Muon_Neutrino

Summoned entities often inherit boosts from the summoning *character*, but not the specific summoning power, as far as I know.

In this particular case, the 2.0 listed accuracy on the power simply denotes that it summons a pet or pseudopet. All such powers list that 2.0 accuracy, and as far as anyone knows it just represents the fact that the power won't ever fail to create the pet. The pet's powers have only whatever accuracy the powers themselves list, in this case 1.2.

So the explosion does have a 20% accuracy bonus, but it's probably not enough to forgo slotting acc at all. 1 SO would probably be plenty, though.

At that, be glad your heroes don't have to deal with the villain trial, which has the opposite problem. I have no idea how a team full of screwed-up builds is supposed to complete that one, unless they're all brutes and buff/heal type corrs and MMs......

Well, with all characters other than controllers and warshades, I always have at least a few staple attacks. These go on keys 1-7ish, with ST attacks coming before AoEs. This takes care of the powers I hit most often. After that, it comes down to finding easy ways to keep track of and activate the rest of my useful powers.

I have two side buttons on my mouse, so I typically bind up to 4 useful and frequently used non-attacks to button4, shift+button4, button5, and shift+button5 (I don't use control and alt because they're harder to reach). This typically includes things like buildup/aim, self heals, end sapping stuff like power sink, holds, taunt, etc. If the character has a ST hold, it *always* goes on button4. Usually the mouse buttons are sufficient, but on especially busy characters I sometimes bind things to Q and E as well.

My travel power is always bound to G. H is often bound to the prereq, although occasionally it's something else (such as hibernate on my dom). Long recharge occasional use powers like godmodes usually go on 8 or 9. 0 is almost always rest.

In general, powers that I want to monitor but don't have to activate with the number keys (toggles, powers bound to various other keys/buttons, etc) go on tray 2 where I can see them but they're out of the way. Tray 3, which is not usually open but is accessed by holding control, usually contains potentially useful temp powers like pets. Tray 4, which is one of the pop-out mobile trays, runs vertically along the right side of the screen and contains mostly travel-related powers (jetpacks, sprint, various and sundry teleports, etc) along with fortune and occasionally other useful temps.

For the vast majority of characters, this setup allows me to easily access almost every power they have. The only real deviations from this are controllers (who don't have an attack set) and warshades (which are just weird). Those would be a whole 'nother post.

I don't think this problem is a linux-only quirk, as I've encountered it on my windows box as well. No idea what causes it, it seems to come and go, and shows up both in and out of mission maps for me.

I'm not familiar with high end IO builds for blasters, so I can't really comment on what bonuses you should be aiming for, but I do have some comments on power choices and the number of slots given to things.

First, please don't skip ice bolt. I know you've got other ST attacks, but not all of them can be fired through mez. Even before the defiance changes I wouldn't have skipped either of the first two blasts, but nowadays I wouldn't do it in a million years.

Second, and to make room to take ice bolt, world of confusion is nigh-useless. Every 4 seconds it tosses out less than half a brawl's worth of damage and a 1.5 second duration minion-only confuse that has a -25% tohit penalty. It is about as close to doing literally nothing as a power can come while still technically having an effect. The only way it becomes useful at all is at level 50 slotted with the purple confuse proc, and even then I wouldn't bother considering it'll get turned off every time a mezzer so much as sneezes in your direction. Dropping it allows you to fit in ice bolt and frees up a few slots too.

Also, I don't really understand why you've given TK thrust 5 slots. It's not a damage power (roughly 2/3rds of ice bolt on a longer recharge), it's a 'get-the-heck-out-of-my-face-you-ugly-boss' power. For that role all it really needs is an acc or two, and that frees up some slots for ice bolt.

Finally, hibernate seems slightly overslotted for me. It really doesn't need end enhancement, and two or 3 heal/rech are more than enough to get you out quickly and get the recharge down to around the 120s nophase period. I would pull a slot out.

With the slots you've freed I would slot ice bolt up to 5, add another to ice blast and subdual, and give freeze ray another slot with an acc/hold/rech in it. If you're not going to end up with more than 45% or so acc in each attack, I'd also suggest getting some global acc bonuses, a kismet 6% in CJ, or both.

