Call Me Awesome

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How hard would it be to perform combos on a Stone tank (Granite) given the -recharge? Is it workable?

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Never having played a DB character I can't say, but I will say that the emphasis of combos seems counterproductive from a tanking standpoint. It's more of a scrapper, or at least (shudder) scranker set and Stone is probably the worst possible pairing for it.

A couple of points, you're over cap on a couple of bonuses; the Cleaving Blow in Foot Stomp is overcap for the third slot; you're also two over on the 1.13% HP increase but there may not be a good way around that.

I personally would avoid Focused Accuracy... since it got nerfed awhile back it only grants 5% tohit and 20% accuracy... not a lot of help for massive end use, and you really shouldn't have any use for it with Invincibility and Rage.

I'd probably drop FA for Laser Beam Eyes... a ranged attack is highly useful for holding aggro from range... Ghost Widow in the STF for example won't stay aggro'd on you from range with taunt alone if you've scrappers or blasters pounding on her close up.

Some thoughts for freeing slots... you can drop one Cleaving Blow from Foot Stomp and still keep ED capped damage... you're actually overslotted as it is. I'd drop the Dam/End or the Dam/Rchg.

You can swap the LotG set out of Invincibility for 3 Cytoskeleton HO's and ED cap all aspects of the power and save one slot at the expense of a 10% regen set bonus... the hit point bonus you aren't getting anyway due to the rule of 5 violation. You can likewise drop a couple of slots out of Weave, it'll cost you the accuracy bonus from LotG but it frees a couple more slots. Incidentally those changes eliminate the problem with being over the "rule of 5" for set bonuses.

By doing that you've freed up 5 slots, so you'd be able to slot up LBE with the Thunderstrike set for some more recovery, E/N defense and 7% accuracy. The last slot (or two, depending on how much you slot LBE) can go for recharge in Conserve Power.

You can also free another slot by dropping the Numina Heal/End from Health... it costs you a bit of regen but the slot may be more useful somewhere else and truthfully you won't miss the small regen amount on a soft capped Invuln.

Oh, just noticed you have Kick from the fighting pool... I'd trade that on Punch; Kick tends to send your target flying away from you... I found that out the hard way awhile back while trying to work out a post-ED build in issue 6. Not a big deal, but it was frustrating.

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I apologize. My personnal style for Stone Tanks is unique(ish) and I should have said so.

My Stone Tank, Guardstone, is a Tauntmonster.
I REALLY like taunt. I have three sets of Perfect Zinger, two sets of Mocking Beratment (spelling?), and I am working on my third MB.
Way too much tuant? Yes. Stupid? Possibly. Its just how I do things.

HOWEVER, I still think what I said about Rooted is true. Slot it with health, and don't be worrying about it slowing you down becuase:
1. It will save your skin more times then not
2. You're a stone tank.....YOU ARE GONNA BE SLOW! So get used to it :P

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You're absolutely correct about Rooted, base slotting for it is 3 heal, although it's primary purpose pre-granite is simply that it's your mez protection... without that you simply can't tank. It's very rare you'll need it while in Granite though, I only use Granite + Rooted for really tough challenges or when I need the end drain resistance. Rooted has quite a lot of that as well.

You know that your attacks draw aggro based partially on how much damage they do? In other words, say, Heavy Mallet slotted to ED cap damage has a higher aggro factor than one slotted only for taunt. In my opinion, slotting attacks for taunt is mostly pointless and if it comes at the expense of damage and accuracy it's actually counterproductive.

All the taunt slotting is doing is extending the duration; and the duration of the taunt effect in your attacks is already over 13 seconds, just the same as Mud Pots. I'd highly recommend rethinking your build and slotting for accuracy, 95% damage and endred/recharge. Trust me, you won't see any reduction in your aggro abilities... to the contrary you'll actually improve them AND you'll contribute more damage to the team. The Zinger or MB set is great in Taunt, and the Zinger proc along with 5 Stupefy works nicely in Fault but that's the extent of the taunt slotting you should have.

You'll have a considerably more effective tanker if you slot your attacks more conventionally. I haven't ever run across anything in the PvE game that I can't absolutely hold aggro of with my slotting.

