Sovera

I've already made my suggestion for a build. As for now don't try to level with these builds. Pick everything, try to slot what you can where you can, and at most respec into one of them at 32.

My bad then, thanks for the compliment and I'll correct that part. In the end I find myself using Lightning Fences so little that the gain in AoE is actually minimal since both get access to Ball Lightning. I suppose it is there for some extra oomph in solo play.

SR and tank is not a happy marriage IMO. Those 5% chances pile up very fast and as a tank you're going to be an agro magnet unlike a scrapper who will have a lot less attention on them. Market Crash is one of the few TFs where we can get to agro cap pretty easily because of huge spawns very close together (it's almost designed as a farm map tbh). Which then need to be healed, but SR has no heal. I posted a SR tank build somewhere and mentioned how when I threw it into a farm map to stress test it I was using Aid-Self as part of my rotation, and often times eagerly waiting for it to recharge. Aid-Self had a six seconds CD. The only two strengths of SR is being softcapped super early (I believe by level 24 on a tank) and its immunity to defense debuffs. I don't find either good enough to warrant playing one. For example. I level plenty of /Bio because I find it super survival and also offense oriented. I am no where near the defense softcap while leveling but I eat one or two purples on tough fights (in TFs) and I'm fine. I replenish my purple stock after a mission (easy enough with a base macro if we use it when a mission is over instead of clicking on exit, loading screen, then base macro, loading screen). And while my /Bios are eaten alive if I jump into the middle of an ITF roman pack thanks to the defense debuffs it works fine if I don't jump into the *middle* of the pack and instead approach them from the side and start unleashing AoEs to kill off all the minions. With those dead my absorb shield takes care of the rest. But lets say you like your SR shield and are happy with it or don't want to level a new character? Well, that's fine. Just carry oranges with you. When you see things are going badly (or you know you're approaching an ambush, or you see a second spawn that was agroed) just pop a couple. It is an unpopular opinion but I would work Aid-Self into the build to not rely on greens. Greens run out and then what?

I just do TFs. But you really want to farm merits? Keep an eye on your LFG and join the double Hami raids that happen daily. That's 120 mertis there for 20 minutes. Join a daily Tinpex for 80 merits for 40 minutes. Do a MSR for about 60 merits for 30 minutes (though it may *take* 30 minutes to get the group together). A Yin TF is 20 merits for 30 minutes too. Few things will beat pure farming. An hour can and should net you 100 million (with XP turned off, check the Farming builds in Guides for the mechanics of XP turned off), and if you can't stomach an hour of farming then do half hour here and there.

*vibrates in place* Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

My first advice would be 'don't'. City of Heroes allows anything to work and that's a trueism so ignore that first advice, but, keep in mind that we have several sets that never got tested and polished. While most of these are overtuned (anything /Bioarmor, Titan Weapons) some came out of the oven undertuned and Beasts is one. We see that there is still something lacking and the whole idea was not fully fleshed out. Beasts/Nature goes well together for both theme and gameplay.

A mastermind is never very involved playing. You spend your time directing your minions and waiting for things to die. Some will tell otherwise but choosing attacks is a bit of a waste. Extra damage is never bad but endurance is at a premium for Masterminds since they have an endurance tax on their secondary. Bots does not pair extremely well with /Sonic either. You have a beautiful -res skill you can attach to a friendly, but it requires the friendly to go into melee range for it to have an effect. None of your bots are something you want to go into melee. For the same reason /Poison works well with thugs (they too have a skill that can be attached to a friendly) using thugs would mean you can attach that -res to your level 32 summon. Now this is just solo talk. In groups there is always some brute or tank or scrapper who dives first into the packs of enemies and you can attach that skill to them and reap the benefits. As you are still only 32 I would say that you might like more a Demons/Thermal (little old lady finds her grandson's cultist book 😄 ) since Demons are resistance based and Thermal offers resist shields. Thermal is pretty sweet at all levels. You're just starting? Everyone is low level and doesn't have defenses yet, so Thermal's healings are sweet ambrosia from the heavens and at all levels your pets will like them. Still low level? You have resistance shields that diminish the damage taken. Medium to high level? The shields are *still* going to be useful, but now you can boost someone(s) in your team to increase their damage as well. Higher level still? You can debuff strong enemies and make AV or EB fights much faster. Personally I found this pairing pretty good since we can put our pets in aggressive mode and let them go nuts while we focus in keeping everyone alive, and if things go sour we can go into bodyguard mode (if you don't know about the bodyguard mode please google macros for it, it's a game changer) to be half immortal. Bots/Cold is a good pairing as well. The tier two bots do +defense shields on everyone of the team, your other minions as well. Cold does +defense shields (different from Thermal that does resistance shields). That means your bots and your Cold shields stack up for even moar defense. There Cold falters is the lack of a heal which your minions will NOT appreciate, but it has more debuffs and knockdowns and strong anti-AV skills. Bots or thugs marry very well with /Time (which is an excellent secondary and quite busy to keep someone entertained) since both thugs and bots have +defense and /Time has buffs that increase defense, plus accuracy, plus recharge, plus it has a decent little AoE heal. One thing you will notice is how fragile your pets are. This is why I am advising stacking themes. Demons + Thermal manages to get the minions to cap of 90% resistances. Combined with the healing of Thermal and it will be hard to lose minions. Sonic does resistance shields but does not have the heals. Cold, Forcefield (not the best choice to pick), Time pair very well with thugs and bots since they stack defenses. There are a few builds around this sub-forum that allows pets to reach the soft-cap defense meaning they take a lot less damage. I even posted one where as early as level 28 a Thugs/Time had the pets softcapped.

