Rhygadon

Hi Jack! Thanks for the great guide; the hard numbers for the -speed/recharge effects are especially appreciated.

I already have a 30ish Energy/Ice "don't touch me!" blaster, 100% ranged with Ice Patch and Shiver to dissuade anyone who's interested in snuggling. Now I'm thinking about starting a blapper, and considering Ice/Ice.

My question is about Chilling Embrace and aggro. I like the numbers on CE (and the distinctiveness of the power), and I can see how it would be great for a solo blapper, but I mostly play on teams. My worry is that it might negate the defensive advantage of being a single-target blapper, by drawing attention from other mobs as soon as I close to melee with one. Does anyone have experience with this? How much aggro does CE tend to draw? If I use it in a decent-size group (that isn't totally locked down by a tank or troller), am I going to get squished?

In the context of movement, "inertia" = "momentum". Fly has a strong momentum component, meaning that you take a while to slow down even after you've let up on the key. CJ removes this, making Fly stop instantly, just like Hover.

(Incidentally, this is why CJ's description says that it "offers good air control"; the lack of inertia makes fine-grained mid-jump adjustments easier, since you can see the effect instantly and don't have to overcompensate for momentum.)

I haven't checked to see whether Inertial Reduction does the same thing; it's functionally identical to Super Jump, so the real question would be whether SJ has the same -inertia component as CJ.

Amusingly, there's *another* Kinetics power that does have this effect: Increase Density! I first noticed this when playing a Warshade in Nova form. Nova flight is super-floaty, with a much higher momentum component than normal Fly. When someone hit me with ID, I was suddenly able to stop on a dime -- fun, but very disorienting!

None of these things should affect your actual travel speed, btw, though the sudden starts and stops will enable you to maneuver more efficiently indoors and in combat.

A few comments from a 40 human-only PB:

-- I think Hasten is absolutely crucial for human PBs, since we have so many fantastic very-long-recharge powers (Essence Boost, Conserve Energy, Photon Seekers, Dawn Strike, Light Form) and two really good medium-recharge ones (Dull Pain and Reform Essence). With Hasten, you can get EB near perma, use Conserve Energy to refill your End several times per mish, and be in Light Form about 1/3 of the time. Without Hasten, you're looking at over a minute of downtime for EB, and much less joy from your top attacks. I would sacrifice almost any other power in the set for Hasten. (Though you don't really *need* to fit it into your build until 22 or so.)

-- Light Form lasts for 180 seconds, not 120. And yes, for those who don't believe, it *is* God Mode! The easiest way to explain it to the uninitiated is that it's essentially the same power as Unstoppable (near identical, except the base resist is 52.5% instead of 70%) ... but in context this makes it much more powerful than Unstoppable, since there's much less overlap with what our set is already giving us. (An Invuln Tank already has great resists and status protection, so much of the effect is wasted for them. It's still a great power, but from personal experience of both sets ... there's no comparison.)

-- Many people (including me) find Pulsar disappointing because of its low Magnitude. It will only reliably stun minions. By itself, it will never stun a Boss, and it will only stun an even-level Lt about one time in four. (Counting only the times when it hits, and yes, this is from personal testing - last week, in fact. Why one time in four? Good question. It looks like it may have the same hidden "critical hold" feature that Controllers get and Dominators don't.) Considering that it also needs fairly heavy slotting to be effective (at minimum, 2 Acc and probably at least 1 Rech and 1 Disorient), it just doesn't seem worth it in a build with so many other great powers that are crying out for slots. Also, Solar Flare makes a great alpha-mitigation power (since everyone has to get up afterwards), so I found I never really needed Pulsar. And in the late game, the critters it can affect aren't the ones you're worried about.

-- I never found I wanted or needed Stealth. If you do, Super Speed or Quantum Flight might be better choices, giving you the same effect with more versatility. (And like Stealth, they'll both work to let you get in that first attack to stun or KB a Void before it can get a shot off.)

-- Believe it or not, Dawn Strike doesn't need an Acc enhancement. Like most Blaster nukes, it has a base Accuracy of 1.4 (double the bonus of most Snipes), taking it way above the cap for anything near your level. Then consider that you'll *always* be using Build Up beforehand, and you can always chew a yellow if you're really worried. I rarely fight anything less than reds and purples, and HeroStats shows that my hit percentage with DS is reliably at the cap, with no Acc SO.

