Nihilii

In my proposed chain CS would also recharge BU as AS has the Hide proc.

Starting with BU CS BU would mean you'd have to hold off onto AS until CS is recharged to get the Hide proc going off at the right time as to get CS crits. It also makes it more awkward to fit BU into the rotation... Well, IMHO. If someone has a working chain, I'm all ears.

I've been trying to crunch the numbers and I just can't find a better chain than this. People seem to love CS due to the perma BU potential, but the animation is so long it seems detrimental to use it at all, from a pure single target damage over time perspective.

Best chain I could make up using CS is BU AS CS SB BB AS SB BB. Assuming a constant +80% damage buff, I'm getting 258 DPS for it.

SB BB QS AS, assuming only one hide proc every 3 AS uses (as the chain itself is 4.752s), does 246 DPS before BU is factored in, and 264 DPS with it (assuming 25s recharge).

Adding Musculature, Reactive and Hybrid would skew the balance further towards the SB BB QS AS chain; lower overall damage buff means getting more from Musc and Hybrid, faster animations means getting more from Reactive and Hybrid.

This is all theorycraft, hence why I'm sharing and looking for input. I don't have a level 50 KM stalker. One big real gameplay advantage I could see on any chain involving CS and permaBU is the substantially better tohit you'd have on average.

Haven't put too much thought into it, but at the moment I plan to slot the entire set in HB, which is essentially a "free" set power right now for me (5 CI + 1 mako proc), and the only spot where I can stick a full set without losing a purple damage proc.

I have definitely noticed the same change as Simon, although I'm not sure it was a mere year ago. Used to be instantaneous, now it takes 2 seconds to update. That change decreased my survivability significantly (defense debuffs becoming much harder to monitor).

I've always assumed it was a physical location thing (I live in EU). I used to get the same problem with the market, which has been fixed at around the same time.

If you are free-to-play, you're earning a lot less cash than VIPs as you don't get salvage and recipes. This stuff is where the big bucks are, on the ingame market.

Having enough to buy SOs can be a struggle on a f2p first character up until lvl 35 or so. You're not doing anything wrong.

You should post your global here, so people can send you at least enough inf to afford SOs.

Probably not going to go with T4 Degen in the near future, as it's not as useful as Reactive against low rank stuff in solo play.

Without even checking the numbers I'm willing to bet Musc would be better DPS for your build. 0.1s is a tiny gap to start with.

On ELA I like Barrier above all. Stacking resists on top of already high resists is very efficient (90% res takes half as much damage as 80% res, for example). Defense is what ELA needs, and the enormous burst values for ten seconds after cast serve as an efficient defense debuff counter as well.

Why not Ageless? ELA already gets powerful end management tools and recharge.

Why not Rebirth? ELA already gets a decent heal and regen.

Cooldown starts at the end of the animation. There will be 10 seconds between the two animations in your hypothetical example.

It's a blind auction. The highest bidder gets the item listed for the lowest price.

Example: say there's 3 of a particular item currently for sale. 1 of them (A) is listed at 4,111,111, 1 of them (B) is listed at 5,000,000, 1 of them (C) is listed at 5,500,000. If someone comes and places a 6M bid, he'll receive A.

There's no way to know what price people have listed their items for, save for guesswork. It's generally safe to assume most items are listed for less than the prices shown in the "last 5 sales" window.

Got my StJ/Ice to 50, mostly IOed out but with a few important holes here and there - all in all, missing ~35% recharge, fury of the glad -res proc, 7% S/L def, 3% res and some enhancement % in various powers. No accolades or incarnates yet.

First try => 06:54, or 220 DPS, using SB HB AS CU SB HB AS SC, trying to use misc clicks instead of HB as needed.

Seems about right, considering the current build shortcomings, and my original calcs not taking into account AS miss before CU (also forcing a SC use as to get the Hidden status back on CU) and the less than 100% chance to get an AS stack from SB and HB.

The issue with the heal is, as far as I can tell, it's got a 3 second animation and the heal only occurs at the end of it. By the time you receive the heal, you might have already recovered or died.

It says it has a 8 second recharge but the pet doesn't seem to want to use it nearly as often as that, even if you're consistently injured, in my limited experience with the tier2 so far.

"Claim all" is nasty. Avoid like the plague.

Another thing that could stand to be looked at is the way memorized recipes are opened by default in your crafting tab. It might not seem like such a big deal when you sit down and craft anyway, but in the middle of a mission when you're trying to sort useful recipes from deletable ones while punching dudes, having to click on the tiny arrow to close the memorized recipe list down every single time gets old, especially as you're going to have to do that dozens, hundreds, thousands of times.

I specifically go out of my way to avoid getting memorization badges for that reason. Surely that can't be intended.

HMFIC- WM is about the same on brutes and scrappers, and Shield is undoubtedly better on scrappers. So WM/SD is better on scrappers. There is nothing wrong with a WM/SD brute, but you'd have to look very hard and pick very specific scenarios to find performance reasons to play it instead of a WM/SD scrapper.

