Gulbasaur

I see your point, but my strategy is generally to just try and outmurder perform as many arrests in a short amount of time as possible... also, the control aspect is a huge boon in that regard. Good active defence (control, debuffs, violence etc) can more than make up for lopsided passive defence (HP, def, res etc).

Your defences are very high. You rarely need over 45% for anything and it's general to shoot for melee/ranged/AoE or the typed defences. They cancel each other out to an extent, and psi as you mention is the only one that works differently... but Fortunatas are pretty psi-proof out of the gate. What's your endurance usage like? The Leadership toggles can be heavy on endurance and Hasten often acts like an endurance vacuum be bringing skills online faster than your endurance can cope. Otherwise: If you enjoy it, it's a good build. I

The last time I looked at that (which was a while ago) it had some significant errors (some of which are also in the Mids datatabase), like peacebringer attacks being lower than they are in-game and warshades apparently toggling in and out of nova form every other attack but never using any damage buffs, making it look like they're less effective than they are. It's a decent attempt but it's also half-finished and abandoned, meaning it's fairly useless.

I know that people poo on peacebringers, but they are ol' reliable (as well as ol' flexible). I'm fairly certain the values in Mids are wrong - they certainly don't match up with what I see in-game for every attack, making people judge them them unfairly. There was also a spreadsheet going round with "carefully calculated" DPS readings of all the ATs a while ago which had a PB rotation that was pure ass (presumably a placeholder as it rotated in and out of Nova over and over again for no reason) meaning they were artificially low because of faulty data. This might help: /macro_image "DayJob_XPBoost" "XP Toggle" "option_toggle noxp" Copy and paste it into chat, press enter and it'll give you an XP on-off toggle. Personally, I like the VEATs - there is very little they cannot do. Widows are armoured scrapper-controllers and SoAs are armoured blasterminds with a lot of AoE. Neither of them are the best at any one thing, but like the Kheldians there isn't much they can't do.

That's a funny way of spelling "best". Storm's a beast!

You've literally described a stalker. I'm not sure what you mean by a "non defective set" - stalkers are strong melee all-rounders, being very tough but also very high damage. They can also pick up a few ranged attacks from power pools and epic/patron pools. It might be easier if you told us what theme was. It's trivially easy to level without AE. Just hammering through the Atlas Park story arcs will get you to about level 7, doing DFB will take that to about 12. Head to King's Row, do the good arcs there, head to the Hollows, then try Faultline for its excellent missions. A few trials and task forces and you'll be on your way quickly. Widows have stalker-tier stealth at level 20, if you can wait that long. I think SoAs might, but I can't remember. Illusion controllers get very strong invisibility that persists even in combat.

Dark is heavy on endurance, having lots of toggles. Slot your attacks as well as your toggles for endurance reduction and use IOs like performance shifter and panacea for the endurance bonuses. Dark melee is dark armour's natural pairing as it has a beast of an endurance refill power, which basically lets you wear down your endurance bar twice over a long fight. Dark armour is a beast of a set, but it also hammers your endurance bar so doesn't naturally suit every single damage set.

I still hold that Brutes are a terrible mix of design choices - tanking AT with aggro generation mechanics in a game that has a fixed aggro cap that rewards moving quickly from group to group otherwise your damage output begins to drop. Where does the aggro go? Normally, the teammates with the biggest debuffs so you end up with a lot of faceplanted support archetypes because the brute feels Fury-conscious. In an ideal team, that's not an issue, but when you've got got sidekicked-up players against +5 enemies, it's a quick and messy death. It rewards poor team play with damage buffs and that's just naughty.

I mean, I tank them on my widow which doesn't have taunt aura. It's less of a problem in play than it looks like on paper. Provoke is a good enough taunt for everything but out-taunting tankers. I don't use it if I'm soloing AVs, though. I've never had one run off. The worst I had was bloody Nemesis with his bubble of annoyingness. I mean, that's basically the same as on a stalker, but their big hitters start at a lower level, meaning you exemplar better, meaning you have a wider arc of AVs to punch in half. Honestly, that's why I like them. I'm not really disagreeing with you - both stalkers and scrappers can do the job very well. I'd argue that that stalkers get their big-hitter chain much earlier with the AS-double-crit combo so if you're specifically building an AV/GM-smasher, it makes sense to take that into account.

