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I would say: KEEP MUDPOTS!|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
First of all, I REALLY want to drop Mud Pots, but would I be making a mistake in doing so? The reason I want to drop it is because I don't like the power very much (I know it's useful) and because it consumes a LOT of endurance and a LOT of slots off me, endurance and slots being things a Stone/Stone does not have a lot of.
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Its useful, yes it consumes a fair bit of endurance, and yes you do not have many slots to work with.
Mud Pots functions extremely well with just 4 slots (1 base + 3 extra).
Slotting it with 2 Dam/End and 2 Dam/End/Acc gives great stat bonuses and reduces the end cost from .78 to .41.
Have no clue on your budget, but Multi-Strikes and Scirocco's are not that pricey. Plus, taking 3 slots is not that many to obtain 42 ACC/92 END/92 DAM. That will help quite alot with running your toggles and all the endurance heavy attacks of stone melee.
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| Secondly, I'm looking to take Earth Mastery.... |
Prison seems to be the better choice between a AoE-Breakable sleep and a single-target immobilize. Between Fault and Tremor, the enemies would be attacking you again and that hefty cost of the attack wouldn't be worth it.
Quick Sand, is like a second Mud Pots but without the nice damage every so often. Stacking debuffs is always awesome, and the base -40% runspeed from Mud Pots and the base -50% of Quick Sand .. that means enemies will not run out of range of your tremor, and they'll be hit more often by Mud Pots.
Stalagmites is not a second Fault, as sadly there is no Knock Up to it. It does have a minor stun attached to it (Mag 3). Fault only has Mag 1 , so you should be able to Stun Bosses with this Mag 4 stun.
If you have to take 4, I would take the hold over the sleep - for the same purposes as the immobilize.
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| Completely separate from that, on the note of Incarnates, I have to ask if there's any point in trying to retain Mud Pots, but going for the Cardiac Boost, or is it still smarter to drop Mud Pots and have more slots to go around, but go for the Spiritual boost that seems to make all Brutes better across the board? I don't know enough about that to predict. |
I don't know if you have slotted this character with IOs, but I would suggest grabbing the PerfShifter +End if anything.
You could always frankenslot , yes it can be costly, but you will appreciate the benefits.
@War-Nugget
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Originally Posted by Wavicle
CoH players are stupid and incompetent compared to WoW players.
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I spoke a little too soon with my original questions, as some further research and number-crunching gave me quite a scare. I calculated my overall endurance usage from both my attacks and my toggles and came to worryingly high levels of endurance consumption, far higher than I'm comfortable with. On the one hand, that's to be expected with Stone/Stone. On the other hand, this means that I need to "save" this character and so won't have room for luxury powers.
Since I don't use Set Inventions (and this is not subject to change), this means I'm in a serious lack of slots, particularly in Earth's Embrace and Fault, both of which are underslotted because I didn't know any better when I was making the character. Furthermore, this character already has Swift, Health and Stamina with four slots sunk into those which won't be freed up when Fitness moves to Inherent, which means that anything I take instead of that will have to syphon slots from somewhere else, and I don't know where that might come from.
For the moment, I'm determine to replace Air Superiority with Hover (I know it's a good power, but it never really fit my concept to begin with), which will free up four slots, three of which will get sunk into Fault and Earth's Embrace, and the only other place I can take slots from is Mud Pots. Again, I know it's a pretty good power, but I'm both unable to run it AND I don't want to devote the six slots to it that I already have. And four slots on Mud Pots won't be much better.
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On the numbers side, I hold my Axe/Shield/Energy Brute as the benchmark for what a good endurance situation is. Admittedly, she does use Energy Mastery's Physical Perfection and Superior Conditioning on top of Stamina, but even with all that said, her final endurance cost with attacks, toggles and recovery factored in is just 1.235 points of endurance per second, which gives me something like a minute and a half of non-stop fighting before I'm even concerned about endurance. And that's an idealised situation, as in reality I don't fight fast enough to achieve this.
My Stone/Stone Brute's current build, by contrast, comes up to 2.281, which is not acceptable, especially for what is essentially a flagship villain of mine. I thought that by getting rid of Mud Pots that cost would drop, but because I removed endurance reducers from powers (an I DO NOT WANT to have to multi-slot those with other tools available), his cost went up to 2.397 per second, and this concerns me. Even with Energy Mastery's powers, that still goes down to only 1.751, which is still too much.
