Call Me Awesome

Newegg is the best computer parts dealer I know of. For some ideas check out Father Xmas' build guides; he has one for around $700 and one for around $1,200.

Ah, just noticed that you've already bought the parts (reading comprehension, I apparently lack it).

Here's a decent guide with pictures on the basic "tab A into slot B" stuff for putting together a machine.

Modern PC's are pretty simple to put together, there's only a few "gotchas". Forgetting thermal paste when you mount the CPU heat sink is a bad thing that can melt your CPU. On the other hand it's extremely easy to apply, just get a thin coating on the heat spreader (silver top) of the CPU. Make sure when you mount the motherboard in the case that the standoffs (the posts you screw the motherboard onto) match up with the holes in the board so you don't short anything out.

Make sure you don't have a static charge; one of the cheapie anti static wristbands are good here. Alternately you can rest a bare foot against a metal chair leg or the computer case

Other than those potential problems it's hard to screw up too badly as long as you don't do something stupid like force a RAM stick into the slot backwards (I had a friend who did just that... it was sticking up on one side because it didn't match up and the idiot powered the machine up anyway. Can you say zap?)

It's good depending on the mobs; it'll plow through most mobs with ease but there's several out there that will hand a regen it's butt.

A 50 Fire/Shield, Elec/Shield or BS/Shield scrapper will be better, but you already have the Spine/Regen at 50 and it's far from useless at mowing down most mobs. Things like Malta, Nemesis, Carnies and the like will be harder but most mobs are easy.

I've a BS/Regen, Spine/Regen and BS/Shield all at 50 and all are quite capable. Regen's a bit squishy at times but it's still a capable scrapper and Spine is really good at AOE. For your Spine/Regen there's two choices in your build decision... go for defense or go for recharge. Either approach is viable. Heck, you'll be fine with a semi-decent SO build for basic farming; after all farming isn't particularly demanding since the idea is killing mass numbers of easy mobs.

I don't really have a build for Spine/Regen I'm happy with; mine hit 50 quite a while ago and isn't played all that much; I think it's mostly SO's and HO's right now. Some general ideas:
From Spines I'd get everything but Barb Swipe and Confront.

From Regen you've a little slack... one thing you'll find is that the old dog of the set, Moment of Glory, is now quite useful as it gives you massive defense and capped resist for 15 seconds... with no crash or HP loss. It's a defensive build up now and just the thing for soaking a problematic alpha strike.

I like the additional AOE potential of getting either Energy Torrent or Fire Ball in the APP; I haven't respec'd my Spine/Regen since the Fire APP came available so I have Energy Torrent on my build. I'd go with Char/Fire Blast/Fireball for the APP powers.

On your slotting, if you go for a recharge build the Crushing Impact set is nice for single target attacks, Doctored Wounds is always nice for Recon, Dull Pain and Instant Healing for cheap 5% recharge bonuses. Impale can take the Decimation set for recharge but it ain't cheap. You'll also obviously want Hasten.

Local, there's also the pairing of Elec/Rad with an aoe /Rad corrupter. We pretty well cleaned up Praetoria with your Elec/Rad 'troller and my Ice/Rad corrupter along with Thorny's Electric dominator.

A couple of seconds to drain the spawn's end dry then drop the rain and debuffs.

There's lots of possibilities, from the standard Fire/Rad controllers (awesome stacking buff/debuff and a TON of damage as they mature) to a group of Shield scrappers (soft capped defenses at 28 with Grant Cover and nice damage output)

I've leveled several combinations of 3-4 players over the years with SG buddies and we've found a lot of effective choices. Actually we haven't found anything yet that wasn't at least somewhat effective.

Let's see, various superteams we've played...
Fire/Rad controllers - one is nice, two is more than twice as good, three is even better. They multiply each other's effectiveness as you add more to the team.

Rad/Sonic defenders - they work nicely together, the only drawback is a lack of control keeping mobs from rushing into your face. On the other hand with all the debuffs they won't accomplish much.

BS/Shield and Dark/Shield scrappers - we had two of each and they made a quite effective team. Very tough, lots of damage output. Slower than Fire/Rad controllers but tougher and safer.

Fire/Dark corrupters - one of our current projects and amazingly powerful once they reach the mid-20's. Alternating tar patch and everyone tossing out rain of fire and fireball tends to melt everything but bosses. Open up with Fearsome Stare and mobs don't fire back much and are under enough -tohit that they can't hit if they do.

