Obitus

Those quotes get to the issue of what constitutes diversity. In a later post, Uber says the following:

I don't want to put words in Uber's mouth, but the above-quoted paragraph, written after the post you quoted, strongly suggests to me that he wasn't even acknowledging the average-player's-pool-powers metric that you so harshly criticized as undefinable until later. The above-quoted paragraph suggests to me that he feels the standard you lampooned is, in fact, useless.

Just as I feel it's useless. There are any number of factors apart from Inherent Stamina that may have equal or greater influence on build diversity, whether you evaluate build diversity as a population statistic or a measure of the game-design incentive. It has become easier and easier, for example, to justify not taking a travel power at all. Incarnate powers allow builds to do things they couldn't before. IO bonuses are probably the biggest factor of all, and their interaction with inherent Stamina could go either way (Fitness offers limited slottable set-bonus options).

Most recently, there's the whole Premium/VIP dichotomy, which is likely to change the diversity of builds across the population. But that's only relevant if we stipulate that the unknowable average player's behavior should be the standard by which we judge build diversity. FWIW, I don't, and the more I read the less likely it seems that anyone else in this thread really feels like that's the appropriate standard.

Does that mean that you're now taking the 5th path, of pointing out the 4th guy to seem cleverer-than-the-cleverer-than-the-third path? I guess this post marks me as also taking the 6th path of wondering about the 5th who points at the 4th who points at the 3rd? If I speculate about whether you'll take the 7th path in your reply, does that also mark me as taking the 8th?

Considering that I was already among the first two sides of this little discussion, that makes me very busy indeed.

Whatever the case may be, even you have to admit that given your signature and your everyone's-talking-out-of-his-**** approach, it sure does seem like you went out of your way not just to convey a point, but also to convey an attitude. I may disagree with Remus in this thread, but I've admired his posts on various subjects in the past, and his conduct here has remained for the most part respectful. You struck me as aiming for a different note.

Nothing personal, just how I saw it.

Superman, for one.

["Look, up in the sky! It's a bird; it's a plane; it's Superman!" "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound."]

Then you agree with a lot of people in this thread. The difference is that you chose to distort their position so you could paint yourself as the level-headed and above-it-all third party.

Arguing that Remus' position is unprovable doesn't require that we prove the opposite position. To my knowledge, no one has tried to do that. There have been counter-examples offered, and arguments that diversity may have increased based on what we can reasonably assume the game's design encourages people to do. But no one has tried to make the case that diversity has definitively risen in the wake of Inherent Stamina.

We don't need to poll the playerbase to discuss the game's design, by the way. Remus himself has disclaimed that the so-called "concept build" is exempt from whatever point he wants to make, so the average behavior of all players is only relevant to the extent that we judge those players as conforming to an arbitrary standard of optimization.

You are right about one thing: the whole discussion is rather silly if for no other reason than that inherent Stamina is but one of a host of factors influencing build diversity.

The big problem is that that's not a useful standard by which to judge diversity in the first place.

Ah, but what if those 6 powers are in 6 different pools? Powers to be spent on pools would be reduced to 4, but there's a wrinkle: you'd still have 2 free power slots which would have to be spent on Primary/Secondary/Ancillary powers, which would mean that even if every AT's constituent builds become more similar to each other, they would also necessarily become less similar to builds of other ATs.

You can call my reasoning here pure theorycraft, but it highlights one of the flaws of Remus' over-simplified premise. Who's to say that the number of power picks people have or even want to devote to power pools hasn't changed since Inherent Stamina? Builds in this game are more than the sum of their parts.

There are different ways to evaluate diversity, of which pool-power selection is only the most superficial.

Yeah, that is impressive. It's probably worth re-emphasizing that Blaze-Char-Blast requires an obscene amount of recharge to run seamlessly, though. Blaze needs to recharge in 2.772 seconds, which corresponds to ~433% recharge in the power.

Even with Spiritual Alpha, Hasten, and 100% in enhancement slotting, that's a minimum of about +131% in global recharge bonuses from IOs. Personally, I run Blaze-Dominate-Blast on my Mind/Fire, which is virtually identical to the Char variant we've been discussing, and I'm a big fan. Even with a small gap in the chain, it's well worth running. As Gavin notes above, the Char chain has a lot of practical perks.

