Vermain

As a soloer, you will absolutely despise Stone Armor, since the major reason to even go that route is to pick up Granite Armor, get a Kinetic dude in your team, and run around being invincible. Without Granite, it's an utterly mediocre set.

Energy Aura is a bit of a black sheep: doable, but not really that great. The major issue is the fact that its defenses are spread out over typed defense, rather than positional, which means that it's nearly impossible to get soft-capped in all of the varying defense types EA specializes in. You end up having a lot of survivability holes that are difficult to patch up.

I'd personally recommend trying out Super Reflexes if you're a big soloist. DM meshes very well with any Defense-based set, and SR is one of the best. You barely need any IOs in order to hit the soft cap if you pick up Weave, and you get Quickness on top of all of that, which helps out immensely with Soul Drain and Dark Consumption. It starts off a bit slow when Drain Life is still a bit of an endurance-chugging machine but picks up greatly in power once you get over the initial hurdle. The click mez defense really isn't anything to worry about, as two recharge IOs are more than enough to make the cooldown much, much shorter than the duration. Put it on autofire and Forget About It.

Tornado has a slightly larger radius and a tiny bit more damage than Fissure... except it doesn't stun and takes 8 seconds longer base to recharge. I'd stick with Stone, unless it's for concept reasons.

With just SOs, you're looking at roughly:

-25% S/L and N/E defense.
-6% F/C defense.
-30%~ S/L and F/C resistance.

...and that's it, really. (This includes Tough and Weave.) You might be able to soft-cap S/L and N/E, but that'd be about it. You're chugging way more endurance than Granite Armor, and you're still pretty bloody slow thanks to Rooted, all for stats that an Energy Aura Brute can likely meet, if not exceed.

Cimeroran Tomb maps are your best bet. You can get some pretty large, open maps in the style of Roman catacombs.

Mind/Electric, in my experience, is a great soloer and a decent teamer. Unlike, say, Ice or Earth, you don't get an "always up" power that can very-nearly lock down a whole group like Ice Slick or Earthquake can. Terrify, while good, lacks truly effective punch. Electric Melee is a great single-target damager, but, again, you get very few good AoE powers.

I largely agree with Weatherby's suggestion on powers, although I will say that I don't like Mass Hypnosis that much. Solo, I very rarely ever run into a situation where I'm colliding with more than 3-4 guys, all of whom are very easy to lock down with just single target powers, while, on a team, Mass Hypnosis is nearly useless since everyone just runs in and uses every AoE they have (barring the RSF).

For power pools, Fitness is obviously a very good one to have for Stamina, though the rest is largely up to taste. I went with that, Leaping (Combat Jumping gives you some immobilize protection, Super Jump is cool), and Medicine. For Patron Powers, it's largely a toss-up and depends on what you want to do. Soul is good for the extra damage boost if you can slice down the crazy recharge somewhat, and Mace is good for personal survivability. It is, in fact, possible to cap Smashing/Lethal Defense with Mace, and you get the wonderful Poisonous Ray and Personal Force Field along with it. Mind/Elec is one of the easier sets to softcap on, in my opinion.

I scanned through this entire thread and didn't see it mentioned, so I apologize if it's already been stated: my female Katana/Willpower Scrapper is no longer using the "Weapon Drawn" animations when her Katana is unsheathed. The Katana is visible, but the running, jumping, etc. animations are the same as if I had no weapon at all. I tried this on a male Scrapper and he was still using the Weapon Drawn animations, so it appears to be solely a female bug. As far as I can remember, this only appeared recently, after one of the post-i15 patches.

Taunt, on its own, is fairly good already, so I only ever find myself really slotting it if I'm trying to do something like softcap Smashing/Lethal defense. Two Taunt durations might be useful since you are WP and your Taunt aura is somewhat weak.

Speaking of Taunt auras, you're best served slotting RttC with one or two Taunt durations (since the Taunt baked into it is somewhat anemic), and then putting Heals into the rest. The -ToHit aura is just too weak to justify spending slots on it, in my opinion.

I'd say Tough and Weave are pretty necessary for a Willpower Tanker, at least if you're interested in tanking for a full group. Willpower has a lot of nice layered defenses, but they do start to crumble after a while if you get hit for too much damage. Tough and Weave help to annul this somewhat, and you have the advantage of being Willpower, so running an obscene amount of toggles isn't that bad for you.

Broadsword.

Katana/Willpower is ridiculous straight out of the box and only becomes zanier with IOs. Unarguably the character I have the most fun with when I'm in a mood to not use complex tactics or battle plans and just rush in and mash every button I have.

As far as I know, the only Giant Monsters you can actually add in that count as GMs are the Devouring Earth ones, which can be purchased with tickets as an unlockable.

Arctic Air is a gigantic endurance vacuum. Ice Slick should be mostly covering your bases as far as keeping a spawn locked down, shouldn't it?

Is there anything more specific about the Children of Enos that can be revealed at this time? They play such a significant part of the backstory of the Rogue Isles, but, aside from a few vague mentions, really aren't elaborated on much, aside from being demon worshipers from France.

That's a pretty good change. It should go a long way towards making Elec competitive.

I'm no math expert but I'd say the statistical probability of hitting a +7 lieutenant with every punch over the course of half an hour is mildly lower than, say, the statistical probability of me being a Thompson's Gazelle in real life, or the statistical probability of this post turning into a giant bowl of custard.

Blight (140423)
By @Witch Engine

It's pretty much the best arc in the system right now, no joke. Excellent writing and great ending, along with being well-balanced in terms of enemy types and encounter difficulty.

To give you an idea of how great this arc is: when I posted the arc as a suggestion for someone to play as a good solo arc about a week or two ago in a thread, it had about 68 total votes, and has, in that short span of time, shot up to 222 votes and is maintaining a 5-star rating.

Night Widows are excellent in both categories. They get great single-target and decent AoE damage, excellent defenses, and can boost the power of their own team significantly.