Warshades

Short answer is no. Here's an example with and without procs and how close using a full damage set is compared to average damage slotting of a proc'd out power: With some exceptions like SS due to rage or else stacking FA + Tactics, normally you'd partially proc out a power along with some acc/dmg slotting. This is FSC slotted with Superior Avalanche acc/dmg, acc/dmg/end, and a acc/dmg HO. This is FSC slotted with a 5 piece Obliteration set (excluding the proc). Now let's look at the addition of procs. This is the same slotting as the first example but with the addition of the Eradication, Obliteration, and Scirocco procs. This is a full 6 set Obliteration. The point of these examples is that you can still 3-4 proc a power and get near identical base damage enhancement (131.6 vs. 138) as what you would get from using an IO set. This gap would be further closed if you used musculature alpha. Having 3 additional procs, even if damage ends up partially resisted from them, would still heavily out damage not using procs or having only 1.

If you want to hit high regen, taking melee core embodiment hybrid would be a better choice. While it's not a permanent buff, it does last for 2 minutes with a 2 minute recharge and you can easily cycle between it and Rune of Protection to get high resists to stack with your regen. My regen tank with capped HP hits 167 hp/sec regen with a fully saturated Reactive Regeneration (this is with 1136% regen). Using vigor core paragon would boost that to 184 hp/sec according to mid's (1254%). Without vigor and instead using a fully saturated melee core embodiment hybrid, it brings regen up to 229 hp/sec (1556%). Having both vigor and melee core incarnates would take it to 246 hp/sec (1673%). Essentially, vigor would give me an additional 17 hp/sec regen when surrounded by a mob compared to getting an additional 62 hp/sec from melee core embodiment hybrid. Here's an article on how ED works : https://homecoming.wiki/wiki/Enhancement_Diversification It's already been mentioned, but alpha slot applies buffs to the base values of powers, not the already enhanced values you've got after slotting (but those values do factor into ED calculations). So it's never as straight forward as taking your current regen rate and multiplying it by a 45% (i.e. 132 x 1.45). Additionally, a portion of the regen rate from Reactive Regeneration ignores enhancements and thus gets no benefit from vigor either (you can see this in mid's by looking at the effects tab when you have the power highlighted and can right click on the power to lock that selection, the 250% base regen from Reactive Regeneration does not increase from slotting any healing IOs or even turning on/off vigor, only the regen rate you get per surrounding foe up to 10 foes is affected). Integration also has a portion of it's regen that ignores any enhancements iirc.

I've not tested this, but my initial impression is that it wouldn't affect allies since the proc specifically says "chance to heal 'self'".

I'll offer a few points to consider: You may want to fit in another attack, either Shadow Maul or ToF. Your only regularly available attacks are all single target and you only have 3 of them (Shadow Punch, Siphon Life, and MG). Recharge on Soul Drain and Dark Consumption are to long for either to be considered a part of the regular rotation. I also wouldn't bother with using slots on Impervious Skin +regen and Regenerative Tissue +regen as those are better spent elsewhere. Psionic isn't a regen only set, it mitigates damage in multiple ways including CC from Aura of Insanity, resistance from toggles, and absorb shield from Psychokinetic Barrier. Aura of Insanity shouldn't be slotted as a damage aura. It's more effective a source of damage mitigation through it's various crowd control effects. It won't proc well since it's a toggle, but self affecting procs like Entomb +absorb can work well. Slotting for mez is useful here since it boosts the magnitude of the mez effect so it can affect more than just minions. You could do 2x of the endoplasm mez/acc HOs boosted to +3 to cover boosting all of the mez effects it can inflict. I added the Contagious Confusion on the off chance it goes off sometimes and help lockdown bosses briefly, but that slot could be moved elsewhere as they wouldn't fire off with good consistency. Since psionic armor at it's base is a resist set with very little DDR and also relies on several clickable powers as part of it's damage mitigation effects (Consume Psyche for regen, Psychokinetic Barrier for an absorb shield, and Memento Mori in emergencies) I would strongly recommend hitting 100% recharge debuff resist. Not having those clickies up will get you killed if you're hit with enough recharge debuffing attacks, something that is very common from mobs like Arachnos. Similarly since you want those clickable powers up often, Hasten would be a good idea for psionic armor in general. You could consider dropping Teleport pool to be able to pick more powers up unless it's there for theme. While Fold Space is great, it becomes hard to fit into builds that want to take all of the powers from the set like psionic armor does. Do not waste slots on Impenetrable Mind, you can leave it with just 1 slot and put a steadfast protection def/res unique in there. Psi armor gets additional psionic resistance from the other armors and has no difficulty capping psi resist. Impenetrable Mind doesn't offer anything else in terms of damage resistance other than psi resist which you'll have plenty of already. Since psi armor already has access to some end recovery tools, I would say that Dark Consumption with its long recharge is not needed and you can swap that for either ToF or Shadow Maul depending on your preference. I would probably then swap the slotting in Soul Drain to either ToF or Shadow Maul and put the slotting in Dark Consumption to Soul Drain. I've not made this change in the build I posted, just offering an option on what to switch for another attack that can be used in a regular rotation. I tried to mostly stick to the original power picks you had with a few small changes. Energy Mastery was switched to Psionic. Harmonic Mind is better for reducing endurance use and Dominate provides another attack that you can slot with winter sets to get recharge debuff resist bonuses with. Focused Accuracy is relatively unnecessary since you'll often have Soul Drain up boosting your tohit. This build could definitely use more fine tuning, but can maybe offer some ideas on different ways to slot it. Tanker (Psionic Armor - Dark Melee).mbd

