ZemX

Depends what you fight and at what level. Earliest you can take FA is 35, so you'll only have it in content level 30 and above. Unless you wanted something else in your build there and ended up pushing FA later. If you're always doing endgame, then it's not a concern. I keep some yellows around for exemplaring below 30. FA and Energy Mastery is something I respecced into when I ran into a lot of toHit debuffers and didn't like being reduced to a taunt bot. If you're not experiencing that, it could be just the content you prefer running doesn't feature that much toHit debuffing.

I generally sketch out the build in Mid's before I even decide to play the character. If I am happy with what I see, that's good enough for a start. I don't necessarily have a leveling build. Just the final one. I'll fill in as I go. Around late 20s I start to look at which ones I should angle to slot out first when I start IOing. Powers that will hold Archetype sets tend to be first. Well, second. Useful one-slot wonder-procs are first. Always. As soon as they can be slotted. I've got a fair number of toons that have had four or five-slotted Combat Jump before any of my attacks were done simply because of all the procs you can stuff in there. Kismet, Shield Wall, LOTG, Winter's:SlowRes, Reactive:ScalingRes, Karma Knockback (if needed). Refinement usually only happens for me after 50 and incarnates. I start to wonder if there's a better way to arrange powers and/or bonuses. Can I squeeze in more defense? Should I bother? Physical Perfection or Laser Beam Eyes! (Spoiler: Always laser beam eyes! FREEEEEM!)

Arachnos Airlines is next, pal!

Thing I learned: Bring breakfrees. "Stunned" isn't something you see a lot in this line of work but enough Rikti Magi working in concert seem to be able to manage it. Didn't kill me, but got closer than I'd like. I also stock up on Resuscitator charges at P2W. Since this is a no-Defenders clubhouse, we sometimes gotta handle clean-up duty for our fellow Tankers ourselves. Recall Friend would be handy to go with this too. Lastly, I don't know if everyone is as bad at it as I am, but I often forget I'm an Incarnate with a T4 barrier. It's too chaotic an event to really coordinate usage of barriers, but if everyone who has them (and other handy Destiny powers) religiously uses them on cooldown, we'll probably end up with decent random coverage. It's a big help to the non-incarnate under-50 tanks who join us.

Are you also a Dark Armor tank? My comments are in that context. Dark Regen accepts accurate healing IOs, which means it can slot Theft of Essence +end. That turns an already massive and very available heal into something that will refill your endurance as well (if you have a few enemies about you ). I use it on Rad Armor's Rad Therapy and it pretty much covers any sort of endurance drain situation. Dark Regen has an even shorter recharge and is a better heal to boot and Dark Armor has good endurance drain resist built into the set too. I mention PP in the Energy Mastery pool as someting that can add more all-the-time recovery. It's not a direct replacement for UP. Wasn't suggesting it was. It's part of an equation comparing what you have with Energy Mastery and what you have (or don't have) with Soul Mastery. Despite the name, Focused Accuracy isn't really about accuracy. I mean, It DOES add some accuracy and some +toHit, but not enough of either to make you want to take this power given, as you rightly point out, the high cost of running it. The real story, as Yomo just noted as well, is the toHit debuff resistance. If the power did ONLY this... I would still take it. It's why I take it at all. It is particularly useful if you don't have reliable defense, which is another reason it matters I'm responding to a Dark Armor tanker. Defense based tanks enjoy not just getting hit for damage less often, but getting hit with DEBUFFS less often. They still take the autohit stuff, but it's less overall debuff. On a res-based Tanker who not only gets hit more often but, simply by virtue of being a Tanker, WANTS everyone to attack them, toHit debuffs can be a serious pain. If the endurance cost is a problem, you can run the power only when you noticed you've been debuffed. The debuff resistance works the same before or after the debuff is applied to you. So you can safely use it reactively rather than proactively. UP still has that defense, but my argument there is that it's of more use to someone with DDR to protect it. That's not Dark or Rad Armors. And as far as hardmodes go, I have little experience with them but from what I've heard the 3 and 4 star varieties need you to be teamed up with decent buff/debuff anyway. Defense can provide a base to stack up on with team buffs, but is +25% available only a third of the time and requiring multiple enhance slots really worth it? Difficult to answer in general. I think it depends a lot on powersets and build. Always does. Not many things you can categorically say aren't worth it. It really depends on how that compares to what else you could have in its place.

