Frosticus

The recovery debuff only affects you for 15 seconds. That said it is a massive 16.67 eps debuff (same as nukes). TA isn't burning through the blue like Storm, but it isn't the most friendly set either. And when you factor in using EMP arrow it is sort of an end pig if you have it up fairly often.

Aside from it obviously just being a copy paste from Rad maybe the dev's figure it hits you too or something...but then why doesn't it hit your teammates? Explaining the debuff on the rad version is easy, but not so easy when you stick it on the end of an arrow. Did I put ALL of my energy into making that one arrow? If so then shouldn't the debuff hit me when I load it up (ie finished making it) rather than when it goes off? who knows.

I achieve this by never going into an AE building...rimshot

Seriously though, agree 100%. The mission listings are a disgrace. I find you either know the # or global of the arc you are seeking or why bother. And knowing that information eliminates the use of the listings in the first place, which further shows how junky and cluttered they are.

Yes you are. You may have taken my comment about ensuring you slot for recharge in key powers a little too literally though

For instance, 5 pieces of the Apoc set gets you 89.9% rech in the power. ED 'cap' is 95%
Slotting a rech IO on top of that exceeds the ED cap, but in all likelyhood will be far more beneficial to either place that slot elsewhere or stick another proc in it.

In the case of spec wounds I hope you brought your sugar-daddy because the only other proc you can place in it is the pvp dam proc, which runs about 800M !

Same thing for sleet. That extra rech IO shaves 0.4 sec off, but would probably be better served with an achilies -res proc.

Blind, same deal, either get another proc in there, or use the 6th slot for the apoc Dam IO and use the other 5 pieces of Apoc in Spec wounds. Ideally you'll slot blind as an attack though. Nothing, and I mean nothing, survives long enough for it to be of use as a hold (the things that do live long enough have AV level hold protection, this includes most late game EBs). You may find to get the recharge you need that you have to slot blind as you have, which is fine. You honestly don't use it on hard targets very often and anything else it is just used to set up containment.

Regarding Infrig and Snowstorm. You may find you end up using them very rarely. I honestly can count on one hand the number of times I use infrig per week. It's a good power, but you kill so fast, why bother? I don't have snowstorm. Same deal, decent power, but why bother? If you do keep them they don't need much slotting to perform well. You may find you can net better global recharge returns from other powers as the slow set has very paltry bonuses (3.75 is very low).

Hasten only needs 2 slots when you have extreme global rech. There is little purpose having it recharge before it expires.

Last but not least, you have 6 lotg+rech slotted. The last one is of no benefit as the set bonuses cap at 5. Worth noting though is that basilisk gaze and the pvp heal set that offer the same 7.5% bonus do not conflict with Lotg, so you can have 5 of each if you wanted for a total of 70% if you found room for them all.

the great thing about pvp IO's (heals in this case) is that aside from costing nearly 2billion for 5 pieces (ok that part isn't so great), is that they also work at all levels just like purples. If you spring for lvl 25lotg's you can have a beastly build even when exemp'ing. But again, I have little doubt this is one of the most expensive builds you can put together in the game if you push it. The build I'm working toward next has 100% global rech all the way down to lvl 22.

The only way this will ever become an issue is if it becomes an issue for tanks as well, or Castle decides to specifically nerf PA and the decoy. They attack PA and continue to attack PA despite you doing a lot more individual damage than each one because each of their attacks has this:
+27s Taunt (mag 4)
Additionally the decoy that Phantasm spawns attacks also do:
+13.5s Taunt (mag 4)

You won't strip agro off of them. You can and will pull agro on excess mobs though as they aren't particularly good at keeping the attention of more than a few.

As a comparison point tanker attacks do:
+13.5s Taunt (mag 4)
Tanker agro aura:
+13.5s to +16.875s Taunt (mag 4) *willpower aura is the exception at 1.25s.
And tanker taunt does:
41s Taunt (mag 4)

I don't know much about taunt mechanics, but I have a sneaking suspicion that PA can out taunt (as in pull agro off of the tanker or make it so the tank can't pull the agro off of PA) everything but actual taunt. Like I said though, I'm not sure on that front and haven't tested it.

Further to that Illusion provides a couple ways to lower your personal threat modifier, which decreases the chances of mobs taking a liking to the idea of you being a corpse.

As a side note the pet recharge nerf (as it was a nerf to far more pets than it buffed or fixed that we use) greatly reduced the ability for Phantasm to hold group agro. When he could be affected by recharge it always had a decoy ready to summon (sometimes even 2 out at once). The decoy aoe taunts with energy torrent. This really helped a set with relatively low aoe control protect a team. But it is what it is.

