VTG_Peace

I'm not super familiar with Alcohol 120%. But if I remember correctly, Civ 4 BTS, patch 3.19 removed the need to have to use the disc in the drive. You may need to download the patch and install it outside the game for it to work.

I had that too. I ended up deleting the power from the main power list.

My spine/dark armor scrapper was the first character I made when I stared playing City of Heroes. This was before IOs and before they reduced the endurance consumption to current levels. So I definitely remember what it was like.

On the plus side, after learning endurance management with my spines/dark, every other character's endurance management seemed like a breeze.

Here are some things that I did:
1. I would round up more than one group and leverage my aoes to hit as many as possible.

2. I toggled armor powers on and off based on the type of damage the mobs did. No fire/ice? Turn off Murky Cloud.

3. If there was only a boss left, I toggled off Death Shroud/Quills.

4. I waited until the last possible moment before firing off Dark Regeneration. (Sometimes I mistimed it and died. But this became a fun mini game anyway.)

5. I let my auras do their work on minions, and didn't hit my powers frantically.

6. I used rest extensively.

I also jumped for joy when teaming with Kinetic, Empathy, and Radiation defenders/controllers.

But really, IOs were a game changing breath of fresh air for my spines/dark, and the Cardiac Alpha slot made me nearly giddy.

What gets me about those screens is more that they place blaster survivability at 4, scrapper at 7, and brute at 8. There's no way that blasters are that tough in comparison unless that scale is some sort of counter intuitive logarithmic scale or something.

If your main concern is endurance reduction, you could also consider vigor for the additional acc/heal. I've changed my cardiac slots in for vigor on my guys that used to use cardiac.

Agility is a good option too though if you can make use of the def/recharge.

I've only been on one of these that failed, and that was because some irritating kinetics player was running around with repel and ended up repelling one of the bad guys right through the geometry.

But, I think that a fire/dark corr would work well thanks to the early aoe available as well as the mitigation from dark miasma and tar patch for more damage.

From my perspective, I have one character where RP'ing the "fall to darkness, search for redemption" thing was fun. I rarely play villains, so the main reason that I take most of my characters redside is to grab the blasted Scorpion Shield and then get the heck out ASAP.

If they made the villain power pools available without the extra rigamarole, I would probably just remain blueside.

So, for me most of the time an alignment token would be purely a game mechanic to help me finish my build. $5 is too much. But I'd pay $1 though.

I would love smaller iTrials. My attitude toward the trials is a bit mixed anyway. I kind of like them, but I'm sympathetic to the complaints against them. For me though, the wait time for trials is just too much.

The Well storyline smashes character concepts. But, I'm willing to overlook that to progress a character that I like. I just pretend that it isn't happening.

The trial mechanics vary between interesting and irritating. But, I'm willing to put up with them to progress a character that I like.

The trial storyline is mixed for me too. Interdimensional war? Right on! Sutter, Apex, and Tin Mage were pretty fun to me. Killing mental patients...er, not so much. Killing the same AV's from other story arcs kind of reminds me of the old Diablo 2 zombies. Sure, this zombie looks like the others, but it's painted yellow! That means it's tougher...er ok, if you say so. Even when it's lame though, I'm willing to put up with the story line to progress a character that I like.

I'm even willing to farm these things until my eyes bleed in order to progress a character that I like. But, here's where I run into RL difficulties. If I'm not on one of the more populated servers, the wait time to the trial is just too much.

From what I've seen, the lower population servers just don't have enough warm bodies to support the trial culture.

The last time that I tried running an UG, the league leader worked on getting the team together for over forty minutes, and still didn't have a league. This was the only trial forming at the time, or at least the only one that I saw being announced. I finally had to quit the league before the trial began because I knew that after the wait, I wouldn't have time to finish it.

It seems to me the trials are meant to be farmed, but even if/when I'm willing to farm the heck out of them, I still often can't because there aren't enough people. So, I'm really looking forward to the small team/solo content that's coming out especially for my characters that aren't on one of the high population servers.

Here's another approach that sacrifices recharge for more defense. Also, Gloom is good on brutes and you might find another single target attack useful. So I substituted it for Soul Tentacles. But my dm/fa brute is still pretty low level, so I haven't actually tried it out.

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Here's another take on a build. It goes for ranged (and energy) defense since it sounds like you want to play at range anyway. And hopefully the ranged defense would help against mezzing attacks. I also added stealth with the Celerity stealth IO in sprint because I've found that having the initiative in terms of when to strike is very helpful and another layer of protection.

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My Traps/Dual Pistols defender is one of my favorite characters. He's useful on a team and even better, he can actually solo well too.

