Speed Boost? Yes/No

This is the exact way my kin is set up. We have 2 builds why not use them? This isn't an either/or situation. You can have a soloing build and a team build. Why not do both?

Then you're not paying attention to just how much 50% recharge is.

Let's break it down for you.

50% Recharge is the equivalent of 5 purple sets in someone's build.

Or the equivalent of 5 LoTG 7.5s AND an additional 5% from somewhere.

That's a titanic amount of recharge. It remains useful through all content, even to many top end IO builds.


A competent attack chain and an unreal attack chain is the difference that SB can make.

Having SB, means not needing to watch your endurance bar and spamming all of your highest endurance cost, longest recharge powers.



Now you're just being purposefully obtuse. Nothing is needed in this game, but buffs improve team performance - this is why kins and all support ATs are so sought after.

If you think anything differently, than you are fooling yourself.


Well at least you have that in your favor.




You're deceiving yourself.

I play with well played kins, people who never seem to complain about how hard it is to keep the team SB'd. No one expects perma SB, they just appreciate it when they get it.

The team is usually fully of fully IOd, well played characters and the times we have kins with SB vs. the times we don't on something like the ITF, or LGTF demonstrate a clear difference in completion time.

You can discount it, downplay it, pretend it's not important - but SB is huge.

+Recovery as a buff, +Movement speed, +50% Recharge - it's huge.



Then I guess the players I play with are simply better skilled then you.

They never seem to be busy "throwing SB all over the place during combat" and they are always tossing out Fulcrum Shift and draining key targets.

I can tell when they fuclrum shift, because it means my Brute has 750% damage in bright sky blue in his combat monitor window.

It appears they are capable of filling the role you seem to be capable of, with the added addition of keeping the party SBd as well.

In which case, they add more value to the team than you do and I'd rather have them every single time over someone who feels it's a hassle to keep team mates buffed when playing an AT powerset that has buffs.


No, I agree completely. I don't think I would someone to a group if they weren't prepared to follow through on their role on a team.



Yes, it's slower. It means less nukes, less shield charge, less footstomp, less FSC, less Rain of Fire, etc.

Correction. They're missing the most desirable buff from the standpoint of their teammates.

As someone who solos on a Grav/Kin, I haven't taken SB on my primary build, and haven't built out a secondary teaming build.

I always inform my team leader and teammates that the build is solo-oriented. I tend to compensate by keeping Transference and Transfusion going as much as possible.

Yes, this makes fights take a bit longer, but teammates rarely have to worry about health and end issues.

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Considering the fact that my teaming on my Grav/Kin has been limited to EXACTLY four instances (a respec a ship raid, and two TFs), I guess you could call me ridiculous then.

But hey! Why not burn a power and six slots on something that's useless to me for 99% of the time I play!

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Exactly. If I never let their health and end bars go below half and keep them hopped up on Fulcrum Shift all the time, honestly who CARES if I could shave 2 minutes off a 2 hour taskforce?

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Undead.

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I'm really very sorry that you actually think SB is the defining power of the set.

Honestly, it's one very nice buff. And yes, it does help the team.

But /Kin has MYRIAD buffs including a relatively fast-recharging End-REPLACEMENT power (as opposed to End Recovery).

If ANYTHING defines the /Kin set, it's Fulcrum Shift. A buff that increases damage without requiring the team to attack MORE, that simultaneously damage-debuffs the enemy mobs. Better still, it's an AoE.

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If I have a power, I don't mind using it. I don't even normally mind taking a power I don't use often.

On my kin, I'll EVENTUALLY build a team-oriented build.

But sitting there and playing "*DING!* The timer went off! Time to make the rounds!" every couple minutes gets to be a drag after a while.

If I have a Stoner on team, I definitely will be diligent about SB for them.

Other than that, I will be judge of the best use of my own powers.

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SB has a recharge time of 2 seconds. If you are hitting 7 people in fewer than 10 seconds you've slotted the power with recharge, have global recharge IOs or an external buff source.

Or you can use a power in between SBing other people. Ten seconds of animation time on SBing, 110 to do whatever, no time wasted.

EXACTLY what I said many times earlier.

People have different opinions of what players should and shouldn't do, and what powers they should and shouldn't take. If someone's playing a kin and chooses not to take Speed Boost, that's their choice, it's their character. Keep in mind though that other people aren't required to accept your choices, and you take the chance of possibly being kicked from a team for not having a certain power like Speed Boost.

