GavinRuneblade

I'll chime in with some actual experiences to give context to what claws and roderick are saying. I have an elec/elec which also has no defense debuff resist. I built poorly (for melee defense instead of s/l) because at the time titanium armor were cheaper than reactive armor and I had two sets of touch of death lying around but no kinetic combats. I have 32% melee defense and 16% s/l. (well in truth, I didn't "build" for anything, I just slotted what I had and what was cheap and poof, there I was. No actual planning went into the character)

I can handle big groups of council no problem. Their gunners do hit my defenses but not enough to actually stop me. I have from time to time gone negative against them but only for less than a second. Typically I'm down into the mid teens instead of the thirty's. However, against certain spawns with lotsof ranged enemies and few melee types, I do get killed. Against longbow (who have way more guns) I go negative and then those -res grenades make me toast almost instantly. Malta, PPD, Cimerorans it's a slaughter even as low as 0/x4, they just own me.

Against CoT, I rarely dip below 20% defense, so I run newspaper missions vs them, farm the Code Merlin arc, run their tip missions etc at +1/x8 no worries.

So I have a very small group of enemies I can take on. Against those I do just fine. But the character is definitely not a generalist. S/L is flat out superior if you can build for it.

I've had the same issue for a while, it started with the second to last version of the Mac version. Not i19, but the version that was downloadable before i19 came online.

What I have found is that stores are safe, glowies are safe, and nearly all other interactive windows cause the crash. Background programs keep running, but can't be accessed, only rebooting the machine helps.

Geometry buffers on/off has no effect on this issue.

No other graphic setting I've been able to track down has any effect on this issue.

It is unique to the Mac Client, I've booted and played in my PC environment via bootcamp and it works fine. I get other crashes there that are related to the ATI card on my iMac.

If I join other people's teams, I can play forever without the crash. If I avoid the contacts and tips windows, the missions and badges windows are much less likely to cause the crash, but eventually they will also. If I talk to a specific contact they remain safe to talk to for a very long time, typically long enough to finish their arc, but I can't use the phone to talk to them (Crimson and Indigo's arcs are too long).

Some of the AV soling specialists have 4 things they consider as the "recipe" for any build:
1. Softcapped defenses
2. enough damage to overcome regeneration AFTER any resistance your chosen AV might have, for instance don't bring axe against Siege and expect to be doing full damage. 150+ is sometimes given as a good baseline. Most AVs heal 94+hp/sec.
3. enough endurance to run your top attack chain for 5-10 minutes straight with no pauses
4. a heal, whether it be aid self or dull pain or anything you might have access to.

on the S/L vs positional, that is 100% up to your choice of enemy. No build can defeat everything in the game. Diabolique is famous for not being soloable by melee types. The record is 9 simultaneous developer created AVs at once defeated by a Dark Melee/Invulnerability scrapper. All of them had primarily S/L attacks. So pick and choose your enemies based on your strengths.

/SR is famous for being easy to softcap inexpensively. /Inv is also very solid especially if you stick to S/L enemies (mynx, marauder, babs, etc).

I'm with leo, placate is not limited to being a damage power it is a swiss army knife in a single slot. I like to get it as soon as possible.

It lets you take on larger spawns safely, if you pull aggro from a second group instead of running you can placate the most dangerous one back, get out of line of sight, kill the 1.5 spawns you're fighting, and take that loner out with and AS at your leisure.

Not recharging isn't an issue as with one slot it is still up every spawn, sometimes more.

And I skip travel powers in favor of the jet pack. Don't care about ninja run, I hate going around things. I fly.

One point has been missed and that is that it is a proc not a regen or recovery bonus. This seldom is critical, but sometimes is very handy. The most common example is with the performance shifter proc on any character who uses nukes or end-crashing tier-9 powers. Because it is a proc, it is immune to the -recovery effect. Numina and Miracle become worthless during that time, but perf shifter keeps proccing away. Panacea is the same.

This is most important to characters with regen as a key survival tool (/regen, /WP, some /SR who don't have a self heal, etc) because when -regen effects hit they turn off your regen 100%. Numina's and Regenerative tissue? Worthless during that time. Panacea keeps proccing away.

Now the issue with it being "not enough" may be true, but if you have a very small margin of survivability during such encounters, it may be worth looking into as it is literally the only passive tool that exists to mitigate these effects.

One other area where it is handy: it wakes you up out of sleep. This is most often seen by blasters who put entropic chaos in their tier 1 and tier 2 attacks so they can use them while mezzed. But panacea in health on any character lacking sleep protection is somewhat handy. Definitely not critical, definitely not game changing, but handy.

Is it worth the price? Depends on your budget. In general the set offers the best bonuses of any heal set available (especially that juicy recharge bonus) and they work all the way down to level 1. But are the bonuses so amazing they are worth the price of the proc? Very rarely.

To follow on Spruce's advice, when you drop vengeance, you'll lose that gambler you have slotted. Move it to Combat Jumping. If you also add the Gambler Defense only, you'll have the exact same % defense, but with the first set bonus as well (10% regeneration). Another option is the Gift of the Ancients Def/Run Speed%.

Waterspout is a lot like tornado if you have a stormie. I slotted mine with 95% damage and really, wasn't so impressed because the knockback is so high that it doesn't do half as many attacks as you expect it to. I recommend keepng that achilees heel for sure, that helps ALOT on hard targets. I think you won't notice a significant difference between slotting for damage, proccing it out, or frankenslotting. But if I'm wrong I'd be glad to be corrected. My recommendation is do what is cheapest or uses what you already have lying around.

I also recommend pulling some slots from stamina and moving them to where they'd be more useful. At a minimum pull that 5th one out. You can save a lot and have 90% of the same effect by using 3 slots with the proc, the pure endmod, and one common endmod. The 4th slot does make a bit of a difference, but all in all, on my spines (spines/nin) I found I liked the end/range alpha slot and that meant I didn't need anything in stamina at all. I did put some into it so I can run the musculature as an option when I'm in teams and don't need the extra range on throw spines and impale. Do you know what alpha you want?

I can make a few additions, it is far more crowded in hero zones than villain zones. The top places to see other people are near the auction house, but those folks are typically busy and not looking to team =)

Positron gave some interesting statistics in his recent interview with ten ton hammer:
175,000 praetorian characters have been created since the launch of Going Rogue.

51% of all existing characters are heroes, 26% villain, 10% vigilante, and 13% rogue.

Best zones for success with finding teams in broadcast, are Atlas, Steel Canyon, Talos Island and Peregrine Island for heros, and Cap au Diable for villains.

Otherwise all the advice about finding your server's teaming channels is the way to go.

Remember that the soulbound allegiance proc also tests t fire on you when you summon the pet it is slotted in. So there are three possible chance for buildups. But yeah, not stacking in any meaningful way.

I like the courtyard of the crey office in Nerva where they have spec opps acting as tour guides telling visitors how great Crey is.

The Eye of Horus oil spill out on the sunken tanker in Port Oaks is cool from the air.

In Grandville, getting into the underground tunnels and coming out on the island with the power plant is pretty fun. There are some explore badges for that. Plus the power plant is really, really big.

The Sky Raiders HQ is ok as a tourist ,but to really appreciate it you gotta do a Silver Mantis Strike Force. The final mission is a raid on their base and it is one of my favorite bits in the redside sub-50 strike forces. (the climax of the Barracuda is my favorite overall with all the ambushes and every AT having a special unique power, etc, way way cooler than Dr Khan).