Crater Kate

And then... there's... uh... this.

And my Widow, Black Heron! Heron is a much more cloak-and-dagger realism character, so MOST of her costumes are just trench coats and body armor, but I'm quite happy with her alt-universe what-if-she-killed-Recluse-and-took-over-Arachnos look:

And now, Redside! I give you Charlequin, the demon mastermind and horrific on-fire-clown:

And speaking of catgirls, here's my first and only, Jagra! As far as catgirls go, a catgirl is a catgirl is a catgirl, but I am pretty happy with how simple I've gotten her design: (Incidentally, I'm working on a 40+ bindloadfile setup with her so I have a taunt macro that cycles insults at characters, to get that full Spider-Man annoying tanker vibe, but that's still WIP)

Next up is... Yourself? An enigmatic entity who tends to shadow people and take their form, coming in the most common forms of Paragon citizen: male, female, huge, and catgirl.

So I've been a busy beaver. I've been REALLY taken with concept characters recently, so that means sharing time! First up is VARSy-T, a disposable Vanguard mech designed for single ops only. And disposable means, of course, I need battle damage: The pirate hook is envisioned as a last-resort close combat weapon built into the armor, for when civilized combat fails. Not really pictured: second armor has a sparks aura, third has an electricity aura. Gotta give that slow-but-impending meltdown feel. (Apologies for the low res scaling btw, I only realized after getting mostly through these screenshots that I had it cranked way down.)

Yeah, those 1.4k crits just do NOT get old. I still cackle every time the team is working on an AV, or a monster, or a Pylon, and they're pushing out consistent damage that's moving the health bar down smoothly, and then I go Build Up -> Crushing Uppercut and take a noticeable CHUNK out of the health bar. Or running in an iTrial like Dilemma Diabolique where the league gets split into teams for the simultaneous killing of the Spines, and your team brings your Spine down to 10% twice as fast as the next one, and then you spend 20 seconds love tapping it with your T1 waiting for the rest of the league to catch up. In a game that's mostly dictated by AoE'ing things down hard and fast, there's nothing that's really as satisfying to me as bringing a Stalker to the table, finding the biggest, dumbest, toughest thing on the map, and saying you're mine.

Street Justice does also bring a pretty wide suite of soft control to the table, with knockups, knockdowns, disorients, fear, and a hold. You don't have a ton of control over who gets affected when, so it doesn't work for actually locking things down, but it does provide a lot and a wide variety of incidental mitigation.

Kind of surprised you haven't seen it at all. Street Justice is not a bad set in the slightest. It's quite generalist, and its AoEs are small, so it lacks a bit of the laser focus some other sets bring. But it's nowhere close to bad. I feel like I bump into a lot of WP and Shield Tankers running StJ, because of thematics, but I have seen Street Justice paired with just about everything. It's fine.

I actually also wanted to ask @Infinitum about Psi Melee! Specifically Shield/Psi, given how much shield experience you have - is this a combo you've tried? On paper, there's a lot to like...

This is going to depend a lot on the character in question. For me, that Stalker that I was talking about is what I use for big game hunting. Her kit is really well suited and streamlined to the task of killing AVs, to the point she can just raw damage down pretty much every +0 AV in the game. Versus the "squishy" +4 AVs, she can juuust about do the same. But versus tough AVs, she has to dip into temp powers. Incidentally, she carries the max of 300 daggers on her as frequently as I remember to refill them even though she doesn't need them often. Just because that's her job. For a character less tunnel vision'd on AV hunting, temp powers become a lot more consistently relevant. Base buff +20% recharge, offensive amplifier, envenomed daggers being the more common ones, and then the Warburg buff for the nuclear (heh) solution. I'd be leaning on these more with any more general purpose character - maybe not a well built Scrapper, but certainly most Brutes and Tankers. It's also worth mentioning that AV hunting might just be beyond your character of choice, and there's nothing wrong with that. AV fights are basically 2 checks: Check 1 - can you stay in the fight without getting pasted? Check 2 - do you have high enough sustained damage output to get him to zero before Check 1 fails? You need to pass both of them, and there's really no honor lost in not being able to meet the requirements of high durability and damage for many archetypes. Your Kin/sonic defender is going to be atrocious versus an AV solo, but they'll make up for that a hundred times over by how easy they make it for your team to melt that AV. And so on and so on. If you can't do it, there's nothing wrong with that, and being at peace with that is a lot better than beating your head against a wall until your brain turns to mush. And then, of course, there are your MMs, Illusion/Cold Controllers, and certain Blasters that just laugh at, chew up, and spit out AVs AND GMs even on SOs. So it really depends on the character 🙂