Energy Melee is a reliable heavy-hitter in the pylon test, which is a fairly good way of testing single-target effectiveness. I think War Mace does well, too. Horrible answer that everyone will hate: For single-target damage, which is what you want, you may be better off with a stalker. The reason being that they have two crit mechanics, the most significant being the fact that you can force crits and choose what powers crit and when. They also have the best ATOs in the game (in my opinion), with one that randomly resets Build Up's timer (which you can slot with Gaussian's for something like a 75% proc rate, meaning build up is usually twice as powerful and goes off two or three times a minute). The second ATO effectively removes Placate as a mandatory power - most people slot it into assassin's strike, meaning it triggers a second crit as part of the normal attack chain, still within the double-build-up window. You can do this a few times a minute. Bio is probably the secondary you want - you can boost your damage output and it has a significant -regen power.

That's a really nice way of putting it and something I think people overlook - a lot of builds I see posted would totally fall apart when exemplared, with builds that only work with incarnates for endurance management. Kheldians scale strangely with several milestone powers that are game-changers more than most (although some support sets come close) and an awful lot of filler if you're trying to keep it tight. Nova form gives you very respectable damage output very early on and Dwarf form is one of the strongest tanks at its level (on a par with most resistance-based tankers, ahead of some) with good enough aggro control to pass muster. They have a lot of "dead levels", in my opinion... but they also rocket in power at certain milestones. Kheldians really can slot in wherever, even if they need some TLC to be on top.

Several (most?) of the hero inherents weren't in the game at launch and it shows. I remember when the controller and defender ones were added in - the controller one was a game changer (and it still needs a look at because it ignored Fear and Confuse). The defender one was crap then and is pretty meek now. The CoV ones mostly make much more sense, even if I still think blasters and brutes should have been the other way rounds. The exception to this is actually in the epics, where Kheldians get some quite significant tankiness (remember, this was before IO sets) for teaming and VEATs get... a tiny bit more recovery and regen.

I'd love to see Dominator secondaries (mix of range and melee) as the primary and a mishmash of corruptor secondaries and armourset stuff - more like the epic archetypes than the current ones. Give me martial assault's shuriken and kicks with an unholy combination of kinetics and energy armour and I'd be very pleased indeed. Edit: I've just done a google and I could literally roll this on Rebirth. Hmm...

My build is here and there is a fair bit of discussion generally in that thread - it's worth reading even if you don't go with one of my builds (which is understandable as I've leant more into melee than you might want to). My base resists are 15-20%, but because fortunatas have secret sneaky scaling resists, when you take one good hit they jump up to 40-50%. It's work taking into account that control builds have a lot less need for resistance than armour set builds - enemies that can't act can't hurt you. I've tanked things on my fortunata that I don't think I could tank on my tanks...

What? Time is generally considered one of the strongest support sets whereas kinetics is a 2-trick pony. Team composition is an important thing - it's possible the stars were just in alignment with buffs and debuffs. Firstly: Take a real look at Arachnos Soldiers - from memory, someone was able to solo all of the ritki pylons and board the mothership using a crab spider build pre-shutdown. Basically, the SoA takes care of the AoE and the spider pets take care of the single-target damage. You need to abuse recharge pretty fricken hard to get there but the buffs and debuffs from the SoA work well an the pets are mobile buzzsaws. AoE: dominators, Arachnos Soldiers and some melee builds can hold it up there. Blasters with a lot of recharge can liquefy every group they come across. Even my widow has got comments on the amount of AoE he can pump out - he hits like a hammer carrying lots of smaller hammers. I've seen peacebringers tear through mobs like they were made out of paper. You've got a lot of options here. Boss-shredder: Stalker all the way. At the cost of about 5-10% survivability below a scrapper and usually one AoE attack, stalkers get the ability to basically crit on demand and with the two special ATO's and Gaussian's they can do so twice in a row, with double Build Up, repeatedly and reliably. We're talking ~2k spike damage in about 5 seconds, every 20-30 seconds depending on how quickly the Build Up Reset ATO procs. Back at CoV's launch, they were undeniably too squishy and their inherent power and core mechanic were clunky, but they got a rework in about i22(?) and their ATOs are solid gold. They're now scrappier than scrappers. Support: back in the olden days, before even CoV came out, radiation defenders were what you'd choose if you wanted to walk up to an AV solo and tear it a new bumhole. They don't get there quickly, but they get there reliably. In combination with other ATs they are still, in my opinion, a very formidable ally. Kinetics brings damage boosts and Speed Boost as well as a good coverage of healing, which makes them a good complement to Rad. Time is basically rad but more convenient so it could very well fill in. For pure destructive chaos, I think storm/water defenders are hard to beat - decent -res, surprisingly high DPS, surprisingly good sustain. EB's aren't a problem but I haven't gone solo against any AV's.

