MechaCrash

For a beam user, I'd say to go with something that lets you hang back. Beam Rifle has only one real AOE, and it's a cone, and cones are hard to use if enemies are in your face. Of course, if you're a blaster, that doesn't really matter.

If you go with a Beam/Energy blaster, then you'll probably want to skip Single Shot (your attack chain will be full enough as it is) and Penetrating Ray (snipes suck). From your secondary, you'll definitely want to take Boost Range and that early Build Up, and skip Power Boost.

If you take Munitions Mastery, you should know that the game engine sees the gun your primary gives you as a Beam Rifle and the gun your secondary gives you as an Assault Rifle. Therefore, you will have to deal with redraw, no matter what. You can use the mecha rifle model with the regular Assault Rifle set if you want, and that won't have redraw, but that's another issue altogether.

Whatever you go with, I advise pairing Beam Rifle with something that doesn't require a lot of clicking. The redraw gets to be a pain in the neck real fast. Thermal Radiation might be good, because barring having to patch a bleeding teammate back together, you only have to use your shields every four minutes and Forge every...thirty seconds, I think? There's also Heat Exhaustion and Melt Armor, but their recharges are relatively long, so you shouldn't need to fiddle around with that too much.

I think the initial idea was to make it come with Titan Weapons. The coding dudes couldn't make that work, so they tried making it cost zero points if you bought Titan Weapons. They couldn't get that working either, so they threw their hands up, said screw it, and made it free for everybody.

Obviously, "free for everybody" is not as good a marketing thing as "free if you buy the actual set this goes with," but it's not all bad. Yes, you can get the weapon bundle for free...but to use that bundle, you still need to buy Titan Weapons.

Snipes are skippable. They don't do anywhere near enough damage to justify their enormous windup time, and the extra range is basically meaningless.

I keep getting stuck trying to figure out a plant/dark build of my own, but I'll give what thoughts I do have as I have them. Sorry it's disorganized.

Why no Nightfall? It's a pretty nice cone attack. I understand being short on powers, but I don't think Nightfall is one to skip.

You can probably drop the endurance reduction from Gather Shadows. It's neither expensive nor fast charging, so I'd say that slot would be better served with another recharge.

I assume you're sixing Coercive Persuasion in Seeds of Confusion for the defense bonus. If not, then you can drop the pure confuse piece, because it puts you way over the ED cap. Also keep in mind that due to converters, "cheap purples" don't really exist. All the cheap confuse and sleep bits got bought up so people could convert them into the more expensive sets. You can still do it, it'll just cost you more.

I'd replace the def/end/rech in Combat Jumping with pure def. Combat Jumping costs practically nothing and doesn't have any recharge, so you might as well wring what defense out of it you can.

I'd put a +jump in Super Jump. The endurance cost only really matters if you're running it in a fight, and if you're in a fight, you should be running Combat Jumping instead. That or a Blessing of the Zephyr: -KB proc.

Energy Manipulator sucks. Why are you putting that in Stamina? If you can only spare two slots for it, use the endmod and proc from Performance Shifter. It'll give you back more endurance over time.

Vines has a PVP set in it. I'm not sure why, because that is expensive as hell. If you're going for the 7.5% recharge bonus, Basilisk's Gaze can do the same thing without breaking the bank.

Tough won't do a lot for you, and the sleep resist from the two piece bonus from Titanium Coating is basically useless. I'd say to stick the -KB and global def bits of Steadfast Protection here.

Why do you have a to-hit debuff set in your PBAOE? It's not even the accurate to-hit debuff set. If you can't spare any more slots for it, frankenslot from the damage sets so the power actually hurts.

Unless you're really desperate for the range bonus Trap of the Hunter gives you, change the slotting in Carrion Creepers. I'd frankenslot it to get some accuracy in it, max out the recharge, and then everything else is a proc. The damage on a procced out Creepers is crazy.

Weave has Red Fortune in it. I'd switch that out for Luck of the Gambler if you're only using four slots on it.

I'd try to find more slots for Fly Trap. I'd give it the damage and acc/dam from Blood Mandate, along with the acc/dam from Sovereign Right. This gives it excellent accuracy and near capped damage. You can then either move the last two slots elsewhere, or use them for procs.

I'd try to find another slot for Midnight Grasp so you can stick a Mako's Bite quad in there. That power hurts, after all, and with the four bits of Kinetic Combat you have and the Quad, you get good accuracy and endurance reduction, ED capped damage, and about 60ish% recharge. If you can find a sixth slot, stick a common recharge IO in it for about 42% accuracy, 60ish% endurance reduction, and capped damage and recharge.

The five and six piece bonuses of Impervium Armor aren't worth it. Here's a good candidate for shaving slots. You can check the other armor sets for details, but I think good candidates are four pieces of Reactive Armor, five pieces of Aegis or Reactive Armor, or six pieces of Titanium Coating.

If you're desperate for the defense bonus, then what you have in Soul Drain is fine. If you want performance, give it two acc/rech bits and a common recharge.

