Sirrocco

...and for the people this guide is for? That really, really doesn't matter. With the exception of the freebies off the START vendor, Procs are very specific enhancements that they almost certainly won't be able to afford soon, often requiring levels that they're going to take a while to reach, and an understanding of one of the more complicated corners of the game engine to know what to slot them in. That's the whole point of this guide. There are lots of guides out there that will tell you "This is how you fast-forward to endgame ASAP, and then the optimal choices to make for endgame". That's not what this is. This is a guide that's trying to offer some helpful advice on taking those first few stumbling steps for those who *don't* want to skip past the learning experience.

Why would it miss the buff on your own team? You tide pool, you whitecap into the tide pool, the enemy focuses on you for a (hopefully brief) moment, and then the rest of the melee comes in and starts getting tide pool buffs. Is that not how it works? Or if you don't like taking alpha strikes, you tide pool, you let the other poor schmuck run in and get all the attention (thus getting tide pool buffs), *then* you whitecap in and etc etc etc. So, that's all useful stuff for the "how do I play my character" question. The question I'm trying to ask is "how do I get the information that will help me figure out how to play my character for myself". I feel like for everything by the support trees, I can mostly get it by feel. Some pools are more complicated than others, but I can manage it for basically all of them. For the support pools, though, especially the heavy debuff parts, I can't.

I'm trying to run the Marine pool, and with a lot of it being debuffs that have a particular duration, i'm having real trouble understanding which bits to prioritize, which bits are useful at which times, and so forth. I like to get an understanding of my powers in play. For damage-dealing, this is really easy. I take swings, I can see how much end it eats and how much damage it does, how often it hits and when it refreshes. Some of the secondary effects get a little wobbly but it's pretty straightforward. DoTs aren't much harder. Heals and HoTs are very similar. Endurance management abilities (in both directions) are also pretty straightforward. Resists are manageable, defense is a little iffy but I can work with it if I pay enough attention. temporary buffs on myself require a degree of attention, but I can work with them as well as I need to to get a gist of what's going on. CC is actually pretty easy because it's nice and obvious, and I can see how it reduces the enemy's ability to function and what other effects it has. -Recharge is a bit harder to track on properly, but I can at least see how I'd come to understand it. Always-on buffs and debuff auras I can look at, say "yet, this is probably worthwhile on general principles", slot endurance management appropriately and mostly just have them on full-time. All of this stuff I can work with. Then we get to duration-based debuffs, and my ability to understand what I'm doing and which ones are more important and what to slot for and what to open with and all of that stuff just falls apart. I can basically figure that the stuff that I'm doing is generally useful, and I should do it, but I'm having real difficulty getting that gut understanding on things like "How long is this effect lasting?", "Who did I actually manage to stick that to anyway?", "Were they or were they not in my cone, and what would I have to do to fix that?", and "How significant *was* that effect?" That, in turn, means that my ability to figure out useful rotations, figure out reasonable slotting, know what things I should be using to burn through minion packs versus prioritizing against single individual threats... it's all pretty much a mess. I want to learn, because it seems like it's an interesting game to play, but it's a game based on deeper understanding that I straight-up don't have, and in-the-moment information that I have real trouble keeping track of. I figure that for Defender mains, this is all bread-and-butter stuff. You have to have solutions for this already... so I'm asking for some clue. I'm currently most directly concerned with Marine, but I'm sure that the same basic skillset of "how do I make sense of this stuff anyway" applies to Trick Arrow and Poison and probably Kinetics and almost certainly a few others as well. So suggestions of specific advice for specific powers aren't unwelcome or anything, but mostly what I'm interested in is knowing how to put together the tools for figuring this all out for myself. I mean, *is* there a way for coming to understand it intuitively? Is it just all spreadsheet madness, all the way down? I sure hope not, but if it is, then I do what to know that. Thank you for whatever time or attention you see fit to offer.

Followup on the last - mostly this ahs just been an annoyance, but there is one particular thing that it prevents. Mistress Eva's intervention prevents me from switching missions. I'd need to click on the mission I want, click on the select mission button, and then click on the "yes, I want to abandon progress" button all before I get another "actually, you're obsessed with a contact that you can't see" tick. So... no resetting the mission, no being able to quickly swap around difficulty and re-try, nothing like that. It is still possible to abandon the current mission at the contact, but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get the same mission again quickly.

Bah. Well, it is what it is. Presumably it's at least no worse for these situations than standard power pool stealth.

