Bastille Boy

That is a fair critique. Here's a variant of the build that doesn't sacrifice E/N defense quite as much. It is still short of the soft cap; it hits 45% E/N defense with five enemies in melee range. It is also just short of the F/C soft cap with two enemies in range. Here's another possibility. (Maybe the winner?) It is based on Hyperstrike's build but using Infinitum's idea of dropping Shin Breaker to get slots to shore up psi resistance. I am using Arctic Mastery in place of Pyre. I initially thought this fell short of the E/N softcap, but I realized I had CJ turned off. With CJ on, I think this softcaps F/C and E/N (as well as S/L, of course). The S/L resistance is 0.7% short of the hardcap with Tough turned off until the proc on Initial Strike goes off.

This build is based on Brikhouse, but it has Taunt and uses Super Jump as the main travel power. It also includes Super Speed at 50. I may take Weaken Resolve instead. I see the reason for using Sweeping Cross instead of Shin Breaker. The animation for Rib Cracker is just a hair longer than the recharge for Initial Strike. So Initial Strike -> Shin Breaker -> Initial Strike -> [Finisher] is a viable attack chain. It's desirable to have two attacks available when exemplaring below 20. Running with Physical Perfection may not be strictly necessary, but I don't see another good use for the power slot. I don't have the slots for another attack. It is possible to run this build with Tough toggled off. The last little bit of S/L resistance from Mako's Bite is key. Posting without incarnates and with Spinning Strike not toggled.

Thanks for sharing this build! Those are some shiny resistance numbers, especially on psionic. I'm going to tinker with this (maybe combining elements from this build and from the one Hyperstrike posted). I want Taunt in the build, and I prefer running or jumping as the main travel power. If I'm going to skip two attacks, I'd leave out Sweeping Cross instead of Shin Breaker. Before I got my T4 alpha, I wanted two AOEs, but now that I have more recharge, I'm not using Sweeping Cross very much. I use Shin Breaker constantly. Thanks for the advice on incarnates, especially the bit about Destiny. I definitely need debuff resistance if I'm going to go up against AE 801.2!

Fair point about having Combat Readiness up as often as possible. It's much more important than the build up power on some other sets.

Thanks for these suggestions! I normally take Maneuvers in every build, since it benefits teammates as well as me. I won't be soloing all the time! But I suppose it's worth giving up Maneuvers in favor of Combat Jumping if the benefit is great enough. I'm tempted to take this build with Melt Armor instead of Weaken Resolve, and with the main travel power earlier. No Gaussian's proc in Combat Readiness?

Thanks, @Linea. Looking at your build made me realize that I have no use for Resist Physical Damage (except maybe when exemplared very low). It gave me some other helpful ideas, as well, like making sure the proc from Might of the Tanker is on one of the attacks I use constantly. (My usual rotation is Initial Strike - Rib Cracker - Shin Breaker - [Finisher].) The build below has a better power selection than the original. It has better endurance usage than your Inv/Rad build, but it is not quite as durable, because I am not using Rune Of Protection. (This character has always been a jumper rather than a flier. Maybe I should rethink that...) I'm uncertain whether I'm better off having the -res proc in Shin Breaker or putting a damage proc on Crushing Uppercut.

