Warshades

I've always found ice control to be underwhelming, especially at end game. Perhaps that will change with the new patch and someone that has tested the various control sets will have better insight into those changes. As of the current live build, I would vote for fire/ice for both general, hard, and solo content.

I don't recommend exporting via mid's, the easiest way to share your build is to drag the saved build file from whatever folder you have them into the section below where you type your comment. It make it easy for anyone to download the build and then open it in mid's. I personally don't like the restrictions and negatives of Granite Armor, so I'll post a tanky non-granite stone/stone build. This is a rework of a different stone armor tank build that I had which was more offensive, hence the musculature alpha. You can easily swap that out for a more +def or +res alpha incarnate to boost survival more. Ageless radial is there to provide you with more debuff resistance which will be more useful for end game content on PUG teams than running barrier (with the small exception for 4 star content, though you wouldn't run this with PUG teams normally). Edit: typos. Tanker (Stone Armor - Stone Melee).mbd

I've only tried psionic armor on a tank, but of those mobs you listed, the only one that truly provided issues was Arachnos and since they've added some toxic resistance to the set it hasn't been terrible. You'll definitely want to build for 100% recharge debuff resist (or close to it) as the set partially relies on it's clickable sustains and the web nades can absolutely floor your recharge. The only time I ran into issues and got killed was when aggroing 2 mobs of Arachnos at +4/8x. I suspect that on a team you'd likely have enough additional buffs that it shouldn't be an issue. While not common outside of the shadow shard TFs, the Soldiers of Rularuu are another tough mob that can be problematic for psionic armor because of the heavy debuffs and toxic damage. Outside of the endurance drain, Carnies and Malta weren't very problematic, though I would target and kill the sapper as quickly as possible. My testing was with psionic/MA tank and did include alpha/destiny incarnates. I think that part of the problem for stalkers/scrappers/sentinels is that aside from the lower resist values, you're also getting lower regen rates due to lower max HP cap and similarly lower absorb shield values. I've always found defensive sets to perform better than resist sets for survivability on those ATs. Psionic armor doesn't quite have as high resists to begin with because it's also trying to leverage other things for survival like like the absorb shield, regen, and some defense (though defense isn't very effective due to no DDR). This isn't as big of an issue for tanks/brutes who have higher max HP caps and base resist values, but it's a bigger issue for the other ATs that don't have that advantage. The result is that psionic armor usually can't take alpha strikes as easily outside of tanks/brutes, but take this with a grain of salt as I've only truly tested psi armor on a tank, the rest is mostly extrapolating and experience playing other primarily resist sets on stalkers/scrappers/sentinels. You could aim to get better set bonuses on your stalker, but without having access to mids, it's harder to plan out on test server through trial/error. Consider maybe slotting some of the winter attack sets in to leverage and get more defense. This won't really help in prolonged fights against debuffing mobs, but it can take some of the additional sting out of the alpha strikes when fewer initial attacks get through. Even though my psi/MA tank would hit soft cap positional defenses with Storm Kick, Arachnos would easily debuff that defense into the negatives within a few seconds of fighting so YMMV with going for defensive set bonuses, but try it out and see if it helps. I would particularly suggest getting soul mastery on your stalker and grabbing Moonbeam (great single target DPS and with quick snipe it's easy to use in fights) and more importantly, Shadow Meld. Between the cycling Psychokinetic Barrier, Memento Mori, and Shadow Meld (along with the regen from Devour Psyche), you should be a lot more survivable. Get as much +recharge slotted into your build as possible also to get those powers up quicker.

