Adeon Hawkwood

Probably Scirocco. Most of his missions have you going up against Arachnos (as opposed to Longbow or Malta in the other arcs) and for the final mission where you have to fight an EB you can rescue two Fortunatas and a Mu Guardian to assist you. The downside is you've also got to fight Barracuda in one mission but since it's not the last mission in the arc you can just auto-complete that mission to skip it if you want to.

Call my Defender a healer again and you'll get an electrical blast where the sun don't shine :D.

While the original MM binds are nice, I think in a lot of ways they are overkill. In my experience you only really need five commands: 1. Attack and Aggressive 2. Attack 3. Defensive and Follow 4. Goto location 5. Passive and Follow So you can actually get away with a simpler bind set than the full one which can be easier to use. One option is to have a set of four keys for the binds and then just use Ctrl or Alt to designate specific groups (I prefer to have the last one as a single all pets command key). Just something to think about.

So I was reminded from the Warshade forums, but Dechs Kaison. He was a great guy for Task Forces, I did several MoSTFs with him (and many more regular TFs).

You can create global channels for specific group types. Personally though I prefer to see all groups in the channel, I can always swap characters if I want to join a different team type.

Set bonuses turn off if you exemplar more than 3 levels below the level of the IO, it doesn't matter whether or not you still have access to the power. Slotting low level IOs is indeed beneficial for keeping set bonuses at low levels. However the downside is that the IOs themselves are weaker. An alternative is to use Enhancement Catalysts to make attuned IOs which basically scale up or down based on your current level. So you get full strength IOs at level 50 and still keep your set bonuses when exemplaring.

So first off Traps just really sucks until you get SOs (and ideally some IOs). This is a set that lives and dies based on recharge timers so you need to get them down. In general you should have most of your key powers triple-slotted for recharge to keep them out as much as possible. After that Traps has five key powers: Triage Beacon, Acid Mortar, Force Field Generator Poison Trap and Seeker Drones. Web Grenade and Caltrops are nice to have but both are more useful while solo than they are on a fast moving team (although Web Grenade is handy for AVs). Trip Mine and Time Bomb are both gimmick powers, you can take them if you want but they aren't a key piece of your kit. Ok so as I mentioned above for those key powers you need them slotted for recharge (except for FFG, that just needs defense). Now a full "all-in" assault by a Traps Defender generally looks like this: Summon Seeker Drones over the enemy group. This will cause them to waste their alpha strike on the drones as well as debuffing them. Jump into the middle of the group (FFG will protect you) and drop a poison trap to further debuff them Jump out of the group and drop an Acid Mortar Start Blasting Optional: If people take some damage drop a Triage Beacon Now obviously depending on how much recharge you have and how fast the team is moving you won't be able to rely on having all of these up for every spawn. In that situation you should alternate Seeker Drones and Poison Trap as your initiator and just drop Acid Mortar when it's up, if the team is moving fast enough then you clearly don't need all of your debuffs on every spawn anyway. Other than that Force Field Generator is your "always on" power and you should be watching your positioning to try and cover those teammates who most need it, either holding back to protect squishy characters or pushing ahead to help out the melee characters. Overall Traps is an excellent set at high levels but it is a late bloomer. Without SOs the recharge times are punishing and it needs global recharge to really shine. You don't necessarily need perma-hasten but putting in some Luck of the Gambler recharge IOs as well as a few sets with recharge bonuses (Positron's Blast is quite cheap and has a 7.5% recharge) makes a world of difference. Getting ~50% global recharge isn't that difficult and makes a huge difference. You can also look at adding more Defenses. With slotting FFG gives you 20.75% Defense, add in Combat Jumping and Maneuvers and you're up to 26.7% (more if you actually slot them). Add in the two 3% Defense IOs (which are affordable on these servers) and you're up to 32.7% Defense. At that point a small purple inspiration will put you at the soft cap or you can use more IO sets to get there (you can also add Weave but I find it rather gauche). Finally I'll add that Traps is a proactive set, not a reactive one. Your ability to save a teammate who gets in trouble is limited, but if they stick with you then they won't get in trouble in the first place. Also, don't be afraid to initiate the assault if the tank is holding back. EDIT: I'll also add an anecdote to illustrate my points. I had a Traps/AR Defender back on live. One day I'm doing radio missions with a team and we're going up against Carnival. We come to a T-junction in the map, I turn right and start setting up the next group. I've finished off the weaker enemies and am starting on the bosses when I realize that the rest of the team is dead or taking massive damage. It turns out that they turned left instead of right. Whoops.

