MechaCrash

Hold -> Sleep -> Hold will let you clamp down on the boss, yes. The first application of Hold will get some magnitude started, but piss off the boss. The Sleep will make it nod off for a little bit, and then the second hold will actually take effect. It'll break the Sleep, but who cares? He'll be held by then.

So...not directly related to the subject at hand, but this always bothered me. Why is it five dollars for four hundred points? Why not five dollars for five hundred points (with prices adjusted accordingly)? It'd make the mental math a lot cleaner.

No. You keep all that stuff.

People take the gun powers?

For the most populated servers, those would be Freedom and Virtue. There are no PVP servers in this game, and I hope that PVP is just a preference and not a major thing for you, because it's not terribly popular in this game. I hear that Freedom actually has people in the PVP zones, but it's not my server, so I wouldn't know.

From the description you give, it sounds like some flavor of Dominator would sit nicely. Their primary is a control set and their secondary is an assault set, which consists of a mix of melee and ranged attacks. Another option is a Defender with the Dark Miasma set. They can control stuff decently thanks to Fearsome Stare (fears make enemies stay in one place and do nothing until attacked) and Petrifying Gaze (a run of the mill hold). On a very important side note: there are no "healers" in this game, healers are generally seen as terrible. Buffs, debuffs, and controls are pretty potent in this game, that relegates actual healing to the mitigation of last resort.

As for stuff you need to know, not really. The only stuff you can't change ever are your origin, which is largely cosmetic, your AT, your primary, and your secondary. Everything else can be changed at some later date if you dislike it. I also suggest taking your time to read the mission stuff, especially the missions in Praetoria. A lot of it is actually quite good.

And finally, here is a very important resource: The City of Heroes wiki. It contains plenty of information. Just make sure you don't go to the Wikia site, as it is obsolete and full of dubious ads which install dubious things.

I discovered that the word "catgirl" is apparently considered bad.

If you run at -1, they don't drop shards. They must be at least equal to what the number in your XP bar says.

I'd say "your combat level" or "your effective level" but level shifts throw that off...

For Dev's Choice arcs, I honestly have no idea. I figure if they drop actual rewards, they'd drop shards too.

You can put it off and, in theory, reach level 50 entirely in Praetoria without ever going to Primal Earth.

Doing so is a bad idea, however, because you will soon be unable to buy enhancements, unless you use the market heavily or engage in mail-related shenanigans. You also don't have to, because you can go back to Praetoria whenever you want. The portal is in Pocket D.

As far as I know, recipes you get for beating things down are based on the level of the target. Recipes you get from end of mission completion, day jobs, and things like that are based on your actual level.

That depends on just what you mean by asking the question.

If you mean "how do you gain it at 50," then you get debt at 50 the same way you gain it from 10 to 49: get your face wrecked. If you're trying for a debt badge, I would suggest one of the Hamidon zones. Get yourself splattered, go to the hospital, repeat.

If you mean in more of a philosophical/lore sense, then that would require defining what debt means in the first place. And I have very little idea what it's supposed to represent outside of the obvious mechanical purpose.

Go to Villa Requin, the island taking up the southeast corner of Sharkhead Island. Go to the airstrip there and start hammering people's heads into their chest cavities. That will get you your rogue tips fairly quickly.

Once you're ready to go hero, you have more options, but I don't think they're as good. I suggest Terra Volta if the enemies there are largely gray, but if not, then Dark Astoria also works. I suggest getting a full load of three tips and then going to Atlas to investigate them, that way you're in a small and low level zone which will reduce transit time.

Four endurance modifications would run into the ED cap anyway, so it'd be a bad idea.

What I would do is stick three slots in Stamina, and rather than a third endurance modification, go for the Performance Shifter proc. If you have another slot to throw around, then rather than stick it in Stamina for another endurance modification, stick it in Health and shove in either a Mircale or Numina. Either of those will grant more endurance recovery than a third SO's worth of endmod in Stamina.

My first hero was Fire Floe, ice/fire blaster. I made her on Liberty due to a miscommunication with friends about where they all play, but I only got her to something like 6 before I was told that Champion was the primary stomping ground. I promptly remade her and my second character (BS/DA scrapper) over here.

I have my Protectors using the acc/rech and dam/end from the purple set, plus Blood Mandate dam/end and damage, and two common level 50 defense IOs.

This gives me 33.13 accuracy, 95.3% post-ED damage, 49.7% post-ED defense, and a very nice 59.63% endurance discount (and 33.13% recharge, but that's not really important).

I have it set that way to ensure they can reliably hit targets, which they can do since I have Tactics, and make sure they actually hurt. The defense commons are there because the other bits have enough endurance reduction that it can shoot grenades all day, and when it bubbles me it's actually worth something. I probably could have replaced the Blood Mandate: Damage with a dam/mez Hami-O, but I figured the set bonus for HP, tiny though it was, would serve me better than turning a four second stun into a five second stun.

I have a BS/DA scrapper, as you can guess from the title. I have her build mostly worked out, but I have one choice left to make: should I use a Luck of the Gambler +recharge and the Steadfast Protection -KB, or should I go with the Karma -KB and Steadfast Protection +3% defense?

Here's the numbers without either of them.

Defenses:
19% smash
19% lethal
8.4% energy
8.4% negative
11.5% psionic
7.7% fire
7.7% cold
26.5% melee
7.1% ranged
9.6% AOE

Recharge: 30%

So I can boost my defenses by 3%, or my recharge by 7.5%. Which one should I go for?

And yes, I know I can probably jack all of those numbers even higher, but I'm trying to stay more or less within my means.

I wonder why they don't just say "this is the new issue." Setting up a fallback in case of catastrophic failure, maybe?

Oh yeah. Just to make sure nobody makes the same mistake I did: if you want Hami-Os, remember that there's a 24 hour timer on taking that reward. So don't bring the same character to both raids or you'll miss out.

This is, I assume, in addition to the regular Saturday raids?

I had really good results when my Warshade was duoing with a kin/rad defender. I could keep Eclipse up most of the time, so it was trivial to run into the middle of dudes and start getting Mires and Fulcrum Shifts, and then going Nova and laying down heavy fire. If Eclipse wasn't up, or I needed to grab aggro for some reason, I could go Dwarf and start drawing everybody's attention to myself. And thanks to Speed Boost and Fulcrum Shift, the "eh" damage and recharge of the Dwarf form attacks wasn't too much of a problem. I seldom had to drop to human form to refill with Stygian Circle, too, but once I19 comes, I imagine this will be much less of a problem.

It is worth noting that the secondary doesn't have to be rad blast, but it's probably best to one that works when standing in the middle of the crowd.