Table of Contents I. Introduction II. Knowing Yourself and Your Powers III. Build Goals -A. Solo/Team/Hybrid -B. Exemplar/Level 50 only -C. Accuracy -D. Endurance -E. Health -F. Survivability -G. Recharge -H. Damage IV. General IO Understanding -A. How to Make IOs -B. IO Sets in Powers -C. Frankenslotting -D. IO Sets with Exemplaring -E. The Rule of Five -F. Global/Proc/Unique -G. Softcap V. Links
I. Introduction
Welcome to Stormy’s guide to the basics of making builds. The goal of this guide isn’t for the pro builders nor a great detail of how to use Mids the program, but is to get people who are either number nervous or who are trying to make their own builds for the first time. I’m attempting to make this as number friendly, but to a degree, any character building ends up with a bit of a number crunch regardless how much you try to stay away from it. I will attempt to explain most of my numbers and what it does means as I go along.
II. Knowing Yourself and Your Powers
The most important thing to remember about making your build is that it is for you. Because of this fact, you shouldn’t feel you have to take a power that you dislike or will never use. Also, you should know how you play the character and this should also affect how you go about making your build. For instance, if you are playing Radiation Emission and know you always remain at range, you could easily find Choking Cloud useless because it doesn’t fit into your tactics.
It is also key to know what your powers do and what you want to do with them. This allows for you to get your character’s powers optimized versus trying to slot your Lightning Rod for range instead of damage. You should keep what your powers do in mind as you slot them. This fact is imperative when dealing with how to slot individual powers, including whither you should set IO them or frankenslot them (details on what I mean below).
III. Build Goals
Something that is a key mistake that happens to newer build makers is not having any sort of goals set. Each goal can effect your power selection and IO choices, so it is important to keep in mind what you want. It is okay after you figure out what is important to what your trying to do to place “As much as I can get” into a category, but realize that it means you’ll be overlooking those since you’ll be focused other places first. Here are a few example build goals and how they can effect how you build your character.
III-A. Solo/Team/Hybrid
In this build goal, you’ll need to choose if your goal is to solo by yourself (which can include teaming but you’re not focused on helping your team), team focused (which means you’re focused more on helping your team than making yourself completely self sufficient), or a hybrid of the two (where you take powers that can help your team but can’t or minimally help you while solo). Choices like these will determine your skipping Grant Cover (if solo only build), taking Elixir of Life (if team build), or having Vengeance with a Luck of the Gambler 7.5 placed in it (gives both a team and solo benefit).
III-B. Exemplaring/Level 50 only
This is a fairly straight forward goal to which you’ll probably know what you want right away – Do you want to Exemplar or do you want to only do 45+ content. This seems simple enough of an answer, but because of rules regarding IOs, it is important to remember your goal here.
III-C. Accuracy
Once again, this feels fairly straightforward, but it is an important goal to keep in mind. How well do you want to hit your enemies? The usual answer is “All the time” which is possible to do. Don’t get scared, here’s a bit of numbers. Against an even levelled minion, the base accuracy (x1.0 powers) have a 75% chance to hit. This means 1 in every 4 enemies will be missed by the power. The key of this goal is to find what accuracy fits you best. If you despise missing, you can build for a lot of accuracy but there is a hard cap to accuracy and that is 95%. This means that 1 in every 20 enemies you will miss with the power. Granted, 1 in 20 is much better than 1 in 4; however, you’ll be pumping a lot of accuracy to get that type of accuracy going on incarnate trials.
III-D. Endurance
This goal has several different components to it; however, as we all are aware that you can not do anything if you do not have endurance. The three components are recovery, endurance usage, and endurance costs to which they can all be looked at separately but contribute to your overall issue if you are having it. Recovery is simple, how much endurance per second you get. There are very few ways to manipulate this, which basically boils down to slotted endurance modification in Stamina, Atlas Medallion and Portal Jockey accolades, a few +recovery set bonuses, and even fewer +endurance set bonuses. Endurance usage are your toggles which translates to your spent endurance per second. It is usually best to have a general endurance gain versus endurance used per second to attempt to achieve. If you do not have enough net endurance gain then you won’t be able to use any other of your powers besides Brawl. The last is endurance costs. These are not typically measured in endurance per second because they are click powers, like most melee and blast sets are filled with. Both endurance usage and endurance costs are best managed with endurance reduction as there are rarely any powers that give you endurance discounts and there are no set bonuses that give out discounts. If you see yourself running out of endurance a lot, it’s going to be one of the above that is causing your problems. Either try to cut your endurance costs from toggles and clicks via endurance reduction or attempt to raise your endurance/recovery via sets.
