Bright

The villains and rogues of the Isles put aside our sundry schemes and dastardly plots long enough to completely beat the snot out of Neuron, Bobcat, Marauder and what seemed like pretty much every Goliath-class Warwalker in Praetoria when they dared to attack Saint Martial.

We were relatively few... but exceptionally vicious.

Cole's toadies never stood a chance.

'Saw that late last night... and was equally amused and confounded by it.

It's an odd thing to find just floating there over a parking lot. XD

Differences in server culture and community norms (and not wanting to unintentionally come off as some sort of stereotypical "obnoxious American" due to any misunderstanding of same-) is exactly why I haven't said a word to anyone since I started working on a Union character.

I figured lurking for awhile to figure out what was what was preferable to just jumping in and ending up looking like a complete idiot...

Too bad that particular player didn't follow a similar plan. He sounds like a real pain in the rear.

I've only really had naming troubles twice with my crew...

The first was my grumpy old broadsword scrap. When I was coming up with his backstory and personality, I knew right off the bat what I WANTED to call him. There was never in question to me what his name was... The problem was that, unlike Palrah and the rest of mine using personal names, his name was a "real world" one. I wanted to call him Saiph.

No dice. Someone had already claimed it. (Along with the rest of the stars in Orion, it turns out. I checked them all later on when I built my Warshade. )... So, old Saiph ended up being the very first of my Rularuu bird-things to have a "Hero name" that was different from his own. He ended up being called Quicksilver Falcon (an Exalted reference, since I play a lot of eclipse-caste Solars-).

The other was much more recent, and kind-of surprised me. I was building another of the bird-things (a Dark Corruptor-) and decided that I wanted to call him Adamas. Since I'd had no trouble getting Suzume, Anu, Kephren and a number of other not-common-but-not-exactly-obscure-either names, I thought I had a pretty good chance at that one. Again, no such luck... and Addie has ended up going by Seraphim Chanter.

The "replacement names" in those two's cases don't bother me, really. They suit the characters well enough and since I've given other toons even sillier names (I have a Peacebringer named Mist in Moonlight, it just doesn't GET much sillier than that-) they don't even stand out as mismatches on my selection list... They're just not the names I wanted to begin with.

I played around with my Ninja/FF mastermind last night. She's at 28.

In the last few days, I've also spent time with my Dark corr (17), my Mind/Psi dom (29) and my BS/Shield scrap (30). I rarely put their recipe drops on the market, though... Most of them just aren't worth bothering.

Only if Kestrel gets to name her Adept, too.

(I'd love it if we all got the ability to name all of our assorted Patron/Vet/Incarnate/Etc pets, myself.)

Some of you guys are harsh. o_0

We've been running a lot of smaller trial groups over on Liberty lately, and it's gotten pretty common to queue the group and find a stray or two added to the list. It's never been treated as a Bad Thing in any group I've run with, even when lag was a major issue, and I've never seen any of those players kicked or pushed off into some kind of "loser team" just because they got dropped into someone's pre-built league.

Did our leader expect to have them? Obviously not.
Will their participation possibly require some team-balance tinkering? Possibly.
Are they an "unknown quantity"? Definitely.
Could they potentially do something stupid enough to make us all curse their names? Of course.

But strays having the *potential* to cause problems and the real probability of them doing so seem pretty far apart. None of our add-ons have ever caused any problems or set off any disasters. Some have even turned out to be damned fine additions to the league.

So... why not give them a fair shake? It MIGHT come back to bite you, sure, but the odds are against it and it's not like you have to Friends List them just because they joined your BAF.

I'd build a DB & WP scrap, tank or stalker myself, just because those are the ATs/sets I'm most familiar with. At this point, I have a very good handle on what one of those can take and what they can't.

So, what are you most familiar with? What melee (or non-) type are you most comfortable running? How you, as a player, handle the missions is probably going to make a bigger difference in the toon's solo preformance than which specific powersets you pick at that level.

Liberty's not bad... It's not Freedom or Virtue, but it's far from an abandoned "ghost town".

There are a fair few trial/raid/TF players and badge collectors around, and several active server channels. Most of the population seem to be eastern US, though, so you won't find much going on late-night if you're on the west coast.

Zhen calls hers DaVinci... (Her other bots are Edison, Oppenheimer and Archimedes. Soon to be joined by Daedalus, the Praetorian clockwork. XD)

I'm a NA player, but plan on moving one of my Liberty stalkers to Union to play with a couple of friends over there.

We've pretty much always killed whatever minion happened to be standing at the end of the long row close to that Arbiter, under the assumption that they were part of his "group"... We've never had the Bane and his captors fail to come up. So, yeah... I suspect you're supposed to have to kill that minion to clear the objective if you're running at a level that spawns one.

When I did Lambda on my FF/Rad defender, I stuck close to her team's tank (or the brute playing tank, as the case may be-), made liberal use of inspirations, turned on her personal force field and flight for faster, safer travel between the mobs (She also has a stealth IO, which helped-), and used ranged, single target attacks on the boxes and tubes from as far away as I could while still keeping said-tank inside my bubble and Leadership toggle radius. I only used her AoEs or attacked things OTHER than the glowie on those occasions when the mob seemed be giving my tank a rough time, but when he left... I left. No lingering around. That'll get you killed.