4/8 eyeballs aren't the *end* of the world for my StJ/SR Stalker, but they're rough. I try to pop an orange before going in, which helps a good amount. But yeah, if she couldn't drop eyeballs in just a couple seconds each, there would be a loooot of flatlining. I know there was while leveling and I did Who Will Die. But basically eyeballs are just a DPS race - kill it as fast as you possibly can, and if you can't, well...

Another +1 for StJ/SR. They're just such a good pairing. Street Justice demands you take most attacks and you focus a lot of attention on them. SR demands almost nothing from you and gives you the world. StJ pushes out great damage on its own, but wants a lot of recharge. SR leaks recharge from its pores. They're peanut butter and jelly. With this combo, on any AT, you can have a character that hits hard, goes fast, and just doesn't get hit. The Stalker version is one of the best single target machines in the game. The Tanker version is beyond immortal. Take your pick 🙂 Plus, they're just thematically great together. You can make everything from street brawlers, to super speedsters, to dinosaur ninjas work with the combo. It's just *chef's kiss* perfection.

If you want a bit better of a running clock, you can also turn on chat timestamps (Options -> Windows -> Beta Features -> Chat Timestamps). I do 24 hour with seconds, which means any activity in any chat channel will give you a reasonable ongoing clock.

One of my favorite things to do is lampshade the hell out of the setup. 🙂 "Hey guys, uh, this might be a weird question, but does anyone ACTUALLY know what we're doing? I just got a call from Ghost Widow and she said meet these guys in this place and... look, if I'm being honest, I've just been following you guys around for the last half hour trying to blend in."

I use almost the same attack chain as Croax, but I think I have a chunk more recharge in my build, as I'm able to cut out one T1 attack. I also run Initial Strike over Heavy Blow, which doesn't matter a whole lot honestly. Mentally, I also start my chain at Assassin's Strike instead of Crushing Uppercut, but starting at Crushing Uppercut is probably easier and a slightly better way to frame it. So for me, my chain is (Build Up) -> Assassin's Strike -> Crushing Uppercut -> Shin Breaker -> Assassin's Strike -> Sweeping Cross -> Shin Breaker -> Initial Strike -> Repeat Or, framed like Croax does: Crushing Uppercut -> Shin Breaker -> Assassin's Strike -> Sweeping Cross -> Shin Breaker -> Initial Strike -> Assassin's Strike ->Repeat I know this looks a little daunting as it's a 7 move chain, but you can really simplify this down to a 3 move chain if you want to. It's Assassin's Strike -> (Crushing Uppercut or Sweeping Cross) -> Shin Breaker and on the chains where you use Sweeping Cross, you close with Initial Strike. Edit: As to you questions about what to pair it with, I'm not a terribly huge fan of a snipe with Street Justice, as this rotation is so fluid, quite End intensive, and already does incredible ST damage. I think my post-incarnate Stalker regularly pushes ~500+ DPS with the chain I posted above, and the only times I toyed with a snipe I felt it didn't substantially help my damage and seriously compromised me in other ways (losing Body Mastery, mainly). If you're thinking of pairing StJ with an armor set with very good Endurance tools, maybe you can think about a snipe. I'm a little bit higher on pairing an AoE with StJ, but not much. I have definitely felt Street Justice lacking in the AoE department - as fantastic as Spinning Strike is versus what it *does* hit, the facts that it's only a 6ft AoE and that it's targeted both really keep the set from being *great* at AoE. So if that's something you want your Stalker to be good at, I think you could consider it. But I would still caution against it - in a team setting, most people on your team are going to be bringing really strong AoE. I've found the majority of team comps will just monster mash through big mobs. But the big slowing point for big late game teams is hard targets - and I like using Stalker to do that job. Pick the bosses out from the spawn, and keep that AV damage sky high. I've found the most success with my Stalker by making her consistent and durable enough to do that close to indefinitely, and she's rarely failed me with that philosophy.

