ZemX

Yeah, there is honestly a strong odor of "troll" to this thread now. When ridiculous stuff like "This game is more grindy than any other mmo" gets thrown out there... you kind of have to take the hint that your chain is being yanked.

Are you serious? Inf is the least of the rewards you earn in this game. Turning that off has about zero effect on your ability to fund a character while leveling up. Now, if you're door sitting your way to 50 in a farm and then complaining you don't have money when you get there? I have little sympathy. That's not playing the game. Farming is for people who have done it all before a million times and don't care to again. Play the game and you'll have all you need. Don't know how? Ask in /help or here on the forums. Answers are at your fingertips.

Going to add my usual recommendation here as well. Do Dean/Leoanard and THEN go to Talos and do Nance/Adair. The arcs are all related by the villain and you get an extra line of dialogue with Adair if you do this. Not huge, but still a neat little touch. You might have to keep an eye on your level to avoid missing anything but this goes for pretty much any attempt to do story arcs these days. Get familiar with the NoXP toggle if you aren't already. Check wikis to make sure you know the levels of each contact. And, trying not to spoil... a few points about the Leonard arc: 1. You are asked what level of challenge you want on one mission. Going for the most challenge gets you a nice badge with a very cool title but depending on what character and powerset you are, can be either easy as pie... or well nigh impossible. I had to get a team to help on my Rad Armor Tanker but my Ninjitsu Stalker skated through no problem, so ... it can be weird. It has more to do with powersets than AT. 2. You will at one point be running for the exit of a mission with a time limit. Pay attention on your way out. There is something (or someone?) you don't want to miss clicking on. 3. Assuming you did step 2 right, consider NOT being too big a villain on the follow up little epilogue mission. Unless that's just really in character for you.

Ain't nobody got time for that! Okay, okay... that isn't true. I am just lazy. Soooo lazy. I make my own SGs for my alts and more or less the same utilitarian base for each server I have any characters on. Portal entrance room with trainer, QM, nurse, tailor, and rezzer. Four arms leading off that with three being teleporter rooms, each colored red, blue, and yellow for hero (+co-cop), villain, and Praetorian zones. The fourth room is where I stuff all the bins and work tables. Boring! But it works. My wants are mostly things HC team probably can't do, some of which is already mentioned, like the AH access. Be nice not to have bugs associated with going to base while on a mixed faction team, respeccing, or boosting/attuning enhancements while inside a base. Maybe another check box to allow teammates to enter your base even when you're not the team leader? Yeah, you can give out the password but that's less convenient than just having it show up on the menu when you click the portal.

[Mighty Core Final Judgement]. I literally do not care if this power does more damage. [Mighty Radial Final Judgement] does massive knockup. Are you having a bad day? Wander into the middle of a pack of Scrapyarders and fire off this baby. THAT will turn your frown upside down... ...and put up to 32 Scrapyarders into near Earth orbit. Take THAT, organized labor! 😈

I don't follow. There's no "nifty rule" about missing three times. Unless you're making a joke here I'm.... missing.

Not a bad idea for testing. I've been toying with the idea of starting a second build on my Rad/Staffer to play with defense. Can achieve some pretty impressive levels of melee defense with Guarded Spin. Might be enough. And if not, perhaps as a rotation with other powers like Meltdown and Melee Hybrid getting you through the low-DDR portions of Ageless.

You might have a look over at the Trapdoor testing thread in the Scrapper forum. Despite where it's located, it includes results for plenty of different ATs. Caveat: You can't JUST build for damage or you won't survive the test. So maybe this isn't exactly what you're asking either. But a tanker trying to ignore survivability has to reckon with the fact you're taunting not just everything you hit, but everything around that too, even if you turn off taunt auras. In any case, skimming that thread I see some combos with Fire Melee and Claws doing well lately. Bio, Fire, and Rad are common primaries. That test really rewards a combination of good AoE and strong ST rather than a laser focus on just one or the other since it involves taking out a whole map of x8 sized spawns and finishing with an AV.

It should stack. Stacking is shown as per-caster, which means different casters can stack. "Replaces existing effect" only applies to each caster. So one caster can't stack but multiple different ones can. You'll see the same notation on Maneuvers, for example. The other thing that matters here is how high your defense is over the soft-cap. RadA can't, by itself, soft-cap everything easily without Barrier (and then only some of the time). So that means team buffs taking you the rest of the way up over soft-cap for whatever content you're running. It's not an easy lift, which is what makes me wonder if it really holds up. I suppose with the right mix of team buffs, and stacking Ageless or Barriers... it should.

Seriously, I almost never worry about acc, since ToHit is so much more important and also because you get decent acc both in IO sets slotted in a power and by chance slotting for other things. @tidge mentioned the one case where I probably actually think about it at all and that's a heavily procc'd attack power. Since I'm not slotting a full or near full set there, I can't just assume I'll have good acc enhancement. I often go with a 2-slot Winter that gives me good acc/dmg or acc/rech (whatever the power needs more) because the 2-slot bonus gives me some slow resist in the bargain. Then dmg proc the rest.

