Stormwalker

Every individual power taken has to fit the concept (with the minor caveat that if a power that doesn't suit the concept is required in order to access another power that does suit the concept, I can take that power as long as I don't actually use that power. This mostly applies to opening up power pools). That said, fitting the concept is generally for me a matter of, "Is this effect of this power something this character could do/within the scope of their abilities?" For example: Some things, like the Fighting pool, are matters of training. Anyone who is willing to devote the time to improve their combat abilities and has access to someone willing to teach them can learn those skills. All my heroes are members of the same supergroup in-character (except for my one vigilante, who would not get along with my heroes). Several of them are skilled martial artists, and one of them (my Street Justice/Willpower scrapper Nanodrive) is a martial arts instructor who is more than happy to give the others lessons in how to dodge, how to roll with a fall, etc. Therefore, the only ones of my characters who I would consider restricted from taking the Fighting pool are the ones who either 1. don't have time for the lessons (my Rad 'fender is a cosmic type, she's away from Earth a lot, so she hasn't had that training) or 2. who don't feel they need them. This also goes for Leadership - it's a matter of learning it - but that learning is not nearly so ubiquitous. Unlike Fighting (which is a skill pretty much every hero is likely to see a use for), Leadership is something that only a few pursue. My blaster Ember Soulfire has it because she's the leader of the supergroup. Another blaster, Skylancer, has it because she's one of the group's captains. A few of my other characters who are in notable leadership positions or who have spent time mentoring others take it. Most of mine don't. A third pool which theoretically anyone could learn, but very few of my characters do, is Concealment. In theory, anyone can learn to be sneaky, given enough training and practice. But most of my heroes are straightforward types who "prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around". Thus, the only characters I've taken Concealment on so far are Kitten America (she's a catgirl, and cats are ambush predators) and Bladewhisper (who has been trained as a ninja). Note that if Stalkers had been available on hero side back when I created Bladewhisper on Live, she might have been one... but they weren't. Sometimes justifying taking a power involves re-fluffing it a bit because the name and description of the power doesn't suit the concept, but the effect of the power is something they can perfectly well do within their concept. As an example of this: My flying blaster Skylancer has Combat Jumping. She took this power for Immobilize protection, and the justification for her having it has nothing to do with "Combat Jumping" and everything to do with her being difficult to Immobilize because she is capable of generating immense amounts of thrust (part of her concept is that she's capable of hypersonic flight) and is thus her movement is very difficult to restrain (this is the same reason she slots the Hypersonic Fly Protect IO - having protection vs. -Fly is in keeping with her concept). As a note, my headcanon justification for the Fly speed cap in her case (and others of my heroes who ought to be faster than 102mph) is that there's a flight speed limit in the city zones of ~100mph. This actually comes up as a minor plot point in the story I'm writing about her (because she exceeds it by a lot, and her supergroup leader is not very happy with her about it until she finds out the circumstances). As another example of "refluffing" a power - or in this case, a power set, my Kinetic Melee/Willpower scrapper Impulse Drive - her defenses are not "Willpower" at all. In fact, Energy Aura would be much closer to what her powers actually do as I envision them (though still not quite right). But at the time that I originally created her on Live, Energy Aura was not available to Scrappers (and, in fact, I didn't know about the set at all back then). So I decided that the Willpower set with its layered mitigation did a reasonable job of describing the kinds of defensive effects that her powers allow her. Or at least, it was the closest option available to her at the time. So I went with it. When I remade her on HC, I stuck with the original powersets because I'd grown comfortable with using them to reflect her powers as they exist in my vision of the character. Sometimes even a power that I can look at and say, "Ok, this character definitely could do that, but would they?" becomes an issue. In my original build for my DB/Energy scrapper Seladri (who is Technology origin - she's an alien whose powers all come from advanced alien technology), I had planned for her to take Laser Beam Eyes. There were a number of reasons for wanting to take it from a mechanics perspective, and... she's a Technology origin. There were any number of ways I could have justified it. But most of them would have required modifying her costume to give her some kind of eyewear to generate the blast, and I didn't want to do that - it's not her style. At the same time, she's just not someone who would have cybereyes. Or any cyberware at all. Utlimately, I ended up removing the power from her build plan (just yesterday, in fact), not because she couldn't have it, but because she wouldn't have it... if that makes sense? I powerleveled one character to 22 , only because I wanted to see how the Sentinel AT played before I actually committed to playing one (I didn't know about Brainstorm back then). Powerleveling was boring as hell. I hated it. I'd never done it before, and I've never done it since, and I'm pretty sure I'll never do it again. The game doesn't start at 50. Heck, some of my characters I'm very tempted to turn off experience on because they're already as strong as their concepts really justify - if I want them to get any stronger, I will have to come up with justifications for where they are finding additional power. This notably applies to a couple of my Natural heroes. Usually I level by running story arcs., mostly solo but occasionally duo with a friend of mine, and sometimes I join a team for a TF. One of my redsiders levels only by newspaper missions, because she doesn't want to be a criminal (she's a fugitive, because she killed several people (they were Malta agents, though she didn't know that - she only knew they'd been doing terrible experiments on her and were trying to kill her after she woke up in the middle of one of those experiments and her powers activated for the first time. She just wanted to escape and they wouldn't let her). She'd really rather be a hero. So I just look for newspaper missions that have objectives I can justify her doing for some other reasons than the stated ones. Doing any of the villain story arcs would be wildly out of character for her. She does do the mayhem missions, but usually only the bank robbery itself - girl's got to eat somehow, and her powers give her an unfortunately large appetite, so that's expensive. But she's just trying to scrape by. It's... the enhancement system really doesn't reflect my concept of how characters develop their powers. My characters develop their powers by practice and by natural growth. They aren't doing experiments on themselves, or installing cyberware, or inventing things (well, a couple of my technology heroes invent things, for certain, but the things they invent are not the things described by enhancements. As far as I'm concerned, enhancements are a game mechanic and nothing more. When my characters get better at using their powers, it's because they spent time practicing and training and sometimes just being a hero and using their powers and learning to use them more effectively. Skylancer had the powers that would allow her to do everything she does at level 50 from the moment she was first empowered, before she was even registered as a hero. But what she didn't have was the precise control to actually do all those things with her powers. Learning to fly took time, and long hours of practice. Learning to hover took even longer, because it requires very precise modulation of her energy outputs. Now it's second nature to her... but only because she kept practicing it until it was. That's how power growth and "enhancement" works to me. It's very disconnected from the in-game systems. What I really enjoy is taking the character ideas in my head and bringing them to life in the game, and playing them and letting them tell their stories in my head as I do. That's not to say I don't also enjoy the game itself, and I do want my characters to be effective. But they have to come by their effectiveness in a way that is true to who they are. Since the game mechanics and available power selection limit what I can do in ways that make it difficult to precisely match my vision of a character, this means sometimes I have to ignore what the flavor text says and do what "feels" right. But it has to feel right. If it doesn't, I'm not being true to the character. And this game gives me the best platform for envisioning those characters and bringing them to life that I've ever had. And yes, I'm having lots of fun, and it sounds like you are, too, and that's the most important thing of all.

