Werner

Fair enough. Outside the box can be good.

Perhaps I should have said "Looks pretty good to me on the surface". I shouldn't give the impression that I looked at every set in every power and calculated both DPS and EPS and am satisfied that this is as good as it gets or anything. I was just glancing at the basics - soft cap, slotted passives, decent hit points, Aid Self or serious regeneration, Tough slotted and used, likely sustainable endurance (didn't actually calculate, just an educated guess), and a high recharge to hopefully run the top chain.

On closer look, yes, high enough recharge to run the top chain, and I'd be shocked if it didn't have sustainable endurance and then some.

Very good suggestions on how to move the slots around, and I agree with replacing the Armageddon damage with the proc. And yes, the PvP -resist would also help a fair amount since even Golden Dragonfly is getting spammed in that chain. (Edit: It opens up a 1/50th of a second gap in the chain. I'm pretty sure it's worth it. Accuracy and endurance should still be fine.)

And I am a fan of the PvP +3% resist IO. I do buy and sell those for profit, so I have a conflict of interest in recommending them. But the idea is that anything you can do to more reliably survive a streak of bad luck will be a significant help in AV soloing. Now, 3% won't help much, and is only worth the influence if you're rolling in it, but it helps.

And of course you can take advantage of the alpha slot. I'd probably go with the obvious - musculature for damage. You don't really need recharge, accuracy or endurance. Your defense is already too high to benefit directly from defense (without a respec). You don't have enough resistance to benefit from resistance. The healing of Spiritual might be nice, but you might get just as much of a survivability boost out of killing them faster. Hard to say for sure.

If it were me, I MIGHT completely redo the build around Spiritual, trading some recharge bonuses for other things. But that would be a lot of work, and might not end up any better than brute force musculature.

Looks pretty good to me. You wouldn't be able to scratch Nightstar, as I think she has 50% lethal resistance. The others should be doable, particularly Chimera and Marauder. The missing ingredient may simply be persistence - Super Reflexes WILL get killed, and frequently, when trying to solo AVs. It is simply too subject to the whims of fate. Luck results from persistence.

As I recall, Burn doesn't do enough damage to include in a single-target attack string, though obviously it's nice for AoE damage.

Perhaps Dark Melee/Shield Defense. That's top of the charts for single target DPS right now, at least when surrounded, and Siphon Life gives you a built in heal to help you survive aggro bleed.

Heh, I'm not much of a budget builder. It makes it easy when you don't even THINK about price when selecting sets. Budget building is harder, I think, though I guess it's not that hard when a typical rule is simply "no purples, no PvPs, no Hamios".

I guess my main comment would be that as nice as it is hitting the melee and lethal soft cap with one Divine Avalanche (and it IS nice), I don't think it's worth slotting for melee defense set bonuses. If you must have it in one hit, consider tossing a defense IO in Divine Avalanche. I think one more slot would be much cheaper in terms of trade offs overall. But really, I'd probably just accept needing two hits.

I'd want a lot more accuracy and/or to hit. A Kismet unique at a minimum, but I'd really want to fit in Tactics. For things I'd be willing to axe to make room, Flashing Steel, Soul Transfer and Super Jump. Dropping Flashing Steel has the advantage of giving you slots too. Tactics would get the Gaussian set.

You also have, if I'm seeing this right, no knockback protection in the build at all. Ouch. You need either Acrobatics or a few knockback IOs. I think the Blessing of the Zephyr pieces have dropped in price now that they provide less stratospheric defense values, and I think it's an excellent set for a Katana/Dark - knockback protection plus ranged and AoE defense. Yeah, fine, you hardly need to enhance your travel powers, but they're good set bonuses.

I'd enhance Cloak of Fear. It's practically useless with just an endurance reducer in it.

Endurance could be a problem, though I'm not certain, and you can always use the endurance alpha slot. Not sure which one you were planning, or if you wanted a build that was good without them, and then just use whatever seemed appropriate for the night's adventure.

Edit: OMG, duh. I didn't even notice that what you were emphasizing was energy and negative defense. Hmmm. I wouldn't have gone that way myself. I have energy and negative at 16.5% of incoming damage, while smashing alone is up at 28%. Also, with ranged defense at 38.6%, it's not helping a lot against ranged attacks (well, it's arguable either way). It's not helping much at all against melee. So it just seems like a lot of effort to go to for what seems to me very little benefit, though of course it depends on what you tend to fight.

The 0.4-second gap won't be eliminated with the very rare, only slightly reduced.

Yeah, level 53 Hamios boost you 23% (Membranes) or 38.3% (Enzymes).

I'd only replace one Membrane in Active Defense with an Enzyme, if any. You still need the others for recharge to keep that sucker double-stacked.

I'm not sure I'd bother with Parry until we know more about the incarnate content. No, that's not true. I'd bother with Parry, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable raising that to the level of recommendation until we know more about the incarnate content. Still, if you feel the same way (overly cautious and wanting to make sure you can handle whatever they throw at you), then yeah, slot yourself some Parry, and Boxing seems like the most obvious place to raid for slots. You'll probably then have a small gap in your Active Defense stack, at least until you get the very rare boost. Also a very slightly larger gap in your chains, but probably not so much that you'd want some other chain (except when you're spamming Parry).

