Call Me Awesome

I've always used a MS Natural KB (I hate straight KB's) along with a Belkin Nostromo N52 game controller; the controller has 16 programmable keys along with a movement hat and scroll wheel. It also has three separate keymaps so you can have 48 different bind/macros all set up on that controller.

It's something to think about anyway; I've found it makes life much easier than using the KB for playing. Heck, it's possible to set up much more complex macros with that controller than you can with COH; as a for instance I can set it so that one keypress will turn on all 8 of the toggles for my Shield scrapper.

Well, I have taken BS to 50 twice, once as a BS/Regen and once as a BS/Shield. For the record the BS/Regen is very good in the low levels and drops off to adequate in the upper levels; it does have issues with spike damage. With any /Regen in the upper levels you really have two states, full health or dead, with little in between. Get good at timing on Recon, Dull Pain and IH and you're going to do ok, miss your timing and you're going to faceplant. It's very active and will bite you hard if you screw up.

The BS/Shield on the other hand starts off fairly weak just like all defense sets do but it matures considerably tougher than /Regen. As an example I've used that BS/Shield to main tank the ITF unassisted; that's how tough it can get in a mature, soft capped build. The BS/Shield will do a LOT more damage than the BS/Regen as well; with saturated AAO (fairly easy to get in a group) you'll have an 80% damage buff; add in Build Up and you have ~+180% damage; that pushes Shield Charge up to roughly ~550 damage to a large AOE... Whirling Sword will add another ~300 damage to a smaller AOE. Headsplitter/Disembowel/Hack/Slice/Parry will tend to take out the remnants quickly.

Of those two scrappers the BS/Shield is definitely superior in the late game in both durability and damage output. It does take some investment in IO sets to achieve that level of performance but I haven't come up with a build for the BS/Regen that can equal it.

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I don't want anyone thinking Regen's bad by any means... I've played it to 50 twice, once BS/Regen and once Spine/Regen. It just isn't going to have the durability or damage output of a MATURE shield build.

As a bit of empirical data on Ultra Mode, I have an older workstation class laptop with an Intel Core2Duo running around 2.5GHz and an Nvidia 7950GTX mobile video card. I can run UM with some of the features enabled at medium level on that machine and still pull in ~30-40fps in Paragon City @ 1680x1050.

Now I do have to pick and choose carefully what I turn on and how high I crank it but from what we've been told about UM requirements that laptop shouldn't be up to the challenge... but it can do it albeit at a lower level. Things I can activate on that machine: UM shadows @ medium, water reflections @ medium/high. Things like occlusion do really throw out an anchor on performance and taking FSAA above 4x is also a no-no. Frankly I don't recall all the settings on that machine but I was able to get good quality results while maintaining more than 30fps in combat. I'll admit that I was surprised at just how much I could use on that computer.

Unfortunately my brand new i7 based Alienware MX11 with an Nvidia 330 really sucks on UM, the only setting it'll even allow is shadows. It's great at crunching numbers on things like video encoding or Photoshop though which come to think of it IS what I bought the thing for.

I haven't checked the numbers but I've always thought that Gunslingers seemed to have substantially better accuracy, or possibly tohit, than the rest of the mobs. I do know that the Gun Drones have a BASE tohit of 75%, just the same as the player version. Fortunately the Drones don't hit THAT hard... but the dang Gunslingers sure do.

As far as I know only Warshades got missed by the "one instance of a pet at a time" nerf back in what, issue 5?

With enough recharge a Warshade can keep out nearly 3 Dark Extraction pets full time. Unfortunately Controllers can't do this anymore... and I didn't get a 'troller to 32 until LONG after that nerf.

While Chad's right as far as he went, in looking at what you have I question the value of upgrading that machine; yes they would improve your gaming but you're still dealing with the bottleneck of the old CPU and the rest of the machine. I'd be concerned that you'd dump $300-400 on upgrades and still be unhappy with what you had. Some of the things he suggested, like a PCI Express vid card (IF your motherboard supports it) would be useable in a new machine while things like RAM (current hardware uses a different type) would be wasted money if you decided to replace the machine later.

I'm not completely up on the latest hardware but you could put together something with current generation mid-level components for not a lot more than $600 that would eat your machine alive, even with the upgrades. I'm going to assume that you'll keep your current monitor ($150 for a good 21" if you want to upgrade) and your current hard drive/DVD drive and possibly as long as you don't have a proprietary design the case itself (Cases are $20 - $200 depending on features... $40 buys plenty for most people).

Let's see, off the top of my head approximate prices for a full upgrade, power supply - $80, motherboard - $80, CPU - $150, 4GB RAM - $80, vid card - $150. Now this is as I said all off the top of my head and without picking out specific components but it should be within $100 of the total cost.

Ill/Rad is a great choice; it's only weakness is it's lack of AOE. It can tank, it can solo virtually anything in the game including GM's and it's always a benefit to any team.

I have one at 50, perma-PA and it's a real beast. It solos missions faster than my soft capped BS/Shield scrapper thanks to invisibility, PA, Spectral Terror and Deceive. It's a lot of fun to play and very different from a melee character. As long as you don't want it to farm then you won't be disappointed.

Ghouls can be really easy or a nightmare depending on your tactics and team composition. If you lack significant mitigation then you'll need to use care not to pull too many of them at once; running through with a group of 3 scrappers with my SG we had to take them a few at a time. Yeah, the death heal can be a problem, but it isn't a huge one in most situations.

We had a run with an Elec/Rad controller, Elec/Elec dominator and my Ice/Rad corrupter that was sheer awesome, the two Elec's would run around and gather up the aggro cap of Ghouls and herd them together, the sleep field and whatever their end drain power is called would drain the entire group dry in 2 seconds (both the 'troller and dom stacking their drain patch) and I'd drop Rain of Ice and Frost Breath along with the Rad debuffs. We would drop the entire herd in very short order with no issues at all and go out for more. The death heal was mostly a non-issue; no worse than the Freakshow's dull pain to overcome.

All in all I've found Ghouls to be one of the better designed of the new mobs; they're MUCH better than the overpowered clocks or especially the Destroyers. Ghouls aren't overpowered in themselves, it's their numbers that make them dangerous. Either limit the numbers you have to deal with at a time or have some method of mitigating their effects. Absent a means of dealing with their numbers though and you'll have problems. These aren't a typical "run in and kill" enemy group.

You could probably soft cap S/L without gimping yourself; I frankly don't see soft capping more than one type/position by starting out from scratch. I did make a BS/Regen scrapper with soft capped Melee and 24% Range/AOE but as you can guess it strongly leverages Parry for the Melee defense.

Things will get easier next issue with inherent Fitness; that will save you three power picks loosening the build up a bit. It still won't be cheap though!