PleaseRecycle

Fortunately the forms do indeed work the same for everyone. Soul is so great: if you keep it at level three, you get a giant endurance discount. If you cash it in with sky splitter, you get a giant regen and recovery bonus. Hard to argue with that.

Er, in that case the answer is yes it has, for like eight years? Were you expecting someone to say, "By Jove, using SOs? Why hasn't anyone ever thought of that?"

I was trying to show off the game to a friend who'd never played it before and had a similar problem with my lack of non-50 characters at that particular moment. After some consideration I figured it'd be better to just exemplar down and play his missions. The problem? His missions consisted of the revamped mercy island experience. I can appreciate how improved it may be in terms of making a good first impression on the average MMO player, but it was really awkward that I had to keep repeating, "Uhhh and now I guess we'll go kill ten of these... I swear this game stops looking like this really really soon!"

There's a difference between "IOs aren't required" and "SO-only is the way it is meant to be played." SO-only is a supported playstyle, as is going all out. Think of it as the minimum system requirements: you could (in the past) have played with only training enhancements all the way to 50 but the devs never told anyone that would be a good idea. If you played a SO-only dark scrapper today on difficulty settings that resembled the old five-tier slider you would be completely fine in virtually all cases. That's assuming intelligent SO slotting with consideration for things like endurance reduction and ED.

The reason many of us enjoy dark armor so much is that it scales very well with investment. Compare it to super reflexes, for example. Both sets are viable with SOs, but super reflexes can practically hit its peak efficacy using SOs alone*. Dark armor just keeps improving as you stack on more goodies. I'd go further and say that one of the coolest things about dark armor is that people can and do take high end builds in a wide variety of directions whereas with some sets and combinations the "correct" build is set in stone. See the five million identical SS/FA/Mu build advice threads in the brute forum.

Has anyone ever asked how that combination performs on SOs only? I think we might have a balance disaster on our hands! Devs, re-evaluate super strength!

*slight exaggeration

I had the same issue where the book mission wouldn't end properly. I reentered it, considered the possibilities, and turned off cloak of darkness. That worked; apparently the mission-ending trigger can't see through stealth.

And how stodgy can you be when you're seeing a magical ghost that can make all of your pain go away? This one isn't imaginary, either, so he probably feels a little less awkward than he did during that fling with "Casperella." Sure, Ray, don't worry. We'll get a table for four, not three.

Fun TF earlier, incidentally, very dramatic to see the ding stars springing out of a horde of collapsing spider-men.

When I say a couple converters, it does vary. Today I picked up the glad armor for my own claws/dark scrapper in the form of a glad armor end/rech. It took 15 converters, or five attempts, to turn it into the global. That's 150 reward merits if you have to buy them, but the way I see it is that I used to pay over two billion inf for that piece, what's a couple hundred merits when the inf price tag is such a tiny fraction of its former self?

Quick reply as I need to be on my way in a moment. The best single target attacks for a ranged fort are ones that you picked up: gloom, dominate and subdue. It isn't hard to chain these gaplessly if you're already going for perma mind link and are willing to use purples. TK blast isn't bad to leave slotted for set bonuses either since it's handy when you exemplar lower than 30. The great thing about this chain, though, is that dominate's prominence in it means you're a natural at locking things down. I have my dominate five slotted with dominion of arachnos and the sixth slot is reserved for a +5 unbreakable constraint: hold. This lets me stack something like 24 mag on a hard target, or possibly more, haven't worked it out lately. That's really nice on a LGTF for obvious reasons, but is handy in all sorts of other content as well.

I'd be surprised if you end up feeling like you need summon widow. You're probably going to like this character enough to get lore pets and those really do the job most of the time, for me anyway. TT:Assault is a pretty key power, I'd prioritize that over a lot of other things. Actually my fort runs all of the TT toggles as well as pool maneuvers and assault, with cardiac making the build sustainable. I'm glad I brought that up because here's another cool thing about cardiac: between cardiac core paragon and a little bit of range slotting from sets, you can get dominate, gloom, subdue, psy scream, and psi tornado's range out to 96 feet. Combine that with some form of flight and you can essentially bombard single targets or groups from orbit with no chance of reprisal, and even if they could shoot back it wouldn't do much for 'em.

Of the posted builds I like Spyral's the best by a long way. What I will say is that there isn't really any reason not to have both the steadfast res/def as well as the glad armor tp/def in a modern dark armor build. PvP IOs are only about a hundred million inf if you're even a little patient and once you have a PvP IO of any kind all you need to do is use a couple converters to turn it into the glad armor global. For perspective, that one IO is more than half as strong as cloak of darkness yet costs nothing but a slot to "run." I'd also try to fit in a fury of the gladiator proc for a similarly powerful offensive boon.

Since the last set of buffs MA is a very competitive set for single target, especially for scrappers and stalkers. Clearly. Dragon's tail is its only aoe, and stalkers don't even get it, but it's one of the best pbaoes that scrappers get. The lack of redraw is nifty and the high speed attack chains you can put together are great for proc application. Storm kick is the jewel of the set and is up there with dual blades' sweeping strike in contention for the "most ridiculous scrapper attack" award.

It hasn't been proliferated to brutes yet so that sort of limits your options, but it's actually a pretty stellar set for tankers too. Storm kick trades in some of its crazy damage for a crazy defense-to-all buff. I wouldn't recommend it in stalker form. For scrappers and tankers, though, it pretty much pairs well with any armor you'd like.