But Incinerate has a much better DPA than Char. The only reason the Char chain is so competitive is that it theoretically allows you to use Blaze more often, not because Char itself is that good. TL;DR: At more reasonable levels of (perma-Dom) global recharge, the Char chain looks like it's going to be closer to 30 DPS worse* than the Incinerate chain (rather than the 4 DPS quoted above). The main perk of the Incinerate chain is that it's much easier to run seamlessly.

(* - An estimate based on the assumption that you'll have a 0.55 second gap in the Char chain, which corresponds to 360ish% recharge in the power.)

Interesting. Still, if you toss Reactive's DoT into the mix, Char ought to surpass Incinerate in DPA. Actually, never mind; just looked up the numbers and that doesn't seem to be true. Incinerate does more damage than I thought.

Before @ level 20: Most everyone had 12 discretionary power picks, of which 3 were Fitness.

After @ level 20: Everyone has 12 discretionary power picks, of which 1-3 might be any of the following -- Hasten, Combat Jumping, Hover, Travel (which could be Fly, Super Jump, Teleport, Speed), Recall Friend, Boxing/Kick/Tough/Weave, Manuevers/Assault/Tactics/Vengeance, Aid Other/Aid Self ...

The problem here is that we're looking at this from different angles: You're emphasizing the numerical diversity in powers on a given character -- in other words, comparing 3/12 before to 4/16 now. By that standard, diversity cannot have increased, and probably has decreased, because the proportion of powers-in-common is, at best, the same.

I'm emphasizing the practical, effective difference in how each character plays based on its power selection. Toss aside Fitness (which is now inherent, and thus now universally shared) for a second, and how likely is it that any given character has the same number of its discretionary powers -- AKA the powers they use -- in common? It's less likely, extremely less likely. Characters will thus play more distinctively than they did before.

Your concept might be simple, but it's abstract to the point of irrelevance.

That's not how people build, in my experience. Pre-Issue-19 Stamina required three powers, usually by level 20. That had a ripple effect on how players selected powers up through at least 30. That's why I suggested earlier that pre-inherent-Fitness was a burden that sometimes discouraged me from building this-or-that new character; when I roll a new character, I want to see its distinctive powers as soon as I can.

Now, I spend more of my initial picks on Primary/Secondary powers as I level up. To the extent that I dip into pool powers at all by level 30, it's usually the typical two from a Travel pool. Then usually (once I've got a feel for which Primary/Secondary powers I can skip) I twink my alts when they hit 30ish with IOs and respec into a build that can benefit more from expensive pool toggles and/or Hasten.

All of that said, you're handwaving just how many so-called desirable pool powers there are. Looking at the list above, it's hard to fathom how anyone could suggest that even dedicated min/maxers are going to end up with a consistently uniform selection of pool powers, even on builds with analogous ATs/sets. Further, even if we accept your premise that people take the same power pools across the board, you'd almost need to twink to take a significant number of them by level 30.

Yeah. To argue on the one hand that people gravitate to the same selection of less-generally-attractive-than-Stamina pool powers now, and dismiss on the other hand that they gravitated to Stamina before, is logically inconsistent. Of the available non-Fitness pool powers, there are definitely a few that are more attractive than the rest, but none so much more attractive in the general case than Stamina used to be. So on average, diversity goes up by default.

Also, as Uberguy implied, even if we take it as given that builds of the same AT/sets are more similar than they used to be, having people take more of their Primary/Secondary powers means that each AT/set is more distinct from others. That is especially true as you're leveling up: before Issue 19, if you were in a level 20 team consisting of a Tanker, a Defender, and a Controller, there was a significant chance that all three of those characters shared 2 or 3 of their 12 discretionary powers, because they all wanted Fitness. Nowadays, the Tanker gets taunt and defenses sooner; the Defender gets her buffs sooner; and the Controller gets his controls sooner. Each is more distinctively itself at least up through the mid-30s.

