Easiest AT/Powerset to start out with?

War Mace or Battle Axe / Willpower scrapper. Simplicity.

Nothing fancy. Just effective button mashing fun. Your most confusing ability is Build Up. Hint: You push it and then kill stuff.

I say Stalker is the easiest to learn, not only because you get to observe the battlefield and plan your assassinations, but also because when you get into a team, you get to watch how other Archetypes play, and how your tactics can mesh and help your team to succeed. Granted, at first, you do need a handful of smackdowns to perfect your strategy, but after that, you get to decide who to fight, and when you want to do it.

Even not a Stalker, play a Scrapper or any melee character. My girlfriend started a month ago on a Scrapper and she's loving it!

Granted, she keeps challenging me to the Arena just cause she has a fire sword....

The easiest AT to start with would probably be a scrapper or a stalker. The reason why I recommend a stalker (my first melee AT) is because the powerful and easily accessible stealth is a great way to flatten the learning curve for players. If you want to explore places or observe enemy behavior, if you do that in nearly any other AT you run the risk higher level enemies mopping the floor with you. But a stalker's hide lets them be curious without all of the risks that come with it. Stealth is itself a defensive advantage, since one of the most damning things that can happen to a player is if they draw aggro unintentionally. Their damage output, while not being as high as a scrapper, is still plenty high enough to bash thing's heads in. The inherent powers of a stalker are easy enough to figure out.

Powersets for primaries would be basically anything but Energy Melee, and for secondaries I would also recommend pretty much everything except regeneration. Energy melee because it kind of sucks, and Regeneration because constant health managing is somewhat hard to do on a melee toon.


For the BEST AT to start with, my vote goes for the Defender/Corruptor. I myself, started with a defender. The reason why I started with a defender is because I thought that various enemies in the game may have had several unique tricks to them, so instead I went with something that I knew I could do and tried to support my teammates instead. Supporting teammates is something that can be almost universally understood by gamers: you heal when their health gets low, you cure status ailments, you increase their stats, ect. Because you are attacking at a distance, combat doesn't take as much concentration, so you can devote more time to your teammates. The various powers themselves have interesting effects in the game, letting you learn the depth of combat and feel powerful while altering the field. Most support powers don't need too much slotting to be effective, so they are very lenient on the wallet. The important thing about being a support-based AT at the beginning of the game is that it trains your mind to be constantly aware of other players around you. You learn to always pay attention to your teammates and help them out when possible, and that is the most you could ask for in a player.

For Powersets, any corruptor primary/defender secondary will do. As for corruptor secondaries/defender primaries, the only ones that I would want a player to stay away from would be traps and trick arrow. Those ones are kind of a hodgepodge of different tricks with many of them needing some serious buffs or changing.

Well the first thing that comes to mind for me after watching the MMORPG video of the i23 trail was... they should have started him out on a blaster.

The blaster is the only fire and forget AT in the game that has no actual role, other then to do damage. The Blaster has no one to buff, no one to protect, no control powers to juggle. You don't have defenses to worry about turning on armors (as the guy in the video didn't know how to do) its effective at multiple ranges, finally a team makes you better as you have room to grow offensively and defensively more so then other ATs and the larger the team gets the more likely that a blaster's weakness is shored up.

It is the easiest AT in the game to just pick up and play without needing any special instructions, or extra explaining to do. Yes the blaster gets harder to play in the higher levels but in the early levels when you are first learning the game the Blaster AT does very well.

hmm that would be a tank or brute or scrapper with invulnerability and super strength.(dont remeber if scrapper get super strength or not oh well)

There is no guess work with those archtypes or combinations of powers....nothing super special or super complex....you punch and you resist damage....cant get any simpler.

Easiest sets....also the biggest snooze fest for players who have played city of heroes alot before.
And coincidentaly the most confortable to some players becasue they dont have to think very much to play as they know what to do and what to expect.

I joined the game about halfway through I3 (ignore my Joined since date: I was playing on my bro's account at the time...), and made a Def (FF/NRG) and a Blaster (AR/Elec) around the same time. Thanks to altitis (filled 3 servers w/ alts when all was said and done), among other things: the def stalled out around mid-20s, but my Blaster eventually (I9) made it to lvl50.

