Heraclea

It is a premier set for tankers and defense based melee characters generally. The lack of AoE is not terrible; there are two PBAoE attacks in the set, but both do benefit from a lot of recharge. And of course, in the endgame this becomes much less relevant once the Judgment slot opens up. It is especially good for tankers because the consistent -tohit on the attacks is the equivalent of adding defense against the mobs hit by them. One of the attacks is also a self-heal, a pretty good one with accurate heal slotting. You also get reliable single mob control in Touch of Fear. These advantages more than make up for the slow AoEs in my opinion. I think that for tankers it pairs up best with defense based armors like Reflexes or Shields. With Shields you of course get an AoE attack in the primary, available earlier than brutes or scrappers can get it. It also works well with mixed sets like Invulnerability and Willpower.

I make conlangs. This also explains why some of my characters do their banter in Nahuatl.

Really needs to be a badge for 'arresting' these as well. Whenever I have a bit of spare time and find myself in FF or PI, I always got looking for them and get rid of as many as I can.

Winged Victory from Amazon Army, Torchbearer. One of the golden gryphons, wall mounted, with small rustic countertops used to conceal undesired parts of the gryphon body. Detail of Winged Victory, side view. Flame is a Torch Flame surface mounted to the staff. Additional desks are hidden by SG floor logo. These things happen.....

FH can serve as a mule for the Numina, Miracle, and Panacea uniques, which takes some of the sting out of lacking QR. I find Willpower somewhat lacking as a tanker set, due to the weaker taunt in its aura. I understand that tanker Reflexes has the same issue. For a stalker this isn't a problem.

I do know that it takes anti-interrupt enhancements, which suggests that it can. The bigger problem for me was that it didn't do much more than the heal from Siphon Life, and was up a lot less, so I found myself just not using it that much.

Tom Petty - Shadow of a Doubt

Bad blood between those two for years. Don't ask.

Once again, we had cleared the Clockwork Lord mission, and Babbage did not appear during a Synapse run on Torchbearer. First time this happened to me, the mission door was in a warehouse directly below the Skyway South train, so we figured he spawned and got droned before anyone saw him. This seems unlikely for the most recent failure to appear. Mission door was approximately 450 yards NW of the Talos exit. No police drones around there anywhere. Still no Babbage. It does get embarrassing when you've announced his imminent arrival in LFG, people have gathered to help, and no monster. Will wait until I see him next time.

Heraclea Furia, consular legate to Paragon City, salutes the Consul of New Colchis, Julia Calusarides. I am writing to update you on the Caelia -- or as she prefers, 'Yamnaya' -- situation. Her religious eccentricities are the least of our problems. If she prefers to call Faunus 'Pauson', or make up novel deities like 'Donavis, Queen of the Freshwater Nymphs' and offer them sacrifices of horse milk and melted butter, these things are indifferent to me. It is her closeness to the Vanguard that causes concern. As I have observed before, the Vanguard is a faction of villains that operate as a paramilitary outfit whose nominal purpose is to combat the Rikti, 'alien invaders' operating out of a crashed ship. They also offer bounties to those who are willing to slay these Rikti. Their methods are underhanded and disreputable; they employ sorcerers who curse their foes with exhaustion. The organization attracts fanatics, it seems. They spend almost as much time fighting breakaway factions as they do fighting these Rikti. The Rikti, by contrast, seem to be an honorable warrior culture with which some accommodation could be made. Yamnaya has been instrumental in bringing one of these Vanguard operatives into the base, where she can eavesdrop on the proceedings of the local assembly. The nominal purpose of this person is to serve as a 'trainer'; apparently all of the other candidates for the position are male. This too is obviously unacceptable, but the Vanguard presence is unnecessary when those who require training can simply apply to Miss Liberty, Swan, or other acceptable choices. Their influence has also affected her fighting methods, which are my gravest concern. We knew of course that she was a spy. Her method is not to defeat enemies openky, but to defeat only those enemies designated specifically as targets. But her tactic now includes appearing in the midst of enemies to exhaust them and render them helpless. Such methods are contrary to the mos maiorum (customs of the ancestors) and seem inherently disreputable. The recruit Catrina Calaveras seems to be of one mind with me about this, despite her own religious eccentricities and fondness for brujeria. There is no dishonor in her vendetta against the Skulls. The other spy, Grandma Gnosis, at least does not use Yamnaya's tactics, even if her own are not much more honorable. Catrina is a positive influence on her; they too share a fondness for established novelties in religion. Given on the sixth day before the Kalends of August, at Paragon City.

