Attention Warshades: You have only one choice.

Seriously, this alpha slot was made for us. We all want more recharge, this has it in heaps. A whopping 30% that won't be diminished. My 'shade will be able to chain Dark Nova Emanation and Dark Nova Detonation seamlessly.

Think about how many powers you have with stuns.

Also, if I'm right on my math here, with this alone Stygian Circle should heal you to full off of one LT. Essence Drain and Black Dwarf Drain just got a whole lot better.

Editing in my thought process from a few posts below:

You're not the boss of me!

Oh wait, it's Dechs and Warshades. I stand corrected. You ARE the boss of me in this case

Quoted for truth.

I'm looking at a whopping 45% recharge boost in i19 if your math is correct.

The +damage and defense de-buff boosts are pretty good for PBs.

Thanks for the compliment, but I am by no means the sole authoritative voice when it comes to warshades.

But let's just take a moment to look over all the choices.

There's Cardiac, the endurance/resist tree, but that doesn't provide much benefit. Thanks to Stygian Circle and the upcoming inherent fitness, I doubt any warshade will be hurting for endurance. Slotted eclipse can cap resistance with five enemies; the resistance bonus from this alpha choice isn't enough to make it four. Even the benefit to Dwarf resistance is minimal, you get almost another 5% resistance. It also enhances range, or fear/sleep/intangibility. Are there any warshades begging for that?

Next we have Nerve, which highlights accuracy and also benefits things like defense buff, fly speed, as well as hold, taunt, and confuse duration. Yeah, I'm already done talking about this.

The first alpha choice with potential to benefit is Musculature, which sports an intriguing damage boost. The other bonuses might as well be sparkle unicorn powers, but that's ok, damage is still great. Assuming you ED cap your powers, this will still give you 30% more damage enhancement, right? ... Not exactly. The damage cap is still 400%, which means 300% in damage bonus will cap you. The 95% from enhancements counts against that, so in all reality, you only need 205% damage bonus to hit the cap. One saturated mire brings you 112.5% closer to the cap, meaning you only have enough room for 92.5% more before bonuses start to get wasted. Nova form's 45% bonus and a few teammates or a second mire from dwarf will do the trick. Musculature looks very unappealing at this point.

I wouldn't care what the fourth tree was; at this point I'd take anything else for my warshade. I turn the page to see the the Spiritual Alpha Enhancements in all their glory. I was sold at recharge, but to see it coupled with stun and healing? I nearly fainted.* There's even the option to go a little lighter on the recharge and add some slow enhancement to everything we have that slows, which is everything.

I'm convinced the developers said "Let's design one of these things just for warshades. It'll help them overcome the performance gap between them and their peacebringer cousins." Ok, that last sentence went too far.

And I'm sure they didn't have any idea how nice that looked for warshades. Kheldians are below even stalkers on the priority list.

*Just kidding.**

**But not really.

When I first heard about the Alpha slot, I wasn't even sure I cared that much. I mean, IO sets have given me capped damage (as far as ED is concerned), plenty of accuracy, and enough recharge/end reduction to make me happy. Sure, any given character could always use more recharge/end reduction, but it's not like I was going to grind for who knows how long just to get more of what I already have.

That was when I thought about things I don't normally slot for, such as secondary effects. Defense Debuff for my Rad Defender and PB, Stuns in my Mace Tank, and especially Slows in my WS. I like that my attacks have a slow effect, especially while in Nova, but it always seemed pretty minimal. Now, when two Extracted Pets and I attack an individual, the slow is definitely noticeable, but I still wanted to make it stronger. As a tri-form, however, I just couldn't use slots for slow IO's.

This Alpha slot will be mine. I will be taking less recharge and boosting the slow. Don't know how much it will boost it, as I haven't really read up on the Alpha Slot and all the numbers associated with it, but that's what I'll be doing nonetheless.

I'm not sure the exact math on it but I'm also thinking of taking the path of the slightly slower. I wish I knew the real in game difference between 33% and 45% recharge, but I feel like 33% might be enough.

Incaraclipse?


As to the comment about devs custom tailoring them to khelds. Why else would they have +33% jump on 'em?

Well, max is still three, with a fourth briefly maybe. I've been looking forward to the ability to cram a couple more pet uniques in them since I saw this on the i18 beta boards, though.

I think recharge is exactly what my human form PB wants as well, so he'll likely go with spiritual (after I get to 50, of course). His attacks aren't up quite often enough for my tastes. Don't forget the fact enhancing heal will make for more +max HP as well.

Don't get me wrong, hitting harder would be nice, but I think I'd rather hit more often, heal more often, and heal better.

Then again, his endurance consumption is off the charts in a way that makes my Dark Armor characters laugh. Perhaps I should go Cardiac and get a minor boost to his resistance as well?