It's all well and good to look at power distribution on paper at level 50, but in actual practice I find there's more diversity not just in the builds I'm prone to design myself; there's a much clearer dividing line throughout the level range among the various builds I encounter on teams.

And your last point is worth emphasizing, too. If there has been a decrease in build diversity lately, inherent Fitness ain't the cause. If there can be said to be a problem, it's Incarnate powers, and those are only relevant for a small subset of the builds in the game. Fittingly enough, the iTrials that lead to Incarnate powers also arguably diminish the effective (or noticeable) diversity of ATs and builds, simply because they require so many players.

Yeah, I think it's worth emphasizing and re-emphasizing that what we're discussing here are two builds with identical power sets. The fact that they can be even 25% different in terms of power selection -- even before we discuss different slotting and IO-bonus set ups -- is pretty remarkable in itself.

Tossing IOs into the mix (and with apologies for not having looked over your specific build or St Angelius'), I could make an Energy/Energy melee specialist, a long ranged specialist, or a mix of the two. I could skew IOs towards max defense, max offense, or a mix of the two. I can flavor any of the above with different supplemental pool powers. Achieving all of those disparate goals is likely easier because of Inherent Fitness (if for no other reason than that Health and Stamina offer a fairly limited selection of slottable set bonuses, and Swift/Hurdle offer none at all).

Granted, I'm gonna end up taking a lot of the same powers in all of those builds, but that's beside the point. Actually, it tends to prove the point, though perhaps not in the way that Remus seems to desire; despite each build's superficial similarity, I can make those builds play so differently you'd scarcely believe they shared the same power sets.

If we take a wider view, the addition of inherent Fitness tends to allow different Archetypes and different powerset combinations to be more themselves, and thus less like others. Speaking personally, and for what little it's worth, the addition of Inherent Fitness has encouraged me to roll characters I would never have wanted to play before. The slog up through the early/mid-twenties to get Fitness, and the resultant lack of new (to me) power picks up through the thirties was just too annoying for me to even consider some builds. If I'm rolling combinations I wouldn't have before, doesn't that contribute to over-arching build diversity?

Then we'd both suck. There's a reason that the devs force you to take some sort of attack power at level 1.

No worries.

Not trying to be flippant here, but you basically just summarized the way most people used to feel about Stamina. The hierarchy of 'better' supplemental powers has shifted, but that isn't, in itself, evidence that there's less diversity overall. If anything, I think the above-quoted paragraph tends to emphasize that the no-brainer pool options are less compelling than Stamina was.

As much as I love Combat Jumping, I'm not seeing a lot of claims that it's mandatory. I guess what I'm not getting is how you can acknowledge on the one hand that players tend to gravitate to the best pool powers, but on the other hand dismiss just how many people took Stamina before.And if you take it as given that Stamina was a common factor for the vast majority of builds before, then giving those same builds three more power picks must increase diversity on average, if not in every specific case. Why?

Because a greater proportion of each build's 24 discretionary power picks at least has a chance to be different - and that's before we even consider the IO options that arise from inherent stamina.

I believe the slots in question are enhancement slots.

Do those characters play near-identically, though? That isn't a rhetorical question (in part because I'm typing on an iPad, and can't look at Mids); I'm honestly curious what, to you, passes for functional diversity.

Take it to the opposite extreme; let's say the devs took away all but two of our power picks. Everyone would have their first-tier primary/secondary powers, and that's it. Obviously either argument breaks down at its most extreme. What's more interesting, and more revealing, is what the restrictions or their lack allow you to do otherwise.

That's classy, thanks.

Of course what you can and can't take affects build diversity, but you're failing to consider how much the pre-Issue 19 sacrifices required for Stamina actually allowed for diversity among most of the builds in the game.

According to the developers themselves, who gave us inherent Stamina in part because so many people took it anyway, pre-I19 Stamina was anti-diverse. Prior to Issue 19, if you had three level 20 characters in a team -- regardless of Archetype, powersets, pools -- chances are they all had used 2 or 3 of their 12 power picks on Fitneess. Nowadays, those three characters would still have Fitness in common, but they would also have three extra powers marking them as distinct from one another.

