ZemX

This, but also protect it with slow resist. Recharge is life. Getting slowed is death. Plus it's nice to be able to dance out of a Tar Patch or Caltrops like it's not there. Rad gets some slow resist built in but you need more, ideally 100% but you can also shoot for 80% as "good enough". You can boost it with the base empowerment station and get a 90 minute 20% slow resist tacked on for a small salvage cost. Otherwise, look into places where you can two-slot Winter IOs for the slow resistance set bonus. I like to toss a pair of Avalanche IOs in Ground Zero. And I like making one of them the Avalanche knockdown proc because it's hilarious to see up to 20-30 enemies all take a seat at once (yes, it has a max 30 target cap minus any allies it hits with the heal). Acc/Dmg/Recharge and Recharge/knockdown is a nice combo here for Avalanche. Another good trick is to use one of your low tier ST attacks to slot both 2-slot normal Blistering Cold and 4-slot superior Blistering Cold. This doubles up on the slow resist. Also, Focused Accuracy is a must-have in my opinion. Sadly it means forgoing any other neat Patron/Epic choices to pick Energy Mastery. But without high defense, you get hit by everything and that includes toHit debuffs. If you don't want to be reduced to a taunt bot vs. toHit debuffing enemies... Focused Accuracy for the toHit debuff resistance. If you can squeeze it in there, less necessary, but also nice... is Tactics. Again not necessarily for the toHit bonus (though that is nice) but for the less-talked-about Confusion protection, of which Rad Armor has none. It's only a little protection, but it can be one less CoT succubus who can twist you around her finger and make you taunt your teammates. Crey also have some confuse now, it seems. Lastly... carry break-frees. Last thing you might consider on a Tanker, but surprisingly you CAN be held. It just takes aggroing more than one spawn of Longbow, Carnies, or Malta, to name a few. Again with the theme of getting hit by everything, you get hit by all mezzes too. And enough bosses with high mag mezzes like the aforementioned groups, can stack up high enough even to exceed your hold/stun protection. Break-frees are also nice vs. fear, confuse (if you didn't get tactics), and repel (which every single freakin Family spawn now has one or TWO of it seeems). All that stuff gets through Rad Armor. I like to put in two heal-set IOs with heal and recharge, then 4 procs with one of the procs being Theft of Essence:%end. This turns Therapy into something that fills BOTH green and blue bars since it already does a little of both, and this kicks that up to ludicrously effective level. Doesn't need accuracy since it has base 300% acc.

Outside the concept, I think using a tanker for this won't mesh well with being a support role on the team. The two conflict when you are the focus of aggression and at the same time trying to help someone. You are bringing enemy fire down, in the form of AoE, on anyone you stand next to. It is particularly bad against Nemesis who have a lot of AoE and explode-on-death enemies, but really most enemy groups have some AoE to watch out for. I take the P2W temp rez and keep it charged because I often find it useful when nobody else has a wakie or is listening to the person asking for "a small orange" or whatever to make one themselves. It's easier to just walk over and click the rez. But doing it mid-battle is tricky with my tankers. You kind of have to "joust" so that the rez power is activated close to the dead ally but you end up far enough away from them that AoEs don't get them dead immediately as they try to stand up. You may have to do the same to pull off a mid-combat healing without doing more damage to the person you're trying to help. Teleport Target is also nice for pulling people out of the fire but again, can be a problem to pull off with a tanker. It's usually easier to taunt the whole fight away from someone (unless a controller "ally" has glued them all to the floor, of course). But anyway, something to thing about. You'd have to roleplay this as pulling someone physically away from the fight though because teleports are the only way to move an ally.

Problem with Rad Armor is the visual effects. You can't (currently) get rid of them. There's no Minimal FX option. Best you can do is minimize them by going to the dark end of the Bright customization option. But that still leaves a dim aura that looks like smoke around you at floor level and the "spinning ping pong balls" of that armor toggle. I am also unfamiliar with the canon here, but if "Medical Ninja" includes healing oneself then yeah, Willpower fits that as well as anything in Tankerdom and also fits a natural theme. Also, Ground Zero isn't a particularly good heal. Not the amount, that is, which is okay. But the recharge time. It's about as good a heal coming from a Tanker as a Defender's aura heal... but that's one shot. The Defender can spam that aura heal every few seconds. Even with a lot of recharge, that Ground Zero is only happening once every 24ish seconds or so.