For your stone tanker I'd suggest the Crushing Impact set in your single target attacks; it'll take care of your acc/dam/end/rech needs while giving you, among other things, a 5% recharge set bonus.

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Am I the only one who thinks Dual Blades should never have been a Tanker secondary?

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I've always thought it fit well as a Scrapper set but it doesn't strike me as a tanker set, particularly with the focus on combos it imposes.

Oh, and I have to disagree with Outback about Mud Pots, your slotting priority for it should be endurance, accuracy and damage. Taunt duration is very low priority.

Here's why I say this: Mud Pots is a damage aura, and if you run Herostats you'll find that over the course of a playsession your number one damage dealer will be... Mud Pots. This holds true even on my Stone/Fire tanker... although Fire Sword Circle will be close. Because Mud Pots is such a significant damage source, albeit as a DOT, you'll want to enhance that attribute... those tics of damage don't look like much but they add up. My personal slotting is a mix of Scirocco's Dervish and Multi Strike to get ED capped damage and end reduction with roughly 60% accuracy.

Now there's nothing inherently wrong about tossing a taunt IO into Mud Pots, but it's already a strong aura and does it's job without any taunt slotting. That being the case you'll be better served by enhancing the other aspects of the power first; you probably won't have room for taunt duration.

Speaking on the Stone Armor side and based on taking two Stone tankers to 50 the hard way here are the powers you will want, in roughly this order:
<ul type="square">[*]Rock Armor at level 1[*]Earth's Embrace[*]Rooted[*]Mud Pots[*]Stone Skin[*]Granite Armor[/list]The rest of the set is optional, and in my opinion Brimstone and Crystal should be skipped altogether.

I recommend taking the following pool powers as well:
<ul type="square">[*]Swift, Health, Stamina[*]Recall Friend, Teleport[*]Hasten[/list]That foundation will build a tough tanker for you. I don't feel qualified to give any advise on the dual blades portion; as I said earlier I'm unsure that it's a really viable tanker set since it forces you to concentrate on executing combos instead of on managing aggro; and if you weren't building an aggro controlling tanker then Stone Armor isn't a good choice for you. If you want a (relatively) high damage tanker then Fire armor or Shield are much better primary choices. Stone Armor is probably the worst choice if your intent is to deal a lot of damage.

In my opinion for an aggro controlling and mob-killing stone tanker it's hard to beat the Stone/Fire pairing, it gives you the supreme survivability of Stone with the AOE damage of /Fire. I'd certainly not recommend the Stone/EM pairing though, and I have one of each at 50, both leveled the hard way long before AE.

Since this is your first tank I'd suggest taking a quick peek at my mini-guide to the first 20 levels of an Invulnerability tank, it'll offer you a framework you can build on without letting you gimp yourself.

Later on you may want to check out my guide to soft capping your tank, also in my signature... set IO's don't have to cost a fortune you know. My last project, a BS/Shield scrapper, was able with little difficulty to afford his complete soft capped IO build in the mid-30's from simply playing the game and selling drops at Wentworths.

In today's game it's trivially easy to amass over $10,000,000 by level 25. By the time you're ready for IO sets in the 30's you should have a bankroll somewhere around 20-30 million... simply from playing the game and selling your drops.

Heck, I rolled a new Brute up and from doing nothing but selling drops from missions he has $6,000,000 at level 16. No market games at all, simply take your loot to the market and put it up for a bit less than the "last 5 sold" for that item. Come back the next day and nearly all of it will have sold. Common IO recipe's I sold to the vendors, and if a piece of salvage was selling for less than vendor price (250 for common, 1,000 for uncommon and 5000 for rare) I would vendor that as well.

Yep, definitely replace those taunt enhancements from your attacks, the few seconds you'll gain aren't worth the loss of functionality of the attacks. Your attacks are far better served by first making sure you hit (accuracy), second making sure you deal enough damage (damage raises your threat level helping you hold aggro) and third making sure you have the endurance to keep swinging (endurance reduction). Once you've done all that the fourth on your list would be recharge so you can attack faster. As you may guess, this doesn't leave you any room to increase the duration of your Gauntlet effect, which is already around 13 seconds.