-- Glowing Touch is insanely good. I keep meaning to write a love letter to it for the Kheld forum, but whenever I start I just want to go play instead. Bear in mind that it's near identical to an Empath's Heal Other -- the best single-target heal in the game -- in every way except for its puny 30' range. (And PB's lower AT Modifier but higher base HP mean that we restore a bit over 80% of what an Empathy Defender does.) The key is to think about it the right way: you're not a regular healer, and you shouldn't pretend to be, but when a fellow melee fighter goes red in the middle of the fight, you can *easily* save their life with one click. It's also nice for when teammates use an Awaken or come out of MoG/Unstop/etc. And it's super-cool-looking! Properly used, this power will make people love you so much it'll be slightly awkward and embarrassing.

-- Finally, re: CJ/SJ/Acrobatics. Young and would-be Khelds should be warned that mezzing *is* a human PB's Achilles' heel, and will be especially painful in the high 20s / early 30s, which is exactly when Acrobatics becomes practical. But to get Acro you have to waste power choices on jumping powers you don't really need, and managing the End cost will be a pain. Meanwhile, the mez protection granted by Acro is pretty trivial, and KB protection isn't that important. (With your lvl1 attack and Gleaming Blast, you can still attack as soon as you stand up, and really, you'll be knocking them down much more often than they'll be knocking you down.) Plus, as a human PB you really *should* be trying to play on big teams anyway, for that juicy Cosmic Balance bonus. Merely having 2 Controllers on your team will protect you from anything but stacked or critical mezzes, and of course one Defender with CM or ID will solve your problems too. You certainly *can* play solo, and much of the time it'll be quite fun; but there *will* be frustrating stun -> toggledrop -> death events every now and then, and you won't be as uber as you'd be with a bunch of friends.

Just my 2c. It's a great powerset, have fun with it!

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Force Bubble is set to self-stack if ticks overlap, while TK and Hurricane are set to Replace.

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Aha! I'd wondered if this was something that varied from power to power. A few questions, then:

Is this one flag for the whole power, or is it per-effect? (Relevant for multi-effect powers like Hurricane and Arctic Air.)

Do you know how this works for the Taunt effect of Invincibility? More specifically: since the power ticks once per second (and multiple Taunts from the same character are additive for magnitude but not duration), does one Taunt SO give me double magnitude for the .33 seconds of overlap after each tick, or does it just add .33 seconds to the amount of time that a critter will stay Taunted after I've moved away from it?

Are Choking Cloud and Inky Aspect set to add or to replace?

And while I'm at it:

Do the Inherent_Taunt numbers that you gave above imply that Tankers' Gauntlet is doing nothing before level 6? Or if Gauntlet uses the regular Taunt modifier, what does InherentTaunt do? (My apologies if this has already been explained in another thread!)


Cheers, and thanks again for all your work! In addition to making the game less frustrating for us stat-heads and P&P veterans, I think your hard data has really helped to revitalize the boards. As of six months ago, discussion of the game engine was stagnant; now it's vibrant and useful again. So three cheers for Iakona!

Hmm ... on the other hand, this has also meant that the amount of time I spend reading the boards has crept back up to i4 levels. So -1 cheer for tempting us stat-heads to sloth and slack.

Rhygadon's career shakes its fist at Iakona

Fantastic guide! It's nice to see someone finally give the exact numbers for what that third reducer does. It's always felt tiny, but seeing that "9%" spelled out in, er, blue and white may finally give me the courage to drop the third recharge from powers like Build Up and self-heals (at least during the levels where slots are still in short supply).

Two minor suggestions that I'll add from my own experience:

On deciding whether to take Stamina:
Of course, it's still (sadly) mandatory for most builds of most ATs. But if you find you're on the fence, one thing to consider is how much of your End is going to toggles. If you have few or no toggles (e.g. most Blasters and Dominators), it's easy to modulate your endurance usage on the fly, by pausing for just a moment between fights or skipping one use of an End-heavy attack. Of course having plenty of End is always better, but if your build is tight for powers and slots, a character like this can fall well short of "infinite attack chain" without suffering too badly.

On the other hand, if you're more toggle-heavy (e.g. most melee ATs), modulating your End use is much more frustrating. If most of your toggles are essential, then it's very hard to modulate your End use in combat, and pausing between combats won't earn you much unless you drop and reraise your toggles every time. Toggles with long recharge times (Hot Feet, Choking Cloud) can also be frustrating in this regard. Plus, psychologically, I find that it's simply not fun having to worry about turning toggles on and off; somehow, it feels more intrusive than just factoring End use into your already multi-factorial decision about what attack to use next. So for characters with multiple or heavy toggles, I always go for Stamina.

