Call Me Awesome

Well, do you want Hasten? Really it comes down to that; your survivability isn't tied to click heals or other long recharge buffs and the only click buff you have, One with the Shield, is not affected at all by recharge.

The benefits of Hasten would be getting Shield Charge back as quickly as possible and shortening the recharge on Seismic Smash. On the other hand once your build matures you'll certainly have a full attack chain without Hasten. The Hasten question is a matter of personal preference, if you want it then go ahead, it will be useful. It isn't a requirement by any stretch however, and getting it perma will mean some seriously heavy duty IO bonuses and a boatload of cash.

Some of my characters have Hasten, some don't. CMA, my Inv/Stone tanker doesn't have it and I don't see the need for it either... my attack chain is adequate with IO slotting giving my attacks roughly 40% recharge. I didn't try for a recharge build... while I have a few incidental bonuses they only amount to about 15% in IO bonuses.

My only high level Shield character is a Scrapper at 50, but I didn't get Hasten on him either and haven't missed it. I don't plan on getting it on my Shield/Fire tanker, currently sitting around level 25.

Bottom line, get Hasten if you want or skip it if you want; it isn't a key power.

As a thought on slotting, I like the Gift of the Ancients set in my defenses... 4 of them ED caps defense and gives me some really nice endurance recovery and endurance amount buffs.

The SS vs SJ mainly comes down to preference, either will work for you. Personally I tend to go SJ for defense characters simply because Combat Jumping gives me a small def bonus for practically no end cost and it's a place to toss a pair of Blessing of the Zephyr IO's.

SS is easier blueside than redside; the hero zones aren't as nasty to negotiate without vertical movement. I've a few characters who are runners heroside and it's workable.

For your shield tanker I'd suggest looking at Tough/Weave. Tough will put you really close to the S/L resist cap while One with the Shield is up and Weave will get you pretty close to the 45% soft cap. From what I remember playing around with Mid's you can get to a little better than 40% to all positions on SO's... finding that additional 5% in set bonuses is fairly trivial.

I could see the combo working quite well with a couple of caveats. For one, Stone Melee is quite end heavy; that might be a problem for you until you start to IO out. For another, you'll be quite weak in AOE damage... if that's important to you then I'd suggest another set. I've played /Stone Melee for almost 5 years now... CMA, my first 50, is Invuln/Stone so I know the set pretty well.

From a durability standpoint it should be highly capable; with only minor IO set bonuses Shield is easily soft capped to all positions and you'll have the added mitigation of Fault & Tremor to knock down the entire group... with some recharge slotting you can almost keep a group on their butts full time. You've the knockdowns in the hammers as well, and Seismic Smash is a MAG 4 hold in addition to being your heaviest hitting attack. Yes, it's MAG 4, it will one shot hold a boss.

The smashing damage I've not noticed being a huge issue overall, there's actually quite a few mobs who are weak to smashing. Those mobs generally are quite strong to lethal but weak to smashing.

One thing you'll need to keep in mind is that no tanker is going to output the kind of damage you're used to with your Brute... damage is our secondary purpose after all. You'll find your durability to be much higher as a tank, once your build matures that is.

If you do decide to roll up a Shield/Stone tank be prepared for some growing pains, the teens will be particularly rough due to lack of endurance and the normal teething problems of an immature defense based build. Until you get your defense above 25-30% you'll feel pretty squishy. Once you have Stamina, SO's and some endred slotting in your attacks things will get better... by the time you start to IO the character, which for me is the early 30's, you'll notice that everything is maturing nicely and there won't be many mobs who will be very dangerous to you.

Ok, I just went to Asus's site and DL'd the latest drivers for my onboard sound, which is SoundMax Digital HD audio, 7.1 setup. Enabling 3D audio in COH no longer gives the muffled, slow, low pitched sounds (yay) however I do randomly loose game sounds altogether. Opening the audio options and changing to non-3D then back to 3D fixes the problem for a few seconds to a few minutes.

No problems at all with 3D audio in several other games I've tried... Mass Effect, Fallout 3, KOTOR 2, Champions Online. Unfortunately COH still doesn't like 3D audio on my rig.

It's strange, the new drivers fixed the bad sound issue, but somehow at random times I completely loose game sounds now. Heck, I'll stick with the non-3D game sounds, they work perfectly.

