Umbral

Yeah... Not gonna happen, I assure you. They're not going to make it SO-grade perma.

And there's a reason that people like myself have been agreeing with the devs the the pre-reqs should stay because the pool power pre-reqs are fundamentally incorporated in the balance structure of the game.

...pokes head in...

Did someone say my name? I'm pretty sure I heard it. I know I heard someone say "DM/Regen" and 99.99% of the time my name gets brought up soon after...

Yeah, but the advantage is that it's not really all that long of a wait. That's the problem I have with having some really awesome attacks and a bunch of rather mediocre attacks in a set: optimized attack strings almost always have wait periods because the mediocre attacks just aren't worth the animation time. It's kinda sad (though slightly amusing) when doing nothing for half of a second makes you deal more damage than actually shoving something sharp into your target right now.

When I checked it, I believe I lost somewhere in the region of 10 DPS by using any of my attacks in that gap. I've gotten the wait period small enough (re: less than .6 seconds) on my build, thanks to the ginormous levels of +rech in FU, that Swipe actually delays the better attacks by a remarkably substantial amount. The short duration of the wait also allows me to get 3 stacks of FU on Focus and 3 potential AH proc chances on FU, which is one of other additional contributors that makes it matter so much.

It's actually not diminishing returns. 30% +regen will provide 1.67 extra hp/sec to a character with 1338.6 hit points no matter if it's the only +regen you've got or if you've already got 700% +regen. Each portion of +regen adds the same amount. It's a linear addition. The "diminishing returns" only exist when you observe on a comparative basis. 30% +regen adds less comparative survivability at 600% +regen than it does as 0% +regen because the percent increase overall is greater. The increase is still the same, it just seems like a smaller improvement because you've already got so much of it.

Mitigation increases linearly as well, but the comparative increases are exponential until the cap (wherein they plateau) because the linear increase is an increase in the percent reduction of an assumed constant value. The reduction in damage you experience at any specific increase in mitigation value is going to be the same. 10% +res reduces the damage of a 100 damage attack by 10 points whether you're already packing 65% +res or none at all. The comparative increase is larger the more you've got because you're reducing a continually smaller value in a linear manner, generating exponential comparative returns.

The only effects in game that actually have legitimate defined diminishing returns are recharge and endurance reduction because of the calculations for them. Because they're modifying the power characteristic by dividing it, the relationship is naturally diminishing: the first 100% +rech you get reduces the recharge more than the second 100% +rech you get. The first takes the recharge from full to half and the second takes it from half to one third. The improvement diminishes substantially.

And that concludes my first math rant of the day.

Where power information is concerned, you're generally better off checking City of Data than you are Paragonwiki, seeing as it actually lists all of the effects of the powers along with their durations, animation times, and pretty much any other relevant non-derivative data point. Check Moment of Glory.

I'll check Paragonwiki for a lot of stuff, but power information definitely goes to City of Data. Paragonwiki doesn't provide enough of it (and what it does provide is often unreliable or blatantly obvious).

Well, how well it looks on paper depends on how good you are at reading the numbers. :P

Honestly, I wouldn't bother. DM/DA with the presence pool can perma-fear pretty much anything. The problem is that it's hard on your blue bar and not as effective as you'd think. Invoke Panic is painfully inaccurate and insists on being slotted very heavily just to be effective (re: you will want to slot it for end redux, accuracy, fear, and recharge; it's really hard to get all of that into 6 slots). Cloak of Fear is easier on a build than Invoke Panic because it's just expensive and inaccurate. Touch of Fear is nice... except when you're trying to kill something rather than just make it quake in its boots.

And this isn't even getting into the quirkiness of the fear mechanic. In my experience, I've found that the target will get off one attack about every 5-8 seconds if you're attacking it (if you just leave it alone, it'll cower all day, iirc). It amounts to roughly 50% mitigation because most enemies aren't constantly attacking you anyway and they're gonna be using their most powerful attacks when they do.

The fear based scrap-troller is an interesting gimmick and would probably be fun to play. Too bad it's not really the most effective build.

Checking it against the Claws/SR build I have on file (turning on the accolades for yours to get more equitable comparisons), yours would have slightly better survivability thanks to Aid Self (and only that, mine actually has slightly better resistances, hp, and regen), but mine would have substantially better DPS thanks to just over 100% more global +rech (so it can actually run the FU>Focus>Slash>Wait attack string fast enough to make it awesome), better endurance sustainability (48% uptime Conserve Power and nearly .5 end/sec more recovery), and much better AoE damage thanks to Shockwave and Spin. Of course, mine's also gutwrenchingly expensive, so you get what you pay for.

