ZemX

I dumped defense and got tougher on the ITF and weaker nowhere else. If there's a perception problem anywhere it was that the defense was doing me any good in the first place. It turns out the only place I needed it was the only place it abandoned me. I'm more than tough enough to survive when enemies AREN'T hitting me 95% of the time, so what do I need defense for? To avoid debuffs but only when one of them isn't defense debuff? I'm gonna stick with Def w/DDR + res stacked on top is tougher than Res wo/DDR + Defense stacked on top, even if you can't reach res caps in the former case. You don't need to. Of course... tough enough is all you DO need in any case. So one being tougher than the other isn't always (or even often) going to matter. This discussion can only really be about surviving the game's hardest challenges. Anything else? Even a decently built Tanker is nigh-indestructible. Any normal ITF ("normal" being run at 54 with a 50+1 Incarnate and a decent team) is a complete pushover these days.

Sure, but only when you're not up against a crowd of defense debuffers is my point. I found that happened often enough that the investment in defense bonuses just wasn't worth it. By shifting that to recharge, regen, and debuff resist bonuses instead it made me better able to survive those fights against def debuffers and didn't affect at all my ability to survive anything else. So win/win. It's nice to have that base of defense on teams where you might catch enough defense buffs to put you safely over the soft-cap, but I usually prefer to be more self-sufficient on a tanker so I'm good in any situation. As for MA, yeah Storm Kick is the shit. But I'd rather stack that defense on a toon with DDR so I decided to try the @Werner-recommended SD/MA Tanker. If I can stop creating alt-tanks, I might even get somewhere.

This is my experience with Rad/Staff. It was my first ever Tanker and it was a blast to play. Big, fast, early AoEs on a Tanker. But as a result, I've had exactly the reaction to some of the other sets I've tried that the OP has. The "good" ones like Rad Melee and Dark Melee just are kind of dull getting started. Maybe they are better later on but I am having trouble getting there. It's subjective though. "Slow but hits like a truck" just may not be my thing.

This was a lightbulb moment for me when I finally got this about my Rad tanker. I gave up trying to avoid debuffs with fragile non-DDR defense and sought stacking more debuff resist from IOs and pools. 2-slot Winters, Tactics, Focused Acc. Tactics even got me some Confuse protection, which Rad also lacks, so I could stop doing the bidding of succubi (sorry ladies!) Sooo much better now.

Yeah, I should have said my problem is really more about the secondary and not entirely about the performance. I have at this point, in various stages of low to mid-levels: SD/Rad, SD/Dark, and SD/MA. And I've taken an Ice/SD Stalker to 50, so I am pretty familiar with how Shield operates. But... the Rad and Dark melee Shield tankers have been kind of a slog. They are both just so uninspiring to play so far. Slow. Late-developing. Lack-luster AoE on Dark. My Rad/Staff just took off and needed no pushing from me to run all the way to 50 on pick-up teams. Big, fast, early AoEs. The Rad has just gotten Irradiated Ground which is both good (or will be once procced up) but also kind of boring. You just stand there and it does damage. Meh. The MA is somewhat interesting and might be the one. It may only have the one AoE but it's fast recharging, decent sized (though not quite as large as Staff's Eye of the Storm), and takes an FF:Rech proc. It also has Storm Kick to provide an extra defense boost which, together with decent DDR, should make it hard to crack. Outside of Shield, I have been considering (but haven't rolled up yet) an Invuln or SR tanker with either Staff or TW as the secondary. ETA: Big reason I might consider SR/Staff, even though I've already got one Staff tanker is the +res on Staff's Form of Body + Sky Splitter. With IOs, Sky Splitter's +res, Might of the Tanker's +res, maybe even that little bit of Absorb from Gauntleted Fist, AND scaling resistances? Who needs a heal? Okay... outside of auto-hit situations, this guy would be very hard to kill even at 40% health.

