Warshades

This is very true. Quick revamp of the fire/rad to stone/rad. With addition of bonus damage from Brimstone and combined with Musculature alpha, it's doing ~521 per hit with Atom Smasher. Probably room for improvement in the build, but still trying to keep it cheap if at all possible. The bonus recharge from Minerals is also very nice. Tanker (Stone Armor - Radiation Melee)farm.mbd

This is just a personal opinion, but you don't need to do a ~1B build to have a successful afk farmer. It may take just slightly longer to afk farm, but the goal is 45% fire def with enough passive regen to keep you alive. Fully achievable with much cheaper builds. I made a few adjustments to your suggested build that should significantly reduce the price and still be enough to AFK farm if done with 2 accounts, maneuvers from second AFK account would put both at 45% fire def. I would also use Reactive radial interface on one and Degen radial on the other to get the benefit of both. I just don't see the necessity of building so far towards global recharge to go with purple sets when you're literally leaving 1 power on auto for the duration of the afk farm. Outside of some semi-costly uniques and a single purple proc (Armageddon), most other IOs on this build are relatively cheap and affordable. You could probably get close to building out 2 farmers within 500-600 million at the most. Tanker (Fiery Aura - Radiation Melee).mbd

Can you explain how SS doesn't work for a busy primary like Bio? For me personally, a secondary is mainly an attack set that you use to attack. Outside of considerations like long animation times of attacks, they're no more or less busy than other attack sets. If anything, I would actually say that SS is less busy as you need to click/use Rage less often than Build Up. To me, the main determination of how busy a tank is would be the primary set with armors that have/rely on a lot of clickable powers (like bio and rad armor) being more busy than those that don't (invuln, stone, sr, etc). Don't get me wrong, fire melee is a top melee set and absolutely worth using if you found you like it. Just trying to understand how SS feels less fitting to you for bio armor as I don't think it makes the combination any more busier. The build below is something I put together really quick for bio/ss with an emphasis on damage output. It's mainly for high lvl content, but it can dish out some massive damage with double stacked rage. While actively fighting and moving quickly from mob to mob, you should find that hasten will be permanent from all the FF +rech procs that trigger and ageless destiny +rech boost. Consider giving it a try on the test server and see if it changes your mind. This definitely isn't designed to exemplar well, so if you're considering playing all levels of content, I'd definitely go /fire instead. For level 50+ content, it will steamroll through mobs. Tanker (Bio Armor - Super Strength).mbd

I wouldn't recommend going off of the description. If you look at the details for each power, you can see the magnitude of the knockback. This is what primarily determines if the power actually does knockback or knockdown. Anything less than a magnitude 1 KB will result in knockdown. Anything greater than 1 will result in knockback. Punch, Haymaker, and Foot Stomp all have a KB magnitude of 0.67, so the powers will actually do knockdown instead of knockback. The exception being enemies that are lower level to your characters will experience increased KB magnitude and can be knockbacked, though I wouldn't expect anyone to be going around and trying to fight mobs that are so low in level. The only 2 powers that SS has that have a higher than 1 KB magnitude are Hand Clap and Hurl. Hurl is a pretty bad power and not worth taking. Hand Clap can offer useful mitigation and can be worth picking up. The knockback can easily be eliminated by putting a KB->KD into Hand Clap.

Sapping works, just not on melee ATs. You want to have a lot of -rec in AoE attacks (enemies need a small sliver of end to launch attacks). While power sink and/or energy absorption work well in draining endurance, electric melee is terrible for this and mu mastery AoEs don't guarantee that -rec will apply. Sentinels, Corrs, and Defenders all do it much better. This isn't really a different flavor of tank (unless you consider knockdown to be a flavor), but I've not played a tank that can out damage a proc bombed rad/ss. You could maybe compare it to your fire/fire.

Import it via data chunk and copy everything in between the top and bottom dashed lines (do not include the dashed lines). Make sure when you copy and paste that it doesn't add any extra space characters at the end.

