ZemX

Rad/Elec is a whole lotta AoE, that's for sure. With Ground Zero and Lightning Rod you'll eventually have two solid big AoE openers to alternate between. Not that the bots won't be making a mess of everything in the room already...

Thanks for the correction. It seems to add AoE taunt to the "main target" of a power as long as it has activate period = 0 (any non-toggle attack, in other words). So that should mean an AoE around the main target of a cone too, though. Probably not noticeable on a lot of cones but if it taunts in a 10ft radius sphere around the main target, that's bigger than most melee cones.

Rad Armor has two large AoEs in Rad Therapy and Ground Zero. RT is available relatively early and has a large area (though hits just 10 targets). Still, remember that, for Tankers, every target hit procs an AoE taunt in a 10ft radius around it. Everyone will get the message. If you have any trouble at all with escapees, the Taunt power itself is the next best thing for reaching out and grabbing runners at a distance without having to move from the group you already have corralled. I wouldn't worry overmuch about the secondary. Pick something thematic. Thematic with a Bots MM? Probably Elec or Energy Melee. Both have a decent AoE at level 16. Elec has more AoE in the end and Energy much stronger Single Target. Make your Tanker the lead Bot in the MM's army? 🤪 Less thematic, but interesting to pair with Rad Armor is Staff. You can pick something tech-energy looking and add flashy colored power customization. The interesting things about Staff for Rad Armor are the +def(melee/lethal) Guarded Spin cone attack. Itself a decently large 135 degree, 9ft long cone on a Tanker. Available level 4. Good place for MotT proc and a LotG. Eye of the Storm is the PBAoE at 16. 15ft radius on a Tanker. Procs -res when used as a finisher in Form of Body stance. Has knockdown so also takes FF:Recharge proc. Innocuous Strikes is another cone, same size as Guarded Spin at level 35. Level 38 gives you Sky Splitter. This single target slow attack gives you +13% res(all) when used as a finisher. Nice for shoring up the weaker resistances in your build without devoting too much set bonus effort to them. Or even for skipping Tough entirely. TL;DR: Staff is not considered one of the better damage secondaries but on a Tanker it's got large and fast AoEs and some nice side benefits.

This. I try to look for stuff I'd actually notice making a difference and if I can't find it, I don't sweat the build. This usually means more like what powers I have and when than the difference between one set bonus and another. Putting that Theft of Essence in Rad Therapy. Having Focused Accuracy the next time I'm assaulted by five hurricane-wielding witches or sorcerers. Having 80-100% slow resist when you rely on healing or absorb shield refresh. That sort of thing. Defense is maybe one of the few things where squeezing out one or two more % can make what feels like a binary difference in survival. But that's the nature of defense. Immortal... until you're suddenly dead. Though not exactly as sudden on a Tanker, still feels alarmingly fast if you're not used to bleeding your own blood.

There isn't anything particularly synergistic between TW and Bio other than TW used to be top dog damage and Bio added moar damage bonus. TW does has a +def move but it's melee/lethal defense neither of which Bio has by default. Though you're likely to be building pool and set def bonuses up to add to Bio's existing typed defenses anyway so Guarded Spin's +def(melee, lethal) might end up helping you get to or over the melee soft-cap. Between that and capped s/l resist, it's very tough. I'm working on a Bio/Staff myself since I'm a fan of Staff fighting. It's not great single-target but it's very good and very quick AoE on a Tanker. So good against crowds of weaker enemies solo and great at punch-voking lots of enemies on teams. Having 3 modes of operation in the primary AND secondary is also kind of fun to play mix and match with. SS I am less far along with. I opted to try Rad/SS because it should largely ignore the crashes as it doesn't rely on defense and has gobs of endurance recovery tools. Bio does rely on typed defense for some things and S/L resist for others, so that will hurt a little more but... it also has a great heal and absorb shield and you're going to be capped to S/L resist. So I imagine it doesn't hurt Bio all that much either. Since I level normally, SS is more of a grind for me having no good AoE damage until 38. Hand Clap (with knockdown converter) is a nice mitigation move though and doubles as another big area punch-voke on teams. Frowned upon by the more damage-oriented Tankers though. Haven't any experience with Claws but I think it's good with anything.

Infamous, even?

Honest question since I don't AE farm... what changes? I saw that the vet xp tihng was already reverted so what other change in the beta patch notes is affecting AE farming?