All the more reason to take GI then. It's cheaper for endurance by a factor of 12x, benefits the whole team and with the kind of recharge being discussed is easily perma.

I follow in the path you have blazed my friend. Much of my interest in big game hunting came from you. After Castle took a giant **** on pvp I quit the game and had no intentions of playing again.

To be honestly I'm not nearly as good of a player as I used to be, but I'm a lot better with calculating pve builds now.

I know why I've been considering ramping up my s/l def on my perma PA ill/cold. It's because PA isn't very good at holding more than a few targets' agro.

And the kind of stuff that perma PA lets you get in to means that the tiny duration they lose agro when you recast them can spell trouble.

As the group I ran a STF with last night can attest to. I had little issue pulling agro on to myself in spite of a very heavily taunt specc'd tank and 3 sets of PA (including my own) all taunting things. I mean if you just sit back and spam confuse while your PA does the work you likely have no issues, but trollers can do some pretty solid damage if they spec everything as though they were attacks.

I'm aware of how the powers came in to play. My comment wasn't asking for a literal explanation. Thanks though, fun as always.

I point out the small radius of blazing aura for blasters because it has a lot of issues working with the set and the AT. Would it be unbalanced to set it to a large area of effect? maybe. Probably not though.

Then again, I've often said that /fire manipulation should have fiery embrace in there somewhere...and not necessarily at the omission of buildup. But then again I look at the damage to survivability ratio that blasters have in relation to some of the other high damage builds out there and they have a lot of room for further improvement before they become unbalanced.

Lets look at it another way because despite your interpretation it isn't nearly as black and white as you'd like people to think I'm saying.

Is the Stanley Cup > World PeeWee hockey championships?
Is Formula 1 racing > GoCart Racing?
Do people covet the featherweight boxing title, or the heavyweight title?
Etc.

In between each extreme there are hundreds, even thousands of potential categories. If you haven't achieved the pinnacle title that doesn't mean you aren't doing good things within your category. It just means you aren't competing on the same level as those that are achieving the ultimate titles of the entire overarching group.

In terms of CoX, you can be doing a bang up job stopping those street muggers, but you aren't in the same league as the character that stops Romulus and the Nictus all by themselves. Heart (which M E seems to be preaching) can only get you so far.

If you are happy with your character reaching their peak doing what they could easily send in a squad of like 5 R.I.P or P.P.D to do then that is your prerogative. I personally like to brush shoulders with the likes of States/LR. To each their own.

Thanks. Glad you noticed where I said "there probably are a few arcs out there". Why don't you list all the arcs that do involve EB/AV's where "epic" stuff happens.
writers. can. make. the. story. go. any. direction. they. want. even. if. it. seems. impossible.
lol. Your funeral. And everyone caught in the path.
Robin != Batman. No matter how much you may want it to.
Just because you RP that poison isn't a capable set for killing tough single targets doesn't mean that mechanically in the game it also isn't. Sorry that is a fail if you were trying to prove anything with that passage.
I haven't. Try reading what I've actually written and you'll see why this is a completely inaccurate statement. Completely.

Every comic is a forgone conclusion. Let me repeat what you are seemingly unable to grasp.
Writers. make. whatever. they. want. to. happen. happen.
Writers. make. whatever. they. want. to. happen. happen.
Superman has failed plenty of times. He's even died iirc..maybe more than once.

If you actually read and understood what I typed you probably wouldn't have responded to any of it. Just sayin'

The numbers are obviously open for debate and were just a suggestion. That said, no other TF has a variable reward rate. You either get the full lot or none. This TF has one side earning above the standard merit/min and one side earning below it. I'd well imagine if the devs ever did something this cool it would be 40/20 merits, which is very reasonable.
I think his goal is to introduce a really cool TF that spans multiple dynamics of the game. A deviation from the classic approach of throwing mountains of HP on to a single encounter and expecting everyone to find it fun.
it has the possibility of earning above average merits and also the possibility of earning below average merits. If you were cooperatively farming it then you'd have to factor in both factions, which makes it a 180 min TF worth 75 merits. Which is barely above what normal TF's give out.

I'm going to assume that to make this a reality some sections would have to be heavily gated so that the teams progress through their content at a similar pace. This means that you would not be able to pull of a sub 30 min ITF and crush the merit/min equation. Because you wouldn't be able to bring the ratio down closer to 1/1 merit/min like existing speed/farmed TF's that would serve as a major deterrent for farming it.

I can't think of anyone that does it off hand. But then again, no one/few was really doing anything like AE either.