Okay. I thank you all for your input. I actually went Illusion/Thermal. Thermal... it's like cold, but the shields are resist shield rather than Def shields. I'm thinking that'll help the kid hit his resist caps that much easier, because I'm not really thinking he'll get there from there without them - not with the kind of slotting we're likely to see during expected playtime. It also comes with two early heals, and, if I make it to 16, an ally rez. It's nothing all that involved, but I feel like a lot of the stuff its' giving me is stuff that I want. Admittedly, my res hole in toxic lines up with his res hole in toxic, but that just means that we need to stay away from Vahzilock. The res weakness to cold... well, there just isn't all that much cold damage in the game in the first place, honestly. We're planning on mostly running storylines, for those sweet, sweet Merit points. All advice that's talking about things like proc-bombs is imagining much higher budgets for enhancements than we're actually working with. there's a decent chance that we won't ever slot anything more complicated than a common IO. It's possible that we'll buy a class ATO or two with merit points, if we get that far. I do intend to slot for endurance, and talk the kidn through it. One of my mains is a Dark/Rad tanker. I know about slotting for endurance. I grabbed illusion because looking at it, it looked like one of the major illusion drawbacks was the tendency for illusory damage to heal itself over time. Well, if I have a Brute tearing out their liver, then that'll help drop them before that gets to be a problem, right? So far it's sort-of working. We'll see how it plays out. I'm looking forward to having superior Invisibility to play with once we hit level 8. It says it doesn't break on attack. If it also doesn't break on glowy interaction, it's going to enable *so much* ninja-running of missions. It also seems like the sort of thing that's useful for keeping the attention on the big guy. For those confused about my initial logic train, it went sort of like this: - My kid and I decide that we want to play this game together. - I explain the options to the kid, and he decides he likes the idea of a Brute. A bit more discussion of what he wants and a bit of research on my side, and we settle on Savage/Fire... which, as I understand it, is a pretty popular Brute build, and not just for farming. - I'm trying to figure out what to play to work alongside that. It occurs to me that I was avoiding Controllers because I'd heard of their difficulties while soloing, and this was an opportunity to try them out while *not* soloing. Sounds good.

Eh... the real thing is that I want to try to play with the control power sets a bit. Like, I do a *lot* of solo, and I've done a lot of digging into the support power pools of various sorts to feed my mastermind habit, and Defender is basically just... that but better at it. The Control power pools are something that I have zero experience with, and I'd kind of like to change that. Well, their main issue (as I understand it) is that they're real bad at solo, because they can't keep up with the necessary damage pressure... and I have a brute buddy who can ensure that plenty of damage gets done. If the real answer is "This is a bad choice. Controllers are bad at low levels." or "This is a bad choice. Controllers need more than one ally." or "This is a bad choice. Controllers are inevitably complicated to play." then... well, okay. I can adjust based on that if I need to... but the way I'm seeing it, this might be my best opportunity to get some experience over on that side of things, and I'd like to try to work with that.

So, I'm setting up to paly paired characters alongside a Savage/Fire Brute as a bit of father/son bonding time. Savage/Fire is a pretty classic Brute package that's resist-based, a little light on the protection, heavy on the damage, and even more interested in blitzing from one fight to the next than normal Brutes are. I've largely been playing solo up until now, and the whole "controllers are terrible at solo" thing has kept me from really even looking into the archetype in a meaningful way... but if this is a paired character, then that might actually work out pretty well. So... I could use some advice. I know that I want at least some healing in my secondary, ideally early on, but I'm thinking that the "single-target not you" heals might actually be better for my purposes than the "area heal yourself and everyone else" ones, as long as I can keep from stealing aggro too badly. I don't want to depend *too* hard on my kid's aggro management skills. He's very nearly brand new to the game. I know I care more about the early game, even the very early game, than the late game. I play a lot of alts, and not one of them has gotten past 25, and I honestly don't expect this pairing to get even that far. If it's a setup with a very solid early game that just kind of whimpers out at the higher levels, I'm prepared to be happy with that. "But it has a really cool capstone" isn't a huge draw. I'm somewhat worried about complexity. I have an expectation that playing a controller is kind of complicated, and... well, one or my favorite archetypes is Mastermind, and there are mastermind secondaries I don't play (like, say, Marine and Trick Arrow) because they just take way more attention and control than I'm prepared to deal out even when my minions are mostly taking care of themselves. So *that's* a thing. I'm quite fond of toggles and autopowers, but I understand that there's not but so many of those in controller space. At the same time, I *do* want a character who's doing *something*. In particular, I want to be doing something interesting in the fight that goes beyond just "keep the shields up, stay in aura range" or whatever the equivalent is. We are not interested in full builds. We will not be twinking anything. We'll be figuring stuff out as we go and paying our own way, and probably not even using all that much from the P2W vendor. I expect we'll be playing blueside, and I do know the available missions in the appropriate level ranges pretty well. Suggestions about "this build is great at fighting X but not Y" are cool. (Example from the Tanker side: Electric armor is fantastic against standard clockwork. It's really not great against Vahzilock.) So yeah. I have a fairly solid grasp of the support pools. I got *nothing* on the control pools, and I also don't know even the bare minimum about the basic stuff you need to know to play a controller well. Mostly, I'm hoping for suggestions about primary, secondary, combos of the two (if that even matters) and any random bits of advice on playing a controller properly in this environment. Explanations of why this or that option is good or quick explanations of the differences are even better than just "I suggest you play X". Thank you for your time.

Surely your mastery is without parallel and your understanding beyond reproach. Perhaps you should write your own guide.

