What Alpha Slot for your PB?

Since I mainly play in all human form I was thinking that the Spiritual Alpha slot would be nice. I want the speed bonuses for quicker attacks and self buffing, the increased healing, and the to hit. I also want the Musculature for extra damage and defense debuff. What Alpha Slots are you thinking for your PB?

Does the Spiritual +health increase the HP to powers that grant HP?

I went for the Cardiac Boost because my human only PB on beta already seems to do enough damage with Build Up and Photon Seekers and Solar Flare/or Dawn Strike. Not to mention big single target damage from Incandesent Strike and Radiant Strike or the damage boost from CB. I've already got Tactics for the + to hit and Assault for increased damage plus it is just great to have them as well as Maneuvers for teaming. 3 slotted Hasten increases my recharge adequately. So the one thing I need most of is reduced endurance cost to keep my 6 toggles running when not in Light Form. Even the extra damage resistance seems to help with survivability (probably as much or more than extra healing would) for an SO enhancement build anyway. Not sure why I would need more defense debuff either when so many of my attacks have high levels of it already.

She transformed from burning up endurance inspirations quite heavily to an awesome unstoppable killing machine which almost never needs them. Many of her toggles keep running even after firing off Dawn Strike or the crash from LF, so much so that I wonder if it's not a bug?

Damage !!!

As someone who already 5-6 slotted all their human and form attacks with set IO's I'm looking primarily at Spiritual Radial (and ultimately Core Paragon once those options go live) since recharge and, to a lesser extent, healing are two of the only areas I don't have more or less soft-capped.

Damage-wise I'm already at the ED cap so until the rare and super-rare options come online they aren't worth looking at (since I'd only get about a 5% damage boost out of it). Endurance-wise all my attacks are sitting at 50% or so in EndRdx from set already and my Recovery is around 3.36/sec so improving my Endurance isn't going to do much (I already take on Sappers for FUN due to nearly soft-capped ranged and energy defenses). And Accuracy isn't going to do much since between set bonuses and IO's I'm already sitting at over +100% accuracy with all my attacks (even with accuracy floored I'm hitting 10.27% of the time) so more accuracy isn't going to meaningfully effect my numbers.

Which leaves Recharge. From testing it has closed the slight gap I had in my dwarf form's attack chain (strike, smite, strike, flare, strike, smite, strike, taunt w. damage proc... etc.) and increased my human form's dps by bringing my heavier hitting powers up more quickly. With the uncommon radial boost, I found that it greatly improved my survivability because it improved both the healing and recharge rate of all three of my partially slotted self-heals to the ED soft-cap (the human and dwarf form heals each heal half my hit points and recharge in 26 seconds).

I suspect that when the rare and ultra-rare options become available that I may swap out the Spiritual for Musculature... but until then Spiritual is definitely the way to go for my PB.

The DPS comparison between a triform and humanform PB would be very situation-dependent and in addition to the usual 'what IOs are we talking about here' problem, also involve questions like 'use of breakfrees' and 'presence or absence of specific teammates.'

Solo and on SOs, the humanform would likely deal more damage over time assuming they use control-based defense to counter mez. A triformer who's frequently shunted away from nova and into dwarf would find their damage in the gutter; a triformer who's trying to use less-slotted human powers to compete with a focused human build is naturally likely to come out behind. The lower spawn sizes encountered solo on difficulties a PB would find reliably survivable would also work to mitigate nova form's powerful AOE damage advantage over human.

Teamed, assuming the team can protect its squishies, nova form wins big because AOE is king, and nova scatter and nova detonation are good AOEs. At this point you're functionally an AOE blaster, and you should expect similar damage output results.

Teamed, assuming the team can't protect its squishies, you'll probably find them working out to about even. The human form's improved survivability and sustainability will offset its relative lack of AOE damage.

Generally, white dwarf is the major offensive performance drag on the triformer. Its damage goes beyond being a bad joke to being a bad joke that nobody finds funny.

As for my PB, I'm not sure. This is the one character I'm not confident I can plan a respec for before an i19 version of mids comes out with alpha slot support so I can test the various options. I may end up defaulting to the musculature (damage) boost because I have sustainable endurance (no need for cardiac), I have more than sufficient accuracy and no defense powers (no need for nerve), and I have a recharge build (probably little benefit for spiritual).

I'd be looking to see if using spiritual and having more LOTG mules from pool powers would allow me to alter my build towards other set bonuses in a useful manner, but poking at it so far hasn't been very encouraging other than the potential of a "ranged defense/recharge split" human/nova build.

Thanks for the qualitative analysis Flux.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Flux_Vector Generally, white dwarf is the major offensive performance drag on the triformer. Its damage goes beyond being a bad joke to being a bad joke that nobody finds funny.