(To a lesser extent, this also applies to alternative End-recovery tools like Consume, Transference and Drain Psyche. I have several squishies who live by these powers and never miss Stamina at all. My toggle-heavy Brute, however, still felt awkward even with Dark Consumption and Consume, one of the more famously viable Staminaless combos. Without very heavy End Red slotting in all toggles, my standing-still End recovery was trivial, and I felt like I was always at risk of exhaustion. Dropping those powers for Stamina made play feel much smoother, and let me focus on punching instead of toggling.)

-- On deciding which attacks to slot with End Reducers:
An important thing to consider is which situations are most likely to run you dry. For example, my BS/Regen Scrapper has the glorious QR+Stamina combo, and almost never runs out of Endurance, even with Focused Accuracy running and his two most expensive attacks double-slotted for Recharge. He went most of his life without ever slotting a single End Red (and then just two in FA once I hit the 40s). Once I started fighting a lot of AVs, however, I found that long AV fights could zero me out. What to slot? Hack. This wasn't the obvious target, since it's a relatively cheap attack and doesn't get used all that frequently; in normal combat, the two top attacks usually alternate with the PBAoEs. Against an AV, however, that third single-target attack sees much heavier usage. A single End Red in Hack (which had only been 4-slotted and hence had room to spare) completely solved the problem. Likewise for my Inv/Ice tank: I had one End Red in each toggle, but found AVs could run me down. One End Red in my basic single-target attack, and all was golden.

Innnnnteresting.

At first glance, here are a few things that popped out at me from these numbers (in conjunction with the Level Lookup tables you posted earlier):

The extent to which fully-slotted Fly falls short of the speed cap is highly dependent on level.
- At lvl15, if you could somehow get your hands on SOs (say by farming Doc Vazh), 3-slotted Fly would get you to a total speed of 3.03, which is 99.5% of the cap for that level.
- At lvl22, 3 SOs get you to 3.17, or 97.4% of the cap.
- At lvl50, 3 SOs get you to 3.73, or 91.1% of the cap.
- At lvl22, adding unslotted Swift to 3-slotted Fly will cap you.
- At lvl50, adding unslotted Swift gets you to about 94.4% of the cap. If you went mad and 3-slotted Swift with Fly SOs, it would get you to 97.8%.
- At lvl50, it is possible to cap Fly without buffs, if you're an SR Scrapper or Stalker or an /Elec Brute: all you have to do is 3-slot Swift and 2-slot either Quickness or Lightning Reflexes. "Just" 3 wasted slots for bragging rights ... what were you gonna do with those last 3 slots at 50, anyway?

The effect of Swift on Hover is more noticeable, if still small.
- When you first get Hover and can't slot it with anything but TOs, your total speed will be 0.2 unslotted or .25 3-slotted. Swift will add a little less than .1, so in those early levels it's a serious boost, increasing your net Hover speed by almost 50%.
- With SOs, Hover speed is 0.53 1-slotted, or 1.2 3-slotted. So Swift adds roughly 20% to 1-slotted Hover, or 8% to 3-slotted Hover. (Since the Swift bonus scales with level but base Hover speed doesn't, these percentages go up a bit over time: at 50 they're about 25% and 11%.)
- At all levels, the effect of slotting Fly enhancements in Swift is vanishingly small. In the very best case, where you have only 1 SO in Hover, putting an SO in Swift nets you a 7% increase. If you have 3-slotted Hover, an SO in Swift adds less than 3% to your speed. Not very exciting, especially compared to the approx. 10% boost to your base run speed that you'd get from a Run SO (on top of the 30% that you get from unslotted Swift).

In consequence of the above:
Slotting Swift with Fly instead of Run enhancers is almost never worthwhile.
The bonus to Fly speed is zero though the middle levels (since 3-slot Fly + unslotted Swift already caps you), and vanishingly tiny (about 1%) at the highest levels. The bonus to Hover, while better, is still much smaller (in both absolute and relative terms) than the bonus to ground movement that you get from slotting Run.
The only exception I can see would be for characters whose feet almost never touch the ground, and who thus don't mind trading 10% run speed for 3% Hover speed. And even for them, adding extra slots to Swift would be a sign of dementia.

Finally, as some kineticists have already discovered from experience,
Siphon Speed + Hover = Joy.
- With just one SO in Hover, a single SS will almost triple your speed, getting you up to just short of Sprinting speed. A second SS will have you Hovering faster than unslotted Fly, and even slightly faster than the old pre-ED 6-slotted Hover!
- With 3 SOs in Hover, one shot of SS gets you above base Fly, and two get you to almost exactly the same speed as 3-slotted Fly.

