Gulbasaur

Yup! It's very clear when things are charged up. It's a very nice set overall for quality of life.

I ran a dark/dark tanker and a dark/dark corruptor. I'm a fan of both, so hopefully enough of this will carry over to sentinels. Dark's attacks all debuff enemy ToHit, giving you a sort of passive defence boost as long as you keep fighting. The debuff factor on the cones (in the epic is your second one) is pretty useful for keeping your debuffs on enemies. The debuff is -5.25% ToHit, which is quite helpful due to how well ToHit scales. Life Drain is a useful healing attack that you can slot to give you some endurance meaning it's a very useful sustain power in a very heavy set. Blackstar is one of the better nukes and does an absurd amount of debuff - slot it hard for recharge before you slot it for anything else and you'll be very hard to take down. Dark armour is quite endurance-heavy on a tanker and you'll want to deal with that fairly early. You probably won't be softcapping anything without some serious work, but you also probably don't need to because of the crowd control and debuff elements. It's a decent all-rounder and part of your damage mitigation comes from your control abilities: Oppressive Gloom of Cloak of Fear. Grab one of them as they both provide an absurd about of damage mitigation for a toggle. I prefer Cloak of Fear because it doesn't gradually whittle your health down and enemies staggering about can be a bit annoying. Fear effects lower enemy attack rates on most minions and lieutenants to one attack attempt every five seconds, which is pretty low as you'll be debuffing them and have some defence and decent resists and probably a bit of +absorb going on and a small amount of healing from your standard attack chain... so it's pretty sturdy. Looking at Mid's, Dark Mastery isn't that exciting. Take the second cone for debuff stacking. I'd stick some procs in Engulfing Darkness. You'll want to slot for endurance hard pretty early on and dark lends itself to proccing quite generously. The sentinel ATOs are solidly middle-tier, in my opinion, but the set bonuses aren't terrible so you can probably find room for them somewhere.

Welcome to Arachnos Land! Come see our giant caves and counterintuitive terrain! It's just so bleak and inconvenient. The elevator fetishist who decided they needed to be everywhere really didn't think about it from a gameplay perspective. That and the broker system's arduous grind before you unlock the more interesting missions between every contact. The storytelling is good, compared to vanilla City of Heroes (but not later stuff, in my opinion - even the Hollows has a decent story). The zones feel indistinct, to me, anyway (which I know goes for vanilla Paragon City too where Steel, Kings and Skyway sort of smear into one in my mind).

It's possible that it was just someone playing with doors, to be honest. An "oh, that's cool" moment. Map designers are people too. Sorry to rain on that parade (but at least you've got somewhere nice to sit if it does rain).

I'd like to add a special thanks to @Redlynne - almost every time I've looked something up, a wall of text crits me and I get an alarmingly in-depth guide (and I say that as someone who writes guides that are a bit too long). Shout out to the grand procmaster @Bopper as well - truly the build-maker's friend. Thank you!

Ah, derp. Thanks! My point still stands, though - there's no single one way to play this game.

95% of what you read online about builds is people taking things to the extreme and you should take it with a pinch of salt. If you followed every piece of advice you read on the forum nobody would leave Atlas Park without 45% in all their defences, nobody who uses smashing, lethal, psi or toxic damage would be allowed on a team and anyone who uses knockdown under any circumstance ever would be banned from the game for griefing. I'm pretty sure no one even notices what the DPS is doing in your average mission or task force. In a lot of later game content, minions basically get taken down by teammate AoEs anyway, so someone who can hit a boss hard again and again until they fall down is probably more useful than yet another AoE spammer. Builds that focus mostly on AoE can really struggle to take down bosses, so it works both ways. You'll be bringing something valuable to any team you're in. Play what you want to play.

I use this for ones with icons: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uHUi6BWFTYj4wbfGBs3LjZL88Fym6B-8EwDr18YZcY8/edit#gid=0 Use the search function - it helps a lot. Texture names don't always match up perfectly, but it's worth a try. Try Inherent_Panther

This actually annoys me a bit... the whole game is balanced around melee combat apart from one or two oddities (Battle Maiden in one task force, Nemesis to some extent), but yes Masterminds are the problem and not repetitive game design. Enemies don't often have auras so stacking them has no downside. Blasters are meant to be glass cannons, but armoured melee cannons do more damage. They identified a problem and rather than try to improve things they just ignored it. Pre-CoV MMs were described as filling in the same role as tankers (and they can actually do it pretty well) but then they tied a taunt mechanism onto a scrapperlock mechanism and brutes emerged and MMs became this sort of niche role. They're pretty decent in a lot of content and can do very high single target damage, but of all the archetypes they have the least clear role.

The "Recharge Problem" has been an issue since Alpha when they had to nerf it and players complained. Sadly, "recharge breaks everything" is such a core part of the game now that it's just something we're stuck with.

