MonteCarla

Resistance sets I always imagine attacks are hitting my character and bouncing off or getting absorbed. My Elec Brute was made of energy like Marvel's Wonder Man. My last Fire Tanker had a force field that evaporates bullets as they hit as well as having a hard energy shield if you punched her. Defence sets, I'll head-cannon as either attacks hit and do nothing, or dodging. My Energy Aura Sentinel had a "magnetic cocoon" from her armor. My /SR catgirl Stalker was just very fast and hard to hit like Spidey. My Shield Scrapper had a shield and was acrobatic and good at dodging, so a bit of both. Even with squishies where I build for defence via Weave, Manouvers and IOs: some of them are good evasive fliers like Angel from X-Men or acrobatic like Gambit (so attacks miss), some have a force field like Green Lantern or medium level invulnerability (so attacks bounce off). ( More than once I've built a solar-powered Superman type Blaster who's invulnerability is down, and grows back over time due to our planet's "stupid weak sun" 🙂 ) The idea of toughness making attacks miss goes back to original D&D, where wearing Plate Mail armor made you harder to hit rather than softening blows that do land. Its an odd decision, but it does kind of work still, which Is why I guess its still around in games.

Blasters survive using active defence, ie mezzes or just straight out damage. Fire Blast is rough for this solo, you can aggro a big group without reducing the incoming damage at all - no knockback, end drain or -To Hit or anything before they fall. You do have a hold in Atomic (Positron Cell), but it's single target. Try lowering the group size, like people have said. Even try +2/x1 instead, a held lieutenant is doing nothing to you, even if you take a bit longer to defeat them. And at the START vendor, pick up Plasmatic Taser and Stun Grenade to help you deal with double groups via knockback and stun while you're levelling. The free Nemesis staff is good for this too. You can work towards solid defences numbers, but it takes time. Tough (with 2 unique IOs for +Defence), Weave (slotted) and Manouvers (slotted) give you just 15% defence or so. This is a good start, but you'll really want to pile on the set bonuses to boost this. Thunderstrike x6 and Artillery x6 in your attacks is a good cheapish start to doing this. Make sure you've got your sustain power (Metabolic Acceleration) - your aim should be to survive any fight a bit beaten up, and then recover very quickly between groups. Open but holding the toughest target (eg a Lt.), defeat the others while keeping the Lt. held, and then finish them off.

Sentinels get a big glowing crosshair under their targets when their Inherent kicks in. You can't customise it and it could be as immersion-breaking as the Domination rainbow.

I had a Rad/Fire Blaster who was very melee-centric. Hot Feet, Cauterizing Aura, Irradiate and Neutron Bomb, Combust and Fire Sword Circle all providing area damage. Defensively I relied on Melee Defence from Obliteration sets in all of them, and slows in Hot Feet so enemies spent longer running away without attacking. I doubt I skipped Cosmic Burst - it is really good, but the emphasis was on melee attacks. I also made a melee Elec/Elec blaster with the aim of using Thunderstrike with the Knockdown IO and end drain to keep enemies close but harmless. (And Electric Fences to keep them there once drained.) I also started slotting heal procs wherever I could, both Power Transfer and Call of the Sandman in the melee attacks. It wasn't super-effective, but a fun experiment.

I wrote a guide on Force Fields after the recent changes. I'd stand by most of what I said still, except I probably talk down Damping Bubble too much. To answer your questions. Essential Powers: Deflection Shield, Insulation Shield, Dispersion Bubble Good Powers: Force Bomb, Repulsion Bolt (these two do -res debuffs now), Damping Bubble Don't Take Repulsion Field (just not awesome, maybe...?) Personal Force Field (its not hard to hit the Def cap and be able to attack) Detention Field (very situational use, slows teams down) I paired it with Sonic (for extra offensive debuffs) or Beam Rifle (because its sci-fi) or Psychic Blast (not a great choice) but really anything will work. FF is a passive buff set, giving you lots of time to blast. And do take Manouvers. By level 13 you can have 3-slotted Dispersion Bubble, Manouvers, and the two ally shields, giving your team like +42% Defence?