Both bots and storm want mass immobilizes to hold the mobs in place while the burn patches and tornadoes are active. So I say WITH the caveat of rushing to get the mass immobilize from the patron pool the combo will work well together since you're immobilizing mobs anyway. Pre mass immobilize I feel it's going to be the usual miserable thing of throwing a tornado or bots doing fire patches and the mobs rushing to gtfo. There really is a lot of chaos and confusion going with Storm but I feel that pylon runs don't have a meaning in real gaming. Lots of KD, sure, a ton of little numbers popping all over the screen, which looks and feels great, but also enemies scattering and messing things up for the rest of the team who is trying to AoE them down, and in practical terms the enemies surviving longer because of this, compared to throwing a Tar Patch which slows them in place and increases damage taken.

I have finished the build and slotted everything and etc. My last thoughts about it are: - Perfect build. If I ever get a friend to join me and want to give them a first build to ease them into the game this will be it. - Quick ST chain completed by level 18. This means it is available even if we exemp down to do Posi 1 for the weekly or to play with friends. No big gaps, no big waits. - Very fast animations. As someone who was leveling a second Rad/ I abandoned it at level 35 because I could no longer stomach the 1.7, 2.3 and preposterous 2.9 animation times with my targets dying before I finished the animation, or whiffing, or doing the whole huge animation and not even having a Scrapper's crit to make me feel good about all that time spent locked in place. - Early AoE with Spin. There is some whining about homogenization but to be perfectly honest here we need MORE homogenization, not less. Telling someone to slog it to 32 to have their first AoE and in the meanwhile kill every enemy one at a time is only valid if the game does not have an exemp feature who then removes the powers. Every set should have an early AoE. This is an AoE game. Picking sets for theme or fun should be the thing, not do so because the damage type is resisted, not because of lack of AoE. I'm going to do a Savage/Bio next to test it since both sets are so similar.

I'm trying to find the post about it again but Hemo's long cast + stack eating made it a loss to use. Great for Stalkers though.

...can you believe I can't find this anywhere? So apparently Hemorrhage is pants and we are better off not using it and hoarding our stacks of Frenzy. Alright, fine. But then what? Maiming Slash, Vicious Slash, ???, profit? Rend is too slow at 2.11. Hemorrhage, as mentioned, not to be used. What then? It looks like Savage Strike is on the menu but I can't find a confirmation. Any Savage Melee players out there? Halp!

Noooo, don't tease us with this and then take two months to roll them out!

I find EA a bit squishy for actual tanking. The first thing that struck my mind is that you really have a lot of attacks. I doubt you need them all. So I trimmed them down to Body Blow (Body Blow and Smashing Blow seemed pretty interchangeable in terms of damage and animation time but Smashing Blow requires an extra power pick), Focused Burst and Concentrated Strike. This is very examplar unfriendly though, but it depends on what you have in mind for the character. You can buy the P2W attacks if you intend to exemp down to Posi 1 or 2, or even Synapse. Or ditch Torrent and take Smashing Blow instead if you do intend to exemp down to such low levels. A rotation of Focused Strike, Body Blow, Focused Burst, Body Blow, Focused Strike should be easily done. For AoE you have Torrent with the IO to not scatter mobs everywhere, Burst, Electrifying Fences and Ball Lightning. Hasten is at 125 seconds and with the Force Feedback in both AoE and ST attacks you're going to have it and Energize able to be perma-ed. The endurance recovery isn't huge at 3.5 without incarnates (and with accolades), but with Energize and Power Drain you should be alright. I took flying instead of Super-Jump + Super Speed but it's easy to just change to your whims. The Kismet finishes softcapping attacks against +3 which is where you'll be after the first incarnate level shift. No luck for psi resist/defense, sorry.

Yes? I know what Meltdown does.

Call me blind, but perhaps it's because I just woke up, but I don't see any visible improvements. 170 second hasten, no defense layer, big boost in psi resistance (good), some in cold and fire (inconsequential in end game), overall slightly worse resistances on the more common damage types, loss of an extra AoE.

