Heraclea

Note that some of the ancillary pools listed in Pines are available only to characters that have done a walk on the redside and unlocked the villain patrons by doing one of their arcs.

I would also point out that the Performance Shifter proc is not a unique. If you have another passive power like Quick Recovery, another IO can go there also. That's usually worth an extra slot to add it. The best use for Health is to add the Miracle, Numina's, and other +recovery passives, as many as your character needs to get by. Health does very little to actually keep you alive.

For Alpha, I chose Spiritual, to have the nuke and other big AoEs up as often as possible, and to get closer to perma-hasten. For Interface, I went Gravitic. I already Frankenslot Pacing of the Turtle into all of the Water AoEs for that -recharge proc, and also with Ninja Caltrops. Gravitic adds to the effect. For Judgment, I went Ion; it seems to be a popular choice. Lore is character concept's choice; I went with Carnies because why not? Destiny, I chose Ageless for still more recharge. Planning on taking Assault for Hybrid because more DPS is always good.

I would say that the main thing Sentinels have going for them that Blasters don't is solid mezz protection. Some of the sets have knockback or immobilize holes that are easily fixed with set IOs or Combat Jumping. I find characters that are subject to a lot of forced AFKs unpleasant to play.

Back in i1 I decided that all of my tankers would be women, because the female Taunt animation was better than the male, which sounded like the cry of a dying giraffe. Not a fan of the current Shield taunt, but the Katana taunt makes up for it.

A lot depends on what you mean by 'canon based'. All three of my currently live missions make reference to canon. But they're still mine, so don't expect a reverent treatment. "The Great American Skull Fry", which is lowbie oriented and fairly difficult at its under-10 level, gives you Flower Knight, Statesman, and Marrowsnap. It also introduced 'Skulls Girlfriends' in anticipation of i25. Azuria's incompetence supplies a plot point. But it's basically the mission I created around the forum meme 'Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.' "Spread My Legions" is all about Romulus Augustus and his plan to conquer the past, present, and future. The mobs are customized groupings of standard game mobs, mostly, with a few customs sprinkled in. "Lawyers of Ghastly Horror" also makes reference to fairly obscure in game canon. The opening mission has you rescuing CoT from lawyers, and lawyers from CoTs: a familiar trope. This sets up a plot involving a scheme that threatens to tear apart the boundaries of space time. The band 'Firemullet' (canon, but in the days of DfB it probably comes from a mission that few people see any more) has been kidnapped by ancient Romans. You must defeat Chris Jenkins and ultimately go on to banish Lughebu, M'teru, Rambetu (canon) and Buugaluu (all mine) back to whence they came. One of these (probably Lawyers or Legions) will be pulled shortly as soon as I prepare my Catrina Calaveras origin story in a fit to publish shape. That will be a non-canon story involving Aztec artifacts, Councilman Birch's Militia, the Banished Pantheon, and Roman amazons. So 'canon related' depends a whole lot on what your canon is and how respectfully you want it treated. Now there's a lot of in game canon that I don't know myself: very little of the goldside story line, or the deaths of Statesman and Sister Psyche, sticks in memory for me. And making fun of Statesman is still too entertaining to me to really accept that he is gone.

I rolled an ill/rad controller like I was supposed to, I guess. The character is stuck at, I think, 42; she still has grossly inadequate mezz protection for soloing, and is both fiddly and fiercely boring on teams, and gets harassed for buffs from the brute who ran well ahead of everyone else. The only worse experience in the game is being 'the kin'. If I ever do get her to 50 I'm sure she'll be popular because she's 'the rad' and get invited to the exclusion of my tankers, sentinel, or blaster. I would run her like my fire/regen scrapper in the service of the characters I want to play: but once you start talking incarnate content, most routes to play for the benefit of other characters are cut off.

I usually take Caltrops if nothing else from the epic pool powers. It adds an extra get-out-of-trouble button: I have a target_name self macro that puts the caltrops at your feet. Especially as /Bio, you'll want the ability to persuade excessively friendly mobs to go stand somewhere else. Caltrops gets it done in one.

One recommendation I would make is to slot Quills as first priority, the cones second, and all of the single target attacks that will take it last, with Pacing of the Turtle Chance for Recharge Slow.

Fire can definitely be built to be tough enough. It also has holes like knockback protection that are easy to plug. You depend to a great extent on your self-heal, which makes -recharge a killer, but is the broadest possible spectrum of incoming damage protection. Fire also has primary powers that distract mobs and make them run away, one reason why fire/spines is a popular combination: slows keep 'em in the patch. Just steer clear of attack sets with excessive artificial lag like Energy Melee.