Now if only they'd let us slot Fly enhancers in SS, we could hit the Fly cap with Hover! (We can already do it for a few seconds at a time with 3 stacked SS, but that doesn't really count. I wanna dust Flyers in aerial races.) Or I suppose it could be done with Swift, at least through the mid-levels. Even 3-slotting wouldn't cap us at 50, though. Damn.

Do you have time??

Doc, this is your legacy we're talking about! Your seat at the table of immortality! Your place in the pantheon of universally-bookmarked guide writers!

Why, there's a whole generation of young whippersnappers out there who may not even have read your guide yet, who may be passing it over because it doesn't mention the effect of Swift on Fly. You're not ready to be obsolete yet, are you? That's not the Doc I remember!

Reach down inside yourself, and find the strength you know is there. The children of Paragon City are counting on you!

-- Rhygadon, clearly in some sort of mood

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Which brings up an interesting question: bug or not, is it possible for a mob to be aggroed enough to *want* to attack (and therefore not run away), but not aggroed enough to want to actually *do* anything about it, like attempt to approach?

And why would a crey eliminator choose only to use melee attacks? I wonder now if it was because I had blazing aura running: somehow, I wonder if taunt overrided the run, but it was BA that was actually causing the eliminator to attack, almost as if it were feared.

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Very interesting. And even more so in conjunction with the (somewhat inconsistent) experiences people are reporting in this thread:
Invincibility Bugged

It occurs to me that one way to capture most of these results would be to replace the standard definition of the Taunt effect (roughly, "makes the target attack you and only you") with something like this:

While under the influence of Taunt, a creature:
1) cannot run away;
2) cannot use powers on targets other than the Taunting player.

This might be enough to explain the observed behavior, in conjunction with the AI behavior rules. For example, if a mob is already determined to run and not fight (for whatever reason), Taunt will stop the running but not force it to fight. The fact that they attack when you close to melee range would presumably then be the result of something in the AI code, rather than anything to do with Taunt. (It would make sense that there might be code to override fleeing behavior when the mob is already in melee range and has a melee attack ready.)

To be completely accurate, #1 would need a caveat for special cases like Burn ... but I haven't followed the Fear/Feeling discussion closely enough to know how the Burn effect might be differentiated from other, non-Taunt-proof forms of fleeing. (At minimum, this seems to show that just one Feeling status can't be doing all the work ... unless Burn simply has a huge Feeling magnitude?)

Thinking of Taunt in this disjoint way opens up a few more possible questions as well. For example, when a caster is Taunted, can they use location-targeted AoEs that don't specifically target the taunter (e.g. Quicksand)? I haven't paid specific attention to this, but I have to say that offhand, I don't remember the mages casting many such effects once I've started Taunting. Ditto for e.g. Crey scientists using targeted heals or buffs on their allies. Either way, the answer could be built into #2 by changing "targets" to "players" and/or "enemies" as appropriate, yielding a little more precision about the effects of Taunt ...

Hi Circeus, thanks for a truly invaluable guide! One question: do you still think that this ...

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Epic and Pool powers *do* have Gauntlet, but they are single target only, not AoE like Tanker Secondaries.

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... is correct with respect to Epics? I ask because you later quote _Castle_ as saying:

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Note that there is no distinction between Primary and Secondary powersets, Epic Powersets or Pool Powers? These all have Gauntlet on them, to one extent or another (Pool Powers version is limited to 1 target, and only the direct attacks have it.)

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Here he seems to be distinguishing between Epics and Pool Powers, and he specifically only mentions the latter as limited to 1 target.

I ask because I'm getting ready for epics on my Inv/Ice/Ice tank, and trying to decide how to allocate a few spare slots that I plan to devote to Taunt enhancements. (Taunt-the-power and Invincibility are already well-slotted.) If the Epics really do have an inferior Gauntlet, then I'll slot the extra Taunt into my melee attacks. If the Epics have a full-strength Gauntlet, I'd much rather put the extra Taunts there, for ranged taunting.

Cheers!
Relevant toon: Harmless Kitty, 38 Inv/Ice, Liberty

What you're trying to do is probably best achieved with "nop" (no operation), the blank command. So, for example:

/bind x "nop"

will clear any binding from the x key. I know this isn't exactly what you were looking for, but it'll get the job done, at least if you're dealing with the same default bindings every time. Instead of trying to clear the command itself, just clear one of the keys that's bound to that command by default.

You might even want to create a separate bindfile (called something like remap_defaults.txt) that just has those remappings, which will presumably be the same for all your toons. Then you could load it with bind_load_file, before loading the keybinds.txt with commands customized for your current toon.