Hopeling

The recipe rolls are not a particularly good example to compare to crits, because it's very difficult to get a statistically significant number of rare recipe rolls as drops. If you get 362 such recipes, your expected number of Touch of the Nictus procs is 1... but the standard deviation is .9986. So getting zero recipes is barely over one standard deviation from the mean, which is to say it's not even unlikely enough to be noteworthy. Now, if you got 362,000 recipe drops, you'd expect to get 1000 Touch of the Nictus procs, with a standard deviation of 31.57 - meaning it would be very unlikely to get more than about 1100 or less than about 900 (~3 sdevs from the mean), and incredibly, astronomically unlikely to get zero (~30 sdevs from the mean. 30 sdevs is like getting a winning lottery ticket while being struck by a meteor while being killed by a shark during an eclipse on february 29th). But getting 362,000 rare recipe drops means defeating millions of bosses, which is impractical (to put it mildly) for a single player to accomplish. If you could see the total recipe drops that all players have ever received, though, you would indeed see that very close to 1 in 362 recipes from that drop pool have been Touch of the Nictus procs.

By comparison, 5% (1 in 20) is far easier to get a statistically significant sample size for. On 400 attacks (easily achievable in a single play session, sometimes in a single mission), the mean would be 20 and the standard deviation would be ~4.36.

You can roll the same number twice in a row. They are completely independent events: it doesn't care what you rolled last time, it rolls a new number completely unaffected by the previous roll. There is no resetting, there is no crossing out. Each roll is a completely separate 5% chance.

So yes, it's definitely not abstract to get zero crits in 400 hits. It's unlikely, but it can still happen: if it couldn't happen, we'd call it "impossible", not "unlikely". But that particular thing is one-in-a-billion (technically, 1.2-in-a-billion).

If you can point me to someone claiming to consistently get a crit on every other attack with a power that supposedly has a 5% crit chance, I'd tell them the same thing I'm telling you: they are either mistaken for one reason or another, or they are experiencing a serious bug that needs to be fixed. But I've never seen anyone claiming such a thing.

Basically, there are 2 possibilities here:
1) You are, for whatever reason, wrong about your luck. This is the one I'd place money on if I were a betting man, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for the purposes of discussion. If this is true, examining some combat logs can demonstrate it, and you can start taking full advantage of defense bonuses and crits and etc.
2) You are, for whatever reason, right about your luck. If this is true, it means something in the game is severely broken, and you are the only one that can provide evidence of it. If this is true, examining some combat logs can demonstrate it, and it can be fixed, and you can start taking full advantage of defense bonuses and crits and etc.

Whether you are right or wrong, providing evidence is personally beneficial to you.

This page? http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Random_R...ipe_Drop_Rates

Note what the table is a table of, though: it's 1 in 362 random rare recipe rolls, not 1 in 362 enemies. Random rare recipe rolls come mostly from merits; you get one of those recipes only occasionally from boss defeats, and never at all from minions or lieutenants. And even if you defeat enough bosses to get 362 recipes from that category, you'd still have a (361/362)^362 = ~37% chance to not get the one you want.

So, not getting the specific rare recipe you want as a drop, even after thousands of enemies defeated, is not bad luck at all. It's completely normal and expected. I've gotten lots of various cool drops over the years (and lots of long periods of getting nothing decent), but can't remember the last time I got a recipe I specifically needed.

Anyway. The game generates a random number and uses it to decide whether to crit or not. But it generates another random number, it doesn't just re-use your hit roll. (If it did, every attack you managed to land on an Eluding Paragon Protector would be a crit, and from observation that's clearly not true.) It would indeed be erroneous to think the odds increase with each non-crit. 5% is 5%, no matter how many crits or non-crits you got before it: it's incorrect to get 19 non-crits with a 5% chance and say "aha, my next attack is guaranteed to crit!" Each roll is an independent event; past failures (or successes) do not affect future probabilities.
But, you CAN say "I am making 400 attacks with a 5% crit chance; I expect to see about 20 crits among those 400 attacks". It's entirely possible that you could make all 400 attacks and get zero crits (or 400!), although not likely, and regardless of how many crits you get, your odds of getting a crit on the 401st attack are still 5%.

As to why SinisterDirge gets more crits per mission - probably because he runs at x8, as he said. That means he's throwing way, way more than 90 attacks in a mission.

Critical hits are separate from to-hit rolls.

NeverDark's math is correct. Yes, it's possible to not get a crit for however many attacks in a row. But it is progressively less likely as the number of attacks increases. 1% is way far from impossible, and in a game with thousands of players running hundreds of missions, it will happen many times. But the times the unlikely thing happens will be far outnumbered by the times it doesn't happen.

The odds of a specific recipe dropping from a given enemy are far less than 1 in 362. I'm not sure where the 1 in 362 number you've cited comes from - maybe the odds of getting the specific recipe once the system rolls a rare drop? - but you have to multiply those odds by the odds of getting a rare recipe in the first place. Since the recipe is in the Random Rare Rolls category, it only even has a chance to drop from bosses, and it's a small chance to get a rare recipe from a boss in the first place, before even considering whether it's the specific recipe you want.

