Werner
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Quote:As with all survivability-boosting powers, you'd use Divine Avalanche only as necessary. If your Tanker has things covered, the final build can run the top Katana DPS chain with two purple procs and both -resist procs. You'd do drastically more than 140 DPS in that case, though it'll only crack 280 with Interface. But yes, your DPS will suffer when you get aggro on the incarnate trials, because you're going to be using Divine Avalanche (and clicking other things instead of attacks).Originally Posted by Shred_Monkey
I read that thread. Why play a /regen toon that survives incarnate content doing at best 140 dps when you can play an /SR toon that survives incarnate content doing 280+ dps? There was a lot of really neat stuff in that thread... but you can apply it to other toons besides regen (and dark) for good results without using katana as a crutch.
Keep in mind that you may need to make sacrifices to hit 59% defense on Super Reflexes. It's possible that recharge for top DPS chains will be one of those sacrifices. I haven't tried it yet myself, so I'm not sure. Deus' build didn't seem to sacrifice all that much recharge, though, so maybe it's not bad. -
In my latest, Hasten recharges in 117.69 seconds, so I suspect that Spiritual got toggled off if you're complaining about how far from permanent Hasten is. Spiritual adds at least 32.25% recharge to every power, so you could look at it as global recharge, meaning my build has 189.75% global recharge, slightly higher than yours since you're using Nerve.
So all that recharge you gutted defense for isn't actually any better than it already had, and Nerve isn't nearly making up for the shortfall on defense, plus you're missing out on the healing from Spiritual. Not having Tough hurts a little as well. Assuming I calculated correctly, that all seems to be reflected in the significantly lower numbers (edit: I had Combat Jumping toggled off, which put it enough below 59% defense to lower the number much more than it should have been at 64% to hit, and more than it should have at the other points.):
50% to hit = 2706
Ah, those assume you don't phase shift, though. You can always phase shift for when your defense is lowest, but I sure wouldn't want to. Still, that helps a lot, because it's your defensive power down time that hurts the most. As long as you just use it in emergencies, maybe it won't hurt too much.
64% to hit = 1747
75% to hit = 1049
90% to hit = 679
50% to hit = 6013
So for 50% to hit, it's about equal to Iggy's "affordable" build, but it drops off quickly from there as to hit goes up.
64% to hit = 3615
75% to hit = 1934
90% to hit = 1182
With the builds we're talking about, the hope is that you don't actually need Shadow Meld very often. Instead, Divine Avalanche and 33% ranged and AoE defense handles you most of the time. Like all of the clicks, you use Shadow Meld as necessary rather than endlessly cycling it whenever it is up. We just calculate as if you're endlessly cycling, just like I calculate survivability of someone with Aid Self as if they used it every time it is up. On a high recharge build, if you're using Aid Self every time it's up, you're barely attacking. But it's there for those waves of massive damage that don't instantly kill you. Total time spent using it is still going to be low, but you could easily end up spamming it for a little bit. -
Quote:I've made a fortune on high margin low volume items. But in addition to them sometimes taking ages to move, it can be very nerve-wracking to accumulate over 10 billion in inventory on something while prices are falling, betting that they'll come back up. So far so good, but eesh! The main benefit (as you noted) is that it takes much less time than high volume low margin items. But time here is time invested, not elapsed time. To make a fortune fast, I'd probably go with volume.Originally Posted by Virusman
Actually ran some tests like this, created an entire server of auction mules for high ticket / low volume items. It... doesn't really work.
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Quote:Did I? The main protection is just to push your defense to 59%+, though with all the buffs flying around, it may not be necessary. It kind of depends on how self-sufficient you want to be and how many purples you refuse to use. Defense debuffs aren't much of a problem on Super Reflexes, but you can give yourself another 1-3% defense if concerned. Not that 59%-62% defense is trivial, even for Super Reflexes, but it should be doable.Originally Posted by Zyphoid
The incarnate trials can be pretty rough on an /SR toon. Not only is the soft cap increased, but all of the mobs do -def. It can get painful fast, Werner has posted multiple ways to protect against that though.
