Spaghetti Betty

Are you kidding? Dark Souls fans are the Lords of shouting "But you didn't play right because you used x!" So this suggestion seems right in line with that.

This is so damn cool

This thread made me want to take a crack at making an absurdly tanky Rad/MA. Also Hard Mode ready with infinite +tohit.

Sounds like the perfect time to get some old school sewers runs going

I'm excited to try giving my custom mobs extra attacks. First order of business is to give all the minions Gang War.

I can't help you on the "teams blowing up my mob" thing. That's an age old gripe. Your best bet there is to learn how fast your team clears mobs, pull ahead early and herd up the next mob for them to blast away. As far as Tanks with strong AoE, try Fire/Ice. Burn + Frost will pancake most mobs and you get them very early. Frozen Aura is icing on the cake. You'll have solid single target as well with Freezing Touch and Greater Ice Sword.

I'm in the same camp that any Tank can have success in hard mode with the right backup, though some will definitely take more effort and tactics than others. IMO, Shield is at the top in the You'll Be Fine tier, where Fire Armor is at the bottom in the Thank Your Team tier. Whether or not your secondary attributes to your mitigation will play a large factor as well. It will be interesting to see how some Tank combos get pushed to their limit.

This is a very strange flex.

Finally got time to sit down and look at this. I'm intrigued by a lot of it. Just a few questions before I give it a whirl in Brainstorm. No Rain of Fire? Even taking into account that mobs get blown up at 50, is it not a decent DPS bump for AVs either? Why slot Defiant Barrage in Burst of Speed? Not an expert on Blasters; I would assume you'd want it in a tier 1/2 blast. Then again, I guess it'd be a little redundant with Inner Will and RoP. Just marked it as a good spot for procs.

Also all true, but IOs have been in the game far longer than Incarnates. Incarnates just made the power scaling far more skewed.

Not to steal the answer, but I just wanna offer some perspective. Incarnate powers were designed to be powerful tools utilized in challenging content that never had the chance to exist, yet we have access to them. Let's take a standard level 50 radio mission. Any single fully decked out Incarnate can dumpster these at +4 because of the strength of the powers available. A T3 and up Alpha nets you a +1 level shift to all content, so 54s now only con as +3 to you, severely reducing the effects of the Purple Patch as you fight. Now add, say, 3 or 4 more Incarnates on the same team and your sk'd hero fighting lvl 54s won't have much of a role in combat compared to the small group of gods in your team, unless they contribute in other ways that aren't damage. I wouldn't say that would necessarily lead people to doorsit, but I don't think anyone would argue against saying those sk'd heroes are being carried a bit by their Incarnate teammates.

Speedy and solo. Synapse goes way faster if you do it by yourself at +0x1. My strategy for every AV is the same. Chomp reds until damage cap and blast away.

Only if I get a reply with more than what I sent.

Make 3x XP cost reward merits to bring the whole thing full circle. That'd be pretty funny. 15 per hour.

I had to put myself down as "sometimes". As much as I wanna run Hard Mode stuff more often, I hardly ever have the 1-3 hours of uninterrupted playtime it requires to do the stuff. I do catch 801 runs the few times I do catch Linea hosting one, but that's about the extent of it. Working late nights over the weekend kinda sucks in that regard.

Yeah, I remember that. We were on an ITF. Honestly surprised I only died once considering I entered as a lvl 35 tank.

Commander Crumpets, Radiation Armor/Super Strength Tanker

If you're unsure if a potential optimization is truly worth it, you can always pop the new build into Brainstorm and give it a test drive before you commit. No effort is truly wasted as long as you are constantly learning.

I just wanna be able to pass my unused Threads to my alts. Preferably in a bundle. To me that seems a lot simpler than passing the salvage itself because not every toon will need the same salvage.

Well, since 90% of my toons these days are Tankers, I guess Tankers. Some Tanks I've found really fun: Ice/SS - Was not fun levelling, but at 50 remains one of my most played toons. SR/Dark - The Tank I play when I want to ignore damage. Probably wouldn't bring it to a Hami raid, though. Fire/MA - My #1 most played toon. Fire Armor and Martial Arts synergize really well with eachother, making for a very enjoyable gameplay experience. Falls to some mobs, unfortunately.

Blood DKs are still that strong? I recall they had to be nerfed heavily many times because they were out DPSing Frost and Unholy DKs while having the best survivability of any other tank spec in the game.

I got lost trying to keep up in the debate but I just wanna add some of my own experiences. This is all with amps and 2x XP, but I don't think that's fairly uncommon these days. I recently had a Fire/Ice Tank go from 1-32 in a day playing my usual route (1 door mish to lvl 5, straight to hollows, Striga, then Croatoa). By level 16 I had the diff cranked up to +1×8. I'm also working on a Rad/MA. That one took a bit to really get rolling since all the AoE comes around the same time (early-mid 20s) but now blows up +2×8 content at lvl 30 something. I suspect I'll be able to bump up to +3 fairly soon. And I've had a Bio/Kat Tank in the past that was soloing +4x8 and lead tanking 54 ITFs by lvl 35. (This was without Amps) I don't have toons of any other AT that can manage this.

Sheathed weapons has been my #1 dream add since all the way back in '04. I'm ecstatic about it.

Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.

The Stalking Jackal, Arachnos Soldier