But that was all covered previously. I won't talk to you like you're a kindergartner because I know you to be an intelligent adult.

Ah. You took my quip about Boost Range as personally charged? Well then allow me to return your apology: I'm sorry, but if your argument relies, in part, on the assumption that vast swathes of the player base are running around with several useless do-nothing powers, then you open yourself up to debate about what exactly constitutes a useless, do-nothing power.

The fact that Boost Range is useful doesn't refute your argument in full, but it's one less useless, do-nothing power. That said, my little post on the subject wasn't meant to be condescending; it was just meant to be pithy, because I'd already written a novel in the previous post.

-Knock knock.

-Who's there?

-70-freaking-foot Blaze

(Boost Range is a really good power, man.)

The sacrifice made each build less unique, prior to Issue 19. Before, (most) everyone had Fitness. Now, most everyone has Fitness and three extra powers. Whether you personally believe those three extra powers offer a substantial benefit is irrelevant; they're there now and they weren't before.

If you think the former option to be a special snowflake by skipping Fitness is that big a deal in the grand scheme of things, then I don't know what to tell you. Seems to me that the issue is settled almost by definition: if datamining had shown that a significant proportion of the playerbase was skipping Fitness prior to Issue 19, then the devs wouldn't have given us Inherent Fitness.

The bottom line is that everyone has more leeway to build in different, sometimes even off-the-wall ways. FWIW, I can assure you that there's a very good reason for every power I pick in my builds. Some are more important than others, it's true, but they all have a purpose, even if that purpose is just to give me OMG-super-speed Flight (Afterburner, which also happens to be an albeit situational +DEF boost for escape, and a mule for Luck of the Gambler). And while we're on the subject of Afterburner, it happens that my Dominator had to give up her combat self-rez (Rise of the Phoenix) to pick up Afterburner. Is that an optimal choice? Maybe not in isolation, but that's irrelevant: what matters here is that the build's capabilities shifted noticeably with that one power adjustment.

Frankly, I'm a bit at a loss as to how you can argue with a straight face that there are so few useful/significant powers from which to choose. Nine Primary powers. Nine Secondary Powers. Potentially four pools, each of which offers 4-5 powers. A fifth, Ancillary/Patron pool that offers five more.

We only have 24 power choices. Those numbers simply do not support your premise that everyone's running around with several powers that are flat-out useless. No offense, but I think that if you can't find a use for all of your power picks, you're not trying hard enough. Case in point:

The primary limiter with my builds is more often pool selections than pool-power selections, if that makes any sense. There are compelling reasons to select from multiple Travel Pools, even if the travel powers themselves aren't all that useful to you. A power like Super Speed is useful even if you never use it as a conveyance, because it offers you Stealth and a place to put some very useful IOs (Blessing of the Zephyr, Winter's Gift, or even the Stealth proc if you want one power to give you effective invisibility). Hover, Combat Jumping, Hasten, and Recall Friend are all good to have on most any build. Air Superiority is very useful for some builds, as is Acrobatics. I'm not a big fan of Burnout or Long-Range Teleport, but they do offer something that wasn't previously available.

As far as Maneuvers goes:

• It can be useful even with one slot, endurance permitting;
• If all else fails it's a Luck of the Gambler mule that helps you qualify for Vengeance (another LoTG mule that carries a very powerful situational team effect to boot);
• A second slot can make a world of difference, and it just isn't that hard to come up with a second slot, because ...
• finally, and most obviously, if you don't feel you can slot the power and don't feel it's useful without extra slots, then you don't take it. Contrary to your apparent belief, there are plenty of other options available.

It's also worth noting that the same averaging method is used to determine Defiance's contribution to all attack chains, so Fire is benefiting too. Not as much, but it is benefiting.

All of those are valid points. For all of the above reasons, we (and I use the term loosely) on the forum tend to separate build capabilities into categories -- burst damage, AoE damage, single-target DPS, control, debuff, etc. Sometimes, though, we (and again, I use the term loosely) forget that not everyone reading is instinctively aware of the assumptions that go along with our little analyses.

