ZemX

Really the only thing I don't love about it. I do use the dark customization but those spinning ping-pong balls are still visible. Dark Armor has that going for it at least. Lots of options for visual customization last I looked.

grrr... could swear I unchecked PvP data in CoD... fixing that (again) now...

I joined and, this time, successfully completed another PuG Tarikoss yesterday. To the best of my knowledge and ability to confirm... @Snarky was not on the team. 🤪

They are not. I only mentioned it because Magic Carpet would be very thematic for a mystical genie, so perhaps Rocket Board would look good for a space genie. Either (or Void Skiff) is a poor substitute for a real travel power. Not much experience with it. It is generally thought of as a more offensive Tanker option. I didn't mention it because it doesn't have any particular synergy with Leadership. It has no defense to add to. No team buffs to go with. Etc. That's not a bad thing. One thing you might do with it is pair with a Katana or Broadsword. The Parry attack in each of those adds stacking melee defense. Add that to Leadership and maybe Weave, Combat Jumping or Hover, and set bonuses and you can get some decent defense to reduce incoming damage. Though without Defense Debuff Resistance that defense will desert you when it's most needed. Another pairing option, if you're open to the idea, is Staff Fighting. Staff's Damage stance adds +dmg and has finishers which either buff your resistance or debuff enemy resistance. Very handy. Stacked with Tough and the Might of the Tanker proc, you can boost resistance considerably and make your Fiery Aura Tanker reasonably sturdy. Staff also does the slightly less resisted Smashing damage whereas the blades are lethal. And any of the weapon options has tech/energy weapon customizations that would go with the theme, although the blades do seem to fit it better than the staff. I know you mentioned already having done a Staff Stalker but one thing to note that's specific to Tankers is the Gauntlet inherent hugely benefits Staff on Tankers. The PBAoE becomes 50% bigger radius. i.e. As large as Foot Stomp in Super Strength, and hits up to 16 targets. The two cones get 50% wider each and hit up to ten targets. It's an AoE wood chipper on a Tank. It doesn't get Build Up like the Stalker does, but it gets the stance selection, which you wouldn't have had on the Stalker. To @PLVRIZR's point though: Fiery Aura and Fire Melee are a great combo because FA's Fiery Embrace is a kind of second build up that, while it adds fire damage to most any damaging attack, also boosts Fire Damage specifically by 100% for 20 seconds. So it's most effective when your attack powers are doing Fire type damage. And Fire damage is certainly already much less commonly resisted than Lethal or Smashing.

Think about Shield / Fire. Shield Defense and Leadership have a couple things in common. Shield has a team def buff in Grant Cover. Not as wide as Maneuvers, but a lot more defense. Maneuvers and Grant Cover, if you enhance both for defense, would be giving teammates around 20%ish defense and a little bit of defense resistance if they are within 22.5ft of you. YOU don't get all that (just Maneuvers and the DDR) but you're not hurting for defense with Shield. Shield has a self damage buff in Against All Odds. That plus Assault is a nice damage bonus. On the looks side of things, if by "space genie" you mean to add some tech look instead of just magical, Shield has some nice tech and energy shield customizations. Or you could stick with elemental for fire. Looks very nice with the Fire Melee swords out, speaking of which... Fire Melee has Fire Scimitars. Sorcery Pool would be a given for a mystical genie... not sure about space genies. Maybe go Combat Teleport. Pick up Teleport Target for helping teammates travel. Skimp on the actual travel power and go Rocket Board instead of Magic Carpet. It has a very Jetsons kind of cartoon spacey look to it, if that goes with the theme.

