Heraclea

My shield tank is /Fire, which has fair AoE and non-smash/lethal damage, and looks good with the swords. /Electric was a classic combo on old live, and also has multi target attacks. Dark Melee will give you the heal you lack with Shields, but the AoE potential is limited and slow. Radiation has a nice AoE and a less reliable self heal.

There does seem to be a correspondence between mission maps and door types: warehouse, lab, and office maps go to building doors. Blue and brown caves, Council caves, and Oranbega get stone doors. Now you know why there are so many minor islands in Talos. All that fill dirt has to go somewhere.

When running a very old mission on a very old arc (The Tsoo Coup) I was sent to a door in Kallisti Wharf. This struck me as odd.

The Cult - Sun King

Neil Young - See the Sky About To Rain

You can do as I do, which is to build a supergroup base with max storage chiefly dedicated to salvage and crafted enhancement sharing. Desirable drops get crafted and put in the kitty of stuff that will actually get slotted. Less desirable drops get crafted too and put in the gambling kitty. So do converters, which are saved from mob drops or bought with 'odd' numbers of merits -- i.e. anything not a multiple of 20, 50, or 100. I run converters until the yellows turn to corresponding oranges, then the oranges get converted until they land on something someone might want. Then that enhancement gets moved from the gambling kitty to the keeper kitty. I try to take all of my level 50s out for a spin every so often to collect their daily catalyst too; those also get saved. When they exceed my storage capacity I sell a few. And I try to run strike/task forces often for a reliable income of reward merits. My characters tend to be merits rich and inf poor. I do insist that my characters pay their own way on ATOs and purple sets. It is still easy to build a quite mighty character without either. Usually that stuff is bought with merits rather than inf. Inf is something to get rid of. I will buy stuff from the auctions, but not often.

Brian Jonestown Massacre - Feel It

Doing the opening mission from any of the patrons unlocks all of the patron pools. Finishing a patron's arcs (I think they all have three) lets you beat up Recluse in the future, gives you the Usurper badge, and unlocks Recluse's strike force. If you just want the pools unlocked, Black Scorpion's is usually considered the shortest, but it will involve fighting Malta. I generally prefer Ghost Widow.

There's One In Every Crowd (Defeats): Defeat 100 Super Stunners.

Handsome Family - Peace In the Valley Once Again

Every character I enjoy well enough to develop gets the numpad (/bind numpad1 etc.) filled with banter binds. These are like your battle cry, only I almost always set them to local, so they will be readable if anyone's interested, but won't beep into team chat. The variable $target figures in most of them. E.g. /bind numpad1 l The power of Cheese compels you, $target! /bind numpad2 l Adorno says that a $target is an agent of the hegemony of the patriarchal phallus! /bind numpad3 l Don't like $target. Not shiny enough. /bind numpad4 l This $target will need to be handled with my usual subtlety and finesse! And so forth. I don't consider a character fully developed until she or he has a reasonable repertoire of these. These actually serve purposes in gameplay. They let your teammates know that a named mob is present and that I have it targeted. Worth doing if you're the tank. I use them to call out AVs and other significant mobs, and also for things teammates might want to be aware of, like Quantums. They also add light roleplay into actual playing the game and running missions.

Er, um, that was the joke. But now I'm tempted to make a Stone Armor character that runs Invisibility.....

Toyah - Thunder in the Mountains

Unfortunately, the other toggles all have the same issues. Stone Armor remains a throwback to the early days of the game. Now I've been trying recently to put together what exactly is wrong with Regeneration and figure out what it needs to be viable. But Stone Armor is something I really don't care about. At least not until it gets ported to Stalkers. That would be totally worth it.....

I just made my Bio tanker Spines, which is going to be strange looking anyways. Then her in game career happened. Now she's an emissary from the Aztec gods, sent to the City to Kill Skuls. Which makes about as much sense as anything else I could think of for the combination.

There's apparently a bug in Heather Townsend's second mission, the one where you need to defeat three Knives of Vengeance leaders. If you find the final room and have your conversations with Sigil and Detective Somebody and beat the BP ambush before finding and defeating all the Knives leaders, the mission becomes unfinishable even once you have found and beaten the last Knives leader.

The Ramrods - Ghost Riders in the Sky

Some pets are much worse than others. Robots and demons are worse than beasts or ninjas, for instance. Lore pets are the same way; now everybody can be a mastermind. I avoid Pantheon and Longbow pets on my characters for similar reasons.

Shoulder pet: bagpipes.

Ted Nugent - Snakeskin Cowboys

As to the debuff resistance, I agree wholeheartedly. At minimum give regen 60% recharge slow resistance out of the box. If you are trying to make an armor set that relies on click powers, with so little means to avoid getting hit, that needs to be a part of the package. But "active mitigation" does not work, because of the animation traps. IIRC when Energy Melee was ruined by Paragon Studios, they specifically built the nerf into animation times because there was no way to build around that other than stripping and rerolling the character. That's what happened to my Fire/EM tanker, rolled in i3 mostly because those powers looked good together in the days before customization. As I have been saying consistently, the most frustrating thing is pressing your trouble buttons and having them do nothing because you have to wait for some attack animation to finish playing and the heal's animation to play after it to get any benefit from them. By that time it's usually too late. They need to be effective immediately and not wait on attack animations to take effect. Either that, or the baseline regeneration needs to be substantially higher to give them time they don't now have. I finished out my Brute sets which got the character's S/L resistance above 50, which should help a little. But it probably isn't going much higher than that, and I've already spent an unconscionable sum on a broken character as a test case.

Traffic - The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys

When I remade Heraclea on HC, I made her Inv/DM rather than Inv/SS. I had an Inv/DM back on Victory, and Dark Melee just brought so much more to the table that this character became my goto for master runs and such. So this time I made it my main. Dark Melee also pairs excellently with Willpower, which lacks a self heal. With enough recharge and recovery slotting you can also use the AoEs as aggro attractors.

Run into this occasionally with Quick Sand, at least the tanker version. I usually use a targeting macro to aim it at a mob, and for some reason it fails to fire. Using the botherous circle target sometimes succeeds when the macro fails.

Patti Smith - Land