Ben_Arizona

Funny, a lot of the team drama I run into is from people ******** that the kin let SB slip for more than two seconds, or that the kin is holding them up by having a quick buff party and should've done it during the fight instead of shooting, or that the kin is SBing people who didn't want SB, or why is the kin Fulcrum Shifting when he could be watching the buff lineups like a hawk.

Earth Control is pretty close to that too, at least before the pet. Earth/Cold is fantastic on teams and a miserable grind solo.

Although the caltrops are apparently several feet tall, so you'll need to be floating a fair bit higher to get out of them.

(I usually hover fairly low for ease of targeting when I'm in groups, about a body-length above the ground - and I still get caught in caltrops. They are very tall caltrops.)

A Mind Controller who doesn't take Confuse is, in my opinion, nuts. Confuse isn't a bad power, it's a very good power that gets overshadowed in cross-set comparison by a ludicrously good power. That's like saying that, I don't know, Foot Stomp is a bad power because it's not Shield Charge.

Edit: The same applies to Mass Confusion, although it hadn't occurred to me that you might mean that.

Illusion doesn't have fast-recharging AoE containment, but then it also doesn't have fast-recharging AoE damage that would take advantage of it. It has a fine single-target attack sequence, but that sequence does create containment (via Blind).

The same applies for the most part to Mind, which excels at single-target damage. Mind does have Terrify for which containment would be nice, but I wouldn't want to trade off two of Mind's many actually-useful powers for the ST and AoE immob that most sets seem to consider mandatory. The absence of those clunker powers is actually one of the reasons I like Illusion and Mind so much.

I have never understood the stance that sets without immobilizes are somehow weaker as a result. There are two control sets that don't have Immobilize, and in both cases they've replaced the immobilize with more actually-effective controls.

Don't get me wrong, immob is perfectly usable for what it is, but I would rather be inflicting any other mez condition given the choice. It's just that most sets don't give you the choice.

After six years of playing almost exclusively on PuGs, you should be aware of how many people on PuGs, even with plenty of vet badges, aren't paying attention.

I am aware that the -range has not always been on Taunt, but since this thread is taking place today about how one tanks (with whatever AT) today, I don't see the relevance of complaining about what Taunt did not used to do.

As far as taunting one target over and over, sometimes there are reasons to do this (AVs, or if you don't want to lead your swarm of "buddies" over to where the target is but at the same time it's something you don't want getting at the squishies). Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, it is a bad decision. As far as "the actual words you typed", sometimes (prepare for a shock here) people on the internet engage in hyperbole and when they see someone in a PUG make a mistake proceed to post on the boards about how idiot tankers do that one thing all the damned time.

That's a decent example of the sort of non-tank tanking I was talking about; I would've used the projecting doorway earlier to make it a little faster but I suppose having a wider open area is better for the Tar Patch. I've seen similar herding to great effectiveness with a fire/rad using rad toggles to seize aggro and hot feet/choking cloud to get the clump-up without being beaten to death. This does take longer than most grouping-up I do, but that's because the particular map you're on is much more clear of obstructions to duck behind than most.

A group of blasters could indeed have cleared them faster than you could group them - but that is a group of equal-level enemies who started fairly well packed together, on a map that's not especially amenable to quick grouping.

You know tanker taunt applies -range, right? Taunting will get outliers to come closer so their ranged attacks will reach, and if they have a mix of melee and ranged attacks they'll often decide to switch over once they're closer. Yes, it's a bad idea to taunt the same one over and over, but (no offense intended) I kind of suspect from your tone that you weren't actually paying attention to what's going on in all cases here and that may not have been quite what was happening.

Snipers won't move in response to anything else short of knockback powers, either. Their legs fell asleep from sitting in their sniper position all day.


If you could get the ranged guys to come closer by ducking behind a handy pillar (or crate, or whatever - you don't need to run back down the hallway on most maps to pull enemies into clumps) then yes. If they lost interest when you did that and stayed where they were to shoot at the rest of your team, then no.

To me, what distinguishes tanker enemy control from just debuffing or mezzing the enemies into uselessness is that the tanker is able to control enemy position as well as reduce the incoming attacks. Yes, a couple of blasters can incinerate spawns that are nice enough to stand in tidy little clumps when you get there, but some enemies aren't that polite without some encouragement. Some stormies can do this by careful pushing instead of pulling, and I'm sure a very careful FF could do it that way too, but my relatively limited experience is that the ratio of those who can actually do this quickly and consistently to those who say they can do it is higher with people using pull-focused methods than with people using managed knockback alone to try this.

As far as that goes, I've seen some people do very well at pull-focused enemy control who weren't playing tankers, but all else being equal (in terms of IO investment, number of power picks available, etc) the tanker will do better at it than other ATs simply because it's one of the main things they were designed for. Yes, a blaster can be made to do it, but given the same investment the tanker will simply be better at attracting and surviving enemy attention because they are given the best tools in the game for it as basic staples of their AT.

I will reiterate this because I'm sure someone will decide to harp on that: By "pull-focused control" I don't mean saying "pulling to here, everyone stand way back", then going in, running around all over the room for half a minute, and then charging back down a long hallway to bring a group into firing range. What I mean is using a combination of seized aggro and terrain (usually crates or pillars near the enemies) to control enemy positions for better AoE.

tl;dr: Blasters can certainly wreck packed groups without a tanker's help; tankers can turn spread-out enemies into packed groups without having to say "wait five minutes while I herd 'em up". If you can do that even while the blasters have opened fire then congratulations, you're tanking well enough for most of the game.

