DarkRevelation

and what it looks like when you need that 'oh shit' regen from Rebirth Radial Epiphany

I wasn't able to upload a pic earlier. Here is what it looks like.

I haven't been back long, and this is the first build I am sharing since starting playing at Homecoming. I played after launch, and then came back years later in 2011 and played again. My username comes from the fact that it was a 'dark revelation' that my Spines/Regen scrapper was a better tank than my Inv/SS tank (pre-nerf). It stuck, and I have used it in games since. I have always loved Inv/Fire tanks, and came around to feel the same about Stone a ways back. Rad fascinates me, and @Spaghetti Betty's Air Fryer build is the most fun I have had playing a tank in a long time. I have enjoyed learning from each of all of y'alls posted builds over the past few months. Y'all have a lot of really nice ideas. Without those it would have been very tough to 'catch up'. Thank you all for contributing and helping folk by posting your builds. With that said, I wanted to take a look at Stone and what could I do with it. I seem to champion lost causes (I am trying to recreate my poor, poor Spines/Regen scrapper as a brute, uggh) and wanted to look at Granite again. People dismiss it, and I understand why, but I wanted to take a deeper dive into it to see what all I could squeak out of it. When this started I wanted to see if I could make a very cheap granite build with just IOs, and you will see that I totally went off of the tracks with this, and ended up with an expensive build. This ended up being something where I wanted to see if I could build something that could survive most things solo. I wanted to go beyond the 'this will survive 99% of content'. I had hoped to post a screenshot of the build, but it didn't work out. I'll go over some of what I did and why. -Roughly 50% def to S/L, 47% to F/C/E/N, 17% to Tox/Psi - Capped on Resistance to everything but Psi, which is at 5%. I'll explain later how I worked around the Psi hole. Toxic is at 84% w/o Earth's Embrace, but I have EE perma'ed, so we will count it at way over 90%. -Capped HP, and actually over by a decent amount. It is something I wanted to look at eventually to see if I could take those bonuses and move the elsewhere, but I haven't got around to it yet. -Regen at 94-96 HP/s (there is a difference with MIDS vs the game), with more available if needed. I'll expound on that in a bit. -95% Debuff resistance to Recharge, which is crucial to this build. I am a perma-hasten builder usually, and not having it drives me nuts. So why take granite you ask? Well, this is part of the 'squeak out' thing I was talking about earlier. I wanted to take the things people hate about granite and see what I could do with them. So I tried to work around them, and finally am happy with the results. Y'all have this nice 'proc' thing now which we didn't have back then, and it is very interesting for builds. I did the following: -Proc'ed damage isn't affected by granite's damage penalty, or other damage penalties. It is the same for when you get a SS rage dump and can still hit for damage. I proc'ed Mud Pots, IG and Atom Smasher. I'm not a blaster but the damage is ok, especially for granite. The issue I had was with endurance when I didn't slot my Ageless Core Epiphany (more on that later), so I had to use some IOs on some powers for accuracy and endurance discount. I couldn't find a HO with that combination. There is one for Acc/End Modification, but that didn't help me. I need discount, not modification. Please let me know if I am wrong and there is some kind of HO that would work for this. - I put a FF proc in Energy Torrent to get as close to perma-hasten as I can. I can keep hasten close to perma, if not perma'ed, if I have a lot of mobs, if not and I am fighting a solo mob, it will be just under a minute to get hasten back at the worst case scenario. Energy Torrent isn't Foot Stomp, but it isn't terrible either for the proc. I am very thankful for the test server, as it is invaluable to building. As for testing this, I am still learning the new content so I am limited by what I know. I tried to come up with ugly scenarios and drop myself into them. I didn't find much that could do a lot of damage to me, with a few exceptions that are interesting. I did the 54 Cimerorans without issue, letting them stand there and floor my defense. The res/healing is too much for them, even in large packs of 20+. I have done the fire-S/L farms, no issues at all there. I dipped into the 801 AE missions, which are very interesting. I only went through 801.0-801.3, but the only time I ran into trouble was grabbing three spawns/packs. I was a bit embarrassed to have to eat a green, and wasn't sure why at the time that I got hit so much all of a sudden. It wasn't until I took this one to 'The Hive' that I figured out what was happening. 