ZemX

We brought the ice... Warboss brought the Ice Pick! This one just looks neat to me. Cool on the left. Hot on the right. Plus some innovative err... propulsion technique from our Martial Artist on the left? I really need to make some macros to tone down particles for screenshots. Otherwise I only occasionally get lucky enough to show the team without too much obscuring effect. Case in point, there are TWO Radiation Tankers in this shot. My Misty is easily visible... Warboss's Axe is somewhere in that green glow. Trust me. (Meanwhile, Larry the Ravager is about to demonstrate why you shouldn't be the slowest Cimeroran on the team). I don't know what Romulus is doing here, but he looks FABULOUS! And finally... I almost feel bad for this minotaur. That's just a perfectly aimed kick. And now I want to roll up an MA Tanker. 😈

Sheesh! Relax and have a biscuit, why don't you?

It will fire reliably 30% of the time. So in a pack of enemies where it's able to hit its 10 target cap, expect 3 of them to be hit with 10s of -20% res (against an even con enemy. Around half that if you're fighting anything worth fighting). And you don't get to pick which 3 so think of it as a very minor damage adder for your AoEs. I have it slotted in there myself for the same reason you mention... can't think of much better to do with its one slot. Speaking of which, it's not really worth adding any slots to Beta Decay. You can use that slot much more productively elsewhere. Pick either the debuff enhancement or the Achilles. Yes, max res and recharge. Def is a distant third priority because you've no DDR to protect it. At best, it can be considered a base for team buffs to build on, rather than something you can rely on by itself. Res and recharge you can always rely on, so build them as much as you can. After that, and I can't stress this enough: Focused Accuracy. You NEED its toHit debuff resistance. Lacking strong defense to dodge debuffs, you need to resist them instead, just like you do damage. As a nice side-benefit, you can laugh at the auto-hit toHit debuffs as well from Cabal Witches, Tsoo Sorcerers, Dark Servants, etc. But without it, you're little more than a taunt bot against anybody with even ordinary toHit debuffs like CoT ghosts. Get FA at level 35. Next up: Slow resist. You wanted to buff recharge so that Particle Shielding is refreshing as fast as possible. Slow debuffs can screw that up royally. Fortunately, Rad Armor gets some slow resist built in. For the rest, you want at least the Winter's Gift, which you have, and preferrably, when you have the funds, start slotting a few Winter IOs for the two-slot slow resist bonus. Then tap-dance your way out of those unresistable NPC Tar Patches (speaking of which, DO monitor at least one of your resistances because those debuffs can be hard to notice in a chaotic battle... you have a second or two probably to get out of those patches before your health starts dropping like a stone). Random other stuffs: - Ground Zero wants more procs. If you can shuffle some around, you will be happy. It's a good place to eventually put a Winter Avalanche pair, including the knockdown proc. Funny thing about GZ is that it can hit up to 30 targets and it has a huge radius. Seeing that many NPCs take a seat at once always puts a smile on my face. But also, just any damage procs you put in there will very reliably proc just due to the large recharge time in the power. Good value proc nuke. - Rad Armor has a few annoying holes in its mez protection that aren't easy to fill. Fear and Confuse among them. You can get some Confuse protection if you manage to fit in Tactics. Not sure what if anything can be done about Fear. It is fortunately not that common. Confuse isn't terribly common either. You'll mostly notice it going up against CoT with Succibi in the mix. You'll end up taunting your teammates for a few seconds. A small annoyance. Might not be worth trying to fit Tactics, which you don't particularly need otherwise. - ATOs. I know you said no purples yet, but as purples go, ATOs aren't the most expensive thing out there. The non-superiors go for around 8 mil a piece. Worth saving your pennies for first. Might of the Tanker proc at the very very least. If you can fit it into an AoE, it won't stack on a single cast, but the AoE will make it fire at least once pretty reliably. The +res is very very nice.

