ninja surprise

Asking for a friend - they signed up last year and played before going to college for 6 months (July - Dec). Just trying to get back in now and neither the game nor the forums accept their username/password. Tried doing a "forgotten password" on the forums and it says "We could not find a member account with that email address. Please try again with other information." I've seen that the inactive account policy isn't being enforced, what could have happened to her account?

You can easily skip Jacob's Ladder for Super Jump. I can't load the build to see what the total defense numbers are, but if not soft-capped you can swap Maneuvers for Super Speed.

Elec/Elec will be fine. You should be able to cap S/L/E/N resists with fairly inexpensive sets and Tough, and get your Psi resist pretty dang high. Your self-heal will keep you going vs toxic and alpha strikes. Slot that handclap-stun for KD (not KB) and the FF +Rech and you can keep non-bosses perma-stunned. It's a good set.

I have a Battle Axe/Energy Armor Scrapper around 30 and that's about as far as I want to go with it. BA basically seems fine, but is pretty endurance-hungry. It does fairly consistent knockdown, which is fun. But the swipes are just so slow.

They are in the patch notes in the Beta forums. They're going to work on it again, just couldn't get it settled for this next release.

I'm putting Dark Consumption back on my DM/Ice Armor scrapper! Energy Absorption will keep my End topped up so I can use DC for the attack!

That's because waiting for a tank to herd is a waste of time. Tank needs to get out there and gather the mobs before the team arrives! Plus, aggro caps are low so big herds aren't really viable.

Thematically Grav/Kin go great, like you're a master of momentum and gravity. Both are low-noise, light on the VFX. You can hold things and use them as batteries to buff yourself while defeating them. You have more damaging attacks than any other controller and /Kin buffs up your damage and recharges them quicker. You'll have useful attacks and buffs pretty much every task force level. It's quite Super.

It's a great combo. Mine is named Super Spooky because it's like being attacked by ghosts from the dark! Most of the /Dark powers don't need many slots, but the Illusion powers want a lot of recharge. So look for sets that boost recharge, Hasten, LotG +Rech, etc. At low levels it's easier to use Group Invis than Superior, it burns 1 end /sec, whereas Group is a click every 2 minutes. You'll want both though for LotGs. And you'll still want Fade from /Dark because it gives great buffs. Soul Absorption is another great power that'll heal you and buff your endurance once you get the timing of using it when there's plenty of bodies on the ground. The skippables are Black Hole from /Dark and Flash from Illusion. BH might save your bacon but your teammates will hate you for it. But you might use it when doing a stealth glowie-click surrounded by mobs. Flash is a short group hold that you'll be able to use about every 2 minutes. I always forget it's there. Incarnate powers recharge quicker. Howling Twilight is a better attack than Flash. It recharges quicker, stuns or scares (stacking with Spectral Terror) everything, debuffs their movement speed and recharge, and recharges pretty quick. Don't just wait for someone to die before you use it! So get yourself to 18 so you get your Phantom armies! If you don't know how to do powexec_location macros or binds, look those up. I use F1 through F4 for PA, Spectral, Dark Servant, and Tar Patch so I don't have to click the power then click a spot on the ground, they just appear at the badguy I've targeted.

I can't open the builds where I am but I suggest going for max recharge: Perma-Soul Drain will do wonders for your acc/ToHit Bringing Dark Consumption back ASAP will solve your endurance woes.

Ah, got it.

Note: there's two P2W self-rezzes. Renewal of Light does: "The restoration blasts nearby foes with an explosion, knocking them down and disorienting them. You will revive with about half of your hit points and endurance. You will be invulnerable for a brief time and protected from xp debt for 20 seconds. " Return to Battle imitates a ding-rez: "If you are defeated, you may return to battle empowered by the effects of several types of large inspirations!" and makes you untouchable for a little while. But takes 1 hour to recharge! I love RoTP, one of my favorite powers. Lesser heroes say you can't do damage if you're dead. They are obviously wrong. I keep the P2W as an emergency backup.

Yes, if you keep Repel on 24x7 you're going to have endurance problems. I believe the power description even says it takes extra endurance for every enemy it repels. If you stand next to a foe you'll lose end super fast. You get Stamina at level 1. Three-slot that, put some End reducers in your powers, and power through it like a hero.

OP said fully solo though so no worries about being the team aggro magnet or protecting other people via attack mitigation. Stalker wasn't in the original question, so I'd still vote for Scrapper as the better solo option. Always at 100% damage, and crits always available. It depends on your playstyle, but when I'm solo I want to get missions done, not spend all of every mission trying to maintain fury. Defeat the boss, click the glowie, move on. If I get a wild hair then I'll defeat everything. Scrappers are great for that. Although, having a taunt aura is really nice for keeping runners from running.

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.