ZemX

Good point. I'd bet his base stats haven't changed, but that "Wintery Aegis" clause is probably gone in favor of the new buffs and Winter Essence stuff.

Interesting, thanks. I basically barely remember what happened before CoV when I returned to the game. Looks like the defense change happened pretty shortly after that. One of my first few villains was a Nin/Nin stalker and I definitely enjoyed going nuts on melee defense with Divine Avalanche and surprising teams who expected any Stalker to face-plant about as often as a Blaster blueside. Funny to see how the wheel turns. In that old defense post by Our Lady of Numbers, she mentions the devs making the change so as not to disadvantage defense. Fast forward to today and Defense pretty much outclasses everything now that you can soft-cap anybody and pile in additional resistance. Much better than adding defense to resistance based armors at least.

https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=event.snowbeast_lord_winter.resistance&at=boss_reichsman 90% to cold. 70% to SLNPT. 30% to fire/energy. Although "Wintery Aegis" caps all that when it's active.

My early game lore is weak. I participated in the beta, but didn't play for long afterwards. Only returned to the game for CoV. But this is the sort of thing that makes me wonder if the original live devs even understood that there was such a thing as a "defense soft cap" when they created it... or only after players dug into the game and discovered it. Because it's conspicuous that SR is the only armor set that can achieve its primary mitigation caps so easily. I suppose before ED, it was possible with other sets, but only with more slot investment than SR had to do. To me though, SR pays for its greatness by being perhaps the most boring armor set in the game. Its sexier cousin Shield gets all the attention at parties.

It's 0.4, 0.9, and 1.5 times the AT specific damage buff modifier. So not linear but a very slight curve.

In general, I am just not a fan of emergency-use-only powers. They took the right direction when they went crash-lite with stuff like Meltdown so it becomes a power you might choose to use on cooldown instead of just in an extreme emergency. But since they have the mutually exclusive option now, there's no reason to change what's there when they can just add something new and crashless or crash-lite and then see what the players pick.

I want a Shield/Staff tanker! It just needs a few alternate one-hand animations and a spear skin for the staff and boom -- THIS IS SPARTA!

Getting to 50 sooner and then running content at 50 by itself will roll in a lot of inf, especially in "kill most" TFs you join at 50 like the ITF. In the meantime, using merits as you have been doing, for cash is good. You can also use merits-to-converters and then use the converters on crafted uncommon recipes you have cluttering up your inventory. Make rare IOs out of them by converting and then sell those for a million or more a pop on the AH. What I do is drop by my base to unload enhancements in inventory and common IO recipes to a vendor. Then hit a crafting table to see if I can craft any recipes with the salvage I've collected. Then I sell off any excess salvage left over, leaving about 4 of each common and 1 of each uncommon just to free up space. Excess orange salvage goes on the AH directly (sells for around 400-500k somewhere apiece. Once the crafted IOs build up enough in inventory, I spend a few spare minutes converting them into things that sell better on the AH and listing them. Check back occasionally to see if anything sold and collect inf. Farming is obviously faster than this, but I'm not into that so can't advise.

Right. Sorry. Superior Might of the Tanker proc is 6.7% res(all) per stack and you can often count on two stacks in a decent combat. So I should have said total of about +26.7% res(all) if you have Sky Splitter in Form of Body and two stacks of SMoT. Might of the Tanker's is +5% res(all) per stack, so still plenty worth it in the lower levels before you can slot the superior set at 50. The six-slot bonus for the set is +5.25% S/L resist too (+6% for Superior set), so not too shabby.

Staff isn't winning any damage contests, thanks to long animations and this game's long-standing "original sin" of never considering animation times in the damage balancing formulae. But it makes VERY sturdy Tankers. I have an SR/Staff I haven't done much with lately, but my main is a Rad/Staff who can self-cap or nearly cap all resistances WITHOUT rotating any long cooldown +res powers like T9s or Incarnates. The sauce, as @Warshades points out, is really Perfection of Body's combo with Sky Splitter. On tankers, it's +13% res(all). Combine that with a couple stacks of MoT (+12%) and you looking at a whopping +25% res(all) added to whatever you already have from powers and IO sets. Very nice on my Rad Tanker. Just about cheating on SR's scaling resistance.

