Umbral

Those are parentheses, not brackets. Parenthese are the curved ones "()" and brackets are the square ones "[]".

It's spelled "you're". "Your" is the possessive. If you're going to say that I'm spouting rubbish and that my responses are garbled, make sure you're actually doing so correctly.

Actually, I have made a legitimate answer to it. You just didn't like it, so you ignored it.

The funny thing is that I doubt anyone here actually cares about what you think. I'm more than confident that the people here care what I think. What's sad is that you honestly don't think that you're really just a joke right now.

So the people that pointed out that Shield Charge was broken and needed to be fixed were being selfish because that required action? Arcanaville was being selfish when she called for all of the various SR fixes? Billz championing all of his various Claws tweaks is selfish as well? Are the players that point out AE exploits to the devs being selfish?

Asking for something not to be touched just because you like it that way is, in fact, more selfish than asking for something to be changed to benefit more people. If there is a problem, it should be addressed, not ignored simply because a few people like it. EC is only a good power for PvPers. It's largely worthless for PvE.

I've done both as well. You're not unique in that argument. I can, however, tell you that PvP is a vastly smaller portion of the playerbase than PvE is, so it doesn't really matter what PvP base argument bring up: a PvE based solution will still benefit more people in a more significant way.

And so is claiming that doing so to EC would completely ruin the set for those people that PvP. You don't get to be immune to your own arguments just because you posited them. "Opinion" is a double edged sword (though I can probably whip up some numbers if you want me to and turn that "opinion" into "fact").

We're both being selfish. I'm being selfish by wanting EC to be improved for PvEs sake. You're being selfish by insisting that nothing should be done to it that doesn't make it better for PvP. Comically enough, considering the number of people involved, I'm likely the one being less selfish because, rather than looking after a tiny group that shrinks every day, I'm looking after the larger group that more of the game is devoted to.

Numerical fun times (also known as "Umbral Schools Your Face and then Laughs About It")!

First off, if you're going to use the numbers, make sure they're right. GFS has a rolling DoT, which means that the previous tick has to land in order for any later tick to land. The damage on GFS is actually 240.8. The same applies to Ripper and its real damage of 136.2. Secondly, One Thousand Cuts doesn't get to use both of the 43.79 damages: only one of them hits in PvP. The real damage for it is 235.47.

Now that we've got the actual numbers, let's play this game again. Oh wait, EC is on top and, unlike every other power on that entire list, gets a guaranteed hard mez effect attached to it. So it's the best ST attack for Scrappers in PvP based on damage and it pretty much assures that you get a follow up attack thanks to a hard mez that no other set gets. I'm going to say that it hits hard because of that.

If you want to play a numbers game with me, make sure you get your numbers right. Honestly, you're just demonstrating exactly how little you know about the game. Which might be why you're really just a joke. Which is why you make me laugh.

Actually, AAO is, hands down, the best taunt aura in the game. Why, you may ask? Quite simple: it has the best taunt aura mag and duration for maximum taunt effect and it has a debuff attached to it (which doubles the threat generated by it). Couple that with the fact that you're also dealing more damage, and it's quite obvious why you can peel hate off of Tanks with no problem.

Now, the issue with this is that taunt auras don't actually force enemies to stand there and attack you. The only reason that people seem to think they do so is because they continually generate threat on targets around them so that threat decay doesn't make an enemy run back to their spawn point. They are just as likely to run away as normal. The only difference is that they'll just be more likely to attack you than your friends if you have friends nearby.

Rad/DP would have some massive synergy in stacking -res: stacking 3 Chem Ammo attacks on top of Enervating Field generates 62.5% -dam (and you can stack substantially more than that on hard targets) which is like giving yourself that same amount of resistance (albeit reduced by things like the purple patch and enemy resistance).

I don't see much synergy with Storm/DP though. The primary advantages of DP are more damage and -dam via their respective ammunitions. Storm/DP wouldn't be a bad setup, but it wouldn't have any particular synergy (and might actually work at odds of you want to close to melee to use HoB).

