Scientist

My favorite is Rad/Rad, though part of that is that it was my main from very early in Live. With the new powersets available I'd definitely consider /Water or /DP for the secondary. My rationale for Radiation primary is that it has arguably the broadest range of support powers even at low levels, it is well known so people like to have them on teams, and I do probably 6 Positron TFs for every ITF. Due to my play times, I have only had a chance to do one 2* boosted ITF since they released that, and I've done a couple of unboosted Aeons, ever. My friends all tend to start alts and retire them soon after reaching 50. . . I like Time, and Cold, and Kin, and Storm, but they don't get some of their really great powers until the late 20s and 30s, unfortunately. Some of them are more dependent on team cooperation too, nothing like playing a Kin and the only person who ever comes into melee for Fulcrum Shift is the tank, sigh.

Doomrider did post in the third reply to your OP that a Squid form gets 5 powers, ever, all attacks. Four are "Squid Specific", you only see them in Squid form, the fifth is the second human form blast which also (unlike originally on Live) carries over to Squid form on Homecoming. Three of these five are ST blasts, the fourth is a cone, and the fifth is a ball like Fireball, though with slower recharge. This would be kind of limiting to play to 50, I think.

I just tried running that mission (among some of the other solo ones at 50), and got all of the Power Limit badges except "no travel powers", which I could not manage to get awarded, but did not get any of the checkbox badges below (enemies buffed, you debuffed, etc.) despite checking those off. I tried again a couple hours later, same thing. I also did not get them from the Antimatter solo mission. Any suggestions for what will award the remaining ones?

I was curious about the various Praetorian badges for changing sides, are those mission holder only, and can you even do them through Oroborous since they are sort of "transition" missions between arcs?

Just a warning, compared to tankers and scrappers, different defender primaries play VERY differently in practice. Playing a Rad defender versus a Kin defender versus a Traps defender is more like changing from a tanker to a blaster, IMHO, very different play styles. You may find you need to have a lot of alts to really check this out, I've got 2 tanks, 1 stalker, 0 scrappers, and 4 defenders, with another 9 chars which use the defender powers as secondaries. I hope you have enough character slots left. . . 🙂

I have been on at least one Posi 1 TF which ultimately failed where if I had had enough team insps, we could probably have succeeded. There were only two chars above level 20 on the TF, and the leader had never run a TF before so had it on +2, and we couldn't beat ourselves. There are often very few team insps on the market, and I didn't think of it in time. I now have some stashed.

Thanks for the info! It is a kind of long arc to repeat in Oro, since there are a lot of defeat alls, so I was hoping to get it while leveling rather than have to repeat it. Sounds like there may at least be one level of grace period, on my character who missed out on it I may well have leveled to 26 and trained, I don't remember at this point.

I thought someone here might know the answer to this question. Stephanie Peebles is listed as a 20-24 contact. I was able to start her Wedding Ring arc recently on a character who had leveled to 25, but not trained from 24. I have previously found that if you start her arc then out level it, she will let you finish the arc, but NOT award the Wedding Ring temp power. So I'm wondering if I can pause XPs on my current character and finish the arc and get the Ring power, or if I've already lost out, like on my previous character, and may as well keep earning XPs because all I'll get is the arc credit, not the temp power. Does anyone know whether award of the Ring temp power is based on trained level, or actual character level?

What makes a Crab great is having a full AoE damage chain that ALSO has AoE resistance debuffs. That means even things like Incarnate AoEs will do more damage. If you are fighting white con, bring a fire blaster. If you are fighting large numbers of tough foes, having a "blaster" who can't be mezzed and has good built in resistances and defenses lets you survive fighting things that might drop the blaster. The blaster will do more damage in the first 5 seconds of the fight, the Crab lets the team do more damage in a 20 or 30 second fight because of the AoE resistance debuffs, which stack if you take Mako for another debuff, and just having a ruthless chain of AoEs to fire off.

Correct, I actually used that for stealth on my first villain character, because you couldn't get a Runspeed stealth IO for love or money redside before the markets got merged, and you could, occasionally, buy the TP stealth IO. Two minutes of stealth, re-teleport to reapply to stealth a mission. SOOO fun. . .

Sounds like you beat her after a respec, but yes, Calystix is a beast. I'd been rolling through content on my Bots/Traps till I got to her too. One key I found on her and some other hard hitting mobs was to hit "stay" on my pets as I ran in, and run past her so she would be facing me, not them, for the cones. Then I had to keep the aggro of her and her adds. Make sure the pets are close enough to provide bodyguard damage reduction for you, and fortunately bots are ranged so they will still contribute full damage parked back 10' or so. This is a classic tanking strategy, of course, face the really nasty mobs away from your pets, um, teammates. . . 🙂

I tend to have only a couple of characters I am leveling at any one time, so that I can focus on doing IO sets on the way up, which powers I like enough to keep in a final respec, and so on. When I get to 50 I keep going to unlock all their incarnate powers and get at least a T3 in each of them. During that time, though, if there is a need on a team for one of my existing 50s, I am happy to use them and rediscover what I liked about them. The leveling is a mix of soloing and teaming, no AE, that is boring, but sometimes a PI team, which is practically powerleveling. I've level locked a couple of characters in Praetoria to do "all the side switching", before they got out and resumed normal leveling, so I don't mind doing that. I spend a fair amount of time these days finishing setting up all my 50s (unlocking all the useful accolades, opening all the openable TFs, and so on). I like low level play (some powersets exemp much better than others), and I like high level play. To those that say high level play is too easy, I've yet to see a successful Master's run in a Trial, though I've only been on a couple of attempts due to limited evening play time. To those that say low level play is too boring, its not as bad when you have full level 50 IO sets, since at least powers are recharging briskly and doing decent damage, and I'm normally doing low level play to help out a team, which makes it much more interesting. My general goal is to have a character that can fill any hole any team is struggling with at any level, which is why I want them twinked out with everything unlocked. I now have that, with 15 level 50s, so any new alt will be ones my friends talked me into because they have all KINDS of concepts floating around in their heads, darn them. 🙂

