How will you alpha slot?

This is a thread for discussion the alpha slot for all types of VEATs. I got no ideas because my brain is all sort of exploded right now with the possibilities. The Recharge (Spiritual) looked pretty good for my Fortunata, though I don't see a use for the other abilities in that set. Maybe I'll go Cardiac and just slot LotG out the whazoo.

Link here to the slots, if you haven't seen it. Don't forget to mouse hover over the boxes with the short text for the actual detailed description.

http://goingrogue.na.cityofheroes.co...lpha-slot.html

My Crab is still growing up and I'm not sure where I'm going to go with the Alpha slot on him. Plus we don't know anything about incarnate content. If too many of the fights have rediculous defense then everybody will be slotting Nerve reflexively anyways. Otherwise Muscle will become quite popular and thankfully Crab will be able to take advantage of the defense debuff side effect on it as well.

Eventually, I want to give my Bane the Nerve Core Paragon (45% acc, 33% hold, 20% defense buff, level shift), more accuracy's good and the defense buff/level bump is very shiny too.

hmm, it would either be Cardiac or Musclature I think for my Widow. The Cardiac would be nice for filling in the resistance hole Widows have and the endurance redux would be an added bonus, but the additional damage in Musclature would be very nice too.

Remember that these are enhancements to your powers, not straight increases. That is not 20% more resistance. That is 20% enhance to your resistance powers.

My only issue with it all is: why give us an accuracy focus when folks slot accuracy naturally already. There aren't many IO sets that neglect accuracy and a great many IO set bonuses that give accuracy along side other bonuses that we wany anyways. I fear that Incarnate content will feature enemies that are neigh impossible to hit without choosing Accuracy for our Incarnate slot.

For my Crab build, I'm considering Cardiac Radial Paragon or Nerve Radial Paragon. It's a conceptual Tank build, so I'm leaning more towards Cardiac due to the damage resistance bonuses being so rare in this game.

For my Bane build... I'm unsure if I want to go for straight up damage with Musculature Core Paragon, or improve my defenses with Nerve.

It's just occurred to me... I may need to re-think my IO setups with the alpha slotting in mind in order to get the most out of my builds.

I figure Spiritual with the recharge will be the most popular.

Yeah, definitely Spiritual for my Widow.

For now I'm thinking Cardiac Core Paragon - 45% end redux, 20% range, 20% res

My Crab runs 5 leadership toggles, Fortitude, Tough, and will either run Hover or CJ in I19. I also have perma-hasten so I spam through attacks quickly. I can manage fine with endurance right now but every now and then i need to eat some blues. The added range to cones and other ranged attacks will be very nice. Also the 20% res will mesh nicely with Fortitude, Tough, and the Crab Armor so there really isn't anything wasted on the Cardiac Alpha.

Muscular seems tempting too because of the +30% damage bypassing ED. The only bummer with Muscular is that the rest of the buffs provided seem a bit wasteful. I like to minimize waste on my build as much as possible.

What's nice though is that it seems like with the Alpha Slot you'll be able to swap out your enhancement so there's nothing wasted with at least trying out the other options.

Cardiac. My Widow is swimming in recharge, and I do plenty of DPS. More is nice, sure, but my problem is she drains her end bar like there's no tomorrow, even though I've slotted for end reduction fairly aggressively and have all the usual recovery toys. Her end consumption is her one glaring weakness, and Cardiac line will address that nicely.

(If you want to see what the Cardiac line would be like, roughly, and you have the Mutant booster pack, see how your Widow plays if you can get Mutation: Pain Tolerance. It gives 30% global end reduction.)

Going to pursue musculature core paragon on the NW as her end consumption is decent for her current build (I could go 9+ minutes on a pylon without worries). This could change with the i19 build as I'm adding assault to the mix (I'm curious to see what a triple-stacked FU + double assault +frenzy + 30% dam ED alpha slot does to slash), but even if there's a little end drain I figure the +30% ED damage bonus will balance it out a bit.

Hoping it works out that way anyhow =) faster I can kill, less time spent swinging the claws is my theory.

Regardless of the results, I'm hyped about this new issue.

I'll be switching my Crab to a heavily-defensive build with I19. Including double-stacked Assault to boost my damage, I'll be running 8 toggles. Added to this are permanent Spiderlings and Serum, and near-permanent Arachnobots. Even with the Performance Shifter proc and a bunch of recovery buffs, I'm still going to burn through a lot of End. So I'll be going Cardiac, with eventual upgrade to Cardiac Radial to boost my Res.

Will be going with Cardiac for my Widow and for my Bane.. well, no idea honestly, since he has oodles of +rech already and really doesn't need more end reduction or accuracy,

I'll go with whichever boost gives the largest increase to my widow's damage. That's probably going to be musculature, although I'll try spiritual to see if I can improve my attack chain.

Since we can switch based on our needs, I intend to have musculature and cardiac both available, and swap depending on circumstances. Endurance is my widow's major weakness, but my i19 build should be slightly better endurance-wise and I'm not sure I'll need to use the alpha slot on further reduction or not.

MOAR Damage for my Bane, Fort and Widow.

Accuracy: is a waste due to already high To-Hit and additional accuracy from the set bonuses.

Recharge: my fort and widow are already having perma Mind Link, and attack chain is good with recharge I already have.

Endurance: it can be option to consider if I was into soloing hard targets, but without that I'm pretty happy with endurance as it is now.

Also keep in mind that with the recharge alpha slot you can indirectly increase your damage output. Even if your ML is perma, your attack chain is flawless you can still get the recharge alpha slot and sacrifice some of your recharge set bonuses and get more +dmg bonuses or other things that might interest you. It is worth looking into and experimenting with.

For example my Scrapper will be going the recharge alpha slot route, however because I can ditch some of my recharge set bonuses and and a couple Recharge IOs I had enough room in my build for 18% more damage buff. (10.5% from ditching a lotg slot for assault, and 7.5% from other various +dmg set bonuses that I squeezed out with the extra slots I got and reworking +rchg sets into sets with +dmg). And my recharge will still be better than it is in my i18 build.