shrikefire

No one has mentioned Bots Cold so I will. It was my first character on Homecoming, kind of a reimagining of my original character from live. The cold shields stack with the bubbles and benumb + infrigidate + sleet + heat loss just neuters AVs, GMs, and mobs as well. Stick the health shield on the assault bot, build for some recharge, and the game is easy mode. I've soloed most of the content in the game with it.

It seems that Entropic Aura on my level 20 EM/EA scrapper is targeting me and slowing my own recharge down. I noticed

On live my absolute favorite all around character was my spines regen scrapper. I jumped at the opportunity to make an SS/Regen brute on HC and he was my second 50. I do really like SS with regen because it has some mitigation in the primary and I have a FF proc in footstomp that is awesome. I both see why regen is considered bad but also think it has become underrated at this point. It is a busy set, sure, but with some management it really has a ton of mitigatory tools. Take burnout, get your health and recharge up high, layer on some defense and resistance, and you have a lot of tools at your disposal. MoG is an interesting power that recharges quickly and makes you almost unkillable. With Dull pain and the brute HP cap you can consistently have a ridiculous amount of HP. THOUSANDS OF HIT POINTS! IH with DP running is like a second tier god mode. In specific instances you can get taken down, but mostly your health won't budge. End management is phenomenal from the get-go. Burnout means in emergencies you can use MoG/IH back to back, use DP as a heal, etc. And the end penalty will be easily mitigated. If you are in a situation where you can kite (and your pride allows you to do so) then your survival rate will go way up vs. mobs that target your weaknesses (longbow can be vexing if you don't annihilate the nulls and spec ops quickly, for example). Regen does need a few updates though I think. Some version of -regen resistance just makes sense and should exist. Layer some absorb in the set somewhere.

Assault Bot sometimes makes me feel like he's the main character and I am just his support spamming shields on him. The number of times that every other robot has wiped and he just carries on carpet bombing mobs is... High. Very high.

Ice atomic blaster is one I'm considering now.

Hello! Essentially I have a concept I'd like to run where my character combines Rad and Ice or Cold. I keep recreating the character (3 times now) trying to find something that feels right but nothing has so far exactly. I have rolled an Ice/Rad Dom, a Rad/Cold corr, and an Ice/Rad scrapper and deleted them all after a few levels. Ironically the dom may have been been my favorite. What I'm looking for is something that solos well and can tackle most or all content that way. The ice rad dom was interesting but I already have a few doms and I honestly got exhausted up front by the money I thought I may have to sink into that build. The corr seemed promising but I decided soloing with no self heal and waiting til the late 30s to get the best powers in cold sounded also exhausting. The scrapper just felt lame out of the box. Any ideas or recommendations appreciated, including to be more patient with the sets I've tried.

Why not also an only AV and EB mode? I'm not really kidding.

My bots cold is named Ymir Zero and has Odin, loki, thor, jormungandr, hel, and fenrir. My thugs rad is named Viper and has various snakes. Rattler, taipan, etc My beast dark is named Wild Moon and they are all moons - Titan, phobos, deimos, luna, europa, umbriel. My demon nature is named Aes Sidhe and has Cu Sith, fear dearrig, fear gorta, chlurichaun, sluagh, and glashtyn. My ninja time is named Ameretat and only has a few names picked out. Ram, Vayu, and some more I can't recall at the moment.

Yeah, my bots cold mm can do it and it's actually fun. I do the S/L one. Every now and then everyone is wiped except me and the assault not but he just keeps plugging along. The procs make him super powerful though and with the cold buffs he can pretty much do it on his own lol.

I rebooted my top characters from live. My original character was a tech themed Merc/FF mastermind, and while the AT and general headcanon appealed to me, I remade and renamed him into a Bots/Cold MM. A huge part of that was the desire to be able to solo all content and also the years of annoyance at just how underpowered my Merc/FF was. I am not sure I could have stumbled upon a less-damaging combination of powersets for a MM. Shrikefire (I don't really even know the naming convention I was going for, but all my characters ended up with some variation of the name Shrike) became Ymir Zero. I also am a dad now with young kids and a lot of my internal backstory for Ymir Zero revolves around fatherhood. The costume is slightly influenced by my first ever costume but overall I think the character is basically a total improvement in concept and execution. My other top characters were a SS/invuln brute and a spines/regen scrapper. I always thought to myself on live that if they put regen on a brute, i'd roll an em/regen brute in a heartbeat. This may have been a good idea in 2008, but after the ET nerf it lost its luster. I ended up making a SS/Regen brute, which I really enjoy even though /regen is not as good as many other sets with IOs. I named him Night Shrike in a nod to my original name. Otherwise he doesn't really bear any resemblance to either character he is inspired by. After that, I have 3 pages of alts and I don't think a single one of them really references one of my many toons from live. I did have a spines/wp stalker that I liked who I suppose influenced my spines/bio stalker, but I can't even remember that spines/wp's name at the moment. Other toons I remember really liking were a fire/kin corr, an ice/em blaster, a night widow. Haven't remade any of those (yet!).

Hello. As you can see in the screenshot below, something is wrong with the enhancement values for my Dire Wolf. 3 generic damage IOs has resulted in only 62.2% damage increase but simultaneously created a 62.2% buff to damage resist. However, this resist damage value doesn't appear to actually exist - I can find no evidence of it when examining the dire wolf's combat attributes.

Is this really ridiculous? I would actually hope for that kind of functionality - a kind of third upgrade with the same aoe application on a moderate recharge. You can even use the equip mercenary animation, since it's just throwing the merc a clip.

Perhaps it could also include a straight damage buff?

Over in the mastermind forum there was a discussion of Mercs as an underperforming powerset. One idea I have is to replace Serum with swap ammo. I am not sure how this could be best executed, but I think it would fit thematically and go a long way towards making Mercs more competitive.

One of my thoughts was replacing serum with the Swap Ammo power from DP.