Oh, and Invincibility should first be slotted with defense buffs, then tohit buffs, then finally endurance reduction. If you're slotting set IO's or you're able to slot Cytoskeleton Hami-O's (level 47+) then you may have room to toss a taunt duration in there but remember the defense comes first!

For me I always have Taunt on all my tankers for the reasons Sarate and Coldmed went into. While a tank with a good aura, and Invincibility is arguably the best aura (Ice tics faster but Invincibility has longer duration), can do fine against the majority of the baddies in the game even the best, most skilled tanker will sometimes have a mob that's out of melee with him and aggro's on someone else in the team... those moments are when you need a ranged attention-getter.

And of course AV's and above have a strong tendency to ignore your aura and turn around and attack the blaster pounding on them, Taunt is a guaranteed aggro getter vs AV's, even on ones you can't hit reliably because they've just hit Elude... I'm looking at YOU, Mako.

For the majority of the tanking I do it's true that Taunt isn't needed; I'm generally able to get and hold aggro with just my aura and attacks. However, it's absolutely invaluable when the unexpected happens... like that ambush that just came up from the other direction, or the other group that suddenly aggro's on the blaster. When things get chaotic you've the choice of running around like crazy trying to use your aura to gather loose aggro or you can just toss a Taunt on that loose aggro.

On a chaotic PuG I frequently find myself gathering a group here with my aura while tossing taunt at some mobs there and tossing a ranged attack on yet another mob on the other side. Taunt is just another tool available to me to do my job. And as a ranged, autohit, zero end tool it comes in remarkably handy.

You can check out the guides in my sig for some more detailed info on the Invuln tanker set; they apply equally to any secondary you may pick up.

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Tactics: Start with OwtS, Wedding Band and 3 Lucks. Run up to LR and start attacking, AAO will keep his attention and interrupt his pet spawns. Keep a supply of Lucks, oranges and greens. It helps if some peeps are brave enough to get near you to drop more inspires on you.

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Not too far off of my normal tactics when I'm tanking him with CMA; purples to maintain 75% def until the red tower dies, then my normal def &amp; res are enough while the other 3 towers go down. If LR gets lucky it's Dull Pain or green candy, no emp required.

If the fight goes long I may have to call for some more purple &amp; green munchies but I typically try and have 10 purples, med-large, and at least 4 med-large greens at the start, that almost always sees me thru the dangerous part while the red tower's up. I can survive him with the blue buffing him almost indefinitely as long as he's not hitting for double damage. With a Shield you'd simply keep the 75% def active until the blue tower died as well as the red.

I'm not sure it actually does anything, I've been thru that thing twice and the second was only because a bunch of friends really wanted to try it out. Well, we beat it both times but this is a seriously bad TF and the "climactic" final battle is, bar none, the most boring fight I've had in nearly 5 years playing this game.

Truthfully I doubt I'll ever run this thing again; the low number of merits aren't remotely worth the tedium of dealing with that final battle.

The Stone/Fire combo is extremely capable; even in Granite the AOE's will drop a group pretty quickly and /Fire is by far the most end-friendly secondary I've played. This combo was my 2nd tanker to hit 50 and it was a smooth ride the whole way. There were a few rough spots in the late 20's in Croatoa but for the most part it wasn't too tough and once 32 rolled around the only times I died were by being a bit late hitting Granite and trying to handle too much in Rock Armor.

Even on just SO's it's capable of tanking nearly anything in the game; I ran thru about a dozen STF's early in issue 9 with him before I started thinking about IO's.

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My experience is that we could be looking at several months of internal development after they announce a teaser about an upcoming issue and at least a month of beta testing on Test. Personally I'd be somewhat surprised to see it go live any earlier than October and wouldn't be surprised if it took until mid-December.

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Sounds reasonable. The stated target is 3 issues per year. We had Issue 14 (which was a big one) in April. Issue 15 (a small one) was in June. Issue 16 seems not too big in terms of 'content', but in terms of 'stuff people have wanted' (as well as engine changes) it's absolutely huge. Still, I don't think they'll need to December. I think it will be closer to October.

