DreadShinobi

Well you have to consider what it is giving up for it. 1) CS is giving up it's ability to crit to recharge BU. Compared to a set like StJ, which gets to actually crit and deal more damage with it's t9. 2) Always clicking BU does mean you aren't dealing damage during that duration, and stacked BU does mean part of BU's duration is being eaten up by the next BU.

It's strong but I would not consider it overpowered, and you would only really be using such an attack chain in a Single target only scenario. As Jibikao mentioned, in an aoe environment you're going to be wanting to use your ATO hidden procs for 100% crit burst, not CS, which means BU will function the same as any other BU sans claws.

And yes, KM's AS does need to be balanced with other AS animation times.

QFT, in it's entirety.

I form up all my trials via BMT of Champion, so that's another option to look at for finding trials forming. Though I haven't been running many lately as I've been preoccupied with getting catalysts for all my toons. I'll probably pick up again next week.

If you have, say, 55% defense, and you're hit with a 10% defense debuff that debuff will not be increasing the enemies chance to hit you, this means within the duration of that 10% defense debuff, the enemies will have to hit you with another defense debuff to alter their chance to hit you. For 2 consecutive attacks to hit you when you are above softcapped defense after the first defense debuff is a 1 in 400 chance (20*20=400)

I am well aware of how accuracy and defense works. This doesn't change how useful defense is.


You're not building to prevent cascading defense failure, you're building to actually have defense. When your defense fails, you have resistance, healing, and regeneration to fall back on to.

Defense is much more reliable than you make it out to be, and I am in no way talking about farming situations.

I have had 3 lvl 50 electric armor brutes over the years, EM/Elec, SS/Elec, and my current being TW/Elec. I've done everything there is to do with an electric brute. I've played them with an without defense, especially considering my EM/Elec existed before IOs. I never once said my defense hasn't cascaded, (as for my defense going negative, that is actually extremely rare, combat doesn't really last that long for you to hit that point)all I've said is that cascading defense failure isn't such a death sentence as you make it out to be. And just because Electric can function when your defense drops does not in anyway mean it doesn't function just as well without it. S/L softcap makes a huge difference for any electric armor toon.

That's where I'm at too, once you get the best of what an AT has to offer, it can be hard to want to play anything else within that AT, which results in faster burn outs from lack of anything to level.

That said, Plant/Fire, Plant/Psi, and Plant/Dark should all be very strong. Plant is just an extremely strong control set.

Yeah, I don't like the idea of a destiny buff granting stealth and placates. However I do like the idea of a Critical hit type mechanic for a Destiny Power, mainly because we don't really have any offensive destiny powers other than the pretty meh recharge buff in Ageless.

A critical hit type mechanic could (i assume) work like fiery embrace buff.

The Core side of the crit destiny buff would give all your powers a chance to a large percent of extra damage, let's say, a 10% chance to do 50% of the power's inflicted damage, this would obviously degrade overtime.

The Radial side could have a higher percent chance to proc but with less benefit, say a 50% chance to do 10% of the power's inflicted damage.


Obviously I would hope the developers would think of something more interesting than that, I just want to see some sort of offensive destiny option.

30+ attacks? Yeah I don't think so. I'm honestly curious if you even have a softcapped electric brute, because from what you're describing it doesn't sound like you do. Cause I do have one, and that's not how it plays out for me.


All longbow defense debuffs check for both Lethal AND ranged defense. The only exception is Longbow Warden bosses with radiation powers. Ranged defense is not advantageous.

Ranged defense will protect you against arachnos defense debuffs better than S/L defense would.

There are only 2 carnie powers that debuff defense. Rapier stabs from minions (which checks S/L defense) and Ring Mistress boss Mask Debuffs, which checks ranged defense. For how rarely carnies are fought, this really isn't concerning.

Devouring Earth do not debuff defense at all. They summon quartz which gives nearby DE large tohit buffs. If a quartz is up it doesn't matter what kind of defense you have, they will be hitting through it. Ranged defense is not advantageous.