There's nothing special about level 54s as far as defense goes. For defense, I'd target either 59% (to floor tip mission devouring earth and Battle Maiden) or 70% (to floor pets). Since that's one unenhanced Parry or two unenhanced Parries over the soft cap, you should be fine slotting Parry as an attack. On the other hand, since you won't normally be using it as an attack, you could do something like a couple Nucleolus, a Mako's quad, the Luck of the Gambler, and an Enzyme. That's what I did on my Katana/Dark. That saves a slot over a full set and will let you put up ridiculously high defense numbers if for some reason it should be necessary. Like maybe you could tank Recluse without purples by beating on one of the towers with Parry. OK, you'd probably need big oranges and serious team support too. Or skip the Enzyme and save two slots, which might be the better overall choice.

I'd definitely add a Kismet unique, but I'd put it in a toggle or passive.

I'd want a lot more regeneration or Aid Self, but you should normally be fine with greens.

I wouldn't be happy being below 45% defense.

You're one over the cap on 10% regeneration, but it looks like just a side effect of the sets you're slotting, not what you were actually going for.

You'll get twice as much endurance out of a Performance Shifter proc in Physical Perfection, at least on average.

You could consider a stealth IO in one of the prestige sprints just so that you have some stealth capability.

Looks pretty good to me otherwise. I haven't played with and haven't seen many Broad Sword/Shield builds, so I'm not really sure what good numbers are just looking at it. But it seems to hit the basics pretty well - soft cap (sorta), defense debuff resistance, good chain, sustainable endurance, AoE capability, good hit points, slotted Tough, bunny hopping, accuracy (with the Kismet added).

OK, OK, OK.

1. For HS>Hack>Dis>Hack, with spiritual uncommon, you should have 66.25%+22% = 88.25% before ED in Hack, 70+(0.9*(88.25-70))=86.425% after Ed, plus your 150% global is 236.425% recharge, allowing it to recharge in 2.378 seconds, giving you about a 0.4 second gap, and Mids' unslotted average damage of 68 DPS. That looks like your best option despite the gap. Your gap in your AoE chain is even shorter, not much more than a tenth of a second. Go for it, I say.

2. Failing to push hard against the ED cap? I have two level 53 Membranes and a level 53 Enzyme in my Active Defense. It's probably not working as intended, though - the game does NOT apply the ED cap to the DDR, at least for Active Defense, at least as of a week or two ago when I checked it. I can't remember if it does for Deflection. I'm again thinking it isn't. So I can't really suggest super-saturating your defense enhancement like I have, since it will probably go away and is very expensive. Honestly, I wasn't even aware of the bug (assuming it is one) when I did it. Found out after the fact when I started questioning why my DDR was so high. Mids' USED to fail to apply the ED cap, and I think at the time, the game DID apply the ED cap. Now the situation looks reversed. So you'll probably have a little over the 89% shown in Mids', but probably not 95% since you aren't losing much to ED anyway.

3. Heading to bed and too tired for an endurance calculation, but it looks pretty good to me. I shoot for about 3 EPS net recovery before the attack chain as my first pass on a build before I start calculating, and that's roughly where you're at. With Conserve Power, your massive recharge and the Spiritual boost, decent endurance reduction in your attacks, I just can't imagine you having an endurance problem outside of massive drains. In fact, you might end up being able to replace one or two endurance reductions in the attacks with some proc damage, maybe some Achilles' Heels if you want to take on hard targets. I'd START with the endurance reduction though, and just see how it goes. Though aren't most procs pretty cheap? As long as we're burning influence, I'd frankly start with the procs and then just replace them one at a time with endurance reduction if I found I had a problem. Bet you don't have a problem, but if I'm wrong, it's a relatively cheap mistake to fix.

Edit: Any other build comments will have to wait. Sleepy!

Chance for build up isn't worth it in Build Up. The Gaussian set is a good one, though, so if Build Up is the best spot for it on your build, then go for it.

If you're uber rich, a Panacea proc is always nice.

Other than that, yeah, what BrokenPrey said.

I'm confused as to why you would pick a secondary to match your desired alpha slot. That seems like putting the cart before the horse. But yes, Regen gets the most benefit from it.

Mids' can now report Arcanatime as activation time, making calculations even simpler.

Confirming what Gaidin said and continuing on:

• Gambler's Cut is better than Sting of the Wasp.
• Elude is mostly pointless on a soft cap build.
• You only take all the attacks if you value variety over efficiency.
• You probably want a Gaussian set somewhere, even if Build Up isn't the ideal spot.
• The idea with Super Reflexes is that defense is easily covered, allowing you to focus more on other aspects of survivability like hit points and regeneration.
• Performance Shifter has great set bonuses. Six slotting is a reasonable approach if you need that much recovery.

Not trying to pick on anyone. I just want to make sure that people reading the thread get good information.