Pink Topaz - Earth/Energy/Energy Dominator Perma-dom with enormous lockdown powers and full Energy Blast and Energy Melee powers except the nuke, and solid defences. She's a space cop with a willpowered jewel weapon and strong preference for her favorite color. Personality wise she's a stiff-necked stickler for the rules, and "hmmf's" her way through teamups, especially if villians are involved. She's fully incarnated out, but I still get her out for Shard Task Forces. Abraxii - Illusion/Pain/Psi(?) Controller She was my first character to use the teleport-to-teammate bind for a quick spot heal on someone several rooms away. Combined with Illusion's Phantom Army, Omnipresence was one of her powers - being able to be in multiple places at once. And it was fun being a sweet helpful demon who just loves helping mortals. Will probably remake her as Illusion/Empathy at some point. Eva Sparkles - Energy/Energy/Force Blaster Defence soft-capped blaster with a powerful punch. A Dale Arden-esque sidekick/romantic interest who receives massive energy powers and becomes her own hero. I really got my Captain Marvel on here. Jenny Foxgloves - Nature/Ice/Psi Defender The hybrid result of a powerful but dumb nature spirit, and the human who wears the gloves in which she resides. A whole lot of lockdown with Entangling Aura and single target holds, and some of the best visual effects in the game from Nature Affinity. I'd regularly do my crafting in Atlas Park opposite Ms Liberty in a Lifegiving Spores patch, and have people come and chat after coming to see what the glowing mushroom ring was.

I run PUG Task Forces with levelling characters, usually do the weekly task force and whatever else takes my fancy. I set the difficulty level based on how many support characters there are. I count the Defenders, Corrupters, Controller and Masterminds and look at their support powersets and can tell how hard it's going to be from that. 4 Supporters? We can probably run at +3 easy! Radiation Emission's an odd set. It doesn't have a big tangible benefit like others do. (Force Fields = yay! No more damage, Kinetics = yay! Free end for everyone!) But, it takes the edge off everything. Your teammates get some free end and recharge, which can make a Synapse or Yin much more bearable. You do provide layered safety via a -To Hit toggle, unreliable hold, -damage toggle and a weak but reliable heal. So its hard to feel your contribution. Solo, your safety's not guaranteed. But, every Defender (and other supporter) on a team is worth it. And if you ever get on an all-Defender team, you'll really feel it!

Wow, how did I miss Unrelenting? I guess because I took Presence once, on my first Sentinel to get a taunt. How does it work exactly? You get the buffs if you click it while you're alive, but if you're KO'd it rezzes you first (at half health) and then gives you the buffs? And yeah, I suppose I omitted Wall of Force because I'm not that impressed with it, @Uun It's low damage and 33% chance of knockback, so it doesn't do either of it's things well. I've taken it on my tank but probably wont do so again.

And yep, @Dauntless - LotG uniques are in a class of their own! 🙂

I've only really started looking at these two powers now. They're like mini-God mode defensive powers, at Tier 3 in the Sorcery and Force of Will power pools. What sort of builds are people using them in? I get that Rune of Protection (uptime 60s out of unmodifiable 180s) is popular for the mez protection (for those of you who don't indulge in unlimited START Vendor buffs like I do), but I can also see it being really nice on Resistance Brutes/Tanks to push your lesser Resistances to the cap. Damn, that's nearly +40% resistance to all when slotted, for 1/3 of the time! (Tank/Defender values) Unleash Potential (60s out of 600s, so out of 150s on a very high recharge build) gives +24% Defence slotted! That would be extra nice for Blasters or other squishies, but not as good as mez protection...? The big downside to both is having to pick two other powers. Force of Will has: Weaken Resolve, a -Def/-Res power that can slot an Achilles Heel -Res and be a decent boss-up debuff ( with a horrible animation! 😞 ) Mighty Leap - a superjump clone with a stompy long-recharge AoE thrown in for free Project Will - a mediocre ranged attack. Sorcery has: Arcane Bolt - beloved of my Controllers Spirit Ward - an OK-ish absorb shield for an ally Mystic Flight, cool looking fly with free teleport! Enflame is nice, but it's also Tier 3 too. If you're prepared to let these pools dictate your travel powers, they're pretty good. I've taken Force of Will on my Invulnerability tank partly just for fun, and I'm planning Sorcery on a Controller, but kinda feel they're the wrong way round for the +Res and +Def buffs. Tell me your stories on how you use them!

