Silas

Ahaha, whoops. Sec, lemme fix that.

Edit: fix'd

At peak performance? At peak performance a Brute will be at the damage cap where they'll do much more damage than a Scrapper.

IIRC, a Brute matches Scrapper damage at 80% Fury. At the damage cap they'll do more damage than a Scrapper.

Because 2 acc/2 recharge is all you'll ever need in Benumb.

Glad you're liking it so far.

Re: Sands of Mu, nah it's not affected by AAO. The vet temp powers are unaffected by damage buffs or debuffs, which is what makes them great for SS characters because you can still do damage during the Rage crash.

Afraid I can't look into the build in-depth atm, but just scanning it there's a few things I noticed:

It looks like your end use might be pretty bad, 1 end/sec although it does go down to .7/sec not running Tough. At that level of recharge though, especially with Fireball costing 13 end you might have some issues. I'd swap the recharge IO in Fireball for an endurance reducer. You only lose 2s of recharge but it'll cost 3 end less.

For the Membranes in AD, isn't that getting changed/fixed/nerfed/whatever? I thought Castle posted something to that effect but I could be mistaken. Regardless, if its a farm build you don't really need to enhance its def debuff res. I'd chuck 2 endurance reducers in it since it'll be perma anyway at your level of recharge.

Edit: bear in mind the Pool C every 2 runs is an average and it's also using a very big map. I'm using the Liberate Television map, which has the huge ruined city (like Boomtown but with water) map. It's got 4 extra bosses on it, which is also a factor, albeit a relatively minor one.

The same map is available heroside but it's either Freakshow who suck for money at 50 or Nemesis who will be nasty to farm as a /SD.

Running something like Council Earth or Battle Maiden you'd probably be getting a Pool C every 4-5 runs on average. That's a really rough estimate though.

t ElectroHawk, Looks pretty good but there's a few things you might want to look into:

You've got no end rdx in Steamy Mist so it'll put a real hurting on your end bar, especially in conjunction with the rest of the /storm stuff and Earth.

For endurance, unless you've got your heart set on Ice Mastery for concept or whatever I'd recommend you go Power or Fire Mastery so you have an endurance management tool or you're gonna be sucking wind a lot of the time. Hibernate can work but taking yourself out of the fight for 30 seconds at a time every few minutes is bad news bears.

You can take some slots out of Freezing Rain, I'd go with 1 Achilles proc, 2 rech/ends and a recharge. Also given that Achilles Procs don't stack, you can take the Achilles proc out of Earthquake since Freezing Rain will be your go-to res debuffer.

I'd also try and fit in the Earth pet if you can, since he's really tough and doesn't have time-set lifespan like the rest of your damage pets he'll more than do his endurance cost worth of damage.

For Lightning Storm, I'd take the hit to global recharge and take out the Decimations. Frankenslot it with the Dam/rech, dam/end/rech, dam/end and acc/dam/end from Thunderstrike and the hold proc and quad from Devastation. That'll give you much better recharge and endurance values.

Har, a Scrapper Soul Mastery with Gloom, Darkest Night, Dark Obliteration, Shadow Meld and a Widow pet just so you have something to skip

Storm Summoning, my droogs. Much maligned because melee hates KB which Storm has in droves. As someone who hates melee, I enjoy Storm because I can passive aggressively drive them off my teams. Take that, scrapper fiends! Nah, seriously though, Storm does have a lot of KB but it’s very possible to minimize it and if you do use it, to use it to good effect.

KB stuff away from melee = MELEE HAZ A SAD

KB stuff towards melee = MELEE GIVE HUGZ

Now I can already hear you cry, but Silas, there are only two people who can play Storm well and they both died in the 1800s! YES, AND WE GREATLY MOURN THEIR PASSING.

But this is the time for change! It is totally possible to play Storm without being an awful, awful Fehlgeburt. Come, take my hand and let us prance through the fields of Storm. Don’t mind the lashing rain and gale force winds.

So you can play Storm in such a way as to be not terrible. Cool, not being awful is nice, but is that it?

I SAY NAY, SIRRAH:

Why Storm is Awesome and You Want to Be One:

• Very high damage/control support set

• No team buffs to worry about maintaining, just do yo’ thang

• Great mob positioning tools to both cause and control chaos.

• A fairly decent ally heal if you want to maintain the façade of not loathing your team mates and wanting them to die.

• Freezing Rain is like Sleet which is GREAT except unlike Sleet you don’t have to wait till like level one million to get it. So yay!

