PleaseRecycle

Er, would the rock-throwing citizen win if she were level 12? I've never run TPN but other posts on the topic gave me the strong impression that the citizens are actually minion-class at best and it is the presence of crippling debuffs on the trial that renders players vulnerable to such attacks.

As a long-time expert on making unintentionally inflammatory posts, JustBling, I can confirm that that's what you're doing at this point.

I dunno if you're shooting for one of the top DPS chains or not, but if so that entails a fairly sizeable amount of global recharge. In this light, weave goes a long way toward softcapping you with a single target in range with a lot less emphasis on defense bonuses throughout the rest of your build. It doesn't hurt that with tough you can be permanently sitting at ~70% s/l resistance, either. Boxing (or kick) can take a low level kinetic combat set in case you wanted to avoid one in one of your better attacks. Storm kick, for instance, really deserves the nicest values you can give it.

Spring attack: I took this for fun on my SJ/EA because I didn't want to go fireball yet again. It's a decent attack, there's really no comparison to fireball, but more importantly it's quite amusing to use. Looks cool, feels stompy, gets the job done. Having access to a teleport power also lets you pull off a few things that you otherwise might not be able to do. Good applications include getting unstuck when buried under a million guys as well as some geometry in combat, and stealthing past blobs.

All right, as someone who does do excessive things with expensive builds, let me chime in and say that while I understand that any reduction in effectiveness is annoying, going from 90+% to 70% DDR really shouldn't be that big of a deal. The only place that could conceivably make a difference that carrying two or three lucks couldn't alleviate is trying to solo a +4x8 no-incarnate TF as a couple other people have done in the history of the forum. The very fact that you are so quick to give up on the character, though, tells me that if you were planning on doing that you'd do it with one of the characters that you already like more anyway.

Some thoughts, having played both sets independently of one another:

For SJ, you pretty much want to take all of the attacks. When you get to 28 and shin breaker you might consider respeccing out of initial strike, as even without lots of global recharge you can always form a chain by integrating finishers without stressing about being at combo 3 every time. Combat readiness is also more important to SJ than build up is to BS, for example.

How committed are you to no IOs? My first suggestion for fire is to get a single karma and put it into combat jumping. You can live without it by taking acrobatics instead but it makes your life soooo much easier. That aside, slot healing flames relatively early for heal and recharge. If you're not going to have a lot of defense, healing flames is going to get you out of a lot of scrapes. Don't be afraid to use lucks, either, as fire is not known for being the sturdiest set out of the box.

I think you're going to want confront. It lets you split up blobs of enemies that will be tough for you to deal with all at once in the mid levels especially. Also, time that enemies spend running over to you as you hide behind a corner to jump 'em is time that healing flames spends recharging. Basically take all of street justice and all of fire, apart possibly from temperature protection depending on how you feel about its recharge resistance. Once you have consume, burn and fiery embrace slotted up you're pretty much home free.

There is no buff stacking issue. Maybe a handful of posters here think that there is but any hope of diminishing returns being added globally to all powers was dead six to eight years ago. Do you actually think the devs are going to fundamentally change one of the basic principles of the game at this point in its existence or are you trying to conflate the hami-o fix with that?

I genuinely and strongly dislike the set for that reason. Boring and overpowered don't offset each other, both of them are bad.

If I had my way you could keep foot stomp how it is, maybe reduce the KD chance. Scrap rage and go back to the drawing board on the set's central buff mechanic. I wouldn't want it to be a copy of street justice or titan weapons, but street justice and titan weapons are excellent examples of the new dev strategy of allowing sets to be a bit overpowered but in a way that they internalize and that forces players to consider tradeoffs. There is nothing to consider with SS: take rage, KO blow, FS, and punch as a mule and then supplement with pool powers. Never, ever exemplar below 30. Character complete.

It kind of seems like you were tired of the character in the first place and the HO fix occurred coincidentally at precisely the correct time to reinforce that feeling.

