i20 Questions

Returning to the game after a long absence I (re)discovered that I have a lvl 30 PB! I've also started a new WS that i plan on taking to Redside. The boards seem very...dead. Where is everyone?

But, I have questions:

PB - lvl 30
1. How should I level? Tri-Form? Dwarf/Human?
2. How should I slot? 3 slots per power as I level? What should I slot in each? End Reduc? Acc? Dmg?
3. 3. When should I take each power?

WS - lvl 1
1. How should I level? Tri-Form? Dwarf/Human?
2. How should I slot? 3 slots per power as I level? What should I slot in each? End Reduc? Acc? Dmg?
3. When should I take each power?

Hopefully, someone answers me!

With both, when leveling i find it best to focus on a specific form rather than trying to slot everything. I tend to use mostly nova early on, so slot up your attacks, 1acc 3xdmg for nova form should be enough, and you can leave slotting dwarf attacks until a bit later in the piece. Tri-form works better with WS than PB for me, as WS has various human form abilities like mire and stygian circle that you want to drop to human for and then return to dwarf or nova.

No...no they suck...they really do...

The people who play them don't, but we are a dedicated and stubborn few.

Peacebringers need more than a little work. The powers are literally cut and paste from other powers, they don't work well together, and the entire AT seems to have been designed in a vacuum.
Also, they're very vulnerable to debuffs, having only a minimal debuff resist. And high end content, particularly Incarnate content, is debuff heavy.
They could use more damage, they could use a pet that doesn't expire almost immediately on a recharge better suited to a full Nova power, they could use a resist cap closer to that of a tanker.
Are they horribly bad? No. Are they below average? Yes. Can a dedicated Peacebringer player pull off some amazing things? Yes. Then again, nearly any AT can pull off amazing things with a dedicated player. It's just other ATs can pull those amazing things off with less effort.
Peacebringers are great in the mid levels. They fall behind in the high levels and keep falling behind.

For most people, relative performance is more important than absolute performance.

People don't want to be minimally strong to be able to play the game. They want to be as strong as their friends.

Unless your friends also all play peacebringers, the only way to be as strong as them is not to play a peacebringer. That is the problem. Relative performance. Not absolute performance.

I don't disagree with you on absolute performance being minimally acceptable for peacebringers. But you're trying to argue that relative performance either doesn't matter, which is simply false because the perception and feel of it causes demonstrable dissatisfaction with PB players.

Or perhaps you're arguing it shouldn't matter and/or that it doesn't matter to you. Which is an opinion, and one you are entitled to. But it's not one that is a fact, it's one that is a belief. You can believe peacebringers are don't suck because they meet minimal standards of absolute performance even though the fail the standard of relative performance.

But that isn't a fact, it's a belief. The fact is that relative to their peers, to the other choices available to players on the AT selection screen, they do suck. The numbers don't lie. They are an inferior choice. Those who choose them are likely to regret the decision once they are able to compare to other ATs and see the relative performance gap. It is human nature to, and MMO player nature in particular. MMO players are competitive, not with the system or the game, but with each other, for performance. Relative performance matters because it's part of what makes the game fun to a large number of people who elect to play MMOs in the first place.

I'd personally lean on a dual build, either human/nova (teaming) or human/dwarf (solo) while the dwarf really can't tank, and thier damage is pretty subpar, the added mez protection, and ability to go dwarf while mez'ed allows you go shrug off most of the very powerful enemys in the game (that malta got you down? go dwarf, pop your recon clone to heal up, and proceed to slowly pound his face in)

Plus a dual build opens up access to a lot of slots that a tri build wouldn't have, so you can very easily up the damage, or recharge of your dwarf side to allow yourself to be able to tank (or deal damage) while completely protected from mez.

human/nova is basically a blapper with a ranged DPS monster as an alter ego. You can dish it out in protection with your resistance shields, and nice -def powers in human form, and when the going gets tough, you let someone else take over, and go nova, and start blastings things away from 60ft back.

-res procs are your best friend either way, as is +recharge and +max HP. PBs have a lot of heals and other tricks so you shouldn't have very many endurance issues (especially with light form and conserve power) but with inherent fitness, and the incarnate powers working in the non-human forms, you can become a pretty nice powerhouse in your own right.

The end game, which is where the problem appears, is not really set up for SOs. Go take an SO'd anything into the incarnate trials and tell me how effective you feel, and how much fun you have feeling that way. They even increased the NPC base to-hit in the trials, the only reason I can offer for which is that they are compensating for the heightened player defenses provided by IOs. Not to mention auto-hit attacks, one-shotting attacks, massive damage, and auto-hitting debuffs.

The "3 +0 minions = one player" metric was clearly abandoned by issue 4. It was outright repudiated by the devs before the release of COV. Heck, if you're here long enough to even remember that phrase, you're here long enough to remember it was being said during the dumpster diving map-herding heydey were tankers were soloing 80 enemies of all ranks, at once. It always was Jack Emmert's pipe dream of a balance point, and never was an actual indicator of anything from the outset except how out of touch Statesman was with the game.

In short: get with the times. It's not 2005 anymore.

You want to minimize the relative performance gap by saying my bar is too high, but the bar is "warshades" and gap is still huge. On SOs, even, peacebringers are half of warshades. Think about how much worse it gets when you look at having perma eclipse and 3 extracted essences out. And how they compare to scrappers or brutes or VEATS is probably somewhere between "I can't watch" and "oh, the humanity."

I understand you like the AT and have fun with it. That's great.

But don't mislead people about it and misrepresent the issue here. It's not that "some ATs are better and some are worse but they're all in the same ballpark and you will do fine as a PB" in this instance. It's not the same ballpark. It's not even the same league. And when the people you're advising "oh go ahead you'll be just as good as anyone else with your PB" get to 50 and are dying like dogs in the incarnate trials and getting the threads table that's the consolation-slash-doorsitter prize on a regular basis that means you didn't "participate enough" to even qualify for a real reward, which is exactly the endgame trial experience that PBs I know are having despite having well-tuned IO builds, I hope those people come back here and tell you what I'm about to: you should be ashamed of yourself for lying to them based on your personal biases about what's really in store for them at level 51 and beyond, when you could have saved them the effort and expense of finding it out the hard way if you only could take off your rose colored glasses and give them some straight talk that is fully supported by actual numerical analysis.