Gulbasaur

Thinking about it, I'm going to suggest a kinetics/assault rifle defender as probably the worst solo choice. In kinetics: Poor self-sustain if you want to play at range- Kinetics has the second strongest AoE heal in the game, but it's enemy targetted and can miss. To be healed, you have to be both in melee range of enemies, and pass an accuracy check, which is actively made harder to use by: Repel - a power that constantly pushes enemies away from you with knockback, meaning if you are using it, you'll have to herd enemies into a corner to get a semi-reliable heal Underwhelming debuffs - 20% recharge debuff and -25% damage debuff, which are fine but scales with purple patch stuff so you will have a harder time fighting harder mobs Buffs that don't benefit you - Speed boost? Not for you. Increased density? Not for you. Yeah, you can pump up the damage, but only if you live long enough to do any. In assault rifle Long animations - middling damage, long animations. A lot of your time will be spent waiting for an attack to go off while you just absorb damage, unable to hit Transfusion. No aim - so it gives no benefit to Kinetics. Three cones - cones can work well with other cones, but kinetics requires you to play up close if you want to heal. Two unhelpful AoEs - Kinetics likes enemies to be clumped together for Fulcrum Shift and Ignite creates a stationary patch. Galaxy Brain's Blaster Primary Comparison: Standard Environment Testing puts AR as second-to-last above Sonic... on a Blaster. Sonic on a Defender is much more workable, and of the two, I'd suggest that Sonic's Amplify pushes it into a better position for acting as a good combo with Kinetics. The best AR has is one -DEF power, helping your heal (or buff/debuff powers) land. If we're looking at more anti-synergy, I might suggest Power Mastery as an epic power pool choice; it's a solid choice for most defenders, but doesn't really solve any problems a solo kinetics player has. Conserve Energy reduces endurance cost and kinetics has Transference, which is an instant endurance heal. Power Build Up is just not much use - by that point, you'll have fulcrum shift so your damage will be capped and yeah, your heal will be better, but you're still in melee range. I'd also argue that Kinetics benefits least from the Defender Inherent (which isn't great to begin with). You'll be able to pump yourself up to Blaster damage, briefly and with long gaps in between, but only by repeatedly opening yourself up to higher damage.

Oh you sweet, summer children. All of those of you planning to buff your pets... that you won't have for another 31 levels. Remember "solo anything" was the criteria. How are you gonna solo Positron 2 with that, huh? HUH?! No poop for you! Jack all's gonna happen for the first 31 levels. Mind solos very well and FF gives you mez protection. Pets aside, I will say that controllers are much too safe to be considered the worst at soloing. You can lock down anything below a boss before they even see you for a long time and Containment means they do a respectable amount of damage. The goal is to find the worst... and you all seem to suck at it.

Traps is a very, very solid set as long as you don't move around too much. If you actually play to its strenghts and kite mobs into your trapped area, it's really strong. Sadly, the average team doesn't use line-of-site aggro management and it's generally just more efficient for a tank to kind of roam around randomly and expect the AoEs to follow them. Agree. They actually solo pretty well and exemplar down immaculately due to how strong the forms are for the levels you get them. I'd actually argue that Kinetics is one of the harder sets to solo with because so little of it benefits you. You've got a heal, some damage buffs and a recharge boost without the endurance boost to back it up until much later. You've got a weak recharge debuff, a weak damage debuff, if your heal misses you get no healing. You have to stay in midrange, which means melee in all practical terms, so you have to deal with the increased damage. It's a long road to 32 before you hit Fulcrum Shift.

It's basically the same skin but without the arachnos spider legs. A lot of hair and face options have been opened up on the female model. Nothing revolutionary, I'm afraid.

Claws is sort of too familiar and I don't like repeating sets. Thank you, though. I played around on Beta and... I think I have come to the same conclusion. It feels like it lacks synergy with itself, if that make sense. You're speaking my language. I'm used to either playing on my Tanker where the aggro is mine and you will give it back or my widow that occasionally has Provoke and I have to actively maintain aggro so that's actually really useful.

Desperate times call for desperate measures... not everyone has the chance to walk up to Ms Liberty with their new hero licence. Sometimes you have to fight for something to call your own! It's a good experience, although I admit that sometimes the gloom can get to me a bit. Spending time in the Wards can help break it up a bit and towards the end you end up in sunnier climes. Do it!

I'll also vote lost cause. It's a power I really wanted to make work, but it's out of sync with procs and it's just not very good to start with. You can sort of make it work with the Contagious Confusion proc, but even that's very underwhelming.

I've got it on my fortunata as part of my constantly shuffling set of pool powers. It's fun. Am I sure I should have dropped the taunt for it? No. Do I regret playing with it? Also no.

