Frosticus

Playing the game well is an exploit.

Sounds like we've pretty much hit the same mark with the difference being that we are using slightly different redraw times.

One day I'll fire up fraps and actually figure out how fast it does draw the mace and the gun.

Woe is me if BaB's ever figures out how to get rid of redraw.

Pretty ridiculously cool looking power.

Sadly that bots/storm was supposed to produce a lot more damage than it actually did. And it is massively inconsistent.

But freezing rain is bugged and only lasting 15 seconds, so no stacking of it. And the Assault Bot's -regen power is bugged and only works sometimes.

Between bugged FR, Bugged assault bot, and the nerf to Lightning storm (awhile ago) I've just shelved that toon. I had very high hopes for it, but it was such a disappointment.

It can barely solo AV's, not because it lacks the take down power, or the survivability, but because even spamming provoke many of them flee like little girls from all the afraid effects of storm and the assault bot. They'll literally run half way across the map. I can resolve that issue by spamming electric fences, but I don't have the endurance management to do it yet. Plus taunting and immobing...come on. If Castle fixes the bugs on the toon I'll probably pick it back up and see what it can top out at. Should be pretty high.

Bane's can be friggin sick. Did you remember to factor the added time for the redraw? I'm not sure how fast it actually redraws, but I just plug it in as 0.77 sec's.

I was hesitant to mention it, but I think I have a Bane build that could throw out 460 dps. I actually sat down and drew out the chains over a full 60 seconds and lined up the -res powers rather than just factoring avg damage minus parasitic drain and lets just say it was dam impressive. Roughly half the damage is generated by the pets though.
I've started testing the first two spiders on my Bane to get a picture of what they will produce in actual gameplay, but it is going slowly as the excessive redraw of the toon has worn me out...hopefully temporarily.

I'm working on a different toon now though, that if all goes to plan should be a contender for this thread. Not a title taker, but in the running.

How'd that work out for you?

Survivability isn't ignored though, it has low 20's s/l and can stack almost mag 60 in holds, perma flashfire, pets to draw a bit of agro and pff if things go really south.

Outside of one specific enemy type the build is entirely self sustainable.

You couldn't skimp on acc if you wanted to, try it. I bet you couldn't make a crazy perma dom build like this that can't easily hit +3's if you tried. High acc is a by product of expensive builds.

You could make it so you are sucking wind after a short period, that was already discussed. The net gains would be small though from a damage standpoint. The fact is purple insp give the best mileage of all the insp. If you are going to use something it may as well be them. And the only time you are going to need them is against one specific scenario. Or we could pretend that every toon that doesn't have softcap def is useless... You keep thing that and I can guarantee you a fire/fire/mace dom will smoke you in pretty much any task. It's not unlike the new trend of dark, fire and ela toons that are aiming for 32.5% def so they are one purple insp from softcap. They rarely need to down those insp, but when they do their peak potential is miles beyond what something like an SR can achieve.

I could just as easily walk into the scrapper boards and tell them they are all useless because they can't solo GM's like my fire/traps can. Probably not the most productive stance to take though. And the day a scrapper posts about taking down a GM no matter how many insp they use I'll be cheering them on.

They aren't though. It would be fair to say they are the easiest to play and leverage all around debuffers. That would easily explain their popularity even ignoring the legacy effect of rad.

But traps is a better debuffer (and a better buffer in many cases, but AM+rad aura and FFgen+triage are both pretty desirable, so which ever you prefer is fine)

Cold under decent recharge is a better debuffer than rad as well and it is definitely a better buffer.

However, rad matures very early, is very easy to play, and has been around much longer than cold and traps. So taking away its throne is probably not going to happen.

No one has suggested otherwise. Hence why you don't put FW on a hp capped blaster any more than you should be putting your iceshields on a softcapped sr in the majority of scenarios.

I get that granting a regen buff to FW would give it a minimum expected performance, which is probably what bothers people about the power given that it can vary quite a bit. In the same sense that when I hit heal other I know exactly what it will do that would be comforting.

