Omega-202

Another option is to make sure you've got a Vanguard Psi Shield in your pocket for Carnie missions. If I know I'm looking at a solo psi mission, I make sure I have a decent amout of time left on the temp power. One MSR can give you enough merits for hours of Psi Shield, as long as you remember to hop over to the RWZ and restock it.

Totally unnecessary from a functional perspective. The lvl32 pets will prioritize following you over engaging anything, and will reappear next to you when you zone. Worst case, respawn them. Phantom Army has a really short duration, so if you're traveling any great distance, they'll despawn by the time you get there. I have a Ill/Storm/Soul with the Fortunata PPP pet also and I've never had an issue with any of my pets not being available when I need them.

You mentioned Ice in your OP, and as the owner of an Ice/Dark/Dark Corruptor, I can say it's a pretty solid combo. Ice Blast is probably the king of proc-ability, so it works really well on Corrs and Defenders.

I think I'm just lucky that the builds that I play in Apex can all handle it well, minus the Stalker. Crab, /WP Brute, Rad Tank, Ice/Dark Corruptor with Dark Embrace and Rune of Prot and capped positional def...all have decent answers to accurate Tox damage, but Invuln doesn't. It means if I shut my brain off and forget which character I'm on, I faceplant.

Arachnos isn't much of a problem at +4/8 if I pick targets well. The def debuff happens, but it doesn't cascade as much like on VEATs because of the resistance. Psi and Tox damage holes are pretty brutal though. The worst is things like the Hydra room in Apex, where a lot of my other characters can just face tank the Tox damage but the /Inv Stalker melts. For Arachnos, just start the fight with BU>LR>BL>TS, which should mean everything is knocked down and very hurt, and then hold and focus down the Forts, Mistresses and Widows.

*Cough*

http://web.archive.org/web/20121025125321/http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/game_info/archetypes/hero_archetypes.php The official description from the close of the game: "Whether up close or afar, he can deal out tremendous amounts of damage" The original devs commented on this numerous times. I'm looking for the archived posts around the Defiance revamp when Blasters got increased base HP. I specifically recall them discussing how the increased HP should better allow Blasters to survive in melee and make use of their secondary, which old Defiance was not accomplishing. You're very wrong. I'm not sure where your high-and-mighty attitude is coming from with this "prove it" stuff but I'd cool your jets. You're way off base.

No, that is not it at all. That is fluff that is sold to you by guidance counselors. Suggesting that you developed leadership skills by running a guild or math skills based on analysis of game mechanics demonstrates a lack of social awareness to the Boomer recruiters and a lack of drive to Millenial recruiters. If you really developed those skills, you'd have taken those skill out into the real world and said you worked as a community organizer in a local election to demonstrate leadership or programmed an app that you can demo that demonstrates your mathematics and analytical skills. The fact that the train stops in the gaming realm instead of making the leap to the practical implementation only begs the question of "why haven't you?". The most common answer is one of (1) you don't have the skills you claim, (2) you don't have the drive to apply them, (3) you don't have the proper level of social awareness to have made that leap and the lack of social skills will likely be a detriment in the work place. We're getting way off topic at this point.

That's not reality. No companies are going out of business for not hiring people based on gaming accomplishments. Like was said below, nobody puts their hairstyle as a qualification on your resume. Nobody puts their tattoos or piercings on there. That's not to say that being a gamer is a negative. When asked in an interview "What do you like to do for fun", gaming belongs right next to gardening, hiking and recreational sports. It's an "also" or a fun fact, not a qualifying trait. It's like saying "I ran a charity bake sale last year". That's nice, it's a positive, but if you're putting that on your CV, that tells me you ran out of other things to talk about. Maybe we're discussing two different worlds of business, which I suspect we are. There's a difference between a retail job and a Fortune 500 home office, but I just can't take gaming accomplishments being taken seriously in any context.

All of that is more content. That's great. If the resources exist, that should be something to add. I fully agree. But paper thin "carrot on a stick" mechanics like Hero is proposing is in a whole different realm.

One legal recruiter my law firm works with said he has a filter set up to autoreject CVs with certain key words. One of which is "videogame".

I used to believe this, but having seen how it plays out in the real world, it really doesn't shake out like that. I've worked with recruiters at big firms who told me that people have lost opportunities for putting gaming related items on their resumes, and having been on the interviewer side, there's a pattern of behavior for those people that is predictive of them not working out at the companies I've been at. If its not a gaming related position, and you don't have more than enough accomplishments outside of gaming to fill your 2 pages, you should reassess your qualifications. I've long held my tongue on these boards beacuse I like unwinding every few days in game and I feel like most of you are really genuinely good people, but most of you really do seem to be living in a bubble that doesn't reflect the world at large. It's easy to fall into online enclaves and ech chambers, and it seems like an unsettling number of people here have done so.

