ZemX

Clearly the answer is.... FOUR MORE TANKERS! Get crackin! 🤪

Shield Benefits more directly from Martial Arts' Storm Kick +def. It has the Defense Debuff Resistance to protect that extra defense too. You could try to bulk up DEF from nothing with Rad Armor but I've not found it very reliable and hence don't bother with it myself. That's not to say MA can't go with RadA. RadA does add a couple procc-able AOEs that could certainly help make up for MA's lack there. I have a Rad/Katana and a Rad/Staff Tanker and neither really benefits much from those sets' +def attacks either. Still works. Fiery Melee is going to go well with either. You'll have ridiculous AoE with Rad/Fire but Shield/Fire can be nice too and there's a good selection of shield customizations that can look pretty good next to a fire sword.

I hate to break it to you, but not only did you fail to explain how I wasn't being called an idiot, you pretty much doubled down with another personal attack. Don't think so? Read what you wrote. Is the subject of this sentence game mechanics? Oops! No, it isn't! It's people. You're making a judgement about people here, not about mechanics. You were saying, to paraphrase, "I'm not saying you're an idiot. The rest of us are just willing admit the set is weak." So... we also know it's weak but we're just not willing to admit it like you are? That's the problem? Get it now? If that wasn't what you intended to mean, I am sorry to say that is in fact what you wrote. And ParagonKid is saying much the same thing by implying the popularity of SS can be chalked up largely to people being misled. Saying someone is being misled, while attempting to blame someone else for doing the misleading, is still insulting the person being misled. They can't think for themselves the way you can. They are just mindlessly following. I mean, it's not like I'm gravely insulted or anything, but when someone levels a personal attack during an argument, I like to point it out because it usually is the sign of a weak argument. If you had a really solid argument to counter points about how well SS seems to perform in testing and how popular it is to boot with a VERY large portion of the playerbase, you'd probably have gone with that instead. Didn't say it was. I said it was the combination of all metrics players care about. Why do you think powers are balanced? I mean, what's the reason it's done? It might make some kind of logical sense that powers should be more or less equivalent in effectiveness... but why? What's the actual reason we do it? The powers themselves don't care, right? So who is it for? Oh.. right... us! Presumably, we balance powers so that when a players looks at their available choices, they will see all the choices before them as potentially viable choices. Right? And performance isn't the only reason people pick powers. There can be other factors. But performance is a BIG reason. I'd say it's the top reason most of the time. But yeah, you might pick out a power here or there that's flown under the radar. It happens. Lots of people sleep on Focused Accuracy's -toHit debuff protection, for example. But in any case, popularity is WHY powers are balanced. Which by the way is me walking back something I said earlier just a bit. I said all powersets having roughly the same performance was the ideal. It isn't now I've given it a bit more thought. They should be balanced by popularity. If they are all equally popular with the players then THAT is the ideal. What else should be? It also neatly answers ParagonKid's point about Staff Stances balancing the set's poor damage output. I disagree but the proof is in the popularity pudding. Do ALL players on average agree with me or with Kid there about how much value Stances provide? It's not something we can easily quantify with some quick forum theorycrafting. It involves peoples' value judgements. Popularity is the sum of all players' value judgements. It's actually a pretty good metric.

LOL, so now I'm just not "willing to acknowledge" that you're right? Give it a rest okay? This is not the non-insult you may have thought it was. Here's a wild notion: I just don't agree that you're right. Weird huh? What am I thinking? I see SS performing among the top tier sets in Ston's Trapdoor trial AND I see its massive popularity among the playerbase and I think these are related but nooooo... you guys who see the truth know that this is all just "misinformation" or "unwillingness to acknowledge the mechanical weaknesses" or maybe roleplaying or something. Anything but the simple explanation, I guess, right? Come on now. Do you see how ridiculous this is? For the record, I am NOT saying SS is literally the min-max best thing out there. And it doesn't have to be. Someone might drill into all this and see that another set does x% better by some metric and has no crash to deal with and therefore... well therefore what? It's not like we've got all the melee powersets exactly balanced now do we? There's quite a range of performance because frankly the original Live devs made a hash of the balance formulas not understanding the impacts of things like animation times and damage types. Then they compounded the problem with IOs and Incarnates and oh my! Balance is now practically an impossible task. So by what metric should we balance? Many may scoff at this notion, but I think popularity is the best metric we have. Nothing else takes everything I just mentioned into account but... well... everybody. Any of us can come up with some forum theorycraft to justify our opinion that X powerset needs Y buff/nerf but we're all just picking cherries aren't we? If you look at the playerbase as a whole you are looking at the collective assessment of all powersets by all metrics players care about all smushed into one number... the number of people playing that powerset. When nobody is playing Super Strength anymore... let's give it a look. Until then, there are far more neglected sets in need of love. SS is really in a fine place. Not because I say so, but because MOST of us say so.