A few things that jump out: If you're fairly often using this for farming, I would try to add build up into the build. Similarly for farming, you'd ideally want to fit in mu mastery with fully slotted fences and ball of lightning. Imo, hover and CJ are absolutely not worth the slots you put into them. You could easily just mule those 2 powers for LotG+rech and move the slots to fences/ball of lightning mentioned above. Lightning armor doesn't specifically need to be built to run fire farms as there are s/l farms out there. For general content, it would perform better if you focused on s/l resist (easier to get thanks to tough) and defense (s/l is far more common than f/c attacks and AoE defense isn't anywhere near as useful as melee for a tank). You should be slotting spine burst for damage, not chasing bonuses with taunt set. It's one of your main AoE powers. Outside of looking really cool, power surge is useless due to the crash that it comes with imo. Hover is just not a great choice for lightning armor because you can lose the effects of grounded (which requires you to be near the ground). DPS toggles like Quils and Lightning Field only have a chance to proc once every 10 seconds, and that to at a low rate. Go for set bonus sets in there rather than procs. There is no good reason to slot stamina or health so much, you've got power sink and an on demand heal in energize. Ageless while not needed would help with farm speed. However if you are using the char for general content, then Barrier is a great choice. Below is a very quick build and can definitely be further improved, but achieves higher damage, has more AoEs, near perma hasten, better slotting for general content with soft cap melee defense and near to it for s/l. I'm sure there's a relatively easy wait to hit 45% on s/l with some minor changes. This should be used on s/l farms. Tanker (Electric Armor - Spines).mbd

That's very true, I went hard on building for survival lol. Slight update to it that gets a bit more recharge. Will also depend on destiny incarnate choice since Barrier can add a perma 5% def/res if going that route, or can take Ageless for the +rech. Endurance would be the main concern, but if it's not an issue then Radial Ageless wouldn't be a bad choice to boost the debuff resist. I will add since I forgot to do so for the first post, but levels at which powers are taken should definitely be adjusted a bit if taking into consideration exemplaring. I was mainly focused on the end goal build at 50 and didn't really take into account exemplaring down. Tanker (Invulnerability - Street Justice).mbd

Post the saved mids file, you can drag it in the bottom box where you write comments and it makes it easier to open the build in mids. Just looking at the text version of the build, you should consider splitting Superior Gauntleted Fist into 2 sets of 3. This will give you an additional +6% eng/neg resist. Your defense/resist toggle/passive slotting seems kinda strange, you can consider doing 4 set pieces of Shield Wall in some which gives a good boost to e/n resist as well. Reactive defense is great for resist powers to provide typed defense. You also don't need Dull Pain so heavily slotted. Also, are you looking to prioritize damage or survival with the build? The build below is a quick rework with a focus on survivability. It reaches s/l/e/n/f/c soft cap with 1 foe within range of invincibility. You could potentially move some slots around to add in 2 more impervium armor +psi resist, but there really isn't enough psi damage content that you need to worry about getting it as high as possible, especially with slots being at a premium. Swapped some powers around to get better set bonuses and reach defense/resist totals easier. This will hit s/l/e/n hard cap with 2 stacks of SMoT, or 1 stack + barrier core destiny (which would also pad your defense a bit as well). Endurance may or may not be an issue, best to test this on test server to see if it is or not. If you wish to further maximize tanking ability, you could swap Hasten for Darkest Night since this build doesn't particularly focus on recharge or getting Hasten perma. DN isn't something that you'd normally need to use in most content, but can be helpful in certain situations such as tanking LR (though I don't expect you to have issues without it either as invuln is very sturdy as is) or reducing damage that allies take from any AoE/nukes from tough AVs/monsters. You can put PZ chance for psi damage in taunt as well, or even just a recharge IO if you want it to come up faster. Edit: you actually don't even need the f/c defense so high. Not sure if mids is accurate in what sets can be slotted in Crushing Uppercut, but if it accepts hold enhancement then you can remove the Superior Blistering Cold proc for a Superior Entomb proc which can provide a further absorb shield and still maintain soft cap f/c defense at 46.1%. Tanker (Invulnerability - Street Justice).mbd