We tried a new combination in Praetoria, two electric/rad controllers and an ice/rad corrupter. Amazing even in low levels, the two electric's patch would literally drain a spawn dry of end in seconds for the ice/rad to drop ice storm and frost breath on. As you probably have discovered the Praetorian mobs are a bit... overpowered for a beginner zone. That combination made them a cakewalk.

I wouldn't suggest a melee team for Praetoria though; our team of scrappers (2 KM/WP and 1 Fire/Shield) had a really tough time of it... and all of us are quite competent players. Praetoria is just really unfriendly for most melee characters; we wiped more times in the first 10 levels with that team than we usually do in the first 30 levels in Paragon/RI.

You could also go with a more traditional team with an aggro monkey (tank or scrapper usually) and plenty of damage & support to back him up.

It's actually fairly hard to come up with a 4 man team that would be bad although something like 4 Earth/* or Ice/* controllers would have a tough time with damage output. Nothing would hurt them but unfortunately the reverse would also be true.

I'm going to say it's an interesting idea, but the problem with mobs scaling makes it impractical.

Now something like Sister Psyche that's all Freakshow could work since they exist as level 50 mobs but Synapse? Clockwork stop at level 20 unless you'd substitute the Psychic Clocks in the upper 40's arcs.

So interesting, but without revamping all the villain groups to span all levels it'd lead to several TF's being cakewalks thanks to weak enemies.

There's benefit in 4 cores over a 2 core CPU in that Windows and whatever other programs you may run (Ventrilo, Herostats, web browser etc) can use two cores while COH uses the other two.

I really doubt you'd get any use out of 6 cores unless you were trying to run some processor hungry aps at the same time; you aren't trying to encode video, apply Photoshop filters or the like while playing I assume?

Short answer is to go with the higher clocked quad core over a hex core CPU. It'll actually save you money and it's faster for what you want.

Take a look at my first 20 levels guide for a template to build your tanker to. Once you're ready for a more advanced build you can look at the soft cap guide.

In general if you follow the beginning guide and pick up Tough Hide at around 26 you'll be on the right track. I suggest getting RPD sometime in the 20's and the fighting pool for Tough/Weave helps a bunch... typically I get Tough at 30 and Weave at 32.

Your most skippable powers in Invuln are Resist Elements, Unstoppable and Resist Energies. On SO enhancements you may find use for Unstoppable but once you approach the defense soft cap (see my soft cap guide) you won't need it. I would get Resist Energies but it can wait until late; Resist Elements is, in my opinion, quite skippable.

If you have any further questions we'll be happy to help.

Corrupter or Blaster... well, out of the box the Blaster wins. However depending on the secondary a Corrupter may catch up and surpass the Blaster in damage output.

Here's a little experiment team my SG rolled up: 4 Fire/Dark Corrupters. From the mid-teens this team was showing promise, now in the upper 20's it devastates everything it's come across. It goes like this...

1. Open up with Fearsome Stare to cower the mobs and hit them with a huge tohit debuff. (15% for each Stare, all 4 gives a -60% tohit debuff. Unslotted!)
2. Two people drop Tar Patch underneath the feared group. This slows the group to prevent them from running and hits them with a -60% resistance debuff... effectively adding 60% to your damage output.
3. Everyone drops Rain of Fire on the group followed by Fireball. Any bosses that live get hit by Blaze.
4. Move on to the next group and repeat the process. By alternating Tar Patch you'll always have two up for each group. Slotted for 3 recharge it's up every 45 seconds.

This is quick, clean and very safe. If you have something dangerous you toss Darkest Night on it and it's harmless. Very little up to +3 survives 2 Tar Patch + 4 Rain of Fire + 4 Fireball... for those survivors you have Blaze & Fire Blast.

Another vote for Arctic Silver paste here; I've been using it for 10 years and have been very satisfied. One tube of it should last you a loooong time; I've put together probably 10 machines and still have about half of it left.

From the articles I've seen though the difference between top quality thermal paste and the cheap stuff doesn't amount to much. On the other hand we're talking the difference between $5 paste and $10 paste so it isn't a big deal.

Can't really help with the video card other than to concur that if you're planning an upgrade the time to do it is when you have the case on the table in pieces. I'm (hopefully) not looking at upgrading for a year or more unless something goes wrong; my quad core Intel from a couple years ago and a GTX 275 should do me for awhile yet.

