Call Me Awesome

One of the best reasons for having both Fault & Tremor is simply the control factor... with both of them you can pretty well keep an entire spawn on their butts; the damage of Tremor is actually secondary... it's roughly (I don't have the numbers in front of me now) equivalent to Stone Fist damage to an AOE.

I usually use Tremor as an opening move since it's untargeted... I just jump into a group and hit Tremor, then target something and start my ST attack chain... as they start to stand up I hit Fault, then Tremor is nearly back up to knock them down again.

Both of them work great as a "time out" power as well if you need a couple of seconds breathing time to pop an insp. and they recharge fast enough that you don't worry about "saving" the power for when you REALLY need it.

Now, you should know better than to blow your drink out of your nose... most of them sting something fierce.

She always is; her hold will one shot kill anything, and it's a cone. The best solution I've found is to either buff up the tanker with 8 Clear Mind or similar so he can resist the MAG 100 hold or to keep him soft capped for defense so it doesn't hit.

My last STF we all ate enough purples to keep the team at the soft cap and everyone took her in melee (sounds bad, eh?) and took her down (worse?) quite quickly... since she couldn't hit us her big heal was a non-issue.

Now now people, I was talking about her powers, not her... um... well... abilities.

Getting in touch with your femine side?

As others pointed out neither Fault or Tremor does knockback on even level or above baddies, both do knockdown.

There are only two occasions when CMA, my Inv/Stone, does knockback with either (or any, for that matter) power:

1. When dealing with -2 or lower mobs
2. When dealing with mobs with KB weakness like Clockwork

Personally both of those powers fall under the "must have" category in Stone Melee for me; I slot 5 Stupefy (skipping the proc) in Fault and Tremor is great with the PBAOE set of your choice depending on what bonuses you need. Scirocco's or Obliteration are ones I frequently gravitate to.

On CMA Fault has 5 Stupefy and the psi proc from the Perfect Zinger set; I usually get at least 1 or 2 mobs with the proc and frequently get 5 or more.

The critical IO's are relatively inexpensive, although they've gone up since I wrote this guide. The Reactive Armor set used to cost around 50k per recipe; last I looked it was closer to 300k per recipe. I imagine the Smashing Haymaker set is still cheap but the Kinetic Combat has once again shot way back up in price.

Mocking Beratement for taunt should still be dirt cheap... most of the recipes should be at well under vendor trash prices. The Steadfast unique is still pricey; your best bet is probably buying it with merits, I believe it's only around 75 merits... that's two of the low-mid level task forces.

All in all, and leaving out salvage (which is at completely insane prices; I'd run a few AE missions and get the salvage via tickets) with a little patience you can probably get it done for around $20-30 million. It cost me about $8 million when I did it in issue 13. But then, it's vastly easier to actually GET influence nowadays so it's probably a wash.

Ah, still sounds kind of pointless, just a series of, well and apologies for the former devs, cryptic comments.

I guess I'm too old to appreciate things like that. <waves cane>

Maybe I'm just too old but looking at the twitter posts is like looking at a bunch of disjointed and out of context comments. I get the feeling I'm only seeing about one word in 10 of a conversation.

The referenced page is completely meaningless without the context for the responses. Is this typical of how twitter works? If so, why does anyone bother?

Same here as well.

It's seemed to me that the forums have been considerably less responsive ever since the changeover; it was pretty rare for it to take longer than 2-3 seconds to view a forum or thread on the old software... now a fast response is close to 10 seconds and it's not at all uncommon for it to take 30 seconds or more.

Obviously there's something going on; I've seen the dev comments that the new system is faster but I frankly haven't been seeing it and the response times have been getting worse over the last couple of weeks.

I IO'd my BS/Shield about a month ago; I think the entire package ran somewhere around $60,000,000. The high ticket items were 4 sets of 5 Scirocco's and two full sets of Mako's Bite. That didn't include the 3 Membrane HO's for Active Defense I had in storage though... but those aren't critical. Come to think of it, that was before salvage prices spiked so badly so YMMV.

