Sailboat

Back in the day (pre-Homecoming, waaay before the Tanker buffs) I had a Fire/Fire/Pyre Tanker with IO sets. She was able to chain Fire Sword Circle, Combustion, Fireball, Burn continuously, with only a fraction of a second hesitation in the chain. Fire Breath didn't fit the concept, but no doubt is decent now. I have rebuilt her on Homecoming although she's not fully IOed yet at 43, nor does she have Fireball yet. But the 16-target caps, greater damage base, and improved radii are huge improvements! Both versions used 5- or 6-slotted Fire Sword, Incinerate and Greater Fire Sword for single-target, and I'm personally happy with that chain, although I'm not an attack chain guru. Fire Sword makes up for being the lowest damage of the three with blazing animation speed and good recharge, great for tapping when you want to get damage in right now.

Doesn't expending 5 stacks of Blood Frenzy merely increase the radius of Rending Flurry, not damage? Or am I misunderstanding DPA?

Quadruped body models. Well, you SAID in no way easily possible at all. I would flippin' LOVE to be a dog or a unicorn or a badger or a rhino or whatnot.

Back in the day, a common topic was the desire to level up as one AT/Powerset and then turn into another. Usually this was dismissed as some sort of powerleveling. It seems to me that on a server with 1000 characters per shard and the ease of power-leveling these days, it wouldn't be much more trouble than setting up an alt build.

Well, here's a fairly thorough discussion on the topic: It's worth noting two minor points in Axe's favor: there's a lot of knockdown powers, so you'll see a lot of it just by playing the set; and War Mace (is there a peaceful mace?) has stuns, which can mean you're chasing staggering foes as they lurch away. I still love Axe, however.

Been a long time since I bought paper comic books. Any interest in superhero webcomics? I have couple of suggestions.

Recently made a Shield/Battle Axe Tanker on another shard for when Tanker Tuesdays rotate to that shard. I think concept is important...despite Axe being mechanically sub-optimal, it's critical for the theme of the character. Increasingly I find myself giving more time to cool characters than to potentially better-optimized piles of points. edited to add: Thus it may be that coming up with completed concepts is delaying my rolling out numerous tanks I'd otherwise be happy playing.

Sometimes I've played "Taunt Tennis" with another Tanker, making the bad guys run back and forth between us as we alternate taunts. Works better if they're slowed. Not especially strategic, but it's funny.

I have been playing a Fire/Fire Tanker off and on for the last 10 months or so. The changes are awesome...the increased target cap for Fire Sword Circle and Combustion are wonderful. I have no math to support this, but with the new base damage AND target caps, these attacks feel as good as, or better than, Brute versions, which do more damage but to only 10 targets instead of 16. Also been slowly gearing up my Inv/SS, a stronger tank defensively but substantially less killy.

Long-established account logged in. Suddenly today I am noticing a warning: Next Step: Create Game Account & Get Started! Your profile is 0% complete! Regardless of whether my profile is or is not complete, this message is new AND when I click it I am treated like a first-time user needing to set up their account. that can't be right, as the screen also shows me logged in and I can see my own mailbox. Is this a bug, maybe?

One caveat - while it's useful to examine the next spawn while the current one is beating on you, be sure to coordinate with your team. Occasionally I am tanking Spawn A and I examine Spawn B, and just while I'm thinking "oh, a Sapper coming up," some unfortunate soul targets through the Tanker (me) and pops the Sapper with something inadequate to kill or mezz him, and then a Bad ThingTM happens. So it might be worth checking if anyone intends to target through you and if so, be careful what you tab through.

Particularly fond of the way Typhoon's Edge looks when performed by a female character -- so graceful.

I have a baby Sonic/Super Reflexes Sentinel using the Leaping pool. Presumably the recharge bonus of Super Reflexes would help cycle the cones. I will explore this soon.

Second this. Tanking can be an acquired taste-- you have look out for your squishies, take the initiative to start engagements, and set the pace, and you don't necessarily get as flashy powers as some other ATs. Love for your particular character can offset a lot of that. Name, concept, bio, costume, role play...if you're enjoying the experience, you're more likely to do a good job (as well as making your game time happy time)!

Yes it was, consistently. The forums and global chat included a lot of people making fun of Defenders and Controllers as useless. Across all servers. Regular content. Also, the unlimited aggro cap kind of made all content into farming.

If I am understanding you correctly, I think you're talking about increasing enemy perception ranges, not the aggro cap, which as I understand it refers to the number of enemies any one player, such as the tank, can be attacked by and hold the attention of. Maybe we're talking apples and oranges here?

But you wouldn't have plenty to do in the old days -- you would have been peremptorily ORDERED to stand in the corner and not interfere while the Tanker herded everything into a ball. Everyone but the Tanker (and only one of those per team!) and one or perhaps two Blasters was treated as a barely-tolerated groupie, if not outright derided as useless.

That's one of my personal bugbears; I'm sure your meaning was understood. 🙂

Incarnate powers were probably a mistake.

As a squishy, I very much love the aggro caps, which saved the game from being only about "One Tanker or Brute and, uh, I guess someone with Build Up."

Nothing of substance to add except to give props to Sucker-Punch for their planner back in the day. Something that doesn't require a download and installation was great -- among other things, we're not permitted to install outside software at work.

Sorry to quibble with such a helpful post, but technically one cannot "soft-cap" resistance. Resistance has a hard cap. Technically Defense does too, but it's absurdly high and immaterial to the issue of flooring an enemy's chance to hit you, so instead we talk about the soft cap for defense.

Thirded. Gotta get my City on.

Also, while I echo the advice to try out different characters, archetypes and power sets -- I've often been surprised to find I liked something more than I'd expected -- don't delete anyone, even if you don't really like the powersets. You've got 1000 character slots on each shard of Homecoming...just open a new character. Drag the duds off the first page if they bother you (you can reorder your list by dragging). If you want to re-use the name, just rename the dud and make a new character with the name you just released. E-mail the influence and transfer enhancements (e-mail or, more efficiently, through a base rack) to other characters if you need them, but save the character's exp progress. You never know when you might decide you'd like to try again with a discarded character, so save the levels. If you get 999 slots filled, feel free to delete. 😉

Long ago I was hoping they'd put in variable weather for the city and permit characters with Storm Summoning powersets to log into the data terminals and vote for the weather.