Shred Monkey

This seems like a good starting place. Note, at the bottom are links to hero arcs and villian arcs. Click around and you'll find the Task Forces listed as well. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Story_Arc

It's my interpretation that the recent clarification of the policy was meant to say, "Hey guys... we all know the rules and their intent, so this is your warning. Please self-police and we won't have to do anything nobody wants us to do."

Nice job. Blasters rule!

For greatest survivability, play a hover-blaster. Use hover/fly as your travel power and use far ranged attacks only. Fly out of melee range and back away from the fight and throw/fire your attacks into the battle from range. This is about as safe as anyone could be in this game, especially leveling up. As you gain levels and money you can start slotting for attuned sets for ranged defense (thunderstrike sets and ATO sets are great for this). Many sets and combos can be good hover blasters. I recommend you choose set that has a targeted AoE Tier 9 and not PBAoE so you can fire your nuke from range.

At least in this game content is locked behind a instanced mission so you can keep the trolls out once you identify them.

I looked at ice/elec before deciding to build my fire/energy blapper and it was a coin toss between the two. No question, what you're proposing is doable and will be a ton of fun. I aim for 45% smash/lethal defense and 45% ranged defense, plus as much regen as I can squeeze out for survival. This has worked well for me.

I'm assuming you're going to run these trials short handed instead of joining in on the public groups. So, assuming short handed, what's needed for each trial. BAF requires a ton of AoE damage in different locations to pass the prisoner phase. You also need to be able to juggle agro from 2 AVs at the end to avoid getting sequestered. Although, maybe you just assume you're going to get sequestered and you use all ranged DPS and ranged heals to avoid anyone else getting caught in the circles. BAF would be hard with a small team, but running with a full league makes it trival. Keyes is longer and more complex. Although, I don't know that any one part is particularly difficult, there's a lot to it. There are ticks of damage to all league members during one phase, so you'd absolutely need some solid group heals. You'll need someone to tank Anti-matter. Energy resists are good here. A Buffer to help boost defenses and add heals will help. Lambda is probably the easiest with a small team. It's basically a dungeon crawl with a big boss at the end. A standard team could do this. A tank is needed. I'd recommend a buffer or 2 to get everyone's defenses up over 60 and add some healing. And then load up with high DPS to speed things up. Ranged DPS tends to be safer and you don't have to stop attacking to move out of nova-fist radius, but any good DPS will do. OK.. so, based on that... i'm going to say an ice defender or corrupter for defense buffs plus one other buffer to add something that isn't defense... heals/resists/absorb, etc. An electric tank for tanking (Because Energy damage is very common in these battles), but really any tank with high resists will do. And some high DPS blasters and scrappers to round out the team.

...the feeling of seeing Atlas Park again through tear-filled eyes. These posts never get old.

I think there are many combos that can do well. Coming up with your own solution is where the fun is, right? But here's some detail on what you'll need that combo to do. First the basics: - You need good damage. I would aim for soloing a pylon under 2 minutes. The lower the better. - You'll need good survival. I went with soft cap'd defense plus hover-blasting to completely eliminate incoming melee. I'm sure you can succeed with phantom army or a tricked out defense secondary. - Having -regen is pretty much a must, but basically this goes into that sub 2-minute pylon time requirement we already discussed. Now, above and beyond that, Here's some stoppers that you may want to plan for before you select a combo: - The two most difficult GMs are Lusca and the Council Goliath War Walker. Lusca's tentacles are easy. But the head will out regen your damage unless you have what I would estimate at around 500 DPS. (thus the 2 minute kill time on a pylon). If you are going to use envenomed daggers, These two GMs are where they're most needed. - Tin Mage and Apex are hard, but basically their AVs have 25% tohit boost, so a stack of purple inspiration on top of your soft-capped defenses will negate them and turn them into regular level 54 AVs. - Market Crash. I don't really know the exact mechanics of the final fight, but I know what worked. Hovering over the final boss's head at ranged avoided the debuff, and aoe'ing the shield generators eliminated his buffs. After that, he's just another AV and not really that hard since his level is just whatever you're running the TF at. - MsLTF. This is a hard one. I've not done it succesfully yet, though I am sure it is possible. There are 2 stoppers. Dr Aeon, and then Recluse himself. I think the answer to Aeon is just a bunch of purple inspirations and some luck... and Recluse probably takes some geometry tricks. - ITF. Soloing this is pretty common, but I want you to know the issue so you can be sure you have a counter. One of the nictus has an auto-hit AoE attack. Fighting from ranged makes this trival, but others beat it regularly using melee toons. Just make sure you can out-heal that damage or have a way to stay away from it. - Level 54 AVs are in many cases harder than GMs. Once you finish soloing the GMs, I would try the AV arcs at level 54 for some more challenge. Siege, for example, has a heal. As does the Goliath War-Walker in the New Praetorian arc. This puts them both at about the same "required DPS" level as Lusca's head. Marauder can be tough. Malaise and Mother Mayhem have attacks whcih ignore most common defense builds. Most of the redside AVs are harder than blueside AVs. Many have -defense attacks, which means you need to be able to counter this. Also, with AVs you sometimes have to deal with runners. They don't beat you, but they might make it extra difficult to beat them.

