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As long as the (attuned) piece has a somewhat stable market, with pieces for sale at a typical 'market price', it shouldn't be a very expensive experience to use the market to get the level 50 piece you want. The cost is essentially the 'vig', although if you are INF poor you may have to sell the attuned piece first. I should note that you cannot sell to yourself. I have kept a sub-optimal (market, SG storage) strategy for attuned/boostable PVP pieces from when I had less Inf but a lot of merits/recipes: I use PVP pieces below level 50 to make attuned pieces (playing converter roulette if necessary) and keep the level 50 pieces for boosting (again, using converter roulette if necessary). I really should just buy what I want from the market when I want it, but I can't break myself of the habit. If the roulette wheel ends on a piece I know sells well and I don't need it: that piece goes on the market, so if I pay attention to the number of 'spins' I can avoid losing Inf even if I am not making as much as I could. Sidebar: I use attuned PVP pieces in most powers (especially attacks) as my characters level up. ATOs are generally the first priority, but my peculiar habit of having new characters build their own Inf-kitty and not keeping (many) ATO in the SG base affects this a little. Generally, the PVP-boosted pieces (50+) that I keep are: Defense (Shield Wall)... decent 2- and 3-piece bonuses when added to the +Resistance global Resistance (Gladiator's Armor)... nice 2-piece bonus when added to the +Def global Healing (Panacea), I like the 5-piece bonus for heals taken at low levels (like Dull Pain) or heals that can benefit from a 6-slot of something other than a heal. Holds (Gladiator's Net)... with several good sets to choose from, and so many %procs in Holds, I have a few characters that use 3-slots (with one being the %Lethal proc) dedicated to the PVP set to get the +MaxEnd boost while adding to Accuracy. In level 50 builds, it is rare that I use boosted PVP pieces in attacks. I think I have one Blaster that uses 5 pieces from Experienced Marksman in a Snipe taken at low level, otherwise I think I always find better options for those powers.

I am less bothered by Citadel's defeat alls, because at that level most characters are able to handle the spawns relatively quickly. The back-and-forth across zones is annoying, but not deal-breaking for me. I feel like Synapse could benefit from an instanced version of a (partial) city zone, similar to how the Penny Yin TF has an instanced version of Independence Port. I don't mind a "defeat all", but having SO MANY of them AND having multiple call box missions AND jumping to Boomtown is quite a slogfest. I'd also prefer if the penultimate Synapse TF mission was slightly tweaked: I'd re-write that mission to lean heavier into the fact that the Clockwork King has a bit of an obsession with Chess and "Medieval Times"... update the bosses, rename the enemies to have 'geekier' names and require the defeat of some number of specific instanced bosses... something like "2 Clockwork Bishops, 2 Clockwork Rooks, etc." I'd be tempted to add either Penny Yin or Blue Steel at some point for some more lore-flavor. I think we could drop the one-shot power from Positron and instead add Penny Yin as a rescue-able NPC to help with the final AV fight.

I'll disagree. I have a couple of characters with maxed out vet levels, and all the extra Incarnate abilities I want. Were talking many different Lores, extra Judgements (woot, fire fighting) etc. etc. I'll take the Super Inspirations and drop them in the SG base.

I'd like to add a few further recommendations to the above suggestion. This arc is a very good one to 'farm' for many reasons. I would typically run it at +0x8. With Incarnate level shifts, the enemies become MUCH easier to defeat. The XP may be less, but the drops are just as good. When I try to 'farm' this arc, I usually go for the first level shift from Alpha, and if the character needs an AoE I will grab a Judgment... but otherwise I'll try to get the other two level shifts... one is Lore, which can help clear maps. Most of my characters I do this with can clear all the maps at 0x8 in about 30 minutes. There is roughly a 50% chance to get a level 50 PVP or Purple drop from this effort. A few of the enemies contribute to badges as well, if that's in your jam. If you just want to stealth the arc for components (or Super Inspirations!), even the clumsiest of characters should be able to do it in under 15 minutes. Lately: I've been VERY lazy about filling in Incarnates on my characters. The IO system makes them very powerful in (non-incarnate) content, and I've had plenty participate in the "level 50" non-incarnate content without even having Alpha slotted. When I do get around to slotting the Alpha, I find that I almost always have enough shards, Vanguard merits and Notices of the Well to build at least a T3. The second T3 is usually made from threads and then I again use Shards and Notices to make the T4.

