Fulmens

If it was me I'd dual-build a version with damage slotted. I am someone who slots acc in my nuke though, so I have conservative build tendencies.

Shmoe tries to hit you with a sledgehammer: melee.
Burning Shmoe tries to hit you with Fire Sword: melee.
Tommy Shmoe tries to hit you with a machine gun: Smash/Lethal.

Huh. I didn't update my policy when they updated the game. My bad.

There are very few bad combos. Good players can of course overcome damn near anything, blah blah blah. I'm giving advice to NEW players. Who will start out, well, average.

Some "harder" combos:
Blaster + Scrapper
Blaster + Kinetic Defender
Tank or Scrapper plus "high knockback" (energy blaster, storm defender, etc)

Anything else? You'll be fine.

Some good duos my wife and I have done: (primary/secondary)

Rad/Sonic defender + Scrapper

Ice/Ice blaster + Dark/Dark defender [I'd recommend Ice/something else or something else/ice, personally, if I had it to do over again. But I'm greedy. Ice/ice is very good, but ice/energy or fire/ice would have been even BETTER.]

Fire/Elec blaster + Fire/Ice tank

Brute + Anything/Kinetic Corruptor

Good duos we have not done:

Two Elec/* Blasters or an elec/* blaster and */Elec defender.

Two Empathy/Sonic defenders- there's a specific build that works UNBELIEVABLY well for this. One empath can make one other character spectacularly powerful. Two empaths can make each other spectacularly powerful.

Welcome to the Cities! Watch your purse.

I have the fear that someone might need one of those respec recipes, someone new to the game... so I refuse to flip them or price them high.

[ QUOTE ]
I love how like the entire ebil market forum is behind a way to literally throw money away in the game. I'm sure that will really help our reputation. lol

[/ QUOTE ]

If you can think of something that would help our reputation, lemme know.

[ QUOTE ]
what happens when you put out so much damage that all the aggro is directed to you?

[/ QUOTE ]

On a good team, you live anyway.

Don't apologize, people, for crafting commons. People need 'em, people buy 'em at higher than you list for; you're doing everyone a favor. (I list for just under 200K and often sell at 250K or 300K each, for level 35-40s. I used to list just under 150K, and people would buy at 200K, 250 or 300K. Inf falls from the heavens.)

You will get hit 1/10 as much as someone with no defense. It's not "1 in 20" except against even-con minions, but it's below 1 in 10 pretty much all the time.

Against a +2 boss I think you get hit just about 8% of the time.

The important thing is the "chance of doubletap" because one hit won't drop you to 0 hp. And unfortunately, the dice have no memory, so your chance of getting hit RIGHT after you just got hit is... 8%.

The mission teleporter is on something like a 60 minute timer. Lest we get overly excited.

... but of course in only the most tasteful way.

... the word that comes to mind about that plan is "Robots".

The only time I've used this is for a Force Fielder that I built during the "serious drought of Pool Cs below level 50" problem. (Which many people outside the Market Forum may not have known existed. ) I locked my XP down at 33 and generated about 30 task force recipes at that level. Doing my part, etc.

Of course I have two level 50 force field defenders, so this might fall into the "I have too much time in the game" category.

Ad Astra: Yeah, response to the original poster. Had somethign written up, it timed out, I cut and refreshed and pasted and it ended up being a response to a different post. Sorry bout that.

Try this.

Standard "traditional" enhancements (from level 22 on) are roughly one acc, three damage in attacks; two to three recharge in Build Up and Aim; and then you add stuff to suit. (I'm short on endurance, so more end reduction; short on recharge, add more recharge reduction.) Invention enhancements are more powerful, but much more complex and (potentially) more expensive; for your first character, you should probably stick with normal store-bought enhancements.

Pool powers: Stamina is good. You don't necessarily need it at exactly level 20, but between 20 and 24 is good. As you go up in levels you get more stuff that burns endurance, and you don't get more endurance to burn. Stamina helps with that.

Based on second-hand experience, the AOE Immobilize is a great way to get yourself killed (controllers and dominators both). Aggro everyone, don't do a lot of damage, and don't stop them from shooting back? Sign ME up!