I have and use all of the traps powers other than time bomb. Web grenade is nice for keeping the big target from running away from all the debuffs that are flying around. I sometimes use triage beacon solo when facing a longer battle.

Seeker drones and poison trap are both great ways to start a fight safely. And I love having the chance to hold in poison trap and acid mortar.

For my build, I mostly went for defense and recharge. Here's what I'm running. Maybe it'll give you some ideas:

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Well we know what they say about all good things. Thanks for putting this together, Irish. These were some fun teams. And thanks to you guys, I actually explored some of the dark side which I hadn't done before.

Thanks for the input! I'm leaning toward the cardiac alpha. Since it helps with both endurance and resistance, it seems like a good choice for sonic/.

I'm also debating dropping soul drain and going with cage. Cage seems like it wouldn't be used too often. But, on the other hand, it's a semi-unique kind of thing that I don't think I've ever seen anybody use. So I'll at least play with it and decide if I like it before respeccing into a "final" build.

Thanks for the dual build idea. So, what would you take in the solo build that isn't currently in the build that I posted? Clarity is the main thing that I'm debating for the team build.

I'm planning a build for my sonic/sonic defender. I have the following goals:

1. I plan to team, but also don't want to be stuck twiddling my thumbs if one isn't available. So, I want to be able to solo effectively. To that end, I'd like good survivability and damage.

2. I need to keep the end consumption under control.

Also:
3. I have the City Traveler veteran reward.

4. How useful is Clarity? Is sonic dispersion enough, or do people clamor for clarity?

5. I'm not looking to spend tons on purple/pvp IOs. I already have a couple of the expensive items from cashing in Alignment Merits.

Here's what I've come up with. Does anyone have any other ideas for this build? Thanks in advance!

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We had a good run on the all dual pistols ITF and showed the Romans why it's a bad idea to bring a knife to a gun fight.

I find that I like what my Traps/DP defender brings to the table for these trials.

For the BAF:
On the Escapee phase, caltrops, poison gas trap (slotted with hold proc), acid mortar (with hold and extra resistance debuff), and the arachnos spider pet (I went with mace mastery) are the big players for clogging up the escapees. Then, I unload my aoes on them. The Lts. can be tougher, but acid mortar/trip mine softens them up nicely for either me, or whoever is downstream from me to finish off.

On the AV fighting phase: poison gas trap and acid mortar help to soften up the big baddies. Triage beacon does 260% regen in the area (and I can usually have a couple out), while force field generator adds defense and decent status effect protection to everyone. I also scatter caltrops to keep the melee adds at bay if they're causing problems for the squishies.

If things get tough and people are dying a lot, I send in some seeker drones and switch to toxic ammo to try to debuff the incoming damage.

For the Lambda:
The collection phase can be crazy, but I can either pew-pew the crates directly from stealth (boring and rarely do it), or send in seeker drones/poison gas trap/acid mortar too. Force field generator helps with the stuns etc and lets people rez using an awaken.

The traps set also helps out quite a bit on the master of Lambda runs.

I think that your answer depends on what you want to do in the runs. I think that overall my traps/dp defender brings a lot to the table for these. But, I've also enjoyed running the trials with my ss/elec brute.

It gets tricky because marketing departments like to periodically change up numbering schemes. I'm sure that someone with more specific graphics card knowledge could give information about how cards work with City of Heroes.

But, in the meantime, there's a nice chart on Toms Hardware that gives a breakdown:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...70,2935-7.html

Achievement: Hit influence cap on my market toon and emailed myself a large chunk of inf.

(Dis)Achievement: Actually sent the inf to some random person with a global name similar to my own. Note to self: Don't email money when it's late.

For what it's worth, I was running on 0x8, but increased it to +1x8 with the level shift because footstomp was knocking some of the guys back instead of down.

I'll admit to accidentally declining a trial on the first day of i20. I had gone to Pocket D looking for a trial. The league got formed and suddenly there were these buttons on my screen. I had no idea what the buttons were or why they were there. I figured that I had accidentally clicked on something.

I just wanted to run a trial, so I clicked the red button and waited for a mission door to appear. Boy was I surprised when everyone else teleported away!

My expectation was that the trial would begin with the leader talking to a contact and a mission door appearing somewhere nearby.

Well we pulled it off: The dual pistols ITF. We had a couple rough patches, mostly when we got separated from each other. But, it was certainly fun.

The Kheldian boss spawn wiped us out at the temple at the end of the first mission. (Though in all fairness, I've seen this happen occasionally with various teams.) But walking back up the temple hill and taking it back step by bullet-riddled step is something that I'll remember for quite a while. Good times!