Gilia

You could still do that if you had a "Prestige Sprint" which was customized and the original Sprint separate. Unless there's use for a third form of Sprint that I'm not aware of, of course.

I agree with the OP other than the "Booster Pack" talk. Travel powers are so widely used, they should be a serious focus for power customization and implemented for freeeeee. FREEE!!!!

I believe it's 2.03 seconds. It sure can feel like a while though.

The BlackDwarf certainly does more damage, because of Mire and Drain. The self +Damage combined with an extra attack spells more damage.

The White Dwarf's advantage is survivability which comes through a few rather unspectacular folds. Sublimation's healing per second is less than Drain's, yes, but its high recharge means it consumes less of your activation time, and there's no to hit check. Also, if you actually intend on the Black Dwarf seriously benefiting from an extra attack, it's probably going to be slotted as an attack, rather than a heal. Sublimation takes very few slots and it's good to go awesome opossum sauce.

The second fold is Flare's knockdown. It's awesome mitigation.

The third is that damage-focused ATs increase your resistance. So if you've got Blasters, Brutes, Scrappers, and Stalkers floating around you're just that much tougher. The value of this could be debated, of course, since WSs get a ton of resists on their own and would be doing even more damage in the same scenario.

If it procs, the values will stack. Follow Up is a great place for the proc.

Controllers and Masterminds are the only two ATs whose primary and secondary aren't focused on dealing damage. Masterminds' primary has attacks in it though. So it seems to me if you're going to make this work, it's as a Controller probably.

Does pets doing damage count? Because you could make a pretty boss MM who doesn't deal any damage, if you let your henchman do the damage.

I would say if you really want to try this do a Plant/ or Mind/ controller with /Empathy or /ForceField. Illusion Control might fit the concept too. /Sonic /Thermal or /Radiation would work, too.

You actually have some flexibility, if you go with a controller.

Fury is what makes the difference. Because Fury stacks with damage enhancements and damage buffs, you can't simply consider it a boost to the damage modifier.

Damage is like this: Modifier * (1+Enhancements+Fury+Other Buffs)
If you figure most attacks will be enhanced to ~95%, you will find that a Brute only has to maintain a 15% damage boost from Fury to match the Tanker.
That's incredibly easy. In reality, the damage boost from Fury will top off at ~120%, IIRC. The average will vary based on play style and strength of the build, but you'd be safe to call it 100%.

With that in mind, Brutes will do about 50% more damage than Tankers and only something like ~10% less than Scrappers.

What does all this mean? It means damage buffs, like Build Up, Against All Odds, IO bonuses, or when someone else gives you Forge or Fortitude, the Brute benefits about the same as the Tanker. The Scrapper and Blaster would benefit significantly more.

The problem with this sentiment is almost all the powers in the game could "break character." That is, if you wanted the powers effects but had built your theme around a different powerset, effect, damage type, and so on. The only self-rez available to Blasters does fire damage, for example.

Why not have the character's story reflect the truth? He went through a series of tests, forming an elaborate rouse to trick Black Scorpion into granting the hero some of his power. He did all this without committing to any true evils, so using B.Scorpion's powers he could achieve greater good!

It is definitely annoying. From a roleplaying aspect however, I'm glad they decided to keep PPPs the way they are. If Heroes could inherit the powers of Recluses' inner circle "just because" that'd make even less sense than a heroic Blaster abusing the rules to steal their powers.

Now, hopefully down the road something will be implemented to alleviate this issue.

That is what we're concluding. I have not tested it on a character who has it slotted twice, but I should be able to very soon. I believe what you will run into if it's in Tremor and Fault is that if it has proc'd, there's no sense in immediately following up with the other attack, as it won't stack.

However, as both Tremor and Fault do knockdown, I would assume you're spacing them accordingly anyhow.

I would just monitor your recharge with the combat attributes and when Tremor procs (I would assume that's your lead), wait till the proc has expired before you use Fault (5 seconds). I believe the proc fires when the accuracy check happens, at the beginning of the animation, so it should only be about a 2 second wait between attacks. That's probably close to how long it takes them to stand up, anyway.