If you want the "why" in a nutshell:
- Shield has a very potent aggro aura, removing one of the reasons for going brute rather than scrapper, aggro.
- Shield typically doesn't hit the scrapper HP cap even once IOed out with accolades, so the higher brute HP cap isn't meaningful save for outside buffs (which are relatively rare anyway).
- Shield has a damage boosting aura, which works roughly twice better on scrappers; scrappers get slightly better damage mods, and their damage not being reliant on Fury they get much more out of any damage buff (due to their base damage being much higher).
- Shield doesn't hit the scrapper resistance cap, although it can come close while using the T9, so brute higher resistance caps don't play too much of a role... Solo.

This latest point is one area where the scrapper SD vs brute SD comparison isn't so clear cut, as resistance buffs are relatively common, and with i.e. Barrier and/or Cardiac a brute can easily go above 75% S/L at times.

On every other aspect, the scrapper gets all the benefits of the brute while also having much more damage not dependent on chasing the fury bar.

If you're only level 7 I'd strongly suggest a reroll to the scrapper version, unless you prefer brutes (again, the brute version is just fine; the scrapper is just better).

Rebirth roughly doubles your survivability if you only consider its lowest value (which you'll always have, at T4). Realistically, it's better than that as the heal + burst part can save your hide.

Likewise, Barrier at its lowest point is a hefty survivability boon against S/L, potentially close to double based on your resistance alone, and there's the added defense to consider. Just like Rebirth, it's even stronger in actual gameplay as having the option to bump your resistances to 90% and your defenses to elude-like levels for ten seconds is essentially a get out of jail free card available every two minutes.

From everything I read on the topic (which is, really, a bunch of Hopeling posts here and there), it should be a buff for anything but extremely low recharge powers, like GC or Neutrino's Bolt. So even if GC takes a hit, Katana as a whole is likely to end up better - Gaussian proc in BU, and so on.

Haven't even bothered to play the market in the last year. If they ever sell sarcasm amplifiers for inf, I promise I'll buy you the 8 hour one.

Adding to what Kitsune said, as someone who's been sitting on 100B inf and loves rerolling, I'd definitely drop some of it on power amplifiers if I had the option to do so.

As a matter of fact, just yesterday I was buying the temp recovery buff, noticed these recipes alongside and was hoping I could buy one, only to be disappointed seeing 0 for sale.

I much prefer Rebirth than Barrier on any invul - which doesn't invalidate the argument /inv on brutes beats /inv on scrappers, hovering around 3k hp rather than about 2.4k means 25% more hitpoints recovered per second. When we're talking about ~700% regen at the lowest point, this is a significant difference.

A few external resistance buffs, or sturdies, can also dramatically improve your survivability in some situations. 90% res takes 0.4 as much damage as 75% res (or 75% res takes 2.5 times as much damage as 90% res), and it only takes +15% to go from 75% to 90%.

One potential downside is, lacking any endurance management, the loss of CP can be a hurdle if you build for highend performance. Not impossible to manage by any means, but it will imply a greater build focus on endurance reduction/recovery than your average scrapper with CP will need to have.

Procs in toggles only get a chance to proc every 10 seconds.

I think it's generally best to go through Wentsworth/Black Market now, unless you've got something that can't be obtained anymore, like costume codes, level 51 and above HOs or base salvage.

If you glance at the first page of topics made on this subforum, it goes back a month and there's not a single "regular" IO sale in there. While a level 10 Shield Wall unique is definitely on the rare side of things, it's still relatively easy to get now with converters and whatnot.

IMHO, just take a look at the Last Five window, put yours for sale for some price between the lowest and highest, and sit back while the market does its magic.

So you can't reach the same performance level I can, yet I'm the one "doing it wrong".

I'm not saying anyone has to run +4/x8 arachnos. It's just a random benchmark point for performance. You could pick a lower setting, but it wouldn't prove the statement that "properly built Controllers practically never even get ATTACKED in the first place - they effectively have no need of DEF/RES enhancement at all", as a positive result could just as well mean you stopped raising the difficulty too soon to see a need for defense or resistance.

Likewise, you can go through most of the solo content with Brawl alone, no powers, no enhancements, on -1/x1. That doesn't mean there isn't any use for better powers or enhancements at all.

Now if anyone wanted to spin the original argument into "for most people", "for normal playing", or whatever, I could agree with that sentiment.

(Perhaps. I think I'd still argue against it as you can build for optimal mezzes and then stack def on top, and obviously A + B > A; but I wouldn't argue as vehemently.)

The original thoughts expressed in this thread are clearly that defense and resistance aren't needed, period, though; and for those claims to be true they have to hold true at the highest levels of performance.

I'd love to know what does the aforementioned well-played controller without defenses do to take on a solo +4/x8 arachnos mission at any kind of decent speed.

As, you know, this is something I can do on my poorly built controller who dares to use defense as a primary mitigation tool; and since obviously that makes me a terrible player, I have no doubt people here should be able to top what I can do.