IDF only have 2 units that debuff defense. 1 is Scryer's which bypass defense anyways. The other is Vickys. The Vicky's four blade attacks that do -def all check off S/L Defense. Only their LBEs check ranged defense.



Now responding to the sum of those above quotes, I think you're missing a huge point. The point being the point of defense isn't just to protect you from defense debuffs, it's to protect you from damage. And the most common damage you're going to facing will be checking for S/L defense, and just ranged defense on a melee toon is going to leave you with many more holes than going S/L would.
Defense does have it's place in trials. Not only is the softcap 59% there (which means you will need 14% from buffs/insps to get to the incarnate softcap from normal softcap), but not all leagues have heavy defense buffing. It's not meaningless, and relying on something that may not be present is bad. Furthermore, Reveal Weakness does not check against Ranged defense, type [reveal weakness] in game, it doesn't check against anything. Ranged defense will not help you avoid reveal weakness.


There are two basic types of defense debuff:
1. Ranged debuffs on lt/bosses.
2. Melee debuffs on minions.

Melee debuffs aren't unavoidable. They're MINIONS. They're going to be dead before they pose any threat. Ya know that thing called Whirling Smash? It works.

I honestly don't think you know how defense debuffs really work in this game, and what causes them. I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but there's just alot of misinformation that you're saying. You realize that if you're softcapped it's a 1 in 20 chance that your defense will get lowered if the attack you are hit by lowers defense? And that if you have any defense buffs on you or you pop a purple insp you have a 1 in 400 chance of having your defense debuffed against attacks that debuff defense.

Also, even if you do take a defense debuff and you're down to 35% (most defense debuffs are 10%), that doesn't mean the rest of it is going to instantly vaporize either (which you seem to imply). And even if your defense does go into cadcading defense failure, you're still an electric brute, with high resists and energize to keep you alive.

The point of layered defense, is that it takes that much more time for enemies to penetrate each layer. They're first going to be checking against your defense, after which they'll be checking for your resistance, after which you still have about 2000 hp to kill them before you die. All those checks greatly increase the amount of time and amount of luck the enemies need to penetrate your defense and kill you, all the more time for you to kill them, which for a TW brute, you don't need much of.

You realize this is a thread about titan weapons too right? After 10 seconds the only thing that will be alive will be EBs and AVs, which you won't be draining that quickly. I have /never/ needed to use end drain defensively on my elec armor brute because nothing lives that long, and nothing should be living that long.

Toxic is extremely rare. Negative damage can be dealt with by energize and moderate resistance. Psionic is semirare and you're already better off that most other people will be, because electric armor does have good psi resists.

I agree there are many other avenues they could have taken to have not run into the problem (if making salvage account bound is indeed the problem)

Such as a voucher in ouroboros to trade your catalyst in and get it back in the form of an email, ala Astrals>threads and Emps>threads or simply making the catalyst itself be something other than salvage so that it could be account bound.

:S

Not necessarily.

1) Not all debuffs are strictly better on defenders. A great example of this is cold domination, which puts out just as much -res and -regen (the important debuffs) as a defender.

2) The OP was mentioning running running 2-3 man TFs. Even with all the debuffs in the world, if you can't effectively leverage those debuffs yourself I would hardly call yourself the ultimate debuffer. If you compare a pure DPS and a sonic defender to the same Pure DPS and a fire corruptor, both using the same support sets, the pure DPS and the fire corr will finish the TF faster any day of the week. Simply put there will be more damage to take advantage of those debuffs by using a corruptor. Debuffs mean nothing if there is no damage to take advantage of them (-res is a damage multiplier, multipliers work best when the number you are multiplying is high).

On larger teams this gap closes, but that's not what the OP was talking about and even then I would say they'd be about even.

3) Damage in and of itself is mitigation. The faster things die, the less damage you will take, and the less time you have for the enemy to get lucky or blow through and defenses you have.




Also, lolDP.

