Heraclea

Siouxsie and the Banshees - Spellbound

Temporary Invulnerability, Unyielding, and Invincibility are your toggles. Temporary Invuln adds smashing/lethal resistance. Unyielding is your mez protection. Invincibility is your taunt aura, and it also gives you scaling defense depending on how many mobs are in range of it. These toggles and Dull Pain, your trouble button, are the heart of the set. Before level 22 or so endurance reduction is your only priority in the toggles. Dull Pain gets six slots seeking to maximize heal and recharge. These four are your core powers. The rest should be taken eventually, except for Unstoppable, which is a free pick of something else at 32 or 38. Tough Hide gets two or three slots of defense. The other passives are fine with their default slot. This is a great blessing for your attacks. They should be taken eventually but they aren't priorities. Get endurance under control. Give slots to Health and frankenslot the recovery uniques. Once endurance is a solved problem, you will eventually want Tough and Weave. This means wasting a selection on Boxing or Kick first. At least you don't have to do the Stamina grind any more.

Dark Melee is not that bad, but it does add a lot of survivability. Solos just fine, and with enough recharge the AoEs are up fairly often.

Grateful Dead - Box of Rain

If I feel like I am still hindered by endurance, Conserve Power/Physical Perfection. If that isn't an issue, Caltrops is available as a tier 1 pick, needs no slots, and is very useful as an extra trouble button. Make a macro that targets yourself and you don't have to mess with fussy floor targeting to cast it at your own feet, which is where it's most useful.

Thanks for the explanation! (Probably something about the player ought to be added to her in game description, which was blank to me.)

Sieben - Love's Promise

I actually ran Serge's mission on a l50 just to see if completing it brought her to life. No dice.

She is standing in the Steel Canyon Icon. She has no description and no dialog. She cons as Level Unknown. The name is of a forest spirit from Brazilian folklore, which somewhat interests me; my dual blades/fire brute Pomba Gira is of a similar origin. What does she do?

Smoke Fairies - Summer Fades

If the goal is to simulate actual gameplay, this will not work. Early and late in the game you run into mobs that do debuffs like -tohit and -recharge. And, of course, they are fighting back more effectively, making your scrapper drop what he is doing and look to his inspirations tray, or fire off a trouble power like RttC.

Your process is very similar to mine. The difference is that I try to avoid, to the extent possible, buying or selling anything with inf. Instead, I craft what drops with salvage that dropped. Then I use converters on those drops until they happen upon something that one character or another can use. These often get Frankenslotted for their actual enhancement effects, especially by lowbies.

That works too. But a broadsword (axe, mace, gun, bow) is a tool; all tools are technology; therefore any weapon is technology.

My biggest problem with this is when the editor decides to whisk an unintended item to another room entirely. I usually just add a new one and hope the old one turns up. Some had gone missing for weeks before being noticed wherever they ended up.

Geminiani - Concerto Grosso in E Minor

My fire scrapper would prefer everything to be a sword..... (Although breathing fire is rather nice).

This was more or less the consensus of the WoW community around ten years ago when I last played it. And it was more or less true - if you were tank specced, you couldn't solo anything that required you to kill stuff with any efficiency. And you weren't all that tanky, either; ranged mobs attacking with spells would cut you to ribbons.

Dirk Hamilton - Classic Sweat Pose

This is glorious. I love the little scenes being played by NPCs.

Lore pets are a time to put min-maxing aside and go for what fits your character concept best. Mine have variously taken Cimerorans, Carnies, Banished Pantheon, and Knives of Vengeance. I'm rather underwhelmed with the lot of them, but differences in performance seem to be rather subtle. If in doubt, go Cimeroran for the pocket Surgeon.

Probably the wrong metaphor for the conversation. By 'catherding' I mean the sort of thing you encounter in other MMOs: 'In phase 1 everybody should be at the dragon's head. In phase 2 everyone runs to the tail. But when the dragon uses Breath of Doom, everybody run to the walls and stay as far from anyone else as possible.' The sort of thing that sends people to immersion breaking VOIP live chat to make sure everyone is on the same page. Getting a group of 12 or 24 strangers to follow these instructions is like herding cats. They make lovely and interesting worlds and lore. You want to engage with it creatively, and give your character a persona in the game world, and a history that flows in part from the character's interaction with the world. Then they go and cack all over it with these fussy mechanics that reduce your characters to chess pieces. It makes me a little bit angry just to remember it.

One of the chief glories of the game is that most of the content does not force the kinds of catherding encounter mechanics that are routine in other MMOs. I absolutely do not enjoy that crap, which is why the appeal of most other MMOs fades for me after a while. And this makes every team different, as is every player's self-conception of their role on it. I do try to set the pace, but I tend to be rather conservative, especially if that last mob from the spawn is a boss (and it usually is). I try to make sure that I have its attention before moving on to another spawn. This means that it often happens that someone else targets a different spawn, and I have to react. I do try to keep an eye out for teammates health bars and try to figure out what's going on if someone's is dropping. In the fog of effects, this is often not easy. And there are some rooms and intersections that invite teams to aggro well over the target cap. I run around headless chicken style and do what I can to bring things under control. And it makes me happy that the situations you confront as a tanker are so varied and situational. I way prefer this over the multi-phase boss encounters in other MMOs where everyone has a precise role to play and all must do it exactly right if the encounter will succeed. And if you are standing out of place by even a little you aggro the whelps and wipe the raid. That is not fun for me. It makes communities elitist and prissy as well: and uninviting to newcomers, who need all that crap explained several times before they learn it. The sloppy zerging of CoH is much more relaxing and much more forgiving. It makes the game better in more ways than one.

Bill Haley and the Comets - Thirteen Women

Atlas was heavily into astrology, and never did anything without first checking his horoscope.

No. While having Team Teleport work like Assemble the Team is a good idea, you shouldn't have to invest three powers in a pool to get it. Recall Friend is a bit slower but it gets the job done.