ZemX

Setting aside WHO created the thread, it is about tanking on a team and it presents the usual tired notions about purely defensive tankers which are in need of debunking, not for the benefit of the person who just rolled into the tanker forum and thought they'd tell us definitively how tankers work, but for anyone else who might be reading and is not yet familiar with how tankers actually work. I mention the thread topic because that's what my comments are about: team tanking. Someone with a different goal like farming or soloing, will have different build priorities. As most of us know, you can build a terrifically nigh-indestructible team tanker without skimping tremendously on offense as the OP suggests. As others have pointed out too, you can also trade some of that toughness for offense and still have "good enough" survivability for most tasks.

Sure, 1-10, not much makes a huge difference and if you blink you'll miss it anyway these days, but I still TAKE those toggles when they are available because I want them there and at least 3-slotted for resistance by around 15ish (since I try not to run the first TFs/SFs until I hit their max level to ensure I am not being sidekicked). If I want them and slotted by then, yeah, I need to start picking them up before 10. It's usually a couple toggles, a mez protect, and a taunt aura I want if I am going to join a TF team, even a Posi TF, as a Tanker. Then somewhere between 15 and about 30, I'll add another slot or three depending what sort of IO sets I am shooting for. I hardly think 50% resistance is something to sneeze at if I am tanking on a team, even at that level. Soloing some damage-focused Tanker is a whole other ball of wax, sure. But I don't think that's what this thread is about. We recently ran Frostfire on TTT with our Dark/Stone newbies and I was plenty happy to have my resistance toggles there. It was still dicey even then. But it's a weird arc given it's typically started at a high diff level to account for all the leveling you'll do just in each mission. But the main thing is that on a team, you can't turn off punch-voke. You're getting a lot of, if not all of the aggro, for a team and at a relatively low level. 50% resistance is no soft-capped defense, but it's something and adding an orange or two when needed pushes that into respectable territory as well.

You are sooo close to the truth right here.

Not entirely pointless. You might not get the OP to change their mind, but other people reading who aren't yet very familiar with Tankers could be confused by this nonsense. It is very common nonsense actually. I've seen a tanker or two in game that never attacks. Look at their power sheet secondary powers and you see just the Tier 1 they had to take and maybe Taunt. And we've probably all seen "pure" Defenders that only heal/buff/debuff. Same "pre-school" of thought, really. Funny about saying they took Taunt as their "first attack". I really like Taunt and never skip it but I do usually delay it into the middle of my build at least. Definitely don't take it at 10. Too much other stuff I want to fit in early and there's just no burning need for it when taunt aura and punch-voke do most of the taunting anyway. Nem Staff and Blackwand are my Dollar-Store ranged Taunt powers when I am leveling a newbie Tanker. No range debuff and they can miss, but they get the job done of pulling aggro off the Blaster. Get a Kismet and the DFB accuracy buff in those early levels and it hits pretty reliably as long as you aren't inadvisably trying to punch well above your weight.

No single AT is "needed". But no other AT has as much ability to tank as a Tanker. Tanking is getting and keeping aggro on team and THEN surviving it. When most people say their ____ other AT can tank, they mean they have soft-capped defense or something that will 19 times out of 20 keep them alive after an alpha strike. Tankers do better than that against more and different types of enemies. Do you need that? No, but you don't need anything else either. Certainly not at 50 with IOs and Incarnates. Toss together any mix of eight incarnates, set it to +4... and snooze your way through it. Long as it's not a hard mode, anyway. ETA: Just to be clear, this has been the case for ordinary content forever, not just post 50, Incarnates, yadda yadda. It's just MORE face-roll easy with all that now than before. But you can read back on threads about the "holy trinity" and how it's not needed in this game. That goes back to day 1. Tanking is just one way to protect a team. Buffs/Debuffs/Control are others. Good ole' kille'em before they kill you works too.

It's good to know but... meh. I feel about this the same way I feel about how I slot an Avalanche KB proc in Rad Armor's Ground Zero instead of another %dmg proc. Yeah, I could be doing more damage. But I'd be doing LESS awesome! Shield Charge for 0 distance? Who charges.. nowhere? Not me, sir!

