Maelwys

Have you both got "Going Rogue"?

If so, my advice is:

(i) Fire Tanker with "Tough" and a high-damage secondary with some AoE (/Stone, /Fire, /Elec, /SS, /Axe)
(ii) Ranged Primary (Demon, Bot, Thugs) /Thermal Mastermind.

Personally, I'd probably go for a Fire/Fire and a Demon/Thermal.
It's a match made in Heaven.

Hot, Burning, Firey Heaven.

As individual combos, Fire/Fire has synergy - Firey Embrace + Burn + Fire Sword Circle. And Demon/Thermal has synergy - Thermal Shields + Pet's own Resistances.

As a combo, the Tanker benefits from Forge and Thermal Shields, with Heat Exhaustion neutering hard single targets such as AVs. The Mastermind benefits from having a big high-damage, self-sustaining Aggro Magnet, leaving them free to concentrate on their pets damage output. MM can completely forget about using Bodyguard mode or any other form of Self-Protection and they only have to throw out three short-activation buffs every few mins to keep the tanker in top shape... aside from that it's just Attack-Attack-Attack.

The applied Damage output of the ATs also doesn't work against each other: Fiery Embrace and Burn + Fire Sword Circle melts mobs around the Tanker. Demons provide ranged damage and have fast activating attacks, so there's no firing at mobs that have already been killed by the Tanker's DOTs due to long activations. At worst the Tier 3 'Demon Prince' is going to be the only other thing in Melee range, so there's little or no collateral damage from the Tank on the Pets.

You should be able to Melt any number of foes with fairly low risk. I'd be very surprised if you weren't able to duo AVs or GMs with that Combo as well... since Demon/Thermals can usually solo those on their own, the addition of the Tanker merely makes doing so much quicker and safer.

My Opinion?

Being a Tank (and even moreso: a Tank with access to Footstomp!) you'll want Defence that works well on foes that try to hit you in melee range. So pick one of either Melee Defence or S/L Defence, and build towards that.

Footstomp is important in 3 ways:
1. Besides Taunt, it's your main Aggro-Holding ability.
2. It's your main source of AoE damage (besides BA, Burn and any Epic Powers)
3. It's a big source of damage mitigation - foes that're Knocked Down aren't hitting you.

Personally, on my Fire/NRG I went for S/L Defence - I found I could get better numbers for that than positional Melee Defence via slotting (and since I also occasionally tank tougher foes at a distance, S/L would also help versus certain ranged attacks- Malta Gunslingers, for example). But it's entirely your call and Fire/SS has some advantages over Fire/NRG- with SS's Rage you may be willing to sacrifice some more +Accuracy by using "Touch of Death" sets over "Kinetic Combat" ones.

Regardless of what sort of Defense you build for, you're unlikely to be able to hit the 45% Softcap without really screwing up the rest of your build, however it's quite possible to hit about 30% Defence without sacrificing very much (and if you go for lower level sets such as Reactive Armor and Kinetic Combat, you'll even keep most of your defence when you exemplar down into your mid 30s for TFs). And I guarantee you'll notice a big difference in survivability even with that level of Defence.

Reactive Armor, Touch of Death, Kinetic Combat, Obliteration and Rectified Reticle are the main sets to look out for, and be sure to pick up a Steadfast Protection +3% Defence Unique too.

------------------------

As a rough guideline (and currently feeling very envious of Footstomp's added PBAoE knockdown yumminess) my level 50 Fire/NRG/NRG build in Mids currently displays:

70.4% S/L Resistance (I took "Tough", but not "Weave")
47% E/N Resistance
90% (capped) Fire Resistance
24% Cold Resistance
60%-80% Toxic Resistance(via Healing Flames)

32.8% S/L Defence (will hit the softcap with one small +12.5% purple)
19.3% Melee Defence, approx 10% E/N/F/C and 8% Ranged/AoE Defence

Health sits at 128.6%, about 2410 HP at level 50 - the same level as the Scrapper HP Cap. Passive Regeneration is 18.1 HP/Second. Recovery is 3.63 End/Second plus the Performance Shifter Unique.

The build also has +30% Global Accuracy (My least accurate Attacks show 141.1% Accuracy) and +40% Global Recharge (Mainly affects Healing Flames's Heal regularity: +50% Base HP every ~18.5 Seconds. As well as increasing the regularity of the Stuns from my Standard Attacks and the Knockdowns from Air Superiority and Energy Torrent)

As Self-Rezzes go, ROTP is a good one.

