Optimal Rage?

While I know many bemoan the Rage crash, and just as many love rage, I've yet to see anything on what might be considered "optimal" rage recharge.

Is there a certain amount of recharge people shoot for when considering rage? Something near perma-rage, or perhaps trying to double stack?

What are people's opinions on the ideal amount of recharge for rage?

At minimum, you want Rage to recharge in about 115 seconds so you can turn it on before it goes down. I believe this keeps the defense crash from occuring. Sometimes that doesn't matter and you can wait until about 5-8 seconds into the crash to turn on Rage again so you have a few more seconds of smashing stuff every cycle.

It depends on your accuracy. Stacking Double-Rage on Brutes is outrageously over-rated. A SS Brute should measure his damage in Foot Stomps: "This pack takes 3 Foot Stomps" "That pack takes 4 Foot Stomps" "This one two". Unless you go from 4-->3 or 3--2 etc. then you don't really improve your killing speed. All you do is increase Rage crashes. Accuracy is different. Some Brutes will need more Rage to hit some high defense enemies. If you feel that at times you want the bonus accuracy from double Rage, or very rarely the bonus damage to overcome a fierce foe, increase your recharge in it as much as possible.

Personally, I just slot a single To-Hit in Rage on my SS/X Brutes with Hasten and IO set bonuses. Some have a few To Hit set IOs specifically for the bonuses, ignoring the recharge slotted in Rage.

Well, my current planned build should have Rage (slotted with 2 Rectified Reticles) at about 104s recharge with Hasten, plus however much the FF Proc from footstomp will boost it.

But I've been debating stealing the 6th slot from Ball Lightning and adding a 3rd slot for a L50 Rech Rdx which would bring it down to about 88s.

Maybe you're right, maybe it's not worth it foir the extra 16 seconds.



If you were going to slot rage for as much double stacking as possible, how many seconds would you aim for?

59ish. So that you're always double stacked. 55 would be preferable, just to give you a little time to fire it before one ends...

But yeah, at 59, you activate, 59 seconds you activate another one, going into double rage, then 59 seconds later you activate a third, two seconds after which the first one fades, leaving you with two still.

This is very achievable, with certain builds, but generally also very expensive.

I'd much rather slot a build for survivability ona brute then waste that many slots dedicated to recharge. Have Rage up all the time, and that only takes 2 slots (I advise Adj Targetting Rech and ToHit/Rech, and the few set bonuses for recharge that end up in your build should be enough. If not, 2 Generic Recharge would be fine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler you *******!!!!

I agree with Smurphy, stacking rage isn't as awesome as people make it out to be, in fact it's terribly over rated. Personally, I never stack rage, the extra crashing sucks. As for how I slot rage, on my SS/Fire I have 3 Gaussian's for the HP bonus.

Doublestacking rage is actually better for damage even considering the crashes, and the recharge going towards this also brings your big hitters up much more often boosting damage further.

There's not much point *not* to doublestack rage unless all you're doing is solo farming. Of course, there's situations in which you may not want to stack Rage - i.e., teaming with a kinetic using FS properly, or to a lesser extent anyone with strong damage buffs.

If anything, I'd say doublestacking Rage is underrated, not overrated.

Now, the crash is terribly annoying to deal with, even with procs, veteran attacks, taunting and travel time, but that (big) QoL issue doesn't change the above. That's the whole design of Rage, an overpowered buff balanced by annoyance.

I usually six slot rage. With Gaussians. The defense bonus is too nice to pass up on any toon that actually cares about defense. Plus they're relatively cheap and easy to get, and can be slotted earlyish in your career, which makes the bonus that much nicer.

On any toon with defense based protection, when I'm trying to soft cap them I always first thing look for a space I could stick the Steadfast Protection +3%, and the second thing I look for is somewhere I could stick Gaussians.

I try to get Rage to recharge as fast as possible but do not go out of my way to gimp my build by only going for +recharge bonuses. If the set I'm looking at has a +recharge bonus in addition to the other bonus I was looking for then that's great. Personally, for a leveling build pre-set IOs, Rage will normally get 2-3 slots. When it comes time to start thinking about IO sets for a finalized build, then Rage gets 3-5 slots.

As a brute with lots of Fury already built up, doubling up on Rage is most likely not necessary. As said earlier, tougher foes may factor in though. I find that Rage usually gives me enough to-hit that I hit almost all the time. In cases where I am not, then usually popping a yellow is a better option than doubling Rage. Sometimes though I just like smashing a mob so hard they don't know what hit them, then I gleefully use a double-stacked Rage.

Also, having the extra recharge in Rage helps when it comes to -recharge debuffs. I say better to have it recharged and wait to click on it again till the first Rage is about to crash, then to keep looking at it wondering if it will recharge at all.