• Very powerful AoE debuffs

• Immense, (and I mean immense), abilities for team griefing :3

AND SO:

Gale: Cone high KB, minor damage (smashing)

Slotting Recommendation: Ehm, depends. As positioning tools go, this is pretty crude and you’ve got much better options in the rest of the set. I have it 6 slotted for Kinetic Crash set bonuses and on the rare occasions I use it, I want it to do its thing well. That said, I use it very rarely and unless your loathing for your fellow man is larger than mine (hah! Unlikely.) you probably won’t either so there’s not much point giving it slots. I would say slot it if you want set bonuses, otherwise don’t bother. Please, please don’t slot for damage. If your team wanted huge amounts of KB for anemic damage, they would have invited an energy blaster. Zing!

How to Use: To send stuff in a huge cone in front of you a-flying. It can come in handy very occasionally, but with all the energy and finesse you put into a good Gale you could have used Hurricane to put them there faster, less messily and debuffed them to boot. To that end, Hurricane is for fine positioning, Gale is if you just want something out of your face right that instant and you don’t care too much where it lands.

O2 Boost: ally +heal +protection (Stun, End Drain) +perception

Slotting Recommendation: Well, it’s a decent heal but healing really shouldn’t be your priority as a Stormy. I put 5 Doctored Wounds in it for set bonuses and while it’s far from a priority power, you might as well make the most of it if you can spare the slots.

How to Use: Well uh, most obviously for healing. Someone’s green bar gets dented, bubblegurglebubble O2 Boost them back up to healthy. The stun and end drain protection should not be ignored, however. While I wouldn’t take the time to keep all the squishies on a team O2 boosted fighting stuff with a lot of stuns, if you see someone stunned or someone calls it out, hit em with O2 to break them out of it. If you’re fighting stuff with a lot of end drains (Mu, Malta) it’s also pretty nice to keep a couple O2s on whoever is leading into the spawns to stop their blue bar going cough splutter poot. Also, unfortunately no matter how many O2s you stack on them, you can’t nullify the end drain of a nuke. I’ve tried :C It also gives +perception which is pretty nice if you're fighting Arachnos with their frigging Smoke Nades.

Snow Storm: toggle enemy PBAoE slow -rech -fly

Slotting Recommendation: I went with 2 end rdx and 2 slows. It uses a tonne of endurance and the rest of Storm is pretty end-heavy as is, you really want to minimize how much this uses. 2 slows ensure brings the slow to -90% which is the slow cap. Slow resistant stuff (GOD I HATE WARWOLVES) will still ignore it (GOD I HATE THEM SO MUCH) the difference is very noticeable against anything else.

How to Use: Sadly unlike other delicious enemy toggles, you can’t really pull with this. Well, you can, but it’ll be like watching paint dry. Or playing a Defender. Use this on a central dude in a spawn to keep them where they are for Freezing Rain and stuff. Just be aware that the animation is a tad on the slow side so if stuff is dying fast or there’s a controller/dom locking stuff down you don’t need to bother. Only use Snow Storm if stuff is running all over the place and you need them to stop so you can deliver FACE PUNCHES.

Steamy Mist: awww yeah steamy bow chicka okay FINE, god, you spoil all my fun. PBAoE ally +stealth +def(all) +res(fire/cold/energy) +confuse protection

Slotting Recommendation: Defense and end rdx first. The defense is against all types whereas the resistance isn't. The defense also stacks a lot more easily with whatever defense the team has. Since you’ll be running this almost all the time, make sure you get good endurance reduction too. Good place for Karma/Steadfast -KB IOs.

How to Use: Toggle on, don’t turn off unless you’re leading an NPC somewhere. While the resistances aren’t always needed, the stealth is always great. Both will help you and other squishies not get splattered. This in conjunction with a stealth proc or Super Speed gives you full invis which is very handy for positioning. It also gives confuse protection which is pretty handy against Succubi and the like.

Freezing Rain: location AoE -def -res (all) slow, -rech, minor KD, minor DoT (lethal)

Slotting Recommendation: Priority is to get maximum recharge and an Achilles -res proc. Getting good values for defense debuff and endurance reduction is also important.

How to Use: Open fights with it. Drop on spawns. Make them go dead faster. You want to use this all the time, its fantastic. This is a cornerstone power in Storm, and the other powers in the set (most notably Hurricane) allow you to make the best use of it.

Hurricane: PBAoE repel, KB, -tohit, -range

Slotting Recommendation: For -tohit and endurance reduction. This is a very hefty tohit debuffer but uses a lot of endurance. Slot accordingly. Godspeed. ALSO: recharge.

lol

wat?

