Muon_Neutrino

Oh, one more thing. It's very good to plan this sort of thing out in advance using something like mid's, because it lets you start placing bids early. Sometimes there won't always be an existing stock of your desired IO at the correct level, so placing bids early and then letting them wait gives you a much better chance of actually having the IO by the time you get to your target level.

However, there is one thing to watch out for when planning, which is that it's not going to be obvious in mid's whether an IO is going to be expensive or not. Eventually, you'll just learn that, but initially, you may plan out a slotting for a power, hop over to WWs, and break your jaw on the floor upon seeing the 'last 5' sale prices for one of your IO recipes (or the salvage, for that matter).

To avoid this, consult the wiki page on IO sets and look at the icons next to each set piece. You will want to build your frankenslotting mostly out of pool A uncommons (yellow crosshair icon) and pool Bs (blue and light grey shield). You may also be able to use the occasional pool A rare (orange crosshair icon), but they're likely to be much more expensive. Avoid any pool C/D recipes (dark grey bar icon with gold I), PvP recipes (round hero/villain symbol), purple recipes (purple crosshair icon) or special availability recipes (pink !), as these will be prohibitively expensive and/or unavailable in almost all cases. As well, look at the set bonuses below the table with the icons and find which sets have lots of desirable bonuses (accuracy, lots of HP, regeneration, defense, and especially recharge) and try not to use those - even if they have pool A uncommons or pool Bs, they're likely to be expensive anyway simply due to demand.

Also, check the salvage in mids (there's a button in the upper right corner that toggles between showing set bonuses and showing salvage requirements when mousing over an IO), and see how expensive they are on the market before you go off buying the recipes. Most rare salvage (orange color) will be relatively expensive, but it varies wildly for common (white) and uncommon (yellow) salvage.

Most pets don't take normal damage sets. They take pet damage sets instead, which don't have any damage procs in them.

If you can find a set that a pet takes which has a damage proc, that proc will work in the pet. However, it will only have a chance to proc on the pet's specific attacks which could take that set - for example, if you have a pet wich can take defense debuff sets and you put in a lady grey proc, it will only have a chance to proc on the pet's attacks which have a defense debuff. For that reason, it's best to carefully consider which of a pet's attacks would work if you want to slot a proc. If all of a pet's attacks do knockback/down, for example, the explosive strike proc could be a good use of a slot. If only one long-recharging attack does knock, on the other hand, the proc wouldn't do much.

Simply put, you've just run afoul of the rule of 5. In short, you can't have more than 5 of any given set bonus, any beyond that are wasted. So you can't have more than 5 LoTG 7.5% bonuses, more than 5 regular 7.5% recharge bonuses, more than 5 5% recharge bonuses, etc, etc. This also applies to all other types of set bonuses - HP, recovery, whatever.

As far as mace mastery, I believe (but don't quote me on this) that it won't cause redraw with the bane mace powers. When you hit 41, I would copy to the test server and try it out there to be sure. The reason shatter armor takes tohit buff sets in mids is because it was originally focused accuracy, before the devs changed their minds. There's no reason why it shouldn't take melee damage sets in game, although I haven't tested it personally.

I would personally still go for the regular leadership pool on the huntsman, regardless - or at least maneuvers. Tactics would be overkill, but a second assault is also appealing. More or less, I guess, it depends on how often you team. Maneuvers is important for personal survivability, but it also boosts your team's toughness noticably since you already have the very strong TT:M to stack it on. Assault is, well, assault. 15% extra damage or 30% extra? On a large team, those two would probably do more overall than the extra AoE.

If you solo more, on the other hand, I could see going mu. There's nothing saying you couldn't do both, though - maneuvers and then 3 mu powers, or maneuvers + assault and two from mu? The pet is fugly anyway, totally doesn't fit stylistically (imo), so it's not like leaving it out is that much of a sacrifice.

