ZemX

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.

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.