I'm not sure what to do at this point. I really don't want to throw on multiple endurance reducers on my powers unless I REALLY have to, but even with all that I still can't make ends meet, so I suspect I really will have to look at the Cardiac Boost on top of everything
My current-ish build with a Cardiac and with the Energy Mastery powers actually does come down to just 1.060, which is well acceptable, but this still involves extra endurance reducers, Mud Pots and underslotted Earth's Embrace and Fault, which need to be fixed from somewhere.
I'll have to run more precise numbers of that particular situation when time permits, but I want to see if I can strip the endurance reducers, keep Mud Pots and still make that up with a Cardiac Boost and the Energy Mastery powers, because this guy is a complete and total MESS. Forget about having fun with his build, I can barely hold it together. I will never play Stone Armour ever again, that much is for sure.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Stone Armor is a beast when it comes to eating up endurance thats for sure. I severely hated leveling up mine.
I too won't be rolling another SA again, one is enough.
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My 'main' toon is a Stone/Stone/Energy (fully IOd) with a build designed around Granite. It is runnable outside of Granite, running Rock/Tough/Weave/Mud Pots/Rooted for 1.29 end/sec.. and endurance recovery of 3.64 end/sec. It ::seems:: runnable really, but with my ::testing:: against a Rikti Pylon I run out of endurance before the thing is underneath 3/4th of health [not using temps/insps]
Not a fair comparison at all figuring he's IOd compared to your concept-fueled SO brute.
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Now, stripping his build of everything and shuffling around some slots and adding in SOs, along with Cardiac T1, along with removing Granite completely.
Running Tough/Weave/Mudpots/Rock/Crystal/Minerals/Rooted = 1.23 end/sec and 3.02 recovery end/sec . I have little idea what toggles you are running.. but to me this seems like it could very well work.
Each attack is 6 slotted (Heavy/Seismac/Tremor) , fault and stone fist have 5. They all have 1 endrdx/2 acc/1 recharge and 2 Dam or Stun (in the case of fault). The attacks with 5 slots sacrifice the recharge.. I haven't SOd anything recently so the two accuracies are probably over killed for even con enemies.
On paper (or mids in this case) , it should work as a build. With use of inspirations, it will run smoother.
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Here, I'll just toss you the datachunk of the quickly made build just show you what I was mentioning above. It might give you ideas of what to do with your character.
Code:
| Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1406;545;1090;HEX;| |78DA6D94DB6EDA40108677B1C109872440154C80E6A890908614B5F755DB2452A52| |0456AEE11A25BB0446D645C29DCF5D97AD393DA37E9E10DE8E0F9971ABB2BD067CF| |FEF3EFECB04BF7FE322FC4876742E65E8EFBD369EF85FF3E50D93B3518B9DED81BC| |E842584A884D15E578D956ABF0E3C17CF558E5FAAB7CA9DEA99E7FE3BCF2FBE7247| |CA576ED0D60F855BCF1BB7AF9DE12870DC61297CBB239389E707FDC0F15C1674D51| |B67E0B82A1FBEDDA8FE84D4D5AB8933685FB9CA1FCE7ADDFE3450FE8C2BB5A9BA26| |7D6D2930E66608D310294D8B499F157E5ACC4BE44093018F4DE6458C3B1229629E9| |6F0CF806BC85D837F16DC2E323F130C5E2F6594A001F3E017421AFE69F8E5B3CC0D| |4DF86DC558276F0B3DB0505349135E0FB657395F8C0625E638319513AB45DB15A62| |483026B44619124BED1F3266FC7D84469754D2CF7509374456CAB881576444C8376| |ED69A282AF8432AF932EC772B5765F135E1D2BB23D835E2AF89D2B98B0C17DF4FD3| |0C64503ABC8A9427B081E99ABD467A546FA1ADA5843F147E0B1CDFC4E68C0B701BF| |16F8C8FC3FF748BF8BE6ED62E34DF0D488517B62DD1F8403AC7780B9A626FC5BE0B| |91969DA3A199C70A238C9E02052EC8C63F20CB14E2692148EBAB9BC8A220C8B9B68| |A4CCFA5B737991840C553FE9EC48AC28A1FA158D6D70ECF7BF584AE2BC9DC7F827A| |A418517B18A5B893A1F27229D44E44922F23411B936977F2CF3F52DBAF43CCBE323| |35B183C9BF587AC401| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
@War-Nugget
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Originally Posted by Wavicle
CoH players are stupid and incompetent compared to WoW players.
