GavinRuneblade

Welcome back!

The key is what alignment were you when you did the villian morality mission. If I understand you correctly, you were a villian and you did the villain morality mission. Therefore you reinforced villain and are qualified for the v-merit award.

Second, I believe that it is on its own timer like the tips, and does not reset on tuesdays.

Also, there is a 1-time bonus v-merit for the second mission. You can get any award you qualify for the first time you do a story arc regardless of the time. So if I understood right, you can do both part 1 and 2 and get 2 v-merits right away. then starting next week it will be 1 merit/week even if you do both parts.

I don't mind it taking some time. But I would like the breakdown and sidegrade costs to be reasonable enough that they are worth doing. Right now, you're better off holding onto the wrong components and hoping they become useful in the future.

Uber mentioned the 52 hamis. There are currently three ways to get a level 53 (equivalent) HO:

#1 buy a level 53 (very hard to find)
#2 buy a level 52 and combine with a level 50 (slightly easier) = 52+
#3 Buy a level 51 and combine twice with level 50s (ends up being harder than #2) = 51++

This is exactly the same as for level 53 SOs. The difference is that there is a ready source of 53 SOs and level 51 or higher HOs haven't dropped since before i10 (but I forget how much before). so there is a very limited supply getting smaller all the time.

Once combined, you can' uncombine them, and they can never again be traded. So eventually we will run out completely and the 50++ will be the best available.

I've seen a description of a "two bomb" raid where after a period of time you can set another one and get Ukon to spawn twice. But I don't know the mechanics.

With katana, you want to go for positional not typed. Parry/Divine Avalanche give melee/lethal only. No Smashing. This is pretty significant.

And I think most of the /regen builds aim for 32-35% defense rather than 45%.

This is really not true. Regen scrappers can and do tank, and have been tanking (scranking rather) hamidon/mitos and other top end challenges since before IOs. On pure SOs regen is one of the more survivable sets. Brutes should be better at it than any scrapper has been. Hell Brute /regen should be good enough to hold Hami himself on par with /wp.

The problem you are seeing is that the build is only 40% of the performance. Another 30% comes from your primary, and the remaining 30% is player skill managing those damn click powers. /regen is a ***** that way.

It is impossible even with two pocket kins constantly speedboosting you to make IH permanent. You can get permanent dull pain, but it is almost never a good idea to put it on auto and "waste" the heal component just for higher max HP. Reconstruction is a great heal, but it's not up as often as healing flames (this is intentional , HF was buffed specifically to be faster than reconstruction). And MOG is currently godly, but not permanent. You need to know when to use your powers ahead of time, and how long you can hold out before firing them off.

Dull Pain: Gives +HP which also jumps your hps considerably. But you don't want to use it all the time, because it is a 1300+ heal when slotted. So you often want to save it for when you're down to only 20% of your health. Let it take you back to 90% full AND give you better healing for a while both. But sometimes, you want to use it first, just because you know you'll need that extra 20-40hp/sec.

IH: Gives huge healing over time bonus but no up front heal. At best it is up 30% of the time. So you need to use it before you need it. This spikes my healing from 59/sec to 178/sec. An extraordinary power when used right.

MOG: 15 seconds of invincibility to all but PSI. I can drop a pylon in the Apex TF with this and reconstruction's toxic buff. I can use this at 1 HP and be back to full before it wears off using no other heal. This is your alpha absorber. Use it while approaching the enemy. With enough recharge, it is back up during the fight if you need it. Every now and again, if the enemy spawn is spread out, you might want to save it for just past the first salvo.

Reconstruction: Gives 25%+ heal. Use it as soon as you need it. This is the one click you want to abuse. All the rest hold until you see your spleen falling out on the floor.

If you manage your clicks just right, regen is a phenominal set. If you screw up, you're toast and you will die again and again and again until you get so frustrated you rage quit. Personally, I don't feel the devs balanced the difficulty of using the tools it has well enough with what they do. But oh well.

To hit some of your points directly:

This is a halftruth. The full story is that Regen benefits immensely from mitigation in the primary (mace, katana, Dark, etc) much more than other sets. If a /SR uses parry, or debuffs the tohit of an enemy with dark, or keeps an enemy on their back with clobber, so what? The /sr was probably at full HP anyway so who cares if the enemy made one less attack? But the /regen expects to get hit. Each second you don't get hit, you recover a big chunk of hp. At full bore in excess of 180/sec is possible. That means if a castrated prefect in cim crits you for 700 damage you only need 3.5 seconds to recover. On a /sr if that crit got through, you need to pop aid self or a green, or you are one lucky streak away from hitting the floor. The /regen can just knock the cim off his feet. By the time he gets up and is ready for another attack you've recovered 80% of what he took.

Fire/ claws/ SS/ spines/ and others are really not ideal pairings for /regen if you want survivability.