More or less, I don't hide from searches because I don't have any overriding need to, and I do like to team in this game.

Like a couple of people in this thread, I am an introvert, but I don't feel the need to hide to satisfy that part of myself - if I didn't feel like interacting, I probably wouldn't be playing at that time anyway. I play on a relatively low population server, so I don't really get pestered too much either. And if it gets tiring, I can always go do something else. So I don't *need* to hide. And I don't really *want* to hide, because it's on teams where I can encounter the most interesting and fun gameplay available. Soloing is fine, but it gets dull after a while, and the much wider mix of elements on teams leads to many more interesting tactical possibilities. I like a lot of the tactical minigames (like aggro control) that teaming brings.

I don't personally have any desire to keep any of my builds 'secret'. For me this is a non-competitive game, and I feel no qualms about giving anyone any advice they want. My own personal builds in particular (as opposed to a build made in answer to whatever question is being asked) don't usually end up coming up as I don't feel they offer much in the way of insight into anything other than my personal preferences, but when they do I have no issues sharing them.

I don't think he was implying that your fire/fire couldn't handle +2-3/x8. Rather, I think he was saying that if you wanted to use it for what he was suggesting (farming for purples) setting to -1 would probably be the most efficient. Since purples all come in at 50 regardless of the level of the mob (as long as it's able to drop purples at all), setting to -1 wouldn't impact the type of drop you're looking for and would allow you to burn through mobs even faster.

Not freedom, so...

No.

Well, just from game mechanics, the alpha will *have* to be affected by at least one of the debuffs, because (if you don't get too close) the mobs are aggroing in *response* to being debuffed. For the rest of it, it depends on how fast the mobs react.

However, if I remember correctly EF casts much faster than RI. I presume you're multi-boxing and casting all three debuffs simultaneously? In that case, depending on how quick the mobs are to react, I could see them getting hit by EF and beginning to attack before RI hits them. That would be bad, because while EF does have a damage debuff, it's not nearly as strong a mitigative effect as the -tohit from two RIs.

I guess the real question is: does it seem to be working for you so far? If so, there's probably no major need to fiddle with it. If you are curious, you can use the combat logs to see if the mobs' alpha is being affected by RI - just add 'tohit rolls' to the combat channel, open your usual strategy on a mob, then after the fight go back and find the tohit rolls for their alpha and see if their tohit chance was something like 70% or 7%. If it turns out that they're not being affected, I would try delaying your casting of EF so that the RIs can hit first.

Nope, slotting end reduction in the pet summoning powers actually does reduce the end cost of the pet's powers as well as the cost to summon them. Just 1 SO would probably make a big difference.

I would love to see illusion for doms, and I personally don't see any problems with the set.

For one thing, domination is built by *attacks* as well as controls, and attacks actually end up building most of it considering how often they're used, so the set won't have any problem building dom.

I also don't see why illusion control wouldn't fit the dominator playstyle. What is so massively different about it that would make it a bad fit? No immobilize? Mind doesn't have one either. AoE mez at 26? Grav's in the same boat. Invisibility powers? No requirement to actually *take* them. Only 1 AoE control aside from the hold? Grav and fire are also like that. The only truly unique element is phantom army, and I defy anyone to give a reason why having PA is a *negative*. In fact, it actually has a *synergy* with dominators in that it'd give a control option that'd actually be effective against PToD.

If I recall correctly, in one of the recent Q&As or panels or whatnot, castle or one of the other devs said something about illusion for doms being a possibility even if they haven't done it yet, so I'm hopeful it comes along eventually. I've already got a concept, name, costume, and secondary ready for it.

No offense, Inferno, but that's a pretty strange build there.

First off, no tank should ever skip his taunt aura. Ever. Full stop. Second, not only did you skip lightning field, you also skipped your PBAoE and put off taunt until the 40s. Combining that, how are you going to hold aggro? Punchvoke can only go so far.