Stalkers specialize in offense and I would personally go all out offensively with this combination since both energy melee and bio armor are offensively focused sets. Energy melee in particular is the best single target damage set for stalkers and can do absolutely monstrous amounts of damage. I've not played bio armor on stalkers so there may be more optimal slotting and power picks, but I like to take Adrenal Booster on stalkers to further maximize damage output. I took Power Crash to offer some more AoE, but if you want to prioritize ST damage then you could swap it for Bone Smasher instead. Additionally if you want more -regen, you can take Barrage (requires Energy Focus to apply the -regen debuff) or swap Energy Punch for Barrage. I don't think Barrage is worth it personally though as you want fast animation powers to build up Assassin's Focus stacks. Stalker (Energy Melee - Bio Armor).mbd

Quick sample build. The accuracy of some powers isn't the best and it would help to get Tactics earlier into the build or else change some of the power slotting to improve accuracy. Without Tactics, if you exemplar down, Arc of Destruction, Rend Armor, and Dominate don't quite hit 95% accuracy to +3. I've not played Titan Weapons since back when CoH was live so I kept your same power picks from it as I'm not very familiar with the set. Tanker (Regeneration - Titan Weapons).mbd

I can take a look after work, but a few suggestions off the bat: Do not skip Reconstruction. If there's any power that's most skippable it would probably be Fast Healing. It offers a relatively low amount of regen compared to what you get from other sources like Reactive Regeneration and set bonuses. Reconstruction is your fast recharging heal and you want to have it, preferably slotted. You can boost your e/n resist by splitting Superior Gauntleted Fist into 2 sets of 3 for the 6% e/n resist it offers. Priority for getting resists is based on the most common damage types, s/l first, e/n second, then whatever amount of f/c/psi/tox you can get on top which are less common. I wouldn't recommend slotting to much recharge into Build Up. High recharge slotting reduces the chance of the Gaussian build up proc activating. Maybe 1 recharge IO at the most. Rather than doing regular 1 acc and 1 dmg IO in some attacks, it's more effective slot the acc/dmg HOs which boost both while using 1 slot. Priority is to try and get your accuracy to at least 95% (make sure build up and the Gaussian proc aren't toggled on) to enemies at +3 (you can set relative enemy level at the top area of the mids screen).

2 masterminds should make it easy, particularly when you get all your pets up and running by the early 20s. You can also leave your MM in bodyguard (and maybe follow daughter's char) and help your daughter with anything she might need. I'd second marine as a secondary as it both contributes to damage with Shifting Tides and proc'd out Whitecap and makes masterminds extremely tanky with a combination of Toroidal, Reef, and PotD. For bringing down AVs faster, I think most MM primaries will work fine. Demons has additional -res from the pets and MM attacks, with robots you can get additonal -regen (although enemies will attempt to run out of the fire patches), and Mercs can offer -res with Achilles' proc and high dmg.

If you actually look at his build after importing and scroll down on the powers, he's got the support radial hybrid incarnate power toggled on which is skewing the defense values that you're seeing. Since it's a 2 minutes on and 2 minutes off on cooldown, you want to build for those values without relying on the hybrid incarnate since it's not permanent.