Ok ? I doubt we'll ever team ingame because with your attitude, I'd leave or kick you (nothing to do with SB/not SB).

Heh. And heh.

Much like taking any power beyond Brawl is mere icing, afterall you can perfectly level to 50 by punching -1/x1 missions. Again, I don't find it that fun. YMMV.

No, I'm pretty sure I didn't miss anything. I'm also pretty sure you perfectly understood me as your wording just screams "troll" with anyone with working brain cells, but I can pretend I believe you. This was in reply to the question "is SB needed ?". No it isn't, but why would you skip it and go slower for the sake of going slower ?

Teams where everyone have competent attack chains by level 26 would fall into my definition of "theorical perfect teams". I've never seen such a team ingame, but then again that might be because I'm not up to your über standards.

1/ If it doesn't miss. Which will happen, the maximum tohit chance is 95%.
2/ If it doesn't hit a dead enemy. Again, probably not a factor for your über self, but for the rest of us commoners it happens pretty often especially on fast-moving teams.
3/ To people in a 20 feet radius of your target. Even "theorical perfect team" wouldn't do justice to such a team.

As for the debuff part I'm just going to assume you had a brain fart, as surely someone as knowledgeable as you would know even defender Transference isn't a full drain on anything +2 and above (and even a full drain needs -recov to be actually efficient for more than a split second), making it basically meaningless as a debuff unless stacked with other end drains (we won't consider a team moving slow enough for the kin to use Transf twice on the same target as someone as skilled as you wouldn't play with scrubs like that).

Uh.

FS is a damage buff. Recharge =! damage. Both can be complimentary to each other, but are two completely different mechanics.

That would be great. Here's a few builds I can't manage to make and need your input on :

DB/invul, 45%+ S/L, 33%+ F/C/E/N, Hurdle/CJ, 300%+ regen, infinitely sustainable endurance (or 10+ minutes) while running a gapless AS/BF/AS/SS chain.
DM/SD, softcapped to all three positions, maximum acc/dam/heal/end% on SL, 300%+ regen, 90%+ DDR, slotted up OwtS and resistances, Hurdle/CJ perma-Hasten, infinitely sustainable endurance (or 10+ minutes) while running a gapless SM/SL/SM/MG.
Kat/FA, 45%+ S/L, Hurdle/CJ, infinitely sustainable endurance (or 10+ minutes) while running a gapless GC/GD/GC/SD chain.

(I'd also want the standard secondary powers slotted up on all builds as well as BU/SD, of course.)

My issue in all of these builds is I don't have enough recharge to use these chains and have to resort to weaker attack chains. Obviously I'm doing something wrong, and I'm looking forward to be enlightened. If you could post the results in the scrapper forum it'd be great as I'm sure other people could use the help.

That two line jump wasn't to make my post look cool.

You seem to be confused here, I'm lumping myself in with all the dirty commoners. You're the one elite skilled dude who should teach us.

Further confusion it seems as I can't help but wonder if you somehow thought we were talking about Night Widows ? Unlike FU/BU, SB and FS aren't mutually exclusive so this isn't an "either or" situation, but rather a choice between 2 and 2 + 1. Given the choice, I'll always pick 2 + 1 ; I'm crazy like that.

Not sure why did we go back to the "need" thing after we established SB wasn't needed. Not sure if there was a need for the leet "heal0rz" meme to further establish yourself apart from the unwashed masses.

Thank you. I'm sure it'll make an entertaining anecdote while you're sipping tea with your buddies and laughing about these people who "do not have the necessary intelligence" to be honored with your presence.

I would think you might have, you know, heard of that little thing called "travel suppression".

That you are going to recast every minute, with our theorical perfect team being in the 25' radius every single time. Okay.

Sarcasm is hard to do when presented with something so blatantly stupid. Most granites pick TP and are the ones least affected by movement suppression.

Face, meets palm, again.

Use Siphon Speed. Run. Jump. SB. Animation plays and stops you from controling your movement, but the momentum keeps you going. Repeat as needed.

This is Kinetics 101, dude.

Ok, I think we've officially moved from theorical perfect team to theorical crappy team. I doubt you could find 7 players who couldn't deal decent damage while SBed without FS.

