Bill Z Bubba

Me. I would have thought this. And have ever since Castle and BAB did the rework on it way back when. Even my claws/fa burn farmer is hanging with the big boys well in that arena. Claws, not the best at anything, but real freakin good at all of it.

Woot for Claws!!!

Would you be so kind to share this macro? That sounds useful for several targeted AoEs.

Keep you alive so that you can keep taunting and killing?

If you can fit them in, the chance for KD procs are awesome in Fire's PBAoEs, and in Spin for Claws, which when coupled with the KB to KD proc in SW and the KD in Focus, the mitigation goes through the roof.

This is my take as well. My DM/Inv brute is built more for concept that anything else. If I want massive aoe, there are sets for that. If I want massive ST damage, again, there are combos that excel at that. I don't use shadow maul because my attack chain is MG, Gloom, SL, repeat with DC, SD and DO thrown in as available. Does he get the job done? Yup. Is he hard to kill? Again yup. Would he be far more interesting if he wasn't shoving his left hand out over and over again? Again, yup. But it is what it is.

Passive scaling resists and the best DDR in the game aren't good tools/secondary effects?

Later in that mission I had two spawns with 5 death mages and 3 behemoth overlords trying to kill me. You have to also note that at no time in that video did I ever use an inspiration. Or barrier. And doesn't rad melee have an attack with a heal? I also have an SR/FM tank. The only time he's died was when he turned into a monkey with a fresh spawn on his head.

Brute and tank SR Evasion provide a taunt aura. From in game info: +400% taunt on target. It needs no aid self because it's easy to soft cap against all positions and ends up with 95% Defense Debuff Resistance so it doesn't get debuffed. Throw some extra regen and health in health and physical perfection and you're good to go. Edit: Oh yea, plus the scaling damage resistance in the passives. That helps, too. I'll post a vid shortly.

SR needs no aidself at +4/x8. As for taunt aura, go brute and you get one but damage suffers quite a bit in comparison to scrapper claws output.

Having now built a WP/SS tank... I still don't get the SS love. Being reduced to using temp power attacks to dish out some damage during the 10 sec downtime feels really weird to me. And with the whole set being kinda garbage except KO Blow and Foot Stomp (which, I get it, FS is glorious) maybe it's time for a change. Just make SS more like Vanden's forum gif and I'll be happy.

I love this sentence so much.

Noticed this behavior a few times, even with my claws/fa on a fire farm after poppin lucks. But does it matter much if they run out of melee range if they're still aggroed on you? You can see some running action here: https://youtu.be/eajaHfL1MYM

And the -defense from the rage crash doesn't cause you any issues of note?

O.o I remember being pantsless.

Long as I get a weekend's worth of heads up to crank up my own server, what shall be will be. I was without Bill Z Bubba for too damn long. That won't be happening again.

Funny how we all see things through different lenses. I got a fire/nin sent to 50, fully IOed up, think T2 on alpha, and all I can think about her is "tankmage." "Needing a buff" makes me do the doggy head tilt thing in confusion. Agreed on the inherent bit, thought, it kinda sucks and I just ignore it.

I didn't farm much back in the old days but now I'm 47 years old, full time systems analyst job, got 40 alts, playing characters I never would have bothered with before and I can make about 2mil inf/min in AE not even counting drops sold. The gorram content hasn't changed and after playing for 8 years, I've seen it. To put it another way, perhaps some people should get off OUR lawn.

Tricked out my Kat/Nin scrapper today and what I noticed most in comparison to SR is that the self-heal just can NOT keep up with the lack off defense debuff resistance. The nin has around 35% versus sr's 95% and the cascading defense failures I'm seeing are proof to me that DDR rocks. Granted, I noticed it most on a DA mission with nothing by Peacebringer cops ... but ... ouch.

Not sure what most folks are doing, but I've gotten to the point that I sell everything (if it's common I sell it at normal store) on the market for 1 inf. I get charged 5 inf and the highest bid at the moment gets it. So I'll sell a purple recipe for 1 inf and get 15 million inf back... minus that next market fee, of course. Then, I buy everything attuned except AT IOs and Purples. Purples I buy and leave unattuned, AT IOs are half price compared to the catalyzed version, so cheaper if you catalyze them yourself. All this said... my brother just did a secondary build for his main where he boosted almost all his enhancements to +5 instead of attuning them. Based on his observations, I may have to give that a go sometime on my main.

Which IOs are you not seeing for sale? Is it that it actually shows 0 for sale, or that there's no history? If the first, unsure. The vast majority of my IOs have come from the market. If the second, if you keep clicking between IOs in a set, eventually history comes up.

A good point. While I do make choices that gear toward damage output, I've never built something purely to the task. Even the claws/bio scrapper I built just to see what it could do against a pylon was built "normally" and performs as expected throughout all content.

This doesn't sound good.

My main farmer is also a claws/fa brute. Followup, spin, burn, followup, shockwave, fireball is the primary chain. I throw in pyrotic and melt armor when available. I have no doubt that a respec would make it faster but it's doin just fine as is.

This is what first caught my eye about SR on a tank. Lvl 21 and just shy of the softcap on MRA def with nothin but SOs.