Umbral

What makes it even stranger is that it didn't freak me out in the slightest. They hadn't bit me in the entire period and at least I knew I wasn't hallucinating. It did explain why my tent was freer of bugs than any of the others though.

And that's the kind of thinking that drives me crazy.

"I don't care if it takes 3 minutes to animate! It's pretty!"

You really think that a large majority of the player base would really stop attacking as soon as something started attacking them just because they want the damage bonus?

Recall that it takes the accumulation of double the threat that someone else has in order to steal aggro from them, so as soon as you steal agg from someone else, it's even harder for them to pull agg off of you.

Of course, this is also ignoring the fact that you really believe that people would stop attacking because they want to deal more damage. People already have a problem with incorporating waits into their attack string to use their most powerful attacks as often as possible. I honestly doubt that doing anything of this kind would actually convince people to stop attacking just to get an increase to their damage. The most I can expect is some damage tanks asking for another tanker to pull agg off of them, which is going to be laughable when you start to realize that the tank is now making it harder to keep aggro off of him by dealing more damage.

Except that the only debuff worth using is the Chem rounds and there isn't actually all that spectacular AoE debuff capability because the durations are all too short to effectively stack.

It's not like DP is capable of doing respectable damage anyways. You might as well get some survivability contribution from a mediocre set.

Which is pretty much the point. Either you're getting threat from Gauntlet or you're getting extra damage from Gauntlet. You're either attack and getting threat and possible bonus damage or you're not attacking and getting... kicked from the team.

Actually, what I posted was facts about the proc chance, proc rate, and proc durations. Opinions are debatable and applied in a qualified manner. You cannot debate that the proc chance is 15%, the duration of it is 8 seconds, and that, because it's slotted in a toggle, it only checks once every 10 seconds. You cannot similarly debate that the power is already providing a larger proc chance more often and with an base duration only slightly more than half a second shorter.

I'm legitimately curious as to why giving a power that is already providing a stronger effect is somehow a 1/5 when giving it a tiny chance to provide additional mez for a part of the time is suddenly so much greater.

Yeah... The biggest problem that I can see is that the set is so pretty that people will play it without even realizing that the numbers are on the "meh" side of things. What made it worse, in my opinion, was that Cryo and Chem ammo are actually lower damage than either incendiary or standard ammo because you're losing out on the -res in Piercing Rounds and the debuff durations don't really last long enough to stack significant numbers so there isn't much reason to use them in the first place. Of course, this also ignores the fact that DP has to use incendiary ammo just to get into the middle of the pack on ST damage for SO grade slotting, so it's sacrificing any debuff capability just to be even with every other set's normal damage dealing capacity.

In my opinion, Dual Pistols needs a fair amount more work before it becomes a well balanced set (notice I did not say "powerful" or "top tier"). The only thing going for it is the pretty, and I'm very sad that Castle and Synapse seem happy with the set as it is now even though it underperforms as it currently stands.

And it stuns, and gives you untouchable.

I had a problem with spiders when I was younger but I forced myself to get over it because I had a few crazy spider/snake ladies that I was very fond of and helped encourage me to not freak out around creepy crawlies.

Probably the craziest thing that's ever happened to me was when I was working a summer at a Boy Scout camp in Texas. When I was opening up my sleeping bag to clean it out and take it home, I found 3 brown recluse spiders living in the foot of it, complete with webs and all. I had been sleeping in that bag for the entire 6 week period and had convinced myself that the slight crawling sensation I felt on my legs at night as I was falling asleept was just my imagining things. I never once got bit either.

I'm not quite sure why you are giving Choking Cloud 3 more stars just because once every 10 seconds, you've got a 15% chance to hold higher level entities for 8 seconds. You're still going to have a 2 second downtime at the very minimum and because you're only checking the proc once every 10 seconds thanks to it being a toggle, it's not all that likely that you'll get consecutive procs anyway.

I'm pretty sure that's one of the "Four stance emotes" that the devs told us would come with the GoRo Complete Collection.

Which is why I prefer my suggestion. Each power would simply have a flag that deals an additional 15-20% damage to the target if the Tanker is not the current target of that enemy. Checking the target of a target is already possible in game, so the mechanical problems wouldn't be particularly difficult and it wouldn't be represented as a bar or anything like that. It's simply a bonus to base damage (rather than simply +dam). Unless there is another Tanker in the party, there isn't going to be much difference except for the first strikes possibly. If there is, the Tanker that isn't as effective at generating threat is going to see an increase in damage output to make up for lower threat gen.

Because Cryptic was completely ignorant of the fact that animation times were actually a mechanical balancing point rather than just fluff. It's for the same reason that some powers have ridiculously fast animation times when balance would dictate they need to be longer (Blaze, BIB, Seismic Smash, pre-rebalance Energy Transfer) and others have ridiculously long animation times when balance would dictate they need to be faster (Total Focus, Shout, etc).

