ninja surprise

I have one, and it's one of my favorite toons for concept and playstyle. But I have so many other alts to play too! With the variety of AoE and melee attacks in Staff it's easy to get the sets to soft-cap SR. Then you just go crazy hitting things with a 10' pole. Lots of KD so things can't try to hit you back. It's fun.

Also you won't run into a bunch of clones of your powersets, which is always award. I haven't seen Shield/SJ very frequently at all.

Yep and the only mission that's a pain in the butt -- a defeat all of Crey tanks and Scorpion dudes -- can be autocompleted to speed the whole arc up.

Shield/Stone Melee is a blast and hits hard with dirt clods flying off the face of everything you hit. It would go great with Ice Melee too. Probably a good unbeatable combo is Invulnerability / Dark Melee. They buffed DM so your AoEs are massive. Shadow Maul hits people standing nearly behind you, up to 10 targets! Even Touch of Fear is a AoE and hits everything around you. Invincibility + Soul Drain gives you massive +tohit and damage buff. My personal favorite right now is Fire Armor / Savage Melee. It's a blast leaping in, lighting everything on fire, and ripping it up. It takes some inf to buy all the IOs it needs to be tough though.

It goes back to the question of "what are you doing to revive PvP?" If you know people aren't going to do it for fun or just for the sake of it, are you organizing events, giving prizes, writing guides, etc? How are you making it rewarding for people to participate? Why would someone want to go get ganked by a min/maxer with a billion dollar build? If we assume that most people either don't care about PvP or don't want to, then changing the game to force them to do it will just alienate them or drive them away. You need to entice them with rewards. If Homecoming team doesn't have resources or motivation to recode the game to make PvP attractive, then it's up to you, the PvP players, to talk people into it.

In the costume creator there's Costume Sets for various themes and then there's all the other options you can choose. Can Sets be added for some of the animal combinations? There's Insectoid, Reptilian, Lizard... I think that's it for the animal-themes. No bird, fish, cat, wolf, or minotaur sets. Would it be possible to add them in with their legs, tails, wings, etc?

Welcome back! In case you didn't know, there's Mid's Reborn hero planner where you can plan out your power picks and enhancements. There's a Test server. On Test you can boost your Tank to level 50, and use a pop-menu to give it all the enhancements you'd ever need. Then you can try it out on some radios, solo task forces, etc, to see how you like it before creating it on Live. Here on the forums there's already a ton of threads with build suggestions for most power combos, and definitely for every primary/armor set, and you can use those for ideas.

@Bopper For me, I can't figure out how to build a Widow/Fortuna. I don't understand how the powers stack. When I look at it in Mid's it seems like it has a ton of low-buff leadership-like toggles and I don't know what to do with them. Your build is amazing though and I'll give it a try on mine. I think Pokey McPokesalot is in the 30's so can choose a path on respec and get a decent start on being strong. My first main was a SR/DM on Live. It was my second 50 (first was Grav/Kin Controller) and my first Incarnate. After CoV came out it was still a long time before I dabbled in redside since my own SG was on Blue. So I built a lot of SR toons and never really got around to learning the redside Vet ATs. However, I absolutely LOVE it when there's Widows on my team. Holy cow are they force multipliers or what!

It's worth noting that much of the time the damage output won't make a whole lot of difference. Minions will still go down while you're doing your attack chain on the boss, mixing your AoE with ST attacks. Bosses might take 4 or 5 attacks instead of 3 or 4. It's only in really long fights against very tough opponents like Pylons, GMs, AVs, etc where the time to defeat stretches out by a minute. And that's only when you're solo. On teams the difference shrinks again. SR is easier and cheaper to softcap. Bio requires a lot of expensive sets to max out recharge, resists, defense, debuff resist, healing, etc. Also you have to click the 3 Bio clickies every time they come up to stay alive and that interrupts your attack chain and forces redraw. With SR you can basically just click Practiced Brawler at every 2 minutes, or wait till you get held before clicking, and spend all your time attacking. Or leave it on auto and let it fire when you aren't attacking. It's trade-offs on what you consider fun.

