MTeague

Soloing most content, I'm quite happy several characters. Most recently, I've focused on my Plant / Psi Dominator, my Spines / Regen Stalker. Now, I *did* trick them out quite well with enhancements. You say you have two farmers up and running so I'm assuming you won't have any issues decking them out. But caveat emptor for the next guy who may read this. Both also worked quite well for me for Group DPS role. For Just Plain Fun and Group DPS, consider a Anything/Martial Kombat Blaster. It is VERY blappy, so if you prefer your blasters never get anywhere near melee, it may not do it for you. But I think it makes a great run-and-gun-and-boot-to-the-head set. I also run Speed of Sound with it, and the super-fast animation teleport in Jaunt every 10 seconds gives me tons of manuverabilty even if Burst of Speed happens to be on cooldown. Group support, you can never go wrong with a Defender. Though lately, I've taken a second and third look at MM's and like what I see, particularly since pets no longer block other players.

Except for the "living" and the "breathing" parts 🙂

This would explain why they run so much from my Storm Defender whenever I solo. Hurricane is one HELL of a to-hit debuff Happily, on the Stormie, I can also generally catch most of them in Snow Storm and savage their running speed. Or, you know, toss down Freezing Rain and make them flop like fish out of water, or throw out a KB-to-KD Gale to drop them in place while I activate something else.

I personally refuse to use base teleport codes, but I'm pretty good at navigating all other available options, roads between adjacent zones, tram, pocket D, midnighters club, paragon dance party, vanguard, normal base port entrances, etc. Blueside will deifnitely send you far more often. Redside will do it some.... a Grandville mission sending you to St Martial, etc. It happens. But FAR rarer on redside. also for this reason, I'm much less likely to delay picking up a travel power when I'm blueside.

These do not bother me, but I am a Map-Clearing Fool anyway when I solo. Even if it's a Malta map or a giant Oranbega map. Very rarely, I'll let some mobs go when it's a giant Portal Corp map. Still. I know teams do NOT generally work that way, and it would be nice if there were some verbage to give you a heads up. Even if it was a generic line like "There might be more to this one. Keep an eye out for more instructions if the situation changes" or something like that. That wouldn't have to "spoil" anything specific, but the player could still know up front, the starting instructions are not all there is to it. (and maybe in a colored text like that, so it stands out in the description)

buying the set enhancements happens faster than you might think. Or at least, it can. most crafted set IOs can go from a 1-4 million on the auction house. each piece. And some very sought-after pieces can be 6-10 mil. That's a gut punch when you first start playing and you say to yourself holy mother of god, how do people afford this??? But you'll have it before you realize it. Just keep plugging away. Keep an eye on your recipe inventory. Some of them are quite valueable, and well sell well on the auction house (Wentworth's / Black Market). Never vendor them, always auction them, or craft them and then auction them. Keep an eye on your salvage inventory. Every piece of orange salvage will probably auction for 450,000 - 500,000 or more. Do taskforces (Posi, Synapse, etc) when you see them advertised. You'll get a big pile of merits at the end. Do story arcs (missions that have a blue mission title from your contact, with a book icon in your mission selection bar). Those give merits at the end of the story arc. Merits can be used at the Merit Vendor (which can be an ATM machine or a human NPC) to buy Enhancement Converters. These sell for 80,000 to 100,000 per on the auction house. They might not sell right away depending how much you ask for them, but they will sell. And if you're only buying a few enhancements at a time, every couple of levels, you don't need to get THAT many drops to fund it all. If you buy set pieces while levelling, I would strongly encourage you buy them from the "Enhancements - Attuned" section of the auction house. You do not have to. If you prefer to cruise to 50 on regular enhancements and not buy anything on the auction house until 50, that's very doable. But I'd still keep track of all the above bullet points to help you earn and stockpile influence as you level up, until you reach the point where you're comfortable buying them.

Stealth from the Concealment tree doesn't even hold a candle to Hide in how much stealth hide provides. I can literally run straight into a boss with hide and no aggro of any kind. Try that with Stealth pool power sometime. And Invisibility requires you to take either Stealth OR Grant Invisibilty before you can take it, and either way, no one gets them out of box. Illusion Controllers have Sup Invis, but not at lvl 1. Storm Defenders get Steamy Mist but not for several levels and again, it doesn't do nearly as good a job as hiding you as Hide.