My first level 50 character is an Invuln / StJ tanker. I'd stopped playing him in favor of other characters that do more DPS, but I brought out Bastille Boy on July 14 in honor of the French national holiday. On a whim, I tried @Linea's 801.0 AE mission at +4/8. Bastille Boy made it through with about four minutes to spare. Last night, I tried running AE mission 801.2 at +0/8. Bastille Boy made it with about 20 minutes to spare. I've tried running 801.0 at max difficulty with my Super Strength / Willpower tanker, an expensive, high DPS proc monster. He faceplants almost instantly if I don't munch purples. (Willpower has no defense debuff resistance, and I hadn't built in any margin.) When I took my War Mace / Super Reflexes scrapper into 801.0 at +2/8, he faceplanted almost instantly...even with all that DDR and defenses well above the soft cap! None of these toons have full accolades and T4 incarnates. They all have a mix of T3 and T4 incarnates, minus Lore, and (I think) two out of four accolades. But instantly faceplanting isn't a good sign. My first 50's decent performance makes me wonder if I can get him through 801.2 at +4/8 with the right investment. Here is Bastille Boy's current build. He definitely needs a respec, but I don't know whether it should be a subtle change or a major reworking. The subtle change would be along these lines: Drop Focused Accuracy and replace it with Conserve Power. I needed Focused Accuracy before I got a T3 alpha power, but I don't use it anymore. Drop the two generic resistance enhancements on Resist Physical Damage. Move the two +3% defense enhancements there. Add four slots to Initial Strike. 5-slot the power with something cheap for now, Hecatomb later. Another modest change I'm considering is replacing Energy Mastery with Pyre Mastery to get Melt Armor. I'd be slightly worried about endurance management. I'm open to deeper changes if it would improve performance. Top priority is being sturdy. Second priority is getting more DPS. (I will need more DPS to finish 801.2 at full difficulty.) Edit: A third possible option with pool powers would be to take Force of Will, with Weaken Resolve replacing an ancillary pool power and Mighty Leap replacing Super Jump. The other big choice is which T4 Hybrid power to go with. I've been indecisive; I've constructed three T3 Hybrid powers. I ran the +4/8 801.0 with Assault Total Radial. I ran the +0/8 801.2 with Melee Partial Core. I also have Melee Total Radial. My guess is that I will want to go with Assault Radial, but I'm not sure. Other incarnate powers: Alpha: Agility Core Paragon (T4) Judgment: Mighty Total Core (T3) Destiny: Rebirth Partial Radial (T3; this was only T1 when I did the 801.0) Interface: Degenerative Total Core (T3) Lore: None yet. I'm inclined toward Carnival Radial. Does anyone have any thoughts?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. Tankers and corruptors can both contribute effectively to a team. They contribute in different ways. Many missions benefit from having a tanker. It is common for team leaders to recruit tankers specifically. That said, a team of all tankers is not going to be efficient. It will be safe, slow fun. A team of corruptors with a diverse mix of powers (including both buffs and debuffs, ideally including +dam, +res, -res, and -regen) can steamroll things. This post recruiting a team for "really hard way" runs on Everlasting seeks exactly two tankers, total, and as many corruptors as possible. (They've opened up the list to other ATs, but those were the two ATs originally preferred.) This was for a specific mission, but two tankers and a bunch of corruptors sounds like a good team composition for most missions. There's an expectation that tankers will be first to dive into the fray. If your reflexes are slow (as mine are), you might be happier playing a corruptor. You can still get in melee range if you build for both melee and ranged defense.

CoX is a cooperative game with no final score. It's designed to be friendly to casual gamers and to accommodate many different playstyles. We've had an influx of new players in the past few months. As I see it, the only way to fail at a cooperative game with no final score is to be uncooperative. My only real pet peeve is hostility to other players, including sharp criticism of the way others play. Advice is welcome and important, but try to keep it gentle!

This weekend I respecced my Rad/Sonic defender. I realized I wasn't using the attacks in Electricity Mastery at all. If I'm going to use attacks as set mules, it makes sense to use Brawl and Boxing, rather than a couple of level 40+ powers. I exemplar a lot with this toon, so having decent melee defense at low levels is useful. Since I'm taking only three powers from Mu Mastery, I have room in my build for Assault. I rarely need to use Conserve Power and Power Sink, even with all my toggles active. I suppose I could skip either Power Sink or Conserve Power in favor of one more power from my primary, but this is what I'm doing for now. Edit: Mids says this build gives me softcap melee and ranged defenses. In-game, I seem to be getting only 43.65%. Not sure what's missing. I haven't done all the +5s yet, and I still need to buy the Hamidon enhancement, but I have a +5 on the LotG in Combat Jumping. Not sure what's up. 43.65% is still good.

Archetype enhancements like Brute's Fury are always attuned. There's no benefit to boosting a PVP enhancement that's in your build only for a fixed bonus, like the +5% res from Shield Wall. The attuned form is fine. If you are at level 50, it may be worth unslotting other attuned PVP enhancements and replacing them with level 50 enhancements (which you would then boost). This brief guide says that you should always catalyze and attune Winter IOs, such as Superior Avalanche. So don't unslot these. Leave them as they are.

