Parabola

Shield/dark is something of a classic combination that works every bit as well on tanks as it does on scrappers. The improved shadow maul is absolutely massive on tanks and you get the key combination of soul drain and shield charge together earlier. I prefer the epic options tanks get too, mine has an aoe attack chain using SM and mu mastery. The self heal in the attack chain is very useful for shield and if you put a theft of essense proc in it you will have very few end worries. On top of all that the stacking damage buffs from against all odds and soul drain work very nicely indeed with tanks new modifiers. I love my shield/dark and highly recommend it.

Yup, all of this. Rad only becomes a slow set to use if you regularly use radiation infection which has a horrible cast time. There is no point in using RI though unless the mobs are dangerous and the fights are going on for a while. I'm a big fan of rad as a controller secondary in particular. It crams so much into a handful of powers leaving huge build flexibiliy. This is particularly useful for controllers because it leaves them free to pick up epic powers early and go deep into those pools.

Still fighting the good fight I see @SwitchFade. Kudos to you sir.

Ah yes. I have been specifically trying to find a really hard content soloer. I was focused in on war mace because I don't get on with TW and smacking down +4 bosses as quickly as possible is right at the top of my priority list. It's not that I have a particular agenda with tanks and scrappers, I have plenty of both (including a lv50 war mace scrapper), but for this purpose brutes came out on top. I rather like the way that some sets are better on some AT's than others. It adds an intetesting element to the meta. I do think that any statement about 'AT A being better than AT B' needs to be qualified with 'depending on what sets you are using and what content you are trying to beat'. Since the tank buffs they are considerably more damaging and I love my recent shield/dark tank but she would be terrible at taking on 4/8 rularuu.

True but the jewel in the war mace aoe crown is crowd control which hasn't been buffed for tanks. Shatter hitting more enemies is a big buff though. Most fights seem to end up being really limited by how long it takes to bring down bosses rather than the lower tiers. Whatever aoe you have is going to clear the dross before the bosses and then it become a lot more about single target damage. Tanks will outdamage brutes in a 'sea of minions' scenario but in regular play I still give the edge to brutes.

Dark/ta is a fantastic blastroller. I have one in the 40's and love it. Loads of control and plays all at range apart from jumping in for the nuke every now and again. Ice/ta is an even more ranged pairing. The highlight here is being able to use ice arrow procced out as a relacement for the lacklustre bitter freeze ray and having an attack chain with two ranged holds in it. It stacks an enormous amount of slow and never has any reason at all to go near the enemy. Rad however is an up close and personal set due to the fantastic irradiate. Rad/rad works but I might be tempted to go rad/ice or rad/time. Rad/ice would be more control, rad/time more damage. I have a real soft spot for sonic but haven't found my ideal pairing for it on blasters. You can pair it with mm for the extra cone but you have to close to melee range to use drain psyche which is a bit clunky with cone use. I tried this back on live and didn't get on with it but ymmv. I've also tried sonic/en on the test server for the abusing of massive cones but I didn't find it anywhere near as fun in practice as in theory. You spend a huge amount of time self buffing and rarely have the room to exploit the mechanic fully.

Apart from anything else the stepping structure of the destiny buffs makes it almost impossible to use them in actual calculations. Well I'm sure someone could calculate (and probably has) for example how close to perma you have to have hasten for ageless to tip it over but it's beyond me! The 'more things to remember to click' aspect doesn't bother me too much. They are at least on reasonably long cooldowns. I've tried a couple of times to make an energy manipulation blaster and the buff cycle in that is crippling. It feels like you're self buffing more than you are attacking.

Ageless radial for the debuff resist is my default choice unless I have a pressing reason to look elsewhere. It gives you things you simply can't build for from set bonuses. The end refill and extra recharge are always welcome too.

