EricHough

Whats worse is that the DE in the tip missions have a base to hit that is higher than standard - even with out the summoned crystals. Apparently they are the Praetorian version of DE or something like that and are tougher than the standard DE. All my characters with softcapped def were seeing around 20% to hit values from DE mobs in tip missions with no summoned crystals in sight.

Yup - all the PBAoE attacks where set to 15' radius and damage was evened out. The outliers are things like psychic shockwave, which still has its insane 1.97s cast time; Tremor with it's insane 3.3s cast time :-); Combustion and thorn burst which do more damage than all the others but over half of it is in a DoT. Whirling hands and ice sword circle are actually pretty middle of the pack these days.

I am not sure its fair to say that Whirling hands is awful - its actually pretty middle of the road these days and does more damage than earth's pbae, tremor (doing 64 damage to tremor's 58). Keep in mind that ALL the PBAoE attacks in assault sets are now 15' radius and do very similar damage, with only minor differences, usually in activation time.

Tremor probably is the worst PBAE attack a dom gets - it has an insanely long animation (3.3 seconds - slower even than combustion and thorn burst) and is all smashing damage. Now, earth assault also has fissure, which is a decent targeted AoE attack which does about the same damage as whirling hands and animates slightly faster, but again it's all smashing damage and compared to the cones in most sets is really short range, since its a small targeted AoE with a short range.

Really, both sets have limited area attacks and I would not pick one over the other based on that, since the new APP attacks that dom's get provide SO much better AE options. I would base my choice on Vids initial advice - if you want to go with melee then go with earth, otherwise go with energy. Earth's ranged attacks are SOO bad that I would definitely avoid it unless you want a melee only toon, however the melee attacks are really good - the two hammers plus seismic smash provides a lot of single target melee damage.

I would agree that on a crab huntsman build you could substitute suppression for arctic breath - and I do agree that suppression looks cooler than arctic breath (heck - the appearance of both arctic breath and bile spray almost turned me off them entirely). However, one point you miss above is the fact that arctic breath includes a -15% resistance debuff which stacks on top of the debuff from venom grenade. On a group support build the debuff trumps anything else that suppression offers.

Its a case of potato/potatoe here - on a crab version of a huntsman you could take either or both of these. Since my huntsman is a bane, mostly because my concept did not include a set legs attached to my back, I didn't have that option. In any case you can only fit SO many attacks in a build, especially if you want to slot IO sets in various powers for def or recharge bonuses, so its really up to the individual - both are good attacks.

I liked frag grenade while leveling - but the tiny area made it an easy choice to drop when I got tight on attacks.

As noted above I have to disagree with you here - in a generic crab build you might be correct, but the resistance debuff in arctic breath makes it a better choice than suppression IF you have to pick one or other and on a huntsman build you ARE going to be using the gun, so redraw is already present. The fact that NONE of your other cones has as large an area as suppression is also going to lessen the effect. By that I mean that the mobs on the edges of suppression are only going to be hit by its damage, not by the narrower cones, which leaves partially damaged mobs that you have to finish off with extra attacks OR you have to cluster everything up anyway, in which case the larger area of suppression doesn't add anything.

In general, I would not recommend a huntsman build for the crab - if only because the crab has much better pet options (spiderlings are yummy) and some nice melee attacks and other gimmicks that give you a lot more options. With a huntsman based on a bane, it is pretty clear that venom grenade + arctic breath + bile spray is the best AE combo you are going to get (and you might as well take heavy burst for cleaning up the leftovers) since the areas overlap and you stack up an impressive amount of debuff before hitting everything with the toxic damage in bile spray.

About the only reason I can see for taking any gun attacks on a crab is if you can't stand the long animations on channelgun and longfang, in which case I would just take single shot and burst and live with the redraw for those two attacks. If you wanted to do a crab devoted to AE damage, I would go with venom grenade + arctic breath + bile spray + suppression and skip the gun attacks entirely - this gets you the nice -res stacking in venom grenade and arctic breath AND the huge area in suppression. However, I wouldn't consider this a huntsman build.

Psychic Wail is an awesome attack - when you can use it. It does mini-nuke damage with no crash but its recharge is fairly typical for a nuke (360 seconds) so even at the recharge cap (400%) you are only going to be able to use it once every 72 seconds.

Psychic tornado is a decent AE - good area, nice range, good secondary effects (-30% recharge and knockup) but its got a long cast time and fairly high recharge/end cost for a targetted AoE attack (20s rech/21 end). Psychic Scream is actually slightly better - same damage, about the same activation but faster recharge and lower end cost and its cone is huge (60'). The best AE attack a fortunata gets is probably dart burst in the base widow line - fast casting and good damage when you include the DoT effect.

A fortunata's real strength is high damage single target attacks (mental blast, TK blast, subdue and domination), nice control options (domination, confuse and aura of confusion, which has only a 240 second recharge and can be up a lot more often than psychic wail) and group buffs in the secondary sets (leadership, mind link, etc).

While leveling up I would suggest going with dart burst and psychic scream for AE, then once you get into the high 40's take one of the patron pools with good AE - Mu mastery will get you a nice extra cone in static discharge and a good targetted AE with ball lighting, plus a nice ae immobilize. You can also go with soul mastery for another nice single target blast in gloom and some AE in dark obliteration. If you want to be a cone monster, go with leviathan mastery and pick up school of sharks, arctic breath and bile spray - all of them have slower animations (2.37s - 2.67s) by make up for it with HUGE cones - also, arctic breath does a resistance debuff (15%) while bile spray is toxic damage which is rarely resisted.