I would agree with you that violence is called for when it's necessary to stop a wrongful attack. Pacifists do not agree. Pacifists think that using deadly force is wrong, even in defense of themselves or other people. It's an extreme view, one that not many people hold. Some very smart people have been pacifists, though (e.g., Leo Tolstoy). I don't think I agree with you about the revenge part. Revenge is not justice. Only the state can do justice, with fair punishment after a fair trial or an uncoerced guilty plea. I would absolutely fault the man in your story for seeking revenge. The writing in the game shows appreciation for this point about vengeance in the alignment cycle. Vigilantism is a step on the road to villainy!

No. The key word here is "team." You're not a bystander if you're on a team. If you agreed to be part of a team that does violence, intending to benefit from your teammates' violence, you are violent. In many jurisdictions, if an innocent person gets killed during a bank robbery, all the robbers can be charged with felony murder, including the one who only drove the getaway car. Maybe that's unfair if the getaway car driver went in thinking that the guns were all unloaded. I don't think that's unfair if the getaway car driver knew that the other robbers had loaded guns and were planning to open fire. A more viable challenge would be to run missions on a team that never does permanent physical injury to enemies. (Permanent psychological harm is probably inevitable after these kinds of confrontations.) That means nobody on the team has powers with a smashing/lethal component. You can take boxing, but don't put it in your tray. No fire, no poison, no radiation, no disintegration. Only cold, electrical energy, negative energy, and psionic attacks. This is a trivial challenge as a solo player, but a real challenge to put together a team that agrees to play by these restrictions. Potentially interesting roleplaying if you can find the right people.

I have a bad case of altitis, and around 80% of my characters are rogues. I often put out a call for teammates when I'm doing paper missions in the 20s and 30s. I rarely get a full team, but I often get company. I've given up recruiting for DFBs redside, though. It takes too long even to get a team of four. Either I use Tunnel Witches in AE to level up to 13 or so, or I street-sweep my way up to level 6 or 7, make my way to Pocket D, and go to Atlas for DFB and/or powerleveling. Blueside folks have been remarkably welcoming of my obviously-not-law-abiding characters.

I think the only widely shared expectation of defenders is that they will contribute somehow to tough fights. My personal expectations: The defender's primary will contribute offensively, not only defensively, to fights against AVs, EBs, and GMs, either by buffing or by debuffing. The defender will use their secondary actively. The defender will not be squishy. Not as tanky as a tanker, but tougher than a blaster. I do not expect healing, at all (except of course in PVP). I am very happy to get a Cold/Sonic defender on my team. I agree with the consensus that Empathy is not a top-tier set, but I think it's a solid B (on an S/A/B/C/D/F scale) if played properly, with buffs rather than healing as the priority. From a roleplaying or fiction-writing perspective, it is the most versatile set in the game. The origin story for an Empathy defender could be almost any story. So I don't want to discourage people from playing Empathy if they have a cool character concept. I want to encourage them to roll the toon and to play it effectively.

(( Advice on how to improve this story's consistency with the game canon would be welcome. The Paragonwiki article on the Rogue Island Police is barely more than a stub, so I figured there was some room for creativity here. No doubt Officer Hobbes would welcome suggestions about how to improve his corruptional programs. ))

