Rangle M. Down

I have no issues with Gauntlet as it stands.

Glad you like the root of the idea, even though you don't like the presentation. It's hard not to note "fury" considering where my concept originated from, but I do get your point considering its (fury's) description.

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Something is needed in a team to make a second tanker useful. ST damage is the less intrusive thing I can think off. It's even less intrusive than the often desired Bodyguard as Bodyguard has the potential side effect of making the team WAY too safe.


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Hey Starsman: Comments like yours above makes me wonder if my idea of a "Single Target Fury" isn't a bad idea. Some else had made the suggestion that it not be an anchor like I mentioned, but shifted target to target as you switched.

Oops. Grabbed wrong link. Fixed.

Sweet! If I'm not working I'll be there. Now. Which of my tanks do I bring. Decisions, decisions....

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DA has three potential Taunt Auras. Ice Armor has two. However, most people playing Dark Armor Tankers only take one of the two status-effect auras (either Cloak of Fear or Oppressive Gloom). As such, in practice, it tends to drop back down to Ice Armor levels of aggro.

Even with those, though, and with the -range on Taunt, it can be a great tool to have. Will you need it? No, probably not. Might it be nice to have anyways? Yes, probably so.

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That pretty much covers it. Get taunt if you feel you need the tool. Don't if you have success without it.

One of the tanks I'm running is a lvl 42 dark/dark. Most of the time I don't have any issues, but I do occasionally run across times when the sets resistances and heals can't keep up with the damage coming in. I still enjoy it, and it's been one of my quicker lvling tanks.

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If I take Fighting, will Weave and that stuff run while in Granite form?

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Running Granite will only de-toggle the other active armors in the set: Rock, Brimstone, Minerals and Crystal. So Tough and Weave will still be active if you can manage the endurance.

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I see it more like this: you want to play soccer. You want to be the goaltender. You get told that you need to wait 2 to 3 years to play goalkeeper. You get told to be a forward. You petition to allow forwards to use their hands.

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Using the soccer analogy: I take it more to mean he wants to play soccer and wants to play forward. But seeing what the goal keepers can do with their hands, he now is petitioning for forwards to use theirs so they can be more like the goal keepers.

(edited for typos)

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I prefer a nice rich BBQ sauce with a hint of garlic and a healthy dose of Sarachi sauce mixed in for a nice bite.

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It's all about the honey and chille sauce nubcake.

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I think you are failing to see that the Sarachi is a chili sauce nublette.


Honey isn't a bad choice if you're going for more of a honey BBQ. I've tasted some nice BBQ sauce that included Saffron as a seasoning as well. As always YMMV

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Not really. we could turn it into a BBQ thread, since there really hasn't been a Taunt debate in a while.

Or we could threadjack it into a Taunt debate, and then threadjack THAT into a BBQ thread.

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I prefer a nice rich BBQ sauce with a hint of garlic and a healthy dose of Sarachi sauce mixed in for a nice bite.

I don't think Stone armor is being left behind, I just think everyone likes to try out the new shiny powers for a while to see what's up with them.

Yes there can be some limitations to Granite armor, but by using IO's and set bonus' you can get around most of those limitations if not all. If you slot the set properly you become the biggest baddest Tank of the game and can take massive alphas that would crumple other sets. I think biggest thing people get hung up about is Granite's visual look, which in the end is really a minor thing.

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I'm all for making exotic builds and I support people playing non-mainstream characters, but I have to say I think this is the strangest Stone tanker build I've seen posted.

<ul type="square">[*]No resists in Granite?[*]Several four-slotted attacks?[*]Many sets stopping one slot short of a defense bonus or other nice bonus?[*]Minimal end reduction in Mud Pots? Why the stray Eradication damage IO there, when you can cap dmg with Obliteration alone?[*]Four run speed IOs in Swift? Doesn't the ED cap make one a waste (especially considering the unfinished attack slotting)?[*]No resists in Granite?[*]The biggest hitters in the attack set are even more underslotted (Midnight Grasp) or not present (Siphon Life)?[*]Rock armor at 30? Not earlier? Why not at the very least switch it with Hasten...you'd still get Hasten just before the Granite debuff.[*]Many of the attacks are not ED-capped for damage or recharge, but you've built for global bonuses to damage and recharge; wouldn't it be better to try to max out the attacks AND add the global bonus on top of that, instead of moving the damage and recharge out of cheap IOs and slots and into very expensive global bonuses?[*]What's up with Granite?[/list]
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All excellent points. And yeah, what's up with Granite?

Hey Look! Somebody pulled JB out of their....




Hat!


I luv my Tank because I don't have to chase down the foolish villains. They come running to me to try and show who's the alpha dog in the house. It ain't them.

I luv my tank because I can get a foes attention away from the squishy teammates and help the team survive better.

I luv my tank because I like jumping in with both feet and going "take that sucka's" and not getting alpha'd to death back. Too much fun for one AT.

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hmm....No Siphon Life? One of the best powers of Dark melee and you don't have it.

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Considering it does do Superior damage, has a to hit debuff on the target with nice health boost per successful attack.

I agree with Aett_Thorn a bit. It does sound like you're looking for more of a base/mechanical change to the game.

I do think the addition of custom critters had at least livened things up since you don't get the same foes every time you try a different arc. Although the critters didn't come directly from the devs, they've given the tools to the players allowing us create them. That certainly qualifies as a structure change.

