Kelenar

This usually does it for me, yeah. 8 purple inspirations (burn 4 at a time) and the rest reds. Blow all the reds at once and go to town. The only one that reliably still proves to be an annoyance after that is Silver Mantis. EBs that are highly resistant to your main damage type can be, too, but in general, it will chop through about anything.

Now, mezz-resistant Arachnos bosses and lieutenants popping up in dozens in every other mission, those were my big issue.

I like playing both of your warshades. O_O

Having played several /Dark Scrappers and pretty much every non-stone armor set in the game, I find Dark to be moderately hungrier than average as far as endurance... the big thing that I find skews my own perception against it is that, not coincidentally, I tend to gravitate toward sets with +recovery/+end powers. With Willpower being one of the darlings of the past year, I'm not surprised that a lot of people find Dark end-heavy by comparison.

My SO'd Katana/Dark Scrapper bottoms out after a single spawn of +0/x5 Council with no bosses (barring blue inspirations), and she has at least one endredux in every single power in her primary and secondary except OG and Build Up. This happens over a broad range of defensive power usage. She hasn't been respecced since just after ED, so her build could use some small tweaks, but I don't see any of them making her drastically more efficient. However, I have non-/Dark melee characters who do as poorly or worse. Not coincidentally, she also does better than most of my characters against those spawns, so I don't consider it particularly off.

On the other hand, my minimally frankenslotted Dark/Dark Scrapper can go pretty much indefinitely while barely touching Dark Consumption. Primary makes quite a bit of difference, and even some basic IOs go a long way.

Just what are you implying here?

That sounds more reasonable. Still not something I'd drink, but it's no longer "... wow, that's twice as much sugar as my mom's vilely sweet tea" levels.

Three cups? Seriously? That sounds too sweet for hummingbirds.

I'll be taking many more characters to grey. Altogether:

Kai-Lian, Erica Strauss: hero->vigilante.
Freelance Rose, Silverbuilt, Entropy Dagger: villain->rogue.
Scrap Dragon: villain->hero.

Little A-Wings are good for those Ewok pilots, but they don't make nearly as much of a dent when you crash them into a Star Destroyer's bridge.

With self-defense powers, I thought they'd been mostly changed so that only powers that affect enemies rooted. Damage auras, auras with debuff components (like RttC), heals with to-hit checks, and the like.

Aha. This.

One thing to keep in mind is that there's an effective limit here. As I understand it, a lot of enemy groups, especially low-level ones, can only scale so far. That is, you can never spawn a level 45 Hellion. But generally, yes, I'd like some fix for this, even if it's only being able to drop the arc. Getting stuck with six missions versus greys sucks. You can turn the enemy levels up if you only outlevel it a bit, but that's not always a perfect solution, and it only works if you're not that high past the arc.

Well...

What these two said. Plus a lot more. I grew up somewhere where there was only one radio station and it only played a single genre of music, so I guess I'm a bit of an experiment in seeing how the internet makes this stuff work. Ways that I've found music I love:

• last.fm and Pandora (seriously, Google them if you want to find new music you like.)
• YouTube videos, AMVs, Flash videos, fan productions, and all other manner of things people make for free that tend to have music in them.
• Recommendations from friends (which are really easy to follow up on thanks to the previous entries.)
• Soundtracks.
• Downloading things almost entirely at random.
• Amazon recommendations.
• Internet radio stations.
• Jamendo.

With cheap mp3 downloads, several legal services that will let you listen to music (or at least clips of it) for free, and multiple music recommendation services, exploring new music is pretty dang easy right now.

YES. I thought I was the only one who knew the glory of a putting a little teeny bit of garlic powder on burgers. (Works best when they're cooking, so that it can mingle with everything.) Use sharp cheddar for the cheese and you have yourself a fine burger.

Me, I like doing stuff like that to make quick-and-easy food also taste pretty good, since I both like good food and hate taking more than about 20 minutes to make it. My recent hotness is mixing seasoned steak strips with brown rice. (Also peanut butter-on-sourdough sandwiches, but I don't expect anybody else to ever want to eat that.)