Also, you have some pretty weird slotting and power choices there. Why do you need stamina, PP, a performance shifter proc *and* both recovery uniques on the primary with the best endurance management tools the AT has (especially since you skipped your most expensive toggle)? You're also over the resist cap to everything but psi/tox with an *unslotted* power surge running, so what's the point in putting resistance enhancements there? Also, you have no other defense whatsoever, so why slot the steadfast 3% (other than to spend more money). I honestly wouldn't use this build as a guideline for an electric tanker.

Troy, as far as electric armor goes, unfortunately I personally don't see much in the way of skippable powers. The only one that comes even close is grounded, as you can get KB from IOs and immob from CJ, and the rest of what it does isn't really worth the power slot. Unfortunately, that only saves you a power choice if you were planning to take combat jumping anyway, which you weren't. If you were going for a pure meatshield type tank I suppose I could see skipping lightning reflexes, but frankly I'd never turn down the free recharge since I think pure meatshield tanks are boring. Endmod slotted power sink combined with lightning field is actually an important part of the set's mitigation through sapping, so that's in. There really isn't anything else skippable.

For mace, you can get away with skipping one of the ST attacks (I dropped jawbreaker on my /mace), and since you don't have something like lightning rod or shield charge I could see skipping build up. Honestly that's where I'd look first for skippable powers, as electric armor is just so tight.

Welcome to the game! Since others seem to have answered most of your original questions, I thought I'd touch on a few other points that might be possible sources of confusion.

(And, by the way, that wasn't a wall of text. *THIS* is a wall of text! )

First off, enhancements. I'm guessing your brute is still probably relatively low level, which means that you wouldn't have seen all the different types of enhancements. Below level 12, all you can slot are 'training' enhancements. These can be used by any character, but give pretty small boosts to your powers.

Starting at level 12, you can start slotting 'dual origin' (commonly abbreviated 'DO') enhancements (they start at level 15, but you can slot enhancements up to 3 levels higher than you). These are twice as powerful as training enhancements, but you have to make sure to get the proper ones for your origin. As implied by the name, each of these enhancements can be used by characters of two different origins. A technology/science origin damage enhancement, for example, can only be slotted by technology or science origin characters.

Starting at level 22, you can slot the final grade of normal enhancements, 'single origin' enhancements, or SOs. These are twice again as powerful as dual origins, but are now limited to one origin at a time, so if you're a technology origin character you have to specifically track down technology SOs. Keep in mind that DOs and SOs tend to have fanciful names, so be careful that you're buying what you think you're buying. For normal play, these are the last kind of enhancement you have to worry about.

It's at the SO level that you have to start worrying about 'enhancement diversification', or ED. Basically, the general rule is that you get effectively no benefit from slotting more than 3 SOs of the same type into a power. So if you have a damage power, it'll do about the same damage whether you've got 3 or 6 damage SOs slotted. This makes things a bit more complicated in some cases, but it's also useful in that if a power only does one thing then you don't need to assign more than 3 or 4 slots to it most of the time, which saves you slots. For example, your defense powers can easily be slotted with 1 end reduction and 3 defense SOs without sacrificing any real performance.

I would personally suggest slotting your attack powers with 1 accuracy, 2 damage, 2 endurance reduction, and 1 recharge SOs. Most characters would slot 3 damage, but since brutes get such large damage bonuses from fury it's less important for them, and you've already seen how endurance is a limiting factor.

At this point, I wouldn't suggest taking taunt, at least not early in your character's career. While it can be a useful power, it's by no means required, especially for brutes. Managing aggro is an entire other minigame in and of itself, and I would just concentrate on hitting things and staying alive for now. Evasion, your area of effect type defense toggle, also applies a taunt effect against enemies in melee range of you, so even without the taunt power itself you still have some ability in that area.

The other reason to put off (at the very least) taking taunt is that this particular powerset combo has a lot of powers you'll want to take. You'll want all of super reflexes aside from (maybe) elude, and to get the two most useful combos (sweep and attack vitals) requires 6 different dual blades attacks. You'll also want blinding feint for the tohit and damage bonuses, so that leaves only nimble slice and taunt as possibly skippable powers. If you want to take stamina, its prerequisites, combat jumping, super jump, tough and weave and their prerequisites, those together with 7 powers from dual blades and 8 from super reflexes will fill up all but one of the *total* number of powers you'll get all the way to level 50. The only free slot would be your very last power choice at 49. I wouldn't personally put taunt any earlier, simply because it'd be cutting out something actually important.

