ZemX

Wierd. I swear I just looked at that in CoD, but I guess I must have only clicked on the AoEs.

Well, not the "giving back" part but I assume you are doing this with Perf Shifter procs? Can't view the build right now.

In that case, you might look at Staff Fighting. It's interesting on a Tanker. The two cone attacks are widened to 135 degrees and can hit 10 targets for a Tanker. They were already 9ft range. One of those is the +def melee/lethal attack which, for no known reason, is able to stack that defense buff, unlike MA or Katana/Broadsword. But importantly, Guarded Spin is a decent cone attack for your AoE rotation. The same can't be said of Divine Avalanche in Katana. So essentially the +def buff can be thought of as a free bonus. GS is also a great place to put one of the ATO sets, more or less guaranteeing a proc any time you use it in a group. Eye of the Storm has an annoying break-dancing animation but it's a solid 15ft radius AoE on a Tanker and can slot FF:+rech, so there's that. Animation looks better in a hover if you're into flying. But what may interest you more if you are going Dark Armor is the Staff Fighting forms. You can select one of three forms, one of which is an endurance recovery mode that is fantastic in early leveling. Another, the damage stance, ironically might boost your survival the most because it has a finisher move that gives you a whopping +13.5% buff to all resistances. And it's easy to keep that refreshed. Between that and the ATO proc stacking a couple times, you are looking at an extra ~25% res(all). That helps a lot early in leveling and even later with the resistances that DA isn't so strong at. It can also be used to give you more freedom in set bonus selection than just pursuing resistance bonuses.

That's someone who didn't check the team roster. Whenever I've run into a problem, it's usually the difficulty is set to +4 and half or more of the team is sidekicked. In other words, the enemies are +5 and +6 above the sidekicks' heads and they might as well be door sitting if they are not buffers/healers. Tends to be a self-fixing problem though as the PuG leaders who routinely ignore this find their teams quitting on them in frustration until they learn to set a more reasonable +1 or +2 until they've taken the measure of the team.

This. Same goes for Tar Patch and variants of it too. Though thankfully it seems the one they are giving CoT in the next update on Brainstorm now ISN'T the unresistable version. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Tell me about it. My Rad Armor Tanker clones always get debuffs from Radiation Emission like the unresistible version of Enervating Field. I once tried fighting 8 clones in Leonard's redside arc and they all hit me with that simultaneously. Capped resistance taken all the way into the negative. Needless to say I was shortly in LFG channel with a plea that began, "Everyone... I think I've made a terrible mistake..."

tl;dr: Don't sweat defense being the meta. Resistance, contrary to what you might have heard, is not futile. Longer... Can't say I've seen anything in the beta patch notes that is quite that momentous. High level Council ARE getting tactics, it looks like, but this doesn't make them any worse than Nemesis who start using Veng. And probably they are less annoying than that even. A defense stalker on the team I was on noted the increased pressure, but seemed to be doing okay anyway. As for Katana, I have a Rad/Katana Tanker and it's fun and stylish. There are even some proc build options that can make it something of a damage beast if you want to go that far. Rad is also not a defense set and it does fine. My favorite armor so far, in fact. If you build to its strengths, in my opinion. Dark should be no different. You can't protect defense without Defense Debuff Resistance (DDR) so building it is kind of a waste in my opinion with the caveat that it can be useful in some select instances. Certainly against anyone without defense debuffs, it's fantastic. But defense debuffs are VERY common. Other than that, it provides a base to build on defense buffs from allies if you are in a situation where you can count on that. I usually cant't. As a result, I build for everything BUT defense. I jack up what Rad is already good at: Resistance, Recharge, and Regen. Healthy dose of slow resistance from both Rad Armor and the Winter IO 2-slot bonus sprinkled around the build. This is important if you are getting hit all the time due to low, zero (and sometimes negative) defense. Debuffs can stack up on your more than on a defense tank. Dark/Katana could be pretty heavy on endurance is all. Katana can be fast and if you slot a few Force Feedback:+rech IOs in the build it can be even faster. But faster burns fuel faster too. And Dark Armor is also notoriously end heavy if you buy all its toggles. Not everyone does but it is certainly part of Dark's layered survival to have those control auras messing with the lower rank enemies Question of whether you want to bother taking Divine Avalanche with Dark Armor though. It is best taken with a positional armor set that can build on melee defense. It won't make a big difference for Dark. You can probably soft-cap melee defense but again, not worth anything vs. defense debuffers, so grain of salt.

Does this actually happen? I wouldn't know because 99% of the time I have hidden General Chat. I know I don't ever see people being dragged in LFG for sticking to their guns about a "kill most". Someone crying about being kicked after acting like a spoiled asshole on a team isn't getting any sympathy there. I'd say if someone is speeding on a declared "kill most" you warn them, then you kick them if they ignore the warning, then you add a note reminding yourself never to invite that person again to one of your teams. I'd even call that a "win".

