Zumberge

At least when Crey scientists proposed making a catgirl with Mynx you can kind of hope they meant it in a "superhuman agility and senses" sort of way. If someone suggested creating a real-world anthropomorphic wolf or Lucario you just know they were doing it so they could fuck it. Manticore, those friends you had dress up like Arachnos troops and attack me to "test me" (in one of the Twinshot arcs)? I'm a Titan Weapons Brute. Your friends are FUCKING DEAD. Closed goddamn casket funerals all around. Praetorian Aurora Borealis is a huge racist. She thought Praet Calvin Scot was as bad as Emperor Cole because he teamed up with "vampires, werewolves, and space aliens." Just imagine being a Kheldian and you hear Aurora say that as you finish the mission. You see someone that you know, and they ask you how you are, and you just have to say that you're fine, when you're not really fine, but you just can't get into it because they would never understand. The amount of non-answers you get for the mutant origin during the Origin of Power arcs are unreal. No matter how irrelevant you think your character is in the grand scheme of things, you're still more relevant than Woodsman. (I actually have a text file titled "coh canon cast roast" that's just me rambling about everyone and everything in turn. Keeps me busy.)

Is Doc Delilah a Gold Diggers reference? Moreover, can I bring this up without people asking questions I don't want to answer? When is Ms. Liberty going to return Excalibur to England? She's not English, and even if Hero 1 gave it to her it's probably a national treasure. It was absolutely a missed opportunity to not have Pendragon take Excalibur from Ms. Liberty and dual-wield it with the Praetorian Excalibur to become THE ONCE AND FUTURE DOUBLEKING OF ENGLAND. Does Manticore know that having Swan stand next to him at all times makes him look even shorter? Positron, when the original Luminary got married, you gave them a wedding gift consisting of a gynoid which looked like his wife, inexplicably developed his wife's personality, and had his name and powers. What is even your deal? Doc Quantum is absolutely the kind of guy who would stone-faced argue that Jigsaw never killed anyone. (Also Doc Delilah in general has a powerful attractive force. She's like six foot eight, smart, outgoing, cut as fuck, and wears glasses. You may not like it but that's what peak performance looks like.)

This might be reading too far into things like "reused assets" and "programmers are not writers," but when some bits of lore collided with each other in my head I realized it had implications that I don't recall anyone bringing up, or at least not recently. Okay, so. Valkyrie got her powers from an old spear which infused her with nanomachines, and her Praetorian counterpart Battle Maiden got her powers in a similar way. Both of these weapons came from Warrior Earth, and you get several opportunities in high-level content to visit it... and when you get there it's a wreck. Ruined buildings, rubble everywhere, the locals are armed with swords and crossbows and dressed in metal armor and historically inaccurate Viking helmets. By all accounts the world is in a primitive state, and they even sound like it when they call Statesman your "clan elder." So someone clearly made a mistake. ...and that "someone" is the inhabitants of Warrior Earth itself. At some point there was an advanced society with incredible levels of technology that reached that given point far before Primal or Praetorian Earth. But something happened - a disaster, a war, something - that devastated the planet so thoroughly that centuries later it's reverted to (or only managed to climb back to) a feudal society. The former civilization's scientific knowledge is just straight-up gone, and what remains is viewed in an almost mythic light. When you go there, you are visiting a post-apocalyptic world. (Oh man if someone points to a contact that's been around since like Issue 4 that lays all of this out for you I'm gonna feel like such an idiot.)

Staff Fighting is fairly unique among melee primaries in that Stalkers have the better version of it compared to the other ATs. You lose Innocuous Strikes (a cone attack with a mag 3 immobilize and speed debuff, which are... there, as far as secondary effects go) for Assassin's Strike, and you exchange Staff Mastery for Build Up. Now Staff's gimmick is the three forms - Form of the Mind/Body/Soul, which equates to a damage buff, recharge reduction, and an endurance discount, respectively - but without Staff Mastery, Stalkers are limited to Form of the Mind, which means that you're "only" able to gain a stacking damage buff. On an AT that's about dealing damage, when you also have Build Up. So yeah, it's good. The set's not endurance-heavy, so you could probably pair it with anything and it would work. Most of its mitigation potential comes from knockdown in the later attacks, though Guarded Spin gives you a lethal and melee defense buff so that stacks well with defense sets until you softcap everything with IOs. Alternately, it provides a very real multiplier to your survivability if you're using a resistance-based set.

Okay so how it works in theory and partly in practice (I think I'm like level 29 or so, haven't played them in a bit) is that at the door I buff everyone's defense. Dispersion Bubble and a Karma: Knockback Protection give me mez protection and defense, and at mobs I drop either Spectral Terror or Phantom Army, Deceive a lieutenant that looks like it can cause trouble, drop Enflame on a second guy (with energy, lethal, and -res procs in it) to smear around a little damage, and start hitting a boss with the single-target hold, Phantom Wounds, and Arcane Bolt (and later Mental Blast). If anyone's health dips they get the Spirit Ward to keep them going or buy them time to finish off whatever's hitting them, and if everything goes right (and it usually does) I get through with little to no aggro on me. tl;dr, fewer people get attacked, fewer hits from the attacks get through, fewer damage from the hits stick, I don't have to stock my tray full of Break Frees, pew pew. It started as a way to keep busy since Ill/FF isn't a very active combination compared to things like Plant/Kin, but it fits the character since her "canon" kit is utility and indirect support (and divination, but anyone can get Reveal for 10,000 inf at a P2W).

