ClawsandEffect

If you're not actually having endurance problems, the Spiritual Alpha path would work better for you.

You get more recharge, so you get Shield Charge and Foot Stomp recharging faster.

And you get more healing, which on the surface seems useless, until you realize that it adds an SO's worth of healing enhancement to every power that can accept it. That means it will be further enhancing True Grit, giving you more HP.

Provided your endurance consumption is under control, that's what I'd go with.

My Sonic/Devices has Gun Drone, and I usually just pull it out for EB/AV fights. It's damage is very nice when it is being buffed by the -res in my attacks, and only has one target to shoot at.

My only real complaint is it's targeting priority sucks. If there is an AV and a lowly minion, it will almost always choose to shoot the minion when I need the extra damage on the AV.

It also gives a HUGE defiance boost when you summon it.

Still waiting for that PM there, champ.

They'll work exactly the same as they do in a passive power for as long as you have RttC toggled on.

If you have the power's other needs taken care of, and have a couple slots left over, go ahead and put some procs in it, it won't hurt anything and you shouldn't notice much difference between that and slotting them in a passive.

The downside is RttC can be detoggled if you get mezzed, so if you want to make sure those procs are working no matter what a passive power would be a better bet.

That's if you're talking about the procs from the Heal sets.

If you're talking about the procs from the to-hit debuff sets, then no, they aren't worth it.

Whats with the lack of recharge in Power Siphon in all those builds? Is it unaffected by recharge enhancement? If not you should try to squeeze a common recharge IO in there.

Some tips I didn't have time to post in my first post (I'm posting from work on my break):

Your primary goal with any Shield Defense build is to reach the softcap on defense. If you're not sure what the softcap is, it is 45%. Most NPCs you will be fighting have a base 50% chance to hit you, and the lowest the game will allow that chance to go is 5%. So, if you get your defenses to 45%, their chance to hit you will be as low as it will ever get.

There are 2 schools of thought on doing that with a Broadsword/Shield character.

1) Softcap using set bonuses, Weave, Maneuevers, Combat Jumping, etc. and drop Parry from your build altogether.

2) Use Parry to help you softcap to melee attacks, and focus your slotting on Ranged and AoE. The theory here being that if you aren't IN melee range of anything, you don't need melee defense, and if you ARE in melee range, it is pretty easy to just open your attack chain with Parry and get your defense at the same time. Ideally, you still want your melee defense to be at or slightly above 30%, so you only need to use Parry once to softcap.

I'm a fan of option 2. If you go with option 1, you are pretty much committed to spending most or all of your slotting chasing defense bonuses. Option 2 loosens that up a bit so you can get other things that will come in handy, like recharge bonuses and Max HP bonuses.

Now, some of the sets *I* use to do that aren't very popular, but I've found they work for me. I like 6 slotting Eradication in my PBAoE attacks, such as Slice, Whirling Sword, and Head Splitter. You won't be doing as much damage as you could be with those attacks, but Against All Odds will make up for that. I like Eradication because it has one of the best colections of set bonuses available for PBAoEs. It gives: 1.8% Max Endurance, 1.56% ranged defense (the closer you get to the softcap, the more little bonuses like this matter), 2.25% max HP (since you have a power that increases max HP, getting more of it is a good idea), and the 6 slot bonus is 3.13% AoE defense.

The Red Fortune sets in your defense toggles are actually exactly what I would use.

I'd also 6 slot several of my single target attacks with Mako's Bite for the ranged defense it offers.

I would slot Shield Charge with 6 Obliteration. You will be getting plenty of bonuses from 3 sets of Eradication, but don't forget you want your melee defense to be at least 30% as well, and Obliteration gives you 3.75% melee defense for 6 slots, and it gives you some recharge as well.

I'd slot True Grit with 3 Numina's Convalescence, which will give you 12% regeneration and 1.88% more max HP. I wouldn't worry too much about slotting it for resistance, you already have the Steadfast Protection Res/Def in there, put a Steadfast Res/End in it and call it good. You want Numina's Heal, Heal/End, and Heal/Rech.

You put the Miracle unique in Physical Perfection, which is a good idea. I'd pull the Energy Manipulations out, and put Performance Shifter End Mod and the +End in their place. In the third slot, put the Numina's Convalescence unique.

Put Luck of the Gambler sets in Weave and Maneuvers. I'd use Defense, Def/End, and the +7.5% recharge (which also boosts your defense a bit) The 7.5% Recharge ones will be expensive, but you can get them for 2 Hero Merits (assuming you have Going Rogue), so they aren't hard to get that way. I'd put at least 3 in each power, but if you can fit 4 in, you should.

Pull the 3 piece Perfomance Shifter out of Stamina and replace it with the Chance for +End proc.

Drop Assault and Focused Accuracy. Pick up Tactics and open Body Mastery with Conserve Power instead. Take the Gaussian's set you have slotted in Focused Accuracy and put it in Tactics instead. Focused Accuracy is an end hog and it isn't that great, Tactics costs less end and benefits your whole team instead of just you.

Take Build Up sooner. (You can also put the Gaussian's set in Build Up if you want, I do it frequently if I'm running out of power choices) If you ever exemp this character down, you're going to want the ability to hit stuff harder.

Now, these are just what *I* would do with a Broadsword/Shield character. In fact I'm leveling one right now and plan to do exactly what I've advised here. I'm sure there will be differences of opinion, but most people will probably agree that I'm giving solid advice here. (the biggest difference of opinion is probably going to involve my advice to use Eradication)

Now, my suggestions here will be quite a bit more expensive than the build you posted, but you can work toward it gradually, and not feel like you have to buy it all right now.

Hope this gives you a better idea of what you need to shoot for with your character. BS/Shield is a fun combination that doesn't give up any top end performance in return for smooth leveling like some combos.

I'm giving it a 1.5, just because it made me laugh.

For the record, you now have the dubious honor of having posted the worst Anything/Regen build I have seen yet. That is of course, assuming that you are actually serious. (I'm not trying to be a jerk, just honest, it really IS that bad)

And because you asked, /Regen benefits the most from the Spiritual Incarnate path. Boosts recharge and healing, both things /Regen wants more of.

Softcapping Melee AND Smashing/Lethal probably isn't going to happen. Well, it might be possible, but you're going to have to gimp your character badly in other areas to pull it off. Example: In order to get the set bonuses you will need to get there, you will be sacrificing a lot of slots that could have been used for more recharge.

I'd say choose whether Melee or S/L is more important to you. I'd be inclined to say you'll get more mileage out of S/L, because there are a crapton of defense debuffing machine guns in the game that melee defense won't do anything to protect you from.

From what limited experience I have with Fire Control, it seems Fire Cages is a lot more useful for Controllers than Doms. It gives a quick and easy Containment boost and makes sure things stay put so you can kill them quicker.

Dominators A) Don't get Containment, and B) Deal enough damage with their secondaries that they don't really need it.