If you're interested, the high points for the IO sets were CJ/SJ 2 slotted with Blessing of the Zephyr, Hack & Disembowel 6 slotted with Mako's Bite, Deflection, Battle Agility, Phalanx, Grant Cover & Maneuvers 4 slotted with Gift of the Ancients and all the AOE attacks slotted with 5 Scirocco's. Parry's frankenslotted for ED cap accuracy/damage/recharge with 30% defense. Oh, and the Steadfast Res/Def unique that I had drop on me in the 20's.

Here's a little trick for money I used this week on a new character; I ran him in AE for a few missions and got about 4,000 tickets. I used those to buy common arcane salvage, mid level (25-40?) and sold it at Wentworths. Those 4k tickets translated into about 20 million influence that way. No really huge "I win" rolls there like you can get with recipes but it's guaranteed good steady income with the market like it is now. My average income was something like $5k per ticket.

Alchemical Silver, Ancient Bone, Spell Ink and the like are the staples in that salvage range, and a full load of salvage rolls would have a bunch of those. The cheapest salvage in that range was going for 5k and the best was going for up to 100,000 depending on the time of day. The market fluctuates pretty dramatically right now.

Resist actually, OwtS is a resistance power, not defense. I believe my BS/SD ended up with two slots there; but I'll admit it's not a power I use a lot.

The BS/SD combo is pretty awesome, mine's running 45% defense to all three positions (assuming 1 parry, I took the easy way out for Melee) and I'm actually getting tanker level survivability with immense damage output. Thanks to some relatively inexpensive IO slotting I'm also getting nearly the endurance efficiency of my BS/Regen... and the shield is running 8 toggles. Slotting 4 Gift of the Ancients into each of my 5 defensive powers offers a lot of recovery and bonus endurance.

That character's become my default favorite solo character now displacing my BS/Regen and Spine/Regen from that slot. More offense and more survivability.

Well Moi, the big news is Posi's announcement about the Super Sidekicking and other things here.

Otherwise we know about the ability to change the color on at least some of the power effects as well as alternate animations for some other powers. I think I recall seeing something about another round of powerset proliferation; I don't remember all the details of it.

Anyway, welcome back!

Several of the god mode powers also include an endurance recovery bonus while they're active; OwtS and Unstoppable are examples of this. The Endmod enhancements would increase this recovery bonus for the duration of the power; it doesn't affect the crash at all.

Mostly it's a waste slotting these powers for endmod. MoG I'd simply slot for recharge; the base defenses will more than cap you out and the base resists are less than 5% from the resist cap. Since the power is an "alpha strike soaker" with a 15 second duration further slotting is pointless.

One with the Shield cannot be slotted for recharge, indeed it's recharge is fixed and unalterable by any means. Personally I toss 1-2 resist IO's into it and leave it at that; after all you're going to be using it when you specifically need the +resistance so that's what you'll want to enhance.

I hope that answers your questions; have fun in-game!

I'm not really sure what you mean by qualities, but there are some differences. Off the top of my head;

• Freedom has the highest population, but thanks to the highest total number of players you also end up with the highest number of jerks to deal with. There are lots of good players there, but with so many players you're going to run into the really memorable idiots as well. On the plus side it's incredibly easy finding a team... on the minus side you're going to find a fair percentage of startlingly bad teams.
• Virtue is the unofficial Role Playing server so you may find some of the people you meet a bit strange if they're playing "in character". It's also the second most populated.
• Infinity is frequently the third most populated server and it has something of a reputation for PvP; since I don't have any high level characters there and I avoid PvP like the plague I can't say if it's deserved or not.
• Guardian is my home server, it's relatively low population but there's enough people playing and it's very rare to run into idiots and jerks; most players are skilled and happy to assist new players.
• Pinnacle is my second home, all in all it's fairly similar to Guardian with a lower population than the big servers and lots of good friendly people playing. Frequently referred to as the "Drunk Server" you may hear some in-jokes about the whole situation of inebriation.
• Protector is more often than not the lowest population server of the bunch; while I do have several characters there it's not one I play regularly. From what I hear it has a good reputation for friendly helpful players. Then again, every server but Freedom has much the same reputation.

That's all the servers I have any real knowledge about; you can tell approximately how populated each is by it's ranking on the server selection screen when you log in. The top server is the one you were last logged into, then they are in order from lowest load to highest load with Virtue and Freedom at the bottom with the highest load.