I sometimes warn teammates in such situations that if they see me running away from the fight so fast that I appear to red-shift, it's because I got hit by one of those debuffs. I like to say I am doing them a favor by carrying the debuff away so quickly but I am really just saving my own ass. 😈 The Tar Patches aren't as bad because you don't need to run quite as far away to get out of them. EF is a toggle and needs a fair amount of distance before it drops. Tar Patch is why I have 100% slow debuff resistance. 😀

Rather than approach it that way, let me suggest that the problem with Darkest Night on a resistance based tanker is that it isn't in the same pool as Focused Accuracy. Without a lot of defense and the DDR to protect it, you get hit by a lot of debuffs. And like anybody you also get hit by the autohit -toHit debuffs like Hurricanes and NPCs own Darkest Night. In those cases, it's nice to have the hefty -toHit debuff resistance provided by Focused Accuracy. And it comes in a pool with other endurance and regen powers. U.P. sounds nice, I guess, but you wouldn't need its recovery if you had a theft of essence in Dark Regen and maybe pick up Physical Perfection instead. Dark Armor has good endurance drain resistance already, doesn't it? The defense is nice, I suppose, but also fragile. You can back it up a little with Ageless Radial SOME of the time, but it's still only going to be useful in situations that don't involve defense debuffs, and I always find my Rad Armor Tankers are nigh invulnerable in those situations already. I assume the same is true of Dark Armor built well. Lastly, you said it was on a two minute timer. Are you sure of that? Mid's might be telling you this if you have some FF:recharge procs enabled. Or maybe you really do have +300% recharge time buff. Just checking. Otherwise, U.P. becomes a lot less available and thus less worth it except as an occasional emergency button. A discount Elude with no crash.

btw, that Enervating Field from Anti-Matter (and, weirdly, from garden variety Paragon Protectors) is an unresistable resistance debuff. This is the opposite side of the question posed in this thread: Player powers I wish NPCs *did* have. I wish they had the player versions of Enervating Field and Tar Patch.

Ehhh..... Here's AS from Hide if a 54 AV were able to use it. It's a big hit, to be sure, but it's still not dropping most Tanks with high lethal res and 2.5K+ hit points. Then again, give him IO sets, Assault, Alpha Musculature, a pocket Kin... 😈

And pretty effective for them as it is most likely to hit a Tanker or Brute who is grabbing all the aggro.... then it prevents them from taunting anyone while it's up. No taunt, no punch-voke, no taunt or damage aura. All gone. And I usually find aggro is pretty quickly stolen from me after that, especially if it has happened early in the fight, which it is likely to if you're the first to leap in and you taunt the whole spawn.

Is it true that you have to re-buy P2W powers for each build as well? (e.g. Team Teleport, ATT, etc.) I heard this in-game but haven't tried it yet. I don't have any additional builds. I would try it now but I am... *looks around*... "working".

Remember that the only enemies you're concerned with in the first place as a Tanker are the same ones that will be resisting about half your debuffs to begin with. So yeah, that's more like 12% -toHit debuff (and then only if you bothered to enhance the debuff). There's some nuance to -dmg as well. It's not exactly equivalent to +res but I can't find that explanation at the moment. One obvious way it's not the same is in providing resistance to resistance debuffing. 60% res means 40% of res debuffs get through. That doesn't affect your -dmg debuff in DN, but it cuts down your own base resistance. Not saying it isn't good. Fair question though if it's good enough to deserve enhancing, though. At 0.65 end/sec, it really does need some end reduction. Also takes some time to toss out there in a fight. And it's a toggle so you need to shut it off when the fight is done usually. Late in your build, it might be just a sometimes thing rather than an every fight thing.

I don't see any exclusion from Gauntlet's radius buff in City of Data's description of this power. That would mean it should be a 37.5ft radius on a Tanker.