Honestly, if you've got the slots for it, I'd consider burning 4 slots for Basilisk's Gase and 2 common Rech IOs. At the top tier, 5 piece Unbreakable Constraint would work well simply because it's packing 89.92% +rech after ED hits. Of course, that's only if you've got the slots. I haven't started playing with elec armor much yet (I plan to for my new Tanker project), but, depending on how slot hoggish it is (it doesn't look like it will be particularly, especially with IOs; it definitely looks power hoggish though... all of those powers look delicious) Power Surge might be slotted the same as most tier 9s: 3 common rech IOs with the occasion set bonus IO mule (i.e. LotG +rech, Steadfast Prot, etc).

Since the build seems to be aiming more for positional than typed, I'd say Aegis before Reactive. Aegis (Resist, Res/End, Res/Rech) will get you 54.16% +res enhancement (just shy of the redzone) and 1.56% +def(AoE). The fact that it's short slotting end redux shouldn't really matter since you're running with Elec Armor.

It depends on what targets you plan on fighting. Using the accuracy numbers given by Mids (calculated with the formula ((baseAcc + tohit) * (1+ accMods))), to have a 95% chance to hit an even level enemy, you need to have a 95%. To have a 95% chance to hit an enemy 1 level above you, you need a 146%. An enemy 2 levels above would require a 169%. An enemy 3 levels above would require a 198%. An enemy 4 levels above would require a 244%.

With the FU>Focus>Slash>Strike attack string, you're only managing a little over 155% for all of those attacks except for Focus (which is sitting happy at 205%), you're only going to have a 95% chance to hit enemies 1 level above you and lower. Slash's -def would help you get to 95% against +2s, but anything higher, and you're not gonna be there even with that (thanks to the lower base acc as well as purple patch debuff resistances).

While it's true that the game will use the highest possible defense for an attack, I wouldn't expect that many of the attacks to be mixed type. A remarkably large number of them are actually pure typed. You'll do fine against enemies that have mostly mixed or s/l damage types, but, as soon as you face an enemy group that has even a few pure attacks, you're going to feel it. Even so, it's not as if you're "low" in your other typed defenses. 30% is more than enough when you've got more than 50 hp/sec honestly.

Spines/DA has the advantage of OG and Dark Regen, but Spines/Elec isn't going to be plagued by the endurance woes of Spines/DA (which inhibit survivability in fights that last longer than 10 seconds) plus, as isn't often mentioned, Spines/Elec would actually have the ability to gain some measure of additional survivability from endurance draining. Power Sink + Lightning Field is actually quite the impressive secondary mitigation, not to mention that Energy damage is significantly more common than Negative Energy damage. Plus, Power Surge is actually a useful tier 9.

I highly doubt you're getting MoG up to 33% uptime. In fact, I know it's impossible. Ignoring the substantial animation time, in order to do so, you would need to get the recharge time down to 45 seconds because the duration is only 15 seconds. Because the base recharge is 240 seconds, this means that you'd need to be packing 433% +rech, which is 33% over the recharge cap.

A much more believable uptime percent is ~21%. 250% +rech (95% from slotting, 155% global +rech) would bring the recharge time down to 68.5 seconds. Add the 2.772 sec animation time and you'd get 15 seconds of uptime roughly every 71.5 seconds for an uptime percent of 21%.

The biggest reasons that */regen gets laughed at nowadays is that it's one of the few secondary powersets out now that actually requires skill to play well. It's not hard to gauge when to activate your one survivability oriented click power because everything else you've got is a toggle or passive. It's substantially more difficult to gauge when to use which of your 4 survivability oriented click powers, all of which are on different recharge timers and have substantially different effects with different effective delays. You can't just steal someone's IO'd build from the forums and be laughably unkillable like you can with many */SR, */SD, and */WP builds (which are currently considered the most awesome).

Of course, it also gets a lot of hate because it's the only defense power set that doesn't have any debuff resistance (/stares daggers at Castle and Arcanaville) and gets the least significant gains from IO slotting (re: it gets a lot, but not as much contributed survivability from IOs as mitigation based sets because recharge and regen diminish in effect the more you get whereas mitigation gets multiplicatively more effective).

I dunno... I expect that an FM/Inv could take her out. Capped HP and a ~1028 hp heal every 2 minutes would suggest to me more than enough hp/sec to allow capped lethal resistance to do its job. With roughly 150% +regen, that would equate to 33.67 hp/sec. With decent +def(s/l) (re: ~30%) Silver Mantis would need to deal more than 336.7 dps in order to take out that character, which, if I'm recalling AV DPS correctly, is a bit out of most AVs' league.

Actually, the DM/* portion of my DM/Regen did remarkably little in that fight against Silver Mantis. It was more the effective timing of my click powers combined with the fact that MoG gave me enough time to drop off all of those nasty defense debuffs. The ability to reset a defense debuff cascade ever minute isn't nearly as potent as the ability to completely ignore defense debuffs, but it worked for me.

Actually, Villains do get it. They're replacing all instances of Elec Armor Conserve Power with Energize.

Yes, it is possible. Damage debuffs and buffs all operate by modifying every damage type rather than a single global damage type. Of course, the debuff would need to be unresistable in order to prevent the damage resistance from the shield from resisting the debuff itself.