Are you sure about that? It's my understanding that the confuse procs cancel the "do not notify" on Confuse and Deceive even when the procs don't fire; does Surveillance work differently with regard to procs and notification?

Yep. Which means it isn't useless unless your henchmen never die (which is possible, but at least for me they do die against tough enough enemies now and then.)

Is it a great power? Well, no. As I said, it's probably one of the more skippable powers in MM Traps. Still, a dead henchman and a big boom is better than just a dead henchman, so if you've got the room for it it's not a terrible power.

Detonator's fine if you can hit it in time when your henchman's about to die anyway. Not fantastic and probably a skippable power for most people, but it beats Time Bomb.

Agreed. Super-jumping is theoretically the most dangerous (since it lacks the consistent distance of Fly or Teleport and doesn't have stealth like Super-Speed) but even then I've only ever felt remotely endangered while Super-Jumping if I am either traveling through severely purple zones, lagging massively so that my jump commands don't actually get there, or in certain spots of Grandville where you may get web-grenaded. Other than those situations, the worst that happens is that a few minions get to throw something at you that hits you while you're hundreds of feet away.

Something else worth mentioning: in Founder's Falls and other sniper-heavy areas, flying high is actually potentially more dangerous than speed or jumping, since the buildings that normally block off their lines of fire won't when you're at roof-height or higher.

Comparing Fly + Swift to Ninja Run + Hurdle seems reasonable to me, given how many character builds have Stamina and don't have any reason to care which entry power to use other than which one dovetails with their choice of travel power.

Counterpoint: If you're steamrolling enemies so badly that nobody ever takes any damage, what do you plan to do with an end discount? Generally speaking, most of the time you will have some (but ideally not too much) damage on your teammates unless you're absolutely crushing whatever you're fighting, and Vigilance does provide a noticeable difference when you're in that position.

If there's any potential perverse incentive going on with Vigilance, it's that I would say it encourages doing your buffing midfight rather than being prepared, but plenty of people do that anyway.

"Just use the vet reward" ignores that some players (even some very competent players) have been playing for less than 42 months, and also that in some circumstances it helps to be able to recall people more than once every thirty minutes. That said, you're right on about Recall Ally, since the vast majority of the time that GT is useful, Recall Ally will do just as well.

Edit: Also that apparently I am entirely wrong about how Group Teleport works. Go me.

Edit 2:
If you are stealthy, you can place a Time Bomb, get out of line of sight, and when it explodes you will garner no aggro. This cannot be done with Trip Mine against immobile or largely-immobile targets.

The only time I've ever used this was against the crystals on a somewhat unusual ITF, but there you go: something Time Bomb can do that Trip Mine can't.

Yours is almost certainly more effective than what I'd end up with on an all-control-power build. I don't think I could resist the temptation to use Greater Invisibility, Deceive, and Confuse to invisibly start bumfights at twice my usual speed, or to take every single pet and run around with a hilariously mismatched menagerie.

I considered it, but I've run more active Masterminds without Stamina so it didn't seem necessary. I could be entirely wrong about how much end this guy would choke down, though, since I tend to think of end usage in terms of overall set end usage rather than specific powers when I'm working from the top of my head. Also, not even QR would be enough to get through the full summoning and equipping without stopping for breath.

I think the real problems would be slot shortage and, of course, total framerate choke.

Counter-edit: I didn't take Blaze or, indeed, any attacks because I sort of figured our eighteen henchmen would have it pretty well covered. Plus Gang War for special occasions.

As I've said, if you want powers from the travel pools, you're free to get them. The advantage given is the option not to, and it's more than cosmetic.

This is why I specify in-game cost, and why Ninja Run annoys me - I'm not a fan of getting a significant in-game advantage in exchange for paying extra out-of-game. The other booster-pack powers are nice but don't have any significant effect (as far as I know) on how you would build a character. Ninja Run, however, removes one of the usual tradeoffs of character-building (two power picks vs. the hassle of not having a travel power) and has the potential to significantly change builds as a result.

People are going to take some damage unless you're steamrolling so badly that it doesn't even matter whether you have an end discount or not. 90% HP isn't exactly failure.

Recently during the DP beta I remember a lot of people with defenders coming to the initial conclusion that Dual Pistols was under-costed to an overpowered degree because they weren't used to Vigilance on large teams.

Then Ninja Run has the advantage of fitting in your build. You wouldn't be able to slot BotZs anyway, because with or without Ninja Run you apparently don't have room for powers that can take it.

Because Ninja Run has no in-game cost to take it, there's no in-game disadvantage to it. It may help to think of it this way: Ninja Run grants you two (or one with City Traveler) bonus power picks in addition to its travel power qualities. You can choose to spend one or both of these on Zephyr mules, so it does not functionally have the "can't use it for Zephyrs" disadvantage; rather, it has the advantage that you can choose to spend those picks on things that don't take Zephyr.

The problem is that Ninja Run is the only travel power that doesn't lock you out of any other choices. When you take any other travel power, two of your power picks (one if you are sufficiently veteran) are locked into position and can't be used for anything else, while Ninja Run essentially adds an extra power slot to your build. Bringing in the question of "locking out choices" is what makes Ninja Run almost excessively good.