Thoughts and comments

Works fine for me under Win7; you may need to update windows with .net for Vista if you're running it.

Regarding your question about slotting for Active Defense, you know it's a click mez protection power that needs at least two recharge to be permanent? (Permanent means it recharges before the buff runs out) Hasten is a click recharge buff that cannot be made permanent without significant IO recharge bonuses, but slotting 3 recharges gives you maximum uptime for Hasten.

I'd never leave Active Defense single slotted; I want it always active and ideally I want it to overlap. Therefore I always 3 slot it for recharge and set it to autofire (control+click on the power).

It'll be like your last words "Avenge me!" Yeah everyone might have it.

Tough & Weave are very useful for a Shield character; my Broadsword/Shield skipped the APP pool entirely in favor of maximizing my damage output and my defense. The more defense you have, up to the 45% soft cap, the more valuable each additional % is. 40% sounds like a lot of protection, and it is. However moving to 45% actually has as much effect on your durability as the entire first 40% by halving the amount of damage you'll take.

At 40% defense you'll be hit, on average, by 10% of all attacks. At 45% defense (the soft cap) you'll be hit, on average, by only 5% of all attacks effectively doubling the amount of attacks you can survive.

Shield has fairly low defense numbers on it's own; it needs help from Weave and IO bonuses to really shine. Once you get it to 45% though it's amazingly durable.

That's how Vengeance originally worked; that version of the power was rejected by the player base in favor of the current version. You still see the original Vengeance power with Nemesis LT's.

Rejected in the days of hard debt.

Even so powers you have to die to use generally aren't popular. To be worthwhile it'd probably have to have a self-rez attached to it.

I know I wouldn't bother with it since most of the time I don't end up faceplanting very often and it's opportunity cost is very high... only worth having if you're taking Leadership anyway.

I have Vengeance on most of my Defenders since they're taking the Leadership pool anyway, but they generally only die if I do something really stupid. It's much more useful when it can be used on any teammate who falls instead of requiring the fallen character to have it.

Outside of Defenders and Controllers the leadership buffs are too low to really be worthwhile unless you're building a superteam.

Nope didn't know if it was 1, 2, or 3 slots to keep something clicky permanent. These are the little things I am still trying to learn, along with the short names for a lot of the stuff I've seen on peoples builds. Like what enzymes(?) or HO's are. o.O

Thanks, I think then when I respect this next time I will drop the 3 I listed in order to grab Boxing, Tough, and Weave. ^_^


The Leadership stuff is really that low? =( That sucks. >_>

I'm greedy, I don't want it to change, but the option for both. xP (I'm only half serious lol) But if the other buffs leading up to it are such low end compared to others, why not have at least that one be the be all end all reason for taking that pool.

Enzymes are a type of Hamidon Origin (HO) enhancement... they're acquired by raiding the Hamidon in the Hive... a fairly extensive undertaking requiring 30 or more players to accomplish. Hami-O's as they're frequently referred to are multiple purpose enhancements that function as two or three SO (single origin) enhancements in one. They only drop as level 50 so you can only slot them at level 47+. Since you specifically asked about Enzymes they're endred/defense debuff/tohit debuff enhancements... the perfect thing for Radiation Infection. You can also, of course, buy them from Wentworth's. They aren't generally cheap though.

Active Defense is, just barely, perma with two recharge enhancements assuming you don't have any global recharge buffs. I always toss in three recharge to ensure it overlaps.

The buffs from the Leadership pool power give different amounts of benefit depending on the AT who has them. Defenders get a fairly large benefit out of them, with Controllers getting the next best use. Scrappers really get little enough benefit that unless you're on a regular team and everyone's running them they're not worth having. The biggest benefit is that all the leadership powers stack... so if two Defenders both have Tactics then everyone on the team gets a 25% (unslotted) tohit buff. Three Defenders running Tactics gives a 37.5% tohit buff.

Scrappers on the other hand only get 7% tohit buff out of having Tactics making it questionable in value, and Maneuvers only gives 2.8% defense. Possibly useful to get that last bit of defense to the soft cap but it's another fairly expensive toggle to run.

A dedicated superteam with all 8 members running Assault/Tactics can be a phenomenal thing. Defender's get 3.5% defense from Maneuvers, 18.8% damage from Assault and 12.5% tohit from Tactics... all of those are unslotted values. Stack those 8 times and you can see it makes a difference.

I really recommend playing around with Mid's Hero Designer to work out your build; it'll give you all the numbers so you can evaluate the benefits of each power & slotting choice. If you're having problems with the .net framework then go to Windows Update and get .net for your version of Windows. Mid's is an invaluable tool for working out your build... you wouldn't believe how easy it is to royally screw up your respec if you don't have a blueprint of how you want it to end up.

Are you running it as the Administrator?

This might be why I couldn't. >_>
I'll have to double check now.