Here's how we do it. We never suppress prisoners’ superpowers. Especially not with drugs. Supers with suppressed powers feel defenseless and terrified. They are desperate to get their powers back. Desperate people are dangerous, with or without superpowers. Drugs are the cruelest way of suppressing supers’ powers, since power-suppressing drugs have have brutal side effects. Some ex-cons never recover completely. (In case you are wondering about me, I’ve regained my strength, thanks to my thermal self-healing. The nocturnal eneuresis is down to once a month.) Furthermore, prisoners with chemically suppressed powers cannot help if the facility comes under attack. If the Rikti show up, doors can be unlocked in an instant, but there is not enough time to give everyone superadine. Good construction is the most important form of security. Power suppression is not necessary to keep a super from escaping a building with heavy walls. Sure, it's possible for supers to bend a metal door out of shape if they hit it hard enough times. But have you ever heard of a hero or a villain tunneling their way to the end of a cave mission? I haven't. And it's not as if there isn't an incentive; navigating caves is really annoying. Powers have limits. Supers can’t tunnel their way through caves, and they can't tunnel their way out of prison, either. Nor can they punch through a properly constructed prison wall. We install Conductive Aura devices throughout the Pen. This is our emergency security system. We’ve only used it twice, but it’s important to know that it’s there. If a major fight or riot breaks out, we can flip a switch, and in seconds, all the prisoners in the affected area will be out of stamina. The COs will be out of stamina, too, but in a fight between prisoners with no stamina and COs with no stamina, locked doors always win. We hire COs with healing, regeneration, and resistance-boosting powers. Thermals make the best corruptional officers. (I admit I’m prejudiced.) Corruptors and defenders with Empathy, Pain Domination, or Electrical Affinity make great COs, too. A few COs with defensive buff powers can easily stop an attack by a single prisoner, even one with active superpowers. A potential tragedy turns into comedy when the aggressive prisoner realizes that their attacks aren’t doing anything, We use buffs on prisoners to influence their behavior. Healing, regeneration, and resistance buffs feel wonderful. We give out some of these buffs all the time to prisoners who are generally behaving. We save the most powerful buffs for moments when a prisoner does something we want to encourage. Ask any animal behaviorist: positive reinforcement is more effective than punishment. When prisoners obey orders, they get buffs. A new prisoner gets powerful buffs when they put on their uniform for the first time and when they first enter their cell. I can see their thoughts on their faces. “Buffs are for allies, not enemies. Why are they treating me as an ally?” It doesn’t take them long to figure out that we see well-behaved prisoners as allies. We use only physical or magical restraint. If a prisoner needs to be restrained for just a moment, “stacked mez” is the way to go. Whenever possible, we accompany “mez” with healing, to avoid creating feelings of resentment. Total Domination combined with Heal Other is the ideal combination. (Mind Control and Empathy is a lousy pair of powersets for defeating supers, but it’s a great combination for keeping captured supers caught.) If a prisoner needs to be restrained for more than a moment, e.g., for transport to court (or what passes for court in the Rogue Isles), physical restraints are best. Super strong prisoners can break standard handcuffs, but they cannot break out of 10kg of titanium alloy. We never use restraint or lockdown as punishment. There are no isolation cells in the Pen. We lock prisoners in their cells only at night, so that we can limit the number of COs with night shifts. We want prisoners to feel safe and comfortable in their cells, and we can’t do that if we lock them in punitively. When discipline is necessary, our first step is to withdraw buffs. The next step is to have some COs with Sonic Attack powers shout at them. There is a leather strap in a display case in my office. It is old but in good condition. Our oldest prisoners have seen it in use. If anyone asks if the strap is on display as a relic or if it could still be used, I change the subject. Cells look spartan but are comfortable. The cells in the Pen hold one prisoner each. (Bunk beds are a luxury reserved for officers.) The back half of each long, narrow cell has brick walls, providing a measure of privacy when the prisoner is at their desk. There is also a privacy divider concealing the toilet. The front half of the cell, containing the prisoner’s bed, has heavy steel bars instead of walls. Many defender-type supers have regeneration auras that are active even when they are asleep. A row of steel bars does not block auras. All of our prisoners sleep in at least one regeneration aura; many sleep in two or three. This is the main reason our prisoners live so long. (In the officers’ barracks, each of us sleeps in at least three auras. The prisoners nevertheless outlive us, on average, because many of us have spent years on power-suppressing drugs.) Instead of suppressing prisoners’ superpowers, we enhance them. This is the key. Some supers may think they want power over other people, through influence, infamy, honor, political office, or an underground cabal. What we all really want is individual, physical power. We’ll do just about anything to get it. We’ll take wild risks. We’ll happily sacrifice our influence or our infamy. We’ll go through long, tedious grinds, spending endless hours fighting identical holograms at Architect Entertainment. Give superpowered prisoners an enhancement that comes in a pill—a pill they can’t get anywhere else—and they’ll start thinking maybe it’s okay to postpone the great escape. I can’t tell you which drugs we use for this. If you guessed superadine, you guessed wrong. We give some chemically-induced powers to prisoners with no superpowers. This includes prisoners whose powers came from hand-held weapons. Our policies on contraband are lax, but we don’t let prisoners walk around with beam rifles. Since we’re disarming them, we have to give them something just as good to make up for it. Super Strength is a popular choice, and there are many drugs that can produce it. Strength-enhancing drugs are not dangerous when the user is surrounded by magical healers at all times. We mostly let prisoners do what they want. They want to brew beer? We let them, as long as they limit their drinking to three pints at a sitting. They want to hang sheets over the bars of their cells for a bit of privacy in the hours between dinner and lockdown? That’s fine, as long as we can see everybody at count. They want to start a reading group on arcane magic? We won’t stand in their way, and we just might steal some books for them from the Circle of Thorns. We don’t force prisoners to work, but we let them work if they want to. Most of them do want to, if given good options. Plant controllers want to grow things. We have a farm. Healers want to heal people. Under careful supervision, some of our prisoners run a health clinic for the indigent (the closest thing the Rogue Isles have to Medicaid). Folks who can summon ice want to summon ice. If you’ve eaten sorbet in a Family restaurant, you’ve consumed prison-made goods. The robot janitors our masterminds created aren’t ready for sale to the public; sometimes they try to whack people with mops. This is harmless as long as the robots stay in the Pen (thanks to all those damage-resistance auras). Work release is available after a year. To earn work release, prisoners have to have near-perfect behavior, they have to work within the prison, and they have to take a three-month course of obedience training. (Yes, that’s what we call it. We don’t sugar-coat it.) Do prisoners escape once we give them work release? Yes, many of them do. This is by design. By far the easiest way to get out of the Pen is to volunteer for “obedience training” run by self-described “villains.” If a captured hero goes through our training and then flees to be with their loved ones in the United States or wherever, that’s all right. The program saps a hero’s will to fight crime and destroys their credibility as a crime-fighter. As for the prisoners who are Rogue Isles natives, if they escape and stay in the Isles, the RIPD will have them over a barrel. They will pay their protection money on time. A lot of our prisoners don’t escape. There are dozens of prisoners who leave the grounds of the Pen five mornings a week and dutifully return at night. In their gray work release uniforms, they are easily mistaken for mechanics. Why don’t they run when they have the opportunity? They all have two powerful reasons to stay. They all get superpowers they didn’t have on the outside, and they all get the health benefits of living in all those protection and regeneration auras, which is the closest thing available to a fountain of youth. Many prisoners have further reasons to stay. A lot of the captured vigilantes need protection from old enemies. Some of our prisoners were rejected by their families and want a home that will never throw them out. We have one prisoner with poorly-controlled radiation powers who chooses to stay in the Pen because it’s the only place he can safely be around other people without wearing a lead suit. The end result? The prisoners who escape rarely re-offend, and the prisoners who stay are thoroughly pleasant to be around. When I go into the cellblock in the morning, it’s like going into a kennel full of loyal golden retrievers. Of course you can’t do everything we do. Work release at the Zig would be politically untenable. But you could easily install some Conductive Aura devices and hire some COs with protective buffs. That alone would make everybody safer. If you could get enough COs with protective buffs, you could get rid of the power-suppressing drugs. That would make the prisoners a lot less desperate to escape. And it would make you a lot safer. If you really want to enjoy your jobs, or if you want to live to see your grandchildren graduate from high school, stop trying to punish the prisoners in your care. Think instead about what you could do to make your prisoners want to stay where they are. Don’t your lives matter more than retribution? Sincerely yours, Jacob Hobbes (a.k.a. "Herocatcher Jake") p.s. If you find any of this useful, please put in a good word for my brother at his parole hearing later this year.