Now, I could perhaps see a /Regen and /Willpower stalker getting some portion of a Quick Recovery effect melded into Hide... and perhaps some of the other trees, some other ability that relates to the power that gets skipped to make room for Hide in those sets. I am for the record, holding out exactly zero hope of that. But if an adjustment were deemed to be necessary, which I don't beleive it is, then that would be the route I would take. Honestly though, stalkers are in a crazy good place right now. They can do extremely good single target damage, they're scrappy as heck, and with the ATO procs they become at least twice as deadly as before. Several primary sets have good AE options to complement their single target stabbiness, and while yes, Hide by itself isn't going to provide much in-combat defense, out of combat, it provides a giant burst of AE defense and gives us a way to simply bypass any mobs we choose (unless it's a laser-targetted-ambush). No one else gets that right out of the box. We get plenty enough from Hide to justify it being part of the secondary tree.

Ha! I meant more the actual Shadows... but a Morden pet would be awesome too!

I don't have a Mind/Empath. I do have a Mind/Kin. Perhaps the Mind Control portions may be of some use as an example. I took all 9 Mind Control powers. Every. Last. One of them. I have considered ditching Teleknesis, but it *has* come in handy in rare situations I do not use Mid's. I wing stuff and eyeball what will give more or less of a set bonus I want. Do I consider my built Authoritative? Hell no. Does it work well for me? Hell yes. Lockdown's in both single target and AE hold. The chance for +2 mag is hard to say no to for either power, and the six slot bonus is +3.75% ranged defense... not exactly hard to take. Could I adjust this for Even More +Recharge? Sure. But this guy is Mind/KIN. Siphon speed is going to give me lots of personal +Recharge, so I have less need to go completely wild slotting LotG +7.5% recharges. I like Stealth. Your milage may vary. But lets me very easily thin a herd with non-aggroing Confuses if I bit off more than I probably should chew when soloing. I should probably toss some boosters in fulcrum shift and maybe free up at least one Acc slot there. For Alpha, I use Nerve, because +Hold and +Confuse, and a giant heaping scoop of extra +Acc isnt' hard to take. The math may be different for a Mind/Emp, but for Mind/Kin, I never ever EVER want to miss with any of my attacks no matter what. Practically everything has an Acc check. For Lore, I use Polar Lights. Small, unobtrusive. Dont' look like they would permanent give civililians nightmares for the rest of thier life (/eye Banished Pantheon pets....). And still good AE. Levitate, Terrify, Psionic Toranado [yes, deliberate] are my bread and butter powers to do damage. (and of, course, Confuses...) Mesmerize and Dominate are inevitable parts of a rotation, but I slot those for CONTROL, not for Damage dealing. Also, if I'm exempted to 35+, I'll have a ton of stacks of Fulcrum Shift rolling, so I can boost my damage that way. Would not be the case for Mind/Emp. I probably should ditch Repel in favor of Siphon Power, but I've loved Repel ever since I used it to freight-train a group to safety in Perez Park back in the Elder Days.

I had flashbacks to a job interview. "What do you see your Mind Controller doing in 5 years?" 😄

In a real pinch.... buy some unslotters. unslot the enhancers. Stand far away from a Hellion on the corner of AP. Try to shoot him. Then inch in closer, and closer and closer little bit at a time, until you can shoot him. Count the number of sidewalk squares between you and him. Slot the enhancements find another hellion near a similar sidewalk grid. stand that far away back up a bit see if you can shoot him.

Don't do it. It's a scam. How do I know this? Simple. Have you ever seen a SINGLE child, anywhere, EVER, in all of paragon city or in the rogue isles? They don't exist. Therefore, there are no starving children. People in Primal Earth and Praetoria are genetically grown as adults. Probably by Crey. There's no other explanation.

I really don't think this was called for. EVEN IF every word you have said is true, which is really just a chain of assumptions that that was Zeraphia's motives, what do you gain from making a post like this?

