Adeon Hawkwood

Ah, that was unclear from your OP, it sounded like you had a a total of 16 of which only 1 was unspent . In that case you'll need 3 more tokens to unlock Tier 9 VIP plus however many tokens you want to spend there. The absolute cheapest would be the $50 package + a $15 package which gives four points but if you want more than one set of costume parts you may want to just get the $100 package which will give you 8 more tokens.

I think you mean level 4. Level 35 is when Epic pools unlock .

On the subject of Tempered Focus itself I like it. With the Resistance changes Mez Resistance is not viable to build for on a squishy so having a pool power to supplement it is nice. My only suggestion would be to drop the Sleep Resistance to 10% since with Inherent Fitness we already have 40% Sleep Resistance from Health.

EDIT: I haven't tested it on Beta but I seem to recall Synapse or Hawk saying that the pre-requisite rules for pool were changing so that the fourth power only requires one pre-requisite. If so then you could take Tempered Focus + Weave without taking Tough. This isn't critical but worth keeping in mind.

Part of the problem with Boxing and Kick is that so many melee sets are either built around a gimmick or use a weapon. This means that for most sets making Boxing or Kick a part of your attack chain ends up hurting you since you either have redraw or are wasting the opportunity to make full use of your set's ability.

Yeah, pretty much. The amount of Defense that IOs can build up on a squishy character is borderline game breaking. There's a reason that Incarnate foes have more To Hit and that so many newer NPC groups love defense debuffs.

As someone who plays mostly squishy characters I'm definitely not getting as much benefit form this as melee characters. I do have a Cold/Ice/Soul Defender that I'm toying with building for Resistance but he already has pretty sizeable resistance boosts from combining Arctic Fog and Dark Embrace so it makes some sense. Honestly though even there I'm not sure it's worth it for him compared to just soft capping Ranged defense.

I could see it being worth doing with sets like Time and Traps where softcapping is pretty easy but they're basically in the same boat as melee characters.

That being said Arcanaville made some good points about stacking Resistance on a Blaster with an Absorb sustain in one thread so maybe for them it's worth doing.

My gut instinct is that they are. The average mitigation they provide is lower than defense bonuses but there are a lot of tradeoffs between Defense and Resistance in real game situations which make the resistance bonuses more appealing. In particular NPCs get defense debuffs handed out like candy while resistance debuffs are less common (although they tend to be nastier when they do turn up). Secondly in a team situation Defense Buffs are a lot more common than resistance buffs so a team is more likely to make up for a lack of defense than a lack of resistance.

Additionally the availability of Resistance buffs in IOs is different from Defense bonuses which is really going to impact it. A good example is the purple sets, with this change there are several purple sets that offer 6% F/C/T/P Resistance and 10% Recharge. I can't think of any defense based set that is offering a combo like that and several characters could easily stack 5 of these sets without impacting their overall build much (Dominators and Fortunata Widows being prime examples). There are a number of other sets that offer two or even three resistance bonuses which is much rarer for Defense bonuses.

On the other hand it's also providing the means for Invuln to virtually eliminate it's Psionic Vulnerability (Psionic Defense is still going to be low but you can easily get Psionic Resistance up to 40% using just the special IOs not to mention at least 12% from Purples possibly more depending on your build).

That's even weirder, maybe they changed it without telling us? I was definitely able to join it on a Rogue and the team definitely contained Heroes.

That being said, buy your IOs BEFORE the weekend starts. Prices go crazy due to high demand (and the fact that crafters are to busy playing to make them).

Assault Rifle and Electrical Blast beg to differ.

Well Force of Thunder would be a bad idea if you were doing the Abandoned Sewer Trial and were near to any enemies. Bowling Rikti off the catwalks is fun until they all come back.

Cauterizing Aura would be risky in the TPN trial, make sure to stay away from cameras .

You probably want to turn Frigid Protection off during the glowies phase of Lambda. The extra regen isn't worth the aggro you'll attract.

The fundamental questions with Absorb are how large the shield is and how frequently you can reapply it (either with a click or a constantly reapplying toggle).

What this means is that the damage you can effectively mitigate with an Absorb power is not measured in straight DPS but is more a matter of how frequently the attacks come relative to the shield refreshing.

For example lets say I have a 100 point absorb shield that refreshes every 3 seconds. Now lets say I have two choices for enemies, I can have a foe that attacks for 300 points of damage every 6 seconds or a foe that attacks for 150 points of damage every 3 seconds. In both cases they are dealing 50 DPS but in terms of actual hit point less the second foe will deal about half the damage.

The first foe will deal 300 points of damage of which 100 will be stopped by my shield since it has time to refresh in between his attacks so he's effectively dealing 200 points of damage every 6 seconds. The second foe on the other hand will only deal 50 damage every 3 seconds since my shield will refresh in between his attacks so although he attacks more frequently he still faces a fresh shield.

So as you can see Absorb works best when faced with a larger number of smaller attacks rather than a small number of larger attacks. Resistance helps this by making all attacks smaller.

That's the basics although Arcana could probably explain it better .

It's 1 point of protection but you can stack it up to three times so you get three points at max stack. This isn't great but it enough to avoid one mez form most enemies.