Interestingly enough, even though Castle knows about the problems of animation time and how it affects the balance of sets, the new sets he's put out have shown similar flaws in balancing the damage/rech/end formula with the practical limitations of DPA and long animation times. Dual Pistols is a great example of this: the numbers would actually be quite nice if the animation times weren't godawful long. The animations make the set, from a numbers standpoint, painfully mediocre. Dual Blades has a similar, but slightly less disadvantageous, problem in Vengeful Slice and One Thousand Cuts which makes using those powers outside of their combos tactically unintelligent.

No love for Spine Burst? 16 sec recharge, 15' radius, 71 base damage at 50. The only bad thing about it is the animation time and animation time is a pretty negligible factor when doing AoE calcs because it only matters when you're saturated.

Actually, BABs specifically told us that they're tiny, infinitesimally thin force fields that can be bent by the projector in whatever form is required. The field itself is incredibly fragile and "breaks" upon contact and is then recreated almost immediately, which doesn't really matter whenever you're attempting to cut through something with an edge that is measured in atoms. The shield is itself two separate but perpendicular fields with opposite charges that reinforce each other by having one alternated the breaking action with the other so there is always at least one field up at a time.

BABs never told us how the VG bow is supposed to work, however. Maybe it's an alternate Talsorian field or something.

Assuming 200% +rech (which isn't even "best situation"), Dark Regen would be on a 11.32 second cycle (10 sec recharge + 1.32 sec animation time; not that anyone would ever use it that often because of the endurance cost) which would allow for 176% uptime (2 stacks 76% of the time, 24% of the time 1 stack). Under the same conditions, Healing Flames would be on a 15.05 second cycle (13.33 sec recharge + 1.716 sec activation time) which would allow for 4 stacks.

The issue here isn't so much the recharge of the powers; it's the duration of the buff. The toxic resist buff has a more than 100% base uptime for Healing Flames (60 sec duration / 40 sec recharge = 150% base uptime). A 20 sec duration isn't going to offer even remotely similar benefits when it's already running at 66% base uptime (20 sec duration / 30 sec recharge = 66% base uptime).

Even so, I'm not entirely sure it's altogether needed. Dark Armor has plenty of other exotic resistances that bolster it quite well, along with excellent protection from its mez toggles. The lack of energy resistance is a bit distressing, but it's not breaking the set in any special way, especially since it's a thematic weakness.

Dark Regen has a base recharge of 30 seconds.
Healing Flames has a base recharge of 40 seconds.
Reconstruction has a base recharge of 60 seconds.
Energize has a base recharge of 120 seconds.
Dull Pain and Earth's Embrace have base recharges of 6 minutes.

You seem to be thinking in enhanced recharge times, not base recharge times.

Tohit isn't more important. It's simply more powerful. When you're heavily debuffed, accuracy is actually more important because it increases your minimum chance to hit whereas tohit simply increases the base number that your accuracy modifies multiplicatively.

Look at what it does. It's 15 seconds of utter unkillability that you can get down to a 75-90 sec recharge. If you need more than 15 seconds of virtually immunity to get yourself back on your feet in an emergency, nothing else in the game is going to be able to help you.

I generally reserve it for when I see a large amount of damage incoming soon. It's a great power to pop right before you jump into the middle of an 8 man spawn you plan on soloing or when your other toggles are down and you'd like to buy yourself some time. What do you think you could do with 15 seconds of immunity from danger?

Yes. You should be infinitely sustainable with all of those toggles because you're friggin' */Regen. The build had QR (which is stronger than Stamina), Physical Perfection (which is stronger than Stamina with how I've got it slotted), and Stamina, along with 3 Perf Shifter procs, not to mention MoG which gives you roughly 20 endurance every time you use it. Endurance problems are the least of concerns for a */Regen.

I don't do AE farming so I don't pay attention to tic prices, nor do I really keep in mind an inf price because I tend to obtain my recipes through drops, recipe trades, and merit rolls. You should probably be able to afford that IO build for under a billion inf, though it could be more or less depending on how good you are at picking out prices.

AV soloing and RCS (Rikti Crash Site) challenges existed before the Storm Palace runs were really popularized. Of course, many of these were designed as challenges for toggle-IH regen scrappers because nothing else really did any lasting damage to them. I distinctly recall some other secondaries laughing at some of the challenges while others had a similarly hard time. Ah... the days before ED. Those were interesting...

500% damage or 400% +dam. Simply stating 500% damage is a bit vague because, while it's correct that you will be doing 5 times the base damage, many people forget that you're already providing 100% of that by simply using the power itself.

Perma-hasten is possible, but not really worth it, and, if you do, it'll be expensive. You need 275% total +rech to get Hasten perma. Hasten provides 70% to itself and 3 slotting will get you roughly 95%. Getting 110% +rech to fill in that last bit is gonna hurt your pocket book hard, and it'll hurt your build too when you start sacrificing any defense to get there.

Perma-Dull Pain is not difficult whatsoever. Assuming 95% +rech slotting in both Hasten and DP, it takes about 55% +rech to get it permanent.