There are non-special uncommon IOs that take rare salvage. This was the case on live and is still the case here. As an example take the set Cleaving Blow. Two of the enhancements require rare salvage and two don't but all four are uncommon. Why did the devs decide that the Dam/Rech and Acc/Rech needed rare salvage but Acc/Dam and Dam/End didn't? Who knows. In the OPs case, I suspect he's talking about the sets Air Burst and either Far Strike or Entropic Chaos all of which have at least one Uncommon recipe that requires rare salvage. https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Cleaving_Blow:_Damage/Recharge https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Cleaving_Blow:_Accuracy/Recharge https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Entropic_Chaos:_Accuracy/Damage https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Far_Strike:_Accuracy/Endurance https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Air_Burst:_Damage/Range https://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Air_Burst:_Damage/Recharge So to answer OPs question, this isn't a change it goes back to the start of the invention system for reasons that are unclear.

The VEATs in general suffered a lot from a role-play perspective, and I think Crab spiders have it the worst of all. With Widows and Bane Spiders you can come up with some other explanation for their powerset that doesn't involve Arachnos but with Crab spiders you're stuck lugging around that giant backpack which basically just screams Arachnos. So while Crab spiders were excellent from a pure power perspective they lost a lot of popularity due to the fact that it was hard to make a genuinely interesting character out of them. I had a crab spider and while I loved playing him and he was one of my strongest characters he was also one of my least interesting characters.

The thing is you're looking in the wrong place. Yes, there are no recipes for sale but there are plenty of enhancements (in fact I bought 10 or so of the LotG recharges over the weekend). With the economy the way it is people aren't trading merits for recipes, they're trading merits for enhancement converters and then converting enhancements. So for rare stuff like LotG recharges you end up with zero recipes for sale but plenty of crafted enhancements for sale instead since it's cheaper in terms of merits to buy a cheap Red Fortune recipe on the market, craft that and re-roll it into a LotG recharge than it is to buy a LotG recharge recipe. In fact recipes are an awful use of merits, right now you're better of trading them for enhancement boosters, converters and catalysts (converters were the best but they seem to be dropping, possibly due to the increase in merits from raids). So overall I would say that the economy is doing fine. Popular rare enhancements are running for about 7-10million each (and less popular sets are 2-4 million a piece) so even quite good builds are very affordable. The only thing that's pricey at the moment are Purples and Hamidon enhancements. Honestly the supply of good stuff on the market is much greater than it was on live and while I'm fine with that there comes a point where it's to much stuff.

If people are getting 1000-1500 V Merits per raid then I agree that the ratio should probably be changed. I think 100:1 is a bit much though, I'd probably do 30:1, that cuts the merit ratio by a third but still makes it on the high end of earning which is probably fair since putting together a full league does require more effort than an 8-man team.

It shouldn't, you just get 1 merit per kill. One possibility is that it's related to leagues. In order to get a merit your team needs to tag the enemy. With leagues maybe it counts every enemy killed by the league rather than just your team?

People are getting 1,200 - 1,600 Vanguard Merits per raid?! That does sound high, I remember it being more like 500-750.

One thing I would add on this. With the I24 IO changes it is possible to get decent Psionic resistance for an Invulnerability character if you want to. There are four IOs which provide a Psionic resistance: Impervium Armor: Psionic Resistance (+6% psi resistance) Aegis: Psionic/Status Resistance (+5% psi resistance) Reactive Defenses: Scaling Damage Resistance (+3% resistance to all, increasing up to a max of +13% at low health) Shield Wall: Teleportation Protection, +Res(All) (+5% resistance to all) You can slot 5 copies of the Impervium Armor IO and 1 each of the other 3. Assuming you slot all 8 this will give you 43% Psionic Resistance and an additional 8% resistance to everything else (this is at full health, you'll get a bit more as you take damage)

No. Once you reach level 20 you'll start reviving Tip missions. If you run 10 tip missions you'll be able to run a morality missions to change or reinforce your morality. At least that's the official way of doing it. On the homecoming servers you can also just change your alignment by talking to Null the Gull in Pocket D (he's a small bird sitting on top of a truck in the villain side of Pocket D).