I'm not convinced it's a great idea for Fire Tankers to be relying on it very often, but then the same could be said for a Tier 9 with a "crash" like Unstoppable.

ROTP is better than most teammate rezzes, and is certainly better than carrying Wakies- For a Tanker, if you DO faceplant, being "invincible" for a few seconds until you finish toggling up again is very helpful. Particularly if aggro control is your concern - With ROTP you simply need to Self-Rez, Taunt, THEN toggle up (compared to another set needing to pop a wakie, a breakfree, and then either use a self-heal and toggle up your armours or pop a bunch of purples and greens before Taunting)

Each of my two regularly-played level 50 tankers, a Fire/Energy and an INV/SS, have their tier 9s. Each hardly ever uses them. I honestly can't remember the last time my INV used Unstoppable, but it was likely on a PUG STF or ITF run. Whilst my Fire tanker isn't HP-Capped, S/L Resist-capped or S/L/E/N Soft-Defence-Capped and can't take nearly as much punishment as my INV, he does have a fair amount of stuns, knockdowns and moderate typed +defence (~33% S/L - enough to hit the soft cap with one small purple) and is far from fragile. Fire's regular powerful Self-Heal is icing on the cake.

Fire/ is meant to trade-off damage mitigation for damage output, and in my opinion it accomplishes this nicely without trading off TOO MUCH mitigation to allow it to function as a proper tank. It might not be able to tank any given GM solo, but it can do so with support (since its existing mitigation combines very nicely with virtually any outside buffs - FF, Cold, Thermal or Sonic Bubbles, Fortitude, Frostwork, etc), has no problem holding aggro and brings extra damage output that other primaries do not. Its Tier 9 is a situational power, just like those of most other tanker primaries - Certainly Dark, INV, Ice and Elec; to a lesser extent Willpower and Shield; and even (arguably) Stone.

Yeah happens with Robots too.

I suspect some sequence of events is confusing the code that usually buffs your henchmen with both "upgrade" powers when you move to a new zone.

It's actually become rather annoying, since on at least one of my Masterminds I prefer to run with my Assault Bot only having the level 2 upgrade but not the level 1 one (for more burn missiles!), so when it happens I need to dismiss and resummon my Assault Bot and re-buff it...

I've respecced into a "no travel power except Ninja Run" build on my Bot/Traps recently, which allowed me to pick up 'Challenge' and 'Seeker Drones' again. I honestly haven't noticed much extra bother navigating about, in fact it tends to be easier for my Henchmen to keep up with me now (or at least find a good pathing solution to follow me!). I'm finding even with infinite purchasable Jetpacks and the GVE jumppack I still rarely use them.

Concerning builds, I'm a big fan of Aid Other/Aid Self, capped Positional Defence and Mu Mastery (both for the Resist based armour and the AoE-Immobilise-with-Knockback-Resistance to prevent stuff getting bounced away from my Assault Bot's Burn Missile patches). The Battle Drones and Assault Bot are softcapped to everything too, although sadly since a Protector Bot can't bubble itself the two of them top out at just over 36% Defence.

I did trade some Global Recharge for Defense on my Bot/Traps (or should that be Bat/Tarps?) but all the major debuff powers are only a few seconds short of the 40-second "perma" cutoff: The -Regen from Poison Trap, for example lasts 40 seconds - Ditto for Seeker Drone's -Damage. Acid Mortar's debuff lasts for about 20 seconds after it expires, meaning with a 40-second recharge you can have 2 sets of -20% resistance up. Triage beacon is also effectively perma with just over a 90 second recharge time.

Concerning setup, I tend to run with "Half Bodyguard" for most normal missions - Everything on Follow, AssBot and ProtBots in Aggressive, BatDrones on Defensive. Standard "Attack" macro button tells AssBot and ProtBots to start firing, with the BatDrones staying in BG mode and helping out when the mobs start shooting back. Naturally there's a "Everyone shoot" macro button sitting in my tray too for when I'm feeling lazy, and I've all the henchmen individual commands such as pet_select goto/attack/follow/stay etc. bound to my numpad buttons.

