Urthstorm

Storm is controlled chaos. It is a blast on teams, but solo a lot of it's potential is wasted. For Energy blast, the single target damage is great, but AoE is very lacking. That being said, the best advise I can give is to simply play around with it until you get the feel for it and what it needs. I like storm as a controller secondary, simply so you can control the scatter and stack the controls or fill control gaps. Most of Storm's powers are great at 3 or 4 slots. It does have one of the steeper learning curves though. As a defender, your secondary effects are going to be stronger than any other AT. I personally would not do energy blast if you're going to neuter the secondary effect. I get it, Energy sucks on teams if the user isn't actively using the knockback to get things back to the group's tank. I'd suggest dark, sonic, radiation, or ice for blasts. Those offer secondary effects that will help your debuffing game while giving you more tools to deal with things on your way to the AVs

To the best of my limited knowledge, as long as you meet the minimum level requirements for the set you get the bonuses. The set's top level only sets how powerful the individual IOs can be. For example, Triage has a level range of 10-30 and has 4 enhancements. So you grab the first 2 at level 10, the third one at level 20, and that fourth 1 at level 30. So at level 7 (The soonest you could slot the first 2) you start getting the first set bonus. You'd keep that set bonus all the way up to level 50+. Then with number 3 you'd get that bonus at level 17 (again the soonest you could slot it) and keep it. Finally the fourth one can be slotted at level 27 and of course keep it as long as you're above level 27. Now say you decide that those 2 at level 10 really aren't strong enough to be worth it. You can use a special salvage from the merit vendor to change them into attuned IOs. (Or just plunk the money down on the auction house for the attuned ones) Then as you level up from 7, those first 2 will get stronger as well, but will stop growing in strength at level 30 (the top level of our example set) . If you ever exemplar back to level 7, you'd still keep the set bonus from having the first 2 slotted. (Of course you'd still get the benefits from having the other two slots filled, but since you're too low for the set bonuses number 3 and 4 the game would treat them like regular old enhancement.) Make sense now??

Twinshot does seem the type to stalk and harrass someone for 20 levels lol. Edited to remove some bad comedy.

Heck, one of my fondest memories of the game is no two characters seemed to follow the same storyline. Yes, most got the god awful referral mishes, but that was way before they found better ways of introducing new zones and contacts to us.

Yes I realize that its the game's way of giving you instant contacts, but having Twinshot etc stalk me passed my first time doing their arcs is annoying. Nutshell, Toon 1 does the auto-introduced contact, Toon 2 on the same account shouldn't need to deal with these same contacts and it is annoying having their mugs stare at me for multiple levels while I enjoy other content in the game. For this reason, I suggest the ability to drop a contact or alternatively the ability to mark them as "uninterested" which would throw them into their own tab under contacts. Granted the second choice would probably be the most desirable one of the two as then you could still do them without having to go through ouroboros unless you've out leveled them naturally.