Extor Prime

It's the place where you can abuse Penelope Yin.

Well, I hemmed and hawed about it in Mids and kept it after all. I need it to mule a set that won't go into Cross Punch for some reason (despite them both being melee cones), at least.

Of course I read the title as "Is the people stupid!" and my answer was "Yes, it are."

It's likely Silos, at a different point in time. If the development of sig arcs continued, we would probably be able to interact with "this" version of him at some point. Whether a good guy or a bad guy, he's still Nemesis, so he'll spin plots and act indirectly and from the shadows as he is wont to do.

It's bugged. Penny's shield works "sometimes", and sometimes it does not. Stock up on res pills or just and suck it up and hosp... Artifacts do not regenerate, so as long as you put a dent into them each time before you die, you'll inch towards mission end. He does stop after you down all artifacts.

What a curious primary/secondary combination. Very interested in how it performs at the peak of optimization!

Ill/Cold/Ice (or Mace). GMs: I've taken down everything except Lusca, Avatar of Devouring Earth and Seed of Hamidon solo. I think. Might be missing some. Soloed the Freedom Phalanx TFs, but at 1/1/1/1 with a crapton of P2W powers. Soloed ITF at 4/8/1/1. Favorite content so far was the signature arcs. Did all at 4/8/1/1, but had to bump down the diff in 2 missions because they are bugged: instead of spawning several ambushes in sequence all ambushes spawn at once. Iamverybadass.jpg, but I couldn't handle what looked like a hundred mobs stuffed in a very small indoor map. Sig arcs are very gainful too because lots of merits.

So what would I take instead of it?

The consensus seems to be that it is terrible, but I'm not certain why; or what could be taken to replace it. I have a Rad/Bio that I periodically play. My attack chain is Proton Sweep - Rad Smash - Devastating Blow - Rad Siphon, with Atom Smasher whenever it is up. The whole thing is a bit ponderous, but gets the job done. Between Irradiated Ground and Sweep, things are kept contaminated, Siphon keeps my HP topped up and everything dies obligingly enough. So what makes Proton Sweep bad? I'm very fond of (over)optimizing my characters, but I don't see what I could replace it with that would work better. I considered Cross Punch, but it's a smaller cone, and pure smashing damage, which is a bit bland compared to Sweep's energy/smashing.

There ain't no kill like overkill.

Ill/Cold, bro. Seriously.

Yeah, hookers usually don't appreciate when you sneak up on them.

I nominate the Tyrant. Let's face it, Paragon Primal is a goddamn mess. And the man knows how to sort out a goddamn mess.

OP has a severe case of rose-colored glasses. If you want edge-of-your-seat every-fight-to-the-death scene, you need to go back to the days right after ED and before IOs. Jack's paradise: one hero = three minions. When IOs hit, you could put together a team of scrappers and beat 90% of content. So much for team comp. Scrappers soloed stuff just like they do now. Illusion controllers did too. Sure, you could not reliably solo task forces, but otherwise there was a lot of content that could be soloed by the right character. Now the only difference is that more characters can do it because of improved inherents and incarnates. I for one don't miss the near-mandatory teaming. I love being able to solo group content at my pace and actually read stuff, and have a chance to digest what is happening. Because even in the good old days group runs were always GOGOGOGOGOGO. Now they are GOGOGOGOGOGO times a hundred. This is an MMO in 2019, nobody has the time anymore, nobody has patience for others' BS, and everybody is miserable and looking for that dopamine shot from getting stuff done ASAP. Nobody has the time for you to read flavor text or discuss what just happened in a cutscene. Them's the breaks. Soloing in MMO is a valid choice. I fight my own battles but appreciate a bit of socialization in between. Occasional teaming is fine. Teaming all the time, particularly with emphasis on team composition... Nah. I'm too old for that.

I love the Shadowrun setting. Played all three of the Harebrained games (I miss the times before HBG cucked themselves). Never played in person though, actual face to face tabletop and RP isn't my thing. I didn't mind "Bright" either, it wasn't a cinematic masterpiece, but it wasn't a complete dumpster fire either.

Yeah... Guilty as charged I suppose, I measure everything by a very specific yardstick, that being my optimized-within-an-inch-of-his-life main. Which often leads to fun factor or purely visual appeal falling by the wayside.

Plant or Fire. /Storm needs an AoE immob to really shine.

It's doable, of course. Still, going to be a much tougher life with this combo. Too bad decoys aren't buffable.