That's the thing. Can't really afford pulling too many people away to deal with the winter horde spawns when we need all the DPS we can get on the WL and WGs and we've been limited to just two teams in the new format. I'll probably get on some WL Realm raids this week and give pulling a try. It would be ideal if we can manage to just dedicate no more than two tankers to pulling in spawns (as well as the WGs when they appear) to the main melee with the WL.

Hey! Thanks for this summary. We recently tried this on Tanker Tuesday with around 14 tankers on two leagues. Mixed success. One league beat him and one ran out of time. Most of us weren't familiar with the new mechanics. But I wonder... would it not be easier to just keep most everybody on the WL, in a location well away from any of the crystals, and then designate two pullers to rope in spawning winter creatures (and the WG when it happens), and lead them away from the crystals and back to their doom in the WL mosh pit? Or do they resist being pulled away from the crystals?

Not bad for all tanker teams most of whom didn't know what they were doing (including me!). Towards the end someone mentioned we should have kept WL away from the crystals so that we could immediately pull spawners away. I think we want maybe two tanks ranging around pulling in herds of spawners towards the melee against the WL (assuming they can be taunted away from the crystals, that is). We were too spread out on league 1 and so we didn't have focused fire on WL most of the time. If everyone knows where they're supposed to be and only those designated to pull run off, we can keep more firepower on the WL more consistently. I noticed, btw, that my Vanguard HVAS lasted a LOT longer than my Incarnate Lore, for whatever that is worth. It might be a good idea to pick up an HVAS for those of us with heaps and gobs of Rikti Merits. Especially the non-Incarnate members of the league. One thing that did confuse me is how "Winter Essence" works. I was wondering why he had an essence bar when no minions were near a crystal and it seems it's because the Guardians add their HP to the meter too, up to 50%. But the essence bar does nothing for WL if it stays below 100% other than cause spawns to run towards the nearest crystal every 30 seconds when essence is below 75%. So as long as we're keeping the meter from reaching 100%, we can be focused on hurting the WL, switching only to, as quickly as we can, down the Guardians when they appear. In that sense, this is really still a lot like the original one where you focus on the WGs when they appear at the 75, 50, and 25 points. The added wrinkle is keeping essence below 100% by pulling spawners away from crystals (or ideally preventing them from reaching them in the first place). Keeping it from ever reaching 100 is also worth a badge, btw. I guess we especially need to be concerned when approaching the 75, 50, and 25 points that essence is not too high because the WG will add a BIG chunk when it spawns. Anything else we can do to boost damage for the WL bangers is probably good. Assault Hybrid. SS Ragers. Red insps. Bad attitudes. You know, the usual. We'll get him next time. Grats to League 2!

It's kind of like Bio without the defense and switchable modes. That is, it's a bit of a hybrid, just not as much as Bio. Its layers are Resistance, Absorb, Healing, and Regen in more or less that order. It used to have two proc-bombs but they pretty much destroyed the proc-chances in Rad Therapy with the change to adaptive refresh. So there's just Ground Zero. Which is still great, but less so than it used to be when it was a giant 22.5ft radius bomb that proc'd like it was 15ft radius. I suppose that was too good to last forever.

No defense and thus no defense debuff resistance (DDR). This makes any defense you add via other means fragile. That works fine if you're a blaster dodging the stray bullet but not when everyone in the room is attacking you and especially not if they have defense debuffs. So you get hit... a lot. The damage isn't a concern but the debuffs can stack on you. Particularly bad are slow and -toHit debuffs since they directly inhibit your Accurate Heal and Absorb clickies. Rad Armor has some slow resistance but one should build on it to achieve at or near 100% slow resistance. Similarly, Focused Accuracy is one I rarely skip on Rad Armor too for the -toHit debuff resistance. Beyond that, lack of Repel, Confuse, or Fear protection are occasionally annoying depending on what you face, but not crippling usually.