I've had that happen on resist tankers too though. Not having defense, for example, leads to more mez stacking. Not enough to break through melee mez protection in most cases, but if I wander through a couple spawns worth of enemies that have good holds/stuns (e.g. Malta, Longbow, Carnies, to name a few) then I have been held and quickly defeated. There are also a few instances of un-resistible res debuffs in the game and whenever that happens to someone who relies entirely or mostly on resist... death can be swift if you aren't keeping a very close eye on it. Much as I prefer resist, and specifically Rad Armor, Defense armors are still kings for their built-in DDR. That makes it more effective to add resistance via IOs to a Defense armor than to add Defense via IOs to a resist/regen armor. The added resist makes defense failure, if it ever happens at all to a defense armor tanker/brute, less of an instant death situation than it once was. You at least have time to deploy some countermeasures usually.

It's pretty typical of MMOs to raise a level cap when adding new content to the high end of a game. Issue 1 added Peregrine Island and RWZ as well as the enemy groups Malta, Carnies, and Praetorians. It's probably more noteworthy they didn't keep adding content that raised the level cap. It wouldn't be until Issue 20 that Incarnates added something to max level (even if it wasn't actually raising the cap). Instead CoH went horizontal with content, adding zones, powers, story arcs, TFs, trials, new systems like IOs, etc.

SOs start at level 5 now, so you should really not bother with anything else unless you are doing so for nostalgia or a challenge or something. You can slot level 5 SOs at level 2, so basically right out of the tutorial (if you ran it). If you need money, search up one of the guides around here on quick money tips.

DOES anyone actually do this though? I'd love to hear from someone (who isn't Diantane) who actually does this. About the only conceivable reason I can come up with for doing it is that it's, I guess, kind of like a little chat room. Maybe people join these things just to chat? I don't know. I've never joined a farm. But I occasionally see people advertising their chattiness as a sitter's virtue in LFG. Otherwise, I just figure it's people making new builds for endgame stuffs and challenges or just to run around at 50 doing radios or TFs. i.e. that they do farm to 50 but then they play that 50 at least some of the time.

It's still an auto power, per CoD. But it is suppressed when stunned, held, or slept, so it kind of behaves like an active power or toggle in that respect. Maybe that's what they meant? I suppose it makes them less annoying if a mez stops their phasing... but is that even a recent change or has it always worked that way?

Thread title checks out.

I haven't tried it but I would guess the Placate effect happens first, then the proc breaks it immediately. I don't know if it matter whether the proc fires or not, it may still count as an attack which would break Placate. But the stealth and Hidden status from Placate are unrelated to this so you might still get a crit hit off after Placate if nothing manages to hit you in the meantime. Placate has had some changes. It is now a 1 sec cast time and a 15ft AoE that hits 5 targets. That changes the old calculus. Most heavy attacks take more than 1 second to animate, so if you use Placate followed by your best DPA single-target attack, this is like hitting twice for (usually) less than twice the animation time. You want to make sure not to waste it if you've just gotten the Hide proc from Stalker's Guile, but that's maybe the only caveat. Placate is also now a much better control power for soloing due to being AoE (or for teaming if you don't mind dumping aggro on teammates 🤪).

Slap Fighting Pillow Melee Shadow Boxing Food Fighting Wet Towel Melee Lucha Libre

This thread has been, all around, a rather amusing community fail, I think. Go team! 🤪

I assumed they were talking about the spooky psycho ward hospital, Bedlam... but I guess that doesn't make sense since it's an instance. Did they mean they were stuck in the Midnighter mansion? That's the zone "hospital" for respawning after a death.

Cast time includes internal monologue? That will get you every time!

More of a Wind Assault, I should think.

Riiight... I certainly don't recall a little kerfuffle over numbers called "Enhancement Diversification" back in "the good old days". No sir! It was a golden age of free love and zero concern over "real numbers" or AT balance! I remember there being a lot of Empathy among the playerbase. And a lot of people looking for Empathy in game. It was touching.

