Warshades

That is true, and usually it's relatively easy to keep it double stacked at minimum. I don't think they were looking at EA being played on SOs. If we go by the SO metric, I think every set is going to look bad defensively compared to stone armor as just a fully slotted Granite/Stone Skin with 3 resist and 3 defense SOs hits 31% defense, 78-90% resists (excluding the obvious P/T where relevant). I'll try to at some point to port over my EA builds from other ATs to the tank on OB and see where the set ends up in terms of defense/resists when it's more optimized. This was with what I previously quick slotted (with the addition of pool powers) and regen rate is with Energize buff active. The S/L resist was around 80% iirc (hit the limit on monitored stats). These aren't bad numbers at all, especially considering the defense values are without Energy Drain active and no SMoT/barrier factored into this. Between the relatively high DDR and the extra amount of defensive cushion you can get with Energy Drain while likely hitting 60%+ resist to all (once optimized with better sets), I think it's extremely durable for a tank. It also has an on demand heal in Energize which provides a very solid regen boost as well.

This may not fit your needs exactly as it's a somewhat expensive build and I only use Dwarf form for the double mire ability, but it may provide you some ideas. It's a high recharge build that relies on perma Eclipse to hit resist caps, primarily for lvl 30+ content. It does have control ability with Gravitic Emanation + Inky Aspect which makes for a nice opener as you can stun entire mobs at times. For mez protection, I tend to rely on macros that combine/use break frees when needed, but you have the option of going with Clarion destiny if you want. The build is very end heavy, but Stygian Circle helps with that (and I prefer to run Ageless personally). The winter 2 set pieces are there to easily hit 100% recharge debuff resist. Warshade (Umbral Blast - Umbral Aura)4.mbd

I was referring to defense debuff resist. Psychokinetic Barrier provides resistance to recharge debuffs, recovery debuffs, endurance drain, and regen debuffs. Even then, it's relatively minor and you can get drained of endurance when fighting specific enemies. DDR would be nice for the set to have as it provides a decent amount of positional defense that can be soft capped when paired with something like MA and Storm Kick, but as it is right now with 0% DDR, that soft cap positional defense can quickly get neutered into the negative values.

This is a very subjective question. Bio/savage or bio/spine are both thematic imo. I personally would take savage just because the frenzy stacks provide additional recharge which benefits bio armor. Invuln/ss is the classic super man combo theme, however you could go with invuln/street justice for a similar theme while avoiding rage crash. Invuln with weapons would also work (you could be really strong and able to swing giant "Titan" weapons around to attack with). SR/claw, SR/katana, and SR/MA would be my go to thematic pairings. You could also pair it with /savage or /staff for theme as well. I personally don't find shield/MA to be thematic (MA to me is all about hand-to-hand combat which seems weird to use while holding a shield, though it is a powerful combination). Besides the one handed weapons as you suggested, you could consider shield paired with energy/kinetic melee also (think something like Black Panther where the shield absorbs kinetic energy and then you're able to use it to attack enemies with). I could see themes for WP paired with a lot of stuff including claws, psionic, katana, DB, TW, MA, spines, etc.

There are other toggle powers that have no endurance drain. Bio armor's Adaptation toggles, dual pistol's Swap Ammo, etc. Oppressive Gloom actually does have a 0.08 end drain. This might be one of the few powers that affects enemies without an endurance drain whereas the others that I can think of like Adaptation and Swap Ammo only directly affect your character.

This was fighting against +4/8x Arachnos. The armor does a lot better against other mobs that don't deal toxic damage. Endurance drain can be an issue against Mu as others pointed out.