Dear Correctional Officers: Many of you have been working at the Zig long enough to remember me. I'm the 5'5" guy who did seven years for providing the getaway teleportation and the resistance shields for a bank robbery. I certainly remember many of you. I can't count the number of times a CO in the Zig stopped another inmate from beating me up. This week I started my sixth year as warden of the Port Oakes Penitentiary, somewhat inaccurately labeled "the world's largest prison for superheroes." (Half of our prisoners are low-level rogues the RIPD picked up for non-payment of bribes, but journalists don’t want to hear about it.) Since I owe you big time, as a group, and since I have a bit of relevant experience, I thought I would offer you some advice. Unsolicited advice isn't usually welcome, I know, but this could be life-saving. Let's look at some statistics. Life expectancy at age 30 Population group Male1 Female1 Residents of Paragon City, Rhode Island 78 82 Residents of the Rogue Isles 73 79 Correctional officers at Ziggursky Penitentiary 59 67 Corruptional officers at Port Oakes Pen (self-healers excluded)2 82 85 Prisoners at Ziggursky Penitentiary 56 59 Prisoners at Port Oakes Pen (self-healers excluded)2 86 89 1Statistics on non-binary people are not available. 2Figures would be substantially higher with self-healers included. All of you are making a big sacrifice by working at the Zig. It takes well over a decade off your life. Nearly two decades, for male COs. I don't need to tell you why. You all know that physical violence isn’t the main thing that kills correctional officers young. The top three killers of the COs at the Zig are heart attacks, strokes, and liver disease. Why do so many COs at the Zig drink themselves to death? Alcohol is a way of dealing with the anxiety that comes from having hundreds of eyes stare at you every day with fear, anger, and hatred. Why do so many COs get heart attacks? It’s the damage you do to your own hearts when you restrain an inmate for his first injection of power-suppressing drugs, and then the next day you do it again even though you can see that he has a black eye, and you do it again and again until he breaks and lets you give him his power-suppressing drugs by mouth. What you do to your prisoners is killing you. And it’s totally unnecessary. At the Port Oakes Penitentiary, corruptional officers live longer than most people. Why? It’s partly because we have so many healers on staff. But the big reason is that the job is a joy. You like putting people and things in little boxes. So do I. So here is another chart. The Zig The Port Oakes Pen Incidence of PTSD among COs High High Cause of PTSD among COs Working in the Zig Doing time in the Zig Health care for COs High-deductible insurance Free; provided by convict labor Meals on the job Sack lunches Free; provided by convict labor Do COs eat with prisoners? Of course not. Why wouldn't we? Knives in inmate kitchen Strictly prohibited Pre-war French steel Training required for COs Four months Fourteen months Longest training module Use of force Taming a wolf K9 corps German shepherds Wolves OK to pet K9 "officers"? No Yes, and it's not optional Main source of revenue Federal taxes Sale of prison-made goods Prison-made goods sold to public None Fruit, vegetables, sorbet, patent licenses Other prison-made goods Pruno, shivs Uniforms, ale, AI robot janitors Most popular hobby for COs Drinking alone Shenanigans in officers' barracks Most popular hobby for prisoners Chess Chess (it's a thing; I don't get it) You’re probably thinking, “Of course you have an easier job. Your prisoners are heroes. Your job would be as dangerous as ours if you had to deal with dozens of serial killers.” But we have dozens of prisoners who were once serial killers. They are known as “vigilantes.” When they arrived in the Pen, they hated us every bit as much as your prisoners hate you. So, how do we do it?

