ZemX

In the world we presently live in the only way NOT to know... is not to have looked. And that tells me everything I need to know about them. If this was a real /help request and not a troll, then this person really joined a new game, got PL'd to max level, and then just asked people in game to tell them what to do next? No. They can move on. It sounds like no great loss. It's also not a huge problem. The vast majority of people who come here try to figure out things for themselves and then ask questions when they are confused or stuck. That is far more worth my time than someone who apparently just expected the community to wait on them hand and foot. I don't care if someone PL's or not. I only care if they tried first. It's like people who just drop a "Give me a build for ____" request in an AT forum. Tells me you didn't even punch in a search first. Or hell, just toss something together first in Mid's and ask people to look at it. Shows you at least tried. Doesn't even matter how badly.

I do this in conjunction with NOT adding extra slots to Stamina or Health for endurance procs/IOs and it works very well. Even so, I often only need to use RT for endurance replenishment when I am under heavy endurance drain assault (Carnies, Malta, Arachnos, Freaks, etc.) Thing to remember about RT is that although it has a generous AoE area, it also has a target limit of 10. Still, it's not a bad way to grab aggro when team tanking if GZ is on cooldown. Ground Zero, of course... is nuts. It hits a total of 30 allies/enemies, so if you're well ahead of the team laying down the first strike on a new spawn... it will hit every one of them. I trade one damage proc for the Avalanche KD proc. Again, more of a team tanking decision but I find it communicates "come and get 'em!" to the team better than words when one shot of GZ puts damned near every enemy in the room on their butts. It's also nice for interrupting their damage for a few seconds if a teammate is in danger, on top of which it shoots your ally with some moderate healing and HoT.

We all play this game for our own enjoyment, but understanding that when you join a team, it's not JUST about you anymore is kind of the difference between an adult and... a Magnificent Asshole! 😈

It's entirely plausible a lot of people just don't know. A big reason is that it's legal to cosplay their favorite characters in real life, so they might assume that's all they are actually doing here. It isn't, but it's not like we're all copyright lawyers around here. There are also plenty of fan-made mods for other games that allow people to play other copyright IP characters in their single-player games. So they might be conditioned to think it's okay when it's not, and it's just that nobody has bothered to go after some rando modder. Only the big projects seem to get C&Ds.

I like PuGs for being different and unpredictable, but "reckless" is just another word for bad gameplay. If the team is so OP it can handle this kind of chaos then it's by definition not "reckless" anymore. But if the team can't handle it... it's pretty much just griefing, really.

I'm not saying your MA wasn't indeed a MA for everything else they did on this TF, but this one specific thing is kind of a pet peeve of mine from the Tanker's perspective. There's no need for ANYONE to hang around fighting rezzers. Move on. The rezzers will follow. Waiting around to be sure no Freaks are standing up after their time delay is a waste of everyone's time... not just whoever is tanking. Same goes for PP Elites who pop a god-mode (MoG, Elude, Unstop, etc.) FFS.... don't just stand around whiffing them for damn near a minute. Just move on. Course you only move on to the next spawn. If your tankers were going past that or in different directions, yeah.. they were hotdogging.

Why does it matter you've been using this same tactic the whole mission? This guy isn't like any other enemy in the entire Task Force. He has extreme energy damage, up to mag 4 stun, knockdown, and, crucially, can ignore 3/4 of your Hurricane's toHit debuff. You ran up into this guys face, effectively, with nothing that you'd need to survive in melee range: And you didn't. Game worked exactly as intended there. What you need to take away from this experience is that you need another tactic if you want to go at him with the same team. You've gotten some good advice already. Try to fight him at range. Hover. Make him use his weaker ranged attacks. Bolster your resistance and KB protect with inspirations so you aren't mezzed and then KO'd. On a team, share the aggro. Kite him if you have to. Run away while your teammates pound on him. You're fixated on the fact you couldn't react when you should have been proactive. You should not have put yourself in a position where you needed to react to a 1K energy punch + mag 4 stun. This game rewards smart play. That IS good design.

I think I spotted the problem with your "Snarky" PuG story already.