This right here is one of the few lingering problems that Peacebringers have. As you said, a TriForm PB who's forced into White Dwarf to counteract mezzes suffers a significant DPS hit.

That's largely due to the fact that White Dwarf, and Peacebringers in general, lacks any method of significantly boosting damage output over an extended period of time. It creates a rather pronounced performance gap between Human only PBs and those who make use of the forms (And if I recall correctly, Castle once stated that taking and utilizing the forms was the intended playstyle for both Kheldian ATs).

Well, I'd say the fundamental problem with white dwarf is less the lack of a way to boost its offense, and more the fact that it doesn't have enough attacks to make an attack chain out of without atrociously high levels of recharge, and the then attacks are weak anyway, to the point that they tend to favor using procs for damage.

Few, bad attacks make for very bad damage regardless of how you boost it.

To an extent dwarf is kind of vestigial in my opinion - forget comparisons to actual tanks, it lacks the survivability of a modern damage-oriented melee, and it has insufficient aggro control either. The 'use it for mez protection' thing is a crock when you consider that scrappers, brutes, stalkers, and SOAs all are reaching equal or higher survivability compared to dwarf, while also dealing damage that compares to nova's. And have mez protection.

Well, since I'm already thin on slots, I'd hope that any solution to dwarf-forms low damage would be to buff the three attack powers they do have.

Personally, I'd buff the PB by increasing dwarf-form attacks' recharge so that with moderate recharge slotting you can get a full attack chain and then give all their attacks a resistance debuff effect (in addition to the defense debuff it has now) that might stack to about -15% to -20% depending on recharge rates and form (I'd put the strongest resistance debuffs into dwarf form to help its damage output). This would not only make the attacks hit harder, but would also help your allies hit harder as well (i.e. it would "give back" to the team).

My Triform PB on live just doesn't seem to need any more damage or suvivability when in Dwarf considering that it's quick and easy to set up a bind or macro to drop into human form and activate Build Up (or Hasten or whatever) and then switch back to Dwarf very quickly which I can usually do in the middle of a fight without getting hit. Not that I often need to as it seems to be able to defeat most foes pretty quickly for a tank even without upping its damage. We can now get damage increases from IO sets and the Inherent damage boost applies to forms. Don't we have to stop complaining about supposed meager Kheldian Dwarf damage at some point?

By the way, Warshades actually have 4 attack powers in Dwarf form (5 if you count the proc they can slot into Antagonize) and a way to buff their damage output via Mire without shifting form.

I thought (from my reading) we can get all of them and interchange as we wish, with a cool down time of course. Since my PB is my main I plan to do that, but if I had to choose one or one I'd use more often then it's got to be Musculature. My Tri-Form is decked out with 6 5-slotted Purples and the rest of my IO's are focused on Recharge, Acc, Rec/Regen and Dam. Now since I don't feel I have a true hole per se in my build I'm going to build up on the weakest which is my Damage at 19%. With i19 I'll also be adding the Leadership pool so I'm excited to see how things pan out.

The problem with it is twofold - one is the animation time of shapeshifting. It represents at least one lost attack. Two is not dwarf's base modifier, it's its attack chain. Or rather the lack of one. You move from having a full attack chain to a non-full one, as well as from having simply better attacks in the human form. You're going to end up with less damage even if the human and dwarf forms had the same modifier. Slotting and buffing applies to both forms - if you don't slot your human in favor of your dwarf, then yeah, dwarf will look better to you... but that doesn't mean it is better, just that it looks better.

Dwarf's like a much weaker granite armor, as I've said before. You get a survivability boost at the cost of a large offensive loss, but the survivability boost isn't nearly as good as actual granite armor's, and the offense loss is even bigger than granite's. And City's an offense-centric game. This is why I call dwarf a trap for PBs. It looks like a good idea to build up its attacks to use it to deal with being mezzed, but after level 30, mezzes are either constant or no problem at all depending on your playstyle and team composition.

With my rebuilt PB Lustrious (tri-form with emphasis on Human and Dwarf) I went with Cardiac and eventually with Cardiac Core for the added range of the ranged attacks. And ultimately going towards to the Cardiac Core Paragon for the bigger End Reduction with the the Range and Damage Res boost for icing. Her build is very heavy with Hamidon Enhancers with lots of level 50 IOs to fill in the gaps. I think the count is up to 43 Hamios. Endurance Cost Reduction was the biggest problem with the build.

So far I got the Spiritual Radial Boost and I like it so far. I can heal for 564 every 17 seconds with Reform Essence, I have perma Essence Boost, and perma hasten on my human build. On my Tri form build I was able to heal for 1009 on my White Dwarf.

My 6 khelds are looking at both musculature and cardiac.

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