You have reached your final form?! 😮 Best use of a Stalker, in my opinion. I think most people are so focused on AoE in this game, they overlook the fact that bosses have something like 6x the hit points of minions and better resistance usually. AoEs kill minions instantly, LTs next, and bosses very much later. Having someone focus on bosses neatly complements any AoE the team is doing and simply ends the fight faster. Unless the team is just ridiculously overpowered compared to the content anyway.

To be clear, what I am criticizing is the idea that Stalkers were ever designed to hit with AS from Hide and then run away to Hide again. The first part yes. The second part no. This is very obviously true just based on the facts that (1) They were given five or six other attacks besides AS along with an entire armor secondary devoted to survival in melee, and (2) Using those other attacks AFTER hitting from Hide with AS nets vastly greater damage. And by that I mean, AS from Hide followed by waiting to re-Hide might be comparable to six-slotting Brawl and just putting it on auto while you have a sandwich. If you find hit and run "fun", sure. You do you. But no, it's not the design. Some people DO find it fun to six-slot Brawl and only use pool powers as a challenge. Lots of weird things can be fun but if we're waxing poetic and recalling the old days... These days never existed. If you played like this, you were a concept player cosplaying a sneaky ninja assassin or something (or you were PvPing 😈), not someone who was using the AT as it was designed to be used. That was hit-and-scrap then and it's hit-and-scrap now. It just works better than before thanks to much needed buffs in Issue 22.

Mother doesn't want you to leave.

I hear there was some loose dev talk back in the day that said something like this, but it never made sense to me. Tanking is not just surviving damage. It's directing it towards oneself. Anybody can do it, sometimes with the help of pool powers like Provoke, but if we're talking which red AT got the most tanking tools built into it, there is really no question that is Brutes. They got built in autohit area taunt, higher hit points, taunt auras, (then) tanker-exclusive armor sets, tanker res caps, and punch-voke. They got all but a sign hung around their necks that read "A mad scientist made this thing in a lab by starting with a tanker and a honey badger." They are only like Scrappers in that they are more offensive than Tankers. But everything redside was meant to be more offensive than blueside. That was the overall design philosophy. Stalkers didn't actually end up being more damaging than Scrappers originally (a clear mistake in my opinion), but they were definitely less defensive, less sturdy. They were clearly more tilted towards the Blaster's damage-only role than the Scrapper's off-tanking ability but at the same time much more survivable than a Blaster. There was no one AT that was the redside Blaster. No red AT was dedicated to nothing but damage. MMs were unlike most anything else in the game. They were one-man teams. Player teammates were just pets they could control even less well than their own.

I am mostly talking about teaming since that is what Snarky asked. Soloing, Stalkers definitely had some different options with built in Hide and Placate to choose only certain fights. That sort of thing. But any idea they should hit and run on teams was just weird to me at the time. I remember debating that with people who insisted this was the design of the AT despite it really not performing well at all. I'm not even talking about super optimized min/maxing here when I say "mathematics". It just didn't make even a little sense. It was that bad.

Same experience. Rarely out on the land area but it does occasionally happen. If I'm on a team I'll sometimes sail out over land spamming a find macro. Usually if she's at the big ball, someone has ATT ready.

They were always just stealthy scrappers. A lot of people didn't get this back in the day and held onto the flawed notion they should hit and run to return to Hide. That never worked out mathematically even on day 1 of CoV. I play Stalkers now pretty much the same way I played them from the beginning. They are just better at it now. The one difference you mention is probably the only one since originally you'd be more interested in using AS from Hide as an opened because you couldn't use it any other time except after Placate. And funnily enough, it never really worked out as a damage improvement to use Placate+AS in a fight vs. just scrapping ST attacks. It makes even less sense today, even with improvements to Placate, since Stalkers have much better in-combat ST dps with quick AS than before. Placate is just a big zero damage hole in any attack chain that is never paid back in the end. Use it as a control power... not a damage enhancer.

I know. The trolls know that too and exploit it. Anyone wondering why the reception in this thread has been a little frosty should do some searching. There is history here.

The OP in this thread didn't ask a single question. I think a lot of people missed that.