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Quote:Have you seen my Katana/Regen thread? Regen has taken a lot of flak recently, including from me, and I wanted to see if one could be competitive in I20. My initial salvo was a soft-capped near perma Hasten build that could juggle Barrier, Shadow Meld and Moment of Glory to be over the incarnate soft cap most of the time. With the community's help, things just got better from there.Originally Posted by Shred_Monkey
If you're worried about survivability, then regen and willpower aren't going to make you feel better. A super reflexes scrapper built for soft-capped defenses and high hitpoints is going to outlive a willpower scrapper and a regen scrapper 10 out of 10 times.
There's other good reasons to roll up a new toon, so I'm not saying don't do it. I honestly wish it wasn't this way, and I've spent a lot of time the last 4-5 years trying to create builds that proved this wrong. Unfortunately, if your level 50 survivability were your only reason for starting fresh, I suspect you're going to be really disappointed with regen and willpower.
I'm not saying it's the best combination around, but I do think it can be competitive.
That's Katana, though, and of course I'm leaning on Divine Avalanche. Not so sure about Claws, though as I recall John Printemps did pretty well with one. -
Quote:Yep, that's the way to go, or at least the way I would go.Originally Posted by Achilles6
I'm not too concerned about the budget, and I farm tip missions for the Hero Merits. I can do what it takes. My guess is that +rchg and getting near soft-capped is the way to go on this.
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How much you can do with Invulnerability depends some on budget. You can do some pretty impressive things on a high budget, and reasonably good things without. It's a very solid secondary. It should be just fine for incarnate content, though the closest I have to any personal experience with that is knowing a mid range build Invuln Tanker doing the trials with no problem, which isn't really the same thing.
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Quote:It is? Not that I get around much on the forums, and I definitely don't talk to people in the game. I just figured that by now people knew Dark Armor was good. I suppose Dechs wouldn't need his "Dark Armor Sucks!" video if everyone was on board, though.Originally Posted by Traegus
seeing as how DA is even more frowned upon by some
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Quote:Yep. I put a L53 Endoplasm and a L50 Nightmare accuracy/endurance in it, which with the Cardiac Alpha gives me:Originally Posted by Desmodos
I agree that CoF should be slotted. You can get away with 4 slots (depending on the rest of your build). I believe Werner has a Dark Armor build that only 2 slots it.
65% accuracy
It still seems worth a power pick that way, but I don't recommend that slotting unless you're super tight on slots. It does feel underslotted when fighting uplevel enemies. I'd really like another slot or two.
72% endurance reduction
38% fear
As another reason to take Cloak of Fear when you're going for a defense build, a high defense Dark Armor can probably take more damage from Oppressive Gloom than it prevents. The opposite is true for most builds, of course, so this isn't general advice to stay away from Oppressive Gloom, as it can do a great job for very little cost most of the time.
As for general observations, I find that Dark Armor is often more survivable than simple number crunching would indicate. I'm no expert on stealth mechanics and maybe I'm just a poor observer, but it feels like compared to other toons, my Dark Armor much more frequently is ignored by half the spawn for a little while when he starts attacking. Then you get the fear or stun aura messing with the minions, breaking up their attacks. It seems like the result of all that is you just don't get hit by much of an alpha strike compared to other characters.
I'm also a big fan of damage auras, and miss them on toons that don't have them.
I also like how the set looks when all toggled up, though I'm not sure how well you'll be able to turn it to steam. You can always turn a lot of effects off, I believe, and just keep what looks right. -
I don't frequent the Tanker boards or play them much, but why would a Tanker use Hibernate? You can't do anything while that's up, right? I guess if you slot it up you'd only need five or ten seconds in there, and probably wouldn't lose much aggro in that time. Is that considered acceptable? I really think I'd want to manage my healing and endurance in some way that didn't require me to take myself out of the fight, but I guess I can see the appeal. Low hit points and out of endurance, click, five or ten seconds later you're perfect. And as far as keeping aggro, Hibernate is probably better than dying.
