BunnyAnomaly

Another thing to consider, with a bit less number crunching, is that by the time a brute reaches the same kind of resistances the tank has, it is rather trivial anyway because you have enough buffs for the team you probably don't even need anyone to take the tanking role.

You know that you're not meant to come within 300 meters of my home, the court order still stands.

Just to let you know, in i19 Fitness is free...

I'm not sure you'll find a "which is the best" answer, but more likely you'll find "this is what the set is good at". Those three have all got their own individual benefits and drawbacks.

Dark Melee is fairly short on AOE damage. I wouldn't suggest it if you want to be in big teams and want to feel like you are contributing lots of damage. It does rather nice single target damage when it has a lot of recharge.

Super Strength has Foot Stomp, Rage and KO Blow which make it feel very smashy It does have a crash at the end of Rage which some people don't like.

Stone Melee has great damage but is also very heavy on endurance. I'd suggest paring it with an armour set that has some tools to manage that.

For new players, it has to be just a choice between Invulnerability and Willpower. I'd settle on either, both are great and very functional with minimal investment.

I just levelled my Electric Armour tank to 39 and have my resistances all slotted out, with Tough, and she is very very squishy. Depressingly so

Defence:
-Main benefit is that a missed attack doesn't apply its secondary effects. This is huge to me. It essentially gives a debuff resistance to everything because it is rather rare that the enemy has toggles to use on you.
-Subject to more randomness than Resistance. A few lucky hits can seriously threaten your life or ill you outright.
-Variably subject to cascading defence failures. On a well built SR, it's going to take a lot to eventuate this - probably you are dead before it happens. On some others without so much defence debuff resistance, it's much more of a problem.

Resistance:
-Significantly more 'reliable' in its expectations. Damage is mitigated by a certain amount and that is basically the final rule on it.
-Is subject to secondary effects and must rely on other debuff resistances inherent to the power tree. Without that kind of debuff resistance, mobs that use these attacks can be deadly.
-Can be subject to cascading defence failures. In fact, will *always* be subject to them. Against mobs with a 50% chance to hit, they will almost immediately be taking double the hits from them.

A mix of the two?
-It is far, FAR easier to have a resistance build and then get IOs for defence, and the defence can be made to be very appreciable. In fact it is basically impossible for a pure defence build to find enough resistance to truly feel the effect.
-There is a general weakness in that cascading defence will still hurt, and in enough numbers/frequency you will quickly revert to a 95% chance of being hit.
-However in the above instance, it is not common to find mobs that both provide defence debuffs as well as other life threatening debuffs in the same groups. This limitation means that in general instances, you can either ignore a lot of debuffs through defence, or you can lose your defence but not have to face the debuffs anyway.

Finally...
-All the examples in these threads are extremely 'one dimensional'. There are very very few builds that are pure defence or pure resistance (even SR has scaling defences, and I can't think of any 'pure' resistance build that doesn't have regen or a heal).

Oh, I just noticed in the numbers the following:

T9 of Battle Axe does more damage (10) but hits 5 instead of 10 and has a chance it won't knockdown.
T8 of Battle Axe does more damage (20) but a slightly narrower (20 degree instead of 45 degree) cone.

On the basis of the T9 (10 targets is beautiful) I'd probably favour WM. The damage is too close to call but the extra targets and mitigation is fantastic.

I stand corrected, sorry. Axe has better base damage, WM probably is better overall. I'd still say go with what you think looks better

I'd echo another "Don't go for Regen" on a WP character. The set bonuses are truly miniscule (on my WP tank who has a bit over 3200 hp, many of the regen bonuses are less than 1hp/sec which is, essentially, nothing) but the benefits of good slotting for defence or recharge are so much more. I say recharge because with good recharge you can have attacks that provide active mitigation by knockdown/stun, for instance.

To repeat... lots of slots for 1 hp/s each? No... bad. Not worth it.

As for the Rage crash, the effect of -defence reads like this:
•Defense -0.2 for 10s (after 120 second delay) [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs]
Effect does not stack from same caster

The important part is "Effect does not stack from same caster". When you activate it a second time, it reapplies this effect and overrides the original. Therefore, it will wait another 120 seconds before it will apply the defence debuff. Again, if you activate Rage during this 120 seconds, it will use the most recent effect to calculate when next to debuff you, as they don't stack.

They are almost identical. Battle Axe has pure knockdown/knockup while War Mace has a mix of stun and knockdown/knockup. The attacks are nearly mirror images of one another in terms of damage/targetting/etc.

I would take whichever one you think looks better.

Make a hybrid mace/gun that stops you from weapon swapping.

k it might look silly but it sure would be nice.