I did my testing with a psi/ma tank, so this may skew the results because of Storm Kick, but it did relatively fine for me. It certainly wasn't jaw dropping performance, but it was a solid tank for most content. Storm Kick absolutely helps with layering some extra positional defense, but the set unfortunately doesn't have any DDR and it won't help against mobs that heavily debuff. I actually didn't struggle much against Arachnos, but this was an IO'd build. The few instances where I took heavy damage was usually against any toxic damage (that's where the real resist hole is and Arachnos have several toxic damage dealing attacks and mobs, like Tarantulas). I would see noticeable drops in HP against +4/8x Arachnos radio mission, but nothing that the tank couldn't handle if doing 1 mob at a time. The amount of lethal resist felt fine to me, but again, definitely higher values on a tank compared to other ATs. With 2 stacks of SMoT, I'm hitting near hard cap to most resists. It also gets a solid amount of regen with fully saturated CP.

I may have to consider doing that. Soul transfer still has a very long recharge so it may not be often enough to rely on regularly.

I actually like these two changes. The only bad part is it feels like I might need to take all the powers that DA has which will be tough fit in some builds. Not sure how I feel about the changes to CoF. Not really an issue for melee ATs, but anyone playing a Sentinel at range won't get that KB protection it sounds like? I get why they gave the kb protection to this power as it was notoriously skipped by pretty much everyone and it's now a reason to run it, but it won't benefit Sentinels much unless you play yours in melee (which is now at least doable since they'll have access to Dark Regen). At minimum, the -dmg debuff is a nice change and it's an easy replacement for Acrobatics which I tend to use on most DA builds anyway.

Did some quick slotting of EA on a tank and it truly looks powerful. Able to relatively easily hit or get close to tanker HP cap, 60ish HP/sec regen with energize, 50%+ typed defense (excluding psi/tox, slightly lower on negative), around 65% DDR, and some mid-high resists to all damage types. Love the no crash Overload (although might still skip if build is tight on power slots). I kinda have to agree. EA was in a very good spot of being a great armor set but not completely OP that it needed any nerfs on the other ATs. At least the nerf doesn't look terribly significant, haven't yet tested it on Sentinels or Brutes. Just doing some quick numbers, the initial hit on Energy Drain gave 0.75% def to brutes, 0.6% after nerf. The per target went from 0.38% to 0.304% if mid's values are accurate. With a saturated 10 target hit (slotting 2 lvl 50+5 def IOs in mids), the initial hit would give 0.9399% def post nerf (1.17% pre nerf) and 0.476% per target post nerf (0.59% pre nerf). At 10 targets, that's 5.7% def post nerf and 7.07% pre nerf on a brute. A difference of ~1.3% isn't terrible. Nerfing Power Shield should also have relatively low impact due to the rarity of fire/cold attacks.

I find it unreliable as you can't guarantee that you're paired with enough of the specific ATs to hit the resist cap, not to mention the slots, endurance, and power investment needed (3 separate toggle shields to slot and run) to help hit that cap without relying on Eclipse or Light Form. Conversely, you can ignore those shield toggles and use the slots for offense, getting more recharge bonuses to make the T9 perma, reduce endurance drain by running fewer toggles, and have access to more utility powers. The one caveat of this is that these perma T9 Kheldian builds are very much for late game content, 30+ at minimum. Personally, I'd probably just build a second build that's better at low level exemplared content which would be easy to switch to and have a high performing build for high lvl content. One thing that I would like to see if the inherent powers on Khelds are kept to the same theme (benefiting from other teammates) is switching the resistance buff to a defense buff (5% def to all instead of the 10% resistance). Defense would actually be useful so that you're hit less often (and when you do get hit, the Kheldian secondary has resist shields/T9 to reduce that damage). At 50 and once reaching perma Eclipse/Light Form, that damage resistance gain from the inherent is worthless. IIRC, unless I misplaced the mid's file, this was my final build for my Warshade. Some of the key points to the build: Perma Hasten/Eclipse 100% recharge debuff resist Resist capped with 4-5 targets on Eclipse Proc'd out Gravitic Emanation, Gravity Well, Unchain Essence (this can be swapped to a proc'd out Essence Drain if you want an additional ST rotation power). Dwarf is there for access to double mire, otherwise it's a human WS build. The build is endurance heavy, but Stygian Circle is readily available and easily recovers endurance. I do run ageless on mine to have fewer endurance issues in longer fights against AVs and get more recharge out of it, but you have the option of running Clarion if you want to avoid mez and not rely on break frees or Barrier to help out team on harder content. With regards to the alpha slot, I found Intuition to be beneficial. It has the same 33% damage buff that radial Musculature does but also provides a range buff (makes for faster travel with Shadow Step and increased effective arc on Gravitic Emanation), hold duration (kinda helps Gravity Well), and improves slow debuffs from your attacks (minor benefit). The additional range buff is what I found particularly more useful over the end mod from Musculature radial. Warshade (Umbral Blast - Umbral Aura)4.mbd