Back to the subject thread. Ranged powers as a secondary on Tanks as they stand in CoX just seems counter intuitive to me. Unless there was a way within the game mechanics to be able to do what I would call knock forward, bringing the foes closer instead of pushing them away, some armor set powers/bonuses wouldn't be as worth while. Consume and Dark Regeneration need foes within the AoE to be effective. All your damage auras wouldn't be as necessary if you could keep your foes at bay with kb typical in ranged attacks. Invincibility's resistance boost, Shield Defense's AAO damage boost, and Willpower's Regen boost require foes to be in range to be more effective. Having taken a blaster to lvl 50 I do know how quickly those mobs will come after you once you've aggro'd them, but that doesn't mean they will close into melee range, which is typical range for the above powers.

When I do use what few ranged attacks I have on my tanks it's usually as my alpha (such as fire ball) before leap into a group, or as a "hey where do you think you're going" tagging a runner or someone that has aggro'd on another teammate and my taunt isn't up.

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No real "beef" with it other than it's more of a gimmick then a real content update, being just player supplied words of things we've done a billion times in exactly the same way.

Additionally I think having a centralized system of content (geographically) takes away from your game world, and the rate with which you can earn tickets and influence, devalues the small reward system that is currently in place in CoH.

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Mechanically, I look at the MA as just a different version of the Portal Corps setup without having to run across the field to get to different portals.
The one thing that I initially thought was odd about the MA was that it didn't auto exemp characters to the zone levels or that you could do missions beyond the zone level you were in. I just figured it wasn't feasible to do so. If there had been such limitations it would have forced people to shift from zone to zone as they leveled if nothing else.

If you're in Mids and open up the power graph window (ctrl+G) you can take a look at a few things including damage/endurance of attacks.

Personally I tend to put end redux in my attacks and my toggles with an added acc in the attacks until I get to lvl 22 and SO's. I will slot DO's as I get them, but the percentage bonus' aren't high enough for me to justify spending the inf. I'd rather sell the TO's and DO's to make it easier to buy the SO's when I can.

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Again, not a problem with your armor toggles at that level, but with your attacks.

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Agreed. But I also throw in end redux in the armor too.

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Generally speaking, you're only really toggling back Rock, and maybe Minerals, and those situations you're reliant on Minerals, you're prolly not getting into Granite in the first place (at least if you build properly). Most ppl bind Granite &amp; Rock to toggle between the two. Still, that's a valid point, as is...

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You would also need to make sure Rooted is on, if you weren't running it already, for some status protection.

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Rooted doesn't toggle off w/Granite. If you were treating Granite as an emergency power (akin to Hibernate, as I describe above), you wouldn't turn off Rooted in the first place.

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I suspected I wasn't clear on my comment, sorry about that. It was more about going from Granite to Rock Armor if you didn't have Rooted on already.

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The only reason I bother with numbers is because I realized long ago it's the language the game and the devs speak. They don't care about Anegdoteze or Envinish or Nerftilian, all they speak is Mathematics.

If it was for me, I'd not bother. I was a math fluke at High School that did the bare minimum math to pass the class, I knew I had the potential (the college board assured me I did) but I am that math lazy.

The fun part is that these numbers tend to back-up personal experiences, and when they don't that's a huge hint I need to make sure these numbers are corrected (I always check my personal anecdotes before my numbers.)

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For me I was the very bored math guy in High School. It used to come to me very easily. My have times changed.

Personally I don't know enough about the "numbers" in the game. I find them interesting and certainly want to get a better understanding before I go spouting them. Conversations like these help immensely.

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Generally speaking, you're only really toggling back Rock, and maybe Minerals, and those situations you're reliant on Minerals, you're prolly not getting into Granite in the first place (at least if you build properly). Most ppl bind Granite &amp; Rock to toggle between the two. Still, that's a valid point, as is...

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You would also need to make sure Rooted is on, if you weren't running it already, for some status protection.

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The fact that the OP himself has not posted numbers does not means that other posters that complain about the set have not seen these numerical issues or posted about them in the past. I know I have, and I'm feeling all my posts are being bypassed here during this argument about no one posting numbers...

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Perfect timing Starsman. I was going to mention, as well as thank you for the numbers that you have put up.

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I think you fail to see that I'm not beating down the dev's doorstep. I'm not advocating that what I said was any sort of end all be all for Stone armor. I'm not saying I have "the answer" at all. Heck, I said that it probably wasn't even necessary. All I was interested in was a dialog. The reason behind what I started with was to get that dialog going. Nothing more. Nothing less. A philosophical discussion so to speak. I was just curious to hear what everyone had to say and see if there were issues that did require the same type of dedication and number crunching that Starsman and Acemace have done.

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Acemace

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Oops. Fixed.

Sorry about the pacifier line, I couldn't help myself. It did give me a chuckle though.

In all reality, I think I do understand what you're trying to say. You think what is being discussed doesn't work, isn't feasible, and would ruin what you believe is a perfectly good set. Anybody who thinks there is an issue is off base and you're concerned that even talking about it could cause irreparable harm to Stone Armor if the dev's stopped to listen. Pretty much end of story unless I'm mistaken. Please, correct me if I'm wrong on that.

I think you fail to see that I'm not beating down the dev's doorstep. I'm not advocating that what I said was any sort of end all be all for Stone armor. I'm not saying I have "the answer" at all. Heck, I said that it probably wasn't even necessary. All I was interested in was a dialog. The reason behind what I started with was to get that dialog going. Nothing more. Nothing less. A philosophical discussion so to speak. I was just curious to hear what everyone had to say and see if there were issues that did require the same type of dedication and number crunching that Starsman and Acemace have done.

I will repeat myself here. The only thing that I would truly be interested in changing is strictly cosmetic. Allowing the Granite form to scale with the character size. That's it. That's all. But again, I'm interested in seeing if people think it's necessary or is it just some silly thing that I would like and no one else really cares about.