This is a quick adjustment from a different invuln build so it's not optimized, but does reach high resist/def values with just 1 foe in range of Invincibility (image below) and 1 stack of SMoT proc. Add barrier core destiny which at minimum provides 5% def/resist and you're at soft cap to s/l/e/n/f/c and hard cap resist to s/l/e/n/tox, close to cap on f/c/psi. Tanker (Invulnerability - Super Strength)4.mbd

Appreciate the improvements you suggested and modified the build. The HOs will help save some slots. Definitely should've checked accuracy without FA toggled on, switched the dam/end Armageddon to a dam/rech/acc. Also swapped Synaptic Overload back in instead of FA, haven't played elec control since the recent update and didn't realize that Synaptic Overload was improved so much. Had some extra slots towards the end so I'll try out the Gaussian in Shifting Tides and see how it goes. Controller (Electric Control - Marine Affinity).mbd

Hello, I would like to get another set of eyes on this elec/marine/mace controller build to see if I missed or could improve anything. I'm not sure how the new sleep mechanic would interact with the SWotC and Ice Mistral procs, but I can easily swap SWotC to Tesla Coil and put Fortunata set in Static Field. Trying to make this into an all around build and maximize damage where possible. Synaptic Overload was an intentional skip, partially since this combination is already slot heavy and also because of it's long cast time. Controller (Electric Control - Marine Affinity).mbd

Depending on the controller/dominator combination, you could probably bring anything and it would still work for most regular content. For fighting AVs and such, having something that can taunt and take aggro for a bit until they're CC'd can be helpful. About the only thing I would actually suggest against is a brute in this case, simply because you wont generate or keep up fury as easily when mobs are CC'd. You could go for an offensive armor set that provides additional damage like Bio, Fire, Shield, Stone, and Radiation. Psionic could also work well to stack CC effects with the controller/dom through Aura of Insanity, but it doesn't provide the offensive buffs that other armor sets I mentioned do. A mastermind can also act as a tank in this situation if you want to try something different. Basically any MM primary with marine secondary can become a very durable tank with Power of the Depths and will also provide further buffs and debuffs to the team with Barrier Reef, Toroidal Bubble, and Whitecap. The only truly weak MM primary at the moment, at least in comparison to the other options, is Beast Mastery.

I believe that Harmonic Mind would win out here. Discounting how much endurance you use which applies to any attacks you use and toggles you're running should end up saving more compared to having a slightly larger max endurance bar and an extra performance shifter proc. You also get the benefit of being able to run a superior ST attack with the snipe from psionic.

So I've taken a look at your build and there are quite a few changes you'd want to look into making. I'll provide a quick build aiming to fix most issues so that you can survive AFK in a s/l farm, but I will preface that this build is entirely made with a focus on S/L AFK farming and not for active farming or fire farming. Additionally, there may areas where the build can be improved as this was put together very quickly with key focuses on S/L resist/defense, regen, and recharge. The goal is to reach 45% s/l defense and 90% s/l resist. You also want to get your regen up to at least 40 hp/sec to survive constant attacks in the typical asteroid AFK farm map and this build gets it to 40 hp/sec without accolades. Tactics and FA are there to boost your tohit so that you can prioritize slotting damage procs in Dragon's Tail and still have 95% accuracy to +3 (assuming +1 level shift from incarnates). I've included the incarnates you should focus on getting for a farm build. Starting out on an AFK farm you can summon BP lore pets, fire off ageless/hasten, turn on Assault Radial, and use Ion judgement. You should then be able to leave the brute AFK for 10 minutes with Dragon's Tail on auto. A more efficient way to farm would be to build without Granite for AFK farming focused on fire farms (90% fire resist and 45% fire defense). This is more expensive to reach on a brute but is doable with investment into winter sets which can provide 5% f/c defense and 6% f/c resist from set bonuses. Granite has a -rech and -dmg component which does slow down farming a bit. Without Granite, you can run Brimstone Armor which provides extra fire damage and Minerals for +rech. Brute (Martial Arts - Stone Armor)farm.mbd

It's not a great choice, it has a smaller radius than larger AoEs like Atom Smasher. MA also lacks a PBAoE aura, another reason that radiation melee is the go to set for AFK farming as it has Irradiated Ground as an additional source of damage. I haven't checked your build, but regardless of what type of farm you're trying to run, you want to have at minimum 45% defense and capped 90% resist to that damage type. Make sure that the farm map you're using also doesn't have any attacks that lower defense or in any way boost the enemies tohit chance. A secondary important factor is regen, particularly for a brute which has a lower base max HP compared to tankers. Rooted helps with this.

