Cendwar

Sleep unfortunately is the most useless mechanic imo (inb4 I get flamed for this). Especially in full teams where constant pbaoe damage is dealt. Unless you are playing solo or with a small team, the coolest thing you'll be able to do with sleep is put a unique IO in it like chance to heal self

RIP All that influence I had in reserves... lol

I'm spines/elec. Vet level 400 something. Not looking back, just living with whatever few flaws my powersets have. I've always loved spines, wanted to give elec a fair try because it seemed like a strong res type and it is. I ended up liking it. I have personally tanked LR many times in the TF while the rest of the team beat his web (although it's been a long time since I've done it). Lord Recluse will knock most people around because his knockback magnitude is just too high, you can't let the little things like that bug you and scrap your whole character over it. The only time /elec lacks knockback is when you're off the ground, aside from that you have more KB prot than other ATs (15.5 mag prot iirc). Someone posted a page on the wiki that listed the kb magnitude of EVERY attack in the game and I was foolish to not bookmark it... but as a general tip, if you're building defensively and want more KB prot you can mix eradication with gladiator pbaoe sets for +3kb prot and energy def

To clarify on neutral it had a blue square around it, not a yellow one, but yes level was much lower. I did not attempt to replicate it on my 2nd attempt, just used taunt to pull them far away and cleared them that way.

No, actually. I was playing through it on a very low difficulty (+0/x1). The main thing is the hostages were level 5 and the enemies were level 15. Not sure why such the huge level difference.

/regen Is an absolute love of mine. Perma dull pain, IH/RoP can be rotated without cooldown, and you can make the most of your support teammates without hitting caps. Your only real showstoppers are -regen debuffs. To get back on topic, as others have said CoH is balanced enough so that playing what you like most can work. No matter your build. People still do like to play whatever's "best" though, with that said MA is lacking in the AoE department a bit, and they don't get their only AoE until 26. So that's what's up with that.

Confirmed again today

I'm a bit confused. The ranged damage scale for brutes was increased to .75 from .5 (correct?) Was Impale (Spines) exempt from this? It seems to have the same damage as before

As someone who played an ice/ice tanker on live before frozen aura even did pbaoe damage, I feel like Ice has the most holes in it out of any of the other sets. Ice can still work, but it takes extra effort to build around. The set offers nothing against psionics. Barely any cold/fire defense, and the only resistance it really gives is cold (easy to cap, but a rare source of damage), and a little bit of fire and toxic (from the heal). Chilling Embrace will help you with this with it's -DMG component, but the part that hurts is that the range on chilling embrace is like any other tank aura and has a small radius (10) which won't help against most alpha strikes and ranged attacks. This means when any kind of energy/negative/s/l/toxic/psi attack hits you it's going to hurt a lot. Orange inspirations are your friend for harder content. All of your resistances are going to have to come from your build, basically. The reason I say it has the most holes because aside from the fact that it gives NO help against psionic, most other defense oriented builds do offer some form of small resistance, like True Grit from Shield Defense. SR gives a scaling resist. Heck I think even Ninjitsu offers an all res power. It's not like ice is an unplayable set, but it could really use a rework.

I don't think increasing the aggro cap was ever something to focus on. I'm probably gonna get hate for this but I'd rather them keep the target caps as they are (for now). Maybe we can roll out these changes incrementally instead of all at once? Give things a chance to smooth out over time. My fear is that tankers are gonna become the top AoE dps and people are not going to play them for their primary role (tanking). Being able to hit 6 more enemies in AoE is just a crazy dps difference in itself. You start being able to hit (almost if not) every mob in a spawn pack vs only 10 of them.

I don't think upping the damage scale is too big problem. I think the real problem is doubling the radius of pbaoes and cones. I'm sure others can relate to this but AoE is the reason I love to play melee. I play a spines/elec brute with double damage auras and the more crunch and ripping and echoing sounds I hear the more fun it is. If I'm going to be short-changed out of that experience by only having half the radius and lower target caps, well, it might be worth re-rolling. I wouldn't really care about what damage loss I take, I'd be too amazed at how far my spine burst, quills, etc are reaching. The more enemies I can take on and hit at once, the better. And as many others have mentioned already, hitting more targets = more dps. When a tank can hit 16 targets with his pbaoe and I can only hit 10, he's contributing more to getting everything dead than I am. I get wanting to increase the radius and target caps of pbaoes and cones to be able to reach more targets and keep the attention easier, but scrappers, brutes and stalkers and other melee are definitely going to feel short-changed for sure. It feels like the problem you're trying to fix here is already being taken care of by the new changes to gauntlet. A 15ft AoE taunt with every attack sounds like a great way to keep the attention on the battlefield and make the tanker feel more in control, imo. In fact I would consider raising the cap on it to 10 instead of 5? Also, this might be a dumb suggestion but have we ever considered just bumping the threat level of tanks to 5.0 (maybe even higher) and keeping brutes at 4.0? Sometimes when I'm on my brute I find myself peeling bosses/AVs off a tank just by trying to dps. I don't even use the taunt power (but I do have debuff procs which I believe contribute).

Was looking all around to find out exactly how rare other types of damage outside of s/l/e were to build a tanky brute with. Thanks for this. I probably won't focus much on f/c/n/p/t