ClawsandEffect

At least you didn't build the SR I saw on a STF (of all places).

DM/SR. Everything from DM. From SR: Focused Fighting (that was never turned on), Agile, Practiced Brawler....and nothing else.

No fitness pool, and 3 travel powers (started with Flurry, Jump Kick, and TP Foe)

He was level 50 and didn't have a single "damage taken" badge (I checked). I would have laughed and not done much else, but he started blaming the tank for him dying all the time, when he was running in and firing off Soul Drain and Dark Consumption before anyone else had gotten there.

My point being Hube02, is that you are MILES ahead of that guy, who was PLed to 50 without ever doing anything. You're recognizing that you have an issue and are coming to the forums to find out how to correct the problem.

One of my mottos: The only stupid question is the one that is never asked.

Uh, yep. There's your problem. With no Fast Healing or Rise to the Challenge you are relying on pure resistance to get you through.

Rise to the Challenge is the power that Willpower is pretty much built around, it is very much the most important power in the set. It increases your regeneration rate for eash enemy in melee range of you, and additionally, imposes a to-hit debuff on every enemy in melee range as well. It is a HUGE part of WP's survivability. Not having a self heal, Willpower relies on a high rate of passive regeneraton to keep it's HP up.

Basically, you want everythng in Willpower up to the last 2 powers, which are optional.

What I do is:

Take the passive that you are forced to take and slot it for heal, not resistance. High Pain Tolerance increases your max HP, which makes the regeneration powers you get later more effective.

Next power in WP for me is Fast Healing, I push the toggles off until I can slot DOs in them at the least. (I take Mind Over Body at level 12 usually)

At levels 6 and 8, focus on your primary, or start any pools you want to have, whichever is more important to you (I recommend one primary power, and one pool power, or 2 primary powers. 2 pool powers isn't a great idea)

I don't take travel powers very often on my melee toons, so if you do, it would be wise to take the opener for your travel power at level 6 or 8.

At 10 and 12 I take Indomitable Will and Mind Over Body. At 14 is my next pool power choice.

At level 16: take Rise to the Challenge! I cannot emphasize this enough. Literally, I tried and I can't emphasize it more than I did

At level 18 is usually a primary power, which is very often an AoE attack. At level 20 I take Quick Recovery.

At levels 22 and 24 you can take whatever, I usually take a couple pool powers or a primary power I couldn't fit in earlier. 26 is almost always the tier8 primary power, unless it's a power I don't want (such as Lightning Clap)

28 should be Heightened Senses. And after 28 you are done with WP unless you want to take the rez or Strength of Will, both are optional and not strictly necessary for a solid WP character.

Willpower benefits a LOT from the Fighting pool, and getting at least Health from the Fitness pool is usally a good idea too. If you take the Fighting pool, I would try and fit Stamina in too, to help offset the extra toggles you're running.

That should help with your Willpower choices, I didn't go into primaries because you can follow this same template with any primary, so it doesn't matter which one you have.

Nothing I see wrong with it. I do have some advice to tweak it a little bit though. Here goes:

3 Flight enhancements is a bit much in Fly, the third one isn't doing much at all. I'd take that third slot and move it to build up for a third recharge.

I'd pull 2 of the heal enhancements out of Instant Healing and move them to Reconstruction. Instant Healing is just fine without any heal enhancement at all, but it does need the recharge. Reconstruction could really use one more of each, as it will be your workhorse heal power.

I'd seriously consider swapping Body Mastery for Blaze Mastery. Char, Fire Blast, and Fireball would round this character out nicely. Between Quick Recovery and Stamina you shouldn't need Physical Perfection for end recovery, but if you took it for regeneration I can see that being worth it.

Other than those points it looks pretty good for a basic SO/generic IO build.

BrandX makes a good point. You see a lot of min/maxed builds on the forums, but how many of them are actually live builds and how many of them are just Mid's numbers?

My BS/DA build is the only one I've done recently that is actually a live build, minus a few IOs. The majority of the rest of them are just Mid's mock-ups of what I'd like to do with the character.

I'd say it is more uncommon than even the forums would lead you to believe. The multi-billion influence builds are common on the forums, but I'd bet not even a quarter of the people putting these builds up on the forums actually have the cash to put them together.

For me, min/max has a slightly different meaning. Maximum performance for minimum cost. I put together builds as cheaply as I possibly can, which gives me a better chance of actually building them on the live servers. I can throw together uber-expensive dream builds with the best of them, but I don't do it because I know I will never be able to afford to actually build them.

I skipped Shadow Maul entirely on my DM/SR. I took Shadow Punch and Smite instead, and it has worked out pretty good for me. I hate using Shadow Maul on single targets, and I can't always line up the cone to hit multiples consistently, so the end drain isn't worth it for me, and if it misses you're flailing away for almost 3 seconds, during which you can't do anything else. Not a huge deal, I just don't really like Shadow Maul.

I took Gloom and Dark Obliteration, which have served me well, but I'm considering swapping them for Mu mastery to beef up my AoE output. I'll still have a ranged attack in Mu Lightning (which I actually like better than Gloom anyway, Gloom's DoT gets wasted a lot in fights, since I tend to punch my target before all the DoT is applied), and I get Electric Fences and Ball Lightning. The DoT in Electic Fences and Ball Lightning isn't an issue, because it is applying it to the targets I'm not actively beating on at the moment.

