Murdok

Originally Posted by Wicked_Wendy

So I am curious aside from the obvious nerf to PvP exactly what don't you like about 13?

Lets see it gave us Cimerora and the ITF..very possibly the most popular TF in game today.. certain the one played the most.

The start of the merit system which gave players yet another way to obtain high cost recipes and salvage they needed to pump up their characters.

It started Dual builds which many players, myself included, use to have one build designed for solo play and another for teaming.

and while not as important as those first few it introduced the Day Job system which allowed players to gain added badges and temp powers.


Oh and this was the issue that changed the patron power options Villain side and let every villain above 40 respec out of the patron powers they had and pick any they liked.. which all of us can do now. Run Mako's Arc pick Ghost Widows Powers!

For those of us that care the prices changed on just about everything in your Super Group base and suddenly even smalled Sgs had HUGE well equipped bases.. was the last really good thing they did for SG bases to date.

Oh and two new power sets Poison for Villains finally an answer to giving villains a set like empathy and SD tanks, scrappers, and brutes.

You know over all aside from the PvP issue that sounds like a pretty good deal considering all it cost was the same 15 dollars a month we were paying before I-13 and still paying after 1-20.

Originally Posted by Werner

I admit it - I'm impressed with what you did without purples or PvPs. I wouldn't play it with over ten seconds of OUCH every other or maybe two out of three cycles (didn't compute recharge on Geas itself). I'd save this for top dollar purple and PvP levels of recharge and fewer compromises on other aspecs of survivability (and even then only if I expected to face very high levels of to hit on a routine basis). But still, interesting.

I'll have to see how Ageless works. I haven't looked at the I20 stuff. Maybe it'll let me pull something like this off with a high budget Dark Melee/Super Reflexes even though it's harder than Spines or Claws. I'm curious about "impossible" recharge chains like Shadow Punch -> Smite -> Siphon Life (446% recharge) or Midnight Grasp -> Smite -> Siphon Life (456% recharge), and I can't get the idea of an extreme build like this out of my head even though I'd hate sitting in Hibernate and a traditional build would be better for most content. You're a horrible person for doing this to me.

Originally Posted by Dispari

I agree though, Elude is silly. I don't have it, don't want it.

Originally Posted by Person34

I've done some testing with my 3 widow builds, here's my view on it:

- Teaming: it's really gonna depend on what leadership skills you take, across the board it's all the same really as all branches have access to all the same team powers. Only difference I can see is the fortunata path has a slower activating mind link, so you will need to ensure it is perma to best benefit both youself and your team.

- AoE: Fort has an edge here with the addition of psy tornado (which is actually pretty decent, just long cast and costs a ton of end) and the phenomenal psy wail. They also have aura of confusion, which does some -serious- AE damage if used right. NWs get evicerate, a killer cone that not everyone is crazy about. NW's psy scream does better damage than the forts though, but not by much. Both get spin and dart burst, two very nice attacks.

- Burst: vs. single targets it's NW, hands down. Forts have nothing in their pool that compares to slash, and a BU slash crit from hide with muscular core alpha and double assaults can hit for 850+ easy. Best burst attack forts get is either lunge from hide or shatter armor.

Also, NWs have the better DPS, backing the blood widow attacks with mental training and slash. I can sustain 225 DPS on my NW, which translates into a 6:55 pylon defeat. I can't break 8 minutes with my melee fort. There are folks who say they have comparable melee dps, I've just never seen it first hand and this is with purposely testing it out across builds. But again, as mentioned earlier, forts have more AE options than NWs, which probably balances things out.

My 3 builds are a pure NW, a pure fort and a blood widow that backs her standard attack chain chain of FU, swipe, lunge and spin with few select fort powers (aim, dominate, AoC and psy wail, with 2 procs is all melee atacks <--- prob the most fun of the 3 to play for me). All 3 are IOed to the gills w/ permahasten, 1500 minimum hps, etc. I'm only pointing this out because I want to show that the builds are comparable for the testing, that it isn't a 10 billion inf build up against a SOed build.