Bah. Ugh. I'm new at reading City of Data, and I keep getting it wrong. Fine. One more edit.

Ah? I was misinformed, then. Good to know before I started slotting those enhancements. I go in and try to modify accordingly. ...and now I can see where on City of Data it indicated that. It was a very small icon in a place I wouldn't have any thought of havign looked, nor necessarily understood if I'd found it. Still... good to know that sort of thing for the future. I'm not sure where you're getting Fissure from on a tanker. If you meant Fault, then that's only Mag 1. In order to perma Mag 4, you'd have to do something like double the recharge and also double the effect time, plus whatever you need to do to punch through the level difference and any specific resist to stun they might have. If you're managing *that*, then you have a much better enhancement game than I do. On electric melee, for Thunder Strike, you're looking at a 50% chance of mag 2 for 5-6 seconds, with a base 20 second recharge... so you basically need to fit another doubling in there somehow. Hand Clap is running a 100% chance of an 8 second mag 2 on a recharge of 30, but it almost doesn't need Dark Armor, because it also has another 50% chance of mag 2 on top of that, so half the time it's hitting 4s all by itself. I can see why SS tankers are so fond of it. Devastating Blow from radiation is doing better than Fault on a single target, though you can't really make it as reliable. It beats Thunder Strike handily, but Hand Clap is in a zone of its own. Atom Smasher isn't at all reliable, but it is still nice to have.

Currently playing as a pure Praetorian (resistance). I finished out the First Ward storylines, looked around for available contacts on the "find contacts" list, and noticed that Mistress Eva (Talos Island) was on the list. I thought that it might be interesting to see what she had to say, so I hit the "teleport to contact" button. It teleported me to the contact, the map server complained (probably because I wasn't a hero), and it immediately teleported me back to where I was. Well, okay. Fine. The problem is that now, whenever I try to select *any other* contact, it de-selects that contact and selects Mistress Eva almost immediately afterwards. This is not preventing me from playing. I'm still able to get missions, to complete missions, and so forth. I suspect that I can solve this little problem by just converting over to being a hero and actually going to visit Mistress Eva... but, honestly, I'd like to work my way through the Night Ward mission set before I do that. Replicating this problem should be pretty easy as long as you have a praetorian of the correct level. It's possible that they may have to be rebel - I don't know who Mistress Eva shows up as a contact for. My character with this problem is Dark Core over on Everlasting. I hope you find this helpful.