That said, when comparing two builds on paper, I usually at least try to be a little more comprehensive than we've been in this thread. But in this particular case, in comparing Fire Blast with Sonic, I think it's fair to say that single-target DPS is by far the most interesting comparison to make, perhaps even the only interesting comparison to make. The two sets are soo immensely disparate otherwise that we're basically reduced to obvious and unmeasurable platitudes.

Fire is going to win easily in solo offense throughout the bulk of the game. It's not close. As you point out, Sonic needs time to ramp up its -RES debuffs before its solo damage truly starts to shine; that's just the way -RES works. On the flipside, -RES gives your entire team (even your entire League, these days) a considerable damage boost against the affected target(s). Theoretically, a Sonic Blaster who just spams Howl and nothing else could end up contributing more damage to a team effort than a Fire Blaster.

It's almost as if we're comparing two different ATs entirely (Say, Blaster versus Defender/Corrupter), so unusual and distinct are both of the sets we've chosen to analyze. Fire is Blaster incarnate; Sonic is force-multiplier lite. That's all you need to know if you're just trying to figure out which set will better complement your preferred playstyle through the bulk of the game's content. If, on the other hand, you want to compare the two sets in an area of mutual strength, you're basically left with long-term single-target DPS.

You're never going to get a completely accurate picture from on-paper analysis, but on-paper analysis can also reveal things that aren't always necessarily apparent from subjective experience. It's a two-way street; if you place too much faith on one or the other mode of observation, you can be misled, or even mislead yourself.

Heck, the diversity of builds here is the single most important reason that other game didn't do it for me, and I suspect I'm not alone. Like Arcana, I'm a concept player first and a min/maxer second, but I'm also probably a little more OCD than Arcana about ensuring beforehand that a given concept is min/maxable enough for me. Sometimes I'll spend hours or even days messing around with various build options offline before rolling a character.

Many characters die on the vine as it were if the results of those tinkerings are found wanting.

All of that is only tenuously relevant, though. The point is that none of my little habits would even be possible if there weren't a magnificent variety among character builds in CoH. In that other game, by contrast, I enjoyed myself for a little while but found that every good build had the same basic elements, each with the same basic functionality. Here, you can make an argument that there are substantial differences between, say, two Tankers using the same powersets, or even the exact same selection of powers.

Given the lack of long-term character development that this game offered for so many years -- and the heavy emphasis on alt play that filled the void -- it's hard to fathom how anyone could even attempt to argue with a straight face that we don't have build variety. Build variety is, perhaps more than any other singular factor, the very reason there's still a CoH forum on which to have this debate in the first place.

You could give everyone exactly the same set bonuses across the board and there'd still be a world of difference between, say, a Storm Defender and a Stone Tanker. I'm not sure there's even another game in existence that encompasses such a massive range of gameplay experiences.

I'm using the OP's methodology, averaging the -RES debuffs over time; in other words, we're assuming that the attack chains in question are repeated for some arbitrarily lengthy period against a single hard target. You seem to be calculating the burst damage potential of a given attack chain over the course of one cycle. Burst damage is a fine thing to evaluate, but that isn't the aim of this thread. Frankly, burst damage would make for a thoroughly uninteresting topic, because Fire is so obviously light years ahead of Sonic in up-front damage potential.

Anyway, here's an explanation of my -RES calcs, using the attack chain Shriek-Scream-Shriek-Shout as an example:

• Shriek is a 13% RES debuff for 5 seconds
• Scream is a 13% RES debuff for 7 seconds
• Shout is a 13% RES debuff for 10 seconds

So over the course of our chain, we invoke (2 Shrieks * 5 seconds) + (1 Scream * 7 seconds) + (1 Shout * 10 seconds) = 27 seconds worth of 13% RES debuff, but our attack chain only takes 7.128 seconds. Assuming you keep attacking at the same rate, those extra 20ish seconds of overlapping RES debuffs don't just disappear. They continue to accumulate until they finally level off.

27 seconds / 7.128 seconds = 3.788, or 378.8% is our up-time on stacking 13% RES debuffs.
13% RES * 3.788 = 49.24% average -RES.