There wouldn't be much value in trying. Killing through one spawn at a time works on any team and is easy to speed up or slow down based on how fast the team is killing. Herding only works if the team can both survive without you and yet kills slowly enough that you have time to pull mobs across a map onto them. Or maybe you tank the fight while someone else pulls in groups. The limiter in that case is the mobs themselves. Pulling mobs is just as annoyingly slow as dragging hostages to a door. They move at less than Sprint speed in most cases. I'm sure someone could come up with a very specific team where doing this would be faster than hopping spawn to spawn and then post a video of it. I'm just not sure it would prove anything worth knowing. I would say, start by assuming you'll fight through and if it happens you notice the team is sturdy but slow? Try the herding. See how it goes. I have more experience with Tankers than Brutes. I'd just worry that Tanker might not be great on the bosses and that could slow you down a lot, though again, only if you're carrying the whole team. If you have even one other 50 with you who does better than tank damage... it's not a problem. Brutes are a bit less tough than Tankers but survivability is a binary. If you have enough, having more is no difference. The -defense will help some, but you may find tweaking the +level notoriety is better. If the team can't kill quickly enough, it might gain slower XP on higher settings than on lower.

If doing what I described is "slow" then you're doing it wrong. Ideally the team doesn't stop moving and someone is always starting the next fight while the last one is mopping up. It goes as fast as the team can kill. Pulling mobs to the team isn't necessarily faster. You might gain some efficiency if the team has good AoE but you're still dealing with pulling slow-jogging mobs halfway across a map. You might only have time to pull two or three spawns in before you have to move anyway. Which one anybody finds more "fun" is subjective. Personally, I find playing meat-grinder in a single location to be pretty dull. But if I'm being honest, PI radios are the last place I go for "adventure" anyway.

I don't remember who said it but someone at one point asked if the mission we were on was a "defeat all" and the reply was something like, "Well, it is when we do it anyway!" Tanker Stealth.

Tanking PI radios is easy, especially if it's just Council. Only the Marksmen (snipers) typically refuse to huddle up to the tank so if you have a few seconds ahead of the rest of the team when jumping into a spawn, you can often have them in a nice tight bunch for AoEs when the team reaches you. No need for herding or corner pulling. It's usually fastest and safest to one-at-a-time these spawns right where they are standing. Corner pulling is generally only beneficial on maps where enemies are widely spread out or reluctant to collapse on the tanker's position. Praetorian maps with Clockwork, PPD, or Resistance are notorious for being spread all over the place and using only ranged attacks. For them, any corner or object you can use to break LOS after aggroing helps as they will stubbornly refuse to close in on you even when Taunted. Herding (i.e. pulling more than one group to the team at a time) is often a bad idea if the team has a lot of sidekicks. To the point of this thread, if the idea is to carry a lot of lowbies for powerleveling... just don't do it. One spawn at a time is "The Way". You otherwise risk spilling over the aggro cap and making paste of the squishies.

According to this at least there are some Malta to be found in a few of the location radio missions (bank, pawn shop, police station) in PI https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Police_Radio Not sure if they are available in the other rescue, get object, or defeat boss radio mission types though.

If your criteria is basically you plus anybody needs to work then I agree with others saying Tanker/Brute. One of the Scrapper sets that has a taunt aura would work too probably but won't be quite as good holding aggro due to lack of "punch-voke". I'm gonna say Rad/Rad Brute though probably because it hits most of your points. You have a taunt aura and a damage aura. Keeping aggro won't be an issue. Definitely take Taunt though. Plenty of people will tell you you don't "need" it and that's beside the point. You don't need it. You want it. It's a ranged autohit AoE taunt. Somebody peeling off to go make a paste of one of your baby blasters on the team? Taunt. Without taking a step away from the main pack. Tanker will have wider AoEs but won't handle bosses as quickly. Fine if you have damage on the team but if you want this to work even with seven sidekicks? Brute. Rad Armor has broad protection against any of the enemies you'll face in its resists, including Psi (Carnies and Arachnos) and against endurance drain (Malta Sappers and Arachnos Mu). It has -def in the taunt aura to which you can then add Achilles Heel -res proc. More -def in Ground Zero. GZ and RT (the heal) can both be turned into proc bombs. GZ also does some minor healing of allies. Rad Melee does more -def. But you could also consider Super Strength if you want to go with a Tanker. Rad/SS is still no Brute but is something of an outlier for good damage on a Tanker and not being bothered when Rage crashes.

They can, so why not just use inf drops as a proxy for "reward rate"? This thread isn't a referendum on farming, though some have tried to make it so. It's specifically about AE farming, so it seems to me the comparison should simply be what reward rate you can achieve inside AE vs. outside AE. And that obviously means farming both ways. So @ShardWarrior's numbers seem like a good start. Unless there's some reason to believe the item drops inside vs. outside won't follow the same proportion as inf dropped. Do they? I don't know because I don't farm inside or outside the AE. But I am curious because I do buy stuff on the market. So my skin in this game is how the product gets to the shelf, so to speak. I don't necessarily WANT higher prices, but it also doesn't appeal to my sense of fairness if the reward rates are so much higher inside AE vs. outside AE (even farm vs. farm), so if that's not the case... good. But I suspect it is and @Ukase seemed to imply as much as well with his comment about the doom that would befall the market if people had to do their farming outside AE. If, on the other hand, AE farming is not significantly better than outside AE farming and the community has just decided it's a good place to gather, then I'm cool with that too. Keeps the farmers and their "sitters" out of the mission teams and TFs and that suits me fine.

