Sailboat

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tough and weave on a stone tank is like medicine pool on an emp. i mean seriously...you can cap the resistance you need to and if you want, take all the optional other armors, then take every power in your secondary and STILL have room for fitness, a travel, and 3 epic pool powers. i could see taking it ONLY if you plan being non granite

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O.o

True not needed for "average" playstyle, but to try to run a granite solo through the missions I run mine thru and you WILL NOT survive without tough and weave. In fact my granite.. fully slotted res/def in tough/weave/granite often cannot survive.

And yes with team support rock can be uber without tough/weave .. but then slap an sb, your other team buffs and target your heals thru/on ANY tank and guess what...

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Do you have Stone Skin too? The default slot in SS, combined with well-slotted Granite, caps you against Smashing and Lethal damage types, making Tough entirely moot except for a prerequisite. Since you're fully slotted Tough, I'm guessing you run it when you're out of Granite, or else you skipped Stone Skin to save a power pick, and use Tough to cap S/L even though it's kind of overkill and costs endurance.

If neither of those two things is true, I can't figure out why you'd slot up Tough.

A

fix

would

be

great!

For me it's about more than being effective. My first villain ever was, for concept reasons, Bots/Dark. Heh. With a clever name and a funny concept. I didn't know Bots/Dark would be one of the power builds V-side.

But he's still sitting around lvl 33, used to pay base rent and set SG permissions, because he didn't hook me. The concept is almost a gag concept, and I think that while the funny ones are clever and make me smile, I don't fall in love with them.

A certain synergy of effectiveness, good looks, good name, intriguing concept, and well-written bio is usually what it takes to hook me. Three or four of them have really taken off and I obsess over them.

I have some whom I like playing very much, but because I couldn't come up with a name I liked, or a costume, or something, just never quite blossomed into romance.

You can finish a toon in much less time without purples. And some of your "lol" commentary is borderline insulting.

Hey, that's not a bad compromise! I'd only lose the recovery bonus but wind up with more recovery anyway.

This wasn't the Brokeback Mountain story arc, was it?

They're not consolidating the farming thread to make it easier to use. They're consolidating it to ghettoize the complaints of the Farm Bureau and free up the rest of the forums for the rest of us to use normally.

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Bad Team Bingo

We could use some better square material

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How about "Pool powers before AT powers".

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<ul type="square">[*] Has travel power but makes you port him to door[*] Watching (and quoting!) TV while playing[*] Tanker gets knocked back[*] I Fell Into a Burning Rain of Fire[*] Casts Immobilizes on the Knockdown Patches[*] SG calling[*] Won't SK[*] SB pls![*] Racist character description[*] Team Leader is testing own custom MA bosses[*] Hopping the whole time team is waiting[*] Influence beggar[*] Feuding in Broadcast[/list]

Merits are great. They don't replace shopping at the consignment houses, because it's too difficult to acquire everything by merits. But they're perfect for when you've almost got everything you want and there's just a few recipes that are either hugely expensive of flat-out unavailable. Use the merits for those and you're good to go. It's a wonderful solution to the immense frustration when you're excited about your almost-finished build but just can't get those last few items!

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and (more annoyingly) Haymaker uses the same animation as Air Superiority.

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Hey, you could take Boxing as a prerequisite to Tough and Weave, then run an attack chain of Boxing, Jab, Air Superiority, and Haymaker -- you'd be endlessly cycling the same tow animations. :P That might work for a "mindless automaton" character concept.

The point of purples is to have something in the game that's hard to acquire and takes time. You can get plenty of power without the purples and do so in short order. The purples are not filling some need for MORE POWERRRR!!!!!, they are rare items to give you something to work toward over the long term.

I finally threw another precious slot into Stamina on my Inv/SS Tanker, and dug up a set of four level 50 Performance Shifter IOs -- the classic End Mod, End Mod/Acc, End Mod/Rech, and the proc.

I failed to note, until after slotting the set, that ED means I'm getting only 91.something % Recovery enhancement.

Now I am getting the (4-slotted) set bonuses --

<ul type="square">[*] Two enhancements improves your Movement by 5%.[*] Three enhancements increases maximum Health by 1.88%.[*] Four enhancements increases Recovery by 2.5%.[/list]
So that means my recovery enhancement is 93-94% counting the 4th-slot set bonus.

If I took out the other three Performance Shifters and just slotted 3 lvl 50 common IOs and the proc, I'd get 99% enhancement (plus the proc when it fires!).

Any opinions on the desirability of doing that? How much endurance are we talking about...I know it must be small, but end is almost wlasy in high demand, so even small amounts might be worth losing the movement and Health bonuses.

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Bad Team Bingo

We could use some better square material

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Okay, that's the flat-out funniest thing I've read this week! Now I'm having even more serious flashbacks (and abusing the "make new card" function).

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there is nothing I dread more than someone saying "I'm not getting xp" once you start a tf. When I was working on TF Commander with my main, it got so bad that I would only invite people that had to exemp down. At least if they were n00bs, we'd get it out of the way as soon as the TF started. I don't know how many times I'd have lowbies drop out of the tf halfway through a posi because they hit the level cap.