Get the shape shifting powers when they become available. Depending on how you'd like to play later into the levels, you can respec out of it (as long as that's not an issue for ironman challenge). Nova form provides some strong early level blast powers, take advantage of the 100ft range on the 2 ST attacks and Detonation, you can easily stay out of hit range if clearing in open zone or outside mission maps. Ebon Eye is usable in Nova Form as well, so you may want to take that over Shadow Bolt at start. Dwarf form is your pseudo resist/tank form. It's not a great damage dealer, but Warshade side provides a secondary, short Sunless Mire AoE/buff that can allow you to maximize damage and stacks with the human form Sunless Mire. Dwarf form also provides you with mez protection while in it. Do not underestimate Gravitic Emanation + Inky Aspect. These come a bit later into the build, but the stuns stack and you can even stun bosses with the combo. The downside is that you will have to engage in melee range for Inky Aspect which can make you vulnerable until you can build high enough recharge to perma Eclipse (this can cap your resists to all damage types at 85% with 4-5 targets). Stygian Circle is an amazing recovery power for both health and endurance, but does require dead enemies nearby to gain the heal and endurance (usually not an issue in when clearing mobs because there are a lot of minions, but can be useless in a long fight against a single target when there are no dead enemies nearby). Nebulous Form will be a useful emergency button to have for the ironman challenge to avoid death as you can become intangible and escape from sticky situations. Shadow Cloak can allow you to more easily stealth through missions if needed if you combine it with something like Celerity + stealth IO. You'll also want to take Gravity Well (good damage and provides you with a hold that you can use against problematic targets), Dark Extractions (the fuzzies can provide some good damage, though you'll notice this more with an end game build and high recharge so that you can have 2-3 up at a time), and human form Sunless Mire (basically Warshade version of Dark Melee's Soul Drain, 30 second damage boost). Quasar and Unchain Essence are also very useful nukes, though Unchain Essence can be a little tricky to use as it requires you target a dead foe before they disappear and you want that target to be in the middle of the mob you're trying to hit. It does also stun which again can stack with Gravitic Emanation and Inky Aspect. What you could do is open with Gravitic while targeting a minion, close in to use Gravity Well and kill that minion, then follow up with Unchain Essence for a mini nuke. I would slot KB to KD IO in Gravitic as it does knockback significantly otherwise. Part of the reason that Khelds are mostly aimed at end game is that they tend to heavily rely on getting their T9 permanent to have great sustainability (Eclipse for WS and Light form for PB). This is only possible with a lot of recharge set bonuses. A lot of the strong/useful primary powers like Dark Extraction, Quasar, Sunless Mire, Unchain Essence, and Gravitic also benefit from high recharge builds so that they are up more often. I would say in very general terms that PBs are more straight forward blaster/scrapper mix of range and melee attacks with an armor secondary. Warshades combine more elements of control utility and also require larger mob sizes along with dead nearby enemies to gain the maximum benefit from their powers. I don't have a level up build for an ironman challenge as I've never done one for that purpose, but hopefully some of this provides you ideas on where to go with the build while playing. I'm not as big of a fan of PBs as I am Warshades (shocking considering my username, right?) so I'll leave it to others to suggest on powers to take for PBs.

There are a lot of slotting choices that simply don't make sense in the build. Granite takes both resistance and defense slotting and provides a massive boost to both. By not slotting any defense sets in Granite, you're missing out on a significant amount. Instead of going for set bonuses that provide defense, you could focus on fixing the one true "hole" of a Granite tank, that being psi resist/defense. Similarly, you want to split Stone Skin slotting for both resist and defense as it provides both. Thunder Strike doesn't need the knockback to knockdown IO, it has a low magnitude KB which will only ever knock enemies down unless you're fighting something that's below your character's level. Additionally, if the point of the build is to use Granite, then I wouldn't waste slots on the other armor toggles besides using them as slot mules for uniques. You can make a second build if you ever need to exemplar below level 21 where you wouldn't have access to Granite. I'm also not sure about your choice of travel power. You'll want TP as a "Granite" tank and it would also give you access to Fold Space which is quite useful. This is a really quick build focusing on getting psi resist as high as possible while maintaining soft/hard caps to the other damage types. The alpha slot is flexible depending on what you want, but since Stone doesn't really get any direct psi resist buffs from powers, cardiac is fairly useless in trying to boost psi resist. You could go agility to get recharge/defense or nerve to avoid the recharge boost if you're worries about proc chances. With an additional 5% def/resist from barrier core and if you count 2 stacks of SMoT proc, this can get close to 85% psi resist. Also as a side note, you could consider other secondary melee sets that will further make your Granite tank more durable. Ice melee can be really nice for the Ice Patch, enemies that are constantly falling down cannot attack you. Edit: the same applies to Lightning Rod as what I stated for Thunder Strike. Unless you're fighting enemies below your level, you do not need to worry about Lightning Rod doing any knockback as it will only knock down enemies. Tanker (Stone Armor - Electrical Melee)sample.mbd

