Draggynn

I also remember reading this, and it is on my list of things to test intensively when I get to the LS section of my guide. Sadly, it's looking like I probably won't have time to do that until this summer

Wow...hadn't heard that. If that's the case I don't expect that to last and I suspect by the time interface makes it to live, or shortly thereafter, interface will be operating like other procs in those pseudopets: a chance to fire once every 10 seconds.

Alright, blunt honest truth. I look at this build and think, "Has the guy ever left AE?" You have gone after bonuses so aggressively that your build is gimped in almost every respect. Your one non power pool single target attack isn't slotted for damage and thus for a single target you must rely on your power pool attacks which are less than lackluster. Sure you have the occasional massive AoE in Blizzard and Ice Storm, which may be all you need in a farm...but in just about any other situation that's horrendous.

I am not familiar with the lethal ambush farm, but I would bet good money that you could make non flying mobs, hover, and get a soft capped ranged build and be just as survivable while not having to gimp every other power. On a Storm Defender ranged defense is generally better anyway since hurricane will protect you from melee damage.

I will applaud you on getting soft capped smash/lethal, with high resistance, but the build is so broken in other respects I wouldn't go near it.

It was unclear to me if that's what was happening, which is why I included the other recharge calculation below:

Yes it does. Strangely the Electric Control AoE immobilize does not, although their single target immobilize is electric fence and does. Electric Fence will also suppress Hurricane's knock back although not its repel.

Recharge goes as Base_Recharge/(1+x) where x is the recharge bonus. It would be far easier to calculate if you could also give us how much recharge you have slotted in PA...but backing that out from the base recharge you gave us:

240/(1+x) = 60+53 -> x = 113% (...wait are you saying that you have no recharge at all slotted in PA and that is just from your global recharge? I think we have found the problem!)

In which case, you should get the entire benefit from the alpha slot, which is 33%. So your total recharge should be:

240/(1+2.1375+.33) = 69 seconds.

If you want perma PA, you really need to slot PA for recharge as well. You can't just rely on your global to do that. It is my understanding that for perma PA you need PA to recharge in 57 seconds which means that you need a total recharge of 321% (you only need 300 if you want 60 second recharge. That means that you need another 75% recharge in PA which you should be able to get easily by slotting...which means with the alpha slot you need to hit 108% recharge in PA...but you get 11% free over the cap with the first alpha, so with ED you only need to hit 97%. Which means without ED you need to hit 113%, but you get 22% from the spiritual so you need 91% pre-ED slotting in PA to hit the 57 second recharge mark.

edited for completion:
If that's 113% recharge slotting (which would have to include the alpha slot) in addition to 113% global recharge, then PA should recharge in 240(1+2.1375+1.13) = 56.2 seconds

Yes, but it should also have fired on enemies, and that extra damage is worth the occasional personal hit in my book.

44.49 base damage per bolt for defenders vs. 40.04 base damage for everyone else: so it's 90% effective (as is the 30% -recovery. -1 on defender -.9 on everyone else). Of course Masterminds also get the added benefit of paying 39 endurance instead of 31.

Well, the force feedback proc will have a chance to fire on you when you summon LS....so although not actually nothing, it can be well approximated by nothing.

I really need to get that LS section of my guide done...**shakes fist at real life**

Thank you. He was intended to look a little melancholy and I think Wassy did an excellent job of capturing that.


True, but I am unaware of any indication that these are not working as intended and could really be called, "exploitable". But then I suppose that depends on whether we are using the term exploit to mean break the game or simply, "take advantage of game mechanics". And just because we haven't heard anything, isn't always a clear indication of whether things are working as the devs intended.

I don't think any of the pseudopets are proccing more often than they should. Even though a Lightning Storm proc'd out with the Force Feedback proc was insanely powerful, the bigger issue was the inherrited recharge from sets (leading to all pets no longer inheriting recharge) rather than the frequency of the FF proc firing. That's the only thing I can think of that could even come close to being called exploitable...and even that wasn't an exploit, it just wasn't WAI.

It has long been common practice to slot LS with damage procs and chance to hold procs precisely because the frequency of a proc is higher when hitting 5 targets, but it's the same logic that makes slotting procs in AoE powers a good idea regardless.

Since there's been a lot of noise in this thread, let me be clear that this is the correct answer. The proc will have a chance to fire on every enemy hit by Lightning Storm meaning that it could theoretically proc on all five enemies hit by a single strike. As with all powers, the proc checks separately for each enemy so if a strike hits multiple targets it could proc on just one of them.

Also, the proc is currently bugged so there is also a chance that the proc will fire on you when you summon Lightning Storm. A minor hassle, but no reason to keep you from slotting the proc.

Agreed, I would not recommend slotting it there at all. Off the top of my head I can't think of a single pet or pseudopet that recharges fast enough to make this remotely close to worthwhile.

If you end up having issues with PvPers my advice is to create a channel and invite folks to it so that next time you can organize without drawing attention to yourselves...I suspect you shouldn't have much trouble though. Also hiding from searches while in a PvP zone is a good way to avoid drawing attention to yourselves. Best of luck to you!

Are you sure about that? I know that pets can get a little wonky with sets, but the proc has a chance to fire on you when you summon Lightning Storm, but then that's only a pseudopet.

Otherwise Necrotech is right. Although the proc will "fire" it will have no actual impact since it will apply the +recharge to the pet, and pets are immune to recharge effects. I'm still a little bitter about that.