This is, of course, a good point. Then again, defense debuffs are not the only debuffs that are overabundant in the 35+ game. My regen scrapper is my Citadel, Synapse, and Trad Sister Psyche farmer. Trying to make her fun to play while running ITFs or incarnate content would require expenses that ain't cost-effective. She buys the recipes my mains need. She will eventually make it to 50, but now that she's 36 she can run all the content she's made for. I've considered turning off her XPs to make her farm inf as well, now that the value of inf has an effective floor. I still think that the long range trend at the AH is inflationary and that inf will be a poorer store of value than merits. The defense also reduces the incidence of other crap like -recharge, which also tends to kill regen and resistance based scrappers, since most of them are relying on self heals and other click powers. This also hurts Shield and Reflexes characters (and maybe Ninjutsu, which looks to me like renamed Reflexes) before they achieve the softcap and then some, since their mezz defense is a click power, pointlessly so since most players just set it to autofire. It's just an inconvenience for players of those sets. If you enjoy New Faultline, you likely want to run the Lost missions on a different character with a regular mezz resist toggle. By level 50 you probably have enough overlap, fortunately. Why this wretched excess of debuffs exists to penalize certain content choices is something of a mystery to me. Your best defense, as usual, is to do something else, a discretion I exercise on just about all of my melees. If you chose to run it, it's solo only; teaming just makes it worse.

I would add that adding a bit of defense benefits a resist set a lot more than adding a bit of resist does to a defense set. Just adding Weave to a resistance scrapper gets you to just under 4% defense, which translates to around 8% mitigation of incoming damage from baseline. This is significant, and easily justifies its high endurance cost. Adding an equivalent percentage of resistance to a scrapper with only defense, of course, mitigates damage by exactly that: 4%. This is hardly undesirable, but you may well question whether it is worthwhile. Tough, for a similar endurance cost, puts you to just over 11% resistance, which may look like the better deal: but that's only smashing and lethal, while Weave protects across the board. And Tough does nothing to protect you against the various debuffs that are attached to incoming attacks, while Weave prevents at least a few of those from landing. Now, if you are starting from a baseline of, say, 20% resistance to smashing/lethal, then Tough adds significantly to that. Resistance has a multiplier effect; the more you have, the more adding another 11% will do for you. But if you start from zero, that .33 end/sec does more harm than your 11% from baseline resistance does more.

Amazon Army new entrance. Latin reads 'The Assembly and People of the Amazons.' Image is usually called 'Minerva Victrix', representing Minerva as chief deity of the Capitoline Trinity on New Colchis (Juno and Proserpina are the other two), identified with the deified Julia Victrix, founder and culture hero of New Colchis. Newest secret room: sewers and catacombs. Not the world's most original, but when you're Romans it's what you do. Damn it. We need to call an exterminator.

Said it before: all of the Mini bases on Torchbearer are worth a look. There are at least four SGs.

What I would really like is taller female characters with the legs still shorter than the scales will let you make. Currently, shortening the legs as far as they go makes the character shorter, and the legs are still disproportionately long for my tastes.

Never minded the void hunters. They gave my banter binds actual purpose. But gaah, those cysts were trouble. You still run into old time cysts on some of Marcus Valerius's Cimerora radio style timed missions. That's the only place I've seen them. All I've ever seen in ordinary content is quantums. Some enemy groups seem to have nothing of the kind.

My experience is that my Sentinel brings a lot to teams, plays more like a traditional 'blaster' than my highest level blaster does, and does not solo all that well like my high level melees do, or even the blaster. My plans for both blaster and sentinel are maybe slightly unorthodox. My sentinel has no melee attacks and tries to stay out of melee. Ninja caltrops at her feet help with that. What she does put out is soft control, in the form of slows that are specifically slotted for, knockdown that is also slotted for, and most importantly, all of her attacks that will take it contain -recharge procs that reduce incoming damage on the whole team. I have not tried to turn the sentinel into a tank; I did not bother with stuff like tough and weave. My blaster is a stealthist and sapper, which adds to her team utility. She solos easier than the sentinel does, especially on old time simple objectives like glowie hunts and boss spawn kills. Her contribution to team utility is that she can drain the endurance of just about any mob short of an archvillain. Her slotting tries to balance this with damage. She is also much more melee oriented than the sentinel; her big saps are PBAoEs, so she follows the tank into the middle of the mobs. She runs Temporary Invulnerability and has a number of trouble bubbles she can pop if they activate in time. My experience with both ATs may be atypical. My sentinel is hardly a solo god. Even the blaster works better on solo stuff like Roman wall work. Both are built to bring value to teams.

The Demons farm I grew up with is one of Maria Jenkins' first offerings. Most people move on to tag the rest of the AVs. Ouroboros version is probably better, assuming it's available there; current version has weird maps and New Praetorian versions, and running it through Ouro means never having to move on.