I wanted to try a /Rad since I never really did a resistance set before (ignoring an abandoned /FA). I ended up going for Rad/ because it works so well mechanically, even though it does feel pretty clunky with the long-ass weird animations (it is one of the few sets where I prefer to just wait for my shorter attacks to recharge instead of using my super long winded Devastating Blow.). I feel Rad/ works better on a Scrapper. Since it is my first /Rad I don't know if I did a good job of it. Tips are welcome. The premise is a gimmicky softcap melee defense relying on Beta Decay's -ToHit. I know it is not exactly perfect (I remember testing it on a Blaster and both pylon and level 54 mobs did not resist the -ToHit but I did not test on AVs) and the radius is short (8 yards, but to be hit in melee mobs will be in those 8 yards anyway), but it's primarily a resist set after all. The defense is just an extra layer. The gimmicky part can be ignored by swapping the six slot ATO from Atom Smasher to Devastating Blow and five slotting Superior Avalanche into Atom Smasher. Either way the Destiny slot goes to Barrier as a panic button since I don't feel we gain much from Ageless. Hasten is at pretty damn decent 125 seconds with the Force Feedback in Radioactive smash able to push it to perma and not even mentioning the extra recharge when surrounded by enemies from Beta Decay. Considering I have seen some /Rad builds pushing for 170 seconds Hasten this part worked out better than expected. I had no slots for Electrifying Fences, but eh, I often finding myself not using it since it makes enemies not hug me and it certainly helped me choose to slot Ground Zero instead. Fusion + Ground Zero + Atom Smasher and we don't have minions to fight. The resistances are at: 83% S/L 76% Fire 44% Cold (low, but not terribly important in the end game) 75% energy 63% negative (eeeeeeh) 67% toxic 25% psi (eeeeeeeeeeeeeeh) All of these gain an extra 5% minimum from Barrier. Endurance recovery is low at 3.06 EPS on Mids, but it has another 0.60% from Gamma Boost that Mids ignores and Particle Shielding to help. At level 31 and with no accolades or anywhere near being slotted I'm at 2.70 EPS with Gamma Boost and my endurance drains rrrrreally slowly with Particle Shielding taking up the slack once I get to half blue bar. Tough and Weave have not yet been taken and will be a further drain but by then I should be better slotted with endurance reduction in attacks. If there is interest I can whip out a leveling build that I suspect should be able to softcap melee earlier than level 50. But I just stock up on purples between missions and use them when needed. At level 31 it's no longer a juggling act and I often don't pop purples any longer.

Overall I would say a character just for soloing I'd make a Rad/Bio (I actually do have one). The heal from Radiation Siphon is just nuts and Irradiated Ground ensures it is up often. 300 HP every few seconds tops health very easily when it matters which is hard fights. Easy fights are just a blur of AoE. The rest of the time it's all on Ablative or DNA Siphon, the swiss knife skill.

The quartermasters do not sell insps (only SOs), but all the others you've mentioned do and are great choices. I didn't want a human nurse in my base but the Combat Log was *perfect*. Kudos!

You might want to check that you have the latest Hero Designer from here. I'm going to assume to mean the last iteration of the build, so Shockwave has the other three Superior Brute's Fury + Sudden Acceleration KB >KD + Force Feedback proc + Javelin's Volley acc/dmg/end/rech boosted to +5.

There are plenty of /Bio builds out there that you can grab one and just substitute the primary. I can't tell you the best attacks or rotation for FM but, again, hunt for a FM guide and mash the two together.

/Bio tends to be stupid since it's super survival on top of being an offense oriented set. I'm currently playing a Claws/Bio which exemps really well and has an early AoE. I have the build on the forums. Rad melee is also pretty fun while being stupidly survivable on account of the passive healng in Radiation Siphon that, on my Scrapper, healed for 300 HP. It also mitigates the lack of early AoE (it only has the 'real' AoE at 32) by having the Contaminated splash damage mechanic and Irradiated Ground that actually does more damage than a regular damage aura since A) it does not require accuracy, B) takes in a LOT of damage procs (in fact the usual slotting for it is six procs), and finally, C) it drops a patch on the ground every 5 seconds giving it double the value. Resist based armor sets are pretty good too but I never played one so I can't tell you more about them.

You da man woman!

While it's not actually solo what I like the most is duoing stuff. Solo itself is dull and repetitive. And in the case of finding glowies even worse. But duo we can chat and split up to find glowies and go woooo when we win. Nothing stops a full team and that makes it as interesting as the RP events where the leader did not take in consideration a possible loss so everything is railroaded into finishing ez pz. With the memorable exception of doing Market Crash with under leveled characters, as a +3, which we slogged through *slowly* and losing one person along the way, and when reaching the giant robot we wipe three times and the team disbands (after trickling back one by one and engaging the fight making them be defeated one by one).

We need more insp sellers. I've been running to the hospital each time I want to stock up. Why do the guys around miss Liberty stop stelling insps at level 20? Or the NPC we can put in the base?

Slight update. Messed with things, lost some resistance, gained some recharge, picked up Slash for the -res, patched the (small) negative hole, threw the second ATO proc into the aura so it goes off on its own. Had to mule a Kinetic Combat *disgusted shudder*. This one is definitely a level 50 build as Slash's longer cooldown only really fits in with all the recharge in place otherwise there will be big gaps. So the advice is still to level with Strike, Focus and Follow-Up. Did a Posi 1 and the build felt slow as molasses so shifted things around to get Hasten much earlier, but this is not strictly necessary as I just want to be extremely exemp friendly with this build (it's my favorite so far even if lacking the big oomph of my Rad Scrapper doing Fusion + Gaussian proc + Devastating Blow + Scrapper crit).