Justaris

Well, the cost is relative. Once you get up a few levels you'll find that you make influence much more easily than in the early game. Also very important - are you selling the drops you get at the Market, vendoring them or just deleting them?

If you're not using the Market, you're depriving yourself of a very large source of potential influence. Many of my characters can fund their first round of level 25 SOs when they hit level 22 based solely on earnigns from drops sold at Market.

Level 15/20 DOs - Steel Canyon, Skyway City (all five Origins in both zones, just find the one on the map that matches yours)
Level 25/30 SOs - Talos Island, Independence Port (all five Origins in both zones, just find the one on the map that matches yours)
Level 35/40 SOs - Brickstown, Founders Falls (requires doing one mission to unlock store-contact)

• Serafina, Magic store-contact, Brickstown
• Holsten Armitage, Science store-contact, Brickstown
• Mark IV, Tech store-contact, Founders Falls
• Agent Six, Natural store-contact, Founders Falls
• Penny Preston, Mutation store-contact, Founders Falls

Level 45/50 SOs - Peregrine Island (requires doing one mission to unlock store-contact)

• Ghost Falcon, all-origin store-contact, Peregrine Island

Level 35/40/45/50 SOs - Midnighter Club (requires doing the Midnighter story arc to unlock access to the zone), Rikti War Zone (no unlock)

Probably the easiest thing for level 35+ SOs is to go to the Midnighter Club or RWZ as there's no unlocking mission to do and you'll likely unlock the Midnighter Club anyway as you need to do that to get to Cimerora, home of the ever-popular Imperious Task Force.

I'm up for another run at this. I'll bring my Rad/Rad Defender, Tetujin (who will be a villain by the 10th).

Everything I've seen suggests you need a level 20+ hero, rather than a Praetorian or villain who's become heroic (and the same for VEATs and level 20+ villains).

Speaking of the CoP Trial, there's a run on Triumph tonight which will likely conflict with the scheduled Triumph Friday TFs time - so if your turnout happens to be a bit low tonight, that may well be why. I know I myself would probably have joined up for this if I wasn't already planning on running the trial.

Random drops are random.

If you want to maximize your chances, give yourselve the most chances in the shortest time - find something you can kill quickly and run those missions at -1 and x8.

I'd like a spot for this.

@Justaris - Tetujin, level 50 Rad/Rad Defender

Based on this list, it appears to be exclusive heroside. Were you planning on dealing in redside SFs as well? Either way, this sounds like fun.

This is an extremely general question. You have a few choices to make first before we can really recommend a powerset to pair with Dual Pistols.

Choice #1: Primary or secondary? If you chose to be a Blaster or a Corruptor, you will have Dual Pistols as your primary powerset and you will need to choose a secondary powerset. If you choose to be a Defender, Dual Pistols will be your secondary powerst and you will need to choose a primary powerset. You get the powers in a primary powerset earlier and the modifiers tend to be in your favor (i.e. Blasters and Corruptors do more damage with Dual Pistols than Defenders because it is a primary for them and a secondary for the Defender).

Choice #2: What role do you want to play? Defenders have support as their primary role (buffing, debuffing and/or healing), with damage as secondary. Corruptors are the reverse, and Blasters are all damage, all the time. So which role sounds more appealing to you? You can always make more than one or even try out all three and see what sticks.

Choice #3: Hero, Villain, or Praetorian? Blasters and Defenders are usually heroes, while Corruptors are usually villains. You can begin the game as a hero Blaster, a hero Defender, or a villain Corruptor. Alternatively, you can begin the game as a Praetorian and choose any of the three, but you'll be in Praetoria for the first 20 levels. While this is the newest area of the game and very highly populated as a result, you cannot directly interact with the rest of game's population until you exit Praetoria. This includes established supergroups and higher-level players in general.

Once you have some idea what you want to play, we can recommend powersets that should work well with those choices. There is no one 'best' even when you narrow things down to a specific AT and role like Blaster, which is part of the strength of the game since it means that there's no 'wrong' selections that get you passed over.

I absolutely loved that opening.

"What're you supposed to be anyway?"
"Space cowboy!"
"There's no cows in space, and didn't you wear that, like, five years ago?"
"I like it."

And the reference to Fillion's time on Firefly was wonderful.
Reminds me of when they had James Marsters shake his head at the concept of vampires on Smallville.

Well, they were playable and viable solo before the buff. Whether they now solo fast enough for you... we're not you.

Maybe. Try it and see. I'd recommend something debuff-centric since those tend to solo more quickly and easily than the buff-centric sets.

The key powers, I'd say, are Envenom and Weaken. Those are your core debuffs. Alkaloid is a decent ranged single-target heal though the endurance cost is a bit high (but you're stuck with it regardless), and Neurotoxic Breath rounds things out nicely. Antiodte for status protection and Elixir of Life for resurrect (one of the better battle resurrect powers, actually). Paralytic Poison is a ranged hold, which is often useful. Poison Trap is quite different from the Traps version and not nearly as impressive. Noxious Gas requires a henchman anchor and is a decent debuff but in my experience only worth the trouble on really tough targets. Your 1-2 punch of Envenom and Weaken takes apart most things handily without the need for anything else. For AVs/Heros, GMs or PvP, you will want that extra edge though.