A typical mob attack just sees Electric Fences immobilising a cluster of foes, with Web Grenade hitting any of them I missed (or stacking immob on bosses), then AssBot laying down a burn missile patch whilst I run in and toebomb the mob with caltrops (to slow them once immob wears off) and a Trip Mine (easy laying one of these down whilst under fire with capped defence). Usually only takes a second or two with all the Pew-Pew-Pew backing me up. For tougher mobs, I toebomb a Poison Gas Trap first.

For AVs, I tend to use defensive GOTO to get pets just behind them and out of PBAoE range, then get in front of them with my MM, lay down a Triage Beacon and start spamming WebNade/Taunt/GasTrap/Mortar. Immob and taunt from range if they're toughies, only running in to toebomb a GasTrap. I tend to not bother using Seeker Drones much even versus AVs, and had respecced out of them for over a year. I've only bothered working them back into my current build for very tough encounters, or for when I'm not the one doing the tanking (rare). I do have Aid Self, but it's rare I need to use it. I'm forever "Aid Other"-ing in teams though, and throwing one to my henchies occasionally doesn't hurt, particularly whenever the random number generator is feeling unkind...

Naturally, the build I'm using could always be made better. You could swap out the Frankenslots in Trip Mine for a set of 5 Ragnaroks (No Proc) for a bit of extra +recharge, but if you're up for going down the "hyper-expensive" road then you could probably drop a Gladiator Armor Proc into Charged Armor and softcap your defence without as many trade-offs in other areas. Though given that the toon was built on a budget of only a few hundred million inf (plus a few merit rolls) and it can already solo GMs in reasonable comfort, let alone AVs, I really haven't found much point shelling out a further 4-5 billion inf on it. Maybe once GR hits and I can take it blueside... :-)

Used to be that If you were able to fire Rage off again before it ran out that you never got an endurance crash. Though if memory serves you still got the only-affecting-self period...? These days? Nope, sorry. Crash is pretty much unavoidable.

Technically one of the few things keeping double or triple-stacked Rage from being way, way overpowered is the crash period (incredibly high damage debuff and moderate endurance drain). Only thing you can do really to mitigate it is raise your maximum endurance or your recovery. Conserve Power from the epic pools helps too, as it makes your other powers (not rage though) drain less over time. Or Save the Geas accolade in reserve. Or pop a blue...

Don't forget it's still quite possible to farm PVP IO recipes.

I find I still get a better return on farming these than farming level 50 mobs for Purples or doing any of that Ebil Marketeering buy-low-sell-high stuff. My best days work (16 hour period?) so far netted me the equivalent of just over 3.8 billion influence.

The good thing about the CoX economy is that everyone seems to have their own little niche, and the only thing that really hurts the market is when everyone saves up hundreds of merits to buy a specific IO recipe rather than rolling multiple random recipe rolls and then selling the stuff they don't need to fund buying the recipe they are looking for (I can, however, appreciate that you sometimes don't see a recipe for sale for the exact level you need it, and often lower level recipes such as "Rectified Reticle" are completely unavailable, so saving up to buy these is the only way to get ahold of them).

And of course, there's nothing to stop you farming stuff whilst you're [buying low/selling high]

Can we clarify what "Herding" actually is? Different people seem to have different definitions...

To me "Herding" is simply "Making a group of foes move somewhere you want them to go".
Not by itself either a good thing or a bad thing.

GOOD HERDING:

(i) The standard teaming "Group-to-Group" herd. Jumping (or Running/Flying/TPing) from one group of foes to another. Grab aggro of all nearby foes in the closest group as quickly as possible. Punch them, Taunt them, Foot Stomp them, Keep them in your Damage Aura, whatever. Stay in one place (in the middle of the group of foes) and attract the foes as close to you as possible for your team's AoEs to hit. Bonus points if whilst them teammates are beating on the foes you have around you, you can pull a second group of foes towards you with ranged attacks or Taunt. The goal here is to have a steady stream of foes around you at all times. The only time you have no foes around you is when you are moving from one clump of foes to another. NEVER PULL MORE FOES THAN THE AGGRO CAP UNLESS YOU HAVE A SECOND TANKER OR VERY SKILLED TEAMMATES.

(ii) The "Corner Pull". Useful only in certain situations, such as a room filled with foes, (to such an extent that if you jumped in you would immediately have more foes than the aggro cap on you). Attack or taunt a group of foes, then find a handy piece of geometry such as a nearby wall to hide behind until they all cluster together at the "choke point" you've just created. The goal here is to pull a "safe number" of foes away so your team can safely take care of them. Once you have whittled down the numbers, you can return to "Group-to-Group" herding.

