ZemX

So you pine for the days when you had to manually sidekick and it STILL had nothing to do with mentorship or teaching because it was just a means to bring a random low level person onto the team or... as was often the case... exploited via "bridging" to accomplish powerleveling? Oh yeah... "the good old days". 🤪

Fold Space is admittedly handy against very spread out spawns. More common in Praetorian maps like the underground or laboratory. But it's a heavy investment and has a pretty long recharge. Unless you have ridiculously high recharge, it won't be a power you can use every spawn. Maybe every other or every third depending how fast the team is moving. The very benefit it provides can speed up clearing a spawn by bunching them together for more efficient AoEs but at the same time mean that it won't be ready for the next spawn or even the next one after that. Teleport is the fastest travel power in the game but yeah, clunky to use. I am also more of a fan of CJ/SJ. Just love soaring through the air and playing the mini-game of "where do I land without touching ground/street-level"? But.. Teleport is pretty nice now with the built-in temp hover and end reduction for chained use. Still, I've tried Combat Teleport for combat movement and... I don't like it. It's simply not as easy to use as CJ. With CJ I can hop in any direction with movement controls. With CT, I have to target something or point-click to precisely move. If a target is up on a ledge, I can't just hop to it. A "tp to target" keybind would sometimes not put me on the ledge with them but falling back down to the ground, having come up short of the ledge. On my Tankers, I've instead started taking just Teleport. I can still use it indoors to leap across a big room or through a doorway clogged with NPCs/teammates. Or I can use it when grounded by fly/jump debuffs to get where I need to go to tank. Still take CJ though for combat movement. Downside is I'm opening three travel pools when you count Hasten. But.. tradeoffs.

If damage is your goal, you probably can't do better than just pairing it with Fiery Aura. I'm a huge fan of Rad and it does give you two proc-bombers, but.. Blazing Aura, Burn, Consume, and Fiery Embrace? That all turns Fiery Melee up to 11, I think. Rad if you want to be sturdier. Fiery Aura if you just want to see the world burn.

Okuri Okami. From Japanese folklore.

Arachnos bugging us while we paid our respects... Chaarge! Group photo!... uhhh... guys? That's more like it! Many envenomed daggers were lost to bring you these images!

In PvP, Stalkers who are not hidden have a small crit chance against held or slept players. In PvE, their random not-hidden crit can occur against any enemy but scales up the chance depending on how many teammates they have. Doesn't apply to Assassin Strike though.

If recent times have taught me anything it's that the term "grown-up" is pretty well meaningless. Actually, that's probably been true throughout human history... we just didn't have Twitter and Cable News yet.

How DID you manage that? I counted eight tanks standing around you while teams were forming. Were some of them under 35 then?

There are a few that can be quite worthwhile. A little extra Endurance Drain Resist when you're doing a Penny Yin. The slow resist temp is something like 20% which is quite nice. The resistances are all 5% which you absolutely wouldn't sneeze at if you were aiming for that in a set bonus. And the aforementioned knock resist. I visit my base often to sell off excess IOs, common recipes, and common salvage. I'll make a pass past the invention table, see if I can build any IO set recipes I've collected to flip and sell on the AH, then go to the empowerment station to load up whatever is available. Then sell excess salvage. Doesn't take but a minute. And yeah, should be available on test. Just build a quickie base, toss in some power/comp, and the top of the line empowerment station. Done.

This isn't a key to anything. It is an anecdote. Allegedly some live dev once said this. The game design says otherwise and always has. Brutes got the higher hit points, literally the same armor powersets as Tankers, the autohit AoE taunt, taunt auras, highest redside threat modifier, mez protection. When punch-voke came along it went to Tankers and Brutes, not to MM pets. The evidence that they are just more offensive Tankers, which you later point out yourself, is right there in front of us. This is why you get threads like this comparing the two. The ATs have gone through a lot of changes, but it's still true that Brutes and Tankers are closer to each other than to any other ATs in the game. And while MMs *can* tank, so can other ATs given some build choices and pool power picks. But that doesn't make them "designed to tank". The redside ATs weren't meant to be 1:1 comparisons to blueside ATs anyway. Brutes do sit somewhere between Tanks and Scrappers. Stalkers somewhere between Scrappers and Blasters maybe, in terms of role at least. Etc. It SHOULD be the case that choosing a Brute over a Tanker means being a bit less survivable but doing more damage. Plenty of other changes to game since, however, have blurred those lines considerably and it's not necessarily true that Brutes do more damage than Tankers in all cases... even though they really should.

