Flux_Vector

Playing other ATs, probably. Except for top-notch warshades the incarnate content has once more pointed out how far behind kheldians are on the power curve.

1 - Human/nova. White Dwarf is a trap! Carry breakfrees for status protection and stay away from the rhinolobster. His damage output is terrible and his "real" survivability is poor. Don't be fooled by people telling you he can tank. Against modern, debuff-heavy content he cannot.

2 - Slot your attacks and self-healing powers first. Slot other powers later. I like to have 4-5 slots in my attacks and 3-4 slots in my self-heals. Acc/3 dam/1 recharge in attacks, 2-3 recharge, 1-2 heal in my heals. Get 3-slotted stamina quickly, and 3-slotted hasten as you can. Then add the last few slots to attacks and heals before starting to slot up other powers.

3 - Depends on the power. Most you want to take right when they become available. Nova form take at 6. Essence boost at 4. Radiant strike at 8, incandescent at 18, reform essence and pulsar in that order as quickly as possible in the 20s. Other powers you have wiggle room in when you take. Take hasten early.

1. Nova/dwarf. For warshades dwarf form is pretty good. Your human form is wonky and hard to use. Use your human form to buff yourself with mire and eclipse for nova as much as possible, and then use dwarf if things get really ugly. Use human form to recover with stygian circle, and to summon your extracted essences. Otherwise, if you aren't buffing or recovering or making pets, you probably shouldn't be in human form.

2. See above. Favor your attacks. Slot other powers as you can. Extracted essence should get slot love.

3. See above. Forms as soon as they're available. Extracted essence and stygian circle asap also.

That's fine, but you won't be doubled up if your team splits and you go different ways, or if your league leader splits you up onto different teams in a trial. When I lead trials I make an effort not to put more than 1 SOA or kheldian onto the same team to spread around the buffs from the SOAs and to maximize the kheldian's buffs from their inherent, respectively. I'd expect a lot of trial leaders who run premades would do the same, so unless you trial with a surplus of SOAs, you may not be kept together that often in the endgame.

And in the endgame is when you're going to need higher than minimal defenses - the 'soft cap' to incarnate trial content is 59% defense, not 45%, and since widows don't have effective -def resistance, I feel 'most comfortable' at 70% or so, so that I can soak a -def hit or one of the tohit buffing Battle Orbs summoned by the IDF before I start cascading. Nobody really plans around getting 70%+ defense on their own, but with a more 'standard' widow build you will be pretty comfortably 'doubling up' with your partner to a trial-friendly defense number on those times you are kept together, like say if you plan on requesting it of your leader or leading yourselves.

As far as recharge, it's only really good to a point. That point being 'where your desired attack chain has no gaps.' After that, recharge doesn't improve your damage output anymore, and with the amount of recharge it already takes to run a 'top tier' or even 'second tier' attack chain in most builds, adding more is only going to have a minor effect on other powers. Lately I've been looking at my build with an eye towards getting the minimum necessary recharge and then seeing what I can gain by diversifying - in the above-posted build from me ,you get +16% damage from set bonuses, for example, which itself is roughly equal to having an second (or third) assault going, but for no end cost.

Still, if you're happy, you're happy. I'm just giving you some advice on optimization based on my experiences. Good luck

Do you post with two accounts? Cause you're not the original poster's forum name, and your name wasn't on the build.

If you're soloing tips and not doing so on team level difficulties, it's no wonder to me that you aren't having much trouble with being mezzed.

BU doesn't affect photon seekers. Neither does cosmic balance, set bonuses, or buffs like assault or fulcrum shift. It's one of the AT's longstanding known issues - unlike other pet-delivered damage powers (rain of X, burn, trip mine, etc) photon seekers don't inherit damage buffs from their caster. Unless there's been a stealth fix in the interim, but none of my friends who still are playing PBs has told me of one.

Radiant strike's KB is a pain in the butt, but as an attack it's got a very high DPA and is very well worth using at every opportunity. It's statistically the most powerful single-target attack you get by a significant margin, due to its fast animation speed.

I am a numbers guy.

I've found for PBs that the lack of true status protection makes tactical defense and self-healing/essence boosting more important than resistance shields. Even a brief stun suppresses your toggles during its application, meaning whatever resists you have are liable to be suppressed during periods you're actually getting hit by multiple attackers, since many NPC stuns are 'incidental' to their standard attacks (such as with rikti energy blasts).

