Call Me Awesome

I'll try and make it Friday, I've both PB/WS at 50 so I'm good to go.

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Just looked over the characters in question and it looks like it'll be ScaleBalancer, the PB. He's current on IO's while the WS is running an issue 17 build.

Well, my only corruptor of significant level is Fire/Dark (and an absolute BEAST) but I've played Dark Blast and Rad to 50 and Sonic to ~35 on a defender. I'm not as familiar with Time; although I'm currently working on a Dark/Time controller in the mid-20's.

The PBAOE aura of Time seems to be quite powerful so you'll want to be at relatively close range... although it's radius is large enough that you can stay just outside Melee range. Now the question is what you want to do with the character. For straight up damage then unquestionably Fire is best, however that's all that it brings to the table. Sonic brings a considerable amount of -res (even more on a defender) while Dark brings relatively low damage but a lot of -tohit which stacks with several powers in Time. Rad brings a lot of AOE and considerable -def, although that's of more limited utility once the character matures.

On the whole I'd probably lean towards Sonic or Dark for a character I planned to team with as both would be force multipliers for your teammates... one with the -res increasing damage output and the other with the -tohit increasing the team survivability.

Also just as a FYI when your character transfers you keep your auction house inventory, personal vault storage and email. You will be removed from your SG however and if your name is taken on the destination server you'll get a rename token and be prompted to rename your character the first time you log in.

So don't worry about emptying all your Wentworth's stuff and your Vault, it will follow you to the new server. All SG stuff stored in base storage will stay behind however as will all prestige you may have earned. Your server friends list will be wiped clean (but your global friends list will be intact) and you'll be without any SG affiliation.

If you're moving "Amazing Man" from one server to another and there happens to already be an Amazing Man on the destination you'll end up with the name "Amazing Man1" and a name change token so you can rename your character.

And, as has been mentioned, there's no limit to how many times you can move a character; it just costs a bus token for each move. Like the OP I've quite a pile of the things from vet rewards; I occasionally use one to move an abandoned toon to another server and free up a slot. Personally I'd rather move anything I've invested the time to get into the 30's or above than delete... maybe I'll want to play that character again someday.

I've played to some extent on most of the NA servers and apart from Freedom which since it's the busiest is also where you find the highest number of jerks, I haven't found a really bad server in the bunch. Unfortunately Freedom DOES tend to gather the jerks so it's one server I avoid.

Most of my time is on Guardian... about middle of the road in population. It's home to quite a few, er, colorful characters and lots of friendly people. I've also spent a fair amount of time on Pinnacle and Infinity... both of them feel remarkably like Guardian with plenty of good people around. Pin is somewhat lighter in population but I haven't found that to be much of an issue.

Virtue sometimes gets a bit weird if you get in a group of RP'ers but if that's your thing then it's certainly the place to go. Generally apart from some occasional very strange conversations I really can't complain about the players there.

Relaxing is a really slippery word in this context... I usually find a mature Scrapper fairly relaxing mentally as I just punch the guy in front of me in the junk, then repeat until the spawn's dead. Plenty of durability so I don't have to sweat my own survival and limited team responsibilities to worry about.

Since I typically play support characters like Tanks, Controllers, Corruptors, Defenders and the like anytime I'm playing a pure damage toon I don't have to worry about buffing/debuffing/aggro as much so I can just take it easy and only worry about the bad guy in front of me.

You'd probably get more responses if you posted this in Player Questions, this is the Guides section and it's for players to post advice and guidance on various aspects of the game.

Personally I'm not familiar with that mouse, I use the Belkin Nostromo N52 gamepad... I program it's buttons for 1-0 to correspond to the first tray and the remaining 4 buttons are space, control, alt and a keybind with the directional rocker programed to move forward/back/strafe left/right.

Play around with various configurations and find out what works best for you.

