Kenji_Naginata

I agree, but I do have to admit to a certain level of amused fascination with watching this play out... mostly due to the fact that it's a laughably one-sided fight, intellectually speaking.

---

On topic:

TonyV, while I have a great deal of respect for your roots and dedication within the greater City of Heroes community, I strongly disagree with the majority of your post. With sadness, I will also echo the sentiments of several posters before me and say that I'm disappointed in the message of this thread and frankly, a little resentful.

We may never know many of the factors that went into the decision to cancel City of Heroes. We don't know what NCSoft's intentions regarding the future of the IP are, or what the future will bring for the game or this community.

What we do know is how the decision was carried out.

Quite a few players invested heavily into the game prior to its cancellation, even as recently as a week before the cancellation. It's not a stretch to say this was done mostly in good faith: faith that, with our ongoing support, the game would continue to exist, and we would be making investments into our future enjoyment for the game.

I can deal with a beloved and celebrated game going offline after years of service. I've been through that twice before. What we as a community cannot, and should not abide is NCSoft's sudden and complete betrayal of that legacy in how they chose to send the game off.

The layoff of the Paragon Studios staff and cancellation of all on-going products, with no previous warning and sales continuing up to the day of the announcement, was, frankly, dishonest and treacherous. They owe us, both as customers and as a community that has poured our hearts and souls into the game for years, more than that. We deserved at least some form of warning of intent prior to cutting sales off cold, and we deserveadditional information on what will happen to our investments in unused points and subscription time.

As of this moment, we've had neither of those... so NCsoft may not be your enemy, but I can assure you, there are a number of posters that feel differently.

Seems to work fine for me. They had a really long extended maintenance earlier, but it should have ended hours ago.

Awhile back, I actually made an advanced mitigation calculation 'worksheet' for my tankers in Excel that had all the numbers, but unfortunately I think I lost it in a recent reformat.

Kioshi's right on the mechanics of how Defense works, though. The gist of it is that if a +0 minion will have only a 5% chance to hit you, the same attack made by a +2 Lieutenant would have just shy of a 7% chance to hit you regardless of whether you have more than 45% defense or not.

A jump is fine too.

That's kind of where I feel like I am right now too, Moonlighter. My main and first to 50 was a scrapper, and I've always loved the AT. Unfortunately, I've gotten to the point where every time I try to roll another one, I end up comparing them in Mids and convincing myself I'm better off just rolling a brute.

The 'scrappers can just jump in' argument doesn't hold a lot of weight for me because I find that the pace I play my brutes at pretty much makes fury dropping off a non-issue.

Edit: Vauluur beat me to punch while I was busy writing a book, and I agree with pretty much everything he says. lol

Werner's thread is pretty good, but you want to be careful of trying to port a Katana build over exactly, as some of the better ones are probably built around reaching specific recharge values on powers for Katana's optimal damage chain (which only uses three attacks.)

First off, welcome back to the game.

Super Reflexes as a tanker set seems pretty underwhelming to me, honestly.

It's strictly a one trick pony: you've got no active mitigation (like Ice's 'soft control' abilities,) zero damage resistances and sub-par hitpoints (by tanker standards.) When things get through that defense, and they will, they hurt and you don't have anything else to fall back on. The resistance scaling, in my experience, is rarely enough to save you against more than an isolated string of bad luck. In order for it to work, the first series of attacks have to not kill you first so that the scaling can kick in. This can be a serious problem when you're tanking several bosses or an AV, as their damage can often 'leapfrog' the resistance.

It's not all bad, though. If you're building your character on SOs, Super Reflexes has excellent performance out of the box and you can reach the soft cap of 45% very easily. It also sports superior defense debuff resistance, which helps avoid the 'collapsing house of cards' effect that can happen on other sets. The 20% recharge speed bonus isn't unique, but it's a nice perk.

From an advanced build standpoint, being able to cap defenses without chasing set bonuses opens up a lot of alternatives for slotting other set bonuses you might otherwise not be able to fit into the build. The large number of defensive powers makes slotting LotG +recharge extremely easy.

Whether that can still manage to hold up to the sheer survivability you get through Ice's multi-layered defense (especially with a secondary with lots of active mitigation) will be up to you.