I would say this is a really good idea.

I just wanted to echo this. The defense on Fortitude means anyone who's attracting a lot of attention will benefit, and the +ToHit and +Damage mean anyone who relies on hitting or has a high base damage will benefit greatly from it. I recommend putting it on Blasters and Dominators for that reason. Both have awesome base damage, need to successfully hit to survive, and can attract more attention than they deserve.

It will depend on your team, of course. Just because a Brute has a lower base damage doesn't mean he might not be a better choice than a Scrapper. For example, the scrapper could be IO'd and survivable, and the Brute might just have SOs, and that extra defense could mean being softcapped or out surviving his teammate Scrapper. So check the powersets of your allies, how much they are IO'd, watch who attracts the most attention, and so on.

I would only try to keep CM up on those who need it. This will often be Blasters, and Corruptors, Defenders, MMs, and Controllers who don't have Sonic Resonance or Force Fields. The exception to this is when fighting Arachnos, particularly when the enemy group is mainly or exclusively Widows. The +perception on CM can keep people from going blind. I'm also more inclined to hold back on attacking against Arachnos on the off chance a boss Bane decides to target me. Those guys can be brutal if they placate your support then come after you.

Lastly, I bet if you take a few attacks and let your teammates HP drop a little more, you will find what has been alluded to in previous posts. There are "bad buffers" out there (myself included) who only throw up shields when HP is actually dropping. I must confess, I've probably made a few Empaths/Pain Dominators work extra hard because they kept everyone's health high enough that I didn't bother putting up shields. Granted, in this scenario it's the other support player dropping the ball, but you convince them to pick it back up .

What's your secondary? I would bet there's at least one attack that would be worth picking up and just firing off when it's up in between heals, even if you still wanted to focus most of your attention on your primary. Howl, Ignite, Ice Storm, and Neutron Bomb are all good examples. Some AoE with a not-huge activation time and a worthwhile secondary effect would be an awesome contribution from the Empath defender.

Just because this hasn't been answered yet, Stalkers fall into the same category as Scrappers, Brutes, and Blasters for Cosmic Balance and Dark Sustenance. That means for you as a PB, they give 10% resistance.

Cosmic Balance is a large part of why I found playing a PB to be so much fun. With tri-forms, being able to fill the role that your team is lacking in is just fantastic.

Just a note about the mag 1 protection:
That +1 means most of the secondary "stun" effects will no longer bother you. Their duration:chance is so low that it's not likely to stack, and the majority of them only do mag 2 disorient. That means it only takes +1 stun protection to ignore them.

I think you would find that incredibly helpful at low levels. I bet if you monitor your status protections you'll find it helps more often than you realize, at least with stuns that are the secondary effect of an attack.

The "Lightning Clap" type powers are only mag 2 as well, I believe. So the controller/dominator would make you able to waltz through those bright flashes.

Well, I can spot two mistakes in your post three up. I'm afraid you just don't understand proportions to get my method. Again, if you would like to be educated on the matter, send me a PM. This wall of text thing, you might find it intimidating, but I don't. I just find it rude to the people using this thread for a more constructive purpose.

This is why I said just read it again...
Yellow added to help clear it up. No essay. You can't isolate B just by subtracting some multiple of D if you go the "variables = base dps" route, because you have to consider the damage enhancement to all sets. What you were trying to do in the first place was only modify "D," which frankly makes no sense.

Also, I didn't contradict myself. The first run down was effective DPS and the second was base DPS. There's no need to argue, just read it again.

This will be my last try. If you don't realize you need to divide to remove a coefficient sometimes, no amount of forum talk is going to help. Perhaps this will:
http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/is...-variable.html
Note the subtraction AND the division in both examples.

Edit: Effective DPS Route
Since this route was too complicated to iterate without an "essay"...

Fantastic! I was running some tests and came to the same conclusion. It would occasionally tick down for a second (like when you double up hasten), but as far as I could tell if it suppressed it was only for a second.

Thanks for the follow up, HelinCarnate.
Perhaps we should updated the wiki...

