Mr. Igneous

Really Vanden? After all the grief you were giving me about not wanting the switch because T2 Ice Sword is worse than T1 Frozen Fists in my Stone tank build. Should I now have you do the math, then make a mistake, redo the math, then try to explain yourself? Then I can dismiss you and marginalize your build as a sub-par subset of tanks and therefore unworthy of anyone listening to your feedback. This is what you put me through. Sound like fun?

Ah...great...Thank you!! Good news for Stone tanks. The swap would have been fine if the T2 power was changed to the T1 recharge time when it was moved to the T1 spot. Later, Mr. Igneous

Anything set off slower is a terrible change to any tank operating in Granite armor, I don't care what secondary it is. I don't want my Punchvoke going off at half the speed of normal. I will slot up Boxing instead to maintain speed...However I can't remember if pool powers invoke the punchvoke.

Hello All, Was on test playing with the Stone/Ice tank and am really liking the new cone widening on Frost. As a stone positioning is a royal pain while rooted in Granite, this change is wonderful, just have to target in the middle of group and can hit many more than on live. Used to be lucky if you could hit 2. This is very nice. True quality of life change here for tanks. I am guessing the other sets are liking their wider cones too. I am going to have to test with a Stone/Dark on Shadow Maul next. Still wish we could copy our live Tanks to the test server, would make testing much easier. Later, Mr. Igneous

Ah...yes activation time. You are correct. I can 1.33s for both Ice Sword and Frozen Fists. So I can only hit Twice per Frost with Frozen Fists, and lol....3.46 for an Ice Sword with the activation time, so once. So 2x107.8=215.60 damage vs 121.3 damage a difference of 94.3 per Frost. Thank you for reminding me of activation time. Although in game I would probably still do 3 Fists to one Frost. Still a terrible change. Later, Mr. Igneous

This is not the point. I am playing a Stone/Ice tank. I do not want to wait 3 seconds for my T1 power to be available after I slot it and get my -recharge down as far as I can with IOs. How would you like your T1 power to only be available every 3 seconds after all Set Bonuses? With a base of 3 seconds for Frozen Fists I can get the power to fire off every 1.36 seconds with my set Bonuses in Granite Armor, 1.05 seconds in Rock/Crystal/Minerals. Those times are doubled if my T1 power is now a 6 second base time. I do not have room in my Build to take T1 and T2 powers. Punchvoke is AoE so every 1.36 seconds I can whack-a-mole, and slotted does 107.8 damage per whack on live in Granite with it's -damage and -recharge. I can hit 3 times with Frozen Fists before my next Frost is available. Frost is available every 4.79 seconds. 3x107.8=323.4 damage from Frozen Fists between blasts of Frost. I can only hit once with Ice Sword in that time for a whopping 121.3 damage a loss of 202 damage, and a huge loss in Punchvoke. Therefore, this would be a bad change for a Stone/Ice Tank. I hope this clarifies this a bit from a Stone/Ice perspective. Later, Mr. Igneous.

Damage over time of Frozen Fists on Auto attack, is far better than Ice Sword will ever be. Not using it for damage, just need it as filler to hold aggro while slower more powerful attacks charge. This is a filler power to hold aggro between heavy hits. Just so happens that it does way more damage than putting Ice Sword on auto attack over the same period of time. You also have to account for an occasional miss. You miss with ice sword and you now have gone 12 seconds without an auto attack, as opposed to 6 seconds with Frozen Fists. To a tank this sometimes matters to keep a solid punchvoke. On a Granite tank these little recharge things really matter. I don't care if Ice Sword does more damage per hit, I need a power up more often than a base of 6 seconds. Why is it you are just talking about damage?

Recharge time 3s for Frozen Fists vs 6s for Ice Sword. Ice Sword does not do double the damage of Frozen Fists, therefore Frozen Fists are better. Especially in Granite lower recharge time is preferred to punchvoke faster. I don't want to wait double the time for Ice Sword to come up. Remember as a Stone tank I have -recharge to deal with, I don't want a slower power as my primary punchvoke. I would not want Ice Sword unless it was also a 3 second base recharge time.

I just tested a Stone/Ice tank for a bit. I really don't like the T1 and T2 power switch at all. Nobody used Ice Sword in the past, Frozen Fists is just the better power. Ice Sword is terrible compared to having Frozen fists. Please do not change /ice T1 and T2 powers.

Wow...this post shocked me. IO set bonuses need to be AT specific if this kind of power creep is available. A blaster should not be this durable. You don't need tanks at all if the whole team has stats like these. Almost anyone can take a hit and survive. I am feeling very useless right now looking at this. There are some SOd tanks that don't have stats this good. 919 percent Regen too. The only thing lacking here is Hit Points to take an alpha strike. Whole thing needs to be looked at, each AT. Tanks should always be the most durable with the best aggro control. A blaster should not be able to achieve this level of defensive stats at all. Especially with the melt your face offensive power that they have. Game is broken. Everyone seems to be able to Solo just about everything without needing a tank, or groups not even needing a tank to function at all. Max defense per AT needs a look at with set bonuses. Caps for each AT should be looked at. Is it possible to cap defense and resistance per AT with the game engine? This blaster does not look like a squishie at all. The cap for Blaster resist and defense should be no more than half that of a Tank! This blaster has Brute level defense and resists of a Brute in slotted Granite armor. Does that seem right to anybody? It does not to me. Wait it is better than a Brute in Granite, this blaster has 72.9% Psionic resistance!!

