Sura

Ice/Electric Tanker here, I drain pretty dang well. As mentioned above, drain works, but only at 100% drained. Which is kind of a bummer. It does make a difference, you can absolutely see drained foes skipping their attacks, but not as much as it maybe should.

I love the idea of rolling the dice and seeing what comes up at high levels. +1

The Gauntlet "power" is a placeholder. Gauntlet is just the name for an effect that's coded into every Tanker power. Bruising, similarly, is something triggered by Tanker secondary T1s because of how those powers are written, not because of the Bruising power itself. I meant that the Bruising Effect would trigger on every enemy that Gauntlet successfully procs against. Given that this isn't self stackable and is resistable but can be stacked between multiple tankers, it wouldn't be a huge effect but it would be appreciated and it'd make having more than one tanker on a team feel like less of a waste of a slot on a team. As for why brutes have 90% resists; Brutes are meant to in essence; be the Incredible Hulk. Who only works as a character in a fight if he manages to stay in it long enough to get mad enough to win the fight. Scrappers deal their damage immediately but Hulk needs to ramp up to the level needed to win an encounter; and that doesn't work if he's as easily taken out as Spider-Man. Brutes are meant to be endurance fighters while Scrappers and Stalkers deal their damage quickly and immediately; so they need the survivability to "endure" their way through battles. Personally I think fury is gained and lost too quickly and the effect is ultimately not really noticeable enough to get that Incredible Hulk feel across properly. It should ramp up slower but have a more dramatic effect. By the time you have your offensive T9 you already don't really care about fury because you're basically automatically brought to 75% by being in any fight at all and that's just not what Fury should be like. It's certainly a noticeable damage boost, but it's not that huge in the grand scheme of things and its taken for granted. Don't forget the Brute Archetype Enhancement, available at level 10, which makes fury much easier to ramp up.

I use them on my Beam Rifle Sentinel. They do make cones bigger, but not in degrees. As you extend the range of a cone the area it's covering naturally gets larger.

I like the range/maxs targets idea. They're cool variables to play with. I like the idea of Grant Cover type powers for Tanker sets, whether they're all the same (save for graphics maybe) or different depending on set. I also like the idea of modifying T9 powers, whether to find a spot for the Grant Cover power or not. I think crashes are silly. I think Hibernate is lame.

Yep, for Lightning Clap it was the convert Knockback to Knockdown IO (Sudden Acceleration I think). All three of the Elec attacks that I'm using are pretty consistent when it comes to knockdown. Clap does no (or very little) damage, but it has a good disorient built in on top of the knockdown. ThunderStrike is the attack I was trying to think of. Not a fast cast time, but a dramatic cast time. In addition to Spring Attack (Jump) other things from pools would include Air Superiority (Flight), Whirlwind (Speed), Jump Kick (Jump), Arcane Bolt (Sorcery), and Cross Punch (Fighting).

I love knockup and knockdown! I'll have to look into that Might incarnate power! My Ice/Elec tanker does some pretty good knockdown. Lightning Rod of course, Electric Clap (slotted to convert to knockdown), and that jump up and slam down attack power from Elec as well. Electric would be the best secondary to take for a Knockdown City kind of character IMO. With Shield as the primary you'd get at least one more teleport/knockdown, and then Spring Attack could be a third. So Shield/Elec with the Jumping pool could have five AoE knockdown powers.

Me thinks people are mixing Catalysts up with Boosters. I have literally never seen a Booster drop either. So if they do, they are abysmally rare. Magnitudes more rare than Purple Recipes. I checked and I got Catalysts, not Boosters. I couldn't remember.

Huh, I thought the Tanker secondary taunt was auto-hit, and Provoke from the pools had a roll to-hit. Pine's says "A To Hit check is required to taunt enemy players, but is not needed against critter targets." when I look at Taunt in my Secondary (elec).

I'm not sure what changing the Tanker taunt magnitude is going to do. Giving Tankers the ability to take aggro from Brutes isn't going to change Tankers' desirability on teams; as long as Brutes can effectively take the aggro and tank for a team they, and the much (MUCH) higher damage they bring, are going to be preferred over Tankers. If you're looking to make it easier for Tankers to keep aggro from Brutes (which seems a small subset of the Tanker/Brute problem) you might be able to move things in the right direction simply by increasing the number of targets hit by Tanker Taunt, or Tanker taunt auras, or both. But again, I don't think the problem here is Tankers not being able to take aggro away from Brutes, it's that Brutes can handle aggro as well as Tankers. And changing the magnitude doesn't change that. Adjusting the aggro cap might be a bit more effective in distinguishing Tankers from Brutes, but I'm pretty sure the cap not AT specific and not an option for adjustment. I feel like the "why EVER have more than one Tanker on a team?" question is relevant and revealing. As mentioned earlier in the thread, there's only one AT for which that question can be asked, and that's Tankers. Defenders suffer from damage deficit disorder too, but no one even starts to question their worth as force multipliers. Maybe that's where Tankers should be adjusted as well.

I'm almost positive I got one the other day. Popped up in the center of the screen, and wasn't a converter. I've never bought one, I'll see if I can figure out what character it was.

Wow, I didn't know we could get to Red Tomax anymore! I use taunt even when I solo, it's just part of my rotation. I was thinking with Chilling that since Taunt only hits five people I'd bump Chilling to help grab more, thus the taunt enh. I can change it to a slow, that'd be easy.

It's always taken taunt, but that's all I can tell you. I don't really get how everything works behind the scenes, so I don't know whether there's a point in slotting it.