III-E. Health
This goal is a quite a bit similar to Endurance, though I’ve got it broke down into two categories, Health and Survivability. The reason I’m splitting it up is Health is about your Hit Points, while Survivability is about preventing or reducing Hit Point reduction. In short, the Health goal is usually best measured with the following two stats: Regeneration and Hit Points. Hit Points is a very basic concept, how much you can get hurt before you die. There are a few powers, a couple accolades, and several set bonuses affect Hit Points, to which the higher your usual health is, the more effective those accolades and set bonuses are useful because they are based off of percent of your usual Hit Point total, in short Tankers will get more bang for their buck with +HP set bonuses and accolades than a Mastermind will get. Regeneration statistic is based completely off your Hit Point total for your character as it is a percent of your Hit Points are returned to you every second. The higher this percentage is, the more that is returned to you, but since it is based completely off your Hit Point total, it is once again more effective for Tankers than it will be for Masterminds as Masterminds have less Hit Point total and thus less Regeneration.
III-F. Survivability
As stated above, this goal is less about your actual Hit Points, but reducing or eliminating damage. As far as reducing damage goes, there’s only two major ways of succeeding at this, -damage on your foes and +resistance on yourself. The problem with reducing the damage method of survivability is that it’s completely set dependant because there are very few resistance set bonuses and they usually don’t do enough to be worthwhile on getting. This means that if your set does not or gives little resistance or –damage, then this is not really a viable method of survivability. Using a heal power, Regeneration, or raising your total Hit Points is a better method than trying to scrounge a few .9% resistance to Smashing damage only set bonuses. The other side of survivability is eliminating damage from even impacting you. There are two ways to do this, increasing your defence and lowering their to-hit. It is plausible to mix and match these as long as you realize that +to-hit on enemies negates both ways and enemy to-hit debuff resistance reduces your survivability. Sets like Time Manipulation where it has Time’s Junction (a –dmg and –to-hit power) along with Farsight (a +defence power) increases the team’s survivability by increasing the team’s defence and lowering the enemies to-hit (eliminating) while it also reduces the damage used by the enemies (reducing). This also doesn’t account for the Time Manipulator’s other set where either can help it (Fire Control’s Smoke, Dark Blast’s Gloom, or Dual Pistol’s Chem Ammo). It is also quite easy with set IOs to gain defence, as there are multiple sets that give anywhere from >1% defence up to 5% in a purple set. Though, I will follow up the defence portion later in the General Understanding of IOs section of the guide in reference to the Rule of 5 and Softcap sections.
III-G. Recharge
This is a usual suspect when it comes to builds to at least have some look into because it is the part that allows you to use your attacks or click powers (like a heal or buff/debuff power) more frequently. Outside of Dominators, there’s no “official” recharge to look at, just what you deem necessary and preferences. For Dominators, the magic numbers you are looking for are X with Hasten and Y without Hasten because this allows you to be “permadom”, meaning that after your initial build up of Domination, you will maintain Domination permanently unless you are in the middle of another animation or other circumstances that don’t allow you to click the power.
III-H. Damage
For me, this is usually my “as much as I can get” clause after I achieve my other goals. Damage is nice, but endurance, accuracy, survivability, recharge, and health usually take a larger stance to me than this. There are a few powers that give you +damage, but it is mostly a few +3% here or a few +2.5% there from set bonuses.
IV. IO General Understanding
If you have done the tutorial from the University and understand it, or dealt with Inventions enough, then you can skip sections you understand already. This is just a quick brush of how the invention system works, along with a few building rules and tips.
