Call Me Awesome

Whew that's one expensive build. I'd hate to give an exact figure, but I'd be surprised if you could do this for under 1.5 BILLION. The Hecatomb purples are ludicrously expensive... last I looked in the 300-500 million range EACH... that's around 1.5 billion right there without considering the Armageddon set (only marginally cheaper) or the Luck of the Gambler 7.5% recharge (80-100 million)

After those the Kinetic Combat are small change at around 50 million per set. Oh, the -KB proc in Combat Jumping is another sizeable expense that's of dubious value to you... Unyielding already gives you all the KB protection you'll ever need.

Looking strictly at the numbers you'd do better to build E/N defense once S/L is taken care of... F/C is much less valuable. Along the same lines the Mako's Bite set offers primarily ranged defense with only 1.8% E/N... not a bad choice but you may be able to do better. I'd swap the Aegis in your armors for more Reactive Armor sets to boost the E/N and if you're keeping Hurl the Thunderstrike set offers a nice boost to E/N defense.

Purples really aren't all that beneficial to a tanker; they don't offer bonuses you really have a strong need for. From a price/performance standpoint they're a terrible option... you can accomplish the same thing much cheaper.

If you have a character who's actually been around the entire time you'll have upwards of 100 free tokens thanks to various instances over the years that have awarded all characters a free token per costume slot.

Last I looked CMA had about 90 free costume tokens and I've probably made use of 20 over the years so that 57 month reward really IS trash.

Hmm, well now that we've completely derailed the topic where should we go next?

Unfortunatly no.

That could be a decent choice; my Plant/Storm is a fairly slow soloer though... safe but not fast. In the late game my Fire/Rad is very competent solo and can kill at scrapper level speed (comparing with my 50 BS/Shield)... it's a bit slow starting though and gathers much more aggro than it can handle in the lower levels unless you play it carefully.

The fastest out of the gate solo I've played is Mind/Kinetic... it starts really strong but peaks early... and it's mainly a single target set. It's really good (arguably the best) in the low levels with a hard hitting single target attack chain by level 6 but it doesn't mature as strong as other sets.

Another idea for you would be an Illusion/Rad... once you get Phantom Army at 18 the character moves from "competent" to "very good". Of my high level controllers the Ill/Rad is the most capable solo, fairly easily handling even most AV's. Of course that's with some fairly extensive IO enhancement... I've pushed my recharge to ~206% giving perma-hasten, perma-AM and perma-Phantom Army. This is definitely the best choice for small numbers of hard targets while the Fire/Rad is much superior against large numbers of mobs. Facing AV's I'd absolutely take the Ill/Rad, facing 8 man spawns of +2 mobs I'd take the Fire/Rad.

Bear in mind that these are combos I've actually played to significant levels... to 50 in the case of the Mind/Kin, Fire/Rad & Ill/Rad and to 44 with the Plant/Storm. All can solo; early the Mind/Kin wins the speed prize and later the Ill/Rad & Fire/Rad win depending on what you're facing. The Plant/Storm is competent, but it's slower due to less inherent damage potential. It'll never rival Fire/Rad for AOE kill speed or Ill/Rad for killing hard targets.

The term refers to slotting IO's from several different sets into a power. As an example, let's take a standard melee attack. If you open up Mid's hero builder you'll see a bunch of different IO sets can be slotted into it. Now you can only slot a given IO once in a particular attack, and set IO's typically enhance multiple aspects of a power. Typically a melee damage IO set includes enhancements for damage, accuracy, recharge and endurance reduction in various combinations... a given IO may be Accuracy/Damage for example or Accuracy/Damage/Endurance.

Many people use "frankenslotting" to mean taking IO's from multiple sets to maximize the enhancement value of a power without worrying about any set bonuses. Frequently this means using IO's from sets with fairly pointless bonuses (therefore the IO's are very inexpensive) to slot your powers. An Accuracy/Damage IO of level 35 for example will enhance a power's accuracy and damage by a little over 22%. Slotting two of these in a power gives you about an SO and a half of accuracy AND damage in only two slots.

I'm probably the wrong person to answer about Electric Armor, but it seems to be similar to Fire Armor with a slower recharging heal/regeneration buff. Pure resistance with no defense and a decent damage aura. Adding defense to it via Weave & IO bonuses makes it a decent performer but out of the box it may be a bit lacking. In the interests of full disclosure my direct experience with it was with an Electric armor/SS tanker during the closed beta testing and operating on straight SO enhancements.

Electric melee seems to be a very nice AOE damage set, possibly surpassing Spines in that area. Like Spines it's somewhat light in hard hitting single target attacks but makes up for it with pretty massive AOE. I've a friend who's just finished a Shield/Electric scrapper and the thing's a nearly unkillable beast once it matures with absolutely massive AOE damage.

