Call Me Awesome

This game is heavily instanced so most of the players at any given time will be in missions... you don't often see people wandering around in the world.

PvP is mostly a dead issue for the playerbase, it wasn't ever very popular and the changes about a year ago pretty well killed off interest. The only server I've heard of that still PvP's is Freedom.

Population is shown by the ranking of the servers when you log in. The last server you logged into will be on top, then the least busy server down to the busiest server at the bottom. Freedom and Virtue are the two highest population and trade the top honors back and forth.

The Mako's offer ranged defense, not typed so they're less useful to you... remember that Inv has significant typed defenses already and doesn't benefit as much from positional. I'd definitely replace those with something else... I don't have Mid's handy to see your percentages but if you've already soft capped S/L defense then consider slotting Crushing Impact for the recharge bonus.

Another thing I noticed is the Numina in Dull Pain... that set doesn't offer the recharge that Doctored Wounds does which is one of the more important things to enhance in the power. I'd move the unique and heal to Health and slot 5 Doctored Wounds into Dull Pain.

As I said I don't have Mid's on this computer but from a cursory look that's all that jumped out at me. There's a few things I'd do differently but I don't see any other real problems offhand.

My thoughts on Stone after taking two of them to 50 are that there's little need to build for survivability... on pure SO's a well built Stone tank can solo tank the tower buffed Lord Recluse on the STF. That being the case, what I want is to minimize the penalties.

To accomplish that I look for primarily two things, recharge bonuses and runspeed bonuses. If you've an end heavy secondary you may want to get some recovery/end bonuses. Some sets I'd look at:

• Gift of the Ancients - 4 slot this for a recovery and endurance bonus. Use the runspeed IO as one of the 4 and you get two things you need in one set. Toss this into Rock Armor.

• Crushing Impact - 5 of these gives a 5% recharge bonus; they go nicely into melee attacks.

• Doctored Wounds - 5 of these also gives a 5% recharge bonus; toss it into Earth's Embrace.

• If you've the inf you can toss Luck of the Gambler 7.5% recharge IO's into several of your defense armors... they ARE pricey and something for you to work toward.

Granite is a weird animal... you want ED capped resistance enhancement and ED capped defense enhancement, this makes slotting sets a challenge. You're going to want to Frankenslot resistance and defense, yet most sets won't ED cap you in only 3 slots. I tend to use a mix of common def and res IO's and toss a couple of special IO's in the last two slots, typically the Steadfast Resist/3% defense and Luck of the Gambler 7.5% recharge.

Now your current budget places some tight constraints; you don't have enough to fully slot the sets I listed even disregaurding the expensive IO's. I would work on the sets a piece at a time as I had the money... probably starting with the GotA sets, then Doctored Wounds followed by Crushing Impact. I usually use SO's as placeholders so the character is playable while you're trying to acquire the IO's you need.

I've always had good luck with Asus and they have several machines that meet your specs in the $1,000 price range. I've 3 Asus laptops I use in my business and they've been very satisfactory. Even the bargain machines in the ~$450 range seem to be rock solid; I bought one last year that runs COH (non-UM) just fine for under $500.

I just got my new Alienware M11X yesterday... I wanted a small, lightweight computer with a lot of power. I got an i7 CPU, Nvidia 335 GPU and 4GB RAM in a 4lb package for ~$1,200... it has an 11.8" screen though. I just got tired of lugging 11lbs of laptop and 4lbs of power supply from motel to worksite. I haven't had a chance to fire up COH on it yet, but it ought to handle mid-range Ultra Mode; the GPU is more powerful than my old laptop and has a lower resolution screen to push.

I've played a dark/dark defender to 50 which is the mirror of your corrupter; the combination is very effective at neutering the enemies' ability to hit you or your team thanks to it's powerful tohit debuffs. It isn't one of the bigger damage sets though; dark blast is strong in mitigation but relatively weak in damage output.

You'll be a very effective teammate but as you level up you'll have lower damage output than some other sets.

Well, on Guardian I haven't had any PvP interference in either Bloody Bay in the last year or so... admittedly I only venture into Bloody Bay for Shivans and rarely bother with Warburg nukes. I don't know if it's changed recently, but Pinnacle used to be much the same... my SG tends to alternate between Guardian & Pinnacle and we've been hanging around Guardian for the last several months.

As a general rule PvP is nearly nonexistent on most servers... the majority of the playerbase never had any interest in it and the changes in issue 13 drove away most of the minority who did PvP.

There is a lot of information available on the nuts & bolts of the game at Paragon Wiki.

You'll definitely want Mid's Hero Designer to plan out your character's build... it lets you design your character from the ground up and does all the calculations to give you the numbers behind your character.

There's a map pack, which is a replacement for your in-game map with all the badge locations and other points of interest indicated at Vidiotmaps

There's also Herostats, a program that runs on top of COH and keeps track of all the stats, it's highly useful.

Additionally there's these boards; many of us have been playing for 5+ years now and quite a few of us have gained a pretty in-depth knowledge of the game. You can get specific answers about particular archetypes by looking in the forum for each specific AT. Don't forget about all the various guides that have been written about almost every aspect of the game.

In any case welcome to the game; like many others I've been playing for over 5 years now so the game must be doing something right. I've seen the ups and downs of buffs and nerfs, some minor, some severe yet I've stayed through it all.

Eh, for a lot of characters purples are overrated... many builds need different set bonuses than they provide and I'm not convinced that they're really worth the cost.

The only purple sets I've ever bothered with are the relatively inexpensive confuse & sleep ones; the rest are just prohibitive in cost/benefit. I'll happily take the drops I get and sell them to those of you with more money than sense... I recently had a Armageddon triple sell for over 700 million.

If you really want purples then you've two choices... either kill lots of 47+ mobs and hope lighting strikes or pony up the cash to buy them on the market. Personally I have way too many characters I play to put that kind of cash into one. My most expensive build is my perma-PA Ill/Rad and I did that for around 600 million with a little patience... most of my builds come in well under 200 million.