Kelenar

I'm still getting them just fine. Usually takes me about 4 street spawns to get a tip, which is pretty much what I was doing before. In my experience, the drop rate is way, way higher for bosses, so I tend to focus on them.

Needs more Whirlwind.

• Dechs Kaison can softcap to Toxic.
• Werner can solo Reichsman as an AV... on the second mission of the Kahn TF.
• The zombies in Dark Astoria have actually learned to form orderly lines to hand over their belongings to Nethergoat. It's less painful that way.
• Economists started calculating the American GNP solely to have something to compare Smurphy's wealth with.

Yotsuba&! and Azumanga Daioh - Both slice-of-life comedies, both written by the same guy. The latter is a very, very direct inspiration on the anime by the same name (a lot of the anime follows the manga panel-for-panel) and is pretty much a staple. AzuDai follows a group of friends through highschool, while Yotsuba&! focuses on the day-to-day life of a curious five year old girl. Since the group in AzuDai is a bit older, there are some slightly risque jokes in it, but both series are pretty much appropriate for all ages. A friend of mine swears that nobody should read AzuDai until they've been out of highschool for at least four years, because it's such a good portrayal of friends hanging out and doing nothing that it will nostalgia bomb you if you're old enough to miss school, whereas younger folks will just go 'eh, what's the big deal about this?'

Franken Fran is usually the third I recommend, but you seem to already have that covered.

You left out nerfing Regen, fire/kins, Controllers/Corruptors making Defenders obsolete, and ED! I can only give this nerdrage a 7/10 at best.

Yep, it is. It seems to be eating my Domination bar and deactivating it if I'm in Dom when I zone, too.

There are still some tip missions with stacked ambushes. I just ran a level 50 Villain tip last night that got me an ambush of Rikti and one of Longbow at the same time, then two more ambushes back to back while I was still fighting those. Hectic and fun.

I tend to just delete characters that I don't enjoy--I've deleted everything from 1-50, so I don't really have many compunctions about going "Eh, this isn't turning out like I'd expected," and deleting a character at 44. That said, a few specific characters of mine, extant and otherwise:

Erica Strauss, 38 MA/Regen Scrapper - Still exists, because she's my second-oldest remaining character at this point and I have some good memories from RP'ing her. That said, I can't stand MA. I need AoE. In the time it takes me to kick one boss to death, the Blasters and Elec/ and /Shield Scrappers have nuked every minion in the mob, and probably killed the lieutenants too. I'm helping!

Colors, Ice/Kin Corruptor, deleted at 26 - I wanted to like this combo, I really did. When it shined, it really shined. She was a blast to play in old-school PvP, since Siphon Speed and all the -speed debuffs from her blasts let me just kite people around indefinitely and perform hit-and-run attacks. In PvE, though... On teams, applying SB was a pain in the butt. Solo, she was a glass cannon and was probably one of the most end-hungry characters I ever played. She could decimate single hard targets, but the game doesn't really reward that. Baleeted.

Shardwave, Psi/Ice Blaster, deleted at 24 - Psi/Ice is something else. It has a pile of tools for managing aggro, pretty much none of which stack with each other and none of which are sufficient alone to keep it alive versus decently-sized groups of enemies (at the levels I was playing her, at least.) I was expecting stacked Shiver + Psychic Scream flooring recharge to be a great defense, but it didn't actually help that much. And the damage is mediocre at best. Rerolled her as an Ice/Rad Corruptor, which is working out a bit better (it would help if Corruptor Lingering Radiation ever got fixed.)

I went with Musculature on mine. Accuracy is almost never a problem. With Domination firing constantly, Endurance is rarely a problem, even when I'm running Scorpion Shield + Maneuvers + Assault and spamming my attack chain... and when it is, I have Consume to help.

I was torn between Musculature and Spiritual. I run around with 185% recharge the vast majority of the time, and most of my controls are already at the ED cap for recharge slotting--adding a bit more isn't going to change much when the powers are at 280% recharge. Especially since some of Earth/'s controls don't stack with themselves (as I recall, you can only have one Volcanic Gasses out at once.) Which pretty much left me with Musculature. It was a nice boost anyway, since a few of my attacks were only at ~80% damage slotting thanks to the sets I'd used for recharge and my vet pet was almost a whole damage SO short.