Does that work? I know that sounds like a dumb question, but what I mean is: Is that actually enough to prevent you from being defense floored in the hardest of hardmode content? Because if not, then it's kind of wasted effort. It might buy a few extra seconds but if you're going to arrive at that floor anyway, might as well invest in stuff you can rely on instead of Defense and DDR. I haven't tried it, nor do I have any experience with hardmodes, so I am honestly curious. If I get to keep it... I'll buy. Otherwise I'll stick to boosting all the stuff I can rely on and which RadA is already good at. In theory, it seems like it ought to work if we include team buffs in the equation. I wouldn't rely just on my own defense IOing and Ageless Radial. But stacked with team defense buffs? Maybe it's enough to stay above cascade failure. Maybe.

It always applies. It's just that the number of misses StreakBreaker allows before forcing a hit depends on your final chance to hit that enemy. If you missed 7 times then your chance to hit that drone was less than 30%. Per the wiki:

Your dedication to both alliteration and obscure synonyms for "dark" is an example to us all. 😈

Taunt is great, but having Beta Decay, the taunt aura, is good enough for the lowest level TFs really, and it can hold a -res debuff IO for a little extra damage help down there. You can push Taunt a bit later that way. Aside from that, I'm also curious what people think is good for hardmode with a RadA tanker. I mostly hang out in normal content. I'd guess there's a greater need for defense slotting, Ageless for DDR maybe, etc. Kind of a weak point for Rad in harder content with lots of debuffs. MA's Storm Kick certainly also helps a bit there. And Dragon's Tail takes FF:rech. I'd say the more recharge you can get the better. Definitely have 100% slow resist (slot those Winter 2-slot bonuses and Winter's Gift). Recharge is life when you have an absorb shield clicky.

As noted, you can't. But just the one in Rad Therapy honestly feels like cheating. It's that good. You could drop Dark Consumption and never miss it... for the endurance anyway. Might still be another good proc bomb candidate if you could spare the slots. That's of course, the real problem in a build. It functions as a set bonus, not a proc. So yes, it is always available as long as you are not exemplared more than 3 levels below the level of the IO itself. This is true even if you don't have access to the power it's slotted in due to exemplar level. I always just get the attuned version to be sure it goes all the way to min level for the IO. After I got a chance to look at your build in Mid's, I noticed you already had 80% slow resist. Forgot how good Fallout Shelter was there. +45% slow resist is a hell of a good base to build on. I still like to reach 100% slow resist myself, but 80% honestly might be "good enough". Worth trying and seeing how you like it. I like knowing nothing is capable of slowing down the recharge on Particle Shielding and Rad Therapy, because between those two and good HP and Resists? You really can be "lol defense!" for most content. Incidentally, tinkering with one of my own Rads in game, I also noticed with some surprise how good the temp buff you can get from a base empowerment station is. The slow resist from there is +20% and lasts an hour, costing just a couple pieces of common salvage. I still like to get to 100% on my own because I often forget to refresh those buffs, but again 80% base in your build with the occasional buff from the station would be plenty good enough. I might be rethinking it myself. I also always put the two Avalanche there like you did, just to give a bit of recharge and more acc. Also the knockdown is simply hilarious given this power can hit up to 30 targets over a 22.5ft radius on a Tanker. After that, definitely just play with different procs for the rest of the slots. I tend to go with four damage procs but there's no wrong answer there. On a team, the wide area knockdown tells the rest of the team you just taunted every enemy that is currently picking itself up off the floor, at the very least. The power is a beast for procs thanks to the longish base recharge and the fact that the Tanker's wider area AoE's don't figure into the calculation for proc chance. It's still based on the default radius of the power, 15ft. So that helps, even if you have a little recharge enhance in there.

I would tell him to pop all the insps he has left and then run through the hallways with his hair on fire looking for the rest of the team. So yeah... fun!

Hmmm... I don't remember that. It sounds like fun, actually.

I think they just cheat. How else can they stuff that many Behemoths into their narrow Oranbega hallways?

Not as odd as the fact that even though these portals can take me seemingly anywhere in the multiverse, I still have to WALK between these stupid Portal Corp buildings all the damned time. Can't we just flip the switches on THIS one to take us to the next mission?! Or... low-tech solution: Build some underground tunnels connecting the three building's basements?

It's there on the left of the power description in CoD. It should be on Mid's power description window as well and, if I recall correctly, you can customize how it calculates that in the Math options. The in-game power descriptions are almost always best ignored, usually because they are incomplete. Maybe for reasons of simplicity, they don't always list all of a power's effects, which makes them less than useless in my opinion. Sometimes even Mid's gets it wrong. CoD is really the definitive place that I've seen. I'd tab over to it in game any time I wanted to know for sure what a power does. And on the subject of CoD, in the spirit of this thread, not everyone might have noticed the menu off on the far right that lists "Entity Search". This is for searching up in game entities (NPCs) and having a look at THEIR powers. I remember a Tanker Forum thread a while back wondering why a certain Shepherd mission in First Ward could be so punishing. Looking up the enemies in CoD, I found one of them had an unresistable Tar Patch power. A couple of them in a +4 spawn could drop even a capped Tank's 90% resist into the red.