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What I'm running is... Basically everything. That is to say, Rock Armour, Brimstone Armour, Crystal Armour, Minerals, Rooted and Mud Pots, all single-slotted for Endurance with the exception of Mud Pots, which is double-slotted. Your appraisal of endurance cost is probably close to what I'd see, as you didn't list Mud Pots but did list Tough and Weave, which should come up to close the same number.
Interestingly, though, I think the problem isn't JUST Stone Armour, but also Stone Melee, because its running cost is quite very high. It's a set with relatively strong, expensive attacks which nevertheless have pretty fast animations, adding up to a LOT of cost.
I finally got my *** in gear and finished my interactive spreadsheet, so I've gotten some more interesting numbers.
I went with Common Inventions (the ones you can buy from the University racks), as well as Stamina, Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection, and with all Stone Armour toggles and a gull Stone Melee attack chain, that still wasn't acceptable unless I multi-slotted powers for endurance, which I don't want to do for lack of slots. However, with even just the Common Alpha Cardiac, that was turned around into actually a pretty decent cost, I'm surprised to say. Better than my benchmark by a fair bit.
So I guess the solution is to dump all of my resources into endurance management and overengineer this guy, at the cost of some raw performance and conceptual fun. Oh, well. You can't always get what you want, but if you try hard enough, you might just get what you need.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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How exactly have you slotted your Stone Melee attacks?|
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
What I'm running is... Basically everything. That is to say, Rock Armour, Brimstone Armour, Crystal Armour, Minerals, Rooted and Mud Pots, all single-slotted for Endurance with the exception of Mud Pots, which is double-slotted. Your appraisal of endurance cost is probably close to what I'd see, as you didn't list Mud Pots but did list Tough and Weave, which should come up to close the same number.
Interestingly, though, I think the problem isn't JUST Stone Armour, but also Stone Melee, because its running cost is quite very high. It's a set with relatively strong, expensive attacks which nevertheless have pretty fast animations, adding up to a LOT of cost. I finally got my *** in gear and finished my interactive spreadsheet, so I've gotten some more interesting numbers. I went with Common Inventions (the ones you can buy from the University racks), as well as Stamina, Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection, and with all Stone Armour toggles and a gull Stone Melee attack chain, that still wasn't acceptable unless I multi-slotted powers for endurance, which I don't want to do for lack of slots. However, with even just the Common Alpha Cardiac, that was turned around into actually a pretty decent cost, I'm surprised to say. Better than my benchmark by a fair bit. So I guess the solution is to dump all of my resources into endurance management and overengineer this guy, at the cost of some raw performance and conceptual fun. Oh, well. You can't always get what you want, but if you try hard enough, you might just get what you need. |
I've found in the past if you're sticking to SO / Common IOs then you're better off skimping on Damage slotting in favour End Reduction and letting Fury pick up the slack. Getting Acc, End Reduction, Recharge and then Damage was the best way I found of slotting them. This also means Build Up becomes more important to you as well in terms of adding spike damage every 45 seconds.
So 4 slots I'd personally do one of each rather than 1 acc, 3 damage. That helps to mitegate Stone Melees two main problems, huge End costs and a slow attack chain (Air Superiority helps with the chain too though).
Of course with my Stone/Fire I ended up going with the most efficient slotting path, but you're allergic to that so I'm not going to even mention it (oh wait..)
Oops! Didn't realize I missed writing it!
I am running Mud Pots for the 1.23 , I forgot to type that in. But, in the little quick build I made I skipped Brimstone Armor, so that could be why I could have lower end/second.
Quickly removing 2 slots in tough, adding in Brimstone to one of the powers I didn't pick, I bring up the end/second to 1.36. This is with SOs.. switching all to common IOs and running all toggles (Brimstone/Rock/Crystal/Minerals/Rooted/Tough/Weave/Mudpots) its at 1.32 with 3.09 recovery.