Appreciate the correction, my mind was on a different game that has defense down effect and got the 2 mixed up.

DDR is short for defense down reduction. Much like some power sets have -def debuffs that applied to enemies, some enemy attacks (particularly those that deal smash/lethal damage) can have defense down debuffs that will be applied to your character. DDR reduces that amount of defense down that you're hit with. So lets say that an attack does -10% defense and hits you, if your character has 50% DDR, you will only suffer from -5% defense instead of -10%. Primarily, only defensive based sets get some DDR from their toggles, Super Reflexes getting the most and on tanks is capable of reaching 95% DDR. Most other defensive sets on tanks like ice, shield, invulnerability, and stone hit around 50% DDR. If I recall correctly, the amount of the DDR you get on other ATs like brutes, scrappers, sentinels, and stalkers ends up being a lower value than what tanks get.

This also partially depends on the primary. Elec blast as an example already has Tesla Cage where you can slot the higher damage Unbreakable Constraint proc, but going with KOB would allow you stack holds on bosses so it could provide some benefit there. While I prefer Havoc Punch, you could in theory get 3 hold powers by running Tesla Cage, KOB and Spirit Shark Jaws (which also can proc well and sending a shark at enemies is kinda fun).

Others have already pointed it out, but dead enemies can't damage you, so the faster you kill, the less damage you take. In terms of your slotting, I'm not sure why you're adding slots to health so early in the process. The only actual use out of health is if you slot the various health IO set uniques like miracle +rec, panacea +hp/end, preventative medicine +absorb, etc. Health has such a low base regeneration buff that boosting it does nothing for you, particularly this early in the game when your HP is low. I would've moved the 2 slots from health, the 1 slot from Weaken Resolve, and 1 slot each from Dark Embrace and Murky Cloud (1 end redux and 2 resist is plenty early on) to your attacks to boost the damage. Was the character based around darkness? Only reason I ask is that if you want something that's extremely hard to kill, invulnerability armor set would be more what you'd want to use. This isn't to say that dark armor can't/won't work, but it is a set that shines better with more investment into the build and IO set bonuses. Invulnerability is quite strong out of the box even without IO sets due to how useful a saturated invincibility when you're surrounded by mobs is. Below is just a quick sample of slotting with SOs through lvl 20ish on a tanker, the values on the invuln/titan build is with 10 foes surrounding you to maximize the defense you get from invincibility. At 50, with incarnates, set bonuses, etc, invuln can be made nearly unkillable. Below is a quick swap from a different secondary build I had to TW so disregard some of the power choices, but just an example of the values you can achieve chasing res/def set bonuses (this is with only 1 foe in range of invincibility, 1 SMoT proc, and the minimum 5% res/def from barrier core). The one thing I will say regarding this is that the more you build towards one end of the spectrum, the more you sacrifice on the other end. Building towards durability generally means chasing set bonuses to further buff defense/resist values. Building towards damage usually results in ignoring some of these durability set bonuses in favor of partially damage procing powers and chasing recharge/accuracy bonuses.