Unless I am on a fast moving team, my thinking on AS from Hide is essentially, "What's my hurry?" Far as I am concerned, AS from Hide isn't slow. It's instant. What time matters to me but in-combat time? If enemies aren't attacking me, the clock essentially hasn't started yet. It starts the instant that AS lands. Someone else who is measuring themselves by how quickly they clear a whole map may have a different view, but this is how I look at it. If I am either solo or far enough ahead of my team that I have time to set up and fire off AS from Hide? Yes, I'll do it.

Except it doesn't always. I quite like several of the local brews in my area which I've drunk far more of than I've ever had Bud Light.

Says the person who claims a "simple solution" is just to remove the penalty. Did you even play that suggestion forward? Because I did. Removing Rage's crash increases SS's overall damage bonus from an average +133% over time to +160% ALL the time. What does that do to the set already at the top of the Brute chart for Trapdoor that you yourself just posted? Oh yeah... it sends it even farther up. Now it's got no penalty AND it's above all other sets in performance. Which of us doesn't understand balance again? You know what? Don't even bother answering that. You just told me you think everyone playing SS right now is an idiot, which means I am wasting my time even bothering talking to you.

That water is cheaper and will give him precisely the same buzz?

It's not a problem, period. Sets performing at or near the same level is not a problem. It's the ideal. Ideally all sets, not just these few, would perform at or near this same level. Rage crash doesn't mean SS should be allowed to perform ABOVE other sets. The crash is there to counterbalance the benefit because the benefit is HUGE. If you simply cut out the crash without changing anything else, SS's overall damage output would go up. It would go up the charts it's already at or near the top of. I don't know in what universe you'd call that "balancing" but I'm glad it's not this one. As I said earlier in the thread, really nothing about SS can be improved if Rage is not nerfed at the same time. Otherwise a set that is already top-tier gets even better. I'm sure fans of SS don't have a problem with that but all the other powersets, including some finishing a full minute or more behind in Trapdoor might like to have a word. Speaking of which.... ... "wallow"? Seriously? I got a good chuckle out of that. Can my Staff Fighter please "wallow" at the top of the Trapdoor clear speed charts with SS? Pretty please? 🤪

I actually worked with a guy from Newcastle many years back and upon finding out where he was from I said to him, "Hey! I like Newcastle Brown Ale!" and he said, "Are you kidding? Only the college kids drink that crap!" Am I just that uncultured?

How can you be sure that was the same team? You just described about 85% of all PuGs right there. 🤪

It was (and still is) definitely the case that XP is split by damage dealt among NON-teamed characters. Whether it was that way literally on day 1 or throughout beta, I can't say I recall. It would make sense though that if they HAD started with an even split among all characters who had damaged a mob, it would lead to the exploit you describe and then be solved by implementing a damage-based split. This would also have mattered more back in the early days when it wasn't uncommon to earn XP via street sweeping rather than in teamed-instanced missions.

Better than wearing a shirt that says "Stalker" on it, probably.

But I visited S.T.A.R.T. and my arms are still the same size!

