MonteCarla

Yeah, there is usually a point where more Recharge doesn't make a difference. Your attack chain starts to get limited by animation times instead of +Recharge. You've got perma-Hasten, -Domination or -Phantom Army sorted out. You've got Adrenalin Boost perm-able on one target but it can never be perma'd on two. and so on.

My quick 2c: I hear you. Force Fields on a Corruptor isn't going to add much to your survivability - Dispersion Bubble adds about 12% Def to you and that's it. Dellects 1 out of 4 attacks that would land. If you play on a Defender that goes up to 16%, and throw in the two uniques, P2W buffs, Fighting pool and so on you can become pretty sturdy like a Sentinel. +Defence becomes more valuable the more you already have. It got better with the introduction of -Res in Force Bolt and Force Bomb. It shines when protecting a levelling team of 8 while still having time to Blast, where you're the keystone who hangs back and avoid the alpha strike. The level of protection you offer would be wasted even on a reckless lone Scrapper. So yeah, Force Fields isn't really great for your mission statement. My fuller thoughts on FF are here:

Woah! It works! Thanks so much, twozerofoxtrot! That made my day! Really glad I dropped by this thread to moan about something! 😄

I wish you luck in your search!

I'd make sure all popup dialogs (Resurrect, Mystic Fortune, Teleport, mission into text) could be activated with Enter or Esc

Very cool! I can't see anything I'd change there. Happy Bruting! 🙂

Have a read of the Resistances for Brutes guide in my signature for some overall analysis on taking advantage of that 90% Res cap. You've got the Reactive Defences unique in Vengeance. Good. There's also the Shield Wall +5% Res vs all unique IO, which I think you're missing. That could go in Hover, which is way overslotted. It's base defence is so low it isn't worth 4 slots. In fact, pop both those uniques (Reactive Def and Shield Wall) in Hover for when you're exemplared, and stick a LotG +Recharge in Vengeance Make Hover just 3 slots - LotG unique and the two +Res IOs Can you easily close the remaining 5% gap for S/L resistances? Plasma Shield needs some slots to max its innate resistance, so 4 Aegis in there adds +3%. Take a slot from Manouvers maybe, and two slots from... 1 from Weave and 1 from Fire Shield. AND/OR Give up on the GSFC in Tactics. Its giving you +2.5 defence vs all, which is OK, but you could redistribute that shore up Plasma Shield and work on your Psi resists with some more Impervium Armor uniques? (You can slot 5 of them) I'm not sure which is better really. (One tip I didn't put in my guide. For Energy heavy situations, you can grab the kinetic Dampener temp power from the P2W vendor for some more energy resist!)

Typical Posi 1 chain of events: Yay, we have Force Fields and Cold! We'll be unhittable! Oh, crap... so will our duplicates. I'd better buy some team yellows between mission for the final fight against our doubles.

Mm Hmmm.... Looks good, Uun. I can see a few spots where I might do things a bit differently. 1) Stone Cages: I normally don't bother with the Dominating Grasp set at all beyond the Fiery orb Proc, and I'm not sure how often it goes off in there anyway. Maybe drop it in Seismic Smash instead. Stone Cages itself doesn't need much slotting, maybe even just a accuracy 2) Volcanic Gasses: You can probably get away with just 4 slots here - the small S/L resistance bonus from 5 is neither here nor there on this build. 3) Ice Storm and Fissure could also lose a slot each - the E/N resistance from slot 6 isn't doing much here. I'm not sure what else to do with these free slots to be honest. Maybe a few well placed damage procs? If you want to be tougher, you could look into Fighting. Drop Hurl Boulder, Assault and Hibernate to take Kick (ignore), Tough (2 slot with Gladiator's Armor and Steadfast +Def uniques and don't bother running it) and Weave (LotG Unique + 5 Red Fortunes) This will give you +13% Defence across the board, bringing you to the S/L softcap and a small purple away from E/N softcap too. This also gains you an extra 6% or so recharge.

I split it too, for the double global recharge buff. Snipes are great, but I usually can't resist putting 5 pieces of Manticore's Sting in my snipe. So it ends up in my longest recharge best single target blast. Some powersets really benefit from this AoE spot heal, such as Force Fields, Cold Dom and Sonic, where your team's health can trickle away if there isn't a healer on the team. Similarly, if you've got very high defence but you're lacking a self heal it can be a big deal. If that's the case, put it in there with the Acc/Dam and Quadruple (for minimum recharge boosting) But if you're playing a set with a self heal already, just use this set to get the double recharge buff. In Dark Blast, I'd pop it in Life Drain or Gloom, where it might go off 1 in every 3 activations roughly?

I recently turned them on for my recent characters. I then had to update my binds file to accommodate them so I can go F5 to heal, F6 for energy etc when I'm in the thick of combat. Until then they clogged up my tray and annoyed me. I haven't turned them on for my latest characters. I guess that's a big old "No" vote to them.