I didn't say you had to be cool with it. I was just explaining how it appears to work based on what's in CoD. As usual, it's the resist tankers that get hosed most by this. This is just one attack out of several that only SOME of the enemy units have. It has only a 5% chance to FREEM. Put that on top of soft-cap DDR-backed defense and I don't see how any defense tank gets knocked down more than on the rare occasion an enemy rolls a pair of 20s.

Thanks for testing! I was afraid that was probably the answer.

Anything over about 1.6 or so on a single stack is the new crit (a.k.a. FREEM). Those are on the order of 5% chance of +14 to +20 mag KB. It varies by the power. They are not all the same. And it will vary a little more by purple patch levels above you if that's the case.

These effects all say they stack so it might just be you have a few stacks of lower mag KBs that just got applied and then the FREEM comes along and exceeds your protection combined with the others.

Correct. Should be 12ft radius for Tankers. Edit: One thing about this I've wondered, but not ever tested.. is how this interacts with Shield Charge. Basically, if you Shield Charge into a group of ten enemies and they are all in range of AAO at the destination, does that Shield Charge get its damage boosted or does the +dmg buff get applied only AFTER the Shield Charge has already done its damage? My guess is the latter. Per CoD, the shield charge pseudopet is created at the target immediately, then has a half second before its effect takes place. But the Teleport from Shield Charge isn't activated until 0.7s. So it seems the damage might occur just a hair before or right as you are arriving at the destination. All of which would mean that if you want to do the most damage with Shield Charge, you should get yourself into the crowd first and then Shield Charge right at your own feet. But what fun is that? 🤪

This is nothing compared to the earlier change to Singularities. Only SOME powersets have Repel protection. Those without can enjoy being bounced around like a beach ball by 2-3 boss-level Singularities on EVERY spawn when going up against Family. I would rather be knocked down a dozen times on a Citadel than endure THAT.

Sorry I missed it. More than usual work this week. But it doesn't surprise me with herds that size, especially if you are DOING the herding. At any given time you could have 17 mobs gunning for you with little defense to deflect. More than enough 5% dice rolls to KB you that often. And you'd need 19pts protection against the Rocketeers when they FREEM if they are +3 to you. So that's gonna knock most anybody... but obviously the defense-based tanks will see it less or not at all because the rocketeer has probably 5-10% chance to hit and THEN a 5% chance to crit. Curse of resist/regen tanks is everything hits you.

This was my guess as well. OP, if you were in an outdoor zone you got to by boarding the train, it was probably an instanced zone. That means you are the only one in it along with enemies and objectives. Often past this point you are not given waypoints on the map. Depends on the mission. But quite often you are meant to search for the objectives whether they are people to rescue, objects to click on, or specific enemies to defeat. If it's a large outdoor zone and you would rather not hunt at street level, buy a jetpack from a START vendor (if you don't have a fly power already) and search the map from the air for your targets. If you're lucky, your targets will all have some generic name like "hostage" or "citizen" or something to do with the mission. If that's the case, you can make a macro button to help you search. type... /macro FIND targetcustomnext hostage Or replace "hostage" with some name or part of a name you find on one of these mission objective people. This puts a button called FIND on your power bar which you can press and it will automatically target someone with that name if they are in your field of view and not too far away. You can fly around banging away at this button and it might help locate objectives. But it does rely on you knowing what they are called. Helps to find one. But if the mission, e.g. says "Find five scientists" then you can usually just use the word "scientist" in that macro and it will find them. If you're unlucky, they will all have been given individual names, and this won't work. But it's worth a try especially on the big maps. Indoor maps are usually a lot less trouble to search through, but even those can sometimes have little rooms that are easy to overlook when you're searching. Worst comes to worst, you can try asking in /lfg channel for help searching and invite more people.

If the Grav Pull actually worked as advertised, I wouldn't have a big problem with it. But instead of just pulling you in, it seems to bounce you around like a beach ball, off the walls, off the ceiling, everywhere. I am thankfully not susceptible to motion sickeness in video games or I'd have to quit any team that went up against these Family bosses if I was playing on a melee toon that didn't have Repel protection. It's even worse when there are multiple bosses. And it's EVERY freakin' spawn. Even without it making me physically ill, I have often considered excusing myself from teams after a few spawns of 2-3 Singularities have played volleyball with me and I've run through all my break-frees. Easily the worst change the HC team has made, in my opinion.

