ZemX

Okay, not the best choice of words. Obviously, having gotten characters to 50, I know you can't six-slot every power and inherent. I meant the 50's build is complete. All the slots that were the plan for that build are assigned and filled with with either boosted or attuned IOs. That's miles apart from the natural 20 who has all of 20 slots to assign, probably no accolades yet, and usually not using IOs with set bonuses yet outside of a few one-slot-wonder procs.

You didn't actually run the task force at level 8 though, did you? Should have been exemplared to 15. edit: Nevermind... some reason I thought Rule of Three was a signature task force.

Fair, but I just hopped in game and asked Synapse to help me win an internet argument. He agreed and promptly exemp'd me to 20. Here's a couple quick snaps: Global 1.3x accuracy bonus. 45% acc in my big hitter here. Is that ED-cap damage? No, of course not. Does this make any real difference at level 20? Not that I've ever been able to tell. Again, maybe this is a much bigger deal on a Blaster. I don't know. I don't play Blasters. But this situation above looks pretty damned good and it's definitely not what I remember from being actually level 20 with this same tank. I haven't posted every stat here but I'll just say Resistances on this mostly-resist-based tank look pretty damned good too. From a purely enhancement scaling perspective, for example, I am losing all of 6% smashing lethal defense in the pic below compared to what it looks like at 50 with ED-capped RES enhancement in the toggles. And this is more than made up for by the set bonuses. No SO-slotted 20 rad tank is looking this good for resistances: I'm not sure why your experience is so different but your statement about being more effective at real 20? Not just no. Hell no. Not for this character anyway. Maybe this looks markedly worse at 15. But it's a clear win for the exemplar at 50 here going down to 20. It's not even close. Maybe per punch this is doing less damage, fractionally, but its getting in more punches, managing endurance better, and is WAY sturdier. Again, it's not even close. Could be you have a different build strategy at 50 and not nearly as many purple set bonuses as I am showing here. That's definitely making a big difference. But this matches what the OP is saying about having 50s roll in and own the place on low level teams. And this is why. The benefits can easily outweigh the "teeth filing" you are talking about.

Yeah, I pointed that out. You can easily max one aspect. Maybe two in one power. But at 20 you've got 12 powers and 20 slots to assign to each beyond the default one. So that's not a lot of fully slotted powers. The 50 has all powers fully slotted at least, which means yes, those strengths all get dialed back to 55% but you have more aspects e.g. acc/dmg/end/recharge in each power than any natural 20 has. AND you do have any purple, PvP, winter, and ATO set bonuses. You have all the procs. Maybe it's different for other ATs, but my experience exemplaring down my 50 tanker to even as far as 20 is that it still feels stronger than any natural 20. I can see it being a bigger deal on a Blaster that was enjoying soft-capped defense at 50 losing all that going down to 20 and having their attacks no longer even enhanced to ED cap on damage. But I would still wonder if all the other benefits outweigh that vs. a natural 20 blaster who is just as fragile but is probably struggling more with endurance or slower recharge on powers than the exemplar.

I think that still works out in favor of the Exemplar. You might have your individual enhancement strengths scaled to 55% or so going 50 down to 20, but you probably have more than double the number of enhancement slots in the powers you have access to. Speaking of which you have access to two more powers than everybody else (your 22 and 24 power picks) as Exemplars get to use powers up to five levels above the team lead. Granted, there will be single aspects where the natural 20 may be beating the Exemplar. e.g. You have an attack with three damage SOs and I have a full set of Mako's Bite or something like that. You've got much better damage enhancement. But I have better everything else probably. And while few sets are active down to a minimum level of 20, there's still purples, winters, ATOs, and PvP sets that are. Those set bonuses don't get scaled down and they are active whether they are in a power you have access to at 20 or not. And the aforementioned number of slots probably also means you generally have more of those sweet one-slot-wonder procs scattered about. Performance shifters and Numinas and Luck of the Gamblers and the like. You probably also have all the accolade stat boosters, which few at 20 would have done yet. The above is not a math proof, but it matches my anecdotal experience exemplaring tankers anyway. Always feel WAY more powerful and sturdy than I did at real 20. I can definitely see why the OP might not want such an overachiever on their team all the time.