This makes me wonder if 3D sound would actually fix a lot of this. One of the few disappointments I had after discovering HC was discovering 3D audio no longer worked. If it did, it might actually attenuate a lot of these sounds by their distance and direction to you. Instead it's like everything happens directly between your own ears, making those particularly annoying sound effects even worse, I think.

http://progressquest.com/

I'm not a huge fan of any of the TFs but Ice Mistral is kind of fun for the unique "jump down the pit" mission at the end where you have this huge cavern filled with exploding crystals ending in a AV fight with just massive ambushes. I also sort of like Sutter even if the final fight can be kind of problematic on some teams. It otherwise takes you some fun places. But my favorite "content" is messy mid-level PuGs. Well oiled steamroller Incarnate teams are boooooring as hell. Random teammates? No incarnate powers? Decent banter? Casual attitudes? Yes please! Bonus points if it's redside.

Yeah I've got a Rad/SS in the works at the moment. My problem is leveling it. I don't farm. And SS is kind of boring until you get Foot Stomp. Hand Clap is fun but does no damage. Otherwise there's no AoE in the secondary until 38. RadA helps a little bit with proc bombed Rad Therapy and Ground Zero though. For a "most survivable" tanker, I'm debating between SR/Staff and Inv/Staff. I like Staff for either because of the +15% melee/lethal defense in Guarded Spin and the +13% res(all) in Sky Splitter's Form of Body finisher. I love that the most defensive stance in Staff is the one that adds a damage bonus too and lets me pick between Sky Splitter's +res buff to me or Eye of the Storm's -res debuff to all the enemies it hits with its 15ft radius PBAoE. I'm leaning SR. Invuln of course has better full-health resist and hit points, but SR would be no slouch especially with Staff's add-on. And it has sky-high defense and DDR. Melee defense especially would be absurd with Guarded Spin's adder. Would only matter in the challenge mode content, of course, but that's the only stuff where you can really differentiate well-built tankers anyway.

I wouldn't think so as pseudopets are normally not targetable. But it does make me wonder about Oil Slick... Also what about Decoys? I would guess that although they can't be damaged or drained, they would still fuel the rez merely because they can be targeted and attacked.

As the name of the rez is "Reserve Power" it suggests, conceptually, the Stunner is tapping some backup battery to revive (though the text description of the power is just a copy of Soul Drain) But you're right. It's also the Stunner's most dangerous AoE attack, even just on damage, to say nothing of the crippling end drain and recovery debuff.

For even more win, make it a Rad/SS. Put Superior Avalanche: KD in Ground Zero. Go knock down avg. 27 out of 30 enemies it can hit in one go. Take Hand Clap and put Sudden Accel KB to KD in it. It's Foot Stomp without the damage... or the foot, I guess. 🤪 Take Mighty Radial Final Judgement. Find a large crowd of Scrapyarders and show them near Earth orbit. Slot KO Blow for knock to send one more into orbit to keep them company. You want Energy Mastery for FA, so squeeze Energy Torrent in there too strictly for variety. Sure, sure... you could do more damage. But can you have more FUN? I don't think so!

You've mentioned this before and it was suggested that maybe you were experiencing lag or something. I don't know what else to tell you. You can review the description of Reserve Power on City of Data if you like. It's a 25ft radius auto-hit PBAoE. If no enemy (of the Stunner, this would include pets or allied NPCs of the players) is in range then they don't rez. I've seen this work many times. But lag between your client and the server can also affect things. Most often I see this hopping into a pack of enemies and triggering a PBAoE attack too quickly. It hits nobody if the server hasn't caught up to my new position in time. i.e. It thinks I activated the PBAoE before moving in range of the enemies and it hits nobody. One thing I see happen fairly often with Stunners is someone hits them with a knockback that kills them. They land a good distance away but still rez. This is because there's no delay on their rez. It doesn't fire where they land. It fires where they were defeated. So if that's not the case that you saw then it's either lag or something went wrong. The power should work the way it's described. And I've seen it work that way because I usually TRY to knock them back from the team with a Nem Staff if I can. And if none of the melee or pets chase it, it works.

I occasionally get a problem where the keys act like I am pressing CTRL when I am not. Maybe it missed a key-up event or something. At-TAB out and then back in to the client usually fixes that for me. No need to restart. Not saying that was your issue but it might have fixed it.

I'm not sure it's going to matter what secondary or epic pool you choose. Invuln/Any, built properly, is going to live up to the name on the product label. If you're after hardmode survivability, that's more specific and you probably want to hang out in the few threads that are going about it now to see what works best there and what struggles with it.

I think redside's Dean MacArthur -> Leonard arc is better. Best is doing that first and then switching to blueside for Nance -> Adair. The nice thing about DMac->Leonard is it can end on a fairly heroic note if you want. Plus, who doesn't want a badge called "Army of Me"?? 😈