There was a useful guide to Rad/Sonic defenders posted last summer. Here's my own advice, having played a Rad/Sonic as my "main" (or the closest thing I have to a main): You can skip a lot of powers. In my build (posted below), I only took five Radiation powers and six Sonic powers. This gives you lots of space for pool powers. When you're starting out, you can use single-origin enhancements or standard invention origin enhancement. You will probably have a few standard IOs in your final build. When you start getting IO set enhancements, buy them attuned if you are under level 50. Don't buy purple enhancements (available only at level 50) attuned. In your radiation powers, you don't need a lot of enhancements, except on the AOE heal. Get some recharge on Accelerate Metabolism and Lingering Radiation. Get some endurance reduction on Radiation Infection and Enervating Field. I recommend two slots in Stamina and Health. You can start with generic SO enhancements. The Performance Shifter proc is not that expensive (a few million) and worth getting early as an attuned enhancement. For attacks, if you are slotting SOs or standard IOs, start with one accuracy, one damage, and one endurance reduction before you add a second enhancement of any type to a given power. Don't add three SOs/IOs of the same type to the same power. Thunderstrike is a good, cheap set to get for a single target ranged attack. With all six slots, you will get a useful ranged defense boost. A good long-range goal is to have 45% defense in at least one damage category. Some people build for ranged defense only. I like to soft-cap both ranged and melee defense, especially for a Sonic, because Dreadful Wail is a PBAoE power, and I like to be able to get in close. You will want to be able to get in close. Building both ranged and melee defense takes planning, though, and requires sacrificing some other things. Going for 45% S/L defense is another option, but it may be difficult to achieve with these powersets. Take Boxing and Tough early. When you take Tough, get three key IO set enhancements as soon as you can: the two 3% defense boosts (in Steadfast Protection and Gladiator's Armor) and the +HP from Unbreakable Guard. Get the procs from three healing sets: Numina's Convalescence, Panacea, and Miracle. Most builds include the scaling damage resistance from Reactive Defenses and the +5% damage resistance from Shield Wall. I didn't include these in my build because I decided to pursue softcapped positional defenses at all costs. Here's my build. It won't be the build you use, since you want Hover, but it may give you some ideas. I do not use Thunder Strike in team play because of the knockback. (It's in my build mainly as a set mule.) Edit: You have choices about which attacks to take. The game makes you take Shriek, and Dreadful Wail is a no-brainer. I strongly suggest taking Screech. You start your single-target rotation with it (for the -res rather than the damage). Which other attacks to take is a harder call. Don't take them all.