Keep the confuse. I loves me some confuse. I really love the AE immob animation, how it's meant to be your OWN shadow extending forward to entrap enemies. That's just several kinds of awesome. I am personally ambivilent on Haunt. I don't mind it existing, but I wouldn't mind if it were replaced with something else, either. Dark Control waits longer than any other control set for their AE Hold I believe. Possibly swap position of Shadow Field and Haunt? Maybe not, maybe that's just something folks should be careful to note and be aware of as they roll up their character. I wonder if Heart of Darkness should be a Fear vs Disorient. You get no other Disorient power to stack magnitude with. On the other hand, it's still a PBAE that applies a -ToHit debuff, and those are always nice. It's effectively +Defense for every member of the team when you apply a to-hit debuff. While I love the look on Umbra Beast, (Dogs are awesome), the one thing I really really REALLY wish it could be, but can absolutely never happen because trademarks would be these guys:

But dogs are better than cats. Science Completely subjective opinion masquerading as science has proven asserted that it is so!

sigh. don't see a good way to remove a second copy of hte image. it keeps posting both since I initially pasted twice by mistake. EDIT: nevermind, @Replacement showed me how to fix it. (Thank you!)

And from reallly bad movies from my childhood, there's the Glaive from Krull

Well, I mean... it doesn't actually compose a physical shove. You're hurling them with your mind. I actually *like* the understated "talk to the hand" before it hurls them across the room. That said, as long as I get to keep my animation, plenty glad to have more choices.

I just slot IO sets. And I trust that the IO set will have sufficient +Acc amongst the varied pieces of that set, or if not, that somewhere among my set bonuses, I will probably have a few "+% Acc To All Poweres" bonuses. But I am a serious, serious, set bonus fiend. EDIT: my Mind / Kin controller did take Nerve alpha however, for the triad of +Acc / +Hold / +Confuse. And I don't regret that one bit. He basically never misses, ever, when on 45+ content. The +Hold and +Confuse made it easy to justify on Mind Controller, but he can never really afford to miss with any of his powers.

Well, no shame in brainstorming and coming up with wild and crazy ideas. For this particular idea, I would vote no. Allow me to get both the -Def effects of Rad Blast AND the -ToHit effects of Dark Blast? All in one? Or allow my SR scrapper to get -ToHit on all her attacks despite not being Dark Melee? Or allow my Brute to apply a -Res debuff with every punch? This would not just activate godmode, this would obsolete entire archtypes.

I would like to see Recall Friend and Teleport Foe merged. But rather than a Snipe (why a snipe?), I think something like https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Martial_Combat#Burst_of_Speed would make sense as an Attack Power for the teleport set. Alternately, just remove Long Range Teleport entirely for a teleport attack like Burst of Speed, because really, until and unless base-teleport-by-macro is 100% removed from the game, no one is going to take Long Range Teleport. Why spend THREE power selections to get a power that you can beat by base-porting by MACRO, and from the base port to nearly every location in the game? And I don't think the HC devs have expressed much interest in removing the base teleport macro. They are quite aware of how many have come to rely on that.

It needs to work with Martial Arts

Full Disclosure: I tend to level 45-50 by getting XP while exemplared in 44-or-below content because I feel so damn useless / carried on a lvl 47 when a team of 50's is being incarnate gods and trivializing all content. I don't mind it once I'm ALSO one of those fully-incarnated out 50's. But I absolutely loathe the feeling of being carried. And when you're a 47 on a team of full incarnates, you could be replaced by a chipmunk and no one would notice. That said. I do not think Barrier should be weakened. Good / Bad / Indifferent, the Incarnate System is literally designed to make your character feel like a god among mortals. I mean, that was literally the design intent of the entire thing, backed up by story arcs and cutscenes in the Mender Ramiel arc. Yes, this does truly unspeakable things to game balance, and I don't think game balance has a "Safe Word" to say "stop enough!". But, frankly, pre-incarnate groups can do the same thing if you have a team with a Force Fields, plus Cold Domination plus Sonic Resonance, plus Thermal Radiation. That entire team will be maxed defense / max resist the entire time if they use their buffs intellegently, from like, lvl 15 all the way to 50. Or just a team of 8 Empaths all buffing each other to SKY-HIGH defenses and regeneration levels that would make a willpower brute cry in envy.

Dude, have you seen the Kung Fu Panda movies? Po is completely OP.