Have you looked at Force of Will pool? Seems practically tailor made for Jedi/Sith toons. You don't get Acrobatics, but you can work around that with KB prot from IOs. Losing CJ would hurt me though. I'd rather give up Leadership, myself. But it's something to look at. Force Push is just so iconic. Almost a shame these powers are knockdown instead of back. More useful that way of course... but less thematic in this particular case.

Yeah, I don't think the database is the blocking issue either. That's probably the easiest part. It's all the places in the spaghetti code of server and client that pass names around and how those names are handled by the UI that's the problem. To really do this feature right, you also want nice things like auto-complete to allow you to select the "right" Super Dude when you type in that name and find out there are ten Super Dude's online right now. It'd also be nice if the game could display the global in a muted color or not at all by player preference (maybe mouse-over or something like that). Or only display the fully qualified name in global chats or in teams where there's more than one person using the base name. The fact the team that invented this game waited until their NEXT game to implement this feature tells me most of what I need to know. The reasons for that were likely both due to technical challenges AND not dealing with the social blowback of changing an existing system which could be popular with some and not with others.

It's there on the bottom left: "Entities Autohit: Foe (Alive)". What I'd love is if everybody took Nemesis Staff from the S.T.A.R.T. vendor and then used it on these jerks. I do this when I am tanking to try to punt them away from the team. Even if it doesn't completely prevent their rez, it often results in them hitting fewer teammates and thus doing less damage and earning the Stunner fewer hit points on the rez so you don't have to completely kill them twice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crow_(1994_film) My guess is that after generic'ing a few Crow look-a-likes back in th day, the name probably got put in the name filter. Then when they later made the Praetorian NPC they figured it was safe since they were creating an original character with a different look. Not sure why it would be blocked on a pet, unless the game just uses the same name filter for character creation/naming as for pets.

Then it was probably because of this guy. Which makes it odd they later went ahead and made an NPC with the same name. But it was probably done by different people at different times.

There are exceptions on a power-by-power basis, but Super Strength is an example of a powerset that gets no area size improvements on a Tanker. That's because Foot Stomp is already a 15ft radius for everyone. Other Tanker PBAoEs are either 8ft or 10ft radius and they get a +50% bonus on Tankers. Foot Stomp stays 15ft. Hand Clap also is 15ft radius, so it is excluded as well. That said, both powers get the Tanker higher target cap benefit of 16 for PBAoEs. So they still get some benefit from Tanker inherent. Titan Weapons has three cones and one PBAoE. Only the PBAoE gets expanded (from 10ft to 15ft radius). The cones are all already 120 degrees and excluded from getting any bigger. Shadow Maul in Dark Melee is a little weird in this respect in that it DOES go from 120 degrees to 180 degrees on a Tanker.

They might just have dumped all the NPC names into the block list. Crow is a mission contact in the Praetorian Underground.

So you're saying this is the mistake we're all making in Posi 1 by telling people NOT to go near the City Hall steps? 🤪

12 doesn't buy you anything vs. the new critical KB feature the Council have. You would need 16. I don't even bother with that on my Rad Tankers that have 10 built-in. And I'm not getting tossed around that much even despite having little to no defense. Critical KB is only a 5% chance on certain powers. It'll happen if you're tanking a whole spawn, but it's not going to be "beach ball" action by any stretch of the imagination. At least that has not been my experience with it on Rad.

I don't know if you want to change anything. What they did is give certain Council a "critical" KB chance. Doesn't seem to happen that often but when it does, it seemed to be accompanied by a "FREEM!" message and it was enough to knock back my Rad tankers with their built-in KB protection. For example, per COD, the Council's rocket folks have a Rocket Launch ability that normally does Mag 1.2 KB. But it has a 5% chance of mag +14 KB. There is no point trying to build for that on a toon with no KB protection.