Warshades

That's fair. I tend to think of inspirations as a crutch and hate to rely on them so I generally don't use them. The few exceptions would be popping reds to make farming faster or break frees on chars without mez protection. I prefer to build and rely on power picks to have sufficient survivability.

You end up paying a tax for powers regardless, so it depends on how you look at it. I don't think many people are taking Boxing/Kick from fighting pool in order to use them, most pick them up to get Tough/Weave. The other 2 powers out of Sorcery do not need to be completely useless to your build to where you have to look at it as if you're paying a 2 power pick tax to get the power that you want. Mystic Flight can be used as a travel power, something I still prefer to have access to even with the availability of prestige/temps/teleports and is a place to slot the slow resist unique in. At most, I consider it a 1 power tax pool as I usually don't take Arcane Bolt or Spirit Ward to use those powers and the latter isn't even useful on a Regen set to slot the Preventive Medicine unique/global. You could consider taking Arcane Bolt and using it as a replacement attack for Haymaker (assuming SS for the melee set) and avoid wasting a power pick, they do comparable damage and the only downside is the inability to slot ATO sets in Arcane Bolt.

It's no invuln in terms of just standing in the middle of mobs and not even having to pay attention to your health (if your invuln is built for max defense/resists), but it can be made powerful enough to tank just about anything at +4/8x if you want. Much like Psyonico said, regen is a late bloomer and benefits a lot from set bonuses. Being able to cycle between Rune of Protection from sorcery pool and melee hybrid incarnate slot can give it a lot of durability and help in maxing out resists.

Quick sample build, you can really choose whatever you want for your epic/patron pool powers. Goes into sorcery pool to be able to cycle between RoP with melee core hybrid. Regarding the incarnate choices: Alpha: Vigor avoids recharge buffs while boosting healing, can swap to Spiritual if you don't care about proc chances and want the recharge buff for closer to perma hasten or musculature for a damage boost. Judgement: Vorpal gives some additional defense for 10 seconds, but really can choose whatever you want here. Destiny: Barrier will provide another perma 5% resist/def, can go ageless radial to get more debuff resists. Hybrid: Melee core to alternatively cycle with Rune of Protection. With a saturated melee core hybrid or RoP active, you'll hit 90% resist to most damage types, very little downtime periods where both powers are on cooldown. Tanker (Regeneration - Dark Melee).mbd

You're missing the Reactive Defense scaling resist unique IO. I would personally move the SMoT set into Crushing Blow, you want the +resist proc to be available early so it's best to slot in your T1 or T2 attack for exemplaring on TFs (you also don't need all 6 pieces of SMoT, the 6% s/l resist is pretty useless since you can cap your s/l resist without it, will save you a slot). You can move the Blistering Cold set into FT. I would then suggest moving the 3 piece Avalanche from Titan Sweep into Arc of Destruction, you can also slot the remaining 3 pieces Superior Gauntleted Fist into Arc of Destruction. Replace the 3 piece Avalanche in Titan Sweep with a 3 piece Eradication.

Maybe it was also accounting for the value of recipe and salvage drops during the farming process. Not sure how old the post you're referring to is, but it's also possible that influence gain from AE in general or from mobs with that particular combination of powers was reduced.

