ninja surprise

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.

I'd suggest removing "Local" from your chat window and only watching for people's bubbles nearby. Then keep Broadcast for chats across the zone.

How about changing it to give: +50% defense debuff resistance (or something, make it with a base value that's worth slotting and enhancing) +50% slow resist Immunity to those annoying web grenades that make it so you can't jump or fly +Endurance Recovery bonus Crash to 10 End instead of the complete wipe-out. That would go better with the theme of being Unstoppable and useful on a fully IO'd toon. It'd be sweet if the T9's gave what the set lacks instead of piling on more of what it already has maxed out.

It only feels like that because WP gets a +endurance power to push it ahead, but SR's three toggles aren't end-expensive. Since most people 5 or 6 slot them for set bonuses anyway, the total end cost winds up being cut by 2/3 and barely noticeable. It's when Tough, Weave, and/or Maneuvers get added on top that it gets tiring.

Personally I like to open with Midnight Grasp for the potential crit + DoTs. If you have the Chance for Crit in Soul Drain it'll fire every time (but maybe less frequently than if it were in another power, but still, Soul Drain + autocrits is a blast) I'd go: Midnight Grasp, Shadow Maul, Cross Punch, Smite, Siphon Life, repeat. Add in your epic snipe if you have it. The cone attacks spread out damage in the crowd. Assuming you're targeting a boss, this'll drop a bunch of minions without having to attack them directly.

Ok, this makes more sense now why when I'm using the right mouse button on my Razer to turn and look during battles, it often drops the "look" and sends a Trade invite to whatever teammate is in front of me. Been driving me crazy! Time for a new mouse I guess.

I'd put Dark high with its Psi resist. Probably tie Dark and Elec and Rad, then the rest further down. Bio doesn't have any defense debuff resist and I don't remember them leaving lots of bodies. Rularuu don't herd well, so anything that relies on tight groups (like WP) will get whittled down.

Ninjitsu, with auto-crit from hide is a blast. Plus you get End recover power plus a heal. It's a good pair. And TW keeps foes on their tushies to help keep you alive.

Until you fight those stinking Rularuus. I want to poke them all in the eye! 😞 Do the defense buffs help there?

Right now it would probably be my Bio/Dark Melee. It's soft-capped on the Defense and Damage Resists that Bio can do and has max -Slow resist from Winters. It's still not indestructible because the right enemies can rip it up, but it has enough clickies that I'm always busy and it does good damage and pulls in lots of aggro. BUT my SR/Electric is a total hoot when I want to just punch stuff without worrying about all the incoming attacks.

Just confirming you can do whatever you want! Then if you don't like it you can respec and pick it up. Some AVs just ignore taunt and do whatever they want. Or maybe it's that some ATs' attacks cause Terrify and AVs go running for the sunset and totally ignore you no matter what you do.

If you do SR/Dark Melee that's a great combo with DM giving you the clickies (endurance/heal) the armor doesn't!

It has +rech, +speed, status protection that doesn't drop when you run out of endurance and toggledrop, DDR, slow resist... If you take the T9 it's like a combo of speed boost + Accelerate Metabolism + a full set of soft-capped forcefields. So if you do run out of endurance and toggledrop, you can hit Elude, flip out and kill everything - without turning on any other powers - until the crash hits. The one trick about SR is that you turn on three toggles and then attack non-stop until everything else is dead or you are. Opposite of Bio where you turn on half a dozen toggles and also juggle three heals in between attacks to stay alive. Yesterday I lead a time on Crimson's arc at 50+4. I only got sapped once in the whole arc but had a blue and a purple so stayed alive until I could toggle up again. Didn't die at all, but the other tank and Brute died a couple times after getting sapped and toggledropped. The Brute got stunned and died a few times. I don't remember what his armor was though. Then I switched to my Savage/Bio Scrapper, joined a TinPex, and died a couple times while fighting Clocks in the first mission because I forgot to click the heals/absorbs after being SR for so long 😪 That's a realy fun combo though!

Scrappers can slot the Chance for Crit proc and just about get crits on demand, on top of the random crits. It's quite beautiful.

One thing is SR and Invuln get access to secondaries that Shield doesn't. What SR gets over Invuln is all the positional Psi attacks that SR can avoid and Invuln doesn't. And depending on how much Energy defense you've got, SR dodges most end-drain effects that might hit Invuln. Oh and the slow resist is to die for! No matter how many caltrops the Knives of Artemis drop, you just run right over them, attacks always recharge on time, it's so nice. SR is the absolute cheapest to soft-cap, making it a bargain that doesn't need Winters or other expensive sets.