Heraclea

Oddly, my radiation/electric brute has a few more set bonuses, but is nowhere near the softcap, and fares quite adequately against Cimerorans and works the wall quite effectively. That character focused more on resistance than defense and has around 85% smashing/lethal resistance. This too is out of reach for regen. Now, I don't farm, and as such don't have the luxury of sending my characters against enemies that have been cherry picked to play to their strengths. I don't know what a farm tailored to Regen would even look like. Rather, I want the power set to be viable in the game as it is. I will admit that I do not agree with the design decision to make all the late game and Incarnate mobs spam debuffs wildly the way they do. It will never be fun to face massed Tsoo minions with Kinetics, or Family with Gravity. Giving those power sets to mobs makes those mobs solo-only content, which defeats the purposes of an MMO. And regen needs way more debuff resistance than it has. I also strongly oppose the importing of generic MMO crap that makes the endgames of other games tedious, like the BAF rings or Apex blue patches. That kind of garbage weighs heaviest on the melee classes I enjoy most. But if Regen out of the box is severely underperforming in the game's most enduringly popular TF, obviously there's something seriously wrong with it. Bumping up the numbers a little bit will not feed the weasel or make it work as a tanker primary. I don't see any path to softcapping the character, at least not without merits I don't have and build compromises I don't want to make. And if you wanted to make a character with softcapped defenses, just about any other armor set would give you a head start over Regen. Regen should be able to succeed on regeneration. It cannot.

I used the original BP deities in my AE adventure Lawyers of Ghastly Horror. This is one of the ones I currently have published (really need to find someone who can be persuaded to give me more slots). Of course, it's one of my AE adventures, so it's mostly comedy anyways. Firemullet is in it too, as is Chris Jenkins.

Yardbirds- Over Under Sideways Down

Having gotten my Staff/Regen brutw to 50 and slotting the basic alpha (Spiritual), I have to say that the set remains not ready for prime time. The little bit of defense I have built on her with Weave and set bonuses just vanishes when attempting to take on Roman spawns. All of my other characters including the blasters do fine working the Roman wall. Regen/Staff cannot hack it. I took Taunt in the hopes that she would be able to take point on teams. She cannot, and probably will respec out of the power. Instant death remains a problem. Incoming damage frequently overwhelms her slight defenses and ability to react. Animation traps are a serious problem as well. My first suggestion would be to increase the base regeneration of Regen to the point that being ganked in seconds is no longer an issue. Making Instant Healing a toggle and part of the baseline would help. My second suggestion would be to make Regen resist recharge slows the way Electric Armor resists endurance drain. If you're going to make an armor set dependent on click heals this needs to be a major part of the package. Finally - no more animation traps. Part of the frustration of Regen is clicking the heal powers and having nothing happen. Some way needs to be found to make them instantly effective without waiting for an animation to play. This was what killed my Fire/EM tanker back on Victory. Edit: Underperforming build is spoilered below. Direct readout from current build. Should I continue to play the character this will want much more, but I have already spent quite a bit trying to add adequate survivability to this character, I've done quite a bit for a fresh level 50 already.

Come on. You got this.

Heroes can get Super Spy, it's an exploration badge in Striga.

Bio has strong endurance relief, so the end-hog attack sets - Stone Melee, Axe, Spines - are all worth considering. My bio tanker is Bio/Spines, which is great fun: you just stand there and mobs die.

There really isn't a minimal FX option. It says there is, but you'll still look like Pig Pen.

Homecoming, or at least Torchbearer, seems to be a lot more on the spot for giant monsters than Victory was. The announcement that one of the GMs has appeared in its zone usually draws people to that zone looking for it. On Victory, it wasn't unusual to see three spawned Paladins in a specific area of King's Row, on a knoll by the road ramping up to High Park. We would take a moment to beat them up every time we passed by the area on a Numina TF.

Disarming (Defeats): Defeat 100 open world snipers in Founder's Falls, Peregrine Island, or Grandville.

Noticed something odd. Brute Integration can be slotted with a Taunt IO or SO. However, it does not take Taunt sets. This also seems to be the case with a number of powers, including Invincibility, Rise to the Challenge, and the Bio primary auras. Invincibility and Rise to the Challenge can be slotted with various procs; the -tohit of RttC means it can take the Dark Watcher's recharge slow, for instance. Now, the Taunt sets have a number of bonuses like Accuracy that are pretty much useless in normal play (it's autohit) as well as enhancing recharge, range, and various procs. Those sets would be a lot more useful and worthwhile if they could be slotted in the armors.

As a tanker, your first priority is survival. I know that the heal in Rad Melee is not as consistent as the one in Dark Melee because of its reliance on the contamination mechanic, but still, a heal that's also an attack that does damage is too good to pass up. Slot up an accurate healing set.

Learn to love Salt Crystals.....

Drowning Pool - Bodies (Too obvious, I know.)

If you visit one of the cosmetic surgeons you can have both male and female bodies in different slots on the same character. What happens to the badges if you switch?