I just today learned about a kind of awesome thing hidden in the Dark Armor/Radiation Melee combo, and I wanted to share, because it's awesome. For those of you who already know how this magnitude vs protection thing works, you already know most of this,.. but I only just found this out today, and I've been actually working on understanding how this game works for a while, so I figure that's not all of you. So, first of all, there's the very straightforward "I get to have two damage auras" thing. Dark armor is one of the armor types with a damage aura. Dark, Elec, and Fire all get it at level 1, then Stone at 6, Ice at 12, and Bio at 22. Meanwhile, the only two melee sets that get damage auras are radiation at 24 and spines at 18. Irradiated ground is 8 ft radius. Dual damage auras is kind of fun, and having one from the very beginning is great. This is the reason I built the character in the first place, and I've been quite happy with him. Admittedly, I *have* had to put a fair bit of thought and attention into endurance management, but that's the game you sign up for when you take Dark Armor, and I've been enjoying it. It turns out that there's another more hidden synergy. Dark Armor has a disorient aura. Radiation melee has some high-level attacks that disorient. This is actually important. First of all, for those of you who've not had the pleasure, disorient is awesome. A disoriented enemy takes no actions. They stop whatever they were doing, stand up, and wander sort of aimlessly and slowly around, until they stop being disoriented. Damaging them does not break the effect. The only real downside is that we're inflicting this via aura, and it's possible for the enemy to (eventually) wander out of said aura. That's it. So... disorient is a crowd control effect, which means that it has something called a magnitude. It also has a duration. In the case of Oppressive Gloom, the magnitude is 2, and the duration is (AFAICT) exactly as long as the repeat cycle on the aura, which means that anything that sits in the aura is going to be under a magnitude 2 effect at all times. Enemies have a stat called protection with respect to these effects. In order for them to actually do anything, the total magnitude of effects of that type applied to the enemy must be greater than or equal to their protection. Protection is tied very directly to tier. Magnitude 2, for example, means that it'll stick on all minions, and all underlings/small, and no one else. Now, there are ways to fix this. The obvious thing to do is to try to use enhancers. Disorient enhancers will increase duration (thus enabling overlaps) and recharge enhancers (and other methods of improving recharge) will let you use your powers more frequently. Unfortunately, neither one will help with Oppressive Gloom. It only allows for one stack at a time per caster, and recharge boosters aren't any more meaningful on toggles than they are on auto effects. If you have a friend who also has Oppressive Gloom, the two auras will stack just fine, but there's no other way to push OG itself. It does the thing it does very reliably, and is not interested in doing anything else. This is where the other synergy between Radiation Melee and Dark Armor comes in. Radiation Melee has two attacks that also disorient. Devastating Blow is a single-target attack that hands out a magnitude 3 disorient for roughly 10-12 seconds (depending on level) at a 60% chance with a 17 second recharge time, and Atom Smasher is a PBAoE attack that hands out a magnitude 2 disorient for roughly 6-7 seconds at a 25% chance with a 22 second recharge time. There's nothing you can do about those percent chances, but you can add disorient duration enhancements and probably *should* be adding recharge enhancements, to cram on more time under the effects, and (if you're quite lucky) possibly get situations where they stack on themselves or each other, cranking it further. It is worth noting at this point that level differentials ("the purple patch") have a direct effect on mez duration (the thing we're talking about here). So if you're trying the overlap trick on yellow and orange enemies, know that you're going to need to add on more of those duration boosts to get it done. Some of them are likely to have resistance as well, which *also* directly reduces the duration. As far as I can tell, OG itself doesn't care much about any of this, because the duration it's throwing around is significantly longer than the frequency with which it fires, but whatever powers you get off of your secondary sure will. Essentially, then, if you don't have Dark Armor, then Radiation Melee's two most powerful attacks have a chance of shutting down minions and maybe lieutenants for a little while. It's cool, but not that big a deal. If you *do* have dark armor, those same attacks can shut down bosses, and if you get everything lined up just right and get lucky with it, even elite bosses. It won't last all that long, but every moment an elite boss is staggering around being ineffectual is a good moment, right? Now, if you don't care about doubling up on damage auras? If you think that the idea of a tanker specialized in disorient is awesome, and you want to build for that? Well, honestly, it's not hard to find. Fully 11 of the 22 Tanker secondaries come with some form of Disorient baked in, with some of them fielding significantly more disorient than Radiation does. Three powers in particular that I'm personally aware of (now) are Stone Melee (Fault), Super Strength (Hand Clap) and Electric Melee (Electric Clap). Each of those powers is clearly designed as a heavy mez power - dealing a solid 2 disorient 100% of the time, and a 50% to disorient further, and I suspect that with enough boosts to recharge and disorient duration, you could get every one of them to 100% uptime... which means that every boss and below you fight could be permanently under the effects of disorient, and every archvillain/hero/monster could be disoriented a third of the time. Getting your magnitude up to 7 for the Elite Bosses could be a trick, but that kind of thing is what friends are for. Of the Primary power pools, though, the only one that offers any disorient at all is Fiery Aura, and that's only as a side-effect on its self-rez power. So practically speaking, if you want to enjoy the benefits of disorient stacking, it's Dark Armor or nothing. /************************/ Credit goes out to Psi and Terminal over on the City of Roleplay discord for being willing to take the time to explain to me how this all worked. Much appreciated. Further credit to @Psyonico for catching some errors and misunderstandings I'd had along the way and pointing out the Electric, Stone, and Super Strength versions of the combo.

I played thugs/traps for a while. It was okay. I suspect it would be better in high level play with the right enhancements, but I'm still kind of a newb. I've started a new character with thugs/time, and it's been working very well. I'm about to hit 20, and the Time powerset has been very satisfying. Now, if only the arsonist would quit picking fights and dying in them... and maybe develop a better fashion sense?

Thugs/empathy. You're a massive fanboy/simp, just following the bug guy around and cheering him on.

Funny thing - I build a guy on a similar theme as DA/Radiation... though that's at least in part because I really like damage auras and buff toggles.

So... I tried out flying on a tanker, and that was clearly a mistake. It seems clear now that fliers ought to be primarily ranged attackers. I generally play solo, which leaves me not particularly excited about defenders or corrupters, and I really dislike the Sentinel inherent vulnerability power, for reasons I can't adequately explain, but not using it feels like just leaving power on the table, which is also feelsbad. So... blaster. I suppose it's time to try a blaster. I've looked through the secondaries, and I think I like the idea of devices. It seems like it's relatively heavy on the persistent self-buffs, and that's a real plus for me. I'm concerned that it might clash with the flying part, though, if it requires contact with the ground for too many of its powers... and flying was the whole point of the character. Does anyone have any insights on this? Also, does anyone have any suggestions for primary? Again, this is for a character who's pretty much pure solo, and who wants to be flying and at range as much as possible. This is also for relatively low-level play (Seriously, I've created and discarded tons of characters, and haven't yet broken lvl 20 on any of them. I mostly just want to get the feel of the "flying blaster" experience) and relatively low money (again, haven't yet broken level 20).

The "inherently high movespeed that's suppressed" would get some strange effects from sending your minions out of your supremacy to attack distant targets. Melee minions in general might get a bit odd. I guess I'm a bit perplexed because it hasn't really been an issue for me? Sometimes you have to pause a bit before you engage so that the henchlings can catch up, but it's just not that big a deal. Is this primarily a problem when running in groups or something?