Want to hear something more weird? I mostly exemp down from 50 to run on lower levels teams... for the same reason. Level 50 steam-roller teams are boring AF. Good for money. But hardly what I call playing. There isn't really tanking or controlling or debuffing or any other role on an Incarnate 50 team except damage. Not doing normal content anyway. It's just rolling explosions following by corpses. So as one of these fully tricked-out 50s ruining your fun.... absolutely put a max limit on your team if you want to. And I won't bother you. And I'm not offended. You have your fun. I have mine. For what it's worth, I try not to exemp down quite as low as 20 unless it's a TF at that level. 25 is decent. 30 is the sweet spot.

I've somehow yet to play any GoW game, so... thanks for that warning. 😉

If someone is annoyed by your unsolicited advice... then it's back seating. It's just as annoying when some games do this to you too. I was recently playing Horizon: Forbidden West because it had finally come out on PC and the protagonist, Aloy, does this ALL THE FREAKIN TIME! She "talks to herself" but really is prodding the player with unsolicited advice without almost any delay allowing the player time to figure things out on their own. Like, "Oh, I think I can move that crate over there!" or "Maybe if I scan this area I can figure out what to do!" Gahh! Give me five freakin' seconds to look around, will ya?! There is literally a mod on Nexus called "Shut up Aloy!" to help prevent this because the game developers didn't think to put in a game setting to tone this stuff down. I'm not saying this is exactly what you're doing, but it's one example of how this kind of thing gets under people's skin, even if they're just trying to be helpful. A lot of the enjoyment playing a game is doing things your way and in your own time, which might not suit someone else who is watching. It might be as simple as slowing your roll. Like that example from HFW above, it would never have been that annoying if the game would let even 30 seconds pass before prompting the player with hints on how to proceed.

I assume the same meaning as "back seat driver". Someone who isn't playing the game, but is criticizing the way YOU are playing it while you're playing it.

This is just a topic that sometimes attracts trolls is all. To be fair, some people really did believe back in the day that you had to have tanks and healers on teams. You'd see them broadcasting all the time "LF emp!" or "LF tank!" Meanwhile teams of buffers, debuffers, and controllers were wrecking everything. The only thing IOs changed was to make people less dependent on teammates. In other words, they don't enable things you couldn't do before. They enable us to do it with less. So yeah, your Brute can solo an AV. But your Brute could tank an AV back in the day with a little help from teammates too. And it didn't have to be a healer specifically. Buff/debuff Defenders/Corrupters were often more powerful and better at mitigating damage because again, they did what you do today with IOs. They boosted DEF/RES/Recharge/DMG etc. And everybody could contribute damage, so there was no need for specialists in that role either. But really I'm just restating the OP at this point. It's a good read and says it better than I am here probably.

I think it's basically the same reason that global +recharge doesn't affect proc rates either: Proc rates don't take global strength modifiers into account. Only base+enhancement values. So Alpha slot recharge enhancement affects proc rates. LotG:+rech does not. And in the same way, since Tanker Gauntlet is a global strength modifier, it's just not considered in the calculation. As a result, Tanker PBAoEs that are 15ft radius and excluded from Gauntlet, like Foot Stomp, have slightly worse proc rates than 10ft radius PBAoEs that are expanded to 15ft by Gauntlet, such as Ice Melee's Frozen Aura or Staff Fighting's Eye of the Storm. Note, this applies the same way to Gauntlet's arc improvement as well. Normally, proc rates are negatively affected the wider a cone is. But just like radius, Gauntlet's global arc strength improvement doesn't impact proc rates.

Depends on the necro. The most hilariously absurd necros are the ones where someone swoops in five years later and directly responds to one of the posts in the thread, as if anyone is still waiting around for that response. Extra funny if it's an angry response which like, "Oooo.. you showed him Mr. Five Years Later! You win that argument... finally!" If, on the other hand you necro a thread and preface your "5 years later" post with a "Hey, I found this old thread but it didn't quite answer my question, which is..." then that is useful. it gives people all the previous context as well as your new question. Or, you could start a new thread and just link to the old one. The latter is probably much safer from the knee-jerk necro-hunters out there.