Use an enhancement catalyst. You do it the same way you combine enhancements. Click on the enhancement and it'll open a new screen, giving you the option to use the catalyst. Yes - if it's a power that's always on, I think it has a chance to proc every 10 seconds. @Warmagontagging you because I originally didn't see your question and I'm not sure if you get an alert from an edited post.

I've done all the blueside ones, all the goldside ones and most of the redside ones. I think I'm slightly in the minority in that I don't think a lot of the redside content is that good - it's better than the content was a CoH's launch, but that's not saying much. It has its moments, but no more or less than blue. Goldside content, including the Wards, is the most consistently well-written in my opinion. Faultline is probably my favourite zone with story arcs, though.

It's really low mag but it does work. It basically gives you one "free" hold bypass, but more than that and you'll be held. It's better than nothing. The most common hold you across the game is (in my opinion) the Mind/Fortunata/Council Vamp Dominate power, which is hard one to build around because it bypasses positional defence - it only factors in psi defence and ignores range, so perhaps counter-intuitively building for Psi defence might (situationally) get you quite far in terms of avoiding Holds, although only against one specific power so it's probably not worth it. It's a bit better for knockback coverage, though.

Storm is a bit unique in that it's halfway between a blast set and a control set because it can pump out a surprising amount of damage and does a good amount of low-mag knockback and knockdown. It's a very strong solo set. I don't think you need to build up defence particularly with storm because it's such a strong lockdown set. Likewise dark - you debuff ToHit so strongly you can skimp on defence and still be strong solo.

Verification pages actually track a ridiculous amount of things. It could be as simple as whether you have the right cookies to what pages you have been to what link you used to get there. Some even track mouse wiggling to look for human-like wiggles.

I did it on my defender and found it worked very well for an aggressive playstyle, which Kinetics sort of requires. It's very proc-friendly, so it goes from good to great if you can throw money at it on a lower DPS archetype. It's a solid damage set with decent control and a heal, and the tidal mechanic is very well implemented. A few of the set gimmicks can be lackluster, but the Tidal mechanic adds a lot to an already respectable set.

Water is, in my opinion, Energy's slightly younger cousin who hit rock bottom, really thought about where they were going in life and worked to be a more rounded person. It has a lot of native knockdown very early, a lot of AoE very early and it's is almost designed maximum proc-friendliness. The inbuilt heal can be procced to give you a small endurance boost. The main downside of it is that it's quite visually noisey... I ran a storm/water defender to 50 and just had to accept that there were times when I wouldn't be able to see anything. The -Def works well with Kinetic's to-hit buffs and debuffs. The level of soft-control via knockdown can't be sniffed at (as with energy), but it just has a slightly more rounded toolkit and doesn't have to pay an IO tax if knockback upsets you.

Don't forget the Hybrid incarnates - you can hit 19. There's also Shadowy Presence, which would hit 20, although dipping into P2W and temporary powers may be cheating. Sounds like you've already reached it.

Sorcery is probably my favourite powerpool - Mystic Flight lets you telenuke and fly. Rune of Protection is better than a couple of armour set T9s. Spirit Ward is a very good power that I think gets slept on - it's a 50% absorb power, doled out in instalments and a really strong teammate-saver. Enflame is a good utility power because enemies are programmed to avoid patches and it's a patch that follow an enemy, meaning it's very good at breaking up a crowd if you get overpowered. Slap it on a boss and they will almost always go walkies.

This is a really valid thing to point out. I have never had anything that soaked up endurance quite like my storm/water defender. Storm is an old set and is basically made long cooldown powers with massive costs... the more you speed up recharge, the harder it hits you.