as few attacks landing as possible.

I would prioritize Smashing and Lethal defense slightly over Energy and Negative defense. I wouldn't worry about Fire and Cold defense at all, because you'll be capped to Fire resistance, and the vast majority of Cold attacks have a Smashing or Lethal component that your S/L defense will apply to.

Sets to look at:

Kinetic Combat for S/L defense, it's a melee damage set. Eradication for E/N defense, it's a PBAoE set.

There are 2 schools of thought on Eradication, mostly revolving around whether it is better to 3 slot it with 3 Cleaving Blow or 4 slot it with 2 Multistrike. I would 3 slot it with 3 Cleaving Blow in Spine Burst and maybe Ripper, and I would 4 slot it with 2 MultiStrike in Quills (because Quills is an expensive toggle and Eradication has very little in terms of End reduction). 4 slotting Eradication gives you the largest Max HP bonus found outside a purple set, that's why I like doing that. You also have a few powers in your secondary that take PBAoE sets. I would 4 slot Eradication in Blazing Aura with 2 Multistrike and do the 3 and 3 in Burn.

For Impale, I would go with 3 Thunderstrike for the E/N bonus, and 3 Devastation for the 12% regen and 2.25% Max HP.

Throw Spines is a no-brainer. Either Positron's Blast or Ragnarok (if you can afford it) They give the exact same bonuses, Ragnarok just has larger amounts.

For Fire Shield and Plasma Shield, 4 Reactive Armor would be the way to go. I would take Temperature Protection for the Fire resistance capping and the slow resistance and slot Steadfast Protection Res/Def in teh default slot. I frequently add a second slot to Temp. Protection so I can put a Steadfast KB protection in the second slot (which will give you a recovery bonus combined with the Res/Def)

You'll need a couple more KB protection IOs. You can slot a Steadfast in each of your armors, or you can put a Karma and a Blessing of the Zephyr in Combat Jumping, your choice.

I highly recommend the Fighting pool if you don't already have it. The extra S/L resitance in Tough will be handy, and Weave's defense is invaluable if you're building for more defense.

APP wise, I'd go with Blaze Mastery here, both for thematic reasons andbecause you can slot useful sets in the powers in it. Now, which power I open the pool wit hdepends on my slotting needs. You're probably in good shape on E/N defense at this point, so I would consider taking Ring of Fire and slotting 4 Enfeebled Operation in it for the S/L defense bonus. Alternately, you can slot 3 Thunderstrike and 2 Basilisk's Gaze in Char for the E/N defense bonus.

Fire Blast can get 3 TStrike and 3 Devastaton, or 5 Decimation (I'd lean toward Decimation here, you won't have a great deal of recharge if you've followed my plan to this point). Fireball should be 5 Posi's Blast or Ragnarok if you didn't use it in Thow Spines.

Hope that helps give you an idea what to shoot for. None of that is set in stone, so if you feel you need to slot for more recharge than defense, go for it. I would not expect to get your defense much higher than 35%. I would shoot for 32.5% to all 4 types, so you can soft-cap with a single small purple. As an added bonus, that will give you room for more recharge bonuses.

Download Mids' Hero Designer if you don't already have it. It will let you plan out your build and share it on the forums for critiquing and advice.

You can find it here: http://www.cohtitan.com/

It's right on the first page, so it should be easy to find.

Have you done the math to figure out exactly how much of a survivability advantage tankers have over scrappers? I have. I'm leaving brutes out of it for the time being, just to keep it simple, and I'm using round numbers instead of actual comparisons between powers to A) make the math easier on me, and B) make the math more easily understood.

Given identical circumstances, say fighting an enemy that makes a mockery of defense (like a Quarts buffed DE for example, just to show that they DO exist), the following scenario will happen:

Assuming both ATs are at their respective caps, and are running the same powerset combination (so the powers can be more easily compared).

Okay, say the scrapper and tank are both using an attack that deals 100 damage. The tank's damage scalar of .8 will make that 80 damage, while the scrapper' scalar of 1.125 will make his damage 112.5.

