ZemX

Well you know what they say, "Garbage in. Garbage out." I notice you haven't said what, specifically, you don't understand about the incarnate system, the online tutorials, or even any of the "supportive" replies you've gotten in this thread. Curious!

In addition to @Sir Myshkin's points on Taunt, I would add that it's also autohit. Together with the generous taunt duration, it means it needs neither accuracy nor taunt enhancement. It doesn't need any added slots at all. Some people put the psi damage proc from Perfect Zinger in there, but I prefer just a single +5 recharge IO so it's ready more often. I use it to grab stray aggro while I am "in the pocket" with the bulk of a spawn. Repulsing Torrent sounds like a great opener though on a new spawn. The cone isn't terrifically wide, but it's super long. At 67.5 degrees arc on a Tanker, it is 68 feet across out at 51 foot range. That's enough to catch all or most of a loosely packed x8 spawn, so pulling up and letting that one rip from 30 feet away or so is a great way to start. On my Rad Armor tankers, I like to use Ground Zero w/ Avalanche Knockdown proc for this if it's up or Rad Therapy if it isn't. Rad Therapy only hits 10 though so it's not as good. A good-sized PBAoE is nice too, but it looks like KM's Burst is just 12ft radius on a Tanker. So Repulsing Torrent is a better way to knock down and taunt up to 16 targets in a new spawn. It just requires you to pull up and fire it from a bit of a range. I gather Fly is taken for concept reasons? You'll have to be hovering close to the ground for your KB protection to be effective. But also... human tornado without Whirlwind? Duuuude. 🤪 Spinning is winning! Neat ideas tho. If I was doing this myself, I might consider working teleport into this instead of Fly. Combat Teleport in particular might be very useful with a bind to BAMF you backwards 30 feet to set up a perfect Repulsing Torrent, then BAMF back into the pack.

It's not that bad. There are plenty of heavy hitters in other sets either as slow or less than a second faster than this. Most of the time, if you're doing it right, you're in Momentum and the attacks flow a lot faster than the worst case you mentioned. The grain of salt I'd caution people with on TW is that very Momentum mechanic. Rather than being an added benefit, it feels more like a penalty for not using the right attacks at the right time. Lag or just getting distracted by a chaotic fight can put you off your rhythm and result in a slow attack instead of a fast one. But even so... it's not all the time. It can feel pretty spry more often than not. But aesthetically, it also seems to lack the "crunch" that sets like Axe, Mace, Super Strength, and many others have. This is strictly a feeling thing. Some of the attacks feel like they have no impact. Like they are just sweeping this big damn weapon through empty air or something. May be a bother to some.

The tohit roll for procs is on the proc page, not the page for the power hosting the proc (in this case, Caltrops). e.g. This one you can slot in Caltrops shows the toHit roll in the effects on the lower right. @ForceHit, I think, is the StreakBreaker. Otherwise it has to roll to hit, even when placed in an autohit power. Traps.Caltrops is a 15ft radius AoE. As a pseudo-pet, it uses 10 seconds as the "recharge time" for calculating procs. That puts it at around a 21.7% chance for a 3.5ppm proc. So every ten seconds, I'd expect one of those 5 procs to go off on each target, on average. In other words, 5 damage procs would amount to 71.7 damage per 10 seconds or just 7.17dps per target. Caltrops by itself only does 2.78 lethal per second unenhanced, so that's certainly a big improvement but for that many slots? Probably not worth it. I don't have Mids in front of me at the moment but I recall there being some Math settings that affect how it calculates the damage it is showing you. You want it to use the proc chance to add an average damage value. If it's showing you max. damage counting as if all procs fired every time? Yeah, that would be through the roof. But you'll never see that in game either.

Right. Of course. That's absolutely what it's all about. Right guys?

Powers were balanced on recharge time so the fast refreshing ones did indeed do less damage than the long ones, but that's it. Devs didn't understand the impact of animation times until players showed it to them by analyzing attack chains. Hence you had slow animating sets putting out less damage than fast animating ones once players put together complete attack chains. Fixing it after that would have been a big pass over all attacks in the game to factor in animation time. Could have been done. Never was. Same sort of thing could have been done with highly resisted sets like lethal. Just give em an x% boost to compensate for it being the most resisted damage in the game.

Right there with you man. Anyone else might have wondered if punching "bow that shoots guns" into Google would come up empty... but I live in Texas. I knew.