It's never really necessary honestly. That last 5% defense to get you to the softcap will double your survivability though, so, if you can, the rewards are actually pretty impressive.

By the way, RttC isn't necessarily going to add 4.98% to that. Enemies above your level will be affected less (according to this chart) as will EB/AV/GMs (all but some EBs according to this chart), lieutenants (10% tohit debuff resistance), and bosses (20% tohit debuff resistance). I wouldn't really rely upon the tiny amount of -tohit provided by RttC in any case. A debuff that small can't really be relied upon to maintain that last bit of defensive oomph.

Considering that strike is going to be in your attack string and Eviscerate isn't, you made the right choice. Now, if you're debating between Swipe and Eviscerate, since neither of them would really be used in the attack string, it's a question of whether you want a set mule (for the extra 3.75% +def (s/l)) or an attack you won't really be using all that often and will be largely underslotted. I think you made the right choice with Swipe.

The standard attack chain for lowish recharge Claws is FU>Focus>Slash>Strike. It doesn't really have much in the way of +rech requirements (Focus, Slash, and Strike require only 62%, 30%, and 0% +rech respectively) except for FU, which requires 185% +rech, which you're not really packing. If you switch out the Rectified Reticle for Adjusted Targeting (tohit/rech, rech) you'll lose out on a little bit of +def(s/l), but you'll be able to run the attack string.

That's always been my biggest problem about slotting for positional defense. The set bonuses are always on the low level sets so you always manage to end up short slotting the enhancement bonuses on your powers. You're packing barely any +acc (22.94%) in 3 of the 4 attacks you'll be using, that I doubt you'll be able to reliably hit harder targets like those on the RWZ Challenge.

Are we talking global recharge that would need to be applied to both assuming they've both got the "standard" 95% +rech slotting? Then that would be 53% +rech.

Points to self.

I'm just gonna point at all of the AE babies that have been playing for 3 days and have a level 50 Kheldian which shaking my head in shame. Of course, we then get into the discussion of what "earning" a 50 means but that's a completely different topic.

With all of the xp curve smoothing, debt reduction, patrol xp, and other QoL improvements that make leveling up much easier than it used to be (Back in my day, 150 hours was excellent time getting to 50!), I'd really have to say that it wouldn't be untoward for the devs to begin assuming that you've at least got a level 50 character. You may not play him/her/it any more, but, chances are, you've gotten at least one character to 50 somehow.

I wouldn't really support something akin the the method suggested here. I'd much rather prefer a much more structured set up that wouldn't throw off the delicate balance we've got at the moment. If it were as such, I predict we'd get a certain amount of whatever that we can earn for our primary and a certain amount of whatever that we can earn for our secondary along with some potential ability to screw with the native AT attribute limits (re: increase Scrapper res cap to 85%) to an extent limited by the AT itself. I've always chafed under what I found to be some of the AT limits that were too easily reached by some builds (I'm looking at you Scrapper hp cap!) and wished that there were some way to work around that.

I'm being used as an example for behaving in a civil manner? Whoa... That's... more than a bit surprising. I generally get berated as the kind of person that, thanks to his lack of civility, is only tolerated because, even within the confines of the scathing commentary, I produce genuinely useful information.

That's kind of the point though. It's still remarkably gimmicky. Even if the set was based around only 3 powers to fulfill the "denial" role with a suite of other effects to actually fulfill the rest of the set's balance, it wouldn't really be all that different, especially since the 3 powers that form the set's gimmick/theme would only be substantially useful against the hardest targets, and, even so, it would serve to completely overshadow every other contribution or strategy (re: the proposed ability to prevent Reichsman from popping unstoppable). Against any other enemy, it wouldn't really be useful or even noticeable (or it would be disastrously overpowered such as would be the case involving enemies with only 2 powers or enemies that are denied their only really threatening power).

You'd also get into the debate of whether "Denial" is more of a "control" set or a "support" set. Arguably, "denial" could be a mez-type effect and the other powers within it could be more akin to holds and other directly inhibitory powers, but, then again, the logical case could equally consider it a debuff and have the rest of the powers simply be attribute reductions.

Either way, you still have the problem of the set quite easily being either too powerful (lol, the AV can't use that power that makes the fight interesting!), too weak (ok, so I made it so that the AV doesn't have Fast Healing... whoop de doo), or too random (last time I turned off his Unstoppable and this time I turned off his Brawl...).

The biggest issue is still the fact that creating a "denial" type effect would be a massive amount of work (re: deep code screwery) for very little actual benefit (unless, of course, they feel like overhauling a bunch of other sets to include said new effect). It's not really worth it unless they plan on using it extensively, which I doubt they would since it would cause a vast upheaval in both the PvE and PvP balance structure of the game.

I wouldn't really recommend it. The primary advantage of the BF>Sweep string is that it's excellent mitigation and decent AoE damage. It's not really a killing combo. It's more of a tanking/survivability combo thanks to the loads of knockdown.