Multiply that by their respective damage caps and you have:

Tank: 80 x 400% = 320 damage that attack will do at the cap, 384 with Bruising.
Scrapper: 112.5 x 500% = 563 damage that attack will do at the cap.

Fighting an enemy with 10,000 HP, it will take the tank 27 attacks to kill it if you count Bruising, while the scrapper needs only 18 (brutes need the same amount as scrappers at their damage cap). With that many attacks, odds are one of them will be a critical for the scrapper, reducing the effective number of attacks to 17.

Now, for the survivability difference.

A tank's HP cap is 3534, and their resistance cap is 90%.
A scrapper's HP cap is 2409., and their resistance cap is 75%

Now, if the enemy that both ATs are fighting deals 1,000 damage with each attack, the respective resistances will work out to the tank taking 100 points of damage with each hit, and the scrapper taking 250.

Now, with the respective HP caps, it will take that enemy 36 hits to drop the tank, while the scrapper can only take 10 before it's dead.

Why is that a big deal? Because the scrapper needs 17 attacks to win the fight, while the tank needs 27. The scrapper requires more hits to win than it can take, while the tank can take more hits than it needs to win.

End result: In identical circumstances at the caps that Johnny keeps going on about, the tank will win that fight while the scrapper will die.

For the percentage minded:

If you take the scrappers survivability in that situation as the baseline, the tank will have 360% of that amount, for an advantage of 260%.

Conversely, the scrapper needs 17 hits to win to the tank's 27. That works out to just over a 50% advantage in the scrapper's favor. (it's exactly 50% if you remove Criticals)

Just for the comparison, that is a 260% survivability advantage enjoyed by the tank, while the scrapper only has a 50% damage advantage

Now, if you were to increase the tanker's damage cap by 100% (to the same value as a scrapper's) and change nothing else, the tanker's attack would then deal 480 damage per hit (counting Bruising) and it would require 21 attacks to win the aforementioned fight, reducing the scrapper's damage advantage from 50% to 30%. (or in the neighborhood, my math is a little fuzzy on the exact formula I need to use to figure it out, maybe someone better at math than me can plug in the correct percentage)

Now, the tank already survives 260% better than the scrapper, while the scrapper in return does 50% more damage.

Would you consider it "fair and balanced" if the scrapper's damage advantage were reduced from 50% while not changing the tank's 260% survivability advantage one iota?

I wouldn't. If tanks want to reduce that 50% damage advantage scrappers have over them, they better be prepared to give up some of that monstrous 260% survivability advantage they have.

Now, I used a bunch of round numbers to make the math easier to compute and understand, but my percentages should be pretty close to accurate. Since I see that Arcanaville has popped into the thread, maybe she could do me the favor of checking my math for accuracy?

Also, another thing that gets glossed over by a lot of people, Johnny in particular:

You cannot adjust the base performance of an AT because of what another AT can do with extensive use of IOs and Incarnate powers. Base damage and damage caps are part of an AT's base performance.

The game is STILL balanced around SOs. And it's more important than ever before to keep it that way. A good number of new and returning players are playing through the game with no access to the things that Johnny is justifying a tanker buff with. On SOs alone, tankers survive better than anything else in the game, by a wide margin. They are the only AT that can reach the defense softcap by themselves, with no IO use at all. With no IOs, tanker's HP is much higher than brutes, because their base HP is 400 points higher. On SOs alone, there is really no comparison when you're talking about survival.

If you can prove that scrappers and brutes are reaching tanker levels of survivability on SOs alone, maybe your argument will hold some weight, but you can't justify an increase to tanker damage levels simply because a scrapper or brute can reach comparable levels of survivability when IOed up the wazoo and using Incarnate powers. You just can't.

Base it on how the ATs compare using nothing but SOs to see if a buff is justified, because SOs are the baseline performance iof the game, and are available to Free, Premium, and VIP players 100% equally.

Making changes based on performance differences using things that are not equally available to ALL players is just unfair.

Notice of the Well is a piece you need for the tier 3 Alpha if you're using Shards to make it.