My favourite things to confuse are the controller-type Longbow Wardens... the illusionist ones just get pummelled by their own phantom army and then cast the other summon to try to deal with it... which proceeds to join in the pummel party. The gravity ones are good too because they cast Singularity, which usually starts trying to lock them down immediately.

The difference is a lot less than people think, over all. Occasionally, you've have to throw in an extra attack or retarget and take them down with your next AoE. It's not like you're coming up against enemies with 90% resists every other mission.

I don't disagree, but I think a lot of the content mechanics are unfair to ranged players due to the fairly significant difference in DPS between melee and ranged characters and the fact that it's usually beneficial to stay in melee or mid range anyway. Lots of AoE buffs have a fairly small radius and the "ranged advantage" isn't relevant in most gameplay, so it's nice to have content that actually benefits from ranged playstyles. Blasters are the nearest to a pure DPS class and they're about fourth in terms of actual highest DPS. This game can be quite repetitive in how you approach enemies and having to actually be aware of what's going on it is a welcome change from the usual AoE dogpile.

I'd love it if Fear and Confuse were added. Their omission is strange, especially as the Control incarnate includes them. Brutes are a clusterfunk of poor design choices, in my opinion... Fury, however, is actually okay, although I wish it wasn't given to a taunting archetype as it rewards running from group to group, dumping aggro onto whichever teammates are left dealing with the bosses. I don't have an issue with Fury, but with the brute auto-taunt. Blaster have Fury Lite, which works for them pretty well. Totally with you on this one. It's not nearly as helpful as it should be, especially as VEATs get a lot of decent, unskippable toggles from very early on.

If you're into damage procs (and you should be), Kick and Cross Punch both take a lot of fairly decent procs, including the +recharge one. It's a nice little power pool!

I think negative energy is also the most common type as an enemy weakness, as well, which people often overlook.

Which can actually cause problems in and of itself. It used to be pretty standard to use processor speed as a way of timing things in older software which meant that different things ran at different speeds on different computers, which was more or less fine until you got processors that ran hundreds or thousands of times faster than the software was able to cope with. I've known a few older games that had to be patched to stop them running too fast and becoming unplayable.

For me, it wasn't logging but logging in and arriving in Atlas Park and seeing other players. So many private servers are basically solo experiences, but getting into the game and finding a team within minutes was extremely nostalgic.

Honestly, it looks solid and what works for me doesn't necessarily work for everyone. I found Gameboy1234's guide and Lobster's guide on the old forums really helpful when I was setting up. Tidge also tends to give very good advice and takes a fairly different approach to Fortunatas. I've now moved away from that exact build a bit... the core is more or less the same but I tinker with things endlessly. I've just got a new computer and I cleverly don't have any of my old builds saved. One thing I definitely did was move some slots around to get more damage procs in - all my attacks have at least one. Thought dump: You take Hasten very early - you might want another attack if you do any Ouro stuff, but if you don't then don't worry about it. I dropped Total Domination, but I always wonder if I should bring it back in. Always slot for endurance reduction, never recharge apart from the mega long cooldown powers. You can sort out the endurance through IOs, set bonuses and slotting although widows will always be endurance-hungry. Provoke is a one-slot wonder, in my opinion, but you can absolutely leave it out. I quite often run "anyone, any level" missions so it's useful for grabbing aggro off brutes who are too low level. Part of me thinks I should have taken Hasten, but I slightly refuse to take that power on principle. Recall Friend is another one-slot wonder, again because I often team with lowbies. Mask Presence loses two thirds of its defence value in combat, so I don't recommend slotting it too heavily. I like Spin - having the AoE is useful. Melee hybrid was a bit underwhelming. I hop between the doublehit one and the control one nowadays.

That's what I usually do. Try a brute, get bored and go back.

I always think it's worth looking at controller builds that make capable tanks and take a few hints from how they run things. Keep the status effects coming and very little will lay a scratch on you. The only reason I can tank on my widow is the fact that I apply constant pressure on enemies and lock down what I need to.

That's nice of you! I'm taking a bit of a break from the game at the moment, though. From 35 onwards, I'm pretty sure I know what to recommend. I'm hammering through them in Ouro to some extent and then I'll work out the details later. I play on Everlasting so do say hi if you're on!

You don't suck at math - it's 1:3 not 1/3. Ratios and fractions are easily confused when you're working quickly. It's actually 1/4 of players. Still good, though!

I started off with melee core (the resistance one) and found out that it wasn't actually contributing all that much as widows are already pretty sturdy. I swapped it out for assault (doublehit) eventually and the little bit more crunch to my attacks does feel more meaningful. The other one I've though about is control for higher magnitude controls. I'm quite good at forgetting to turn my hybrid power on, though, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Have fun! For those quivering in anticipation: I'm really struggling to do the redside version of this guide... so many contacts are locked behind so many things! It was frustrating on Live, it's frustrating now.