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Depending on how much "lots of influ" is, you may want to have a look at this thread. Scroll up from the bottom for the final builds. They come at a couple different price points, though both are very pricey. Start at the top if you want to see at least some of the thinking that went into them. Lots of knowledge of the game mechanics are assumed in that thread, though, so you may have questions that we didn't bother addressing there. The final builds are probably literally more than an order of magnitude more survivable than what you're using right now, particularly against incarnate content (though to be fair, we're including the tier 4 Destiny). They should put out noticeably more damage as well.
Basically, your build neglects everything that makes Katana/Regen strong - recharge and defense. You should have Divine Avalanche and Hasten. You should have lots of recharge and defense set bonuses. You should have Shadow Meld. Anyway, have a look at the numbers in the builds in the thread, and how they achieve those numbers. Feel free to ask questions, either in that thread or here. -
The first spreadsheet is John Printemps' attempt to clean up and make more user friendly my personal spreadsheet for calculating a single survivability score for a build. Download it and you'll find a lot of mouse-over notes, which seem to be identified with the little red dot in the corner. It's very new, so there are probably usability issues and perhaps even some bugs to iron out. It's probably also going to be missing tweaks needed for some builds - it's including tweaks to account for Dark Armor, Regeneration, Barrier and Rebirth, though I haven't verified that it all works and generates the same numbers I generate.
As far as differences between it and Dechs Kaison's spreadsheet, they have the same basic idea, but John's just goes quite a bit further and is therefore quite a bit more complicated. Two of the bigger complications are averaging from a matrix of the distribution of damage across types and positions, and averaging multiple levels of mitigation over time resulting from powers like Barrier, or more mundanely, various tier 9 powers. (Edit: Also, John's handles positional defense, not just typed defense. Dechs suggests just averaging your positions, which I think is a very poor way to handle it due to the non-linear way that defense affects survivability and the differing amounts of damage you can expect from each position. I think it was just his way of saying, "I don't care about that because all my Tankers have typed defense, but since you're going to ask, I need to say something." I think a better answer remaining consistent with his spreadsheet's simplicity would have been "replace the first three types with the three positions, and blank out the rest", though that has weaknesses as well. I think John's/my handling of it is much more sophisticated, of course, but again, is more complicated as a result.)
Here's the thread where John's spreadsheet was introduced, and below are my comments on the basic philosophy taken from that thread. I haven't actually used John's version yet, though, so I can't really directly explain how to use it.
Quote:(Edit: Heh, amusingly, Dechs uses the same definition of mitigation as I use, which as I mentioned above, isn't the Scrapper forum consensus definition. Both of us say that a character with no defense and no resistance has 50% mitigation because only 50% of attacks will hit. The Scrapper forum consensus was to call this 0% mitigation. Again, no big deal, and it actually means that Dechs' numbers are directly comparable to mine instead of being half mine. Basically, his "Survivable DPS" numbers are using the same scale as John's "Survival Score".)Originally Posted by Werner
I don't think I'll have much time to do much tonight, but I'll clean up and post the spreadsheet when I can. In the mean time, I'll try to explain the basic idea. And it's a long post since I'm short on time. Hopefully that makes sense to some people.
Well, the BASIC idea is the old immortality line (the name of which Arcanaville I believe regrets to this day).
I divide incoming damage into a matrix by position and type. I divide that across types by blue side percentages given by Besserwisser a long time ago. I split apart into melee, ranged and AoE by 70%, 20% and 10%. Multiply to get the matrix. In theory you can enter every cell in the matrix individually, but I never have because I'm not sure what I'd change.
Now, your resistance and defense combine to form a matrix as well. Each cell in this matrix is a specific damage type from a specific position. Do the opposite of a mitigation calculation in each cell, a "% damage allowed" calculation based on your typed defense, positional defense and resistance. Multiply that by the percent of damage in each cell from the earlier matrix.
Now, sum up the second matrix, and you have an overall percent of damage allowed. That's one fundamental number, basically 100% - mitigation, though "mitigation" here is not the forum consensus definition. It's not a problem, though, as it just means my numbers will be twice as high as if I calculated using the forum consensus. Since I give no scale for the number, and use them only for comparison with other similarly-calculated numbers, this isn't an issue.