To be completely honest though, even though the NW is a melee powerhouse and the fort has better AEs they all perform about the same in standard PvE. It was only through pylon testing that I was able to get a good idea of how much bette the NW is over the fort in single target damage. Outside of that I would have never known because they all feel "powerful" when shredding enemies on maps. If your are going to do something crazy like solo AVs, the NW has the edge. Against hordes of minions/lts, a fort's psy wail is unmatched. But in general gameplay I don't see a clear edge one has over the other.

Edit: just did some testing on my fort, they are capable of decent burst if specced for melee: vs a 50 equinox archon I hit with lunge for 524 and shatter armor for 649. Kinda what makes widows rock, they can do well across the board regardless of how they are built.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

I've probably stared at this build longer than I've though about all other builds for all other characters in seven years combined. Its really easy to get trapped in Mids and never get around to building and playing, so just decided to build it. And on the subject of Elude vs soft-cap, another decision I agonized over was Super Jump or Elude. Not a near-perma Elude of course, but a panic button Elude. I decided I wanted the travel, but I was biting my lip on that one also. Murdok's build now has me questioning the decision also. I wouldn't want to live within Elude's non-perma restrictions myself, but the more I think about the advantages of Elude, the more I think it would be nice to have around. I guess I could live with Ninja run and jump pack temp powers.

Originally Posted by Werner

Made some more changes, some of them expensive. But now in comparison to Murdok's original build:

10% more global recharge
~3.5 seconds faster recharge on Elude
~5% higher defense while Elude is up (~1% lower when down. Yes, I know adding defense is silly, and recharge would be better, but insane defense is the point of the build. Might as well go for it.)
~20% higher smashing/lethal resistance
~3% higher resistance to everything else
49% more regeneration + Panacea proc
50 more hit points
Water Spout now slotted as an attack (or could swap for Spirit Shark for another 15 hit points)

I suspect there's still room to grow. There are a lot of options still.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

There are places Elude would be stronger than the soft-cap. The ITF is not one of those places. If your Eluder has better performance in the ITF than your soft-capped build, something is amiss with your soft-capped build.

The only reason my soft-capped SR doesn't tank ITFs is because she doesn't have taunt. There's nothing in the ITF that can penetrate her defenses except a bad-luck string of hits that Elude would do no better at deflecting.

My guess is that your "soft-capped" SR is *too* soft-capped: its dead-on 45% defense (you say "a little over 45%"). Mine sits at about 47% defense, which means I have a 2% cushion against defense debuffs. Which translates, after 95% DDR, to perfect protection against the first -40% defense debuff. If you are at exactly 45%, then even with 95% DDR some defense debuffs will leak through and elevate your tohit from the 5% floor (before accuracy) to something like 5.5% or even 6%. That's a whopping 20% increase in incoming damage and a significantly higher chance of having a string of hits take you out.

Some primaries can benefit a lot from ultrahigh recharge, but martial arts is not one of them so I went with a high survivability MA/SR build. It has about 47% defense to all positions, 14% defense to psionic, 19.9% resistance to smash/lethal before passive scaling resistances, 403% regeneration, 143.6% health, and aid self is recharging in about 7.1 seconds after cast and healing for 42.6% health (with Spiritual Core Paragon slotted).

My guess is that except for high tohit areas (which the ITF is not), selling out totally on recharge will radically outdamage my build, but it will come at the cost of being far less survivable. Every one of my SR builds prior to this one had Elude for those high tohit cases. This one doesn't, and to be honest what I've lost in those cases I think I've made up in being almost indestructible in most others.

Originally Posted by Sailboat

Not only has my soft-capped /SR scrapper never had any trouble durviving vast crowds of aggro on the ITF, but it hadn't occurred to me that any /SRwould have trouble with it. /SR pretty much completely neutralizes the Cimeroran defense debuffs.

Originally Posted by Doomguide

The real question here is what about running Elude is more fun. Is it the significantly improved +recovery, or +jump and +run speed over your soft capped build, for instance, or even the "rush" of knowing in 3 minutes I'm facing that crash (and may or may not have cleaned up most of the spawn), as it isn't the defense ... that's the whole point of all that number crunching 'soft cap' posting above.