Warkupo

Assuming I did the math correctly, a 33% increase should put Flight Speed at 56.19 MPH with one SO enhancement, which is still about 2mph below the cap. Adding swift without any enhancements should put you over the cap to 60.7 mph.

If I'm right, I'd still probably only put one slot in fly from now on. I really doubt I'm going to notice the missing 2 mph.

I'd probably shove it under my keyboard for later, and then forget it is there.

Consider that you've gone 41 levels without an epic power. That should give you an idea of how "necessary" they are. They can help to improve your build, but none of them are by any means required.

Darkest Night is pretty powerful. Compared to Tough/Weave we get these numbers for the Tanker AT, assuming that Darkest Night keeps the same values when transferred to the Tanker AT:

Darkest Night: Target; -21% DamBuff, -16.6% To-Hit (Value of 57.52%) End/s: 0.65
Toughness: Self; 23.8% Resistance (Value of 58.48%) End/s: 0.33
Weave: Self; 7.92% Defense (Value of 58.48%) End/s: 0.33

The biggest problem with Darkest Night is that AV's render a lot of it's potential meaningless. In their most powerful form, AV's can resist the To-Hit debuff from Darkest Night by 87%. This lowers the To-Hit from -16.5% to -2.14%. In a team this isn't such a big deal, but if your goal was to solo AV's then it's important to be aware of this limitation in Darkest Night.

The other major flaw is that Darkest Night is an anchor power. In order for it to work, you need to stick it on an enemy, which will have the effect of causing the rest of your team to try to kill this enemy with a sort of zealous rage. Hopefully by level 41+ your team has learned to suppress this fascinating mental ailment, but it isn't always the case.


All of that said, Darkest Night is very potent, has a wide area of effect, and is beneficial for the entire team. I think my favorite aspect of the power is that it suddenly turned my Brute into a Tank, a Damage-Dealer, and a Defender all at once. For ultimate team defense consider Shield Defense as your primary, pick up Grant Cover, Maneuvers, and Darkest Night, slot them up appropriately, and your team should be sporting a net "defense" of 37.91%. This is pretty *********** good.

Darkest Night isn't susceptible to cascading defense failure in the same way as Weave or IO Set Bonuses due to it effecting the enemy, which can be very beneficial against enemies that have large amounts of defense debuffs.

Other than in the case of AV's, most enemies are not going to resist the To-Hit debuff, and most of the time you will be applying the full effect. Even when it IS being resisted, it is such a large debuff that it is still probably worth using, and will still probably be more potent than Weave.

If you have to make a decision between Tough/Weave or Darkest Night, I tend to lean more towards Darkest Night. When resisted by an AV, the difference between Weave and Darkest Night is about 5% in favor of Weave, which is big, but not so significant that I couldn't still solo the AV if built properly. Other than that, it's numerically superior than Tough/Weave, costs less slots, less total endurance, and one of its' perquisites, Gloom, is responsible for some of the highest melee DPS chains in the game.

The three weapon sets (Axe, Mace, and Broadsword) are in desperate need of alternate animations due to their otherwise *exact* similarity. It seems odd that you swing all three weapons in the exact same fashion, and begs the question of why they are all different sets to begin with. It would be great if the three had alternate animations that better capitalized on the type of weapon being used.

*Edit* - Also throw my vote in for the Medicine pool. It's a very useful pool that is constantly turned away because of how immersion breaking the animations in the set are. Something that doesn't have such an explicit theme to it so that it can more seamlessly be integrated to a wider array of character concepts.

*Edit2* - It would be great if you could profilerate animations across the Masterminds' Thug set and the Dual Pistols set. I felt pretty deflated with my Thugs when every yahoo was dancing around, and yet I was stuck shooting people like some civilian. Alternately, many people don't like the gun-fu, and the Thugs set has some pretty generic animations that could probably be pretty easy to transfer to Dual Pistols.

I don't even know what a skill is anymore.

That's probably a design flaw in AOE's, not the Stalker AT.

Storm mixes pretty good with most things. I haven't played it, but off the top of my head I don't see any huge conflicts. Having Hurricane on while you are trying to use Hail of Bullets is likely to be problematic, and letting the Tornado run free while you're setting up your AOE's could be annoying too, but those problems are pretty consistent in the defender version of Storm regardless of your secondary.

I say go for it.

I don't slot HPT for Resistance because the return isn't any good (something like 3% resistance to all types after 3 slots) and can almost always be better spent slotting something else.

I would typically only slot RttC with 5 slots to take advantage of Global Recharge bonuses from the Doctored Wounds or Pancea sets, and only six slot it to take advantage of the melee defense from the Pancea set (which may become more plausible with the next new merit system)

Alternatively, you might slot RttC with some To-Hit debuffs (2 slots takes the To-Hit from 3.75% (Brute) to 5.61%) if you are building for "defense".

