Carnifax

Totally agree with this. It's like half an aoe confuse. Elec is basically lots of weird layered light-ish controls. But Trick arrow should help with that.

I've an Elec/Poison and a Grav/TA and you've hit on some interesting synergies between Elec & TA which seem fun. Both Jolting and Acid Arrow are good proc candidates. Epic-wise Mu makes most sense overall, but Elec does like being in close for Conductive Aura draining so Earth or Frozen might work too (for the S/L shield). Frozen Armour will also take both Def and Resist sets so a good choice for a defensive armour where you can also slot the Resist uniques (so you can skip fighting). I've cobbled together a build by merging my two but trying to squeeze everything in is hard (I can do it if I go Mu though). You can always replace Leadership with Fighting if you prefer. Synaptic almost forces you into the purple set for the 5% range def. Normally Malaises Illusion is a good sub but if the Proc goes off it alerts them. It'll be a very clickie combo though. *Edit : Also at the moment EMP Arrow is bugged and does No Hold At All (got me killed one day). Known issue apparently.

I think it's a combo of that and how the Auction House works now. IOs going into the AH "with no level" makes a big difference. Also Converters being an easy thing to earn make a huge difference. "Crap" Def set IOs can be turned into good ones very easily, so the supply of "good ones" is easier to sustain. It WAS broken in live but part of that was the AH supply was utterly fragmented whereas now its much more streamlined.

The last two Loot updates were pretty good. That was Artillery + Bombardment first, two cone-friendly sets with useful bonuses. Then the End Mod sets which again widened the use cases for them (some were more damaging). I think Slows, Stuns and debuff IOs could have a few extra sets added in the same way with saner or more interesting enhancement values and options. I can also totally understand why we haven't seen more purple sets, for fear of power creep. Edit. I have been slightly disappointed by the lack of new Cossie pieces but again I understand the time constraints involved make it harder. Asynchronous shoulder, boot and glove options are fab.

The Stalker / Scrapper version is my favourite "no slots required" power. Makes corner-herding-if-things-get-tough so effective.

It won't be difficult, both Illusion and Dark make things pretty safe overall with Invises, Confuses and -ToHit debuffs all over the place. Dark Affinity basically has good powers everywhere so it's not late blooming (you get excellent powers early and keep getting good things throughout). Early on "Darkest Night" pulling can be very effective for luring things into Tar Patches. What it will be is a bit "feast or famine" as PAs do a lot of your damage. You'll be amazing with PAs up and quite a bit slower without them, especially in terms of AoE. Well placed Confuses can help with that. As your build matures and your PA up/downtime ratio gets better so will your damage.

Howling Twilight. The SFX are so good and it does so many things all at once. Also the new, shortened Dual Pistols nuke, especially slotted up with the "Chance to knockdown" Winter IO. Pew-pew-pew-pew; all fall down.

Yup, this is what I do too and both the common recipes and the selling prices for the results seem reasonably stable. Occasionally some selling points for specific sets seem to drop but generally they perk up again (Kinetic Combats were the last ones I'd noticed, used to be 3-4 million, dropped to 2-3). Farmers are probably one reason, keeping demand up even if supply had also increased.

Not sure about cosmic rays. Seems to be if you transfer maps (Mish complete). Most pets will transfer with you but Spirit Tree has a habit of doing so and forgetting about the immob effect it gets. So it scuttles off after you. Weirdly I've never seen the same happen with Acid Mortar or Spectral Terror. Just Creepy Bush, multiple times

And that's the really sad thing about FF. It'll give you excellent defenses (except Psi) but it gives no protected against Def Debuffs at all. So even though your FF is giving excellent Def it's as easily stripped. Your only hope is that FF gives enough buffer to deal with that. I'd be happy to see any other "Shielder" over FF to be honest : Time, Cold, Darkness Affinity (Fade has a huge chunk of DDR). Thermal & Sonic are more useful for IOed out builds too I feel, because the +resists sit nicely behind the IOed def someone has for themselves. FF really needs DDR and some sort of Absorb minimum and realisically a proper revamp. At the moment it seems the question is "Why bring a bubbler", especially after level 30-35ish when builds mature.

+1 for this. Water would also work here, be all ranged and solve your "I haz no heal" issues. Both Geyser and Steam Spray do some Fire damage. Fire Blast is much better single target damage over Water but Water has good AoE and interesting slotting options.

I'm not 100% on what you have due to the formatting but Fire/Nature is a nice combo. Buff yourself and your team and just go to town. There's always the "Better as a Corruptor or Defender" argument to have but I went Corruptor and really enjoyed them. DP / Kinetics is my favourite Corruptor. Kin gives you lots of damage (obvs) but also lots of spare slots for a decent build. My DP/Kin/Dark has very good positional defenses, decent s/l resists and a nice amount of of PBAOEs / AOE-that-can-be-fired-point-blank.

Level 50 Common IO recipies also go for a nice chunk at a vendor btw. So if you're running level 50 missions don't forget to cash in on them every once in a while. Quite common for me to make 1-2 million from a chunk of those sitting in my inventory.

If we're talking "Interesting power picks from 1 through to 9" then Darkness Affinity for Controllers probably fits. The only "bad" power is at 35. Which is perfect since you can start your Epic Pool then.

This is a good point too. Rather than doing my Merits > Converters > Convert cheap crafted IOs to sell route you can use the merits for Boosters and just sell those. It's much quicker but less lucrative.