Recharge in a toggle? Yes. Because this isn’t an Always Power(tm). It’s a power you turn on and off when needed, so you want it recharging sharpish like. I wouldn't put recharge SO or IOs in it, but if you're using a set (I went for 4 Dark Watchers) get the ones with some recharge if you can. Global recharge as well is also usually enough. As long as you've got it recharging in 4-6ish seconds it's good.

How to Use: Well. This is something I could dedicate an entire How to Not Be Awful section to. But basically, the golden rule is this: be gentle, lover. Unless it’s incredibly KB/repel resistant (like an AV) you should pretty much never have something in the middle of your Hurricane. It’s possible to debuff stuff with the very edge of the ‘cane without shoving it around. If you do want to shove stuff around (which is also a very valuable use of the power) you still only need to graze them with the edge of it. Stuff will occasionally get randomly KBed, but if you’re gentle with it they’ll generally go flying to where you wanted them to go to begin with. It also debuffs range by a sizeable amount (60%), so stuff you nick with it will have a much harder time hitting as well as needing to be closer to do so. Stacks nicely with Taunts -range. Good times.

It’s a very fiddly power, but an incredible useful and powerful tool. Practice with it until you get a good feel for its nuances. Probably best to do this solo.

Here’s a picture to show you the ranges on the power. The blue circle is the range on the visual sfx, about 15 feet. The red circle is the actual range of the power, about 25 feet. Anything in between the red and blue lines can and will be repelled and sporadically KBed. In order to gently nudge stuff around, you want them to be riiiight on the edge of the red line. Unfortunately one of those things you’ve gotta get a feel for. Like a big ol’ bag of sand. Crunch crunch.

In fact, I’ve decided to give Hurricane its own HTNBA section. Exciting!

How to Not Be Awful With Hurricane:

• As above, be gentle. If you’re running right at stuff and getting them right into the middle of it and hurling them everywhere YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. There is almost never a time when you want stuff radially KBed.

• For positioning. For stuff that’s wandered outside of the main spawn or has been KBed out by your Lightning Storm or whatever, gently nudge them back into the AoE killzone with this. A good Stormy means there are fewer random stragglers to chase down, not more.

• When not using it for positioning, it’s still a great power to have running just to keep stuff out of melee from you/other squishies. Fighting stuff with big bifurcating melee weapons it can be a lifesaver to run this for a safezone for the squishies because anything trying to melee you or them will be pushed back and debuffed. Just you know, don’t make the squishy safezone right in melee where it’ll be obnoxious for stuff like Fulcrum/Heat Loss/lolmelee/etc.

• For debuffing. As I said above, you don’t have to get stuff within the repel radius to debuff it. If you’re careful about it, you can debuff stuff in a spawn without pushing them around. Since the -tohit on Hurricane is pretty huge, this is a skill you want to hone.

• Don’t be lazy about Hurricane. Don’t either never use it or never turn it off. The animation is sluggish so you don’t want to be flicking it on and off all the time, but leaving it running all the time is a pretty good way to piss off a team.

• Positional awareness. Running Hurricane you’ve gotta keep an eye on how close you are to stuff so you don’t accidentally push/aggro stuff as you’re running around. As a huge slacker I resent being made to expend any kind of effort, however I’m a big boy and with regular therapy I manage. So can you.

• While you can stand right next to an AV without KBing them with Hurricane, its generally better to only touch them with the edge of the debuff instead. This means they’ll get the debuff without you throwing all of their minions and stuff away who would otherwise be delicious, delicious Fulcrum/Heat Loss/Soul Drain fodder.

• Mobility. If you’re running Hurricane to move stuff around you want to have as much freedom of movement as possible. Hurdle and CJ are great for this, but if you’ve gotta do a lot of positioning with ‘cane you might want to hold off on attacks just so you don’t get suppressed. Attacks like Freezing Rain/Ice Storm/Rain of Fire are great for this because you can drop them and not be suppressed, then focus on pushing stragglers back into the storm. Good times.

• Practice makes perfect. Boring, cliché advice but very true. While it is totally the worst that you have to like, pay attention and ****, Hurricane in the right hands is a fantastic tool.