Ah, that explains why Enhancement Converters were dropping in price Sunday afternoon. I like the idea of Mothership raids being profitable since they were a lot of fun, but I agree that they probably shouldn't be THAT profitable.

I posted my old Crab Spider build in another thread: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/index.php/topic,1339.msg7943.html#msg7943 Keep in mind this was my high-cost late game build so it's not cheap but it gives an idea of what you can do (there's probably also room for improvement with some of the newer IO sets and you might want to replace the HOs). In regards to your second question, you don't need to take the Arachnos Blaster but you should since it lets you pretend that you're a mastermind, they have six pets so you should as well. In all seriousness, both Web Envelope and Shatter Armor are actually quite useful for a Crabbermind anyway so taking them as prerequisites for the Blaster isn't a bad thing.

I disagree, you should always have a team full of Defenders. You can fill with a Corruptor or two if you can't find enough Defenders but you can never have to many Defenders.

Yes, as I mentioned the fast-snipe still seems to occur. I was unable to interrupt it by moving and the timing seemed about right for fast snipe so as near as I can tell this is purely a display bug.

Unless the team is already damage capped (unlikely unless there's already a Kinetic's character present) then you really can't go wrong with adding a Kinetics for your 8th man. As unknown said between the damage boost, recharge boosts and recovery boosts the team will just keep on rolling. Adding Sonic Blast to the mix is just gravy. The fact is from a team power point of view the support ATs just beat everyone else hands down. One of the best examples was The Green Machine which was composed of 8 Empathy Defenders. You see it turns out when you take 8 defenders and give them all triple fortitude plus Adrenalin Boost their low base damage doesn't really matter. Another famous example was taking 8 Fire/Rad controllers and just steamrolling everything under a wave of fire monkeys.

Which is fine for dual stats but there are places where you can tri-stat an HO. As an example Membrane Exposure HOs are great in a lot of powers (Farsight, Fortitude, Mind Link) ect since it maxes out all three stats for just three slots.

Well a lot of it depends on how you define the most damage. If you want to give the team the most damage then you can't go wrong with a Kinetics/Sonic Defender. You won't necessarily do a ton of damage yourself but your teammates will do a LOT more damage so you increase the team's damage by more than basically any other AT. If you want to do the damage yourself then the question becomes Single Target or AoE?

So I encountered a weird bug with the fast snipe indicator. I have an AR/Dev blaster and targeting drone means I have fast-snipe permanently. I did a Synapse Task Force (so exemplared down to level 20) and the yellow ring around sniper rifle vanished. Now mu assumption was that the exemplaring mechanics had reduced the effectiveness of my enhancements such that Targeting Drone was providing less than 22% buff. The thing is I checked the powers screen and that showed a 22.37% buff (or there about). I tested Sniper Rifle and it was definitely benefiting from the fast-snipe bonus (no interruption and the regular fast-snipe attack speed). So it looks like the bug is with the fast snipe indicator rather than the mechanics. For whatever reason the fast snipe indicator doesn't seem to appear under certain circumstances even when the To Hit bonus is high enough to allow fast-snipe.

Pets are great for PvE, I'm not sure about PvP, my guess is no but the PvP forums would probably be a better option. In general you can mix and match and primary and secondary sets that you like. The most thematic matches would IMHO be: Bots/Traps or Bots/Forcefield Demons/Thermal Zombies/Dark Miasma Beast/Nature Ninjas/Trick Arrow Mercenaries/Traps Thugs/Pain Of course not all of these combos are necessarily good (Ninjas/TA in particular is awful) but those give the best thematic matches. Overall the primary sets are generally ranked like this: Tier 1: Bots, Thugs and Demons Tier 2: Mercenaries and Zombies Tier 3: Ninjas and Beasts

Not really, sorry.