Fire and cold resist are pretty minor in most content. Most fire and cold attacks are split 30% to 60% with smashing or lethal damage. Other than cherrypicking enemies like in a fire AE farm, I don't know of any content where you'd get more mitigation from the fire/cold shield than from the smash/lethal one. Not that it's necessarily bad to have, but I certainly get more actual survivability from superspeed.

Except it's not an attack that fires in 4s vs one that fires in 6, it's an attack that animates in 3.3 seconds vs one that animatins in 1.2 seconds. Recharge time matters less for your overall damage output than animation time. A fast-animating attack does higher damage per second of animation speed, and animation speed is the only choke on your attack chain that you can't do anything about. I fire radiant strike twice as often as I fire incandescent strike in my single target attack chain.

And again, BU doesn't work with photon seekers, or at least, it didn't as of issue 19.

I misidentified your pvp io as part of the hecatomb set though, they looked similar when I pulled up the data chunk to inspect because that 'long forum export' format really annoys me to read.

Then it works for you, and congratulations. But your build (which at the time of my posting I had no way of knowing was your build) is a nonstandard one and makes what I consider to be terrible choices for high-end play in the hands of someone who isn't tuning it specifically to a certain goal. I consider mez resistance an extremely questionable choice in particular, especially because you're slotting powers you otherwise wouldn't in order to get it, and overslotting shields for it. Also, because it was nerfed with the pvp changes in issue 13 - you're using around 180% hold resistance, for example, to get about the same effect as 100% hold resistance would've given in issue 12.

You can easily get the 5% recharge boost from doctored wounds in your heal powers instead.

Set bonus on apocalypse. Recharge is the PB's friend. The hold proc in devastation is mag 2 and achilles heel doesn't stack, so having too many of them in your attack chain isn't worth it. It's a judgement call how many to use.

I don't expect to use IS to hold a boss, because its cycle time is too long. When you factor in its animation speed, and level and rank resistance adjustments for the target, having IS on a 6-second recharge is just barely enough time to stack it onto a boss. You'll see him actually be held for like, 3-4 seconds before it wears off, if you're lucky. And a lot of that time will likely be consumed by IS's animation.

I don't expect to use pulsar to stun anything but minions. But stunning an 8 person spawn of minions is worth a lot of mitigation. I doubt a PB could survive an 8 person spawn by themselves for very long without using pulsar, or nuking in some fashion, to get the minions out of the equation. It's the same animation speed as IS, but it hits all the minions in a spawn and some of the LTs. That neuters alpha strikes when you fire it from stealth, and helps your team.

It - and dawn strike - are also some of the only powers PBs get that make them anything other than a gimped scrapper. Half the ATs in the game - scrapper, stalker, brute, warshade, PB, soldier, and widow - do the "survivable DPS" thing. All the other ones do it better - more survivable, more DPS. PBs need to have, and use effective, their extras to nuke and control and heal other. Really, I'd advocate human/nova for PBs who wanted to do their best, because nova's AOEs are quite well worth it.

You get +hp from +recharge as a pb, in the form of essence boost. My build still comes out to 2030 hitpoints with perma-ess boost. That's only 70 less than your 2100 and I'm not throwing slots at it.

You also get +20% hitpoints from accolades on any given character. That's generally 7 to 10 set bonuses worth without having to throw slots at it at all, if you make the effort - and if you're gonna build out a char you should be willing to make the effort.

I didn't recommend it to them. I did the opposite and pointed out I haven't updated it for issue 19 and the free fitness pool and said point blank I wasn't happy with it and wasn't able to get it to a point where I was happy.

I just said it might give them some ideas. But the posted build already included some purples, too (and a pvp IO I misidentified as a purple). In for a penny, in for a pound.

Actually, warshades are about average when built correctly, played well, and fed enough enemies to drain for self-buffing. Warshades have a perceptional problem in the playerbase - there are a lot more bad and mediocre ones than good ones - but at least in theory their stats do hold up with other characters.

But the "average" performance for endgame characters in City is quite high. Players are very, very powerful relative to the content with a proper IO build and some incarnate powers... unless they've picked relatively well-known outlier sets and/or ATs. Like peacebringers. Which is unfortunate, but no amount of liking them will change the numbers, and the numbers are what need changing.

If you're teaming with 3 doms or controllers, as necessary to get enough mez protection from cosmic balance to block a single non-minion tier hold or stun power, then you're probably also fighting things that have been locked down by their control, debuffed by their secondaries, or with buffs from them - all of which make that cosmic balance buff redundant.