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Come to think of it they probably will try and have it out in October; Marketing probably wants the Rogue expansion box out in time for Christmas.

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And, just curious, you know it will be several months before issue 16 goes live how?

....just wondering

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Mainly past history and experience; issue 15 just went live a short time ago and we've just now started getting any info at all on issue 16. If things run true to past experience I'd expect at least a month of beta testing on the Test Server prior to it going live and possibly considerably more.

My experience is that we could be looking at several months of internal development after they announce a teaser about an upcoming issue and at least a month of beta testing on Test. Personally I'd be somewhat surprised to see it go live any earlier than October and wouldn't be surprised if it took until mid-December.

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1. For my offensive melee powers, how many accuracy and damage enhancements should I have? I currently have 3 acc and 3 damage which gives me around 101% each. Are any more wasted?

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For the vast majority of the game you won't need accuracy beyond around 60% or 2 SO/IO's worth. That pretty well caps your accuracy against nearly anything you have any business fighting... with the notable exception of Crey Paragon Protectors who have hit MOG and Nemesis who have stacked Vengeance. For those rare situations the occasional yellow inspiration is your friend.

You may have heard about ED; this means that for all intents and purposes enhancing an attribute of a power beyond 95% is mostly worthless; to take an example with even level SO enhancements:
<ul type="square">[*]The first enhancement gives you 33% of enhancement.[*]The second gives you another 33% bringing the total to 66%.[*]The third, which would give you 33% is devalued somewhat and your total is ~95%.[*]Adding a fourth, which should take you to 132% is only worth 5% due to ED... so it's worth less than a Training Enhancement. For this reason we talk about the "ED cap" or the point at which further enhancement is so devalued as to be worthless. This cap is generally figured at 95% enhancement.[/list]I should probably mention that some enhancements have different "schedules"; as a thumb rule anything dealing with offense (acc/dam/recharge/endred) is Schedule A and, as an even level SO worth 33% enhancement and has an ED cap of 95%. Anything dealing with defense (Defense buff/Resistance buff primarily) are Schedule B and an even level SO is worth 20% enhancement and has an ED cap of 55%.

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2. Can you get much higher than 100% improvement for powers? Is there a 'magic number' to work for?

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Like I mentioned above, the point at which your enhancements are so severely devalued that more enhancement is pointless is roughly 95%. This is what we generally look at as the "three SO enhancements worth of bonus" rule.

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3. For powers that have only one enhancement type available, is there any reason to give it more than 3 slots?

If there are any guides available, please let me know. I'm not trying to min/max everything and I don't care for PvP so it's not a concern. I'm looking for some simple answers without a lot of number crunching. (NOTE: I'm good with numbers but I do that at work, I don't want game time to be a second job).

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Things that only accept one type of enhancement like your passives generally aren't candidates for massive enhancement although I will occasionally slot 4 if I'm using the power as an IO mule to get a set bonus.

For guides to Invulnerability I've written one that applies to any secondary and shows you a relatively inexpensive method to massively boost your survivability... it's linked in my signature. At the time I wrote it about 6 months ago that build cost around $15,000,000 or less... I understand some of the prices have spiked recently. Still, I'd expect you could put it together for under $50 million; a relatively trivial amount to make with a small amount of playing the market. I actually have a level 15 who has made over $20,000,000 just from playing the game and about 5 minutes a day of working Wentworths.

If you're looking for some basic guides to making money on Wentworths check in the Market section of the forums; there's several guides that will result in considerable return.

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If it were me and I was trading out a power from your build for Fault I would drop Icicles. You have Chilling Embrace for a taunt aura and Fault provides a larger AoE and better damage mitigation than Icicles.

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You'd find that over time Icicles does more damage than any other attack you have; I find on my Stone/Fire tanker that Mud Pots actually outdamages Fire Sword Circle by a substantial margin. This is taken from Herostats; those small pinpricks of damage that a damage aura puts out really add up. It may only be dealing small bits of damage, but it deals lots of them constantly to everything around you. Those little bits of damage also work with your taunt aura to make sure the baddies pay attention to you.