"Yeah, them damned capes keep going around jigglin' door handles 'round here like.. what... they are gonna steal my mop? They got nothin' better to do? So you knows what I does?" "What's that, Ned?" "I gots one o' them wizardy types to hex the door. Freaks people right the hell out when they touch it, hee!" "Whoa! How'd you pay for that?" "Cookies." "Oh now you're pullin' my leg!" "No lie! You wouldn't think so but this guy says, damned if everyone doesn't promise him they have cookies if'n he just joins their heroey team and casts his spells for 'em and what do you know but THEY NEVER HAVE COOKIES! So he was happy as a clam. Gave him the whole bag!"

Just ran a PI Mayhem to confirm all that. Yes, no waypoint for jailbreak. Every other waypoint came up as normal before doing the vault. I have four waypoints in the map and was able to run them all. Racked up 30 minutes of time and then hit the vault.

Yeah, the good news (or bad news depending how you want to look at it) is that it's a lot more generally useful to my zero-defense Rad Armor tankers, so I take it at 35. Basically any group of toHit debuffers can otherwise disable me by stacking toHit with normal attacks that a Defense tanker would dodge.

Focused Accuracy is another solution for Tankers. I never skip it on Rad Armor because I get hit by every debuff in the game. Tankers get the best toHit debuff resistance out of FA, topping out at 86.5% at level 50. On a Katie Hannon at level 34, it would be 70.5%. Still very nice and means I mostly laugh at Cabal Witches and Tsoo Sorcerers and their hurricanes... provided I am not exemplared below 30. 😏

I didn't even know you COULD reset a timed mission. In any case, I'm pretty sure I've done these things side-mission first before. Will have to try it again.

Hey... occurred to me when I joined 'Boss's team doing Crimson's arc that it could be cool to get multiple teams doing that on a future TT. If we all kept in sync on the missions via TankHQ, we could cause several Kronos Titan ambushes to spawn at once, couldn't we? We'd at least have to coordinate leaving this mission at the same time: https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Crimson#Check_out_Project:_Wildflower_and_look_for_Dr._Hedia_Lamarr Doable? I am not sure how long this whole arc takes though. Might have to check it out as it's been a long time since I've done the whole thing. And we probably want to save it for the next Excel TT since the number of teams we get = the number of Titans we get. Or... we could try teams of six Tankers each. Or both! 😈

I think I took this one a little early. Not everyone gathered yet: You get a car in the face... and you get a car in the face... and you... Red, White, and Blue... (and some green) Nice place. Peaceful.

Except Babbage just spawns once. The weird thing here is the two or three Titans. I just assumed that was GMs having a bit of fun whenever it happens.

City of Data is also a good place to look: https://cod.uberguy.net/ Very detailed info parsed from the game data files and updated regularly when patches land. If you are trying to Google information on this game, you will very often be directed to old Wikis like Paragon Wiki that are describing the state of the game back when it was Live.

We usually run a few teams depending on turnout. One or two Task Force / Trial teams for whatever the weekly strike target is and at least one mission team to level the lower-level Tankers who show up. You can suggest this story arc for the mission team if you want, but most people often just want to run level 50 radios or something like that. I agree it has a funny ending, but it's probably better solo than on a team of Tankers.

Even in the twisted original dev vision of Stalkers being single-target assassins.... MA was weird. Even when Assassin Strike couldn't be used as a rotational attack, you still had SIX other single-target attacks. Now that AS can be used in combat, it's seven. It is long overdue to have one, if not two of the non-AS attacks swapped for a cone and a PBAoE, respectively. Oh, and there's no reason Storm Kick shouldn't have the +def from the Brute/Tank version when other Stalker primaries get similar +def moves. With Incarnates and Hard Modes pushing up the soft-cap, it would even be useful for that.

Moving around the room isn't the problem I was describing. It's how inefficient it is to fight enemies that are that widely spread out and reluctant to gather up. Really the only fast way to handle it is Fold Space, but I can never justify spending three slots in Teleport pool to have it available early enough in my build.

Oh definitely, I try to corral a few to a pillar or corner or whatever, but more than half the time this gets interrupted by the PuG I'm on. Usually by some controller using their one favorite power.