Resistance reduces the duration of status effects. So if, as an example, an enemy hits you with a hold that has a base duration of 10 seconds, a 100% status resistance should halve that duration to 5 seconds. I'm not sure if the scaling remains consistent, but in theory 200% status resistance should result in 2.5 second hold duration (someone can correct me if my numbers are wrong or it functions in a different manner past 100% resistance). The best way to avoid status effects is to have status protection. That provides immunity as long as the magnitude of the status effect is lower than the amount of protection you get. In addition to having a duration, status effects also have magnitude which can stack. As an example, if your tank has 10 mag hold protection, you could get hit by 3 hold powers each with a magnitude of 3 (for a total of 9) and you wouldn't be held, but if you get hit by a 4th before any of those expire, then you would get held until at least one of those holds expire.

Since this is for theme, I would go with what fits the theme the best. Sorcery pool is the closest to what Doctor Strange would look like imo. Looking back over kinetic melee (don't actually have any kinetic melee chars), I realized I assumed incorrectly on Power Siphon being like build up, it's actually closer in function to Soul Drain with a longer duration and buffs based on amount of enemies hit so do ignore my standard Gaussian proc + recharge IO that I normally use for BU powers lol.

Came up with this, though this could definitely use more work. A few main changes in this build: I picked up Arcane Bolt over Spirit Ward. Unless there's a thematic reason/choice for Spirit Ward, this gives you another ranged attack (replacing Body Blow) and less of an endurance drain as there's very little, if any reason to use Spirit Ward. I slotted for more resistance, but this did come at a cost of defense. Ideally it would be nice to reach at least 50% to positional defense which the build can get close to with nerve alpha (this also helps with some of the low accuracy slotting in attacks because of procs, a lot of your attacks were below 95% acc to +3 when gaussian proc/build up is off). You could consider going for less resistance slotting to get more defense since you would have RoP when needed, but I personally am not as big a fan of relying on powers that don't have reliable uptime. Picked up Taunt and combat jumping over maneuvers (less end consumption). There's some definite room for improvement, but maybe it can offer some alternative ideas for you. Please ignore the level that some powers are picked at, I wasn't really considering exemplaring and more focused on the final build. Tanker (Shield Defense - Kinetic Melee).mbd

Homecoming changed some things on stone armor, the most important being that Rooted no longer has any movement or jumping penalty. You can even use any travel power with rooted, it only "roots" you during the activation of the toggle. It's a big part of the reason why a lot of people just build stone armor without granite. Crystal armor now also provides and allows slotting of endurance modification, this helps with end management as you can have a combination of Stamina, Crystal Armor, and Harmonic Mind/Physical Perfection with performance shifter procs slotted.

According to Mids, it's a -100% regen for 15 seconds which you should be able to keep permanent. Should certainly be impactful, but you can also easily run a test and see which attack chain variation brings the AVs down faster. Can't say I was ever a fan of EM personally, but it is consistently one of the better ST damage sets. Didn't know the tidbit about Barrage until you mentioned it.

Not sure on how much fury would help the brute version, but at least base damage on a tanker will be higher. The real nice thing about the tanker version of dark melee is the boosted arc on Shadow Maul, makes it so much easier to hit multiple targets compared to trying to do so on any other melee AT.

I tried ToF once when I heard that it was changed to a PBAoE on homecoming, but I really didn't like it after trying it. Perhaps with 0 recharge buffs in it, it will proc semi-often, but it doesn't have a long base recharge to begin with. As for Dark Melee as a whole, I still like it for certain armor combinations. It pairs quite well with SR and Shield which both lack a heal and offers endurance recovery in Dark Consumption which shield, and to a lesser extent SR, could really use. While dark melee offers very poor AoE damage, it can have a decently good ST rotation, especially if you choose to proc out Siphon Life. I have a SR/DM tank that I've nearly finished building and the thing is tough as nails between positional soft cap defense and scaling resistance. Add to this that I've built it with ~55% s/l/e/n resist before any scaling resist/SMoT proc and it has access to Siphon Life, he basically is never at risk of dying.

