Warshades

Don't think I ever ran through this one. Generally speaking, tanks have the easiest time surviving against heavy hitting mobs and also do excellent AoE damage to help reduce the mob size (though it would likely take longer to clear through the bosses/EBs). With regards to Warshade/Nictus spawns, reaching 100% recharge debuff resist should fix any annoyances here since their powers primarily debuff recharge and not accuracy iirc. The bigger issue would be Cimeroran Traitors as most of their attacks cause defense debuffs and once your defense is floored, you'll end up taking some heavy damage (this issue is worse for scrappers who max out at 75% damage resist caps compared to tanks/brutes being able to reach 90%). Generally speaking, I would run a tank if I wanted to do this at +4/8x with minimal risk of dying. Invuln in particular stands out since they can easily hit 90% s/l resist and can hit high defense values with invincibility when surrounded by mobs. I would also try to pair it with a heavy damage dealing and damage mitigating secondary attack set, most likely Battle Axe. The one downside to invuln is it doesn't directly provide any damage buffs via attacks or buffs from the armor set, so it would take longer to kill mobs. Shield should also be capable when built for heavy s/l resist and would be much better on damage output, but it does have lower max HP while lacking a heal, so you may end up wanting something like rebirth radial destiny slot. Stone armor should also be capable with a stronger focus on s/l resist buffs, I would certainly still run it outside of Granite. Energy aura, when fully built out, should also be able to handle this arc at +4/8x, but it does have a bit of a weakness to negative damage. SR in theory should manage just fine if you focus on resist bonuses. With it's 95% DDR, you literally have 0% chance of your defense failing and falling below 45% and in theory, you should be able to cap your s/l resist at 90% at around 40% HP left (from the passive scaling resist effects), but at that point it's kinda down to RNG. You could easily slot power transfer chance for +heal in stamina/harmonic mind and some other uniques like panacea and preventive medicine in health for sustainability, but you may still want rebirth radial in case you hit a particularly bad string of luck and get hit more often than 5% of the time. If you want something other than a melee char, MMs with marine affinity should be able to manage just fine even with additional EBs in mobs as long as you're just fighting 1 mob at a time. Demon/marine, merc/marine, and necro/marine would all work well. If you want to take a slower approach, Phantom Army on a controller is an option. Illusion is unfortunately dreadful for clearing mobs so I wouldn't recommend it, but they are a safe option that will eventually kill everything once you hit perma PA. Lastly, anything that can stay at range by hovering and building for high range defense would in theory be able to manage just fine. Fortunata Widows have solo'd ITF at +4/8x and outside of some extra EBs, it should manage just fine for this also. Cimerorans in particular are extremely weak to psi damage.

For me, the set bonuses vary widely depending on what power sets/AT I'm playing and what my goals for the char are. Global recharge is always useful, but I don't particularly care about getting perma hasten unless the power set/AT is heavily dependent on maxed recharge, in which case I'll end up achieving perma hasten anyway simply because I'll focus heavily on global recharge set bonuses. Recharge debuff resist is something I tend to chase more of partly because I often play melee chars or play in melee range. This goes a long way for characters that aren't defense focused and/or rely on clickable powers for their sustainability. Regarding defense/resist bonuses, that more so depends on the char and/or armor set that I'm using. Generally speaking, defense focused sets like SR, Shield, Stone, and Energy can easily hit soft cap value, particularly on a tank, with very little need to invest in defensive set bonuses. For those cases, I'll prioritize resist bonuses. On other ATs like scrappers, stalkers, brutes, and sentinels who get lower defensive values from toggles/passives, I may have to shore up some of the defense values to reach soft cap. On resist focused armor sets, I stick to resist bonuses and make sure that recharge debuff resist is at 100%. I think Invuln is the only armor set where I'll end up heavily chasing both defense and resist set bonuses. For some set bonuses like max HP, I only ever occasionally try to get them on tanks that can't easily cap their HP through the armor set + passive accolades powers. Accuracy is something that depends on if I'm procing out the attacks on the char or not. In some cases I don't bother with accuracy bonuses since powers are fully slotted with sets instead of procs. KB protection is an interesting one and may depend on who you ask. Personally, I often don't bother to try and build it very high unless the armor set completely lacks any KB protection (like dark armor used to before the Cloak of Fear change) or I have extra slots and nothing else worthwhile to invest them into (which doesn't happen often either). Those are pretty much the main set bonuses that I'll ever really focus on when building. For others, I don't really consider them very relevant or worth chasing. Endurance can be easily solved with ageless, temp powers, or even setting up macros that convert/pop insps to blues if you're exemplaring below incarnate level content.