IV-A. How to Make IOs
IOs come in recipes that you get from defeating enemies. Enemies also drop salvage, sometimes depending on what enemy group, they drop different type of salvage. For instance: Circle of Thorns drops arcane salvage while Sky Raiders drop tech salvage. When a recipe drops, you can go into the recipe tab on your powers bar, click the enhancement you are interested in making, and it will tell you what salvage is required to make it. White Recipe/Salvage are common, Yellow are uncommon, Orange is Rare, and for recipes Purple is very rare. You can search at Wentworths/Black Market for both recipes and salvage (among other things) and buy it from there. Recipes can also be obtained via completing Story Arcs/Task Forces, Reward Merits redeemed at the Merit Venders (either random draw or save up for specific ones), AE tickets as a random draw, Astral Merits from Incarnate Trials, or Hero/Villain tips from either their respective tips or completing a Signature Story Arc once per week. Salvage can also be bought with AE tickets either as a random draw or specific salvage.
IV-B. IO Sets in Powers
When you get an IO set, it’s usually pretty easy to tell it apart from a generic set. First, it is in your Invention subfolder instead of whatever common IO it is. An Invention: Healing (40) is a common while Reactive Armor: Resistance/Endurance Reduction is a set IO. The other major note about set IOs is they do less than a common IO but do multiple things with one slot. For instance, the above mentioned Reactive Armor: Resistance/Endurance Reduction increases a power’s Resistance and Endurance Reduction of that power but not as much as a common IO of either, while a Reactive Armor: Resistance would increase the resistance of the power at the same rate as the common. If you were to put both Reactive Armors into the same power, you get a set bonus, which is a small bonus for using the same set. It is also something to note that you can not place identical set IOs into the same power, like you could not place 2 Reactive Armor: Resistance into Dark Embrace; however, you could place Reactive Armor: Resistance and Resistance/Endurance Reduction into Dark Embrace and Murky Cloud and get bonuses from both.
IV-C. Frankenslotting
This is a term that is used on a power where you are care less about the set bonuses and want to capitalize on a few specific areas. An example of this (for the cheap people like me who don’t want to buy Hami-Os) is Empathy’s Fortitude. The Endurance cost isn’t too damaging, and some may not want to focus on the to-hit buff of the power, so they do the following slotting: Luck of the Gambler: Defence/Recharge (50), Red Fortune: Defence/Recharge (50), and Serendipity: Defence/Recharge (40). This makes the Empath’s Fortitude capitalized on the Defence and Recharge aspect without caring about what sets they can put into the power. A note: A triple enhancing power like Acc/Dmg/End paired with another Acc/Dmg/End is equal to a Damage generic and Endurance generic of the same level. In this terms meaning your getting a free Accuracy generic if you were mostly focused on Damage and Endurance. Two dual Defence/Recharges are stronger than a single Defence and single Recharge IO of the same level.
IV-D. IO Sets with Exemplaring
This is one of the reasons you need the goal of going to stick as much as possible to 45+ content or allow yourself to exemplar down without crippling yourself. Whenever you exemplar, with very few exceptions, IO sets stop giving their bonus if they are under of 3 levels above of your new exemplared level. For example, let’s say you have Positron’s Blast: Damage at level 30, Damage/Recharge at level 34, and Accuracy/Damage/Endurance at level 50. At level 47+, you have the 2 and 3 set bonus of Positron’s Blast. If you exemplar down to level 40, you maintain your 2 set bonus for having the Damage and Damage/Recharge being under the 3 levels above, but lose the 3rd set bonus of Positron’s Blast because your Acc/Dmg/End is well above the level 43 maximum to keep your set bonus. However, your power does keep the Accuracy, Damage, and Endurance that the IO offers, you just lose access to that set bonus. This all stays true until you get to level 30 or below, since the Damage/Recharge is level 34, you lose access to that set bonus as well, while maintaining the Damage and Recharge increases. If you expect to exemplar a lot for whatever reasons, lowbie task forces or helping out SG mates, and you want to maintain your set bonuses, you must choose lower level enhancements to keep your set bonuses. The trade off naturally being that those lower level enhancements offer less straight up bonuses as a level 30 Damage IO is going to be less effective than a level 50 Damage IO.