I've recently been doing a load of testing comparing the same builds across scrappers, brutes and tanks. It hasn't always been desperately scientific but it did give me a good feel for where the AT's are at in relation to each other (and the differences in performance of a bunch of armour sets against tough content). The upshot was that brutes really did seem to be where you'd expect them to be. They are significantly tougher than scrappers when res caps and healing/hp/regen are involved. And for all that tanks do good damage these days with wide aoe they didn't seem to keep up with an annoyed brute in hard single target or even hard aoe spawn clearance. It's this last part that is the heart of the matter I think. I doubt anyone would dispute that brutes are tougher than scappers but there is some debate about how much damage tanks do vs brutes, particularly in aoe. Powerset selection is probably the key variable. I can only speak for the sets I tested which were combinations of war mace with bio, rad, wp, dark and elec. These powerset selections may well have been favouring brutes from the start but the brutes were consistently better overall with them (although the bio/mace tank was the best of the bios). The content I was throwing them at was things like rularuu, carnies, arachnos, praetorian clockwork, itf (all at 4/8) and taking down the odd pylon. So I do think there is still a good place for brutes with attack sets that aren't based around self damage buffing or pseudopet attacks, and armour sets based on res, particularly with damage auras.

Yeah I'm sure sr tanks are very tough indeed. But I've been building specifically for the kinds of enemies that ignore defence altogether like the rularuu watchers so it had to be a res build. War mace is a set I've played before but I've fallen for it all over again. Clobber simply deletes enemies! The single target attack chain of jawbreaker-clobber-shatter puts out significant hurt and crowd control-shatter-whirling mace isn't exactly shabby on the aoe front. I wanted to keep the aoe all within the set as I need to take energy mastery for focused accuracy. I'm also taking ageless radial, planning for really heavy debuff environments. The only thing I don't have much of is ddr but without d to r the d of it doesn't matter much either way! Fire melee isn't one I considered but I'm now wondering what a bio/fire tank would play like. Fire melee on tanks getting extra aoe (something I've never really understood). One project at a time though...

Thought I'd close out my ramblings in this thread. Firstly I will say it has been really interesting trying out a bunch of very similar builds on the test server and seeing how they perform. I learned a lot and highly recommend it. I settled on war mace fairly early on and a bit further into the process decided on using a brute. Scrappers just aren't tough enough for the sort of content I am building for, hampered by the lower res cap and less hit points. Tanks do pretty well these days, particularly with bio, but it was the wonky progression with the melee set (maturing very late and being stuck with the wrong filler atrack) that decided it for the brute. Also even with the tank buffs brutes still do noticably more damage to really tough targets. When facing highly dangerous +4 bosses it's important to get them down as quickly as possible and brutes are better at it. So I auditioned mace/bio, mace/rad, mace/wp, mace/dark and mace/elec brutes. All built for res and healing and largely ignoring defence. They were all pretty good and much as expected. Some do more damage, some are tougher. It's very difficult to quantify most of it, particularly on the durability front as they have different ways of achieving it and I was having to go on gut feel for how they seemed to play. Rad is very tough against everything with good healing/absorb options. Bio adds more damage but I found it fiddly to build and use, you end up relying on the clickies a huge amount and that can go wrong against the really nasty stuff. Willpower is very solid and straightforward to use but I wish it had a heal. Dark is a set I love and it performs well. The energy hole is a worry at the high end though and although having a complete heal on something like an 11 second timer makes it basically unkillable, I did end up spending a lot of time healing rather than attacking. The surprise for me was elec and this is the set I have gone for. It's very solid, I've got s/l/e/f/c/psi all capped and energise seems to roll around just often enough to make up for any neg or toxic getting through. I'm also planning to take the tier 9 which is something I usually don't bother with but it will cap neg and get toxic very close. Should be useful for proper emergencies. But in the end it was actually the fx that clinched it. I was testing using a costume I had hanging around and it looked way better with elec than it did with rad (my no2 pick overall). If rad had looked better I'd have likely gone with it but I really find it a bit ugly. So in the end days of testing and rambling about it (apologies to the op btw) have led to making a decision heavily influenced by cosmetics! Elec is properly tough though so I don't think I'll regret it. Now I just have to level her up for real!

