_Zep_

I have not played BAF or Lambda as yet, I do have three Alpha'd 50's one of which is a PB.

My experience is I bring damage to the team. Oft as not I am the only AOE when I run the weekly TF and this brings a lot of damage with it.

Mostly I play my tri-form. If there are a couple controller/dominator types I may play my human build - it is still mostly SO's and not IO'd like my tri-build.

With cosmic balance on a nice team I am a flying AOE machine with 40%-60% (or more) damage resistance. Meaning I need very little support or healing even if I manage to pull agro (as aoe tends to do). With that DR, I also get a damage buff and some mez protection.

If I am pulling agro or things go bad I can always get 85% damage resistance by going dwarf - that's 85% before buffs or cosmic balance.

From time to time things go sour and I have taken over for the down tank or held agro on a second spawn pulled by mistake. With the recharge buff from my alpha my single target heal cycles pretty quickly -- I have also been the sole healer a time or two, not fun but we got the job done.

So, ya, versatility is the word.

All that said, it is harder for a Kheld to be "uber" at damage rather then just very good or decent. We used to be more effective at tanking and the build in fly once was much better then regular fly (imo) -- before movement suppression.

When you had to be 50 to get a Kheld people would also think better of you because you had experience with the game (including the late game).

Us Khelds could defiantly use some tweaking for 'balance' reasons we are not however, completely broken or useless.

Giving PB's another pet to replace photon seekers, something more like Voltaic Sentinel with no duration, or three sentinels with a 1 min duration would help quite a bit.

In fact, make VS white and glowey, replace charged bolt with gleaming bolt and with (perhaps increased recharge) times Proton Scatter and/or Solar Flares and/or Pulsar.

With my human or scrapper-ish build I bring a melee toon with 85% damage resist, and two self heals, self buffs, control, if slotted correctly some decent debuffs.

Most PB powers debuff defence, with procs a lot more can be done, like the unique -acc proc that can go in pulsar and be fired off reasonably often.

Biggest issue I have with the human build is endurance. More IO's will fix that (or /Kin /rad /emp /etc.)

So er ya, we bring our wonderful selves full of game knowledge, experience and we bring tricks and the ability to jump roles as needed.

I got the impression that Shards are more of a single player tool to advance and threads are team/raid rewards to advance.

As such I dont see a problem with them coexisting. Many people like to be able to complete just about everything on their own one way or another.

It wont be fast, you could however, get all your slots and fill them just running tips and radio missions.

What resolution is the main monitor - sorry if I missed it - that will determine how aggressive you can set the ultra mode options.

I have 8 gigs of ram. My hard drive is reasonably fast.

Load times used to be so much shorter. Even just to start the game up takes a while now.

Well maybe not literally, it is seeming like it. Is something going on?

I remember an official post some short while back about a fix, I dont recall my load or zone times getting better or back to previous levels.

OP: Are things working for you?

I think VS has much larger issues that need to be worked out.

As you say recoloring it is an easy fix.

Likely as a pet (gimped though it may be) the artwork is a bit off some how and needs special handling to recolor with a power set.

Lets see it either be able to stack or be semi-perm like controller pets. Both VS and the gun turret should be addressed.

For my End starved fire/storm controller I have it slotted as follows:

Undermine Defenses, <def debuff> <def deb/rech/end> (def debuff/end>
common IO, <rech> <dam> <dam>

Besides the various damage procs and the uber Achilles proc, razzle dazzle has an immob proc which is nice - It helps tornado/spout stick on one target.

There are lots of ways to slot the power depending on what you want it to do.

Is it emergency crowd control? Extra damage? A debuff? For hard targets like AV's?

I even see people us it to pull groups.

Water Spout is a great power.

Nvidia has a new beta driver out. 270.51 might be worth trying to see if it helps.

Seeing set bonuses shows IO's are in place. It does not mean it is a good build. Could be all Kinetic Crash which has wonderful set bonuses and is good in the right powers, not so good in all your attack powers.

Not seeing set bonuses does not prove you arent IO'd... you could be hyper franken-slotted for extreme efficiency with regards to slots / power. Something I am often tempted to do with my Peace Bringer so I can have more free slots available.

So, ya, guy was a huge dork....

Blizzard will do it for people if they can show ownership of both accounts or for situations like my little brother, son, daughter, other relative was using my account and now has their own.

Would be a nice feature to have available for those very same reasons.

Weird. The only time I get that Oh Snap dialog is when i start a shutdown or reboot and then abort it.

It must have something to so with sockets closing or some other resource becoming unavailable.

What kind of firewall are you using? What OS, what router?