I agree, and I don't use red fortune on melee ATs personally. That doesn't make it a horrible set, however. It's also the only defense or resistance set that really encourages you to six slot it; aegis comes in at five (or three) slots, and the rest give you the good stuff with three or four slots.

The defense set I didn't name, red fortune, gives both recharge and defense bonuses and is an excellent low budget alternative to luck of the gambler for characters who can afford the slots either because they need the ranged defense or because they have the leeway. This is without even bringing up reactive armor and aegis, sets which can deliver exceptional amounts of defense considering the values you can get, or gift of the ancients and impervium armor which are more esoteric but can be godsends on certain builds. Then again, we aren't talking about certain builds, we appear to be talking about TF soloing shield defense characters.

Obviously "I might want to go with barrier over my current rebirth, in order to gain protection against defense debuffs, and..." is incredibly hyperbolic since we both know that for a set with as much resistance and defense as shield plus fighting has, rebirth is better by leagues. What you might have to do is take two or three lucks in the course of soloing an ITF. Is that really a big deal? You can still use inspirations on a master of! I'm also fairly sure that you enjoy thinking about builds given your posts that I've seen so I don't buy that it's too much trouble, either.

The funny thing is, by far my most defended meleer lately has been EA and it has I believe the standard 51% DDR. You're right, I don't have trouble with defense debuffs on that character, even on ITFs and such. Know what else I've been running lately? Fire armor, dark armor, willpower and regen. If you split all of their DDR between them they wouldn't have enough for the bus ride to Cimerora, yet that has somehow failed to stop me from abusing our distant ancestors' evil cousins with a variety of fighting techniques. In that light I find it hard to believe that a mere 70% DDR is completely insufficient for an effective character.

The next time the devs alter the stats of a power in super strength, expect big changes to foot stomp or rage. See psychic shockwave.

That said, yes, SS probably should be revamped so that its efficacy is distributed throughout the set rather than baked into three powers. I would never play a SS character with rage functioning as it does today, but if they nerfed it and nixed the crash I'd have to consider it.

I always got the impression that mind link was designed to accept recharge in an indirect way, since it was concocted fairly near to Willpower so they certainly could have made the recharge unbuffable had they wanted to.

As to the HO fix, 'bout time.

If you could change alignment via tips faster, you could also earn alignment merits faster. It's as simple as that.

I dunno Sam, it seems like the devs have been trying to give more context to the whole team by adding cutscenes and dialogue parts to missions and a lot of people on this forum at least don't like that either. I don't really mind either method; it's nice to see a well thought out cutscene now and then (which not all of them are, but neither are all of them not), but I'm also fine with a bad guy showing up and getting right to the fighty part without much chatter.

I forgot Gyrfalcon existed because he is so profoundly bland. Slinger appears on the Recluse Strike Force, so if you don't play villains that would explain why you haven't seen him. He is a slightly cybernetic looking gunslinger and he summons dozens of robotic minions during the fight, which seems suitably interesting to me.

This almost seems too obvious but no, there have not been any hints of anything like that. If anything it seems particularly unlikely because then they'd have to worry about people who bought the sets themselves versus those who unlocked the APP version when considering the status of costume pieces. What about them seems inherently great for APPs, though? overcharge is not making it into an APP, I can tell you that right now, and I am not aware of any APPs that comprehensively focus on debuffs as one based on time manipulation would have to.

Give them taunt that actually works.

Looks to me like someone spilled a little phazon on the place. Or maybe on the art team.

Even if the giant lady is Trial-sized Diabolique, which would be ironic since usually that means it's smaller than normal, it seems perfectly fitting since presumably the reason she has transformed is some kind of tapping into a Banished Pantheon god, who presumably would feature the Banished Pantheon aesthetic. They don't wear a ton of clothing.

Corollary: add alternate animations that are the same but that apply the magnetism aura to affected targets.

Or, if you want to be a curmudgeon about it, just run T-Mac's arc in the appropriate range and then ouro A Hero's Hero at 50. Easier still, run Maria's new arc and then run the first three missions of AHH since that's where you find Siege, as I recall.