Mr. "Handsy" ended up regretting it. I let the rest of you have Mother Mayhem, tho! 😈

Well... that explains everything! 😈

I DID quit a PuG Tarikoss recently, but in my defense, it went down like this... Level 15 leader, no advertised specs for the TF. We fill and load into the first mission to find... yep... we're set for +4. First group of legacy chain is +5. People immediately charge in and are already engaged as I am stepping through the door. I'm exemplared from 50 down to 15 and the only tank on the team. Half the team drops dead straight away and exits to the hosp. I am slowly losing and about a third of the way through my insp tray before I start paying attention to team chat. *Assorted grumbling from people headed back from hosp* Leader: "Nah, we're fine!" Me: "We're getting murdered on the first group!" *eats another three insps* Leader: "If you can't handle it, quit!" *literally half the team quits* Leader: "WTF? I'm done!" *leader quits* Me: (to the remaining two other people on the team) "gg guys! tc!" /quit (Total Run Time: ... About 4 minutes? 🤪 )

It does still. If the goal is to have Dark Regen available as often as possible then it makes sense to keep ToE in there just to at least pay the cost of it, if not return some end. I don't have Mid's in front of me so I can't see if there is recharge enhancement in Dark Regen. If not, the proc rate is 56%. With 100% recharge, it's around 30%. Unless I've botched the math.

Bingo. I think a lot of people would point to ED as the big mistake, but I think it was really Set Bonuses. Making them additive bonuses instead of enhancements meant that you could add things your powersets didn't have, most notably, of course, being soft-capped defense to ATs that didn't even have armor powersets. But what powersets (and ATs in general) DIDN'T have was as important as what they did have in setting them apart from one another. That's really the only nostalgia I have for the old days. You could still put together a team from any collection of ATs and powers, but the team needed to work as a team. After Inventions, it was just eight people soloing together much of the time.

I'd say buffs are more efficient than debuffs in this game just due to the Purple Patch. Maybe the one exception there is -regen on an AV/GM... but then they went and put Envenomed Daggers up for sale so anyone can do it. Nice thing about choosing a debuff set though is all the powers are useful both in a team and solo. Not true of most team buffers. But the Purple Patch does make me sad.

Ha! Whoever has the name "Pool Boy" reserved has BETTER have one of these builds (and the appropriate costume) to go with it.

This. It is more plausible 1823 is the "incorporation" date of Paragon City. Founding dates tend to be more informal. They might denote when settlers first built homes there or when they first named the place. Incorporation is when a local government is formally established. The most populous city in Rhode Island is Providence. It was founded in 1623 but not formally incorporated as a city until 1831.

This thread is no fun! Stop telling us what wonderful accepting-of-all generous people you are and start dishing dirt. Admit it! No? Just me? Fine. MMs. I can't stand em. I'm sure they are fine people. Probably help old ladies cross the street and donate to their local pet shelters. But man are pets just annoying! Chaos. Pure chaos. Why did ninjas have to suck? I love these guys! They are silent! You barely notice they are there! Meanwhile robots are all CLOMPCLOMPCLOMPBBBBBZZZZAppppp! Everywhere. All the time. Demons growl. Wolves poop everywhere. What? You know they are! Controllers: For the love of Pete... stop with the AoE immob. This is like the embodiment of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Everything has got to be glued to the floor NOW! Or confused. Or... whatever those vines are doing! Ewwww! Tolerance doesn't mean I don't cringe inwardly when I look over a team roster. It just means I don't make a fuss about it. 😈

You can if you "enhance" your AT by re-rolling as a Tanker. 50% wider cones!* *Results may vary. Other side-effects include increased desire to herd, inability to die, and uncontrollable laughter in the face of danger. Ask your doctor about Tankers!

Assault, Tactics, and Maneuvers can be taken by someone solely for the benefit they provide the player. Now... if they've taken Vengeance you know they are thinking about teaming! 🤪

Masterminds released with CoV on Issue 6. They got Bodyguard mode in Issue 7. And yeah, I remember this same discussion on the forums. Then, like now, lots of nonsense occasionally got discussed on the forums that had no connection with reality in the game. Brutes were tougher and had better aggro control tools than MMs on release. The situation in-game was that Brutes were redside's tankers while on the forums a bunch of people were "well actually"ing some silliness about MMs being annointed by the devs as the tanks of redside. That was either a misquote from some loose talk from a dev somewhere.... or Brutes being better tanks than MMs was a total accident that nobody could have predicted... after the devs designed Brutes to be tougher and have taunt? I'm sure giving them Stone Armor was just an attempt to trick us into thinking they were redside's tanks! How gullible we were! 🤪 It's mostly an irrelevant historical academic argument though. I think it's pretty obvious you can build an MM who can tank TODAY. Bodyguard plus insane levels of personal defense added to the buff/debuff/heal possibilities in the secondary? Sure. How well they can hold aggro against squishy high damage teammates? I have no personal experience there. Tankerminds claim they can do it. I can't claim otherwise having never tried it myself.