Also, the reason people are talking about getting defense to 45% is due to the way the game calculates an enemy's chance to hit you. They start out at 50%, and your defense score is subtracted from this base 50% chance. Once you get to 45% defense, the enemy is at 5% chance to hit you, which is the lowest the game will let it get (you can have more than 45% defense, but they'll still be at 5% chance to hit). As you might imagine, getting hit only once out of every 20 attacks is a pretty darn powerful survival tool (compare that to getting hit once out of every 5 attacks (30% defense), which is what you get from just the base super reflexes toggles, fully slotted). Getting to 45% is referred to as 'hitting the softcap', and is highly sought after. With the super reflexes toggles, weave, and combat jumping all slotted with 3 defense SOs, you're at almost 40%, which is getting pretty close. Any defense buffs from a teammate will put you the rest of the way there, which is why the fighting pool is recommended.

Finally, you will probably see people referring to another type of enhancement at some point, 'IOs'. These are 'invention origin' enhancements, which are considerably different from standard SOs. They can be used by any origin, they don't expire as you level up, they can boost more than one type of effect at the same time, and they can confer additional bonuses when slotted in sets. However, they also must be acquired as drops and crafted using recipes and salvage before they can be used, so the system as a whole is considerably more complicated (and often expensive) than the 'buy-slot-go' of SOs. At the highest levels of monetary and planning investment they can make characters nigh unto gods, but for now I'd suggest sticking to SOs, which are perfectly adequate for any normal content. By all means, investigate IOs at some point, but I wouldn't suggest worrying about that just yet.

The real reason I brought up IOs is to give you an idea what you can do with the salvage and recipes you'll get as drops from the foes you fight. If you stick to SOs, you won't need any of it yourself. You can simply sell it to the NPC stores, but this might sometimes be a waste, as other players may well have some use for it and be willing to pay more than the NPC would give you. Therefore, I would recommend checking out the black markets scattered throughout the rogue isles. These are where you can sell and buy recipes, enhancements, and salvage to and from your fellow players. There's an NPC at each market who will explain how the system works. When your salvage or recipes fill up, consider dropping by a market to see if any of it is valuable. For any given item you can see the prices and dates of the last few sales, which can give you an idea if it's worth anything to other players (and if it's likely to sell any time soon). If so, put it up with a relatively low asking price (I like to put things up somewhere between 50% and 80% of whatever seems to be the going rate) and see if anyone buys it over the next few hours or days. You might not always get a price quite as big as the last few sales, but hey, it's free money. A lot of what you find will be junk that sells for hundreds to a few thousands (if anyone wants to buy it at all, if not just sell it to an NPC), but it's entirely possible to get a lucky drop worth tens of millions and set that character up practically for life. Even if you don't, it's still likely to be a useful revenue stream. I personally think this is one of the most important tips to give, as there's nothing that sucks worse than leveling up only to discover that all your enhancements expired and you don't have enough money to replace them.

1 billion would be more than enough to put together quite a good build. You won't get a bazillion purples or anything, but you will be able to afford plenty of decent sets. For that matter, you would still be plenty survivable and deadly with a 50 mil build - willpower lends itself to that pretty well.

I personally get all of my IOs in the 30ish range myself, for the exact same reason. By that point the enhancement percentages are most of the way to their level 50 values, and the increase is flattening out. You do give up *some* enhancement, but it's really not that big of a difference overall - and it could be worth it even solo if you decide to do some ouro flashbacks at any point.

Let me say first that I love your guides. Even when I don't agree with you, they are always informative and fun reads. That said, if you're planning to update things, I do have a minor bone to pick with part of your pain guide. Specifically, soothing aura/suppress pain.

