Mr_Morbid

Interface with pets was pretty wonky when it first came out. It kept changing from working to not working and then back again with each minor patch, mostly because reactive was so brokenly overpowered at first with pseudopets like Rain of Fire. It took a while to get the kinks worked out.

Ugh. I already have to wear glasses. I never want to have to wear another pair of glasses on top of them and pay extra for the privilege.

There are some tips I generally drop:

The oft mentioned Panther 541 I drop because of the annoying wait time between the attacking waves.

The debutante one is my least favorite because it not only has THREE npcs to escort, but it's guaranteed to have at least three of those annoying Master Illusionists in it. I will, however, do this mission whenever it come up until I get the Illusionist badge BECAUSE of the Master Illusionists.

Sister Jocasta is a drop depending on whether or not the character in question deals well with caltrops. My Ice Armor tanker laughs when the Knives try to slow her with little bits of metal on the floor.

I'll generally do whichever morality mission drops first. The Unusual Suspect is nice and fast, but One Good Spider is more fun.

Villain side I usually just drop the ones that require leaving Grandville. And I always take Hometown Hero over My Other Selves. The latter is nice to do once, but too talky for repeated runs. And the former lets me beat up Sky Dragon, the Rodney Dangerfield of heroes.

For the lower levels on either side there aren't any I consistently drop since I'm not going to be doing any of them on a particular character often enough to get irritated with them. Though I do wish there was an alternative to the 20-29 hero one. I hate that mission.

There isn't a whole lot we definitively know about the Battalion (much of what others have posted is extrapolated from fairly vague statements in game and may not end up being accurate) but there isn't anything to suggest that they are the titans. The only titan in-game at this time is Prometheus and he at least claims to be on our side, though he's a jerk about it.

FYI the Atlas referred to so often in-game is not the mythical titan, but a (really big) human hero who lost his life defending Paragon City against a German sneak attack in 1941 (which seems to be Primal Earth's closest analogue to the real world's Pearl Harbor attack.) A number of characters in game have names taken from mythology (Talos, Ajax, and pretty much every named Warrior are examples) but are unrelated to the myths that inspired them.

The bombs and the 100 Rikti are easy. The EB's are a pain since you have to get a pretty big bunch of people together for them to spawn.

And forget the buff, I want the Rikti axe.

Brutes can be built up to have as much resistance and defense as tankers, but it takes more effort to get them there as the base values on the defense/resist sets are lower. Tankers also have better aggro control as their single target attacks taunt the target and up to four additional mobs near the target. Brute single target attacks only taunt the target, but that isn't too much of a drawback since brutes can still get an aoe taunt in the primary set and a taunt generating aura in the secondary. Brutes also have a slightly lower hit point caps. Long story short: Brute's aren't as good as tankers for tanking right out of the box, but they can be built up to do the job very well.

Scrappers can serve as off tanks on occasion if they take a taunt (and will have to go into the Presence pool to get an aoe taunt.) They can build defense up to tank levels (all AT's can for that matter. There are different hard cap defense amounts but they are so high above what is realistically needed or achievable that it doesn't matter) but have a resistance cap of 75% as opposed to 90% for tankers/brutes. They also have much lower maximum health. They are almost never 'main' tanks mostly due to the limited aggro control and many scrappers don't take any version of taunt.

As far as making 'proper' builds, that's a whole book worth of discussion.

IMO, Regeneration is a great secondary for a semi-casual player since it can be built to be effective at what it does without the amount of number crunching that some sets need to really shine. But I wouldn't tank with it unless you grab a lot of defense from other sources.

Not effected by this myself, but I see your problem. The merits should be redeemable for ATOs since premium players are allowed to use both ATOs amd merits.

The set does indeed suck. But if you have any recharge intensive pets (say Gang War) you can slot the aoe defense in that instead of a henchman.

It took me 14 packs to get all the costume pieces. No wolf though.