Hopeling

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.

DoTs generally do stack, and City of Data lists the DoT as a separate effect from the Disintegrating debuff, so it should but I haven't checked directly. The -regen does not stack from either power, but since we need to keep up Disintegrate for other reasons, it's not much of a consideration there. I guess it does rule out high-recharge Disintegrate spam as a viable strategy, which is worth mentioning explicitly.

What's the best ranged ST attack chain for Beam Rifle? First, since Pine's doesn't include Disintegrate bonus damage in the power display, here are DPA values when Disintegrate is up, counting Arcanatime: Single Shot: 50.05 damage, 1.188s cast = 42.1 DPA Charged Shot: 82.08+12.31 damage, 1.848s cast = 51.1 DPA Disintegrate: 108.1 damage, 2.112s cast = 51.2 DPA Lancer Shot: 106.1+21.22 damage, 2.112s cast = 60.3 DPA Piercing Beam: 108.6+35.84 damage, 2.508s cast = 57.6 DPA Overcharge: 175.2 damage, 3.036s cast = 57.7 DPA So all of our DPA are fairly close together, but Single Shot is clearly lower than the rest, and Charged Shot isn't great (but of course, you need one of them to activate Opportunity). Overcharge is maybe just barely worth using on a single target; slotting it with an Achilles' Heel proc might bring it up to 'definitely an improvement, but a marginal one'. We also have to consider secondary effects: Disintegrate gives +12.5% damage for 9.4 seconds for some reason (I think Blaster Defiance got left in by accident here), even though Pines doesn't display this. You also want the Disintegration debuff up all the time, so casting it more than just once every 10s is probably good to allow for misses. Piercing Beam gives -9.6% res for 10 seconds, and stacks. Single Shot gives -75% regen, which doesn't stack. On a level 50 AV, this amounts to ~10 DPS. I'm not sure if this is enough to make it worth using in your attack chain, but it's there. One obvious candidate for an attack chain is Disintegrate - Piercing Beam - Lancer Shot - repeat, requiring 231% recharge in Piercing Beam and less in the other attacks. This chain is 6.732 seconds long, so you should have 2 stacks of the Disintegrate buff for every Lancer Shot and Piercing Beam, and 2 stacks of -res for every Lancer Shot, but Disintegrate will fall off if you miss. Is there a better chain? Preferably without using Dominate?

Endmod will make Paralyzing Jolt drain more endurance, but endurance drain is worth very little in PvE unless you can drain them completely, which you aren't going to do with just Havoc Punch and Paralyzing Jolt. I agree that getting high defense on /Bio looks hard, especially as a Sentinel, but the set also shouldn't need softcapped defense to survive pretty well. Hoverblasting makes this doubly true. So in this case, I'd just accept not being softcapped and use Lucks/Barrier to make up the difference when needed.

No Aim? It pairs pretty well with the nuke, especially with a Gaussian's proc. I'd drop Rehabilitating Circuit for it, personally. I don't think slotting endmod in Paralyzing Jolt is going to be useful. IIRC, the +end proc will apply to the target, not to you. The level 20 endmod in Stamina isn't doing you any good either. Don't slot Lancer Shot with just a stun set. It's an attack. Parasitic Leech is not a very good place to put the Miracle proc. You'll only get the +recovery for 120s after using the power, which in this case isn't all the time even if you're using the power on cooldown. I'm also very interested in Beam/Bio; I've got a Beam/Elec that I've been thinking of rerolling. I haven't played /Bio on anything yet, so I'm not sure how to give useful advice for it, but a lot of your defenses look underslotted to me.

Disintegrate's -regen doesn't stack, sadly (nor does Single Shot, incidentally). It's basically ~20 extra DPS for free, which is cool, but it's not flooring any AVs.

Sure, some builds just go without an epic pool. It works fine. Superior Conditioning and Physical Perfection are fine powers. /WP doesn't always need them because it handles endurance pretty well by itself, but if you want more endurance, they're great. Focused Accuracy is a terrible all-the-time toggle; its accuracy and tohit buff are pretty small, its endurance cost is really high, and few builds need the extra accuracy anyway. It's a solid debuff resistance toggle though: it makes you highly resistant to -tohit and -perception, so you can laugh off smoke grenades, Hurricanes, Darkest Night, etc. You turn it on when facing those enemies, then turn it off. I used this to solo Lanaru The Mad.

CoH had basically no melee penalty for a really long time, to the point that "is there any reason to bring a blaster instead of a scrapper?" was a serious point of discussion. Having some fights that aren't melee-friendly is fine; none of this content was actually supposed to be soloable. Some of the Incarnate content went overboard on the melee penalty IMO - Marauder's ground punch is dangerous, but if you're at full HP and pop heals right afterward, you can get by. Autohit unresistable attacks that deal multiple ticks to bypass the one-shot code are a bit much though. That fight is frustrating as a melee character, even on a team. I think marccussmythe is right that they were still figuring it out a bit.