Now you need to look at your average damage recovery per second. No matrix here, since you recover from all types of damage equally. Just time average your healing and regeneration.
Divide this total by the damage allowed, and you get survivability. And survivability here is basically the amount of enemy damage output per second that you can survive. More precisely, it's the amount of enemy damage output (split according to that first matrix) that would produce a random walk of your hit points instead of an upward or downward trend.
What it DOESN'T recognize is that a random walk that takes you to zero hit points WILL KILL YOU. That's a big limitation when you're talking about these survivability levels, which on paper are enough to survive crowds of AVs pounding on you.
Hit points, for instance. The more hit points you have, the less likely the random walk will kill you in any reasonable time frame. Resistance. The more resistance you have, the less likely the random walk will kill you. Ability to match healing to the spikes of damage. The better you can do this, the less likely the random walk will kill you. And so on.
It also ignores other things, like debuffs. That's kind of accounted for by being able to plug in a to-hit number, though. It won't give you one number, but you can get an idea how tough you are when things get nasty.
So, tons of problems. The way around them is to write a program that simulates the entire game. That's beyond my interest, and possibly beyond my capability. Certainly beyond my capability in the time I'd be willing to devote to such a project.
Or I could just say that I already HAVE such a simulator. The devs have been kind enough to provide it. I can take my build, build it, and go test it out in their simulator against an amazingly good recreation of the actual game. Why, I'd almost think I was playing the game when I was using their simulator. Unfortunatly, it only does the calculations in real time, so it takes a very long time fiddling with their simulator to get any good numbers out of it. Ah, well. At least they made it fun to use.
Hmmm, it doesn't explain how I account for Barrier or for the defense and resistance buffs. I basically create a matrix for each, and weight them by the average time each is up. I don't calculate survivability for each, because let's say that once per minute, you had a five second power that gave you 100% resistance. Hopefully it's obvious that wouldn't overall give you infinite survivability, even if it did for those five seconds. -
I think that's where the magic of Divine Avalanche comes in. It won't protect you from everything, but it'll protect you from a lot of things. Willpower is likely to still feel a lot more solid. I have a lowbie Katana/Electric myself, and don't remember feeling squishy, but it's been a long time since I've touched him, so perhaps memory is kind.
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Quote:I'm tempted by your Ribos. Resisting temptation so far.Originally Posted by LaDiva
Toys still available.
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Quote:You know, you're right. I'm not sure exactly how we're going to go about it, but if this is going to be useful beyond a few people or a few specific purposes, it IS going to have to include some measure of active mitigation, damage reduction, mez auras, and so on. And as long as we're leaving the realm of the easily-quantified, y'all can be thinking about how and if you want to make adjustments for the relative contribution of hit points, resistance and defense beyond their "naive" application in the current spreadsheet. Now's our chance, I guess.Originally Posted by Microcosm
Your survivability sheets are great and I understand why you limited it to the more straight forward. I am only worried that people will take the numbers from them and say "clearly Willpower is the best because it has this number," like seems to have been done upthread, because, unlike you whom the sheet was made for, average forum-browser guy does not realize that there are other things to keep in mind.
For that matter, we might want to take a look at how Arcanaville did everything. She has her own survivability spreadsheet, and as I recall, it looked comparatively user-friendly. I never really played with it, though. -
Katana/Willpower
Easy to build, easy to play, easy to level, and gives up nothing in top end power if you go for it.
