Heraclea

FWIW, I set up an outpost of TankHQ on Guardian this evening to close the evening's festivities. If you have a character on Guardian, I or any of the other members can invite you. I added some basic functionality to the base, too - invention salvage storage and an invention crafting table. A medbay will be next. It's barren, and we need an alliance with a transport hub.

Look me up at @Heraclea and if I'm not otherwise occupied I can log on there and invite you.

(I also have a TankHQ allied SG on Champion called Themiscyra. The one thing I guarantee about any of these SGs is that they won't kick anybody for inactivity.)

I seldom slot up Taunt for set bonuses, either. 2 Mocking Beratements is usually all I ever put into Taunt, some combination of taunt duration, recharge, and range is the priority in the set, but mostly for the recovery bonus you get from two of them.

Another place to consider slotting taunt sets is when you have no-damage powers like Fault or Hand Clap. (Does Ice Patch take taunt sets? I seem to remember it doesn't.) You aren't losing damage by slotting for Taunt; Taunt is what they're for, and Taunt sets contain useful things like recharge and accuracy for those powers as well.

You can read the mission briefing in the nav window, it is true, but only the leader can ever read the debriefing.

I keep my debriefings very short, and instead add the mission exit popup which contains a short explanation of how the mission you just left was significant for the story. Everybody has to at least look at that box, if only to click it away.

You don't get recipes or common invention salvage. This becomes an issue at around level 32, when simple IOs become as good as even level SOs. It's fairly easy to keep your SOs updated with tickets, but you won't be replacing them with simple IOs, and thus spend money or tickets on their upkeep longer.

You are not getting badge missions or defeat badges in MA. This puts important accolades like Atlas Medallion harder to achieve. I recommend that you take time out around 23-28 to run the Moonfire task force a couple times, which usually helps a lot in getting your Slayer and Silver Bullet badges.

First scrapper I got to 50 is Fire/Regen. That character was fun to play at every level.

Also enjoying Martial Arts/Shields and Dark Melee/Super Reflexes.

Yep - the three most universally concept friendly sets are Shields, Willpower, and Invulnerability. Invulnerability and Willpower have glows that are not all that distracting, especially if particles are on a low setting. Shields just hands you a shield, which comes with many customizable varieties.

Battle Axe and Mace work quite well with Willpower; I don't recommend Dual Blades all that much with it though.

Dual Blades is very demanding and has fairly tight build requirements, so it works best with primaries with plenty of skippable powers, like Fire Armor, Stone, and (to a lesser extent) Invulnerability.

Invulnerability/Super Strength - high concept, why I made a Tanker in the first place. Slow to mature, but when there worth sticking with.

Willpower/Dark Melee. Another punching combo, this can get almost as tough as Granite with none of the aesthetic or play style drawbacks.

Gemini: The transit of Mercury suggests that Jerk Hackers lie in wait when least expected. Tinfoil headgear recommended. (Arc No. 162482)

This might be amusing:

* Dark Armor

The best melee-controller set. Fussy and hard on endurance; you aren't meant to run all your armors at once. Resistance based. Full of several different kinds of control and utility including fear, stun, and to hit debuff. Relies on self heal. Needs knockback protection. One of the armors turns you into a dust bunny. The others just wreath you in smoke.

Played by: controller fans and emo kids.

* Fiery Aura

The old offensive set. Resistance based. Adds a very slow +endurance power, a very slow build up style power, and a damage based AoE that mobs run for so it doesn't do much any more. Solid damage aura. Needs knockback protection.

Played by: veterans who are attached to the characters they rolled when it was better than it is now.

* Ice Armor

The chief defense set. The chief aggro holding set. Endurance recovery and an odd tier 9 that amounts to an in-combat rest. Almost all defense, so liable to sudden spikes in damage.

Played by: Vikings, and players who want to hold all the aggro and don't care what they look like doing it.

* Invulnerability

An old set that's had its ups and downs; was lacking for a long while, much better now. Resistance and defense, much stronger against physical than other damage. Self-heal is the only real utility. Solid at holding aggro. Controversial tier 9 is a reverse-suicide button that is almost certain to kill you if you are in combat when it crashes.

Played by: Team tankers who want their characters' costumes to be visible while they tank.

* Shield Defense

The new offensive set. The distinctive look of the power is not an obscuring aura but a fashion accessory. Has a damage buff and a strong AoE attack. Not all that strong, but a lot of fun.

Played by: Spartans and former Fire tankers.

