Gorgar

Dark/Rad sounds fun. Their guys can't hit because of your primary, your guys can't miss because of your secondary.

I'm solidly in the cowboy camp. Prefer comics to movies, don't like action movies at all, might play DP if it looked more like Jonah Hex and less like it does. I do like blast sets like fire, rad, and energy for the appearance, but don't like DP or Kinetic Melee due to the animations. In fact, I like that the blast sets are mostly very minimal in animation. They look efficient to me, and therefore more believable.

Probably a cultural thing. I don't watch anime, and my comics roots are in the 70s. Fight scenes, special effects and property damage aren't really my thing. I actually get sort of bored if they go on very long. The JLU Superman/Captain Marvel fight was one of those, though I loved the rest of the episode.

I value Tactics a lot more. When you need it, you need it. I tend to prefer powers that let me do things I couldn't otherwise do (such as seeing Arachnos) over powers that increase kill speed. Your mileage may (and probably does) vary.

I may well pick up assault on my defenders, and maybe, maybe on corruptors, with the new change to Fitness. I will likely skip it on blasters and anything melee, just because the modifier is so low.

I have to agree. Containment is, for me, a really obnoxious mechanic, because it encourages spamming AoE immobs at the beginning of a fight, which well screws anyone dependent on melee cones.

...What? I like melee cones. (Except Shadow Maul).

Anyway, making Containment apply to single-target controls only, or just not having it apply to immobs, would make my Dual Blades scrapper very, very happy.

I think it depends partly on how you play. The weekend they released Dual Pistols on live, I spent most of the day tanking for pickup groups of mostly low-level DP blasters and offense-based DP defenders, plus the odd scrapper. That day, I wished I had Tough and Weave, because I was getting zero help from the team. If you need your tanks to excel in a vacuum like that, definitely take Tough and Weave.

My main tank, a level 50 Inv/Axe, has never had the Fighting pool, and I've not regretted it. I have a lot of attacks six-slotted with Crushing Impact for psi resist, and three AoEs six-slotted with Obliteration, and my shields are four-slotted with Impervium Armor including the psi resist one. She's worked out just fine. I wouldn't say she's squishy, but she's not soft-capped for defense, hard-capped for S/L resist, or anything else. But she provides a fine focal point for enemy aggro and friendly buffing and healing, and is a lot more fun for me to play than my recently respeced Willpower/DM who does have Tough and Weave, is really hard to kill, but hasn't had slots or powers to do much else at level 32. But she'd probably handle the team full of DP noobs just fine.

Dual Pistols and Kinetic Melee are both sets I would probably use if they had less flashy animations. If DP looked like Malta Gunslingers, and Kinetic Melee had simple animations like those of Touch of Fear and Siphon Life, I'd have used each set at least once. Long flashy animations work for Dual Blades, in my opinion, because it looks like the entire time is spent attacking, whereas DP and KM, to me, both look like mostly choreography with an attack at the end. I get that these are allusions and lots of people really enjoy that; it just doesn't appeal to me at all, so of course I'd like to see alternates.

Also, it's great to see this being asked. Very cool.

Shadow Maul, Smite, Shadow Punch would be my first choice. DM is close to a magical melee set now, with five powers not involving physical contact. I skip Shadow Maul every time because of the activation (I know, that won't change) and the, to me, out of place speedster nature of the attack. Nothing else in DM evokes super speed. I'd love to see those first three given any kind of alternate that would look more like Siphon Life and Touch of Fear.

Aid Self: Arcane version, please! Or even just something that looks like Empathy?

All the melee spin attacks look strange with wings, especially in Hover, which most of my melee characters use. I'd like Hover-friendly versions.

And, I'm another vote for more natural claws (less Wolverine, more Cheetah), not having a backflip in Eviscerate or a jump in Total Focus and its clones. And being able to keep the fire scimitar out, and alternate breath attacks, and wand/staff blasts. The Blackwand was really well done. More of that! I like how the blasts were done in general. I could see alternate animations with gadgets (Starman's cosmic rod, Sonar's sonic gun), too.

Once I was able to slot SOs, endurance problems weren't a big deal on mine. It's a great combination of powersets.

Energy/Energy blaster, built for keeping things at range and not getting hit by ranged attacks. Especially after the Defiance changes, so that I can still keep batting things around while mezzed. Always fun, solo or teamed.

As said above, corruptors can be force multipliers, and blasters really concentrate on being a force to multiply. Blaster advantages include: higher damage multiplier (Flares from a blaster does a bit more than Flares from a corruptor, etc), access to a secondary full of utility powers and melee attacks, plus Build Up, which makes their nukes a lot more powerful. Outside of rare builds, blasters generally are strictly damage dealers. If you want to concentrate on taking the enemy down, blasters are an excellent choice.

