Obitus

Yeah, and even at that the customization UI for Incarnate powers is a little cludgy, forcing you to pick through every single slottable option. (Or you can just hit 'Bright' or 'Dark' for all of them and pay through the nose.) In any case, and for what little it's worth, my guess is that the devs were willing to let the UI go through in its semi-cludgy state for Incarnates because:

• thus far, it's only three powers, with a maximum of five more on the way, and
• Incarnate powers come very late in a character's progression.

That second point is key, I think. If the devs took a similar approach with power pools -- just throwing every single pool and every single power at you every time you entered the tailor screen after level four, new players might get turned off. Long-timers might protest that they don't care about the UI; I certainly wouldn't care -- but there is something to be said for professional pride. If you can't do something to a certain standard, you can't release it even if all your customers clamor for it.

Anyway, there is a limited workaround. If you don't mind turning off all persistent effects around your character's avatar, then you can type:

/supressclosefxdist 255

And then:

/suppressclosefx 1

It works great, IME, for natural-themed characters. For other characters, I usually just grin and bear the Hasten/etc effects that I don't like. To switch effects back on, you just change that 1 to a 0. (or disable Suppress Effects option in your Options-Graphics&Audio window)

Immobilize resistance it is, then.

Ah yes, but do you often see pure-typed Fire/Cold attacks*? Under what circumstances do you see them? Are you usually surrounded (and thus probably soft-capped regardless because of Invincibility's scaling)? Do those attacks often carry -DEF debuffs with them (as Lethal/Energy attacks do)?

Usually, I'd be the first to tell you that a lot of these build decisions are subjective, based on play style. In this case, unless you have an amazingly atypical playstyle, it's pretty clear that Fire/Cold DEF is less valuable than Psi on an Invuln build. Fire/Cold DEF is definitely and vastly less valuable than Smash/Lethal/Energy/Negative DEF. The applicable attacks are rare enough that they're not worth building around. Inspirations do exist.

If you want to cap Fire/Cold, then that's fine. Fire/Cold DEF is not useless. Soft-capped Fire/Cold DEF is not worth making any significant compromise elsewhere, though, not when you'll probably end up with F/C DEF north of 30% just by accident.

[* - Fire/Cold attacks are often also typed as Smash/Lethal for the purpose of opposing DEF. Dual-typing is one of the main reasons that Invuln builds, which have high innate S/L RES, still bother to soft-cap S/L DEF.]

You really don't need Nerve to soft-cap an Invuln build to S/L/E/N. Fire and Cold DEF are virtually irrelevant throughout the game's content -- and INV basically can't avoid boosting those categories to very respectable levels anyway. Boosting Psi DEF is more worthwhile, once you've got the S/L/E/N bases covered, than pursuing the cap to F/C, but if you want appreciable levels of Psi DEF, you're probably not going to do so comfortably on a tight budget.

Don't have time to go through the whys and wherefores, but I'll link to a Scrapper thread that illustrates the principles I'm describing, at various levels of expenditure. Even that is probably a waste of breath, given the way these build discussions tend to go, but here you go anyway.

The problem is that now you're getting into standard-code-rant territory. In principle, sure -- if it's easy for the devs to give the Defender IO set a small enhancement bonus to all/most buff/debuff powers (as they did for all/most control types for Controllers and Dominators), then there's no good reason Defenders shouldn't have that comprehensive bonus instead.

But AFAIK, some of the bonuses you'd need aren't in any IO set, and we have no way of knowing how easy or hard it would be to incorporate them into this one particular IO set. And since we're discussing an absolutely miniscule bonus to begin with -- the kind of throwaway bonus that CoH players shrug and accept every day in the pursuit of better, attendant bonuses -- I'm not sure it's reasonable to ask for an unprecedented replacement.

For all I know the heal proc that comes with the Defender set will be far better than anything other ATs get. Or worse. Who knows? Certainly, I think it's fair to say that a heal proc is more useful to builds that don't have heals. That's worth considering for those who feel like they've been left out in the cold by the small bonus to heal strength in the set.

The last numbers I saw put the Energy and Negative DoTs at exactly the same damage as Reactive's (not including the -RES debuff). The Psi/Toxic DoTs were at half of Reactive's damage.

Then Arbiter Hawk posted his comment about raising the Psi/Toxic DoT damage, but he didn't say by how much. Since the Character Copy Tool has been down for ages, and since I don't feel like asking a dev for a level bump and then outfitting a build through Empyrean Merits on the Beta server, I can't test any of that stuff myself unless it's on live. You may have been looking at different/better numbers, or I may be misremembering.

