Sailboat

What about Dual Blades? The only set with combos, speaking of new conceptual territory, and you can customize each weapon differently.

Yeah, but you used to have to make a character on each server you wanted to check on, which is why I still have the name "Nametest" reserved on one or two servers.

Running the Striga content also enables your character to start the Moonfire Task Force (Burkholder). I've literally been on Moonfire teams where nobody had done that, and someone had to go find an alt so we could start the Task Force.

Piffle! You only need thirty-eight complete Touch of Death sets plus a single complete Gaussian's to get there.

For melee only.

Exactly. Up to +5, higher level critters do have a slightly higher chance to hit you -- but defense won't do anything to reduce that, once you've reached the soft cap.

For example, a +0 minion hits you at 5% when you're soft-capped; a +something minion might hit you at 6%...but you can't change that with extra defense. It's like the 5% minimum floor got moved on you. So you're correctly perceiving increased hits, but you don't need to / aren't able to offset it with more defense slotting. I usually use a technique called "punching" to deal with those cases.

Well, aside from Tough, you can't really add significant resistance to a character, so the issue is pretty much moot. You'd like to hit the 90% cap on everything, but aside from the cases Call Me Awesome listed, it's not happening.

One of the knockback-causing sets gives a 2.5% smashing res bonus for four slots. If you'd like to four-slot two knockback powers, you could in theory get another 5% to smashing (note -- this would not include lethal resistance). This is about the best you can do with IO sets, and it's weak...while absorbing six of your discretionary slots AND causing two powers to do knockback, something many tanks don't want. Gah.

Ok, tested and verified -- Hover does not cap with at least FIVE flight speed SOs. Note that three hits the ED cap. So you are indeed not reaching optimal hover speed slotting the way you are.

Whether you are reaching a speed you personally find useful is another question -- you may not desire greater speed. But it's clearly wrong to say Hover caps with no speed enhancement. FLIGHT does, however.

It bears noting that most of the pole weapons you cite can not be used, and were not used historically, with shields. Particularly the swinging-style pole weapons like halberds and poleaxes.

Spears used with shields were generally short and/or lightweight javelin-style items, like the Roman Pilum. Heck, the Zulu Iklwa was shortened so much it was basically a sword with a longish grip, and it was used "underhand" like a stabbing sword.

There are exceptions -- particularly Alexander's Macedonian phalanxes, which used the pike-like sarissa, and a lightweight shield strapped to one arm:

Note that such a shield strapped on the arm will be much more limited in mobility to block and shield-charge and so on. Also note that later armies entirely dispensed with the shield when wielding pikes.

Personally, I think the (relatively) small, one-handed thrusting weapons used with a shield like the Spartan hoplites are so different in size and function from larger pikes, lances, and sarissas that they probably would be better as a separate powerset...not to mention the entirely differently-used sweeping-type weapons like halberds, poleaxes, naginatas, quarterstaves, bos, and so on, which would have completely different animations entirely incompatible with shield use.

I'm not sure about that. FLIGHT is now speedcapped with the base slot, and there's been some discussion about it. HOVER, I dunno. I have an active character with one-slotted Hover and it does not appear to me to be capped (currently at level 40). I have an old character waiting to be rebuilt from the ground up who has it six-slotted; although that character is not level 50, I will try to remember to pull him out and test Hover speed slotting.

I think the thinking is, you might as well do Oroborous merit content while doing the bulk killing for purples; not quite as time-efficient as a single easy farming map, but you'll be pulling in reward merits while hunting for that elusive purple drop.

For what it's worth, I've gotten two purple recipes while doing tip missions, and unlike reward merits, alignment merits can be saved up to (eventually) get a purple, although it's pretty labor-intensive.

So to sum up, perhaps running +0/x8 tip missions is the surest path toward purpledom. Once you've run your daily limit of them, if you still want to look for purples before the tips become available again, you would then go back to your typical farm map.

I'm with the posters saying, "Not necessary, but since Inherent Stamina frees up several one-slotted power picks anyway...."

However, I want to nitpick a pet peeve of mine.

You do not have soft-capped resistance, to s/l or anything else. Resistance has a hard cap. Typically, most posters would just say "capped resistance."

Defense has a hard cap too, but it's very high, too high to reach with IOs and much too high to be useful as a term of discussion in almost any situation. It turns out that 45% is the point at which adding additional defense doesn't protect you any better against all but a tiny subset of situations. it's not a true cap, but it's the useful point to talk about; hence the term "soft cap." Generally, "soft cap" is used only in reference to defense, not resistance.

I don't know the reasons behind this, but for all but the most popular items of all, I find that although the crafted version has been consistently more expensive than the recipe for month after month, occasionally the crafted price is suddenly lower than the recipe price. This usually changes back after a short while, but in one case a niche I was crafting in stayed "inverted" for weeks, then mysteriously returned to its previous cost structure.

I'm not sure in every case whether it's the result of the crafted price actually falling or the recipe price spiking, but in the niche I referred to, it was definitely a case of the crafted version dropping like a rock. I was left holding recipes for a good while that I would have lost money on crafting. So I just did other things on other characters until the price came back up and I was able to list for a profit again.

The moral of this story, so to speak, is that it's worth at least checking the crafted price and availability, particularly if you are having trouble acquiring specific items. You might steal a real bargain, but even if you have to pay somewhat more, actually getting the desired IO at the desired level might still be worth it.