ninja surprise

Also, nobody knows how long the game will be around. Live Shutdown was a total shock with 30 days warning and everything that everyone spent years grinding for was gone. We get to play now because of a curious combination of benign neglect from the content creators and generosity of the Homecoming hosts. At any time, circumstances could change and Homecoming could shutdown. It just boggles my mind that anyone wants to increase grind time when all I want to do is play the fun stuff I never got to play before and skip all the grinding. On Live, it was interesting to look for every exploration badge in every zone in order to unlock all the base teleporters, but I totally don't want to do that again. Likewise, I don't have time to build out my toons *and* a base; I focus on my toons and enjoy the game. I'm very glad I'd forgotten what Prestige was.

How about take this and add -Fly so a scrapper can confront a flyer and it'll come down and let itself get punched.

I've silenced or replaced a handful of sounds. But like OP, I have the game's overall volume set to around 5% and game music turned off. Game noises still overpower any other sounds from my PC. If you make your app, I'd love to export all the sound files and adjust their gain down by 50% - 75% so I'd get more granularity from the volume control. I love the game's atmospherics and the sound effects overall, it's just so loud I have to turn it way down and then the finer sounds get lost. But when an Earth or Ice controller drops an AoE and the thunder and glacier sounds rumble... love that.

I keep Permafrost and put the +Def uniques in there to hit the soft-cap without the Fighting pool. I hate wasting a pick on Brawl. But there's a bunch of ways to build to the soft-cap.

Go Brute if you like spending a long time fighting everything. Go Scrapper if you want to get stuff done and move on to the next task. I'd go Scrapper because Scrappers are always at full damage. Just waltz up, crit, and 1-shot the badguys. Then you go to the next mission.

Depends on how far apart the spawns are, or how much of a ninja you are. I do a fair amount of stealthing and it's easy to go 20 seconds running across a map before I need to ambush something. Or you defeat a spawn, take an elevator, and run to the next spawn. It pops up pretty regularly. And totally the opposite of a wimpy Brute that would start out at the bottom of the fury bar - Scrapper jumps in at full power with a crit in hand. 😎

A couple other options that are a blast: Ice Armor / Stone Melee - Ice is easy to soft-cap and Stone is just fun and powerful-feeling with the animations and sound effects. Electric Armor / Super Strength is similar, but resist-based. Both combos have self-heals and "give me my endurance back" powers which means you can fight forever, or until you've defeated everything.

I bind lshift+lmouse to Quicksand so it's easy to put down, but a target-macro would work well too. Love those two powers. Even though Salt Crystals is a sleep, it's fun to pop it on a spawn then go punch another spawn, and the Salty mobs will be taunted when they wake. Great way to keep targets trickling in to be defeated.

New opinion: A week or two ago I made a Titan/Ninjitsu Scrapper and it's a royal hoot. I just did Black Scorpion's patron arc against all the Crey. I'm not a glutton for punishment so I'm on +1/x4. On a Crey spawn I'll target the Paragon Protector boss and on a single dose of momentum I can use every AoE attack and most ST attacks and defeat the PP before it can MoG. So that's fun. A bonus from Ninjitsu is the hide power gives you an auto-crit on your first attack. So Build Momentum + crit + the spin attack usually wipes out the minions, then throw a cone in each direction and everything's dead but the boss, but they die in the ST chain before momentum drops. The Ninjitsu heal and Endurance powers activate quickly enough to use during momentum without losing it, so they work pretty well together.

Except that Ninjitsu is positional, not typed. OP- you'll want to six slot a few attacks with Touch of Death to boost Melee Def, Makos Bite for ranged Def, and I forgot the name of the AoE one... Obliteration or Eradication. Or Multi Strike for both Melee and AoE. Get both of the resistance unique that give +Def. In your Def toggles put 5 Red Fortunes and the Luck of the Gambler +rech. This is a good start. Soft capped Def then add recharge.