Resilience core alpha, barrier core destiny, and melee radial hybrid are the main ones to help boost survivability. There are some choices you could go for with judgement and interface that could also help boost survivability further, vorpal radial judgement gives a significant 30% defense boost for 10 seconds while void radial does a -50% damage debuff against enemies (though most regular mobs will die from judgement and other AoE spams quickly at 50+ content and AVs/GMs resist debuffs, so neither are that big of an impact and you could go for whatever you prefer). For interface you could go with diamagnetic core for the -tohit or paralytic for -dmg, however /dark melee doesn't have great AoE options as both Soul Drain and Dark Consumption have long base cooldowns. To really get the most use out of the interface slot, you'd probably want to swap Shadow Maul for Touch of Fear so that you can hit and affect more targets with the interface ability. Others might have better suggestions on what lore pets provide the most useful buffs if you're trying to maximize survivability further. I normally go BP radial in the lore slot. If you want a recharge boosting alpha, I would suggest agility core for this tank. While it provides a slightly lower recharge buff, it does enhance defense which will put you further past the 45% soft cap and give you a bigger buffer against defense debuffs from mobs. You will still be able to hit resist caps on most damage types by having 2 SMoT procs running, which is relatively easy to keep up if you're constantly fighting and going from mob to mob. Below is the build with agility core alpha, a second stack of SMoT would add 6.7% resist to all which would cap everything except psionic (89%). You could also consider moving the performance shifter proc from Harmonic Mind to 3 slot Dull Pain with Preventive Medicine (heal/rech, heal/end/rech, and end/rech) to get your HP capped (does rely on getting all the +max HP passive accolades as well).

It is one of my builds also I think (at least based on the name since I'll often just add a number any time I make changes to a build and save to have easy comparisons). It's low on recharge bonuses as it also focuses on maxing resists while hitting soft cap defenses with 1 foe in range of invincibility. If you toggle on the SMoT proc and T4 barrier core which are turned off in the screenshot of the build, you'll hit 90% s/l/e/n/f/c resist. 89% on toxic and 85.9% on psionic. A second SMoT proc would cap those as well. You also want to reset the foes in range of invincibility to 0 and back to 1 when loading in invulnerability armor sets to see accurate numbers from it (you can right click on the power in Mid's to lock it so that you can easily go to the info tab and change values like foes in range or time elapsed from using a destiny incarnate power). I always set time elapsed on destiny incarnate powers to over 60 seconds to see the minimum values provided by the destiny incarnate which are in essence permanent if the duration of effects is 2 minutes, some do last only 90 seconds instead of 120. I made one other change to that build that sacrifices a tiny bit of e/n resist to add more global recharge which would be more useful to increase the uptime of Dull Pain to near perma (may be slightly off from perma during the hasten downtime periods). Below is the comparison of both with SMoT and barrier active, 8th version on the left and 7th on the right. Essentially I just distributed the Maneuvers slots to add more LotG pieces, did replace one of the Superior Blistering Cold to a heal IO to increase the amount of HP restored since the f/c defense at 53% was overkill. Posting the 8th version of the build below. Edit: one small side note just in case, I did boost the PvP set pieces like Shield Wall to +5 in mids. This can be slightly expensive but will boost defense a bit higher and you still will get PvP set bonuses when exemplaring even if they're not catalyzed and are boosted to +5. The same is not the case for none PvP sets like Unbreakable Guard, I would recommend getting the catalyzed versions of those IOs on the market (or crafting if you have recipe drops and using a catalyst) so that the set bonuses exemplar with you when doing content below 50. Tanker (Invulnerability - Dark Melee)8.mbd

Shield is in fact really good, you'd pretty much be splitting hairs trying to pick between shield and invuln, both can be built to be insanely durable. I would recommend /dark for shield just to have access to a heal to add some sustainability and Dark Consumption for endurance (also helps that /dark is light on endurance as an attack set). Invuln doesn't really need to go with /dark for Siphon Life as it's high def/resist and access to DP is sufficient imo, so you could go for other secondary options. Posted a sample shield/dark below. The build is focused more on trying to reach high resists, I don't know that I would recommend going this far for it as it makes several sacrifices, but it should be very durable. With 2 stack of the SMoT proc, you'd be hitting 89% s/l resist, 87% e/n/f/c, 85% toxic, and 76% psionic without relying on OwtS, you could honestly swap that out for taunt. Again, at this point it's more about what flavor of tank you prefer and like playing more. Both invuln and shield can hit such high survival stats that only extreme cases and specific scenarios would ever pose any issues. Willpower has a few holes that make it, imo, less of a durable armor set than invuln or shield. Regeneration takes time to work, so you're inherently more vulnerable to burst damage. WP can easily cap s/l resist, but you won't be reaching such high e/n/f/c/tox/psi resist with it that you can on invuln and shield. Additionally, it's DDR is pretty low and your defense can get floored more easily than it would on invuln or shield, at which point you'd be taking a lot of hits. It also wants RttC saturated with 10 foes around you to max out the regen bonus. You'll end up losing a good portion of your regen if you only have 1-2 enemies around you. With a saturated RttC, you could hit ~205 hp/sec regen with Vigor Core alpha. Drop the foes surrounding you from 10 to 1 for RttC and that regen will drop to ~130hp/sec. It will still do fine in most content, but there will be more scenarios where high burst damage that's not smash/lethal can create problems. Tanker (Shield Defense - Dark Melee)7.mbd