That said, if my recharge were a bit closer to the 70% required for permadom, I probably would have gone with Spiritual, especially as Earth/ or Fire/. More recharge is nice, and most of the Spiritual boosts past the basic one also add to stun duration.

My feelings are highly mixed. On the one hand, I think that the last thing the game needed was more of a reason for people to grind level 50 TFs--it's not like the ITF was exactly unloved. On the other hand, the prospect of shards has discouraged speed runs, which eliminates one of my big problems with them. I've also traditionally been pretty big on altitis, but more recently, all other alts have paled in comparison to my Earth/Fire Dominator. Having more ways to meaningfully advance her basically brought me back to the game at a point where I was playing a few times a month. ... but, if every upgrade is as easy to get as the Alpha one (I doubt they will be, but still) and we only get one or two upgrades per issue, I'm not sure if it'll be able to hold my attention. At the same time, the last thing I want to see is the required effort increased by just making it a mindless grind to get components, running the same TF 20 times in a row or something.

tl;dr: I don't knooooooow.

Holds are another option. He didn't seem to have PToD when I fought him on my Dominator, so I just held him and let loose. He didn't spawn anything once he was held.

My Earth/Fire Dominator's pets seemed to also get some sort of boost. Animated Stone and my Toxic Tarantula killed Reichsman without me lifting a finger. So lots of pets is also nice to have.

I saw a supposed advance leak from this earlier that said it's just weird bacteria found on Earth, as people have been guessing. Guess we'll find out soon enough.

If you get the inherent powers for all ATs you have levels in, all of my characters would have one level of Brute and one level of Corruptor. Yes, I'll take a scourging Blaster with Fury, please.

Ooh, and different ATs that have the same powerset. I could make a Defender/Corruptor/Mastermind with triple Darkest Night.

/Shield Scrapper with a few levels of /SR Brute to softcap really straightforwardly! Dominators with Siphon Speed! Blasters with a secondary in Traps!

Well, I had a whole big response to this typed out, but then I tried to preview my post and got logged out by the stupid forum software. That said, I agree with Hydrophidian that the arc as a whole is pretty meh. Not horrible, but a bit less epic and... interesting than I'd hope for. As for Honoree, it's probably not the greatest idea to have an EB punching for 1100 damage (that's not so much 'challenge' as it is 'fake difficulty',) but I also don't think it makes him insurmountable for anybody. I pretty much just used Standard EB Operating Procedure* against him and he wasn't much more annoying than a regular EB. And this was on an Earth/ Dominator, so about the only thing I had going in my favor was good damage output. I might try him tonight on my pretty-much-IO-less Rad/Rad Defender tonight... without using her primary. That should be a pretty good test.






*Standard EB Operating Procedure
(Note that while this works on every character I've ever tried it on, which covers almost every possibility, I dunno how it works for Controllers without a ST immob, since PToD can interfere with their damage-dealing capabilities. Fortunately, nor do I care about Controllers.)
Since I still regularly see people referring to EBs in general like they're this big invincible obstacle, here's a guide to soloing 90% of the EBs in the game on pretty much any character.

• Fill your tray 2/3 of the way with purple inspirations. Top it off with a mix of greens and reds.
• Get the EB alone.
• Softcap yourself with purples. If you have no defense, just eat four of them and call it a day. Eat all of the reds.
• Wail on the EB.
• If you get hit, eat greens. When the purples start flickering (keep an eye on this,) eat some more.
• If you die, stock your tray back up and return. Chances are, you won't die.

And that's pretty much all it takes. Will they get a lucky shot now and then and kill you? Yeah. But unless you get really unlucky, the vast majority of them will just whiff at you impotently. Very, very rarely do I get killed doing this, and I mostly play squishies. Hell, it worked for me on IOless pre-buff /Energy Dominators, where almost my entire primary (and the secondary effects of my Assault pool) was neutered by PToD and my damage was subpar.

The EBs this tactic doesn't work as well against include those with heavy debuffs, especially -defense, like Silver Mantis, and those who summon lots and lots of pets, like Lord Recluse. For these guys, you might want a Shivan or a team, but I usually find that perseverance or just changing your insp load (I found a tray of oranges to work against Silver Mantis) to usually do the trick.

Sometimes, I run clockwise.
Sometimes, I run counterclockwise.