* Stone Armor

In Granite, the toughest tanker in the game. Makes up for this toughness with a damage, recharge, and movement penalty. A lackluster defense plus regeneration set out of Granite, where your anti-mez power comes with a movement penalty as well. All Granite tanks are identical in appearance.

Played by: people who want to live, and who don't care what they look like as long as they survive.

* Willpower

With mild, unconcealing aura powers making it friendly to any concept, with uniquely useful passives including an early available Stamina type endurance power, with fairly good out of the box performance that can become extremely tough when Tough and Weave are added, and that can easily get the endurance to run them, the regeneration based Willpower has everything going for it except for one thing. The taunt aura is much weaker than other tankers get. You definitely need Taunt if you are going this route.

Played by: Regen scrappers, and people who enjoy writing Taunt binds.

Yeah - in terms of actual synergy, two Shield Tankers with Phalanx and Grant Cover might be your best bet. That, and Shields is fun to play.

I'd make two identical tankers and call one -

I Am Spartacus

and the other

l Am Spartacus

(big I, small L.)

My stone/axe tanker doesn't get out much any more, but when she does, she solos in Rooted only. I don't think any tanker needs tough or weave solo. Stone surely doesn't, especially if when things get hairy you still have Granite to hide in and eat some inspirations.

Dark Melee might be good for a team oriented Stone tanker. You have -tohit in most everything, which would work well out of Granite, since without it Stone is mostly defense. Stone doesn't need AoE help to hold aggro. The first couple attacks are fairly fast recharge. You get an extra self heal. You get recovery. You get a superior Build Up that's also an AoE attack. These things make DM a favorite attack set, and they would seem to mesh well with Stone's needs.

/Fire can be made good as a scrapper set - works much better than as a tanker set. But its chief virtue now is that many of its powers can be postponed or skipped (Burn, Fiery Embrace, Temperature Protection, Rise of the Phoenix). You would do well to use the opportunity made by the postponable or skippable powers to get early Tough and Weave. Slot everything, attacks and toggles, for endurance recovery.

If you're not in so deep, I would strongly recommend Willpower as a secondary. The main issue this game has, especially in the early levels, is Endurance. I have a Broadsworld/Willpower scrapper that plays quite nicely on Virtue, my distant second as a server home, but that character was enjoyable enough that she got to level 38 fairly easily. (I am much more often found on Victory.)

At any rate, for Willpower: get Quick Recovery at level 20 and plan to take Stamina at level 22. Qualify for Stamina at 22 by postponing Mind over Body and Heightened Senses until 24 and 30, respectively. It will be somewhat of a rough road to 22 (hint: Positron and Synapse) but once you get there your character will be a very tough killing machine that you will enjoy quite a bit.

"Live Through This" in my signature is a Brute guide, but the Willpower part is the same for Scrappers.

I have a MA/Shield scrapper on Victory. That scrapper is maturing nicely at 41, and probably will overtake my Shield/Mace tanker who's currently at 43.

Shields does a pretty good job shoring up MA's AoE weakness, and the combination both looks nice and performs adequately.

I now use that character preferentially over the Dark Melee/Super Reflex scrapper I rolled specifically for Mission Architect stuff. I made that scrapper to be a survival oriented scrapper, but now despair at ever making her tough enough against large spawns - she handles bosses easily, but large numbers of minions can't be debuffed enough in time. Her primary is also weak on AoE with nothing to compensate for it the way Shields does. And she seems much more of an endurance hog, and I don't now how Tough or Weave could ever be sustained on her. So the MA/SD scrapper gets the nod instead.

[ QUOTE ]
Further, having a common language was one of the things that allowed people living in Europe at the time to communicate with each other, despite having a varity of languages to deal with. It's what we do now, with English - and most people consider having a common language that people can speak to be a good thing.

[/ QUOTE ]

At least until around the time of Charlemagne and Alcuin, most people in western Europe who wrote in Latin didn't draw a distinction between what they were writing and their local language. They called it "grammatica" - i.e. "grammar". It was a baroque spelling of the language they learned at home, and when they read it they pronounced it with contemporary values. As such, it is pretty much the exact mirror of English spelling, which preserves a fifteenth century phonology that nobody speaks any more, which is why English is so notoriously irregular and hard to spell.

It was the spread of Irish monasticism and a German empire - from people who did not speak Romance languages at home - that made it dawn on people that "Latin" had now become a different language from the vernacular languages in use in Romance speaking Europe. During the Carolingian renaissance, the church began to insist that priests pronounce Latin as it was written rather than adapting it to local usage. The priests then had to begin to write down local languages on their own terms in order to preach to ordinary people.