I play and build to concept, too, but I use Mids', frequently (but not always) take Hasten, and often use LotG's. For me, building to concept means that the powers I take have to fit within the character concept. Usually I still have to pick between several powers which reflect things that fall within the scope of the character's abilities, and if one option isn't clearly more suited to the character than the others, I'm more likely to choose the "optimal" one - I refer to this as "optimization within concept". In many cases, there are a number of powers a character "ought to have" and I couldn't cram into their build because other powers they also "ought to have" were better choices. Very few times do I get to the end of a build and not have to make tough decisions on "which one of these powers am I going to take?" As for enhancements, in my personal headcanon, enhancements aren't a thing. That's purely a game mechanic, and generally its effects are things that I chalk up to "my character has spent time training and become stronger/faster/tougher/more mentally resilient because of it". Only rarely is an enhancement's effect so overt that it causes concept problems (one example that does is that I currently have two Lockdown Chance for +2 Mag Hold procs slotted in my Ice/Ice blaster's freeze attacks and I'm going to have to remove them because the obvious electrical effect of the proc doesn't mesh with her concept. So pretty soon I'll be replacing those with something else). To be clear, I'm not saying you or anyone else should to do it this way - you should absolutely play the way you want to play, not the way anyone else wants you to play - I'm just observing that building to concept and some degree of optimization are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Though, obviously, building to concept rarely allows for full optimization (for example, many Scrappers can improve their DPS by taking a Snipe from an epic pool, and I almost never do this because it rarely suits the character concept I have). Probably the one character I have whose build is closest to fully optimal is Kitten America, my Claws/SR/Energy catgirl scrapper. But that's because pretty much all of the optimal powers (Fighting, Leaping, Speed, Concealment) she could take are all very easy fits for her concept. Basically, I want my characters to be as capable as I can make them while remaining true to their concepts.