Bonjour Spines is the only primary I can see with ranged attacks (edit: apparently I can't read, some others do to0) and I like the idea of two damage auras and Bio looks like Dark but more clicky and I like Dark and I've got a character theme that broadly works. Spines seems a bit clunky to play - the attack chain felt off when I played around on beta with an auto-slotted character. I have tankers (dark/dark: completely invincible but does about 1dps), a brute (rad/rad: it's fine), and a stalker (BS/Shield: Crit on Demand is very good). My heart lies with the hybrids, though: Peacebringers and Fortunatas are just bae. Spines will hopefully fulfil my need for range and melee. It's that or a blaster and frankly I'd rather not spend the whole time holding floor aggro. My questions: Any skippable powers? Bio looks like it's a clear "take everything" set. How's Spines? What's the conventional wisdom on where the ATO sets go? This looks like a scranker build. Will I scrank, whether I like it or not? It has a lot of taunts and a lot of debuff so it looks like an aggro magnet. I'm not particularly a "softcap or gtfo" player because I've never found it necessary and everyone and their little dog too farts out defence buffs once you get past level 30. I'm not looking to solo 801 missions or ITF. I just wanna have a good time, baby. Beyond the basic obvious once like the two 3% defence IOs etc any super special proc interactions I can abuse? Teach me, scrapper gurus.

It was fixed. I worked it out by doing some boring statistics stuff and noticed the pattern and posted the bug report and it wasn't picked up (I think it just disappeared into the sea of bug reports at the time) and then Bopper worked it out independently, found my post confirming his theory and did a clickbait title and it got attention and got fixed. Basically, the first roll was double-rolling, so instead of having a 25% chance to proc it would have 25% of 25% i.e. 5% to actually go off at all (and a 1.25% chance to go off twice). The 75% ones had 75% of 75% so did better. On average, it's still only an extra proc per attack, but it's better than it was. It's fixed and I have a shiny Bug Stomper badge as a result.

1 - That's a beautiful turn of phrase. 2 - My fortunata can solo AVs. They can hit defence and resist cap without even trying, which more than makes up for the middling hit point pool.

Added on some stuff about strike forces and cleared up a couple of typos.

Wow, this takes me back. Anyway, some favourites: Professor Electric Wolfman The Quantum Rhinoceros Dragonloom Lord Glorious Bear and his husband Agent Gigantic Catman And several others I'm keeping to myself because they were actually good.

IIRC debuffs were a part of the old threat algorithm. The wiki says Is that no longer the case (or is that just very old information on the wiki)?

The "Atlas Park But..." mission maps are quite large and open. There's a ruined one as part of the last of the Patron missions. Smoke and Mirrors has Atlas Park set up for a fashion show. Croatoa is fairly notorious for large, open maps. There's a large ruined city map that's used in (I think) The Fall of the Clockwork King as well as a few others. Back in the pre-CoV days, there was a map that was used for farming that was the large ruined city but absolutely packed with (I think) warwolves. I want to say it's one of Unai Kemen's missions.

I'll third this. There's something in the hip/upper leg area that's off. It's less noticeable when going really fast, but with Athletic Run alone it's very clear there's something going on. (Male character model).

Male widow/fortunata. 200,000 inf cost on entering the costume editor. This increases to 500,000 when changing to one of the other bases like no collar or helm.

Which hats?

Confuse is a very useful power, indeed. Also, maybe she was just a very muscular, flat-chested woman. Arachnos doesn't discriminate.

I've found strong, fast heals really benefit brutes. Radiation and dark, for example, do nicely on a brute. Dark/dark (on a tanker) is ridiculously good - they have two mez auras, an AoE buff that's like having Build Up going off continually, a heal and an endurance refill power. Even when I do get overwhelmed, the healing is so strong that I'm not overwhelmed for long.

It's soon, guys, gals and nonbinary pals. Soon.

What is it with the Council and seemingly endless identical missions? While I approve, on principle, of setting an arachnos vigilante against a gang of fascists... there are a lot of them.

Final Fantasy Firemen. Muscle dudes and chunky dudes. Purple... stuff? Magic pansexuals. Witchwoks? Hatskillet? Hatskillet. I'm off work this week with covid, so it'd be really nice if this fanservice pack came out today. Hatskillet. Can I suggest I am awarded a knighthood for my restraint in not likening the Dark Crystal to anything rude, given my current state of total braindeadness. Honestly, this disease is 2/10, would not recommend. I'm mostly fine but I am more snot than man and I keep coughing like a young edwardian lady in a white dress whose whole purpose is to make the hero lament the fragility of life. Anyway, by highlighting my restraint in not saying how the purple shaft of crystal would contribute to my joke about this being a fanservice pack, I realise I have immediately ruined my chances of being awarded an OBE. Order of Bad Eokes. I'm almost running out of paracetamol and my husband has it too. This is a really fun spoiler, although all I've really got for it is something something sentiels. Maybe the sword backpack is a thing? I think Page 3 added a new backpack category, so maybe weapon backpacks is a thing - I think Tpsy impletemented them as well as weapon sheathing, presumable using a similar system to the rocket boots or the jump boots or the wings. The magic stuff is really intruguing, and it'd be raelly nice... does anyone remember the Rael cult thing where people said they'd cloned a human baby about 20 years ago? I'm fairly certain that was all a scam but I wonder what happened to them. Anyway, I meant to type really nice. I can't remember where I'm going with this and need to go back to bed. Hatskillet.

I have a star/solar themed hero and polar lights are, indeed, fine.

Just to clarify (because I checked). The testing discord is legit and not a rickroll. There is, however, an agreement process you go through and an intake window scheduled for the future, so don't hop on today and hope to get into the closed beta. Bopper was nice about it, though. Even my Bug Stomper badge didn't let me past the bodyguards.