Heraclea

I have never taken Concealment on a character without also taking Teleport for Recall Friend. Needed IMO since Assemble the Team has a totally ridiculous cooldown. This makes for some pretty tight builds since you probably want Hasten on a squishy and a travel power you'll actually use for travelling.

I had a Ninja/Poison MM in old live that I think I managed to get to level 33 on old live before sunset. I figured that the character would finally click after I got him out of Sharkhead and it never happened. One of my first villains, made in the day when MMs were villains only, I took my villainy to heart so he had a terrorist theme. The weakness of the sets in question was almost made up for by his ability to put on a little show, where he had all the pets doing the 'praise' kowtow emote, while he turned and faced them with the 'research' book emote.

Depeche Mode - Going Backwards

Fiery Aura/Energy Melee tanker. Fire is not the strongest tanker armor set out of the box. Its saving grace is its solid damage auras and Burn, but for survivability it depends on a self heal, which is reasonably fast to recharge, has a reasonable endurance cost, and does not need to hit mobs to work. Most of the survivability of the set is due to the availability of that heal. Pair that with a weak single-target oriented attack set that was ruined on old Live by turning the hardest hitting attacks it had into sludgy things with three to four second animations, and it will end in tears. Animation traps like that put your self heal out of reach, and that's a bad place to be if you are a fire tank. I rolled one of these in issue 1 or 2. It was before power customization, I know, because the chief motivation of the selection was that the red pompoms of Energy Melee looked good with Fire. Played to 50 , and once was one of my favorite tankers, the one I built for DPS. I sent her to a seldom visited server after the energy melee nerf. Slots on Victory were at a premium by then, and I didn't see this character getting played much any more. She occasionally made appearances on Tanker Tuesdays, when she didn't have to take damage for a team all that much.

I will take a travel power. Boils down to Flight or Leaping, because Super Speed won't get you there, and Teleport costs way too much endurance and needs Fly or Hover anyways. The more time a character spends redside the likelier they are to take Flight. Apart from a travel power other pool powers are definitely optional. I take Fighting on most of my melees, all but for a regen scrapper, to help top off resistance and defense. Hasten is vital for control oriented characters, skippable on most melees. I will take one or two Leadership toggles if a character has endless endurance to run them with. If a character prefers to be out of melee, I take Caltrops or Tashibishi, to cast at my own feet as a trouble button, if it is available. Scrappers have more build freedom than other melee ATs if only because all scrapper primaries contain one clinker power in the form of Provoke. And then there's usually something like Boggle as well. I took leadership toggles on my Psi/WP scrapper because she could run them, they are team friendly, and help resist otherwise poorly resisted mez. On my WP/Mace tanker I have Salt Crystals and Quicksand, which are handy debuffs that slow down mobs and attack in a wide AoE. I bothered to run to redside on a couple characters to unlock patron pools; what I haven't done is to take them on any of them. For ancillary pools the question really is, 'does this character need Energy/Body Mastery, or not?' If I need to mule a couple more Performance Shifters I take them; otherwise no. I generally prefer primary and secondary powers to any pool powers. I even gave serious thought to taking Boggle over Hasten as the last pick on the Psi/WP scrapper. Decided against it in the end. May never know what I missed out on.

Faith and the Muse - Scars Flown Proud

I have a TW/WP scrapper. Didn't much take to the set. I build full game characters that are just as happy on a Penny Yin as they are on Ms. Liberty. The set is just painful when exemped down that far. And I found Momentum difficult to manage, and again, clumsy and slow below max level. I think that TW is like Stone Armor. It needs to excel at something because its inconveniences are so annoying.

I generally find characters with player buffs a PITA to play. Speed Boost and similar movement buffs are the worst, and I just will not play Kinetics. They enable players to zip out of range and then expect me to be by their side as they bawl for more when it wears off. If a character has an AoE buff, I typically fire it if it is up when several players are gathered, rather than announce its availability. If I have a heal, I typically will focus on a tank or similar character and concentrate on keeping them going. Everyone seems to be constantly rushing ahead and out of range, and I am on a weak character with little damage throughput and no mez protection.