To provide another point, the reason this works is because multi-aspect IOs provide more total bonus than an SO, even though the bonus is split between two or more types. For example, a level 30 generic damage IO provides 34.8% enhancement, roughly the same as a +1 SO. A level 30 acc/dam provides 21.8% accuracy and damage, for a total of 43.6% total enhancement value - one and one quarter SOs. A level 30 acc/dam/rech IO provides 17.4% to each, for a total of 52.2% - one and one half SOs.

So, if you can slot out a power with nothing but double and triple aspect IOs, you will get much more total enhancement percentages than if you simply slot out with SOs/generic IOs.

I personally do almost nothing *but* frankenslotting. I haven't ever slotted out a character with nothing but SOs the entire time I've played this game. Frankenslotting is just flat-out superior in every way - it's even cheap if you make sure to look around for the sets no one else wants. I can get the equivalent of 2 acc, 3 dam, 2.5 rech, 1.5 end in an attack power this way - a total of 9 SOs worth in 6 slots, and that's with level 30ish IOs that will never expire. Or, I can get almost 2 acc, 3 dam, and a bit more than 1 end and recharge in 5 slots, if I don't have as many slots to throw around.

If a power has to check to hit, then a proc in that power will not have a chance to roll against any targets which are not hit. So, yes, you should put in that acc io. It's a bit odd here, though - WoC has standard accuracy, but the confuse portion is marked 'must hit at -25%'. I'm not sure what that implies for the accuracy of the procs, but I believe they'll still key off the standard non-penalized accuracy roll.

I've got some; there'd be a few more if certain proliferations would go through.

I've got a pair of self-aware robots made by an evil organization who escaped their creators. One became a hero after being allowed too much independent thought. The second (made in response to the first's failings) was a distributed intelligence where each part watched the others for signs of morality; it worked so well that it felt no loyalty, either, and went rogue as a villain. Neither is aware of the other's existence. The first was originally an ice/ice blaster (remade as a cold/ice defender), the second is a bots/traps MM who will be remade as a bots/storm if I ever get around to it.

I've also got a pair of defenders who are members of the same order of nature mages. They know each other peripherally, but aren't close friends or anything like that.

I've also got a father / daughter pair plotted out. The father developed the PPD's battlesuits and was working on the next generation when he apparently went evil and defected to arachnos, taking his designs with him - but he was actually being psychically controlled by a fortunata. His daughter was the only one who refused to believe that he'd turned, and took the only prototype and swore to find him. She's a shield/mace tank (energy shield/techy costume), but his concept doesn't really fit into the game as it stands (battlesuit squad / energy assault MM/dom hybrid). If some more proliferations come through, though, he could be either a bots/rad MM or an illusion/energy dom. Perhaps eventually they will, and then I can take him heroside once his daughter rescues him.

Most of my characters, though, are one-offs or conceptually partnered with the characters of people like my brother instead of others of my own characters.

Ah, that's the reason. You're still looking at the wikia version of paragonwiki. That version was abandoned when wikia insisted on putting ads for things like RMT on the pages, and afaik is currently maintained (and none too well) by those same RMTers. It's got a *lot* of outdated and incorrect information on it. The current, properly maintained and legit version is hosted at http://wiki.cohtitan.com . If you look at the same page over there, it says:

Something you can try is to manually time a power recharge as precisely as possible (something long, like AB) and see what recharge level it implies. Since you know what the power has in it, you should be able to check what level of global recharge you *actually* have, to see if it's a real numbers display bug.

That didn't ring true for me either, so I jumped in game and did a bit of testing with my level 50 FF/nrg defender. He has total focus taken at 47 with 4 level 50 crushing impact in it, temp invul at level 44 with an entire level 30 steadfast protection set in it, and nova at 38 with (among other things) level 39 and level 41 pieces of cleaving blow in it.

Exemplaring to level 34 with ouro and losing access to total focus and temp invul (but not nova), I saw the following set bonuses change. The set bonuses from the crushing impact and cleaving blow sets vanished, but the set bonuses from steadfast (the hp and recov, not the 3%) did not (the 3% defense was also still present). So, we can conclude that only the level of the IOs matter - the power can be greyed out and the bonuses will still be there. If LOTG 7.5%s are globals like the 3%, they should also work in greyed out powers if the levels are still good.

edit: regarding the strange lotg behaviour, it's a really silly question, but are you sure you don't have another lower level lotg somewhere on your character you forgot about? Otherwise, exactly what levels did you take fort and venge? Was one of them at or below 34 and the other at 35 or 39? If so, maybe there's something screwy going on with the new exemplaring power availability.