Well, at least you read that far...Veteran Tank. Although many of us played in Live Beta 15 years ago. Some of the people playing now were not even born yet. Mmmm....Old may be a decent descriptor after all! Ye Old Fogey Tank from Live Beta, YOFT for short. Now there is a desriptor! All tanks from Live Beta shall now be known as YOFT!

I Love this idea. Tanks need to be tanks. We need to be able to hold large groups with Taunt, and adding a -Resist (All) Debuff on actively Taunted Mobs would be fantastic. This idea fits with what a tank should be much better than added damage. Tanks need to be more resilient and differentiated in play style from Brutes. Make the Tank version of Taunt at least 25 please!! Brutes Taunt should not be as strong, say 10 or so. Tanks are damage absorbers, not damage dealers. We need the capability to hold large amounts of aggro, right now we can only hold a very small percentage of an 8 man teams aggro. This makes tanking difficult on large teams. However with IO's teams can also steam roll content, not really needing a tank most of the time. This makes Tanks feel useless at times. This is why many old Tanks rolled Brutes to feel useful. Tanks need extra control and debuff capability not extra damage. A team would much rather have a Tank on an AV with automatic debuffs from the Tank then have a little bit of extra damage from the Tank. Don't turn us into Brutes. Make us unique. Could also make Tank Debuffs scale with team size, that would be awesome! Encourage groups to want a tank.

Hello all, Is there a way to send a copy of a Live character to the Test server with all enhancements in place? This would save so much time to not have to kit out a new character for testing. Later, Mr. Igneous

The game is played way different now. Back when a tank could herd an entire map, a team had to wait until the tank had a solid aggro on the group. If a blaster decided to attack before the tank had full control of the herd, they could pull off a massive amount of aggro, and they would die. Teams had to have patience and wait for a tank to do his/her job, if not then the team would wipe, except the tank...lol...we would wait for them to come back to finish the battle...lol....poor impatient folks. Patience is lacking in this game as of now, it is like massive chaos in some groups. I would be happy as a Stone tank with 25 to 50 cap. People would have to start relying on tanks again...or just don't aggro that many. It was very possible to pull groups that were too big for certain tanks to handle...fire...cough...fire....lol..., this also made it much more fun, a bad pull or impatience on a team member would wipe the team. It was the tanks decision how many they wanted in each pull for the group to succeed, not some game mechanic limiting the pull. I want that back, should be able to pull too many if not careful, adds back some tactics to the game. Tanks are way more durable than any AT, and right now we can't show just how much we can really handle. A group of 10 or even 20 on a Stone tank in Granite is a joke, let us strut what these builds can really do!!!

As I said before. Tanks used to be able to use the taunt power to auto hit unlimited mobs, you had to use taunt to hold the mobs. If you did not actively taunt you would lose your massive herds. Raising the aggro cap is not a death sentence to squishies, it is fun for tanks to manage large mobs with taunt. It was done in the past. It can be done again.

Indeed as a stone tank on live in the early days, I could herd up the entire Drek mission for nuking with unlimited target taunt. 100 percent hold on the entire map of Mobs, there was not a to hit check on taunt, it was auto hit 100 percent and could hold groups of 100+. A site to behold. I would love to have the power taunt back to at least 20 mobs, 50 would be even better. A stone tank holding just a handful of mobs is sad and absolutely no challenge. Nothing could pull taunted mobs off of a tank using active taunt. I loved those days before ED and all of the changes that made tanks far less useful. I want to herd massive amounts of Mobs again!! Maybe someday it will be possible again. Please increase the power Taunt to at least 20 per activation, let this poor stone tank feel useful again! It's not like I can be killed, lol.

Hello GM Jimmy, Hope you are well. What a fantastic post with answers to so many questions. Thank you!! A question for you. Is there any way to implement time stamps in the chat window in the future? Thank you, Mr. Igneous

Hello Rylas, Hope you are well. Thank you for your reply. I will now go set up my own test server to test my builds. Have a great day! Mr. Igneous

Hello Philotic Knight, Hope you are well. Yes, they had a public and a development test server on live. Later, Mr. Igneous

Hello Mjolnerd, Hope you are well. When the game was live there was a Test Server that had the beta of the next patch running on it for testing. Also, you could transfer a copy of your characters to the server to test out new builds before taking them live. They would also host special events on the Test Server so that anyone from any shard could participate. Overall a very handy service. Later, Mr. Igneous

Hello GMs, Are there any plans to set up a Test Server? Thanks, Mr. Igneous

Yes. I am also running Windows 10 Pro. I downloaded the files via the torrent link. Put Tequila in the same folder and hit validate. It can not download any of the score folder files. score/missions.pigg and 22 other files that should go into the score folder. Any help would be appreciated. Maybe someone could just put the score folder files in a torrent magnet link. Not the whole directory? Thanks! Tony

I played a Granite tank, I would love the aggro caps to be removed. Getting rid of ED would be great too. I want to herd 100s of baddies....the fun is endless!!