Rolled a plants/poison oontroller this week and discovered that I could turn her Spirit Tree into a Poison Tree.

You haven't by any chance tried to edit the mission on two different computers, did you?

I find that I have a glut of magic salvage and am often short on tech salvage. This may have something to do with the fact that I have many more Magic/Natural characters than Mutant/Technology/Science characters. So the Magic empowerment station with the tallest chimney gets more work than the three-prong Science one, but I keep one of each in every base.

You will love WP/Ice on a tanker. Willpower is blessedly simple, provides layered defense and resistance, and now you don't need to worry about an inferior aggro aura. /Ice secondary is full of control that will be both useful to your team and amusing to watch.

I have learned not to keep candy canes and Halloween storage in the base storage racks. Of course, each item counts towards the 100 items total that can be held in each rack. When carried on a character, though, they do not count towards the limits of invention storage you are allowed to carry. They are subject to other limits I have never reached and don't have to worry about. So I keep all of that on Heraclea and mail it or put a set into regular storage when a character needs it. Save the base racks for invention salvage. The number of characters that need more than five costume slots is rather small in itself.

I only learned a couple months ago that it was possible to rename the Light Fairy Pet and similar buff critters.

Whenever I make a Broadsword or Katana or War Mace character I am always drawn to a Technology origin. All of those things are technology.

Many of my favorite characters and builds, from willpower/spines scrapper on Victory, to invuln/dark tanker, fire/dual blades brute, and ice/plants blaster on Torchbearer, seem completely contrary to purely thematic choices. What I look for is synergy. If the synergy flows out of unusual combinations so much the better. And oftentimes there is an odd lack of synergy between thematic combinations. Dark Melee doesn't do much for Dark Armor, and benefits defense armors much more. Super Strength doesn't shore up Invulnerability that much, Fire Melee doesn't patch up Fire Armor all that much, and so forth. From their design, I think we were always intended to mix 'em up a bit.

The Insight mechanic is clunky, and getting a smooth attack chain you can mindlessly mash is rather difficult. It needs more AoE earlier. But if you can time your Critical Strike proc you can one shot all sorts of things. Made mine to replace the Titan Weapon scrapper who I don't see having much of a future. Boggle seems utterly pointless. Confuses are useless on teams even on a controller. That said, the set does make a good replacement for the TW scrapper: this one can only go up.

I could not find anywhere for people to post critter costumes that they might want to share because others may find them useful. So I thought I'd start one. Here are Satan, Doc Delilah, and a Kentucky Colonel: satan1.costume Doc Delilah.costume Colonel.costume

All of my level 50 tankers can do this pretty much anywhere at level 50 content. Most of my brutes and scrappers can also; it took some doing to get the Regen brute there, but that was the point of the experiment. My regen scrapper can't; her build is focused on 35 and under content, though she actually does fairly well when Rularuu are the weekly. But I don't outside of tailored AE content. It just gets boring, taking forever to kill the several bosses in each spawn. I prefer to run story arcs for their ending rewards, and running them at +4/8 just slows me down. While I generally could run them at that level, I wouldn't bother doing it on, say, Dark Astoria Tsoo missions. I grind Ephraim Sha at +0/1; the point there is to finish them fast.

I would be interested in learning which combinations work well together. I haven't done the math yet, but is 1000 slots enough? I've set myself the more modest challenges of getting every armor set on a tanker or brute to 50 (missing Ice, Stone, Energy, working on Reflexes) and one of every basic AT to 50 (no Defender yet).

Have her spawn as an invasion class enemy, always proportionate to who she's fighting regardless of level, in any random redside zone. Let her temporarily lay waste to the place: trainers, shops, contacts, as well as NPCs. Villains must band together to take her out.

Buffalo Springfield - For What It's Worth

To serve that purpose, that zone is going to need about four more train stations.

Are your thousand character slots close to filling up?

I like it quite well on my Dark Armor tanker, though here Fury isn't an issue, and the chief attraction was the endurance discount.