Of course I firmly agree that Fault is a large part of the reason for rolling a Stone Melee tanker in the first place, it's an incredible amount of control and mitigation and should always be taken ASAP... I put Stamina ahead of it but taking it later than 22 is a big mistake.

Truthfully I've always looked at Build Up as a completely skippable power for any tanker... there's always something else available that will help you more. While you obviously have damage remember that it isn't your primary focus... you're mainly looking at controlling and surviving aggro that would turn most other AT's into a grease spot on the carpet.

In your case you've a tight enough build that there's lots of powers that I'd take first... Taunt for one. It's a ranged attention getter that you can toss some really nice inexpensive IO bonuses into. I always apply the following general philosophy with any tanker I roll up:
<ul type="square">[*]1. Will this power help me with my primary purpose, to control and hold the attention of the baddies?[*]2. Will this power help me survive the aggro I generate by my #1 priority?[*]3. Will this power help me deal damage to the mobs I have aggro'd on me from my first two priorities?[/list]I look at the powers available to me and prioritize them in that order, #1 is aggro tools, #2 is survival tools and #3 is damage tools. Obviously there's some overlap as the #1 and #2 go hand in hand but that's the thought process I apply for any power choice.

Applying that logic I want my taunt aura and armors as a priority so I can get and survive the team's aggro, followed by attention getting attacks and damage mitigation attacks such as Fault. I want to have the endurance to last out the fight and finally I want to have the damage to both kill the mobs and keep their attention via Gauntlet.

That thought process prioritizes my power selections; by using that priority list I find that I've run out of power slots long before I run out of higher priority powers than Build Up.

My first suggestion is to get Fault, it's in my opinion one of the best powers in the entire Stone Melee set; make room for it by dropping Stone Mallet. I'd also personally try to find a way to squeeze in Taunt but that would mean dropping Fire Ball.

My best suggestion would be to eliminate Stone Mallet, move Hoarfrost to 2, Heavy Mallet to 4, Hurdle to 6, Combat Jumping to 12 and slot Fault in at 22. Pick up Seismic at 38, then Char/Fireblast/fireball and Weave at 49.

Any way you look at it you're going to be making some fairly painful sacrifices by including the Fighting pool. At a cursory glance over your set you'll need to find about 8% S/L/E/N defense in set bonuses in order to soft cap your defense... which is fairly easy to do. You can forgo getting Weave and make up for it by finding ~16% in set bonuses which is also relatively easy to do.

Sets you could look for to boost your defenses:
<ul type="square">[*]Kinetic Combat - 4 of these is worth 3.75% defense to Smash/Lethal and you can slot 4 sets of them for 15% defense to S/L (Stone fist/Heavy Mallet/Boxing/Seismic Smash. [*]Blessing of the Zephyr - 2 of these gets you 1.56% Energy/Negative defense; you can toss them into Combat Jumping/Super Jump for 3.12% E/N defense.[*]Steadfast Protection 3% def unique - you can toss this into Tough or Permafrost for a 3% defense to all types.[*]Reactive Armor - 4 of these gives you 1.25% S/L/E/N defense, you can toss the set into Tough.[*]Thunderstrike - 3 of these gives you 2.5% E/N defense, the set fits nicely into Fire Blast[*]Mocking Beratement - lots of goodies in this set, bonus end, 2.5% S/L defense and 7.5% recharge are the big ones. This goes nicely into Taunt.[/list]
As you can see, once you start thinking in terms of IO set bonuses you can find more options in your build and ways to "loosen up" your build a bit. Your S/L defense is by far the most important one; the vast majority of damage you'll take will either be S/L or have a S/L component. Due to the way Defense works an attack that does, say, 100 energy and 100 smashing damage has to get thru the highest applicable defense you have... if you've 30% energy def and 45% smashing def then the attack has to get thru the 45% defense or it misses completely.

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You can't use Rock Armor or Crystal Armor while in Granite, so they can't assist you. Rooted, however, can be used and it gives Defense Debuff Resistance.