On the other hand, any/any works well. There are no dud combinations, even if some are better at some things than others. -
Quote:Originally Posted by Microcosm
Definitely, but dealing with an inaccurate assessment of its contribution is much better than leaving it out entirely.I personally prefer to quantify that which is more easily quantified, and simply keep in mind that which isn't. The danger with my approach is that people will think the numbers are all that is, and that a build with a 3000 survivability score is simply better at surviving than one with a 2000 survivability score. It may not be the case if the second build has a lot more active mitigation, plus there are a lot of issues quantifying even passive mitigation. You can, certainly, try to quantify even the active mitigation. The danger there is that your number will seem even more trustworthy since it includes "everything", but the margin of error on what is being measured has been significantly increased.Quote:Originally Posted by John_Printemps
Looking into this issue at the moment. Time is fleeting, though, but I do have the Survivability Matrix now and working with a friend in an attempt to infuse DPS values into quantifiable damage mitigation that coincide with the Matrix. So far, I am more cursing the spreadsheet and wanting some C++
So I guess it's up to whoever's doing this - do you want to measure less with a smaller margin of error, or measure more with a larger margin of error?
Me personally, I'm sticking with the first. I use the number as just one aspect of how I think about survivability, and I have a lot of "yeah but" in my mind as I use it. To me, it's very similar to calculating DPS. There are only a few situations in the game where the DPS figure will be an accurate measurement of your damage output. In most other situations, you're also using AoEs, you're moving from mob to mob and spawn to spawn, and so on. But all of that is much more difficult to quantify. I think it is better to go ahead and calculate DPS, and have a big "yeah but" in mind, than to try to quantify what your average damage output per second across an average mission might be. It may be worth calculating AoE as a separate figure, but I wouldn't try to combine the two, and I'd recognize the huge error bars on the AoE number.
I guess part of my reluctance to quantify the difficult to quantify stems from my original reason for doing these calculations - AV soloing. With an AV, all that active mitigation amounts to very little. You don't knock them back, hold them or fear them, they have massive resistance to debuffs, you used to not be able to kill them fast enough to make much difference, and so on. So for me, there was never much point in including anything other than your basic, passive mitigation. But we've always had groups that could challenge us, from the RWZ challenge to +4x8 to now things like finding yourself solo while trying to pick up some molecular acid. And these days, even Pylons go down fast enough that damage can be considered a form of mitigation.
Eh, I'm curious to see what y'all can come up with.
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Active mitigation is, unfortunately, a bit difficult to quantify.
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Quote:Well, technically I have 51++ or 52+. They used to be easier to acquire, I think back when people were converting from Hamio to IO builds. That's mostly come to an end, so they're very rare now, but they still sell occasionally on the market. I begged for some at crazy high prices on the market forum when I was actively slotting a toon and got a few that way. Some show up for sale there now and again along with the usual PvP suspects. Basically, it's a whole lotta influence and a whole lotta patience these days.Originally Posted by Santorican
Werner how did you get L53 HOs? I have been looking for some for YEARS...
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I wanted recharge so that I could spam healing when hurt. Hit points were important to me too, so I didn't go for a full frankenslot. And I didn't mind sacrificing a little DPS. I went with:
53 Nucleolus
This was also a long, long time ago. There are probably better approaches these days.
53 Golgi
50 Hecatomb damage/recharge
50 Numina's heal/end, heal/rech and heal/end/rech
acc 38.30
dam 71.28
end 84.40
rec 79.74
heal 96.87
12% regeneration
25.1 hit points
Mauk, I love how high you got the enhancement values, but it looks more like it was done for the sake of doing it than as something that a build requires. I think you'd only need that much recharge in two cases - you want to spam the heal, or for an attack chain. But if you're doing it to spam the heal, I'd think we'd want to focus at least as much on the heal enhancement. If for the attack chain, well, if you have the recharge for the top attack chain, you don't even need recharge in Siphon Life. There are some extreme recharge chains to spam Siphon Life faster that that level of recharge would be critical for, but the point there is again to spam Siphon Life for the heal, so you'd want more healing. Accuracy is great, but probably higher than it needs to be in most builds. I guess what I'm suggesting is to try to hit similar numbers, but use accuracy as the dump stat instead of healing. Then we'd really be talking!