Weird thing is I just played my Psi/Savage Dominator who happens to have Evasive Maneuvers. I turned on power monitor and attacked stuff in Dark Astoria and the 17% def buff was listed while attacking and being attacked. Would the number disappear when suppressed or just the effect stops applying? Edit: Yep, it's misleading. In the itemized Combat Stats it shows every bonus possible, but the total changes. So out of combat I have 27% ranged defense, but when I attack it drops to 7.55% even though it still lists all my power bonuses. Good damage, but you'll need buffs / assistance for GMs. Temp powers, P2W pets, etc.

Hmm... Just realized I have a few hundred more slots for alts. Gonna try this!

Does Evasive Maneuvers give any defense buff during combat? I can't tell from the description whether it totally suppresses.

What amazing builds! But now I have to decide whether to abandon my Bio/DM, SR/DM, or Shield/DM tanks and use their IOs to build this one out 😰

I thought we'd have to get @Hyperstrike in here to CinemaSins ding the Brute discussion!

This discussion comes up somewhat frequently. Back on live the people really good with math and stats ran the numbers on running with Confusion vs No Confusion. If you let a confused mob entirely defeat another mob without you doing any damage, then you lose the reward. HOWEVER, as long as you are doing any damage at all to a spawn, Confusion increases your overall speed to defeat and rewards earned. You don't have to spend as much endurance or time attacking to defeat a spawn but still get rewarded for defeats with drops, exp, and inf (unless you've disabled them of course). And the mission completion XP bonus is the biggest reward. With mass confusion you can complete missions quicker and get more of those fat bonuses. Plus your team can handle bigger spawns at higher difficulty for bigger rewards. Confusion is good for a team, if you can believe it.

Agreed. But with Spines I used the "Silence specific game sounds" tweak to make Quills quiet, Maybe some of the other attacks too. Fire Melee has some attacks with a screaming sound effect I had to disable to make my Rad Armor/Fire Melee tank playable. It's a lot of fun now.

I really want to like Fire Armor but the pulsing action of Blazing Aura makes my eyes hurt. I wish it had a Hot Feet alternate animation. Or one of the fire-body animations from the Blaster's Fire secondary.

Looks good and tough! Personally I can't sleep at night when my En/Neg defense isn't capped. Up to you but unless you really like the Fury of the Gladiator bonuses, I'd swap those and the Touch of Fear sets for three each of Eradication and Cleaving Blow. That'll bring you up from 39% to 48% and keep you safe from sapping Sappers, Carnies, and other stuff. (But drops S/L defense from 52% to 49%)

Tough question! Bio/DM is a hoot, but Radiation/Savage Melee is a load of fun. Before that, Shield/Stone was my favorite for all its smash. SR/Electric Melee was a really fun concept build, but Elec felt low on damage compared to other combos. Same with Invuln/Staff - lots of fun but took a long time to defeat tough things.

My Bio/DM tank is almost my favorite. Bio makes Dark Consumption is skippable so it's easier to squeeze in what you need to make Bio survive better. It's easy to cap S/L resist and get the Defenses high enough to mean something. Then just add recharge and Winters to max out your resistance to recharge debuffs and you should be golden. Thanks for this! I'm going to have to tweak my build and maybe replace Air Sup with ToF.

Can you attach a picture of the boot? I can think of a couple boots that have wings as an option.

I just assumed it was my costumes. 😬

Your mutation origin doesn't affect what powers are available. Even you can trade your freebie Mutation attack at a P2W vendor for the freebie attack from a different origin. I usually switch to Throwing Knives from Natural. For endurance and long fights it makes a bigger difference to have endurance reduction in the attacks than EndMods in Stamina. Best thing to do there is two-slot Performance Shifter with the +End proc and a plain Endmod, and then in Health put in a few of the +End procs (panacea, numina, etc). But if you get 33% end redux in your attacks you can fight that much longer. Any build that uses a bunch of sets will include a few EndRdx IOs in every attack and let you fight longer. For Alpha Incarnate I usually do Cardiac to get even more EndRedux across everything.

Also, those have to get through your regular defense to hit you before they can apply. Since I normally play defense armors it's always surprising/annoying how many more status effects hit my resist-based toons and sometimes stack enough to overpower the status protection. As an extra bonus, since AD is a clickie it still applies for its full duration if you run out of endurance and toggle-drop. It's pretty great.

I'd love it if the Croatoa neighborhood boundaries were enlarged so that there weren't gaps between them. Seems for some of the hunts, the mobs spawn along the trees just outside a neighborhood and it's a royal hassle to try to drag them into the border before defeating them.