I'd suggest pairing it with a good damage mitigating secondary, usually in the form of knockdowns. You can also dip into sorcery pool for RoP and melee core embodiment hybrid. Cycling between these 2 allows you to stay at 60%+ resist to everything (70%+ when counting the minimum 5% resist from T4 barrier core), closer to 90% on s/l resist. I'd focus set bonuses towards resist buffs since regen doesn't have enough DDR to make defense bonus chasing worthwhile IMO. I've linked my current regen/ss build if you wanted some ideas on slotting. I do highly recommend making sure you hit 100% recharge debuff resist as regen is a set that does rely on click heals and emergency powers like MoG at times and you don't want those stuck on cooldown because of recharge debuffs. High resists with regen allow you to take less damage and indirectly gives you more time to regen HP (as well as needing to regen less with higher resists because you took less damage). Tanker (Regeneration - Super Strength)5.mbd

Good shout. I usually look more at the HP/sec regen rather than the % values since the amount of regen is also heavily affected by the max HP and also still remembering the old regen set before the buff having very middling regen % values outside of instant healing being activate. You are right that regen can definitely hit 1000% range even with 1 foe in range of Reactive Regeneration. My regen tank very nearly does so (and would have if I went a healing alpha incarnate slot instead of musculature).

I don't think you'll reach 90% cap to everything like you can on Tanks, but you should still be able to reach high values. S/l resist should still be easy to cap. There are a few things working against invuln Brutes reaching 90% resist to all. No SMoT proc which contributes a significant amount and can be easily double stacked, lower base resist values, and no way to double stack a 6% e/n resist bonus like tanks can from splitting Superior Gauntleted Fist into 2 sets of 3. You'd be looking at closer to 90% s/l resist and ~70% on other types, but I can play around with Brute invuln to see where I can get it to when I have time. Edit: mid to upper 60s% range is where I was able to get resits other than s/l on a brute for invuln, this is with resilient core alpha slot on but without factoring the 5% def/resist from barrier T4. Counting barrier, you can hit 70% or very close to it for the other resists.

Personally, the only reason to get any defensive powers on regen is to use them as LotG +rech mules (small exception being MoG which I would add some additional slots to reduce recharge). Regen just doesn't have enough DDR or any permanent, inherent defensive powers to make boosting defense an effective investment. One thing you can do, which works very well for regen, is take sorcery pool for RoP. You can cycle between RoP and melee core embodiment hybrid incarnate to keep up high resist values, which aside from taking less damage per hit, will also give you additional time for regeneration to work. Cross Punch is fine to take, but I probably wouldn't invest an extra power slot to pick both Boxing/Kick just to boost it's damage. Spring Attack isn't worth taking either imo, the recharge is way to long for it be a consistent source of knockdown for you. I would also check your recharge debuff resist on the regen build in particular as that needs to be at 100% or as close to it as possible. Recharge debuffs are extremely common and nothing will kill your regen char as easily as getting recharge debuffed and unable to use your clicky heals, attacks that do knockdown for soft mitigation, MoG, etc. With regards to your SR build, I'd suggest 4 slotting more Shield Wall sets in the defensive toggles to get the e/n resist bonus. I usually like to slot the auto passives with 1 LotG +rech and 2 Red Fortunes (for the s/l resist). In one of the auto passives, replace the 2 Red Fortunes with 2 Reactive Defense to get the scaling resist unique and same s/l resist bonus. Elude is worth skipping entirely unless you're taking it for theme reasons. Also, the regen on WP build seems low unless you just have RttC set to 1 foe. It looks like you have Reactive Regen on the regen build set to 10 based solely on the regen numbers in your pictures.

This build might have endurance issues so worth testing first and adjusting if it does, but should give you an idea of how to slot. Scrapper (Claws - Super Reflexes).mbd

I'll add one more sample build for invuln/ice, this one I haven't built in game yet but do plan to once I settle on a final version that I'm happy with. I'm getting close to that point. This one might not be as tough/resilient tanking AVs since /ice doesn't have a self heal like /dark does, but it should be near impossible for any mobs to ever bring this tank down with ice patch in the mix, which could also be more beneficial for teams in general when exemplaring for content. The main part I'm not yet happy with is that I wanted to include taunt in the build and ended up dropping GIS for it and moving the slots to Kick for the defensive set bonuses, but otherwise this version includes the LotG +rech slots that I mentioned in the previous post and adds Psionic Tornado with FF +rech proc to get Dull Pain permanent. With the auto +max HP accolades and DP, the HP will be just slightly shy of the tanker cap. The slotting of invuln can be done very similarly or even identically across any secondary pairing, but depending on the type of attacks the secondary provides (ST, AoE, range, target AoE), some of the secondary slotting or epic pool power choices may need small adjustments to reach near the resist cap and soft cap def with 1 foe in range. Tanker (Invulnerability - Ice Melee)5.mbd

It's not without sacrifices elsewhere. Recharge is definitely on the low side and Dull Pain isn't really permanent, You could get a significant amount of recharge back if you remove all the slots from Maneuvers, give it LotG +rech, move the shield wall unique into Weave, and then distribute the 3 slots to Invincibility, CJ, and Tough Hide to slot 3 more LotG +rech. Still keeps you at soft cap with 1 foe in range and nets you +30% rech at the cost of 4.5% e/n resist.