In any case, for me it's wait and see.

Yeah, I saw Arbiter Hawk's post in the Beta forum about increasing the psi/toxic DoTs' damage, but I haven't seen any hard numbers yet so I don't feel qualified to offer an opinion. "More damage than half of the others," isn't a precise enough statement for me to consider those options seriously. Is it 60% of Reactive's damage? 75%? 80%?

In any case, I agree with you in principle about the -maxHP and the -end debuffs, but again I don't think the secondary effects matter much in practice, because most people on most of their characters are likely to stop at Tier 3. And if we're going to bother evaluating, say, Pre-emptive on the basis that -end is more useful than immobilize, then it's also worth mentioning that Energy damage is probably more often resisted by PvE targets than Negative damage is.

Part of what makes Reactive uber even now, in other words, is that it combines a universally appealing secondary effect and a generally very favorable damage type (fire). I don't think any of the new Interface options are going to be as good, on paper, as Reactive if you consider all of those things, but there are mitigating circumstances that make the comparison much more even.

Eh, the -RES debuff is negligible in normal content (against minions/lieuts and even bosses). Against harder targets, the -RES is more useful, but it also doesn't stack very well; against harder targets, you're more likely to be teamed, in which case there's a good chance the -RES debuff will quickly reach its stacking limit of four.

On the subject of stacking, the DoT has a stacking limit in teams too, and since most every existing Incarnate already has Reactive, the other options will be more valuable at least in the short term.

And then there's the fact that a lot of people are going to be content stopping at Tier 3 for their Incarnate powers. At tier 3, the Reactive option with the best DoT offers no -RES.

So as a practical matter, I consider Spectral and Preemptive functionally equivalent to Reactive. The psi and Toxic Interface options do less damage, last I heard. YMMV and all that jazz.

More to the point of the thread, I took Spectral Interface (@ tier 3) on my Blaster yesterday. The visual effect is really cool; it's a yellow-black whirlpool at the target's feet, almost as if they're getting sucked into the pits of hell. If you have an infernal-flavor to your character, Spectral's a great fit

A no-expense-spared INV/SS Tank build can do things an analogous Brute build can't. Perhaps most notably, a Tanker can more easily boost Psi DEF because he has to spend fewer resources to boost everything else.

There are pros/cons to both choices. I'm pretty happy with my uber-expensive Tanker. I explicitly and exhaustively compared the possibilities of an analogous Brute build, and found the Tanker superior for my purposes. For your purposes, the Brute may well be better and if that's the case more power to you.

But I don't think you can make a case that spending (virtual) billions on a Brute is unambiguously better or worse than spending the same amount on a Tanker.

[Edit for clarity: It just occured to me that you may have read my comment that your bulid spends billions for very low offense as an indictment of the Tanker AT. I didn't mean it that way; my Tanker has very good offense. What I meant was that your build spends billions and has anemic offense even by Tanker standards; you can't make a good attack chain out of Jab, Haymaker, Hurl, and KO Blow no matter what your global recharge is. In order to have what I would consider good single-target offense, you need to have Punch at the very least, or preferably Gloom/Fire Blast/Mu Lightning. And if you're going to opt not to have good single-target offense, that's fine, but then at least you should consider bolstering your AoE offense. Footstomp is great, but by itself it's not gonna win any awards. Worse still, your build doesn't have the endurance management to handle spamming Footstomp along with your other attacks.]

Super Roy. He's the best.

I'm showing your ranged DEF @ 33.6%, and your psionic DEF @ 32.4%. There isn't enough difference between those two numbers to justify the investment in ranged DEF.

Toggles versus recovery is a decent at-a-glance measure of a build's endurance viability, and endurance viability is admittedly somewhat subjective: if popping a blue after five attack cycles is ok for you, I can't tell you you're wrong. But if you really wanna get a feel for how end-viable a build is, you have to look at attack chains, average end cost of things like Hasten and Rage and Performance Shifter, AoE cycles, that sort of thing.

Without trying to construct a decent on-paper attack chain out of Jab, Haymaker, and KO Blow (which would give you rather pathetic DPS no matter how you mix and match them), I am immediately drawn to Footstomp's end slotting. The Obliteration set is notoriously bad with respect to End reduction. If all you do is cycle Footstomp every time it recharges, you'll burn 15.62 / (5.93 + 2.244) = 1.91 EPS. That's almost your entire net recovery right there. Toss on Rage, which at best will cost an average of (111.8 * 0.25 + 2.99) / 120 = 0.25 EPS, and Hasten, which will cost on average about 15 / 130 = 0.11 EPS, and you don't have a lot of room to do anything else.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be playable; I'm saying I wouldn't pay what it would cost to play it. Alternatively, I'm trying to say that you don't need Nerve Alpha; if you're not going to take Energy Mastery, then the obvious choice is Cardiac Alpha.

