Momma told me never to be a Gambler

I'm curious - what builds out there don't need:
- Luck of the Gambler
- Recharge stuffed in every set bonus
- Spiritual Core Alpha
- Hasten

To perform at or near their top-level performance?

I think in particular it'd be neat to see builds that use Radials instead of Cores for their Alphas. The side bonuses are potentially very nifty QoLs - better Hover Speed, Longer Intangibility (though everything I've had that uses Intangibility doesn't actually accept that slot...), Super Accurate to-hits.

Also curious what DPS builds use Musculature instead of Spiritual.

More to the second part of your post, I played an Electric/FF controller whose target Alpha was Nerve Total Radial Revamp (and would have been Radial Paragon, but it's not a character I wanted to push for Tier 4 on).

Nerve is certainly a choice that you don't see very often, but the radial variant enhances Hold, Defense Buff, and Confuse, so every bit of enhancement from it is useful.

I don't particularly recall Electric benefiting a huge amount from recharge, so it might even be a candidate for your first question.

My Elec/Rad/Mu Sap-troller uses in the Musculature Radial. In addition to a much-needed little boost in damage, its the only toon I have the actually uses every single one of the Radial's secondary and tertiary abilities.

Thanks for the fast replies. =) Just curious, what DPS builds use Musculature instead of Spiritual without relying on stuffing recharge everywhere? Mind, I'm not adverse to doing a little recharge, I just kinda wanna put together a build where I'm not a slave to the blue dice IO.

Lots of builds don't need lotgs. WP or SR meleers with primaries that don't need tons of rech to have a good chain, for example. Part of the reason lotgs are popular though is that using them is not typically a sacrifice: they fit perfectly into powers that don't need slotting such as invisibility or vengeance, and the set has good bonuses for just a few slots so why not use the globals to get there?

I skip hasten whenever possible. My fanciest character forwent hasten in favor of global bonuses, and for my blasters I often find that it isn't necessary since they have easy access to global recharge and blaster single target chains barely even require any recharge at all.

Spiritual is nice for making up for shortcomings on a struggling character, but then again cardiac can fill that same role. My own ideal is using musculature on every character but sometimes I don't feel like making the investment in the build that makes that possible, and sometimes I like to take advantage of the silly slottings that cardiac and spiritual allow you to get away with. Another point in favor of spiritual is that its secondary healing enhancement is a stellar bonus that not only works with many sets but also enhances rebirth destiny to tremendous proportions.

So yeah, there are many ways to build. The things you mention are popular because they are widely applicable, but that doesn't mean nobody uses anything else. Run some trials and pay close attention to the teams' buff icons and you might be surprised at how many people use nerve, gravitic, and everything else.

Not on your player model but it's certainly visible in the extended team information that shows all of the effects active on everyone. Alpha and interface are always visible (at level 45+) while judgement, destiny and lore are visible while active. So yep, it isn't too hard to see what other people have chosen during highbie content. However that obnoxious bug that makes the icons disappear sometimes may occasionally interfere until they fix it.

I mostly play melee, so my answers are biased towards melee sets.

Electric armor is an interesting set for the alpha slot in that it can benefit equally from cardiac, spiritual, and musculature. It has the highest resists in the game so it can cap S/L and Elec resist on a taker with cardiac. It also really benefits from spiritual to grant permanent energize and boost the Regen grated by it. But with musculature and overslotting Power Sink, you can completely drain a mobs end with a single application of power sink.


If you don't want to worry about recharge at all, it looks like 0% global recharge Street Justice chain will be very close to a crazy fast permanent hasten chain. Combine that with willpower that has 0 benefit from recharge and you have a very sturdy set that can chase other things than recharge without any real loss in power.

stoen tank. Sit there like a rock with brawl on auto and keep aggro while you sleep

Street Justice is very lenient towards recharge levels, and reacts favorably towards Musculature.

/kin or kin/

They don't need musculature either though.

They can stack enough +recharge on themselves that I would say they dont NEED it from LOTG's. However, I think an easier question may be to ask what build doesn't gain much from increasing recharge and having their buff's/debuffs, heals, holds, attacks, and defensive powers up more often. I can't think of any.

Yea, I've taken Musculature on several characters and Cardiac on one with monster end issues caused by the last few powers. I've only taken Spiritual on 1 character, as most play close enough to the end edge that I couldn't handle it (with cardiac and musculature radial helping that problem instead of making it worse like spiritual would).

