Minotaur

Not sure, I just shunted powers around where convenient, the levels of the individual powers should be taken with a pinch of salt.

This squeezes a little more defence:

You may make a lot of scrappers, but you don't know much about damage, katana > broadsword for DPS, and broadsword is quite low on the list. DM is probably about the best for single target now and shield is the unargued damage king for defence unless you want a primary it's incompatible with.

Several people have spoken a lot of sense above, sounds like fire/shield for a money no object build will fit the OP's requirements.

Has anybody done MA/DA, I can imagine that being a bit of a nightmare, particularly on SOs.

As said by somebody else, the self damage is trivial and you save yourself way more damage with the stun in OG. The heal only takes 1/3 of your end bar if you fail to slot it for end reduction (which is easy to do as you don't need to slot it for heal much if at all).

Dark armor sucks to some extent on SOs, but with IOs it can be a really nice set. The theft of essence proc was made for dark's heal for example, meaning that in a crowd, it usually costs me little end if any.

I hit the melee def cap on a BS/regen, triple stacked parry slotted for def + MoG + set bonuses + CJ + weave. Not sure if there was external buffing involved as well.

Correct - back when you could fail the first mish, we were knocking these out sub 10 minutes on a regular basis. I probabably ran 500-1000 of them before it was fixed.

The thing is, Katie is a nice TF, they should have simply fixed the last mission so katie's soul couldn't fly (and if they really wanted to, make the Amy mish a lead out) and kept the merits sensible or the random roll. By all means allow more than one random roll for the longer TFs.

Depends if you include hibernate, if you really want to take yourself out of the fight so you're in prime position to deal with unexpected aggro ...

Ice is a set I know very well and like with 3 50s and another in the high 30s.

Ice is nowhere close to softcapped just on SOs unless you have maxed out EA (and in usual play, if you're taking on an AV with team mates, you won't get to refresh EA with >1 target). I usually take the medicine pool on my /SRs and rarely get interrupted (2 interrupts slotted). The advantage ice does have is not the heal but the +HP that goes with it (and the -damage aura, but this is a lot less useful v +lots mobs).

My /SR scrappers are much more survivable than my ice tanks against heavy defence debuffing. Ice's heal is on a long enough recharge that it will save you once, but not on an ongoing basis, you will very rarely get to use it twice in the same fight with SOs.

Rad's -def became a lot less useful than it used to be when the devs (correctly) made the tweak to low level accuracy, you don't miss as often now anyway at low level. I was also doing mine pre I17 and the solo defender buffs, it would be fine now. I wasn't saying it was unsoloable, just not fast enough to be fun without the vet attacks.

I also didn't say defenders can't solo, I said a new player with a FF/rad couldn't solo decently pre I17, my rad/sonic has always solod fine.

Another comment from elsewhere I need to answer is the one that new players should be encouraged to team not solo. Quite right, BUT a lot of new players in my experience like to solo to start off with while they get used to the controls etc, I know I do in any new game I play. That's why the first say 10 levels should be very soloable for everybody.

Err, then it's a mirage that I've tanked a load of TF/SFs on my /SR scrapper and brute without buffing perfectly easily. The reason /SR is not a tank set is because the numbers would be farcically good, comfortably softcapped with weave, CJ and SOs. It actually tanks stuff that debuffs defence better than a lot of the other sets like ice (and shield unless you have HOs in AD and a lot of recharge).

I did say "basically can't" rather than "can't". Anything CAN solo, it's a matter of how well.

FF/nrg is way easier than FF/rad, you have bigger burst attacks (admittedly on slower recharge) that actually have some mitigation through knockdown, and your AoE kills up front and does KB rather than being DoT that does -def. Remember defender tier 1s and 2s weren't normalised like the blaster ones were.

Without vet attacks because new players don't have them (and a lot more people only have 1), and they're the ones that are unlikely to continue with the game if extreme frustration sets in whether it be inability to kill stuff or end hell.

I only really noticed this because I happened to start a FF/rad just before I17 and thought "just how bad would this be if I didn't have the 3 vet attacks". I played an I1 troller, before vet attacks, containment etc and this was worse.

If you're a new player on your first toon, you may not have the cash for TOs let alone craftable temps in the first few levels.

And don't say "Well if you want to solo, don't play a FF/rad", that's fine to say to me, but if you bought this game because you played superhero P&P and you wanted to play your favourite toon Dr Roentgen, the powersets exist to make him and then you find he's basically no fun. All toons should be able to solo decently at very low levels and some basically can't.

As an aside vet rewards are the reason I don't start a second account. I don't want to be restricted to which toons are actually playable at low level, and don't want to have to PL toons with my main account. If you could transfer the vet rewards to a new account, I'd have one by now, as it is I buy slots, have filled up Victory with 36 and am getting that way on Justice.

You tried soloing a lvl 1 FF/rad def before the I17 defender changes with no vet attacks ?

I have never been more happy to be a 70 odd month vet

On the main subject of the post, at really low levels, unless you have a lot of vet stuff, you won't run out of end. The bad time is about 8-19 for a lot of toons, certain sets (try a DA/SM or ice/SM tank solo) are awkward beyond stamina till you get set IOs or your end recovery power.

That said, it's always surmountable with a decent build, and acquiring the inf for a functional (if not uber) build has never been easier.

Since prior to I17 I was only in the troublesome levels for about 5 hours or so of playtime (old posi and synapse would get you 10-20 on a decent sized team), I was happy to live with the way end use worked.

The resists on /SR when combined with tough are very significant at low hits. Also remember SR's a scrapper/brute set, so those values should scale up for a tanker equivalent. I've had 60%+ res on my scrapper which is more than a DA scrapper can do for S/L. Being essentially immune to defence debuff also helps.

Been trying to check up exactly how the SR scaling resists work, but can't find anything on them, IIRC, you have 60% resists at 0% health so hit the scrapper cap of 75% at extremely low hits with tough, but can't remember where it starts scaling from. This implies at 4/3 as good for a tank, you'd hit the 90% res cap on a meaningful number of hits as you'd be at 104% or so on 0% health with tough.

There are other factors in this. If you're level 50, random rolling is probably better, although when I did my research on a sample of about 3000 merits, I'd have been better specific buying by a long way as I rolled crap. (I'd have needed to make 8M a roll profit at the time I did it, and actually made about 6.5). It was also a lot more work and clogged my market slots for weeks.

If you've accumulated 600 merits by level say 38 and want to slot your set IOs at that point, you may well be better off by a long way specific buying one or two due to the lvl 38 stuff you roll being worth so much less than the level 50 equivalents.

My old posi running toon was a perma level 17, and I know for sure that spending 240 merits (about 4 hours work) on a lvl 20 miracle unique which I was selling for 150-200M was better than random rolling.

The solution of forced rolling would mean I never did a posi or synapse TF till I hit 30+ as most of the pool Cs at level 15-20 are a waste of space. Hence the solution I proposed with tokens and a limited capacity for storing them. In fact it might cause me to leave the game as I use the TFs to get to 30 and doing them effectively without rewards would suck. Allowing unlimited storage of merits till a set level was reached (30 or 35 ?) would sort this issue out.

I do a mix of random rolling and merit buying. What have I merit purchased recently ? Mainly pool As that just don't turn up with any frequency like kinetic combat dam/end and level 21 performance shifter +end. The only 200 sized purchase I've made recently was a redside basilisk's gaze quad, where there were none available recipes or crafted at any level.

Removing the ability to merit buy specific recipes would also open up some potentially horrible market coups. At the moment, there is at least a safety net.