Kruunch

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Fire/SS

I don't tend to play a lot of TF's so a reasonably tough but very hard hitting tank suits me fine.

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Same for me, just because it was my original tank and it gives me the chance to prove the "fire tanks are squishy and suck" crowd wrong every chance I get. It's also a very easy tank to play with lots of utility powers and great with managing aggro.

Human Torch and Hulk were also two of my favorite comic characters as a kid so it kind of gives me the chance to have aspects of both in my toon.

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Ugh ... I wish the Fire/Axe Tanker we had in our ITF last night was the "prove you wrong" kind.

But no ... he went down faster then a sub with screen doors.

Constantly.

PvP Forum might help you out more.

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Yeah as I'm coming up to the late teens now things are getting a bit better. Theres definitely some prejudice against the newer players (even though I'm not really new, just out of date) right now probably a result of the massive powerlevelling that went on. I'm seeing alot of low level groups still trying to powerlevel but I guess it was changed enough that it is kind of hard to do again now.

I guess what was probably giving me issues was that the teams were probably looking to do low level AE and thats why they wanted my wife to join whereas I don't get my AE until the mid 20s so having me get dragged along is kind of a waste. I found some good people though after zone hopping a bunch to do radio missions and TFs so that made me feel alot better.

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Yeah the Meow farms brought up a lot of players quickly in the first couple of weeks of I14. Like you, most of them were returning players, giddy at the thought of hitting L50 in less then a week.

The prejudice against these types of players has always been around by the more veteran crews in the game and on these boards. Right or wrong most forget what it was like when they were nubbies and didn't have every percentage memorized.

You'll be fine.

P.S. - In general I tend to use MAs for farm teams (which still can power level you btw, just not as fast as those original Meow farms) and run full groups for normal mission arcs and radios. MAs (as content) tend to get a little annoying when trying to wade through all the crap to find the couple really neat ones. Mostly it ends up feeling like a waste of time after awhile. Full group radio missions can be fun as heck and fairly easy to form (and fast levelling to boot).

Shield/Axe is fine ... go out and have a good time.

Except for maybe Stone, every other tanking primary (including Inv) has to work their build to take very large alphas and few other tanker primaries have such a cool attack.

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It seems to me the main goal of the people who make their custom mobs is to make their mission as hard as friggin' possible. I might just be getting bad arcs but the few I have played with custom groups have all had LTs in them that are harder to kill than an AV(bit of an exageration but they have been tough!).

This arc I did last night had LTs that were Bots MM set to extreme + some electric powers that take your end in like 2 shots. There were 2 of them with every mob so you go from fighting 4 to 10. I ended up quitting after my 7th faceplant in less than 10 minutes, lol.

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A big problem with designing MA's is that newbie authors don't understand that if they have a neat concept mob, it might not necessarily be a good thing to make every pack full of them.

Imagine fighting Malta where every minion was a Sapper. Yeesh.

Another problem (from a playability standpoint) is making themed MAs that don't exactly endear itself to players. For example I had a friend make a "Matrix Revolutions" MA, where every mob was an Agent Smith who spawned more Agent Smiths. Simple and neat right? Except everyone one of them was an MA/SR Scrapper ... kind of annoying to just whiffle yourself to death.

Most people who gripe about this game's ATs not measuring up to comic books enough seem to fall into this trap with the MAs constantly.

See this is remains one of the big problems with CoH ... accidentally stepping into a really clunky build.

Timeshadow: EM gets very slow animation wise (Whirling Hands (your AOE), Energy Transfer and Total Focus (your two big hitters) and Granite Armor (Stone's god-mode which will have you removing all your other Stone Armor toggles off your power tray) gives you -recharge as a penalty for god-mode.

Heraclea's suggestion is about the best (or lesser) of the evils of this particular combo.

Then again watching a Stoner in Granite perform Total Focus would probably be fairly awe inspiring (even if it is on the same time scale as Haley's comet).

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why no love for the axe? all the builds with a few exceptions seem to avoid it...

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For me it's the draw times of weapons in general and the general anti-thematic theme to the comic book genre. Of course there have been Heroes (and Villains) with weapons, but by and large the only Tanker analog I can think of off the top of my head is Thor, and War Mace doesn't behave in that way nor looks remotely as awesome as say Walt Simonson's Thor.

Put the two together and ....

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I keep seeing these threads pop up about tankers needing to do more damage.

Tankers need to understand their archetype, learn their position/place/advantage for a team, or pick another archetype that does damage.

