StrykerX

I actually prefer the old look. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the new costumes... I just liked the whole "robed cultist" look. It was kind of nice having an enemy group that wasn't at all flashy. The new outfits are awesome but they lost that understated, basic look that I found appealing. Sometimes in fashion less is more...

Maybe we could get the old robes on some of the basic grunts like the Guards? Those mooks don't even know magic yet... they don't deserve flashy outfits.

A Traps Defender's role on teams is generally going to be to keep as many people as possible in your FFG bubble, dump Seeker Drones on groups when you can, and drop an Acid Mortar and Poison Trap any time it looks like a fight will actually last a while. Aside from that I'd suggest shooting stuff a lot, using Incendiary ammo if things are going smoothly or Chem ammo if you can actually use a bit of -damage (even on a Defender I don't consider the Cryo ammo's slow to be strong enough to fool with and the KB in standard ammo is probably not needed). You can also use Suppressing Fire to hold Sappers or other annoying targets but in most cases you probably won't need to.

Oh, and don't forget the Triage Beacon in AV fights. The silly thing is almost useless for normal spawns unless there are several right next to each other but in long fights it actually helps.

If you want a psychic Blaster don't go Psi Blast (it's one of the worst blast sets), go with Mental Manipulation and pair it with something thematic like Fire (pyrokinesis) or Energy (telekinetic blasts). If you want an all-psi character a Mind/Psi Dom is far stronger than a Psi/MM Blaster. If you want to go the telepathy + telekinesis route then a Mind/FF or Mind/Kin Controller could be interesting too.

Oh, and don't totally dismiss Defenders... Kin/Psi would not be very low damage at all, especially after you get Fulcrum Shift.

Absolute fastest way to get to 20: get PLed or run AE farms and you'll be there in a few hours.

Fastest fun way to get to 20: make a Fire/Mental Blaster (massive early level AoE power) and team a lot. Farms are boring... you can hit level 7 or so in no time on a good sewer team then either run Hollows missions (if you find a group doing them) or radio missions to 15. Then do a Positron TF and the Faultline stuff and maybe a few radios and you're there... should only take a few days and you won't be staring at the same stupid enemies on the same stupid map for hours.

EDIT: Never mind, I see you already got there. Have fun squidding around and be sure to get that Kheld to 50 before trying a VEAT and realizing how much better those are.

What if it had several mutually exclusive toggles? Instead of Focus Chi, Speed Chi, and Power Chi it could have:

Tiger Stance - Toggle damage buff (30% or so)

Crane Stance - Toggle defense buff (+5% to all but psi)

Snake Stance - Toggle speed buff (+30% recharge, 20% slow resist)

Turning one stance on would detoggle any other stance currently running so they could be a bit more powerful than otherwise possible since you can't stack them. The attack powers could also have different secondary effects depending on stance, like KD in Tiger, Stun in Crane, and Slow in Snake...

You might also try a Crab Spider (Bane Spider built for gun attacks). You'd get a very agile, hard to hit guy with a gun and two grenade types plus you could go Pyre epic and add Fireball.

If you specifically want the Hobgoblin's pumpkin bomb type attacks, try a Dark/Traps Corruptor with orange Dark powers. That's about as close as you'll get to flaming jack-o-lantern bombs in look, but you won't have them actually explode since the attacks that have the right look are single target. Energy/Traps colored orange might also give something like the right look and more of the right feel.

If you want to wait until Beam Rifle is out you may want to check that out too.

The only existing character I have who may reroll using Titan Weapons is my Stone Melee Brute (who only uses Stone Melee for the big rock hammers). It'll depend on what sort of great big hammer / club options there are.

I'll definitely be making a new Titan Weapons character or two though, since I do like the anime / Final Fantasy style "insanely big sword" guys.

A Kin/Sonic Defender could be interesting. You'd get recharge and damage buffs for the tank as well as an excellent heal to keep him going, plus significant resist debuffs to speed up combat. Sonic/Sonic would also be nice since you'd add resists to the tank's defense and even more resist debuffs.

If you want more damage then a Fire/Thermal or Fire/Dark Corruptor might be fun. You get good ranged damage plus early healing and buffs (Thermal) or healing and to-hit debuffs (Dark) to boost the tank's defense to the softcap earlier than he could do it on his own.

I'd probably go with a Fire/Thermal or Sonic/Thermal Corruptor myself. An Ice Tank's biggest weaknesses are fire and psionic damage, and Thermal provides massive fire resists plus decent resists to other things and excellent healing. It also adds a nice buff and a couple of debuffs later on.

Though if you want a cool theme you could go Ice/Thermal instead... you'd have less damage but more control and you can color coordinate your powers with the tank.