I don't know what soft-cap builds you're looking at that rely on Cardiac or Ageless. Only ONE of my character builds uses Ageless, and it's not for endurance, it's for recharge (because she is an experimental build to find out if running Blinding Feint -> Ablating Strike -> Sweeping Strike as an attack chain is practical, and that requires insane amounts of global recharge). My blaster is crafting both Clarion and Barrier and using one or the other depending on the content she's running. All my others use Barrier (because you need it to get to the higher Incarnate soft-cap, and also because frankly Barrier is overpowered). The only one that MIGHT consider Cardiac is my DM/DA, because Dark Armor is pretty brutal on endurance, but I'm pretty sure he's going to go Barrier, too. Oh, and he's not a soft-cap defense build, because DA isn't a defense set. I for one prefer not to rely on Incarnate powers in non-Incarnate content, since they tend to trivialize it. Which is another reason I build for soft-cap on my melee (and ranged soft-cap on my Blasters). I don't want to use Barrier as a crutch. Also, you're complaining about being singled out, but most of the people in this thread who are arguing in favor of soft-capped builds ARE giving context. For example, I was very specific that I solo a large percentage of the time, and my builds are designed to accommodate that.

I occasionally use the LotG set if I am already maxed out on some of the set bonuses from the other sets (this is really only an issue with sets that have tons of defense powers, like /SR and /EA, and usually even not then because I usually slot a mix of 1 LotG + 4 Shield Wall, 1 LotG + some number of Reactive Defenses, and 1 LotG + 5 Red Fortune (if I REALLY need recharge, like with Claws and DB which demand huge amounts of recharge for their optimal attack chains), or straight 6-slotted Reactive Defenses (which gives more recharge than the LotG unique does). My DB/SR does actually have one 5-piece LotG planned, though. Consequence of having 7* defense powers in her build and an enormous hunger for recharge (she is an experimental build intended to run Blinding Feint -> Ablating Strike -> Sweeping Strike as an attack chain. She has 285% global +recharge in her final build plan. I don't know if this will actually prove to be worthwhile, but it's going to be fun to find out.) I also do occasionally slot 2-pic. LotG (usually +rech and Def/End) in a power which is a little bit too endurance hungry to run JUST the +rech. EDIT: * 9 if I remember to count Hover and Evasive Maneuvers!

I'm pretty sure I've never once taken a defense power just so I could slot another LotG. I have, on occasion, weighed that benefit alongside the benefits of taking certain powers (for example, I like Evasive Maneuvers on its own merits (mostly for additional Hover speed in combat), but it's easier to justify choosing it over some other power I might be considering when I also know that I can also drop an LotG +rech in it.

The problem he's describing is one that can't be solved. You can't magically make someone who doesn't want to play a villain suddenly want to play a villain. And adding "incentives" to play red side over blue will just make the players who don't WANT to play red side disgruntled. It is what it is. Even as someone who does play both red and blue, I enjoy playing blue side more than red, and I spend a lot more time playing blue side than red. There are a few things here and there (which I've already mentioned) that would make red side somewhat more appealing than it is, but it's never going to be as appealing to me as blue side, because the idea of playing a villain is inherently less appealing to me than the idea of playing a hero.

I mean, most of the things people have said in this thread can be summed up in the statement "Build for the content you play." But I'm going to point out that the OP said "Task Forces". They didn't say "four-star hard mode Task Forces". If I ever decide I want to actually run those four-star hard mode TF's? I'll put together a dedicated build for that. We can, after all, have more than one build. But for anything short of that, the builds I use for soloing will work just fine And anyone who thinks otherwise is free to not team with me. We'll probably both have more fun that way.