Any tank can handle general content without issue when built well, but you'll be hard pressed to match invuln in terms of sheer survivability. This is a sample invuln/claws that can hit resist cap to all damage types with 1 SMoT proc and the 5% minimum resist/defense from T4 barrier core destiny. It also hits 50%+ def to s/l/e/n/f/c with 1 foe in range of invincibility. It doesn't really matter much what secondary you take, you can go with /dark for the extra heal in Siphon Life, /ice is a good one for Ice Patch, and you could also consider /MA for Storm Kick which gives 10% positional defense (while invuln is a typed defense set, the extra positional defense will be slightly helpful against psi/toxic typed attacks which you can't easily get typed defense set bonuses for). As @Psyonico stated, you can go for Soul patron to get DN for the additional -dmg. Do reset invincibility to 0 foes in range and then back to 1 when loading invuln build into mids as there is a known bug that defense totals won't display defense from invincibility when loading a build into mids. Shield is also an extremely tough set capable of easily soft capping positional defenses and having high DDR. You can also build it to reach high resist totals, though it won't cap all of them like invuln is capable of doing without relying on OwtS. Tanker (Invulnerability - Claws).mbd

You could try something like this out. Electric armor did get some changes and buffs recently and Power Surge no longer has a crash. You don't really need it for the resist, but it does offer a very nice regen bonus. Power Sink can be stacked and also offers a large amount of regen when it hits the max (10) targets. Energize also provides a regen bonus on top of the heal and endurance discount. Elec armor very much feels like a mix between regen and resists now. While you don't really need to go into Force of Will pool, I do find it nice and fun since Unleash Potential also provides a strong regen buff and keeping Mighty Leap toggled will let you have another AoE knockdown power in Take Off for some soft control. For DPS, you want to 4 proc your main powers (KO Blow, Foot Stomp, and epic attacks). Epic pool is flexible, you can go for Mu if you want to have more AoE with Fences + BoL. Soul provides better ST damage with Gloom. Brute (Super Strength - Electric Armor).mbd

You have your debuff toggles slotted with recharge instead of endurance reduction. You'll have hasten + high global recharge with AM and the debuff toggles have a very low cooldown to begin with, slot them with endurance discount instead. You also have Sprint toggled on in your build which contributes a decent amount as well to your end drain/sec. Additionally on fast moving teams at end game, you likely wont even have time to apply both Radiation Infection and Enervating Field, whether you need to use them or not is going to be more situational and depend on team make up and how much damage everyone is doing so your end consumption won't really be that high most of the time. Maybe try something like this below. Others may have some better slotting ideas/options. I like to have the option to double up on Aim + BU so picked up ice mastery for it. Hoarfrost is not a bad power to have to increase your max HP as that will help with durability. I'm not a fan personally of single target rez powers like Mutation. There's free access to a self rez from the start Vendor so it's basically never needed unless someone didn't pick it up. The only ally rez power that I ever bother to pick up is Howling Twilight from Dark Miasma/Affinity which can rez multiple allies (and also applies -500% regen to enemies). Fallout is to situational as well imo. Corruptor (Radiation Blast - Radiation Emission).mbd

Also, you should have a few free respecs available, you can always change things unless you've used them all. Type /respec into the chat window when you get into the game and you'll see if you have the option to repick your powers and power slots (you can always cancel by backing out and it won't consume the respec unless you finish the entire process).