Actually, they finally removed the -ACC from Group Fly. Pets still tend to wander off and fall out of the fly radius but at least they shoot straight.

Bots are indeed slow pre-32, but once you get the Assault Bot and the second upgrade you suddenly have some real AoE power and speed up a lot. Bots/FF is pretty much immortal, though since FF is a pure buff set you will indeed be on the low side for damage (any /FF MM is)... if you want good defense plus debuffs then Bots/Traps is a better choice but Bots/FF is even harder to kill.

(Of course since almost nothing kills Bots/Traps anyway I'm not sure you need to be harder to kill, but you will be. )

Stealth + SS is great if you want to actually stealth into mobs, but a stealth IO alone goes a long way towards reducing incidental aggro. With Hover and a stealth IO you can maneuver around most mobs without aggroing them, though tight quarters will sometimes prevent it... the real question is whether you feel you need to be able to walk right up to an enemy unseen often enough to warrant a power choice (and possible pool choice) you would otherwise skip.

I'd suggest just using the IO and carry a stealth or phase temp power for times when you really need to slip past something at point blank range.

Since Ouroboros is essentially in a pocket dimension it could easily just be Praetorian Hamidon working alone... it takes dimensional / temporal travel to reach Ouroboros whether you start from Primal Earth or Praetoria.

My guess is that Dr. Aeon (or his Praetorian version) will some day try to time travel back and defeat / capture Praetorian Hamidon but end up getting his butt kicked. By defeating a time traveler Hamidon will earn the Entrusted with the Secret badge and get an Oro portal, which he can then use to drop in and trash the place.

If you want a weapon set then I'd suggest going Willpower, Shield or SR for your secondary since they don't have many click powers to cause redraw. If you also want a cheap-ish build I'd skip Shield too because it's expensive to softcap and kind of squishy if not at least close to softcapped.

As for the weapons themselves, Katana is great on Scrappers... it provides significant melee defense which goes well with WP (or Regen if you don't mind the redraw) and makes SR trivial to cap for melee. For a Brute I'd consider Axe or Mace... Axe requires almost no global recharge to get a good attack chain and has a fair amount of KD for mitigation while Mace has stuns and is also fairly easy to get a good chain on. Again, WP or SR make good defensive choices, or possibly Electric if you want a resist based set. Invul and Dark are nice if heavily IOed but not quite as good on a cheap build unless you cherry-pick what enemies to fight. Dual Blades can also be interesting... it's a middle of the road set but it gets a good attack chain with relatively low recharge (BF -> Attack Vitals) and it looks cool.

As far as Tanks go, I'd say go Brute instead. Few Tanks have "good" damage, and the ones that do generally aren't weapon sets (Fire and maybe SS, generally). A Ninja Blade / Ninjutsu Stalker might also work but I'd rather have a Katana/WP or Katana/SR Scrapper personally.

A couple of general suggestions:

- Make sure you have a -KB IO slotted somewhere. Hover or Combat Jumping are good places since most characters tend to have one of those, and you can drop the Zephyr -KB IO in a travel power if you don't mind paying more inf. One KB IO stops about 95% of the knockback you will run into, which helps a lot.

- Get a defensive power from your epic pool ASAP. Going Flame Mastery can be handy since it gives you Fire Shield for protection, Char to stop annoying minions or Lts (sappers, those DE mushrooms, etc...) and Rise of the Phoenix to turn a faceplant into a chance to blow things up. Force Mastery is also good since it has a nice armor power, an emergency "you can't hit me" power, and a mini-godmode for tough bosses. Cold and Mace (if you go villain long enough to pick up patron pools) offer S/L defense instead of resists in their shields... very handy if you want to make an expensive IO build and boost S/L resists to the 30s or even the softcap and stay in melee a lot. If you prefer a cheaper build the resist shields are probably better though.

- One handy tactic with /Energy is to use Boost Range and just stay back and shoot. You can even take Acrobatics for the hold protection (since most stuns are melee range holds are your biggest mez threat at range). Then once the enemy is thinned out you can stun or take down the nastiest remaining target with Total Focus and toss a few punches.

Unless you really like melee I'd go with the Flame epic and slot up Char for recharge and hold. Add in Fire Shield for some resistance and Rise of the Phoenix for when the inevitable happens (blasters faceplant more often than most ATs no matter what) and you should be good to go. Then it's just a matter of learning the new enemies and figuring out what your strategy, because "charge in headfirst and blow stuff up" really doesn't work that well any more.