Battle axe will be a better damage dealer, but will also be significantly more endurance heavy compared to Street Justice. Both combinations will perform well, shield is just a really powerful armor set out of the box. Pick shield/axe for damage if you're willing to work on fixing the endurance problems you'll face. Pick shield/StJ for less endurance problems compared to battle axe.

Here's the thing you need to realize about dark melee, the -tohit is more of a bonus rather than a reason to take the power set. When you're in the middle of a mob, you're getting attacked by, most likely, 12+ enemies. Dark melee doesn't have any useful AoE attacks that can hit all those enemies and apply -tohit. You can slightly remedy this by going with soul patron pool for dark obliteration, but a large majority of your -tohit attacks from dark melee are single target. I don't fully recall on Touch of Fear, but iirc, the -tohit only applies to the target of the attack and while it can damage nearby enemies to the target, it doesn't apply the -tohit to them. So really, the only dark melee attack that can hit multiple targets to apply -tohit is Shadow Maul. In my personal opinion, because radiation armor has no inherent defense, you're likely better off pairing it with a high damage attack set secondary. Your best defense for radiation armor is high offense to kill things quickly. Dark melee isn't very good at this.

I mean, you could build for soft cap fire/cold defense if you really wanted to and as a byproduct, get a good amount of recharge debuff resist as well. It would make the build cost quite a bit, but it is doable.

This doesn't clear all enhancements, it switches to a second alternate enhancement for the power. This allows you to compare how different slotting and sets are for the build. If you do shift + right click again, it will swap back to the first enhancement set you had in that power.

In my opinion, you're chasing the fire/cold resist to much. Cold is barely existent in the game as a damage type and fire is also on the rarer side compared to s/l/e/n. You could fully proc out Dominate and drop another damage proc and decimation chance for BU proc instead of the 2 winter bite. I personally like to 2 slot rage with 2x membrane exposure HOs and combine them to 53, it saves a few slots and works well to boost both rech and tohit. You could add another slot to Psionic Tornado and replace one of the damage procs to put in 2x frozen blast, that will up your recharge debuff resist a bit more. Personally, I almost never use Punch, so I would definitely consider removing the FF proc from it. It won't have a high chance of activating anyway and it's not a power you need to spam for most content. I also don't think that Weave is worth the 6 slotted reactive defense. Consider 5 slotting (4x shield wall including the unique there instead of CJ and 1 LotG +rech), replace the shield wall unique in CJ with reactive defense unique and add the slot removed from Weave to give another LotG +rech. You're getting 15% rech this way compared to only 8.75% from reactive defense, you're also replacing the lost eng/neg resist from adjusted targeting in rage by having the 4 set shield wall. You could also consider changing your alpha incarnate to musculature as well. It will further boost your damage since most powers are fully proc'd out and the entire point of building rad/ss in this way is to maximize damage. You also don't lose that much resist, and for tough fights you can spam Punch to upkeep 2x SMoT procs and still reach hard cap to most resists.

It's not worth it on that build imo. Tank resist caps are at 90%, anything above that doesn't count or help. The build is already sitting at 89.9% s/l resist and mids does not factor in the resistance that you get from the Superior Might of the Tanker proc (6.7%) which can also stack (usually up 2 times is max though you can briefly get 3 stacks on rare occasions). You could actually aim for only reaching 83.3% resist and rely on the SMoT proc to get you to the 90% cap. Procs also don't work well in damage auras as they only check for proc activation every 10 seconds iirc and have low chance of activating. Cupid set is decent, but I wouldn't use it in this case. It doesn't provide enough value to replace any of the other attacks sets.