Oh yeah, I had intended to mention total dom but completely forgot. Normally I never use that power and only have it for the recharge bonus via basilisk's gaze. When I ran a Dr. Q yesterday I was mighty glad I had it. Not only can you alternate it with aura, enemies resistant to confuse are not the rarest things around. Take eyeballs: immune to confuse, 200% tohit and they inflict massive -def. I hope nobody is going to run a Dr. Q every day for their own sake but when you do silly things like that it's very nice to have the aoe hold available.

I think it does and doesn't need to be debuffed/buffed so I am displeased by the myriad paucity of options presented or omitted in the OP.

The main things for a ranged fortunata are attack chains, perma mind link, and softcaps. Attack chains because in addition to your single target dominate-subdue-gloom, you can make a gappy sorta-chain out of psy scream and psi tornado. The ST chain is easily achieved while the aoe chain is the main area where you stand to gain from high global recharge.

Perma mind link, despite being much harder for forts than for widows, is actually pretty easy to get. You only need recharge just shy of perma-hasten; my fort has 86.25% global recharge before hasten and that makes mind link permanent despite the eight second or so gap in hasten. Here's where I'll note that my fort doesn't have any purples apart from superior dominion and coercive persuasion.

The soft caps are what lead me to believe that purples may not be incredibly optimal for a fort. There isn't just one softcap, there are two. Ideally you should be softcapped without ever using mind link at all and incarnate softcapped with mind link. In addition to being a huge boon in incarnate content, the effect of this is that you then have no need to worry about hitting mind link except in reaction to severe debuffs or danger to teammates. That's great since mind link's ungodly slow animation is the last thing you want to be casting in combat unless you need to.

In spite of all of that, I can see a couple places where purples would be nice: ragnarok instead of a posi's blast set for example, trading the damage proc for better enhancement values. Apocalypse is another great option but I'd put it in either dominate or gloom rather than subdue. Dominate is good because this is the attack that you use when there is a danger so great that you care more about stacking two holds on it as fast as possible than you do about completing an attack chain. Gloom is good because it's your most efficient attack and it also stands to benefit the most from recharge and endurance slotting. The AT set is fantastic in psi tornado and coercive persuasion is a very natural fit for aura of confusion, as the proc explosion ensures that it locks down everything around you for something like eight seconds in addition to the great values and bonuses it provides.

Oh, I also recommend trying to fit in confuse. With just a single slot it gives you utility that's hard to match. Need a ton of control in a pinch? Alternate confuse and dominate on problem targets. Fighting a villain group that contains a powerful minion or lieutenant? Spend those two seconds on impromptu recruitment and breeze through a fight that frankly probably would have been easy anyway because you're a freaking fortunata. It's nice to have to stack with aura as well, though: on a certain Dark Astoria mission you go up against giant blobs of bosses. A tactic that served me well was to drop confuse on four or five bosses before diving in and hitting aura. Bam, four or five confused bosses right out of the gate, and it helps them bunch up as well.

For all of issue 9 I avoided slotting more than a single lotg global per character because I was positive that they were meant to be unique. Heh. Also they cost like eight million influence! Is that crazy or what?

Yet again I forget that gloom is a thing for brutes, with that you can of course make an actual chain out of stone fists, heavy mallet and seismic smash. With those three powers alone though you'd be spending a lot of time glaring menacingly at your incapacitated foes, or throwing in an aoe every five seconds (assuming you have anything less than 200% global recharge).

In general, I like primary sets that are a complete package on their own. That's one of the reasons I instantly loved staff, and certainly why I keep going back to claws. Stone is anything but: it can do very good single target and aoe but only with specific outside tools. Obviously that makes no difference in terms of its final efficacy but in principle it bothers me. Beyond the fact that I want to make the character that I want to make it's also mechanically limiting to be railroaded so.

Going back to fault, I stand by my statement. It's a great power but it's too great in the sense that for most, in my opinion, situations it's overkill. Your enemies are either disabled or they aren't, you don't get style points for extra magnitude unless one of your teammates is keeping that tally for you. On a topical note I think that stone melee in a sense is going to suffer from the new overwhelming force set. Right now fault is one of the only ways to permanently disable a spawn as a melee character. After that proc there will be many ways to do so and by definition all of them will also involve doing damage to it.

Not trying to denigrate your brute or anything, but those are the reasons for my lack of patience for the set.

The minor things I'll bring up with mauk's build are as follows: for less than a twentieth of the cost you can just use doctored wounds in dull pain instead of panacea and still get two thirds as much global recharge out of it. I'd also be more inclined to just cram the miracle and regen tissue globals into health since there isn't any benefit to putting them into physical perfection instead and then you don't keep them while exemplaring. That said it looks good to me.

I ran a Dr. Quaterfield yesterday on a rogue. Between TUNNEL, team transporter and a clutch performance by mission transporter when I accidentally hit ouroboros, we won in something like 2:45 and it was only moderately painful! Strange days.

Dear Faultline,

Wouldn't you know it, Fusionette really was in over her head. I kept trying to get her out of that warehouse but she insisted on lighting up every TV-headed hobo in sight. Maybe think about getting her a stealth IO for her birthday?

P.S. Do not pet the hellraven!

Sorry, but people suggest changes, or nerfs in my view, to confront fairly often in the AT&P General section. I've yet to hear anyone suggest allowing those who actually do take and enjoy confront as it works currently to opt out of the new version!

I will say this, though: if you've been craving an autohit aoe taunt effect on an auraless scrapper, melee hybrid is right up your alley.