In my experience, MMs tend to be pretty solid on solo regardless. Traps has some pretty clearly tech themes. Like, when you can drop a small block on the ground, and it makes all of your nearby friends heal faster...? When you can launch a forcefield drone? I wouldn't suggest Trick Arrow unless you like the idea of all of your powers on that side being ranged debuffs (area or single-target). It's going to be the closest you get to all natural, though.

In general, "Mastermind without pets" is roughly equivalent to "Corrupter, but a bit more fragile, tires out faster, and way, way less damage" or "Defender, but worse at literally everything." Literally the only thing that petless mastermind still has going for it is that a petless demon mastermind is still the only whip-wielder in the game. That's it.

Yeah... "Run through enemies, smashing away" is more of a brute thing - brute is all about "I want to be constantly smashing enemies, as much as I possibly can be, with few or no breaks for anything." Honorable mention for Brutes goes to spines/fire. Get access to a PBAoE damage aura on the one side at level 1, and a second PBAoE damage aura on the other side at level 18. If you want to play a brute, and have your weaker enemies just die while you ignore them, then spines/fire is the way to go.

Necro and Demons are both quite solid. For necro, though... I'd suggest a test. Throw together a necro MM real quick - not one to keep, but one to throw away. Take the attack as your first standard power. Go get into a fight and use that attack until the wraith shows up. Do the wraith noises make your ears bleed? Then you do not want to play a necro. I will say that I found the starting heal on Dark to be satisfyingly chunky, while the starting heal on Time felt a bit anemic, at least at first. On Time, it's worth noting that it has a very shiny PBAoE aura at level 10... that produces noise of its own. I'll also say that there's two different ways you might be playing this. You might be saying "These are characters we want to futz around with, and maybe learn the system" and you might be saying "these are characters we intend to take to 50, and possibly to the spaces after that." If it's the former, I'd suggest you take a look at the guide I recently wrote for just such an occasion (please feel free to post any comments or questions). If it's the latter, that guide's a lot less useful. Between the three of time/electric/dark... - Electric wants you to manage your buffs and heals. If you want your minigame to be all about managing the buffs and heals you hand out, then that's what electric is for Do you like that? Given what you said about heals, It sounds like you might like that. If you don't, then pick something else. (Note: At this point, this is the one that I haven't played) - Dark is all about dropping debuffs on the enemy. Like, it does have a nice, chunky PBAoE heal at the beginning, but even that is a debuff that you drop on the enemy. Among other things, proper debuff usage is going to involve a lot more coordination with your Brute friend on which targets to be hitting when. How much effort do the two of you want to have to put into coordination like that? - Time is an excellent default if you don't want to play either of those two minigames heavily. Worth noting on the Brute that the Brute is going to want to move. They're not going to want to have to slow down and prep before each fight or whatever. That may well mean a lot of resummoning your henchlings because they got beaten down and fell over, rather than healing them back up. Basically, for heals you should mostly care about your friend and yourself, and if that means that you head into a fight where your henchlings are at half health from the beginning and die in the middle, then that's what it means. This is actually a decent argument for Dark, because you can just put Twilight Grasp as part of your standard rotation, make sure that you're close enough in to the battle to catch everyone in the area effect, and at that point the healing is something that just happens. Edit: - Brutes really like it when you feed them endurance, and when you let them grab and keep aggro. Healing/defensive stuff so that they can afford to grab *more* aggro and not have to pause for breath is also really nice, of course. Of the three you've mentioned, Electrical is the only one that can be used to feed someone endurance. - From what I can recall, both demons and undead tend to be resist-based henchlings. Time is Def-based, while Electric is Resist-based, and you generally want to stack rather than diversifying. Dark does its own thing.