You don't have to search around in Combat Attributes. Just bring up Base->Recharge and it should list everything currently affecting. My guess would be an outside buff or temp you forgot you activated. Mystic Fortune. Secondary Mutation. Random passing Kinetic with Speed Boost. Could have been a lot of things.

Should be a decent combo. Staff has a lot of good AoE potential, which is nice because Invuln doesn't add anything to that. What I was looking forward to with SR (and same for Invuln) was having enough defense to maybe skip Focused Accuracy, which I never fail to take on Rad because everything hits me, including a lot of toHit debuffs. So I haven't given much thought yet to what other patron/epic pools might go good with that combo.

Right. That's why I suggested building Musc alpha first with threads. You may find later on if you choose to build up a second alpha slot tree that you have enough shards by then to do it "for free" or mostly so. Depends what content you are running. Tends to work out that way for me.

Not in the context of this thread though. "Because DDR" is a decent enough answer to the question in the OP. Why a Scrapper? Because they don't need to be nearly as careful diving head-first into a spawn of angry blade-wielding or gun-brandishing enemies. Defense debuffs are ridiculously common. If dealing with this complication is a fun challenge for some, that's a reason to choose Blapper, I guess. But the difference here is quite reasonable. In exchange for more risk, Blasters get more damage potential than Scrappers. That difference just isn't as black-and-white as it once was thanks to the muddying influence of IOs and Incarnates. But it's still there to some extent at least.

Always prefer Musculature on Tankers myself. But there's no reason to sweat this decision since you can eventually build up both and switch between them in down-time between TFs. Start with Musculature and if you later notice problems in some content with survival, you can build up something else like Resilient. Maybe use your early threads to build Musc alpha and just keep accumulating shards, favors, and drops of the well running weeklies to use to craft a second alpha later on. You have a similar decision with Hybrid Melee vs Assault for example. Hybrid Melee can be kind of another "T9"-like defense panic-button but whenever I've taken it, it tends to sit unused more often than not. And then I end up building Assault. Again, build both and eventually you have some customization possible for different kinds of content if you want it.

I like Teleport on Tankers lately because it lets me pass through anything that is blocking my way. If I need to be on the other side of a doorway that is clogged with enemies (or teammates) or if I've been hit with -fly/-jump or unresistible movemeent slows (hello Red Ink Man!) it's no big deal. And I can place myself exactly in the center of a packed spawn for perfect AoE positioning without having to run around them and deal with their collision boxes. Especially nice with lots of large enemies in small spaces. Think Behemoths jammed into narrow hallways in Oranbega maps. Having the fastest travel power in the game is a side-benefit.

Not sure what you mean. The crit, if it happens, is applied in a single tick rather than appearing on each tick of the DoT. But Scrappers aren't missing out on any crit damage on DoT powers vs. single-shot powers.

Not acknowledging it because I haven't really been bothered enough by it to notice. There are already sixteen collision boxes in that spawn. Unless literally the whole team tried to dive into melee at the same time, it wouldn't change that situation much. These days, I take Teleportation on my Tankers to zip into the exact middle of a spawn without worrying about their collision boxes. Ironically, people blasting a spawn to smithereens with KB or locking them down spread out with immob actually HELPS your crowding problem. I'll take the packed spawn crowd any day over that though.

I like to start out Praetorian. When I get to Primal Earth after 20, I immediately run Dean/Leonard then switch sides to run Nance/Adair. Lots of great dialogue and tie ins. Should probably work Vincent in there too. I got a kick out of him being thrilled to see me last time when I ran as Loyalist but did undercover for the Resistance. Switched to Loyalist (officially) at the Cleopatra moral choice mission and then stayed there but still working for Calvin Scott.