Unless it's been changed, Willpower has an aggro aura, but it is noticeably weaker than the ones in older sets like Invuln. If thaat's a concern, yu may want to consider Bio again. You get an aura that does damage.

My TiW scrapper is Willpower. You're going to want all the recovery advantages you can get with TW. Bio and Rad are also worth a look.

Have to agree 100%. Ennis is one of my least favorite writers for just this reason. Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Vertigo are what's wrong with the DC superhero universe, in the books, in the movies, wherever. You get these people who think the brightly colored patriotic heroes who strove to do their utmost to do right were just greasy kid stuff. To make them interesting, you had to make them dark and pervy. Comics informed by this belief system will be the death of the industry.

As an almost wholly irrelevant aside, if you want to name a SG (or a character) in Latin, please check your grammar or have someone who knows the language do it for you. This pays for any foreign language; apparently a lot of pseudo-Japanese gibberish is present in the game. I would be pleased and happy to serve as a Latin proofreader. And Google Translate is always wrong.

Also missing from the discussion are t9s that work on entirely different mechanics like Bio Armor's Parasitic Aura, easily the best t9 in the game right now, which leaches health and endurance from surrounding mobs. Then again you have Fire's Rise of the Phoenix, which blasts mobs if you're dead. Dark Armor gets something similar whose name eludes me. I have never taken Unstoppable on a tanker and never will. Had it for a while on my i23 SS/Invuln brute; respecced away because of non-use. It just isn't useful, especially not in situations when you need to put your defenses into overdrive, like tanking the fully buffed Lord Recluse. It will not last long enough, you are sure to detoggle and die instantly, and the team will quickly wipe. Better just to stock up on purples and have a defender pet. The Willpower crash is somewhat manageable, at least if you are paying attention to the little icon and know when it's about to fall. Its penalty is probably disproportionate to the slight benefit it gives. It is useful as a mule for some of the resistance uniques; Invulnerability has passives for that, so Unstoppable isn't needed for them.

Medicine pool Aid Self is subject to interrupts, which makes it a bit difficult for melees to use. I tried it on Heraclea this time around, and respecced out of it; too difficult to use, and this time she's Dark Melee anyways. At ancillary pool levels, for a scrapper, I'd suggest Caltrops instead. Caltrops at your feet work wonders to take the edge off incoming damage. Also fits in well with the notion of a warrior using medieval technologies.

Energy Melee/Regen brute would be pretty bad. Take the worst attack set in the game, whose only semi-worthwhile powers lock you into five second animations, and pair it with a defense set that basically starts at zero and relies entirely on click powers for survivability. I had a Fire/Energy Melee tanker back in the day, rolled during i2 if I recall rightly. Definitely before power customization, because a chief motivation of the power choices was that they looked good together out of the box. She was stripped of enhancements and exiled to a seldom visited server.

I made my pistols sentinel /radiation because I had never toyed with the set before.

It is a godsend on Water Burst.

My /shield and /reflexes characters all just leave the mezz protection on autofire, although this prevents you from keeping something like Hasten or your buildup on autofire. Once you hit level 17 and can have 3 20 recharge IOs in there you should have enough overlap to get by, although it will pay to keep them upgraded as you are able. You don't want dying SOs here.

Terry Reid - Superlungs my Supergirl

Neil Young - Someone's Gonna Rescue You

If you press f5 again and again with the item selected, it will cycle through a number of potential points of attachment including 'wall' and 'surface'.

I do know that Tech portals require power and control, but that they run fine from Arcane sources. I always use Tech main portals because of the superior legibility of the beacons, but Tech beacons do not work with Arcane portals or vice versa. At least they didn't used to. Have not experimented with the vault, because I hardly ever use it.

FWIW I have updated the background information on New Colchis to mention some of the new characters from Homecoming, and added some pictures from the new base. I have not changed Heraclea's old biography or any of the characters with pages there, however. Those will probably remain as a witness to what once was.