Heraclea

You will want Fighting eventually for Tough or Weave, which benefit every tanker type. But bother with Air Superiority before either Boxing or Kick. You'll find it much more useful. You'll even want to give it slots if you can spare them. A good place to add another Kinetic Combat. And, it just feels good. Adds a lot of mitigation, and has one of the most satisfying sets of animations in the game.

Another consideration is how demanding or undemanding they are. Take Dual Blades, for example. The combo system means that you'll want all the attacks. You're a tanker; you'll want Taunt. This favors primaries that contain a lot of postponable or skippable powers, like Fire, Dark Armor, and (dare I say it) Invuln. My main fire tanker was Fire/DB. There's actually a lot of mitigation if you get all the combos and make them land, so make accuracy a high priority. On Invuln I tend to put off the passives, give them no slots, and use them as receptacles for the several uniques in the resistance sets that give universal defense or +HP. I take Energies well before Physical Damage, and tend to take Elements last. And I never bother with Unstoppable.

I don't really agree with the notion that resistance is better than defense. One, with mixed attack types, defense always breaks in your favor: i.e. when you're under a melee attack with smashing and dark damage, three types of defense will be checked (melee, smashing, dark) and your biggest defense number decides whether the attack connects at all. Second, the original devs went so debuff crazy with the new story lines, revamped areas, and incarnate content, that the only way to enjoy this content is to not get hit at all. Resistance and regeneration work fine for the levelling game; endgame you need defense, and lots of it. Defense is always binary, you either get hit or you don't, while resistance removes a reliable percentage of incoming damage by type. This means that defense can have a streak of bad luck. But all things considered I think that defense works better, especially for the 50+ material and stuff like the Kahn and Ms. Liberty TFs. Best is to have some resist and as much defense as you can get, of course. I would pick an attack set that either gets you to the softcaps faster (Broadsword, Katana) or that offers -tohit (Dark Melee) that effectively builds on the value of your defense. Or you could try a layered approach with something like Kinetic Melee; its damage debuff is the equivalent of adding resistance to your defense.

Regen works great so long as you have no ambitions for tanking on your fire scrapper. I remade my fire/regen scrapper here. She is my lowbie task force farmer. Regen is not ideal out of the box for absorbing full team alpha strikes, and has only attacks for generating aggro. I took Stealth, Invisibility, and Recall Friend for team utility, Air Superiority for single target control, and Caltrops ASAP for an extra trouble button.

Bio/Spines. For when you absolutely, positively, want to have all the aggro. Everything can also be slotted with chance for recharge slow.

More than once, now, the game informs me that I have blocked a person from chatting when in fact we were in the middle of a series of tells. I have to manually unblock them with a slash command. I don't think this is a finger fumble on my end. It may be an automated system based solely on the number or frequency of tells.

There are probably advantages to being a vet. You know that the chief point of having a supergroup is to share salvage and crafted enhancements and avoid Wentworth's. The basic layout of the maps, and how you get across several rooms and where the mobs will spawn, is slowly coming back to me. There are also aspects of the 2012 game that I considered myself to be something of an authority on; for instance I had a level 50 tanker of all the primaries except Electric Armor, and all the secondaries save Titan Weapons. That said, I assume that you know better what your characters can do and how to use your powers effectively. If you judge it important to immobilize enemies before I can round them up, I assume you have a strategy in mind where that helps. If you need me to tank you'll let me tank, and this means using tanker approaches: corner pulls, let the mobs bunch up and then nuke them with your AoEs. If the team is succeeding without any of that using the leader's chosen settings, great. If it helps, you'll let me do it. And you'll stop sprinting in the caves.

Ice is also one of the graphically challenging armors, like Stone, Dark, or Fire. I don't think there;s a 'minimal' option. As such it puts a crimp on creativity, and that's always an issue with the game.

RIP Dr. John.

For all the toadstool corruptors out there.

I love the expansiveness of bases in Homecoming generally, and the fact that it's now feasible to create outdoor areas. Great work, all of you.

Adding the planet symbols and maybe some of the other chest detail characters would also be nice.