S/L defense is actually quite good on /elec armor, like it is on many other things. Actually S/L defense is typically better on Electric Armor than other things because of Elec's fabulous layered mitigation covering S/L defense's holes. IE: weakness to defending against mez attacks (which is a problem any S/L defense squishies will run into not carrying clarion), Psionic attacks (which elec has very respectable defense to), and radiation (which elec is capped to) attacks. For everything that gets through S/L defense, energize is there to heal/regen it off.

The whole thing about defense being neutered by any defense debuffs if you don't have defense debuff resistance is typically blown out of proportion, and elec armor actually does quite well with them. Any rad blast enemies will fail to be a threat because even if they go through your defense you will still be sitting on 90% energy resist and good regen. Any machine gun -def will fail to threaten due to high s/l res and good regen. The only defense debuffs that actually pose a threat to my /elec brute is the IDF's [reveal weakness] which doesn't check for defense and stacked telepathist debuffs on the TPN if people aren't killing the telepathists. There are no psionic defense debuffs that I'm aware of or ones that specifically have high accuracy vs S/L. Toxic defense debuffs are only found in Arachnos and Arachnoids afaik, which aren't very common.

S/L defense doesn't just protect against S/L attacks. Here's a list of other things it will also be protecting against:
-Energy Melee/Energy Blast
-Any weapon attacks (this encompasses alot)
-any punching/kicking attacks (this encompasses alot)
-Ice blast/Ice melee (crey, cot, winter horde, and pretty common in Dark Astoria and DD)
-Dark Melee sans midnight grasp (one of Elecs lower resistance values)
-Fireball and Fire Melee sans Incinerate/Scorch
-kinetic melee (tsoo)

The only damage type Elec armor is capped to is energy resists, and even then taking less damage from energy blasts and energy melee is actually very nice, becuase they are so common, it does make a difference.

Electric armor actually has very respectable psionic resistance. It's actually better than everything else sans Dark Armor, stacked Ninjitsu, and Arachnos Widows. That's a farcry from actually being a weakspot. Toxic damage is extremely rare. Your S/L defense blocks most Smites/Shadow Punches/Shadow Mauls, leaving you only vulnerable to Dark Blast/Gloom. Almost all enemies that carry dark blast/gloom are also going to be carrying attacks that you do resist better, typically energize and the ~33% negative resist you have will be plenty to ward off any negative damage.

Going pure ranged defense on a melee toon is going to leave you taking alot more damage than you would be going S/L defense. Defense debuffs will trip up ranged defense just as much as S/L defense. And even having good resists to common things that S/L defense protects you from doesn't mean you're immune to them. If you're taking all those melee S/L attacks because you went ranged defense, it is going to hurt, and it is going to happen all the time, because of how common those attacks are.

I won't even get into how much more work it takes to build for Ranged defense compared to S/L defense either.

Indeed. At one point I hastily broke down like 8 uncommons into 8-10 threads each so that I could use those threads to make commons. I later realized I could have downgraded those directly into commons and made twice as many, but I didn't cause I skimmed over it. It's definitely worth going through all the options to see what is available.

Not necessarily.

First, not all buffs and debuffs are affected by AT modifiers. Many attributes within powers or entire powers have the same buff/debuff values between corrs and defenders.

Second, Damage in and of itself is support. Dead enemies cannot fight back. Dead enemies mean you are moving on to the next group sooner, meaning you will be completing your goal faster. Whether you are defender or corruptor and even if you're building to be the best team support, you should not ignore the path to dealing damage as effectively as possible. A corruptor will always deal more damage than a defender outside of extreme fringe exceptions which is mainly just limited to sonic attack typically paired with Sonic/ or Rad/.

Cool write up.


I wanted to throw my computer out the window around the 20th time I read "Slash/Lethal Defense" though.


Smashing....

A minor recharge debuff is not comparable to damage resistance. Everything should be dead long before they're looking at a 7th attack. It does nothing until they've exhausted all of their attacks. Many foes will be impacted differently, depending on how many attacks they have to cycle through.