Flux_Vector

However, you seemingly are treating the analysis like double miring and using stygian circle as not taking time. They do.

The time you spend miring, shapeshifting to dwarf, miring again, and then shapeshifting to nova both counts against the time of your mire durations, and the time your attack chain takes. A double-mire takes about 8 seconds to get into nova form and be ready to go to town with that capped damage, ignoring the time it takes to position yourself for it. You probably only get about 5-6 seconds of 'useful' double-mire time under this strategy.

And the time you spend shapeshifting, in particular, is time other offensive types are spending attacking. Other ATs' self buffs also take time, but they don't have to form-swap in between to leverage them. If you're a warshade who finds fights are mostly over by the time you're done ramping up for them, using an alpha boost that lets you save a 'step' in your setup, and going right from mire to nova form, is likely going to improve your performance substantially more than getting long-timer powers back 5 to 10 seconds faster will.

Alternatively, you might find that while you're pausing to recover with stygian circle on the spawn you just massacred, the rest of the team is racing to the next spawn and killing most of it without you. If this happens to you alot, trying an alpha boost that makes it so you have to use stygian circle less often is likely going to result in your getting more performance.

And performance aside, tailoring your build to get you into the action faster and keep you there longer is very likely to be more fun, since you spend more time attacking and seeing those happy orange numbers.

If you're the type who'd rather 'solo in the team' and go off by themselves in order to make sure you could do it your way, this might not be for you. But it's a fairly rare team who's going to appreciate that playstyle, even if many won't say anything about it. I know I tend to snicker to myself in a bit of schadenfreude when a 'lone ranger' gets KO'd. Especially if they then have to wait for the team to go 'rescue' them. (This is especially amusing to me with "FOTM" melee types - like DM/shield or fire/shield...)

Depending on your existing build (which I don't know, but considering you're talking about having 3 fluffies, I assume you have significant global recharge already), you're probably looking at an improvement of 1 to 1.5 seconds of recharge time per 60 seconds base recharge on those powers. So guesstimating, you should get 4-5 seconds of extra time with your three fluffies, and have quasar back 8-10 seconds sooner.

To figure out what you'd gain on a given power at the 'very rare' alpha power (which we can't get yet), calculate power recharge / (100% + (enhancements + global recharge) + 30%) and subtract that from your current power recharge speed.

It's hard to measure the value of recharge increases on long-timer powers, though, because said powers tend to be fairly situational. I'd say the most broadly applicable ones are tier 9 nukes, but I think if you're in the 90 second recharge range on that already, it's unlikely that getting it much lower is going to help too much. As a practical matter, I've found that lets me nuke every 3rd spawn on most teams. Having it cycle up in the middle of the 2nd spawn just means I'll save it for the 3rd one anyway.

SR characters aim for 47% defense in my experience, because with 95% def debuff resistance they don't need a "buffer" of more than 2%; the average def debuff 'hit' will debuff them for less than half a percent. If it weren't a particularly harsh tradeoff in terms of effectiveness, it'd be other defense sets who'd want a 50%+ defense rating to absorb debuffs. In practice though, that's a harsh tradeoff and nobody I know personally makes it. Especially since you can largely counter cascade failure when it happens via offense (kill the units that are debuffing you), and/or luck inspirations (after a few seconds of not being hit the stacked debuffs will start to fall off you).

To the point, though, warshades don't have -recharge resistance. I think a really useful buffer would be prohibitively large, like for def-chars who don't have SR's debuff resists. I also would think you'd be in dwarf form if you were tanking for a team, and otherwise you shouldn't be focused on by that many enemies who use -recharge powers. If you choose to solo on high difficulty against enemies that target one of your weaknesses, it's not the build's fault if you lose

That said, if you do find yourself in that situation and want to use a buffer against -rech, you can always cycle in your spiritual boost slot then. One of the nice things about the alpha slot is that you can change to what's most useful to you at the time.

That depends heavily on the character's personal situation, but most peoples' builds are going to 'disappear' if they exemplar much anyway... and really, not much that you'd exemplar for is particularly hard, only time-consuming. I used to be diligent about using IOs I could exemplar into the mid-30s with in my builds, and so forth, until I realized that I was levelling up various characters through the exact same taskforces who didn't even have all their enhancements slotted, and not having any trouble.

I'd still be worried about your GPU going, or since you say it happens after a couple hours, having a heat buildup issue, and start to monitor its temperature and/or test it in other games.

That behavior isn't the flickering being reported by other users, and random textures is never a good thing.

The problem is more that 'what's fine' is subjective and rarely covers variables like 'from what level to what level', or 'at what difficulty level' - let alone things like 'how much money did your other chars invest into your kheld' or 'what kind of IO build are you playing.'

That's why I find it a bit more persuasive to argue 'relative to other ATs performance.' If the devs (and other players) find it acceptable for other ATs to perform at a certain level, they should also find it acceptable for kheldians to perform at that same level. Otherwise I'd like to hear a rationale for why they should not that isn't self-contradictory or hypocritical.

This is pretty much how I feel. The KB instead of KD on solar flare does not give the power any additional mitigation value over foot stomp - in fact, it does the opposite by scattering enemies outside of other players' area of effect powers (including melee auras like invincibility, locational debuffs, toggle debuffs, and so on). The power being KB makes it situational when it could be a bread and butter AOE damage power that helps PBs close the performance gap vis-a-vis warshades and their non-KBing AOEing long-duration pets. If flare had no secondary effect at all, I'd use it much more often, because it does quite good damage and without KB, using it wouldn't be counterproductive to the team's effort.

The KB on radiant strike is just annoying. KD would provide equal mitigation, and I wouldn't have to go chasing after my own damn target to keep punching it until it stops standing up. It's not rocket science, and it's the reason almost all knockback in melee powers was changed to knockdown in the first place. But just because it's not counterproductive, doesn't mean it should stay as is.

And yet they exist as a mechanic to deliver a power, which is the behavior and purpose of a pseudo pet. (I'm assuming you'll agree they aren't the same as an actual pet, ie, fire imps or extracted essences).