In fact all 5 damage procs that can go in Freezing Rain have the same 20% chance to fire.

I think when building so strongly for set bonuses you sort of need to throw orthodoxy out the window. My Ice/Kin is soft capped to smash/lethal/ranged, and her slotting certainly looks bizarre in places.

I know you said you did this quickly, so you may already have tweaked it quite a bit from this, but there are a couple small optimizations I would make. Because at that level of defense, an increase from 44.5 to 45% defense means that you get hit 10% less, I would subslot glacier with 4 Basilisks gaze and an acc/mez hamio to hit the soft cap. That way you only lose 2.5% in global recharge and 2% in recovery.

Actually it looks like with the basilisk change you don't need to sacrifice global recharge. It looks like with a little tweaking, you could slot steamy Mist with two HamiO's and LoTG and shift the other slots around to a Zephyrs in fly and combat jumping, or Reactive armor in tough while tossing the uniques into MoB (although then you have no end reduction in there) and maintain the same global recharge and be at the soft cap. However this would come at the cost of some end reduction in Steamy Mist, so whether that's actually an improvement or not depends on your view point. I suspect there's may be a better way to hit the soft cap with those 3 freed slots, but don't have the patience to look right now.

The slotting in Freezing Rain makes me sad and I would probably sacrifice a global recharge bonus to force a little more recharge out of it, or at least swap the Lady Grey end/defdebuff for the the recharge/endurance and rely on tornado if you find you need that extra little kick through.

Also you can optimize a little bit without loosing anything you have by using Hamio's for your single slots. Swap out the second maneuvers slot for a cytoskeleton and that will give you a couple extra tenths of a percentage point (which is quite significant if aren't interested in the sacrifice in glacier). Also swap out the mind over body for a ribosome. Small tweaks, but when you're already throwing that much money into a build, what's another hamio or two

Whether or not it makes a practical difference or not, depends on how much your crunching numbers and what the make up is of the rest of the team. Both corruptors and controllers have enough -recharge with Freezing Rain and Snow Storm to floor +2 enemies (defenders can do it to +3) and floor movement on even con enemies (defenders can do it to +3).

Running Maneuvers and Steamy Mist Defenders can hit 8.75% defense to team unenhanced, corruptors can hit 6.4% unenhanced (when enhanced 14% vs. 10%). Whether or not that makes a practical difference is highly subjective. If you have a widow on your team soft capping everyone already, then no, it doesn't really make a difference. If you have no other defense on your team then it also doesn't make that much difference. However, if combined with other buffs on the team, and especially since so many folks build for defense these days, that couple percent has the potential to make a difference. Also if you're planning on soft capping a build, it can be easier to do with defenders (not to mention that you can get some pretty impressive resistance for yourself as well with an epic shield, tough, and the cardiac boost).

20% resistance to fire/cold/energy for defenders versus 15% for corruptors.

Freezing Rain: 35% versus 30% -resistance. A high recharge Storm defender can triple stack Freezing rain, so that can become 105% vs. 90%. Of course this is only in ideal cases due to the Freezing Rain bug, but a 10% difference in -res can be common.

Hurricane: 30% vs. 37.5%, not a huge difference and massive enough to be powerful regardless.

Tornado: same pet summoned for both so there's no difference.

Lightning Storm: I'm pretty sure that like Freezing Rain, Corruptors get the Controller Version, so Corruptor LS deals less damage.

And then there is of course that corruptor blasts will provide 20% less -to hit than defender blasts.

Whether or not this makes a difference in game, depends entirely on team makeup and what assumptions you make when crunching numbers.

As to the effectiveness of vigilance, it can certainly help some with endurance management on teams, but a good team really shouldn't be taking that much damage, so vigilance is of limited assitance.

If you're planning on mostly teaming I would probably go with the defender for the increased modifiers, but it doesn't make all that much difference.

Just echoing what's already been said several times, Freezing Rain has standard accuracy on each hit, and inorder for your proc to have a chance to hit, that very first tic needs to connect. Although in normal play, there are enough tics from Freezing Rain fast enough, that eventually streak breaker will force a hit. BUT if you are trying to get the most out of procs then you will probably want to supplement accuracy. You get no proc chance if the first tic misses and the second hits.

The problems with it I see are really three fold (although it appears to have grown to 4), and are outlined in this post. In the interest of keeping feedback in one place, I'll just summarize here:
1) Icons over names make health hard to see.
2) Names over health makes healthbars hard to see, especially when they're moving. It's not so bad in a static shot, but otherwise it can be like trying to spot a deer running through the trees.
3) as players take damage the health bar goes dark red. Not so bad as this screenshot was taken during the day, but in dark rooms or at night, the dark red is hard to see.
4) Because of the team icon the health bars are actually longer than they appear. Note in the screenshot it looks like I have a fair amount of health left in the team window but I'm actually almost dead.


No the new health bars appear to be for all teams. The screenshot I posted was while on a standard team, not in a league.

I know this is a joke, but just to clarify, that is the same pets button that is currently at the top of the team window, although the pets window is now formatted like the new team window as well. Also in the screenshot the team window has been set to 2 times it's default size because the default is very tiny.

I think the issue is that under the new league system, when you have 48 players, our old team window can get bulky. As a result I think that they tried to streamline it but at the cost of utility, in my opinion.