Each attack is now slotted with common 'rack' IOs..
5 slotted = 1 acc, 1 end, 1 recharge, 2 damage (or 2 stun)
6 slotted = 1 acc, 2 end, 1 recharge, 2 damage
Armors slotted:
Weave/Minerals/Rock = 2 end/3 def
Rooted = 2 end/2 heal
Mud Pots = 2 acc/2 end/ 2 dam
Tough/Brimstone = 2 endurance / 1 Resist
Stoneskin = 3 Resist IOs
Yes, you may need to skimp on concept if you want it to work sadly.. although I don't understand having hover in there as it cancels out Rooted, combat jumping does too..
Code:
| Copy & Paste this data into Mids' Hero Designer to view the build | |-------------------------------------------------------------------| |MxDz;1334;557;1114;HEX;| |78DA6D94DB6EDA401086D7D8948643124253C080835344524848DCF6BE6A9B44AA1| |4A448CD3D42740B96A88D8C2B95BB3E5B6F7AEE9BF4F00674D87F005BD412FBADFF| |FD7766766CD37D7F9115E2C353A1655E8CFBD369EF79F02E94E95B391879FED81FC| |E444A0851546AAF2BC752765E85BEC7F332F40BF9467AD3E5CAB3E0AD1FE45F7A23| |19482FEC2C27B91BDF1F77AEDCE12874BDE19EBABBA520133F08FBA1EB7B3074E56| |B77E07A32ABEEAE657F42EEF2E5C41D742E3D190C67BD6E7F1ACA60864A4B545D93| |7E254DF0353784497044A20DD80A06A3A6F069E1D4D88E953B40D352388BC1D4D82| |DE649CD8CDAEF3210360DDC47E6CF34EA4892D04F6000B2C0171A931C368940D986| |C23603817663A852C8141F358562F6EC28EE9D47315F5C35DA93C19E44C68C16597| |214348A988341E4163BC4379AEFA07A7D07E55419486331C893E743281ABA3053A0| |B5A40ED697CC835F0905E44816509609D4D1499B81540EF09DC67DEEEB3EA4070CF| |455A7B4453614B152026C180C3294F9F19763111A5614FC3254C85AE1EE55D0B606| |D07CA4F083C61AC7AB21500B38B1FE833A590FB8650738EF11EC0F6B317028E4FA4| |9E3212739B4A3BB8E10B6059C5AEBE7BE458D3EC61E715CC71B46521B92D686E4D4| |D73BD45535565F9350B2B88E2A053CBD1B63F555084DB97EA549E1741ABB7E47B56| |D687FD65A42C34B751AC3DFA801D59DC56A6D6D5478BEA1381BCAE30DE5C9867265| |ACFE1AE65BBBF4056375FE91FAE6B0FE0F7F44D1FC| |-------------------------------------------------------------------|
@War-Nugget
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Originally Posted by Wavicle
CoH players are stupid and incompetent compared to WoW players.
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Quote:
Ah! That explains the difference in cost. I'm only running single-slotted for endurance, and I really didn't spot that in your build.|
Originally Posted by War-Nugget
Weave/Minerals/Rock = 2 end/3 def
Rooted = 2 end/2 heal Mud Pots = 2 acc/2 end/ 2 dam Tough/Brimstone = 2 endurance / 1 Resist Stoneskin = 3 Resist IOs |
Thing is, power use consumes a LOT more endurance than toggles, even for something like Stone Armour, so if I want to overslot on endurance reduction, powers would be it. Just the attacks single-slotted for endurance cost 3.770 points per second, given a fairly consistent attack chain. And it's easy to keep it fairly consistent as I only come up to about 95% uptime, which actually gives me some wait time to absorb possible collisions. It's probably not QUITE that high in actual practice anyway... But it's high.
The thing, though, is that this is an extremely slot-tight build, with Stone Armour not really having almost any powers that I can leave with just a couple of slots. Stone Skin comes the closest, but even that requires a few. And Stone Melee isn't much easier, either, with Fault - the one place I could save up a bit - needing double accuracy slotting because of its inherently low native accuracy.
