PunkRolex

I finished the DA arcs last night for the first time. I know it doesn't add much to the discussion, but I really felt like the ease with which my purpled-out 50(+3) Fortunata trashed regular spawns and EBs was entirely appropriate for a character with some fraction of deific power. None of the EB fights seemed inconsequential. In a group setting, yes, they probably would have been and I think I'm OK with that.

But then again, I've seen groups of 50(+3) toons massacre level 50+ AVs in non-trial content and I don't really know if bumping anything up to AV level would do anything but make some fights take a little bit longer. Challenging groups of Incarnate-class characters largely means having some kind of non-standard mechanic to prevent a battle from turning into 40 seconds of pounding on a bag of hit points, and that's something downright hostile to solo and small group play regardless.

I think the devs balanced DA just about perfectly.

Also, dammit, the entry to the last Dream Doctor mission was awesome. Totally made me grin. I just wish they could have put Info on all the characters so I could finally see who all the Members of the Civic Squad are.

Random thought: There are a couple IOs that confer knockback protection.
Several ATs suffer for lack of some other form of status protection. Judging by forum participation, representatives of one AT are endlessly bitter about it.

Why not offer an IO with, say, Mag 2 or 3 sleep or hold protection or something?

I'm thinking this would work pretty well in resistance sets, just like Steadfast Protection. All the ATs lacking status protection have access to a resistance-type armor in their APP or Patron pool and from Tough.

Sleep, hold and stun are all common enough effects that building for truly worthwhile protection would make slot allocation problematic, assuming that the per-IO magnitude were sufficiently low. The IOs in question could even be unique or attuned to a particular character.

I've never heard anyone suggest this before. Is there some reason why it's completely off the table?

I tend to hop on and solo mid-level red-side on low population servers, so I don't see many people ever, but...

Fortunatas. When I do see Widows, they're Night Widows.
Sonic and FF types. When I do see an FF bubble, it's almost always somebody playing Traps.
Ice Melee. Do people do that ever? Even EM is more common.
Kinetic Melee. Shockingly unpopular.
Ice Control, Gravity Control. Electric Control. I don't think I've ever teamed with anyone using Electric control and it's probably been four years since I've seen either of the other two outside the courtyard in PI or standing around in AP.
Psychic Blast and Dark Blast Blasters. I suspect I wouldn't see any Electric Blast blasters if it hadn't been a launch set.

Empathy. I don't think there's enough value in it as a set at high levels, and at low levels I don't want to encourage the kind of players who think they need it.

Storm is another sore subject. It just doesn't mesh with my play style.

I have 450 levels worth of Rad/ Defenders and /Rad controllers and corrupters.
I have 200 levels of Mind Control.
I have 150 levels of Kinetics.
I have 150 levels of Plant Control.

I think I'd make a Confuse/Kin Dominator.

My primary would be something like

Confuse (Mind)
Confuse (Fortunata)
Seeds of Confusion (Plant)
Valentine's Day Seeds clone
Aura of Confusion (Fortunata)
Aura of Confusion (Defender)
Mass Confusion (Controller)
LRM of Confusion (based on Blaster Munitions)

At that point, I really would not care about a secondary, but what the hell? I can play another Kin.

I guess I'd take Air Superiority and some of the craftable temps for that one mob that lives through the carnage. My special toon would have Scrapper melee values.

CoTs could be brutal all the way to 50 if the Spectral demons didn't stop showing up. I'd like to see Ruin, Madness and Energy Mages up that high as well, just to mix up the mobs that might show up in a typical spawn.

Of course, the biggest beef I have with CoTs is just the fact that I'm playing a Super-Hero game and those losers are refugees from Everquest or something. I don't mind the occasional CoT mission but I generally think the lore, their base maps, their lame lack of respectable archvillains or even memorable named bosses are a waste in this game.

At least somebody gave them snazzy new clothes recently.

I've long advocated a Prehensile Hair melee set. It's a staple of comic book characters and it could be flavored in much the same way as dual pistols with Fiery hair or Snake (Toxic) hair. I see it as having short-duration controls as a secondary effect, maybe each hit has a 20% chance for a 5-secon immob or mag 1 hold or something.

Task forces usually live and die by having a decent meat shield and some kind of buff/debuff types. Everyone wants a good tank on their team but not many people want to play them. In my experience, TFs seem to form up with lots of Blasters and melee types who are going to want all the help they can get from more support-oriented toons.

The first thing I thought when I read this post was a Plant/Cold corrupter. They get the signature power from their primary at level 8, in time to be fully slotted for a Posi run, and they bring a good mix of buffs and debuffs to the table at all levels. On down side is that they spend a lot of time just spamming their AoE immob and ST hold at low levels; there just isn't much else for them to choose from. Things get better as they mature, but they're very team friendly and useful at any level at all.