Unfortunately it is relevant. This character will always suffer performance issues, even on teams. Here is why: the primary and secondary work against each other rather than together. Illusion favors being at range and flying. Kinetics favors being in PBAoE and on the ground. /Kin's main mechanism is "steal from the enemy, give to the team"; and its preferred position in combat is PBAoE range, so in the middle of enemy spawn. Illusion is very light on actual controls. Flash is a PBAoE hold, but the animation makes it bad. Other AoE "control" and main damage dealer is PA. PA cannot prevent the character from being hit by enemy PBAoE attacks, and while its taunt is strong, a character standing next to the decoys using /Kin powers can in fact steal the aggro from the decoys. Not good already; now add to that the fact that decoys cannot be buffed by /Kin's "steal from the enemy, give to the team" and things start looking really bleak. Even a defense-capped controller is fairly sqiushy. You cannot cap both defenses and resistances through set bonuses alone, so even though you will get hit rarely, when you do get hit, it will hurt a lot. Generally it is easier to avoid damage being at range (and flying), but /Kin can't do that and remain effective. So it has to kill everything quicky before it becomes a threat. The reason why Fire/Kin works is because it has several tools for AoE/PBAoE mitigation and damage, and imps are buffed by /Kin. It puts out a lot of damage quickly. Illusion can't do that. Decoys CAN be very damaging, but you have to debuff the enemy resistance for them to really shine. /Kin cannot do that. So, to sum up. We have a relatively squishy character that needs to be in PBAoE range, that has one slow AoE hold for mitigation and actual control. Said character has a solid ST attack chain, but its AoE is produced by pets that are unbuffable (PA) and a permanent pet that is quite squishy in melee range (but needs to be close by in order to receive /Kin buffs). Solo, he will struggle. On teams, he'll be annoying because he'll need extra attention to be kept alive. You can play any combo of primary/secondary, sure. But some just don't work very well. Even the gimpiest character can play at -1/1/0/0, but the weakness will show as soon as a proper challenge comes along. I myself would LOVE to play Ill/Kin, but it's just not a combination that will ever work well enough to carry its own weight.

You picked a sub-optimal primary/secondary combination. That's your biggest issue.

The other time she pretended to be mugged by the Skulls. It's a completely different scenario. The only thing in common was the subsequent profound regret for the life choices that we both made.

Well... This one time I put on a cape and paid a hooker to pretend that she was being mugged by the Hellions...

Say, what does Ill/Dark NOT have (functionally) that Ill/Cold does, aside from Benumb? As far as debuff stacking goes, at least on paper it seems comparable, but for the life of me I could not achieve nearly comparable DPS on a test Ill/Dark controller. It's a lot sturdier for sure (heals, and hitting the caps with Fade is a cinch), but doesn't seem to kill quite as fast.

Recovery ain't got nothing to do with recharge.

First off, if you haven't done Who Will Die? yet end to end, I highly recommend that you do. It is perfectly soloable, it is pretty decently written and it deals with the death of Statesman (like him or not, he was one of the cornerstones of our universe) as well as some substantial changes to the world in general. Then comes Pandora's Box, which deals with my two favorite subjects: Incarnates and Nemesis, and it is actually more challenging in places than Who Will Die?. But two missions stand out as ridiculous due to bugs, and if you haven't experienced them yet, here's a PSA for you. Minor spoilers. This is blueside only, not sure that the same thing happens redside. Part 4, "Parental Ambiguity" section, mission "Meet up wth Doctor Harvan". The mission includes a countdown of sorts that triggers an ambush every so often. Well, in my case at least, the countdown jumped all the way to the end and triggered EVERY AMBUSH AT ONCE. This, at team size 8, meant a hundred or so enemies overall in a relatively small indoor map with zero cover, with a generous portion of enemies being flying melee bosses with a Statesman-like "lightning of Zeus" AoE. I grinded through them over the course of several embarrassingly quick deaths and by burning two signature tank summons. Oddly enough, Part 5, "The Powers that Be" section, mission "Investigate Harvan's Lab" is even worse. In this mission, you have to survive 4 minutes while fighting enemies and clicking glowies to prevent more enemies from spawning, and in the end clear out whatever is left. And you are playing on that same small lab map from above. Well, at team size 8, the additional spawns are so enormous that in under 2 minutes, the map was literally CLOGGED with Nemesis Warhulks. Needless to say they killed me very quickly. I said "screw it" and "kneeled on the ball", waiting the timer out before entering the map. This in turn spawned MORE warhulks. Seriously, there were so many that they couldn't get through the doors anymore and couldn't really walk around without bumping into each other either. Even before the adds triggered, while fighting unavoidable reinforcement spawns, I could not possibly click the glowies fast enough to prevent these "adds on top of adds", which created a literal Nemesis traffic jam. I was so shocked I forgot to screenshot it. There must have been easily over a hundred of Warhulks alone, plus fake Nemeses, plus various human troops. Anyway. Even if you have enormous brass balls, I highly recommend that specifically for these two missions, you drop the team size difficulty setting to 1.