Sovera

Not really a problem, just be wary of mechanics.

Getting super good defenses/resistances/recharge/etc in a low level is complicated. I will preface it by saying that emphasis in accuracy is not something that particularly needs to be chased after. We are fighting +0. Tweak your Mids to +0 (I believe it's 75%) and even exemplared down we should be safely in range considering some of the heftier accuracy bonuses that do not go away such as the purple sets. The best way to mimic exemplaring (since Mids does not at a baseline) is changing 'level of enhancements' to the level you'll be exemplared to. Without shields (and even with them) it's hard to get good defenses above something like 25 or 30% at a very low level. If we were to focus on something I would say S/L defenses since a small purple insp can turn median but still porous defenses into a bullwark and S/L can be found mixed in pretty much everything. Aiming for specific things like psi or toxic or even energy or negative can be a trap. These need consolidated stacking to be of use. Going from 3-4% to 15% may be good at a spreadsheet level but it will not keep someone alive in combat. Further more they are very specific and will not protect against the rest. Ranged or Melee or Smash/Slash defenses will work on most, especially Smash/Slash who will work for AoE, ranged and melee as long as this (very common) damage component is included, where for example Ranged protects against every ranged attack, but will do nothing against melee or AoE. But a punch is melee but also Smashing, a bullet is ranged but also Slashing, an electric blast is ranged but has Smashing in it. The use of inspirations is something that needs to be considered as well.

People still run radio missions? No, seriously. They were my bread and butter back on Issue 7 to 13-14, but in the two years I've been in HC I don't think I've run enough radio missions to need more than one hand to count them. A radio mission only gives XP. A Task Force gives XP and merits. But you do you. That said, yes, the post history is a bit cringy. I'm sure everyone is evil and mean and forced the OP to delete all their characters and change their global. It has absolutely nothing to do with the OP at all. Just a mean server. I'm sure. No, really.

No need to toggle off Hover before dropping Burn. Just hug the floor before activating. I have Hover on all characters and Burn goes off without a problem.

Absolutely nothing has changed for sentinels since that oldie (muh first guide evah).

But Snarky, the guy said he was going to run it at +3 or +4. If you say 'If you run this at +3 or +4 I'm not doing it' and they insist then you leave. He stated his terms, you state yours.

Some small sacrifices are needed to insert the teleport pool. Also, don't take this the wrong way but I will have to roll up a newspaper and swat you for taking team teleport and not Fold Space. *swatswatswatswat!*

I mean, all gurus? I'm not sure I qualify. What's the pay though?

Fair is a weird word. Maybe you're looking for 'impartial'? They can rarely be impartial. Just for an example the main populace loves huge titted barely clad females with body sliders to minimum except chest who goes in the opposite direction. That wouldn't even register on my radar so good luck selling me this awesome (to the person's eyes) costume. Same person who loves those may set a costume contest and barely glance at any male character while a clone of their character will get max points.

Because you're misunderstanding the game a bit. It's not on you though, it's just a bit different from other more mainstream MMOs who have subs or B2P, or F2P mechanics. With the current CoH we can level to max extremely fast. We can gear up very fast (full T4 incarnates and most purple IO sets in two weeks). We have a thousand character slots instead of 8, or 3 and having to pay for more. But then what? There isn't a tremendous lot to do. My highest 'level' is a Fire/Claws Tanker who was my first baby and it cured me of altitis for a good two months. I would log in, I would do random TFs, I would create teams for TFs, I hunted a few badges, etc etc. But there is not really a lot to do so we end up drifting back to 'well, okay, I've done Claws. What could I try next?' And that's how we end with 50-70 characters. The Fire/Claws has something like 90+ vet levels which is a huge amount for me. Most of my alts I would make a different character by vet level 12 or so. But even my favorite baby I eventually stopped to make something new, something different. I seldom log it nowadays. It's still one of my best characters who exemplars really well and does great damage from Posi 1 to the ITF. But once everything has been done it's trying new things that comes up. So I have a second baby who is a Fire/Martial Arts Tanker and nowadays I'm usually tinkering on a Fire/Ice. Are they strictly 'better' than the Claws? Eh.

Someone tested part of the answer:

You never needed to join a SG to use the portals. If you already have a base that has these portals just input your code with your new character. If you don't have a base then use this for a new character: /macro Portals "enterbasefrompasscode ZONE-8888" I prefer the keybind option ( /keybind numpad9 enterbasefrompasscode ZONE-8888) since then I save keybinds to default and all my new characters already have the default numpad 9 as teleport to portals, no need to add new macros for each character I make. Edit: This is actually Everlasting's portal hub. But each server has a portal hub and if you ask on the general chat someone will say which one is your server's.