No archetype is supposed to be the end-all uberest. Each Archetype is supposed to rely on the others.


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Well said. Issue4 was the closest tankers came to being gods of damage and indestructibility, literally not requiring any player but the tank on a team of eight set on invincible, to do anything.

BaB's has said Castle's data mining on tanks shows them still out performing all the other AT's (within his metric).

If you can't get into a tank as it plays right now, I'd suggest playing something else, problem solved. ;]

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*cough* Issue 1 *cough*

I'd like this more then a damange hike personally. Especially for the squishier Tanker sets.

Depends the build, slotting and the AV in question.

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Reading your post got me to thinking, short of running a TF I don't see many requests for a tanker. Now granted the team composition has alot to do with it also. Get a bunch of trollers together and they'll generally scoff at inviting a "pure" Tanker. Get a group of blasters and it's heals and a tank.

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True, a multi-troller group doesn't need a Tanker. My Ice/Rad and Ill/Kin Trollers both can replace a Tanker in most group situations.

However when I log on my Trollers it can sometimes be painful how long it takes me to get a group. On any one of my Tankers (save my weee ones in their teens) the moment I log on I get asked to join a team (from strangers no less).

Now there have been times where I've hung out on my Tanker and did missions while waiting for a team and there are times my Trollers have been picked up right away. Go figger.

My Scrappers tend to be very hit or miss.

My Blaster is still picketing outside of Atlas City Hall bemoaning the smoke grenade fix of 4 years ago

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I'm currently a WP/SS tanker and with perma rage seem to deal some pretty decent damage. My blaster does more obviously but not so much that I no longer appreciate my tankers output. My question is, whats the best damage output primary/secondary possible on a tanker? Is it possible for one to get pretty scrapper esque?

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Most Tanker AT combos can get Scrapper-esque if built and slotted correctly.

Just be prepared to alpha'd to death a lot

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Your biggest stumbling block to a further buff to tanker damage is game balance. Most folks agree that more tanker damage=less tanker defense/resistance. This means that upping tanker damage only homogenizes them with the other melee archetypes while still leaving them bringing up the rear in damage output.

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Or to go the other way, upping Tanker damage would compel the devs to up Scrapper defenses through sheer Scrapper whineyness ... which would lead to the samething.

All kinds of reasons Tanker damage shouldn't be touched and in some cases already impinges on that line between Tanker and Scrapper.

P.S. - This is me agreeing with you.

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To agree right back, the other possibility for fixing the "damage gap" is the lowering of scrapper and brute defenses so that their superior damage doesn't make them as survivable as tankers.

Here's another thought, Change status protection for brutes and scrappers so that it shortens the duration of the mez effects rather than resists it. Also, any status protection buffs would just augment the duration reduction for scrappers and brutes rather than provide resistance. Their superior damage should still see them through but they would become less likely to replace tankers in teams.

This tends fits the source material as scrapper types in comic books are constantly being pummeled and tossed around but they always come back to finish the fight.

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Ok but if you nerfed Scrapper/Brutes' protections and buffed Tanker damage, why on earth would you ever play a Scrapper or Brute?

I have a bunch of Impervium Armor duos (for the +recovery) and the defense set versions (forget the name off the top of my head). Without Numinas +rec/regen and Miracle +recov, I was doing pretty well endurance. With both of those slotted now, I have more +recovery then a WP Tanker with Stamina.

One trick I found very beneficial to my stamina woes was to frankenslot Footstomp and Knockout Blow (my 2 heavy end using attacks) which I got 97/97/97/33 dmg/end/rech/acc out of each. You may want to look into that kind of slotting and it needn't be hellishly expensive if you're not looking at set bonuses for those two powers.

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I just came back to CoX to play with my wife because she always really enjoyed the game. She is playing a Mind/Kinetics Controller and I'm playing a Shields/SS tank since I wanted to play something new and different from what was there the last time I played.

So we started joining groups in the teens and there is usually an immediate grumble since we join as a pair (They want her for kinetics). The general feeling seems to be that they don't want any tanks in the group at all, they would rather have another controller or a scrapper, I guess the general view now is the scrapper can tank just as well due to the high kill speed and the defense difference is negligible.

Is this the norm now? Because if I'm gonna be dealing with alot of players giving me a hard time just cause of my AT I would like to know now so I can switch out early because it is really ruining my gameplay experience at the moment. I've always enjoyed playing tank classes just to be a meatshield and knockdown based character but I could do the same thing as a scrapper too and all I really lose is taunt....