What you get with /regen if you play purely passively is an invincibility line. At this point you can walk away and come back later and be fine. I once made a cup of tea while my /regen was being pummeled by 14 crey tanks. came back and I was still at 95% health. But go much above that amount of damage and you die really fast. Your clicks can mitigate this, your primary can mitigate this. But you gotta learn it and learn how to control it. MOG, Shadowmeld, and similar tools let you reset the fight (unless you're up against psi damage, then you need purple insps).

100% false. First of all MOG lasts for 15 seconds. That is a LONG time. With dull pain and IH going that's probably over 2000 hp worth of healing. Secondly, if you were barely over the invincibility line, taking say 150 hp/sec more than you can recover, when MOG ends it will take another 10-20 seconds for you to go down. Dull pain or reconstruction may be up in that time. then by the time those HP are gone, you might have gotten a purple insp as a drop, or whatever. Last, you don't have to kill everything. Usually, you just gotta be able to drop 1 enemy or 2. At that point the remaining ones don't do as much as you heal. I don't know about you, but ALL of my brutes and scrappers and stalkers can drop 2 bosses in 15 seconds. Now, if it's one nasty EB that is the problem, yes you are just buying time. But it is possible to cycle powers to keep buying time long enough to wear him down. That's why scrappers like having both shadowmeld and mog. You cycle them. Mine is a bs/regen, I can also just stack three parries before it wears off and be above the softcap for melee/lethal. As long as I use those attacks to drop one or two enemies dealing ranged damage, when MOG ends I'm still protected.

Go into the scrapper forum and look at the 100+post thread about top end kat/regen builds. Werner and Eldegost posted builds that can indefinitely survive over 6,000 damage per second. I used one of the builds a BS/Regen to hold AM's attention on a Keyes run while the tank came back from the hospital (no taunt so I'm not holding him for long), I've held Nightstar on a take 'em where they stand BAF when the whole rest of my team was down for over a minute, I've held requiem busy while the rest of my team killed romulus, and thats with my crap reflexes on a scrapper. A brute /regen would be much more survivable and I bet any of you can drive them better than me. Several /regen scrappers have soloed the ITF.

Yes, I do often run into a full spawn of cims and faceplant. Then laugh because I forgot to hit MOG before going in. AND I accidentally used IH (+regen with no up front heal) instead of Dull Pain. I do that way too often. When I'm doing it right, I can MOG, jump in the middle, target a prefectus parry, buildup, headsplitter hack disembowel parry headsplit parry and he's down and I've got a LOT of melee defense left over from three parries, even with the -def they're tossing out. With the prefectus down usually the mob can't spike me, they gotta grind me down. But I still have dull pain and reconstruction if I need them.

Actually it is very similar. Only two major differences: knockup comes at T3 instead of T8 replacing one AoE. A stun instead of parry. Otherwise you have knock instead of -def but basically the patter of the attacks, the animations etc are very similar to kat/bs. But yes I agree that kat is a better match since the powers are exact duplicates.

I think you're very wrong here. I've seen it hit people hard. I've been in pugs with level 20s and seen a BS user get so upset at how much better the kat player was doing the dropped the team and rerolled. I've been that person on my bs/regen with an outrageously expensive build, standing next to my friend with a middlin' kat/wp and he does 98% of the damage per hit, has more survivability, deals more over time, kills things that I'm still stuck in attack animation against, and spent a hell of a lot less inf to achieve. I've seen stalkers complain about it, scrappers, and now even brutes. People do notice it.

I'm particularly sensitive to it, because my bs/regen is my favorite character. So I'm that guy who bought a red car and then thinks everyone else did too because I suddenly see them everywhere. They were there all along, but if you're not looking for it, you won't see it. Once you get tuned into it, there's quite a bit of it out there.

That was supposed to say bs and ninja blade. Not "regen". Heh.

Can we add Mace now that it is a scrapper primary as well and while it lacks parry/DA it is otherwise very, very similar to katana/broad sword.

and that third point of data might shed light, might muddy the waters, I dunno. But we now have a third that is very very similar and that might help clarify some with the "kat is good, BS is middlin' why buff and cause power creep when you can nerf and balance" question.

Anyway, I dunno. Just tossing it out there.

Have you LOOKED at the current sidegrade costs? Again, if they gave us this option, following the currently implemented pricing, we'd pay the two most expensive components and drop the third, plus add a few million inf.

They have some neurotic fear that breaking down components gives too much freedom. It takes 60 threads to make an uncommon, but you don't even get 20 out of it if you break it down and it takes more to sidegrade than you get from breaking it down.

First ask them to fix the current breakdown and sidegrade process. Because otherwise they might give you your requested breakdown or sidegrade, but at so high a cost it is completely worthless. And yet they'll say "you asked we delivered".