Not unless you put a proc in it. By itself, surveillance does not aggro (which is one of the things I like about it).

As far as scaling AoEs, fulcrum shift and heat loss are also good examples of this sort of thing. I think the reason we haven't seen more of these (and no debuff versions) is that they're probably a balance nightmare. The absolute amount of damage prevented and extra damage added from a power like freezing rain already scales linearly with extra foes in the area - making it scale quadratically could definitely raise some concerns. The reason I think fulcrum shift and heat loss can get away with it is that the damage cap is generally not that high, on the one hand, and that beyond a certain point extra recovery doesn't really have much benefit, on the other hand. But if the debuffs scaled, you'd have the strange situation that a large spawn is actually less dangerous than, or dies faster than, a small one. The idea is still interesting, though - it just strikes me as difficult to implement.

Another direction that hasn't been explored much, I think, is the general idea of 'toggelizing' enemy-affecting powers we'd usually expect to be clicks - telekinesis being pretty much the only example I can think of off the top of my head. For example, a common suggestion for a hypothetical 'electric control' set is an AoE hold that arcs similar to chain induction. What if you had such a hold that was a toggle? Make it root the player as long as it was active, but hold the targets as long as you can keep up endurance (with a scaling cost per foe held and long recharge so that it wouldn't be abused).

Another idea is toggle summons. What if you could have a summonable barrier of some sort (a sphere pseudopet that spams immobs?), for example, that you can target at a location and then dismiss by deactivating the toggle? What about, say, little ghosts that flit among your enemies causing disruption and damage as long as you can muster the concentration to keep them active? I don't know if the tech for this particular application is possible (I think it'd have to be based on short duration pets that are continually resummoned as long as the toggle is active), but I think it'd be cool.

As sort of a inside-out version of fading buffs, what about escalating debuffs? Say you have a debuff that initially provides only modest effect, but if the target(s) survives long enough the debuff starts to scale up (to some predefined maximum to avoid being ridiculous) , making it harder for them unless they can escape in some manner. This could be done for a click by having effects that are delayed or by having it grant a temp autopower that applies the debuff repeatedly, stacking with itself. Or, for a toggle, it could simply be done by making the debuff amount very small but very long lasting and then allowing it to stack.

Or, and this is a real long shot, what about a sort of 'teleport cage'? Make it a click location drop that summons a stationary pseudopet. Give that pet two powers: a (say) 30 foot radius power that repeatedly attempts to teleport all enemies inside it to the center of the cage (which I'm pretty sure they can do), and a 20 foot radius power that slows foes and gives them 100% teleport resistance. It would basically be a literal 'cage' that they can move about inside of but not escape (at least, things which can be teleported).

To elaborate, it's not true because the ice shields have an enhanceable resistance component. Due to a quirk of the power system, any power with an enhanceable resistance component must be flagged as 'cannot be buffed' in order to avoid having damage buffs boost the resistance granted. So, the ice shields are thus flagged and their defense is not boosted by power boost.

Force field bubbles, on the other hand, have no enhanceable resistance, and thus power boost works just fine for them.

First question, which server are you playing on? Some servers have larger redside populations than others. All of my villains are on one server (infinity), so I don't know off the top of my head which server has the best villain population, but if I had to guess, I'd probably pick freedom.

Second, what powersets are your corruptor? From your mention of lethal, I assume your primary is assault rifle or archery. What secondary do you have? As long as you don't have something which is all based around buffing allies, you should be able to solo fine eventually. For now, though, it's quite hard to judge the long term viability of a character before level 20. The teens are a pain in the rear for most characters, no matter the AT/powersets. Most corruptors will solo reasonably well once their powersets mature (just try to get stamina, from the fitness power pool, by level 20 or soon after, it will help with your endurance woes).

