Heraclea

Use frankenslotting to split the Brute's Fury ATO set into two groups of three. That's 10% smashing/lethal defense right there. Slot four Kinetic Combats in single target melee attacks. I usually frankenslot this with two Crushing Impacts for a bit more S/L resistance and to improve the accuracy and damage of the attack. Take Fighting for Tough and Weave if you haven't already. Combat Jumping or Hover also help. Maneuvers won't do much for you, and eats precious endurance with too small a return. Put an Energy Manipulator Chance for Stun in your aura. Does a world of good there.

Dio - God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen

Secondaries first. I think Bio, Radiation, Willpower, and Electric are the most fun from 1 to 50. Shields gets good but takes a long time to mature, especially as a secondary. You don't need 100% safety but you do need to be a murder machine. These sets mitigate endurance fairly easily and give you enough survivability to get by. Willpower also has the advantage of being friendly to almost every concept. The others saddle you with various glows and funks but these can be mitigated by the bright power, dark color strategy. Primaries? None are terribly bad. These sets pair well with the more endurance demanding primaries like Spines and Titan Weapons. Dark Melee if you want your character to be very hard to kill. Radiation Melee is similar but not as reliable as Dark. Kinetic Melee is fun and underrated. Katana is better than Broadsword but won't work with Shields. Mace brings control, and Dark, Kinetic, Radiation, and Psionic bring various debuffs. I tend to prefer the sets that do something other than smashing/lethal damage because in the endgame high resistances to those become common enough to be annoying.

https://youtu.be/01JYYAJ5_o4 Fotheringay - Banks of the Nile

When you get to Croatoa at around level 25, the content there is mostly entertaining and everything is in zone. There are a couple defeat alls and deliveries. But save your three days grace for 'Stop 30 Fir Bolg."

On old live I had a Dark Armoe/Ice Melee tanker who I conceived as a melee controller. On Homecoming i have an electric/electric blaster who is a short range defender type, basically a sapper on our side.

As to pool powers, you might consider Weaken Resolve from Force of Will, a handy single target debuff. Not an ancillary pool, so available much sooner than Melt Armor. I agree that Maneuvers seems redundant to Grant Cover, which is better and not another toggle. If you take Vwngeance, get Recall Friend as well. There's always that brute who wanted to leave the group and go solo another room, which did not lead to a best case scenario.

I may get rid of it once I hit 50. Combat Jumping is a possibility, but I may swap in the debuff from Force of Will, which I've found handy on other characters.

The Clash - Overpowered by Funk

On old live I had a Dark Armor/Ice Melee tanker that was built to just such a specification. A pure team support tanker, all about control and debuff. I still have her build, which I am attaching; it's an old style build with Fitness as a pool power. It would probably be more feasible to redo this to work in Weave, but you don't need another toggle on something like this, and the little bit of defense you'd get from it is just lipstick on a pig.

Powers come in three flavors for me: - Bread and butter powers that you turn on or fire whenever they're up. - Powers that are situational but have a fairly short cooldown, that will be there for you when the time comes up to use them. - Situational powers with long cooldowns. These tend to be moved off of bar 1 because they're dangerous or costly as well as situational, and using them involves a dangerous crash or an extremely long cooldown. These tend to be 'saved for special'. Which in practice means that you forget they're there, and they don't get invoked even when the scenario where they're useful comes up. And at any rate, you're dead before you remembered which icon they are and what bar they're on. This third category can probably be replaced.

Alex Harvey - Jungle Jenny

Coil - Christmas Is Now Drawing Near At Hand

I put together a wish-list build somewhat based on yours, a bit more focused on the primary. It has 79.4% S/L resistance, 'close enough' while being designed for sustainabilty. I am frankenslotting the Brute's Fury set in this build, and several other powers are also mix-em-ups.

Thanks for the offer, but I'd rather learn the character in live scenarios while I get my TF Commander and Atlas badges. Don't see a need for Taunt on the character, not with those two auras working. On the cusp of 30 and the slots levels right now, so I expect more from the armors especially soon.

One of the attractions of Electric Armor is its high resistance to endurance drain. I thought that would be more impressive in practice. I did just get Energize and gave it three slots of recharge. I have it on autopilot now.; the endurance discount seems quite valuable.

You're definitely going to want all three of the Panacea, Miracle, and Numina procs in Health, as well as a Performance Shifter in Stamina. Take the Energy Mastery ancillary pool for Physical Perfection and Superior Conditioning to slot 2 more Performance Shifter procs. 2 endredux or the equivalent in every toggle. Lack of sustain is the downfall of a brute, no matter how tough you are, you need to be able to keep attacking.

Cloud Cult - Through the Ages

Blondie - I'm Gonna Love You Too

Rolled this character today and got her to level 27 on the strength of a couple DfBs, both Positrons, and a Synapse. I do not think I have ever made a character with the severe to the point of unplayable endurance issues that this one has. Titan Weapons was not this bad. Three defensive toggles and two offensive, and I have no idea how this character will ever be able to run Tough and Weave on top of that. The character did fine on Synapse, but all she had to do was attack two or three times and the toggles were in danger of all dropping. The offensive toggles meant that all she had to do was stand there and mobs eventually died. But that really isn't interesting as a play style, or really what I imagined a brute would do. My ability to absorb Clockwork alphas was rather satisfactory as I figured it would be, but after that there wasn't much I was able to do. Slotted the Miracle proc at 17, just slotted the Numina proc, and the Performance Shifter, and if I keep on playing this one will need the Panacea as well. Do I just have to wait for Power Sink to make it all better? And assuming I get that far: Power Surge - is it the skippable suicide button that it seems to be? I ordinarily would give a hard nope to that drastic crash, but I seem to remember some people claiming that it was the linchpin of the set in the old game. I may be misremembering.

Rainbow - Light in the Black

Claudio Monteverdi - Vespers of 1610

Truth be told, I did not plan on making this character to run endgame content. I created the character deliberately to do speed runs on Synapse and the like to make merits for other characters to use. She does use liberal recharge, but this was done mostly by frankenslotting key powers with multiple damage/recharge or heal/recharge enhancements from different sets. Leveraging set bonuses was never part of the plan; frankenslotting yellow sets was. Set bonuses exemp away when you underlevel them, unless you want to spend millions on catalysts. But a damage/recharge continues to enhance both damage and recharge. I have two scrappers - a TW/WP and a Kinetic/Rad - that work quite well in endgame content. Or at least as well as any scrapper can perform; incarnate trials are not all that friendly to melee DPS. Unfriendliness to melee DPS in endgame content is a problem shared by many MMOs, unfortunately. But this one was deliberately made to run lower level content for inf, lower level salvage, and merits. I remade one of my characters from old live because I knew she worked well in the role I made her for.

Easy to find Council in Boomtown that aren't getting pwned by 5th Column. Look between the sewer entrance and the west wall, where the Goliath War Walker spawns.

Thanks for the tip! Have not looked at Dark mastery, though it probably works well with the theme.