Yeah, this comes back to another point about defenses. You don't need to have strong defenses against everything if you're not a melee. You just have to defend against what you expect to be targeted by. In a team, a blaster/defender/controller who expects to operate mostly from range (even if you are delivering some melee attacks via jousting) doesn't need strong melee defense. They're not going to be close enough to the enemy for melee attacks to target them most of the time. And they don't need a ton of AoE defense, either, though it's nice to have some. The vast majority of attacks targeting these characters are going to be single-target ranged attacks, so what they mostly need is Ranged defense. Some middling resists are nice as well to protect against being one-shotted if you somehow get unwanted attention from the AV. Plus, if your teammates bring resist buffs, suddenly your middling resists become strong resists. Someone will certainly think, "What about defense debuffs? They won't have any resistance to those!" That is true, but these characters should not have mass aggro so long as: They don't do something stupid, and The Tanker is doing his or her job. Given that, mostly they're only going to have to deal with stray fire from a couple of enemies, which isn't going to be sufficient to provoke Defense Cascade Failure. Especially when the enemy will have a hard time landing that first hit to begin with because of high defense. Note that I said "high defense" and not "soft-capped defense". If you don't ever solo, you probably don't need soft-capped defense on a ranged-primary character; you just shouldn't be taking that much fire to begin with. Even 25% defense cuts down your incoming damage by more than half against enemies who don't have accuracy buffs. I personally find that soft-capped ranged defense is not that hard to get on a Blaster - you can only use so many attacks in a practical chain, so you don't need to take all of them, so you have plenty of room for some defense powers. Defenders, though, are going to need to take most if not all of their primary to deliver the most benefit to a team - their role is more complex than damage and can't just be broken down to having enough powers to complete an effective attack chain. As such, a defender may not be practically able to soft-cap ranged defense - and depending on what kind of Defender they are, they may have other tools that are more effective for their survival anyway. I know that on my Rad/Rad defender I don't worry all that much about defense (it's nice to have *some*, but I'm not going out of my way for it) because her massive To Hit and Damage debuffs plus Choking Cloud are plenty to keep her alive in most cases. Controllers, I can't speak to in any detail. I've never played one. But I imagine that if I was playing a Controller, I would be counting more on my control to keep me alive rather than passive defenses. Any defense I had would be there just to protect me from anything that leaked through. Now, if you ARE a melee, you're going to face a lot of incoming fire. Even if you don't have aggro (and you probably have some, at least on your primary target), you're going to get rolled against by every single AoE that gets chucked at the tank, because you're right there in the middle of things. As such, I consider a strong defensive package a requirement for any melee AT. Exactly what that "strong defensive package" consists of will vary from powerset to powerset. /SR, /Energy Aura, /Shield all depend on soft-capped defenses. WP is a mix of defense, resistances, regen, and max HP. Invuln is resistances and defense, plus enough recharge to keep Dull Pain available at all times. Of course, exactly HOW strong each layer of your defense needs to be depends somewhat on your team. If you know you're teaming with someone who provides defense buffs on a regular basis, you don't need to soft-cap, you just need to get close enough for the buffs to push you over the top. If you know you're teaming with someone who provides resist buffs, the same goes for hard-capping resists. If, like my Dark/Dark/Dark scrapper (who always duos with a friend's Kin/Psi defender), you know that you're going to have constant Recovery buffs, you can run with a build that is fairly end-negative and still be fine. On the other hand, if you're teaming with randoms, you don't know what you're getting and it's best to be as self-sufficient as possible. Remember: a dead scrapper does 0 DPS. EDIT: This reminds me of one other thing. Willpower is not my favorite armor set for solo, but it's GREAT in teams. Why? Because whatever kind of buffs the team brings, Willpower can use it! Defense buffs? Great, my "decent" S/L defense just got soft-capped and now I'm a monster with soft-capped S/L defense AND hard-capped S/L resist! Resist buffs? Also great, because my fair-to-middling E/N/F/C resists are now quite formidable Recharge buffs? Well, it doesn't help my defense any, but I can trim the fat from my attack chain and do better DPS. Since it's hard to build Willpower for recharge without sacrificing too much durability, this is very helpful. Healing/regen buffs? Sure! WP is a "mitigate part of the damage and heal the rest" set, so more healing never hurts. Recovery buffs? Ok, WP has a hard time making use of this one. It's got lots of recovery. Though it'd still be helpful to mitigate any incoming end drains or recovery debuffs.

