Heraclea

When I've nothing better to do, I will go to Cim and grind on Marcus Valerius's endless timed missions. He's the zone equivalent to a police radio. Like the radio, there are ones you don't wantl avoid the ones that involve destroying shadow crystals. His RWZ counterpart is Borea. Hers give mobs that drop tech salvage; his are magic. Many of my characters are for RP reasons reluctant to give Vanguard the time of day. If you have no qualms, there she is.

Get some accurate healing sets into Siphon Life, or if they are pricier than Mako's Bite just slot two accuracy, two heal, two recharge in it. That will do more for your toughness than any set bonus. If getting damage out of the attack is important, then Frankenslot two damage/recharges for the generic recharge from any yellow set, and maybe one accuracy/damage. Siphon Life was made for Frankenslotting. I always recommend that Willpower anythings put off Mind over Body until after Quick Recovery at minimum. It really only starts to become worthwhile at SO levels, and you'll enjoy that Synapse so much more if you aren't struggling to keep it on. The only toggles you should take ASAP is IW and RttC. And you're telling me your travel power is important to your concept.

WoW taught me to appreciate COH and to see how different it was from other MMOs and their more punishing environments and mandatory min-maxing. I do not want any generic MMO crap (the ubiquitous 'drop what you're doing and stand over there') in my City. I do not want tanks or healers to become prima donnas. I do not want encounters that require live voice chat to coordinate.

My blaster solos most everything reasonably well, but is a multiple stealthed electric/electric blaster. Her method is to slip unnoticed into the middle of the spawn and hit everything with the big nuke followed by Power Sink. I have almost got her to perma-Hasten as well, so this is a working strategy for most every spawn. Anything still standing will have zero endurance for at least a couple seconds, and will be mostly harmless.

I experienced this as a curse that killed my interest in endgame raiding. You're always on the clock in WoW. Raid leaders, and probably everyone else, always knew how much damage or healing you were putting out and how much threat you had generated. The opposite of fun. It also means everybody knows immediately who stepped on the wrong square and the other sorts of catherding that sends players into realtime voice chat just to play the game. - pretty much sums up my experience. I might be tempted to go back and dust off that version of Heraclea. But only if this kind of data gets hidden.

I typically slot generic IOs starting around level 15, and Frankenslot anything that drops that fits, sharing among all the characters. I upgrade these when the salvage drops to make replacements as they go; if not I don't worry much about it. This will serve until at least 47 mostly, when I slot 50s for the sets that go that far. Exceptions include Kinetic Combats and the like, which I will slot at 32 in main attacks that have 4 slots by then.

Another 'thank you' to the organizers. Are the streams available archived? Would love to see them, and see the results.

I haven't played for ten years and my experience is out of date, obviously. I would give WoW the nod in two fields. PvP is in many ways better there, more of a thing in game. I geared my character mostly in PvP towards the end; until they required arena wins to get the current gear. That killed my interest. Still discriminates something fierce against melee. The market is more of a mini game there. I had a racket running for a lot of my time over there. I was a miner and blacksmith. There was a mid tier metal - mithril, I think? - that once was a top tier crafting material, but level increases made it levelling content. Still, anybody wanting to level their blacksmithing and armorsmithing had to craft mithril weapons and armor. I cornered the mithril market. Anybody who was buying mithril had to buy mine. I'd log in a couple times a day to make sure no one was putting any on the market. If they did I'd buy them out and raise the price. I do not miss that raiding game at all. A DPS warrior is an odd fish over there. Tanking is a chore. Repair costs make a bad community; so, of course, does PvP.

Purely subjectively, I have never felt as useless on a tanker on a team as I did on a blaster trying to make it to 50 on a team full of judgment nukes.

I enjoyed Water/WP well enough that I got mine to 50 this evening. Water blast is interesting. Using the same frankenslotting tactic I use on my Bio/Spines tanker: Pacing of the Turtle -recharge procs in just about everything that will take one, starting with the AoEs. A lot of soft control, especially with the knockback to knockdown slotted.

Just a reminder that Tanker Tuesday comes to Torchbearer again tomorrow 7/9. Feel free to join the other Tankers running all-Tanker missions. Meetup is in Kings Row by the IP at 9 PM Eastern, 6 Pacific. Join the TankHQ global channel for more information.

Speaking as a former Super Strength tanker, you don't want it now. I25 changes to Rage make the set a liability. Take Street Fighting and add Air Superiority and there you go.