In my opinion:
Must Have - Envenom, Weaken
Good - Neurotoxic Breath, Alkaloid, Paralytic Poison, Noxious Gas, Antidote (if you team)
Situational - Elixir of Life
Skip - Poison Trap

I also recommend you read this guide

Given that no one is forced to play on one and only one server, many of the longtime players play on more than one (either by choice or because they've filled up all 36 slots on their server of preference). While Freedom and Virtue are the top two consistently in terms of population, the servers occupying the other positions in that particular ranking are going to vary from moment to moment and day to day. So any list we give you is already wrong.

Just attempted to do this on Triumph and no one who tried it got the badge on the first attempt, so we disbanded. If anyone's had success at this since the launch of GR, I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong.

Update: one of the team members got the badge a few minutes after we broke up. Not sure what we did but it seemed to work, will try this again soon in hopes that I may be the lucky one next round.

Anyone know if there are new costume pieces in GR with the carnival of light and all? I'm making a carnie character (more than one, actually) who is to be in the Resistance and I was wondering if there were more options somewhere? Maybe something unlocked later? Anyone know?

Yes. Invention Origin (IO) enhancements. "Inventions" is oftne used to describe the entire crafting system (recipes, Invention Salvage, Invention Origin enhanvements and Invention Sets). It gets a bit complex.

In this whole "OMG Blasters are tanking as good as Tankers!!1!" discussion, there's a couple of things being missed. First off, and I believe this was brought up, Blasters have far, far less hit points than Tankers and therefore aren't as able to soak those few hits that do come through the softcapped defense. Hits that a Tanker with his high HP and therefore higher regen can shrug off could faceplant the Blaster handily.

Secondly, there's the issue of Defense Debuffs. I think granting a bit more of this across the board to Tankers might solve some of the inequities here, and while it is possible to protect yourself from Defense Debuffs a bit by chewing on purple inspirations to exceed the soft cap and give yourself a buffer, it's still noticeably less effective than real DDR and additionally requires a substantial inspiration cache to maintain.

Finally, there's the tradeoffs that these Blasters make in their builds just to acheive softcap defense. It's not as if they just choose the SoftcapDefenseNao power and they're good to go. In the aftermath of the changes to Blessing there are even more compromises that must be made to get a Blaster build to softcapped defense to just one position.

In summary, while I think this issue could stand a bit of tweaking especially on the Tanker end, I really don't think it's the crisis that some in this thread make it out to be.


Aaaaannd Call Me Awesome beat me to it while I was typing this out. Good post, CMA.

"Good" and "playable" are often subjective words. What you would consider to be good may or may not match someone else's defintion, so specific questions are more useful (i.e. "how well could this solo?" or "how well does this pair with X?").

Storm Summoning / Dual Pistols is indeed good and playble. At least, I think so.

For starters I just want to say that this is a general overview. There's no slotting here and I'm going to assume this is an SO or generic IO build for the moment. If you're looking for Set IO advice I'll need some kind of specific goal in mind to help you out with that (common specific goals include recharge, soft-cap defense and 'frankenslotting' which aims for making the individual powers very strong but gives up an overall set bonus goal to do that).

That said, here's my general comments on this:

• Ice Patch. This is a very potent power and probably one of the big reasons to take Ice Manipulation at all. I would very strongly recommend taking this power. Or, if there's a particular reason you've chosen not to take Ice Patch (doesn't fit concept, etc), it would be helpful to know that.
• Overslotted Build Up and Aim. Unless you are planning on slotting IO Sets, there's not much point in slotting anything other than Recharge in Build Up and Aim, so you shouldn't need more than two or three slots for each power. Keep in mind that once you reach SO levels you only get good value from the first three or so enhancements (see also: Enhancement Diversification)
• Slotting. Hard to say much here since this is a blank build, but I'd recommend 1-2 Accuracies, 2-3 Damage, 1-2 Endurance Reduction and 1-2 Recharge for attacks. Yes, that adds up to more than six, so you'll need to make some decisions, a lot of which will likely be based on playstyle. For example, if you find yourself often running out of endurance, you probably need more Endurance Reduction in your major attacks than you have.
• Inventions. I'm not sure if you're planning on going with Inventions for this build or not, but if so I'd strongly recommend trying out a frankenslotting approach (particularly when leveling up) as this is usually fairly cheap in terms of Market and crafting costs and very effective.

I hope all that was helpful, feel free to reply/repost and I'd be happy to help you further, as I'm sure would many others around here.

Unfortunatey, given the likely influx of new players and of returning players who've been away for a very long time (making them also effectively new players), catering to the so-called "holy trinity" mentality is likely to be effective. Many of these players will have the expectation that they need a healer, so I wouldn't be surprised if this particular dead horse rears its ugly head in a big way in Praetoria.

Sounds like fun.

Techbot Alpha basically lined out the various special threats Kheldians (Peacebringers & Warshades) face, but I'd just add that the boss-class Voids and Quantums, who are easily the most dangerous, you don't see unless you're in a team or 7-8 or have yoru difficulty set to the same (x7 or x8). The Lts, while still dangerous, can be taken out if you're alert and hit them first, especially with some form of control power (stun from Gravitic Emanation/Inky Aspect or hold from Gravity Well).


And yes, Warshades are absolutely worth it.

For most badges the above works very well, but Monkeywrencher and Illusionist are special cases in that you can't just find them on the street. Illusionist requires you to find a certain kind of boss, a Master Illusionist, and keep it alive while you farm its summmoned minions.

This particular badge, Monkeywrencher, is for the Zeus Titans who form from two Hercules Titans. I can say from experience that trying to hunt for this badge outdoors can be frustrating indeed. Sometimes you get lucky, but you can have a long string with nothing.