Fair warning: Massive wall of text incoming. Read at your own risk! I solo 90% of the time. Maybe more than 90%. I pretty much only group when I want to run a TF. As such, my builds are constructed mostly for solo survivability. That said, all of my builds have functional attack chains and are quite capable of dishing out their share of damage. They are generally not built for exemplar play, however, so no promises about a functional attack chain at level 15 (though I have soloed Task Force Commander on almost all of these (all except the blaster, who has only soloed two of the TF's so far), meaning they are perfectly capable of soloing AV's when exemplaring as long as I remember to pack Envenomed Daggers - and the Energy/Energy Scrapper and the Claws/SR scrapper didn't even have those). It should also be noted that I build my characters to specific concepts, and I restrict their power selection by those concepts. Very few of my Scrappers take ranged attacks from their Epic pools, because very few of my Scrappers can justify those attacks within their concepts. Of course, some of them have ranged attacks within their primaries, which helps a lot since those attacks have better unity with their primary concept. But, for example, you will rarely see me taking a Snipe from an Epic pool on one of my Scrappers (I think my Dark/Dark/Dark scrapper has a ranged attack in his build plan, because it's not hard to work that in to his concept at all. My DB/Energy scrapper currently has Laser Beam Eyes in her build plan, and I have been arguing with myself over that one for a couple of weeks now - not whether I can justify it (she's Tech origin, so it's definitely possible), it's just a question of how).. 1). In some builds, it's very easy to have both. One of my three mains is Kitten America, a Claws/SR/Energy scrapper. This is one of the easiest "have your cake and eat it too" builds there is, because if you have sufficient recharge (and Super Reflexes helps with this), you can have very strong single-target (Follow-Up -> Focus -> Slash) and AoE (Follow-Up -> Spin -> Shockwave) attack chains with only five attacks slotted (you have to take either Strike or Swipe, which I use as a mule for two-piece Blistering Cold for the extra slow resistance). This leaves plenty of room for my travel powers (SJ and Infiltration), Combat Jumping, Boxing (another mule for Blistering Cold), Tough, and Weave. I even found room for Conserve Power and Focused Accuracy, both of which are of highly situational benefit but are really nice to have in those moments when you need them. Similarly, my second main, the Energy/Energy/Energy scrapper Stardriver did not give me much trouble fitting in everything I wanted. Her attack chain is Energy Transfer -> Total Focus -> Energy Transfer -> Bonesmasher -> Energy Punch in single target situations, with Whirling Hands regularly subbing in for BS + EP in AoE situations. It's not the best AoE output, but that's Energy Melee for you, and when you are one-shotting minions left and right you don't miss the AoE so much. Energy Aura gives you just about everything you could want in survivability. Fairly easily soft-cappable defenses (though Negative Energy is only 44.9% in my build, and it took some work to get it that high), a heal with endurance discount, an end steal that adds extra defense (which helps patch that minor deficiency in negative energy) and reasonably good resists. Plenty of room after taking my five attacks to fit in Hover, Fly, Evasive Maneuvers, Boxing (again used as a mule here - slow resist is important!), Tough, Weave, Conserve Power (not that I really need it unless I am getting end drained a whole lot), Physical Perfection (more regen never hurts when 2/5 of your attack chain is self-damaging) and Focused Accuracy. 2). Some builds are a little tricker, but you find ways to strike a balance. My third main is Skylancer, my Energy/Energy/Force blaster. She is built for soft-capped ranged defense, reasonable Smash/Lethal resist (Tough + Temp Invulnerability, with Force of Nature available if I need it - though I very rarely do) and Personal Force Field is available for absolute emergencies (I think I've used it once). Even though she's a concept character first and foremost, she doesn't skimp on offense. I don't waste slots on KB -> KD (except in Nova, for convenience), because I have Hover and blasting things straight into the ground so they bounce is more effective KD than KD. Also, it means I still have access to my KB in situations where it can be useful (as well as for self-defense. I did mention that I solo a lot, right?). Even though she's a hoverblaster, she does have Combat Jumping for Immobilize Protection and she slots two KB prot IO's. If something DOES get into melee with her, it's going to eat a Total Focus for hefty damage, followed by a Power Thrust to get it out of her face. I'll also note here that Skylancer has soloed the Posi 2 and Synapse TF's when exemplared down (with only Envenomed Daggers outside her normal powers), and has duoed Citadel with a Katana/Dark Armor scrapper friend of mine (whcih was a cakewalk, as it happened; if I'd realized it was going to be that easy, I'd have tried to solo that one, too). Energy is not exactly the strongest of Blaster primaries, but it's pretty good for single-target damage and Skylancer can dish it out just fine. Furthermore, she brings Maneuvers AND Tactics to the table in terms of team utility. I don't feel like soft-capping her ranged defense or investing in some damage resistance has blunted her offense at all. If anything holds her back in the offensive regard, it's that her concept demands that she be a flying/hovering blaster and not a grounded blapper, which limits the mileage she can get out of her secondary. She seems to be able to hold her own just fine in teams, though, so I'm not too worried about it. Now, I'll be first to admit, I had a lot of help coming up with Skylancer's build from folks who know way more about blasters than me. But I still think it makes a good example of how you can achieve reasonable defensive goals while keeping a strong offense. 3). Some builds, you spend a lot of time tinkering with until you finally make it work. Now, where the builds start to get tricker in terms of meeting my survivability requirements and still getting the offense I want is with my Willpower builds. I have two level 50 Willpower scrappers. One of them, Stormy Walker (Staff/WP) is built for soft-capped Melee, Lethal, Energy/Negative, and Fire/Coild defense. She's not soft-capped to Smash, and she doesn't really need to be because she's hard-capped to S/L resistance. The only reason she's soft-capped to Melee/Lethal is Guarded Spin. Similarly, Dancing Edge, my redside DB/WP street samurai scrapper, is soft-capped to E/N and almost to F/C, but not to S/L. She has resists to handle the S/L. And my several other not-yet-50 WP scrappers (like Impulse Drive, who is level 45 and is KM/WP) and brutes are similar. Now, you might be asking, why did I bother soft-capping E/N on a set that is largely not a defense set? Well, I can answer that in two words: ENDURANCE DRAIN. One thing I discovered very early on with Dancing Edge was that she had major problems with Malta, and significant issues with any enemies that had electrical attacks (Arachnos, Praetorian Clockwork, etc.), due to the endurance drain eating her alive. The solution to this was to soft-cap Energy defense - if the Sapper/Mu/etc. doesn't hit you, it can't drain your endurance, and only being hit 5% of the time kept the end drain to manageable levels. Ever since I soft-capped their E/N defense, neither of my WP scrappers has issues with those enemies anymore. (As for why I soft-capped or near-soft-capped F/C, honestly that was mostly a side-effect of slotting winter sets for slow resistance). So, what did I give up to achieve that soft-capped E/N defense? Mostly, what I gave up was recharge. Fortunately, Willpower doesn't really NEED recharge. Offensively, it does make some difference, but it's not as bad as you might expect. For example: Dancing Edge uses BF -> Attack Vitals as her attack chain. This is not the optimal DB attack chain, obviously, but since the combo system was changed so that missing an attack doesn't drop the combo, it's not as far behind as it once was... and the optimal DB attack chain requires enormous amounts of recharge. She also has Typhoon's Edge to give her some extra AoE punch as well as to provide a place to slot some more slow resistance, and similarly she uses Power Slice (since either Power Slice or Nimble Slash is required) as a mule for a bit of E/N resistance (2-pc. Touch of Death, IIRC). And then there's my Inv/SS tanker, Sylvie Stardrive. She's only level 37 (as of tonight), but I copied her to Brainstorm and tested out her level 50 build - which is based on one of Infinitum's but with a few changes for personal taste - and, yeah, even though it's a more defensive build than offensive, I could have sworn I was playing a Scrapper. Except for, you know, the fact that my health meter wasn't moving. She's a monster. I'm not worried about her damage output at all - she does just fine, and she's nearly indestructible to boot. So, all of that to say this... unless you are going to absurd lengths for defense, in most cases I think you can meet reasonable defensive requirements - enough to solo on fairly high difficulty settings - while still retaining plenty enough damage output to be a solid contributor on a team.