Don't have access to Mids at the moment, so I can't see the totals, but eyeballing it.... it looks like it probably wants more slow resistance. Debuffs are a big problem for resist-based armors. You can try to build defense, but it will be stripped from you when you most need it, so I usually don't bother. Recharge time resist (a.k.a. Slow Resist) is vital for Rad Armor since it enables your heal and absorb shield to be available more often. Speaking of which, you might want more recharge in Particle Shielding. It's a big deal in terms of Rad's survival. And if you can sprinkle more pairs of winter IOs in the build, the two-slot bonus is 10%/15% (for superior) slow resist. 100% slow resist is easily possible and then you can avoid one more RadA-killer, the unresistable Tar Patch res debuff. Just skate on out of it like you're wearing non-stick boots. And never worry about cold-slinging enemies flooring your recharge, preventing your heal and particle shield from being available. Ground Zero can be an excellent proc bomb. You've six-slotted Shield Breaker instead, presumably for the defense bonus. Seems a bad deal to me, again because defense can't be relied on with Rad Armor. When not in the presence of heavy defense debuffing enemies, your resist, absorb, and heal are more than enough to keep you in the fight. When you are facing defense debuffs, your defense will be zeroed and into the red quickly. It might take an extra couple seconds if you built up some defense with IOs like this... but it will happen. Rad Therapy is not a bad place for MoT, but it's an even better place for the Theft of Essense +end proc, if you can forgo the six-slot bonus of MoT. Not saying Rad Armor has many endurance issues, but mostly for when you face endurance draining enemies, it's a godsend to just punch that heal and fill BOTH bars while standing in a crowd. Yeah, you have Dark Consumption, but Rad Therapy with Theft of Essence and a few damage procs and having one third of the base recharge time? You might consider even dropping Dark Consumption. It's only benefit at that point would be as another AoE damage power and there, the very long recharge limits its value, in my opinion. YMMV. Lastly, getting back to debuff resistance, strongly consider taking Energy Mastery for Focused Accuracy. You'll lose Gloom, but you didn't have it very strongly slotted anyway. Meanwhile Focused Accuracy, which you can run only when you need it, provides massive toHit debuff resistance that will help out immensely when you are the focus of a gang of toHit debuffers like CoT ghosts. Soul Drain can help but you don't have it slotted for recharge so it's not going to be available very often. And I find +tohit doesn't really counter toHit debuffs when you're being hit by ALL the debuffs. A defense based Tank with soft-cap defense and DDR to protect it can get away with that. Rad Armor can't, in my experience. The stacking toHit debuffs are difficult to equal with +toHit of your own.

Eh... they just appear. The Rikti Invasion sends in ships dropping bombs you have to defuse. Then they start beaming down troops. And then you get an accolade power if you do well enough. Now, if the Nemesis invasion event had included mole machines? Whole different ballgame. Have the event grant you a Fake Nem summon temp power as reward. Boom!

Eh.. If you're a defense-based Stalker, you can't sleep on taking out those Quartz the instant they show up, Cairns or no Cairns. Your defense is effectively zero while they are out there, so it's definitely a kill-them-before-they-kill-you situation. I'd say that's more interesting than most enemy groups. Or maybe "annoying" is more appropriate. Fighting these guys just ends up being a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.

I can only comment on melee. Ice Melee is particularly good on Stalkers due to the fact they get the mediocre Greater Ice Sword replaced by the always awesome Assassin's Strike and unlike other sets proliferated to Stalkers, doesn't lose any of the set's AoE powers. As for the armor, defense is always the better choice on a Stalker than Resistance, so the combo should be pretty good overall there. On a Tanker, you're stuck with Greater Ice Sword but get larger AoEs. Frozen Aura gets bigger (15ft radius, same as Foot Stomp) and Frost gets wider (135 degrees instead of 90 and can hit 16 targets). Leveling up, Ice Patch is nice to supplement early defenses and then decide to keep it or drop it later. It's still useful to help protect teammates, but not that needed otherwise for the tanker themselves once built.

Yeah, he does that, unfortunately. I have been in some failed Adm. Sutter TFs before because the lead was 40+ and wanted to run +4x8. Then you get some 20s on the team sidekicked up and facing +5/+6 AVs and they can barely scratch them. Even just the massive load of Sky Raiders to defeat in some of these missions, along with War Walkers, can take a VERY long time on a weak team. It can be done with the right team of course, but I wouldn't recommend rolling the dice with a PuG for this above +2 unless everyone is at least 40+.