Endurance is going to be a problem. Spending that much inf and coming away with that little offense (even regardless of endurance) is probably not a good investment, either.

You're on the right track, IMO, with your use of Impervium Armor and Apocalypse, but you kinda brute-forced your way to high DEF through toggles/Nerve Alpha. The use of Mako's and Gaussian is questionable, and you're not making use of the resources available in APP/Patron pools (either supplemental attacks in Mu/Pyre/Soul, or Regen/Endurance in Energy).

[Edit: And because I don't want to fall into the all-too-common forumite trend of only posting to criticize or correct, here's a link to my version of a no-expense-spared INV/SS.]

I didn't buy Beam Rifle because I have no interest in a rifle-toting super hero. That's just a subjective preference; the only reason I mention it is to explain that I neither have, nor intend to have, any personal experience with the set.

Ordinarily, my lack of personal experience wouldn't necessarily stop me from trying to analyze a set, but in this case we're talking about a set with new and non-standard mechanical quirks. And because Beam Rifle is a brand-new set, City of Data hasn't, AFAIK, been updated to include it. I'm sure there are others out there who'd be willing to indulge you, but I'm not gonna bother for the time being.

To your point about Regen debuffs: yes, regen debuffs will influence your time-to-kill against a hard target. In a solo situation, regen debuffs are analogous to DPS, but they're still not equivalent because their DPS value varies wildly based on the target. So in this sort of analysis, it's impossible to assign a regen debuff a fixed DPS number.

Better simply to figure out your DPS and then add your regen debuff's DPS score on a target-by-target basis. For instance, if I want to estimate how well my Cold Defender will do against a Pylon, I can just add 127 * (5 * 0.15) = about 95 DPS onto my damage output.

Anyway, if I'm not mistaken, Beam Rifle's -Regen is pretty low. It's worth noting that AVs/GMs at higher levels have absolutely absurd debuff resistance. That's why my Defender's 500% regen debuff gets modified by 0.15 in the above estimate. If you're looking at, say, 100% regen debuff from Beam Rifle, then your virtual DPS against a Pylon would be 127 * (1 * 0.15) = 19ish. Not nothing, but not a whole hell of a lot either.

I doubt very much that Beam Rifle will beat out Fire by any significant margin.

Yes, that's why I suggested it. The above-quoted point was made several times in the other thread.

If the objection here really is in principle -- if you really don't care how useful the bonus is as long as it can technically apply to everyone -- then Immobilize Resistance is a fair replacement. If, on the other hand, the objection is that the heal bonus isn't practically and noticeably useful to all Defenders, the issue becomes much stickier; most non-DEF, non-Recharge bonuses in every AT-specific IO set become fair game to question.

I hereby nominate Nihilii as the new Minister of Pithy Walkthroughs.

(Seriously, I'm gonna link people to this post when I'm in a League queued up for Keyes.)

That's the thing. Regen does reward exceptional build and playstyle, but the rewards are psychological. Mechanically, there is no reward at the extreme high end.

From the devs' point of view, the extreme high end is only one very small factor in their balance scheme, and Regen performs admirably in the lower-middle range. The Scrapper-Forumite point of view is different, heavily skewed towards the extreme high end of bleeding edge builds -- but as you can see, even here we have people who place a lot of value on the intangible reward of knowing that they, as players, have as much to do with their success as their builds do.

So for good or ill, Regen is what it is, and it isn't likely to change. The complaints about Regen come from a small subset of a small subset of the player base, and those complaints concern a small subset of the builds in the game (heavily IOed level 50 builds).

Personally, Regen isn't my cup of tea, but that's not a bad thing. I think there's kind of an unconscious presumption that personal taste shouldn't be a huge factor in distinguishing melee defensive sets, because they're all designed to do basically the same thing. But why not? Every other AT offers absolutely monumental differences in playstyle from power set to power set (compare, say, a Force Field to a Storm Defender). When you really think about it, it's not only healthy that Regen should offer a distinct play style; from a design perspective, it's actually kind of impressive that Regen manages to do that without compromising too much on raw performance.