Now, is that number going to be accurate for every situation where you repeat your attack chain more than once? No. Is it quite fair that I left out the 5% miss rate when Sonic potentially loses more with a miss than Fire? No, not really. Are you realistically going to be able to use Aim/BU at exactly the ideal moment, every time? No.

The calculations in this thread are not meant to be exact predictors of in-game performance. They can be used for comparison, though, given a plausible and uniform set of assumptions. Anyway, I appreciate the feedback; if anyone feels they have a better way of calculating these things, I'm always happy to hear it. God knows I'm not infallible.

Yeah, you did. As is so often the case, I find myself piggy-backing on your points.

Preach it. Nothing says un-fun to me more than stopping for 4.5 seconds to pull out a tricorder. Mostly a taste thing, but Invuln is so freaking sturdy with Rebirth I see very little point in using Aid Self. Plus, Invuln's design sorta runs counter to Aid Self's interruptible cast; if you're losing HP fast on an Invuln, chances are it's because your DEF is either inadequate or ineffective against whatever's attacking you, which means you're less likely to succeed at firing Aid Self.

Not super familiar with Beam Rifle (just have zero conceptual interest in the set), but I do have a Fire/Mental Blaster, and I think it's fair to say that your friend's build isn't nearly as sturdy as yours is, appearances notwithstanding. He's also likely to have some scatter issues when soloing.

None of that is a knock on your friend or his build. It's worth noting, though, that a Blaster build, even a top-of-the-line Blaster build with an unusually strong pair of powersets supplemented by Incarnate powers (Mental is unusual in the sense that it covers healing in crowds, making Clarion a guilt-free Destiny pick to cover the mez hole) requires much more skill and attention to shine on its own than an analogous Scrapper build.

On the other hand, you'll never compete in kill speed on your BS/Invuln with his Blaster. Sadly, you have a low-DPS weapon set paired with a low-DPS Secondary. Doubly sad is that Invuln basically invalidates Parry, which is perhaps the main mechanical attraction of Broadsword. (You probably already know all of this, I'm mostly typing for the sake of typing here, just in case. Apologies if any of the above comes off as patronizing.)

Yeah, if you want truly sustainable endurance (or near enough), you basically have two choices -- Body Mastery or Cardiac Alpha. Ageless Destiny would work too, but Rebirth's just too good on an Invuln to pass up. Personally I tend to favor the Cardiac approach, but you seem to have a pretty firm grasp on what does and what doesn't work for you, which is good. No one can tell you what you'll enjoy playing; we can only try to optimize what you do like.

Heh, the above should read, "your gross recovery is 3.87 + (2 * 0.2398) = 4.34 EPS." Not sure how exactly I ended up typing 3.58 End; anyway, the rest of the numbers should be accurate.

Oh, good point. Yeah, Broadsword isn't exactly an area of expertise. So just glancing over that chain ... Headsplitter-Hack-Disembowel-pause 0.484 seconds -> repeat, with my build's slotting, gives us 137.6 DPS (153 w/ Build Up, 175 DPS w/ Build Up and T3 Reactive) at a cost of 3.24 EPS.

So your chain is superior in every way to the Slice chain against a single target. The only problem is that Hasten on my cheapish build has considerable downtime (loosey-goosey estimate of about 20 seconds, without doing the math; Mids' puts Hasten's downtime with the T3 Spiritual boost at ~13 seconds, but Mids' doesn't account for the fact that Hasten affects its own recharge).

Either way, this isn't gonna be a world-beater in terms of long-term ST DPS. To increase ST DPS significantly, it looks like you're gonna need -RES procs and/or purples -- or you're going to have to sacrifice an undue amount of DEF. On a budget, though, and for what it's worth, I think it's a pretty good build.

I thought about posting a no-expense-spared build example, but I find Body Mastery a little limiting vis-a-vis slotting options. Well, ok, here's a half-baked attempt at a more expensive build with the same power selections:

• T4 Spiritual assumed
• Soft-capped S/L/E/N DEF
• 18% Psi DEF
• HP capped (perma Dull Pain, accolades)
• Perma-Hasten (+73.75% global recharge from IOs, rest made up with Spiritual)
• 40% Slow Resistance
• ToHit-capped against +3s without Tactics

Attack chain is Headsplitter-Hack-Disembowl-pause 0.183 seconds ->
for 151.7 DPS w/ an 11.66% avg crit rate. Three Achilles' Heel proc checks over 6.255 seconds put our average -RES debuff at 10.91%, which raises our DPS to 168.2. Average in Build Up @ 29.5 seconds' recharge, and we're up to 186 DPS. Tossing in T3 Reactive Interface on top of Build Up gives us 211.5 DPS.