Re- the name, it dates back to when I first started playing COH... running around in AP as a baby blaster the civies would frequently say something like "You're Awesome!". After I got tired of getting killed as a newbie blaster who didn't know what he was doing I rolled a tank... at that point the name seemed an obvious choice.

I'm not sure about that Werner, I have DDR monitored on my BS/SD scrapper and as long as AD is double stacked (only about 40% of the time on my build, I haven't invested the massive $$ into recharge bonuses) I maintain capped 95% DDR according to the in-game numbers. It drops to the 75-80% range with AD single stacked. That's with AD slotted with 3 Membranes and BA & GC slotted ED cap def.

I can also say that Cimeroans have to really work to cascade my def below 40%, the only times I've seen it happen were when I had the aggro cap on me and the RNG decided it didn't like me.

There's a good reason Mid's won't let you get Energy Torrent without first taking two other powers in the pool, that's because it requires two of the first three powers to be available. In order to select Energy Torrent you will have to have two of the four lower tier powers, I'd suggest Conserve Power, Laser Beam Eyes and Energy Torrent in that order.

A quick glance at your build shows a few problems. First, the travel pools are incorrect in the current Mid's build... that means that you must take Hasten (or Flurry which I do NOT recommend) before you can take Super Speed. That means your posted build is impossible to recreate in game. Hasten MUST come before Super Speed, the game will not allow you to do it the way you have. The only exception to that is for 60? month veteran players. Mid's is currently bugged in the power order for the travel pools so your build as it stands is invalid.

Second, you're slotting your attacks for positional (Melee/Range/AOE) defense, not typed (Smash/Lethal/Energy/Negative/Fire/Cold). That's costing you quite a bit of benefit, Invuln already has a decent base of TYPED defense, these do NOT stack with positional. I suggest slotting your attacks with Smashing Haymaker for the Smash/Lethal defense, that's going to be far more effective and far cheaper. Finish out the last two slots with a couple of Pounding Slugfest for a small regen bonus and you'll be at the ED cap anyway, even slotting level 25 IO's.

Third, you can stop your armors with 4 slots of Reactive Armor, that 5th slot bonus is fairly pointless and you will want slots for your 41-49 powers. Likewise Tough Hide is overslotted as is Build Up (which I always skip on a tanker anyway). Combat Jumping I would stop at 2 slots, just the BotZ set.

In order to reach the survivability levels Invuln's capable of you will need the Fighting pool for Tough & Weave; that'll also put some squeeze on your available powers since it means taking Boxing, Tough & Weave. Slot Tough with 4 Reactive Armor and Weave works great with 4 Gift of the Ancients. Boxing is a throwaway prerequisite that typically is left at the base slot.

Remember, the goal is to reach 45% defense vs Smash/Lethal damage and as much as possible Energy/Negative defense. Focus on the S/L first, it accounts for over 75% of all damage you'll take. Then think about E/N defense as it's the next most common. Fire/Cold is very rare so don't worry about it; the small amount of F/C damage should be handled adequately by the "incidental" defenses you'll get with Invincibility, Tough Hide & Weave.

Oops, you're right, I did have a boo boo there... my bad. I was going from memory and forgot that little idiosyncrasy. I'll correct my earlier post.

Look at my soft cap Invuln guide for some suggestions (linked in my signature); it'll absolutely solve any survivability issues and doesn't sacrifice any offense to do it. It's written from a "secondary neutral" perspective and works equally well with any secondary.

On the /EM side I imagine you want the heavy hitters, while I do have a Stone/EM tank at 50 I haven't played her since shortly after the EM nerf so I'm unsure of the best choices there anymore.

Here's the standard Warshade triform macros:
/macro nova "powexec_toggle_on Dark Nova$$goto_tray 9"

/macro dwarf "powexec_toggle_on Black Dwarf$$goto_tray 8"

/macro human "powexec_toggleoff black dwarf$$powexec_toggleoff dark nova$$powexec_name gravity shield$$goto_tray 1"

The first will put you into nova form and change your bottom tray to tray 9, substitute goto_tray 9 for whichever tray you have your nova powers in.

The second will put you into dwarf form and change your bottom tray to tray 8, again substitute the "tray 8" for whichever tray your dwarf powers are located in.

