Hew

This is a strawman and misdirection. What makes things more difficult is explicitly bounded by the constraints of powersets. Some powersets excel so much at what they do, pretty much anything you pair with them will be overly successful. Some powersets are so.... middle of the road? NOT middle of the road? that you have to work hard to gain the same ground as using the powersets that excel. That makes things lopsided, because the powersets that tend to excel do so because they were crafted with layered offense/defense/support in mind, or were so berserk off the deep end with their particular strength that sheer muscle will power you through. You have several powersets that are defined by one power, sometimes two, with the rest being relegated to MEH. Those sets are intrinsically powerful. Making the game challenging for those powersets or powerset combos will dramatically skew difficulty/challenge for those bringing more "unique" sets to the table.

I don't really like any of it either. The stuff from late + Going Rogue was palatable. Almost everything else was an endless relentless cavalcade of Be Good. This is not to say I think Be Good isn't OK, but then, a lot of it is Be Good, but not really, because it is really myopic Good, and not nuanced good. There never is some sort of, take someone in, rehab someone, so on so forth. The closest you get is Frostfire joining the good guys, and sortof, flamebait going vigilante? rogue? but def not Villain with a Big V, and that is all NEW content, compared to the many years that came before, where you just send endless streams of people to the hospital via mediports, while not asking yourself, mediport tech is EXPENSIVE, but every single one of these villains i blow up with my assault rifle or fire blast or whatever is absolutely going to be treated after a mediport call and be good as new. To me, thats BS. Redside, people get more interesting "endings", and for all its urks, it at least is a little more realistic than what is pushed old-school blue.

Wait. This is supposed to be BLUE side?!

To be fair, we generally have the game worked out so much that damn near anything works for at +powersets, on a team, with random others, given a set of people functionally capable of working on SOs alone and not set bonus suckers.

The crazy lady thats like hequat or something in the fancy room!

I have named my char Fleadom. 😛 It should be end OK being /wp.

I have actually become fond of this, and like it more than the "meta" zapp/bl, or moonbeam.

Fire/dark/foldspace+cj/elecfences

You can max hasten with +4/+5, instead of 2 +5's. Any saving on boosters is great! I have an observation: Unless this is for theme or just to have that very specific order of powers, I would switch to Plant/Earth. Plant is stupid good, and /Earth comes with seismic SMASH (mudpots?) and some other fun things. It might be stronger, but at least, its faster to manage especially with low level seeds of DOOM.

Everything! I don't end up slotting any sort of set ios until my late 20s, early 30s anyway. I am totally cool with SO only team flea, but availability is tough. Right now my bane/crab/everything is just straight SOs, pretty much 3 dam, 1 end, 1 rech. I have others that are just on 25 generics and will likely never up those, which are pretty much exactly SO values.

The new lowbie content (shining stars equivalent) is actually pretty cool, and your decisions have repercussions, like how I off'd a guy and he was REALLY OFF'd. He was a fire AT of some sort who double crossed me? I kind of regretted that, but not really. You get to use all the people you did right by in the last mission of a multi-contact multi-arc arc.

There are two places you do. One is new, I don't know about the other. The Marchand equivalent has you assemble a full team of lacky minions based on your actions in missions, Some come, some die or don't talk to you or stuff. The other has you assemble a full team of lacky news reporters that spread your deeds far and wide.

Actually it is immensely helpful. You really don't know when you have it up, but when you have it down, you spam like crazy to get the same mileage out of chains as when you have high static count and only have to cast one or two chains.

You get an absorb. You get +recov + +recharge in one power, in a chain, that you can spam and get 50% uptime on value that exceeds many other powers that provide +rech in context. The heal? Really kind of beat. Get in the middle of melee, drop cage, profit. Chains bounce off everyone doing everything, its easy to keep the absorb shield up along with the +recov, FARADAY CAGE MAKES THINGS CHEAPER TO CAST FOR EVERYONE IN THE BUBBLE, you get -recov/-end resist in the cage... There is a million things you get out of the set. Green numbers are _definitely_ not it.

Web things if you can, disintegrate a hard target, lancer shot (100% disintegrate spread) or fast snipe (55% disintegrate spread) the target, tag something else disintegrating with charged shot (39%), nuke or spread, repeat. You ALWAYS start with disintegrate, then you ALWAYS follow up with a high disint chance power on the same target. This causes lots of spread, which then can spread some more when you target other mobs that got splashed. The use of the aoe cone has no chance for disin spread, so really, thats a mopup power, not a primary power. Disintegrate is 100% your primary power, and maximizing the leverage of your 2.5 useful spreaders.

Kinetic melee is definitely a thing people avoid. Psionic melee is kind of like, a stalker thing. The rest there, Titanic Weapons, Beam Rifle have more players than you might think, but it has fewer than they should because they are both driven by mechanics people don't like to mess with. BR for instance can be tweaked to do A LOT of damage _if you order your attack powers in a specific way to maximize disintegrate_. If you don't, its ok, it can be colored very pretty, its got neat guns, but it isn't fire or ice blast.

shock therapy? Do you mean elec affin? Elec affin is amazing. You finding it lack lustre probably has to do with what you expect derived from excessive play of overly effective/strong sets. Amp Up is AMAZING. Faraday Cage is AMAZING. The +end/+rech can be made to have a 50% or better uptime with absolutely enormous self-+rech using just the sentinel. In team play, it is thoroughly amazing; you can tell when an elec affin is on the team, as they tend to act like a little bit of everything + a whole lot of mez prot/+resist + Amp Up. I have seen teams fall apart when an elec affin left, because they fill so many holes so effectively. It is a very layered set where you dont have 1 _function_ that is mondo powerful and then a bunch of less powerfull but still capable functions. It is like the Bio or Rad armor of defensive affinities.

Mods, please move this thread; Thanks! This thread started off as a means to help the OP understand the invention system, and has delved straight into what Blackbird has stated, which is dedicated Blaster build development. Thanks!

Well, valkyrie (the peoples) _definitely_ rode horses, which may have flown-ish, but not with wings. Just regular old horses that are not your normal horses. (just read the wikipedia article on them)

Llama would disagree, as he? first destroys the universe with too much cake, and then too much pie.

SAFEST place to be, in a council base. You KNOW a PI Radio Group will show up ANY MINUTE to rescue you. Redside arachnos or longbow base? LAST safe place to be. NOONE WILL EVER SAVE YOU.

Exactly.

I think there was a misunderstanding there. The tohit from offensive mode + a kismet should be way more than enough tohit, when factoring misc acc bonuses from set bonuses + acc slotting, to totally not need focused accuracy or tactics... Offensive mode is BIG +tohit. I was not advocating tactics over FA. I was advocating against _both_, the edge case of snipes and max-fast-cast damage being the only one I know of.

This. If you have problems with tohit as a bio, you are doing something seriously wrong, since you can easily hit 97?% to hit with kismet, offensive mode, and tactics, with nothing else. Thats a big deal, since it lets you fastcast and max damage on fast cast any snipe you launch.

You dont. You are elec affin, which has the amazing faraday cage. Max out your general resists, because faraday cage provides resist to ALL (pretty sure thats including toxic and psi), and big numbers of that. I have had far better success building elec affin for resist, because I have portable, built in hard-mez protect that I can even drop _when mezed_ because a lucky mez got in while I was in transit. Defense is great and all, but faraday cage is absolutely amazing. Stack it with a resist armor and tough, and profit. I last stacked it with charged armor I think, would have to look. edit: (this is on a troller, which doesnt have as great numbers as a fender)