(iii) The "Kill Zone" pull. Useful only in very very specific situations, such as when you have a Traps or Devices player on the team that can set up static pets or buffs/debuffs. The goal here is to get a large number of enemies into the area where they will be fastest killed. In nearly all cases though, it is faster to simply Group-to-Group herd.


BAD HERDING:

(i) Corner Pulling on EVERY mob. It is SLOW, and it is BORING.

(ii) Trying to grab all foes in an area without caring about the aggro cap. This is dangerous for your teammates and leads to teamwipes. It doesn't matter if you're pulling or group-to-grouping. When you aggro more than the aggro cap, it's a bad thing.

(iii) Insisting on fighting in a particular manner on every mob. There are times when it will be safer to hang back and corner pull... and there are times when you can group-to-group it safely, providing you keep a close eye on what that other nearby mob is doing.

(iv) "Trailing" foes halfway round a zone. This is what many percieve as the 'old style' Herding and is never good. Unless you're pulling foes over a very short distance in order to clump a limited number of them together, don't bother. It wastes time, bores your teammates and makes your tanker look bad. There is nothing worse than hanging around for 5 minutes after every fight whilst your tank runs off "Herding" by themselves, then finally arrives with 16 weak foes running after them and another 45 foes they attempted to aggro but subsequently "lost" strewn about various corridors.


...any more I've forgotten about?

For the OP, a quick break down of an IO'ed Katana/Regen's available mitigation:

+ Dull Pain grants +80% HP for its duration. Get it Perma (easy enough with IOs + Hasten) and that's 40% mitigation out of the box. Your HP will be capped at 2410HP at level 50, and due to the way Dull Pain's buff gets placed, every 120 seconds you'll also get healed for 80% of your enhanced (not base!!) HP.

+ Reconstruction heals 50% of your base HP every 20 seconds or less (assuming you've already got enough recharge for Perma Dull Pain)

+ MoG is 71% Damage Resistance (Scrapper Cap is 75%) and 71% Defence to everything except Psi for 15 seconds, and it's up roughly every 75 seconds.

+ You'll be regenerating ~70HP/second without Running Instant Healing, with simply Fast Healing, Health and Integration.

+ Running Instant Healing on top of this, you'll regenerate a total of ~170HP/second.

+ Divine Avalanche grants just short of 23.5% Lethal/Melee Defence with every application, and you'll be able to Triple stack it, even though you'll pass the soft cap with it just Double-Stacked (Duration: 10s, Recharge just short of 1.2 Secs. Cast Time 1.33 Secs).

+ You also have access to additional soft control in Soaring Dragon/Golden Dragonfly - Knockup/Knockdown means you can permanently juggle any one foe.

+ "Mitigation through enemy elimination" - a Procced-out Katana toon can push out around 250 Single-Target DPS before you start considering using Build Up. Using just Gambler's Cut, Soaring Dragon and Golden Dragonfly... which means that you're also inflicting alternating Knockup/Knockdown whilst inflicting that DPS. It's not uncommon to be able to smack the living bejezus out of a +5 Boss in a very short period of time whilst keeping it unable to hit you back due to all the Knockup/Knockdown spam.

Assuming you're running with Perma Dull Pain, with double-stacked Divine Avalanche you'll need to be getting hit for an average of ~1400 damage every second to get past your standard regeneration. That's permanent mitigation. (With Single Stacked DA it's 260 damage, without DA it's 70). With PDP, 2xDA and Instant Healing that rises to 3400 damage. With PDP, Instant Healing and MoG all running (DA is irrelevant), that's 10200 damage. Every Second. Not factoring in Dull Pain's 80% Heal every 120 seconds, or Reconstruction's 50%-heal every 20 seconds.

Regen's only weakness is Burst Damage, and MoG and Divine Avalanche cover that beautifully. MoG for shorter fights, DA for longer ones.

I used to have Resilience, many moons ago, when stunning even for a brief second meant you would detoggle Integration and therefore remain stunned for a long period of time. Back then, fighting things like Energy Melee foes (Tsoo Ink Men, or virtually any melee toon in PVP in those days) was far easier when they needed to stack more hits to detoggle you.