Fire/Kin/Stone controllers will deal stupid amounts of damage.

You have:

Fire Cages to set up Containment.

Flashfire to stun them so they can't fight back.

Hot Feet ticking away at them.

Imps slapping them.

Fissure providing the AoE punch (which ALSO stuns them)

Seismic Smash dealing huge amounts of damage, on top of being a mag 4 hold (it'll hold bosses in one hit)

And then add Fulcrum Shift, which will keep you more or less permanently at your damage cap of 300% on top of enhancements.

Controllers aren't the most damaging AT you can combine Fire and Kinetics on, bt they are by far the safest. You have enough mitigation in your primary that very little will be able to fight back, not the case with corruptors or defenders.

Truth: Dead characters deal zero damage. A Fire/Kin controller will spend less time dead than a defender or corruptor, with the end result being dealing more damage over a period of time.

The best single target chain last I checked was still Follow Up-Focus-Slash. But you need a LOT of recharge to pull it off.

That's funny, I haven't felt underpowered on my Street Justice characters at all.

I know it burns a lot of endurance, and I also understand WHY it does. The powers don't cost more endurance than other sets, it's just an extremely FAST set, so you're firing off more powers in the same amount of time as other sets. The set that is closest in terms of speed is Claws, and Claws gets an endurance discount as part of the special features of the set. Street Justice gets it's combo system, so it's not going to get an endurance discount as well.

I still don't think your hybrid AT idea is going to fly. It is HIGHLY unlikely that the devs are going to be willing to sit down and rebalance every single offensive power in the game to take into account Every. Single. Possible. Combination.

Because that's exactly what they would have to do. They would have to take all of the hundreds of available combinations that would arise if you combined 2 powersets into account when balancing the powers for this hybrid AT.

By comparison, when they design a completely NEW powersset, they only have to take into account 9 powers and 4 ATs at MOST. They don't take secondaries into account very often, if they did certain primary and secondary combinations would not be so much more powerful than others.

You're asking them to balance hundreds of powers in every possible permutation of power combinations that can occur when you smash 2 sets together. And then you're asking them to take all that balancing and shoehorn it ino a completey new AT with entirely new mechanics. All so people can create incredibly overpowered or incredibly gimped characters.

The game worked very much like that in beta. It doesn't work like that now, and hasn't since the early stages of Alpha testing. There's a good reason for that, and you seem completely unwilling to accept that there is a good reason for the game to work like it does.

If you're really that gung-ho about it, do the work yourself. Balance every single power in the game in every single combination that would exist.

The simple addition of Rage to powers that were not designed with it in mind is going to break things horribly. Did you realize that all the attacks in Super Strength deal less base damage than attacks in other sets, because the entire set is designed around Rage being consistently used? Now add Rage to the attacks in say, Fire Melee without adjusting their base damage and see what happens. Voila, instant overpowered character.

You know what else that means? You would have to have 2 different base damage values for every power that is NOT in Super Strength to make sure things are balanced when you combine them. The simple fact that Rage exists, and is easily made permanent (and is stackable) breaks things in bad ways when you start thinking about adding it to other powersets.

I notice that you don't want people mentioning Fulcrum Shift or Criticals or Fury. That's ridiculous. You HAVE to take those powers into account when you balance things. Much like Rage, the fact that they exist means you have to look at what will happen when you combine every power you can combine with it.

Example: Why do you think Fulcrum Shift s only available on relatively low damage ATs with low damage caps? Because it would be broken to give that power to brutes with their 675% damage cap. A Defender deals about the same damage as a brute before you add Fury, and their damage cap is only 300%. Give the ability to hit a higher damage cap with no outside help, with higher base damage to a hybrid AT that you can cherry pick powers on, and you have the potential for some of the most broken things ever seen in the game.

When you design things like this, you can't just ignore things like Criticals, Fury, and Fulcrum Shift. If you a\balance things while ignoring them, bad things will happen when you add them.

Honestly, I'm not too worried about it though. The devs would have to be pants-on-head imbeciles to implement your idea. And fortunately, they aren't.