Mids' has indeed been picked up recently... I believe Ston3y's taken over the program. The latest version is available here.

Welcome back to the game.

Umm, I think you mean Transference here; Transfusion should be slotted, at basic SO level, 2 accuracy, 2-3 heal, 1-2 recharge. For sets I like the Touch of the Nictus set.

I did say "at LEAST 40%", but for the record I agree with you about going to 45%.

If everyone in melee is around 40% then the heals are unlikely to land, and nearly certain to only hit one person instead of multiples if she does get lucky. Still, cutting her hit chance in half again by going from 40-45 is always a good thing... it's just doable without that last 5%. Much below 35% defense and you're going to be having her heals land way too often.

By the way, I don't think her Dark Regen is as potent percentage wise as the player version... I've seen her hit it with a half dozen fire imps in melee and she only got back a little less than 50% (she was at a sliver when it happened, so it was pretty obvious how much she healed... there was much cussing on Vent when it happened)

I've run the STF many times and I've found two methods that work quite well for dealing with GW, depending on team composition.

If your team is melee heavy, but the melee characters are NOT high defense to negative damage (ideally 40%+ negative defense) then it's generally best to fall back on the taunt from range and toss a ranged attack at her to keep her attention. Taunt + a ranged attack should hold aggro from the scrappers & other tankers as long as they don't taunt... but if the taunter gets caged by GW he WILL loose aggro before the intangibility wears off so watch out for that.

This method obviously works best if you can immobilize her, unfortunately she got buffed a few issues ago and her immob protection seems to be included in her purple triangles of doom now... two controllers cannot reliably immobilize her anymore. If Ghostie manages to get into melee range of the taunter she'll pop off Dark Regeneration, which if the other melee characters don't have defense can result in a HUGE heal for her. One thing that can help with this is having an Illusionist drop PA right in FRONT of GW... they'll act as kind of a fence to keep her from running up to the tanker. Pulling GW back to the red wall works even better... the tanker is on one side of the "gate", PA is IN the gate and GW is on the other side

The second method assumes that everyone in melee does have high defense... since GW's heals all have to hit you can ignore them and just concentrate on taking her out in melee. Have the taunt tanker on one side and the rest of the melee attack from behind to stay out of any cones. Lately this is the method I've used more often than not... it's much easier than trying to pin her in place while taunting from range. Beware of pets though... Phantom Army is fine since she can't heal off of them but things like Fire Imps WILL be fodder for her Dark Regeneration.

The easiest method of dealing with Ghostie is certainly the high negative energy defense option; if everyone in melee has enough defense you can simply treat her like any other AV... tank from one side while everyone else pounds from the other. If you're low on defense remember that purple pills are your friend... have all melee load up before the mission. Everyone in melee needs to maintain 40+ defense for however long it takes to drop GW... a good AV team should drop her in 3 minutes or less. Purples last for one minute, so you'll need 12 small purples per melee assuming that they have no defense. Adjust accordingly depending on powersets.

The Numina unique grants you 10% endurance recovery and 20% regeneration. To put that into perspective unslotted Stamina grants you 25% endurance recovery and Health grants 40% regeneration... in other words it's about half of those bonuses. Yes, you will notice them, endurance wise it's about the difference between unslotted Stamina and Stamina with one SO slotted. The regeneration, in and of itself, is fairly minor but remember it stacks with all other sources of regen you may have. As a WP tanker it'll amount to roughly 2 HP/second regeneration.

I'm fully aware that an Emp has lots of nice things to bring to the party; unfortunately a skilled Emp who actually USES their secondary is a very rare commodity. I've been here 5 years now and I've seen way, WAY more bad Emps than good ones. A good Emp tosses out the buffs then spends most of their time blasting until it's time to buff again or toss out a rare heal. The far more common variety will use healing aura, heal other and maybe the RA's... if nobody needs a heal they just stand there doing nothing.

You're absolutely right that a skilled player is an asset no matter what they're playing and I do wish there were more skilled Emps. Unfortunately your odds are much better finding a good player with any other set. A FF, Sonic or Rad is just more likely to have a good player at the controls.

To some degree I can understand it, I've played an Ill/Emp to 40 and found I despised it... I could do it, I just didn't like it. It was the recharge cycle of Fort that was the most irritating to me; I much prefer a set you can use to buff all at once then do other things until it's time to buff again. Kinetics were a lot easier; just take time out every 90 seconds to buff everyone then back to killing.

This does get to be a problem, when I'm playing one of my Rad characters I generally don't bother to call for AM, I just move to where I can reach most of the players and fire it off. That way most of the team gets the buff; on a good team that sticks together everyone gets it and it doesn't cause any break in the action.

Heck, with my perma-AM, perma-PA Ill/Rad firing off AM the moment it's up is more or less a requirement if I want to KEEP it running.