(Well, actually, charging in headfirst and blowing everything up works great... if you make a very expensive IO build and pick your target groups carefully. But you have to really know what you're doing so it's best to start off more conservative until you get enough experience with the endgame groups to know what you can and can't handle.)

A Performance Shifter proc theoretically gives you more endurance over time than an EndMod IO when slotted in Stamina or a similar auto power. However, exactly when that endurance is granted is unpredictable whereas an EndMod IO gives a constant recovery boost. Which is better really depends on the character and what you like to fight.

- If you expect to be at zero recovery often (for instance, if you have a nuke or other power that crashes recovery) then the proc is pretty much the clear winner.

- If you don't mind popping a blue at times or you don't run enough toggles to particularly care if your endurance hits zero then the proc is probably best since on average it does offer more endurance gain.

- If it's important not to fully run out of endurance and you don't want to carry plenty of blues then the EndMod is likely a better choice, especially if you drain your bar fairly quickly. The proc may give more average endurance over the course of a mission, but it is unreliable over a single fight which means that some fights you run out sooner than you would with the EndMod and others you run out later. By using an EndMod you know how long you have and can plan around it rather than hoping for a lucky proc before the bar bottems out.

- If you don't have any recovery crash and you can fully balance your endurance gain to your peak output with an EndMod (either through recovery alone or recovery plus an endurance granting power) then slot the EndMod. It's cheaper and you'd only need the proc when drained to zero recovery by an enemy... something that in my experience happens less often than having a blue pill drop so just pop a blue if it does.

Overall I'd go with two EndMod then the proc, simply because I prefer consistency to a a small but unreliable increase in recovery. The exception would be on a nuking Blaster who has an endurance recovery power... hitting Inferno and then having a the proc go off to power a Consume is a thing of beauty. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's worth the wait.

I'd go Kinetic Melee on the Scrapper, since they get better results from Power Siphon's +damage. Possibly Kin/Shield (Shield's damage boost also does better on Scrappers), or maybe Kin/Regen if you find using cool chi-powered martial arts while carrying a shield looks odd.

For a Brute, I absolutely love my Dual Blades/SR. It's not a power gaming combo but it's a really interesting character and SR works well with a Brute's higher HP.

My only Tanker I've played to high levels is a Fire/Fire, which is a lot of fun if you want to be a slower, tougher Scrapper but not so great if you want to be the immortal guy laughing off an entire 8-man spawn's attacks. For that you might want to try Invul/Stone Melee... especially if you can afford to IO it for extra defense and recovery.

As far as Stalkers go, I personally don't like them but if I did make one it would be Ninja Blade/Ninjutsu. The whole AT screams "ninja" anyway, so why not make the real thing?

Short answer: it depends on what you want to focus on. If you are interested in sustained damage output then the most important thing is DPA (damage / activation time). On the other hand, if you want maximum burst damage capability then the hardest hitting attacks tend to be best even if they aren't that great on DPA.

In general, sustained DPS is probably the most important factor for single target attacks since you ideally want a nonstop attack chain which you will be using over and over... the only exception would be if you intend to joust or hit and run and aren't going to be standing there trading blows (but that would be rare for a melee AT outside of PvP). For AoEs it's more about total damage... you aren't likely to have a nonstop chain so DPA isn't as important as raw damage output.

Personally I'd take Total Focus simply because it hits like a freight train and is a guaranteed stun. However, I wouldn't actually use it in my attack chain unless I had low recharge and couldn't make a gapless chain without it... instead I'd use it to stun annoying targets or to help stack stuns on bosses. You could use Stun instead for that, but why not deal a ton of damage too while you're staggering them?

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Blasters are less useful to a large-ish team than Defenders or Corruptors until a certain point. That point is generally where everyone has enough buffs / debuffs / heals to survive and plenty of -resist and +damage to boost the team's damage output. Once you hit that point more buffs and debuffs serve little purpose and more raw damage (which gets multiplied by the existing buffs) starts to be a better addition.

For instance, if you took an Empath, a Thermal, a Rad, a pair of Kins, and a Cold and put them on a team everyone would basically be damage capped and immortal. At that point two more Defenders or Corruptors are not going to speed things up as much as two Blasters. But if you don't already have 4+ Defenders or Corruptors then adding one of those will generally boost a team more than a Blaster (or a Scrapper, Brute, Tank, Stalker, MM, EAT, Dom, or Controller). Fortunately, you never actually need a perfectly optimized team unless you're trying something crazy (aka, you're in Repeat Offenders or something )... in normal play a Blaster is plenty useful and seeing the massive damage they put out is worth playing one.

Plus if you invest in a high end solo build the ability to obliterate large spawns in about half the time a Brute or Scrapper would take is just plain awesome.