Grouchybeast

That's how it works at the moment. If you're teaming with someone and you both have the same mission, then completing theirs will also complete yours. You just need to keep calling the contact to turn in the mission and pick up the next one, and you'll both progress through the arc in sync. The only exception is for failable missions, like some of the rescues. In that case you'd have to repeat the mission with the second player's mission set as active to complete it. The big issue, as you said, is that for most missions you don't get to see the in-mission dialogue unless you're the mission owner, and it would be brilliant if it was changed so you could. I tend to duo with my SO, so whoever has the mission just reads the text aloud, but that's not really a convenient general solution :-)

I exemp a lot, mostly for TFs. I always slot Attuned IOs, and when I do my tidy-up respec at 50 I make sure I do things like take travel powers at a low enough level, and have enough attacks for a Posi. That said, carefully minmaxing powers and IOs for low level isn't really such a big deal. Full teams tend to have such huge buff numbers flying around anyway. Whether my blaster's IOs are contributing the maximum possible +Def is pretty immaterial when I already have 75% Def from the rest of the team.

I'm not sure if you've looked into the Auction House mechanics at all, but one of the brilliant things about CoX is that the AH is very easy to use, and takes very little time. If works on a blind bid system, so there's no need to sit in there and wait for bargains to pop up. You just place your bids and walk away, and check back later. So if you place some reasonable lowball bids for some Common IOs before you log off, they will very probably have filled when you log in the next day. Then you can just slot and go. It's not only a lot cheaper than crafting, it's probably faster. While the AH takes a fee to list an item for sale, it's free to place and cancel bids. So if some of your bids don't fill, you can simple cancel them and rebid a little bit higher, and it will have cost you nothing. Until you get the hang of which drops are likely to valuable, it's always worth dropping a set recipe into the AH and checking the price, just in case. Some of them can be worth millions without even bothering to craft them, and recipes with that sort of value can start dropping at level 10. You can access the AH from anywhere in the game that isn't an instanced map or a PVP zone, by using the /ah command. So no access inside missions, but any non-PVP zone. So it's very easy to quickly throw your drops in the AH between missions and see if you got something good. There are lots of excellent guides for how to use the AH efficiently, which other people have already linked. But even the most basic interactions with it can make and save you a LOT of inf.

I don't have enough experience to have a detailed opinion on Water or Rad (my main opinion: Water is a fantastic powerset to recolour) but one thing you might want to add to your post is how you feel about enhancements. If you're happy to spend a large pile of Inf on IOs, whether you'd rather just play with SOs/Common IOs, that sort of thing. You're going to get very different play experiences from the same character depending on its build. Corruptors and Defenders generally make for good duos, because you can pick sets that will really complement your partner's. I duoed an Ice/Ice Corr with a Fire/Fire Brute, and it was a ton of fun. Blasters are enormous fun, though. I've always had Blaster mains and loved then, and the I24 Blaster upgrade made them even MORE fun. Oh -- if you want to stick to range, Water is basically all ranged powers, while Rad has some PBAoE, including the nuke. It would be a shame not to take full advantage of the glory that is crashless nukes on your Blaster.

Sometimes those turn out to be the same thing, though.

Fun fact: At least 50% of forum posts opposing AE nerfs are actually written by members of the Council working at bases on Peregrine Island.

I'm normally a big proponent of 'play how you want to play', but that is certainly A Choice.

Cannolis are really delicious, if they're well-made, fresh ones. But you can buy things that are called cannolis, but are actually a highly-engineered, long-life product that has a shelf-life of months. Cannoli filling is supposed to be made with sweetened, flavoured ricotta cheese, and no fresh dairy filling is going to last for months at room temperature. If you know what a cannoli is supposed to taste like, they're crushingly disappointing.

Are you using XP boosters from the P2W vendor? Because it really sounds like you're using XP boosters if you're getting into the 20s with that little inf. ETA: You should have some free respecs on your higher level characters that you can use to change your tank into a more effective build. In fact, if you're still skeptical about the need for a tank to take their attacks, you can use you second build on any character over level ten to test it out. This feels like a trick question... This is a game where blasters can soft-cap themselves on defense, and can solo spawns meant for full teams. People solo Task Forces on support characters. It's very much not 'any MMO'.

If you head over to this General Discussion thread, @Yomo Kimyata will set you up with 20 million :-)

I was skim-reading the thread, and until I got to the last sentence I thought you were talking about spouses.

Ooh, perfect timing! I was thinking about levelling up a villain, and this looks awesome :-)

Although you do need to run around Dark Astoria a couple of times with no travel powers, which is certainly exciting.

I'm sorry. I can only suggest you make less delicious friends. 🐙🔪🍲🍴👌

...they had it coming! They had it coming all along! I didn't do it, but if I'd done it How could you tell me that I was wrong?

Shotgun-Axe Powerset CONFIRMED!!!

So long as you've started a story arc (one of the ones that shows up in your mission list with a book next to it) then you'll always be able to complete the arc, no matter how high your level.

My spare inf is parked on a level 1 Mastermind who I made for a costume competition and then abandoned in Kallisti Wharf.

Does anything show up in the combat log when this happens?

@Gremlin did an experiment on pack-opening profits with some stats on inf per minute spent earlier in the year. Bear in mind that was before the recent market deflation.

So what happened in the end? I'm on tenterhooks, here!

'Just' doing that would require rebalancing all the enemy groups which don't already span the required levels. I'm not sure it's a given that it would be less work than other potential solutions.

This is a larger issue, I think. At the moment the editor is such a mess that you very often won't even get to use the theoretical maximum number of characters.

Pretty much all the story arcs are already in Ouro. Most were added on live, and I think a few more have been added since by packaging up collections of stories from contacts who didn't have real arcs. I think there might be a small number of missions still not in Ouro, mostly the 'go talk to the security officer for [x]' missions, or other single non-badge missions from the older contacts.

I guess that's Grammar Rock, USA, since spelt is a perfectly acceptable past tense of spell in British English. 😉