Finally, lethal damage resistance is, in my opinion, sometimes overstated. Yes, you will run into things that heavily resist lethal damage. Will it stop you from killing them? Generally not. If your secondary has a decent amount of foe debuffs, self buffs, or offensive style powers, you can change that to 'almost certainly not', as long as you have taken a reasonable number of attacks from your primary and slotted them well. Also, while assault rifle and archery are both predominantly lethal, they both include at least a bit of other damage types. For archery, blazing arrow includes a fire DoT, and exploding arrow is half smashing damage. For AR, flamethrower and ignite are both pure fire, which helps a lot.

If you want to look around for different ATs that use weapons, redside you're looking at brutes, stalkers, and masterminds. Brutes have several weapon based powersets (which are all at least decent - and war mace is smashing instead of lethal), and several nice non-elemental secondaries such as willpower, invulnerability, and shields. Brutes generally solo well, but are also fine on teams. Stalkers have many of the same sets as brutes, but play much differently with their stealth focus. They're generally considered trickier to play, especially on teams - but they solo very well. For masterminds, two of the primaries have you and the pets almost exclusively using weapons (thugs and mercs), and bots use energy guns instead of elemental stuff. Controlling your pets can be quite tricky, though, and I wouldn't really recommend it for a new player.

So if you want to try another redside AT with a weapon (and you don't necessarily have to get rid of your corruptor, either, even if you do make another character), I would probably suggest a weapon-using brute, probably with invulnerability or willpower as a secondary.

Somebody spiked regenerating flesh, of all things, up past a million for a short time blueside today, too. Couple hundred bidding, none for sale, and a few 1.5 mil sales in the history. I just chuckled, placed a couple 50k bids, and had mine inside of 10 minutes. I love impatient people, it's so nice how they fund my lowbies for me.

For a discussion about PvP on *these* forums? It's about the most civil discussion of the topic I've ever seen. I'm actually rather surprised at how stable the whole thread's been.

One nit: the resistance procs aren't reduced in duration (or anything else) by the purple patch. The way those procs work is they grant the target a short-duration temporary autopower that applies the debuff. Since the target is effectively debuffing itself, the purple patch doesn't affect it. Of course, if the mob has resistance to a certain type of damage, it'll still resist the debuff for that type, but just being an AV or a purple mob doesn't have any effect.

Ignore that guy, some people just don't get the whole 'politeness' thing.

Anyway, looking at the build, my first thought is that that's still gonna be expensive, even if it doesn't have purples. My second thought is 'what are you going to do before 50?' Those are secondary, though.

Mostly, I'd question your slotting priorities. You have a ton of recharge, end recovery, and regen, but no defense. On a shield tank, 31% defense with nobody in range of phalanx is going to get you killed if you try to actually tank on a large team. Unless you're specifically trying to build a scranker, I'd rethink some of your slotting and get the 14% more you need to softcap. Touch of death, mako's, blessing of the zephyr, steadfast 3%, etc. With your apparent budget, you should be able to get there without even taking any extra defense powers like weave/maneuvers/etc, and it will give you a truly ridiculous boost to survivability. Aid self by itself probably won't be enough, given how many attacks will be coming your way to potentially interrupt it.

The other thing is, why on earth did you skip shatter? It's one of the better attacks in the set. Even with a heck of a lot of recharge, bash and clobber is a bit light for the ST work, and shatter can help there. With some skill, shatter also makes a very good AoE attack. If you don't care about the 47 power, put shatter there instead (although I would prefer it earlier).

Finally, many choose to put membrane HOs into active defense at the top levels. Due to some quirks in the way the enhancement system works, those enhancements actually boost the defense debuff resistance the power offers, greatly improving the set's overall abilities in that area. Softcapped defense isn't nearly as good, after all, if its stripped away by the first roman to come along.