That is a good point. I was boldly rounding the difference in base hitpoints at 50, which was silly. Of course it's 10%.

Also a very good point about max HP. Doesn't this mean that dull pain is not as good on a Stalker as it is a Scrapper? Not just because of the lower base HP, but because it would max out their HP unenhanced...

So, /Regen is even more solidly in the Scrapper's favor.

That's actually what I did...

I saw that you were considering the variables to mean the relevance of base damage (like you reiterated, again), while I was considering them to mean the effective damage, after being enhanced.

I ran both sets of numbers using arbitrary amounts of DPS for each set. Both routes check out. Like I said, what you were hinting at (though you don't seem to be able to follow through on the math) is a more informative place to start.

Sorry, I don't think there's much value in trying to force the only functions in this experiment to be arithmetic. I know you mentioned a 10th grade algebra class at some point, but I'm well beyond that. The ratio of damage, how much damage one is relative to another, is what you have to use if you want a logical symbol to represent DPS.

If you'd like, I can send you the progression of the strict inequality formula to try to clear it up. I bet if you just read it over again you'll see why it doesn't work the way I've quoted you here.

It's 3.75% to all but psionic and AoE, AoE gets 37.5%.

Without hide it's 1.88%. Besides with AoE, you lose half the defense it offers.

Mid's, however, treats it as if you weren't hidden. On my copy, anyhow, sets all my defenses to 1.9% if Hide were on. That's the 1.88% rounded up, exactly like you'd expect.

So you don't actually have to consider that difference.

As far as the OP is concerned, I think that build would make for an awesome AS build. The big old chunk of +dam multiplied by critical would be very nice. However, your attacks seem short changed for accuracy, endurance, and recharge. I imagine post-AS the performance would almost level out with a build that gave the attacks more love than the set bonuses.

Well the chart has what we know is 5 seconds (the duration of FF) as 3 dots. The suppression according to it is 5 dots, so theoretically it's 7.5 seconds. It's saying that for 7.5 seconds after the effect ends it won't activate again.

That chart is dated about 2 years. It's been a while since I ran any tests myself, though not quite that long.

Now I'm kind of curious how it actually works. I'm having trouble getting Herostats to run properly in Windows 7 so testing it is a quite a bit more work now.

Perhaps I was wrong.

Can anyone say with certainty I wonder?

Edit: Plus the chart suggests the proc can fire off, but not actually have an effect. That might complicate testing it...

This isn't quite true. The suppress effect affects toggles and psuedo pets. The proc will check against every single target that Footstomp hits every single time it is activated, regardless of when the proc was last checked or last activated.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=120808
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Proc#Procs

The proc won't stack with itself, however.

OP:
I did a test with an Energy/ Blaster, with this proc in every attack. The end result was the same as if I had just added a recharge SO to each of them. At least, as far as the attacks were concerned. The little extra oomf on Nova and Aim/Build Up was nice. Dropping the proc from the ST attacks, but not the AoEs, did not cause much of a drop in my effective recharge. With 100% global recharge and FS fully slotted, you could actually chain several FSs at 5 seconds apart, if you have a large enough group to hit. The most I've done, I believe, was 4. Either way, the proc was definitely not suppressed. If you maintain 10 hit targets each attack, there's about a 27% chance that will happen.

Unless you have some very high recharge powers floating around that might benefit from an occasional boost, I would not put a FF Proc in any single target attacks.

This, for sure.

I started with 7 others, all with moderate MMO experience. We covered all 5 ATs, and we would all try one or two of the others.

We had 1 all-primary Empath, 2 Scrappers, and the other 5 settled on Blasters. I was one of the Scrappers. My next level 50 was a Blaster, and then the two after that were as well.

Blasters are easily the best way to start the game. They start taking names right away, they are incredibly easy to slot, it's pretty hard to accidentally skip a crucial power, you feel like a power house, and it will teach you enemy mobs, kiting, and general positioning. There's no toggle management (though this will be less of a concern with i19). The playstyle won't change at certain key levels like it will with many support sets, so you're not readjusting at all. You're just getting better as a player.