Yellow insps are not Accuracy. They are +ToHit. This is the fault of text descriptions. They sometimes say a power (or in this case an inspiration) increases "ACC" but in fact it is +toHit. Still you may be right and it has no appreciable effect. It depends on just how many toHit debuffs you have stacked on you. It won't make any difference if you have so many toHit debuffs on you that even adding +37.5% doesn't bring you above the 5% floor. You'll still be stuck at (Acc x 5%) in that case.

It might sort of look like a double-jump if you are hitting the jump key again just as it's doing the flip animation, but it's not really leaping again off the air. And it's considerably slower than Superspeed or Super Jump for travel speed. Though many people consider it "good enough" for getting around in exchange for not having to spend a power slot on a "real" travel power.

More redirect it, I think. AE farming is there for people who want easy farming and sitting their way to 50. Out in the game world, it's a good thing if you don't have pushover enemies like old Council that become everyone's punching bag because that causes teams to be more boring and repetitive. Newbies joining those teams might be more quickly turned off if it's just an endless stream of Council punching-bags. If this means less "Council PI Radios" teams then it's a success. Doesn't mean PI Radios won't still be used as a leveling platform but if it means more people are just running whatever the police scanner hands them instead of reloading, reloading, reloading to get more easy Council to bash... so much the better.

I didn't need a CoT update for that. Old CoT would easily turn my tank into not much more than a Taunt bot. Or Tsoo Sorcerers. Or Cabal Storm Witches. Or BP Storm Shamans. Or Master Illusionists's Fluffy Pets. Or.... It's still a choice. If you want to be as self-sufficient as the OP seems to, then you take it. If you can rely on teammates to overcome enemies you are particularly vulnerable to, then that works too.

Hey maybe I'll run into you as well! Ex-Virtue player here so I hang out mostly on Everlasting now. Lately I've been working on incarnat'ing (that's a verb right?) my current Tanker project, a Rad/Kat named Crimson Kerfuffle. So I join any team for the threads. I mean for the people! Yeah... people. It's about the friends we make along the way! *counts threads*

You know, it's somehow never occurred to me to wonder why the Stalker icon looks like a targeting crosshair. NONE OF US HAVE GUNS!!

You're hired! Go stand by that door!

I think it's worse than overly cautious. If there's one thing I've learned PuGing Posi 1 it's that the odds at least one person isn't going to read your instructions are at least 50/50 if not worse. They're in "SMASH OBJECTIVE MARKER!" mode and no map icon is safe from their wrath. Not the fallen heroes. And not the door once the heroes have been saved. Saving the heroes and then rushing the door might be the safest plan, really, because both the people who are listening and the people who aren't are at least all doing the same thing so... teamwork! Even if you draw some stray aggro, the key is just getting most of the team to body block that doorway and grind up the ambushers as they pour out of it.

There isn't any one best-at-everything tank. Defense is generally thought to be toughest though you also want to add resist to it to prevent quick spike deaths. Shieled, Invuln, and SR tend to get listed most often as "toughest" to crack Tanks than I've seen. But those won't necessarily be the most damaging tanks. If "making AVs cry" means hurting them than you need more offense than a Tank built for survival typically has. Then you might want to steer more towards something like Rad/SS or Bio/Fire or Fire/Anything. Endgame is a whole other ball of wax if you mean Hard Mode TFs. There you really need a good team around you and you might be in a situation where a resist or resist/heal tank does better than a pure defense tank. All that said, you're absolutely not going to have any trouble with Inv/Energy and you will have plenty of "It's entirely possible I can't die!" feeling about it while also being able to lay the smack down with satisfying crunch.

I am embarrassed to say I only found out about this last week when a squishy on my PuG team kept using it to teleport right next to my Tanker from somewhere else entirely on the map (split group situation). Unfortunately for him, the area immediately around my tanker is usually... exploding? Yeah, it didn't always work out for him. But I was impressed with it nonetheless. I mean I'm sure I've seen people mention this bit about how you can teleport to a target without needing to be in line-of-sight but it hadn't ever clicked with me how useful that is in an indoor mission map. Especially a very confusing annoying one like a blue cave or Oranbega map.

One showed up as Lady Grey once to help us try to fix a problem in LGTF. Even played it a bit in-character. 🙂