IO Shopping List

Edit March 1st -

Here is the current shopping list. Those purple IOs are currently listing in the 70-100million range each, scary stuff.

Upsen.

• 1 x Miracle: Heal/EndRdx (40)
  (have a placeholder Mira H/E/R right now)
  
• 1 x Pounding Slugfest: Stun% (30) optional*
• 1 x Reactive Armor: ResDam/EndRdx (40)
  (placeholder low level version)
  
• 1 x Apocalypse: Dmg/Rchg (50)
• 1 x Apocalypse: Acc/Dmg/Rchg (50)
• 1 x Apocalypse: Acc/Rchg (50)
• 1 x Apocalypse: Dmg/EndRdx (50)
• 1 x Apocalypse: Dam% (50)
• 1 x Ragnarok: Dmg (50)
• 1 x Ragnarok: Dmg/Rchg (50)
• 1 x Ragnarok: Acc/Dmg/Rchg (50)
• 1 x Ragnarok: Acc/Rchg (50)
• 1 x Ragnarok: Dmg/EndRdx (50)
• 1 x Eradication: Dmg (30)
• 1 x Eradication: Acc/Rchg (30)
• 1 x Eradication: Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg (30)
• 1 x Eradication: %Dam (30)
• 1 x Obliteration: Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg (50)

Slotting +Regen and +Recovery into RttC is strange

There's something buggy about slotting the +regen/+recovery IOs in Willpower's Rise to the Challenge. The amount of health and endurance recovered scales with the opponent you are fighting. At first I thought, oh, maybe it's scaling with the number of opponents! That would be pretty cool, but it wasn't the case.

It turns out that it scales based on the level of the opponent that your RttC hits. If you change the foe group you are standing in, the amount of regen from the IO actually changes too. The higher the foe, the less benefit you get. The lower the foe, the more benefit you get. The biggest differential you can get is your L50 fighting a L1 foe, and you should see what crazy numbers you get. Too bad you can't get those numbers in any useful encounter where you actually need them. In a fight with L54s when you really *need* the boosts, they are only running at about half the effectiveness they are supposed to run at.

Tenmos is L50.

Here's the empirical data (some screenshots follow) :

%/s Numi RTis Numi Mira
Lvl Regn Regn Reco Reco
F.H 0.16 0.20 0.17 0.25 <-- Using Fast Healing as a baseline comparison
---------------------------
L01 0.98 1.23 1.00 1.50
L05 0.92 1.14 0.93 1.40
L10 0.83 1.04 0.85 1.28
L15 0.75 0.94 0.77 1.15
L20 0.67 0.84 0.68 1.03
L25 0.59 0.74 0.60 0.90
L30 0.51 0.63 0.52 0.78
L35 0.53 0.42 0.43 0.65
L40 0.34 0.43 0.35 0.53
L42 0.31 0.38 0.31 0.47
L44 0.27 0.34 0.28 0.42
L46 0.24 0.29 0.24 0.36
L48 0.20 0.25 0.20 0.31
L49 0.18 0.23 0.19 0.28
L50 0.16 0.20 0.17 0.25 <-- This is what you get in Fast Healing.
L51 0.15 0.18 0.15 0.23
L52 0.13 0.16 0.13 0.20
L53 0.11 0.13 0.11 0.16
L54 0.08 0.10 0.08 0.12

If anyone has their +regen/+recovery IOs slotted into Fitness:Health, can you give me the percentages?

Thanks,
Upsen.

Level 1 foes

L25 Foes

L50 Foes (same as slotting in Fast Healing)

L54 Foes

What Numina and Miracle numbers look like in Fast Healing

Almost 50 but not quite

I've been on a merit craze in order to get Invention Origin set enhancements for Tenmos. It's actually coming along - I have just over half the IOs that I want to get, besides the hard to get purple sets I want. I've changed my build around more times than I care to remember - I've even sold off IOs I didn't think I'd need, only to find out I still want them after all in the next version of the build.