Hasten in my build probably won't be perma, but may be close depending on how often the force feedback +recharge procs go off for you. I accidentally left the procs turned on in Foot Stomp so it's counting the +100% recharge from the FF proc (those only last 5 seconds so it's not a permanent buff). For a cheap build, you're unlikely to hit perma hasten and 45% f/c defense at the same time.

I like my farmers to have 45% f/c defense as that eliminates worrying about popping purple insps. You won't have that luxury as you'll need to pay attention to rage crashes (-20% def), but popping 2 small purple inspirations before a rage crash will keep you above 45% f/c defense. This is a really quick rework of a spine/fire that I used to use before. Still hits 45% f/c defense and avoids purple IOs. Some things you will want to try and get, like the steadfast/glad armor +def uniques and LotG +rech. This build will be very endurance heavy, so craft Ageless Core destiny T4 first before anything else. Then you can add on musculature, interface, etc. I didn't spend to much time on this, so there may be some better slotting options and improvements. The goal was to keep it as cheap as possible by avoiding any purple/ATO/pvp IOs other than the necessary uniques. You shouldn't really even need to 3 slot LotG in Weave/Maneuvers if you want to save more influence, can easily replace the def and def/end ones with a cheaper Red Fortune def and def/end. Just need the LotG +rech to help with global recharge. Again, monitor your blinking rage while farming to see when it's about to crash, low defense can still get you killed if you're hit enough even with 90% fire resist. You can also go to combat attributes (on the top bar after clicking "powers" on power tray), then go to defense attributes and right click on fire defense and hit monitor to have your fire defense total show up on screen for you to see. Brute (SS - Fiery Aura).mbd Edit: I like to use the xtomic carnival map. Can just search "xtomic" in AE search bar.

Can depend on preference, I find Tesla Cage to have very good damage. It's slightly lower damage per activation time compared to Zapping Bolt, but it does easily beat out Charged Bolts and Lightning Bolt which don't proc well and are below 200 damage per animation. I run 4 attacks for my ST rotation, Charged Bolts, Zapping Bolt, Tesla Cage, and Havoc Punch (also proc'd out) from electric mastery. Below is the damage per animation time of both Tesla Cage (4 damage procs) and Zapping Bolt (no procs) on my build (it is elec/energy instead and not elec/psi). Does include musculature alpha and reactive interface on the mid's build. They are nearly identical. The damage per activation on Tesla Cage with 4 procs is 598 according to mid's. Really comes down to preference and how/what you enjoy more. I find the additional 0.5 second animation time of Tesla Cage (as compared to Lightning Bolt) to be well worth picking it over Lightning Bolt since it has high proc rates.

Ice got a little bit better with the addition of Rime and now has more absorb shields to rely on besides defense and a small amount of resists. I don't know how well it would pair with AR since it does have a lot of cones and if you want to use Moisture Absorption, you would need to go into melee range. Regen, from what I've heard discussed about it, got worse after the new patch changed the set for Sentinels. It lost Instant Healing and the absorb shield that it gave which were more useful than relying on passive regen from Reactive. This was discussed on the beta feedback with regen changes being a nerf to Sentinels (don't know how accurate this is as I don't have a regen Sent myself).

Iirc, control core hybrid should be best if you're trying to max damage on most controller sets. The base damage on most controller powers is quite low and a lot of your damage output will come from a combination of procs and containment which control core hybrid helps. Assault would be more ideal for dominators which have a damage dealing secondary set and already benefit from increased control magnitude if built for perma domination. Edit: ignore my comment.

