Rangle M. Down

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I'd make Rooted and Granite's movement debuff resistible (but I would not lower them) and I'd make it possible to jump with a much reduced max jump height.

Stone Skin could also offer resistance to most other damage types (not toxic or psi) ( 5% or 7.5%).

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Another thought would be to allow some jump height in Granite but cap it at 6'-8' or so. I find it very incongruous that I can leap up to deliver the Tremor attack from Stone Melee, but I can't get over a curb.

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Rooted: Make the -Jump penalty -95% Jump so you can make small bounds (about the hieght of a normal step).

Granite: Add Speed/Rech resistance. Sorry stoners, one Kin should not be able to complete negate the down side of this awesome power. Sure a couple of Kins can speed you up, but not a single one.

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If some of the penalties were lessened from where they stand now I certainly would think adding in some resists for speed/rech might not be a bad way to balance things.

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I would be hesitant to make granite layer over the other toggles without a major overhaul of the end costs for each.
granite/rooted/mudpots already uses quite enough without the additional drain of three or four more toggles layered on top.

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Part of that is mudpots 0.78 end/s usage which is pretty steep. As I mentioned in my original post end costs would certainly have to adjusted to reflect such a change.

I haven't been around long enough in the game to know that Granite used to look like Poo Monster. I'm certainly glad that it doesn't anymore.

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I think that all these changes move Stone toward Invulnerability and Willpower. I think it's unique and interesting as-is.

People pay tons of money for purple recipes -- why is that? They are a significantly better than all the rest at what they do, and you cannot get them with merits or tickets -- so people will pay full price for them. Similarly, Granite offers significant survival advantage. The penalties seem severe, but plenty of people, myself included, have endured them to get that top-end durability.

Conceptually as well, to me anyway, it makes sense that "turtling up" into the super-heavy armor involves tradeoffs. You become the ultimate anvil for foes to beat against.

I suppose I wouldn't be totally opposed to some kind of changes, but I am opposed to watering it down with weaker durability in exchange for fewer offensive penalties; it's too close to homogenization for my taste.

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I wouldn't want to water down the survivability greatly if at all. I was leaning towards having to manage your armors to have your weakness be shifted around. Make it so you can use Minerals with Granite, but then maybe you can't use Brimstone or Crystals as well.

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Perhaps if rooted was nudged towards something closer to Grounded from the Elec Armor.
Essentially remove the -jump, make the slow resistable so it can be built around. That way you can regain mobility to jump a curb but you still have to be in actual contact with the ground to recieve the status protection and regen buff.

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It's certainly an interesting idea, but some may argue that it then would be "just like grounded"

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Remove the penaltites from rooted and balance it against the other status protections (which I think it mostly is anyway).

Remove most of the Def bonuses from Granite Armor make it maybe 5% defense, reduce the resistance bonus from 50% to 40% (number may need tweaking, to balance it with other power sets) and spread those 10% resistance to out over the other armors (so lethal/smashing armor would give both resistance and defense to lethal and smashing). Then allow the tanker to use all armors at the same time. When not running Granite armor the tanker is comparable with other tankers out there not using their ultimate protection power (well, the sets that has one anyway) and when putting on granite it would be comparable to the inv. tanker hitting unstoppable. But where unstoppable has a 15 minute cooldown or something like that, the Granite armor is a toggle, but also comes with the built-in penalties that it already has. So yes, you could run around in granite all the time, but 90% of the stone tankers would probably not hit granite until in the middle of a mob and that only if they really felt it was a problem they couldn't handle without. This would also allow stone tankers to get other powers than teleport for travel, since they could detoggle that granite armor to use fly, jump or super-speed. It would also get rid of the "At 32 all my previous armor powers are obsolete! Eat that, other tankers"-thing.

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This is sort of along the lines of what I was thinking. I still believe there should be some penalties for running what is ultimately the uber tank, just not as much as they currently are.

I still think there should be a way to keep you from having all the damage/resist holes covered all the time. Whether that's through a game mechanic or end cost I'm not really sure. Having the current hole to psi isn't a bad thing, game balance wise and I doubt the devs would allow all the holes to be covered all the time.

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I'd make Granite the only penalized power, no movement debuff in Rooted (sure it makes conceptual sense, but so did Unyielding.)

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Or, at the very least, allow people the ability to jump, just enough to get over curbs.

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Yeah, cruising along and suddenly bumping into a curb is pretty much a "what the $%#$%?" DAMN CURB!

I very much enjoy playing my Stone Armor tank (he's currently lvl 45) but I found it interesting to hear some of the comments on Stone Armor spread throughout the tanker threads recently. (You'll have to excuse me if I paraphrased a bit.) Comments have ranged from "it's disappointing that the tier 9 power makes most of the previous amours in the set useless" to "I'd be happy to give up some of the uberness of Granite armor to regain some of the -dmg, -recharge and -speed".

