Sailboat

Even Defenders?

My memory of those days was that defenders were regarded as largely superfluous.

Here's a post where I discuss a relatively cheap and dirty way to soft-cap a Shield/Battle Axe Tank that still leaves most of your attack slots uncommitted, so you can slot your attacks for whatever you want.

Welcome back.

If at all possible, keep a slot open for new inspirations to drop, even if it means using one when you don't really need to. Particularly, clear out the low-tier insps until higher ones drop, and keep those. It's a steady flow as long as you have one open slot; it dries up when you're full.

Buddies can pass you critical inspirations in combat...IF you have one or more open slots. Many times I will quickly drop a purple or green inspire on a teammate who is in desperate straits, but it's wasted effort if the dreaded "does not have room" message comes up.

But you know what's REALLY a waste? Trying to give someone an Awaken inspiration and getting the "does not have room" message. I feel like saying, "Dude, you're dead, what were you saving them for?"

Ahem. Not that I haven't been dead with a full inspiration tray myself many times...but at least I'm embarrassed when I realize it.

Agree with UberGuy, although I'll make a possible exception for Brutes. Brutes need to keep fighting, to keep their inherent power, Fury, as high as possible; it takes endurance to keep fighting. Fury supplies so much damage that lower-level Brutes can get by without slotting damage enhancements until they have enough slots to do so comfortably.

I agree with you that it sounds odd...and until this week, I'd never seen any behavior like that.

But this week I was on an ITF and when we were fighting Romulus and his Nictus buddies, some of the squishies died and did not immediately go to the hospital. I just kept fighting, but our tanker ordered them to hit the hospital and get up as fast as possible, and then when the fight was over (we lost and had to regroup) he quit the team, leaving us tankless, apparently because he felt that players who did not quickly rez and rejoin the fight were "leechers."

I'm no fan of leechers myself, but I thought these guys were mostly just overwhelmed by all the action. Those of us left in the TF got ourselves sorted out, went back, and finished the task force with no deaths at all, so I guess I'll never know if they would have been slow to revive a second time.

Someone with the mindset to quit a TF on the final fight because teammates are not rezzing quickly enough might want an all-one-faction team.

Well, Fiery melee is great, no doubt. But after Fire Sword Circle and Combustion, there's downtime unless you use Breath of Fire, which, if you take the power, isn't that great.

Axe has the ability to alllmost continuously chain Pendulum (albeit limited to five targets), Whirling Axe, and Cleave...without global recharge. Add in global recharge and pretty soon it's continuous. Cleave is a narrow attack like Breath of Fire, but most builds would take it, I think, and it does a ton of damage.

I guess I can't claim to have compared damage output per hour, so you're probably right. But the ability to constantly chain AoEs is very attractive on Axe and Mace.

I quite agree. I meant to imply fire->axe->mace in INCREASING order of AoE goodness, but I see that I wasn't clear.

My experience with Invuln was that I could tank on Positron and Synapse Task forces when exemplared below my set bonuses, Tough, and Weave. One thing about Invulnerability is that Invincibility really rewards a difference in playstyle from squishies -- all tankers jump into danger, but Inv is significantly stronger when surrounded than when "pulling" from a distance. Dive right in!

Sappers won't be much of a concern, frankly, because in addition to high defense (once you've made contact to fuel Invincibility) you'll have access to some end drain protection in one of your passives. And, in theory, the Sappers will be shooting at you and not an unprotected teammate.

The stock answer is, any of the ones you mention interest in would be fine. If you want to fight a lot of significantly higher-level stuff, the synergy between Rage and Invincibility both boosting your to-hit might weight your preference slightly toward Super Strength. But despite Foot Stomp being superb, Fiery Melee, Battle Axe and War Mace have better AoE, in approximately that order. As I understand it, not having played it, Ice has okay AoE, but the ST damage lags a lot in exchange for the greater control.

Once mature, you'll have enough durability that you won't particularly need mitigation from the secondary. I've read accounts of many very happy Inv/Fire tankers over the years. I like /Fire, although neither of my two high-level tankers using it are Inv. I'm currently enjoying the incessant knockdowns of a Battle Axe Tanker, but I don't think Inv needs that for safe Tanking.