I think it's hilarious that your only defense is "omg selfish!" when it's just as apt (if not more so since there are more players that participate in PvE than PvP) to state that your desire to prevent any buff to EC that makes it more useful in PvE is selfish in and of itself. Giving EC some degree of splash damage would go a much longer way towards making the set as a whole a lot better for a lot more people than it is currently. Are you honestly going to try to say that it's selfish to desire improving the power so that it benefits more people rather than the few that enjoy it now (and that's assuming that you don't simply call out the current EC in PvP to be broken because it hits so hard and has a stun attached)?

Well, considering that most tier 9 Scrapper powers can't do the roughly 390 damage needed to take out a level 40 even level minion with their tier 9 without a crit and/or BU, I'm not entirely sure why you think they should. Assuming 95% dam enhancement, you would need a 3.5 damage scale attack in order to do that. The highest that Scrappers get is 3.194 with GFS.

Now, there are some attacks in game that are that strong (Total Focus, Energy Transfer, Seismic Smash, KO Blow), but there are 2 caveats: none of them are currently available to Scrappers and all of them have a recharge of 20 seconds (or 25, in the case of KO Blow). The slowest Scrapper tier 9 (what we would consider a "tier 9" rather than a mini-nuke like Lightning Rod) takes 15 seconds to recharge.

Personally, I'd rather have the Scrapper attacks than the Tanker/Brute ones because I like having my big hitter up more often even if it does deal a bit less damage. The 20 and 25 second attacks simply aren't available often enough to be put to substantial use within the confines of attack strings (where that extra 1.5-3.5 second difference in recharge time can drive you to do some very sad things with your string).

You're confusing the cause of GFS getting skipped with the cause of EC's being skipped. GFS generally gets skipped because it has very high recharge requirements to manage a well formed attack string; the best attack string for FM is actually GFC>Inc>Crem, whereas MA's is Storm>Crane>Storm>CAK. EC gets skipped because it's actually got worse DPA than the other major ST attacks in the set, not because it's harder to use.

It depends on how many stacks of BF you're managing. If you're getting 1 stack (37.5% +dam for Scrappers, 30% +dam for Brutes), a Brute would need 75% Fury (1.125 * 1.075 * (1 + .95 + .375) = .75 * (1 + .95 + .3 + (x * .02))) to equal a Scrapper. If you're getting 2 stacks, a Brute would need 90% Fury (1.125 * 1.075 * (1 + .95 + (.375 * 2)) = .75 * (1 + .95 + (.3 * 2) + (x * .02))).

Something else to remember is that Brutes are also going to be getting more out of the Attack Vitals and Sweep attack strings because Fury fully augments the bonus damage whereas Critical does not get any benefit from them. It's a small difference, but it's present.

Either way, it doesn't really matter. I would choose based on preference. From a purely numerical perspective, they're going to get roughly the same performance if you can manage 75% Fury (of which there is a good bit of evidence to prove that most people should be able to) and better performance if you can manage more than that (getting more than one stack of BF can be problematic if you're going with combos).

You're misreading my intent. I was talking about the Shard as a whole rather than just the Dr. Q TF. The Dr. Q TF is a travesty or boring proportions. The only times I do it (and I've done it more than most) are when I'm feeling sufficiently pumped up that I think it'll be fun to go through the crucible again.

Honestly, a Dr. Q TF could likely be turned into something of a two-part story/TF fusion: you first start working for Dr. Q doing solo missions throughout FBZ and occasionally bouncing back to PI and/or FF. Once you complete that arc (finding out about Crey, Nemesis, and others breaking into the Shard without alerting Portal Corp and destroying the first lab), you then get to run the remainder of the content as a TF (destroying those labs and dealing with the Rularuu outbreak).

The attack string that build is using is FU>Focus>Slash>Wait. Swipe or Strike are useful if you don't have enough recharge to get the wait in that string down under .396 seconds, but, if you can get it below that, you're going to be reducing your output. Those attacks just don't have DPAs high enough to make them worthwhile in top end strings any more.