I would suggest some adjustments. You're chasing recharge bonuses a bit to much imo, Time Manipulation already offers really high recharge buff from Chrono Shift and you can take out the 5 slotted Red Fortunes to distribute those slots to your other powers more. Poison Ray is an excellent power to proc, I would highly recommend the Achilles -res proc and 3-4 damage procs. Do not skip Flash Bang, it is incredibly useful and also procs very well, I would replace Time Stop with it as it doesn't really offer much. @tricon did a some good testing and breakdown of Arsenal (although it was with /trick arrow secondary). Definitely worth taking a look over I'm not the most familiar with Time Manipulation so there may be some better slotting options/choices, it was never a set that I really got into. One thing I would add is that the Panacea proc should go into Health. It needs to be in a passive/toggle power to have a chance to fire off otherwise it will only have a chance to fire when you use Chrono Shift. Preventive Medicine proc functions like a unique and doesn't have to be in a power that's used/active to fire, though still worth slotting a full 6 set for the recharge bonus if you have a good heal power. This build gets soft cap s/l/e and range defense and has Hasten and Chrono Shift perma. I don't know how often you'll actually be playing in melee/PBAoE range seeing as all of your power (except Liquid Nitrogen) have high range so YMMV on Time's Juncture, it may be a power that you could drop. I left it in the build as I didn't really see a direct improvement that wouldn't require more slots. One thing you could consider is Fold Space if you want the option to group mobs. Combat TP > Teleport Target, but you can change it back if you want it to help TP teammates. With the easy access to various Mission Transporter, Assemble Team, and Team Transporter powers, I find that Teleport Target isn't useful in most cases. Regarding incarnates, I would avoid any alpha incarnates that boost recharge. They function as if you're slotting a recharge IO into powers and that will negatively impact your proc chances on procced powers. Nerve is a good option as it still offers a defense boost, boosts accuracy which will help with the highly procced powers, and increases hold duration which will benefit your procced out T2 hold power. If you're having endurance issues, you may also want to consider Vigor which will help your heals, accuracy, and end redux. Edit: looking over it, I think I missed Slowed Response in my posted build, would be worth replacing either Combat/Target TP or else Time's Juncture for it. It may also be a better power to put the Achilles' proc into as well, though others may know more about that. Controller (Arsenal Control - Time Manipulation).mbd

Where you write your message post, there's an "add files" and "other media" at the bottom. You can click add files and locate your saved mids file (usually a folder in the documents folder) or alternatively just drag the saved mids file into that area and it will upload it. Much easier to download and load a file than trying to rebuild it from text.

Has nothing to do with having 3 forms, it's best to visualize how it's getting exploited currently. Now to be clear, I could care less about pylon times someone is able to achieve using this exploit and I'm quite sure this isn't even close to the record that some other ATs have been able to set on pylon times. The bigger problem is that kheldians need to use this exploit to even attempt to match the damage output that other ATs are able to output and without it, this pylon time would likely be over 200-300 seconds. The exploit should be removed, but kheldians need to be changed and those changes need to be buffs. No one is saying that they should be nerfed (aside from removing the exploit).

This makes some sacrifices on fire, cold, toxic, and psi resist and slightly lower defense totals, but should output a lot more damage by procing out your attacks while taking RoP and melee core hybrid incarnates to cycle between to get higher resists to the most common s/l/e/n and make up for the lost f/c/t/psi resist from set bonuses. Energy Drain will help with making up some of the defense loss, but you'll want to watch out for the rage crash. Couldn't find room in the build for Hand Clap unless you're willing to use Mystic Flight as your travel and then you could replace Super Speed for HC. It doesn't quite hit 100% recharge debuff resist but should be high enough at 85% (you could also move the Rectified Reticle slot in Rage to kick and 2 slot Superior Avalanche to get it to 100%). Can always swap the levels at which you take powers as you need for whatever levels you exemplar to often, RoP is definitely picked up late on the build. CJ can be swapped for Maneuvers if you prefer as well. This build uses musculature alpha and reactive radial interface to maximize damage and provide more -res debuffs. Definitely test it out on test server first to see if it works. Brute (Super Strength - Energy Aura).mbd

This is the most important part in the end. Radiation will also help with endurance management since Battle Axe is end heavy, so it's a good pairing!