Even so, the difference between, say, Spanish and Latin is less than the difference between written Modern English and Old English. There has never been a major shift in the vocabulary, like English endured. The active verb forms mostly map into Latin verb forms, and as a result a Spanish verb is still fairly complicated.

What you need to do is work up a credible facsimile of Dark Watcher as a new custom character. Then give him powersets that you think fit.

Some in-game characters are fairly easy to duplicate. I made a spot-on Doc Delilah, and Sister Psyche is not difficult. Others you can do sort-of, like Ms. Liberty. Statesman can only be approximated, and Lord Recluse is impossible. These clones can be used if you don't want to invoke level limits from the actual characters.

[ QUOTE ]
Nerf Speed Boost.

[/ QUOTE ]

I would be strongly pleased if the technology for the Fortune and Teleport were added to it, to give you the chance to decline the "buff".

I like Dark Melee a lot - I have it on a Brute and a Tanker (both 50s) and a Scrapper that I rolled for i14 (now 35). It turns out that I like Dark Armor a lot more than I thought I would, and the character I decided to stick with it on is now at 38, That character is Dark/Ice, a pure team tanker that doesn't even try to solo.

The thing is, I don't see the two sets really meshing all that well, and both have more to offer other primaries or secondaries than they do the matched pair. Dark Melee is a control and utility set that benefits chiefly primaries with strong Defense components, because of the -tohit debuff that's the only consistent thing about the set. Ice/Dark, Shields/Dark, Inv/Dark, and WP/Dark all make more sense to me than Dark/Dark. Dark Armor has a once-a-day endurance recovery AoE that might be beneficial to Shields and Inv.

Fire/Dark doesn't make much sense but looks really cool.

Dark Armor seems to be a complicated control set with fears and stuns. The thing is, Dark Melee's fear is strong enough that you don't need to stack it outside of bosses, and recharges fast enough that it is easy to stack on a boss. Sets with a lot of stun, like Mace, or even (turn your head and spit) Energy Melee might be nice combinations. I made Dark/Ice to be a melee controller with a big bag of tricks.

[ QUOTE ]
I dread posting in this thread because I know I will have a grammar error somewhere, but here it goes anyway.

[/ QUOTE ]

I put Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Arthur Schopenhauer in one of my arcs. If there are spelling or grammar solecisms in there I expect to hear about 'em.

I took Earth and Salt Crystals - the only power I took - on my WP/DM tanker. Salt Crystals's sleep is useless in team situations, but the important thing is that it is a -def debuff that aggrovates up to 10 mobs in a huge radius, and as such more than makes up for the slowness of Dark Melee's AoE powers.

I may end up making an alternative build that has Quicksand too. That also seems very useful, if situational: I've seen it used to great effect on single file ambushes on the ITF.

My guess would be around 120-130, although to be honest I wasn't keeping close track until that message appeared.

The character I played with is not under any level pact, either.

The point being, assuming that the ticket cap is 1500 consistently, there is no way that an indoor solo warehouse mission on a small map ought to invoke any ticket cap at all. Either the message is being displayed in error (in which case it may cause a great deal of needless fuss) or the cap is being miscalculated.

I would welcome it. We make our own worst proofreaders, and grammar is important.

I know for certain that I was nowhere near 1394 tickets on that map. I was soloing (Unyielding) a standard indoor warehouse map with three or four mobs per spawn, most of which were minions and only one of which was a boss. Assuming a standard drop rate of 2-4 tickets a minion, that would mean that I would have had to defeat more than 325 minions assuming that they all dropped tickets to get near the cap. I know I didn't, and there aren't enough spawn points on that map to come close.

According to the mission, it was a Small map, a warehouse. One of the warehouses that is partitioned with doors.

[ QUOTE ]
The Mission Architect will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

[/ QUOTE ]

Awwwww, that's one of the best mission ideas I've seen yet.

I received the following message upon completing (solo) a mission set on a warehouse map in the "Too Many Bunnygirls" story arc. (Cute story BTW).

[ QUOTE ]
One or more architect tickets were not rewarded because you have reached the ticket limit for this map.

You have received 106 bonus architect tickets for completing the mission!

[/ QUOTE ]

Looks to me like <ul type="square">[*]Individual maps have ticket caps; and[*]Somebody misplaced a decimal point for this one's.[/list]