Call Me Awesome

You're getting into significant IO bonuses to get those numbers; I was comparing the sets on straight SO's. Straight SO enhancements, every power including Tough slotted to ED cap nets you 78% S/L resist, 90% Energy and roughly 45% - 55% to everything else. Those numbers are directly from my level bumped Elec/SS on test. With no defense at all in the set you're going to get hit by the majority of all incoming damage... an 8 man spawn of +2 mobs will chew your resistances away in very short order.

I've no doubt that adding ~30% S/L defense would make a huge impact on the survivability, but in order to get that you'll need some pretty noticeable IO slotting; Kinetic Combat, Reactive Armor, Steadfast Unique... you're getting into a pretty steep price range there. IO's will make a difference in performance certainly, but the set's got to be able to do the job on straight SO's... if it can't then something's wrong with the set.

What makes sets like Invuln so powerful isn't their resistance levels, or their defense, or the +hp and heal of Dull Pain... it's the combination of all three layers of protection. Shield is the same way, it has high defenses to prevent the vast majority of damage from landing in the first place backed up by decent resistance for the stuff that gets thru. Electric has, basically, only one line of defense in it's resistance. Energize helps as a heal and short term regen boost but it'll only be available at best once per fight. That's not enough to keep up with the steady HP bleed of damage and your resistance numbers aren't high enough to keep the incoming damage down to what Energize can sustain.

One thing you should be aware of is that, operating on pure SO enhancements, Electric is highly squishy. My testing of an Elec/SS tanker at 50 with SO's showed a tanker who will have extreme difficulty as a main tank on larger teams.

I tested the following tanker sets, all operating on pure SO enhancements and all level 50, all slotted to ED cap for resist or defense as applicable:

• Electric/SS - with Tough, no Weave
• Shield/Electric - With Tough/Weave, defenses were in the 38% range
• Invuln/Stone - no Tough/Weave

And for giggles I also used a Broadsword/Shield scrapper as a comparison... this character was fully IO'd to the 45% soft cap.

My testing involved setting my difficulty to an 8 man team facing +2 enemies... something that would be fairly typical to face as main tank.

The enemy groups tested were Carnival of Shadows and Council, using Radio missions in PI.

My results:

• The Elec/SS typically lived about 5-8 seconds against a 8 man spawn of Carnies containing a Dark Ring Mistress boss... Energize only seemed to add a couple of seconds to his lifespan. If a group didn't spawn a DRM then about one in 5 tries he could survive long enough to kill the spawn. Against Council it was better, but it still faceplanted in 15-20 seconds on average.

• The Shield/Elec was able to handle the Carnies provided they didn't get lucky... on average he managed to defeat solo about 2-3 spawns before the Carnies got lucky and took him out. If a boss spawned or not was largely irrelevant to his survivability. SO survivability was good. Against Council this tanker was never in serious danger; performance was quite good.

• The Invuln/Stone was effectively immortal against the Carnies... a test with the aggro cap of mobs all pounding on him without any response lasted for almost 30 seconds before I hit Dull Pain. Adding a DRM boss made things a bit tougher but it was doable. Eventually they would have worn thru his armor but overall I'm satisfied. Against Council the issue was never even in question, I left him standing in the middle of 17 mobs for almost 3 minutes without his health dropping significantly.

• The IO'd Broadsword/Shield scrapper was the best of the bunch against both Carnies and Council having effectively no problems surviving and killing off all the mobs.

My theories on the results I got are that the Elec/SS, being a pure resistance tanker, simply doesn't have enough raw mitigation. Possible solutions would be adding defenses to the mix via Weave and IO bonuses... since you'd be starting from scratch this would be a major undertaking. If I were suggesting changes to the powerset I'd try boosting the S/L resistance up by 12%; that would allow you to cap it at 90% with Tough... current numbers put it at 78% with tough. Alternately I'd shorten the recharge of Energize to match Healing Flames or boost the regen component.

I find it interesting that the other pure resistance tank, Fire, actually seems to have higher survivability... I put that down to the much faster recharge of Healing Flames over Energize. This last is from third hand comments of other beta testers comparing Fire and Elec.

The Shield had decent defenses to start out backed up by some pretty good resistance numbers and of course the mitigation provided by Shield Charge and Lightning Rod. It's plenty good enough on SO's... adding IO's to the mix moves it up into the "incredible" category. I see no need of any changes to this set.