Axe in particular sounds like what you're looking for in a secondary. It has a good amount of AoE's and Axe Cyclone actually draws enemies in closer to you, which can be helpful on maps where mobs are more spread out. As far soaking up hits and remaining standing, I would not personally go with radiation armor. It's a decent set but ideally you would want a set that can mix both high resist and high defense, Invuln is perhaps best for being able to stand and soak stuff up without failing. I actually got curious to see if I could get invuln to sit at soft cap defense with 1 foe in range of Invincibility and capped 90% resist to all with just 1 SMoT proc and the 5% resist/defense from barrier core detiny and came up with this below: Again, radiation armor can be made durable and should easily handle most general stuff without issue, but if you're trying to soak things up, Invulnerability is the way to go (unless you're ok with dealing with Granite on stone armor, it could technically be considered more durable as it can also hit soft cap s/l/e/n/f/c and can be hard capped to all resists while having higher regen from Rooted and a more readily available heal in Earth's Embrace).

It's a pretty good build, there are certainly ways to add a tiny bit more resists and/or defenses at the cost of damage output and recharge, but I would ask what enemies are you struggling against with those conditions? As it is, it should be able to handle +3/8x against "most" stuff. A few general points: Are any difficulties surviving tied to the -20% defense from rage crash? If so, popping 1-2 luck insps should easily fix this. The one unfortunate thing with pairing a defensive based set with SS is that rage crash can significantly impact your survival. What specific enemy groups are you struggling against? Energy Aura does have some inherent weakness to toxic and psi, both because of having low inherent resists and lack of typed defense buffs to toxic and psi. You can get more resist by doing some full set purples for the 6% boost along with doing 5 piece sets of Unbreakable Guard in resist powers. How much are you really needing Leadership pool in the build? The reason I ask is that you could consider going for Sorcery pool to get RoP. While it's not a permanent resist buff, it can help for any situations that you can anticipate being difficult to handle. Ageless Radial is certainly helpful in providing debuff resists, but you can consider changing to Barrier Core. It can function both as having a permanent 5% resist/def boost as well as saving it for emergency situations for the first 30 seconds of it's duration. I don't know what you picked for your hybrid incarnate slot since it's not in the build, but Melee Core can provide a solid resist boost and be interchangeably cycled with RoP to increase the uptime of having high resists. Consider adding Haymaker to be able to 6 slot Superior Unrelenting Fury (6% resist to s/l/e/n/f/c on final bonus slot) and possibly Hand Clap as well (can be 2 slotted with Sudden Accel KB to KD and FF +rech) which helps to add some additional soft control through knockdowns. HC can be left towards end of the build as the incarnate level shift and double stacked rage will help significantly with the required accuracy for it to hit without additional investment. By taking the Agility alpha, you're going to be hindering your proc chances because of the recharge buff on it. Consider taking Nerve (accuracy will further help with HC and it also has a defense buff) or else Musculature to further boost damage. I think you could consider in procing your attacks more. Dead things can't hurt you and that is especially applicable to SS which doesn't suffer from ignoring dmg/acc slotting because of it's ability to double stack rage. This will come at a cost of lowering some of your resists, but you would kill enemies faster by slotting Fury of the Gladiator -res in FS, Annihilation -res in Dark Obliteration, and generally slotting a lot of damage procs in powers like KO Blow, Foot Stomp, and Dark Obliteration. You can essentially 4 proc these powers and leave the remaining 2 slots for the acc/dmg and acc/dmg/end winter set pieces which will also give you a solid slow resist boost. Without knowing what area you're specifically struggling against and need to improve, it's hard to suggest what needs to be changed.