Nihilii

Hmm, yes, that makes sense. Thanks!

The way we actually play is so far from the way they anticipated we'd play I forget all too often about the later, hehe.

I have to say I'm not seeing the logic. The less players there is, the better these players have to play to complete the trial successfully.

On a standard 24 men PUG BAF, I'd say easily one third to one half of the League is close to dead weight. The more players you have, the less each of them has to actually play, to the point that people can actually leech and still get rewards just fine. One of my friends actually pushes that to the extreme by using his defender with a debuff on auto while he plays another account doing another activity entirely on a different server.

That I do, well, the very first part. It often ends up with 2 stars or 1 star (I rank 1 lowest 5 highest) with player notes such as "yells in Lambda", "insists on using choke points", "cries too much", "is being generally annoying" and so on.

In a team of 8 you'll end up with maybe one jerk. In a league of 16+ you're much more likely to end up with multiple jerks, and whereas they'd likely shut up if they were alone, once there's two or more they validate each other and proceed to be annoying during the whole thing.

In trials, I have met maybe six or seven players I'd like to play with again, whereas I've shitlisted ten times as much people.

Bottomline, I'm socializing less than ever since I20. Whereas with I19 I used to TF a lot with friends, we filled the gap with PUG people and I explained to them how it worked and generally cared about them having a good experience, now I just trial without saying a word and care about my teammates so little they may as well be reality show participants.

That perception seems even more prevalent lately now that most people are in Pocket D (or RWZ) doing trials rather than the rest of the content.

I agree with this post so much I can't think of anything meaningful to add. This is, simply, truth.

Personally, I find both options have their strong points. The added damage on a brute is very nice ; on the other hand, the tanker can push S/L res very close to 90% with Cardiac, Barrier and a Shield Wall as well as having generally high resistances to everything but psi, and Bruising plays well with teams, Reactive Interface and Lore pets. It's also probably easier to build for the S/L softcap or something without sacrifices on the tanker.

Ultimately, I settled on the brute (the tanker sits unused since months) because I pop inspirations like it's candy and taking care of survivability through insps is easy enough, but I think the extra mitigation you get from being a tanker has its worth for a no insp playstyle. Even now with T3/T4 incarnates *and* insps, I occasionally die a bit more than I'd like on my brute soloing +4/x8 arachnos (that dreaded psi defense debuff!), whereas I remember my I19 tanker having much less difficulty in the same situation. Both are built for the same amount of defense (~20% positionals), so the main difference comes from the max HP, heal and resistances.

It sounds like I'm trying to push you towards the tanker. I don't know. Honestly, I'm having more fun with the brute. As great as Bruising is, it can sometimes feel like a drag to have to use Jab to maximise -res, and the sheer DPS the brute can pull off is fun. Then again, I haven't played the tanker lately nor ever gave him a proper maxed out build, so I should probably do that at some point.