I also think that Regen gets an unusual amount of criticism simply because the way the set plays now is different from how it used to play; if Regen had been introduced as-is, people would be much more inclined to shrug and move on if Regen's play style didn't suit them. Instead, people who've come back to the game over the years find that a character they already had plays in a wholly different way that's frankly unfixable, no matter how much influence or iTrial grinding they throw at it.

That's a very good point.

Back before Incarnates, I would have said that's a great approach to take. Nowadays, eh. Interface gives everyone a healthy DPS boost (which is multiplied by pets, but less so by pseudo pets like Tornado/Water Spout), and Lore potentially gives everyone WTFUber DPS 1/3rd of the time.

Arguably, single-target DPS as a whole category of performance is much less valuable than it used to be; I like it because it's one of the simpler measuring sticks, but when push to comes to shove, if what you want is general-purpose performance, you can afford to skimp a little on the single-target DPS front.

TL;DR - It certainly wouldn't hurt to have Water Spout, but since it's mutually exclusive with a decent general-purpose Patron/APP AoE attack, I think someone like Vauluur would be happier with a different option.

Ah, ok. That does make a big difference.

Still, KnockUP on a mindless pet can be pretty chaotic too. If Water Spout is anything like Psionic Tornado, for instance (also KnockUP), it'll still spread mobs around a good bit. Personally, I'd rather build up my defenses to the point where I don't need that sort of extra panic-button utility, and then use a more traditional Patron AoE attack.

You'll get more damage out of Fireball or Ball Lightning or even Exploding Shuriken. If you want the Coralax pet then more power to you (there are some good IO bonuses in pet sets too), but for general purpose play I think your best bet is Mu or Blaze. Or you take Body Mastery for the extra end management, which opens up your Alpha choices.

Secondary Mutation has a random chance of giving you either a positional or a typed DEF buff (among other things). That's a little different from totally excluding one side or the other.

I can't imagine the devs would deliberately design Storm Kick arbitrarily to provide a huge benefit to some Tanker Primaries and not to others. A few years back, we had a major dust up about that very thing; people were annoyed that Force Field gave no benefit to SR Scrappers, and it was eventually fixed because there was no defensible reason for the discrepency. The original designers of the game had, at times, some pretty off-the-wall ideas about balance, but I think we've left most of them well behind us.

None of that is to say that Storm Kick definitely does provide typed DEF, and especially Psionic-typed DEF, but I'd say that if it doesn't provide typed DEF then it's probably a bug. Will have to check later, in game.

Fair enough.

Yes, of course. From NCSoft's point of view, whatever they spend on Customer Service is part of their budget for CoH. The only point I was making is that it probably costs NCSoft less. You can have a CS agent answer calls on multiple games, or even if each one only handles one game, they can all be based in the same place.

In other words, I was trying to distinguish between employment costs that can be wholly applied to Paragon's budget (whatever that is), and employment costs that are only partially applied, in some cases probably at a small fraction of what they would cost otherwise. It's like outsourcing to your host company, and I imagine that it's pretty standard procedure for a game's publisher to leverage its greater resources in that sort of way.

But hey, I probably shouldn't have opened my (virtual) mouth. Seems I was way off. In any case, we're no closer to knowing what the profit margin is (or isn't); on first glance the OP looked pretty encouraging to me. Now, it's the obvious wait and see.

Again, I'm just going on my foggy memory. I'm not one of those people who hangs on the webcasts or even knows what any of the devs looks like in RL. That said, the photo you link was just before what I gather was a rather massive round of layoffs. The staff was at its peak to produce Going Rogue.

In was, in fact, in discussions referring to those layoffs, months later, where I heard the staff number I used earlier. Could be wrong, but I don't think I'm 200% wrong.

Yes, NCSoft probably handles most/all of that stuff, and at considerably lower cost than Paragon would incur if it tried to make do without a publisher.

I'd be amazed if Paragon Studios were solely responsible for staffing Customer/Tech Support. NCSoft can probably handle it a lot cheaper.

Don't know from experience, but the patch notes seem to think not:

Well, I'll be the first to admit I don't keep up on the happenings at Paragon Studios, but the last I heard their staff was in the high teens. Even if we (generously) assume that everyone on the payroll costs $100k to employ, that's an upper bound of $2 million per year for staffing.

So, ok, maybe I was too hasty. Still, if all the rest of it (buying/maintaining equipment, cost of running offices, etc) costs more than another $2 million I'd be greatly surprised. So let's say $4 million in cost. That'd still give you a healthy overhead.

But like I said, standard business rant applies. Suffice to say that I don't think an MMO's operating costs 7+ years later are going to be anywhere near where they are at launch.