A Waste of Shards?

Howdy All, I've made all of the available incarnate abilities for Musculature, Cardiac, and Spirit
(I almost always run Radial Spirit) and was wondering do y'all think it'll be a waste to make the Nerve abilities? I currently have 88.88% To hit bonus and 1.77% accuracy bonus. This is in my main wich is DM/SD.

I don't see much point in Nerve.

I would guess Nerve is good for some Controllers and MMs.

wait, your a shield def scrapper and not sure about nerve boost?. The radial boost gives you a global def buff for your def based toon. I did this on a widow of mine and it gave me a total of 8% more def to my def based powers. I do not think that is a waste at all.

Nerve Radial Boost - For all powers: Increases Accuracy by 33% and Defense Buff effects by 20% One third of these bonuses ignore the effects of enhancement diminishing returns.


sounds like a good idea for a def based toon to me, more accuracy and more def is always nice.

Assuming Weave + Shield toggles + Combat Jumping, SD has 16.875% defense, base (discounting PF as it isn't affected by enhancements).

One third of 20% is ~6.67%.

16.875 * 0.0667 = 1.13%

If you're already ED capped on powers, the remaining ~13.33% affected by ED gives you a 2% enhancement to powers.

16.875 * 0.02 = 0.34%

I can find a better use for an alpha slot on DM/SD than an additional 1.5% defense and 33% accuracy, especially if I'm already softcapped along with a 95% tohit rate against +4s. It's really only useful if you're severely underslotted in defense powers somehow or build around the alpha by moving slots around, which I'm guessing the OP wouldn't want to do if he's already using three different alphas (not to mention you can probably do the same thing more efficiently with cardiac and/or spiritual).

As a side note, your widow must be seriously weird if you get 8% def from the alpha slot, seeing as, even in the "best" case scenario for your case (unslotted powers), the alpha would give a 20% boost, which means to get +8% def from it alone you'd have to have 40% base defense, with just the unslotted powers.

... Needless to say, you need to pick every widow defense power + CJ + Weave + Maneuvers + Hover to reach these values, and not slot any of these powers beyond their base slot to get such a boost from the uncommon alpha.

I'm saving my shards, I already crafted the boost I need so they'll go toward the rare and very rare boosts.

Well at the current rate of doubling with each upgrade my guess is that rare will cost 16 and very rare will cost 32 shards.

Actually, no, being at the soft cap is fixed irrespective of foe rank and level until you are facing +5s or higher. The soft cap is the point at which their chance to hit you is reduced to one tenth the value it would have absent any defense or toHit debuffs. It cannot be lowered to less than that. Accuracy bonuses, such as those for rank and/or being over-level, are multipliers on that value, and scale with the mitigation of defense.

That is to say, if a foe has 1.5x the chance to hit you of an even-level minion, it will have that 1.5x the chance to hit you at 0% defense and at 45% defense, and having more defense won't affect that it is 1.5x as likely to hit you as an even-level minion.

More defense will do nothing against the purple patch / higher rank mobs. They'll always have the same minimum chance to hit you.

You are correct in saying extra defense helps against defense debuffs and tohit buffs, though - albeit the former is often mitigated by Shield's DDR. The thing is, it's not free defense, and it's not a lot of defense we're talking about here. I'd never sacrifice the possibilities offered by Spiritual or Cardiac for a meager 1.5% defense, even if I wasn't using insps.

I think alot of people are missing the point of the alpha slot. Its not to make you that much stronger by building on your strengths directly but to do that indirectly. Instead of ED capping yourself stop short of 1 slot if you can on a few powers. Allow the alpha slot to make up the difference. For instance on a SR toon you can 2 slot the passives and go with a defense alpha slot to make up the difference, or if using resistance set like invulnerability you can 2 slot the passive resists there. In those cases those slots can be used on another power where you previously didnt have the slots for. The only thing right now I dont like about the alpha slot is that it doesnt help all ATs the same. Its for the most part worthless on masterminds. Maybe once we get to the very rares it might make a difference when more of the bonus bypasses ED.

The AS can be used either way.

With rare exception, I haven't found it useful for slotting something I already wanted to slot heavily, because if I've slotted it heavily, I've invested in set bonuses as well. There are a few edge cases, but in most of my builds, trying to use the Alpha to save a slot would deprive me of bonuses I really want. Instead, I've gotten far more mileage out of using it to provide things I couldn't as heavily as I wanted across most of my powers. That's meant, primarily, recharge and end reduction. In fact, on a couple of characters now I've created both the Spiritual and Cardiac uncommons, and I switch between them based on what I'm about to undertake.

I have one character who needs neither more recharge nor better end management at level 50, and he could benefit marginally from Nerve, but I'm actually much more likely to go for the Rare Core Musculature, because he's a Scrapper, and +30% ED-bypassing +damage enhancement is just sweet.

I use the alpha slot to shore up any weaknesses I might have or to totally top off something.
I really dont want to build anything around the Apha Slot because of I exemp down then I am hampersing myself.

In all honesty I have found that End Redux is the one that does more for my characters. Tanks and Brutes with toggles and attacks floating around 75-80% end redux ?????? You know how much that helps ???

My DM/SR is going nerve for the bonus to acc and def. I have well over the softcap which helps considerably when fighting +4s, and the Accuracy is nice since I don't run Focused Acc. With Stamina, Numina, Miracle, and Perfected Self, end isn't necessary and the recharge isn't really needed since my st chain is gapless as is.

To claim the Nerve Uncommon (Or Nerve in general) is worthless--or generally not worth the effort of obtaining--is opposing the entirely situational aspect of the Alpha Slot abilities. Each one is respective to a certain need, and some are interchangeable to a scenario based on those needs. The Alpha enhancements are also possible to build an entire toon around in order to better enhance other aspects of a character that you previously couldn't.

Taking this into consideration, I'll proffer up my own KM/SR as an example. Prior to the Alpha Slot, I was still working through a build I liked and shuffling around slots and powers in Mids, trying to come up with something I liked. His build, as a whole, was not complete in-game, so when I decided to drop into the Nerve Uncommon, a realization occurred to me. Nerve was globally boosting me another 3%. This may seem a bit marginal, but when 1.5% of that was ED complicated, and the other 1.5% came out of underslotted passives. Knowing I could collect an easy 3%, and boost the overall accuracy of the build, meant I could sacrifice Combat Jumping from my plans, overpass the softcap, and fill other gaps in my build as a result.

Nerve gave me the chance to grab Aid Self and Hasten together, where previously I was stuck shuffling between one or the other. I have a panic button in Aid Self, and because of the ability to strip an extra slot out of all the passive (running them all at base slot), I've gotten a tremendous turn around. Aid Self, 46/47/46 M/R/A, Perma Hasten, and enough end to run my overall attack chain indefinitely. A Kinetic user who is capable of shuffling Quick Strike succesively five times in a row to ramp 156% Damage into a 1,000+ point CS? Don't mind if I do.