Gospel_NA

Eh, maybe I am.

((Actually, I'm still second guessing this. I've got about 7 sets of kinetic combat that I've had for a long time and I'm sure I didn't use merits to get those. I only recall using my merits for LOTG 7.5's.))

Oddly, that level slider use to work where you could set it and you'd only get recipes to that maximum level. Like if you were 50 you could set to 35 and just get level 35 recipes as your max.

They've seemed to change this at some point, no idea when, to only showing you options for the level you set. You still get recipes relative to your level. Made me sad when I realized it no longer worked this way.

Good advice. I've never done this and now feel silly.

Almost makes you glad there's the option to have a detonator power.

Yup, any solution is a good solution as long as it provides the desired results when you needed them.

Your guides have been pretty good, so I'm looking forward to reading it.

The issue with cloak of fear is how fear works itself.

The problem is that when a mob is affected by fear it will cower in place only some of the time. The rest of the time it actually causes them to run away. So, stunned or not they still have a 50% chance to do one or the other.

The great thing about it though is cloak of fear debuffs their to-hit and when the fear is in effect that mob doesn't attack.

But then you run into a second issue. The mob that is affected by fear can't attack, unless you attack them. This means ticks from death shroud or a failed stun from whirling mace gives the mob a chance to throw a single attack when they are hit.

It's a useful ability, but with the most taking damage most of the time, you're not going to see any sort of reliability of them staying in your circle of doom when they are stunned.

Yes, I could have worded that better, I imagine.

Clarified my post without making signifcant changes to it.

But that's a situational variance. Over normal use the buffing turns out to provide more mitigation over time.

I agree with you 100% that there are, indeed, better times to use it.

But healing is synergetic with healing. That's the idea, more of a good thing.

Your main sources of healing are reconstruction and dull pain. The best I could do, while maintaining at least 32.5% defense, was get the recharge on reconstruction down to ~16 seconds. That's with spiritual core paragon. That means one full heal every 16 seconds or so.
Dull pain, should already be active (To clarify this, dull pain will typically be active as this should be your first choice of which heal to use when you need one. If dull pain is up, use dull pain to heal. If not use reconstruction.) It's been tested time and time and time again that Dull pain is more effective as a mitigator overtime (More clarification) i the form of added regen/hp boost rather than a heal which I am simply going to trust their word on that.

This means that you have one clickable heal available, you have dull pain up for the HP/regen boost (Which has already provided you a substainal heal), instant healing, you have MoG, Shadow Meld, and barrier in reserve to use as needed, but on top of all that you have siphon life plugging away at a 33% heal every three seconds (in my build). This means you can become less reliant on reconstruction and have it up more when you absolutely need it. Without siphon life there will be a lot more situations where you absolutely need reconstruction. It's really an attempt to make reconstruction more useful when you need it rather than making it a regular necessity.

The idea is that you really do have layers of defense. The only things I see as a real differences (Without doing a point for point comparison) is that each layer of defense is of a varying size and effect between the two sets and that regen has more active mitigation tools than invulnerability. Plus when you actually look at the layers, the only thing that really changes is when and how much mitigation takes place. For example defense mitigation takes place first and is either 100% or 0% mitigation, resistance takes place next based on your % of resistance to that damage type, hit point total (Some people may look at this as a form of mitigation, I'm one of them) the amount of damage you can mitigate at this point is any amount that will leave you with one hp or more, and then healing which takes place after the fact and is a positive mitigation (which is kind of neat). When I say that healing is a form of positive mitigation, I mean that it actually increases your potential for mitigation activitely. Out of all the layers of defense it's the only one you need (If you remove the potential for 100% resistance or 100% defense, which we don't have to worry about) as long as it continues to be higher than the incoming damage.

Regen has resists and Invul has resists. Invul simply has more resists.
Regen has regen and Invul has regen. Regen simply has more regen.
Invul has defense and regen can have defense. Invul simply has more defense
Regen and Invul both have active healing abilities. Regen simply has more of them.

Clearly there are expections and situational circumstances involved as well as variances that I didn't address (such as types of resists and defenses, etc.), but broadly they aren't different in their end, simply how they meet that end. Of course then there are variances of performance over different durations, sustainability, etc., but that's a whole different ball of wax.

Either way more healing is great for either of them.

Turn all those hours into days and you have over a month of time invested. That doesn't include all the time spend reading/participating in other resources, such as those discussion threads.

Dun dun dun! *Insert dramatic sting music here*

And I don't mean the Police type of Sting either....

Oh....geez.....I just got what it was funny that he was named Sting and part of the band Police.

I actually though DM/Regen might not be bad as well.

Simply, because you can get your regen to a very high level, support that with dull pain as a mitigator, reconstruction as an emergency heal, siphon life as both a damage source and healing source, instant healing for tougher situations, both MoG and Shadow Meld as supports for your regen when you're facing tougher groups or other tough mob types especially when IH is down. You can also use barrier as another mitigation tool.

My simple issue with regen has always been it's low resists, 30% S/L is a great improvement from what it use to be, but 30% is far and away from what is achieveable with a /inv 60-70+ resists in S/L is very significant and without shadow meld, MoG, or barrier active I'm personally never been able to put together a regen build that was able to reach 45% S/L defense on its own. That's probably, because I typically focus on +HP/+Regen on regen builds.

Oh! I lost my train of thought when I was posting, so I had to come back to this. On top of that my real issue with regen is how crippling -recharge can be to the entire secondary.

Actually your figure for how long MMOs last has been changing quite rapidly.

As far as my definition of "Not that long ago". Yeah, I guess you have no idea.

Oh, good link. Thank you.

It was clever for them to give us taste tests of some of these things.