Supernumiphone

Well it's been a while now since I leveled mine up, but as best I can remember, yeah it felt a bit squishy during much of the ride. I didn't mind that so much, it made it more fun. I didn't jack up my difficulty as high as I might have otherwise, and made good use of inspirations, and enjoyed the trip to 50 immensely.

It bothered me at times to be so reliant on inspirations when facing EBs, but considering that's standard practice when playing other squishy ATs, I made my peace with it.

The contrast between my IO'ed Regen and IO'ed Nin was stark though, to say the least.

I agree with all of this. IMO you are going the right direction with the build. My first go at my Elec/Regen was a pure +recharge build, hoping that getting all the mitigation powers back faster would provide strong survivability. Not so much in my experience. Once MoG wore off and I fired off both heals, all I was left with was my squishy Stalker-level HPs, and there are plenty of mobs that can knock those off fast enough that regen is a non-factor.

That's not all of it though. I'd guess that better than 50% of my defeats came during the Thunder Strike animation. 3.3 seconds is plenty of time for mobs to chew through Stalker level HPs. So many times I was mashing the Reconstruction button while slooooowly doing the slam dunk.

Some defense and/or resistance goes a long way towards lessening the damage spikes that are the weakness of regen. It was nice having Lightning Rod recharge super fast, but it's much nicer to stay upright.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=113746

I agree with this. I have a Dark/Sonic I'm quite fond of. It's a little sad that the blasts can't be relied on to do more, but hey even if they're not needed for your protection at least they're helping your teammates...or something.

Still with mez protection, defense, some small amount of resistance, and a self-heal, you'll have yourself a damn solid toon. If things look like they might get ugly, you can open with [Liquefy], and with that much -tohit anything not an AV will be floored.

Just glancing at that build I'd say it will set you back at least 5-6 billion inf. If you're starting with 200 million, you have a long ways to go.

It looks like a "sky's the limit" build to me. A lot of expensive stuff for very little real gain from some of it.

My suggestion is to start with a more focused build that will be a lot cheaper. It won't have the same level of performance but if you go with the biggest bang for your buck you can still get very good results for a lot less. That will give you something to get you started and you can shoot for the moon once you have the loot rolling in.

This, IMO. I've looked at quite a few of the soft-capped builds that get floated around, and many of them are (IMO of course) ridiculous beasts. Useless powers that will never get used, only there to mule sets. Fun and situational powers skipped to make room for the aforementioned useless powers. Useful powers so severely underslotted as to their primary function that they become useless. You get the idea.

It can be a stretch, but I can usually get to 32.5% defense while still slotting my powers effectively and taking the powers I want. Being one small [Luck] from the soft-cap means I can go a looooong ways on a tray of them, and with inspiration combining, it's exceedingly rare to find myself needing one and not having it.

Some people feel they just really need to be able to stand in a group of mobs while they go make a sandwich. That's fine. There are other approaches to builds that are worth a look though.

It depends on what content you expect to be running the most. Brutes and Masterminds are good all-purpose toons. If you choose flashbacks that can be sped through primarily and avoid defeat alls, a Stalker may be a better choice. If you just run to the end of most missions and complete the final objective the time spend ramping up Fury on a Brute will just slow you down, while a Stalker is the king of burst damage, perfect for those situations.

As someone who runs a fair amount of flashbacks for merit earning, my advice is: pick something you will enjoy playing. Otherwise it's just an unfun grind.

Thanks for doing that. Based on your numbers it looks like this will indeed be the melee version of Dual Pistols. Unless you're waaaaaay off that is.
If the set is as clunky as it looks in the video, and appears to be based on your numbers, no amount of damage would compensate enough to make me want to play it. Well maybe on a Tanker if it has lots of AoEs. Probably not though.

A level 53 AV would have 30,071 HPs. So that would be a lot of scrapping after the group AS. For those AVs with additional resistances it could take longer to take them down than a single tray of inspirations would last. Then again maybe not, it would have to be tried. You might need a group of soft-capped Stalkers to avoid the problem.

Anyway if anyone wants to try it I am available on Freedom.

My guess: Greater availability of sub-50 recipes. Much higher prices on purples due to significantly lowered generation.