I suggest a little more recharge in Siphon Life. The sets you're using are fine, just switch around to get some more recharge in there.

Looks alright otherwise, but I don't have access to Mid's right now to check it out in detail.

He is only level 27, and Heightened Senses isn't available until level 28.

He is getting hit by damn near every exotic damage attack, and taking most of the damage from it. Fire, Cold, Energy, and Negative Energy are getting through unopposed, and are barely being resisted at all. And since the late 20's is when those damage types start to get more common, that would explain why he is getting killed so often.

Fast Healing won't help much if you are taking 90% of the damage from exotic damage atacks, and are not avoiding any of them.

OP: Do NOT skip Heightened Senses in favor of taking Fast Healing at level 28, it will not help that much in your current situation. If you can't respec to take it earlier, it can wait until level 30.

At this point, taking Fast Healing instead of Heightened Senses will not help the situation enough. Regenerating HP does no good at all if you're being hit by 8 electric blasts at once, your HP just drops too fast for Fast Healing to keep you alive.

Go with Invuln, since you've never tried it. I presume here that you HAVE tried WP since you made no mention of it and made a point of saying you haven't tried Invuln yet.

Kinda sounds like you've half decided on Invuln anyway, and are seeing if anyone has a reason NOT to play it. No reason here, it's a solid set IMO.

Well, for the first time in a long while Pinnacle wasn't at the top of the list today, Victory was instead. Pinnacle was actually more active than something

Sounds like someone hacked the account. First I've ever heard of someone hacking an inactive account and reactivating it, though I suppose it's possible.

If you're absolutely sure neither of you set up the questions, then that is, unfortunately, what probably happened. About the only way I can think of to clear it up is to try and confirm with support that your fiancee's email was the one used to originally set up the account, because email contact is one of the things you can change in the master account.

I can't help much with how to go about that, as it has never come up for me, but good luck getting it sorted out.
There should be someone there at all times, so it might be that it just got shuffled into a large workload for someone.

My favorite cow-themed character was InvulnerBull on Pinnacle. I'd post a screenie, but I never got around to taking one of him.

I can't help much with the costume though, unfortunately.

Another nice thing about Regen is the fact that Quick Recovery comes so early in the set. Pretty much from level 4 on you shouldn't have too many endurance issues.

This frees you up to take more powers from your primary or secondary without having to try and cram the fitness pool in by level 20. If you get Stamina in by level 30 or 35 any endurance issues you may have had should have completely disappeared.

Iggy was being modest in his above post. I've seen video of his Claws/Regen pulling off the RWZ Challenge using nothing but Swipe. So yes, an IOed regen can pull off some crazy things. (On a related note, Iggy, I just saw what you did with your Kat/WP.....you disgust me )

My Claws/Regen is nowhere near that good, but he is unkillable in most situations he is put in. I can't solo on max difficulty, but most normal content at normal difficulty levels is almost too easy.

The rumor hasn't been squashed yet that they are working on a sort of "advance past 50 without actually advancing past 50" kind of thing.

If I recall correctly it would be a kind of universal enhancement slot, of which there would be 10, adding up to a "theoretical level 60"

I have no idea if they are going ahead with it, as no one from Paragon Studios has yet confirmed or denied this one (to my knowledge at least). They did mention along with this that the actual number of the level would not change, you would still be level 50, just with a few more shinies.

Anyone know if they have confirmed one way or the other on this? Last I saw, Posi hinted at something that sounded like this and hasn't said a peep since.

Regen scrappers are beasts at high levels once you learn when to heal and when NOT to heal (many times your base regen will get you through a fight)

The main advantage I've found is: As long as you don't run into anything that can kill you in 2 or 3 hits you just NEVER STOP. A regen that also has Stamina will never run out of endurance unless hit by a Malta Sapper or similar. With IOs you can get up to around 25% defense to all positions, which is very noticable with your ridiculous regen rate.

Wait until you hit level 50 and you're regening 50 HP per second and have a 600+ point heal every 30-45 seconds. If your timing is good you become nearly unkillable.

Mescaline Dreams is actually a pretty cool name, be a shame if it gets modsmacked.

Odd, people usually leave me alone.

Probably due to my search comments telling them exactly what they're going to get.

I have one character with the search comment "Always willing to team, but if you are rude, I will be rude right back" That character doesn't get very many invites, seems it's too much to ask for people to be polite (which is all I'm asking there)

Another says "Psychotic melee range fire blaster, you have been warned". He's been kicked from a few teams because of the playstyle I adopt with him...after I warned them about it even.

I never bother with the LFT flag, it doesn't seem to make much difference in whether I get a team or not. Since I usually solo unless I'm in the mood for a TF or feel like being social, it doesn't really bother me. On the rare occasion I actually put together a team, I search based on what I'm looking for first.

I created a Force Field/Energy Blast defender just for grins (planning on emphasizing KB with him) and was curious as to whether anyone has tried softcapping to ranged and running Force Bubble at all times.

On paper it seems as though it would be a very safe combo, though it would probably not be a fast soloer. But that's not the point, I wanted to play this combo for sheer fun.

With the relative ease of getting good amounts of defense and the ability to keep enemies at range and falling on their butts, coupled with the fact that it has (minimal) mez protection, it should be a fun combo for just sheer unadulterated chaos.

I understand that it's not going to be a ZOMG uber-combo, but am I correct in my assumption of the synergy the two sets have?

Thoughts? Suggestions? Witty non-sequiters?