I'm at a loss. Tankers used to be incredibly necessary as anyone else seemed to get killed really fast trying to deal with AVs. Now I just feel unwanted and unwelcome in groups and it is making the game very unfun.

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Wait till you hit your 20s and beyond. You'll be asked to group more then your wife.

In the teens (and I hate to say this) Tankers just don't shine well ... almost to the point we feel we're being carried. This all changes however and quickly as your defenses start to mature in the 20s, and teams start watching their Scrappers wilt under heavier alphas and/or prelonged fights that require agro control.

I will say that the tandem you guys have picked isn't the best from a synergy point of view (confuses and power increases with capped power (eventually) requiring a close concentration of mobs) *but* Kinetics will always be valuable in a team setting and a Tanker will always be valuable in a team setting. Also, you can both cover eachother's weak points well (so not a disasterly combination by any means).

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Anyway, call it what you like, and others will point out the issues, major or minor, such that people who aren't in the know won't go, "hey, I tried that and I get slaughtered! What gives?!" Generally part of the purpose of creating definitions.

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And speaking of obnoxious I *did* already mention that what I'm describing here is something newbie Tankers *could* aspire to, not what they should be doing out of the box.

Part of the problem of being so pickyune in your arguements (and Sarrate, and Starsman and many other minutia driven vet posters) is that you tend to either accidentally or willfully misquote and/or misrepresent what has been previously posted.

Please don't imply that the majority of this pickyune discussion is me saying that I think all newbie Tankers should be doing this. I didn't say that and have posted a few times to the contrary.

Thanks.

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Your biggest stumbling block to a further buff to tanker damage is game balance. Most folks agree that more tanker damage=less tanker defense/resistance. This means that upping tanker damage only homogenizes them with the other melee archetypes while still leaving them bringing up the rear in damage output.

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Or to go the other way, upping Tanker damage would compel the devs to up Scrapper defenses through sheer Scrapper whineyness ... which would lead to the samething.

All kinds of reasons Tanker damage shouldn't be touched and in some cases already impinges on that line between Tanker and Scrapper.

P.S. - This is me agreeing with you.

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Except for the part that...it's not as efficient. It's certainly more fun to simply cause chaos and rampage through content while keeping your team alive.

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We were doing full group Meow maps on Inv (CL5) in 8 minutes (by the clock) and that was with ranged based foes (Rikti Comm Officers).

Can you say that?

I'm just being that "other person" pointing out the issues both major and minor (obnoxious isn't it?).

Note: I bring up Meow maps because its a current common point of reference but I've done this with Portal Corp farms on the same settings too (again ranged based mobs) and in the same amount of time.

MA missions with custom critters are almost impossible to classify from one MA to another in terms of difficulty from AT to AT.

My Inv Tanker can usually sit in the middle of a any (non-MA\non-Psi) spawn while I go watch my favorite Lord of the Rings director's cut version and not get a scratch.

I can run the same Inv Tanker solo (so small spawn counts) through an MA and more times then not, end up running around screaming like a little girl.

Electricity, slows (both recharge and movement), stacked patch or rain effects, and so forth will bring a Tanker to its knees *if* you approach MA missions the same way you do normal ones.

When I do MA missions now, I treat them as if I'm doing a full group Posi TF. I corner pull a ton, run n gun my rocky butt off, use LOS where possible and so on until I either beat the mission or figure out that it isn't that tough.

Ironically enough, my Fire/Dark Corruptor blows through MAs with nary a concern (different play type and controls obviously).

But in either case, I always approach MAs (even farms) with caution first (moreso then I approach "normal" content that is).

I think I said it wasn't "needed" (several times). You're either misunderstanding what you quoted or misunderstanding the point entirely. Read again.

And as I also stated, to replace a decent Tanker in this situation *and* still go as quickly as we do, you'd have to handpick most (if not all) of the rest of your team.

So in this case the Tanker is "needed" (or more precisely, more desireable) then trying the samething without. Of course I could pick 8 Fire/Dark Corruptors and have them solo packs on the same map and kill off the map *much* more quickly then any other combination of team mates could. But again, you're hand picking 8 people (and a certain AT combo no less) versus hand picking 1 general AT.

Caveat: Yes even in my scenario you have to "hand pick" to a certain extent, damage being the overriding factor here to killing quickly enmasse (as you've pointed out). But I think you'll agree that it's much easier to find 2-3 in any combination of scrapper/blaster/scranker/pb/ws then it is to hand pick say 8 Fire/Dark Corruptors specifically.