Until I switch over to my IO build, however, I usually leave both at 3 slots because there are simply better things to be throwing slots at.

I'll agree that the KB hole is stupid, but not that is hard or even very detrimental to work around. Take Combat Jumping (something I was usually going to do anyway), shove the KB protection BotZ in there and possibly another BotZ to take advantage of the piddly ranged defense, and then place a Luck of the Gambler: Global Recharge to finish it off.

Yeah, I'd rather it not be there, but I don't think it's a big deal anymore either.

@QuiJin

Minor nitpick: Accept means to include or agree, Except means to leave out.

I can't really follow your logic, either. People aren't going to want to see the Deadpool movie because of Ryan Reynolds, but they are going to want to see the Green Lantern movie which has... Ryan Reynolds.

I guess the decision will boil down to if Reynolds can be swayed by money or passion. I'm hoping for passion.

Am I the only one that watched "Under the Red Hood"? Or are we just not mentioning it because it's too new and we'd have to spoiler alert the whole thread?

One of my favorite characters is my Fire/Fire/Dark brute, but I had to do a lot of optimization to make his powers work. Taking a group immobilization to make Burn any good, having my primary be compatible with Fiery Embrace, dumping a ridiculous amount of recharge into him so he could survive off his self heal, and making sure he was equipped with Darkest Night so that he could have comparable damage mitigation.

I knew that if I had another primary I probably wouldn't be doing anywhere near comparable damage to my other Brutes, and I never felt as though the mitigation I was trading was worth the "extra" damage I was supposed to be doing.

Perhaps my biggest complaint with the set is that Electric Armor was, for the most part, a copied version of FA that was numerically superior in nearly every way.

I feel like the changes were the much needed push this set needed to really capitalize on its' promise of dead enemies as a form of mitigation. The fact that I don't have to immobilize everything just to use Burn should be a great help in my DPS.

As far as it's lingering KB hole; It hasn't really been an issue to me since we got a plethora of KB protection IO's. It isn't even like they're expensive anymore.

With the buffs to Tanker, and the "re-balance" to Brutes, I feel they should be on more equal terms now. Before Brutes were simply numerically superior to both Scrappers and Tankers. I considered this to be a problem with the Brute AT rather than a deficiency in the Tanker AT, so I've never felt like Tankers were under-performing, just that Brutes were too powerful.

lalala

Unless he's already signed a contract for Fox along the lines of "You will do a Green Lantern Sequel regardless of whatever other things you want to do", he'll probably put more of his energies on the Deadpool movie (which is the one I care about), and shove GL off to the side.

The reason they haven't been changed until now (I imagine) is part professional testing (theories and hypothesis is great, but it's amateurish to just throw numbers in without having a hands on experience of how they'll react), and part because Brutes are expected to be exposed to Tankers/Scrappers on a much larger level once Going Rogue is live.

While I can't speak for the testing of Closed Beta, there has actually been a *lot* of documentation about the disparity between Brutes and Tanker/Scrapper previous to GR in the Scrapper forum. I imagine that such documentation has become more accurate in Closed Beta, where the AT's could be examined side by side in the actual game on a more consistent basis, rather than the confines of a spreadsheet.

I don't have an opinion on whether or not this should have been done sooner (it didn't really matter to me), but I'd have been miffed if something wasn't done until after GR.

@Grey Pilgrim

I suppose I don't really consider AV's a big enough menace to be really concerned about them. Outside of a few TF's, I've never really gone up against an AV that I considered utterly challenging to defeat or requiring of some specialized tactic to take out. Once you get an AV by itself it isn't really challenging regardless of what your team composition is; You just attack it until it dies.

Where I notice deaths occurring is when the team is getting swarmed by MANY enemies at once. Without someone to manage the hoards, be it a Tanker, Controller, or well buffed team, the group is going to start having problems. So it's actually in general game play that I'm more interested in Tankers because that's where I feel their niche exists.

I DO think that some AT's can replace the "role" of a Tanker, just as a Tanker can replace the need for the other AT's. I don't see this as a problem. If a Tanker was MANDATORY for every team a lot of players wouldn't *get* anywhere and this would quickly turn into every other MMO I've played and dumped where the progress of your party often relied on having a specific class such as the Tank or the Healer.

All of this said, I rather doubt a team if normal players is going to notice that the Tanker is lowering the AV's resistance by 20% unless they already knew that the Tanker could do that. Just like when playing a defender, teams rarely realize you're the one making them awesome unless there's green numbers flying around their noggins.

Outside of the lone AV fight, why would Tankers be fighting the same enemy unless they were in some epic e-peen match? If there are two Tankers in a team they should be fighting different enemies or of course they are going to be redundant.

Brutes are not the only other AT that can hold their ground against an AV either. Hell, a few of my Stalkers can do that, and that's ignoring whatever buffs I'm getting from being IN a team.

Pulling. While I doubt anything bad happening, I don't see a compelling reason to set myself up to be irritated if something does.