A) You didn't accomplish something meaningful. It's a videogame. B) I haven't forgotten. I have just grown up and realized I wasted hour upon hours of my teens and 20's chasing shiny baubles that didn't actually matter, doing videogame tasks I didn't enjoy, all for the dopamine hit you're describing. The fact that you're denigrating "participation trophies", as if videogame accomplishments are something to be proud of instead, is frightening.

If the goal is to increase player retention, suffice to say that any sign of "goals to work toward" aka grind in any form being added to the game, and it'll be the end of my tenure here. There's more than enough for most people to do in the game as it is, and if you're finding yourself having run out of things to do, you should find another game or redirect your energies to some other venture. There's nothing wrong with moving on or taking a break.

@KaizenSoze Did you also mix in the Vigilante alignment power? I've found it useful on certain builds (Dark Miasma, Illusion control) for stacking. It's got a decent uptime for a freebie power.

The +end is definitely a nice little bonus and it makes it easier to have an infinite single target chain. However, I am a big proponent of 5 slot Apoc (all but D/R) + Gladiator proc for maximum single target damage in either Gloom or ML, as long as you haven't used Apoc elsewhere in the build. The double proc, 10% rech bonus and all around high stats makes that combo a standard in a single target blast in nearly all of my characters.

My Widow went Soul for theme, but I barely play it anymore. Overall you hit all of the main points though, as I've done substantial testing of both on Crabs. Regarding the pets, I can only really speak from the PoV of a Crabbermind. The Mu Striker is a great ranged and AoE damage pet that generally stays out of trouble. The Widow chews through single targets really well in melee, but one Boss melee AoE and she suddenly has orange health and is one hit from death. I will never get the image out of my head when I was testing the Widow on a Council mission and saw a boss use Dragon Tail and she just crumpled into a ragdoll. Maybe she'd survive a bit better on a Widow that is also in melee and can grant more defense via Mind Link, but on a Crab, the Widow pet was a glass cannon. One additional comment is Re:Darkest Night. It's "meh" in my opinion, but some people really like it. I found it was only ever useful on AVs (and even then the AVs neuter the debuff heavily) or, more usefully, for aggro management as a psuedo taunt aura. You can anchor something in a spawn and add a lot of threat to yourself if you want to take the heat off your friends.

None of that is true if you know how to play and build your Crab. Few things melt single hard targets as fast. There's a reason that a Crabbermind was the reigning Pylon king from game close until recently. If your pets are dying or you're not seeing their contribution, that's on you. It's not hard to get the pets to 35% defense and you can tack on Rebirth Destiny to easily keep them up. Go read any of a number of threads in the VEAT forum.

I can intend to make a team-healing focused Tanker, but that doesn't make it a good build. As you showed, your build is basically non-functional. By all definitions, that's a bad build. I'm all for non traditional character concepts, but you can't just slap together a bunch of garbage, get a trash result and then say "where is all of my endurance?" By that logic, we should buff MM personal damage to help all of the petless builds.

That's a bad build. End of story.

Week 1 of Issue 1, I was running teams in the outdoor flooded Boomtown Freakshow maps through Portal Corp. There is a dumpster (or at least there was, I haven't been on that map in a while) not too far from the map entrance that you could herd Freaks into.

I haven't remade my TA defender on HC yet, but don't most people just ignite OSA with a secondary power or the Tech Origin Taser Dart? I specifically chose Tech Origin on my TA just for the free taser, which isn't even a thing on HC because anyone can take any origin power.

On non-damage focused ATs, yeah definitely stinks. On VEATs, which are damage dealing ATs, its a crime. My Crab has to pace out his red insp usage just to make sure I'm not wasting any.

I'm curious what you're building a Scrapper for if not that? What other goal is there when building Scrappers, Stalkers and Brutes? Their job is to dish out maximum damage with enough durability to survive. That's not the edge case, that's their mantra. Building to any other goal is non optimal.

1) Sure a Dark Defender can easily get away with that because you're only running 1-2 other solid toggles. Compare that to 5-6 on some melee builds. I run Tactics, Manuevers, CJ, Shadowfall, Dark Embrace and Sprint on my Dark Corruptor, but that's completely irrelevant because we were talking about the melee ATs. 2) You conspicuously leave out what your Scrapper's armor set is. Willpower? Energy? Electric? Rad? Of course you'll be fine with those sets. The issue is the other half of the armor sets. SR, Invuln, Shield and Dark can't afford the extra end drain. It's not a matter of knowing how to build. I can make an Invuln that can run Leadership, but at what cost? And by taking Leadership on your Scrapper, what are you not taking elsewhere? 3) If you bothered to read, I said all Defenders and Controllers should probably take at least 2 of the toggles, if not all 3, so not sure what your point is at the end there.