The Invuln has the layered defenses that make the set so good, decent defense, good resistance and Dull Pain all make it a great set, even on SO's. Add a little IO love and the set becomes almost unkillable.

Membranes do indeed boost the DR of Active Defense; my BS/SD scrapper runs roughly 78% debuff resistance with one Active Defense... double stacked (I get roughly 45 seconds of stacking with my slotting) it caps out at 95% debuff resistance. That's slotting 3 Membranes in Active Defense.

Certainly, I probably should have mentioned that... mea culpa.

Yes, slot 3 runspeed into Swift; it won't solve your mobility issues by any means but it does help.

My level bumped Elec/SS had Tough, but not Weave and was on straight SO's due to the total lack of any salvage to make IO's on Test... they gave us 9,999 merits with the bump to 50 but no tickets and salvage was nearly non-existent on the market.

I worked up a theoretical Mid's build that soft capped S/L def; with significant defense I can easily see Elec being a monster but you're building defense from scratch which isn't cheap or easy to do.

From memory, my Elec tanker looked roughly like this on Test with SO's:

• S/L - 78% (with Tough)
• F/C - 54%
• E - 90%
• N - 46%
• Psi - 54%

That was with every power in the primary slotted to ED cap resist and Tough also slotted to ED cap. Energize is a nice power, but it wasn't coming back fast enough to handle the incoming damage... I had it slotted like old school Dull Pain; 3 rchg/3 heal.

All of my testing was done with mobs set to spawn at +2 levels for an 8 man team; I was testing solo simply to stress test the build.

Just to cover the bases I also tested an old, SO'd version of CMA from around issue 7 with the same difficulty settings against the same enemies I faced with the Elec/SS... in every circumstance the Invuln easily out-survived the Elec. I also had a Shield/Elec tanker in the level bump... interestingly enough it was tougher out of the box on SO's than either the Invuln or Elec comparing SO build to SO build.

Heh, I was just remembering I tested my BS/Shield scrapper vs the same missions with the same settings... it mopped the floor with the mobs. (Said BS/SD scrapper DID have about a $150 million IO build... possibly a relevant item)

Once you throw IO's into the mix of course the situation changes; I can see a soft capped Elec (If you can get there to more than one type/position) being tougher than a soft capped Invuln but it's going to be a lot harder to get done. The one I came up with used 5 sets of Kinetic Combat, 5 sets of Reactive Armor and a few other bonuses to get to about 44% S/L defense with Weave and Maneuvers. Doable, but difficult in today's market.

OwtS does NOT have a huge crash, it takes a chunk of your endurance, roughly 50%, when it crashes but that's all. While it's active it boosts your damage resistance and offers a recovery bonus... just make sure you've more than half a bar of end when the power drops and you're golden. The crash isn't much more severe than Hasten's crash.

It's not an Unstoppable type power that crashes your end to zero and HP to 10%.

Obviously I'll chime in with the suggestion of Invulnerability.

In all fairness though you may want to think about Shield; it'll need some IO love to reach it's full potential but it's not that hard to soft cap a Shield tanker with power selection and moderate IO slotting. The last character I took to 50 was a Broadsword/Shield scrapper and it was a real eye opener; once I got it close to the soft cap it suddenly jumped into tanker levels of survivability.

One of my latest projects has been a Shield/Fire tanker; the set's a slow starter but once it starts to mature it gets really good really quick. Based on my scrapper who's run the ITF as main tank (yes, a SD scrapper can main tank an ITF) I've no doubt it'll mature as a very sturdy and functional tanker.

Shield is also a "set and forget" set, your only click defensive power is One with the Shield. It also gives you a really NICE AOE attack with Shield Charge... it gives Scrapper levels of damage. While it can be a bit end heavy I solve that problem by slotting Gift of the Ancients in my defenses... that gives 2% recovery and 1.8% more endurance for 4 IO's.

Well, that's because Incinerate IS a single target attack, NOT an AOE. It's a single target attack that does a lot of damage over time, it's not a sudden spike but several (I don't have Mid's in front of me right now) tics of moderate damage over about 5 seconds or so.