Those comments got me thinking: Given the chance, what changes would I make to the Stone Armor set? While I admit I haven't researched any solid numbers to back this as it's mostly a rough idea so far, so if you want some numbers to support this, sorry I haven't got any. Do I think they're necessary? No, not really, but I think it makes for a good discussion and may bring out better ideas from the community at large. Do I think this might be an interesting direction? I hope so.

With those caviates mentioned, here goes.

1. I'd change things so that Rock/Brimstone/Minerals and Crystal Armors can be run with Granite. I'd add in a little bit of resist/defense into the individual armors. I'd make holes in Granite so that it wasn't the end all/be all with the base line 20%def 50% resist, but an end cap to the other armors that would bring the whole set to that near uberness. To keep some game balance, the final numbers would probably have to be less then can currently be achieved with Stone Skin/Granite combined, but still high enough to keep stone the sturdiest tank set. I'd also make it difficult to run all the armors at the same time, which brings me to my second point.

2. I'd make changes to end costs so that you wouldn't want run all the armors all the time as it would be too end heavy to do so. This would require a little bit more managing of the stone armor set, but would create shifting holes to keep it from being too uber all the time. Similar to what folks do with the dark armor set because of end costs.


3. To make up for the increased end usage/penalty in the armor set itself I'd offset some of the -dmg, -rech, and -spd of granite. I'd remove the -dmg, halve the -recharge if not more and drop the - speed by 20%. Again, trying to find some balance between end use and effectiveness.

4. The last thing I'd like to see changed is a cosmetic change. My Stoner out of Granite stands 4' nothin. But once I hit it I look exactly like every Stone Armour tank around. I'd love to see the Granite "costume" scale to fit your toon size, just like Ice Armour does. This is something I really would like to see changed. I'm not even interested in changing the color of the Granite armor, although I suspect some folks would like that as well.

Well, there you go. Have at it folks. Pick it apart, dissect it. Tell me I'm out in left field or not. But in the end I want to ask you, how would you change Stone Armor if you could?

I believe the dev's do listen to the ideas that are floated out there when they're brought to their attention. Whether it's by them reading posts, having posts pointed out to them, or by someone sending them an email with suggestions.

I suspect they're fully aware of JB's suggestion as he's made quite a bit of noise about it, much to the detriment of the thread topics he's posted it in. But whether or not the dev's feel it has as much merit as JB would like to believe is a different thing. JB feels he's struck gold with this idea of his and can't understand why the majority of the vocal tank group opposes it. Said vocal group evidently sees his idea as pyrite.

In the end the dev's will make changes they feel improve the game and the AT's involved. Inevitably, there will be hits and misses and great debate as to which is what. I'm looking forward to Going Rogue as I will play a tank redside. I'll grab a powerset I haven't played with yet and go to town. I'm looking forward to seeing how it will play out in the long run. In the end, it still just a game. A fun game, but a game none the less.

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The general population prefers ham sandwiches to steak, therefore they are better than steak?


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You do like to constantly use overly exaggerated metaphors don't you?

Actually I think it's closer to looking at two different steaks. One 10 oz. porterhouse and a 11 oz porterhouse with lots of marbling. Although the 11oz steak looks bigger, once you trim all the fat away you may have had a tastier steak, but you really ended up with only 9 oz of meat.

And why do you keep trying to order a 11oz steak at a sandwich shop anyway?

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Stone and probably Inv in that order.

I don't think I've ever seen a Fire/* main tank the STF and the couple I've seen do the ITF were fairly horrible (not totally their fault ... its the squishiest of the Tanker sets).

I'm sure 542524252 Fire Tankers will come up here now to say how they've soloed Recluse but if you're looking for the cheap answer ... Stone can tank anything with Inv as a fairly close runner up.

The rest need a little love and care

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I have main tanked the ITF on my fire/fire tank once.... and it wasn't pretty. Vs. certain mobs he stands up about as well as a wet noodle and in the ITF he certainly got smacked way too often for me to want to run him in one again for a bit. And no, I wasn't the fire/fire in the ITF last night.

Stone is a great set for tanking the ITF, but I suspect INV would work quite well.

So do you then kick the guy who won't take the SB since he's not taking a buff that turns his abilities up to the preverbial 11 even though the rest of the team is taking it? Since his choice of not taking the SB doesn't make him as effective a team member as he could be....

I'm just askin...

I think you're using what would be an extreme case to make an example as I think it's fairly rare that someone doesn't pick up their status protection. (I'm not saying it couldn't happen) Truth be told, if you're teaming with someone who isn't a good player/team mate or is having a difficult time with their toon, it really doesn't matter what powers they've chosen or not. They could still have them and have them slotted wrong. I have seen that. I've accidentally done that myself and had to respect to correct it.

So let me ask you this, are you saying that when it comes down to it, if a kin doesn't have speed boost are you going to kick them?

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I'm sorry, but that in combination with the devs not doing anything about the Tanker situation demonstrates to me very much that no compromise has been made and that I have not been heard on one issue and ignored on another.


