Scientist

I managed to do decently on the Lambda collection phase by (1) having inviso with SS plus the stealth IO, and (2) putting the pets in passive as soon as a crate went down and running along with whoever was taking point. The pets come back out of passive and into defensive/BG again after someone has smashed into the next objective, distracting some of the nearby spawn. Not all would make it to the next glowie every time, but if some of the rest of the team was running along it would keep all the spawns in between from focusing just on my pets. Conversely, if a pet gets shot instead of one of my teammates, I'd consider that overall a good thing because having a teammate die probably does count against overall league "success" in some way, if only by slowing it down, I'm sure a dead pet doesn't.

I have not had a chance to try it yet, but I know at one time when you issued a BG mode command, it was several seconds till the pets would fire on anyone. I think it was to prevent balance issues, whereby they would only ever be out of BG for fractions of a second while firing with keybinds. I wonder if spamming BG mode commands repeatedly while traveling around would keep them from shooting mobs and aggroing them, but preserve your shared BG damage with them.

On certain characters such as my rad defenders, who have very potent team helping abilities at low levels, I'll try to have at least some sets at 30-31 (you can do all but 3 blueside TFs and still have your set bonuses with level 31 IOs), and/or some purple sets to keep the bonuses at low levels. Below that I don't think the content is hard enough to require anything beyond the well slotted powers and large insp tray you have exemping down, remember it was mostly designed for people running with some, but not all, SOs up to about level 30. Those characters also aren't likely to be soloing lower level content for fun, so their "team helping" abilities are picked at lower levels, with less focus on offense.

For other characters such as my tank, I just do level 50 sets because his build was strong enough to tank everything below that on SOs while leveling. He only needs set bonuses for lvl 50 TFs and Trials.

If you wanted to spend a fair amount of time soloing lower level content, say you love Oroborous content or actual AE stories, which sometimes cap out below 50, I'd suggest at least one build with lower level sets. Downside; some of they take awhile to buy on the market, for example TF recipe drops can have long waits before any sell there. Expect to spend a lot more time accumulating the IOs then for a level 50 build, where pretty much anything can be bought in 24 hours.

One other thing I'd suggest, I think the game is much more interesting played with teams. In the best case, you make progress a lot faster on the team, in the worst case you have some great disaster stories to share with the forums. People LOVE reading about other people's bad PUGs.

So look for a supergroup on your servers forum, and make sure you are on the globals for your server. The globals are where a lot of game activity and team and TF forming goes on these days.

Dark is nice for preventing anchors from running via Fearsome Stare, as well as personal safety when soloing. Tar Patch works great for bunching up foes with debuff pulls, and keeps working if you are mezzed, unlike Enervating Field. A location based debuff requiring mouse positioning slows some people down, though, you have to decide if you like those.

Rad is nice for some of the current end game content where mobility is important, and both teams and AVs are moving around a lot. You may not get full effect out of Tar Patch in things like the Apex TF and Lambda Trial, whereas Enervating Field stays locked on the AV. Accelerate Metabolism is an easy to use team and personal buff, which Dark lacks, and addresses End which Dark has nothing to cover.

Rad/sonic and dark/sonic are both great choices, and will be welcome on teams. Ill/Rad is obviously easier to use soloing, and does provide a nice backup tanking capability if you are way into something like the STF and the tank vanishes, or you want to solo anything in the game.

For anything less tough then a well IOed tank/scrapper/brute, the container phase of Lambda is hard. My fully IOed tank dies once in awhile with that (though should be a lot less now that he has +3 level shift) Have Demonic/Eye of Magus ready as well as lots of insps for that phase, and strongly consider letting a sturdy melee take the alpha before opening up on a crate.