IV-E. The Rule of Five
IO sets have a very hard rule: The Rule of Five. What this rule says is after you get five of one type of bonus, you can not get any more of that bonus. This, however, is not taking about three 9% accuracies, three 5% accuracies, and one of those stop working. It is for each individual number, so you can have up to five 9% accuracies that work, but once you place a sixth 9% accuracy, it will ignore that one, but will allow a 5% accuracy to work along with all five 9% accuracies. Most are pretty easy to spot, do you have six 2.5% recoveries in your build. Do you have six 10% regenerations in your build. It becomes more complex when you start bringing in defence set bonuses. The reason it becomes more complex is because there are two different numbers per set bonus: typed defence and positional defence, each usually having one high number and the other halved. Melee is linked with Smashing/Lethal, Ranged is linked with Energy/Negative, and AoE is linked with Fire/Cold. The reason it is more complex is because if get three 1.875% Smash/Lethal Defence set with a high Melee defence and three 1.875% Smash/Lethal Defence set with a low Melee defence it is six 1.875% and one of them will not be counted, while all six Melee defence numbers, since they are different, will work just fine. In short, if you are messing heavily with defence, make sure you are keeping a close eye on the number of each, or just keep your eye focused on either typed or positional numbers.
IV-F. Global/Proc/Unique
In some IO sets, there are special IOs that give bonuses to either powers or your entire character. The first is Global bonuses. These IOs give you a set-like bonus within itself. Example: Karma: Knockback Protection. This enhancement follows the same set bonus rules in regards to Exemplaring, the enhancement has to be within the 3 level rule of your exemplar level. Meaning if you have a level 16 Karma: Knockback Protection, if you go below level 13, you will no longer receive the bonus, regardless what level the power it is put it was chosen. Chose Maneuvers at level 49? Karma still works at level 13 or above if level 16. Procs are the next thing on the list. They allow a percent chance to make damage powers deal more damage, gives you a recharge boost for a time, or placates an enemy and they ignore your presence. These work the opposite way of Global enhancements. It does not care what level the enhancement is, but as long as you have the power active while exemplaring. So if you took Positron’s Blast: Chance for Energy Damage in Psychic Scream, each enemy you hit with Psychic Scream could potentially take Energy Damage. The enhancement can be level 50, and you exemplar down to level 30, it will still work in Psychic Scream, as long as at level 30 exemplaring you still have Psychic Scream as a non-greyed out power. Unique IOs tend to be Procs, however you can only slot one per build. It is a common practice to place Numina and Miracle unique IOs into Health, as Health is a passive power at level 1, it is always active.
IV-G. Softcap
I know there are more detailed guides on this, but I just wanted to hit this, since this goes with the Survivability, but much more detailed and with numbers. A usual equal level minion has a 50% chance of hitting your character, assuming no buffs of any kind on them and no debuffs on you. Since they have a minimum of 5% chance to hit you, it takes 45% to go from 50% to 5%, but since you are not debuffing their to-hit, the most you need is 45% defence to achieve this 5% chance to hit. When you are looking at the numbers, 40% and 45% do not seem like a big difference, but when look at it from an enemy’s to-hit perspective: at 45% defence, they have a 5% chance to hit you, while at 40% defence, they have a 10% chance to hit you, then that 5% defence missed on your part is doubling their chance to hit you. I will say that achieving softcap on everything is very difficult, so this is a place that I consider very important to look at your tactics and build. With few exceptions, every accuracy power in the game has either some sort of positional or type to it. For example: Lingering Radiation from Radiation Emission has the tags of AoE and Energy. It will take your higher defence between AoE positional and Energy typed while Ice Bolt from Ice Blast has Ranged positional, Smashing typed, and Cold typed. If you are always at range, then there is no need to try to softcap your melee defence. If you are in all and have a lot of defence to make up, it is usually best to go for Smashing/Lethal defence since those are the most common types of attacks. Gunfire being Lethal and punches being Smashing. Energy, Negative, and Psionic tend to become more common in later levels, so you may consider trying to softcap those as well.
V. Links
For those who wish to help better my guide, please let me know (via this thread or PM) of more specific links on these topics I've raised so people can easily get to locations for more information on that topic. As for the rest of this guide, it'll be links that don't specifically go with any topic above, but are useful places to find information.