Just the base difficulty: +0/x1/no bosses/no AVs (which made the EB robot into just a boss, and IX into an EB). Monica spawned just before I got to the roof (one floor down), and all the bombs were on the roof. I didn't realize at first that I would be having to escort, so I actually stealthed to Monica (after killing IX) and ended up taking out the family on my way down - which is why I commented that I didn't see any easy way to get her killed, since even doing that, the family wasn't any real threat to her.

Although, to be honest, I'm not sure I would have thought of leading her to IX and getting her killed anyway - in fact, the possibility of getting her killed to fail the mission didn't even occur to me until well afterward. I'm not used to failing objectives on purpose, especially by action instead of inaction. I was all set to have to make a choice, but I wasn't clear about how I was going to go about doing that. Would it be possible to have IX try to impede your escape instead of waiting for you (say, spawn near the beginning after you rescue Monica)? With some appropriate dialogue from IX (and objective bar text), I think that might bring home the possibilities more forcefully to players who hadn't considered that sort of choice. That would, of course, be contingent on the spawn points for IX working out so that the players would be actually forced to get past him on the way out, but at least it would be a way to ensure that the players won't be fighting him without Monica in tow. (By the way, the souvenir, of course, only makes sense if Monica survives. Is it actually possible to have an arc award a different souvenir if the final mission is failed? I can think of one canon arc that does that, but I didn't know if the MA had that ability.)

As far as the 'legit family' thing goes, I'd have to go back and look at the intro dialogue more carefully, I guess. Going for a slow reveal does make sense, but in that case, it might be good to ensure that the hero is provided with what seems like a very good reason to work with them. I know that you played up the 'agree to keep things legal' part, but that only covers part of it, as the hero needs enough motivation to actually take on the job in the first place.

Warning: this post will likely contain SPOILERS.

Reflecting on the arc a bit more, there were a couple story points that came to mind as well as the technical issues we talked about right afterward.

The first, which is a bit minor, is that I think you might want to emphasize a bit more at the beginning that this is a branch of the Family which has gone legit. I know for a while I was wondering "ok, why is my hero agreeing to do work for the family...?" I even canceled the arc temporarily after reading the first briefing so I could go look at the description again and make sure it was marked 'heroic', not 'villainous'. It becomes clearer after a while, but I was a bit confused at first.

Also, while the title for the last mission read 'Choose', I never actually saw a point where I would get to *make* a choice. IX and the family guy both were waiting for me in the very first room, and both of those objectives were required, as far as I could tell. After that (by the way, nice map choice), the only thing left to do was to go get the chick and clear the bombs. From what I've seen, the usual interface authors use for making a choice is to make the mission failable and offer different dialogue and clues for that, but I didn't see any way to fail the mission other than somehow getting the escort killed, which I don't know how I would have managed. Was there actually intended to be a choice offered to the player, or is the title simply referencing the choice your character must presumably have made in accepting the mission?

VEAT ranged and melee modifiers are both 1.0. For comparing this sort of thing, check out this page, select 'melee_damage' and compare their values to those of blasters, who we know have a 1.0 melee modifier. There aren't any other ATs with scale 1.0 ranged modifiers, so you can't compare that way, but you can note that they have the same ranged scalar as melee.

I would go stone melee. It's got really good single target damage, and the usual drawback (huge end use) is easily mitigated by /EA's tools. It has somewhat lackluster AoE damage, but does have spectacular AoE and single target mitigation between knockdowns in the hammers, the MAG 4 HOLD in seismic smash, and the AoE KD/stun in fault. I don't think it would have the AoE damage to solo *fast* at x8, but if you can soft cap your defense, between that and your ability to keep stuff on its butt or incapacitated, I think you'd be pretty safe.

Thing is, you can replace a lot of the things it does without using up the power slot. It does do a lot of useful things, but /elec is so darn tight that sometimes, something's gotta go. Combat jumping is not really a sacrifice since you were presumably going to be getting a travel anyway, and even 1 -kb in combat jumping is enough to stop 90+% of all the knockback you'll see. Yeah, you lose out on the free slot to stick the 3% in, as well as the neg and -end resist, but you gain a priceless free power slot. Sometimes, depending on primary, that might be worth it.