Beyond that, collect the accolades to survive better, the +hit points ones, etc. Have full inviso on any build thats not an alpha soaking melee (I like the stealth IO at least even on my tanker, no point to taking extra damage going through the halls). Stick with the team, use caution when fighting, and learn your limits, these trials were designed to be a challenge to characters who can solo on x8 normally. Arcanaville had a nice comment on playing her blaster in this phase, she plays like "she is the last non-virgin in the woods in a horror movie".

For fighting EBs on a non IOed out rad/rad build, I try to bring a pet, either a Shivan or a Scrapper.

Something to be aware of is that higher rank foes resist tohit debuffs now, I believe bosses resist 30% (that was the case at one time, unless its been reverted), and a level 50 AV resists about 85% of it. Plus, you will note that the Enzyme HOs come with a 20% tohit debuff, not 33% now. Thus Radiation Infection does not floor the tohit of as many foes any more.

That said, *some* defense helps a rad quite a bit, since Rad Infection is still pretty potent and stacks with it. I won't go into the calculations, but as you get near a total of 45% defense + (-tohit), the "soft cap", your survivability goes up a lot. The Steadfast +3% defense IO is a way to start.

Longer term, for a cheap defense build, take the character villianside, run a Patron arc, and pick up Scorpion Shield, the only defense shield available to a defender. Though for the same effort invested, you could run regular hero tip missions, get alignment merits, and convert them into something like Luck of the Gambler +rch recipes (I suggest level 25 ones, and crafting them to sell the enhancement generally pays off well). Sell those on the markets and buy recipes for +defense IOs, most defense sets aren't that expensive. Thunderstrike in ranged attacks, Gaussian in Tactics, Lockdown in holds, etc.

I personally feel that more emphasis on recharge for a rad/rad is good, to get perma Hasten/Accelerate Metabolism. Thats a somewhat more expensive build, but I'm happy with mine at about 75% global recharge (before Hasten/AM) and only ~10% defense. Then I rely on the Psi epic pool for Mass Hypnosis on spawns, Dominate and Cosmic Burst to control bosses for survival. But its more a team build then a solo one.

Lets say I decide to get the recipes, figure out what salvage is needed, run to a crafting location and zone in, and craft that Acc IO, Dam IO and End Red IO I need for the three slots I just assigned to my character when I leveled up. In order to do that, I'd probably need to pay "buy it nao" prices for the salvage, in addition to going back and forth between recipe and salvage windows on the auction house interface. With zoning time, call it 5 minutes.

Or, I could overpay by 300k per enhancement to just buy them now, call it a total of 1M Inf wasted, but probably 4 minutes of time saved. Thats enough time for me to log into a market character, turn over a couple of items, and make roughly 200M Inf (I tend to deal in low turnover, high margin items).

So which is the better use of my limited game time?

I believe the AI fix that was done a year or so ago was to cause all critters to cycle through their powers better; for example, until then Lord Recluse in the STF almost never used his End draining ranged attack, now he does. Unfortunately, pets use the same AI as critters, so now they are trying to use every possible attack, which includes running into melee if necessary. I think the statement from Castle was in regards to "spawn AI", which is another thing, and causes the members of a spawn to do different things to make them less vulnerable to our AoEs and make combat more interesting. Thus, some foes will stay at range, some will run into melee, based on their "preferences" for ranged or melee combat. This also tends to force one or two of our ranged pets to charge in.

I'd be happy if they just set it up so that Stay meant, well, Stay. Not "Stay for the next 5 seconds, then do whatever you want".

A friend and I had a lot of fun with a Fire/Fire tank and a Fire/Rad controller. The idea was the debuffs of the controller would make the tank survivable even with the "weaker" Fire armor, and between them they would have plenty of damage to make mobs melt. Then, at higher levels the two of them would make a good team nucleus for TFs and other content, with solid builds they could add any 6 other random characters and make it through. This worked out quite well, was fun to play all the way up, and is still one of our favorite pairs. As a tank I was never bored trying to keep aggro off my friend, who has a rather "aggressive" playstyle. Now that they are available, a fire/rad or fire/dark corruptor could also work, and could be paired with a Brute for even more damage, though it could take a fairly extreme build to make a fire armor brute sturdy enough to tank high level content the same way, so you might want to consider a different brute armor set.