If you're not taken with any particular concept, you could try out a few of the sets at low level and see what appeals to you. You can also see all the animations (and alternate ones, for SS) in the character creation screen, which might help.

One caveat -- I think the OP in specifically looking at farmig recipes. The build presented here has zero AoE powers. It's a little extreme to farm with a low-level, partly-slotted, single-target specialist. Heh.

I know some people don't like Shadow Maul's animation time, but you might prefer it to farming, say, 30,000 Freakshow with Smite.

I really like the slotting for Dark Regeneration I discuss here. I didn't have my character handy when I wrote it, but it should be possible to reconstruct it , and if you express any interest, I will look it up when I'm home and be more explicit. It's very nice, especially when supported by some global accuracy bonuses.

90% base accuracy? Not sure what you mean by that.

I have a 23 BS/Shield Scrapper in the Iron Eagles supergroup. The relevance of the SG is that the Iron Eagles play "hardcore" mode -- any defeat, even by accident, like someone else's purple ambush at the train station -- is final. Iron Eagles only get one life.

Squishy or not, this guy's reached 23 so far (although the process has been slow since the SG isn't very active these days) without ever dying, even once. Parry is really, really good.

Fully-slotted /SR with all the toggles and passives has 95% defense debuff resistance, which is huge.

By way of example, my MA/SR Scrapper is sitting at just over 45% to 47% to all 3 positions. I took point on two ITFs yesterday (yes, I got merits reduced for running them too close together). The Romans debuff defense...um...a LOT. They can tear apart most defense builds. But my defense never dropped below 42-44%, even when I was the only melee character left standing, surrounded by Romans and dark energy using Nictuses...Nictus's...Nicti? I didn't even bother to hit any purple inspirations, which of course one could carry for emergencies.

That's what I did except instead of Combat Jumping or Hover I put a TOD set into Boxing (I wanted a "Fist of Death" and the negative damage proc going off when I'm slumming and using Boxing is funny) and then a Blessing of the Zephyr set into my travel power. Frankenslot those attacks for monster enhancement!

That's my impression -- also haven't worked with elec much myself -- but he is asking about farming. Isn't farming mostly mass-minion-killing? :P

That's the key. It's really the debuffs that kill with COT, especially the Nerva Spectral Lords with their darkness powers. The Scrappers and Tankers shrug off the initial mezzes, but then can't hit anything due to the debuffs, and eventaully mezz gets stacked up and then the whole cookie crumbles.

The groups that have the most trouble with COT seem to want to corner-pull the Spectral Lords. Moments later a huge clot of COT arrive at the corner and three Spectral Lords debuff the team to 5-10% chance to hit, and the Mage stuns your Defenders, and it's all downhill.

Instead, jump them by opening with area mezzes if you can. Hold or stun the Spectral Lords instantly, and the Mages soon after, and nobody gets started makiing trouble. They're just bags of hitpoints once mezzed.

The biggest problem will be getting PUGs to try this. I've seen so many Controllers unwilling to act until the Tank pulls -- which of course wakes up all the debuffers and puts the team into the toilet again. Mezz first, and ask questions later! Or mezz second, for god's sake...just try to get the characters with controls to stop fireballing for damage and use their game-winning controls.

Well, actually I am pretty sure that some of the debuffs COT uses are anchor toggles and thus auto-hit. And the Chill of the Night is an auto-hit PBAoE aura. I know the Snowstorm slows cast by Air Thorns are autohit toggles, and I suspect the Spectrals have Darkest Night or some equivalent; the animation looks right. Anyway, a lot of the debuffs seem to hit my softcapped characters. And the Quicksand patches are auto-hit if you're in them, and at least the ones cast by Possessed Scientists are not resistable by defense debuff resistance -- they cut right through my /SR Scrapper's 95% DDR. Not sure if Earth Thorns' version is also unresistable, but I'd suspect they're the same power).

The mezzes you can generally defend against; not so many of the debuffs.