The third will drop you out of either form, activate your S/L resist shield and change your bottom tray to tray 1.

Personally I tend to use /bind instead of /macro for form shifting... I bind the nova form to button 4 on my mouse and dwarf to button 5; they're the two thumb buttons on the mouse. For human form I bind that to the "h" key. That layout would look like this:

Nova form
/bind button4 "powexec_toggle_on Dark Nova$$goto_tray 9"

Dwarf form
/bind button5 "powexec_toggle_on Black Dwarf$$goto_tray 8"

Human form
/bind h "powexec_toggleoff black dwarf$$powexec_toggleoff dark nova$$powexec_name gravity shield$$goto_tray 1"

<edited to correct the mistaken binds for Human form>

I'd agree with this, and here's a thought. Leave the Synthetic HO's from STF/RSF at the current levels and only boost the "genuine article" HO's back to the issue 4 levels. That gives incentive for running Hami instead of the STF/RSF.

I'd much prefer increasing the zone cap to get back some of the feel of the old raids but a HO change would aid the fairly moribund event in gaining popularity.

It does sound like something died; it kind of reminds me of the symptoms on a work desktop that fried it's video card. That machine powered up the fans, then sat there doing nothing... opening it up revealed that the card overheated and popped a half dozen capacitors. As I recall it sat there with fans spinning and giving regular momentary flashes of the HDD activity light. Fortunately it was a desktop, not a laptop, so I just replaced the blown vid card. (It was amazing just what the card looked like, the capacitors had popped and peeled away just like a kernel of popcorn)

Unfortunately troubleshooting hardware on a laptop is a bit tougher; many of them you can't replace components on. If there's a PC repair shop near you it may be worthwhile to at least see what they have to say before you give up. About the only good news is that I doubt your hard drive is a problem so you'll at least be able to get data off of it. Small consolation I know.

Stone Armor tanker. Granite, the tier 9 armor is a toggle and if that isn't a "make you unkillable" power there isn't one in the game. I realize that isn't what you were really looking for but it's the true perma god mode.

A Warshade can perma Eclipse which grants +res based on how many mobs it hits so they can have capped (85%) resistance to all but Psi so long as there are mobs available to fuel Eclipse.

A SR scrapper can easily have soft capped defenses making Elude fairly pointless as it won't increase your survivability outside of a few edge cases. Shield likewise can soft cap vs all positions giving you, in effect, a perma god mode. If you want to invest in the set bonuses most AT's can soft cap their defenses to at least one position, many can soft cap all three but it may well take a highly specialized build that sacrifices too much effectiveness.

Traditional tier 9 defensive powers like Elude, Unstoppable and the like aren't perma-able anymore... I think the best you can do is roughly 50% uptime. Fortunately IO bonuses can make most tier 9 powers superfluous.

You may have hit the nail on the head here; I'm certainly in the hundred plus old school raids attended group and I think you're right with this. Technically the new Hami probably is better, but the zone cap causes it to loose the special-ness that old Hami had.

I've been to I think 4 new Hami raids including the first successful test server one. Admittedly all of them were early in the process so they were rather disorganized but it was an overall disappointing experience. Now with the zone cap many don't bother trying anymore... and that same zone cap causes problems since you need specific AT combinations, or at least the earlier strategies did. I'll admit I haven't paid any attention to Hami since probably issue 10 so I imagine strategies have evolved. If you end up with lots of scrappers and no controllers you'd have to try and get people to leave so you'd have room for the AT's you need.

That all depends on your team, my Invuln with Taunt fully slotted out (full Perfect Zinger set) will still loose aggro to the team's scrappers and blasters if I don't include a ranged attack. Believe me it came as a surprise to me the first time I saw it too. I switched to alternating taunt/Nemesis Staff vet power and had no further issues. Now if the team is all ranged attackers then you're right, you'll hold aggro. If you've melee or short ranged high damage teammates then they'll have a tendency to strip aggro.

If you've a couple of scrappers with any kind of aura (shield, invuln etc.) then you're very likely to shed aggro without a ranged attack. I've seen another tanker loose aggro on the STF to a couple of blasters attacking at short range; the tank in question was slotted ~90% taunt duration. Since he was friend and I worked with him on his build I'm fairly sure of his slotting.