3K is not "typical". This number came about because @Luminara was trying to make sense of your claim about 11k damage and is speculating it must have involved max. challenge and notoriety settings. The conditions necessary to get Hopkins to hit you for even 3K at this level are pretty weird and I seriously doubt you were running with those settings given you are also saying the AVs had 5% chances (impossible) or 7.5% (possible only at even-con) to hit you. Hopkins as an even-con level 35 AV can hit you for 1K with Total Focus. That goes up to 1550 if he's +5 to you (the maximum if TF is set to +4 difficulty). It goes up again to 2325 damage if the TF is set to "enemies buffed". But if we're going there, you already have no argument. There's no "I should be able to tank an AV with my SO-built Defender on the the hardest difficulty settings" argument to be made. The game is not even designed to make this easy to do at +0 difficulty. I don't. Eight small oranges or fewer larger ones would have capped you at 75% energy resist. His Total Focus, even at +5 level to you would then have done 388 damage. A single break-free would have prevented you getting knocked down, giving you more than enough time to react to that hit and heal, move, or do something else. Your tactics and your build need to match the challenge you're facing or you won't do well. The specific tactic you were using the entire rest of the TF relied heavily on -toHit and controls that would work fantastically well against boss-level and lower enemies, but an AV class enemy typically can ignore that or reduce it in effectiveness.

I doubt this occurred at all. edit: Okay, to be less blunt about it. I think OP probably did get dropped instantly by Hopkins, but that would not have required any challenge settings or even any raised difficulty setting. At level 35, the max for Manti TF, and even up against an even-con Hopkins it would be OP at around 830 hit points (Defender average hit points at 35) vs. Hopkins's Total Focus which can deal 1K pure energy damage at that level. Or even his Bone Smasher which is 839 energy. With no energy resist, that's enough right there. It needs no 11K damage or challenge settings. A Defender trying to melee Hopkins at level 35 would need significant energy resist to mitigate the lucky hits. Defense alone might work but the more swings he gets, the less likely you are to stay upright. Again, that's at minimum difficulty settings, essentially. It gets worse from there. But point is, it doesn't need challenge settings for his Defender to be in trouble standing next to Hopkins. When I tank him, I always remind squishies that even if he's focused on me, he still has a couple hard-hitting AoEs in melee range. Hopkins has both Foot Stomp and Whirling Hands. He probably surprises a lot of squishies who built primarily S/L defense or who rely on toHit debuffing. His attacks are almost all purely energy based except for Foot Stomp and his couple ranged rifle shots.

He shows up in the Freakish Lab of Dr. Vahzilok, and since Buzzsaw is a 25-39 contact, he would top out at 44 on a +4 notoriety setting. On a Manti TF, he would be at most 35+5. That might just be possible if you start the TF with a level 31 lead, get a +9 PP Elite Rad Defender to toggle you with Enervating Field and then run over to smack Hopkins in the face with your Hurricane.... yet, somehow I don't think that's what happened here. But now I almost want to try it. 🤪 Thanks for the buff/debuff links tho. None of my search-fu was working for that.

For my Rad Tankers, and I would imagine this goes the same for Elec... the PP Elite Radiation Defender is the absolute worst. Unresistible Enervating Field. We were at +2, so worst case, the +3s were chopping -40% res(ALL) off anybody in range of their toggle anchor, no matter how much RES you had to begin with. Nasty business. Everybody else was just annoying. THOSE guys were deadly.

Short of a bug occurring though, he can't be more than level 40 on a Manti TF, right? At +5 I think that's around 2K damage for Total Focus. What effect exactly do "enemies buffed" and "players debuffed" have when you select them? I can't seem to find values for that anywhere. I don't think 11K damage would be possible even then. I doubt that combo works out to +550% damage does it?

If the chance to hit is 30% then you need to "roll" a 30 or less on 1-100 random roll. That's why the 16.36 hit and the 80.89 missed. This is only counter-intuitive if you were expecting something more like a d20 RPG system where lower rolls miss and higher rolls hit. But really this is an arbitrary choice.