If they have a good amount of MMO experience and have enjoyed melee or support in the past, point them to a Scrapper/Brute or I would say Defender.

Once they know how to survive and manage aggro without the help of holds, shields, etc, and start getting a grasp of game mechanics I'd move into other support ATs.

After a while of getting their feet wet with the Blaster, they can swim around and try the other ATs. I personally have played all 14 to level 50 at least once and my subjective experience of what is fun and what is not is not going to be the same as the next guys'. Your friend may find that he absolutely loves masterminds, for example.

You're confusing the damage formula again. It goes Base*(1+All Enhancements(fury,rage,SOs)). If you removed the base 100% (the 1 in that formula) you would get an incorrect proportion. Keep it simple and you'll see why. Let's call our hypothetical power "attack." Attack has 50 base damage. We both bust through ED and get 100% from SOs. You attack with just that and do 100 damage. I add some fury on top, say another 100% damage increase. I attack and do 150 damage.

The proportion then is 100:150, I do 50% more.

What you are suggesting above, removing the base, would make the proportion look like 50:100. That would mean I'm doing DOUBLE damage because of Fury. I'm not. That isn't how damage works. You HAVE to include the base if you're trying to consider relative damage.

Okay, I made a mistake in my initial math that might have caused some of the confusion. You're still a little off in your reasoning though.

When determining my final ratio, I gave the inverse. The actual value should have been 22.7% of the Epic Attack. I did 407/315 (1.29) instead of 1-(315/407) (.227). My mistake.
With that correction though, you should see that 22.7% of the epic at 407 is 92 DPS.

So A+B has to beat A+C by 22.7% of the DPS that D offers. Which happens to be 92 DPS, as you noted. In formula, that's still:
A+B+D > A+C+D*1.227
B+D > C+D*1.227
B>C+D*0.227
The DPS of Claws must be greater than the DPS of SS PLUS the 22.7% of the Epic's DPS. If it had 100 base DPS, that final amount (407*0.227) would be 92 DPS. I'm treating each letter as a final DPS allowed/offered by a powerset.

In order for 0.92*D to work, you would have to consider each letter to be the BASE DPS of the set, rather than the effective DPS. If you're working with the base DPS, however, you need to include the expected damage modifiers.
3.15*A+3.15*B+3.15*D > 4.07*A+4.07*C+4.07*D
3.15*B>0.92*A+4.07*C+0.92*D
Note here the reality that was ignored above, that the damage modifiers enhance the secondaries as well. For the sake of continuity, let's remain ignorant to that fact.
3.15*B>4.07*C+0.92*D
B>(4.07/3.15)*C+(0.92/3.15)*D
B>1.29*C+0.29*D
I'm sure I changed your letters around. A is the secondary, B is claws sans follow up, C is SS, and D is the epic.

The funny thing, using your difference model and base DPS we end up with the 0.29*D that I incorrectly concluded the first time. Using my quotient model and effective DPS we end up with a simpler formula with 0.227*D.

Honestly, your method is probably more informative. If I didn't make any hair brained mistakes this time, it shows that Claws has to beat SS by 29% of the base DPS of the Epic and 29% of the base DPS on SS. That's a little easier to crunch than my method's broadstroke "the effective DPS of Claws" > "the effective DPS of SS."

Anyway, it's just a matter of how you slice it. It's probably more useful in a word problem anyway: In order for Claws to be better than Super Strength in AoE DPS, Claw's DPS on its own must be greater than Super Strength's DPS on its own by the same amount the Rage contributes to the DPS of the secondary and epic sets.

Again, full circle, it does.

This has been fun.

I have two entirely subjective theories.

A) I honestly think it's the large radius on Foot Stomp, with a screen shake and knockdown. That combined with the simplicity of spamming the same attack over and over. You don't even really need to move around to keep hitting several targets.

B) For Tankers, before Dual Blades, it was the only attack set with a consistent damage bonus. Even there, though, I imagine a /Fire Tanker can compete with a /SS Tanker's damage.

Who knows.

This isn't true.
X=1+(enhancements+fury+rage)

The damage modification from enhancements, rage, and fury are ADDED together, not multiplied. You take the base and multiply it by the enhancements in the power, fury's bonus, and rage's bonus combined.

