Bill Z Bubba

Depends on the enemy and build. It is not a fact. I can go afk against several enemy factions at max diff with quite a few of my builds simply because my mitigation is greater than their incoming damage. Even my claws/sr brute is immortal against an aggro cap worth of +4 Cimerorans...

Yea, I can grok that.

Oh, it's not that, I just like seeing my costumes properly. It's also why I don't use Nrg Aura. 🙂 Even though I've stated the same, it's really not true. While there is the binary portion (mezzed or not mezzed) there's also the bit where getting hit with multiple mezzes stacks. Something you can watch while playing. Mez hits, you lose mez protection, as it drops off, your prot value goes back up. This is why tanks get 13 to scrappers 10 pts. Giving squishies 3 would be nothing more than a buffer against the stray mez and not something I see a problem with. I like my fire/bio sent's identity: Burn it all to the ground while laughing.

The best DPS I've mustered on my sr/claws tank comes from the following: ST chain is Followup, Focus, Slash, repeat. T4 Musculature Core T4 Degen Core T4 Assault Core T4 Pyronic Core Maybe 4-4.5min pylon times. Haven't done one in a while. The main problem with SR is that it doesn't buff damage at all. My bio/claws tank does much better just as my claws/bio scrapper greatly out DPSes my claws/sr scrapper.

Forgot to add, with an FA/Claws tank, I strongly advise reading through this thread.

Absolutely. It's why so many lean on Rune of Protection or hover blast with as much ranged defense as they can get. I'd place good money that the vast majority of us make all sorts of concessions in our builds, concessions not needed at all by those with built in mez protection, that given even a modicum of baked in protection would allow for a great many other things to improve our builds and lessen the aforementioned performance disparity.

At lvl 50 and incarnated out, sure. It's not like I run max diff at lvl 1.

Would 3 points of mez protection that kicks in at lvl 10 added to the inherents of all squishy ATs homogenize everything? They'd still get mezzed through that but it wouldn't be nearly the binary fun vs mezzed that the current situation creates. And it wouldn't involve respecs nor would it force a change in tactics. You left off Stalkers and Sentinels, by the by. Not that I play stalkers but, yes, I don't enjoy having to hide or constantly back away from fights or analyze every spawn every mission because one mis-step means having to use a rez or a hospital trip or waiting around for someone else to pick me up off the floor. I don't judge ATs by how easy they are. I judge them by how annoying they are to play at a level to which I've grown accustomed. Masterminds are the only AT I refuse to play due to considering them completely broken in a bad way. Stalkers I don't play just cuz I don't like Hide. I guess in the end, I simply dislike having to buy mez protection to have fun with some ATs when the other half of the archetypes don't have to. I don't consider that a balanced situation.

Crutch probably is the wrong word for what I'm attempting to explain. I like teaming these days. Even have a regular group I hang out with but when they're not around I would like to have just as much fun with my squishies as I do my non-squishies but I don't. Certainly not before 50. It was only thanks to hopping on the PLing Train that I even ended up with as many non-melee as I have now, and yes, some of them can at least get through missions at high diff, but it's a drag. I only want to see some of that disparity alleviated one way or the other.

Which IO set do you have in Spin? Are you always leading off with Followup for its ToHitBuff?

Granted, I do and always will judge an archetype by what it's capable of solo. Anything can become great when using the crutch of teaming.

Could be, or you can buy defense amps from 1 to 50 or perpetually stock up on break frees or do all manner of other things but in the end, DPS and thus XP gain drop to zero when you're faceplanted from getting mezzed and lessened by more than the DPS gain from being a blaster. I've got a blaster. T3ed/T4ed mix. She's fun on teams. Sucks ass solo. Nope. Never was a shortage of defenders or controllers or corruptors either. Doesn't mean that they didn't always lag behind due to a lack of mez protection.

Go do a Werner rules ITF with your blaster and get back to us.

They were never "just fine" and still aren't. The disparity in leveling speed shows this.

Thanks, @Sovera Got my own fa/em tank to work on soon. He never did get properly looked at.

I don't consider the game side unbalanced at all. We're given a huge range of difficulty levels and three starting zones of varying difficulty. It's the archetype/build side that's completely out of whack and yea, a whole lot of that comes down to how mez protection/effects are dealt with and the massive disparity that causes. Can't get clarion until after level 50 and some vet lvls, after all. Do IOs exacerbate the issue? Absolutely. But does that mean the game needs to be rebalanced? Or does it mean that there's a few underlying concepts in our character builds that could be looked at without ever having to touch the environment those builds exist within.

If this were true, then why is soloing at that level ridiculously easy for some archetypes and painful to impossible for others?

To be fair, I did feel kinda dirty... in a good way. /boobs

While already knowing that resist sets have done the Werner challenge for ITF? Got a bio/em tank I made a loooong time ago that I haven't rebuilt since any of the changes. Kinda don't want to. However, bio doesn't hang as well in the ITF due to, as Gobbledegook points out, it lacks DDR worth a dang so can get into a mess quickly if you're not on the ball. All that said, tanks got overbuffed, yall. Hard. EM got overbuffed. Everything changed, that I've seen so far, since the rebirth happened, has been a ridiculous case of "screw balance, make everything into a god." ... while ignoring the things that *need* balancing like mez.

et/tf/et-shortened/gloom-or-moonbeam/bonesmasher/repeat is ridiculous by design, yes.

More info. Took 1.5 months off for Cyberpunk. (Screw the bugs, it's still awesome on PC.) Came back and first thing I did was hit ITF with my shield/em and was immediately struck by how ridiculously easy it was. Just did first two missions and logged off to get back into CP. Last night, ran three ITFs, first with my fire/bio sent, then my shield/em tank, then with my dark/pain troller. While the fire/bio sent is, indeed, glorious, it ain't shit compared to the shield/em tank. Not on survivability, not on damage output, not on crowd control, nuthin. The tank surpasses it, and everything else I roll with, even my beloved BZB's, because it doesn't die and still manages to dish out silly damage.

Of course.

Anyone else feeling a need for a new thread discussing how horrifically broken tanks are these days thanks to all the buffs they've gotten? I'm on my shield/em right now and I can literally read threads while clicking tab-follow-attack chain without watching the screen at max diff while slaughtering Cimerorans.

Holy fark sticks... /I still love this thread.

Even if it is numerically superior, I just can't handle that level of heresy. 🙂