In all the times I've tanked yellow mitos, I've never gotten a single complaint about melees dying to splash damage, and the Taunt on that toon is completely unslotted (it's completely empty). The only time you're going to get idiot melees dying from splash damage is when you have an idiot tank that is standing well within the range of their own taunt: on the last raid I was in, there was a Stone tank that swore he wasn't the cause of the yellow team wipes when he was standing less than 20' away from the mito and simply refused to admit that he was too close; as soon as I fired him and got a tank that knew more than just "stand still and auto-taunt with Granite on" (which always made me wonder why he left it on when it did absolute nothing for him except for debuff his recharge), the rest of the raid went quite smoothly.

I always suspected that the Cryptic devs originally intended to fill the Shadow Shard with more stuff. I mean, honestly, if you look at the zones and how they're laid out (there are entire barren stretches of empty sky that can, quite easily, just have a new island dropped into them and it even makes sense within the context of the zone for a new island to randomly appear), they seems more like zones still waiting on the content monkeys to come swarming by: the only thing really missing from the zone is, quite simply, story arcs (though I'd agree that some development of the Mole Point system would be awesome, especially if it were tied to zone content to represent you delving further into the Shard and pushing further in). It seems to me that the devs probably just saw how little attention the Shard got (which, really, it didn't get much even when it was new, but I think that was mostly due to the lack of content rather than a lack of interest) and then, in a monumentally back decision, decided to simply abandon any plans to fill the zones with content (and instead focused on giving us more mid-level content... joy!).

FA provides 5% +tohit and 20% +acc. Tactics provides 7% +tohit. The only attribute of those two that can be enhanced via augmentation is the +tohit though, so Tactics the better option. In either case, it's largely a toss up between the two when you're putting a build together: FA is nice because of the tohit debuff resist whereas Tactics is nice if you're short on endurance and/or want to be more useful to your team.

FA seems useful... until you realize that it provides less improvement for your end chance to hit than Tactics does, costs more endurance, and doesn't buff your friends. All that it really does is provide a bit of tohit debuff resistance, which is nice, but of debatable value considering the endurance costs of the power. FA is one of those powers that really bit it when the devs nerfed it. It really needs to have its endurance cost brought down to a sane level to make up for the fact that it's been nerfed into oblivion.

If you play with intelligently, you can get away with baseline range on the taunt with no problem. The simplest way would to simply find the exact maximum range outside of the goo and simply stand there and taunt. If you play more intelligently, you can get away with it still and manage to keep yourself even further away from them by running just barely into range right as Taunt recharges and then backing out again to a "safer" distance: because the Mitos have massively huge ranges, you'll still keep aggro even outside of your normal Taunt range. If you play like a crazy ******* that enjoys doing things that he has no right doing, you can tank multiple yellow mitos simultaneously with baseline range in Taunt by simply alternating targets and backing away from both of them while Taunt is recharging.

Assuming that the 400 damage every 4 seconds number is accurate (it seems about right in my experience), it means that yellow mitos have a dps of 100. When you pop an EoE, you take this down to a dps of 10 (100 * (1- .9)). Assuming you have Health with a single, even level SO and no other sources of +hp (like the passive accolades) or +regen (like Rooted, Physical Perfection, or Fast Healing), a Tanker will recover 12 hp/sec. As long as he's chugged an EoE, any tank with Health can tank a yellow mito indefinitely (as long as that EoE is still active).

In order to tank a mito without an EoE, you need to manage more than 100 hp/sec, which excludes a large number of builds out there: willpower and dark regen wouldn't be able to because you can't be in melee with a mito when you're tanking it.