Well we started kill-through anyway... that always gives way to speed by about the second "kill so-and-so, his men" mission. It'd be a hell of a long slog otherwise, so I'm cool with that. Some good herding in the first few missions. Always happy to give Ground Zero's 30 target cap a workout. 🤪

There are multiple statements that don't track with game mechanics in that OP. I'd say that casts enough doubt on the whole account. That said, it is theoretically possible to get two hits in a row at 5%. Streakbreaker does only break miss streaks, not hit streaks. But this should be an exceedingly rare occurrence. People like to complain about the RNG, but it's not like pseudo-random generators are rocket science. They work well enough even if they are not "truly" random. Psychology makes us notice odd occurrences like this over the vast majority of the time it appears to be behaving perfectly randomly.

It still doesn't seem a great combo because it has no heal to help put back what gets through your RES during the crash and then it also has no endurance tools outside of the very occasional One With the Shield. That would be an issue with any secondary that doesn't help endurance, but SS also hits you for a 25% endurance crash (every minute if you are double-stacking Rage). You'll probably need to pull out all the stops for endurance recovery via IOs, Pool, and maybe Incarnates. Perhaps less so if you only aim for Perma-Rage.

Probably, but not what they asked. Then again there's no real answer to the question they DID ask. They want an AT that can handle aggro better than a tanker and there really isn't one. But even if asked a bit differently, what other AT can control more enemies than a Tanker? Controllers obviously. But they don't survive as well in as many diverse situations. MMs can have more aggro than a single AT thanks to their pets but they have no means of holding that aggro when just about anyone on the team can outdamage one of their pets. Real answer? Play smarter. If I had a nickel for every time a PuG I was on just barreled past my Tanker when I stop short of a dangerous room... I'd have a lot of nickels. I mean, I can even be well ahead of the team and I'll stop short and try to pull a group out of the room ahead to avoid double (or sometimes triple) spawn aggro... and the DPS squirrels will just shoot past me and immolate themselves amid a group of about 30-40 enemies. You'd think some would notice that the Tanker who had previously been cannonballing into every spawn with apparent reckless abandon suddenly stopped short and tossed out a Taunt... but few do.

(0) Yes, Evasion is where they jammed a Taunt aura into Super Reflexes when they ported it to Brutes/Tankers since it didn't already have one. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but they had to put it somewhere. (1) Nope. Both Evasion and Gauntlet Proc Aura are tagged as AutoHit for Foe(Alive). You'll see that in the list of attributes on the left in CoD near the bottom. Not sure what you're seeing in the combat log, but if something is missing to reset StreakBreaker, it should also be printing in the log, I'd think.

Bossman... you slot FM for "kill fasterer" and it achieves the same effect. Permanent KD. Only need to do it once. 🤪

If definitely has nothing for KB. Just absorb, regen, and recovery. I would guess the more likely reason for getting knocked down less was... knocking THEM down more. Rad/SS puts butts on floors more often than Fire/Fire, I'd wager.

Is this maybe one of those things that got changed in the "modern" keybind profile? Can't think why else you'd lose that ability except if you started a new toon and didn't notice it defaults to modern profile now instead of classic.

Right there with you. My tanker builds are probably overkill for most normal content and it means I have not procc'd all my attacks out to the gills, but for those few moments where things go really pear-shaped on a PuG and I can pull it together? It feels great. Or just the stupid fun moments like the end of a Ice Mistral with that huge ambush of CoT. Team downs the AV, wins the Strike Force.... and then everybody but my Rad/TW tanker dies to the ambush. I just keep fighting. Slowly. Dead teammates shouting encouragement. I can't even see my toon amid the pile of behemoths. One of the team finally says, "Bro.. you can't die, can you?" And it was true. I was just barely staying ahead of the incoming damage. Also true: I couldn't defeat them either. Not the bosses anyway. Fought them to a stalemate and then we all said our goodbyes and punched out.

The "Tank HQ" SG is on all servers we visit. Ask one of the TTT leaders for an invite if you arrive early enough. Personally, I just made mini-bases on all the servers and park a level 1 SG leader to hold down the fort and invite my travelling tankers. Not that I've been around lately. Hope to make Everlasting next week tho and maybe even Reunion Saturday if I can remember it this time.