Gulbasaur

I use it as it is as an opener. It's great for clumping enemies together before you unleash all your AoE.

Widows do suck up endurance. While levelling, putting endurance reduction enhancements in your main attacks helps a lot - widow toggles use very, very little endurance so reducing them has less of an impact. It's one of those things that sort of rights itself when you get into IO sets.

I'd be very surprised if you actually need tough and weave - I can tank +4 AVs safely without them on my fortunata!

Every* attack has certain positional tags and damage types. For example, an attack might be tagged "ranged" and do fire and smashing damage. The game then looks at ranged defence, smashing defence and fire defence and picks the highest of the three. The rest don't matter. In this example, if ranged defence is the highest, that's the number used. If smashing defence is highest, the game uses that number. If fire is the highest, it uses that number Highest value always wins. If you have good melee, range and AoE defence, you're covered for almost* all attacks because almost all attacks have positional tags. The other route is to aim for high smashing and lethal defence as they're the two most common damage types and many attacks have multiple damage types (usually smashing and lethal plus something else) - again, highest number wins so if an attack does smashing and energy damage, the high smashing defence will cover it. Which is better? The one you can get most easily. If you've got 40% S&L defence but only 10% melee defence, building up your melee defence is probably not worth doing because any attack with smashing or lethal damage will only use the 40% higher value. Likewise, if you've got massive positional defences, you can basically ignore all others. Toxic defence doesn't exist but toxic resistance is a side-effect of some heal skills (as well as some other powers) and psi defence and resistance are something you either have a lot of or none at all but can be built up with IOs if you really need to. (* there's a small number of attacks that don't have a positional tag - they're all psi damage and really I wouldn't worry about them too much. There's also stuff like Hamidon's special damage, which you need to use special inspirations for).

For me, it's the focus on instanced missions that scale to the number of people. I really like being able to rock up with a group of friends and have a suitable challenge, no matter how many of you there are. It's something I definitely miss in other games.

And a fantastic one at that. It's not been a hazard zone for a while, which is why I didn't call it one. Still, it's one of the more interesting Hero zones with the Arachnos tunnels and stuff.

With the exception of the Hollow and Striga, the Hazard zones basically have nothing going on in them at all, other than the odd giant monster. Eden basically only has the Eden Trial, which doesn't even really take place in the zone - you spend most of your time in an instance. Crey's Folly has one of the more varied Hero-side maps with things like the Lost shanty town but there is almost no reason to go there.

I remember when the Defender inherent came out and I, with my kinetics defender, had literally no use for it. The controller one, on the other hand, was amazeballs. In the pre-IO days, it was a massive boost to a controller's DPS. The VEATs are, in my opinion, two of the better designed ATs in the game (except night widow builds which are bargain-bin stalkers) so the inherent doesn't need to be particularly strong. There's a definite difference in quality between, say, 5% endurance regen and the stalker critcritcritcritcrit inherent.

Increased Regeneration (0.50%) and Recovery (1.75%). It's technically a higher base stat, rather an a power effect, which is why it's hard to see in the powers window. Works out to an extra five endurance a minute, which multiplies with enhancements and bonuses that increase endurance recovery. It's not nothing, but it's also not particularly good.

The one who climbed the beanstalk? If true, this is HUGE.

90% of the time yes, but if you have three tightly clustered groups of enemies and you're not all end-game kitted out it's just common sense to say "pulling the middle group back" or whatever. Not everything in the game is played with full sets and incarnates. I do get what you're saying, and it's not like I make every group wait for every mob - mostly I just run in - but if you're in a situation where a wipe could happen then it makes sense to avoid it by communicating.

If I'm honest, I might not realistically have time. I've just started a new job and life is pretty hectic besides.

I take them both and use them both, basically whenever I can. Vengeance is a decent defence boost and if someone's dropped you probably need it. Victory Rush I tend to fire off a boss when it comes up. Neither of them really need slotting and both are situational but pretty powerful. If I've got spare slots then I quite often pick up Vengeance.

Yeah. I mean, by its normal definition mutants are natural. A genetically modified hero would presumably fall under science whereas a hero with a natural mutation would be... natural? I mean, would you call someone with haemophilia a mutant? No, unless you're a horrible person. I think part of the issue is the choice of the word "natural" - perhaps "trained" or "honed" would have been more appropriate for some heroes. I mean, peacebringers are natural but they're very different from Manticore. I think the Origin system was part of the design of the game from very early on from something extremely important to basically flavour. I mean, it's literally the first thing you choose when creating a character. In hindsight, maybe more origins (like the titles system) might have been a better idea, but they're a relic of an earlier stage in the design process and we're stuck with them.

This proc is a complete game-changer for water blast - it turns Dehydrate into a mega sustain power.

Crab/bane soldiers are also psychic canonically - but they "turn their powers in on themselves" and self-brainwash. The lore says that psychic women are made into widows and psychic men are made into spiders, apart from the VEAT exceptions. It's a minor lore point that psychic powers are sort of natural in-universe. In the Origin of Power story arc, Sister Psyche says:

Nice to see Rune of Protection get some use. I really like the Sorcery power pool. Mystic Ward is a better power than most people realise, so I'd at least put a proc in it to get some benefit from it. It's a real "save the squishy" power. Likewise Aid Other - at least shove a proc in it as teammates do appreciate when you use it.

Yeah... I didn't understand that. The two ATOs plus the Gaussian's proc are my "hit for over 1k damage" combo, almost guaranteeing you two critical hits in a row under double Build Up. I honesty think they're the best ATOs in the game.

The VEAT toxic damage proc, just because it's global. It adds a mechanic to the two archetypes by adding DoTs. Similarly, the two (slightly overpowered) stalker procs actually change how the archetype plays. The defender procs are pretty ignorable, in my opinion. The corruptor endurance proc is nice. The tanker +Res proc is borderline useless on a resistance based tanker. The kheldian heal proc is so slight it's barely there.

Actually, I think it's quite impactful on my fortunata - enemies feared = enemies not attacking = fewer rolls against defence. I'd love it if it were a global proc like the toxic one, but I see why it's not.

I think on live it was only ever about 20%, which is why later developed stuff (RWZ, Cimeroroa, Dark Astoria) was co-operative - the devs didn't want to develop stuff that only 20% of players would see.

@Jimmy do the VEAT Leadership equivalents use the new or old cast times?

Warshades and fortunatas come pretty close. I can tank incarnate AVs with my fortunata.

I think Radiation Siphon can take the Theft of Essence IO, which gives you back 10 or 15% of your endurance (can't remember) when it procs. Might be worth looking at as it's a useful power anyway.

Night widows are definitely fun and I wish I enjoyed playing them more. They seems to be getting more interest recently, which is interesting. You probably don't need fighting - you can reach pretty decent resists with IOs and scaling resistances don't show up in the Hero Planner but are really, really good when they kick in - I can safely tank with my widow. What are your position defences like?