Thanks. First time I've encountered this.

It gets weirder... now he's offering to introduce me to Harvey Maylor and Maria Jenkins, also both level 45-50 contacts. I'm just going to take "Don't choose right now." just on the off chance that this is something messed up with my character data on the server; don't want to make it worse.

So, I finished Tina McIntyre's story arc on my level 41 DB/EA scrapper, Seladri. And I got introduced to a new contact. The new contact was Unai Kemen. Now, I couldn't remember what Unai Kemen's level range was off the top of my head, whether he was 40-44 or 45-50. So when it let me take mission from him, I didn't think much of it. Until I got in the mission, and there were purple Werewolves everywhere. At first, I thought, "Did I accidentally set myself to +4 or something?" Then I actually did the mission and I was winning (which tells me that either Werewolves are really weak, or I need to turn up my difficulty a lot, or possibly both). And then I thought, "Wait, are they level 45 because this is a level 45 mission? What *is* Unai Kemen's level range?" And then I looked it up, and sure enough, he's 45-50! So... this appears to be a very interesting bug. Albeit a kinda fun one so far. But I thought, you know, I should report this. The second screenshot I took with the mission name in it made it too big for the file size limit (I had to resize the screenshot from 2560 down to 1920 just to get even one of them in), so I just cropped the relevant section and enough of it for context.