Thunderclap: PBAoE stun

Slotting Recommendation: Weeeeell…as stuns go its pretty butt, to be honest. Animation is glacial, accuracy is low, duration is short, recharge is long. It’s also PBAoE, meaning it doesn’t play nice with Hurricane. I went with 5 Stupefys because the set bonuses are delicious and when I want to use Thunderclap I want it to count. If you’re not going to dedicate a fair few slots to it, don’t bother. It’s certainly not a key power, so don’t worry. It does have more use for controllers, who can stack it with a stun from their primary and who can have an AoE immobilise to mitigate the stun stagger.

How to Use: If you want to stun a spawn, hop right in the middle (perhaps best to turn ‘cane off first :3 ) and shhhhRRRRAAAKOOOOOOOMMMM they’re stunned. Well, minions and lts are. They will now kindly refrain from shooting you in your face, but they will drunkenly stagger around, sometimes at high velocity. Minimize this with an AoE immob if you have one or Snow Storm to slow their stagger to a crawl. If they get really unruly you can always nudge them back into place with Hurricane.

Tornado: pet with PBAoE KB, -def, stun, high DoT (smashing)

Slotting Recommendation: Of the various aspects of this power (KB, defense debuff, stun, damage) only the damage is worth slotting for. It throw stuff around enough without being slotted for KB, the -def is nice but the damage is nicer and the stun is a minor side effect at best. The damage is actually pretty impressive, the only problem is you’ll only get the benefit of it if you can lock stuff down.

How to Use: if you just throw this around you’ll create havoc. Great if that’s what you want to do, but generally you’ll want the havoc to be controlled. Due to this, be circumspect in your use of Tornado or not at all. If you’ve got an AoE immobilise with -kb then go nuts, otherwise only drop it as a panic button to give you some breathing room and you’ve exhausted all other options or on a KB resistant target like an AV.

Lightning Storm: pet with high damage (energy) KB, -end -recovery

Slotting Recommendation: This is a tricky power to slot. You want as much damage and recharge as you can get, but it uses a truckload of endurance so you want good end rdx too, as well as being able to slot some nice procs. I recommend frankenslotting from the ranged damage sets (Thunderstrike is great for this, appropriately enough) to get good dam/rech/end values. Accuracy can’t hurt, but it’s far from necessary with its high base accuracy and Freezing Rain.

How to Use: Throw it up and it’ll fire lightning bolts at stuff. It does fantastic damage, especially combined with Freezing Rain. The downside is that each bolt does KB, so if you’re not careful about where you place it, it’ll send stuff flying. While you can easily correct this with Hurricane, its best to minimize it in the first place. You can do this by dropping Lightning Storm in the air directly above a spawn, so that they’re knocked back straight down, so it’s effectively KD.

How to Not Be Awful:

• When using Gale, less is more. Much, much more. Rare is the time when you absolutely have to throw everything in a huge cone back. Sometimes stuff bounces and flies back further, sometimes they don’t. Its unreliable distance, unwieldy cone and much better positioning tools means Gale is almost never worth it. Keep on your bar only if you enjoy tormenting Scrappers.

• If you’re going to torment Scrappers, go whole hog. Turn on Hurricane, put Gale on auto, set yourself on Follow to the scrapper and target through them. :3 They’ll rage so hard they’ll give themselves an aneurysm.

• Okay 4 srs though don’t do that, its not a nice thing to do. Or what you can do is be more subtle in your tormenting, always be excellent in your storming so that the scrapper will extol the virtues of Storm and their peers will think them delusional and scorn them as a pariah. Muahaha.

• Storm can be trickier to use in open maps, but for this it shines in indoor maps. Especially office/warehouse maps with lots of delicious corners to herd stuff into with Hurricane and then obliterate with AoEs.

• That said, try to judge when its best to push stuff into corners and when to just tackle the spawn where they were. If the team is moving fast and is plenty safe, it’ll generally be more of a hindrance to insist on rounding things up into a corner. When this is the case, circle around it to push the spawn together into itself, rather than towards somewhere else.

• When dropping Tornado as a panic button because the team is getting mauled, bear its duration in mind. If you think you need the full 30 seconds to regroup, go ahead and chuck it out. If you only need 5-10 seconds go with another option because otherwise you’ll have the Tornado following you around making a mess of things when you don’t want it around.

• Speaking of Tornado, while it does do a lot of damage to KB resistant targets (especially AVs), it will throw everything else around the AV all over the place and there’s no guarantee it’ll focus on the AV rather than chasing some poor minion it just threw across the room. If you’ve got someone on the team who benefits from big spawns (kinetics, cold, dark melee, willpower, invuln, shield defense) hold off on Tornado. If you really want to drop it on an AV wait until the spawn around it is dead.