It seems we are all at a complete impasse with this topic. One group of people believe that there is a fundamental difference between creating and amassing wealth and the effect they have on the market. Another group don't believe that is the case and after 72 pages of arguments and counter arguments it doesn't look like anyone is going to be persuaded otherwise. Such is life I guess!

So I have two game accounts for the dual boxing but the way it worked out I ended up with my main email address attached to my secondary account and a throwaway one attached to this main game account. Having not thought about it in ages I tried to log into the throwaway email account and found that it had been frozen and by the looks of it I'm not going to be able to get past the security validations to resurrect it again. So what I think I'm going to have to do is move my secondary account onto a completely new throwaway email and then I'd like to move my main account onto the main email that frees up. Is this likely to run into problems? Is there validation against email accounts having ever been attached to game accounts or is it just email accounts that are currently being used by game accounts? I'm reluctant to start the process if it might result in either game account becoming frozen...

I like the resistance armour sets with damage auras on brutes. You get the 90% res cap and fury boosting the aura damage which seems a good deal. For melee sets they are all pretty good. I believe sets that use pseudopets or self damage buffing such as elec or dark melee are technically better on scrappers or tanks due to damage modifiers but really go with anything.

Yeah what the hell happened to that thread? Not even locked, just nuked from orbit. It was turning into the usual drama we always see on threads of that type but I'd have expected some form of comment and a lock. Actually overall I'd really appreciate some word from the devs about where they think the game is with regards to incarnates and balance but they are probably wisely not touching the issue with a 10ft pole...

My thought is as follows. I often lead pug teams and too often find that radios or tips are the only readily available content. Yes contacts can be arranged as you go but they can easily be outlevelled and can be a bit of a faff. And also without wanting to drag a heated debate from elsewhere into this discussion I find the pre-incarnate teaming experience infinitely more fun than when incarnates are involved. Teaming drives off a cliff for me at lv45. So the flashback system should be ideal for me. I should be able to run a team exemped to 40 or 35 doing the various story arcs available. But I can't really do that because it's not compatable with the rolling recruiting, drop in, drop out, nature of pugs. The point of spreading the merit rewards out isn't so much about the rewards themselves but just splitting them up to avoid the last mission = full reward problem you mention. The goal is simply to casually team doing a wider variety of stuff, all rewards are incidental to that. Actually a sort of solution to the badge problem has just occurred to me. Some badges are linked to a series of invisible behind the scenes badges, they only award when all the background ones have been collected. It might be possible to do the same for tfs; add an invisible badge to each mission and only award the main badge when they are all collected. Not a great solution for the obvious reasons of complexity but it might just about work!

Well it's like I said, I don't know how you'd handle the badges. They would probably have to remain linked to a complete run. Breaking the merit rewards down wouldn't have to be unfair though, they could be weighted according to the type of mission etc. But it's really the story arcs in flashback where I'd like to see changes. We have all this content sitting there that is largely unused because of the limitations of the rigid tf system. Seems such a waste.

The merit rewards could be broken down to award on each mission completion? There is already code that governs whether you were on a mission long enough to receive the end of mission xp bonus so it could be linked to that. How you'd then handle badges I've no idea though. In general I'd love to see this kind of thing. Not even so much for tfs and trials but for running story arcs via flashback. A huge amount of content would be opened up if teams could casually run story arcs recruiting as they go.

This is possibly the heart of the matter right here. Teaming extensively leads to a poorer character unless they market to some degree. If the desire is to make it so that a regular player feels that they can build up all the funds they want, without feeling compelled to farm or marketeer, then tweaking the drop rates based on the actual number of players in a team might be a good place to look. Of course multi-boxing farmers would have to be considered if any such change was made. It's possible the upcoming afk farming adjustments might take care of that one though depending on the route they take.

