G_Tanker

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You didn't correct me ... you just illustrated that you don't know how to play a Fire Tanker in an ITF.

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Why do you quote the entire post for a pointless quip? If all you're going to do is throw around ad hominems while I correct you, at least remove the wall of text! I can ignore pettiness, but scrolling down a page of quote to get to it wastes my time.

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I figured by making you scroll I saved 1.7 people from dying in one of your ITFs

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Ahh, more pointless quips!

In truth I was rather surprised by the death count that run (shield brutes just weren't able to handle agro), but that's nothing to a Smurph ITF where he's actively trying to kill his teammates and still finishes in an hour. The entire ITF probably would have been done 20m earlier had I thought to grab insps before going in; mission 2 took a bit longer as I didn't have the tools to solo more than 4 of the crystals. Still, for a 7 man challenge level 4 ITF with 4 folks under 50, 1:15 is fine, and deaths weren't exactly a big deal to anyone involved.

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You didn't correct me ... you just illustrated that you don't know how to play a Fire Tanker in an ITF.

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Why do you quote the entire post for a pointless quip? If all you're going to do is throw around ad hominems while I correct you, at least remove the wall of text! I can ignore pettiness, but scrolling down a page of quote to get to it wastes my time.

Rad or Dark defender. Hands down.

Fire/Kin won't be useful till 22 (SB) 32 (imps) and 38 (FS) for farming teams. They've got mediocre use as controllers before that.

Rads and Darks are useful from level 1 on. I invited a level 6 rad to a farm last night and he left the team a few hours later at level 41... and he was a great asset from minute #1.

Don't go empath. For the love of god, don't go empath.

Given the poor stackability of tanks it would be nice if gauntlet came with 10% -res on all targets.

Fun story from last night...

Grabbed a level 6 rad defender out of broadcast as I started up a 53's farming team to level my shield tanker. He was the first player I picked. "Do you have EF?" "Yes" "Ok. Bear with me while I build a team."

He hit 41 after a four or five hour session. Most dependable player on the team. <3 Defenders. <3 that people are looking for healers and leaving me the good stuff.

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You're being obtuse.

Of course I'm talking about IO'd sets. Anyone with even minor experience in tanking and the sets we're talking about should have understood that.


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Actually you were being obtuse in your statement, which is why I had to correct you. I eschew obfuscation, to steal a phrase. It is not a fair expectation that the average fire or dark tanker has hundreds of millions of influence in IO investment. You subjectively view that as the threshold for a well built tank, but my experience is that most people don't share your opinion - and people hardly have that expectation when looking for a tanker to run the ITF, or at least I've never seen "Looking for tanker for ITF - if you're fire or dark please have 30%+ smash/lethal defense!".

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And yes, Fire Tankers would need some type of support (I believe Dark can resist cap S/L or close to it so not as important for them), but in a full group, the chances of their being no Defenders or Controllers (or Corruptors, or MMs, or Doms) is fairly minimal.

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Dark and Fire both get to 70% S/L res with tough. I recently ran a 1:15 ITF at challenge level 4 with 2 corrs (kin and storm) and a 48 defender (bubbles) with 3 low level (37-45) shield brutes. (I was on a fire/invuln scrap). I think we ended up with ~50 deaths. Mostly experienced players (1 newbie, 2 semi newbies), 43% of the team on support characters, yet with all that "support" the shield brutes spent half their time flat on their back during mission 2 and 3. Making the assumption that just having a defender or two along = the right type of support is silly.

As much as I dislike empaths (simply from their tag as 'healer' rather than buffer), they're probably the single most useful powerset to pair with dark and fire for the ITF, with cold and FF right behind. Sonic and thermal are also both fantastic - 90% res is significantly less damage than 70% res and gives dark regen and healing flames more time to recover.

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Someone who's run the ITF a billion times on a Fire and Dark Tanker would know this ... just by purview of that statement.

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Which is exactly why I had to correct you. A leveling fire tanker with a solid build will do very poorly on the ITF without significant support, while solidly built sub-40 invulns and granites will do fine. People don't ask for a fire tanker with 300MM in IO's, they ask for a tanker. If you're the tanker in question, you should know what type of support you need to do well.

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Fire and Dark Tankers do just fine in the ITF. Badly built Tankers of all varieties do not.

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Either your approximation of a well built tank is a ton of IO's or you're oblivious to what support does for you (my guess is the latter, given our discussions) while playing a fire or dark on the ITF.

Dark and Fire are resist based sets with no defense debuff resistance and low base defense. Even if you get them up to 45% S/L or melee (I've got builds planned for both of mine to hit 45% S/L defense) they suffer from cascading defense failure that makes standing in a crowd of 4-8 roman bosses for an extended period unsupported, well, an unwise endeavor. My mitigation route has been to bring oranges to cap my resists (the extra 20% reduces damage significantly and gives the team time to come bail me out and dark regen/healing flames time to refresh) and I tend to run on support heavy teams, so my tanks do fine... but neither can stand in a crowd of bosses and EB's for an extended period of time unsupported. Just because I run on teams that routinely pummel the ITF doesn't mean I'm oblivious to the mechanics involved.

My invulns (scrappers and brutes, mind you, all softcapped on the cheap to S/L) laugh at Cims, they're less dangerous than 54 boss farms (thnx for adding defense debuff resist to tough & rpd!) ... but for a pure resist set like Fire or Dark, Cims will eat you alive by design. Go herd up the towers on a fire or dark (you know, drag 2-3 spawns into one location for efficient aoe) and show me how easy it is with no support or insps to hang out there for a minute or so

I have both sets of tanker and have run approximately a billion ITF's, which is my basis for disagreeing with "A well built fire or dark tanker will do just fine" ... no, they'll do fine with support, but they're just not designed to handle that type of punishment. It's sort of like suggesting invuln's a great set to kill the CWK with - there's no way to 'properly build' an invuln to handle it without ridiculous IO investment. We're not talking about faceplanting WP tankers that forget tough and weave, here - darks and fires don't have tools available to them to handle cascading defense failure plus extremely low defense before IO's, and that's by design. Get some help capping your defense (or invest very heavily to softcap yourself) and you're much safer, but still need to be on your toes for the cascade.