Run Task Forces, especially the Weekly Task force. Get merits at the end Exchange the merits for converters Buy a load of level 31 yellow travel recipes (ones which only need white and yellow salvage). Craft them Use the Converter. First convert them to another travel recipe, which will typically be an orange one. Then keep converting By Rarity until you get something worth 2-7 million on the auction house and sell it. Thats how I do it. Easily make enough with 40 mins crafting and selling to fund my builds (one 'run' of 30 travel io conversions usually yields 60+ million and takes me about 20 mins). Normally I do it in the Vanguard base in RWZ, which is accessible from Atlas. Takes a few days for things to fill and sell, but you can be playing while they do. And don't forget you can convert merits into Hero / Villian token thingies and back again, perfect for emailing between alts.

Hilariously this is actually a thing. Sometimes if you complete a mission and exit with Spirit Tree it can become mobile. Happened a few times when teaming with a friend a couple of times. It's creepy as hell.

Traps is littered with powers like this though. Web Grenade (if not forced into it), Seekers, Caltrops & Triage are skippable. Time Bomb isn't even remotely close to takable. FFG, Acid Mortar, Poison Trap and Time Bomb are both good and fun though. Like you said it gives you options elsewhere though, my Ice/Traps got to take a lot out of Sorcery, Teleport and my epic to make a pretty fun character.

I've lots of fun chars but I think the DP/Kinetics/Dark corruptor probably wins in terms of just being so much "Turned up to 11" fun. Lots of things to click but running around with capped damage and lots of PBAOEs makes for fun times.

I' m also running one of these, mostly soloing mission arcs. 40-ish now and chugging along nicely. Here's my "No winters and no purps" build. Which is exactly like the planned final build other than I'll lob 3 purple procs into various places instead of the Mako's, Eradication & Cloud Senses ones I have here. Went with Moonbeam and I do find myself praying for Dark Consumption to come back sometimes, so I might change that. I'm also unsure if the Crits proc should be in Maul or somewhere else. Feels like I'm wasting half the buff whiffing at the enemies.

I have it on my Thugs / Traps cos it's better than nothing. But the recharge on it is really silly for what it is. My Ice/Traps didn't bother and has never missed it. It's a very meh power. Lowering the recharge and lifespan of it would go a long way to making it more available. Ticks of Absorb a la Temporal Healing could be an interesting addition to it either (at least you could see it doing something then). As-is on teams it pretty much becomes another "drop it, oh we've moved on" thing. Or just giving Traps some sort of inherent "redeploy" power which acted like an Assemble the Team just for your Traps pseudopets would be interesting too.

This is a really good point (and one I used for my Grav/TA respec). If Ranged is capped and covering most incoming attacks anyway then the Def from Scorp or Ice armour isn't really needed and the Resist shields can be an excellent next line of defense.

If you look at your Mids build you can see how "badly" the proc rate is affected by checking the damage breakdown in the power description (hover over the damage). For example my Grav/TAs Hold which has the 6 Superior Will of the Controller IOs in it. Because the Recharge is enhanced to 95% the proc rate is 49%. If I rearrange things so there's only the recharge from the SWOTC proc itself (23% recharge) that number goes up to 67%. But I don't mind because I want the set bonuses more. Acid Arrow IS my Proc Monster power so that is slotted with 1 Acc and 4 procs (1 Achilles Heel and 3 "normal" damage procs). And actually because Acid is reasonable quick to recharge anyway the % for any one of those procs to go off is 47%, which is good enough for me. So it may not be as bad as you think.

The chance for a proc to go off is based off the PPM (Proc Per min) along with the Enhanced Recharge + Animation time of the power and the Area of Effect. It's a reasonably complex formula but it means quick recharging powers have a lower % to go off each time than slower ones. Larger AOE powers also have a smaller chance to go off (but should hit more targets so it should balance out). "Enhanced Recharge" means how much recharge is slotted into the power, not Global recharge bonuses from IO sets, Hasten or other powers like Chronoshift. Alpha slots count as enhancements too (hence the "% of this ignores ED") so an Alpha which boosts recharge will reduce the % chance of a proc going off on an enemy. So most "proc monster" builds will avoid slotting Recharge Enhancements in powers with procs and also avoid an Alpha which boosts recharge. Instead quite often they'll try and make up the difference with global recharge bonuses (which aren't counted in the PPM calculations), Hasten etc. Note this is how it works NOW. There's been talk of Captain Powerhouse having a look at the whole PPM system and "adjusting" it (ie nerfing it somehow). Nothing concrete yet as far as I'm aware (to be honest given ever-falling player numbers and how the game has gone City of DPS with Blaster and Tank changes I think nerfing procs which Controllers and Defenders rely on to close the gap would be a huge step in the wrong direction but hey, I'm not a Dev).

The only difference would be the animation times, Fire is the fastest followed by Mind. Ice actually is towards the back of the animation times (Elec & Plant are the slowest). I don't think Cold affects an opponents resistence to Holds either (Benumb debuffs the duration of THEIR holds on you, but not the other way around I think, I don't have it to check but did test Ice Arrow which has the same sort of "X% Heal Dmg, Absorb, Endurance, RunningSpeed, FlyingSpeed, Confused, Terrorized, Held, Immobilized, Stunned, Sleep Strength for 60s (all affected targets) for 60s" effect using a Power Analyser). One area of debuffage we don't see much / any of actually. Debuffs to enemy Mez resistence which would make mezzes last longer. One thing it may be is the fact that not all EBs are equal. Some get The Purple Triangles of Doom AVs get (54 Mag Mez protection) and those that have ot toggle it on / off. so maybe you ran into a Purple Triangle EB or the cycle of On / Off is to blame.