Seriously, if what you're saying is true, you've encountered a major bug that affects multiple parts of the game's RNG. If that is so, odds are very good that you're not the only person experiencing this bug. And if that is so, bugs can be fixed.

Can you record and post your combat log from a mission or two? Make a new thread for it in the bug forum maybe? The first step in fixing any bug is figuring out exactly what the bug is, and seeing exactly what's happening can help nail down what's going on. You say defense and crits don't work well for you; what about procs? Hit rolls? Streak breaker? Powers with a chance at a secondary effect? Etc, etc.

Broadly speaking, Brutes are slightly more durable than Scrappers, deal slightly less damage, and have to chase Fury. They have taunts built into their attacks (but only against the targets they hit, not AoE like Tankers have), and all their secondaries have a taunt aura, so on a team they'll be drawing aggro to some degree even if they aren't actively trying to tank.

The Fury mechanic gives Brutes a "selfish" incentive to gather aggro, which was thematically kind of interesting when all Brutes were Villains (the Tanker takes aggro to protect his teammates; the Brute hoards aggro because it benefits him personally).

On a team, Brutes are sometimes expected to tank, especially if a Tanker is not present, but they can just as easily fill a damage role, depending on their preference and the team's needs.

We're talking about using Kismet + Power Boost + Tactics to reach +22% when Aim and Build Up are down. It's a third button to cycle between Aim and Build Up, not so much to pair with Aim and Build Up.

And, again, I don't think anyone is contesting that (although I doubt any large fraction of /nrg blasters have perma-PB and use it consistently for the defense bonus).

Spending 9% of your time Power Boosting means you spend 9% of your time Power Boosting. It doesn't mean Power Boost is worthless, but it means Power Boost is worth less than not considering its activation time and duration might lead one to think, and this means /nrg's damage advantage from fast snipes is not so large as one might think.

Edit: If you're relying on Aim and Build Up for fast snipes, that works fine too, but other secondaries can do that too. So, again, /nrg's advantage in having fast snipe all the time rather than only part of the time is partially eaten by the need to use Power Boost to do it.

The point is, there is no way to say "Power Boost is an advantage for fast-snipe" without having to account for Power Boost's activation time, past the beginning of combat (by buffing before engaging). And the beginning of combat is when Aim/Build Up are most used, anyway, so Power Boost's fast-snipe advantage is the smallest there.

The Villain alignment power, Frenzy, puts you at 100 fury instantly (although it then decays normally). You can reach 100 fury in extended fights with an attack chain that properly leverages the brute ATO proc.

Other than that, yeah, it's functionally impossible.

Edit: "properly leverage" here having the meaning of "abuse the hell out of"

Scrappers do more damage than Brutes in general, but not by nearly so wide a margin as the quoted numbers might imply, since they will only be accurate with zero Fury. The damage difference is comparable in magnitude to the durability difference - that is to say, pretty small for most sets. (I'm also not sure how you got your Scrapper numbers - the Brute numbers look like ~100% +damage, but the Scrapper numbers are more like +115%.)

Edit:

The current t9 repeatables are in the 4-500 point range (roughly). If points were to be an option, it should presumably be less than that, unless the intent is render the other repeatables pointless. 200-300 for a token?

I'm not convinced it's a good idea in the first place, though.

Most discussions I've seen on the subject tend to agree that enhancements purchased from the market are also not IOs, because again, they are not created via the invention system and are usable without an invention license.

Saying they're IOs tends to be more confusing/misleading than saying they aren't, IMO. The problem is that they share several important traits with IOs - set bonuses, multi-aspect enhancements, and the sets from the Paragon Market are the same sets that you can craft of course. But they also DON'T share several other important traits with IOs - they're not crafted, they don't require invention access to use. So it's easy to go either way, but I think "they are not IOs, although they bear many similarities" is easier/clearer to explain than "they are IOs, but they are different than everything we call IOs".

My apologies, I omitted an "un-" which reverses the meaning of the question >.<

I'm not sure what your response is supposed to mean, though, since neither ATOs nor Overwhelming Force can be purchased from the Paragon Market.

Resistance to def debuffs is pretty straightforward: if you have 50% resistance to debuffs, you resist half of the debuff. If you have 70% resistance to debuffs, you resist 70% of the debuff, and so on.

If you want to build for defense, you'll want the Fighting pool. Weave is ~8% extra defense to everything, and with Elec's resists to build on, Tough will dramatically reduce the damage you take from the game's most common attacks.

You don't need every power in Titan Weapons (by 50 you can drop Crushing Blow and maaaaaybe Titan Sweep), and Laser Beam Eyes and Energy Torrent should be totally unnecessary. Power Surge is, frankly, not particularly necessary either, considering the severity of its crash, and that you can cap S/L/E resists all the time with just toggles and the ATO proc.

Note, though, that getting Overwhelming Force and ATO enhancements will be difficult without auction house access. If you're planning to give them to him, of course, this isn't an issue.