I ran the villain side version and I thought it was outstanding. I got to be a real villain and do something that appears to have lasting consequence at long last. Not only that, but I got to take down a bunch of EBs I wasn't particularly prepared to fight and I had no major difficulty with it. So I felt intensely powerful and incredibly villainous. Is this was a level 40 villain is supposed to be like? Even theoretically lacking the patronage of one of Recluse's Lieutenants, I launched a nuclear weapon, beat the tar out of Manticore twice and a bunch of named also-rans and was brought in on a grand scheme with far-reaching consequences. How awesome is that?

I also loved the new base tileset and the opportunity to visit Warburg without sullying myself by entering a PVP zone.

Villains are definitely getting the better out of these missions so far. I like that. I can only guess that they're going to get stomped hard by part 7, but for right now I'm doing my diabolic laughs every time I run one of the SSA missions.

Minor quibbles: In the first mission, Dillo doesn't have an info box. He does in the third mission. Marshal Blitz on the other hand has the longest info I've ever seen on a mob, which is odd for a throwaway character whose purpose is clear in the NPC dialog. And I saw a couple misspelled words in the mission text. Nothing serious, but would it kill somebody to proofread for typos?

My Bots/FF has 5 primary powers and five secondary, with huge investments in Medicine, Leadership and the Flight pool. Air Superiority is her auto power. I leave her in Bodyguard mode full time and spend most of my time smacking things in melee. She's the only character I've played that ran out of places to put slots and useful power picks in her mid 40s. She's not at all gimpy. She makes a reasonable replacement for a Tank, Defender or Blaster as a team requires. I mostly play her on teams where I'm more interested in chatting than gaming because she is almost 100% autopilot.

My Fortunata. She's invisible, has aggro-free Confusion both single target and AoE, does solid ranged damage, has some kind of nuke up for every spawn she runs into, is defense-capped to all positions vs. +4s, gives her teammates around 22% defense just because they happen to be standing near her, can toss mobs all over the place with her Psychic Tornado and TK Thrust and has a spiffy rainbow aura that follows her around. She's not perfect but I don't think there's a better combination of fun stuff in the game than that.

The Avatar has A LOT of tricks that it's throwing around. Cluster around Desdemona (who is where, exactly?). Scatter away from targeted player. AoE confuse. -Def/-Res. Even being prepared for it, it's somewhat overwhelming. The UGT team I was on tonight more or less settled on as many people as possible flying over the Avatar's head while our melee types got turned into chum. We need a group hug protocol for hitting Clarion. It didn't happen.

I think the player base would do well to do develop the ingrained tactics that have made it in to people who grind BAF runs all night, or else the League Leader needs to be someone who basically sticks to nothing but micromanaging every fight. I don't think the UGT is too hard, exactly, but it seems like every victorious run is laid at the feet of whomever is tanking and whomever happens to have Clarions.

Any EAT is for whatever you need it for. The wide degree of variability is the entire point of being Epic. Now there's a down side in that someone can't just tell by your archetype what you're actually capable of doing but I think the theory is that the person behind the toon has enough experience to figure out how to be effective at whatever it is that they do.

Is it just me or has Liberty not done a public UGT in several weeks?

Personally, I went with ranged (TK, Dominate, Subdue, Gloom) and ranged AoE (Scream and Tornado) rather than melee because I found it easier to build for high levels of defense and recharge that way. My own Fort sits at 55 - 61% defense to all positions with Hasten and Mind Link permanent and no external buffs.

I can't solo an AV with my build, but EBs don't represent much of a threat and my Fort can and has defeated multiple huge spawns of 54s in a Lambda trial by herself (barring an unlucky run from the random number generator, at least).

I will say that I get more use out of having Coercive Confusion six slotted in the single-target version of Confuse since the proc is a lot more noticeable and useful there than in the AoE. I have a set of Malaise's Illusions in Aura of Confusion.

I went with the purple hold set for Total Domination. Purple sets for attack powers are difficult for me to justify on a Fort because of their tremendous cost and the dubious benefit of getting even more recharge than I have anyway; most of my slotting is in full sets that grant some kind of defense bonus.

I use Phantoms for a Lore pet and I normally have Ageless slotted for Destiny. Both of those are very useful for keeping my blue bar full.

It's a pretty sweet setup.

I'm also a Nethack player, someone who has actually managed to ascend with a Tourist-class character. Tourists in Nethack have cameras that they can use to blind foes, and they can tame the monsters they meet to work on their behalf.

Which sounds a bit like an Illusion controller without all the blue knockback guys.

Anyway, I could definitely see a control set based heavily on low-mag AoE confusion and disorient powers rather than hard controls. I think that set would be a lot of fun to play.

I have a Plant/Ice at 38. I actually thought damage on it was surprisingly good. Good AoE, good, flexible single target damage, good secondary effect. I'm sure there are more damaging combinations, but it was a vastly easier trip than my climb up the Dom ladder on my Mind/Psi was.