Burning Patch? The only thing I can come up with that you may be talking about is Burn, and that's in the Fire Armor set, not in the Fire Melee set so it's a non-issue with an Inv/Fire tanker since you can't get it anyway.

This is very sound advise for your current level; and in all honesty your slotting won't matter much until at least level 12 when you can start slotting DO enhancements.

In the low levels, 1-11, I generally don't even bother to actually slot anything. Sure, if an accuracy or something else I can use drops I'll slot it but in general TO enhancements don't offer enough boost to really be worthwhile. The sole exception to that would be accuracy; and really since the "beginner's luck" tohit buff in the first 20 levels went in even that's not critical.

Anyway, hopefully we've made things clear as mud for you

You really hear that? Only Stone for the ITF? I guess the idiots are everywhere.

I tanked an ITF last night with my Broadsword/Shield Scrapper, any competently played and decently built tanker can handle the job. Top choices would be Invuln or Shield. WP is tough enough if built well but unless the player knows what they're doing holding aggro will be more difficult.

Getting back on topic I rolled up my first Tanker, Call Me Awesome, back in early issue 3. He was my second character created and my first level 50... I rolled him up after finding out just how easy it was to get killed over and over as a Fire blaster played by a raw newbie. CMA came about because at the time Invulnerability was the toughest primary out there and I was sick and tired of faceplanting every other spawn. I went with Stone Melee for two reasons... first because super strength was way too common and second because it let you smack someone upside the head with a big freakin' hammer. Over the issues I've come more and more to appreciate just how well those two sets work together but originally it was mostly a spur of the moment decision of "hey, that'd be cool".

Over the years I've played most everything on Heroside but I seem to always gravitate back to tankers; something about the whole idea of grabbing all the aggro and bodyguarding my team seems to click with me. Heck, I frequently play my scrappers like a tank as well... and my Dark/Dark defender actually does a pretty good job pinch hitting for a tank if need be.

Huh, funny, but I was just looking over my character list and while I tend to identify myself as a tanker I actually have more controllers than anything else... 5 total tankers (3 at 50) vs 7 total controllers (2 at 50 and 1 at 43).

For what it's worth, on my Shield scrapper I slotted True Grit like so:
Steadfast +3% def unique
Miracle +recovery unique
Miracle Heal
Generic Heal
Generic Resist x2

Deflection got:
GotA defense
GotA def/end
GotA def/rchg
GotA def/end/rchg
Generic resist x2

That slotting has been highly effective; I tanked an ITF last night with that scrapper without many problems... outside of OwtS I had roughly 45-50% resist to all and soft capped defenses to all. That's on a scrapper with scrapper base numbers.

But you either had location based KB or AOE damage to kill the repairmen instantly or you had massive damage to overpower their heals I'd bet? I'll fully admit the team I had wasn't optimal for damage but it was getting the job done up to that point; then there simply wasn't enough damage to overpower the repairmen's heal or location AOE to kill them before they became targetable.

I've no question that it can be done with either massive damage or AOE's to KB or kill the repairmen the instant they spawn. The problem lies with more typical PuG teams that may lack those advantages.

Yeah, I've seen that happen several times in previous runs; it doesn't happen much to people familiar with the STF but newcommers sometimes don't realize what the repairmen will do.

Yeah, it was an unpleasant surprise for me... I hadn't run an STF since issue 15 hit and I guess I just assumed that this bug had been squashed somewhere along the line.

I've heard people handling it with several blasters keeping rain of fire or similar active over the tower as well; and if you've truly massive damage you can probably simply overpower the heals... we were only adequate damage wise for the TF leading up to that point.

Well, the run was on Guardian this afternoon so it may have been. I was tanking LR in the back corner so I didn't see what was happening at the towers but the reports I got were that the repairmen were healing before the team could kill them; and at least one person on the team was an SG mate who'd run probably close to 50 STF's with me.

We weren't an ideal team but we shouldn't have run smack into a brick wall like that. I think we had a scrapper, couple of 'trollers, a couple of defs, one a dark (who didn't have darkest night, go figure) & one a storm and two blasters. I was tanking with CMA.

From reports I've gotten from other SG mates they had no issues on their runs but they were running Fire/Rads and using Bonfire on the towers. Maybe if the stormy had used Hurricane? Funny what occurs to you to try long after the team breaks up.