Scrappers and Shadow Meld.

I love this power and I love it even more on my resistance based scrappers. It's almost like a MoG minus the extra resistance and less defense, anywho I have a question about that. Let's say you have perma hasten AND the Spiritual Radial Boost with meld frankenslotted for def/rech. That should put the recharge down to around 7 seconds correct? With so little downtime would that be enough to completely forgo trying to softcap with sets and just shoot for some +def instead? Depending on that could be dangerous but would that be enough for pylons/AV's just as long as you have good resists?

I think the main downside with using it to do that is the negative impact on DPS of the ~3 second activation time.

That is true but I don't think that'll hurt to much. That is something to think about hence why I'm here to get different opinions.

At a 7 second downtime, that 3 second animation /will/ hurt your dps considerably. You really want to avoid using those clickies as much as possible (this is why lolregin).

7 second downtime = every 22 seconds, 3 second animation, 25 second elapsed time between cycles. 12% of your time will be spent casting shadowmeld. (if my terrible math skills are right)

Yeah, don't rely on Shadow Meld for protection. The DPS drop for using it constantly is just not worth it most of the time. Still, you can stick a LoTG in there, and it's a good power to have if you're in a bit of trouble, so just use it wisely.

Well i'd consider first the balance, going for softcap through IO often hurts your dps in another way (worse attack chain / weird slotting / weird power picks ) while going for shadow meld allows for a full recharge build. I grabbed it on my spines/dark and i'm perfectly happy with it, it doesn't allow me to do pylons or AVs but the anim doesn't root me in place so, i just use it while running between spawns.

I went from doing +2/X8 without bosses to +4/X8 with bosses on the demon farm, it's useless but still a nice improvment and i like to dive in first in TFs so, it works wonders for that. Soft capped + good resists + 8sec timer on dark regen makes pretty much invincible when it's up unless there's some massive defense debuffing going on.

That said, it still falls short for stuff that can kill me while it's down, any AV or swarm of bosses don't need more than 2-3sec to splat me. So i wouldn't consider it as good as a normal soft cap, it's more of a situational help for high recharge builds.

Inspirations can be more useful than Shadow Meld. They last longer and take much less time to activate.

I use SM mostly for diving into spawns on my DB/Elec. Activating it between spawns doesn't even cut into my damage.

Even solo with a lot of AoE i don't like to rely on insps, sometimes they just don't drop what i need even if i fill my inspiration slots faster than i can use them, and combining them in the middle of action just doesn't work well. It's already enough of wasted time deleting the damn rez inspirations.

I have a high recharge build on an elec/elec where I hit softcap while shadow meld is running. It is pretty nice to have to soak up some alpha or as a non crashing "tier 9 lite" so to speak.

I prefer my toons to stand on their own two feet and only use inspirations for special occasions.

Thanks for the ideas guys. I REALLY didn't want to waste the cash on kinetic combats but that's better than killing alot of DPS.