Gearsinger

Same problem here. Started last night.

Widnows 7
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That's how I see Ultra-Mode water. I assumed it was normal.

A lot of these have been posted already, but consensus is good, yes?

I made a list as things occurred to me while reading the posts before mine, so it's a bit disjointed.

1. I don't like the current animations for Barb Swipe and Impale.
2. A different animation for tough would be nice. I would especially like to not make the odd girly grunt/shriek noise female characters make every time I zone.
3. Ice armor could use a going-over. Stone tankers have been out of their poo cages for years, but ice tankers are still cube'd.
4. A gun option for blast sets would be great.
5. The random pulsing of Charged Armor and the pulsing lines of Sonic Dispersion give me migraines. The fix to the smaller shields stopped me from getting headaches from those, so hopefully something similar could be done.
6. Dark blast could still be thematic if we were allowed to color it white. Bright light makes seeing as difficult as shadows do. There's even some precedent in Soul Mastery.
7. As a lot of people have mentioned, the option to have all-weapon or no-weapon elemental melee sets would be appreciated. Also, metallic stone melee would be pretty cool.
8. Weapon-wise, having a normal run animation when a female characters is holding a weapon would make me very happy. Broad sword, axe and mace would look better to me if the weapons were wielded with both hands.
9. Lastly, I would love to have an option to select one of the new flight poses as a default.

There is only one (melee range) hold in the ice secondary. Ice Blast has the two holds.

Energy/Ice could work. Shiver slows things down, so you'd have even more time to kill them as they try to get back to you after you knock them back. You would have to be a bit careful to not knock things right off your ice patch, though.

Did anyone try out Electric/Earth? Seems like a solo artist could do good things with that. Open with the sleep and confuse, run in with the end drain aura, and smack them down one at a time. If they happen to wake up, they'll helplessly swat at one another.

Although I imagine Mud Pots and the Gremlins would mess up the carefully controlled nature of that scenario.

I'm no good with builds. Mids makes my head hurt.

Hopefully someone else will wander along. In the mean time, try putting one up for folks to look at. Most people are more willing to help with a build if you've taken the time to make one yourself first.

Y'know, I had hoped and dreamed for Rain of Fire and Fireball on my Fire/Fire dom, but I never thought they'd actually give it to me. Glee.

I would personally recommend Sonic/Mental. The resistance debuff on Sonic attacks helps both you and your team hit things harder. The sleep will help you be able to use Drain Psyche even when solo. Sonic is short on AoEs, which are really useful on teams. Mental will help a bit with that.

If you prefer more AoEs and don't mind losing a bit of survivability for it, Radiation Blast is pretty AoE heavy.

If you decide to go with Sonic, I recommend slotting heavily for Accuracy. I don't have any hard numbers to back it up, but Sonic always seems to miss more than I expect at low levels.

The Barracuda Strike Force was added (the Villains got this when heroes got the Khan TF), a lot of powersets were proliferated, color customization was added, Dual Pistols and Demon Summoning were added (for those who pre-purchased Going Rogue), and the Silver Mantis Strike Force was opened up for people outside villain groups.

Blasters, for me at least, tend to have several skippable powers. For instance, if you want to stay out of melee range, there are usually a couple powers in your secondary powerset that you can not take. It should be no problem to get both Stamina and a travel power.

For survivability, most primary sets have at least one mez-type power to help keep things from killing you. Sonic's sleep generally makes soloing a spawn easier by allowing you to kill them one at a time. Energy has knockback, which is a great way to keep the enemies from hitting you, but it takes practice to use it properly on a team.

For secondaries, most have an immobilize to keep an enemy at a distance. Mental Manipulation has Drain Psyche, which greatly increase your Regen and Recovery, but you have to get in close to use it. You're also still in danger from tougher foes who can hit you hard enough to kill you before you can regen your health back. Ice has a lot of tools for safety, but I find my time better spent burning things to death than debuffing them on my Fire/Ice blaster. Devices can be very safe, but tends to move a bit more slowly.