I will also re-iterate some advice I gave earlier: right now recipes at anything lower than L50 are extremely tough to find at any price on the market because everyone is playing their L50's in high level TF's and farms for incarnate drops.

So it may be a couple of weeks and even as much as another month until the market gets back to something approaching normal as the Winter event is likely to continue skewing things even after the incarnate frenzy wears down.

EDIT: As for raising money - Tex has given you the best advice if you are willing to grind in the AE a bit (or don't grind - play some of the dev choice arcs and guest author arcs - they are pretty good) but if you don't like AE I will again suggest running heroic tip missions to earn hero merits, picking up LoTG +Recharge IO's, crafting them and selling them. Its probably not quite as efficient as AE but I enjoy tip missions a lot.

Since Ultimo mentioned the character in question was L41 he was probably shopping for recipes in the 30-40 range and right now those are a little scarce, since everyone and their mother is running 50's for incarnate drops so very few mid level recipes are being generated. Its even worse since we went right into i19 after coming off the halloween event, although trick or treating should have at least generated the type of IO's he is trying to buy.

Ultimo, you do need to have some patience though - even on a normal market you are not going to get everything you want at the drop of a hat. Since right now is not a buyers market (in the mid levels at least) its time to sell and raise cash. Run tip missions for hero merits, use them to buy LoTG +recharges, craft them and sell them. When I was looking earlier this week the L25 recieps alone where going for 200 million inf - that may have changed, but I usually got 140-150 million for crafted L25 in the past.

Also, if you have a store of reward merits and you don't like doing random rolls and hoping you will get lucky (which is what most folks suggest) you can still make a fairly easy and simple profit on them, provided you have some starting cash (about 45 million or so). Just convert them into hero merits: 100 reward merits and 40 million inf will get you 2 hero merits, convert that to an LoTG +recharge, craft it, sell it, net profit around 100 million. Not as good an overall return as you might get it you do random rolls and are careful about selling them on the market - but a lot less trouble and it doesn't rely on the RNG, which I hate with a passion.

So, use the next week or two to build up cash and put out reasonable bids on the IO's you want and let them sit. They WILL fill eventually.

EDIT: Also, if you are picking up hero merits on a regular basis the same 2 merits that bought you an LoTG +recharge can buy you a numina's or miracle unique. Now that everyone has fitness you can slot one of these with no cost to you in term of build since you have that nice free slot in health. The miracle would probably cover a large portion of your toggle costs, if not all of it and if you want a nice regen boost to go with the recovery boost, slot a numina's instead.

I want to second the advise on hero merits - L25 LoTG +recharge IO's were selling for around 200 million the last time I checked - that is the recipes as well as the crafted IO's so you could probably make a decent amount of money without even having to craft it right now. Run tip missions to earn 2 hero merits, buy a L25 LoTG +recharge recipe and drop it on the market - bang, you have enough to buy as many thunderstrike sets as you need and it will take 4 days total. If you have to much trouble running the tip missions on THIS char, you can run them on a more solo oriented character and give the money to your defender.

You can also get a numina +regen/+recover and miracle +recovery unique this way, both cost 2 hero merits just like the LoTG +recharge and will go a long ways to solving end problems. Now that fitness is automatically given you can easily slot one of those uniques in health at NO cost.

Any account hacking is likely to occur on the NCSoft account management web page for your master NCSoft account, not at the in-game login for any particular game. They likely run some script on the master account web page that detects certain actions as 'hacking' and then sends an alert to support and/or locks the account. That doesn't mean that the script is correctly detecting a hacked account - but ever since the master login bugs they had a while back I suspect NCSoft has been extremely paranoid.

You are correct Sam, Vet attacks pretty much do the same damage for all ATs, regardless of the buffs/debuffs - your description of how it worked used some game mechanics terms a bit loosely is all.

The vet attacks appear to either ignore AT damage mods or work from a fixed set of damage mods (maybe pet damage mods?) They also ignore damage buffs/debuffs (as shown in the combat attributes window). However as far as I can tell they are affected by all other combat buffs/debuffs (accuracy, to hit, recharge, etc) which is good since there is no way to slot accuracy modifiers in them.

I find the vet attacks are best in the following situations:

1) At low levels when you don't have a full attack chain and beginners luck makes up for lack of acc slotting
2) At high levels when you have a lot of +acc or +to hit from powers/IO sets and you need a ranged attack, etc.
3) on low damage AT's that don't have a lot of attacks, especially those that have some way of debuffing enemy def like controllers.
4) on super strength brutes/tanks when rage crashes. Nice thing here is that since the vet attacks ignore damage (de)buffs you get full damage but they are affected by to hit/acc buffs so you get the +20% to hit from rage.

Oh, I agree on taking the first two ranged attacks - I just meant that if I could also use the tier 2 secondary power I might take it a lot more often - that would give you 3 hard hitting attacks that you can use to finish off the mobs pounding on you while mezzed, instead of 2 attacks and one rarely slotted immobilize. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure that its only the first tier in the secondary that works this way (I don't have any blasters I can test this on, so I am not sure).

I thought the range on the def/res aura IO's was about the same as supremacy, which has a 60' range.