It's been a long time since I've looked seriously at Siphon Life, though. I could be off base on some things. -
Quote:I considered plugging some numbers into it to give an answer. Then I realized I had really important things to do this evening, like read some comic books. I mean graphic novels.Originally Posted by John_Printemps
Mock up some builds and toss them in Here and find out for yourself
I couldn't resist throwing around the new Survivability Score Matrix. -
I've pretty much always listed anything but rare salvage and above for 1 inf. These days, I'm mostly deleting anything below rares because I'm not going to take the time to check what has bidders and what doesn't. I also have no idea why I bother checking what rares are worth when I should be listing for 1 inf. It's probably time to change that bad habit. Rares at 1 inf from now on (except on characters that I haven't bankrolled).
I agree that marketeering is a skill, and that inf only grows on trees if you have that skill. It's not a DIFFICULT skill by any means. It's well within the grasp of almost anyone that wants to learn. But people may not want to take the time to develop that skill (it being a game, after all), and gambling all your inf on the market with no idea what you're doing is just as likely to lose you inf as gain you inf. I think where intelligence comes into play is to simply recognize that you need to develop the skill in the first place rather than blindly tossing inf at the market. -
Quote:Well, in this thread and for this sort of build, the consensus is Rebirth for Destiny. I'd also go Void for Judgment if our focus is on survivability. Reactive seems to be a favorite for Interface overall, though if everyone uses that, we're missing out when we all gather together to fight hard targets. Not sure what to do with Lore.Originally Posted by Shinmen
As far as incarnate powers beyond alpha (where spiritual seems to be the no-brainer) what is the consensus, if any?
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Quote:If this was in response to my post, I really have no idea how you could take my post to be telling you that YOU don't know how defense works. I tried rereading it, but can't see it at all. The only thing I can see even vaguely close was "Other things, though, are simple basic facts about the game, like how defense is applied when the game calculates the chance of an enemy to hit you." In context, it certainly seemed clear to me as a writer that this was given as an example of things that are facts vs. things that are opinions, as I'd just given a similar example of something that would be player preference and opinion. And that the more general context was in discussion of the OPs build. That I replied to you didn't mean that every comment I made in the post was directed specifically to you and that I was implying negative things about your knowledge or skills. But that's me as a writer. Perhaps it read differently.Originally Posted by Sinny
Shockingly I do know by now how defense is applied to in the game...Give me some credit before you skim over my post and wait to type...
I said I would NOT build a wp like that, in fact I've NEVER seen a wp built like that and WORK....my point was if she's claiming it IS in fact working for her....then go team with her...or test it for yourself....Yes, wp is not designed to work like the way her build is set...but like it was said in a previous post....it may look 'suboptimal' on paper...but could perform *shrugs*
Now, I think you were responding directly to ClawsAndEffect's post, so maybe this was directed at him, but that's even more confusing to me. He was responding to me instead of you, and I thought was clearly discussing the OPs build, and continuing on the idea of what was preference vs. what was simple fact. Again, I see nothing in there indicating that you personally don't know how defense works.
On to the next point, you say we should team with her or test it ourselves, but since we all know how defense works, there's no need for me to go test it myself. Unless the game's rules changed in a recent patch, or Mids' is displaying the positional and typed defenses incorrectly and the positional defenses are actually higher, we know that the positional defense isn't doing anything, right? That's one point from my most recent post. In this case, this is a fact of the game, not a player preference. There's no need to test unless we suspect a Mids' or game bug. Do you suspect a Mids' or game bug?
Mind you, sets with positional defense bonuses have smaller typed defense bonuses. So it isn't that the sets are useless (they aren't), just that they aren't doing what it seems like the OP thinks they're doing. Also, I've never successfully seen the OPs build since there was no link and no data chunk, and my attempts to import from the description failed miserably. So I'm just going on second hand information here. Apologies if I'm misunderstood anything due to lack of first hand information. -
Ah, yeah, I suppose I should have mentioned the market. That's how I afford everything. Selling the Hamios will give you the nest egg for diving in to the market deep end. Mind you, I've heard horror stories of big bets gone bad. But it's the usual advice - don't gamble what you aren't willing to lose.
Some people hate the market, so if it's not your thing, there are alternatives - the alignment merits already mentioned, farming, heck just playing the game on a L50 and selling your drops goes faster than I think most people give it credit for.