Hopeling

I admit I never quite understood why the original CoH devs felt that hit chances should be capped at 95%. RNG means "random number generator", not "consistent number generator". Sometimes you will have streaks of weird luck, like several misses in a short period of time, or getting hit by a lot of enemies at once, because that is how randomness works. However, this kind of question has been examined many times, and I don't think an irregularity in hit/miss chances has ever been found.

As a tanker, not especially hard. Even your ST attacks are AoE taunts. You also have a taunt aura, and you can get another AoE attack from epic pools if you want to. Dark Melee is a good set. It's not a farming set, but it will kill things and keep you alive.

Both Opportunities apply the -20% resistance debuff to the target. Offensive also adds a small energy damage bonus to your attacks (but for AoE attacks, it only applies to one target), and Defensive gives a small heal and endurance restore on every attack. The bonuses are fairly small, and you can generally only use one at a time anyway; if you mostly use Defensive Opportunity (or vice versa), saving a power choice and 4-5 slots by not taking the other power at all may be more useful than having slightly more flexibility. Few sets need both to make a good attack chain.

I'm trying out the absorb proc in Disintegrate and the +opp proc in Overcharge. I'm kind of underwhelmed by both procs, but Overcharge instantly filling my bar is kinda neat.

If you don't like the "splash" aesthetic, recolored Water Blast is very easy to reconceptualize as acid blast, lava blast, ink blast, blood blast, or whatever other thing you like.

I don't think Arachnos villains count. My scrapper sits at "Defeat Generic or Signature villains in Safeguard missions: 5/25" while also holding the "Saved The World" badge, and there are more than five Arachnos AVs in the STF. I'm pretty sure all of my badge progress here actually came from leveling via tip missions. If I'm right about Arachnos, this sadly won't work either. Bad Mr. Gary's suggestion sounds promising though. But yeah, logging out will reset missions, even if you just logout to character selection and then log right back in.

Before shutdown, City of Data was the site you went to for numbers and detailed power info. Paragonwiki was never very good at that. Unfortunately, City of Data is now gone, although you can still view the archived version if you're willing to tolerate it being a bit slow and some of the pages being broken.

Sorry, let me give a more thorough response with less jargon. Slot cost reduction. For lowbie brutes in particular, thanks to Fury, slotting for damage is your last priority. As a basic template, I'd give attacks 1acc, 2 endredux, 1 recharge, and only then maybe some damage. Get the Miracle: +Recovery and Numina's Convalescence: Regeneration/Recovery IOs, and slot them in Health. Get the Performance Shifter: Chance for +Endurance IO, and slot it in Stamina. Of course, slot Stamina for endmod too. Get the Unrelenting Fury ATO proc, which gives a cost reduction buff. Put it in your favorite attack. Even with 2× XP, you can still make decent inf from drops and merits via the auction house. Rare salvage sells for 500k apiece, and any recipe with "Gladiator" in the name is worth a few million and so are some other rares. If you run any story arcs or task forces, you'll get Reward Merits; use those to buy Enhancement Converters and sell them for 90k apiece. 10 merits gets you 30 converters gets you ~2.5 million influence, which will comfortably fund common IOs in every slot. The unique IOs I mentioned above will run you several million apiece, so that may take longer, but it's still very doable in the 20s if you just do stuff that gives merits.

Just the usual tricks: slot more cost reduction in your attacks and toggles, get the +recovery uniques and Performance Shifter proc, and get the Unrelenting Fury proc. Endurance is TW's primary drawback.

Sure, it still helps your primary, pool powers, etc. /WP itself doesn't get any benefit from it, is all.

It doesn't have any click powers except Resurgence (if you're using this on cooldown, something is wrong) and Strength of Will (whose recharge can't be reduced), so recharge doesn't help it in any meaningful way. Compare this to eg /Regen, where recharge lets you use all your heals more often. Edit: wait, did WP/Resurgence get the same treatment as Regen/Resurgence for sentinels, ie, turned into a self-buff if used while alive?

I mean purple inspirations, haha. LotGs are nice if you can afford them, but /WP cares less about global recharge than almost any other secondary.

Typed defense is your #1 priority from set bonuses, although not necessarily to softcap; 32.5% is pretty good with your resists and regen, then pop Lucks when you need more. +hp and some extra S/L resist are nice too, but not transformative.

It's not clear to me why you'd even want to run fire farms with a /EA. Fire brutes like them because they have high fire resist, but /EA is largely agnostic to damage type.

Willpower is firmly a Jack-of-all-trades set. Decent S/L resist, decent defenses, high HP, a heal and some regen, no psi hole, and status protection that includes fear and confuse. It kind of sits between Regen and Invuln, with more than half the strengths of both. Add some defense from IOs or even just buffs/insps and it becomes very durable.

Damage resistance. If you apply a -10% damage debuff to an enemy with 30% lethal resist, their lethal attacks will do 7% less damage. NPCs tend to resist the damage types they deal, so -damage very often is partially resisted.

IIRC, you can also slot Membranes in Active Defense to enhance its DDR value directly. That might have been changed near the end though, my memory is hazy and I don't have a 50 shield character to check with.

I like it in Whirling Smash, and it would probably also work well in Arc of Destruction. Sometimes it just doesn't fit though: if I want 5-piece Armageddon and the Fury of the Gladiator proc in Arc, there's no room left to put a FF proc.

/Shield is a more aggressive set, with a damage bonus from Against All Odds and a strong AoE attack in Shield Charge. I would say it's a bit less durable than Invulnerability overall, particularly since it doesn't have any self-healing. Both are quite good overall. For pairing with Broadsword specifically, I've played both to 50, and preferred /Shield, simply because Broadsword's AoE leaves something to be desired. Since you're playing a knight, War Mace/Shield is also a good pairing (arguably better overall). For a completely different approach, TW/WP makes a great combo and is pretty fitting for a knight.

I can vouch for /WP, which definitely pairs well with TW. I'm not sure about Ninjitsu, but it would probably work fine.

Nice! If I can match that with my Beam/Elec, I'll be pretty satisfied. He only just hit 50 yesterday, so not really built out yet, but once he is we'll see. Achilles and Fury of the Gladiator give -20%, right? It's strange that Annihilation is weaker for no reason, but that seems to be the trend for ranged attack sets in general.

Oh, I thought it was -20% like Achilles' Heel, but maybe not. I'll check it sometime.

What's the -12.5% res coming from? In other news, Refractor Beam takes defense debuff sets and accurate defense debuff sets. Why, who knows, but if you ever wished you could stick two -res procs in there, I guess you can.

ATOs are always attuned. There is no such thing as a non-attuned Superior Unrelenting Fury, and the non-Superior version is also attuned. The purple version just has better stats. For non-ATOs, there is indeed no reason to attune purples.

Yes, regen debuffs are in a weird place in this game: they're useless except against AVs, who resist them heavily, so any worthwhile regen debuff has to have huge values even though NPCs almost never have more than base regen. Then this carries over to NPC regen debuffs, which seem to have -500% as a default value even when it's the secondary effect on an attack, which is absolutely punishing for any player character that relies on regeneration.