Stormy’s Guide to Build Basics
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. Knowing Yourself and Your Powers
III. Build Goals
-A. Solo/Team/Hybrid
-B. Exemplar/Level 50 only
-C. Accuracy
-D. Endurance
-E. Health
-F. Survivability
-G. Recharge
-H. Damage
IV. General IO Understanding
-A. How to Make IOs
-B. IO Sets in Powers
-C. Frankenslotting
-D. IO Sets with Exemplaring
-E. The Rule of Five
-F. Global/Proc/Unique
-G. Softcap
V. Links
I. Introduction
Welcome to Stormy’s guide to the basics of making builds. The goal of this guide isn’t for the pro builders nor a great detail of how to use Mids the program, but is to get people who are either number nervous or who are trying to make their own builds for the first time. I’m attempting to make this as number friendly, but to a degree, any character building ends up with a bit of a number crunch regardless how much you try to stay away from it. I will attempt to explain most of my numbers and what it does means as I go along.
II. Knowing Yourself and Your Powers
The most important thing to remember about making your build is that it is for you. Because of this fact, you shouldn’t feel you have to take a power that you dislike or will never use. Also, you should know how you play the character and this should also affect how you go about making your build. For instance, if you are playing Radiation Emission and know you always remain at range, you could easily find Choking Cloud useless because it doesn’t fit into your tactics.
It is also key to know what your powers do and what you want to do with them. This allows for you to get your character’s powers optimized versus trying to slot your Lightning Rod for range instead of damage. You should keep what your powers do in mind as you slot them. This fact is imperative when dealing with how to slot individual powers, including whither you should set IO them or frankenslot them (details on what I mean below).
III. Build Goals
Something that is a key mistake that happens to newer build makers is not having any sort of goals set. Each goal can effect your power selection and IO choices, so it is important to keep in mind what you want. It is okay after you figure out what is important to what your trying to do to place “As much as I can get” into a category, but realize that it means you’ll be overlooking those since you’ll be focused other places first. Here are a few example build goals and how they can effect how you build your character.
III-A. Solo/Team/Hybrid
In this build goal, you’ll need to choose if your goal is to solo by yourself (which can include teaming but you’re not focused on helping your team), team focused (which means you’re focused more on helping your team than making yourself completely self sufficient), or a hybrid of the two (where you take powers that can help your team but can’t or minimally help you while solo). Choices like these will determine your skipping Grant Cover (if solo only build), taking Elixir of Life (if team build), or having Vengeance with a Luck of the Gambler 7.5 placed in it (gives both a team and solo benefit).
III-B. Exemplaring/Level 50 only
This is a fairly straight forward goal to which you’ll probably know what you want right away – Do you want to Exemplar or do you want to only do 45+ content. This seems simple enough of an answer, but because of rules regarding IOs, it is important to remember your goal here.
III-C. Accuracy
Once again, this feels fairly straightforward, but it is an important goal to keep in mind. How well do you want to hit your enemies? The usual answer is “All the time” which is possible to do. Don’t get scared, here’s a bit of numbers. Against an even levelled minion, the base accuracy (x1.0 powers) have a 75% chance to hit. This means 1 in every 4 enemies will be missed by the power. The key of this goal is to find what accuracy fits you best. If you despise missing, you can build for a lot of accuracy but there is a hard cap to accuracy and that is 95%. This means that 1 in every 20 enemies you will miss with the power. Granted, 1 in 20 is much better than 1 in 4; however, you’ll be pumping a lot of accuracy to get that type of accuracy going on incarnate trials.
III-D. Endurance
This goal has several different components to it; however, as we all are aware that you can not do anything if you do not have endurance. The three components are recovery, endurance usage, and endurance costs to which they can all be looked at separately but contribute to your overall issue if you are having it. Recovery is simple, how much endurance per second you get. There are very few ways to manipulate this, which basically boils down to slotted endurance modification in Stamina, Atlas Medallion and Portal Jockey accolades, a few +recovery set bonuses, and even fewer +endurance set bonuses. Endurance usage are your toggles which translates to your spent endurance per second. It is usually best to have a general endurance gain versus endurance used per second to attempt to achieve. If you do not have enough net endurance gain then you won’t be able to use any other of your powers besides Brawl. The last is endurance costs. These are not typically measured in endurance per second because they are click powers, like most melee and blast sets are filled with. Both endurance usage and endurance costs are best managed with endurance reduction as there are rarely any powers that give you endurance discounts and there are no set bonuses that give out discounts. If you see yourself running out of endurance a lot, it’s going to be one of the above that is causing your problems. Either try to cut your endurance costs from toggles and clicks via endurance reduction or attempt to raise your endurance/recovery via sets.