We also tried a Stone tank with kin/sonic defender, and while that was effective, it was much slower to take spawns down unless we recruited a blaster, say. Stone tanks are also not in as much fashion for end game content now, since it has moved away from "stand in one spot and be extremely survivable", Stones speciality.

If you *just* want to duo with a pair, definitely swap scrapper or brute in for tanker in the above, any kind of support at all is plenty for a duo and you'll want the damage.

Bots/Traps MM here, and my only "personal" damaging attacks are the unavailable veteran ones. I would think /Traps would be about the worst case for personally affecting baddies, as well as slow animations, but I've not yet gotten the 10 thread table. Last four were Uncommon, Common, Rare, Common, which seems like a reasonable random distribution (in fact I'm sure Rare isn't 25%, I just got lucky). Amusingly, I got the Rare on a Lambda, where I felt I made less contribution since the collection phase is tough on a MM and fighting Marauder with Traps is not terribly efficient since he keeps bouncing around.

I do spam my ST and patron AoE Immob sometimes between dropping traps, just to make sure I get some credit for personally affecting foes.

I would also not be surprised if the devs tweaked their formula for pets and pseudopets up a bit, after seeing its pretty hard to "go afk and let the pets do the work". Pets just aren't sturdy enough in these trials to do the heavy lifting. Maybe dropping a pet counts as several "hits" in the participation system or something.

It might be worth turning the purple lines into arrows, to show which way things are going in the illustrations.

It can also be handy to knock enemies to over by a tanks aggro aura, they tend to get picked up by the aura while picking themselves up. This works especially well when its one mob that comes over to hit you, and you have a ST knockback.

If you are going for a defense build, you don't tend to need purples (with a few corner cases, the Confuse purple set IIRC has Ranged defense). You will probably use up all your slots getting defenses.

I posted a data chunk for my Fire tanker below, which may give you some ideas for Fire Armor + defense. Obviously you probably won't be getting the PvP +3% defense IO, but the rest isn't terribly expensive.

I was able to get to about 40% S/L defense on my fire tank before deciding I wasn't willing to make the sacrifice to get the last 5% for soft cap. Getting to 40% in place of 30% entailed sacrifices I *was* willing to make, and made a substantial survivability difference, but that varies by person. I took Darkest Night for extreme tanking situations. The build has worked pretty well in Incarnate trials, I don't seem to die any more often then other tanks I see there.

I saw a soft capped katana/dark scrapper build that gave up any slotting of Lotus Blossom, the main AoE of the set. Not a sacrifice I'd be willing to make, I'd rather use Divine Avalanche and Shadow Meld to handle defense, the one handles alphas while the other covers later in the fight.

For sets, I suggest a lot of playing around in Mids planner. The resistance sets provide fairly low defense bonuses, you may be able to take Aegis or Reactive set slots out of an armor, for example, and put them into Gaussians in Focused Accuracy and get more total defense. An IO defense build is pretty much always slot constrained. Conversely, if you are close to the cap on something like Energy resistance, overslotting it may be helpful, since there is a lot of energy damage out there in high end content.

One thing I didn't see people mention much is that the Crab will generally be a more welcome addition to teams, from a combination of lag/blocking issues from multiple MM pets and the fact that some people will have played with MMs who don't know how to control their pets and get the team in trouble. A Crab (assuming you took your defense toggle) protects the team just by kind of standing near them, and generally brings lots of AoE to the table, both popular on teams. Plus, especially with the Mako patron pool, you can bring very substantial AoE -resist debuffing to the table, which helps the team melt mobs.

