ZemX

Exemplaring is really TOO good, IMO. You end up being way more powerful than someone at that level normally and it's mostly because of the way set bonuses can still be effective even if the power they are slotted in is disabled by exemplaring. Even without that, you would still have the advantage of fully slotted powers and the sets that are in active powers, to say nothing of the five extra levels worth of powers.

I've done this twice, so far. Once after I joined HC and once again doing the "Ironman/Woman Challenge". That second one was a little harder since it also outlawed all P2W but by this point I had self-funding down well enough to be comfortable. My first toon, I think I got to about the late teens before I bothered to read any "how to make money" guides and realized I was sitting on a fortune in merits already just from solo story arcs. The only difference now with having rich(er) alts is that I get some of the nicer procs and things earlier. That's about it. Once you know how to make money on the market, the game really doesn't have TOs or DOs anymore. You can be in SOs from level 1 to whenever you decide to start on IOs. Even starting from nothing.

I think a lot of people don't realize how big this is. You can get a total of +10 end from two accolade powers. That sounds unimpressive if you don't know that most endurance recovery in this game works as a percentage of max. So you're not just adding 10 extra points of end to your bar. You're adding 10% to most every other power or proc you have that gives you back endurance. Some "drain/transfer" type attacks don't work this way, but most other stuff does. Even Panacea's proc ticks give you a %end rather than an absolute amount. So 10 more end points to max means 10% more end from Panacea, Miraacle, Numina, Stamina, Physical Perfection, Quick Recovery, Ninjitsu's +End clicky, Blaster Sustains, etc. etc. It's well worth what you have to go through to get them. Speaking of Panacea: I think Panacea's proc isn't counted here because it's a periodic chance of +%end rather than a boost to Recovery stat. So you might mentally add about 0.375 end/sec to the number shown here if you have it slotted (and have 100 max end... 0.412/sec if you have both accolades).

Oh... there was a "bit", yes. 😂

Not any options I'd call "good". Have you already three slotted Health with Panacea, Miracle, and Numina? Put one Perf-Shifter proc in Stamina and maybe a Perf Shifter: EndMod alongside it?

I have floating trays that never move. I play in full screen mode. But I have seen them move after switching to windowed mode and back.

To paraphrase The Incredibles... "If everyone leaves early... then no one left early!" 🤪

I wouldn't say it's all that new for a tank to leave early for the next spawn once they feel the current one is under control. It sounds like a particularly good idea if you have any doms/controllers with area immobs to get to the spawn before they do, though. Those folks, in my experience, don't care to wait to glue mobs to the floor no matter how scattered they are. If a tank can get them to bunch up a little before that... so much the better. Easier than trying to talk about it since people get all bent out of shape concerning that sort of thing no matter how politely you try to approach it.

Yeah, I'm sure the point of the "persists through death" pseudo-pet is not really to rez yourself but just to more reliably rez anybody else, even if the caster dies in the middle of using it.

I assume any buff timer based on "in game time" refers only to time spent ON that character. Not on other characters. It shouldn't matter how much time you spend on your other toons doing SG activities.

There is nothing ridiculous about it. The whole idea of putting something like that in the game in the first place is precisely to check strong defense. It's supposed to make you deal with that threat in a different way than simply charging in head first and face-rolling AoEs. There's not enough of this in the game as it is because charging in and face-rolling AoEs is pretty much how 99% of it is played.

Yeah, I didn't realize it could do that either but looking at City of Data, I think I get it. HT is a little weird in that it's foe-targeted but then rezzes in a PBAoE around the caster. So the HT power itself just handles the enemy targeted debuffs. It spawns a pseuo-pet attached to the caster to do the rezzing. That pet is tagged as persisting through death, so you can die immediately after casting and the pet will still do its thing. Because that causes about a 1 to 1.5 second delay, it seems you can die and then be hit by the pet's "Howling" rez a second later. That rez only hits dead allies, but at that moment... that included you. 😀

If nothing else, this is worth running across a few oddities I never knew existed before. I commented about this one in General when it happened: Unlocking Kristof Jaeger in Nerva requires the Villain badge. The Villain badge is given for defeating 1000 Longbow. Surprisingly, when I looked, I had already done 901 Longbow somehow, so I had just 99 more to go. Having completed that, I went to Jaeger. First thing he wants me to do? "You need to prove yourself to me. Go defeat 20 Longbow!" ...

I give up. I can't get 6 across or 1 down.

I'm not sure if that's what's being asked. Admittedly, it's a bit contradictory to say "top tier" and "viability" in the same sentence. One means "the best of the best" and the other means "anything that's good enough to survive" essentially. I can believe you can build anything to survive content in this game, but you're going to have a lot of variation in how safely and/or how quickly they can do it. Plainly, some ATs/combos will be better than others. By a lot. If that's what's really being asked, then people need to take the usual "anything works" response down a notch, because while anything works, not everything works as well.

A contact has to have at least one story arc or I don't bother with them. I can get random filler from the scanner/paper if I want that. However if I do pick up a contact for a story arc, then I tend to finish their side filler too just to clear them off my list right away.