Have you read Jimmy's post above? Farming with double inf was problematic for the game economy because it was generating a higher ratio of inf to drops than other activities. This was causing inflation which isn't good for anyone. Marketeering just converts rubbish into things people want and removes inf through fees limiting inflation.

I think the problem with defence as a whole is while it probably outperforms resistance for 99% of the game, sooner or later you come across something that ignores it completely. That can be either autohit damage or enemies that have insane levels of tohit. Cascading defence failure is certainly a thing but it's far from the only way a defence build can run into trouble. As I recently posted in another thread I've learned this the hard way. I took my main, a pretty heavily tricked out ss/ea brute who has way over softcap s/l/e/n/f/c and about 50% res to everything but toxic, into a shadow shard tf at 4/8. I'd got used to being basically immortal as long as I paid passing attention during the rage crashes but the rularuu absolutely destroyed him. Tore him to pieces. Energise couldn't keep up with the damage in any way, even barrier was of limited use. This has led me to the conclusion that solid resists backed by healing/absorb options are pretty much the only way to go for that 1% of content. I'm doing quite a bit of testing at the minute to try to find my ultimate solo melee character. This takes it slightly outside this tanker discussion as damage output is a serious consideration but actually a bio/mace tank is one of my frontrunners so far. I'm willing to accept being a bit below par for much of the easier content if it gives me a fighting chance in the cheaty hard stuff. My limited skills may prove to be an insurmountable barrier though!

Barrier? Very impressive though, I'd be interested in seeing that build?

Blimy, this is back again? Deep breath; thechangeworkedthemarketisinbettershapeinflationisincheckfarmingisstillperfectlyviablelv50scanstillhandilyoutearnlowerlevelcharactersallisoknothingtoseeherenotgoingtobechangedback... Think that more or less covers it!

Well this is now becoming my obsession. I've spent a good chunk of the weekend making and testing builds. The criteria I'm looking at so far are a couple of pylon runs, and then a carnies mission, a rularuu mission and the first mission of the itf, all on 4/8 with bosses. I am only really interested in melee characters, I imagine an ill/rad would be able to do all this but it's not really my cup of tea. I don't mind a bit of pulling but in general I want to be getting stuck in and beating the enemy fair and square. So far I'm in agreement with those above that have said that defence builds simply don't cut it. I've been testing willpower, rad and bio on scrappers, brutes and tanks. I've more or less settled on war mace as the best attack set option, I'm not a fan of titan weapons and war mace has good single target, self contained aoe and decent mitigation. It's been really interesting comparing almost identical builds across AT's. So far they have functioned almost exactly as you'd expect. Scrappers do more damage but are much squishier, tanks are solid but can lag a bit damage wise (some very embarrassing pylon times), and brutes are somewhere in the middle. Willpower surprised me a bit with just how tough it can get. It's big problem is that it offers nothing on the offence side and isn't tough enough to allow the use of a scrapper further limiting the damage output. The lack of an actual self heal also proved a liability. Rad armour is really tough. Built entirely for res it can cover just about everything I need. My only concern with rad is whether I can make a scrapper or brute tough enough as the tank just couldn't quite do enough damage. I need to go back and fiddle with the builds some more as I'm sure there is more to be squeezed out. I'm making them en masse so they probably lack polish. Bio is a great set for adding damage as we all know. It has the slightly annoying s/l res, e/n/f/c def structure but I have been largely ignoring that and just trying to pile on e/n/tox/psi resist. Unfortunately even on the tank version there is a pretty big e/n hole and a marginally smaller tox/psi one, particularly with offensive adaptation running. But it doesn't half add a load of poke. Interestingly I was getting similar pylon times with a bio/mace tank to those with a mace/rad brute. Those are probably my top two so far. Tomorrow I'm going to have a look at some dark armour builds...

The first time I logged in back on live I'd never played an mmo before and felt mainly lost. First time on homecoming I was struggling to see past the *ahem* something in my eye.