No Scrapper with the same powers selected will ever be as tough as an equivalent Tanker. IO sets don't change that. The Tanker will still benefit more from them. Incarnates do not change that, although they add considerably to a Tanker's damage. If anything, they favor tankers: adding more damage is a big QoL difference to the tanker, but changes relatively little for the Scrapper. Brutes may approach Tanker levels of survivability with somewhat more IO investment. They are IME not as much fun to level, even now that you can make them blueside. The Fury mechanic is constantly hampered by your endurance and by your smaller out of the box survivability. The tanker has time the brute doesn't. Tankers are just more fun for me. Any Tanker is tough enough out of the box. You don't really need a single IO bonus. This also means that Tanker builds are more forgiving, and you can focus your attention on making the character you want rather than making min-max the chief priority of your build.

I don't have high level experience with Street Justice yet. I will say that Fire is the i1 offense oriented tanker primary par excellence. It is also a very forgiving set to build with. You don't need the last three powers: Burn is not the best at what it does, and serves largely as a trouble button and Immobilize breaker. (Which you can also get by running Combat Jumping,) Nor is Fiery Embrace, and the self-rez Rise of the Phoenix isn't really on the menu for any tanker I'm going to make. Temperature Protection should be taken, but there's no hurry. Blazing Aura can be postponed until you have slots and SOs or IOs in Stamina and Consume. The core of the set - Fire Shield, Healing Flames, Consume, and Plasma Shield - represents only four powers. This is a great liberation; you're free to concentrate on your attacks. This comes with a word of caution. You depend a great deal on Healing Flames for your survival. This means that animation lag can kill you. My first high level Fire tanker was Fire/Energy Melee, not a standard build back then, made because I liked the looks of the two sets together back before power customization. She was simply destroyed by the EM animation changes, stripped of her valuables and put out to pasture, unbearable to try to play. My second was Fire/Dual Blades, a demanding attack set that you aren't going to get the most of until you have all of the powers. The animations were also quick and simple. One of my favorite tankers towards the close of i23.

In game, Heraclea looks to me rather like Carla Gugino (The Rock's ex in San Andreas.) Gina Carano would be another possibility, of course. Her ideal voice actor would be the late Lynne Thigpen, The Chief from Carmen Sandiego.

I remade my fire/regen scrapper from i23. She's level 36, and will eventually make it to 50. No hurry; her entire mission is to farm merits running Synapse and Citadel and Old Sister Psyche to buy recipes and enhancements my other characters want. She works fine on generic IOs, and being Regen, is all but godly on a Synapse. She is a melee blaster with mez protection; all her other defenses are basically starting from so close to zero to be not worth talking about. Up to a certain level you can get away with this. About 30 or 35 it start becomes less viable, and at 40+ it becomes too difficult to work. This is also why, even on a willpower tanker with Taunt, I recommend you postpone Mind over Body until after Quick Recovery. It doesn't justify its cost before level 25 enhancements are available.

Merits for the recipes, Architect for the salvage, was my formula up to i23. Merit costs for recipes have been reduced from what I remember as well. Seeding the AH with salvage was a necessity because apparently Architect was straining the servers. Merits work better than they ever did.

For my Amazon mains on Torchbearer, I've decided to bring back a limited form of the supergroup uniform, based ultimately off Heraclea's colors of red, gold, blue, and white. This is an ancient Roman style army, bring your own gear, but the costumes don't have to be Roman themed or use all the same logos or pieces, though some are pretty popular. At any rate, here are my seven top characters in their versions of the team colors:

All defense sets, across the board, that provide a level of immunity to Hold, Sleep, and the like ought also to provide a comparable level of immunity to Confuse and Fear.

What I do is to add the original power directly above the slot the macro occupies, so I do see the cooldown. I've also done the same thing with Ninja Caltrops, or whatever that thing is called; this one just does target self. The point being to surround yourself with the caltrops and keep overeager suitors at a safe distance.

I picked the Ninja version of caltrops (it has a weird name I don't remember in the set) on my water/WP sentinel. It seemed to offer some synergy with my slows, and another place to put a Pacing of the Turtle -recharge proc. None of the ancillary powers available without a redside turn seemed particularly enticing. This will likely be the only power from the pool I will take; a ninja sword would be disconcerting, and the idea behind having caltrops is to discourage unwanted melee suitors. I doubt I will pick up anything else from the pool.

Not quite. One way to stay in the game is to not get hit. The other way is to be tough enough to survive whatever you DO get hit by. If you don't have 100% immunity to -tohit, -regen, -recovery, etc., debuffs that diminish the effectiveness of heals, and mezz like Confuse that ought to be covered but isn't -- your ability to resist the damage won't do you a lot of good. This is the point Arcana was making, I think.

I am going on memory myself, but my recollection is that Gauntlet was an inherent threat modifier that kicked in if a power was executed by a Tanker. Brutes get a different and smaller modifier. If this is how it works there isn't any reason why the modifier would not apply to pool powers, especially since there aren't anymore any attack sets exclusive to Tankers that I know of.