Which describes most of the Praetorian experience, as I recall. Giant rooms full of enemies all spaced out evenly and having only (or just preferring greatly) ranged attacks with enough range to largely ignore the range debuff in Taunt. [Cries in Tanker]

I also took some photos! Got lucky with this first one. Not too many obscuring effects. Caught a saw blade spinning overhead., Tankers lined up vs. Freaks! FIGHT! More freaks! I look out in the distance and see.... a stage all lit up! "GUYS! We gotta take a group photo over there when the mish is over! WHO'S WITH ME!?" *MISSION COMPLETE* [Sound of doors slamming] Uh... guys? I'm tellin' you. It would have made the front page! Hey, You listening, man? Back to the action! Wentworths.. yay! Skyraiders and Freaks? Boooo! There are Tanks in this picture. Honest! Everyone in this next one is in a cool action pose. Me... It looks like I am really mad at the floor but I think it's cause somebody just knocked the AV on his ass. He's down there somewhere. Just take my word for it. Ah, the great outdoors! Wide open spaces. Trees. Okay, lotsa Skyraiders.... ...and a GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT!! I know it doesn't look like it... but we're winning! And then we asked some BP to throw us an after-party. And yes, we cleaned the bowl in the center of this map. We were raised right! Fun night, Tanks!

Was it a sniper? Those dudes never follow as far as I've seen.

Then they are missing the point of it. It's not primarily for holding aggro in melee. That's what punch-voke and taunt auras are for. Taunt (the power) is for grabbing aggro from range. That's the whole reason it has a built-in -range debuff. You are holding down ten enemies in a group and see a couple on the outskirts of the battle making a beeline for the Blaster? Taunt. Auto-hit. 70ft range. 22.5ft radius sphere. 5 targets. Extremely effective even with no additional slotting. It's not that you can't tank without it. It's just easier with it.

Threat. Taunt is just another way to build Threat. Being at the top of a given NPC's threat list is what keeps them on a Tanker (or anybody). You accumulate threat by "doing stuff" to an enemy. Even without doing any damage, Taunt by itself generates some threat. Likely very little given Recluse's resistance to it, but probably not actually zero. It nobody else is doing anything to gain threat with him, it could be enough.

You're seeing that in the screenshots folder of Homecoming game client or is this being captured to the clipboard? If you are running in windowed mode it might be Windows that is capturing the window instead of the game client. I normally run in full screen mode, which works for screenshots most of the time but not for things like the character screen. For those I have to switch to windowed mode and use the clipboard, I think. Haven't done it in awhile.

If you had only mentioned recharge, I wouldn't have replied. You also said ACC, so it's important you and others realize that does nothing in PvE and that slot could be spent elsewhere. That's all.

Unnecessary. Tanker and Brute Taunts are auto-hit. Taunt enhancement increases duration, which in turn increases the multiplication factor for threat. That's nice, but the default duration is plenty long enough here. Only thing I slot in Taunt on my Tankers is a recharge IO. I'm not saying it isn't possible for a Scrapper to peel aggro from me on a single target like an AV. I've just never personally seen it, which makes it too rare an occurrence to be worth more slots in Taunt, unless the set bonuses happen to be worth it to you.

This. It's not a taunt bug. Taunt is not some master override of AI behavior. We know several things that cause mobs to run regardless of Taunt/Threat/Aggro. Avoid effects in powers cause them to run out of certain damaging effects. "Positioning" is a power some mobs like Longbow Eagles and Cabal Witches have. It makes them max. Afraid for a few seconds, which has the intended effect of causing them to run away, then turn around, and continue attacking at range. It's a hack way to make a "prefers range" AI behavior where none existed in the game engine explicitly. Some of what's being described here could still be AI behavior bugs, pathing problems, or yes, even odd corner cases where Taunt is indeed bugged. But it's simply not common, and that means it's going to be far, far down anybody's list to even investigate, let alone fix. Bigger fish. Etc.