The challenge as originally stated really only disallowed conveniences like P2W or accepting any outside help whether from other players or your own alts. Otherwise, if you earned it on that character yourself, you could spend it yourself. I bought converters with merits at the merit vendor and sold them for quick cash to buy IOs I wanted. As far as AE goes... there is a prohibition on "power-leveling" but that's usually defined as having someone else higher level doing all the work while you just suck up a portion of the rewards and level fast. In that same spirit though, I would avoid any AE arcs that are specifically designed to farm tickets at some optimal rate... but that's just me. Nothing actually in these rules about it. As for the difference between this challenge and your non-challenge characters, it's kind of why I sort of gave this up at around level 21 with my Stalker. I had been comfortably set for SOs and even had money to buy some helpful procs. It didn't feel a whole lot different from normally leveling except for the lack of P2W. I was earning enough merits that it wasn't likely I'd have a problem slotting IO sets at around 30 as I typically do. The only other difference was being more cautious due to the permadeath thing. For the moment, I've decided to try @Snarky's all-redside-arcs thing to see how long I can stick with it. The character is otherwise unrestricted. So far I've done through First Ward and am working on Nerva contacts now. If I do another challenge character soon, it will probably be something more like the Rogue Legacy idea recently posted here. Similar to what you're doing here: No buying from AH. Merit Vendor okay but no buying anything with merits just to sell at auction. So no converters for cash or to make cheap IOs into more expensive ones for sale. Only to use myself or store in the base. The legacy part means on death, the character transfers enhancements to the base for the next iteration of the character to inherit, along with anything else. Add to that a forced difficulty bump of either +1 or x2 (player choice each time) at levels 15, 25, 35, and 45. I like the idea that it's not exactly permadeath but not "death is meaningless" either. You still have to start over but you theoretically start over each time wealthier and eventually are pretty well off for enhancements and such. But you put a lot of time in for that too.

Unless this is going to be a dedicated 50-only build, I would just slot the attuned set. It's not worth losing those set bonuses if you ever plan to exemplar below 47 just to have a really tiny extra chance of proc at level 50. Also remember that Agility and Spiritual alpha incarnate abilities affect proc chance as well. They count as recharge enhancement in the power and not global recharge bonus.

Yeah, that was a raid leader breaking their own rules. Not cool. If they opened up invites in LFG they should have honored that. They don't own the zone in any case. If they wanted more control over the invites, they should have done it instanced. Or at least gotten all their friends invited first before inviting the public.

This is where I'm at too most of the time. I find the endgame stale due to power creep. 50+4 teams are often just a rolling mass of explosions that eats everything in its path with overbearing visual and sound effects. Some people find that fun. It give me a headache. But so does the 1-20 game. Around level 25-30 things get better. IO sets are more worth slotting but not yet overpowering. If you exemplar to 30 you have access to every primary power and all but your T9 secondary. You have pools and maybe one power from an epic/patron if you took it at 35. But no Incarnates. It's just plain more interesting not to have all the highest level powers and soft-cap-finishing abilities that render the endgame so bland for me. I'll visit the endgame from time to time, but I live exemplared somewhere in the mid-levels whenever I can. The game for me is more about joining random pick-up teams and seeing what can make them tick. Each one can be different. Again, in the mid-levels where it maybe still matters what AT and powersets you have on the team. It's either that or trying to find interesting solo challenges to occupy me.

There are two sides to every story and in my experience there are both people who overreact to knockback AND knockback-users who accept precisely zero criticism, however constructive or politely phrased, that falls short of them using knockback whenever and however they want on a team. A team is ideally more than just eight people soloing near each other, each doing whatever they want with no regard for how it affects the rest of the team. It's a game and we should all be doing what we find fun, but if you join a team, consider that what you find fun could be affecting someone else's fun. That doesn't mean you have to stop. But it should mean you are willing to consider a compromise. If that's how you approach it already, then you're doing nothing wrong in my opinion.

No, here's the standard: "If you ran into one jerk today, you ran into a jerk. If everyone you ran into today was a jerk... you're the jerk." Sixteen or more people had no problem joining this league and one person was a jerk about it. That's all that happened. You are right though... it's best to not let them upset you. Because you're occasionally going to run into them no matter how well you think you're conducting yourself. And that's because you aren't the problem. They are. If you are the problem, as noted above... everyone will let you know about it.

I was just as surprised when I joined back in March to find that nobody on Everlasting had taken Annie Matter the name of an old Rad/Rad Corruptor I had on Virtue. It's such an obvious pun. I have several variants of this toon with different AT/powers and also scored Annie Proton and Annie Social for them. Weird.

Yeah, this fight changes a lot based on who you are (and thus who the clones are) and how much you've put into your build by that point. In my case, this Staff/Nin stalker was showered with enough inf from rich alts to have all attacks fully slotted with IO sets, including both ATO sets. I think the clones are not a copy of your build but just NPCs generated to use powers from the same powersets so they don't have these advantages. Between that and soft-capping with a couple purple insps, they didn't really stand much of a chance even against just me alone. I'm sure 8 blasters is no picnic in that level range. Imagine facing eight storm defenders or something like that? 🤪

Guarded Spin is pretty nice too as a 9ft, 90deg cone. It makes this a pretty balanced set for Stalkers with better AoE than most other Stalker sets and better ST than Staff Scrappers get. Shame about the stances, but you quickly forget about that once you have slotted the ATOs and Build Up is recharging so often (thanks to those AoEs) it's actually slowing down your attack chain. 🤪 Would kill for some No Redraw though definitely. And there's an animation bug with Assassin Strike if you use it from Hide without the weapon already drawn. But it's not a huge problem.