1-8 of the Giant Monsters is nothing, they don't budge the health bar really. An occasional tick, but nothing bad. Any damage is mitigated by res/healing. To test it further I dropped into the large 'gathering' of DE Giant Monsters. One of them is listed for badges as "The Sound of Thunder". It is what you use to kill giant monsters to get Hami to spawn. I believe I counted 16 Giant Monsters, and 6 smaller helpers, plus the various Swarms. I was doing fine when all of a sudden I am watching my health bar tick down in visibly noticeable ticks. I keep a monitor of my defense/resistance/healing rate open at all times, and I didn't see anything that was reduced. I popped some greens and TP'ed away. I ended up doing this multiple times and long story short, figured out what was causing it by having every category of log for combat available in a different tab. I could see in the logs 'Thorn had a 95% chance to hit...' ,which was puzzling, as I knew my defense was not dropped, at all. All of those mobs were hitting their streakbuster in order, and roughly at the same time. Getting hit by 16+ GMs at once is rough. Same thing went for three packs of insane 801 mobs, streakbuster is a PITA. There is a way to deal with this though. 99+% of the time in, let's call it non-ultra content, I will use the Ageless Core Epiphany in my Destiny slot, even with this build. For that ultra-content I slot the Rebirth Radial Epiphany, which I included on the build I posted. That will push you way over the regen cap, for a nice 'oh shit' button. If anyone ever asks why we don't have regen for a tank, you can point to this as an example of why. It will get you past almost anything for 10 seconds, and then reduces again at 30, 60 and finally ends after 120 seconds where it is ready to go again. I use the Spiritual Core Paragon for the Alpha, which gives 45% recharge, 33% to healing, plus 33% to stuns. That is necessary to try to try to get as close to perma-hasten as possible. I use the Assault Radial Embodiment for double-hit, as that works on procs. I have tried the Melee, and use them on other characters, but I couldn't get enough out of them for the Psi hole, so I abandoned that and went in another direction. Edit - I use the untouchable Banished Pantheon Radial Superior Ally, as it helps with recharge and they can't hit it. I didn't put that in the build file. The Psi hole; each set has a hole and this is no exception. There are two ways to deal with it that I have found. The first is just to suck it up and if you know you are getting into something with Psi mobs, slot the Rebirth Radial Epiphany. I tested with Arachnos packs and didn't need to use it, even though it sounded like I was being taunted a few times a second at points. The regular regen covered those large packs. Second, and this is 'different', but you can drop out of granite and keep 'Minerals' up. With this build you have more than 45% defense to Psi with granite down and Minerals running. I tested this on a 4x8 Maria Jenkins mission with almost all Psi, the "Malaise" mission, as well as the one with Penelope Yin and Mother Mayhem. I had no issues on either. The regen was more than enough to catch whatever got through. I have not tested it in the Shadow Shard, as I hated that place way back when and if I never go back I will be fine with it. Mostly joking.....mostly. I will try to test it though out there eventually. The jet packs you can get now will correct some of the misery from the past with trying to get around that place with Super Jump as your travel power. I rambled on a bit too long, but builds are fun. Take a look at the build and let me know what you think. Tanker - Stony Simona - granite v5 - Tanker (Stone Armor - Radiation Melee) - Copy.mbd