Yeah, I realized this one when I saw Arbiter Orr and Arbiter Howe in the same zone, and then remembered Arbiter Richard and said, "Wait a minute..." I'm not sure what an Arbiter Howe hat trick would be, but it would certainly involve a fight.

A lot of valid points here. I wouldn't say that Mercy is the reason I play less redside than blueside -as I've noted elsewhere, I don't find playing evil characters to be very appealing most of the time - but certainly the design of Mercy has caused me some frustration when I do start a character on redside. I definitely agree the spawns in Mercy are too dense. Half the time I take a mission below level 5 I end up leveling up from defeating the spawns I aggro on the way there and end up having to do the mission at -1 because of it. At that point I might as well be street sweping. Also, the layout is very unintuitive and it's really easy to get turned around. Just finding your way back to Arbiter Richard is a royal pain, invariably I end up having to open up the map and zoom in on him to find him amongst the forest of icons. Not a problem in Atlas, where the whole layout of the zone funnels you toward Atlas Plaza.

I can't speak to "optimal" as my Energy Melee Brute is still only level 28, whereas my Energy Melee Scrapper is level 50 and full T4, but I personally find the Scrapper version of Energy Melee to be a lot more fun than the Brute version. The extra Short ET's (especially with Critical Strikes in ET so it leads to lots of TF "crits") make the set feel quite a bit faster, and it's more enjoyable to me. Not that I don't like it on a Brute also, but I like it better on a Scrapper.

Well, now you've done it. I haven't even finished reading this thread yet (I had to try out a few things for myself after reading about them), and just the things I learned from the first two or three posts have converted me. Last night, I logged in Stardriver and she had 57 million inf. By the time I logged her out, she had 100 million inf. This morning she has 128 million inf, and a bunch more stuff that hasn't sold yet but definitely will. All from buying yellow recipes and playing rare roulette with them. It hasn't even taken all that much effort. You've officially converted me into a (small-scale) Ebil Marketer. EDIT: And I realized I forgot to say the main thing I wrote the post to say., which is thank you taking the time to write all this up.. It's extremely helpful, and I wish I'd read it a lot sooner.

The Indigo and Crimson missions are some of my favorite missions in the game, and I don't mind the verbosity on them at all because they're complex stories and there's just no real way to tell them without it, and they're well-enough written that I wouldn't want to lose that... but you are definitely right that some of the places they put in ambushes are very inconvenient if you are trying to read the mission text. Especially since a Sapper is one ambush most characters don't dare ignore.

Phantasy Star Online 2 has an interesting thing called "Emergency Code: Clone", where you could find yourself fighting clones of other players' characters There was actually a story behind it, in that the villains were abducting ARKS and making clones of them. In order to show up in an Emergency Code: Clone", you first had to actually get your character abducted (there was, of course, a trick to this) and then fight your way out of the enemy's hive/nest/thing (which was not an easy mission by any stretch). If you succeeded that quest, it flagged you for Emergency Code: Clone. There was an interesting twist on it, in that you were more likely to encounter clones of characters from people on your Friends' List than from other random players. And it created a bit of an "arms race" for a while where people would try to figure out the best combinations of equipment and Photon Arts to make their clones as overpowered as possible to try to kill their friends. It was actually pretty fun. The only downsides to doing something like that in CoH are that 1) we've already done the evil doppelganger thing to death here, and 2). unlike in PSO2, not everyone's character has the same background, and some characters should really not be clone-able (for example, many Science heroes whose powers are not in-born). Actually, if it was something you could designate which of your characters were eligible to appear in (for example, in PSO2 you had to "register" your character for it by getting them abducted and completing that mission), I wouldn't mind something like that here.

She might have a free slot, but she definitely doesn't have a free pool, I'm afraid. I might be able to find something I can live without in her planned build.

Yeah, the Shard might be even worse without Flight than Grandville is. The only upside is it's a lot easier to just not go to the Shard. It's kind of hard to avoid going to Grandville.