The absolute value of any AT on a given team is not terribly necessary. That said, with the coming of especially Bio Armor I'm not sure that Willpower is all that great as a team main tanker powerset. I wuldn't want to be Willpower on a team with seven fire blasters. Odds are your pickup team won't be that. The value of Willpower as a set is also challenged by the availability of Bio Armor as a tanker set. AFAIK there is no issue with its taunt aura. Bio also gets easy endurance relief, available at level one rather than 20. Endurance relief was always the main selling point of WP IMO. Then again, WP doesn't make your character look like Pigpen. OTOH the availability of Spines as a tanker attack set is a game changer for WP. I would imagine that a WP tanker running uils would not be hindered by a weak taunt aura. My Spines/WP scrapper from 2012 was an adequate main tank for full teams.

Added some scenes to the Amazon Army base on Torchbearer. Passcode is in the sig. The public face of Amazon justice. Proceedings in the Comitia Centuriata. Some Arachnos guy has been captured and is on trial. Where the actual work of justice gets done. Shrine of the Mithraeum. One of Yamnaya's pet mystery cults. Heraclea got this damned thing US government surplus. Whatever it is, it's dangerous, so even if it is covered in gold it was no bargain. The Latin says cave faciem, 'look out for your face'; there have been incidents. I'll spare you the details. Heraclea says that there is some crazy man from Excelsior, wherever that is, who is desperate to get his hands on this thing, so it's important that we guard it closely. The Amphitheatre. Get ready for an extended drum solo. And we've brought back chariot racing! It's apparently hard to get good horses here, but we get by with what we can, and it really is more awesome this way anyways.

I hate the Discord website/PC interface quite intensely. No idea if it's any easier to use on an 'app'.

For a scrapper, Caltrops from Weapons Mastery is something I find useful. It adds another get out of trouble button to your repertoire. It will also take a Pacing of the Turtle Chance for Recharge Slow proc.

I used to be a strong advocate for Willpower in the former game. Before Electric Armor, it was the only tanker primary that gave you a passive extra endurance recovery without a to-hit check. I hated, and still do not like, the endurance mechanic. But it had an inherent problem, which I don't think is fixed in i25. It's taunt aura was much weaker than other defense sets. This weaker aura required special strategies and cooperative teammates to do what other tanker primaries did natively with no fuss. And since endurance relief was available through inventions, I eventually soured on the set. On the other hand, my spines/WP scrapper, loaded with defense sets, made a quite adequate tank. Holding aggro was not a problem for her despite the weaker aura: she had Quills. But now Tankers can get Quills, albeit rather late in their development. This may be a game changer for Willpower if you want to make a Spines tanker.

I'm a fan of all the PBAoEs in Electric/Electric. Follow the tank or stock up on Awakens, though. You will also want one of the knockback to knockdown buttons.

It isn't completely unplayable. You do not want to mix it with sets like Fire or Bio that depend a great deal on click power heals. Too much can happen during the five seconds you're stuck watching animations play.

Invuln/Dark Melee, tough as Granite with none of the drawbacks. You get a self heal that's also an attack that does decent damage. Most of your attacks do -tohit, which mathematically is the same as adding defense against the mobs you hit with them. I rolled Heraclea as Inv/SS back in the day, and Dark Melee was not ported over to tankers until i12 IIRC. The current version is Inv/DM. The synergy there is just greater.

I have a bi/spines tanker that I rather enjoy. Two damage auras are always fun. Bio has built in endurance relief which makes running Spines easy.

The shared backstory of all of my Amazon characters is the link on the Latin text.

Having more slots than you know what to do with is usually not a problem in tanker builds. Taunt is one of the happy powers that needs no slots, freeing them up so that you can use them elsewhere. Since every attack in a tanker secondary and one or more powers in your primary take taunt enhancements, you don't need to add slots to Taunt to use those sets either. You can get accuracy and recharge as well as taunt in the taunt sets, which may help when frankenslotting. There's a chance for disorient proc that you can put in it which is rather handy, and adds a bit of mitigation. Forget the set name. Other than that, one recharge is enough. There is absolutely no need or point to slot it for accuracy.

Heraclea: 'Liberator', 'Last Line of Defense', 'Tough', 'Centurion', often others. Still waiting for 'Strong and Pretty' and 'Mistress of Olympus'. Catrina: 'Kill Skuls', always. Xihuiyan! Xictemocan! Xicmictican in Tzontecomatl! The Aztec gods are peeved at the Skulls. She is their emissary. Grandma Gnosis: 'Old Fashioned'. Maiden Heaven: 'Protector of Innocents'. What are some of the badges your characters typically display?