I haven't played sonic resonance since live I think, but this is about as close to perma PA that I could get with a quick build while taking all the same powers that you did. If you're more flexible on what powers you can take, then it can definitely hit perma PA, but the build will look a bit different. Ideally, you'd want to get 2 more powers that take defensive slotting to be able to put in the LotG +rech which would help some more. Now, if you're counting incarnates, then a recharge boosting alpha incarnate (like Spiritual) will get your PA perma for lvl 50 content. My quick build didn't aim for any recharge debuff resist so if you expect to be hit with a decent amount of -rech from enemies, then I would suggest reworking it to add in some 2 piece winter sets to get it. I'm not entirely sure why you're picking up the entire medicine pool unless it's mainly for theme, those power picks could be spent for better slot options. However, I stuck with the same power choices from what you posted. There may be some better slotting picks for some of the /sonic powers that I'm not aware of since it's been a long time that I've played one, I just tried to prioritize recharge where I could get it. Controller (Illusion Control - Sonic Resonance).mbd

Could also depend on what you want the build to do. If you're trying or want to try to solo AVs and such, then Mace Mastery is the optimal choice for Poisonous Ray which you can proc out and slot an Achilles' proc for additional -res. While Disruptor Blast doesn't provide as much damage as Ice Storm, it does allow slotting of the FF +rech proc, so some things to consider on what you want to do with your controller. Edit: I would also add that survivability shouldn't be a big concern for you since you'll have PotD from marine which helps a lot in that department along with all the other goodies like Toroidal Bubble, and Barrier Reef.

A slightly different, high positional defense take on dark armor. Also extremely costly and not a level up build. To be clear, DA is not a defensive set and it will get easily stripped against mobs that do -def, but should be even more bulky against mobs that don't debuff your defense. Additionally if you're on a team with supports that can further boost defense, you'll get some cushion before you start encountering cascading defense failure. Stuck with the psi blade team that @The Trouble did, also agree that it looks awesome. Tanker (Dark Armor - Psionic Melee).mbd

Iirc (and someone can correct me if I have this wrong) the -tohit from the targeted AoE is only applied to the initial target. The only thing that surrounding enemies get is the damage effect and not the -tohit. As a result, the only dark melee power that can hit multiple foes with -tohit is Shadow Maul since Sould Drain and Consumption don't apply -tohit either. If you want an AoE that can hit multiple foes easily and apply -tohit to all of them, soul mastery is the best patron to pick for Dark Obliteration, and this can be done with any melee set pick.

I'll second @Spaghetti Betty and say that going for a secondary with a lot of knockdown soft control as being the best choice for making a durable regen tank. The biggest downfall of regen from what I tested so far is getting hit by to many debuffs. Mobs that are constantly getting knocked down won't be able to use attacks and debuff you while also giving your regen time to work. FF +rech procs unfortunately may not hit as often anymore on tanks due to the other changes that are happening. Regarding -rech/slow and -tohit from spines and dark melee respectively, mobs tend to have multiple attack powers to hit you with so I never found -rech useful end game and dark melee -tohit is largely ST which doesn't actually help when you have many enemies attacking you. Having said that, spine is very thematic for obvious reasons. Staff would actually be more useful for the (iirc) +13% resist to all buff they get from one of the form combos and it should also have a little knockdown in the set. It is however extremely low on damage output. Long animation times on attacks can also be problematic if you're stuck in the animation when you need to pop a heal.

The answer to this will depend on everyone's perspective on what a tank should be. @Yomo Kimyata brings up a good point that for anyone who doesn't remember tankers from when CoH was live, they may feel this is a massive nerf. Personally I agree with others that a tankers main role should be to tank and be able to soak up/hold aggro. The issue with these changes is that it affects every secondary melee set on tankers. The sets that already overperform like SS, fire, axe, etc will be fine. It's the sets that underperform that will get truly killed by these changes. There is to big of a disparity between the top and bottom damage dealing melee sets and I would've preferred that they worked on closing the gap by increasing the performance of some of the weaker sets before scaling back damage output the way they are. I think there's also a legitimate question of why to even run tanks if scrappers/brutes can hold aggro and take alpha strikes while doing higher damage (haven't actually compared to damage output to brutes on test server just yet), similar to the current situation of brutes not having much of a niche when tankers are more survival and had better AoE damage and close ST dmg performance. One thing they can consider doing is maybe increasing the aggro cap for tanks so that they can do so against a higher number of enemies which would fit the theme of a tank.

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.

Ok.