I keep hearing this but if this was ever their plan, they dumped it before release. Brutes were given the Tanker's toolset... not MMs. They were tougher, had Tanker threat levels, punch-voke (unless this got added later?), and the autohit AoE Taunt. They also got Tanker-ish armor sets like Stone. It wasn't the players who decided they were redside's tanks. It was the design. I can imagine there was probably some discussion about how MMs *could* tank, but in the same sense anyone can, by taking Provoke in the pools and then just trying to keep aggro with constant attacks. MMs do have the numerical advantage and their pets are at least Scrapper equivalent in terms of threat generation level. And to a certain extent they can replenish them during a fight as they are defeated. So doable? Sure. But hell, I've "tanked" for PuGs on a Stalker before. IOs make a lot of silly things possible these days.

I use it on my Rad Armor tankers but RT does some +end of its own. Can't say I've ever checked the log. I just know it fills the bar more reliably with ToE in there than just by itself. I also hope that's working as intended... because it's so good it FEELS like cheating. 😈

It looks like you're testing against only three enemies. Dark Regen has a wide area which drops proc chance considerably. A 3.5ppm proc would fire 55% of the time if you put no recharge in the power. With 100% recharge enhancement, that drops to 30%. It's possible you're just being unlucky here. Try it a few more times or try it against ten targets and you might see multiple procs. City of Data, at least, still shows the ToE proc as "Stacks with Existing Effect".

1 tanker is a tanker. 2 tankers is a tag team. Three is an XP bucket brigade of herding. Eight tankers... ...is a Tuesday. 😈

I think this thread is lacking some context. More than just any old rescue being annoying due to mechanics, Lt. Dietrich is MEANT to be annoying as part of the story. She is written as holding a grudge against Vanguard. A professional rivalry between Longbow and Vanguard. What she says to you for a rescue that, despite what she claims, she really did need, is as follows: Considering the co-op nature of the RWZ, it should almost have been a requirement to let villains do precisely what is suggested here: Leave her to the Rikti if she doesn't need your 'amateurish bunging'. That's got everything to do with her petty attitude and nothing to do with her gender. But the RWZ came a long way before Going Rogue invented options like this. Speaking of which... Problematic characters who happen to be male? I submit, for your consideration, one Westin Phipps, and freely admit one of my favorite missions in this entire game is the vigilante tip mission where the objective is literally, and I quote, "Beat the snot out of Westin Phipps!"😈

Yeah, ever since I learned about Tar Patches and Enervating Fields being unresistable, I have made sure to keep a few resistance values in my combat monitor at all times so I know when to bravely run away (away) from the fight with my resistance-based tanker.

Most 120 degree cones aren't allowed the Gauntlet bonus. Shadow Maul seems to be the exception (or an oversight... shhhhh!). But yeah, it's also a shame the PBAoE is 12ft radius instead of 15ft. It gets to recharge faster as a tradeoff though, so there's that. But hey, at least it's not Titan Weapons, which not only has THREE cones that don't benefit from Gauntlet, but two of them also only hit 5 targets each. Bleh.

You may be thinking of Paragon Protectors. Crey Protectors are the armor suited dudes that put up Force Field powers like Dispersion Bubble and Deflection Shield. That does give the trios you can run across in Crey's Folly MoG levels of defense though when they overlap. I can't recall if they put those powers on immediately or only in response to being damaged. I can say for whatever reason, I usually don't have trouble taking them down. They take longer but are not impossible, so I might need to check them out again. I try to avoid them just in the interest of time on a Manti TF, which is 9 times out of 10 a speed run. The tenth time is a +4 where the team lead wasn't 35, the whole thing is bugged, and we're down a man because the vampire quit!🤬