Damn, I don't have to smack your niches up. Y'all are doing it to yourselves.

(I crafted two or three Reactive Armors last week. I don't remember which ones or why I stopped. )

What sort of characters do you tend to like in That Other Game? And were you thinking more of heroes or villains?

Tell us what you like to do, and we'll tell you what you might like to play.

As mentioned, anything can solo. Heroic/Villainous (the starting difficulty level) is designed so even the most solo-unfriendly characters (empathy/elec defenders, or earth/force field controllers, or whatever) can still beat three white-con minions at a time. Yes, there are people who can solo four purple-con bosses at a time, but those are "good soloers".

I will repeat my theory:

YOU DO NOT WANT PLAYERS TO HAVE ACCESS TO BOTH HIGH RESISTANCE AND HIGH DEFENSE AT THE SAME TIME.

Softcapped Defense, minor Resist: 10x tougher.

capped Resist, minor Defense: 4x tougher [10x for tanks]

Capped both: 40x tougher [100x for tanks]

You cannot balance a game where one character is forty times tougher than another. I was there in issue 4.

The only reason Granite [50x, actually, tougher] "works" is that it also does about half damage and it actually slows gameplay because the tank can't physically move fast. But Granite is kinda famous for having the entire team die around it.

Isn't tone of voice a strong component of recognizable sarcasm?

A lot of the things in the Blaster fire secondary also show up in a Tank's fire secondary. They are designed to get aggro, that is, they are designed to focus enemy fire on you at pointblank range.

They will also do damage, slowly, at pointblank range. They have very little mitigation (many other secondaries give you knockdown, stun, or sleep for free with their high-damage melee attacks)

When I'm blasting, I have a half-life of about five seconds at pointblank range.

The things I like in the set:

Build Up (common to nearly all secondaries)
Fire Sword (similar to most secondaries' singletarget melee attack)
Fire Sword Circle (VERY nice. Good AOE damage, to a lot of people at once. You don't see that in other secondaries.)
Consume (grabs a lot of endurance, does a little damage.)

The Energy primary has mediocre AOE, late in the set. Hitting the same guys with both AOE's can be done but it's a trick. That is, it requires a trick to do something that anyone else can do intuitively. Both AOE's, generally, won't kill what you are shooting at and the main rule of Blaster survivability is, "Kill what you're shooting at."

Oh, some other unsorted hatred:

Combustion takes three seconds to START doing damage, and seven more seconds to finish. One of you is going to be dead by then, most likely.
Some people swear by stacking up the final two plus Burn for "a lot" of AOE damage. I know I'm comparing primaries to secondaries here, but Fire Breath/Fire Ball will drop your minions in four seconds. Sitting around in melee (which does around 60% more damage on average than ranged) for a long time, with no defenses, barbecuing guys is NOT SAFE and NOT FAST.
Even Fire Sword Circle, though it's good damage, is kinda annoying to use. I end up with the hokey-pokey where I jump my squishy butt in [fire sword circle], I jump my squishy butt out [and hit the cone], etc.

For an actual duo, my recommendations are "anything but a Kinetic defender or a scrapper." Kinetic defenders are adding mostly offense and very little defense (compared to a factor of 3 to 10 more survivability with any other defender, "one heal and 25% off incoming damage" is very little) and Scrappers add damage- but not enough to keep them interested in the guy with the defenses, instead of you.

Anything else- even another blaster- will work more easily and better. (Two blasters... they're SHORT fights, and exciting, and you usually win.)

The MOST active are Freedom [some people think "a little TOO active"], followed by Virtue, followed distantly by the others (infinity is usually listed as #3, but Freedom and Virtue are way ahead of everyone else.)

Every server has a community, though, and we try to be friendly and supportive and heroic to new people.

I started with Infinity and still like it, but I'm also on Victory, Pinnacle, and a little bit on Freedom and Virtue.

Welcome!

My first Blaster was NRG/Fire.

