Bill Z Bubba

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. 🙂

Now that it's done and tested, shield/em is the best (numerically) tank I've played.

While I still refuse to go with proc-heavy builds (dunno why, I'm old and stuck in my ways,) it still makes me grin at those builds pushing the DPS they are that run 'em.

What's your pylon time with that chain?

No. The numbers show a slice of reality. Nothing more, nothing less. SR not at the softcap sucks horribly. But folks don't run around talking about how much SR sucks in actual play. Edit: Well... some do but those people are stupid.

I used it. I used it well. I do NOT love it.

I hear ya. It's a valid point.

I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. But tanking isn't what's being studied here. It's base mitigation of the armor sets with SOs. Or base mitigation of the armor set + tough/weave/cj with SOs. Or even base mitigation of the armor set tough/weave/cj with SOs and the unique +def/+res IOs. Each iteration shows us something different. Arguing that the test doesn't show what it isn't being tested doesn't make much sense.

Wut. No Tough/Weave? No Gloom? No CJ? Madness, I tells ya. Also gratz!

Maybe the extra inf spent keeping SOs green? Other than that, I've no clue either.

I still hate the combo system being added to EM, but I hate corpse blasting even while solo even more and, sadly, I do it a lot.