I tried that for a little while, but with Infiltration I found I couldn't make a lot of the jumps that would be needed to make it even passably efficient - that, and some of the ones I could make, I could just barely make, and if I missed it and fell all the way down and had to start back over again... yeah, I don't have the patience for that. So I just started keeping around a temp power rocket pack. It's slow, but at least it's reliable. Of course, the one she's using right now is a *Longbow*-design rocket pack, so I guess she must have stolen it. SJ is probably a lot more viable in that regard. As I've said elsewhere, I generally choose my travel powers by concept, but if I can justify a character having flight, that's my preference even on blueside. But on redside flight or SJ feel like the only really viable options. I shudder to think what is going to happen when my Natural Katana/Ninjutsu Stalker (who is, predictably, a ninja) makes it to high level - her travel power is... Ninja Run! Yeah, that's gonna suck. I did forget that I have one other relatively new redside character that has proven to be fun to play so far, but in the case of Gun Bunny (DP/Martial Blaster), it's because my headcanon for her story is that she's obfuscating stupidity ("Everyone assumes I'm just a dumb bunny, so I'll just let them go on thinking that until I take them for everything they're worth.") which makes her voice in my head entertaining as I play her. Sometimes making a character work in any setting is just a matter of finding that something that makes them feel unique.

Not just in the military, either. My job title is "Technical Support Engineer Level 3." This comes with vastly greater responsibilities than someone whose job title is "Technical Support Engineer Level 1" at the same company. We're both engineers, but I'm a much more experienced engineer and therefore more is expected of me.

You could make redside more attractive to me by turning Grandville into a parking lot. No, really, my one level 50 redsider has Infiltration as her travel power, and that really is kind of utterly miserable to the point of being demotivating, so I don't play her very much because of that. I do have a Psi Melee/WP brute with Mystic Flight that just hit 40, so maybe I'll be able to stop hating Grandville so much soon. To be honest, the other thing that keeps me away from redside is... I don't really enjoy being evil. I hardly ever played Sith in Star Wars: The Old Republic, either. Pretty much the only way I've ever been able to enjoy being the "bad guy" is by being cartoonishly over the top about it. My Sith Marauder in The Old Republic was the one Sith-side character I actually played, and it's because she was all rage all the time and that made her entertaining. (Incidentally, the aforementioned Psi/WP Brute is a lot like that, too). Other than that, my redsiders are either "only-in-it-for-the-money" (my level 50 DB/WP street samurai scrapper) or "I was framed for a crime I didn't commit and now I'm a fugitive" (my EM/Inv Brute who is a re-creation of a character from Live and who I only run radio missions on because all of the story arcs would be absurdly out-of-character for her). Honestly, my one redside hope is Catastrophe, my recently-created Claws/EA catgirl hoverbrute who is... not really evil, because she's basically a force of nature. As she would tell you, "I am Catastrophe," and she is. Since she's not actively malicious, she's just a walking hovering disaster in progress (who doesn't understand why people don't understand that and stay away from her when she tells them that she is Catastrophe!), I can have fun with her. Of course, she's something like level 15 right now so she's got a long way to go. But, well.. the point of all that is that making redside appealing to someone who doesn't generally like playing evil characters is... actually pretty difficult, you know? Regarding the suggestion about NPC's that are copies of player characters, honestly... the roleplayer in me really dislikes it. I don't really want my character appearing in places that are out of my control.

This is really an important thing to remember in general. In an online game like this, we don't know what's going on in another player's head, and we don't know what their motivations are. We should try to respect people's preferences as much as we can (within reason), even if we don't understand their reasons, and even if their reasons don't make sense to us. By "within reason", I mean, for example... if the solo player in your example specifically asks you not to buff them, then don't buff them. On the other hand, if they want to team with you, they're going to have to accept getting buffed because otherwise it's hurting the whole team's experience. To the OP, my suggestion for dealing with being stuck with the Midnighter badge when you don't want it is to ignore it on an in-character basis. Like, "these crazy people gave me membership to their stupid club. I told them I didn't want it, but they wouldn't take my name off the list. That doesn't mean I have to actually go there or even acknowledge them, though." So, basically, it's like being signed up for someone's spam email list - you can't really do anything about it if they refuse to take you off the list, but you don't actually have to read their emails. I realize this might not be a satisfying option for you, but it's the only suggestion I have.

I actually created a character named Arc Flash a while back, only to later discover that there is an NPC by that name (it's one of the ones who shows up in certain Mayhem missions). Of course, my character looks completely different than that character. The only things they have in common are the name, that they're both female, and that they both use electricity. They have different AT's/powersets, hairstyles, faces, and vastly different costumes and color schemes. So it'd be pretty hard to confuse my character for the NPC. Given mine is a villain, I imagine if they ever met it'd be a "There can be only one!" scenario 😛