The only time the status prot cosmic balance is actually beneficial is when your team isn't competent, or when they aren't present... except you don't get cosmic balance if your team isn't present.

It's possible you aren't fighting many mez-heavy enemies. It's possible you're working with melees who are tanking effectively for you. It's possible you're getting ally buffs that are helping you out. It's likely you simply aren't noticing being mezzed alot of the time that you are, because many minor mezzes are very brief and you probably aren't directly dying as a result of it.

But it's very unlikely that either your mez resistance or cosmic balance are actually preventing you from getting mezzed on a regular basis.

I read it, just now. I don't check the forums alot, so blame delays in my responses that.

Well, here's the thing. To me, when my PB was still my main and only IO'd character, she felt really strong too. And technically, against the content of the day, she was. But when I started playing more alts because I'd finished polishing my PB, I started feeling the same or more strength... with just SOs. And then minor IOing made a bigger difference... until I reached a point where I have multiple characters who could solo many TF/SFs, AVs included, and my PB is not one of them despite having one of the most expensive and played/tweaked builds on my character list.

Because the PB doesn't also bring a strong 'team support' contribution either through statistical buffing/debuffing, or through tactical support (such as tanking and aggro control)... the only role left is DPS, where the PB ends up being a weaker cousin to the scrapper or stalker - weak to moderate damage, with weak to moderate survivability, going to fairly high survivability with the Clarion destiny buff, but with no real means of leveraging that into a team benefit.

Capped resist is meaningless when you aren't being attacked much. Defenses that aren't used (by getting aggro or being splash damaged) just aren't needed. This is the whole theory behind tanking - the tank is tough and can make things attack him, so the blaster doesn't need to be.

Things like photon seekers and dawn strike represent an X-Factor. They can be very effective in specific situations, but the long timers on them keep them from having very high "over time" performance. They'd be high blips on the radar, but infrequent enough to not bring the average up that much.

That said, I love me some kabooming. When I still played my PB, I tried to use DS and PS off cooldown.

Cosmic balance has a maximum 140% damage boost. BU - because it animation-chokes itself - gives PBs a 72% damage increase for 8 seconds out of every ~30; you use 27. Over time that accounts for a +2.667% damage buff.

Generally I assume 100% damage as a "generous" buff from cosmic balance, and 40% as a "stingy" one. My PB's humanform build (I'll post a data chunk of her mids' build at the end here, she's fairly well optimized) has an attack chain of Radiant Strike - Incandescent Strike - Radiant Strike - Gleaming Blast - Gleaming Bolt - repeat. The following are theoretical calculations using Mids' numbers, assuming no use of BU and no time spent on actions other than attacking. And I'm rounding off the decimals

With nothing from cosmic balance, counting procs (apocalypse, hecatomb, a TOLG), it yields 116 DPS before achilles heel and 139 after. With 40% cosmic balance, it's 136 DPS before achilles heel and 163 after. With 100% cosmic balance it's 156 before achilles, and 187 after.

Actual ingame performance will tend to be lower, especially when you don't have some form of status protection up. Notably though, radiant strike can work against your DPS in this chain if you don't have a wall to KB things into. Having to chase the target down to keep punching it lowers your DPS.

I don't know of a better attack chain for single targeted damage from a PB, I think even using shapeshifting: while I haven't tested it, I expect the animation time of shifting to nova form would counteract the damage increase of replacing the human blasts with nova blasts.

Oops. Forgot the data chunk.

Your rad/sonic fills a different role than your PB, and would use different tactics, but in the endgame content being discussed here neither should have the need for capped resists and 2100 hps on a consistent basis because your PB doesn't have the aggro control to tank effectively against more than a token number of enemies that your rad/sonic could debuff or control against just as effectively... and if you did, you still wouldn't have the debuff resistance to survive the stacking -recharge, -resist, and -defense put out by praetorian IDF spawns.

With teammate buffs you could, but then, your rad/sonic would also have the same teammate buffs, to the same general effect.

Capped resist and extra hps, while doing weak damage, makes you about the same as a fury-less brute. Except without the chance to get to having any fury.

I've played my PB in less than 10 years. I don't hate the AT. I'm just honest about their performance characteristics. With a bunch of cosmic balance it's a decent AT. When the stars don't align and you haven't got the cosmic balance, it's substandard for its role, which is DPS, because it absolutely lacks sufficient support powers and aggro control and modern survivability to fill either the support or tank roles.