I've taken Radiation Blast to 50 nearly 6 times now. 3 of them had Light Powers, either "Solid Light" photon blasts or dazzling light that knocks opponents out. 3 of them had Captain Marvel-ish Cosmic Energy type superhero blasts. Radiation Emission's stood in for Jubilee-esque Firework powers, Pixie magic and Power Cancellation like the X-Men villain Scramble (mainly via the hold aura and enemy toggles) None of them gave people cancer or caused irreparable cellular damage, because I say so! 🙂 Kind of like how none of my fire users cause third degree burns, or sword users don't leave people dismembered or bleeding to death, or super-strengthers aren't punching people's spines through their bodies. I'm just not that kind of superhero. And powerset names are just names. None of my empaths sense or modify emotions, while we're at it! EDIT: Safety inspectors are very well paid in Paragon. Those 5% fees from Wentworths really add up!

Totally agree. 🙂 Dr Q has the variety of doing endless Council missions with a bit of street-sweeping in between, activities which people might actually do outside the Shard. Justin Augustine is like street-sweeping in a zone 10 levels below you for half an hour and then doing some radios. And to top it all off, I think The Chantry where Justin's task force takes place is Nemesis free, so there's not even any Unveiler bonuses to it.

Wow, that's impressive! Do you get people lined up pre-emptively for the hunts as they come up, or are you just zerging through everything as a team?

In an hour or so, the Weekly Task Force ticks over to the much-maligned Dr Q. Task Force, and I'll complete the last mission and be 244 merits richer! I thought I'd give a little review of each of the 4 Shadow Shard Task forces, since they had a certain negative mystique about them before I took the plunge and did them. Dr Q. (40-45) - 122/244 merits, 3 hours solo This is the longest task force in the game at 22 missions. It starts with 5 hunts (eg defeat 50 Rularuu at Point X-Ray) amongst the instanced missions, and the missions are nothing to write home about. It's basically like 3 hours of messing around in the shard (which I do enjoy as a Roger Dean fan) and doing the most basic radio missions, including quite a few defeat-alls. But... it has no AV at the end, so anyone can solo it. It gives the biggest merit reward in the game, and while you're doing those boring hunts you'll often find Fake Nemesis in pairs for a bit of badging goodness. Point X-Ray is great for this. (I'm at 30/100 without really trying now, just taking out pairs who were visible when I entered or exited missions, or I saw while hunting.) You get exemplared to 45, so you keep your incarnate powers. If you play at +0, the many Crey you face will be half and half suits instead of power-armor, which makes things easier, unless you're badging for Gamma Tanks or something. Soloing a task force can be done over several days of course, so you should break up the grind if you have a few days where that character doesn't need to team with anyone. You'll often hear negative talk in chat about this one, but its really just 3 hours of dull-ish radios with a big payoff. And that got me from 43 to 46 on my TA/A Defender. (Competes with Tinpex as the weekly. Lucky for me I'm not fond of that, but I now others are) Sara Moore (40-50) - 64/128 merits, 1-1.5 hours teamed This one is a proper adventure. You'll need a team because you fight Ruladak the Strong at the end, in a rather cool and scary special map in the final mission. Its about an hour, and you end up hunting a fair few Nemesis in the Cascade Archipelago, which helps getting Unveiler for the Freedom Phalanx Reserve Member accolade. The Cascade Archipelago with its bloody waterfalls is the most vertical map in the Shard, and second only to the Storm Palace. This one has always felt like a "cosmic" Justice League/Avengers adventure. (Competes with Synapse for the weekly, accolade hunters! A tough choice, but this one's more fun!) Justin Augustine (44-50) - 42/84 merits - 1-1.5 hours solo The first half is the dullest thing ever. Go round the Chantry like a clock, defeating 50 under-levelled enemies at each point, then click on a monument. Thrill to being sent back to Firebase Zulu to click on many groups of monuments for Dr Boyd! About half way through you actually get to fight enemies of your own level (CoT) inside an actual instanced map. Reveal is an absolute must here. I recommend solo-ing this one, if you want to just for completeness or the merits when its weekly. I got a team together for this on my first time, and kind of regretted it. One thing I always enjoy in here is finding groups of Brutes standing on high points and shotting at the Chantry in protest at its presence. Just a nice little idle animation that they have. Yeah, that's the highlight. No AV's here, just a few CoT mages with more than usual hit points, that can be tedious on a low damage AT. (Competes with the ITF for the weekly, in what may be the best TF ever vs the worse ever, so good luck finding a team!) Faathim the Kind (44-50) -73/146 merits 1.5-2 hours teamed This last one's intense. You fight multiple AV's (Malaise, Mother Mayhem, Nemesis, Baphomet) and eventually Lanaru the Mad. There's lots of Nemesis along the way for the Unveiler badge. And it takes place in the dark psychedelic grandeur of the Storm Palace, unlike the others which are in the "nice" orange parts of the Shard. This has the full Avengers: End Game feel, and is a whole lot of fun with a good team. (Competes with Yin as the weekly, do this first to maximise your bonus merits!) Temporary Powers from the SMART vendor. If you forget, remember the vendor in Pocket D will talk to you when you're on a Task Force, unlike the Atlas Park one. Reveal - definitely get this to clear the maps for each zone. Especially useful for the two solo-able task forces. Team Transporter - makes navigating the Shard nicer in a team. Mission Transporter and Assemble the Team - these two double as a second Team Transporter nicely. Defensive buff - gives you some mez protection if you don't already have any, which makes soloing Rularuu groups much easier. Happy psychedelic hunting!