These days though? Resilience grants a pitiful level of Smashing/Lethal damage resistance and a large amount of stun protection. There is not a worse power pick in the Regen set. In fact, there is not a worse power in ANY damage mitigation set, with the sole exception of Temperature Protection in Fire Armor.

+ Need to self-rez? Take Revive instead. Revive doesn't stun you and returns more health and endurance after the rez than any breakfree.

+ Need to slot a Steadfast unique? (Though really: Why? It's a Kat/Regen, you'll already be at the defence softcap to anything relevant to Scrappers simply by using Divine Avalanche. And you CERTAINLY don't need "weave"...) Stick it into MoG.

+ Need extra damage mitigation? This is the only somewhat subjective point that'll vary from person to person, as some people have the "I must have maximum possible damage resistance" idea lodged in their heads. But consider the numbers: Resilience grants 5.6% Smashing/Lethal Damage Resistance. That's equivalent mitigation to 2.8% defence - about the same level of mitigation granted by running a slotted Combat Jumping (but applied to only S/L damage types, instead of "everything"). I can guarantee you will never notice it, especially if you're Katana and have Divine Avalanche to draw upon.

You can get to just under 25% Smashing/Lethal Resistance by stacking Tough and Resilience and slotting them both up. Or you can tap Divine Avalanche once and get double that mitigation, then a second time to be virtually invulnerable to melee damage when you need to be. Sure, if you were Dark Armor or Fire Armor and relied primarily on Damage Resistance for your mitigation, Tough is certainly handy to stack with your other armors. But with all regen's other toys combined with softcapped defence, is 25% S/L resists really worth three power picks and 5+ enhancement slots (for boxing/kick, Tough and Resilience)?

Yes, Fire/NRG plays more like a Scrapper, but with a bit of tweaking they can take a fair bit of punishment too.

I would first of all echo Firehearts advice: Get "Tough" from the fighting pool.

Hasten from the Speed Pool helps to get Healing Flames up sooner and is therefore helpful. I've also found that swapping out, say, Energy Punch for Air Superiority lets you Knockdown-Juggle a boss indefinitely which really increases your life expectancy versus tough single opponents. Versus a group, drop Burn. You'll keep aggro, but they'll run back and forth in and out of the patch, and not attack you as often. Energy Torrent from the Epic pools is a cone knockdown which does decent damage - firing it off whilst approaching a group of foes will bounce half of them on their backs and break up the damage you take from an "alpha strike".

Personally on my Fire/NRG I went for Fly and Air Superiority, Boxing/Tough, Combat Jumping (for the immob protection) and Fitness. Plus Conserve Power, Laser Beam Eyes and Energy Torrent from the Epics. Four Pools meant not being able to take Hasten, but I was able to drop Consume for Conserve Power and free up a slot for Burn.

Concerning Slotting, initially I went for +HP and +Recharge, but even with 70% S/L resists and Healing Flames recharge down to well under 15 seconds I was still getting hammered when taking on larger groups of foes. It was very hard to properly tank for an 8-man group without getting any extra buffs. It could be done, but often involved Mob Scatter (due to Burn), wildly oscillating HP and regular use of Rise of the Pheonix!

Since then I've gone for S/L and Melee +Defence, with Recharge and +HP as a secondary priority. My Current build has just over 30% S/L defence (18% Melee Defence) and 34% +Recharge. HP is sitting at 2410 at Level 50 with accolades, and Healing Flames recharges in a hair under 17.5 Seconds. The difference in survivability is astronomical. I can tank large groups now without resorting to using "Burn"- my HP certainly falls, but it's rarely more than Healing Flames can handle, and I still have Burn, Air Superiority and Energy Torrent as backups. Be warned though, going for Melee defence via IO sets is VERY expensive. Changing from my old build to my new build (where the only real major buys were five sets of Kinetic Combat IOs and three sets of Reactive Armor IOs) set me back about 1.6 billion influence.

--- #1: Survivability ---

Regen's still a good solid pick, particularly for soloing. Traditionally it has a lot of flat damage mitigation ("can withstand up to X damage over Y seconds") rather than scaling damage mitigation ("shaves X% off all incoming damage") due to all the regeneration and Reconstruction/Dull Pain... but with the new MoG it also has a severely high level of scaling damage mitigation for a very short space of time.