I usually 2 slot Hasten, with 2 SO's as I level and 2 Level 50+5 IO's once I hit 50. You can get perma-Dom without it just by stacking set bonuses, but it's tight and usually won't kick in until you're 50. Hasten gives you breathing room to enjoy perma-Dom from somwhere in your 30's onwards.

I've done this once with a character I really enjoyed playing - Jenny Foxgloves (Nature/Ice Defender). I'd got her to 50 and Tier 3+ incarnates in everything, so I remade her as a Plant/Storm Controller and levelled her up to 50 again. (This was her winter form as a nature spirit, since Plant Control produces spiky thorny effects compared to the lush foliage of Nature Affinity) I'm considering doing that with a couple of other characters who I've capped out on, and kind of miss playing. Same character, but with different powersets.

Repulsion Bolt and Force Bomb will keep a 35% resistance debuff on your AV target, so FF is nowhere near as bad as it used to be for this task. Dispersion gives you status protection and a very good start to capping your Defences. You have zero native regen or recovery tools. Add in Envenomed Daggers from the START vendor and as much damage as you can slot and proc for?

Here's a weird idea for Regen - what if the set was made so that "death" was not much of a problem at all, but part of the playstyle? Revive currently has a recharge of 300s and provides 90s of Debt Protection, meaning if you slot it for Recharge build up a big Global rech you can pull off serial Revives. What if we made that really easy? Add 100% Debt Protection to Fast Healing, so its always on. Lower the Recharge on Revive to like 60 seconds or even 30. This way, every time you get defeated, you're seconds away from being able to get up again. That's a very Wolverine/T-1000 -like way to fight. 🙂 What am I missing here? Every time you die you wipe all debuffs (which is good) but also lose Hasten and Instant Healing and other click buffs. If there was a way to put the buffs on hold so they still applied when you revived, that could work? (And I second the idea of lowering Reconstruction's recharge to 30. It struck me as odd when I started playing that it took 60 seconds but Healing Aura had like a 8 second recharge)

I defeated her the other day using the Complete Mission button. I totally hear you. She is insanely hard, even for characters who should be able to handle her.

Working backwards from the Rule of 5: 5 x 10% (Purple sets for Melee, Melee AoE, Ranged and Ranged AoE, (or substitute Confuse for one of them) and Superior Ascendancy of the Dominator) 5 x LotG +7.5% (Manouvers+Vengeance, Weave/Hover/CJ, and Stealth+Grant Invisibility or Indomitable Will+Link Minds) 3 x Other 7.5% (Basilisks' Gaze x 2 and Sting of the Manticore) That's 110% You can then add 3 x 6.25% (Stupefy, Glimpse of the Abyss, Positrons's Blast, Decimation, Malaise) or 5% (Crushing Impact, Obliteration) to bring it to 125% or more. It won't be cheap, but it's doable. And if you're willing to rely on the SG Base Empowerment buff, you can drop two purple sets.

OK, so it sounds like it's failing for you only when its on that knife's edge of 123.75% Recharge? Because that's when your window to reactivate Domination is less than a second. (It recharges in 89.3 seconds and only lasts 90 seconds) I think this can fail due to lag? The server has to tell your client that the power's recharged, then your client automatically presses the button for you, which then fires off to the server to tell it to activate the power on the server. If either of these messages are too slow, it might be the server gets the message too late. I typically have Domination on auto-fire, but also set up Q and E to activate Domination and Hasten for convenience, and because I've sometimes seen Domination un-grey itself without activating straight away. Particularly in the mid-30s when I'm getting unreliable chain-Dom with Hasten, I tend to press that button. If you're getting reliable perma-Dom with the SG base buff, then I'd say its' worth rebuilding with an extra 5% recharge to cover that gap. (Gives you 87.4 second recharge with that extra Crushing Impact set, so 2.6 second leeway instead of 0.7 seconds.)