III-E. Health
This goal is a quite a bit similar to Endurance, though I’ve got it broke down into two categories, Health and Survivability. The reason I’m splitting it up is Health is about your Hit Points, while Survivability is about preventing or reducing Hit Point reduction. In short, the Health goal is usually best measured with the following two stats: Regeneration and Hit Points. Hit Points is a very basic concept, how much you can get hurt before you die. There are a few powers, a couple accolades, and several set bonuses affect Hit Points, to which the higher your usual health is, the more effective those accolades and set bonuses are useful because they are based off of percent of your usual Hit Point total, in short Tankers will get more bang for their buck with +HP set bonuses and accolades than a Mastermind will get. Regeneration statistic is based completely off your Hit Point total for your character as it is a percent of your Hit Points are returned to you every second. The higher this percentage is, the more that is returned to you, but since it is based completely off your Hit Point total, it is once again more effective for Tankers than it will be for Masterminds as Masterminds have less Hit Point total and thus less Regeneration.
III-F. Survivability
As stated above, this goal is less about your actual Hit Points, but reducing or eliminating damage. As far as reducing damage goes, there’s only two major ways of succeeding at this, -damage on your foes and +resistance on yourself. The problem with reducing the damage method of survivability is that it’s completely set dependant because there are very few resistance set bonuses and they usually don’t do enough to be worthwhile on getting. This means that if your set does not or gives little resistance or –damage, then this is not really a viable method of survivability. Using a heal power, Regeneration, or raising your total Hit Points is a better method than trying to scrounge a few .9% resistance to Smashing damage only set bonuses. The other side of survivability is eliminating damage from even impacting you. There are two ways to do this, increasing your defence and lowering their to-hit. It is plausible to mix and match these as long as you realize that +to-hit on enemies negates both ways and enemy to-hit debuff resistance reduces your survivability. Sets like Time Manipulation where it has Time’s Junction (a –dmg and –to-hit power) along with Farsight (a +defence power) increases the team’s survivability by increasing the team’s defence and lowering the enemies to-hit (eliminating) while it also reduces the damage used by the enemies (reducing). This also doesn’t account for the Time Manipulator’s other set where either can help it (Fire Control’s Smoke, Dark Blast’s Gloom, or Dual Pistol’s Chem Ammo). It is also quite easy with set IOs to gain defence, as there are multiple sets that give anywhere from >1% defence up to 5% in a purple set. Though, I will follow up the defence portion later in the General Understanding of IOs section of the guide in reference to the Rule of 5 and Softcap sections.
III-G. Recharge
This is a usual suspect when it comes to builds to at least have some look into because it is the part that allows you to use your attacks or click powers (like a heal or buff/debuff power) more frequently. Outside of Dominators, there’s no “official” recharge to look at, just what you deem necessary and preferences. For Dominators, the magic numbers you are looking for are X with Hasten and Y without Hasten because this allows you to be “permadom”, meaning that after your initial build up of Domination, you will maintain Domination permanently unless you are in the middle of another animation or other circumstances that don’t allow you to click the power.
III-H. Damage
For me, this is usually my “as much as I can get” clause after I achieve my other goals. Damage is nice, but endurance, accuracy, survivability, recharge, and health usually take a larger stance to me than this. There are a few powers that give you +damage, but it is mostly a few +3% here or a few +2.5% there from set bonuses.
IV. IO General Understanding
If you have done the tutorial from the University and understand it, or dealt with Inventions enough, then you can skip sections you understand already. This is just a quick brush of how the invention system works, along with a few building rules and tips.
IV-A. How to Make IOs
IOs come in recipes that you get from defeating enemies. Enemies also drop salvage, sometimes depending on what enemy group, they drop different type of salvage. For instance: Circle of Thorns drops arcane salvage while Sky Raiders drop tech salvage. When a recipe drops, you can go into the recipe tab on your powers bar, click the enhancement you are interested in making, and it will tell you what salvage is required to make it. White Recipe/Salvage are common, Yellow are uncommon, Orange is Rare, and for recipes Purple is very rare. You can search at Wentworths/Black Market for both recipes and salvage (among other things) and buy it from there. Recipes can also be obtained via completing Story Arcs/Task Forces, Reward Merits redeemed at the Merit Venders (either random draw or save up for specific ones), AE tickets as a random draw, Astral Merits from Incarnate Trials, or Hero/Villain tips from either their respective tips or completing a Signature Story Arc once per week. Salvage can also be bought with AE tickets either as a random draw or specific salvage.