I hate to say it, but no BS is simply an underperforming set out of PvP. My main is a Bs/Regen scrapper I've been playing for 3 years and it never gets better.

BS is not worthless, but it is inferior to ninjablade in literally every metric except if you measure one single blow. The attacks are slow enough that you do need to pick your targets in teams or you really will end up whiffing on already dead enemies.

Try re-rolling with ninjablade if you want a sword, or kinetic melee if you just want a hard hitting primary.

/Dark is great especially if you layer on some defense. It combines well with both BS and regen thanks to parry/divine avalanche.

If you are going to stick it out, go in first, and focus on lieuts and bosses, don't bother with the minions on teams. The one saving grace of BS is that your good hits don't kill the enemy, but often get them low enough that someone's AoE will do it fast enough. So I just hit people once and then tab to the next one.

Wait are you saying there isn't an alien invasion coming? All that preparation was wasted?

Man, now I gotta go sell a 30 year supply of spam and bottled water. What am I supposed to do with the bomb shelter.

Giving the existing breakdown rates, I'd say if they did implement this you would be extraordinarily disappointed because it wouldn't be significantly cheaper.

Right now you can breakdown an uncommon or a rare into the common of your choice, or a very rare into a common with a few threads left over. If they let you completely break down a crafted T4, I'm willing to bet you 500m Inf you'd not even be able to get enough threads to make an uncommon out of it. I bet they'd give you 30-36 threads.

Hmm, I haven't bothered with watching the logs for over a year but while levelling my ninjas they definitely fired. I'm over 21 now, so no good testing.

Pet healing delivered if I remember correctly. I dunno for sure but that's where 90% of procs turn up. I just turned everything on and waded through the chaos.

I have the KD one slotted on my ninja/time and it definitely goes off. Kind of funny to see the ninjas chuck a throwing star and knock down syndicate, or run up and slash, then knockdown. Hehe. I love that one. I usually slot it in AoEs for some early mitigation.

I believe every time you summon them there is a chance it fires on you. Everytime the bot attacks it checks to proc, but the bot is immune to recharge so the results do nothing either way. Basically, you have a 5-slotted assault bot.

The only time you should ever slot dark watcher's proc into any power on any character is if you need the set bonus. Almost but not completely waste of a slot. Berserker is 100% right on when it checks. Only their -tohit attacks will even check for it. They have 2. But virtually all of their attacks do -def so the lady grey proc will go off well over twice as often.

It gives you an aura, within that aura your pets get the defense/resist bonus.

All of them. If you can only fit one proc, I found the best results were -res in the T1, and damage in T3. But the spec ops do such crap damage that a proc was actually worth more over time than 25% damage from a set IO. An SO or any IO that gives more than 25% bonus damage is worth more than a proc in them. I didn't bother testing to see which was the best proc to use, I had (at the time) a stash of 9 lady grey's so just used that one. The do so many of their stupid non-damaging attacks that I'm wondering if trap of the hunter or something similar might not be better. Keep in mind that even with a proc they still do less damage than you do if you attack with your T-1 gun shot. So in my mind, the spec ops are basically a set mule and cannon fodder. Don't expect them to help, because they pretty much don't. they're good sacks of HP for bodyguard mode though.

While Berserker is also right that the -res doesn't stack, the commando has a lot of AoE and the soldiers like to split their fire. so giving the -res to the soliders often lets you -res debuff multiple enemies who the commando will then hit with a grenade, LRM, or full auto.

It checks on you each time you summon the pet. It checks on the pet with EVERY attack. Put it in your top damaging pet (almost always T3, but there's a good argument for T2 on demons).

supposed to, but I never tested it. Looks like it when I partner with my friends. None of my MMs are incarnates. Officially the rule is that anything that causes damage is supposed to allow interface to proc. So on your mercs that means everything your soldiers and commando do and about 1/4 of your spec ops attacks. It SHOULD be higher than that, but the morons don't cycle their attacks properly and they use the flashbang and immmobilize way too often. Neither one causes damage so will not proc the interface.

That would be awesome. I actually do like it as a toggle because while fighting I don't like having to stop for click powers, especially defenses. I much prefer to be smashing faces in.

I just hope they fix the bug where using leviathan attacks too fast make the sharks chase the carps instead of the target. Because if that makes it live I'm not paying for it.

you never could boost hamis. But you can combine them just like enhancements.

It's still more useful than several other procs they came up with.

-recharge in a sleep set. If it hits, they can't attack and the proc doesn't last as long as the sleep. Brilliant!

-tohit in a stun. This piece of geniousness is purple folks. You can't attack, but if you could you'd have an insignificant chance to miss.

Really, quite a few of the procs are as handy as debt resistance as a set bonus.

Why do only one of the two options? You can only get 1 from the SSA per week, what are you doing the rest of the time you play? Earning merits probably. convert them.