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And to expand on that somewhat I don't know of much that would really matter; a decently slotted Granite tanker with Rooted has so much overkill survivability that even loosing most of your defense due to debuffs (something I haven't had happen yet to my Granite tank) should still leave you with more than enough survivability between your resists and regen.

Frankly I wouldn't worry about def debuffs on a Granite.

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I've found the scrapper version at the soft cap is more than capable of handling anything in the game; a tanker should be comparable and due to it's higher base values cheaper and easier to get there.

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CMA, just don't go running into the shard without some suppoprt

I was talked into tanking a Dr. Q this weekend on my shield/ice tanker (loving it, btw) and had forgotten how wonderful those giant eyeballs are... and hadn't noticed how little psi resistance I had (try '0'). That hurt. Alot. Was all gravy against the wisps, brutes and flying things, and the Crey were a breeze... but that pure psi damage and 100% tohit buff the eyeballs have is, well... 'unfriendly'.

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Hmm, yes, the Shard isn't someplace I've spent much time. Thinking about it CMA is the only character who's actually done more than hunt Fake Nems in there.

I did run one of the Shard TF's a few months ago with CMA and I don't really remember having a lot of problems with the eyeballs or wisps, I did have to be a bit more alert than normal though.

I guess I'm like most of the playerbase; I tend to forget the Shard is there. I go there with characters who need the Fake badge but other than that I avoid the place.

Stone Melee skippable powers:
Stone Fist (but you're stuck with it so... )
Build Up (IMO highly skippable for any tanker)
Hurl Boulder (aptly named IMO)

If your build is tight, Stone Mallet is your next most skippable.

The Stone Melee "must have" are:
Heavy Mallet (I snag it at 4 generally)
Taunt (in my opinion a valuable tool for any tanker)
Fault (Only Stamina takes precedence, get this at 22 and slot it up. 2 accuracy SO's at a minimum as it has lower base accuracy)
Tremor
Seismic Smash

Shield really doesn't have any truly skippable powers; the closest candidate is Grant Cover... but it's holding a good chunk of your debuff resistance hostage. If you're teaming with a group of shield characters GC is very valuable... I leveled my BS/Shield scrapper with a SG team of all shield scrappers and we all had soft capped def as soon as we got GC.

I would snag Deflection at level 1, then True Grit, Active Def and AAO as soon as they come up. Battle Agility I'd want to try to squeeze in fairly early; Phalanx I'd grab in the 20's as even solo it's worth 5% def to you. Shield Charge is a simply awesome AOE attack and aggro getter that should come ASAP.

One with the Shield I've found useful but not mandatory on my scrapper; for a tanker I'd try to squeeze it in sometime.

I realize I'm listing more "get early" powers than you have room for in the early levels so you'll need to prioritize based on your own needs and playstyle. You could put True Grit off a bit and take Battle Agility in it's place but you likely would have problems running both your defense toggles prior to Stamina, that's why I've suggested TG instead at that point.

Active Defense as your mez protection I place as a "get the instant it's available" power. Against all odds is your aggro aura as well as a damage boost; if you're tanking you'll want it early.

Remember to slot end reduction in your attacks, Stone Melee is fairly high end useage and you'll save more end with one SO in Heavy Mallet than you would with an endred in EACH of your toggles... so keep that in mind.

Overall, once you get the end problems under control in the '20's the Shield/Stone combo should be very effective. Just realize going in that it WILL be end heavy... particularly in the low levels.

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Which is better for PvP? My Scrapper DM/SD is killed instantly in 1v1 PvP.

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I have not the slightest clue about PvP; I have zero... well, actually considerably less than zero interest in it.

It all depends on what you want. Want to have a very durable character who can dish out a lot of damage? You may want a Scrapper. Looking to be a more traditional aggro magnet for a team? No brainer to go with a tanker.

Personally I dislike the entire "skranker" approach; if I want to be a heavy damage dealer then I play a scrapper, if I want to control aggro and push the team thru the mission as safely as possible then I play a tanker. I know several players seem to enjoy that style, but I tend to believe you should play an AT to it's strengths rather than try to force it into another AT's mold.