Although it's easy to discount the small heal numbers of soothing aura, it's actually quite competitive with suppress pain's regen. Soothing aura is 21.5 hp/s fully slotted. Suppress pain's (slotted) effect varies with base HP as: 13.05 hp/s on masterminds, 16.5 hp/s on doms/controllers/defenders, 17.4 hp/s on corrs/veats/khelds, 19.6 hp/s on stalkers/blasters, 21.8 hp/s on scrappers, 24.4 hp/s on brutes, and 30.5 hp/s on tanks (minion and LT pets have less HP than masterminds, boss pets are a bit below doms/controllers/defenders).

Given that in most cases the user will be hanging back with the other squishies, soothing aura will actually often give more healing than suppress pain. Now, that doesn't take into account the variety of fringe benefits that the MM version gets (such as no green number spam, +regen getting around the share pain self debuff, the effective multiplicative effect of bodyguard, the way regen scales with +max HP, and omg the green numbers agggggghh), but I really wouldn't call the corr version of the power worse than the MM version.

edit: also, world of pain has a damage buff attached as well. It's small (12% MM, 16% corr), but I'm surprised you didn't mention it.

Only problem would be that you'd still be stuck with the arachnos gun.

I've been monitoring temperatures through the day (including some gaming) and the highest the processor's gotten has been 49C. Vid card's gotten up to 67C. Hard drive's been absolutely constant at 37C, and the other two temperature leads (which I presume are generic motherboard temperatures) haven't gotten above 50C. So I don't think overheating is the problem.

At this point I think I'll just see if it does the same thing tomorrow when I turn it on, and if so, go inside and look for loose connections.

Well, there were enough people that we managed to find melee-only teams for posi part 1 and 2. Granted, it took a bit to replace the 3 people who had to go after part 1, but we managed it. Restricting ourselves to less than half the population and still getting a full TF team together might be significant (and there were *tons* of tanks and scrappers on - if so many of them weren't already on teams, it'd have been even easier).

Hm. If it were a simple linear falloff after 80, it would be something like:

Fury from attacking: 5 - (floor(fury-80))/4
Fury from being attacked: 2.5 - (floor(fury-80))/8

If you get up to 87 fury through that attack string alone, then at 87 the decay must exactly equal the production. That string normally produces 3.78 fury/sec, so it's producing ~52% of its usual fury at 87. Thats.... actually pretty close to what a linear falloff would give (65%). Allowing for some variation due to the discrete nature of attacking, it might actually be as simple as that.

We should do some data collection. If anyone wants to go beat up the RWZ dummies with their brute and report the attack chain used and maximum sustainable fury levels, we could test this some more.

No beeps, this case doesn't have a built in speaker so there wouldn't be any beeps regardless. The computer doesn't shut itself back off, it just sits there whooshing away until I force it back off by holding in the power button.

Double checking the connections is probably a good idea. I'm sure that there isn't anything completely disconnected as I'm actually using the computer right now (it eventually did boot up on the nth try), but I guess there could be something loose or intermittent. Unfortunately, I don't have any other video cards laying around to test with.

Hey all, I recently put together a new computer and, while it worked fine for a while, it seems that I've got a problem of some sort now.

Simply put, it won't boot all of a sudden. When I push the power button, instead of the usual bit of hard drive noise and a quiet fan whirr, I get a loud whooshing sound as of a fan running flat out and nothing comes up on the screen.

Opening the case, I believe I have determined that the whooshing sound is the video card fan running at top speed. That would make me wonder if the video card has died, except for the fact that none of my peripherals light up - no light under my mouse or on my speakers. That makes me suspicious of a motherboard failure.

I did have one possible precursor issue. A couple of weeks ago, it hard crashed in the middle of a game with the same loud whooshing sound. I forced it to power down by holding in the switch and it afterwards booted just fine. I don't know if it would be related, but I figured I'd mention it here.

My specs are exactly as we eventually decided on in this thread. Does anyone have any suggestions for diagnosing this problem?

[edit: If I do need to return something, the deadline for newegg to replace or refund it will be friday... so help would be appreciated soonish.]

[edit edit: Ok, I dunno what to think now. I remembered that the motherboard has leds on it, so I tried to turn it on one more time to see if they flashed or anything - and the darn thing booted. I'm still worried, because I doubt it would just do this randomly if there wasn't still something wrong in there somewhere. Still open to suggestions...]