Knowing how you want to play (solo, in a team, or PvP) and what kind of enhancements you want to use (Single Origin, Basic Inventions, or Invention Sets) would help to know what to recommend for you.

Ah, okay. I was worried it was something that had to be spent in the 20 hours you have with it. Thank you.

What's a Fame Point?

My project is incredibly unlikely. I imagine it couldn't even be done if they wanted to with the current engine. But we're dreaming here, right?

I would call this system Combat Customization. It would be level-locked (say, level 25) and completely optional, like dual builds. The idea is to not overwhelm new players.

At first, it would be a toggle to turn knockback into knockdown if you wanted to.

For instance, let's say I love my energy blaster, but I don't want to go through all the trouble of positioning my knockback to best effect when I'm on a team. So, I go to the trainer, pick my team build and open up the combat customization interface. From there, I can select my knockback powers and turn them into knockdown instead. Now I don't have the extra mitigation afforded by knockback, but I can blast as much as I want without scattering the enemies.

The biggest problem I see with that is that it would turn Hurricane into a ridiculously powerful mitigation tool. In theory, you could jump into a tightly-packed group with Hurricane toggled on and continuously knock them down and apply a huge to-hit debuff.

After the kinks were worked out of that system, I would open it up to include small tweaks to a great deal of powers, allowing you to scarifice something for something else.

This could be used for roleplaying:

I want my stalker to use poisoned blades, so I use combat customization to trade in the defense debuff on some of my dual blade attacks for a small toxic damage-over-time effect.

or for min-maxing:

I want my scrapper to get a bit more damage from his large attacks. Since I use Follow Up (claws) more for the buff than as a damaging attack, I decide to reduce the damage of Follow-Up by a small amount (say, 10%) in exchange for adding a short-duration resistance debuff effect. Now, every time I use Follow Up, the next attack does slightly more damage.

If that worked out well, I would explore options that might actually change the feel of a set. For example, trading in the three small imps in fire control for one larger, tougher fire pet. It could perhaps be an invisible humanoid with the Fire Armor particle effects.

Obviously all of this would be a complete nightmare from a developer perspective, but I think it would be pretty awesome.

DA can be very tough. IOs help an awful lot. Knockback protection IOs can help avoid needing Acrobatics, which is fairly endurance expensive. The Theft of Essence chance for +Endurance proc is super helpful. Dark Regeneration eats a lot of endurance without it.

I personally much prefer Oppressive Gloom to Cloak of Fear because the endurance cost of CoF can be troublesome with such a toggle-heavy armor set.

Failing a mission when it's not my fault. Like the boss that books it to the door or elevator before you're anywhere near him, or the idiot NPC that gets him/herself killed because he/she tears off after three separate spawns.

When I legitimately screw up, I don't mind. When mechanics beyond my control screw up for me, it's /ragequit time.

What about debuffs? I assume if anything is going to protect against Sappers, Carnies, Longbow Nullifiers, etc. it would be AoE defense. Is that correct?

Odd. My college Latin prof pronounced Caesar CHAY-zar. Does anyone know the modern Italian pronunciation? That may be the explanation, as he was a native of Italy.

I've always pronounce Praetorian as pray-TOR-ee-an.

I imagine arachnophobia is way more common than coulrophobia, yet we have spiders everywhere.

A lot of people don't like playing blasters without Aim and Build Up.

Another way to go is Dominator. Fire Control has Hot Feet. Options for PBAoEs in the secondary are Earth (Tremor, Mud Pots), Energy (Whirling Hands), Fiery (Combustion, Consume), Ice (Ice Sword Circle, Chilling Embrace), Psionic (Drain Psyche, Psychic Shockwave), and Thorny (Thorn Burst). Power Sink from Mu Mastery and Dark Consumption and Soul Drain from Soul Mastery are also PBAoE.

Granted, several of those don't do damage, so they may not be what you're looking for.

Yes

I've been doing something similar with a Claws/DA scrapper. She's around 24 now. I've just been going after all the story arcs, though. The Paragon Wiki page listing the arcs has been a big help.

That makes more sense, then. Sorry for throwing my confusion at you.