When combined with Katana, you also have access to a very solid Survivability boost in Divine Avalanche, which by itself will let you soft cap Melee/Lethal defence.

That's Regeneration, Heals, Defence and Damage Resistance. Pretty much all bases covered. The only thing it lacks is Psi Damage Resistance, but realistically the Regen/HP Boost/Heals will make up for that on anything short of the AV version of the Psi Clockwork King.


--- #2: Damage Output ---

Regen doesn't give much other than Quick Recovery. This lets you basically ignore slotting extra Endurance Reductions in your attacks - if slotting set IOs, for example, you can go for a Damage/Recharge instead of a Damage/EndRed without fear of your tank running dry.

Katana is far, far better than it used to be since the major animation length changes a few issues ago. It's now one of the Highest single-target DPS primaries, and is probably the primary that is most suited to the use of Damage Proc Inventions. The only real weakness in Katana is that it's virtually all lethal damage, which can be highly resisted. However, this is offset drastically through the use of damage procs (Negative Damage from 'Touch of Lady Grey', and the -resistance proc from the 'Achilles Heel' set).

Katana attacks are all fast activating (in particular Gambler's Cut is very, very high damage-per-activation now - only being slightly edged-out by "Soaring Dragon") and can fit several damage procs including "Touch of Lady Grey", "Mako's Bite" and "Achille's Heel: Chance for -Res debuff".

Katana is still primarily a Single-Target DPS primary, but has respectable AoE in "The Lotus Drops" and its two cones "Flashing Steel" and "Golden Dragonfly". It also has a bit of Soft Control in the Knockup/Knockdown of Soaring Dragon and Golden Dragonfly, but lacks any hard control such as stuns/holds. Generally you'll only notice this when fighting annoying enemies such as Malta Sappers... and frankly, a Build-Up-Golden-Dragonfly combo tends to one-shot them anyway.


--- #3 Build advice/Slotting ---

**Best Powers in Katana: **
DPS: Soaring Dragon, Gambler's Cut, Golden Dragonfly, SOTW. In that order.
AOE powers will help a lot when fighting more than one foe. Flashing Steel at a minimum, Lotus Drops help too if you can fit it in, but it's not vital.
Take and 6-slot Divine Avalanche. You will want at least the equivilant of Two level 50 Defence Buff IOs in it, so that you can double-stack it and be at the defence softcap. Build Up is always useful to have for getting your spike damage up.

"Calling the Wolf" (taunt) is actually fairly handy given that you will be very, very survivable when you choose to be (stacking Divine Avalanche and using your heals intelligently). You will certainly be able to tank the vast majority of endgame Archvillains, along with some Giant Monsters (generally the ones that don't have a spammable AoE/PBAoE).

Slotting Advice: Recharge Rate and Damage Procs. I can't stress this enough. Katana is MADE for damage procs, and reducing the recharge time of all your fast-activating attacks and heals will raise your effectiveness considerably.


** Best Powers in Regen: **
Integration, Reconstruction, Dull Pain, MoG, Quick Recovery are your core powers. Instant Healing and Fast Healing are both also very nice to have. Resilience is useless, Revive is situational or a "flavour power" at best.

For Your Heals, you'll want 100% Recharge/100% Heal enhancement in them. MoG only needs 100% Recharge (and the equivilant of one Resistance SO if you want to cap your Resists for its duration). Integration and Fast Healing only need 100% Heal. You can put an endred in Integration if you find yourself running low, but realistically it should never happen.

Eventually, it'd be good to aim towards attaining Perma-Dull-Pain, which kicks in at about 60% Global Recharge plus Hasten. This lets you run about with capped HP permanently, adding a good bit of extra survivability.


** Best Pool Powers **
Travel Pool (I recommend the Leaping pool which allows you to take Combat Jumping + Hurdle for fast non-supressing in-combat movement), Fitness Pool (Stacks with Fast Healing/Quick recovery), Hasten (More Recharge), Stealth (Combined with a Stealth IO in sprint you'll have full invis - it's situational, but is quite fun to suddenly pull a Build-Up-Golden-Dragonfly on an unsuspecting Sapper! Also important for "Ghosting" to objectives if you wish to, as a Katana/Regen will have no problem ghosting to the end of a mission and killing a "Hard" boss)

Hope some of that helps. I've a Mids build here of my Main Kat/Regen if you are looking for some more ideas, but be warned it's very, very expensive to slot it up exactly that way.