Hmm. So avoid things like Illusion that thrive on high recharge. Scrappers love Kinetics. Plus it gives you a bit of bonus recharge via Siphon Speed, which is what you'd be missing from a high end build. And it doesn't lend itself to IO slotting, so no big loss there. Earth Control's good for making those Kinetics powers hit with the -Def, and gives a lot of security with multiple fast AoE controls. Its main problem is lack of direct damage, but that's helped a lot by picking up some START vendor powers these days (or Sorcery for Arcane Blast) and by having a Scrapper buddy. Does Earth/Kinetics sound any good? Actually, Arsenal Control might be good too for similar reasons, lots of different AoE controls if you're not running on high recharge? Arsenal/Kinetics would be an odd combo, and maybe quite effective 🙂

SO's were traditionally only available at level 25, so 22 became a big watershed level when you could start slotting SOs. The Homecoming team only changed that recently to make them available from vendors at all levels. I guess they didn't update the merit vendors.

Domination can only be activated while your Domination bar is full Your Domination bar stays full while Domination is active. So... If Domination recharges before it expires, you can activate it straight away because your Domination bar is already full! I do have to build it up first, which takes maybe half a mission solo? But after that, by having Dom on autofire and wither pressing Hasten manually or having +123% rech or more, I never lose it until I log off or die. That's the absolute beauty of Perma-Dom. Once you have the recharge you don't have those downtimes where you're building it up.

What I have noticed recently (post the last big update) on my up and coming Arsenal Dom was the drain sound effect would go off sometimes when I was chaining Dominations. It felt like it happened when a Domination expired, regardless of whether it had been stacked/replaced with another one. But I didn't get a Domination drain actually happening, just the noise.

You got me panicking, Outrider! 🙂 I just checked with Pink Topaz, who conveniently has 123.75% Recharge buff when I use the Base empowerment. When Domination goes off, it has a recharge of 1:29, and manages to fire off again without Hasten when I'm idle, as long as CoH has focus. After typing this, I've lost Domination. With Hasten up, it's been cycling fine of course. So Perma-Dom doesn't appear to be broken unless you're on a knife's edge with recharge AND you background the game?

I like soloing Dr Q and Justine Augustine. I've really enjoyed Sara Moore and Faathim with a team. (And the Shard TFs will also unlock the Fake Nemesis "Unveiler" badge, so another chore down) I enjoy Synapse with a PUG, always a good chance to chat with the team. Same with Citadel, and I take a perverse pleasure in Numina's TF and organising people for the hunts. Patron arcs... ehhh... not super-fond of them, so they always fall under "doing it for the rewards", even if I RP a reason to go undercover in character. Hero Tips in the 20s! I don't like a lot of those missions particularly. Fighting Sky Raiders, CoT ghosts and Banished Pantheon before I've got my global accuracy up can be a pain. But I always feel obliged to do them to get my 40 merits and most importantly, get Call to Justice counting down quickly. And Striga! I did the first arc for the Wedding Ring recently (and haven't used it since). I often do the last arc to unlock Hess TF via Ouro, before its the weekly. But they really are dull missions full of dull enemies in a grey rainy map. Oh, and occasional defeat hunts like taking down 100 Family bosses in Striga docks to score the Untouchable badge

I didn't know you could do that! Like others have suggested, you're better off buying Enhancement Converters (under Special Salvage) from the merit vendor. They're the purple circle with yellow arrows. 5 merits buys 15 of them. List them for 1 inf in batches of 10 on the Auction House (available anywhere by typing "/ah") and they'll sell immediately for at least 50,000 inf each, maybe up to 70,000. SO's cost 30-50,000 each, so you'll get at least 3 per merit, probably more. Going this way via influence also allows you to upgrade your SO's using the handy Upgrade button on the Enhancement screen, rather than having to buy all new ones every few levels and manually slot them. Its a little bit more hassle than just buying the SO's, but it doesn't require much marketeering, and really turned thing s around for me when I was new.

Yesterday I joined a Posi 1 and then ran a Posi 2 on a new-ish Tank. I had a great team both times. The Posi 1 was one of the smoothest I've ever had, despite us having 4 support characters on the team (which often leads to a bad time with the Shadow Duplicates at the end) Later on I ran Manticore on a Defender, and had an awesome time once again. I got lucky enough to have I think 3 Controller/Doms, so between that any my own holds and Choking Cloud I think maybe 2 Paragon Protectors managed to pop their god-modes during the entire run. And we had a high level Tank who offered to tank-stealth some of the missions (eg find the computer, rescue Councilman Birch) while the rest of us beat up spawns near the door. He even ATT'd us all to Hopkins for the final mission.