So much brouhaha over the D's entrance. People actually used those? When ever I want to head in there I hit my Fast Travel button.

Thank -you- for raising the awareness of this.

Well, I need XP to level, and money isn't bad either, so I can not do TF Commander or I can do TF Commander, get XP to level, get merits to turn into money and get the accolade. Seems win win win to me.

No need. Synapse is part of the accolades we want and it has all the gears we might want or need. I have never had to seek them out.

EA then. Anything with defense debuffs makes everything fold (you would think only defense sets would fold, but no, resistance sets too) and EA has protection against it. Scrapper for damage, Brute for easier early leveling and more tankyness with buffs from the team.

Dark is good against everything and its main selling point is a uber heal that recharges under 12 seconds. It's downside is a hefty endurance cost that has no counter from the armor itself (unlike for example Rad with two sources of endurance, or DNA Siphon of Bio, or Consume from Fire Armor) but IOs can help. A good middle ground is Energy Armor. It lacks heavy resistances but has them, and also has defense as well as defense debuff protection. It has a decent heal that doubles as endurance reduction and later on you get Energy Drain which gives endurance and a small defense buff.

Bio is squishy but offense oriented. It works well against easy content, but folds harder against hard content. Depending on how you intend to play it, solo VS team, damage VS tanking, it can be fine though. It's one of the highest offense oriented secondaries on par or a bit better than Fire Armor, though Fire Armor brings Burn which is better for burst.

Radiation Armor without a doubt. Instead of a slow ass heal you get a heal that doubles as an endurance clicky, then also a shield that -also- doubles as a recovery buff, and instead of a damage aura you get a recharge aura that makes those clickies faster. The damage aura can be replaced by proc monstering the heal and the mini nukes Rad Armor has.

Gravity/Kinetic would be my take on that. Grab the sorcery pool for Spirit Ward and Enflame. Your low level experience prior to 32 will be Speed Boosting everyone and Spirit Ward&Enflaming the tank. At the low levels your SB and the healing will be extra buddy and everyone will love you. By level 30 try to have grabbed Teleport Target (and make a macro so it auto targets your Singularity pet). By level 32 you get Singularity and you change your gameplay to instead stop using Spirit Ward on a tank (since by level 32 they shouldn't need it anymore anyway) and place both it and Enflame on Singularity. Now your opening salvo is to run just behind the tank, use teleport macro, drop Singularity on top of the tank (which both makes mobs all start flopping like mad thus negating their damage and also start pulling all mobs closer). The need to heal will be lower by now but you can still do this when needed. You can repeat this teleporting combo in less than 10 seconds so it's up at every spawn. Just be prepared o slowly whittle mobs if you're trying it solo because you got separated from the team. 38 and above you add dropping Fulcrum Shift after Singularity has been teleported in to boost everyone's damage in melee range. The thing is, and I know I am in the wrong sub forum to say this, but it's mostly not needed and just faffing around. CCing mobs has little value and killing them works better so a Corruptor and dropping actual AoE works better in the long run than to try playing with CCing and dropping Singularity on mobs when the whole spawn has a tendency to be vaporized in seconds once combat starts. You can actually kill solo spawns with a Fire or Water or whatever Corruptor and still provide the Kinetic buddy buffs. That said the magnetic pull Singularity does pulling all mobs close into a clumped ball does have some value and other than the lack of AoE Gravity does decent ST damage which can be boosted with damage procs.