Maybe the two biggest mistakes the original Live devs made in the design of this game were not balancing the game around (1) animation times and (2) damage types. Animation times were literally decided by how long the artists' animations for each attack happened to take and this had a direct effect on performance. Similarly, damage types and damage resistance were determined by aesthetics, not with any concern for game balance. There was no plan to ensure each damage type was evenly balanced against enemy resistances. Stuff that was flammable just got no fire resistance. Things without blood got high lethal resistance. Etc. I don't know who decided late game enemies should be more "strong willed" or whatever the reason is for their higher psi resist, but I assume it was something like that. It wasn't any conscious attempt to ensure that the damage type was being fairly treated. Nobody got that consideration.

Yeah, I would never claim to be immune to perception bias. I am mostly playing Tankers these days so I am hyper-aware of other tankers mostly. I am most often the only tanker on the team. Sometimes there's a second. Rarely more than that. It's far more common for there to be two or more blasters or two/three controllers. I probably don't take as much notice of Scrappers and Brutes unless one of them runs off ahead of the team to die gloriously.

Ah, but you see... these are the forums and on the forums nobody fights a single enemy! Everybody is soloing +4x8 proc-monkey Incarnate builds and we must balance around this! I do get a kick out of it. I can come to the forums and read how nobody should be playing anything but tankers and then I can go actually play the game and hear teammates tell me, "Oh wow, a tanker! I hardly ever see you guys on teams! Doesn't seem to be much point anymore!"

The Tanker AoE radius and Cone Arc bonuses apply. But as far as I can tell, APP/PPP powers already have the higher target caps for any AT that uses them (i.e. 10 for cones, 16 for AoEs) so these are no different on Tankers than anyone else. Weird thing I just noticed... Shiver has a cone arc of 135 degrees. Normally, cones this wide are explicitly disallowed from the Tanker arc bonus, but I don't see any such exception in City of Data for Arctic->Shiver. 202 degree "cone"? I wonder if that actually works or if the game limits it at 180.

Interesting. Betting it's the melee defense then. Recluse only has one -def attack, his Arm Lash. Depending on how often he uses it you might only have -10 or -15% melee defense on you at any given time. And he has a fair number of melee attacks. I generally ignore defense on my Rads but now I wonder how much better my alternate Samurai Houston (Rad/TW) or my Rad/Staffer would do. They can both generate a lot of melee defense with defensive attacks in the rotation. Something to think about...

Respect. He seemed able to do more damage against my Rad/Axe later in the fight than I saw you taking when you were keeping him busy solo. Not sure what I do that makes AVs so mad, but they do like my Rad tankers even in a crowd of other tankers. 🤪 Maybe it's the -regen in Rad Therapy? We definitely make it "interesting" when we didn't take out the red tower. I remember someone said something like "Bah! Red Tower? We're tankers!" Three or four Witty deaths later, we were victorious!

Ah, now I get it. Thought you were talking about inspirations. Hence my confusion.

Put two Avalanche IOs in Ground zero. I like Acc/Recharge and Knockdown proc (seriously, try it... it's hilarious. This power can hit 30 targets in a 22.5ft radius on a Tanker. It just makes the whole room take a seat). Fill the remaining slots with damage procs. Here's a trick: Slot two non-superior and four superior (at level 50 of course) Winter IOs in an ST attack. Blistering Cold. This gives you both the two-slot and the four-slot bonuses, so you double-dip on the slow resist. While leveling up, you can supplement slow resist with a SG base empowerment station. For a small expenditure of salvage, you get +20% slow resist for 90 minutes. Focused Accuracy is the way. Dump Conserve Power for that. Stick a +5 boosted common endurance reduction IO in the default slot. If you ever have endurance trouble, you can leave off running FA unless you are facing toHit debuffers (e.g. ghosts, Tsoo Sorcs, Witches, etc.) If you are teaming at all with this tanker, don't skip Taunt. It's just that useful at grabbing distant aggro without having to go over to it and punch it in the mouth... however satisfying that can be. You can be controlling a big bunch of enemies with punch-voke and AoEs and then grab outliers and runners with Taunt, the range debuff in it helping to coax them in towards you and melee range. Rad Therapy doesn't really need heal enhancement or accuracy. I stick a couple Heal set IOs in it for recharge and heal and then the rest are damage procs. Oh and ALWAYS slot the Theft of Essence +end proc. With this and the recovery and recovery resistance already built into Rad Armor you don't really need any other endurance help. Put a perf shifter in Stamina and another in Gamma Boost (as you already have) and that's that. RT will still heal you plenty in a crowd. It's not really your primary means of staying alive anyway. That's Particle Shielding... and lots of recharge. I wouldn't take both Hack and Slash. With those two AND Parry you have three light damage attacks. You only need one. Sadly, Parry is at T5 so you need to take either Hack or Slash. Maybe just add two slots to Parry and then do two Superior and two non-superior from that set for the slow resist.