Total endurance consumption of powers + toggles for Stone Melee and Stone Armour only, all single-slotted for endurance reduction but not recharge reduction (which doesn't help much with cost) comes up to 5.072 before recovery, 2.458 after Stamina, so this gives me around 40 seconds' worth of fighting. Adding Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection brings this down to 1.796, which is better but still high. It isn't until the Cardiac Boost that I get 1.544 per second and 0.822 per second with Stamina and Stamina + Energy respectively. 1.544 is about decent, comparing to my other characters, and 0.822 is downright great, but that's kind of to be expected. Going from Common to Uncommon does not show significant improvement on this.
Really, I have two options now: Either go for Stamina + Energy + Cardiac and be overengineered but short on slots, or kill Mud Pots and go from there. I'm thinking I'll go with the former. This guy is a flagship villain of mine. He deserves to have unnecessarily good endurance.
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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Everybody deserves to have unnecessarily good endurance!
Go with Stamina + Energy + Cardiac, try and keep endurance high .. with regular use of inspirations you shouldn't run out of endurance. You could omit taking [Weave] and just eat [Luck] giving yourself how ever many slots to spend elsewhere. They drop often enough anyways.
@War-Nugget
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Originally Posted by Wavicle
CoH players are stupid and incompetent compared to WoW players.
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Quote:
I think I'll omit Fighting entirely. I need as many powers with no slots to them as I can manage to have. Hover is one such, as is Taunt, but I want to have my final two picks be something simple and largely useless, that I don't have to worry about. Say, Provoke/Challenge or some such. Right now, from the build I have, I need to salvage at least four slots for Physical Perfection and Superior Conditioning (the ones I have in powers of that Tier will stay with Stamina and Health), as well as at least three more to un-suck Fault and Earth's Embrace, so a total of seven. I'm not sure where I'll take this many from.
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Originally Posted by War-Nugget
Everybody deserves to have unnecessarily good endurance!
Go with Stamina + Energy + Cardiac, try and keep endurance high .. with regular use of inspirations you shouldn't run out of endurance. You could omit taking [Weave] and just eat [Luck] giving yourself how ever many slots to spend elsewhere. They drop often enough anyways. |
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Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
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I know you said you wouldn't put in IO sets, but would you run with Hami-O's?
I want to say up-front that this guy is primarily played solo and does not go for perma-grantie. Just to get that out of the way.
I'm looking at respeccing an old level 50 Stone/Stone Brute that I've had since CoV launch for inherent Fitness, and a few things are starting to concern me.
First of all, I REALLY want to drop Mud Pots, but would I be making a mistake in doing so? The reason I want to drop it is because I don't like the power very much (I know it's useful) and because it consumes a LOT of endurance and a LOT of slots off me, endurance and slots being things a Stone/Stone does not have a lot of. I realise it's a net gain in performance in battle, but this guy is running with Stamina even now, and even now I'm not too fond of his endurance performance. And I'm looking to take even more powers and skimp on even more of his endurance reducers.
Secondly, I'm looking to take Earth Mastery, finally, which gives me four new powers. But of the five available to brutes:
Stone Prison
Salt Crystals
Fossilize
Quick Sand
Stalagmites
Which four should I take, and what should I slot them for? I'm thinking of skipping Salt Crystals because of the sleep component, as I'm not sure I would be very good at keeping that unbroken between Stalagmites, Fault and Tremor, but the rest seem... Interesting.
Stone Prison is fairly unnecessary, but that just means I don't have to slot it much. However, is that worth slotting for damage? It does about as much as Stone Fists, after all.
Fossilize should help stagger annoying critters like Sappers, ACUs, Guardians and so forth, but here's my question: Is that worth slotting for damage? It does about as much damage as Stone Fists, which I DO have slotted for that, but doesn't it seem like a waste?
Quick Sand... Doesn't really seem to have anything worth slotting for, other than possibly recharge.
Stalagmites I really don't know what to make of. Isn't that essentially Fault 2?
Are any of those worth slotting for recharge?
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Completely separate from that, on the note of Incarnates, I have to ask if there's any point in trying to retain Mud Pots, but going for the Cardiac Boost, or is it still smarter to drop Mud Pots and have more slots to go around, but go for the Spiritual boost that seems to make all Brutes better across the board? I don't know enough about that to predict.