How do you have so many friends? Please tell me how you did it. I'm very lonely. 😞

Anecdotal story time: I have a TW/Elec Brute. Titan Weapons is rough in the beginning because it's slow, endurance hungry, and missing attacks really hurts. Elec Armor is... less rough but still kind of an issue because the self-heal comes at 28 and as an elemental defense set your S/L resists are merely average. It's an absolute beast once all is said and done, though. Titan Weapons isn't for everybody so if it doesn't work out for you, it doesn't work out; at least you tried. Stock up on blues at least until you get Power Sink. Tough is a good investment; Weave less so, especially if you go down the IO set route because there's some juicy defense bonuses in PBAoE attack sets, which fit into four of your powers. Grounded only gives you knockback protection when you're on the ground and one of your attacks can only be performed on the ground, so Fly as a travel power isn't optimal. Negative energy and especially toxic are huge problems so keep that in mind if you're trying to figure out who should take the alpha on a team. On the upside, you can fight basically anything that Peregrine Island radio missions or Grandville paper missions throw at you with no problems.

Ultimately, OP, you are asking for something that neither we, nor the game, can satisfactorily offer you. What you want will have to be found elsewhere, in either single-player games, or other MMOs which take design cues from earlier ages. Unfortunate, but so it goes.

"Nothing is truer than a eulogy. It tells you precisely what the person should have been."

The notion of self-imposed challenges is a concept as old as video games. Even the hardest games will, inevitably, prove lacking for one group or another in some respects.

Step 1: Find a trainer and switch your build to one you don't use (this is easy, scant few people use multiple builds and you're probably not one of them). Step 2: Respec it and pick your powers and slots to your liking. Step 3: Slot it with SOs. You heard me. Step 4: Convince seven other people to do Steps 1 through 3. Step 5: Do high-level content. (This isn't me being flippant either, I kind of want to try this at least once.)

I wouldn't run ahead if I wasn't confident in both my ability to survive, and the team's - and your - ability to survive. Mastermind pets are squishy and unintelligent; players are not. I can absolutely expect my teammates to be able to not merely fight but thrive. If there's a problem then I hang back, if it's an Incarnate TF then I hang back, if it's a +1 Imperious TF then I'm plowing into every mob I see like a freight train.

You guyyyyyyys, stop answering people's posts when I'm typiiiiiiing, I'm trying to be helpful here. ;_; Of a sort. Twinshot in Atlas Park and Dr. Graves in Mercy Island each have a series of three arcs that require you to complete them in sequence as you progress in levels, and there's newer contacts and arcs in Atlas and Kings Row that linked together and hinted at plans for a longer narrative, except the whole "stopped existing" thing happened. There's contacts that give you multiple arcs that unlock at different levels (the Arachnos patrons are the prime example), but you won't ever get locked out of those.

As far as control sets go, Earth is probably in a better position than Mind. As for damage, generally how smashing versus psionic goes is that more things resist smashing, but the things that resist psionic resist it more strongly. At times it seems that "psionic resist" is the new "psionic hole" since, yeah, it's an issue, but it's not like it's going to stop you dead in your tracks. ...and the XP loss from confused enemies isn't a significant issue since, compared to another (unteamed) player dealing damage to something, damage from other enemies only counts 1/4 as much when calculating damage done and how much XP that subtracts. There's a graph of how it works out on the Paragon Wiki, but the gist is that enemies would have to lose about 80% of their health from other enemies attacking them for you to get half XP when you finish them off. It's a fair tax when you consider how absolutely bonkers AoE confuses can be.

Absolutely. Neither set is the sort of thing where you'd change the slotting based on what it's paired with. Out of Darkness Control, I'd say everything except Shadowy Binds. Single-target immobilizes are generally skippable unless you're planning to solo, in which case they're part of your damage. Don't worry about Fearsome Stare being a problem; aside from a hefty to-hit debuff it causes enemies to stop moving and tremble in terror for a bit between hits or attacks, which cuts down on incoming damage. This does not make them run away from the area of effect - that's listed as "afraid" in tool tips, and is usually applied to things like caltrops and powers that set the floor on fire. As for Radiation Emission, skip Choking Cloud. It's a costly PBAoE toggle that holds nearby enemies, but it's too weak and infrequent to be of tactical use. Fallout is a hefty chunk of AoE damage and defense/resistance debuffing, but it does require someone to be dead, so it's not going to be used often; if you find it collecting dust, respec out of it. EM Pulse is effectively a second AoE hold with a big recovery/regen debuff and might have had its endurance crash taken out. When it had the crash it wasn't worth using, but provided someone can double-check this, it could be worthwhile. Compared to Gravity or Illusion or maybe Mind? Nnnnnnot really. It's not a very shooty set. Even Haunt is more about dropping fears on enemies and distracting them rather than outright violence. Maybe wait for a second opinion though, just in case.