Hopeling

The bonus crit is definitely diminished in usefulness now that we can do the same thing with the ATO proc. KM maybe gets a little more use out of it, since it has Burst and Concentrated Strike competing for "use me when hidden!"

It's as useful as ever for making a boss stop attacking, but overall it is at least as skippable as it was before.

I like Eviscerate's animation... but my Claws character is a flyer, so the animation isn't particularly ridiculous for him. A forward spin as part of an attack isn't much different on the ridiculousness scale from Spin if he can move freely in 3d.

But yeah, Eviscerate a good power; Shockwave is kind of a love-it-or-hate-it power.

Yeah, it's not presented in a very intuitive way. Glad you were able to get it to work.

When you select the radio button for the starter kit and Continue, it's not asking for credit card info to show you the serial code so you can go back to the first screen and type it in. It's just applying the code directly to your account. Using the code requires you to set up a subscription, which means it requires your credit card, but it will not bill your card until the end of the 30 days that come with the starter kit.

Yes, that's just what it does, although it doesn't explain it as clearly as it could. It requires you to set up a subscription, but it won't bill you for it until the free month from the starter kit ends. You can cancel the subscription immediately after setting it up, if you like.

It isn't bugged. It's not supposed to grant fire/cold resist. Why not? I dunno, apparently the devs didn't want it to. You can still cap f/c defense, so it's not a big deal.

No more than Maneuvers.

Edit: And wait, since when is the +20% regen from Physical Perfection more than barely worth mentioning for survival?

Only on yourself, as I understand it. Fortunately, this also means it will not buff enemies in powers like Follow Up.

The leading theory in the help channel seems to be that they need to take the servers down to apply 2xp. I don't know if that's true, or if it's for some other reason, or maybe they just want to make sure things are stable before 2xp's inevitable spike of activity.

I'm a bit miffed we didn't have an announcement for it more than 30 minutes in advance, but oh well.

Kathari, your registration date and post count suggests you're new, so please don't take this as an attack, but you're operating under some misconceptions.

Reactive Armor provides ED-capped resist, and sufficient endredux, with only 4 slots, as well as its most useful set bonuses. 6-slotting the armors is totally unnecessary.

Boxing, I assume, is being used as a set mule, and the 3.75% defense is certainly not a waste of slots.

6-slotting Red Fortune is very rarely better than 4-slotting LotG, mostly for certain positional defense builds, which this isn't.

The build itself looks OK, I've got a few nitpicks but nothing dramatic.
Lighting Field is a little underslotted IMO. My preferred slotting for damage auras is usually Multi-Strike: Dam/End and Acc/Dam/End, and the same pieces from Scirocco's Dervish.
Agility seems like a good alpha for this build. Spiritual might be slightly better overall, and would boost your Fault duration as an added bonus.
I would not want to drop Tremor, but Gloom and Darkest Night are awesome, and Dark Oblit is cool too.
A Kismet proc would be helpful; your accuracy is insufficient for fighting enemies at +3 or +4.
You might also consider splitting the ATO set 3 and 3, instead of all in one power, to get the S/L defense bonus twice. This can get you up to 10% S/L defense, if you catalyze them, which might let you change other slotting/power choices and retain your softcap. For example, you could drop Stone Fist or Stone Mallet for Gloom. Remember that you can mule Kinetic Combats in Brawl, too. The fury proc will probably do best in Heavy Mallet or Seismic Smash.
You've slotted Charged Armor oddly; I'm not sure if that was just a mistake in Mids, but you should use the 4 pieces of the set that boost resistance, not the end/rech.
I'd suggest maybe a Winter's Gift proc in that empty Super Jump slot; stacks nicely with the 40% you already have.

Willpower benefits tremendously from defense bonuses, especially S/L. As PrincessDarkstar said, 32.5% is a good threshold; more is better, but softcapping is both difficult and generally unnecessary for /WP. Health bonuses are nice, but don't go too far out of your way for them. Recharge is great for TW. Regen set bonuses are a drop in the bucket compared to what you already have from powers, so don't bother with them, other than any you might get by accident while building for other things.

Just for example, here is the build mine uses; the purples place it outside your specified price range, but can be easily replaced with cheaper sets without significant impairment.

What Mids refers to as Damage Per Second is what the game refers to as Damage Per Cast Cycle, and is near-useless for determining how good an attack is. Brawl has a DPCC nearly identical to KO Blow, that's how poor an indicator it is.

Also, for some reason, Mids thinks Brute Follow Up has a 2.64s activation time???

That's an interesting idea.

You've probably been hearing about Enhancement Converters, which have been on beta for a while, and should be going live quite soon. They would have been live with i22's launch, but for an unexpected minor technical snag.

Shield gives positional defense. Most Shield builds try to softcap all three positional types - melee, ranged, and aoe. This will protect you from swords, machine guns, fireballs, and almost everything else.

Almost all attacks check against two or more defenses - swords are melee and lethal, bullets are ranged and lethal, fire blasts are fire and ranged, fireballs are fire and aoe, et cetera. The game uses the highest applicable defense, so if you have softcapped melee defense, you're safe from swords, whether they're regular lethal-damage swords, or fire swords, or ice swords, or Titan Weapon smashing swords.

Edit: Here's the paragonwiki page on defense. Also applicable is attack mechanics, although that gets more into the math of exactly how it works, rather than just understanding the concepts.

I prefer to make t1 and t3 with shards; I often try to make the t2 with threads, since uncommons are so easy to get from trials (I'm mostly burned out on trials, but even I can stomach 1-2 per character). I then save whatever shards/notices I get and slowly build a t4.

The vegetarian analogy is a very poor one, since it was not made at all clear until late in this very thread that DA was focused not only on solo/small-team players, but a specific subset of that group. It's cool that "vegetarians" got something specifically for them, but the design intent as it was presented at first said nothing about a total absence of "meat". To further extend this analogy that I dislike, we've now got a purely vegetarian thing, and a pure carnivore thing, and I still can't get a hamburger with lettuce or a chicken salad. Which is odd, since the non-Incarnate game is a chicken-salad-and-hamburger restaurant. But seriously, can we please stop using this analogy?

Using
/bind z "powexecname kuji-in sha"
appears to work for me, so either you're making a mistake somehow, or have encountered a bug. I copy-pasted that /bind from in-game, so copy-paste it into yours and, if that doesn't work, there's some other issue.

Badge progress should be a reliable indicator, except for deaths below level 10, or if you paid off all your debt in AE.