Not that I play PB's, but you could still go recharge and just get enough so that you can alternate conserve energy and lightform. You can get enough recharge now to do that without the alpha slot.

I'm aware of the diminishing returns, but I've already gone over the lack of benefits the other alpha options provide. If you are already capped for damage (it's not hard to do with a 'shade), Musculature provides no benefit. The resistance bonus is likewise wasted when eclipse is taken into account, especially since it is not enough benefit to drop the required enemies from five to four. Endurance reduction is the last thing we need considering Stygian Circle. Even my high recharge build, low end reduction build is fully sustainable in dwarf, without dropping for Stygian Circle. Adding inherent Fitness to forms will only make this better.

Diminishing returns, at least in my book, are better than no returns.

My warshade isn't concerned with a seamless attack chain (unless you consider Nova Emanation -> Detonation, which isn't quite seamless yet). The added recharge will allow me to use the long recharge powers more often. I beg for a faster Quasar, Unchain Essence, and more time with three fluffies on my own.

I also think you're overlooking one of a warshade's weaknesses: -recharge. By going with the Spiritual branch you provide yourself with a buffer zone. Why do SR characters aim for 50% defense? To have a buffer for when the debuffs start falling on. If my Eclipse overlaps by 15 seconds instead of 10 as it is now, that just means I can get hit with a few more -recharge attacks before I have to worry about losing the protection of Eclipse.

This is a good idea for some people. I like to be able to exemplar without changing how my character functions on a fundamental level. Since the alpha slot goes away, I wouldn't put any stock in having the core of my build disappear at level 49.

However, you seemingly are treating the analysis like double miring and using stygian circle as not taking time. They do.

The time you spend miring, shapeshifting to dwarf, miring again, and then shapeshifting to nova both counts against the time of your mire durations, and the time your attack chain takes. A double-mire takes about 8 seconds to get into nova form and be ready to go to town with that capped damage, ignoring the time it takes to position yourself for it. You probably only get about 5-6 seconds of 'useful' double-mire time under this strategy.

And the time you spend shapeshifting, in particular, is time other offensive types are spending attacking. Other ATs' self buffs also take time, but they don't have to form-swap in between to leverage them. If you're a warshade who finds fights are mostly over by the time you're done ramping up for them, using an alpha boost that lets you save a 'step' in your setup, and going right from mire to nova form, is likely going to improve your performance substantially more than getting long-timer powers back 5 to 10 seconds faster will.

Alternatively, you might find that while you're pausing to recover with stygian circle on the spawn you just massacred, the rest of the team is racing to the next spawn and killing most of it without you. If this happens to you alot, trying an alpha boost that makes it so you have to use stygian circle less often is likely going to result in your getting more performance.

And performance aside, tailoring your build to get you into the action faster and keep you there longer is very likely to be more fun, since you spend more time attacking and seeing those happy orange numbers.

If you're the type who'd rather 'solo in the team' and go off by themselves in order to make sure you could do it your way, this might not be for you. But it's a fairly rare team who's going to appreciate that playstyle, even if many won't say anything about it. I know I tend to snicker to myself in a bit of schadenfreude when a 'lone ranger' gets KO'd. Especially if they then have to wait for the team to go 'rescue' them. (This is especially amusing to me with "FOTM" melee types - like DM/shield or fire/shield...)

Depending on your existing build (which I don't know, but considering you're talking about having 3 fluffies, I assume you have significant global recharge already), you're probably looking at an improvement of 1 to 1.5 seconds of recharge time per 60 seconds base recharge on those powers. So guesstimating, you should get 4-5 seconds of extra time with your three fluffies, and have quasar back 8-10 seconds sooner.

To figure out what you'd gain on a given power at the 'very rare' alpha power (which we can't get yet), calculate power recharge / (100% + (enhancements + global recharge) + 30%) and subtract that from your current power recharge speed.

It's hard to measure the value of recharge increases on long-timer powers, though, because said powers tend to be fairly situational. I'd say the most broadly applicable ones are tier 9 nukes, but I think if you're in the 90 second recharge range on that already, it's unlikely that getting it much lower is going to help too much. As a practical matter, I've found that lets me nuke every 3rd spawn on most teams. Having it cycle up in the middle of the 2nd spawn just means I'll save it for the 3rd one anyway.

SR characters aim for 47% defense in my experience, because with 95% def debuff resistance they don't need a "buffer" of more than 2%; the average def debuff 'hit' will debuff them for less than half a percent. If it weren't a particularly harsh tradeoff in terms of effectiveness, it'd be other defense sets who'd want a 50%+ defense rating to absorb debuffs. In practice though, that's a harsh tradeoff and nobody I know personally makes it. Especially since you can largely counter cascade failure when it happens via offense (kill the units that are debuffing you), and/or luck inspirations (after a few seconds of not being hit the stacked debuffs will start to fall off you).