This. Darkest left-column of the "Bright Radiation" palette. I find the reds are least visible but that might just be me. You'll still be able to see the whirling ping-pong balls but the taunt aura will appear more like low smoke on the ground than a serious glow.

Pretty sure I teamed with someone like this once. Level 50 Ice tanker with literally one attack from the secondary. They'd hover around just... BEING. I am sure, without even asking, that they considered themselves a "pure" tanker. I don't assume people are going quite to that extreme in most cases. When someone says they aren't concerned with DPS, I assume they still want to deal damage... just that they don't particularly care if someone else is dealing 10% more with a different build or powerset.

I've done Rad/Staff and loved it. Super tough. I've wanted to try Staff with a defense set but haven't really been able to get into Invuln or SR. I chose to try SR but... it's just dull. And I'd expect Invuln to be the same. Tough as all hell, but that's about it. RadA kind of spoiled me with its extra goodies like Ground Zero and Rad Therapy, both of which are excellent for grabbing aggro and helping the team. GZ does some healing and slotted with Avalanche KD proc knocks stuff down across a wide area just like Shield Charge does. It's a great combo for turning around a sudden "oh crap!" situation like getting an ambush from the rear or aggroing a second spawn. You simultaneously knock everything down and give a small jolt of healing and then healing-over-time to affected teammates. A word about the idea that a primary doesn't need Staff's extra mitigation though: Thbbbbt! 🤪 Builds are a zero sum game. If you are getting +13% res(all) from Sky Splitter's finisher than that's 13% res you don't need to get from IOs, which means you can build more of something else. Typically, it means not sweating the more exotic res types. Or... it can be used to negate most resistance debuffs by pushing you over 100%. At times when you aren't so hard pressed, you can simply spend stacks on the PBAoE finisher instead and drop a -10% res debuff on everything it hits. The other stances offer some different bonuses but personally I leave it on Form of Body and then forget I even have the ability to change stances. It's that good. Staff's big downside is the long animations. Like most sets with long animations, it was never balanced to make up for that loss of DPA. But you said damage wasn't your #1, so that's probably okay. It's definitely a lot more aesthetically pleasing now that redraw animations have been taken care of. It was especially annoying when you had to redraw all the time with a more active primary armor set like Rad. Staff's large AoEs, made even larger on Tankers, are also very nice for getting and keep aggro. 15ft radius on the PBAoE and 9ft+135degrees on the cones. Speaking of those AoEs, the Rad/Staff Tanker does this: - 15ft radius, 16 target PBAoE - 2x 9ft radius 135 degree 10 target cones - 30ft radius 10 target proc nuke +heal/+end - 22.5ft radius 30 target (not a typo!) proc nuke + team heal - standard 12ft radius taunt aura that can be slotted for -res Achilles proc - standard 22.5ft radius 70ft range 5 target taunt +range debuff You would not lack for aggro-grabbing abilities if tanking is what you want to do.

Normally, I just quit teams that are annoying me in some way. Figure that's mine to deal with. But there are exceptions. I WILL tell someone who is pushing things around with a force bubble to stop, especially if the situation just doesn't call for it. And Sonic Repulsion might be my most hated power in this whole game ever. Who thought of this abomination even? It's straight up griefing to drop this on a melee teammate if not slotted for KD and even if it is... the looping sound FX should be considered a form of torture and banned by international law.

I didn't say many ATs could achieve that level of mitigation nor is the point I'm making dependent on reaching all the way to that extreme. My point is that there can't possibly be a one-size-fits-all metric (like 400%) for determining whether adding ANY regen to a build is "worth it". How much regen you need (whether that comes in the form of passive regen or active healing) depends entirely on how much damage you're taking. In other words, it's inversely proportional to your mitigation level, whatever that level is.

That doesn't seem like it would be true for everyone. I can see this being true if Regen is the only damage mitigation someone has but if someone already has 95% damage mitigation from defense and/or resistance, say, then a much smaller increase to regeneration should make just as big a difference in the amount of incoming damage you are actually affected by (assuming you're not sacrificing something more effective to get it, of course).