Diablos Kitty

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

That's tricky. Without the license as T_J mentions above, Masterminds and Controllers are out. Ranged squishies have difficulty consistently soloing AVs and GMs even *with* inventions without very strong builds. In almost every MMO if you want to go one on one against the strongest NPC foes, you need enough defense to keep yourself alive, enough damage to bring them down, and enough sustainability (endurance, mana, power, whatever) to last long enough to make it happen. Most things for obvious reasons don't have all three automatically.

I think your best bet is a high damage corruptor, something like Fire/Rad or Fire/Kin. With just SOs, you're not going to bring an AV down without help, but fortunately for you in City of Heroes we can cheat like no other game. We have inspirations which are little temp powers that can give us a temporary boost to damage, defense, resistance, heal back some health, etc. By level 50 you'll have twenty slots of these, and some inspirations are very powerful and not difficult to get. Medium strength lucks, for example, are strong enough that two will buff your defense so high it will reduce an AV's chance to hit you to the game's minimum floor and they last a minute each. You can easily have ten minutes of being nearly impossible to hit.

If you use inspirations to take care of the defensive side, its possible you can build a ranged character with SOs that is strong enough to get there on the offensive side, and you're there.

The fact of the matter is, if you're limited to SOs, you're never going to have a build remotely as strong as what a player with inventions can make. So if you're looking for some trick there, there isn't one. But if you don't care about that, you just want to be able to play the game and do most of the things other players can do, that's possible in this game because so much is within reach of players that take advantages of the tools available to them, including temp powers, inspirations, and the like, most of which are available to premium players.

Originally Posted by Organica

I think illusion controllers, and especially illusion/rad, were some of the earliest and best AV killers along with masterminds. But your second problem is going to be that the Mastermind AT and Controller AT are not available to free players unless you've purchased them.

To be honest... while I've solo'd a few AVs before, it's hardly what most players strive for, and doing so on SOs is (to my mind) really setting yourself up for some frustration. But it's a challenge, I guess.