Holy moly that's what's happened! I put that KD enhancement and was surprised at how much it was making mobs flop! Edit: I have Kinetic Combat Chance for KD in each of my dark melee punches and they proc seemingly every time too. I get the feeling this is too good to be true.

There is no Break Free strong enough to stop Scrapperlock.

You could try taking your regen with a Sentinel and that opens up a ton of new primaries. Dual pistols is like a scrapper because so many attacks are pbaoe or cone. Plain ammo does knockdown. Lots of other fun primaries. Just kidding, roll with war mace or battle ace depending on your character preference. Scrapper 4 life.

Yep, depending on secondary set, the only toggles a blaster has are the pool powers for travel or self-buffs, whereas all the 9 powers each from primary and secondary could be click attacks or power ups. That's a lot of clickies.

Oh man now I wish I could get stone Melee on a scrapper.

Regardless of the sets you choose, you can get the effect you want by using auras on your hands and feet and body (for instance SR with a fire or electric aura), and you can color the attack animations. Plus you start with 6 costume slots and you can do binds or macros to change your costume with an attack. You can use the same body costume with different auras and attack colors. So you can make dark Melee look like fire, or Psi blades all sorts of colors for different elements, or street justice that has electric, fire, or frosty fists. Man this is a great game!

I'm thinking my Dark/Dark tank is going to come out of the shadows...

I started a Titan Weapons / Ninjitsu a couple days ago, currently at level 31. I've tried TW with Ice, Willpower, and maybe a couple other armors except Bio. I just can't get into Bio. It's fun with /nin. Particularly since the hide lets you auto crit on your first attack! That comes in super handy when jumping into new spawns. Just need a little more recharge so the +end power recharges a little quicker, and more slots for +Def bonuses.

It should show in the combat logs when it triggers, but otherwise just the combat stats. Know what your standard recharge rate is then after using an attack with it slotted see if changes to s higher number.

The anthem! I wish I had a copy of the lyrics because the song is spot on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBo7piCWRn4

You can get it free with a badge, or go to Echo of Galaxy City and into the train station to get it. Otherwise at 14 you can enter through someone else's portal.

My Spines/Ice Scrapper is a blast on teams, but a bit of a pain solo when tough bosses come out. It's great having two damage auras and stacking slows, less-resisted damage, etc. But only three single-target attacks... takes a long time to defeat some critters. Particularly those Devouring Earth, when they drop Cairns that buff their damage resistance. I spend all my time defeating Cairns so I can defeat one mob then they drop 4 more cairns! Over in the Brute/Tanks forums there's been talk of Street Justice replacing Spines for farming, and supposedly it has good single target damage too. So don't forget it exists too. Totally agree. My observation of team play is: "everyone will attack everything, regardless of whether anyone else on the team is already fighting it", and "It doesn't take 8 heroes to defeat one critter." My endurance is my most precious asset, so I'll try to avoid even attacking something with less than 1/4 health. The Defender can take that thing down. And when the spawn's down to about 3 nearly-dead critters it's time to move on to the next spawn. Particularly true if I'm the Tank or lead Brute. I'll get to the next spawn a couple seconds before the rest of the team; Just long enough get aggro and soak the alpha when the team arrives and begins Operation Mop-Up. Ain't nobody got time to wait for the tank to take a swing at the very last critter that was just defeated by the blaster but his attack is still gonna animate over a dead body.

I've had fun with a Claws/Energy Aura Scrapper. Stalled out at 30 though because I have so many alts.

Salut mon ami! Je To make reduce toggles, in Radioactive Smash and Radiation Siphon you can replace Touch of Death with Kinetic Combat and then don't turn on Tough or Weave. Or just move one slot from Chilling Embrace to Energy Absorption and put three Recharge Redux in there. Then it recharges within 20 seconds - that's about 10 attacks then EA to get all your endurance back. Tu peut lutter a jamais!

What were your favorite controller and blaster sets? You can just combine those. or do a sith themed dark/electric or something. Sky is the limit!