In any event we're starting to debate in circles I think. If your playstyle demands that you adhere to "rules and regulations" of what the popular consensus on these boards are of tanking, then far be it for me to stop you.

I just wanted to point out that there are other (and more fun by my measure (and certainly more efficient)) ways of tanking then what you guys popularly consider "tanking".

Heresy to go against conventional wisdom I know.

Edit: I freely admit that some of my knowledge can be out of date at times. But as I've been doing this for the past few months (since my last return to CoH) this isn't one of those times. It's a shame when others who so gleefully point this out, fail to admit when they themselves are in fact wrong. Anyways I do this on a daily basis because doing it the way you, Sarrate, et al. would have me "tank" would drive me out of my skull with boredom and this game is boring enough as it is. The fact that I've been told it wasn't possible and then when I showed proof was told it isn't really "tanking" is fairly laughable. But we all need our comfort zones.

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I'm only really having problems with the exotic stuff. I also have started soloing some of the AE content(which should say enough right there!). I know some of the bonuses put me over the cap on Defense, but I was trying to get higher on the other types of defenses as well. I figured if I could get all my defenses up to a good amount, I could cover all the bases.

This is the build for my alternate build. The toon is already 50 and has standard IO's for everything and doesn't have too many problems. On a team, I have zero problems whatsoever. By myself, sometimes I come across some stuff that's a little too much on my own.

I know all of this stuff is going to cost a hell of a lot... I dropped 50 Million on a couple of the recipes already. lol But I figure, this build won't happen overnight, and money isn't a huge issue for me, so why not go a little crazy? It's only play money anyway!

As for the power choices, I really don't exempt down with this toon, like, ever. I have other tanks I play when I want to do something low level. So, I kind of just picked the powers as I came across them when making the build. The slotting on Temp Invul was to get the recovery boost, the run boost, and the defense for fire/cold, AOE, and psionic.

Taking some of the suggestions that Gashes made, my numbers look like this now(and thank you for pointing out the over use of the Psi resist! Didn't even realize it!):

Sm: 49.7
Le: 49.7
En: 38.1
Ne: 38.1
Psi: 17.4
Fire: 44.7
Cold: 44.7
Melee: 24.9
Ranged: 21.4
AoE: 22.4

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I'd still take Invince and Unyielding much earlier (as soon as you can even) and hold off on Resist Eng/Elem/PhD until later in the build.

I run a similar build and with some IOs (especially the ones you've mentioned) tank-wise it's like being an I1 Tanker again (almost).

Just a note on Numinas +Recov/Regen and Miracle +Recov; both of these together basically mitigate any further need for +Recovery (past Stamina of course) on your Inv/* Tanker. So concentrating on +recharge and even grabbing those proc IO's (chance for XXX damage) will turn your Inv Tanker into an Inv Scranker (which really mirrors I1 style of play more closely).

If money isn't an issue (and even without purples) you can achieve a mega build (being the perfect combination of max defense and max offense (or as close as you can get)).

One note: Sands of Mu on a */Dark Tanker simply rocks when combined with Shadow Maul. I don't foresee ever giving up this combination (although not using it when I don't have 6 seconds to spare of course ).

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Tanks are not for dmg there for agro control. The Mastermind is its alt because it holds agro much better then a brute red side that is. Tanks are like controllers not heavy dmg but there abilities make them strong

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And yet we can still produce Tankers that shine in the area of damage.

If you need your Tanker to do more damage, build it that way.

Otherwise pop a red or play a Scrapper.

That's my $0.02 (and I'd like change please).

I agree with this but as I stated before I believe this exists above and below the agro crap (oops Freudian slip) and your summations apply to all team play in that regard.

Also it's important to note that what I've shown above (and do most every night I might add) isn't the product of some special "super team" (heh pardon the pun). These aren't hand picked guys that I run daily with and I don't usually have to do any more explanation then "1-2 packs, don't worry about agro ... 3+ packs make sure you only hit what I Footstomp and then run". After the first couple of multi-packs we hit, most everyone gets it by then.

The one reason I'm belaboring this point ... I can do this with any pick up team. To do this without me (that is to say, without a Tanker) and triple the amount of deaths (or more) you'd need to hand pick the team in the vast majority of cases.

Tanker needed for tanking to fast kill multi-packs of mobs ... see what I mean?

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One part of your question might have been thinking that the Axe wouldn't cause a "draw" animation since you're already using "axes". I don't believe this is correct ... I think you draw the different axe when using Ghost Axe (can someone confirm?).

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Yes, it's not the same as the battle axe or any of the custom axes. You do draw it every time.

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Thanks!