Sailboat

I'm mildly curios about the biggest damage a single attack can put up on a single target.

Some clarification: PVE only. I'm not asking about damage-per-second or damage over an attack chain. I'm not limiting this to single-target attacks -- Shield Charge would work, for example...but (for the purposes of this argument) I'm looking for what it would do to one guy's life bar, not what it would do if it hit all 16 guys. I am interested in damage-over-time as long as it comes from a single click/attack, so Incinerate could be considered, for example.

Bonus damage from things like Build Up, Aim, Against All Odds, and Fiery Embrace, count too.

Crits I'm not sure about -- I guess highest not considering crits "but it would be cool if it critted on top of that" is what I'm looking for, since crits aren't an every-time phenomenon.

Blaster nukes should count, but I'd like to find something usable a little more frequently, so if it IS a Blaster nuke, I'd also like to know the highest non-nukes.

Fulcrum Shift counts only if the character doing the damage can cast it (i.e. for purposes of this discussion, you're solo).

Without consulting any sources (such as Red Tomax or the wiki), just off the top of my head, it strikes me that the top competitors would be:

• Brute Energy Transfer, with Fury up, with Build Up and either AAO or Fiery Embrace
• Blaster Inferno with Aim and Buildup (and maybe some stacked up Defiance bonus)
• Stalker Assassination (is one better than the others? Do Stallkers get Fiery Embrace?)

Not sure if a Sonic Blaster would be competitive, if he built up Defiance while stacking -resist.

I'm mostly motivated by seeing a few large hits I've dealt out and thinking, "that was cool...I wonder what the biggest single hit possible would look like?"

What do you think?

For typed defense characters, 3 Eradications and 3 Cleaving Blows aren't bad. Pick the quad and triple from Erad and make up damage, acc and end reduction the best you can from the others.

After the Animal Pack came out, I sauntered over to Infinity and made Illegal Eagle. :>

Anyone at all who enters a doorway first and decides to park there and click attacks, keeping the rest of the team trapped away from the action.

Okay, being fresh out of Tanks for my (admittedly quixotic) hardcore adventures, where any defeat is the end of the character, I want to make a new Tanker...with an emphasis on extreme durability. The character will probably NOT have serious IO investment, since it's too painful to spend big money on a character who might drop dead at any moment; but otherwise I'd like to pick powersets and powers with an eye to both personal survival and keeping my team alive.

Note that we do NOT build carefully-synergized teams (i.e., we don't make sure a Stone Tanker is paired with a Kin, and so on) even though they'd be stronger. Two reasons: one, deaths would disrupt any such strategy, and two, it's more about having (our own kind of) individual fun than building a super-machine.

But I don't have a problem with matching up the two powersets on my new character for synergy and strength.

Opinion time! What would be the best sets for this character? I've experimented with /Shield (on a Broadsword Scrapper with Parry -- very nice!) and, as Tanker, with Fire/Dark (three times, I'm stubborn) and Stone/SS as hardcore characters. I have considerable experience with regular (non-hardcore) Tankers as Fire, Shield, Invulnerability, and Stone; and I have some Scrapper experience with /Dark Aura and /Willpower. Ice and Electric primaries would be new to me. I don't HAVE to go Stone, but it seems like ultimately, in the 40s when things get scarier, it's the least susceptible to sudden catastrophe. I'll listen to any opinons, though.

I'm much less confident about ranking the secondaries in terms of which would offer the most mitigation to myself and my team. Frankly my first thought, in making my "this time I won't die!" character, was to go Stone/Ice. But I could easily see arguments that /Stone or /Axe would provide better team mitigation with knockdown, and that /Dark might be better for personal survival (more due to Siphon Life than to the debuffs). I know next to nothing about /Kinetic either, but I understand it reduces damage, which sounds good (typically we die in hardcore when sudden spikes of damage occur before we think to reach for emergency measures; reducing incoming damage might flatten out those spikes and buy more time for the operator to respond).

Opinions and experiences welcomed. Shouts of "hardcore? you're crazy!" tolerated as well.

Heh. While I like all of the Scrapper sets, in actual play the two that make me smile the most often are MA and BS. Really, either one will be a lot of fun, and in particular, "hits like a truck" is a strength of both sets (as opposed to, say, Spines...which is more like being a human Claymore mine).

I'm currently playing one in a concept group that meets weekly. Progress has been slowish, playing only once a week, and I'm around 26, iirc, without much in the way of fancy IO slotting, and feeling starved for slots as always.

I too was concerned about the durability at first. However, having a team every time has alleviated that concern -- since I'm not tanking, I can follow the Tanker around and just lay into whatever he's got gathered up. Often, I only need to hit Healing Flames a couple of times a night.

However, in this case he's a Dark Tanker, and every once in a while he mis-times Dark Regen in a large herd and pays the price. I've been startled to see that most of those times, my Katana/Fiery Aura Scrapper has held up quite well, including a few times when I had to hold the line against tons of foes while the team recovered. I think the key is that (so far) I've already had a Divine Avalanche buff (or two) up before the Tanker went down, so that within seconds of finding myself unexpectedly the point man, I've been able to triple-stack DA. I don't know if I'd do so well if I had to absorb the alpha before getting DA stacked up, however.

45% melee defense, plus my resistance and my (half-slotted!) Healing Flames, is a potent combination. Add to that the fact that my Blazing Aura is still only one-slotted and I don't even HAVE Burn yet, and you can see that religious attention to stacking DA can make this combo formidable for churning through crowds.

2. The first-tier attack is typically fast-recharging. That means it's usually available and although slows affect it proportionately just as much, the net effect in seconds is less. Furthermore, procs are more useful in fast-recycling attacks -- more chances to proc. I like to slot mine with either a set that gives a good bonus (like a defense bonus, for example) and/or a proc. In some cases both -- I have a character with Jab slotted with Kinetic Combats AND the Hecatomb purple proc. AND it bruises! Very nice.

I went to 32.5% typed defense to s/l/e/n damage (and less to f/c). Positoinal melee defense would probably be stronger, but I was able to get typed defense without six-slotting entire sets, so I was better able to keep my enhancement values as high as I liked on my attacks. And the attacks are a big part of Fire/Fire/Pyre.

Your Scrapper shouldn't be "casting" "spells."

Lag is a problem, I don't dispute, and it's worse for reactive sets like Regen. However, some builds are stronger than others. Perhaps you could export your current build to Mid's (it's easy using the new Titan Sentinel program, no more typing the build in) and post it up in the Scrapper section for advice.