Easy Mode is for children.

Link?

This is just the henchman powers for the demon half of a demon/cold Mastermind, but here's what I've got and why. (I did the cold domination in another Mids build for a corr, if you're wondering how that works.)

In the Demonlings, I put a full set of Edict of the Master. I wanted the global bit from it, and it'll give me good accuracy and endurance reduction with capped damage, so why not? I had slots to spare, so I don't need to frantically compress with frankenslotting on this.

For the Demons, I used four pieces of Blood Mandate (leaving out Acc and Acc/End), along with the Resistance bonus of Sovereign Right. Again, good accuracy and endurance reduction, with ED capped damage. I used Blood Mandate instead of Sovereign Right because Sovereign Right's set bonuses aren't as good.

For the Demon Prince, I used five pieces of Blood Mandate (leaving out the Acc) and the Impeded Swiftness damage proc from the slow sets. Again, really good accuracy, damage, and endurance reduction, and I added the proc because basically everything it can do is a slow, and thus has a chance to set off the proc.

For Hell On Earth, I used the acc/dam/rech, end/dam/rech, and proc from both of the Recharge Intensive Pet sets. This gives it good accuracy and endurance reduction, and pretty good damage and recharge, although at around 76% it's not as good as I'd like. But since the entire point here was a place to stick the +res and +def globals, I figure it's good enough.

You can condense the slots pretty heavily if you use Hami-Os and crazy frankenslotting, if you need to. I didn't for this build because Cold doesn't really need a ton of slots to shine, so I had plenty free to play with. Or I will if they ever get around to proliferating Cold Domination to Masterminds, anyway...

While it's true that Repair is far more potent, it is also far less versatile. If you're on a team, Repair is only good for your robots, and only if you're getting attacked. Aid Other can be used on teammates in addition to your goons, and its interruptibility shouldn't be too much of an issue, since enemies should mostly be swinging at your goons and not you.

But I would suggest Thermal over Sonic, anyway, which renders this mostly irrelevant. It's true that Sonic will offer more resist, but I don't think the extra mitigation provided by the big bubble is as much as the extra mitigation provided by being able to patch your bleeding goons back together. (How does Cauterize work on robots, anyway? Spot welding?)

It's also true that Sonic has more -resist in the form of Disruption Field and Sonic Siphon, and the very nice Liquefy, but Disruption Field is horribly expensive, and Liquefy's recharge is entirely too long for what it does. On top of that, Disruption Field requires, as has been noted, the person wearing it to actually get in there and mix it up in melee range, which I feel does not go with robotics very well. On top of that, Sonic has two major stinker powers in the form of Sonic Cage (which may stop sucking if all cage powers get the kind of love Dimension Shift did) and Sonic Repulsion, and the niche but largely redundant Clarity.

Sonic does have the advantage over Thermal in that you have a mez protection power that directly benefits you, but I think that's about all Sonic has over Thermal these days.

I have a fire/shield scrapper. She's probably the most powerful of my characters. I've got her softcapped without the use of any purples, although my build doesn't achieve that until 50. It's a bit short on AOE at 47, and softcapped to melee at 40, however. I got around this by, uh...begging friends that could buff defense to come along (like Cold Domination users, empaths with Fort, VEATs, that sort of thing). She was perfectly playable without that, of course, I just got hooked on hacking my way through missions set for x8.

Now that she's 50 and has all the shinies, I use Agility Radial Paragon. The endmod bonus isn't too useful, but the boosts to recharge and defense are very handy, and I figured a bit of extra moving speed is more useful than a tiny bit of extra bonus for Stamina. Endurance can be an issue, which is why I took Ageless Core Epiphany for my Destiny power, which basically lets me push a button to refill my endurance, and by the time the recovery bonus wears off, oh hey, Ageless is back up!

I took Reactive for the obvious reasons and Phatoms because they fit, but those can be traded out.

Also, Werner, I have a question: are you softcapped? Because I looked at my own build, and almost all of my powers that can take purples needed other sets to squeeze out every bit of defense. She's not purpled because I just didn't have the room.

I have never seen anybody go for the debuff resistance side of the tree.

Odds are, if you took Ageless as your destiny, it is because you need the endurance it grants you. And if you need the endurance it grants you, then the boosted recovery is going to help you a lot more than the debuff resistance would.

The interface doesn't do -75% debuff, by the way. 75% is the chance it has to actually fire. According to the wiki's article on Interface slot abilities, Paralytic has a 75% chance to apply a 5% defense debuff for ten seconds, which can stack up to four times for a total of 20% defense debuff. Which is, quite frankly, not worth it, because it's pretty rare for people to not have at least an 85% chance to hit the things they're swinging at, and that's mostly because of the dodgy jerks.

Yeah, as far as I know, the only way to see how many procs per minute a store bought IO has is to look at the actual IO itself. I got the numbers by buying the thing on the beta server, where everything costs zero points.