On my Rad tanker, I eventually gave up on bothering much with defense. But Rad already layers absorb, healing, and resistance and that's good in all cases I've found except when I am surrounded by angry, buffed, Cimerorans with no access to Incarnates to keep defense up (level 44 challenge). Aside from that, I haven't needed defense with this build. I'm still trying to find a defense-based tanker I like enough to play to 50. I generally think building resistance onto a defense set is better than building defense on a resistance set because of DDR. Obviously if you can rely on Incarnate abilities for it, that's different, but I exemplar often enough I can't rely on it in general.

Yeah, lamp life is a big concern if you game long hours. I used to game on a projector like that and I think I worked out that it was costing me 20-25 cents an hour or something like that. But it was also annoying to have to keep the room dark. I have a home theater setup in the living room, so there's lots of windows to put blackout drapes over. These days I am addicted to variable-refresh-rate as well so I game on a desktop. Cheaper and better image quality really. To get the same features in a projector can be 4x the cost. Or at least it was last I looked which is admittedly a few years back by now.

Eh... you can already dump inf into converting stuff for alpha components, so why not the rare and v.rare thread components?

Should also be noted that Frost is one of those cones that can be range enhanced, which is a big deal in combination with Tanker's +50% arc width. It means you can make that sucker a 15ft range, 135 degree cone. And it hits 16 targets. Move to one side of a packed spawn... hit everybody. 11 second base recharge too. Longish animation is maybe the only downside but when you're hitting that many targets with an AoE, it's not that big a deal. Also, Frozen Aura on a Tanker is as big as Foot Stomp.

Yeesh... I have enough trouble with the 1 hour challenge. Slow down! 😈 I mean... congrats!

Seconded. My Rad/Staffer wouldn't need it for the damage mitigation anyway. The only thing that bothers me is debuffs. Run up against CoT or Ghosts and I might as well just be a taunt bot without Focused Acc. Still.. could be interesting if you want to rely on DN's -dmg instead of capping all resists. Instead go for more defense bonuses and maybe the combination of that and the -tohit from DN will help you avoid most debuffs. Just seems more complicated and less reliable than leaning into Rad's strengths: Resist, Recharge, and that absorb shield. Building for debuff resistance rather than avoidance seems to work for me in most cases short of extreme challenge type stuff.

I wouldn't say central, exactly. Tanking is just one way to mitigate incoming damage/threat. Control and Buff/Debuff are others as is the old "good offense". It's just the last one is about the only one that matters anymore when everyone has defense. Tougher challenges make that self-defense from pools and IOs less effective and thus make mitigation roles valuable again. That could mean a tanker... or it could just mean stacking some debuffs or having good crowd control.

The wrinkle in all this is that there appears to be at least two different games here and whether someone is OP or UP depends on which game you are talking about. Come to the forums and try to talk about team tactics, for example, and three people will pop out from behind a rock to tell me that nobody needs tactics because everything dies in seconds to a withering hail of AoEs. And they're not wrong in some cases if we're talking about teams of IOd and Incarnated (that's a word, right?) level 50 characters. But they ARE wrong for most random pick-up teams running max. difficulty below about level 40. Tankers, for example, aren't particular overpowered in the endgame where "enough" survivability is all you need and then what is more important is how much damage you can do. Tankers do okay damage but you can hardly call it overpowered. A Scrapper or Brute boosted by their team is arguably more useful. But... Tankers are like cheating in the middle levels since they can achieve near-immortality much sooner and with less investment than anyone else and couple it with very respectable damage.

Since I don't have a Fire Tanker, I don't play my Tankers on teams where "it all melts". You hardly need a Tank on those teams, let alone one who took Taunt. But yeah, I've seen that "hop in and taunt the pack of mobs you just landed in thing". I don't mention it in game, because... unsolicited advice. I use Taunt on the annoying ranged foes and whenever I want to grab something without leaving the main pack of enemies I have taunted with aura and AoEs. I could do without it, but find it useful enough that I don't want to. Like anything else in the build, I ask myself if there's a better one-slot wonder power I could replace it with and the answer is usually "no".

Adding injury to insult is NOT how the saying goes, man!