Shields, based on my experience with my currently 47 Broadsword/Shield scrapper, is a slow starter that takes awhile to become good defensively but once it does it really takes off. I've found the scrapper version at the soft cap is more than capable of handling anything in the game; a tanker should be comparable and due to it's higher base values cheaper and easier to get there.

So in a roundabout way I guess I'm saying "decide what role you want to fill in the team, then pick the AT that best fills that role" Shields is a solid performer for either AT.

My BS/Shield uses the Gift of the Ancients set in all my defenses... I wind up with 4 pieces of the set in 5 powers. That gives me significant bonus endurance as well as recovery. I purchased with merits the Miracle Unique for True Grit.

I've used the entire Mako's Bite set in Hack, Disembowel and Parry (4 pieces in Parry, a common def and a acc/dam/rchg from Crushing Impact) and 5 pieces of Scirocco's in Slice, Whirling Sword, Headsplitter and Shield Charge. Two pieces of Blessing of the Zephyr into Combat Jumping/Super Jump, the Steadfast unique and Maneuvers pushes me past the soft cap for range/AOE... adding one parry soft caps melee.

The end result of this has nearly the endurance recovery of my BS/Regen with considerably more damage and survivability. I haven't had any end issues since I finished the basic set IO build.

Speaking as someone who has been on both sides of that question, the tanker and the controller side, I'd probably go with a Fire controller. The Stone tanker, if competent, should be able to handle all the damage mitigation needs and Fire brings what the Stone tank is most lacking... damage. A good tanker will vastly reduce the need for large amounts of control but benefits greatly from high damage teammates.

Fire/Rad matures earlier than the Fire/Kin but either combo would work great. Rad brings awesome debuffs while Kin brings some nice buffs; unfortunately you have to wait until 38 for the best of them. Either should work great as a partner to a Stone tanker.

Oh, and any Stone tanker who says they MUST have speed boost isn't using their other tools to their best advantage. Sure, I love having it when I'm playing one of my Stone tankers (or any other character for that matter) but it isn't NEEDED; just a "nice to have". I use TP for my combat mobility so runspeed is largely redundant, I also build for an adequate attack chain and recharge out of my own resources.

It's a tough decision... you really have no use for it on a regen scrapper but it would be VERY useful on another character and it's hard to come by. On the other hand it would probably sell for enough to completely outfit your scrapper with IO sets.

Personally I would put it into base storage for a needy alt but then I have enough high level characters to play sugar daddy that inf hasn't been an issue to me but finding rare IO's frequently is. It's up to you and whichever way you decide to go you'll probably end up kicking yourself for making a mistake

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Many of my deaths occur with every click power available, they occur so fast.

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Werner: This is my biggest frustration with Regen. Everytime I die in the blink of an eye, I feel extremely cheated. It's frustrating on squishies, but more-so on a Scrapper. You, along with several others, have proved it can still be a strong set, but it just doesn't suit me anymore.

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I can definitely see how that might turn off most people. I guess I just see it as a challenge. I could have survived! I just needed to be THAT much faster! Regen is AWESOME! It's just me that sucks.

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Well, in some ways I agree with you, in others I don't. I've played two /regen scrappers to 50, one a BS/Regen and the other a Spine/Regen. I've also played a BS/Shield to 48... and it's considerably more survivable than the regens and puts out lots more damage.

Regen is a secondary where you're either just fine or dead in 2 seconds... I've taken both of my Regens thru the STF and they go from full to dead vs the patron AV's and LR faster than I can click dull pain or recon. My Shield seems to fare much better... I've gone deathless on an STF at 45 (sk'd to 49 of course). I AM soft capped to all positions with my shield which does make a considerable difference.

In fairness both of my regens are primarily HO builds with limited set bonuses since they're both pre-issue 9 characters while my BS/Shield is heavily IO'd. Still, the best Mid's builds I've come up with for the regens end up around 25% defense which isn't enough to prevent the cascade defense failure. Maybe I should try investing in a second build on them to try a set-IO build... their main builds would take 5 respecs to pull all the Hami-O's off.