I haven't tried Martial Arts, but I reworked a StJ/Willpower Scrapper as a Stalker and I find the Stalker to be the better of the two builds for 99% of content I've tried. The 1% is due to escort missions in which I have to turn off Hide. This is not usually a big deal, but the auto-Hide Stalker ATO still comes into play. The main differences that I (non-scientifically) observe about StJ on Stalker as opposed to Scrapper: On the Stalker, I am very rarely thinking about combos (which I find to be a mixed bag)... so I don't sweat trying to have an optimized attack chain. The Stalker ATO seem to work much better at improving DPS.

It took me about a year of HC before I realized that folks teleporting directly to Positron from the penultimate mission is what was causing almost all of the "missing Babbage" spawns from the Synapse TF. I know most teams were blaming AE (or tram police drones), but I think this was the cause of most missing spawns.

I long ago accepted the particular misery of having 95% chance to hit with all of a character's AoE and still seeing more than one MISS! per spawn.... n almost every spawn... but I don't like it. I'm not entirely convinced that the AoE streakbreaker is really working against single spawns of many mobs... and since I usually have %proc in AoE, I half-wonder how those could be affecting it. The most annoying aspect is switching between ST and AoE, since the streakbreaker count is different. It's highly annoying to miss an enemy with an AOE and then miss with a ST. Almost all of my gripes are perception bias, but much of MY perception would be improved if I could see the actual attack roll in the combat monitor and not have to crawl the combat logs for them.

He'll be missed. I'm proud to say that the Heraclea (on Torchbearer) accompanied one of my toons on the mission to earn her "Mistress of Olympus" badge.

It has been MANY years, and many updates, since I ventured into PVP with my Inv/EM tank. At that time, it had no problem with survivability, and it was the STUN component that was ultimately the most valuable dealing with pests in PVP zones. It's not really like the Tank could do enough DPS to 'win' at PVP. There are a few slotting and pool choices that would probably make sense for a PvP-focused EM/Inv Brute that are sub-optimal for PvE play. I'm just guessing: make sure toggles never fall, increase perception/ToHit, if Stuns are a still a thing, lean into those, Dull Pain should be perma, multiple Power Transfer (because of base HP), etc. I'm not a Brute player, so I have no idea how Fury factors into PVP. I have a vague recollection that there was a time when EM Stalkers we considered to be a top-tier choice for PVP offense. If it is just worrying about surviving in a PVP zone, I would be surprised if ANY Brute or Tanker had issues in 1-on-1.

I wouldn't sweat downloading the build. This isn't the most difficult problem you will face as a Soldier of Arachnos (ehem, forced respec).

"Can I interest you in the exciting world of Day Jobs?"

I know that, it's just that there is precious little to explain it.

What you call "nowhere", others call @Yomo Kimyata's pockets.

This is precisely what I did with my Widow... I made one male, one female. I even played them through content as different characters while I was leveling them. I tend to stick with the Fortunata, but occasionally I will shift between them on TF/SF to see if anyone says anything.

In (new) Boomtown, at location [-1980.1 -16.0 5148.5] (near Phalanxer badge) it is possible to end up in a part of the map that doesn't have the geometry boundaries properly established. This is 'between' the trusses on the ground. This appears to only be an issue with the textures (not) applied to the geometry, as I have not been able to find any holes in the bounding box.

Without a Build Up, Invincibility is a solid place to put that %proc. My Invulnerability Tanker is Energy Melee, and for my play style, I prefer it in Build Up. I usually want the boost against single-targets at specific times more than I want the boost against a large spawn, YMMV, especially depending on the type of content you play. There is nothing quite like seeing a single Paragon Protector hit Moment of Glory and then immediately clobbering him after using Build Up.