I agree. So why can't someone who comes back to a toon after a year of not even logging them in let alone playing them... do the same? I have done exactly this both here (with names I had on Live and can't get here) and in other MMOs I've stepped away from, sometimes for even less than a year. It was not the end of the world. Maybe someone else who WAS actively playing the game even got to enjoy that name while I was gone. Maybe they still are. Can we at least agree that the level 6 line could be activated (assuming all bugs are fixed first of course)? I don't think it's too much to ask that people squatting pages of character names be arsed to get them each to level 6 at least. Does that even take more than 1 DFB these days at 2xp? It's 1 or 2 for sure. Even without DFB, it's maybe an hour of play (if that) solo with story arcs. As has been noted in the past by devs, this alone would free up almost three quarters of a million names currently in the database and a much smaller number would be freed by the 6-49 range anyway.

Check the "Hide...." drop down on the bottom right. You might have selected to show only the things you have the needed currency to buy on one of them. Same goes for other similar windows like the Enhancement Workbench or SG Base Empowerment Station. You can filter it to show only what you are able to buy or to show you everything that can be bought.

A few of them will even pull a shopping cart out of their asses when walking.

I've always found this deeply weird. Why do people hug the portals? The first thing I do after zoning in at a portal is MOVE AWAY. It feels like standing in a doorway to just stand there on top of the portal. Why do people do this? There's this whole area to spread out in! This even happens in Pocket D on Everlasting. All these purple-named roleplayers are practically kissing the SG portal instead of moving out into the club, across the dance floor, etc. Whyyyyy!

It's not gonna make a huge difference either way. Punch is slightly better and has knockdown, which means it can slot the ever-useful Force Feedback:+recharge IO so you probably eventually want Punch anyway.

You are probably citing old information from the Live servers. For a number of reasons mentioned both in this thread and previously, it is not even close to the same situation. HC allows 1000 character names per account, which is effectively unlimited when you add the fact anyone can have any number of accounts. Since opening HC, millions of names have been scooped up and a huge portion of them abandoned without really even playing them. Worth noting that some people seem not to be aware the policy was updated to 365 days inactive for any character level 6+, with 50s still being indefinitely preserved. Later in this same feedback thread, it is pointed out by Telephone that there are something like 700,000 names in the "less than 6 and inactive" grouping and "significantly less" in the 6-49 range. The idea that none of these names are "good" is wishful thinking by people who don't want this policy activated. It will free up hundreds of thousands of names. The devs wouldn't be spending their valuable and unpaid time working on this if it wasn't going to do anything at all. All this said, remember this whole thing is on pause (and has been since page 4) due to some as yet unresolved technical problems. It may yet be the case they DON'T have the time to diagnose and fix those problems and hence this never will be activated. In the meantime, it's a good idea to take a look at your own stable of characters and note the warning signs if they are displayed. They could flip the switch that activates this policy any time, though I doubt they will do so without a decent amount of notice.

Me too but it's a matter of preference. Some people like it for comic book genre stuff like this.

Are you talking about contacts you are still in the correct level range for or ones you have already exceeded the maximum level for? If the latter, you're out of luck. You can only run their missions in flashback mode in Ouroboros. If you are still within their level range, you can search them up on Homecoming's wiki. Should be mentioned there how to unlock that specific contact.

Goliath War Walker's Ground Slam will knock down anyone with less than 20 KB protection because it is also unresistable. Fair warning too, the new Council on Brainstorm seem to have a "critical" KB that was knocking back my Rad tanker. Not super often but it was happening. And that was just a PI radio. I assume it's probably a mag 20 to 100 somewhere unresistable KB.

If we're placing bets, I think it's likely that policy gets turned on at some point in the not too distant future. In hindsight, it now seems likely they turned on the warning system because they knew the license was probably going to happen at some point.

The number of available character slots was also very limited, especially for F2P accounts. I don't have a 100 level 50s like some people around here, but I have quite a few more characters on more servers than I ever did on Live.

Gauntlet applies taunt to anything you hit with an attack whether that's melee or ranged. But even so, melee range is wherever your Tanker is at the moment. You don't need to stay put in one place. That's why I mentioned lacking Taunt pretty much just means having to move around more to maintain threat. But this is probably now getting quite a bit off topic. This is well-worn ground over on the Tanker forum if you are interested in hearing more about it. Tanking a group of mobs up to the 17 target aggro limit is really no big deal in ordinary +4/x8 content. @Seed22 is of course correct that Hard Modes are a different story. They were designed to stress builds and teams that were already overpowered for normal content.

Oh, in that case no thanks anyway. All of my Tankers have Taunt and I rarely do Hard Modes. But I know the crazies in the Master ITF channel on Excel are always looking for weird challenges. Could ask them.

This is a thread about random PuG-mates running off to solo. So no, the context here is not Hard Mode TFs. Not following your goal post move.

It's not. I mean, I get it. People casually say "need" here all the time when they just mean "really want" but this is a case of the latter. Tankers (and to a slightly lesser extent Brutes) taunt whatever they touch. Taunt, the power, makes it easier at range, is more reliable, and debuffs range for enemies, usually causing them to close the distance to you. That's useful even solo. Useful... but objectively not necessary. It has to be looked at, like any build decision, in the context of the whole build.

Does Phantom Army mirror the appearance of the hologram costume though or always use the player's current real costume?

Coincidentally, I use the same word to describe people who think Taunt is necessary rather than merely useful.