• Jump-cancelling (video here) can be very tricky to master, but if you can get the hang of it for the Snow Storm/Freezing Rain/Lightning Storm animation, it’ll be tremendously useful for your mobility, especially for Hurricane. Even moreso if you’ve got something else which shares the same animation (Ice Storm/Blizzard/Rain of Fire).

• Don’t underestimate soft controls. Freezing Rain and Snow Storm is a devastating combination because the mobs will try to run out of the patch but are slowed to hell and back, giving you and the team plenty of time to take them apart.

• Storm Summoning is end heavy. I find this to be the case even with heavy endurance reduction slotting. Invest in +recovery from sets and/or other endurance management tools. As someone who loves Blizzard SO MUCH I took both CP and Power Sink.

What Goes Well With Storm Summoning:

Ehm, I'd say there are several good options for Storm. Fire is of course, as with almost any Corr secondary, balls-acheingly great. Rain of Fire + Freezing Rain = win. Fire just does absurd amounts of damage which goes well with the debuffs and damage of Storm, but you will be pretty squishy and end-heavy.

Sonic is a great primary for teaming and is very endurance light. The drawbacks of Sonic, (namely, crap AoE and lowish on damage in general), are covered by Storm.

I went with Ice for all the rain synergy, all the stacking AoE slows are great. Freeze Ray is great for marking the Snow Storm anchor and Ice isn't too end heavy.

How Silas Does It:


Behold!

So uh. Hope this has been helpful. Sorry for the delays and all that, if it helps, I blame the Warshade.

Now go forth and trow stormz!

IX: Storm Summoning

Storm Summoning, my droogs. Much maligned because melee hates KB which Storm has in droves. As someone who hates melee, I enjoy Storm because I can passive aggressively drive them off my teams. Take that, scrapper fiends! Nah, seriously though, Storm does have a lot of KB but it’s very possible to minimize it and if you do use it, to use it to good effect.

KB stuff away from melee = MELEE HAZ A SAD

KB stuff towards melee = MELEE GIVE HUGZ

Now I can already hear you cry, but Silas, there are only two people who can play Storm well and they both died in the 1800s! YES, AND WE GREATLY MOURN THEIR PASSING.

But this is the time for change! It is totally possible to play Storm without being an awful, awful Fehlgeburt. Come, take my hand and let us prance through the fields of Storm. Don’t mind the lashing rain and gale force winds.

So you can play Storm in such a way as to be not terrible. Cool, not being awful is nice, but is that it?

I SAY NAY, SIRRAH:

Why Storm is Awesome and You Want to Be One:

• Very high damage/control support set

• No team buffs to worry about maintaining, just do yo’ thang

• Great mob positioning tools to both cause and control chaos.

• A fairly decent ally heal if you want to maintain the façade of not loathing your team mates and wanting them to die.

• Freezing Rain is like Sleet which is GREAT except unlike Sleet you don’t have to wait till like level one million to get it. So yay!

• Very powerful AoE debuffs

• Immense, (and I mean immense), abilities for team griefing :3

AND SO:

I will laugh so hard if Scrappers get Stalker patrons.

Well, it's a shame you're leaving and while this is incredibly generous of you...are you really sure you want to give away all your stuff?

GR is on the horizon, you may want to come back at some point in the future.

I agree with almost all the suggestions. I'd love for the Shard to be redone, especially made coop.

I also agree with IanTheM1 though, if the Shard TFs are going to be a requirement, they should be redone first. If the Task Force was intesting, dynamic, entertaining and long I'd be okay with it. But it's not. It's long, repetitive and lazily designed.

As was the Posi TF which has now been redone. So at least it seems the devs are on the same page on this.

I like the movement towards shorter, more dynamic and better designed content.

Quick question: I'm planning on replacing my graphics card but the new one requires 450w (ATI Radeon HD5830).

I opened up my case to look at my power supply and it says max 385w at 50 degrees C or max 460w at 60 degrees C.

What does this mean? That my current power supply would work but the system be hotter with all the possible complications that entails?

Ideas, recommendations? All help appreciated, thanks

I was thinking about this last night.

8 DM/Nins would be best imo. Softcap builds and high recharge, eat orange and red insps (few purples for debuffs) and try and spike down the AVs. Running out of insp, retreat and repeat.

I've been running Liberate a lot the past few days. Gotten 4 purples so far. For the amount of runs I've done, it seems about right to me.

One drop every 3~ runs. Sometimes I get 2 in a run, sometimes I go 5 runs without any. Random drops are random, more at 11.