My first blaster to 50 was Fire/Elec (made 2 years after the nrg/fire).
My second blaster to 50 was Ice/Ice (made 1 year after the nrg/fire).
My third blaster to 50 was Fire/Energy. (Dunno when made)
My fourth blaster to 50 was either the energy/fire or a sonic/mental (made 3.5 years after the nrg/fire).

It took me FOUR YEARS to get that blaster to 50, draggin' her all the way, and the only reason I didn't delete her was the sentimental value. First duo with my wife.

I have all sorts of logical-seeming reasons why the two sets are not very strong and really don't go together, if you want to hear them.

tl/dr: Try and convince her to make some other blaster. Maybe fire/ice or fire/electric.

I'm going to give my [no devs were interrogated in the making of this post] views on 'how the system was probably thought out'.

And to annoy EVERYONE I miss with my pompous mind-reading I'm going to start with ED.

Back in "the day" (I4, say) Invulnerable tanks were three hundred, or more, times tougher than Blasters. They had capped Defense (invincibility was hideously brokenly strong), 90% Resist to everything and they were fighting things so tough that they had about 95% To Hit.

So INV was TWENTY times harder to hit than a squishie, took TEN times less damage, and 50% more hit points [roughly], 300 times tougher.

The Devs, I like to think, learned something from that. Don't let people get close to the Defense cap AND the resist cap, for it shall multiply brutally.

They picked one kind of protection for IO's: Defense. Used to be almost all positional defense, with typed getting pretty much screwed. (All tanks use typed defense, I think. ) They eventually supported positional, because INV was "about balanced" compared to other things with SO's, but pretty screwed with high end IO builds.

Another thing that I have mind-read is that there are some sets, and some bonuses, that are DELIBERATELY BAD.

The difference between, say, a Crushing Impact Acc/Dam and a Focused Smite Acc/Dam, is pretty much only set bonuses. Crushing Impact goes up to level 50, so you can get 2.5% more Acc and about .5% more dam, but at level 39? Same damn thing. EXCEPT that one has lousy set bonuses and the other has really, really good set bonuses. Why would they do that?

... Maybe so you can buy one for 25,000 inf and not have to figure out how to save 2 million inf or whatever the other one's going for.

"No set bonus" frankenslotting can give you 7 slots worth of SO's in 5 slots. Cheap cruddy sets let you frankenslot for REALLY CHEAP. (At one point I did an entire level 50 over a weekend for 6 million inf to make a point.)

So, yeah. There are things nobody wants (sleep resistance), things almost nobody wants (runspeed), and things everybody wants (recharge.) Some things are better than others and more expensive.

Damage- I think Damage was expected (by the devs) to be valued more highly than the players actually did. For most of your core powers, damage is in the 4-slot, the "you can't get two of these in the same set" bonuses. They were so worried about players putting together +67% Damage and bringing back the bad old pre-ED days that they pre-nerfed it into worthlessness. I could be wrong about this. Note that I think there are very few purple sets that give +4% Damage... they're still watching it.

So there's my theories.

I have lots of theories. Like "it's really hard to get both a lot of 5% rech, and a lot of 6.25% rech, on purpose" and "regen is pretty worthless even in big percentages in slot two" and "they give out a lot of the same bonus for Rule of Five purposes- like 1.5% HP, 5% Rech, etc."

But I'm already going on even longer than you did.

Damn, maybe I need a miniguide on "how to make a freakin' team".
/t $target, "Making level 35-ish invincible team to do regular story arc missions. Interested?" If you have any particular bonus features already, like "have force fields" or "have kinetics", you can maybe mention those as an additional draw.

then you just click on a name in the search window, hit enter/uparrow/enter to send them the canned tell, repeat about ten times, see what you get. Oh, and respond to rejection with an apology for bothering them.

The idea that (drogoh quote) "I honestly could not find enough people to make a team and be remotely survivable" is insane. Three people can make a perfectly good team. I keep wanting to say "As long as one is some kind of support" but even that isn't true. I trio'd in the early days with a tank, a scrapper and a blaster. Worked fine.

I built a respec team on Freedom this way in the middle of the day. Took about 15 minutes, which was longer than I would have liked.

It's not magic. You click on blue names in your level range and ask nicely.