Chance for Build Up

I slotted Gaussian's Synchronized Fire Control: Chance for Build Up on my scrapper about 2 weeks ago. I put it in my Dual Blade's Blinding Feint attack. I execute the attack often as part of the Empower compination and have never noticed an extra "Build Up."

Does it notify you somehow when you get the Build Up? If not how can you test that it is working?

BTW: I just noticed that the wiki doesn't list To-Hit Buffs as an enhancement or set that Blinding Feint can slot.

I believe you have to look in the Healing Channel to see that the buildup has fired. There is an icon that appears briefly in your buff list but it doesn't look like the normal buildup icon. There are no other visual clues that it has fired.

You can also add Damage Buff to the things you have in your combat monitor. It only fires off 5% of the time and only lasts 5 seconds, so it's often easy to miss.

Sure was nice seeing my damage buff suddenly bounce up 200% on the extremely rare occasion that my Gaussian CFBU in Followup fired off right before the Decimation CFBU I had in Focus fired off.

I'm beginning to think I should have left the to-hit buff in there.

Remove this worthless proc from your build unless you like wasting a slot or need the 6-piece set bonus. This proc is one of the worst in the game and I resent it's existence.

WARNING: I bold names.

You're better served putting it in a persistent power like Tactics.

In fact, go get tactics, right now, and put it in there. You'll thank me later.

Worthless? No more so than the damage proc in Mako's.

I say that because the CFBU adds exactly the same amount of DPS to my FU, Slash, Focus, Swipe attack chain as the 20% proc chance of damage from Mako's.

Granted, I fight a LOT of hard targets like AVs and Pylons, but what I worked out in the spreadsheets was rather dead on to what I found in game when it came to my DPS calculations.

And as for better served by putting it in tactics, this is only true if blinding feint is being used less than every 10 seconds. My claws chain has followup being used every 5.28 seconds. 5% chance every 5.28 seconds is better than a 5% chance every 10 seconds as with toggles.

I haven't bothered to time my attack chains but it's probably less often than every 10 seconds. I usually alternate between Empower and Weaken combos with One Thousand Cuts/sweeps thrown in after an empower if I can get multiple targets in the cone or really really need to knockdown everything around me for the mitigation. So a minimum of 5 attacks between Feints but often more.

Justice Fencer dinged 43rd over the weekend so I don't have a lot of power/slot choices left. I'm not sure Tactics would be a good choice for me. She already has endurance problems in big teams that can't provide a recovery buff (she is fine solo unless fighting an elite boss with a swarm of boss protectors - I'm looking at you Hro'Dtohz - but man what an epic fight that was ).

I'll search my logs and see if I can find where it went off and put the damage buff in my monitor box for future reference.

In case anyone is curious, I finally found it. The only indication you get that it went off is a little line in the Combat chat that says "Your attack strength has increased temporarily" and the attack buff goes up by 100%. I played her for about an hour last night (first chance I had) and it went off 3 times according to the log although I only saw it twice. Not great but probably worthwhile.

Thanks for the replies and the idea to monitor the attack buff. I had assumed there would be some sort of Build-Up-esque SFX but nothing so grand.

On average in Tactics it will go off once every 100 seconds for 5 seconds. That's +100% of base damage, so +50% enhanced. At 5% uptime (which is being a bit generous) you're seeing a 2.5% increase in your overall damage. Now subtract from that every time the thing goes off but you fail to be using an attack during that 5 second window and you're looking at less than 2.5% damage.

In Followup, that 2.5% would probably be a bit more reliable. Given Followup's recharge time you're probably looking at closer to 4% damage increase over time. On a Brute, far worse as the 4% gets buried under Fury. I'd sooner slot another Accuracy, ToHit or Recharage in Followup and get more net benefit.

Slotting it in Buildup is the worst-case scenario. You'll see it once every 3 minutes or something like that. I've got it in Buildup on my MA/SR Scrapper PvP build strictly for the +Defense. SR helps Gaussian's miserable Recharage out with it's 20% Recharge bonus in Quickness.

God, I love SR.

Uh, what were we talking about?

P.S. Oh, yes. Gaussian's Buildup proc is basically a waste of a slot unless you want the 6-set bonus, but if you must use it, use it in Followup, as that's your best-case scenario. Otherwise, using that slot nearly anywhere else is going to be of larger benefit. But hey, IY15, so use it all you like if that's your thing.

P.P.S. This proc could really benefit from increasing its chance to 10%, it's duration to 10 seconds, and a visual Buildup cue on your character when it goes off.

WARNING: I bold names.

Follow Up? I'm Dual Blades so Blinding Feint is the place to put it. Or is that what you meant?

Now that I know what to look for I see it fire off 2-4 times per average length mission. I got it once today while fighting Neuron which was a real help since he was a +4 AV for me. I suspect I'd be better off with a to-hit buff instead but I haven't decided yet.

I was just about to take tactics and slot the Gauss proc. Yikes.

I was only comparing the difference between the CFBU in Tactics/FA versus Followup/Blinding Feint.

Whether the adding tactics/fa to a build and dealing with the extra end cost for the constant tohit buff and 2.5% defense to melee, range, aoe with a full gaussian set is a different discussion.

My current build has FA slotted that way while followup has 3 crushing impacts and 3 mako's bite enhancements.

I don't much care for my current build.