I do agree that Crabs, solo, really thrive with IOs. The difference between SO level defense slotting and IO soft capped defense slotting is about a factor of 10 in incoming damage, plus various other debuffs and such hitting. I noticed this when running tips on Crabs on 2 servers, the IOed out one was easily able to double spawn sizes. The other thing that helps is taking a patron power pool with an AoE Immob, to force everything to stay at range where your defenses are strong, again at higher levels then you are yet.

For now, I suggest teaming as much as possible, which should be easy since Crabs are welcome on teams. This lets you see what AoEs you like and fit with your playstyle, so you can do a final respec and downselect to the ones you want in your final build, which will almost certainly have some global recharge so you won't need as many.

Its not a bad idea to get the Dark/Thugs to 50 as well, mind you, thats a VERY strong soloing character or help for a struggling team. A Crab is a very optimum choice for a team that can support it, a Dark/Thugs MM can pretty much *be* the team.

I'm actually dusting off my grav/FF controller again for the first time in a long, long time. The Trials are the first time since after IOs came out where people actually NEED boosts to their defense, because the new mobs have higher then previous tohit. Not a lot of builds can get to "the new soft cap" without being horribly gimped, so FF actually helps survivability considerably. Its a rare BAF or Lambda where half a dozen people don't die at various points, that right there tells you more defense would be helpful.

Other bonuses;
-Even very sturdy melees run into trouble with End Drain in the Lambda containers. Your bubbles block that.
-Lambda requires some splitting up, and in virtually every run has even more than required. Bubbles can keep people alive for that phase, which is rather important for the next phase.
-Force Bubble, as mentioned, could be very handy for the BAF escapee phase.
-I've had my Crab, who has mezz protect and good defenses, Held several times during BAF fights. Think about most other squishies without mezz protect in that situation. I'd be happy to have Dispersion Bubble there.
-Barrier lasts something like 10 seconds for the really high numbers. Your bubbles last for 4 minutes. Easy call.
-There are ideal times in both Trials to shield everyone on the league. Waiting for the AV pulls in the BAF, fighting the Security Guard in the Lambda, since defender damage isn't going to turn the tide on that one.

I've seen that kind of discussion several times now, in terms of "Judgement makes blaster obsolete. Interface makes debuffers obsolete." etc. Yet, at the end of the day, I know that if I want a supply of something, be it damage, defense, debuffs, or whatever, I'm most likely to find it if I recruit someone who built their character around it.

If I have a FF/ defender on the team, its very very likely that they'll actually try to support the team, because nobody picks that power combo to self Powerlevel. If I have a blaster with Barrier, eh, not such good odds. . .

I think the actual sg bases are still very useful, for transport, storage, etc. But the globals are very handy because people often have characters on multiple servers, and globals are a better way to reach them in all of those different locations. Plus, sometimes people are on Hide because they are badge hunting, or marketing, or something and don't want to be bothered but would still be willing to join certain activities (maybe that TF they have been waiting for). They may be monitoring the globals, and will pop up if a discussion gets going.

There are definitely some sgs that are very active still, though, and have regular activities. The forums might be a good way to find them.

I'm curious about whether anybody knows whether Wormhole will teleport the spawn away from the container, or if the container goes with it?

I realize there are alpha strike issues with that, but have plans for mitigating that.

I wasn't thinking so much in terms of soloing a container, as that with Repulsion bomb (Mag 2 stun) plus Wormhole) Mag 3 stun), if it moves the mobs away it could be handy for when a few people hit it if they don't have to worry about ANY surrounding spawn, because its both stunned and removed. That obviously doesn't accomplish much, though, if the box gets teleported too.

I have been contemplating dusting off my long neglected Grav/FF controller, as the Trials seem to be the first content I've seen where he might be more useful in some circumstances then my rad/rad defender.

I was curious whether anyone has found out whether Wormhole teleports the acid containers and crates in the Lambda trials? I was contemplating trying to TP the spawn away from it (obviously other tricks would be needed to survive this), but if that also moves the crate its kind of moot, I'd have to treat it as more of just a stun.