1. From what I read there would only be one actual pvp interaction where pvp IO's would have a chance of dropping. One of his suggestions was a 3 KO elimination. Our understanding (which we have right?) of how pvp IO's drop tells us that they could probably increase the drop rate by 100 fold and this wouldn't create a worthwhile pvp IO farming opportunity.
2. Cooperative farming would lead to just barely above average merit/min when you factor in both reward pools. See 3 for why this wouldn't be much of an issue.
3. The content of the TF would likely be heavily gated to ensure progress is done at a consistent rate. This means that you won't be able to drastically reduce completion times of the TF. If the Tf is cooperatively rewarding just barely above avg merit/min and you can't cut that number hugely like you can for currently farmed TF's then it probably won't be farmed.
4. You wouldn't lose until you lose from my understanding of it. The pvp encounter is the last "mission". If you forfeit at that point in time you wouldn't be shaving very much time off of the TF as the pvp encounter would likely be a 10 min match.

I don't think that is the intention of the TF. It is largely still pve from the sounds of it making use of the doppelganger technology and only a single actual pvp encounter. My understanding of the intention is to create a cool TF that adds a lot more dynamics than what we currently have.
Not at all. The technology is already in place to facilitate the forming of the two faction teams. They just aren't using it.
It may result in longer TF formation times than popular ones like the ITF, but that is to be expected. The fact that it would be reasonably rewarding, reasonably fun, fairly short, and very unique would likely mean it is fairly popular. It may suck trying to run it on some of the ghost town servers that I'm told is a figment of my imagination, but that isn't an indication of anything wrong with the idea. It's an indication of something else wrong.
The pvp (at least as described) only happens in the last mission. I well imagine that if people dropped from the initial team formation the system could sub in a doppelganger for the pvp match.
As the OP proposed it it would not be popular for pvp IO farming. We know that because we understand pvp IO drops.
It would not be popular for speed farming because it would likely be heavily gated.
He's not claiming to be the new messiah of pvp fixes in an earthly form of this TF. If pvp is so badly broken that it can't be used in the game then that is a pretty clear indication that CAstle took a dump all over the system. If taking this game to a new level requires hiring a dev that has a clue about pvp then I guess it is pretty clear what needs to happen.

IMO though, pvp has been dipped in enough molasses that it would actually be fine for something like this. Yes if your pug goes up against a coordinated team in the final mission it will get stomped. It is supposed to. Hence the variable reward rates.
What efforts? they have never tried to spin pvp and pve together. Well unless we are defining 'trying' as the equivalent of me lifting a leg while sitting down and letting one rip and calling that a good effort. Zones? no they have pve that happens to occur in a pvp zone, but they aren't entwined. There is no pvp involved with BB-meteor runs, SC-hotspots, WB-nukes, RV-turrets. Pvp can spill in to it, but those activities are just pve that happens to occur in a pvp zone.

Thank you for agreeing with everything I just said in the post you quoted.

In case you are still wondering what the mystery is...its called writers.

Then by default you haven't done any of the tasks that would involve saving the world in CoX.

There might be a few missions in the game (as I haven't parsed the entire mission database) that allow you to achieve more than stopping a local bank from being robbed without having to face a named character than is of EB/AV status, but they are few and far between.

If you look through the content where big things happen (especially in later levels, when our power starts to become noteworthy) found on this page:http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Hero_Merit_Rewards
virtually every arc that has something significant has an EB (most of which will scale to AV status if set for it). Almost every taskforce/trail where something big goes down has an AV/GM.

If you aren't prepared to take out named characters (of at least EB rank) then you are a second rate hero in this game if you plan to solo. Just the way it is. Of course, there is plenty of room in Paragon for people wearing tights and stopping muggers. If being as powerful as a whistle is all your hero needs then that is all you need.

I make heroes and villains powerful enough that anyone short of Statemans/Lord Recluse would be my errand boy instead of the other way around where we are on beck and call of characters as weak as Manticore... And given that my newest toon took down AV statesman in just over 4min, even incarnates would want me on speed dial for when trouble hits. The hero that managed to stop that bone daddy that one time...probably not who they'd look to for help unless really desperate.

It's sort of like this scene:
http://www.videovat.com/videos/2780/...he-rescue.aspx

You have received some incorrect information. While some things like high recharge /fiery, /psi, or plant/earth can deal solid aoe damage they aren't even in the same realm as real aoe builds like elec or fire/shield, archery, ss/fire, aoe/kinetics, bots/thugs, crabs, etc.

That isn't to say they can't take on x8 content and do a good job of it though.