A well built Fire Tank can manage it because of Healing Flames: with 3 Heals and 3 Rech SOs, Healing Flames provides 913.3 hp every 23 seconds (20.5 sec recharge + 1.716 sec animation), which equates to 39.7 hp/sec, so that the Fire Tank only needs to find ~60 hp/sec from other sources in order to accomplish this (which isn't hard to do with +regen and +hp set bonuses, procs, and passive bonuses), not to mention that more recharge would actually make it even easier (with roughly 150% global +rech, Healing Flames would provide 70 hp/sec, and 30 hp/sec regeneration is a pittance for an IO build).

An Elec tank could manage it with a bit more work, relying upon Energize to provide ~40 hp/sec (~25 from the heal and 15% from the +regen). Getting the remaining 60 hp/sec isn't impossible, but it would definitely be hard.

If you really wanted to devote an entire build to tanking mitos without EoEs, though, you could always go with Aid Self slotted out for interrupt reduction: well slotted, you'd be getting roughly 700 hp every 12-15 seconds or so (~5 sec animation) for 45-60 hp/sec and would have to make up substantially less regeneration otherwise.

Not always though. Personally, I've always found it best to get your info from the various global channels that tend to have people that run them.

One of the reasons why Hami raids aren't broadcasted as violently is that not as many people are required for them. Before, you could have (and sometimes needed) more than 200 people to take down Hami. Now, the most that can be in the zone is 50, and you can do a raid with as few as 25-30 people (if they know what they're doing).

Eh, debatable, but that's the very nature of comedy. Personally, I've always felt that Bob Hope's humor was a little too reliant on one liners. Personally, I prefer comedy that operates on a more patient time scale and then inverts your assumptions concerning what the joke was intended to be rather than having a predictable end point. Bob Hope topic jumped a bit too often for my tastes and delivered more in quantity of comedy rather than quality. He doesn't really make me guffaw though he can generally make me smirk (and, if you know anything about memory and how we remember the past, magnitude is incredibly important so my exposure to Bob Hope has largely met with a "meh").

Now, if you really wanted to try to put me in my place, I probably would have referenced some SNL skits with Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Chris Farley, or any one of the many other more "classic" (and generally more critically acclaimed) SNL cast members than Andy Samberg, rather than attempting to rely on a largely outdated comedian that most people simply reference to appear more cultured or because they don't like anything new.

The question is not whether it's additive. The question is whether Brutes suffer from +dam dilution. They do, in fact, because +dam dilutes itself but Brutes are the only melee AT we're discussing that uses a native +dam mechanism to accomplish its "normal" damage. Because Brutes start off with +dam, they dilute any +dam they get otherwise, granting comparatively lower contribution from any +dam they receive..

I did my math correctly. I was not assuming 100% Fury, I was assuming 100% +dam from Fury (i.e. 50% Fury). Even with that, the numbers are correct for 50% Fury (100% +dam):

1.0 (base damage) + .95 (enhancement) + 1.0 (50% Fury) = 2.95 pre +dam
1.0 (base damage) + .95 (enhancement) + 1.0 (50% Fury) + 1.0 (+dam buff) = 3.95 with +dam

3.95 / 2.95 = 1.339 = 33.9% better damage output

If you're going to challenge my math, make sure you at least know whether I'm wrong or not.

+Dam dilution refers to the presence of more +dam providing progressively smaller comparative returns. It does not refer to each portion of +dam providing smaller real returns than the previous.

Except that it doesn't. You've pretty much proven that I was right by agreeing that Brutes, thanks to having the lowest base damage modifier of all of the ATs present, will get the absolute least out of any +dam buff provided (provided that the other ATs are not already at the +dam cap). Any native +dam effect will provide both better real contributions and better comparative contributions when used on any AT except for a Tanker. Considering we're discussing who would use a new set best under the assumption that the only deciding factor is who uses the new +dam effect to the greatest effect, it's pretty much a given: Brutes use it the worst (just like Super Strength and Shield Defense; any set that relies on heavy amounts of +dam is going to be used worse for Brutes than for anyone else).

Well, actually, the temporary powers are in the same drop pool as all other critter drop recipes. Common recipes (the white ones) have a chance to drop any time you would otherwise get a common IO recipe from an enemy kill. Uncommon recipes (the yellow ones) have a chance to drop any time you would otherwise get an uncommon IO recipe from an enemy kill. The same applies for rare recipes.