Thirty seconds, right. So our theorical crappy team consists not only of ridiculously weak characters, but the poor players also run this game on a netbook.

Back to theorical perfect team who always stick together in a 20' radius at all time !

I'm starting to see a trend there, but that might be just me.

Sure, if you say you do.

(FS doesn't boost recharge.)

That would be true if you killed one spawn, then stopped there and logged out. That's not really super efficient though, most people like to take on spawns after spawns and occasionally finish missions too.

Of course... If you're going so slowly you're not even aware of travel suppression... You might have everything recharged for every spawn, and I guess endurance wouldn't be a concern either. Suddenly, it all starts to make sense.

An useful rule of thumb when doing maths to support your point : don't be wrong.

(Another even better rule of thumb is to do maths to understand how stuff works, rather than make up your opinion about how stuff works and then try to manipulate maths to support your view.)

Everything in there completely forgets animation time. Fortitude animates in 2.27s before server ticks, which means it actually animates in 2.508s. Let's say 2.5s.

Three even-level recharge SOs give you 94.93% enhancement (let's say 95%).

So, in that example Fortitude can be used every 2.5 + (60 / 1 + 0.95) = 33.27 seconds.

With a duration of 120 seconds, we can see it can be kept on 120 / 33.27 = 3.6 players. We can't have 3/5 of a player, even if he doesn't have SB and takes a nap between each spawn, so that's only 3 players.

Add SB into the mix.

2.5 + (60 / 1 + 0.95 + 0.5) = 26.99 seconds.

We can now see it can be kept on 120 / 26.99 = 4.44 players. Well, 4 players.

Now I'm pretty sure 4 is more than 3, so SB allows our theorical Empath to keep one more person under Fort.

Not going to bother adding the animation time to that, AB not recharging as fast as Fort the difference isn't as meaningful.

Instead let's use the numbers given and look at something else.

AB lasts 90 seconds. Without SB, it recharges in 150s. With SB, it recharges in 120s.

150 - 90 = 60
120 - 90 = 30
60 / 30 = 2.

That's right, in this situation SB just singlehandedly slashed the downtime on this buff by half.

Going from 180 - 90 = 90s downtime to 144 - 90 = 54s downtime on the buff portion, again quite the improvement.

How can you deduct that from math showing otherwise, math that you posted yourself will remain a wonder to me.

Suddenly we're all level 50s. It's nice, the goalposts keep moving - sometimes it's "when the kin gets transference", sometimes it's "with FS and transference", sometimes it's "at level 50". Randomness !

To balance that out, we're seemingly back into the "people need SB" thingy, after it has been disproved, what, one page ago ? Another familiar theme is confusing Fulcrum Shift for +recharge, or +recharge for +damage. I'm starting to think Warkupo read "+recharge translates to damage" somewhere and understood "+recharge = +damage" instead.

Hey, here's something I can actually genuinely agree with.

Well, the gist of it anyway, not the 19 second max figure which doesn't seem to come from anywhere that I can see. SB animates in a second (1.188s with server ticks), x7 that's 8.316, add a little bit of time for selecting your teammates and that's about 10-12 seconds and... Oh now I get it. You're the kind of guy who would actually use SB by casting it, waiting for it to recharge, casting it on another person, waiting for it to recharge, and so on.

Heh... And now I take a look at the posts made since I'm typing this, and I notice Smurphy made the exact same remark.

Right. The "lower levels" without animation times using level 50 invention enhancements in their powers. Right, right.

I am interested in seeing data to support this conclusion. I am interested in running herostats on various Fire/Kins you have or know.

My normal rotation is SB on Auto, then ID. As ID is casting, i select the second character, who then gets hit by auto'd SB. I click ID, move to next target.

Assuming optimal placement, the whole team is buffed in 8.5 seconds.

It should be noted that i have like +75% global recharge on my kin, which helps the timing of this sort of thing.

Here's my perspective on whether or not you should "HAVE" to take SB. If you're a Defender, then yes, take and use powers that help your team... the ones in your PRIMARY. However, if you're a Controller or Corr, then I think more leeway should be given. After all, buffs aren't your primary focus, control/damage are.

What does kill me though is Kins who don't take or use I.D. IMO it's a better power than Clear Mind and yet you won't find an Empath without THAT power. Especially if you're on a tough mission with lots of mezzers. But mweh.

Noone is advocating skipping FS or Transference, though.