If someone actually plays the game from tutorial on, it does a decent job teaching you the basics. Where new players are going to feel overwhelmed is when they step into teams with veteran players. There isn't anything the devs can change in the game that makes that any less jarring. Which is why I am giving this whole thread the side-eye. I suspect it's got little to do legitimately with newbies wanting to learn the game and everything to do with someone wanting to door sit in a farm at 2XP and still earn inf. Because people who want to learn the game... can. But they have to want to and they have to ASK when they want to learn something they don't understand. Ask anything in /help channel and you'll get multiple answers usually. The tutorial points you right at it too. Specific to the premise of this thread, if you ask in /help channel how you can, as a new player with no rich alts, afford enhancements if you've been running 2XP, you'll be told how. You don't even have to go search in a forum. I don't know how it gets too much easier than that.

Unless this has been addressed, I see old posts about MSR instanced raids saying it is a hard requirement: If someone out there has a 35+ without the Member of Vanguard badge, the easy way to confirm this is probably to see if they can queue and enter the MSR instance themselves. That's actually the method suggested in that thread to avoid certain other issues with forming the raid. Again, not sure if those issues have since been addressed by Homecoming team or not.

There's a "calculating debuffs" thread in the achives here somewhere. Resistance to damage resistance debuffs works off of the "undebuffed" (another non-word) resistance. Meaning all your res buffs are tallied first, no matter where they come from. That's used to reduce the value of the incoming debuff. What's left subtracts from your active resistance. But the "undebuffed" value is still what is used for any subsequent incoming debuffs. Hence there is no such thing as "cascading resistance failure" like there is with defense. There is either an astonishingly complex reason why it was done this way or.... the combat formulas weren't all written by the same person.

Tanker Tuesday Tentacle Trouble! Taken care of... Peaceful waters... once again... Infernal causing trouble this time... Tanks vs. Tankers... and Blast Furnace "helping"... Blast Furnace? You there dude?

Except by unresistable debuffs, yeah.

You mentioned an even better reason later on: Unresistable resistance debuffs. Pretty much any NPC that has a Tar Patch is unresistable. Having a combat monitor up showing any of your resistance values AND 100% (or near to it) slow resist is a must if you rely mostly on resistance for survival. A +3 or +4 purple boss mob dropping a Tar Patch on you can knock you down from capped 90% res on a Tanker/Brute to 50%. Then again down to 10% if there are two of them in the spawn. This became a topic of conversation a while back on the Tanker forum when someone when and Flashbacked the First Ward mission that sends you into the Survivor Compound to find Anna. Praetorian Shepherds enemy group has one called a Prophet. And they have the dreaded unresistable Tar Patch. Night Ward's Black Nights and Huntmasters also have variations on the same thing. And as you mentioned, some radiation enemies have that unresistable Enervating Field. Also something you can run away from, though you have to run far enough for the toggle to cancel. Carrying that debuff away from your friends is also a good thing.

I'm well aware of LOS pulling. I mentioned the Praetorian maps because they take a lot more time to collect than the usual spawns. So Fold Space is more of a benefit there even without someone locking down mobs. It's a whole lot faster to collect them with Fold Space than by zig-zagging through half the room and then running back and hiding behind a pillar. Even without controllers, I find most teams don't have that much patience.

I know I appreciated being able to punch the floor with my Rad/Rad's Atom Smasher. 😈 I definitely need to dust off and finish leveling Captain Subatomic, my Rad/SS... because I don't have as many Rad toons as @Warboss yet!

I believe you also need to have the "Member of Vanguard" badge, no?

I'm being a little unfair to single them out. There are other situations where enemies start spread out all over and, if they are ranged-only, are difficult to convince to converge on me, even with Taunt's -range debuff. Fold Space would be nice on most Praetorian interior maps where mobs are literally spaced evenly out over an entire room or subway tunnel. CT would also solve another problem I run into fairly often. -Jump/-Fly seems a lot more common than I remember. I'm not immobilized, but my feet can't leave the floor. I can get completely stuck because I can't hop over a curb or railing until it wears off. Not as big a deal on a ranged character but my Tank can sometimes not be able to do the job if they can't reach the fight!

I really want Fold Space on a Tanker. I want it every time I find myself on a team with 2-3 controllers and I know my odds of ever gathering mobs into a nice tight group for AoE is about nil. But the big problem I have with that is I've never NOT taken Combat Jumping on a melee character. I am just so used to it, it would be like learning to write with the opposite hand to quickly move about a combat with CT instead of short hops in any direction with CJ almost without needing to think about it. Guess I just need to do it! *game face*

Good one! I have had to TP people out of that room because they were literally trapped and unable to find the route back out.