The problem that most people are seeing with the "increased" drop rate isn't that the drop rate for temp powers was suddenly increased arbitrarily or that the drop rate for other powers went down: it's that additional recipes were added to the potential drop database and, because what drop you get is determined by the system randomly picked one from the database of potential drops based on your level and the enemy defeated and, because it's not weighted and so many new temp powers were added, the chances of a temp power dropping were increased simply because more were made available. The drop percent that determines what recipe you get from a kill is zero sum and, by increasing the number of temp powers on the list without adding a similar number of common recipe entries the chance was skewed.

Posi explicitly said that the drop rate is zero sum and the system operates by providing an equal chance for each item on the database to be chosen. Though he never said how weighting was done (and I don't believe it was ever done to pool A), because of this, I'm confident that the weighting was likely done by simply adding redundant entries into the database to create the desired ratio (which would be the easiest way rather than assigning a specific chance to each recipe and forcing the database query to do some substantially funkier stuff). The spike in appearances of temp powers follows with this design: they added temp powers to all of the recipe pools and the zero sum system shifted the chance for IO recipes to decrease and temp powers to increase.

Unless the devs want to weigh all of the temp powers and common recipes by usefulness, it would be better to simply generate a number of entries equal to the previous number of entries for temp powers that then sends a secondary query to a sub-database of all of the applicable temp power recipes so that the rate of temp power drop actually goes back to where it was rather than the inflamed rate that it is currently at.

TLR, yes, temp power drops do take the place of other drops that you would get because of how the drop system operates. Posi said so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhwbxEfy7fg.

Utter hilarity.

+Dam dilution demonstrated mathematically:

Scrapper: 95% +dam from base slotting; 100% +dam from a buff; the 100% +dam buff equates to a 51.3% increase in damage output.

Brute: 95% +dam from base slotting; 100% +dam from Fury; 100% +dam buff equates to a 33.9% increase in damage output.

Because Brutes have large amounts of natural +dam that they rely upon to deal damage, they suffer from +dam dilution. Whereas every other AT uses +dam in a method exactly like Scrappers, Brutes suffer from dilution because they're already getting large amount of +dam from their inherent.

Actually, if you want to say that it's based off of base damage, then Brutes are still last. Check it. Brutes have a base damage scalar of .75. Scrappers have a base damage scalar of 1.125. Stalkers have a base damage scalar of 1.0. Tankers have a base damage scalar of .8. Brutes are still at the bottom of the heap for +dam contribution from that perspective.

Even more amusing, you have to remember that Brutes share the same melee buff dmg attribute as Tankers and Stalkers: .1. Scrappers have a .125 melee buff dmg attribute.

If you really want to go about creating tiers of usefulness, Scrappers are at the top because they have a high base damage scalar and the best melee buff dmg attribute, Stalkers are next because they have a higher base damage scalar, followed by Tankers for the same reason, and Brutes are last because they have the worst damage scalar and the same low melee buff dmg attribute.

No matter how you stack it, Brutes get the least out of any +dam contribution mechanism than any other class in the game. This is why Shield Brutes are actually the least overpowered of the Shield ATs and Scrappers are, quite easily, the most broken.

A better solution would be to simply reduce the drop rate. Rather than having each temp power exist as a separate entity on the drop database for each level range, it would be better if there was simply a single entry that randomly chose from a secondary database of all temp powers for that level range and rarity so that the chance to get a temp power is drastically reduced, down to a level that actually makes them somewhat worthwhile drops.

Actually, Brutes use +dam mechanisms the absolute worst of all ATs specifically because of Fury. Brutes dilute all +dam they recieve because they're already bringing so much +dam to bear. Any power that provides a large amount of +dam is better for other ATs than it is for Brutes, unless that +dam is going to put the other ATs at or above their damage cap (at which point it becomes a question of one AT getting benefits while the other doesn't).