I am absolutely not saying it didn't happen. It happened enough that empaths had a crowd of people treating them like gods, no doubt. But there were as many people laughing at them in global chat channels whenever teams would go "looking for healer" or "need a tank" so there were at least both camps of people present from very early on. If you chose to play an Empath, you didn't go hungry... not saying that. But the reality too was that the core game mechanics that make stacking buffs/debuffs so powerful were there from the start. Hell, ED was a result of that buff-stacking problem applied to enhancements. The Live devs didn't realize how much power they'd given and many players didn't either right away.

If it's Excelsior, there's a group that runs Level 44 challenge mode ITFs that DO put "IOed 50s" in the LFG message. But people still sometimes join who aren't 50 or aren't IOed because people sometimes just don't read. Not saying that's what happened here. It would indeed be rude if it was not announced.

I've read it several times and it, along with your follow ups, sure sound a lot more like you think empathy was more popular than I remember it being. Maybe if when you think someone has misunderstood you, it would be more admirable to clarify than to insult first? Just a thought for you.

When you write a post that's 90% talking how popular and prevalent the Trinity is, don't bitch at ME because I didn't put that much weight on your last sentence that sounded like an exception to that rule. I am saying people who bucked the Trinity were as popular, or more, than those who were sticking to it. If that's what you're saying then great... we're saying the same thing.

I don't recall any such time and I started with the beta. This probably depended on which circles you ran in. The Holy Trinity was by then already well established in other pre-WoW MMOs so people brought it with them. The game never required it though and Empaths weren't REALLY king. They just often thought of themselves that way and enough people treated them that way. But people who knew how the game actually worked could run circles around the tired Trinity. Eight Defender teams were always a sight to behold. Once you realized how stacking buffs/debuffs worked... it was off to the races really. It was really funny to get one of those "healers" on a team back then that wasn't taking any damage thanks to the other support.

"Enabled" isn't the same as required or even encouraged. As loud as people were declaring themselves to be healers or "looking for healers" in game, there were equally loud people telling them they didn't need a healer. That goes all the way back. It's not quite THAT simple to find a challenge for a Level 50 Incarnate these days. But it can be found. If Hard Mode does anything it will be to both make that easier to set up for Level 50 teams AND worth doing with better rewards. That last part probably keeps plenty of people from bothering with harder modes of play that are already available. Generally, I find +4/x8 on mid-level teams a good compromise. No incarnates and often not everyone is fully IOed yet. Roles matter more but still nothing in particular is absolutely required. A team doesn't need a tank, but still benefits from one. Same for buff/debuffs or control. More than half the reason I won't set foot in a farm isn't any disdain for people who farm but just that some of the best team gameplay still to be found in CoH is on low to mid-level teams where people still have SOs (or at least not full IO builds). Takes me back.

I see a lot of Tank builds with Taunt dead last and I can only assume they are meant to be 50-only endgame builds. Taunt is a HUGE help if you're actually playing the game while leveling instead of sitting at a door in a farm. Not that you can't get by without it. It's just very handy when you're standing in a group you have controlled and need to pull something else into it or off of someone else. You don't have to go smack it yourself or worry about a ranged attack missing when another hit might flatten a squishy. Just one more thing that goes away when nobody is "squishy" though. That's the state of endgame CoH pretty much. You don't need anything but damage and more damage. Why anybody plays the high end game is beyond me. I can only find "real" CoH myself on teams running max. difficult below level 45 and usually without everyone on the team being fully IOed yet.

TIL! Thanks! I guess it really is as easy as a costume change.

You might also make use of the three builds. Obviously not as convenient as a costume change, but you could BaseTp -> Trainer -> step back through portal and be back where you were in a new costume and alternate build inside of a minute or less probably. This would let you emphasize Blaster melee attacks and melee defense in one build, ranged in another, control type stuff in a third?

The most annoying thing about the Zombie and Rikti invasions (since they both work the same way) is the way they consistently keep spawning on the same side of any given pack of players. Instead of randomly spawning around players. Causes the whole thing to migrate over time. I've seen them go over cliffs in Talos like a bunch of lemmings. You can't get people to move back either because once something spawns, people run to attack it, no matter what you are telling them in League chat.