First off, not having "all the books" is okay - there's only the one in 3e.
So there's nothing of relevance in Supernatural Handbook? Good to know, I was planning on buying it. Is a shame, though, it sounded interesting.
And I would have sworn there was an Instant Heroes book, but on second glance it's 2e.
Actually, I wasn't aware of its existence at all. Been a while since I took a look at 3e products. Looking at its product page, it sounds like a Mecha & Manga or Swords & Sorcery kind of supplement - mostly flavor content with some advice for tweaking mechanics.
My first instinct, without opening the book, would be to go for Concealment and stealth, and pick up a penetrates concealment sense and a Perception attack power. Be as far away as you can still detect them (which can be very far if you also extend your sense), avoid them detecting you, and plink away with an attack that can't miss. Alternatively if you're feeling bold, attacking from surprise with an attack traded off to abysmal to hit and sky-high damage is effective too (and faster, but probably riskier since you need line of effect). This works much better on the "badass normals" like Batman than on flying bricks (who can not only tank a good number of your attacks, but also often have flight to close the distance faster than you may be comfortable with), but it's probably the most reliable tactic I can think of.
I'd forgotten about that little trick. How will it be able to deal with people who casually go hypersonic, though?
That probably depends on some external factors. If you can hide in plain sight and have a Stealth check they just can't beat, being faster won't help them. It's hard to get there due to the caps, though, if they have any kind of Perception at all. With Skill Mastery and a fully capped Stealth check, you can be at between 28 to 30, or 30-32 if you also pick up Favored Enemy (JLA). Most of the JLA statted in the core book don't have terribly high perception, but a lot of the PL 14-15 ones do have it high enough to beat a 30 on a high roll, so they could find you eventually if you don't manage to take them out first.
There's also a bunch of cheese you can pull with very low-ranked Perception-range powers with a lot of extras (Penetrating, Sustained, Indirect, Triggered etc) if you just turtle up and let the power do its work for you.
Can you elaborate a little more? I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean.
Let's see, as a quick example... say you have a Damage X power, with the extras Sustained, Penetrating X, Subtle 2, Triggered 2, maybe Contagious too. Let X be some low number like 2 so you aren't paying out of your nose for it. Make the rest of the build social, get friendly with peeps, be nonthreatening. Put a dozen or so triggers of your damage power on your mark. Because it's Subtle 2, they literally can't notice this unless they have a sense keyed to the power's descriptors, which is easy enough to avoid. At some point when you're far, far away, trigger all the damage activations at once and (metaphorically) watch the mark make a dozen Toughness rolls every six seconds against a pitiful damage DC. Penetrating bypasses Impervious Toughness. Again, they won't even notice they're taking damage thanks to Subtle. Eventually, they'll fail enough checks.
The weakness of this strategy is people like Supes who can make most low Toughness checks even on a 1. To take him down eventually, you need at least Damage 5 (making for a DC of 20, with his minimum result being a 19), which starts getting expensive.
IIRC, the bathtub telekinetic still works as well, though I think it's become fairly expensive.
I don't recognize the term. Can you define it?
I think the more common name for the build is the bathtub psychic, actually, but nevertheless:
The idea is basically the same as with the stealth build outlined above, except you take Remote Sensing and target people with Perception powers via that while sitting somewhere safe. It was called the bathtub psychic/telekinetic based on the idea of a character sitting at home in their bathtub while interacting with the world through Astral Projection (which was the power used in 2e).
On reading up, however, it doesn't seem possible any longer to target people with powers through Remote Sensing while also preventing others from targeting you, so that may put a wrench in the build.