I am surprised by the Asus MB failing on you though... I've had probably 6-7 of them over the years and all are either still working strong or were retired in working condition.

I'll throw my $0.02 in here.

Broadsword is really hard to beat for heavy hitting attacks; I've leveled two of them to 50, one BS/Regen back long before IO's entered the game and a BS/Shield that hit 50 last year. Of the two unquestionably the BS/Shield is the tougher character... by a pretty healthy amount actually.

BS/WP will work fine for a scrapper... the only serious drawback is that you'll have problems trying to play tanker with it due to a very poor aggro aura. On the other hand many scrapper secondaries completely lack an aggro aura so you're better than, say, Regen in that role. Shield is an oddball in that it has a full Tanker strength aggro aura; it's capable of holding aggro nearly as well as most tankers.

You'll probably find WP to be a bit smoother to level, particularly in the low levels than a Shield. It won't reach the same level of damage output though... Shield's aura is a fantastic damage buff and it comes with a mini-nuke called Shield Charge that hits a WIDE AOE for more damage than Headsplitter every 30 seconds or so (with full recharge slotting).

Shield is a defense based set however, those tend to struggle early as defense starts out very weak and gets progressively more and more effective as you approach the 45% soft cap; until you climb above 20% you'll sometimes wonder if you even have your shields toggled on and it won't start feeling really good until you get above 30%. At the 45% soft cap though you're a force of nature and can move through the battlefield ignoring the puny enemies who are trying to hurt you with their feeble attacks. Expect a Shield to struggle until the mid-20's and to start getting good in the 30's. By the time you get Shield Charge at 35 you should be becoming a very solid damage dealer.

I'd say it's a tossup right now; I can say I wasn't all that thrilled with my Fire/WP brute though. It was ok and decently survivable; it just didn't have any real zing to me. I took it to 50 and enjoyed the ride but I always felt that WP was lacking. Durability was ok, it's endurance was fine it just didn't really click with me.

My BS/Shield wasn't very cheap to outfit; I have roughly 300 million in the build as of now and I could rely on Parry to softcap melee defense and only had to worry about ranged & AOE. Come to think of it Parry makes up for a LOT in early game durability as it'll come fairly close to soft capping you for Melee with two stacks and it recharges fast enough to double stack out of the box.

One thing to be aware of is that BS is moderately end heavy; this is an area where WP will work to your advantage. A BS/Shield can be built to have zero endurance issues though, it just takes choosing the right sets. Gift of the Ancients is nice for this.

Well, I seem to have navigated a full circle here and come back to the start; either BS/WP or BS/Shield will be capable. One will peak considerably higher and the other will cost less. Heck, go ahead and try both; all the cool kids have a bunch of characters

You're over the soft cap for S/L defense yet well under it for E/N. You're also overslotting Smashing Blow for damage; at least one of those Nucs should be removed... it isn't buying you anything valuable.

Unyielding is 5 slotted but you missed the Res/End/Recharge IO... I'd drop a slot and put the triple in place of the End/Recharge and drop the Endurance IO completely. The extra slot isn't doing much for you and missing the triple is hurting your resistance numbers.

Invincibility does not need another defense IO, 3 Cytos will ED cap all aspects of the power. You can toss a taunt in the 4th slot if you like or you can move it elsewhere.

RPD should be considerably earlier, trade it with Res Energies.

I'd dump Unstoppable and move Weave up to 32; a soft capped Invuln won't need it.

Frankly I think you'd do much better to just go with something like my first 20 levels build for now and not worry about the final build until you've gotten some levels under your belt and more experience with your powers. It looks to me like you're still uncertain about your tanker; I think you'd be better off not worrying about an uber build just yet. Several of your choices in slotting and power order strike me as odd but I know very little about the Kinetic Melee set.

One example of what I'm talking about is your placement and slotting of Focused Burst; it looks like it deserves more slots and a full set of Thunderstrike will help your E/N defense quite a bit. I also wouldn't slot Perfect Zinger into Power Siphon; it appears to want recharge and tohit buff enhancement. From reading the Mid's description of the power I don't think it even has any taunt component... the ability to slot Zinger is probably either a Mid's bug or a game bug.

One question, do you have a ton of inf? Kinetic Combat is very expensive with at least one IO costing over 100 million.