That's another valid point that results in a strike for SR: Shield Defense has a solid 'steroid' power that can really give you a lot of clutch survivability. Elude, on the other hand, has a hard crash and is only useful when you come up against mobs that have massive +to hit buffs that completely floor your defenses.

Another major difference between the two is their "out of the box" performance. Realistically, if you're posing this question on the forums basic IO budgeting probably isn't a major consideration for you, but for some people (like seasonal subscribers that don't have the IO system permanently unlocked) it's a perfectly valid consideration.

Super Reflexes is extremely easy to cap even on SOs and a defense boost from your secondary (ie: Storm Kick) or weave. Shield defense by comparison only gets 28.4% defense from SOs. In order to get to the soft cap of 45%, you'd need weave and combat jumping and maneuvers, a defense boost from your secondary, or saturated Phalanx Fighting (which can be unreliable.)

If you're planning around building with IOs, though, I personally don't see the draw to Super Reflexes. The defense debuff resistance is a very nice perk in some conditions (like the ITF,) but Super Reflexes is strictly a one-trick pony. When you come up against something that can see through that trick, you'd better have a tray full of oranges to fall back on. Shield gives you a bit more room for error with its higher HP, and minor resistances while also potentially buffing your team and giving you a very noticeable bump to your damage output.

The best reason I can come up with for picking SR on an "advanced" build is intentionally giving yourself room to pick up alternate set bonuses since you don't have to go out of your way for positional defense.

I was thinking of making the same thing, but I'm very spoiled when it comes to planning builds and I figured I'd wait until Mids got an update for TW.

Running out of endurance is a huge issue for me, and I'm not sure I would even attempt this combo on SOs. With some solid building and a moderate budget for IOs, though, you could probably make it end stable without being forced to resort to incarnates. I play with lower level friends frequently, so my personal build philosophy is to make a build stable at a reasonable level (usually ~32 give or take) without incarnates/accolades.

Hi there, welcome back.

Not to be nitpicky, but a few scrapper secondaries actually do have a taunt effect, such as Shield Defense, Invulnerability and Willpower (though WP has a very weak one.) If I'm not mistaken, they should function the same as brute or tanker auras for holding mobs in a burn patch (with the scrapper AT threat multiplier used instead.)

I share your frustration, though. I have a spines/fire scrapper and a dark melee/fire aura brute and it really displaces mobs for follow-up AOEs on the scrapper.

I'm sorry, but your post was a little fuzzy on some of the important details so I'm not sure how close to the mark my response will be.

Because of the nature of how Provoke works, I can't help but feel we may not be getting a complete picture of what was actually happening. It sounds like you used two completely different strategies for each of the builds: one where you stayed back and just used provoke, and one where you teleported to the center of the group with your PBAoE debuff running.

As stated in posts above, Provoke effects are not "automatic aggro" buttons, they act as a threat modifiers, multiplying threat generated by a factor of its remaining duration. Your distance to the target also affects your threat. In layman's terms, if all you do is stand in the back spamming it it's not going to do much of anything.

An ideal use of Provoke would be to combine both of those strategies together: teleport or jumpinto the middle of the group, provoke when you get there, and then hit everything with Time's Juncture or your other attacks/debuffs like you would normally.

One thing to bear in mind, however, is that without hard numbers it's very difficult to make an accurate assumption about a pet's use of powers from a specific set compared to a player archetype.

I'll use Katana as an example (because it's what I know, my Kat/SR scrapper has been a main on my account since i3.) The reason it's considered a set with high sustained DPS, for example, is through its ability to boost recharge to the point where your optimal attack chain only uses your three highest DPA attacks: this isn't relevant to pets, who no longer gain any benefits from +recharge. All of these attacks animate quickly and can benefit further from procs. Additionally, it has two solid skill cones and a decent PBAoE, rounding out the set with decent AoE.

None of that applies to your Jounin, so you can't really infer that its DPS will automatically be higher than, say, a Grave Knight without analyzing all of a pet's DPA values, how much time they actually spend using those attacks on average, etc. And, as William said, as far as I personally know, I don't think anyone's ever really run the numbers to produce such a list.

Long story short: if you really like Ninjas conceptually, why not be happy knowing it will be a strong set offensively since that's what you're going for and then build around it to increase survivability as necessary?