Another advantage of going with the 15% of the regular crafted one is that if it turns out to be the inferior option, I can unload it on the market and recoup some of my costs. But the store bought one? I am stuck with that forever.

Due to that, and the uncertainty around the store bought version, I think I'll go with the regular version. Thanks for the answers.

Good to know. As a followup question, which is going to fire more: the 2 PPM of the store bought version, or the straight 15% chance of the regular version?

If I stick Lockdown's chance for hold in Distortion Field from Time Manipulation, then it has a 15% chance to go off on every target and checks every ten seconds, right? And it doesn't matter if the actual hold for Distortion Field fires, just that it can hold is enough to make Lockdown potentially fire?

I'm pretty sure that's how it works, but I want to be positive before I go for it.

I've got an idea for a demon/cold mastermind and illusion/ice dominator. For the obvious reasons, I can't do those.

I've got a name reserved on my home server for a staff/elec scrapper, so I just need for Staff to happen.

I will warn you now that I have never met a "healer" that was any good. Don't start down this path, it doesn't end well.

Be a Defender, not a "healer."

I wouldn't add that extra accuracy to Freeze Ray unless you're really twitchy about it missing. Between the accuracy from the set itself, and the accuracy from set bonuses (or to-hit from set bonuses, which is different in a way I don't understand), you will not be missing very much except against stuff that would laugh off the Freeze Ray anyway.

You can also shave a slot in Bitter Ice Blast and drop the pure damage piece from Apocalyse, because that puts you way over the ED cap. Unless you have some burning need for the psi defense, anyway. You can either use enhancement boosters on the dam/rech piece if saving the slot is important, or you can scrounge up a dam/end/rech or dam/rech from another set.

On the same note, for the Positron's Blast in Ice Storm, I would swap out either the dam/end or dam/range for the proc, because you're over the ED cap for damage, and the proc will be more useful. For Blizzard, I would definitely swap out the dam/end, because it's going to zero out your endurance anyway.

I'd also put the slow resist in Recall Friend and stick a common run speed into Super Speed, because the range for Recall Friend is so big that the range boost only matters if you're at opposite ends of Independence Port or if you're in the Shadow Shard, and I suspect you'll notice the extra 30ish MPH from boosting Super Speed more than you would the extra range in Recall Friend.

You can also probably free up a slot on Soul Transfer by sticking a single recharge in there and leaving it at that, and using the other slot elsewhere. The second recharge IO shaves 18 seconds off the recharge, which is already at two and a half minutes. If you need Soul Transfer even that often, something is horribly wrong.

The LFG tool behavior that annoys me is when people get the minimum they need, and then sit there trying to fill the group forever instead of just getting the hell on with it. I understand wanting to get a big team, but once you have enough people, just put out a last call to see if anybody else wants in, then stick it in the open queue.

More than once I've seen people spend so much time trying to fill up the team that they could've just run the DFB with what they had.

Defense and recharge are the two major priorities, as far as I know. Building for resist is pointless, because you can't get enough from IOs to actually mean anything, but you can build for plenty of defense.

Resist doesn't have a softcap. It has a hard cap of 75% for Scrappers and most other ATs. I think it's 85% for Kheldians, and 90% for Brutes and Tankers. I'm not sure what it is for VEATs, but it's not immediately relevant.

Warshade is also a possibility. My reasoning here is that, once you hit 20, you'll have Black Dwarf. If it's just the two of you, you can turn that on and do the ol' tank and spank. If you add more people, however, you can adapt as the situation requires. So if you get more squishy shooty types, you can stick with Dwarf form. If you get someone who can take a punch, you can let them take point, go Nova, and help bring the pain. You will eventually have things like Dark Extraction and Eclipse, too.

Of course, "stay in Dwarf Form" probably sounds less than exciting, and to make Warshades stupidly good requires IOs, so I don't blame you if you pass on this option.

Against Incarnate Trial bosses, controllers will always get Containment damage. No source other than the wiki, though, but if you want to see all the stuff (which isn't much), you can do so here.

Attacks can have one of three positions they come from: Melee, Ranged, and Area Of Effect. Melee attacks and Ranged attacks are fairly obvious. Area Of Effect is stuff like fireballs, rocket launchers, and shotguns.

This is not a given, mind you, because it's possible that there may be cones out there that count as melee or ranged, but I can't think of any off-hand.

I would like to see an enhancement attuner. When used, it would convert the relevant enhancement into an Attuned enhancement, just like the store bought versions. I don't know if it would then become account-bound, but it'd be nice to be able to just buy enhancements at whatever level and then use the attuners to make them level with me.

I know it was not asked about, but something that is probably worth knowing is that Tankers and Brutes both get Taunt, but there is an important difference: both versions get a range debuff, but only the Tanker version has that debuff being AOE. The taunt is AOE for both, but the Brute will only debuff the range of whoever they target, while the Tanker gets everybody the taunt hits.

Confront for Scrappers is a single-target taunt with single-target range debuff too, if you care about such things.