IV-B. IO Sets in Powers
When you get an IO set, it’s usually pretty easy to tell it apart from a generic set. First, it is in your Invention subfolder instead of whatever common IO it is. An Invention: Healing (40) is a common while Reactive Armor: Resistance/Endurance Reduction is a set IO. The other major note about set IOs is they do less than a common IO but do multiple things with one slot. For instance, the above mentioned Reactive Armor: Resistance/Endurance Reduction increases a power’s Resistance and Endurance Reduction of that power but not as much as a common IO of either, while a Reactive Armor: Resistance would increase the resistance of the power at the same rate as the common. If you were to put both Reactive Armors into the same power, you get a set bonus, which is a small bonus for using the same set. It is also something to note that you can not place identical set IOs into the same power, like you could not place 2 Reactive Armor: Resistance into Dark Embrace; however, you could place Reactive Armor: Resistance and Resistance/Endurance Reduction into Dark Embrace and Murky Cloud and get bonuses from both.
IV-C. Frankenslotting
This is a term that is used on a power where you are care less about the set bonuses and want to capitalize on a few specific areas. An example of this (for the cheap people like me who don’t want to buy Hami-Os) is Empathy’s Fortitude. The Endurance cost isn’t too damaging, and some may not want to focus on the to-hit buff of the power, so they do the following slotting: Luck of the Gambler: Defence/Recharge (50), Red Fortune: Defence/Recharge (50), and Serendipity: Defence/Recharge (40). This makes the Empath’s Fortitude capitalized on the Defence and Recharge aspect without caring about what sets they can put into the power. A note: A triple enhancing power like Acc/Dmg/End paired with another Acc/Dmg/End is equal to a Damage generic and Endurance generic of the same level. In this terms meaning your getting a free Accuracy generic if you were mostly focused on Damage and Endurance. Two dual Defence/Recharges are stronger than a single Defence and single Recharge IO of the same level.
IV-D. IO Sets with Exemplaring
This is one of the reasons you need the goal of going to stick as much as possible to 45+ content or allow yourself to exemplar down without crippling yourself. Whenever you exemplar, with very few exceptions, IO sets stop giving their bonus if they are under of 3 levels above of your new exemplared level. For example, let’s say you have Positron’s Blast: Damage at level 30, Damage/Recharge at level 34, and Accuracy/Damage/Endurance at level 50. At level 47+, you have the 2 and 3 set bonus of Positron’s Blast. If you exemplar down to level 40, you maintain your 2 set bonus for having the Damage and Damage/Recharge being under the 3 levels above, but lose the 3rd set bonus of Positron’s Blast because your Acc/Dmg/End is well above the level 43 maximum to keep your set bonus. However, your power does keep the Accuracy, Damage, and Endurance that the IO offers, you just lose access to that set bonus. This all stays true until you get to level 30 or below, since the Damage/Recharge is level 34, you lose access to that set bonus as well, while maintaining the Damage and Recharge increases. If you expect to exemplar a lot for whatever reasons, lowbie task forces or helping out SG mates, and you want to maintain your set bonuses, you must choose lower level enhancements to keep your set bonuses. The trade off naturally being that those lower level enhancements offer less straight up bonuses as a level 30 Damage IO is going to be less effective than a level 50 Damage IO.
IV-E. The Rule of Five
IO sets have a very hard rule: The Rule of Five. What this rule says is after you get five of one type of bonus, you can not get any more of that bonus. This, however, is not taking about three 9% accuracies, three 5% accuracies, and one of those stop working. It is for each individual number, so you can have up to five 9% accuracies that work, but once you place a sixth 9% accuracy, it will ignore that one, but will allow a 5% accuracy to work along with all five 9% accuracies. Most are pretty easy to spot, do you have six 2.5% recoveries in your build. Do you have six 10% regenerations in your build. It becomes more complex when you start bringing in defence set bonuses. The reason it becomes more complex is because there are two different numbers per set bonus: typed defence and positional defence, each usually having one high number and the other halved. Melee is linked with Smashing/Lethal, Ranged is linked with Energy/Negative, and AoE is linked with Fire/Cold. The reason it is more complex is because if get three 1.875% Smash/Lethal Defence set with a high Melee defence and three 1.875% Smash/Lethal Defence set with a low Melee defence it is six 1.875% and one of them will not be counted, while all six Melee defence numbers, since they are different, will work just fine. In short, if you are messing heavily with defence, make sure you are keeping a close eye on the number of each, or just keep your eye focused on either typed or positional numbers.