How is the Arachnobot Disruptor? I'm working on a Cold/Sonic/Mace build and thinking about whether the pet is worth it.

On just about every character I've built on Homecoming since last fall, I use only four pools for my PVE builds: Fighting, Leadership, Leaping, and Speed. I always want Boxing, Tough, Maneuvers, Combat Jumping, and Hasten. I almost always want Weave. The only real choices I'm making are whether to add additional powers from Leadership and whether to take Super Jump, Super Speed, or both. Not a recommendation, just a data point.

I encourage new players to play whatever attracts them thematically. But I do give this advice (and try to give it gently): If you play Empathy or another "healer" set, focus on buffs, debuffs, and attacks. Don't think of healing as your primary role in PVE. If your attacks include knockback, you should think about slotting knockback-to-knockdown enhancements. Knockback can be used skillfully, but it's tricky to do it well on teams. Energy Blast might not be the best choice for a new player, because of all the attacks with knockback. (I don't say this to people who've already chosen Energy Blast.) If people are choosing an archetype for a first toon, I steer them toward the archetypes I consider most newbie friendly (melee or a def/corr with some self-protection) and away from ATs with more complicated mechanics (masterminds, dominators). I don't discuss epic archetypes because I haven't tried them.

After a year in the game with bad altitis, I have eight level 50 toons, all melee types, defenders, and corruptors. I've rolled blasters, controllers, dominators, masterminds, and sentinels, but every time, I've lost interest. I think this pattern reflects my inclination to play in melee range. My favorite ranged character is my Rad/Sonic defender, who fights best close to the action. My choices also reflect my theory about how supers' powers affect their personalities. I like to roleplay and write backstories for supers who get along well with other people. ("Getting along," "being good," and "being conventionally heroic" are three different things.) The most sociable archetypes are tankers, defenders, and corruptors. Tankers are naturally tolerant. Nothing really hurts them, and unlike brutes, they don't get angry easily. (Super Strength tankers do get angry, but only when they deliberately choose to.) A room full of tankers is very chill. Defenders and corruptors naturally want to be around other people. They especially want to be around each other. Being in seven other defenders' buff auras is an amazing feeling. If you put a bunch of defenders and corruptors in a small space together, even if they initially hate each other, they have a powerful incentive to work out their differences and become allies. The one archetype I definitely don't want to roll again is Brute. I like playing Brutes just fine. But I can't get past the name. My characters aren't brutish, so I don't want them to be called Brutes. Except for my farmer, who is pretty brutish. He is a demon who was last summoned in 410AD and is really confused by a lot of things, like why everybody is wearing pants. Pants are for barbarians. Also, why do people look at him funny when he eats glass? Glass is crunchy! They are missing out.

I was one of the biography judges for the Pride costume contest. A lot of planning went into this event! The judging procedure @Arisara describes is pretty close the procedure I used. It's not easy to do this quickly. Latecomers joining the lineup at both ends added substantially to the time I needed to make sure I had screenshots of everyone's biography. I'm sure we could have done things better. We are open to suggestions! One thing we could do is post a detailed schedule further in advance, so contestants know roughly how much wait time to expect. As@ImpousVileTerrorpoints out, there's no way to time these things exactly. We did go overtime, but not by much.

Thanks to everyone who came to CoX Pride today! Big thanks to everyone who helped make today happen: to everyone who helped with the judging, organizing, and publicity, to everyone who donated to the prize pool (including the artists!), and to DJ Eros and DJ Violet Wanda for really great music. Special thanks to @BluWitch and @VileTerror. This would not have happened without both of you.