A.I.D.A.

Oh, that's a neat rune! What temporary power is that?

Nice, thank you!

Are those badge numbers for /settitle listed anywhere like on the wiki?

Or you could just use them attuned. I make my builds with all attuned set IOs, and only boost the few basic crafted ones like the recharges in Hasten. Attuned still gets you to red ED in the power aspects that matter, and they retain more benefit while exemplaring than boosted 55's do.

Would be nice not to have to, but for the record, you can type: /e idle2 to play the idle animation manually. Unsure if it would default back to combat stance after moving, though -- I haven't played Shield Defense in ages.

Swashbuckling Assault. Sword in one hand, pistol in other. Sword models can (and should) include the Carnival Harlequin energy rapiers.

Don't slot anything but the five prestige enhancements 'til 22, then get crafted Lv. 25 IOs. Those will last you 'til 50 easily. And before 22, you really, really don't need them.

Sounds neat and simple to implement. +1

All-kicks option would be great, especially for pairing with a set like dual pistol.

More cosmetic options is always good. Even (and perhaps especially) when that option is hiding a model you don't want. The claws animations are perfectly fine re: unarmed combat. And, like the OP showed, there are plenty of gloves models which would make a great stand-in for weapons. I see no downsides to the OP, only upsides.

Yes pls, more idle stance options!

Are new players incapable of reading tooltips and parsing them? Because it should only require basic reading comprehension to understand what "Dual-Origin (Magic, Mutation) ~ increases a power's Damage by X%" means.

Oh, another tip I just thought of: don't use the XP rate boosters from P2W. They are a trap from the point of view of a character gearing itself over the leveling process, without an external source of influence. They make you level faster (doing less arcs, and thus getting less merits, over the climb to 50), and also reduce the influence you get from enemy drops accordingly. The XP rate boosters are for people who are fire-farming their 600th character and buying them a build.

Working at less and less than their schedule each time you ding, yes. That's technically true, but not very valuable. SOs three levels below you are basically TO's. And those are barely better than empty slots. XD

Other tip: save influence by crafting your Lv. 25 IO's. Save all the white and yellow salvage you find while you're out doing arcs, because that's what you use (alongside a small fee of influence at the crafting bench) to make the Lv. 25 IOs that people sell for a profit on the auction. If you craft them yourself, the fee is far, far lower than the marketeers charge for them at Lv. 25.

Don't buy anything that isn't at least a basic IO. Use what you loot (along with the five prestige enhancements from P2W) until Lv. 22, when you can slot Lv. 25 IOs -- that is the level at which they're equal to at-level SO's, except you will never out-level your IOs. Use the Reward Merits you get from doing arcs and task forces to buy salable salvage (enhancement boosters/converters, etc), from the Merit Vendors. Stack up that influence and save it until you know what kinds of IO Sets you want to build. I'm assuming that since you're new to the server, you won't pre-build in Mids (the character planner software) and won't know what you want until you're 50 and have had a chance to play around a bit with your character's powers. But basically, don't ever buy an SO. That's influence wasted in three levels when it greys out and becomes inactive.

That's how character Section IDs worked in Phantasy Star Online -- little coloured symbols with names like 'Bluefull,' 'Redria' and 'Purplenum.' If you ever played that, that might be what you're thinking of? That was actually a pretty neat system, it represented which section of the ship your character lived on, and affected things like loot tables, so some rare weapons would only drop for some Section IDs.

Powercust. Then the boring practicality chuds can have their silly single pistol cop stance, and the fun people can do equilibrium gun-kata and have fun with the game. Another idea: 1.) Dual Wield 2.) Suppressive Fire 3.) Tough 4.) Weave 5.) Empty Clips Clarifications: Normal pool, rather than ancillary. Mutually exclusive with Fighting, cannot learn powers from one if you have a power from the other. Attacks in this pool synergize with each other if you learn all three, and have comparable damage and effects to Boxing, Kick, and Cross Punch.

Yep, Sorcery got a massive buff lately. And it provides an elemental power to contribute to the "fire/ice/lighting" perception that wizards have had since Final Fantasy did it that way. Electric/Cold blaster with Sorcery (enflame) and the Fire ancillary, does all three of those elements in respectable quantities, and gets to cast Magic Missile at the darkness. The only thing that's really missing is the ability to use a staff visual with your elemental blast sets. It's a shame the Blackwand and Nemesis Staff get sheathed when you activate primary powers.

People take Sorcery for a lot of reasons. • Arcane Bolt is good damage when its proc is up. I find it consistently outdamages my epic pool's blast (though not the snipe), and it's available as a ranged attack as early as level 4. • Rune of Protection is a great oh-shit button (or just something to press before harder pulls), even after its recharge nerf. Especially for otherwise defense-heavy characters with little resistances elsewhere, like my many scrappers and stalkers. And it shines so much with /Regen that I might have to rebuild mine to include it. • Spirit Ward is apparently okay for a bit of support if you team a lot more than you solo, though I've had little reason to take it as someone who solos a lot, and plays archetypes with bad support scalars. This one might be truly skippable unless you're playing a defender/controller/corruptor and your chosen support set doesn't have an absorb shield in it. • Enflame is apparently pretty great AoE? I've heard good things about it but never taken it myself, so, can't confirm. Mystic Flight/Translocation is just the cherry on top of that pool, in that it combines travel with other really useful things into only one of your four pool selections, especially if you are already playing a defense set and have no need for Hover as an LotG mule.

Interesting. Probably a poor design choice on the part of Cryptic back in the day. Imagine being demoralized enough to flee a fight with 90% of your HP left, because you took 1 damage, 20 times. Not to mention dual-typed powers probably also count as two 'ticks' in that framework. I think it's important that enemies start to run away when things turn against them -- it's that tiny little extra bit of immersion preserved, rather than the lone gangster fighting to the end while surrounded by his dead buddies. That being said, it would be even more immersive if fleeing enemies would either flee toward a mission exit, and despawn if they reach it, essentially having escaped / fled the scene, or toward other groups of enemies (possibly also sharing their threat table with those enemies and causing agro). In any case, my general experience with runners has been that if one does manage to get away, they do eventually come back later while I'm fighting a different mob group.

I'm fairly certain they start to run at a certain HP%, and it has nothing to do with number of damage instances taken.

War Wolves have a different flee code than everything else. Sometime during Live, they were made to flee almost immediately after taking damage, to make it harder for people to grind them for Atlas Medallion. I've noticed the Vampyri tend to have that code too, presumably for the same reason.

Runners are not a problem. Just jumpcast at them, or take an epic snipe like Zapp or Moonbeam or something. Maybe hit your Fold Space if you have it, and follow it up with an AoE. If it's really that big of an issue for you, take an AoE immobilize from an ancillary. Taunt auras are absolutely not necessary for corralling or picking off runners.

Follow Up is explicitly better than Build Up -- it stacks higher, you'll only lose it if you forget to press the button on-recharge, and it's on all the time. It's a flat upgrade to melee sets that have it. It ramps-up to a constant 90+% damage buff at three stacks, as opposed to Build Up being instantly 80% but then having a downtime while it recharges. That being said, Blasters specifically probably should never have a Follow Up. They're already one of the strongest archetypes, and I don't think a Blaster, specifically, would even want the ramp-up instead of the downtime, because then it's no longer something they can hit for a big buff before they nuke a spawn.