One of the biggest things to fix is that you have no KB protection, ideally I would aim for at least mag 12 kb protection at bare minimum. This is relatively easy to fix without changing much. You also have a sudden acceleration KB to KD proc in Vicious Slash. Vicious Slash has a base kb mag of 0.67 so enemies won't actually be knocked back unless they are severely below your character level. Changed this to a full set of Touch of Death due to changing 4 piece Unbreakable Guard in Obsidian Shield to 3 piece Gladiator Armor (kb protection set bonus). Dark Regeneration slotting could be improved. The Triumphant Insult stun proc is quite useless, even more so if you don't take Oppressive Gloom to be able to stack the stun magnitude. Your accuracy is high enough without Focused Accuracy to where you could consider taking Conserve Power instead to help with endurance. Added Unbreakable Guard +max HP unique to Tough in place of the res/rech one. Death Shroud doesn't need a full scirocco set if you're not getting to 45% AoE/psi def (you also have plenty of psi resist anyway). Taunt (for tanks/brutes) does not need accuracy in PvE, it's in the power description. It only accepts accuracy because an accuracy check is done if used in PvP situations. Taunt is on a short enough recharge that I also usually 1 slot it with PZ chance for psi damage, but left it in your build with 1rech IO, you can change if you'd like or keep it as is. Gaussian BU pro would be better in Blood Thirst imo. Moved Shield Wall unique to Weave in place of the def/rech, saves a slot. Removed 1 SMoT dam/rech from Maiming Slash, you were over the resist cap to s/l and rech enhancement reduces proc chances. Steadfast unique in Dark Embrace provides higher resist enhancement compared to having it in Tough due to the base resist values of Dark Embrace compared to Tough. If you can afford it, 2x Ectosome Exposure HOs in Fold Space would be the ideal slotting as it buffs both acc and recharge, but they are extremely expensive. Left the build as is with 1acc and 1rech IOs. This build hits 15 mag KB protection and 80% recharge debuff resist (can be helpful if facing enemies that reduce recharge when you're relying on Dark Regen as a heal). There are 2 additional slots to spend that I haven't found a good spot for, though you could consider 3 slotting Stamina with Synapse's Shock to get 10% more recharge debuff resist. I'd also look into changing which attacks are slotted with which sets. I'd probably place Armageddon into either Savage Leap or Rending Flurry as an example, someone that's more familiar with Savage Melee can perhaps offer the better pick here. Tanker (Dark Armor - Savage Melee).mbd

When importing, I'm getting a ss/wp brute build. Did you export the correct data chunk?

It would be easier if you drop a download link to the build. You can drag and drop the save file into where you write comments at the bottom (it says "drag files here to attach, or choose files..." and that's where you want to drop your saved build). There are a few power picks, or lack of power picks, that appear strange to me. You didn't take Physical Perfection which would help with endurance woes and instead went for Focused Accuracy. I'd absolutely swap those two at minimum. I'd also say you don't really need to run Tactics, it's an additional toggle that will eat up endurance. 95% accuracy with enemies at +3 should be the goal, anything higher than that won't help since all attacks have a minimum 5% chance to miss. The only exception is if you're facing acc/tohit debuffs. Your overall resists (aside from s/l) and defenses are on the low side. The build I'm posting is just a change of my shield/dark to shield/mace with some powers switched around. Don't follow the levels at which powers are taken and this could further be optimized to get more positional defense. Barely getting to 45% positional isn't good enough since you can end up with cascading defense failure. This shouldn't be as big a problem if you always team and get additional cushion from Phalanx Fighting and whatever team buffs others are providing, but an extra ~10% would go a long way towards helping. You can play around with the slots to try and get more, my original build prioritized resist bonuses more and had some different powers/iso sets that didn't transfer over evenly when switching between dark and mace melee. Tanker (Shield Defense - War Mace).mbd