Whichever server you decide on I strongly advise you to avoid the Architect building and play thru the regular content at least until you're in the upper teens. That'll give you a foundation for playing the game; lots of new players have gotten into the Architect missions at level one and come out as level 50 without ever learning how to play.

Oh, and welcome to the game and enjoy your stay!

Adding the resistance values you're talking about to the passives would force a nerf in the defense... otherwise you'd have a tanker that was tougher than a Granite with none of the penalties. As it is a mature Invuln can almost equal a Granite in durability; the last thing I want is to have penalties tacked on.

Ah, I just re-read your paragraph, you were referring to a TOTAL resistance fully enhanced of the passive + unyielding, not the enhanced value of the passive itself. I read it as you wanting the passives boosted to around 18-20% to give an enhanced value in the low 30% range.

It's my experience that Invuln is now extremely capable at almost all levels; the pre-20 game isn't dangerous enough that Temp. Invuln, Unyielding and Dull Pain can't handle the incoming damage... once you get up to the mid-20's the set really takes off now and it can be an unkillable monster by around level 30 with a bit of IO slotting. I don't really see any need for further buffs to the set and I'd be afraid that if we got them we'd loose something more important. I've run newbie Invuln tankers thru the Posi TF in the last couple of issues; they handled things just fine.

The RPD/TH swap would be pretty much a wash; after all the 5% def by itself doesn't mean anything until you have an additional source of defense to stack with it. What I would support would be swapping TI and RPD; that way scrappers and brutes wouldn't be stuck with the lesser power by default.

Overall I truly don't have any problems with the current state of Invulnerability; once it matures its second only to Stone in durability and if you have a reasonably good build it'll handle the lowbie game quite nicely. The biggest lowbie problem is the long wait for your taunt aura and frankly I'd rather just tough it out as opposed to asking for something like moving Invincibility up in the power order.

Yep, when you exemp you'll loose powers taken over that level, but the slots and the enhancements in them remain.

For example, you're level 50 and you have a level 16 power with 6 slots. As long as you don't exemp below 16 that power is available and it has 6 slots, no matter if you slotted it at 17 or 50. If you exemp to 15 then the power is unavailable just as you'd expect.

Now there is one caveat, your enhancement values will scale down when you exemp; your SO's would scale to DO levels below a certain point and to TO levels at another point. I've seen the table but I don't remember the specifics; I think SO's degrade slightly exemping below 30, drop to DO level close to level 20 and TO level in the early teens. You'll still have all your slots in a power, your enhancements will just be less effective.

If I'm not mistaken I think IO's scale as if they were whatever level you're exemped to, so a level 40 IO would enhance as if it were level 20 if you're exemped to 20.

But in answer to your question YES, you will keep all slots when you exemp so your slotting order is meaningless on a respec.

Nothing wrong with CJ/SJ; that's the route I took with CMA and a fair percentage of my characters are jumpers. CJ is useful for combat mobility and it provides a small amount of defense; stacked with Invincibility and Tough Hide it becomes more noticeable. By the way, CJ is so incredibly low in endurance cost there's absolutely no reason to ever slot endurance reduction in it... it uses 0.07 end per second. By comparison your armor toggles, TI, Uny & Invincibility use about 0.26 end per second each. Also, Super Jump is a lot of fun

Anyway, you should have a solid foundation now; if you care to learn about set IO's and more complex builds you can check out my guide to soft capping the defense of an Invulnerable tanker... the link is in my signature. Don't worry about it for now though; you've enough to learn without adding another level of complexity.

Ok

• First you have 8 AM's contributing +160% damage, +240% recharge and +480% recovery. (+20% damage/+30% recharge/+60% recovery each)
• Second, you have 8 Enervating Fields contributing -160% damage resistance on your target, effectively tripling your damage, combined with AM.
• Third, you have 8 Hot Feet contributing, after containment, 230DPS (36 damage per controller per tic with a 2 second tic rate x 8 controllers = 288 total damage per tic / 2 seconds per tic x 160% damage buff from AM = 230 per second) Figuring in the -res debuff from EF and you're dealing ~360DPS from Hot Feet alone.
• Fourth, you have 8 Fire Cages which will deal, slotted up, 49 damage each every 3 seconds if spammed for a DPS of approximately 208, not counting the -160% res of EF.
• Fifth, you have 8 Char's available that can deal 250 damage each every 2 seconds, again not counting the -160% res of EF.
• Sixth, you have 8 Choking Clouds that will have everything held almost instantly.
• Seventh, you have 8 Rad Infections for hard targets contributing -40% def and tohit debuff each for a total of -320%. Obviously AV's will resist this and limit it's effectiveness but you're still applying roughly a 25% debuff even on them.