I think this is related to psuedo pets. How do procs work in rain powers? For example, damage procs, knockdown proc, or the annihalation -res proc can be slotted in rain of fire, do they do anything?

My most recent 50 is a DB/electric tank. Once I got past the low levels and got a decent level 22 build I felt very strong. I had endurance to run my damage aura so I think that contributed well to my overall taunt abilty. The extreme resists versus energy and good resits vs smash/lethal is plenty of reduction against a lot of enemies... clockworks, freakshow, crey, etc. And it's a refreshing change to be able to laugh at the +tohit from nemisis or -defense/psychic attacks from arachnos when you're climbing from 40-50. At level 50 my build has 90% resists to all except negative at around 70ish and toxic at around 30%. On top of that I have 45% defense to smashing/lethal and melee. The only time my health bar even moves is when i'm soloing a 4x8 map and get swarmed with -def attacks which drop my defenses to -50. This causes 95% of attacks to land. Even then, my regen is enough to counter the damage when Energize is up, so as long as the fight doesn't last too long I can just stand there and duke it out. Once you get a destiny slotted you can pick either rebirth for more regen or ageless for debuff resists and it will close this gap, too. I really don't have a lot of tank experience to compare it to other sets, but if other sets perform better, they're wasted. The game doesn't have enough danger to need more mitigation then what electric has.

Good analysis. I'd not thought of the powders as damage attacks. I'll look into this. I really want to like this power set, too. Since you didn't take the sword powers you missed IMHO, the dumbest thing of all.. the cool down on the whirling sword attack is WAY too long! Why would anyone ever take this power? If it had a "normal" cool down, it'd fill in that gap in the AoE attack chain of Dual Pistols or Electric, etc. But as it is, it's just a waste of a power choice. I tried really hard to make /ninja my secondary for my DP blaster but devices ended up being the better option in all the ways that mattered. Even though I've now played a DP toon to vet 100 and semi-retired him, I still go back to looking at DP/ninja on occasion trying to find a synergy to exploit. But still haven't found it.

The fundamental flaw with democracy is that the majority is dumb.

Looking at level 50s isn't a good measure of what people stick to considering how easy it is to farm up a toon to 50 and then put them on a shelf, never to be played. I'd like to see the data sliced to eliminate those chars. Maybe look at chars with over 25 hours of playtime? 25 hours may be the wrong number, but if you look at a graph of count vs hours played, you could probably identify a drop-off point between the "real" chars and the "abandoned" chars.

.. / .... .- ...- . / .- / --. --- .- - / -. .- -- . -.. / .--. . .--. . .-.-.- / / .... . / .. ... / -- -.-- / -... . ... - / ..-. .-. .. . -. -.. .-.-.-

The stalker numbers are very different than I would have expected. Is Psi/Energy a PvP thing?

shift click... or just default to 10 (or all) on the slider instead of having to adjust it every time. This would be a big improvement. What I do now is choose the invention salvage tab, then sort by amount ascending... then i pick from the bottom of the list so I'm always taking a stack of equal or less then my last stack and thus I don't have to touch the slider except on my first stack. But that's just a work around.. It needs a fix.

If it means a new endgame Task Force he could be brought back by rainbow fairies and mousekin wizards as far as I care. More content is great. The plot line it has is of little significance to me.

I did this once on another game. It was great. But a word of advice. Set it up to not trigger every time (use blanks in your pool or add a 2nd check to choose to fire or not). What I mean is, don't do it every time you use "power X" or every time you change targets, etc. In fact, I would aim for about 1 trigger every 3-5 minutes with 10-20 variants on what you say. This allows you to be amusing and witty, without crossing the line to being annoying.

I'd like an all throwing set. like granades, or boomerangs... ok, lets just go with boomerangs, cause that's cooler than a grenade. I want it to fit with a traps/gadget feel to make a hobgoblin style toon. There's lost of powers there already as individual pieces. We just need to put it together in a blast set.

not be lazy? well.. um.. *yawn*... maybe I can explain it better after my nap. Or someone else will do it.. you know.. .whatever.

Yeah... whenever i run into a new player, or a "learning" player who's struggling in that levels 5-20 range, my advice is always to take Air Superiority slot it with 2-3 of the P2W dam/rech enhancements.

I would choose a secondary based on which sustain power/powers you want. Just because a secondary has melee attacks doesn't mean you have to use them. Trick Arrow is a very popular set among min/max'ers, even if you don't use any of the arrow attacks.

I have witnessed a lot of enhanced stupidity on these boards.

For lower level blapping fun i recommend air superiority. It's mitigation is too good to pass up (around 40% recharge it will perma-knockdown 1 target, including bosses) and it fills in the attack chain nicely.