So far my Staff/Regen brute that I intend to build for toughness has not really been a resounding success. So far the character is at level 43. In other words, at the point where a basic build starts maturing but before incarnates. At the current stage she has all of the primary except the tier 1 attack and Taunt. She has all of the secondary except Revive. Unlike the Fire/Regen scrapper the character has Tough and Weave. All of the click trouble buttons have been slotted up with at least two recharges and at least two heals. I also have Hasten three slotted for recharge as well. I don't have any more recharge bonuses. The generic IOs, of which there are still quite a few in the build, are at least level 30 now and most are 40-45s. I am also just starting to slot the Brute ATO sets. I have one set of Kinetic Combat, a Steadfast, and a Gladiator's +Defense buttons. I also have a Panacea and a Regenerative Tissue +regen button. I chose Staff deliberately, one, because I wanted one, and two, because its baroque animations would test the reliability of Regen. What I didn't really appreciate is that it would put a crimp on my usual survival strategy which is to slot up Kinetic Combats in single target attacks. But that makes the character more valuable as a test case. On the plus side, Staff has a lot of AoE and gets them early. I can also get to the melee and lethal softcap briefly by stacking Guarded Spin. The character currently has smashing/lethal resistance of just under 30% and defense baseline of just under 15%. This is not enough. With resistance the magic number is 50%, which is of course the tipping point after which every additional point of resistance adds exponentially to your survivability. I don't see how it is going to be feasible for the character to get to that number on powers and set bonuses alone, at least without perverse slotting that will hamper DPS and general functionality. The main problem is that the character just gets instantly killed and goes from 90 to 0 too fast for me or the game to respond. This is especially noticeable when I turn and try to stand in the path of an ambush - say, the Kheldian ambush of the ITF. The Roman ambushes are less of an issue, perhaps because I don't have much stock in defense. Moment of Glory and Instant Healing are not up often enough to be available when needed. Any of my other non-Regen melee characters including the stalkers fare better against difficult alpha strikes. This is not adequate performance IMO. My first suggestion at this point would be to turn Instant Healing back into a toggle. It needs to be part of the baseline, not a click with a long, long recharge. It isn't available enough to make a big difference. My second suggestion is a game wide change that would do a lot to boost Regen's ability to function. Inspirations, click heals, and other trouble buttons need to take effect immediately. They must not wait on animations to play. I don't know if this is possible given the state of the code, but when the game has three and four second animations by the time the heal fires it is too often too little too late.

I've always played tankers often. I did roll a new one (WP/Mace) to check out some powersets that were improved by the patch. This is a quite fun character. But my current main project is a staff/regen brute I am making as an experiment, to see if adding stuff like tough, weave, and IO global defense bonuses improve Regen enough to make an adequately tanky brute. Some people were complaining that the patch nerfed brutes. I find it quite the opposite. Brutes are better off than they were beforehand 95% of the time because of the slower rage dropoff and easier generation on teams.

Horrible Histories - Burke and Hare

This is why I ended up with an Amazon Army. I came up with quite a number of character concepts, but tankers, brutes, and scrappers have always been my favorites. The female taunt in i2 was always 'A-Ha!" while the male was a "Waah" that sounded a bit like the 'adult' voices in a Peanuts cartoon. I liked the female taunt much better so all of my tankers and brutes were female. Since then, the taunts have changed: mut my female shield/ax tanker has a terrible taunt. But with the old line power sets the sound remans the same.

It's the well developed side of the magical side of CoH that always drew me. Always been a particular fan of the Circle of Thorns. Baron Zoria has just enough contacts with occult lore from our world to feel fully fleshed out. The idea that people are roped in by the promise of magical powers to become vessels of Oranbegan spirits appeals to me. The Banished Pantheon also had a lot of simple appeal in their first incarnation; worshippers of exotic gods raising zombies and playing the bongos. Not sure ties to Mot were an improvement. When you still had to buy enhancements from origin stores, who could deny but that the Magic stores had the most character? Hellion band posters are probably my favorite bit of obscure lore. I play the old starting arcs rather than the new ones because I like that mission where they appear. Firemullet rocks!

I was a longstanding DC fan until 2012, when Brian Azzarello's vandalism of Wonder Woman and her world killed a forty year fandom and made me drop my DC subscriptions for several years. I still follow a few artists and get a few books, but nowhere near like before.

IMO the place where Statesman's absence is felt most keenly is in the Maria Jenkins Hero's Hero arc. This has been downgraded from 'go save the hero who is the public face of the game and the most famous guy in Paragon City' to 'go save the guy who gives you level 8 task forces.' This is not an improvement, nor is the replacement of many of the original enemies with IDF, which are the Longbow and Arachnos of the late game. I don't know if the original version is available in Ouroboros, because the whole thing is too long to finish in one sitting. It should be if it isn't.

You mean Perkwunos? Sweetheart of a guy. Don't have any problems with him. Zeus, though? Athene can run rings around him.

Journey - City of the Angels