Epic Woes

I've got a case of the Epic Woes. I have two epics, the Warshade and the Bane, both sitting around 40.

Warshade first.

First of all, I thought I'd check out an interestingly named story-arc, which I will call "Bob". Bob promised me a lot of entertainment in the form of pop references to psychology. Seeing that nobody has played it yet, I thought I'd try it.

Enter into the mission. Ahm. Hmm. Dual blades and empathy minions. They were really doing a lot of damage, so I had to turtle in Black Dwarf. Except that even in Black Dwarf, they were tearing me a new one. Every time I injured one, the others would heal it up. I could stun them in human form, but even one left standing tore me to shreds. I was baffled. Why was my Dwarf dying so quickly? Did I miss some kind of change to Black Dwarf resists?

Finally, I gave up and decided to ahead and try Footsteps Initiative again. Oh. Black Dwarf was fine after all, I was barely touched by the Circle of Thorn, at the same difficulty setting. Then I got to the boss. Dangnabit. Human/Nova meant getting spammed with controls and a quick trip to the hospital. Dwarf doesn't have enough damage to take it down. There's the new Mire, but I was running out of endurance so quickly with no appreciable improvement in damage from miring a single boss. So there I was, smashing and smashing, popping blues now and then, until I ran out and the boss barely had a nick in him. No mobs left in the mission to make more fluffies. Fine. I gave up.

A solo warshade is tedious, boring and ineffective. If only I had a team. Somewhere.

Then you get the opposite situation with the Bane. This guy is like a stalker. Perfectly fine, more or less, in a solo mission. Plays like a stealthed blapper.

But there are so many frustrating things about it. First of all, all its melee attacks are long recharging and endurance intensive. Even with two SOs of recharge in each attack, they just don't come back fast enough for me to form a proper attack chain, meaning lots of standing around. Then, they cost so much endurance that even with all that standing around, any period of fighting means I have to keep eating blue pills. Oh, and they're squishy.

...Which becomes a problem when teamed, when you have to stand in the middle of flying AoEs and lots of loose aggro doing these huge melee attacks, with mediocre melee defense (all the while running out of endurance because there are so many mobs to kill).

I think heavy IOing will improve both of them greatly. But I don't see why "epic AT" should mean "epic IOing".

Maybe I should only play the Warshade in a team setting, and just turn the Bane into a Crab (I hate crab legs).