So... I found this game something like a week or two ago, and rapidly discovered that Mastermind is my preferred archetype. It is what it is. I dug around a lot and saw a lot of advice (much of it at least moderately conflicting, some of it old enough that it almost has to be partially out of date and/or possibly applying to the rulesets on other servers). I saw a lot of build advice on primaries and secondaries and how they fit together... but most of what I saw, in retrospect, was about who you're going to be at level 50, or at least level 35. They're talking about having access to all your powers and slotting a bunch of enhancements and hitting your defense caps and all that stuff. You know what? I haven't done any of that. I've bounced around between different builds trying to figure out what I like and what works for me. I'm currently running Thugs/Traps, Demon/Dark, and Beast/Storms. To date, I've discarded a Beast/Cold, a Bots/FF, two different Undead/Dark, a very brief attempt at a Ninja/Trick Arrow (my goodness those Genin look stupid), and four characters who weren't masterminds and thus don't matter, and not one of them has yet even made it as far as level 20. So I'm going to assume that you either already have or will soon read all the guides put out by people who know the game really well, and just tell you thee stuff that I've figured out on the fly that's a little more dialed in to the experience you're having right now. First, this may just be a matter of personal experience, but I've found that I really can't bring myself to care about a character who doesn't have at least a bit of a personality, and one that I can like or respect. There are decisions about which missions to take and how to complete them that basically don't have right or wrong answers, and if I can't make them in character then I'm not having nearly as much fun. You don't need a huge backstory or anything, but there can be value in giving yourself even just a little bit of a personality to play with. Second, I encourage you to try building your first few characters as "one to throw away". There's a whole bunch of system to learn and stuff to understand, about both the game and yourself. Better to make the kinds of decisions that are going to make your early game fun/easy/whatever to better enjoy that process than to focus on building something that will be awesomely tuned at a level 50 that you might never get to. The rest of this doc is going to basically assume you're taking that strategy and offering insights and suggestions accordingly. Third... there's going to be stuff that you just can't play because you can't play it. I personally am limited to characters who are either huge build or who can justify ninja running. I feel awkward playing females, the powerslide produces way too many sparkles for my taste, and both standard running and beast running just look stupid to me on the standard male model. I refuse to constantly watch something that looks like that. Also, the run type and the appearance and the character concept and the personality all have to fit together in my head and make sense, which makes this an actual meaningful limitation. But that's not all! I hate the sounds of the specters off of the Undead Primary. Hate it. I want to be able to play with my sound on, so if I'm playing an undead build, it has to be an undead build that can manage without primary attacks. Maybe some day I'll master the art of replacing sound files (I know there's a help around here somewhere for that) and unlock that stuff for myself again. Maybe not. Regardless... you're probably going to have weird little hangups of your own, and you don't necessarily even know what they are yet. Thankfully, there's enough flexibility out there that you can probably find at least a few good builds anyway. /************/ So... things that matter for pre-20, and things that don't: - Nothing anyone has said about enhancements matters. I don't have a single character who's even filled in all of the enhancement slots on the powers they use most. At low levels, enhancements just aren't that big a deal. Eventually I intend to start hitting that invention thing, and at least get all of my slots basically filled in, and then slowly upgrade them over time. Eventually. For the moment, though, raising that +10% defense to a +11% or +12% just isn't that big a deal. Discussion of stuff like "mule pets" really doesn't matter. - Stamina doesn't matter... until it does. At the very beginning of the game, it's just never going to be your most limited resource because you literally won't be able to spend it fast enough. Once you hit level 10 or so, though, if you're sporting a lot of toggles, then you're likely to start feeling the bite. I have to switch between my travel toggles and my combat toggles because I just don't have the recharge to run them both. It's one of the next parts of the game that I personally need to figure out... but "figuring parts of the game out" is kind of the ride that we're on right now, you know? - Matching protection strategies barely matters. Sure, if you've got more defense, then defense is worth more, and the same on the other side for resist... but you're not going to get anything close to the cap on either regardless, so it's not as useful overall as one might prefer, unless you're somehow stacking quite a lot of it for your level. - Most of what's in your secondary doesn't matter as much as you think it does. You're going to get one of the first two. Level four unlocks the third, level 10 the 4th, level 16 the 5th, level 20 the 6th. numbers seven through nine may as well not exist as far as we're concerned. Also, you're almost certainly spending the level 2 on a direct attack off of your primary (either the first or third), level 6 is your first minion skills upgrade, and level 12 is your t2 summon. Those last two are basically hard mandatory. You may well want more than one basic attacks off your primary, and there are also power packs to consider. So... honestly, there's a good chance that you don't pick up very many powers off your secondary for a while. - Debuffs are hard to track. At the levels you're dealing with, enemies tend to die pretty quickly, and it can actually be really hard to tell how much any given debuff actually mattered to the fight. Like, we can assume that they help some, because the game isn't going to just tell us lies, but did they help enough to be worth the bother? Not always easy to be sure. Might be better to leave "learning about effective use of debuffs" until a little later in your personal journey. - What kind of powers you're dealing with matters. PBAoE toggles are wonderfully easy to use. you turn them on, and don't get too far from your henchlings, and they just work. They also drain stamina, at levels that can