A key is that if you DON'T debuff AVs, it can be pretty hard to take them down with one characters damage, and I've seen a team of 3 or 4 almost stall out on them if they aren't pretty well maximized for damage output or carry temp powers like Envenomed Dagger. Whereas a scrapper, brute, or tank plus single debuffing defender, like radiation or cold, can very comfortably take down an AV. A well built debuffer can do it solo, and probably faster than a solo melee, but you need pretty good defenses.

I figured teaming will be needed for a lot of the trial and some TF badges, and I've noticed whenever I've joined a team that was working on anything badge related my rad/rad defender badger seems to be the only support character. That experience makes me put in a word for a debuffing character to speed up teams with AVs and GMs, and also fortunately a rad defender exemps very well, all your key powers come by level 10 if you build right. I agree with a previous statement that I'd only use a MM if I planned to solo a lot, I like MMs but even I agree they are a pain to speed run a lot of missions (run to end, summon and buff pets, defeat boss or room, dismiss, next mission, run to end, summon pets, buff, etc.). I also don't love running them on larger teams, even I get problems figuring out what is going on. Great for soloing normal missions if you aren't in a hurry, get interrupted often, and/or want to be able to solo EBs and maybe AVs.

The place I've used them is in Swift, the Stamina inherent, because then it boosts both your Run and your Fly speed. Swift doesn't take sets. This is only for characters who have Hover or Fly, though, who can benefit by it, otherwise a Run Speed common IO is fine. Its a small benefit, but for the true min-maxer/ebil marketeer, why not?

What will make this tricky is that some "board transit" missions are different than others. During the Market Crash TF, for example, there is a board transit mission that won't offer an option to enter from the Oro portal in Oroborous, which will work for other "board transit" missions. You actually have to get to a tram somewhere.

I definitely start putting sets on characters by 20-25 range, and what makes it even more economical is that some sets like Positron's Blast and Decimation that work on a lot of characters but are likely to get swapped out in an end game build can go in the base bin to go on another leveling character. I have Posi Blast sets that have been on 3-4 characters now. Kinetic Combat is another example if you run a lot of melee, good Smash/lethal defense with 4 slots, handy at low levels when you don't have many slots. One other note on the Stupefy set, which got dissed a bit above, it is one of the rare sets that has both a very decent recharge bonus (6.25%) AND ranged defense (3.75% I think) in the same set. Most other sets only do one or the other. My main complaint with it is that getting the defense requires slotting a knockback proc, and I'm not a fan of unreliable knockback.

Can you get another Summon Amy power if you use up the first 5 charges by running the Katie TF again? I never dared to use all mine up to find out. I actually think the Shivan Shard mission is easier solo or duo, on a larger team each teammate has to wait for the meteors to recharge before they can siphon them. You do want stealth to fly over the meteors and siphon them without being seen by the spawned Shivans (with enough stealth, sometimes they don't even spawn), and if your damage is low, take the turrets down to low hit points and finish them all at once. They don't regenerate.

Do either Combat Teleport or Fold Space take any sets other than the travel ones, out of curiosity? And does Fold Space take recharge? Seems like that would be another handy one for a Stone tank, move the mobs to you, but only using it every 2 minutes is kind of slow.

What are the coordinates of the Atlas, Khallisti and Destroyed Galaxy buildings?

Have only done the villain arc so far, but I'd agree it was lots of fun on a team. There is really a lot of nuance (and humor) in both the dialogue from talking to NPCs, which teammates don't get to read, and even conversations between them you have to have NPC chat on to see, though, so I suggest doing it solo at least once to see all that. On someone sturdy, some of those fights are no joke. . .

Is there any particular reason to choose Resistance or Loyalist as your last choice on exiting Praetoria, for later purposes? Underground base access, dialogue in the Mr. G arc, etc.? Or does it pretty much wipe all that away when you pick Hero or Villain, and reassign it if you do Oro?

If you start a Strike Force underleveled, then level up during it, it still locks you down at the lower level, even if you log off and back on the next day, swap leaders, etc. Found this duoing Mistral with a friend, man I wish we'd gotten Shivans before fighting that +3 ArchMage Archus with +3 Succubi at the end who should have only been +2. . .

As a note, while heals may not break stealth, and back on Retail a dev confirmed that while healing could cause aggro in the game engine but they never set in a factor for that, spawns do have a "group AI" that will cause some of them to target anyone on a team, whether or not they are stealthed. Mob aggro is independent of stealth (just ask stalkers re: ambushes). In addition to individual mob aggro generated from attacking them, there is spawn aggro where some can come after you even if you have never targeted any enemy or come in view of any of them. I've got a friend who mained an Emp, so he saw that a lot.

The other point I've seen made about the VEATs in particular is that you only need one of each, since you can do multiple builds with them and cover literally every power and role that way. For a Defender, or a Blaster, or a Tank, you may want half a dozen of each, because the powersets play so differently and there are so many powerset choices.