This again. It's really really simple. It has less content. Thus it has fewer people. Because it has fewer people, it draws fewer people. That was the condition on DAY 1 of redside and it is the condition still. Why would it ever have changed? The idea this has anything to do with actual villainy is laughable. This may be a real issue for some few, but the vast majority couldn't care less. Virtually nobody on the most populated server in HC (Excel) is roleplaying. The people that DO roleplay (Everlasting) actually turn out MORE villains (by percentage of population)... not fewer. It's not a real barrier. Hell, 99% of that villain is cartoon villainy anyway. Nah. It began as a separate game you had to BUY separately. You couldn't carry any progress. You couldn't "fall" to the villain side with your hero. Even after dropping some of those barriers, annoying issues persist. Mixed teams run into trouble keeping everyone on the team. You get auto-kicked for hitting Ouro or your base... sometimes. You have trouble being invited. But overall it had less content and it still has less content. Why would it get more people when there is more to do and more people blueside? Goldside content trumps both Blue AND Red and it's even deader over there. Again they walled it off. Even imprison new characters there for 20 levels. It's beautifully designed and beautifully written... and totally empty. The only things that can really be done is, if it's even possible with the state the code's in, to drop the remaining barriers and annoyances with mixed teams. If you could go there and start a team and anybody could join from any zone just like they would join a mission team in Founder's Falls or Peregrine Island? You'd see more people doing it.

...and sometimes... the floor. 🤪

When was it changed? ParagonWiki says it is "No deaths and No temps". Nothing about insps. That was as of 2012. Was it changed before that at some point?

It showed heavily procced, Incarnate tanks doing well on a solo max difficulty challenge, to be precise. Tanker vs Brute vs Scrapper isn't going to resemble those results much while leveling up in normal content. But you can't go wrong with Brute or Scrapper for someone who wants DPS. Tanker will feel a bit lacking on normal enhancements, I think, compared to those. The best you'll notice with a Tanker is the ability to ramp up the number of enemies you face earlier and that will bring up their XP earning to better compare vs. the other two while soloing. But it's not going to knock anyone's socks off on damage until it really is an endgame Incarnate proc-tweaked monstrosity.

EARTH FOR (LIVING) HUMANS!

I don't think avoiding real world comparisons is possible on this one. They were already developing this game when 9/11 happened. So this was being developed as we were going through a period of exactly this same kind of hyper-nationalistic reaction to an outside attack. What about the aliens on our side in Paragon City? If true to human nature... they'd be getting attacked, harassed, or suspected just as we did the same to Americans of certain ethnicities and national backgrounds in the years following 9/11. Or you can go farther back and look at Japanese internment camps during WW2. Probably countless other example throughout human history and around the globe. tl;dr: People suck. Granted, this is fiction. But it's also based in our real world to some extent. We don't have to imagine a world where people are as shitty as they are in the real one... but it's not exactly entirely out of bounds either. This billboard is probably rather tame compared to what would likely happen following a real extra-terrestrial attack on Earth.

I agree with you that jumping three mobs ahead is not "tanking". It's soloing. Moving ahead to the next mob before the current one is completely dead... is another story. People still argue over this one but it's a judgement call on the part of a tank to do this. It's advantageous to the whole team if you can do this and do it right. Obviously, if you skip out early and someone dies... you screwed up. But if you can leave the team to finish off the last enemy or two, judging they can handle it, getting to that next mob to establish aggro and collect them into a tighter group (if possible) before the rest of the team piles into it? That's good tanking. Sometimes though, I'll notice I'm not the only one leaving early. Doesn't happen tremendously often but it does happen. If I see too much of that and I am tanking, I usually slow down and stick with the rest of the team. If the other folks running ahead aren't dying well... that's just a different way the team is playing. I do what I do. Maybe I can put it more simply this way. Personal tanking philosophy: "If people are dying ahead of me, that's their fault. If they are dying behind me... it's mine." (unless they are blasters)