Malaise is, incidentally just the absolute worst for Defense sets. Not only do the typed sets all have holes to him, but he's also one of the extremely rare (possibly only?) suckers out there who attacks mostly with non-positional Psi. That was a ruuuude awakening for my SR Stalker. Back on EA, I've just taken an EA Brute out for a spin on Aeon against +4/x8 Arachnos. Now this is with an average of about 38% E/N defense and 28% E/N resist, 16% Psi defense and an average of 19% Psi resist. The build I took has noticeable holes against a large percentage of the damage Arachnos throws out. And it felt... manageable? She definitely took damage, but it wasn't enough damage to really beat through Energize + Energy Drain, and nothing so scary as to make me use Barrier as a panic button. And that's solo vs. +4/x8 - it goes without saying that in a team setting, those holes will rapidly close up. So... yeah. I stand corrected, I guess. Maybe the psi hole isn't as bad as I've been imagining. The defense junkie in me still doesn't like being in a place where I'm accepting damage anyway, but... it's much more tolerable than I gave it credit for.

MLTF Recluse is waaaaaay tougher than a run of the mill 54 AV. Even if you *can* blitz the towers down fast enough, then the repair crews happen and... yeah. Even "just" L54 Recluse anywhere else is gonna be a lot easier than that fight.

Fair enough on EA, I didn't realize its recharge scaled quite that hard. That's a more reasonable tradeoff, then. And you're not wrong about Energy Cloak, but given that I count myself among the people who don't like being forced to be invisible, I haven't found it to be the end of the world to skip it. It's definitely the most efficient choice, but you can make that up elsewhere if you want to. Edit: and again, I want to reinforce that I do not think Energy Aura is bad by ANY means. I love this set, I think it is incredibly good across archetypes. I'm just trying to illustrate why some people don't like it.

Another one I'm very proud of - meet my Street Justice / Energy Aura Brute, Crowning Glory! (She has since been rerolled into a Rad/Rad Tanker, which fits her conceptually a bit better)

There is a reason why you don't see lots of Claws Stalkers running around. Claws loses a lot of what makes it special on the Stalker port, and I'm not 100% sure if it really makes up for it. But YMMV!