Instant Healing is impossible to make permanent. The base recharge is 650 seconds, and the duration is 90 seconds. Minimum recharge of a power is one-fifth of the original recharge time (400% +rech) which means that, at absolute best, if you get external buffs like crazy on you, you can get IH down to a recharge of 130 seconds, which is still only 70% uptime.

What you're asking for here doesn't grok with the build you provided. You only provided Storm Kick with 3 slots, and it's actually the best attack (and most slotting intensive power) you've got.

To use that attack string, you need 225% +rech in Storm Kick, 161% +rech in Crane Kick, and 103% +rech in Crippling Axe Kick. You can generally get 70-95% +rech in an attack from slotting and 70% from Hasten (while it's up, the ~10 second downtime you get with most top tier */Regen builds isn't all that big of a deal), so you'll need to make up between 60-85% +rech globally to manage it.

Some of what you're asking for is probably out of ignorance of the capabilities of the set itself. Other parts are probably out of ignorance of what generates the best performance. Either way, it was good to ask here because you're at least attempting to learn.

Now, if you're looking for a starter IO build, you're not going to be able to manage Storm>CAK>Storm>CK. That requires a lot of +rech, and +rech is expensive (purple sets and LotG +rech IOs). You'd probably be better off going for something that uses Eagles Claw and/or Thunder Kick so as to ease up your recharge requirements. When you're building a */Regen character, the first thing you should go after is recharge. The second thing you should go after is recharge. The third thing you should go after is recharge. The fourth thing you should go after, when you don't think you can manage any more +rech, is defense, and you shouldn't shy away from losing a small amount of +rech if it means you'll get a lot more defense.

+HP set bonuses are largely useless and redundant because perma-DP along with the +hp accolades puts you right next to the hp cap. A single tangential +hp bonus (such as from Crushing Impact, Mako's Bite, or Touch of Death 3 piece bonus) will put you over the top. +Regen set bonuses (and, hell, the powers as well) are largely redundant as well because you've already got an unholy amount of damage recovery. Adding an extra 3 hp/sec doesn't mean much when you're packing on 100 hp/sec already.

Here is an SO build that should work while you accumulate the money for a more expensive IO build.
Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.601
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Here is an IO build that should let you know what to start saving up for.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.601
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Natural Scrapper
Primary Power Set: Martial Arts
Secondary Power Set: Regeneration
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Body Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Storm Kick -- C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg(A), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg(3), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(3), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(5), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(5), RechRdx-I(7)
Level 1: Fast Healing -- Heal-I(A)
Level 2: Reconstruction -- Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(7), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(9), Dct'dW-Heal(9), Dct'dW-Rchg(11)
Level 4: Quick Recovery -- P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(11), EndMod-I(13)
Level 6: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def(43), Zephyr-Travel(46), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(46), Zephyr-ResKB(48), Winter-ResSlow(50)
Level 8: Crane Kick -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(13), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(15), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(15), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(17), T'Death-Dam%(17)
Level 10: Dull Pain -- Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(19), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(19), Dct'dW-Heal(21), Dct'dW-Rchg(21)
Level 12: Focus Chi -- AdjTgt-Rchg(A), AdjTgt-ToHit/Rchg(23)
Level 14: Super Jump -- Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(23), Zephyr-ResKB(25)
Level 16: Integration -- Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(25), RgnTis-Regen+(27), Heal-I(27)
Level 18: Crippling Axe Kick -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(29), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(29), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(31), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(31), T'Death-Dam%(31)
Level 20: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(33), RechRdx-I(33)
Level 22: Boxing -- Empty(A)
Level 24: Tough -- Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(33), Aegis-ResDam/Rchg(34)
Level 26: Dragon's Tail -- Oblit-Dmg(A), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(34), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(34), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(36), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), Oblit-%Dam(36)
Level 28: Instant Healing -- Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(37), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(37), Dct'dW-Heal(37), Dct'dW-Rchg(39)
Level 30: Weave -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(39), GftotA-Def(50)
Level 32: Maneuvers -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(39), GftotA-Def(50)
Level 35: Tactics -- GSFC-ToHit(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(40), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(40), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(40), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(42), GSFC-Build%(42)
Level 38: Moment of Glory -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def/Rchg(42), RechRdx-I(43), RechRdx-I(43)
Level 41: Conserve Power -- RechRdx-I(A)
Level 44: Physical Perfection -- P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(45), EndMod-I(45), Mrcl-Rcvry+(45), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(46)
Level 47: Super Speed -- Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(48), Zephyr-ResKB(48)
Level 49: Resilience -- S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Critical Hit

Agreed. Though none of the Praet AVs are particularly difficult. The only ones that are really "bad" are Dominatrix, who, thanks to her absurd resistances but complete lack of real damage dealing ability, simply turns into the longest, most boring fight of that arc, and Diabolique, who, thanks to her friggin' phasing, is like fighting an AV version of an illusionist.

I've also always been a bit perturbed by the fact that Tyrant has to rely on the use of Marauder's minions. He's friggin' Tyrant man! He should have a squad of private badasses assigned to guard him or, at the very least, a combination of all of his underlings' minions so that it's not just Marauder redux.