(If you wanna get really extravagant, you can replace the Achilles' Heel in Headsplitter with a Fury of the Gladiator Proc, in which case avg -RES rises to 14.6%, which raises debuff-adjusted DPS from 168.2 to 173.8. Build Up DPS rises to 192.1, and Reactive+BU DPS to 218.5.)

Endurance is a little less comfortable on this build but it should still be sustainable long enough to carry you between Conserve Powers. (I'm showing a 102 second burn time w/ 113.6 max End, 4.14 EPS adjusted recovery, a 1.64 EPS toggle cost, and a 3.61 attack chain cost. Conserve Power's downtime is ~91 seconds.)

Just a note on +4/x8:

FWIW, I think soloing on the highest difficulty is a bit overblown -- not intentionally overblown, just a bit over-emphasized because of the crowd that tends to hang out here. For one thing (once you've hit 50), there's very little mechanical incentive to solo at +4. AFAIK, there's no difference in the recipe/salvage drop rate for killing mobs at +4, and in fact your kill speed will be much reduced against higher leveled foes.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, we do play an easy game, but it's not necessarily as easy as it's sometimes made out to be. Making a build that can solo +4/x8, in principle, isn't that hard to do. Making a build that can solo every faction at +4/x8 efficiently is another matter entirely. Every build has weaknesses, after all. And the high-level content is varied enough that if you're not cherry picking your missions, eventually you'll come up against something that exploits your weaknesses.

I don't question anyone's claim that they routinely solo at +4/x8. There are a lot of good players out there, and there's something to be said for craving the occasional challenge. I do caution against reading too much into those claims, though. Reading the forums one might understandably conclude that there's a large segment of the playerbase effortlessly and indiscriminately soloing the game at +4/x8, and though I'm certainly not the greatest player on earth, I know enough about the game's mechanics to understand that no such group of players exists.

Or rather, no such builds exist. All the player skill in the world ain't gonna make Rularuu at +4/x8 on an SR Scrapper a cakewalk.

So in my customarily long-winded way, the point I'm making here is that I hope you don't expect too much out of your build, even at its most perfect peak of forum-approved perfection. A top-end Invuln build is a sight to behold, but you will still occasionally have to keep your head on a swivel, especially at +4/x8. Personally, I tend to solo at +0/x8 most of the time. Admittedly my Invuln Tanker can pretty much sleep walk through almost any faction at that difficulty, but eh, his kill speed at +4/x8 puts me to sleep. YMMV, caveat emptor and all that jazz.

AFAIK, the best non-Parry attack chain for BS is Headsplitter-Hack-Disembowel-Hack, which requires +172% recharge in Headsplitter, +76% recharge in Disembowel, and unfortunately +304% recharge in Hack. That's not gonna work for us, but for comparison's sake we'll note that the above attack chain deals about 139 DPS with standard ED-compliant damage slotting and an 11.25% average crit rate.

Your ST attack chain on this build would be something like Headsplitter-Hack-Slice-Disembowel, for (with our slotting) 129.3 DPS w/ Assault. With our slotting, that chain would consume 27.34 End over 8.316 seconds, or 3.29 EPS. (For completeness' sake, that chain delivers 144 DPS if you average in the contribution of Build Up. With the Tier 3 Reactive DoT, DPS rises to 153.4 DPS, or 167.1 w/ Build Up.)

Your toggle cost w/ Assault and Tactics is 1.97 EPS. With just Assault, it's 1.58. Hasten will cost you roughly 15 / 140 = 0.1 EPS.

Recovery is 3.87 EPS before procs. Max End is 119.9. Each Performance Shifter proc is worth (0.2 * 0.1 * 119.9) / 10 = 0.2398 EPS on average. So your gross recovery is 3.58 + (2 * 0.2398) = 4.34 EPS.