I mildly regret giving up on the Willpower/Superstrength version of Tenmos - SS is really the powerhouse offense set for tanks. It just does that much more damage, and gets all this to-hit bonus on top, if I could just live with the rage crashes. I can console myself in that the fire AOEs are a bit better than SS's AOE. Maybe I'll build an Invul/SS later on after Tenmos is completely done.

Double XP Weekend is Over (and a long stupid-team rant)

Double XP weekend is over - I managed to get Tenmos from L37 up to L42. Just 8 more levels before Level 50! Tank offense is pretty pathetic in the late 20s and especially the early to mid 30s, so I am glad that I am past my slow spot there. The 40s move pretty fast for me, now that I have my major attacks all available and slotted up. On my second account, Fires is getting pulled all the way up there too - this is exciting too in that Fires should be my first 50 on that account. Not too bad progress for a level pacted character.



A few annoying things happened that really got to me this weekend, this one being the prime one:

I joined a 8-man group doing missions in Peregrine Island for XP. The problem was that they selected a difficult, ie, SLOW, mission against Carnies, on a high difficulty setting at that. We were something like L35-40 fighting L43 carnies, if I remember correctly.

Carnies, or the Carnival, as you know, are notoriously evil for all of their endurance draining attacks and deaths. You can't herd carnie purples for easy killing, cause when even a few of them die, they drop your endurance bar to zero. Which in turn, results in your own death from the remaining carnies, cause your defenses have all dropped and you have no endurance for keeping your attacks going.

This sort of thing can be avoided with enough defense numbers like I did with my SR scrapper a long time ago, but that's not how a Willpower tank works.

So basically we were reduced to doing a couple carnies at a time. You could concentrate 8 people on them and kill them quickly, or you could spread your attack power all over the place and kill them slowly. The group I was with was more of the latter - people all soloing a couple of carnies each scattered here and there. We had enough people that there were Master Illusionists in the mission, summoning xpless minions that we wasted a ton of time on.

I actually went to wash dishes and wipe down the countertop with soap, during one fight, and came back to find them all still standing in the SAME AREA doing exactly what they were doing before. That is how slow each fight was going. They were impresssed by how fast I did dishes, I wasn't impressed with how slowly they were taking down the carnies.

It was a suicide run - heroes were dying off on a regular basis against the carnies, which was stupid, so many deaths were slowing us down, using up our resources constantly reviving the dying. We were in way too far over our heads, but not so far in that it was impossible - it was just mind numbingly slow progress, mission and XP wise.

I protested a couple of times - asked them to pick a saner mission, but they didn't really want to. So the next time I saw a team offer appear on the global chats, I took it and left these people doing their attrition war against the Carnies.

They weren't very happy when I left, and rightfully so for a couple reasons: It was bad form to just leave in the middle of fighting a group, but it was a trash group that was taking forever to kill, and they wouldn't see that it was too much to handle properly. Also I was SKing one of their members - when I dropped the team they went down by a few levels, probably resulting in their quick demise. Though, they were already dying pretty regularly already, at that point I didn't care if they minded an extra death.

Anyways, the end result is that I left, they were pissed off, and I was badmouthed a bit on the "BMT of Champion" global chat. They gave up on the Invincible level mission and restarted the mission on a lower difficulty level, and did fine. I wouldn't have left them if they just did that in the first place. :P Oh well.

I guess the nice term for what they were doing is "Scrapper Lock"

I'm probably not going to get invites from some of those people again, but if they are doing stupid things like that, I dont really want any part of it.

Upsen.

Invention Origin Sets Update

After sinking countless hours into staring at the Mids Planner, even beyond that of my last post, I've got a build that falls part way between the highest possible stats I can find (at the moment), and what I have already purchased or found.

The Kinetic Combat sets I wanted are almost done - just one more piece to go.

I dropped one set of Entropic Chaos - it was much cheaper and actually more effective if I slotted out my Taunt with Mocking Beratement instead of Char/Ring of Fire. The cost for all 6 pieces of Mocking Beratement was actually under 1 million inf, while the Entropic Chaos is sort of unavailable and costing between 2-5 million per piece. I was really happy with that.