We're up to almost 700DPS of AOE damage and we haven't even mentioned the 24 Fire Monkey's contribution yet. That's more than enough to drop an entire spawn, including the bosses, in 2 seconds. The limiting factor is the speed the team can move thru the mission, not the speed they kill the mobs. There's a reason 8 man Fire/Rad teams have completed the STF in under 30 minutes; it has to do with the incredible effectiveness of stacking buffs and debuffs.

I've been on many steamroller teams and superteams; absolutely nothing else has matched a group of Fire/Rads. My Fire/Rad solo outdamages with ease my Archery/EM blaster, my BS/Shield scrapper, my Spine/Regen scrapper... I've never played anything else that comes close. Stacking additional Fire/Rads on a team doesn't just add the damage, they multiply each others effectiveness.

You may want to rethink this some, Deflection has enough resistance to S/L to be worth considering slotting for.

I'd really suggest pulling the endreds out of here; they aren't doing you much good. I'd put them into CJ and SJ; slotting the Blessing of the Zephyr set there for ranged defense. The travel and travel/end IO's... skip the KB protection which you have no use for.

I think you're overslotted in Health; that third heal isn't getting you much and you can use the slot elsewhere. Personally I typically leave Health with 1-2 slots and call it good.

If you're slotting the zinger set I'd suggest the full set. If you're only slotting 3 then DON'T slot the Acc/Recharge; Taunt is autohit so the accuracy is wasted. Personally I'd consider the Mocking Beratement set for this build; the additional endurance would be very welcome.

Hurl is generally looked down on by most tankers as a rather long animating attack. If I were looking for a ranged attack for late game I'd pick up an APP power.

Oh, this is level 38; get Foot Stomp here! I'd also suggest Rage come earlier as well.

Big problem here, Against All Odds should be MUCH earlier! It's available at level 8; I'd get it then.

Overall it's a bit better than before but the power order is off, in some cases such as AAO it's horribly off. Modifications I'd suggest would be dumping Punch, slotting Jab & Boxing, dump Hurl and pick up one of the APP's; my favorites are either Energy or Pyre. And, of course, moving AAO up to the teens at the latest.

I'd also suggest getting the Steadfast Def/Res unique IO for an additional 3% def; True Grit is a good place for it. Based on your earlier build I assume price isn't even remotely a consideration. With the Steadfast and CJ you're 0.7% short of the def soft cap without Weave, so it can be skipped also. (this assumes 2 slotting BotZ into CJ/SJ) Dropping Punch/Hurl/Weave opens up room for Char/Fire Blast/Fire Ball from the Pyre APP.

Here's kind of what I'm talking about; it still could use some modification but this is your build with the critical changes; this is assuming a HUGE bankroll however:

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Le French Tickleur: Level 50 Natural Tanker
Primary Power Set: Shield Defense
Secondary Power Set: Super Strength
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Fighting
Ancillary Pool: Pyre Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Deflection -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def(3), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(3), LkGmblr-Def/Rchg(11), ResDam-I(13), ResDam-I(23)
Level 1: Jab -- T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(A), T'Death-Acc/Dmg(7), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(11), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(43), T'Death-Dam%(43), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(45)
Level 2: True Grit -- S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(A), ResDam-I(5), Heal-I(15), Numna-Heal(19), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(23), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(36)
Level 4: Haymaker -- C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg(A), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx(5), C'ngImp-Dmg/Rchg(9), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(17), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(25)
Level 6: Active Defense -- HO:Membr(A), HO:Membr(7), HO:Membr(9)
Level 8: Against All Odds -- EndRdx-I(A)
Level 10: Hurdle -- Jump-I(A)
Level 12: Combat Jumping -- Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(A), Zephyr-Travel(13)
Level 14: Health -- Heal-I(A), Mrcl-Rcvry+(15), Mrcl-Heal(17)
Level 16: Battle Agility -- LkGmblr-Def(A), LkGmblr-Def/Rchg(19), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(25), LkGmblr-EndRdx/Rchg(33)
Level 18: Super Jump -- Zephyr-Travel(A), Zephyr-Travel/EndRdx(43)
Level 20: Stamina -- P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(21), P'Shift-EndMod(21), P'Shift-End%(31)
Level 22: Boxing -- Dsrnt-I(A)
Level 24: Taunt -- Mocking-Taunt/Rchg/Rng(A), Mocking-Acc/Rchg(34), Mocking-Taunt/Rchg(40), Mocking-Taunt(42), Mocking-Rchg(42), Mocking-Taunt/Rng(42)
Level 26: Shield Charge -- Armgdn-Acc/Rchg(A), Armgdn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(27), Armgdn-Dmg/Rchg(27), Armgdn-Dmg(34), Armgdn-Dmg/EndRdx(37), Armgdn-Dam%(39)
Level 28: Knockout Blow -- Hectmb-Dam%(A), Hectmb-Dmg/EndRdx(29), Hectmb-Dmg(29), Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg(31), Hectmb-Acc/Rchg(33), RechRdx-I(37)
Level 30: Tough -- ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(A), ImpArm-ResDam/EndRdx(31), ImpArm-ResDam(33), ImpArm-ResDam/Rchg(34)
Level 32: Phalanx Fighting -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
Level 35: Rage -- GSFC-ToHit(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(36), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(36), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(37), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(39), GSFC-Build%(40)
Level 38: Foot Stomp -- Sciroc-Acc/Rchg(A), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg(39), Sciroc-Dmg/EndRdx(40), Sciroc-Acc/Dmg(46), Sciroc-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(50), RechRdx-I(50)
Level 41: Char -- HO:Endo(A)
Level 44: Fire Blast -- Apoc-Acc/Rchg(A), Apoc-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(45), Apoc-Dmg/Rchg(45), Apoc-Dmg(46), Apoc-Dmg/EndRdx(46)
Level 47: Fire Ball -- Ragnrk-Acc/Rchg(A), Ragnrk-Dmg/Rchg(48), Ragnrk-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(48), Ragnrk-Dmg(48), Ragnrk-Dmg/EndRdx(50)
Level 49: One with the Shield -- ResDam-I(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet
------------
Set Bonus Totals:
* 9% DamageBuff(Smashing)
* 9% DamageBuff(Lethal)
* 9% DamageBuff(Fire)
* 9% DamageBuff(Cold)
* 9% DamageBuff(Energy)
* 9% DamageBuff(Negative)
* 9% DamageBuff(Toxic)
* 9% DamageBuff(Psionic)
* 8.63% Defense(Smashing)
* 8.63% Defense(Lethal)
* 8.94% Defense(Fire)
* 8.94% Defense(Cold)
* 7.38% Defense(Energy)
* 7.38% Defense(Negative)
* 4.88% Defense(Psionic)
* 10.5% Defense(Melee)
* 11.8% Defense(Ranged)
* 10.2% Defense(AoE)
* 4.05% Max End
* 79% Enhancement(Accuracy)
* 67.5% Enhancement(RechargeTime)
* 10% FlySpeed
* 253 HP (13.5%) HitPoints
* 10% JumpHeight
* 10% JumpSpeed
* MezResist(Held) 5.5%
* MezResist(Immobilize) 4.95%
* 22% (0.37 End/sec) Recovery
* 58% (4.54 HP/sec) Regeneration
* 7.56% Resistance(Fire)
* 7.56% Resistance(Cold)
* 3.13% Resistance(Negative)
* 5% Resistance(Toxic)
* 10% RunSpeed

You rang?

I wasn't on the team, but I believe I remember the time was somewhere around 24-26 minutes; there was a contest a while back with teams racing the STF. The Frad team won and I believe second place was somewhere around 50ish minutes... I imagine the forum purges have deleted the threads by now.

Unfortunately I haven't had that kind of success, I think our best run was something around 1 hour, 20 minutes.

<edit>
Well, either my search-fu is weak or the threads are gone, I wasn't able to find the discussion. Anyone from that team around to set the record straight?