With Assault (and without Tactics), your ST attack chain is sustainable for ~190 seconds. But there's a wrinkle: Conserve Power is available for 90 out of roughly 200 seconds. When Conserve Power is up, your attack chain only costs 1.82 EPS, and your toggle cost drops to 0.85 EPS w/ Assault. (Hasten's over-time cost is unaffected).

Long story shorter, you'll have a net gain of 1.57 EPS during Conserve Power time, which means you'll get back more than a full bar of end over the duration, which means that as long as you're end-sustainable for the period leading up to Conserve Power, you have effectively endless endurance. We're well over that threshold of sustainability with our single-target chain, with a good bit of headroom to account for AoE-heavy scenarios.

Anytime, fun thread.

Yeah, it looks like the Reactive -RES debuff is fairly easy to calculate; I just didn't want to alter your 4% approximation because I wasn't absolutely sure that the duration was 10.3 seconds. I've also seen 8.3 somewhere.

I'm not sure I totally agree with this conclusion. Yes, attacking faster means more proc damage. But -RES also means more proc damage. That's why I suggest skipping Shout in the Sonic Attack chain.

Yeah, that's a great thread. I've had it bookmarked for a long time now, but I think nowadays it's probably out of date. The introduction of Reactive Interface, alone, has massive implications for any attack chain, but especially for an attack chain that heavily features -RES debuffs. And double-especially for an attack chain heavily featuring -RES debuffs with an extremely slow-animating tier 3 attack (Shout).

Hey, we've all been there, in my case probably more often than most.

I know. I just got a little thrown off by the phrase, "The GM has 0.5% Regen." Usually when I hear that sort of phrase the percentage refers to a proportion of the baseline, as in, "My Scrapper has 350% Regen," rather than the percentage of health regained per second. The percentage of health regained per second is, of course, a perfectly valid way to describe regeneration, and I probably would have picked up on it if the result of your subsequent calculation hadn't confused me.

In any case, I'm grateful for the clarification. I still think there's an error in your previous post, though, because these two quotes are in disagreement:

Your more recent number, 5% health per 40 seconds, or 0.125% health per second, matches what I'd expect out of a 75% regeneration debuff. The number in the previous post, 5% health per 15 seconds doesn't.

It's not a big deal and it really isn't my intention to play gotcha games; I'm just trying to explain where my confusion came from. The difference between post-debuff regeneration of 88ish HP/sec and 235.6 HP/sec is absolutely ginormous.

Because half of a percentage point doesn't make any sense to me. So I asked him to clarify whether that percentage sign was a typo. It is not unusual for the game to refer to 100% as simply 1.

Thus, 0.5 would equal 50%. Now you seem to be saying that he regenerates 0.5% of his health per second, which does make sense, but that idea wasn't clear in the post in question.

Yes, that's why I said that a level 50 Archvillain's debuff resistance reduces a 500% regen debuff to 75%. Level 50 Archvillains have 85% debuff resistance. (1-0.85) * 500 = 75.

0.5 * (1 - 0.65) = 0.175, not 0.353

I'm not saying the guy's wrong; I'm saying he's speaking a different language than the one I'm accustomed to reading on this subject. So I asked for clarification. Apparently you're fluent in that language, which is great, but don't act like that strange math you're using is obvious, because it ain't.

I don't understand your numbers. Eochai has 0.5% Regeneration? Do you mean a flat 0.5 Regen? Doesn't that correspond to 50%? If so, then the GM in question basically comes pre-debuffed, and it shouldn't be difficult at all to floor his health recovery.

Even if he isn't pre-debuffed, a 500% regeneration debuff modified by a level 50 Archvillain's debuff resistance corresponds to a net loss of 75% regeneration. So in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I'd expect the so-called typical regen debuff to knock out 3/4s of the target's health recovery. (1/4 of 353.4 is, needless to say, much less than 235.6.)

With all of the Ill/Rads and Ill/Colds running around soloing GMs of every stripe, I find it hard to believe that those builds' regen debuffs are inadequate to the task.