Hah I automatically filled defense in when I read that.

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Softcapping smash/lethal resist won't be much more effective unless you've got a lot of ranged smash/lethal attacks being directed at you.

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Exactly. Edit: defense, not resist.

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You should just go for melee defense.

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Didn't find it effective enough.

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I truly did not think such monstrosities were possible.

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Keep in mind that you're sacrificing a lot to hit those stats. This is a very specialized build, much like AV soloing builds are generally pretty specific (re: lack AoEs). They're good for what they're built for, but doing anything else will suck.

I'd much rather have a less extreme build that fares well under a broader set of circumstances. Just my personal preference.

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Fair, but I already have an SO build that does just fine for the broader set and I was curious about feasibility.

Thanks all for the input!

45% S/L defense spines/fire scrapper, with energy torrent, spine burst, throw spines as main attacks, consume & healing flames working.

Travel power optional.

Anyone up for the challenge? I've tried a few builds, didn't get anywhere - but I forgot you could slot immob in impale... maybe I'll just do one myself.

(For those wondering, I'd rather have 45% S/L than 45% melee.)

Fly used to give -acc, I'm still not used to the idea I can hit stuff with fly toggled instead of hover.

Rage has needed a nerfbat for ages, but it's just too popular.

I'd rather see they just turn it into a +10 tohit / +40 dambuff / 0.16 eps toggle. (/ducks the whines)

Really depends on IO investment. *shrug*

Fire can be made very survivable against certain types of attacks, but dark can't replace fiery embrace.

Go fire if you're ready to commit tons of inf, go dark otherwise - the survivability is kind of important.

~540 tix for ~850K inf (rare salvage)
~8 tix for ~30k inf (common salvage + high sell price + patience)

Inf is 'cheap' right now.

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What do you mean fire for easy, dark for hard? As in Farms that are easy/hard?

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Fire is a pure resist set with a good self heal. It does not do terribly well out of the box against tougher opponents; if you want to make life super easy set up a fire-melee opponent spawn so you have 70% resistance and try to up your defense a bit.

Dark comes with arguably the best self heal in the game (on a shorter cooldown), two minion-cancelling auras (optional, so you can skip them if you hunt bigger game), stealth (so handy, especially when you double stack - getting picked off from range was one of my quibbles with my spines/fire even after I slotted her with a +stealth IO) and minor innate defense, plus the same S/L resist base as fire.

Dark is more flexible and survivable. Fire can be fine tuned to trash very specific enemies very well with minimal IO investment. You can heavily IO either ( I toyed with a 40% melee def spines/fire ) but even with substantial IO investment they're not going to be happy against 54 S/L bosses the way an /invuln will. With IO's you can close the gap somewhat.

Anyhoo. Fire's squishier, but has more damage. If you get very picky about your opponents or IO heavily, it can do pretty well.

Farming: Fire for easy, Dark for hard.
Survivability: Dark
Damage output: Fire

Clawwwww Brute.

... they were amazing pre-I4, and then gimpy for a while, and now very very good?

Invuln on its own as a set is *very* respectable now, and DM brings a ton more survivability to it with SL and TOF.

I has one, I likez it ok, I prefer more aoe-centric characters... but it tanks just fine?

I'd focus on endurance, recharge and accuracy in your single target attacks. There are lots of other ways to taunt... invincibility, on it's own, is rather huge in that regard.

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However, going for max resistance instead of DA's unique auras means I'm just a funny-looking Invuln.

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Invuln's a hybrid defense/resist set, key being defense... there's a massive difference between a dark on an itf and an invuln.

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I'm a returning player who left the game sometime shortly after Issue 7 or so. I've been trying to bring myself up to speed again by lurking the forums, but many posts I see refer to so-and-so build being powerful if you have a zillion inf to sink into it.

My highest level character is a level 30 Claws/Regen and I gave the meager inf I had away when I left, so I am essentially starting fresh.

With that being said, what are some combinations that won't make me rip my hair out if I can only afford SOs?

I'd like to use either DM, DB, or claws as a primary since I have an irrational hatred of Build Up, but I'm honestly at a loss for secondaries... Back when I played, you were either Regen, DA, or possibly SR. Now, I don't even see mention of Regen in any posts and there's WP and SD to consider now.

Any help would be appreciated.

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Play a few AE missions.

Spend tickets on 41-50 common salvage (or 20-40 arcane common salvage; alchemical silver). Sell for 100K each, more or less.

Buy level 25-35 IO's when you hit the right level for ~100-200k each. Never replace till 50.

/shrug

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It depends what kind of mob.

If you're aiming for lieutenants of any kind, mitigation won't be a problem and it's best to aim for as much offensive output as possible. For that purpose, I'd go with Fire/Shield, Spines/Fire or Spines/Dark.

If you'd like to take on packs of level 52+ bosses, you'll want good mitigation to get it done efficiently ; go Fire/Invul or Spines/Invul.

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This. For boss spawns 52 and up, go /invuln.

For LT spawns (or regular spawns with just 1 boss) /dark and /fire are both fine.

/wp is ok, but I'd prefer either extreme survivability to specific types or extra damage, and /wp is neither.

... so why not done by now?! details!