Heraclea

The worst part of dying on a tanker is needing to restart anywhere from five to nine toggles.

My all time favorite blaster is archery/devices. The surgical mission specialist and spy par excellence. Gets to the boss and gets the rest of the team to the boss, ideal for old school story lines. Blaster perfection is no melee attacks at all.

Ten seconds of enforced inactivity may as well be forever in this game. SS is gone. Roll Street Justice and pretend.

Fields of the Nephilim - Dawnrazor

Kyuss - Apothecaries Weight

Clan of Xymox - Obsession

Make rhe place teamable. Have middle alignments like vigilante and rogue that open up your friends' missions to you even if their main path is not the same as yours. Make the place teamable. The missions over there are full of overpowered mobs like Seers and Ghouls that do not sca;e up for teams well. Going into a Seers mission other than solo invites larger spawns that will turn the mission into a totally miserable slog, especially for 1-20 characters. Goldside is gorgeous, story rich, solo only, and not all that much fun.

Pat Boone - Crazy Train

I have many tankers without Hasten, but none without Taunt. (I also don't have any 50 brutes without Taunt, but many took it quite late in the build. Tanker is always Taunt at 10.) It simply is the best power for doing what it does, and what it does is the reason why you rolled a tanker. It also needs no slots if you don't wanna, and since tanker builds tend to be slot eaters, it helps there too.

The Driving Stupid - Horror Asparagus Stories

Fu Manchu - Squash That Fly

The Troggs - Love is All Around

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer

Rival Sons - Electric Man

Aye, with the scrapper taunt auras I notice the fact that it is there a lot more than I notice the fact that it is weak. It's really only an issue when I am soloing, including when I am doing the scrapper thing and soloing team spawns on one corner of the big defeat-all map. The auras on Willpower and Energy work just fine; the mobs stay in melee range and that's all I want. OTOH, my tauntless scrappers all tend to build for stealth and are mission completionists rather than mob murder machines. A taunt aura would break them. The problem armor sets are Fire, which needs a taunt aura to make Burn viable; and Energy Aura, which for some incomprehensible reason has both a taunt aura and stealth in the secondary. I still think Energy is fairly strong, but the self-breaking stealth makes no sense.

Haim Sabah - Musclor

I kind of like the current setup, where it's possible to build a 'light' scrapper for stealth in the fashion of a stalker with more hitpoints (with the tradeoff being less predictable crits) versus a heavy scrapper that does have a taunt aura and can hold spawns together. Scrapper is to me the most versatile and concept friendly of the melee ATs and this is one reason why. I do think fiery aura needs one, because the armor set should have one to do its job. The happy place for me is a defense based scrapper with taunt in its armor set. Defense based, because a scrapper is at no disadvantage here like she would be on a pure resistance set. Willpower is the exception that tests the rule; 75% smash/lethal resistance on a scrapper is more than enough with everything else that WP brings to the table. My current main heavy scrappers are spines/energy, electric/shield, and savage/WP. all of which are combos that make them quite adequate moneymakers.

Bon Jovi - Runaway

I attune everything except purples, where it does nothing for them. I also attune some PvP enhancements like the Panacea chance for HP and endurance, where the important thing is to make them slottable at level 10. Apart from the limited demand for them whenever a character dings 50 and needs to upgrade any ATOs they have slotted, the main demand for catalysts walks hand in hand with unslotters. I will routinely catalyze, unslot, and replace entire sets when the catalysts start stacking up, so that the catalyzed set can be slotted at 7 / 17 / 27.

I will admit that I do run weekly SFs for the merits. This is so my established characters can work for the benefit of up and coming characters in my factory system. I also enjoy the opportunity to collect lowbie salvage and recipes they often provide; lowbie salvage and set recipes that aren't level 50 are things that are in everlasting short supply. I do think that tagging along for a fair number of the preliminary missions and the final mission on old school content should give merit rewards to teammates who were there for more than half of the journey and not just to the mission owner.

Synapse is one of those things to run as close to level 15 as possible. In this situation you don't really want to stealth through many of the missions anyways, and won't save that much time doing so on any but the last one.

I don't think I have a brute without Taunt at level 50. I have lots of Brutes without Taunt at lower levels. I usually don't take Taunt as a brute until both Tough and Weave are in place, and since I prioritize primary/secondary powers above pool powers, that may be a while. And Taunt's a one-slot wonder, which makes it a fine choice for that problematic level 49 power pick.

Certainly is an option. Heraclea (Inv/DM) swaps between Rebirth and Barrier at will. I don't generally build for 50 though, since I have too much fun when exemped. Willpower works fairly well for mid level content.

First tanker I made is Invulnerability/Dark Melee, and that would still be my go-to. Dark Melee benefitted a whole lot from the tanker changes, and that combo continues to be quite strong.

I have very few of these: an electric/electric blaster, an ice/ice tanker, a ninja blade/ninjitsu stalker. Of these, the ninja is probably my favorite, since I do NOT dote on all things Japanese, and the character's concept (La Faiseuse d'Anges) is about as far removed from Japan as it is possible to be. I used to play the blaster a lot more, basically a blastfender concept, until changes to the /electric secondary sent her into semi-retirement. The ice tanker has the tissues that come with Ice armor. Built as a melee controller, she is certainly playable but is slow DPS even for a tanker, and was made in fulfilment of my vow of having every armor set (except Stone) and every melee attack set (except Super Strength, which I will not play in its current form) at 50. Count me in the faction that would take Invuln/SS as a matched pair. There are a whole lot of matched sets among the melee sets (Fire/Fire. Dark/Dark, Stone/Stone) that would seem to me to not have all that much synergy, and where the sets would benefit from a mixed up pairing.