Yeah, 70% defense is cute and all, but you wanna see something even dumber? How about a Super Reflexes tank... with 132% max HP... ...and 435% regen. Yeah. Hero Plan by Mids' Reborn : Hero Designer 2.7.2.10 https://github.com/Crytilis/mids-reborn-hero-designer Click this DataLink to open the build! Level 50 Magic Tanker Primary Power Set: Super Reflexes Secondary Power Set: Street Justice Power Pool: Force of Will Power Pool: Leaping Power Pool: Fighting Ancillary Pool: Energy Mastery Hero Profile: Level 1: Focused Fighting -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), LucoftheG-Def(3), LucoftheG-Def/EndRdx(3) Level 1: Initial Strike -- OvrFrc-Acc/Dmg(A), OvrFrc-Acc/Dmg/End(43), PndSlg-Acc/Dmg(43), PndSlg-Stun%(43) Level 2: Focused Senses -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), LucoftheG-Def(5), LucoftheG-Def/EndRdx(5) Level 4: Sweeping Cross -- SprAvl-Acc/Dmg(A), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(11), SprAvl-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(11), SprAvl-Rchg/KDProc(13), SprAvl-Dmg/EndRdx(23), Arm-Dam%(27) Level 6: Practiced Brawler -- EndRdx-I(A) Level 8: Agile -- ShlWal-ResDam/Re TP(A), ShlWal-Def(9), ShlWal-Def/EndRdx(9) Level 10: Dodge -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A) Level 12: Evasion -- ShlWal-Def(A), ShlWal-Def/EndRdx(21), ShlWal-Def/Rchg(21) Level 14: Mighty Leap -- BlsoftheZ-Travel(A), BlsoftheZ-ResKB(45) Level 16: Combat Jumping -- Rct-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(A), Rct-Def(17), Rct-Def/EndRdx(17) Level 18: Lucky -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), LucoftheG-Def(19), LucoftheG-Def/EndRdx(19) Level 20: Rib Cracker -- Mk'Bit-Acc/Dmg(A), Mk'Bit-Dmg/EndRdx(23), Mk'Bit-Dmg/Rchg(40), Mk'Bit-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(42), Mk'Bit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(42), Mk'Bit-Dam%(42) Level 22: Kick -- OvrFrc-End/Rech(A), OvrFrc-Dam/KB(33) Level 24: Tough -- StdPrt-ResDam/Def+(A), GldArm-3defTpProc(25), UnbGrd-Max HP%(25), ImpSki-Status(27), ImpSki-ResDam/EndRdx(29), ImpSki-ResDam/Rchg(45) Level 26: Quickness -- Run-I(A) Level 28: Spinning Strike -- SprFrzBls-Acc/Dmg(A), FrcFdb-Rechg%(29), SprFrzBls-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(34), SprFrzBls-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(34), SprFrzBls-Dmg/EndRdx/Acc/Rchg(34), SprFrzBls-Rchg/ImmobProc(37) Level 30: Weave -- Rct-Def(A), Rct-Def/EndRdx(31), Rct-EndRdx/Rchg(31), Rct-Def/Rchg(31), Rct-Def/EndRdx/Rchg(33), Rct-ResDam%(33) Level 32: Taunt -- PrfZng-Dam%(A) Level 35: Shin Breaker -- SprMghoft-Acc/Dmg(A), SprMghoft-Dmg/Rchg(36), SprMghoft-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(36), SprMghoft-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36), SprMghoft-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(37), SprMghoft-Rchg/Res%(37) Level 38: Crushing Uppercut -- SprGntFis-Acc/Dmg(A), SprGntFis-Dmg/Rchg(39), SprGntFis-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(39), SprGntFis-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(39), SprGntFis-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(40), SprGntFis-Rchg/+Absorb(40) Level 41: Conserve Power -- RechRdx-I(A) Level 44: Physical Perfection -- PwrTrns-+Heal(A), PwrTrns-EndMod(45), NmnCnv-Heal(46), NmnCnv-Heal/EndRdx(46), NmnCnv-Heal/Rchg(46), Prv-Absorb%(48) Level 47: Project Will -- Apc-Dam%(A), Apc-Dmg(50), Apc-Dmg/EndRdx(50) Level 49: Unleash Potential -- LucoftheG-Def/Rchg+(A), PwrTrns-+Heal(50) Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A) Level 1: Gauntlet Level 1: Prestige Power Dash -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Slide -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Quick -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Rush -- Empty(A) Level 1: Prestige Power Surge -- Empty(A) Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A) Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A) Level 4: Ninja Run Level 2: Swift -- Empty(A) Level 2: Health -- NmnCnv-Regen/Rcvry+(A), NmnCnv-Heal(7), NmnCnv-Heal/EndRdx(7), Pnc-Heal/+End(13), RgnTss-Regen+(15), NmnCnv-Heal/Rchg(15) Level 2: Hurdle -- Empty(A) Level 2: Stamina -- PwrTrns-+Heal(A), PwrTrns-EndMod(48), PrfShf-End%(48) Level 1: Combo Level 1 Level 1: Combo Level 2 Level 1: Combo Level 3 ------------ This set is so stupid on Tankers. I love it.

I'm going to hard disagree on Aid Self, actually. I find this gets recommended a lot for SR, and maybe that was true in the live game, but these days the power is almost always more trouble than it's worth, I've found. The point of a heal is to keep you in combat longer. But an interruptible heal like Aid Self is really *only* useful either out of combat (in which case, Rest is inherent) or vs a very small volume of incoming fire, as even a scratch cancels the thing. On SR, if you're vs. that few attacks, you're either fighting a scary big threat, in which case the heal's not going to stop them from 1-2 punching you (the only situation where a single target will even kill you), or you're fighting a small number of idiots, in which case you're in smooth sailing territory. Relying on Aid Self and slotting Aid Self to work when you need it, for your defense to hold up for the actually ~very~ long activation time... it is extremely, extremely inconsistent, in my experience. I generally have more success just chasing Power Transfer procs, Regen uniques, and just slotting more +Max HP and Regen set bonuses. Those always work even when in the fight and keep you chugging much more reliably, IMHO.

This is a hell of a lot easier than using Snipping Tool...

But... @Veracor's already omnipotent!