I can't speak for Staff, but StJ is a LOT of fun on a Scrapper; mine is StJ/Inv level 50 and it's one of the most fun characters I've ever played to level. There's no redraw of course, but you are building combos with your attacks and the combo buff doesn't last long so you'll find you're in a hit-hit-hit-HIT HARD-repeat rotation. That's one reason I'm glad I went /Inv since it's set and forget, and being soft capped to S/L (can't get E/N there on a scrapper without too many compromises) I don't need Dull Pain very often.

I'm not sure StJ would work really well with a Stalker; it's very much an "in your face" set rather than a stealth and strike one. Still, I've never played a Stalker so my opinion there probably isn't worth a whole lot. One thing to keep in mind with StJ is that it'll burn a fair amount of endurance with it's fast activating attacks so plan for that in your build. I'd say it's equal or slightly heavier in endurance than Broadsword. Nothing you can't build around as mine has near infinite sustainability even without the Alpha slot but it can be an issue early.

It sounds to me that you're sending the item, then seeing it in your email? That's perfectly normal, just log out, log in the other character and claim the email.

When you email something to yourself you're really tossing the item into email storage and any character on your account can retrieve it, including the one who originally sent it.

Example:
You have character Bob sends something to your global @whatever. Bob sees the item he just sent appear in his email inbox. Bob logs out and then character Jim is logged in and he also sees the item in his email inbox. Jim claims the item from the email and you've transferred it from one alt to another.

Personally I would take your issue as a sign that it's time for new toys and buy myself a new mobo, CPU and RAM at a minimum. I've built a couple of non-gaming rigs in the last year and you can do that for anywhere from around $150 (pretty low end) to $600 (good board, i7 and plenty of RAM).

I'm not up on the latest hardware... it's been about 6 months since my last build... but you should be able to get a nice mobo/CPU/RAM combo for around $250 or so. I've had good luck with Asus and MSI; haven't built a Gigabyte board yet but they're well rated.

Oh, if you get over 4GB of RAM remember you'll need to add a copy of Win7 64 bit to your shopping list @ around $120. XP only sees a max of 4GB.

Right now I've been debating upgrading myself; like Leandro I'm still running a Core2Quad Q9550. I've upgraded to an SSD boot drive and tossed a 275GTX vid card in and it's still ok, although it is starting to show it's age. Still, it does what I need and for the moment I'll probably save the money until something breaks and gives me an excuse or I need more horsepower for something.

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Your old CPU is only single core? Then it's definitely time to retire it; I'd consider one of the new i5 quad core CPU's as they seem to be a good bang for the buck.

If you're feeling wealthy you COULD go with a pair of hex core Xeon CPU's for 12 cores of goodness. I had to build a new video editing machine in August (lightning strike melted the old one via surge through the NIC) and that's what I used. Only cost $3k for the CPU's and $500 for the mobo and it really does scream. It's just barely conceivable that may be overkill for you however...

Darkest Night does work well with 4 Dark Watcher... that's my slotting on my Dark/Dark defender. My Fire/Dark corruptor gets 3 Discouraging Words for the S/L defense... I built him for the S/L softcap and simply accept lower enhancement values in DN... I only use it in the upper levels against hard targets anyway.

Fearsome Stare I like to slot for tohit debuff and range... I do use the Cloud Senses set there. Range is important also however as it extends the cone enough to cower an entire room, therefore I stop at 4 Cloud Senses and toss a debuff/recharge and a common range in the last two slots.

Haunt I would slot like Phantom Army with 4 Expedient Reinforcement and 2 Soulbound, the proc and the Dam/Recharge.

One trick to keep in mind is the Impeded Swiftness proc; it works nicely in Tar Patch.

I'm having fun myself with my new Dark/Time 'troller... I decided against /Dark since I've already taken 2 Dark Miasma characters to 50 and Time was brand new to me.

My thought is that my Ill/Rad/Fire generally doesn't get much aggro thanks to perma-PA and my other controls so the shield isn't a priority for me. One problem with Mace Blast is that you're going to have redraw slowing down your Blind/SW/Blast ST chain that doesn't exist with Fire Blast.