quickly become unsupportable if you get too many. Delightfully, the Leadership power pool is there to hand us all a few more. On the flip side, enemy-targeting toggles are incredibly finicky. You have to actually hit to stick the thing, or you've wasted the action and stamina, and some of those things are *slow*. Then if that foe dies too early, the effect fades into nothing fairly quickly. If they manage to run instead of dying, then that aoe effect hanging off of them can easily aggro others.. It's complicated to use, in a way that can get really frustrating if you're an optimization perfectionist. Oh, and they're also basically all debuffs, to add yet another layer on. - What intensity you're running at matters. Fact is, if you're playing a mastermind and running solo missions (as I've been doing), you can afford to go at least x2/+0 and probably x2/+1, and you'll need to in order to actually develop the skills to play a mastermind right. At the same time, if you jump in doing that from the beginning, you'll find that you're rapidly outlevelling your storylines, especially if you're on one of the double exp servers and/or are trying to run more than one set of contacts at once. If you care about those storylines - if you actually want to enjoy the experience of playing through the lower levels of the game as they were intended to be played, that could be a sadness. Calibrating how fast you level vs how fast you burn through content is tricky. - There's another aspect to the fact that you're beefier than your security rating would suggest. If you're playing the hero storylines, line, they'll eventually send you to Perez Park. They'll send you to Perez Park over and over again. As a Mastermind? It turns out that you can function as a solo in Perez Park, if you work at it, especially if you grab a level or two so your targets aren't conning purple anymore. Protip on that one - if you're hunting hellions, there's some really convenient spawns of them just to the left through a little alleyway as soon as you come out the Atlas Park entrance, and if you come running back in through that alleyway, the floating robots will happily disintegrate them for you. - as a further bit on "how much do you want to actually play out your lower levels", there's the P2W/T4V shop. How much you use that thing is up to you. I would suggest you at least get athletic/ninja/beast run and your choice of jump pack. The run power-up makes running back and forth to various place a lot less grindy and a lot more fun, and the jump pack really simplifies certain bits about getting to rooftops and whatnot later on. - Primaries: Whether your T1 minions are ranged or melee matters. How durable they are matters. Whether you like how they look matters. Any "ranged" T1s are going to start as a ranged/melee hybrid until you get to level 6 and can upgrade them further. Still, beyond that? At this level there's surprisingly little difference between them. Go ahead and pick your primaries based on what feels good to order around, and which one has basic attacks that you enjoy throwing. I personally found the Thug "I shoot them with two guns and they fall down" very satisfying, and the Robot "I blast them with a weird laser and the fly backwards" very unsatisfying, but it's very much a personal thing. - Secondaries: Technically you can make it through these levels without a secondary at all, but it still matters because your secondary is one of the few things you can actually do, and you might as well work it. Whichever is the better of your two starting options is going to matter a lot, because you're going to be using it a lot, and any particularly good powers that you can access early are going to matter some. - Healing: It matters, but not as much as you'd think. Keeping your minions alive is great... but they're also really easy to resummon, especially at first. Good, solid healing can keep fights under control. Bad, slow healing might as well not be there. /********************/ Now we move on to the breakdown in secondaries. I'm going to be talking about what you can get out of those early levels, and, in particular, how much of a hassle it is to use. That hassle part matters. PBaOEs are *easy* to use. PBAoE toggles are even easier. single-target ally-targeting and enemy-targeting powers are pretty straightforward. Ground-targeting AOEs and enemy-targeting cones can be a bit of a hassle. Enemy-targeting toggles are a pain. Eventually, I understand, we'll all learn enough that some of this will even out, but for the moment that's what's up. Cold Domination: I've played it. You start out with Ice Shield, which is delightfully easy to use (fast-cast, long-lasting, and affects all of your minions as once) and provides some real benefits to protection for most of the foes you'll be facing. Infrigidate is a skip - it's the kind of debuff that'll make you wonder if it's doing anything at all. Snowstorm is more of a skip, as it's the same thing but as a enemy-targeting toggle. Glacial Shield is basically Ice Shield except for all of the things that Ice Shield doesn't cover. So... early game, you basically get one good schtick out of the powerset, and not one you'll be using in a fight. Dark Miasma: I've played it. You start with Twilight Grasp, which is a *very* solid "heal everyone" power that also happens to debuff the enemy you're shooting it at. The rest of the stuff is various debuffs in varying degrees of "frustrating to use". Darkest Night is particularly frustrating because that thing takes an incredibly long time to case, and then gets resisted a bunch and then that enemy falls over and very soon it drops away and it's just a hassle. Still, it's an opportunity to learn how to use some of these ability types, and the fact is that Twilight Grasp is a hell of a flagship power. Electrical Affinity: Haven't played it. It's got a sort of funny gimmick, but it looks like its base power of Rejuvenating Circuit winds up being a "target one ally, heal yourself and most/all henchlings" power. Honestly, that sounds pretty nice. So you'll have something solid to work with at base, and you can try to figure out the rest of the wackiness as you go. Empathy: Haven't played it. This one's giving you healing. It gives you *lots* of healing, and then mixes it up with a rez. I'd suggest starting with Healing Aura because that can heal you too (this will matter) and involves a bit less micro. Still, a warning - in the long game, pure heal isn't worth nearly as much as other MMORPGs might have taught you it is. Don't get too attached. Force Field: Played it briefly. This one is... basically giving you more or less the same shield setup as Cold Domination is. The rest of it is stuff you might want to fiddle with, but not enough to pick a power set on for these early bits of experimentation. Kinetics: Haven't played it. This one is weird. A whole bunch of "debuff the enemy, and if you do then you buff yourself and allies", plus a repulsion field. that becomes available at level 10. Does this sound like fun to you? Maybe try it. If not, there's a lot of other options. Nature Affinity: Haven't played it. Regrowth should be your starting power. "Ranged facing cone" sounds like a funny way to distribute healing, but not necessarily a bad one? The bloom gimmick is the sort of thing that can matter a lot in the long game, but really doesn't matter at all now. A lot is going to depend on how easy it is to keep Wild Growth up more or less full time without a lot of slotting, and I don't have that information. Still, as "with this set what you get it a heal" goes, it isn't bad. Pain Domination: Haven't played it. This powerset is Empathy Mark 2 in general, and that's really the case for the early levels. So if you're trying to decide between them, it should be more about theme than anything else. Hey - theme can matter. Poison: Haven't played it. A single-target heal to start with, and then a bunch of area-effect debuffs. Single-target heals... aren't great. They're certainly better than nothing healwise, because you aren't going to want to spend the time to let natural regen bring your minions up to full between fights, but it can still be an annoyingly long process, and fiddling back and forth between your two T1s when the HP is dropping on both of them isn't necessarily great. The debuffs look interesting? The fact that they're all AOE helps. Radiation Emission: Haven't played it. You get two different enemy-targeting toggles, which I'm going to just shudder and ignore, but having your starter power be a PBAoE heal for yourself and your allies isn't bad at all, and Accelerate Metabolism also looks potentially shiny. Sonic Resonance: Haven't played it. Looks like it has the same sort of shield setup as Force Field and Cold Mastery, but this time for resists rather than Def. There's some potential here. Storm Summoning: I've played it. Storm Summoning... huh. It's got some potentially very interesting long-term stuff. In the short-term, though, what it mostly has is a single-target heal that you can't use on yourself. It's still useful. I use it pretty regularly - but it's not amazing. Beyond hat, knockback is enough of a mixed blessing (especially with melee minions) that I haven't taken that power, and I've had bad enough experiences with enemy-targeted toggles that I haven't taken *that* power either. Steamy Mist, though? That one has potential. The partywide +Def is nice, to be sure, but the thing that it really does is give you concealment... which makes it a lot more possible to just walk around a bunch of the fights in a bunch of the missions. You can basically get some of the stalker schtick without having to play a stalker. Incidentally, both Dark and Cold offer this as well, but theirs requires higher level - Dark at 16, Cold at 20. Thermal Radiation: Haven't played it. Yet another shield set, but this time you also get an AoE heal that also affects you. Honestly, that sounds like a very solid setup for early game. Like, if you just want something to try, and you don't know what, then maybe try this. Time Manipulation: Haven't played it. Yet another PBAoE heal in your starter set, but this time you also get access to an "enemies get much less threatening in every way" PBAoE toggle at level 4? That's... really very shiny. I mean, I haven't played it yet, but I think I know what I'm playing next. Traps: I've played it. Traps is wacky. It doesn't play like anything else plays. Everything else is about targeting allies or targeting enemies or putting out emanations. Traps is about dropping stuff on the ground. Your best starter power is caltrops. It's slow enough on the regen that you wont' be able to use it every fight, but when you *do* use it... well, the actual practical effect is this: You drop it under a melee enemy. They start taking damage, drop what they were doing, and run away... while your buddies shoot them. Then they get clear, stop taking damage, realize that they're a melee enemy, and run back... while your buddies shoot them. Then it happens again. It's legitimately funny. Now, there's a lot that goes into this. It's slow on the recovery and a bit tricky to use and whatnot, and maybe this shouldn't be your *first* set, but maybe come back around to it once you've tried a few others. I never bothered with web grenade - it looks like a solution for a problem that you dont' have. Triage Beacon... honestly, it's hard to tell if that thing is being useful or worthless. Acid Mortar requires work on placement in order to have any value at all, but it does seem to do nice things to the enemy melting process when you can deploy it effectively. Force Field Generator is very solid and very easy to keep up pretty much all the time. Be aware, though, that if you're running on an older machine with high graphics settings the visual effects may cause your computer's processor to sit up and take notice. I'm very happy with my traps character, but that's at least in part because he's got a nice little backstory that pleases me, and traps fits right into it. I would *not* suggest Traps as a first secondary to play with. Trick Arrow: I've played it... briefly. Don't do this to yourself. Trick Arrow is composed entirely of debuffs, with no buff or heal component, and its best lvl 1 power is the power that I never bothered getting off of Traps because why would I? I understand that there are people who play with Trick Arrow and enjoy it and try to explain to the rest of us about how it really isn't that bad and we should all give it a try. Maybe they're right... but for you they're not. As far as I can tell, Trick Arrow is the worst set to try to learn the game on. Please don't do this to yourself. /********************/ Conclusions on "I have no idea what I'm doing. Which of these should I try?": - Dark: because having a solid party heal that's also a debuff is really very nice in practice, even if you ignore the rest of the powerset. I often use it to pull. - Thermal Radiation: Having a PBAoE heal is nice. Shields are nice. This one gets you both. - Time Manipulation: as Thermal, but instead of getting a set of shields, you get what looks like a very solid "enemies get much less effective" PBAoE toggle. - Whatever makes you happy. Like, seriously. If you look at one of these (even Trick Arrow) and something rises up within you and says "I want that." then you should go with that. A huge chunk of the actual power of the Mastermind comes built into the chassis. Grabbing the thing you want isn't going to going to hork you over even if it's got no value at all, and all of these have at least something you can eke out of them.