IV-F. Global/Proc/Unique
In some IO sets, there are special IOs that give bonuses to either powers or your entire character. The first is Global bonuses. These IOs give you a set-like bonus within itself. Example: Karma: Knockback Protection. This enhancement follows the same set bonus rules in regards to Exemplaring, the enhancement has to be within the 3 level rule of your exemplar level. Meaning if you have a level 16 Karma: Knockback Protection, if you go below level 13, you will no longer receive the bonus, regardless what level the power it is put it was chosen. Chose Maneuvers at level 49? Karma still works at level 13 or above if level 16. Procs are the next thing on the list. They allow a percent chance to make damage powers deal more damage, gives you a recharge boost for a time, or placates an enemy and they ignore your presence. These work the opposite way of Global enhancements. It does not care what level the enhancement is, but as long as you have the power active while exemplaring. So if you took Positron’s Blast: Chance for Energy Damage in Psychic Scream, each enemy you hit with Psychic Scream could potentially take Energy Damage. The enhancement can be level 50, and you exemplar down to level 30, it will still work in Psychic Scream, as long as at level 30 exemplaring you still have Psychic Scream as a non-greyed out power. Unique IOs tend to be Procs, however you can only slot one per build. It is a common practice to place Numina and Miracle unique IOs into Health, as Health is a passive power at level 1, it is always active.
IV-G. Softcap
I know there are more detailed guides on this, but I just wanted to hit this, since this goes with the Survivability, but much more detailed and with numbers. A usual equal level minion has a 50% chance of hitting your character, assuming no buffs of any kind on them and no debuffs on you. Since they have a minimum of 5% chance to hit you, it takes 45% to go from 50% to 5%, but since you are not debuffing their to-hit, the most you need is 45% defence to achieve this 5% chance to hit. When you are looking at the numbers, 40% and 45% do not seem like a big difference, but when look at it from an enemy’s to-hit perspective: at 45% defence, they have a 5% chance to hit you, while at 40% defence, they have a 10% chance to hit you, then that 5% defence missed on your part is doubling their chance to hit you. I will say that achieving softcap on everything is very difficult, so this is a place that I consider very important to look at your tactics and build. With few exceptions, every accuracy power in the game has either some sort of positional or type to it. For example: Lingering Radiation from Radiation Emission has the tags of AoE and Energy. It will take your higher defence between AoE positional and Energy typed while Ice Bolt from Ice Blast has Ranged positional, Smashing typed, and Cold typed. If you are always at range, then there is no need to try to softcap your melee defence. If you are in all and have a lot of defence to make up, it is usually best to go for Smashing/Lethal defence since those are the most common types of attacks. Gunfire being Lethal and punches being Smashing. Energy, Negative, and Psionic tend to become more common in later levels, so you may consider trying to softcap those as well.
V. Links
For those who wish to help better my guide, please let me know (via this thread or PM) of more specific links on these topics I've raised so people can easily get to locations for more information on that topic. As for the rest of this guide, it'll be links that don't specifically go with any topic above, but are useful places to find information.
List of Set IOs by Set type
50s: Bla- Arch/Mental Cont- Mind/FF, Earth/Cold, Ill/Therm, Earth/Rad Dominator- Plant/Psi, Elec/Earth Corr- Fire/Storm, Arch/Sonic, Rad/Kin, Beam/Sonic, Psi/Time Stalker- Elec/SR Def- Storm/Dark, Emp/Psi, Dark/Elec, FF/Arch, TA/Ice, TA/Elec, Kin/AR, Cold/DP, Traps/Psi Scrap- Fire/Shield Tanker- Dark/Mace, Ice/Kin Brute- Claws/WP, SS/Energy, BS/Elec