The ease of play will depend on the new player's support system: is someone going to walk them through/help them with how to make builds? When I first started playing Melee characters, I found myself to be *more* squishy than my "squishies", since I didn't know how to manage endurance w/ my defenses, and didn't do enough damage to make up for me constantly sucking wind.

With good build advice, Stalkers may be the easiest starting AT, but regardless, I, too, say that Blasters are definitely the best starting AT: it will give you a great understanding of what a priority target is (and/or you'll die trying). Plus, after lvling a Blaster to 50, everything else will seem easy! (My WS, made after my Blaster made lvl50, reached lvl50 during I11).

I'm gonna cast my vote for stalker, especially with the buffs they got fairly recently. My DB/NIN stalker has been working out for me better than any other AT/powerset I've tried over the years as an off and on player.

I also agree with the view of making a blaster to get a better understaning and feel for things. I'd even go a step further and suggest dual pistol if a person's willing to buy it or go VIP.

I'd suggest an energy blaster. It's the bog-standard baseline blaster set and the random knockdown makes them pretty durable.

Sonic's another good choice; Siren's Song is an I-win button if you're careful. It helps not be frustrated but not be bored either (by being able to faceroll with a scrapper).

Why blaster? Blasters are fun to solo. By the time they stop being fun they'll probably be ready to start another character anyway.

If they're planning to team a lot, they should do some sort of defender or corruptor instead of a blaster, though.

Oh, or mind controllers or doms. Mind is a fun set, with powers like 'mez boss instantly' and 'make enemies kill themselves without risk'.

For simple, brain-dead easy play, I think a Claws/WP Scrapper would win. They get Quick Recovery, have no essential clicky powers in their secondary and Claws has a good mix of single target and AoEs, with no really bad powers AND it has that one ranged attack.

Easy control? Probably Earth. Lots of useful AoEs, a useful secondary effect and it's generally all team-friendly.

Easy buff? Force Field. "Stand in the middle of everybody and tap two keys every four minutes" is ridiculously simple. Sonic adds a few extra wrinkles but also feels less effective as a player most of the time.

Easy ranged? Radiation or Fire. Fire for the extra damage and radiation for being so fast animating and recharging. Both have a good mix of AoE and single target options compared to other sets.

Easy Pet: Robots. They're tougher than the other pets. They have decent resists and some built in defense and healing. It's hard to make a bad Bots MM.

For actually learning game mechanics, something like a Mind or Dark /Empathy controller would be pretty huge. Emps have a bunch of strategically useful powers on long recharges, and Mind and Dark control both have a good mix of control effects to play with. Mind control is particularly interesting because it has confuse at a low level (which is just good clean fun) and also has something not unlike a single target attack chain, which is unusual for a control set.

I see lots of recommendations for claw/wp, and I have to agree with that reasoning. Claws has pretty much its entire attack chain, AOE and all, by level 8. Willpower is just set and forget.

However.

I am going to go Old School here. The Oldest of Old School, a combo that has been around and awesome since Launch Day: Claws/Invuln Scrapper.

If you want to update this with a considerable boost in power, go brute instead.

A Claws/Invuln Brute is stunningly powerful by level 8, and simply increases in power from that point onward. It makes a superb 'first timer' toon. Even better, a claws/invul brute also has an amazing top end, soaring to Incarnate levels of power with no flat spots along the way.

Easiest? Probably a bots/ff MM. Even with the bog standard controls (Passive, Aggressive, Defensive), soloing +0/x1 content is easy - stand back, tag one enemy, and send in the bots. It's also boring. Painfully so. But easy.

I'd strongly recommend against a Blaster. On a Corrupter, Scrapper, or Brute I can routinely turn my difficulty up to x3 or even x5. On a blaster, I get smeared at +0/x1. Granted, I'm no expert on Blasters, but it's indicative of the AT if it can't meet the same challenges as other AT's. It does teach you how to gauge a pack of enemies and how to rely on others, but absolutely nothing else - you have no defenses so you don't learn about those, you have no major buffs to speak of so you don't learn about those, you have few if any toggles so you don't learn about those, you have little to no control so you don't learn about that. The only real advantage of starting with a blaster is that everything else seems tolerable after that, and for that you run the risk of scaring the newbie off for good.