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Oh lord, I'm having flashbacks. I once recruited an entire team by pasting a canned message into tells and broadcast. The canned message said the level range for the task force and ADDED "if above 30 you will be exemplared and not receive exp, but will get inf and merits and the badge."

One of the players who joined followed me, for some reason, as I zoned through several zones posting my broadcast invitation. My text said where to gather, but this person followed me anyway. That means she SAW me spam this message over and over-- she was exposed to it quite a lot.

TF started and she said, "Wait a minute, I'm not getting exp!" I explained again about exemplaring...

and she came back with all-caps, "THE LEAST YOU COULD DO IS TELL ME BEFORE WE START!!!" Several of us told her, quite nicely, that it had been in the invitation, and I invited her to scroll back through chat and look it up herself, but she was furious. After sputtering for a few moments, she then typed something about people always abusing her and rage-quit.

She had joined with her significant other (whom she left in the lurch by quitting) and even he wasn't able to calm her down, and he wasn't getting exp either.

I know people like to get exp, but....geeze. Everybody was being nice to her, too.



[/ QUOTE ]Another pet peeve of mine , which i saw a couple times on the ITF, is people that would "dc" on the first mission, and miraculously restore connectivity just in time to get a reward.

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Ugh, I met a guy who, for reasons too long to go into, decided he had something to prove. He invited me to a Task Force the next night, using a second account, then "revealed" that it was him again, ha ha! I decided to stay and ignore the jabs. As soon as the TF started, he DCed, and I assumed he'd quit after "making his point," but he appeared for the last mission and got credit. God only knows what he thought he was proving about his skill as a player by not playing.

I've never had anyone use the term "fill" or send a "fill pls?" tell to spawn a Task Force. I know it can be done, but when so doing, people have (so far) always differentiated the request from the standard fill spam, usually by saying something like "Can you help us start a Synapse?"

Don't feel too bad about putting the fill tellers on ignore. They're only using you, not interacting with you.

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Its not like you see a difference between lethal and smashing damage in game.

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*I* do. The way some players confuse lethal and smashing as if they're te same thing is annoying, because there's considerable difference. Just because some powers and IOs offer mitigation against both doesn't mean they're the same. Ask the robots that question.

Yeah -- if you're exclusively duoing, you may find a Fire or Shield Tanker is plenty sturdy (since you'll be facing smaller groups) and does more damage.

And if your duo partner has buffs, you might be quite durable.

I think the problem is the incredible power of, and hence the reliance on, the Dark heal.

Dark Regeneration completely heals the scrapper with the same click it completely heals the Tanker. Since Dark Regen can fix practically any problem, this means that the subtle difference of the increased res numbers and more hit points of the tanker is hard to notice most of the time, as long as DR recharges before you run completely out of life. So the more visible difference is the attack sets, and the tanker loses out there.

They should fix everything -- endurance, damage, defense, recharge -- so all brand-new level 1 characters work just like a purpled-out level 50. That way no one is disappointed! Of course, there's nothing to look forward to either.

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If you have Mids Hero Designer, use the "Set Bonus Finder" tool to help.

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Or the wiki:

Sets that improve run speed

Sets that improve movement speed

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Good call! I didn't know they had that cross-reference for set bonuses.

*The more you know*

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When you're on the Big Glorious Page o' Sets, click a set's name to go to the page for that set, then go to the bottom of the set descriptions page. There will be a list of links that categorizes...err...subsets of the...sets, like "Sets for levels 15-10" and "Sets for improving melee damage."

Once you're at one of those tables, the hourglass at the top of each column can be used to sort, so you can group all the sets in different ways -- for example, grouping all the defense bonuses you can get with 2 slots next to each other, or sorting all the melee damage bonuses in order from strongest to weakest. It's useful.

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Oh very much yes.


Cohort,

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Pony's name isn't Cohort! It's _____ !

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I suggest we call that forum ID "Flatline" when we refer to him/her.

So what is your build? Roughly. Or at least what AT/powersets? If it gets compliments, I'm curious.

Heh, I just recently decided to try the craft-and-sell shtick, nosed around, and settled on...Reactive Armors. Did a couple of them successfully and as soon as I got serious, suddenly got squeezed. Guess I know what happened. :P

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Are there other primaries that truly outshine the Dark set?

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Yeah.

The Scrapper primaries don't have any stinkers. Anything will perform well. But most of the primaries have something in particular they do very well. Dark is a grab bag of great utility powers without giving up good, fast damage, although largely single-target. It won't compete with Spines or Claws for area damage, or the swords for defense if stacking with a defense-based secondary. Even Martial Arts was recently shown to be a much better single-target set for DPS than previously thought, and it always looks great.

For synergy, though, Dark/Shield, Dark/Inv, Dark/WP, and Dark/SR are pretty sweet combos.

Both Dark/ and /Inv got improved. Also, changes to the structure of IO set bonuses for typed defense really, really helped Invulnerability become more competitive with the best Scrapper sets.

Dark/WP would do fine -- but Dark/Inv will also do great, and the synergy between primary and secondary is pretty good in either case. Either one would be a solid choice. If you still have that 28 Dark/Inv, that might sway you; and WP might be a little easier to start from scratch.