Fulmens

820 million left in the program. (Matched 100M for Johnny Velocity and the Justiciars SG, Guardian.)

So I've got ... 200 M for Bashful Banshee, 100 M for Catwhoorg, 100M for Cthulhufan, and 100M for Destrukt in the queue. Should be 320 M left. I'm @Boltcutter in game - send me a tell or a PM and we'll try to set up times and places. (next few days are kinda busy for me.)

Phantom Ranger: We set up a time, server, and side to meet. We meet at the SG or VG registrar. I look up your SG's prestige, give you the money, you donate twice that amount, then I check that it went through.

( For example, the Justiciars was just over 1 million prestige. I gave Johnny Velocity 100M, he donated 200M which turned into 400K prestige. Actually, he donated a bit more than that so got 520K prestige. )

Cthulhufan: I also do currency exchange := - 750 million would get you 600 million in this case, and I take care of server and side switching. (It's less profit than it looks like, because I usually have to move it through Wents once or twice and that takes 10%.) Are you @Cthulhufan in game?

What's behind Ouroboros? I mean, the Midnight Club doesn't trust 'em. . . there's mysterious notes scattered around. . . anagrams . . . you know, STUFF.

Traps. Teach them to fear the FF generator.

I don't particularly like base building. I don't particularly like badging. I don't like SALAD DRESSING. And that is why it's a good thing that I don't get to set the rules based on what "I don't like".

Edited to talk to Gilia:

Huh. Never knew that. Cool.

Less holding more killing.

(Sorry for brevity; just wrote a giant chunk for some other new blaster.)

also, blaster guide in sig.

I think you're sort of coming at this backwards.

Survivability on a Blaster is like towing capacity on a Porsche. You can DO it, I guess, but it's not going to show it to the best of its abilities.

In the case of a Fire/En/Force (I have a Fire/En/Elec) what you can do very, very well is CHUNK TONS OF DAMAGE IN A HURRY. Ruby Burns, the blaster in question, once dropped about 20 Crey in around 10 seconds. Yes, there's an AOE limit of 16. BU/Aim, Fireball/Firebreath/Static discharge on one side of the doorway, Inferno on the other side, jump back out and pray that the rest of the team is covering me against any survivors.

My point, if any, being that a build that gets gimped down to Scrapper level damage will still not reach Scrapper level survivability.

I tend to aim for "conditionally high survivability"- that is, if I can hit a single small purple and be at the defense cap in one or more important categories, that's enough for me. At 60 seconds per purple, with 16 slots open... how many tough fights am I expecting to get into? With Force of Nature (slot that for Resist and Recharge, please, or you'll get to see a Blaster cry. Do not make the Blaster cry.) and PFF (PFF is VERY handy- all it needs is recharge) you should live long enough to kill most things.

So what do you need to kill faster than a Scrapper?

AOE: Fire Breath and Fire Ball, used together, will drop even-level badguys. Almost nothing has significant fire resistance. Aim + FB/FB drops +1s, Aim/Bu/FB/FB drops +2s. If you have Static Discharge add 1 to those numbers but you may have to tab a lot to find a target. You want Fire Breath. You want Fire Ball. You want to have a lot of recharge in both of those.

SINGLE TARGET: Blaze is the famous attack here, but do not overlook your melee attacks. The ones you didn't take in your build up there. Havoc Punch and Bonesmasher, together, do around 60% more damage than Headsplitter, and they go off in somewhere around 2.3 seconds. If you have a BU/Aim cycle up at the time, that's the equivalent of 320% damage on a Scrapper (Blaster Melee is a little lower damage scale than Scrapper Melee or Blaster Ranged.) Maybe a little higher depending on Defiance.

I don't think I can actually drop a boss before BU/Aim wears off, but it's pretty close.

So let's count the attacks that do at or near typical Scrapper Tier 3 damage (Disembowel, Crane Kick, etc):

Blaze
Blazing Bolt
Bonesmasher
Energy Punch
Inferno
Fire Breath (Slightly lower, but it's an AOE... and defiance can kick it up a little)
Total Focus (takes a while to go off, admittedly)

THAT is why I have both Fire/Energy and Fire/Elec at 50. I'm not going to say it's the most damage in the game... but it's close enough for me.

Nobody's mentioned Sonic primary yet. I would have thought that the ally-targeted -Resistance and the general usefulness of +Resistance vs Romans would have come up. I wouldn't want my ONLY support character to be a Sonic/* defender, but I'd love my SECOND support character to be one.

As far as "kins that die a lot" my wife refers to it as "being addicted to your own crack." Fulcrum Shift is so very, very tempting, is it not?

I need to make a list of low level AE content that was also fun and balanced.
... or maybe I don't.

It's hard to find a truly "random PUG" TF group. Usually two or three people running the TF do a lot of TF's.

If you went on Freedom right now and asked 100 people about kora fruit missions, I'm guessing 75 would have no idea what you were talking about.

I'm also thinking 50 of them would have no idea if you asked them about TF's but I may be in a pessimistic mood...

Given that a single generic recipe drop is... what, 150K influence? The direct inf is not that big a deal. And a single purple is 20 million to to 200 million...

I'm going to try to limit myself to answering one question you didn't ask... plus the one you did.

For a team oriented defender: Rad/Sonic is very good at everything. Most of your key powers come early, you do good damage, you make your TEAM do good damage, you have pretty solid team defense, I have nothing bad to say about Rad/Sonic. Other good recommendations are Dark/Whatever (I like Dark/Psi and Dark/Ice based on personal experience) and for your "pure teaming" experience, Force Fields or Sonic.

Welcome! I try to restrict myself to one piece of advice per new player ,because otherwise ... well, it's very easy for me to build walls of text.

I'm going to discuss stamina. This is a power which gives you back, as you might expect, a lot more endurance than you had before you took it. To get it you need two other powers from the Fitness Pool. (Pool powers work like this: First or second pool power can be gotten at level 6. Third power can be gotten at level 14, but you need one of the first two as a prerequisite. Fourth power can be gotten at level 20, and you need two of the first three as prerequisites. Another example of a "pool power" is Flight, or any other travel power. Those are third in the pool, so you need Hover or Air Superiority first. )

So Stamina requires a lot of investment, but it is a game-changer. A lot of people will say "You need Stamina by level 20"- that is an exaggeration. I like to have fitness by level 24, unless I have a "workaround"- for instance, Regeneration has a power called Quick Recovery that does the same thing, only better.

Almost every character has a couple of good, important powers that take a BUNCH of endurance between 12 and 20. This makes the levels just before stamina hard on endurance. Teams help with endurance usage (everyone fights, nobody uses as much endurance.)

Here endeth the lesson. If you have any other questions, feel free to send me a private message here, or a global tell in game (format is "/t @Boltcutter, what's this do?" @Boltcutter is my global, /t is "tell", comma before your message. )

As with any of these things, if you can find like-minded people to team with (in the same zone) it's faster and more social.

The difficulty slider for TF's was temporarily disabled, because people were running TF's at -1/x0 . Some people like their TF's at +4 or something, and Smurphy was one of them.

... because nobody ever did that before...

I'm a big fan of /elec, /mental, /ice and /energy for use with fireblasting.

Not so impressed by fire/fire, actually deleted my fire/dev.