Now, it's not like I have any character who wouldn't enjoy more recharge, but the same goes for damage and resists and defense and pretty much everything else. It's just a question of what is better on any given character, and I haven't noticed Spiritual being universally better on most of them.

Very few builds "need" Recharge but finding one that doesn't "benefit" is IMO very difficult. TBH post inherent Stamina I can't think of a high end build that could skip Hasten and actually end up better for it unless the person just hates the Hasten graphic or animation time or something. I'm not saying there aren't builds that don't have it, but I would certainly never skip it, may the ugly graphics be damned.

If I were forced to name something... maybe something completely random like Psi Blast/Sonic Resonance/Electric Corruptor who doesn't care about Liquefy and lacks (because of the blast set) Aim. But even there you're potentially throwing AoEs a little slower even despite the long animation times on them.

I took Musculature on my namesake, a Earth/Energy Dominator, but only because I've stuffed myself with purple sets and luck of the Gamblers and recharge already. It works rather well because I dont have any native damage buffs, so the net increase is better.

When I returned to the game, I looked at reviving my old Force Field Defender and going with Nerve to boost defence, until I looked at the numbers. If I provide 28.5% base defence (45% enhanced) 28.5*.13=to a teammate, (Bubbles + Manouvers) say, then the extra gain with the Tier 4 is of the order of an extra 6% or so. Ceratinly not enough to make a difference in incarnate content.

The + Accuracy from nerve isn't that great, because its still an accuracy bonus rather than +To Hit. You'll still hit regular enemies with 95% certainty and whiff against Rikti Drones, Captain Mako and Paragon Protectors, despite devoting your alpha slot to being able to hit more often.
And two purple sets will grant you +30% global accuracy anyway, which is not unusual for many incarnated characters.

I'd almost say Nerve is useless.

As for set that don't need recharge bonuses, I'd say Force Field and Sonic Resonance defenders.

In my case, dragon's tail is up super quick due to the global rech and the periodic punt of ageless, and I supplement it with fireball and judgement, the former of which comes up about every twelve or thirteen seconds. As for dark regen, heh, it's a great heal but you don't usually need it very frequently when you're s/l softcapped and sitting pretty on e/n as well. In retrospect it's almost like I set out to make the best character I could think of that would be a repudiation of hasten. Edit: On the subject of dark regen, one amusing use for it is as an aoe attack once you've got your radial reactive interface slotted. DR -> DT -> FB -> DT is a gappy but impressively number-producing chain in large crowds.

I think with enough effort you could come up with a combo in almost any archetype, not so sure about the epic ATs, that would just not need hasten. Some are easier than others, i.e. masterminds. But like, take a rad/sonic defender. Sonic blast only needs recharge in a couple powers to run its best debuff chain and its best damage chain is pretty trivial. Meanwhile, rad emission doesn't especially need recharge for anything but permaing AM, and AM itself helps you perma AM. If you have enough global recharge for that, what good does hasten do? If anything it harms you since it then means you can't put AM on autofire. Not that perma AM is trivial without hasten... But the other option is just let it be slightly less than perma. What have you really lost there? Just as one example off the top of my head.

Since spiritual doesn't affect domination, I often don't take it on a dom. I have a dom with radial nerve paragon for the +def and +hold. The +def is enough to put it over the softcap, the +hold is nice for domination, the build has no purples so the +acc is nice, and even the +fly speed is nice because the character is in hover all of the time. This particular permadom is hastenless as well. I often don't like hasten on a dom because juggling 2 powers (dom and hasten) that you want to put on auto is a pain in the neck (especially in big fights with UI lag.)

Of course, my doms tend to be maxed out at 5/5 LoTG and a whole bunch of other recharge to get permadom without hasten, so this doesn't maybe address the first post in the thread but some subsequent one.

I have a bane build (look in the SoA forum where I posted it just a couple of days ago--or I could post it here if your search-fu is weak ) that focuses on +damage (and of course enough def which is easy for a bane) that took musculature. So it has (withOUT including surveillance or shatter armor buffs or exec strike bonus or buildup) 455 damage shatter, 452 damage shatter armor, 353 pulverize, 351 crowd control. Even the lowly brawl-like bash does a little over 218 damage.

So I think you can certainly find viable builds out there without spiritual or need of recharge. Certainly FF was mentioned by other posters and is another case.

Actually, ninja or merc or necro/FF gets next to nothing from recharge. Of those, necro does the best, but it's still basically nothing.