See my old guide (formatted for the old EU boards, so please excuse the old bbcode tags) at Making pointy sticks more pointy for some more specifics of Katana Attack Slotting.

I wouldn't get either.

Given the option, I'd go with the Concealment pool tier #1, Stealth, plus a Stealth IO in Sprint (jump or run, doesn't matter). That will grant you full invisibility when you run both toggles together, since the stealth IOs stack with any other form of stealth. You don't even need to leave sprint on (since you can just "tap-on" sprint for 120 secs of stealth every two minutes).

Stealth: 0.33 End/Sec, +35 Stealth (PVE), 2.25% Defence (+2.25% when not attacked)
Sprint + Stealth IO: 0.29 End/Sec, +30 Stealth (PVE)
Sup. Invis: 1.04 End/Sec, +200 Stealth (PVE), 2.25% Defence (+2.25% when not attacked)
Invis: 1.3 End/Sec, +55 Stealth (PVE), 9% Defence (cannot attack whilst using invis)

PVE Mob Perception Ratings from ParagonWiki:
+ Minion, pet, Mastermind henchmen (all tiers): 45
+ Lieutenant: 50
+ Boss, Elite Boss, Archvillain/Hero: 54
+ Turret, Giant Monster: 100
+ Sniper: 149

So running [Stealth + Sprint] requires less End than either Sup. Invis or Invis, grants a better Stealth rating than Invis (+65 to +55), grants the same Defence as Sup. Invis and still lets you attack whilst Invisible the same way as Sup. Invis.

The only extra thing the other options have going for them is that Sup. Invis will prevent you from being spotted by a Turret, Sniper or Giant Monster (assuming it doesn't have any +perception powers). And the Stealth IO requires a bit of inf to craft.

[Edit] Actually, come to think of it, since you're an Illusion Troller you'll have Phantom Army, right? And therefore probably Hasten too in order to get PA up sooner? So another option would be to just take SuperSpeed then and slot a Stealth IO in it- you'd lose out on the extra tiny bit of +Defence, but you'd get Full PVE Invis for only 0.46 End/Sec and save on one of your four power pool picks. [/Edit]

"Available Physical Memory 1.34 GB"

That's fine. RAM is not your problem.
The problem is solely Graphic Card related, as Zombie Man has already pointed out.

The Intel GMA 950 does not support Hardware Vertex Shading and its Pixel Shading Support is very weak/flaky. You MIGHT be able to get around this limitation by installing updated chipset drivers from the intel website

What I'd try is FIRST updating the chipset driver to the above (download whatever version matches your installation - probably VISTA 32bit judging from your specs post) then SECOND, if there are still no changes, try using a program called "3D Analyse" to emulate the required extra features - you can download this from http://www.tommti-systems.com/main-Dateien/files.html

Emulating extra video card features will put more toll on your CPU and will therefore probably lower your framerates, but it should make the game look much prettier.

Hope that helps!

I think leaving Taunt that late might become a problem if you're exemplaring down for TFs etc. The rest looks OK, but the Numinas in Health will be very expensive, espeically the Proc. Same for the Miracle Proc in "High Pain Tolerance". For the cost of those uniques alone you could probably build the toon to the softcap without needing to pickup "Weave". I honestly can't see Willpower needing the extra recovery either. Maybe the "Regenerative Tissue" +Regen Proc would be worthwhile, but I doubt you'd notice the Miracle one or the Recovery Portion of the Numina.

Not sure about Weave to be honest. It gives a decent buff, certainly, but there's little point in going over the 45% soft cap and weave costs a fair bit of endurance to run. Being Willpower you've got Endurance to spare though. It's just fairly easy to softcap defense without taking weave these days so you'd save yourself a power pick. The Zepher Travel IOs aren't very expensive either (just don't get put off by the price of the Knockback protection ones! - the other two were only a few million apiece last I looked).

RE dropping a travel power... you could always drop the self-rez I suppose, it's effectively identical to a large Break Free. If you're looking at going without a travel power it's certainly doable, but you'd probably be better off with Hurdle and Combat Jumping rather than Swift and Combat Jumping - with one Jump IOs in Hurdle it's slightly faster than unslotted "Fly", with two Jump IOs in Hurdle it's about as fast as [Fly + Swift with one Flight IO in each].