Call Me Awesome

Soft cap ranged damage on a Fire blaster and you'll do very well; mine's Fire/Energy and focused on ranged with Boost Range. Rain of Fire, Bonfire (with KB-KD proc) & Fireball work wonders with Blaze and other ST attacks for bosses.

Eh, stack up 8 sets of Leadership toggles, some buffs and debuffs and watch the mobs melt as fast as you can walk through the mission. One of the most fun super teams I was on was when my group started a new set of characters on another server. We had 2 Kin/Sonic defenders, 2 Fire/Rad controllers, 2 Ill/Rad controllers, one Rad/Rad defender and a Fire/Fire blaster. At level 25 we took out Lusca in IP by ourselves in under 5 minutes and by the time we hit 50 we had the Master of Statesman's TF in a 30 minute run. Yeah, 8 Fire/Rad controllers might have been faster but we never ra

I've had highly effective builds that would come in under 30 million, some even under 20 million. I've also had builds that would be well over 500 million. As an example, building a Blaster for ranged defense can be cheap since one of the best sets for that is Thunderstrike, an uncommon set that's pretty inexpensive to get. Building up an Invuln tanker to soft capped S/L defenses can also be cheap, maybe even as cheap as 15 million if you're willing to slot extra powers with low end sets. On the other hand if you're building for extreme recharge, say for a permanent-phantom army

I can only speak for the Stalker combo but it rocks. I can clear an entire spawn with BU/Shield Charge/Lightning Rod/Fireball, then clear the next with conventional AOE attacks and repeat from the top for the third spawn. AS finishes off any bosses.

While I have no clue what may cause respec failure I've done them in Atlas City Hall, an abandoned corner of a zone and, most often, in my SG base. Offhand I only recall one failure ever, and simply doing it again the same way worked. I just put it down to random connectivity glitches.

Welcome back, you'll find your Brute is a Go Go Go Go character; once you get Fury built up you want to keep going in order to keep it up. I suggest slotting accuracy and endurance reduction in your attacks for now, Brutes have a love/hate relationship with their blue bar and it tends to drain way too fast. Also get a couple of endurance mod SO's into Stamina. I found that all my Brute characters had endurance problems in the early and mid game until I got them under control via IO bonuses and the various +end unique IO's. I suggest getting the hang of the game first before you

Question I had not long before shutdown: "Why is your Fire/Fire blaster named The Amazing Redshirt?" Along with "Why the shredded red shirt and black pants?"

At the time there were a few "AE Baby" videos floating around.

Unless there's been a revival in the last year or so I'm not sure about the AE Baby thing. Sure, there were HUGE numbers of them on Live back when AE first launched... there was a period where you constantly ran into level 50 characters who's players had never left Atlas Park. That seemed to die out however and I haven't seen that much since. I do unfortunately remember that era well, level 50 characters on an STF with no enhancements. And no idea how to play.

It's not my favorite but there's lots of TF's I dislike much more. Synapse for example, and all the Shard TF's. And Numina, those gray hunts drive me up a wall.

I've had three characters that really grabbed me that way. First was my namesake Inv/Stone tanker about the time I hit 25 and respec'd into an unkillable build back in issue 3... suddenly I knew what SUPER was. That was back when Invuln truly was if you built it well. The second was my Broadsword/Shield scrapper sometime around issue 9 or so, unkillable defense and extreme damage output with a high end IO build. Third was my 2nd Fire/EM blaster. That was actually the very first combination I rolled up when I started playing and my noobish hands could not stay alive s

I've had teams that could crush that, but you're right, most would struggle. A team of Incarnates with good buff/debuff stacking? Sure. A team of mostly at-level characters? No thank you unless it's something stacked like 8 Fire/Rad controllers. My approach is to first look at the team, AT's, power sets and levels. Then I'll usually start at either even (if most of the team is at minimum level) or +1 and evaluate after the first mission. If we're crushing everything I'll ask if the team wants to up the difficulty. If we're struggling I'll suggest a lower difficulty. Obvious

My worst was Dark/Dark... I abandoned it in the mid 20's as the end was too high and the damage was lacking. This was before the tanker changes, and I didn't stick with it to make an IO build which likely would have solved several of the problems I had with it. I've played a couple of Stone tankers post GDN and ED nerfs and pre-IO; they're kind of junk pre granite with weak defenses and Rooted being your only mez protection. Post Granite the penalties tend to outweigh the benefits. Still they were quite effective and I did get both to 50.

Ionic has a larger AOE than anything else and doesn't need them to be all clumped in a small area. For that reason it's always been my go-to choice on all characters.

My best AOE killer stalker is my Elec/Shield, it's ridiculously easy to quickly clear 4/8 maps and it's very rare to run into a situation I can't handle. My ST damage isn't first rate but with BU/Lightning Rod/Shield Charge/Fire Ball there's not much left of a spawn and Chain Induction/Thunder Strike finishes all but a boss, easily taken out by AS. Then on to the next spawn with CI/Thunder Strike a couple times to clear and BU/LR/SC/FB is back up for the third spawn. If things start getting dicey with health Rebirth fixes that, or some green candy since it tends to drop much fas