I'm just gonna call it Frost Stomp from now on! 🥶

Honestly, the CoD page on this guy doesn't look that impressive. Is this not him? https://cod.uberguy.net/html/entity.html?entity=genericvillains_mr_g Whirling Sword is the PBAoE. 8ft radius. Yeah, it's a decent chunk of damage but it's neither autohit nor unresistible. How is this guy one-shotting you through a stack of insps before you can even exit the elevator? Or is CoD missing the correct info on this guy? Don't know when last I ran this and probably didn't betray him when I did, so I can't say I remember.

More @Spaghetti Betty I would say. My advice is geared to general content and I think HM+ upends that almost completely and puts the primary focus on damage dealing, assuming survival will be more of a group buff / coordinated-Incarnates effort than traditional self-reliant tank toughness.

By itself, it's not that big a deal, but I think people also use it in a rotation with other boosts like Hybrid Melee incarnate power and Rune of Protection to give more complete coverage with boosted resistances. Unless you're building for Hard Mode with that, I think it's largely unnecessary. If you have nothing else to do with a power slot late in the build, it's not a bad thing to have as a panic button and/or single slot to mule some useful one-slot-wonder IO like Gladiator's Armor or Steadfast Protection.

Defense on Rad Armor isn't conventional. It's a house of cards. If you built for resistance, heal/absorb, recharge, and slow resistance, then you've done Rad Armor "conventionally", in my book. And it doesn't need help from a Radial Lore pet.

This is my point though. If you run with the team to the next door, then tp to base and train, when you leave you will be back right next to the mission door. It's a lot faster than running to the zone trainer, which might be in completely the opposite direction as the next mission door.

Speaking of running all over the place, I'm always a little surprised how few people use a base teleporter to train instead of hoofing it all the way to the zone's trainer and back when on a mission/radio team.

This is bait.

I mostly play my 50s and I'd hate it. Mid level TFs right now are the best because nobody is walking around with all their Incarnate powers obliterating every spawn with a sideways glance like any other level 50 team does. Bleh. Scaling down from 50 still ends up leaving the Exemplar at a sizeable advantage just for having powers up to five levels over the TF max, all their slots, and potentially all or most of their IO set bonuses vs. someone who is within the level range of the TF naturally.

(1) To ALLOW characters as low as 15 to join a higher level team running this. If you think about it for a sec, there has to be some range or it would be virtually impossible to form a team (at least without resorting to everyone being much higher level, exemping down) if everyone had to be exactly 20. True, they could have made signature task forces spawn at the same level as the team lead like non-signature TFs but this thing was decided way back on Live. It's not a HC invention. (2) Originally, most TFs had a minimum team size. Tarikoss needed 4 to start. Since things became so ridiculously overpowered and it became much more commonly possible to solo task forces, this restriction was lifted. That's why you can start then solo now. Combine (1) and (2) and yeah, you can get in trouble. It's been said before but this is a 20 year old game. There are not all the same guard rails and hand-holds you might expect of a more modern game. Just the way it is.

This went off the rails in the OP when they tried to claim originalism: (paraphrasing)"This game was balanced around SOs". Anyone who wants to go THERE needs to reckon with how the game also wasn't balanced around every AT, much less Blasters specifically, being able to solo as easily as every other. This is only possible today for many of these historically bad soloist ATs because of Inventions and Incarnates and if you're not doing that with your Blaster then welcome to the early aughts, a time when the floors of Paragon City were kept spotlessly clean by dragging Blasters over them repeatedly.

Caveat: Many of those cone AoEs it has are limited to 5 targets, which is unusual for a Tanker. Tankers normally get 10-target cones and 16-target TAoE/PBAoE type attacks. TW also has the Momentum mechanic, which can be very annoying to some. It was to me. Rather than being a state you maintain, as the name suggests, Momentum is gained for a fixed period of time and then it is lost and has to be reapplied, leading to a rollercoaster fast, fast, fast, slow, fast, fast ,fast... etc.... flow that doesn't say "Momentum" to anyone who has access to a dictionary, at least. It also seems to penalize you using anything BUT a TW attack while Momentum is up since it's just on a timer. Battle Axe is now a lot more fun since its updates. Axe Cyclone and then Pendulum is a perfect one-two AoE punch.