Corruptor advantages include: Scourge, access to a secondary full of buffs and debuffs. Can be easier to solo. Can, with the right secondary, do incredible damage. Also can, with the right secondary, keep the enemy from doing much to your team. If you want to balance your attention between damage and protecting the team, or you want to do both damage and debuff/disruption to the enemy, corruptors are an excellent choice.

Apparently I write C# code like Douglas Adams, and Perl like David Foster Wallace, but my chord progressions are like Salinger.

I took the three cones on a dm/da. They're all six-slotted, and so far I am finding that the repositioning makes them less useful than I expected. It helps a lot if you fight from hover and can just go up after Soul Drain, ctrl-tab to target the nearest, then let the cones loose.

Mostly the use I get out of them is concept plus just having ranged attacks on a team, so I have more options. Also, Torrent is oddly useful as an opener to flatten a group up a bit, then charge in and they wind up more bunched than they would have been otherwise.

Knockback and stun are my two favorite mechanics.

Clearly I should read the Virtue forum more often. This looks fun, and I've got energy/energy, storm/energy, and ill/storm to choose from.

There are those of us for whom theme is more important than optimizing characters. That doesn't mean that we aren't interested in improving performance, within our self-imposed theme rules.

I'm happy with DB/Willpower. I did skip Power Slice, don't really use Nimble Slash, and am built entirely around recharge, accuracy, and an attack chain of Blinding Feint -> Sweeping Strike -> 1000 Cuts or BF -> Attack Vitals combo. Willpower's extra recovery power lets me keep doing this pretty much as long as there are mobs willing to step up to the chopping block, and the extra regen seems to keep me alive pretty well.

I've got a DB/DA scrapper as well, but so far I'm not convinced that pairing is worth it, as much as I like Dark Armor. DB needs to shred, and DA seems like more of a control/stall set.

Storm/Energy defender: Everything --> over there, all the time. IO out with ranged defense. The only melee attacks you have to take are debuffed by Hurricane. Energy/Energy blasters can do something similar with Boost Range on top of the knockback, and either Repulsion Field or Bonfire in the epics.

Also agree on the aforementioned Dark/Sonic and Storm/Dark over Dark/Dark, as well as Ice/Ice blasters being a good thing. And Sonic/Energy blasters. The sleep recharges fast, can be buffed with Power Boost, as can the stuns, which stack. Good for blapping.

Dark Armor/Dark Melee tanks can be pretty survivable, if not terribly original, and have useful control effects. Even if someone steals your aggro, there's a good chance the mobs are debuffed, stunned, feared, etc.

My main went without a nuke for a couple years, but eventually respeced back into it. All my other blasters take the nuke. (So far, none of my defenders do; not enough damage to be worth it for me.)

When I nuke depends on the team. If we're steamrolling, I use it whenever it's up and it doesn't look like anyone else is about to. If the mission is difficult, I save it for emergencies. Occasionally I will use it for an EB/AV fight that looks difficult, just to clear out the minions.

Haven't tried them all; Nova and Inferno seem just fine, and the elec one is sort of underwhelming so far.

I feel morally obligated to have Aim and Build Up available before the nuke. I also really like Bonfire (set fire, run in, nuke, run back across fire and maybe around corner, be generally unbothered during crash). I'll actually nuke solo if that power is available.

I've been doing ranged defense builds on a bunch of my squishies lately. I tend to wind up with both CJ and Hover, but don't slot either beyond the default slot, unless I want more hover speed.

Neither power provides a lot of defense by itself, but ranged defense is mostly a case of six-slotting a lot of powers. There aren't enough slots in a build to six-slot everything, so these two powers are nice for adding a bit more defense but not consuming slots. They would take Red Fortune, which is a nice enough set, but I'd rather spend those slots on a full set of Thunderstrike, Lockdown, or something like that, where I'm getting good use of the power, and save Red Fortune for powers with higher defense and that can use the end reduction, like Shadow Fall, which generally blasters don't get.

If you are going to blap, ranged defense is less universally applicable, and you may want to consider typed defense or possibly even melee defense instead of ranged, but I still wouldn't slot up CJ or Hover for defense.

Costumes, sniper hunts, Super Speeding around a zone without stopping or leaving the road, helping lowbies, but more than anything, my personal vendetta against the CoT's dignity: Wizards Over The Cliff, Wizards Off The Roof, Wizards Into The Red Crystal Of Damage.

Fusionette sort of reminds me of Spoiler in the Batman: War Games arc.