I would personally say that electric/energy does best being in melee range. One of the things that it can do extremely well is drain endurance from mobs and it has enough powers that cause -recovery to keep that endurance floored. Enemies without endurance can't attack (although they will attempt to run around a lot). Since you're using /energy as the secondary, you would want to be in melee range to get the benefit of Power Drain as well (this also drains endurance and pairs nicely with Short Circuit). I'll upload the build that I last used and settled on for my elec/energy Sentinel. As a side note, if you plan on soloing a lot then you may want to replace Lightning Field with Chain Fences to prevent mobs from running around when they are sapped of endurance. If you plan on teaming a lot, they'll die quick enough or you'll have other controllers/dominators on team to not need Chain Fences. Sentinel (Electrical Blast - Energy Aura)3.mbd

This is pretty much par for the course on resist armors and a massive reason to build for 100% recharge debuff resist, which also unfortunately means waiting until 50 to be able to slot the winter purple sets to get that recharge debuff resist efficiently. The armor is functional once you build for that recharge debuff resist as it relies heavily on it's clickable supporting powers for sustainability, but debuffs will always be a resist armor's kryptonite. I do think some amount of soft control in the secondary would help out a lot which fire melee doesn't have.

First image was the build skoryy posted, second image are the adjustments/changes I did to it, and third image is the revised build by skoryy. Edit: as a side note and something I didn't catch initially, Power Up was toggled on when I was making adjustments and that did affect the defense calculations from powers. Without Power Up, the build I posted only hits 41.3% range defense and not 48% as shown in the image.

I should add that psionic did go through some fine tuning. I had tested the set initially before the DDR was added to it.

Not a dom expert by any means and haven't ever played /arsenal on a dom so take the suggestions with a grain of salt. To me it looks like you possibly have to many attacks and not enough slots to spread around to some powers. I removed Buttstroke to have some extra slots and changed some sets to get more recharge and ranged defense, also added an armor to provide you some resistance to the most common s/l/e damage types. Kept most of pyro slotting the same, I haven't really experimented with it to know what would work best so others may have better ideas there. I don't know about the merits of having achilles proc in Burst sine the PPM rate would be so low in it. Foxfire - Dominator (Pyrotechnic Control - Arsenal Assault).mbd

My first psi armor char will be a psi/ice tank. I wanted to try out the idea of having Aura of Insanity while also laying down Ice Patch. If they're not CC'd by AoI, they'll be falling down on the ice and provide more time for the regen to work. This is more for the fun than any theme or OP combo. I could also see this working out nicely for scrappers and stalkers since you can lay down the Ice Patch, back out to use the cone version of Devour Psyche, and then get back into the middle of the action with the mobs not scattering or moving much. The only version of psi armor that I tried on beta was a psi/ma tank. Unfortunately without any DDR, the soft capped defense with Storm Kick would get destroyed to easily and quickly to really be a factor beyond reducing the impact of the alpha strikes by mobs.

You're completely fine @luficia. My apologies for my own part in going off topic. Going back to your original question, Overload would primarily be useful if facing significant tox/psi damage. It may depend on how you build your EA tank as to whether you need it or not. I ran my EA tank on beta through both Arachnos and Carnies at +4/8x and did not feel that I was ever at risk of dying. If you build for tox/psi resist through IO sets, it gets more than enough to survive such content compared to how relatively rare tox/psi damage is as a whole. You could use Overload as a slot mule if you slot toggles like I did with 4 piece shield walls as an example. I've always built EA on other ATs to get as much resist as possible after reaching S/L/E/N/F/C soft cap and it has always turned out extremely tough for any mobs to kill.