You already have considerable -res in EF along with a ton of -regen in LingRad so I don't see a compelling reason to look for more in the Mace secondary effects. I really think you're better off sticking with Fire and the damage.

It's really hard to come up with a rule for min/max that actually applies to all AT and powerset combinations. For a scrapper you'll want to maximize your damage, defense then recharge yet for an Ill/Rad controller you'll probably want to focus primarily on recharge.

There's lots of differing ways to maximize a character as well and that may well change from one player to another according to what they're trying to get out of their character. I applaud the OP for wanting to take on this rather daunting task; the biggest pitfall I can see is falling into the "thou shalt build this way heretic!" trap when there's multiple ways you can go in optimizing a character's build.

My own thumb rule is to look at the character and assess what it's strong at and what it's weak at, then work out a build to maximize the strengths and minimize the weaknesses. Yes, sometimes that's the "defense then recharge" route however many other times it's something else.

As an example I have a Dark/Dark defender that I've optimized for tohit debuffing. In doing so I quite deliberately maximized the debuff potential at the expense of some of the damage output. This was designed as a team character and the purpose is to completely neuter entire spawns for the rest of the team to kill quickly and safely, and it can maintain a -70% tohit debuff on an entire spawn and well over -100% on a single target before you take Dark Servant into account. It would have been equally valid to have chosen to build that defender to maximize damage and defense, particularly if it was a solo character.

Probably a bug, several times I've run across a radio mission to get "Boss_Name"... and in the mission the baddie actually IS Boss_Name. My guess at the time was someone forgot to give him a unique name and that's just the default if the name's blank.

Once you hit 50 I'd say that the Grav Anchor hold proc is pretty much a given in any AOE immob; I have it in my Dark/Dark defender's Tentacles and my Fire/Rad 'troller's Cages. It's just too good not to slot.

I haven't studied the Dark control set that closely... even though I just rolled one... but it seems like the Shadows work similarly to the dark blast Tentacles power? I found on my defender that the damage wasn't worth slotting for yet the tohit debuff was significant so I went with the Cloud Senses set.

For procs you've the Posi, Cloud Senses, Trap of the Hunter and Grav Anchor available that I see offhand... 3 damage and one hold. You could proc it up that way and toss in acc & range to fill it out. It does look like procs will get you considerably more mileage than straight up damage slotting.

On the Will of the Controller I just bought a set for my Ill/Rad, it was really fairly inexpensive at around 10-20 million per IO. It has no damage enhancement though so it may not be ideal to slot there... it's mainly acc/control/recharge. I tossed it into Flash on my Ill/Rad.

I rolled up Dark/Time; it looked like it should be effective and I'd never played a Time character. The Dark/Dark combo is interesting, but I've played Dark Miasma to 50 twice and to the 30's 3 times and the dark secondary is really similar.

At this point After Midknight is only 6 and way too young to know for sure but it looks promising.

As was mentioned there is the "rule of 5" for IO bonuses... you can only get the benefit of a given bonus 5 times. To illustrate this, let's say you have a couple of different sets slotted and both of them have somewhere a 5% recharge bonus. You can slot however many of those sets you like but you'll only get that 5% recharge bonus 5 times no matter what set the bonus comes from. You can, however, get a 5% bonus 5 times, and a 7.5% bonus 5 times, and a 6.25% bonus 5 times... you get the picture.

The rule of 5 applies to the bonus, not the set that bonus happens to come from.

If you're thinking about an IO build I strongly recommend downloading Mid's Hero Designer (http://www.cohplanner.com); a good IO build gets very complex in a hurry with the interaction of all the set bonuses. It wouldn't hurt to check out your AT forum for some advice on your build either, people will be glad to critique and help you improve your character. It can be really easy to gimp yourself if you're just throwing IO's in without an overall plan.