GavinRuneblade

I thought that it does affect +recovery in heat loss? Never tested, but I thought it did.

Thanks for the correction! I created mine a while back and apparently forgot the specifics.

Glad it's working out for you!

I found that I had fun levelling mine, but got frustrated with it after a while. The low single-target damage is really annoying. By contrast, fire/fire has been much more satisfying. The knockdown is easily fixed with base enhancement stations at low level, and a -kb IO or acrobatics.

elec/elec is fun, but I have enjoyed fire/fire more.

That said if you're soloing everything anyway, why not claws/willpower?

The thing is bosses have a higher chance to hit than minions. It is rare that people worry about streakbreaker from minions, but on bosses, yes it kicks in. You can look at your combat log and see it. When it really sucks is where a boss like say the Roman Castrated Prefects have streakbreaker kick in and force one hit, then they get luck (aided by the -def) to land a second and one or both of those are crits. Typically, you're dead at that point, and yes it was streakbreaker that killed you.

The other thing is that all enemies of a given type and level have the same chance to hit and use the same attacks on very similar timing. So if streakbreaker kicks in, it will kick in for several in very short period of time, causing multiple hits in just a few seconds, one each from several enemies. And again, yes it was streakbreaker that killed you.

Suggestion 1:
If you have bad AoE damage then your best bet in AE is to create yourself an boss farm. What you want is a big outdoor map and set enemy group to none. Then pick one boss who is weak to Negative damage (hint, don't use Banished Pantheon or Circle of Thorns). Shivans and Devouring Earth take 20% bonus Neg damage, Redcaps 14%. Set the maximum number of mission goal "defeat boss" set the group to weak so it is just the boss and 1 minion. Set your difficulty to +2/x1. Only go higher if you kill at the exact same speed as you do on x2. If it takes you several more hits to kill the boss, you are not increasing your inf/hour even if your inf/kill is higher. Do NOT change the player number, any attacks on enemies weaker than bosses are hurting your influence per unit of time.

Suggestion 2:
Outside of AE, find an Oro Arc that you can run very fast (-1/x1, or 0x1) and collect merits. Convert to Hero Merits and sell those for profit.

Suggestion 3:
Last, make a better farming build on your second build screen. Say pick Fire for your APP. Shadow Maul, Fireball, and Shield Charge should work for you to earn inf pretty quick at +0/x6,7,8 depending on what your defenses can handle. Keep bosses off for this as with AoEs you'll earn more by killing many mobs.


Summary:
So, with high ST damage, you want lots of bosses minimum minions and lieuts. If you can up your AoE rock the minions and lieuts and turn off bosses. Farm tickets or merits, or just get AoE and go to town on your favorite missions and hope for purples. Best part is with two builds you can do all three to keep from getting bored.

As stated, use IOs, they're cheaper than SOs, never expire on you in the middle of a fight, and from character level 17 on give higher bonuses (exception: you only care about 1 modifier and have very few slots, then you have to wait until character level 29 but 1 IO is still cheaper than 31 levels worth of SOs).

When Ocho and Nivea were transformed into Rikti and assaulted various servers that only lasted a few days too.

The aniversary events only last 1 day.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the holiday events instead of developer interaction events?

None taken, that's why of my 4 doms I don't have a gravity anymore. Tried it, didn't like it, moved on.

if he waits/toughs it out a few months he'll get fitness for free at level 2.

<begin Russian accent>There is no overkill, only kill or don't kill</end Russian accent>

=)

Whites are not the issue. Rares going for 2mil+ put a limit on how low you can sell for profit. Whites do not have such an effect. Even 100k for salvage is a joke compared to the price of rares.

At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, I think our current development team have far more than one-upped the former owners.

The new content is so far above and beyond the stuff that was around when I started, and looking back with my friends who played in i1 through i3, wow.

I get what you are saying, but they do far more than one-up the competition. In my book anyway. =)

Patrols that spawn ambushes if they aggro. Like that one Rikti Warzone mission where if you defeat the boss in the third ambush wave you lose the mission completely. Muhaha.

but I don't think we can do that level of detail in AE yet.

Depends on incoming damage. If character a regularly takes 90+ damage/sec with spikes up to 250 that extra 5/sec does matter. Not necessarily enough to outweigh some defense as you mention, but still.

I'd like a purple and PvP for every category so that we always have the option of keeping some bonus nomatter how low we exemp.

No worries. Not upset. Just trying to be clear. When I do that, I get wordy/long winded. =)

Why keep touch of death in the power if you're not getting the defense bonus? The 5th bonus is just hold resist, ie meaningless. You're only getting 1.5%HP and 2.5% damage.

If you go with Mako you get same HP and 3% damage, plus higher % enhancements on the off abilities.

Crushing Blow gives you HP and Accuracy instead of damage, and you can stop at 4 and add two procs.

On the procs:
I recommend against Mako's and Touch of Death. Mako is more lethal damage and ToD is only 15% to fire. Ablating strike takes defense debuff. Lady Grey is same damage as ToD but 20% chance to fire and cheaper to buy. Plus you have the option of Achilee's Heel.

There is no such thing as a "self-benefitting proc". All procs have a chance to fire on the target of the power. For a while you could slot the end mod stun in stamina and stun yourself. Right now if you put performance shifter's proc into an electric attack, it gives stamina to the enemy.

Read the power carefully to see who the target is.

hmm, might have read them inverted, it's certainly not unheard of for me =)

I didn't say defense debuff is rare, I said "cascading defense failure" is rare. Yes it is pretty normal to lose 6 to 20% off your defense. It is not normal to be dropped from softcap into the negatives. Here is my exact wording so you can see for yourself:

Notice I did not at any point say that defense debuffs were rare. I was only talking about cascading defense failure. I brought it up specifically because some people like to pretend that defense debuffs are so common and so powerful that res builds shouldn't bother with defense under the mistaken beliefe that you will have effectively no defense most of the time.

On my /elec brute I have 28% melee defense. I pretty commonly go down to about 12 against council at the beginning of a spawn. And I am back at 28% by the middle of it. Romans put me into the negatives. Council do not. Knives of Artemis do not. 5th column do not. Rularuu do not (unless it is a spawn with 5+ eyes, but I was farming Scirrocco's rularuu mission at 0/x6 for a long time quite happily).

Yes they all debuff me. No they do not all cause my defense to go away completely.