I can see why you might think rage is the end all be all if ALL your damage was multiplied by 2.6. It isn't though.

You were right insofar as simply +D was not totally accurate. However, neither is saying 2D to 3D.

Even with double rage, you're talking about +160% damage. If you figure fury adds 120%, enhancements add 95%, and the base is 100%, then double rage is adding 160% to what is already 315%. That's an increase in damage of about 50%.

That's countered by a drop in damage of 1/7th from rage crashes.
So the first pool of damage all brutes get: 315%
The pool that SS double-rage Brutes get: 407% ((315+160)*6/7)
Even without considering that you will likely lose some fury while it crashes, now the real damage difference is 29%.

So if all the other sets get D, then SS/ gets 1.29D.
So claws only has to beat SS by 0.29D to be better.

It does.

Wouldn't x=3 mean you need 200% global recharge, since ~100% will come from enhancements?

If you even get 100% global recharge, a Force Feedback proc gives you a decent chance to get Footstomp back in 5 seconds. Namely 1-(0.9^X) where X is how many you hit. If you max it out at 10 that's a 65% chance to have it back in 5 seconds. Force Feed back happens to last 5 seconds, so occasionally you can string together a few 5 second foot stomps even on a pretty cheap build like my SS/Electric/Mu has.

If you actually activated Rage every 60 seconds, then you'd be killing 1/6th of the damage. You'd spend 10 seconds crashed, 50 seconds double raged, 10 seconds crashed, and so on. The crash would be eating into each activation. To get 1/7th you would activate rage the instant the crash ended. That seems possible enough, watching your damage bonus and everything.

However, to do that you only need to activate Rage every 70 seconds. Which would only take 242.25% recharge. (240/1+2.425)=70.07
I think that's a wee bit easier to pull off. It would delay your initial "double rage" by 10 seconds, but from then the end would be the same. I only have 200% recharge on one of my characters and that was a very much "all in" build. I imagine you compromise a fair amount getting a Brute build to that much recharge, let alone higher than that.

I'm pointing this out because of this rather goofy response:
I'm pretty familiar with the game and the mechanics. I can handle a spreadsheet and so on. Yet in all of Bill Z's math, all the stuff I might dispute wouldn't change the conclusion.

SS has a healthy amount of AoE and it is nice how Rage lends itself to a secondary and an epic with more AoE. However, the fast recharging, good DPA AoEs in Claws paired with an also awesome global damage bonus power are just better. The only advantage I see to SS is that increased radius, and that's only because I've been speeding villain tip missions on the lowest difficulty. If I were farming, the radius would not matter because I would kill what was bunched up nicely and then move on to the next group. With either power set, if you're standing around at each mob cleaning them up you're not maxing out your DPS anyhow.

If you don't spend them and switch quick enough, you could go with Cold Mastery. The effects can pretty easily be counter to your current theme, but I prefer the other powers in that set to Mace Mastery. Of course you'd have to wait till 44 instead of 41 for your shield if you went that way.

That's why I said most durable Scrappers don't finish a fight with 1/13th of their health. That's where they'd have to be... for the comparable to Stalker to drop, even though the Scrapper still stood.

Teaming with both, unless the Stalker runs off a lot, you should find that the Stalker dies less because they have a lower threat modifier and no taunts.

It makes sense that WP would have a noticeable difference. While Reconstruction might be better than RttC in some cases, it doesn't have the -ToHit, and if your HP hit 0 before (or between) using Recon, then it didn't do any good. Also, the dependency on regen means increased hit points are worth more.

However, I doubt for most "durable Scrappers" that they finish their fights at 1/13th of their hit points very often. Also, the other secondaries are not going to have a drastic difference in survivability because they don't lean so heavily on regen. /Regen might though... of course :-P.

Now, the lack of a damage aura/taunt aura means it can be harder to keep guys together, also the lack of AoE means they might not die as fast. Not being able to manage mobs w/o that could result in face planting more often.

The difference in survivability doesn't come from a difference in defense/resists though.