Really? It doesn't seem complicated to me. A Blaster's nuke recharges in 40 seconds ish. Kill one spawn, wait until the 40 seconds finish running, kill the next. It's not how we would usually play the game (use nuke, next spawn ignore it and kill the spawn without it), but for a hard setting aiming for Master of it's definitely how I would do it. Perhaps even throw in a modicum of stealth with an IO in Sprint or something. Most mobs would be skipped with that single IO (maybe take Super Speed and put the IO there instead in order to 100% ignore mobs) and the oracles could be found in the first mission without killing all. The ambush at the top of the hill can be skipped by not taking the path and just freeing the last oracle on top. The cysts would be harder but full BU (+Gaussian) + Aim + nuke + all AoEs would do a lot of hurt. Depending on secondary even more hurt (leftovers of BU + Aim powering Burn, or dropping Ice Patch, or whatever. I was on a team with a /Ice Blaster who soloed cysts while the the rest of the team went the other way). The ambushes don't need to be fought and for extra bonus points just leave all cysts at a sliver of HP instead of breaking them, then do all cysts at the same time since they don't regenerate HP. The climb up the hill with all the generals should not be complicated since the previous strategy kills most mobs and then the EBs can be hoverblasted with near impunity. Computer would need to be stopped at each wave of robots, but, again, BUAimnuke and then hoverblast until dead before resuming computerizing. AVs who can't fly aren't a problem as their ranged attacks are seldom dangerous and so both AVs would not be much of a problem IMO. Last mission is just more of the same. Stealth in, nuke, clear mobs, wait for 40 seconds to elapse. Repeat. Last boss pull the fluffies who will fly up but the AV will not. I'm not sure on which Blaster I would do this. A Water Blaster would have poorer ST, but poorer is subjective when it's a high octane AT like a Blaster, and the great AoE and ranged nuke would clean things up easily while according to Mids a Dehydrate frankenslotted would heal for 15% HP every 3-4 seconds (or 21% HP with three combos) which coupled with hoverblasting should be near immortal. Being fully ranged I might say go TA to be fully ranged with a bonus of Slick Arrow lining up with the nuke meaning its original purpose of being a giant sized Ice Patch works just fine for extra survival (for the cyst packs for example), or use something to make it go on fire and it's another super wide (25y 15y radius) biggo AoE adding to the melting of faces. Water's nuke also recharges faster and the FF procs the build allows would make it recharge even faster diminishing the 35 second wait. Fire would just kill faster overall. Not as good AoE but it would light up Slick Arrow by itself which is good and not good since having mobs flop can be of service, but the ideology of dead-mobs-don't-hurt-back is pretty valid. Nuke recharges about five seconds later, but it has no FF procs unless choosing a secondary that allows it. It forces to go into melee range which is generally not healthy but should not be deadly as long as having stealth to have the opening strike. Ice would have poor AoE in general (Ice Storm is a bit crummy and Frost Breath is a joke) but still serviceable with the above strategy of lining it with the nuke. Rad has definite promise barring the slooow animations. Rad/Rad can nuke one spawn and kill the leftovers as they cough and wheeze from the nuke's secondary effect, and then Radioactive Cloud can be used for the next pack for another fit of coughing. I found it pretty safe because of this. Solo both can be staggered to keep a group coughing until everything is dead. Regardless of primary/secondary the basic gist is 'stealth, nuke, wait for nuke to recharge, obvs build for S/L or Range defense'.

Not really. You can buy most stuff for 50-100k, and then can make 2-3 million for the least rewarding of TFs, or make 5 million at level 50 just running a single map. So 50-100k? A pittance. At the start of HC I would do a Posi 1 and 2 and be level 22. Selling the merits I'd have 5-6 millions. Slotting everything with generic IOs cost something like 2 million. Then I got into the habit of stripping the characters and remove those generic IOs and just hand them to my newest alt so I stopped even spending the 2 million. So it's basically for badging or because it's fun, purposes, but otherwise the time sunk into it is not returned in any shape or way when what we get is saving 20k, or maybe 50k.

I've waxed long and poetic on the Brunker theme so rest assured unlike what others may have slotted 'for fairness' in comparing ATs my slotting is minimal for survival to just squeak past or reach the defensive caps, and then pour the rest into offense. As we have said several times already in Blaster VS Sentinels we can up a Brute's survival, but we can't up a Tanker's damage all that much. Even so 5 minutes later I barely dented the AV as my post showed where AA's tanker actually killed it in 7 minutes. Not sure what is the secret ingredient in their sauce is without them posting their build. I, in fact, come from a string of tests done a few days earlier and posted on the Brunker thread over the Tanker side of the forums, where I tried to up a Fire/Ice Melee's damage and nothing I did really moved the scale. Super proc monstering my heaviest attacks, proc monstering my weaker attacks, add different attacks, change rotations, add more procs, etc. While on paper a Freezing Touch all procced out at 700 damage seems absurdly better than a 'normal' slotted Freezing Touch at 540 damage the fact is that it did not budge the scale more than whiffing would account for. Actually, it made it worse. 4:20 and 4:30 was the reward for super proc monstering Freezing Touch. As long as I did not add -res procs into the mix nothing I did moved the needle down from 4 minutes from my usual slotting. It's all documented.

Other than the fact it is something like 20-30 +3 bosses? Who also do -def debuffs. -def debuffs eat alive resistance based sets. Barrier is a near necessity as a panic button.