The thing is though, even if it did have that minimum expected performance granted to it the power would still vary wildly in actual beneficial terms. In fact it would expand the gap rather than shrink it.

Is it that FW can potentially have zero benefit that bothers people? because I'd point out that every power in the game falls under that restraint as well. The circumstances that FW runs low on benefit may be more of a common occurrence than some other powers (I'd very much gladly debate this point though), but at the same time there are times where it is a tremendously powerful ability.

You are irked by a weird thing if I do say so myself. You'd rather have more unknowns than less. That is very strange.

Allow me to demonstrate: with knowing absolutely nothing else -
Q. If I regen 50hp/sec how much incoming damage can I withstand before being overwhelmed?
A. 51 dps

Q. If my target regens 100hp/sec how much outgoing damage do we need to defeat it?
A. 101 dps

Now as a percentage: again with knowing absolutely nothing else -
Q. If I regen 5% how much incoming damage can I withstand before being overwhelmed?
A. 5.1% of my unknown total hp
Q. Which means?

Q. If my target regens 5% how much outgoing damage do we need to defeat it?
A. 5.1% of its unknown total hp
Q. Which means?

If you know the hp/sec the only question left is how susceptible you are to burst damage and how much time defeat will take, but not whether defeat will occur or not. If you know the % regenerated you know pretty much nothing of what that actually means when in combat.

Once you know the total hp in question then both pieces of data are fine and tell you everything you need to know. But with that being an unknown, I'd personally rather know how much damage I can expect to repair and how much damage I need to do to start defeating my target.


As for tick rate of regen, that is a very minor issue. It would only matter if you sustain an increase in damage taken during the difference in the interval of healing rate. That's not impossible by any means, but it is probably far more common to experience overkill as a result of low total hp regardless of how fast your health tics than it is to experience a flux in the damage that would drop someone healing in shots of 100hp every 4 seconds compared to someone healing in shots of 50hp every 2 seconds.

In all fairness acid mortar does say this. As do a lot of powers that stack in the way that we want them too (ie multiple castings).

But acid mortar says it so that it doesn't stack with itself as each tick of the debuff lasts longer than 5 seconds, rather than preventing a second mortar from working in addition to the first. It can be confusing though.

The Femur is neat for some select concepts. If the game was rated M and had some more visceral animations I'd be all over crushing skulls with a leg bone and feasting on the gooey inards

If there was a more weathered version of the warhammer that would do it for me. It looks too clean for something that is used to bludgeon things and break through walls.

None of them compare to this
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/File:Roman_Axe_C_Final.jpg
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/File:Rikti_Axe_Final.jpg

the rikti axe in particular suggests you are about to get cut in half from head to toe and very likely bury itself in the ground several feet with just one swing.

It's only complicated in the sense that explaining how something like Rain of Arrows works is complicated. Or complicated in the sense that fully understanding the final tohit chance is complicated. For the end user you just point and click and things die. How the power is resolved doesn't really matter to most users.

Thunderstrike essentially uses what I'm talking about except is radial rather than conical. Lightning Rod as well, but through the use of pseudo-pets, which is unnecessary for what I'm talking about. The reason it isn't used often, or at all really, is because there is little need for it to be used.

I don't believe it would make the rifle overpowered, but of course the numbers would need close examination, but even if you were to use buckshot as shown in the previous post as a purely single target attack it would still deal less damage than a standard 8 second attack and cost more endurance. The focus of the set would still be aoe damage, but as a by product the things you happen to be focusing on would die quicker. The set would still be near the bottom for st dps if you were only killing single targets, but would deal pretty good st dps while also doing very strong aoe at the same time.

I dunno, I'm just a fan of unique solutions rather than just standardizing all attack sets and/or a flat damage boost to things. To me that is unfun and not very creative. Honestly, I only came up with this idea while reading the first few pages of this thread, but it just made sense to me. Things in the actual focus of a buckshot blast, or flamethrower, or minigun volley (or w/e fullauto is supposed to be) take a lot more damage than things on the outer edges of the spread.

I'm not sure of anything that the purple patch doesn't affect. Probably the -res procs because they aren't something you cast, they are something the target casts on itself.