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See. I'm still not sure why you believe that you, above everyone else, should be "listened to" and that your vision of what tankers should be is the "solution to tanker problems". It comes across as very egotistical and you seem to throw more temper tantrums then my neighbor's spoiled 6 year old daughter. As I've mentioned before, even if I thought your overall idea had merits for tankers I doubt your ideas will at this point in time ever get anything more then a roll of the eyes as you've become sort of the "rabid dog" who won't let go of his "tanker-omination" chew toy.

Before you go "I'm being a tank" on this idea, please stop and think. The general community has rebutted your every attempt at pushing this idea. Even though you probably won't ever believe it, maybe your idea isn't the best thing for tanks. Please, do yourself a favor and step back from the idea for a while. Look at it with fresh eyes and look at CoX as a whole. You may not change your mind about the idea, or you may come up with a better one. You may even figure a better way to present or prove that your idea is either a good one or the best one. And your continuing to use a four year old quote from the lead designer who no longer works on the game isn't going to help you win your argument no matter how much you'd like it to. That kind of argument doesn't work in divorce cases much either.

By the way, if you really think about it, Shield Defense has given tanks "moar damage". It may be only for that one powerset, but still it is "moar damage". So really, maybe in that way they did listen to you and the others who were calling for tanks to have more damage. And they did it in a manner that doesn't break the game balance. Think on that.

(corrected for spelling)

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Not to mention they can't really post much without people calling them every name in the book for not making the game exactly as they want it, rather than what would be the best compromise between all interests.

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And then some....

Or play a version of a tank that does more DPS like fire etc. My fire/fire/pyre makes lots of orange numbers fly. My Stoner, not so much.

That's what's nice about variations within each AT. You do get a nice range.

Uh oh. He quoted me. Does that mean I'm in trouble now?

*ducks*

First of all disclaimers: A. I have no idea if this is even mechanically feasible within the CoX game engine. B. I'm not sure that it's really needed, and C. if it might break game balance. That being said, let me try and define what my pea brain is thinking.

The reason I called it a pseudo-anchor is because you would want/need some sort of visual representation within the game of who your Single Target Fury (STF) was attached to or else it would be fairly useless if you had to keep switching targets to figure out who had it. Talk about creating a headache. I don't see it as a true anchor because I'm not looking at is as a debuff, but really following the fury mechanic of the damage building over time/attacks.

Mechanically it might need to be something like the inherent Dom power button so that you could set the STF target, but I don't see it as building up and giving you the same Inspie style boost that the Dom inherent does.

Hope that makes some sort of sense.

Nicely stated.

My favorite tank is the one I'm playing at any given moment.

Currently I've got a lvl 50 fire/fire, lvl 45 stone/stone, lvl 38 dark/dark, a lvl 25 sd/ss and a lvl 10ish ice/mace. (damned altitis) They each bring something different to the table to make them fun in different ways.

Since I'm sitting with a BS/Inv scrapper at lvl 42 I haven't gotten around to trying an inv/ tank yet but I'm sure inv/ would be a hoot as well. Maybe once I get the scrapper to 50 I'll make one.

I agree whole heartedly. I'd take those two range slots he has on recall friend and stuff then into swift and drop in run IO's. I do have Granite set with one EndRedux instead of a defense enhancement for my Stoner.

I threw out an idea similar to this in another thread awhile a go. I didn't call it "fury-lite" but "single target fury (STF)".

The idea would be that the longer you fight against a single target that you're "fury" would build until that target was defeated. That way you would slowly unleash the full might of your "tankdom" against only the biggest foes. You're first foe would become a pseudo anchor for your STF. If you switched to another target you wouldn't get the fury on the new one until the "anchor" was defeated. That way you wouldn't penalize you for punchvoking or taunting the surrounding targets to hold aggro. It would force you to make sure you attacked the biggest and baddest foe right off the bat so that you're STF would be on them, but it certainly would be a pain if that target ran, just like it does with other anchors.

I'm certainly not thinking it would be brute fury level of damage bonus, but a little probably wouldn't hurt. Once you're original target/foe was done, the STF would drop waiting for the next big target to build it up. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Mind you, that idea had about as much of a positive response as asking all your friends to help you move.

"I am Spartacus" and "Spartacus am I"?

A little tit for tat with Grant Cover on both SD tanks wouldn't hurt.

Back to the original question:

Personally I think everyone develops personal choices and comfort levels when it comes down to AT's and given the opportunity to play tanks redside, anyone who enjoys playing tanks will give it a shot. I know I will. Same thing with playing a heroic Mastermind and Brute, or a Controller/ Blaster going afoul. (sigh, altitis will strike again)

In the end it will come down to how much you like or dislike the content you're playing and how well the AT you're playing does with that content and your play style.

For me, my pseudo aggressive play style works well with the tank mentality. I like jumping in with both feet first, but I'm not huge on bouncing around the room single target to target most of the time. I like the -range on taunt, ie. "Come here yah bums so I can wack yer heads"....