To the point, though, warshades don't have -recharge resistance. I think a really useful buffer would be prohibitively large, like for def-chars who don't have SR's debuff resists. I also would think you'd be in dwarf form if you were tanking for a team, and otherwise you shouldn't be focused on by that many enemies who use -recharge powers. If you choose to solo on high difficulty against enemies that target one of your weaknesses, it's not the build's fault if you lose

That said, if you do find yourself in that situation and want to use a buffer against -rech, you can always cycle in your spiritual boost slot then. One of the nice things about the alpha slot is that you can change to what's most useful to you at the time.

That depends heavily on the character's personal situation, but most peoples' builds are going to 'disappear' if they exemplar much anyway... and really, not much that you'd exemplar for is particularly hard, only time-consuming. I used to be diligent about using IOs I could exemplar into the mid-30s with in my builds, and so forth, until I realized that I was levelling up various characters through the exact same taskforces who didn't even have all their enhancements slotted, and not having any trouble.

I just want to pull this out first and mention this is not something I was aware of. I imagined it was like enhancements, once you slot it, it stays. Thanks for the information.

I've a couple things to say about this. You do not need to be in nova form to benefit from a double mire. Human mire lasts 30 seconds, the Dwarf lasts plenty long enough for a Gravity Well, Unchain Essence, and Quasar. By this point I'm already moving to the next spawn.

Shifting forms does not take that long. If all you do is fight +0s, then yeah, maybe it's a bit prohibitive. I run most TFs on +2 so they're at least interesting.

Finally, "ramping up" only happens once. After the first spawn, I am almost always the first into the next group. I have my momentum, I don't want to lose it. For more insight into how I play, I encourage you to read The MFing Warshade guide linked in my signature.

Again, I'm never the last one to the next spawn; usually I'm the first. I have superspeed and teleport. You also seem to be making the assumptions that I need to Stygian Circle after every spawn and that it roots you for some inordinate amount of time. Neither of these assumptions are true.

Don't forget that Eclipse can refill the endurance bar if it is lacking. Usually, it's not.

I run my TFs with a strict set of rules to include:

"If you think you can handle it, you're free to go for it."
"If you thought you could handle it, but couldn't, you're expected to get back up or hosp out."

I have quite a few regular friends who run TFs with me. None of which have problems with Lone Rangers. I tend to do a bit of this myself. More often than not, the eight people on my team are split in three or four directions.

I admit I haven't done the math on it yet, so you may be correct here. In which case, the benefit does not seem like much. It still seems like more than damage I won't benefit from often and endurance reduction I don't need.

Remember, even a single mire in nova form cuts you down to about 40% more room for damage bonus. With two offensive teammates, you're done right there.

I don't see them as situational. I want to use Quasar every time it's up, as soon as it's up. The only thing situational about it is that I need a small blue inspiration or Geas needs to be ready. With insp combine macros and heaps of global recharge pushing Geas to be ready every 9 minutes, I never worry.

This is how I do it. Please, watch the Dark Armor Sucks video in my sig. There's a bit of purple in my tray.

My warshade has minimal amount -recharge resistance in the form of a Winter's Gift unique, but don't forget that any other EAT on the team will boost it by an equal amount.

I don't know about you, but I don't always have a tank on the team. When I don't, that doesn't mean I shift into dwarf and actually tank. Tanks are not necessary in this game; aggro is shared on the best teams.

Further, I'm not really talking about getting recharge floored by a mass of enemies with the debuffs. If that happens, just about anybody is screwed and munches on purple insps until the things fall off. I'm more talking about getting hit with one or two (5th Column Marskmen come to mind, as well as psi cones from Arachnos). Not enough to cripple you, but enough to cause a lapse in Eclipse and Mire. A little buffer here would be nice. I speak from experience knowing that little buffs like AM or SB seem to make all the difference in the world.

Personally, I aim for level 40 with my builds. The difference in enhancement value from 40 to 50 is generally not noticeable thanks to the ED caps. One of my favorite TFs is the Abandoned Sewer Trial. Also, our SG tends to do a lot of AE, and 40 seems to be a common level to set the missions around. Level 40 is when troublesome enemies like Malta and Carnies start to show up as well. I don't like to be without my sets if I'm exemped to a friend in that range. Finally, Warburg is fun.

Someone who tried it on test said there is a 5 minute timer. So faster than the dual build switching, but still a delay. I haven't figured out if you can do it mid-mission or if you need to talk to a contact though.

You know what, I apologize for carrying this bit of an argument out so long. You're right, we're down to playstyle differences and this is highly subject to opinion at this point. I came across a bit too strong with the initial post.

Don't worry, all this information is getting compiled into the guide. I'm in the process of writing a section on how to build your own death machine on any budget.

I'm still going to recommend more recharge from the Alpha, but I won't be so negative about the others.

"Total Eclipse" of the Heart! =P

Civility? In MY internet?