It was nice to meet y'all on Tuesday. I wish I had the time to run something with y'all, but at least wanted to say hello. I've been lurking here since I came back in January, and have really enjoyed learning about the things that have changed since I was away from your builds. I appreciate the posted builds and advice that y'all have posted over the past few years. It made coming back a lot easier having points of reference from people who have been playing. I am still getting my feet under me, but I am sharing a build in the near future. It is a very different build, but it should at least make for some good conversation.

That did it. I was able to get on my character in PI, as well as get into my SG base. Thank you very much @Lunar Ronin

Odd, I am using the Homecoming Launcher but it didn't show up as needing an update until I forced it to. Thank you very much. Hopefully this will work.

I did, yes. It went to 27.7.6043

I can log in and get to characters in Atlas/SC, but anything to do with PI is causing my client to crash. I am also crashing trying to get into my SG base as well.

I am repeatedly crashing after the emergency maintenance on 03/30/2024. I was able to log in three times, and when I tried to get into my SG base via the portal in Atlas, I crashed. I logged in again and tried to zone to PI via Atlas, crashed. I tried to log in to that character and crashed 3 more times. I rebooted my computer and tried to log into a different character, who was also in PI at the time, and crashed on that character as well. I am not sure where to go from here. I sent in multiple crash reports.

@Spaghetti Betty Your 'Air Fryer' build is one of if not the most fun builds I have played. That build can do a lot of things. It is a blast. I have been trying to put together something like this for Fire/Spines, and it just isn't coming together. I have an odd Stone/Rad build I am going to post to the forum eventually, but it uses procs in a different way. I have been gone for a long time, so forgive my ignorance on this, but one question I have is why the Increased Perception enhancement in Rage? Where or how is that used?

I couldn't put any of the 'Mocking Beratement' set into Mud Pots. It would take the D-Sync taunt enhancement, but that was the only other one I tested.

@Spaghetti Betty Thank you for posting this build. I copied it, put it on a toon, and it is a lot of fun! I was initially looking at it and couldn't figure out why you put the KD in the heal, but after playing, I understood. I really appreciate you showing this, as it also gives me ideas for other builds. Thank you again!

'What was old is new again' A long time ago my first min/max character was a Spines/Regen scrapper who I loved to play. IH as a toggle, set up properly, was incredible. Finding ways to increase you HP was an obsession with us, and we could do some unreal things. I left for the 1st time right before they destroyed Regen as a viable power. They didn't use a nerf bat, they used a nerf tree. I have never seen something nerfed so bad in all of my years playing games. It still makes me sad almost 20 years later. Regardless about the death of IH/Regen, I started testing last night with the help of my empath defender, which I have on a separate account, what rate of healing it takes to stay alive if you aggro the whole map. It is not the easiest thing to test, as the multitudes of variables are interesting, but I am trying to look at it. Changing the defender's rate of applied regen to the brute via unslotting enhancements in the defenders powers is slow work. Toss in using 'Consume' to boost the HP, and it gets even more interesting. I'll pass along what I find out.

You have to change the way you think about choosing a power or slotting. This isn't 'traditionally' how some folk choose powers/slot where you'd put 2-3 DMG IOs in a power, plus one ACC, and possible a recharge/end reduction. You are (mostly) choosing powers for the ability to pick up set bonuses. I'll use the Spines/Fire AFK build from AA as an example, as I believe you are referring to it in this case. You brought up Taunt. The 'Mocking Beratement' set has some nice set bonuses. 3.13% Fire defense and 7.5% recharge time are the big selling point to that set. Another one is Brawl, which no one is ever going to really use, but it allows you to 5 slot a Hecatomb set and get the 10% recharge to all, 15% accuracy, and some end recovery as well. Since the changed everything with ED, in order to get what they took away, you have to use set bonuses to achieve what was taken. That is where these folk who are really good at finding these different ways to achieve this shine. I howled laughing the first time I saw someone slot Brawl to get that set bonus from Hecatomb, as that is brilliant and totally against what I am sure the devs ever thought how Brawl would be used. It is brilliant. It is a big shift in thinking from how things are usually done. It takes time to get into that mode, but once you start seeing the brilliance in their work you will appreciate what they do even more.

I am returning to CoH, not having played since retail. I have only been back about three weeks or so, but I do love looking at builds. I took a look at yours, and I don't believe I have seen a fire defense so high, 67.62%. I looked and saw how you did it, by boosting most everything to +5. I don't know if you did that intentionally, but that is above the soft cap, by a lot. There was a post earlier on in this thread that I don't know if it received the attention it should have. Everyone works to hit the defensive cap and fire resistance, and most get there, but the key to doing this IMO is the ability to regen your health or heal for the stuff that gets through, especially AFK. Active is not too bad with having a lower regen, as you can use incarnates/heals to stay afloat. Doing it AFK is a no-go. This post below covers what looks to be a proper regen number to stay alive AFK. I would play around in Mids and see if you can't hit that number, or wait on someone who may be able to point you in the right direction. I'm getting back up to speed, and I wish I could help more, but I wanted to at least throw that out to you as a place where I would start if it were me.