Ice/Axe FTW! and yes, I made it because people told me not to make it. It was "let's see what I can do with this" character that turned into my signature toon back on Live. I didn't stick around to see Incarnates happen though... and all my IO set slotting was for the Enhancement value, I pretty much ignored whatever set bonuses I was getting as gravy. Svengjuk was a legend. I haven't been able to bring myself to play him again. In fact, all my old toons, can't do it. I've moved on to new things. I'll admit, sometimes the naysayers are right and something is gimped. But it is fun to prove them wrong when you can. I ran into the same thing; I just didn't feel like re-making my old character. On Excelsior I did Ice/Staff up into the high thirties and then started my Ice/Elec. In fact, now that you mention it, I think all of my characters are new, I haven't re-created any of my old ones. Seems weird. Even back in the day the Incarnate system did more harm to Ice than good. There's only so far a non-layered tanker can go. Now if the recharge debuff in Chilling were enhanceable, that would help. I don't mind Ice doing things in what I call a non-traditional way (like using recharge debuffs instead of resistance, or END drain), but those non-traditional methods still should bring the set in line with other sets. I'm happily amazed there was another Ice/Axe tanker! :)

*raises hand* WoW is not graphically superior to CoH. I mean, CoH has its graphical limits but when was the last time the game got a visual overhaul? Was Bush still president? ... There's also a very distinct graphical choice made differently between the two games: CoH has made a choice to devote graphic development time to characters (including powers) and WoW has chosen to devote that time to the world. When you make a character in WoW, there might be eight faces for you to choose from. CoH might have fifty. Just faces. I thought WoW was OK, but I really wanted my character to be different from other similar characters.

I agree, I think "Best Tanker Primaries?" wasn't a question back when SO's were the top of the list, and pre-Brutes. It's a far more relevent question now though, because of power creep and AT proliferation. If Tankers have primaries (perhaps Ice, perhaps not) that are easily or more easily equaled or surpassed by IO's and Brutes (or Scrappers or even Stalkers) that's something that should be noted for potential change. I love Ice. My highest character on Live (up into Alpha at least) was Ice/Axe (can you imagine?) and I've got two more on Excelsior. My Ice/Elec is fun to play; she's an END drainer alongside her defense, slow, and little bits of resist, she's been fun to build (no sets yet). That doesn't mean I don't recognize that Ice is at or near the bottom of the Tanker primaries list (as seen in this thread). I'm not going to run out and start a different Tanker, I like Ice, but I'd like to see Ice get a boost or two somehow.

I recall earning the PPD Hardsuit code from a giveaway at some point. Didn't see as much usage as my Freakshow or Rikti costumes, sadly. I had that one too, but didn't use it as much as the Ring Mistress.

I'm a Tanker through and through and all I've ever played is ice. :-[

I think Ice is meant to have a fire weakness, just as Fire has a cold weakness, Dark has an Energy weakness and Energy has an Neg Energy weakness. How would one justify buffing Ice's fire resists? Also, it may not be the most popular power on the set, but some people do like taking Hibernate. Taking that away from them doesn't seem like a great way to fix inefficiencies. <shrug> I think fire damage is used more than you think, and cold a lot less than you think, but it was just an idea. Wasn't there a breakdown somewhere of the frequency of damage types? Seems like I saw that somewhere, I'll have to look. I was just trying to think of something that would benefit Ice but actually be something doable, and adjusting a number seems doable. Hibernate is, quite simply, a T9 power that is completely antithetical to the entire purpose of the Tanker archetype. It's a completely selfish power that takes the Tanker out of the combat for a time; no taunts, no damage, no help for the team. Maybe, if you're lucky (or good) you can get off one last taunt before you hit it, and possibly that taunt will maintain through the 30 seconds or so you've removed yourself from combat, but the chances are that neither of those things are going to happen. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone complaining about getting an actual help-the-Tanker-help-the-team power as a replacement for Hibernate. Hibernate has always been the "take it at 49" power, and I haven't taken it on either of my Icers started after rebirth. I wish all the T9 primary powers were powers you anxiously awaited and cheered when you finally got, but that's a different thread.

One thing I'm noticing is it gets confused if you target an enemy at a higher elevation, where you can't see the floor from your angle. It seems to jump you to your own location, or the nearest convenient parallel dimension... Yep, I've noticed that too. Can be a bummer when I forget and try to change elevations. I've run into issues with elevation changes in between the target and myself as well, where the target is on the same elevation as I, but there's something in between.

Some ideas for Ice Tanker: - Make fire resist equal to cold resist. - Exchange Hibernate with Icy Bastion.

It'd be cool to be able to go the other way too (limit pets to melee attacks). In order for the Bruiser to effectively use Noxious Gas I have to not upgrade him fully.

I've seen Lightning Rod - Shield Charge. It's a bit nuts, but if nothing else I'm sure they had one of the two ready for opening up every foe group. I'm not super slotted and for me Lightning Rod isn't necessarily always up for new groups, depending on how fast we're rolling. I remember thinking at the time that the player almost HAD to have chosen primary/secondary based on having those two powers. :)

simplifying this thread that way seems... perverse. that's probably the right call. from what we've gotten here, taunt enhancements only go in your taunt power or (rarely) your aura. as long as you're using your taunt power, taunt enhancements anywhere else are wasted. I've got taunt in Chilling Embrace, is that wasted? I'm trying to follow the technical discussion but not doing very well. :)

For me, Spring Attack is a nice AoE aggro grabber (doesn't matter because that's not how Gauntlet works), it also provides a way to get through blocked doorways. Best of all, Spring Attack is AoE knockdown which can save you from alpha spike by disrupting several mobs. I really enjoy it. You can also make a macro to have it teleport to your TARGET instead of your ground target. I use Lightning Rod for the same reasons. Mostly, as you say, because I think it feels SUPER when you appear in the middle of the group and lots of the bad guys face plant!