One element of Red Side play that I find personally rewarding is that Villains (and Rogues) get to go through non-SF arcs where you face and take down members of the Freedom Phalanx. This is particularly satisfying if you play the first SSA1 arc, don't exit the first mission as they show up at +20 levels to you to wipe you off the map. As I was collecting a few KOs for some defeat badges in Peregrine Island, I remembered a long-ago few questions I had about the random spawns that appear there: Nemesis troops along the southern docks. They are clearly control of those areas, yet there is nothing (to my knowledge) like an arc or even Tip mission that explains their presence there. It always strikes me as a cross between "Mary Sue" and "Recycled Enemy" when Nemesis appears in the Shadow Shard, and the role in the Rikti war is revealed, so just having these chumps stand around on the docks strikes me as weird. If we are brainstorming reasons why they are hanging around: How about they are shipping things through the Vanguard portal on the sly? This might explain why they have their Sharpshooters stationed around Founders Falls. The Possessed Scientists near Portal Court. There are some late-game missions on the red side that do a better job rationalizing the inclusion of these mobs, but on the blue side I have not encountered any reason why they exist. Minimally, I would have expected a Tip mission to detail it. Are these guys just dumped out the back door of Portal Court from other worlds/Shadow Shard? IIRC Unai Kemen doesn't offer anything like an explanation for them, which would have seemed like a natural fit. The Cutlass Isles. (and to some extent, Monster Island and the Abyss... although the badges in those zones at least hint at a story). We get teased (small) Kaiju. We get teased Crey involvement (but nothing like what they are doing in the Nerva Archipelago). We witness Rikti Monkeys everywhere. The Janet Kellum mission I guess is as close as we get to an actual explanation about what Crey was doing with them, but it all strikes me as rather unsatisfactory.

I was PUGging with a SG, and it took them a while to realize this^. It is easy to "jump in" and not realize what you are actually up against. I've not tried to be a tank on the ASF yet, but I HAVE found myself "supporting" a tank in ways I can't be certain that the tank realized it needed help. As I wrote earlier: My Fortunata ended up leaning VERY heavy into controls and confuses, and my Stalker had to make sure to target very specific enemies. I'm not ashamed to admit that my other characters were less suited to switch up against specific targets in giant spawns, so in those circumstances I was making sure to pass Insps to teammates as I was trying not to get aggro myself.

Flashbacks can be their own flavor of misery... more times than I can recall I have started an Ouro arc with some sort of restriction or buff or debuff and too late realize that I have left the settings at something like +3/x8.

So why not dual box the "Master of..."?

Many MM primaries don't have recharge intensive pets, so instead of slotting the henchmen for other things, they have to burn henchmen slots. EDIT: I was trying to summon an echo from using a slot in a KB attack to making it KD.

While not precisely the same, somewhere a lonely old Mastermind whose primary doesn't include a recharge-intensive pet laments having to sacrifice precious henchmen slots sacrificed for the effects of global enhancements.

This is how I see it: These badges may now be the sort of thing that can't be achieve through rugged individualism; consider that there may actually be a different part of the game that has to be leveraged that a player doesn't have specific and precise control over in order to earn the badges going forward. I accept that there are players who deeply believe that if they can as an individual get something in the game then they should always be able to use those things to get more things individually. I accept that there are some players who feel like they are being held back when they can't use everything they could have. I don't believe there is some fundamental truth that makes the current mechanism for earning "Master of..." Badges inherently "unfair". Under the previous HC settings, there were plenty of characters that couldn't earn the "Master of..." badges solo, but many could still experience the content as a solo player. No players are going to earn the Mentor badges by playing solo characters.

I expect no less from an iBot.

Sorry, I'm not installing MIDS. That build uses mostly set bonuses, so it shouldn't be much effort to construct it. There may be some subtle choices withe respect to a couple of sets, but they aren't complicated (slot pets for recharge, purple sets probably skip the pure damage piece because of ED, toggles probably have a /end piece).