Reactive Armor is turning out to be hard to find. They don't list for a lot on the auction house, but there is almost nothing ever available to buy. I might have to do these through the merit system - they are only 50 merits each.

I haven't started on the Level 50 IO sets I wanted. I'll need two full Obliteration sets for offense. I'm using plain IOs right now for my AOE attacks.

Defensively, I need two partial Luck of the Gambler sets and a good number of healing set IOs - Numina's, Miracle, Regenerative Tissue, etc. These look like they are going to be the most difficult part of my build. The auction house sells these things for 25-75 million influence EACH. That to me is jaw droppingly expensive right now, and I will have a hard time convincing myself to spend so much influence on single IOs.

The merits system also has these for 200+ merits each, which means they are still pretty difficult to obtain. I did get one Miracle already for 240 merits a while back, but I'm wishing I knew about some other ones at the time, such as Regenerating Tissue's +end/+regen dual bonus. Perhaps I would have picked one of those first.

Sure I could play the market to get more money but that to me is not why I play City of Heroes. If I wanted to play market buying and selling to make money I'd be better off logging onto my trading account to watch the TSX and Dow Jones, not the Wentworths in City of Heroes. Inf costs 10 bucks for 100 million anyways as the daily in-game spams tell us.

I'll be satisfied with just getting these IOs slowly over time - eventually I'll get there. Stuff comes pretty quickly at 50. A few million inf per task force, etc, plus some nice drops, and I'll have those IOs sets complete soon enough.

Upsen.

Mids - CoH Planner

I picked up a copy of Mids and I've been going nuts on a rebuild for Tenmos.

It's a pretty end-game build, except it doesn't use those horribly, horribly expensive ultra-rare purple IOs. However, I really do only have half the influence I need in order to build it. So I guess I'll start slow, on what I can afford first. I've put out bids on Kinetic Combat which people are saying is rare now, probably due to shield tankers, and stuff like Entropic Chaos, Reactive Armor, and Gift of the Ancients, since they reach their max level at 35s and 40s, so I dont have to worry about a sub-standard version of the IO not being L50. These L35-40 IOs are costing me about 90 million influence - pretty much every cent I've earned in the game so far with Tenmos, and transferred influence from other characters I've played. So it's going to be a pretty hefty investment.

Upsen.

omg this is going to cost a LOT

IO set builds versus non-IO set builds - A Side-by-Side Comparison

I did all the levelups for my secondary tank, Fires of Conviction so he is now L35 like Tenmos.

So after all these millions of inf I've spent on IOs, what do I have to show for it? Is it actually worth while to do all this IO slotting? Let's see what these two tanks look like side by side at L35.

Fires has better HP regen and Endurance recovery than Tenmos. (cause Fires has Fitness Pool Health and Stamina.) Fires has way more HP, since he has had time to fully slot his High Pain Tolerance.


Fires has more powers that are optimally slotted - Tenmos will need more slots to get his powers all slotted out properly, and may run into a shortage later on.


Tenmos has somewhat better defenses (about 4% better for all elemental types)

Fires has somewhat better resistances cause he has more slots in Tough.
(5% better Smashing/Lethal)


Attack-wise, Fires is much harder hitting at the moment. A bit lower in accuracy but about 30% more damage, and 10% less endurance used. That's the difference between 4-slotting and 6-slotting.


Tenmos has more accuracy from a Kismet but Fires could slot the same for the cost of a little more endurance use on his status protection.

So, at this moment in L35, the IOs are a mixed bag. I am doing a lot less damage than I should be doing at this time, but I can make up for it using hasten and buildup. I'm also slightly better on the whole with the higher defenses.

Considering that Tenmos is not quite fully slotted out, there is a lot more room for growth. Fires on the other hand, has 6-slotted a good number of powers, meaning they are already at their optimum performance level. Once Tenmos hits 50 and I get him more fully IO-slotted, the differences between Tenmos(IOed) and Fires(non-IOed) should be quite pronounced.

Overall, it is very worth while to slot with IOs.

Upsen.