Sample of an invuln/dark tank, hits near E/N resist cap with 1 SMoT proc and soft cap def with 1 foe in range of invincibility. A second stack of SMoT or the minimum 5% resist/def from T4 barrier will get you to resist cap. Tanker (Invulnerability - Dark Melee)7.mbd

I can post a few examples with different secondaries when uploading is fixed, but hitting 80-90% on all damage types is possible for invulnerability. As others mentioned, most of your e/n resist will come from set bonuses. 3 pieces of Unbreakable Guard (5 pieces if you want to close toxic psi resist holes), 4 piece Shield Wall in defensive powers (like Invincibility, Tough HIde, Weave, and Maneuvers), and splitting the Superior Gauntleted Fist set into 2 sets of 3 pieces to double up on the 6% e/n resist bonus. Pair this with cardiac or resilient core alpha incarnate to boost resists further, factor in SMoT, and add all the unique +resist IO's and you can easily reach 80-90% on e/n.

In addition to the +def unique IO's, I would also suggest slotting the +res unique IO's like shield wall and reactive defense. EA is very much a mixed armor set and can achieve high values on both resists and defenses when built with set bonuses, but it will be more of a struggle while leveling naturally. Toss those uniques in whenever and wherever you're able, you can always go back and respec to properly slot your build later. EA is more of a late bloomer with sets and will eventually get very durable. Early on, I would suggest trying to get both the +def and +res unique IO's and don't skip over the passives like Dampening Field, Energy Protection, and Power Armor, they can provide noticeable resist buffs whenever attacks do manage to hit you. Energy Drain isn't working on Mid's currently, but it should provide you with ~5% defense if you use it surrounded by mobs as well. With some built in +recharge bonuses or FF +rech procs in Foot Stomp, Hand Clap, KO Blow, you should be able to double stack it.

I'm still recovering funds from building out 3 new tanks (psi/ice, regen/ss, and energy/energy) so I haven't actually IO'd this char yet. I have a few other chars that I'll be deciding from on who to build first including an elec/dark, pyro/marine, and pyro/dark controllers. I picked Poison Ray for this build to have some better ST -res debuffs for fighting tough targets like AVs/GMs. For regular mob clearing, Disruptor Blast or even a completely different patron/epic pick could be more optimal. It just isn't very useful imo. Low damage, fragile, and a regular damage proc will likely end up doing more damage than the energy font can. The ATO procs are also paired with a recharge reduction enhancement and can hurt the proc rate of the power it's slotted in unless it has a long base recharge to begin with. I avoid the energy font (and Dom version fiery orb) proc in general as I'd rather just slot a regular damage proc over it.

If you want a high damage secondary, sets like battle axe, fire, and SS (if you don't mind rage crashes) are some of the best options. Ice is a fantastic melee set, but it's more of a utility set that can boost survival in mobs further thanks to useful powers like Ice Patch rather than being known as a high damage dealing set. As an aside note, if you really want a high damage dealing tank, you'd also want to pair the secondary melee set with an armor that can significantly boost damage. These include stone, fire, bio, shield, and radiation. Other armors, outside of having a damage aura (these are very minor contributors) or recharge boost passives, don't have any significant damage increasing powers. If comparing dark/ice to your shield/fire, you'll notice a significantly lower damage output since DA doesn't have an offensive buff/attack like AAO and Shield Charge while ice melee doesn't have the raw damage output of fiery melee.

A few things I noticed: You're missing both the Shield Wall and Reactive Defense uniques. Since rad armor at it's base is a resist set, I would find ways to try and fit them in. You could easily remove a slot from Heavy Blow since you wouldn't need the s/l resist and gain that back from a Shield Wall along with resists to other damage types. I would put the Power Transfer from Rad Therapy into Stamina. Personally, I don't think the slots in beta decay are worth it. It has a low base -tohit and with rad armor completely lacking in DDR, I don't think it's worth trying to chase to shore up defenses. Shin Breaker probably isn't a great spot for the achilles -res proc since it has such a low base recharge, though I've not tested it personally on StJ. Rather than using Spring Attack, I would consider an epic AoE that would be part of your regular rotation more often. Fire and psi are both excellent choices, the former providing Melt Armor as an additional -res (and def, great place for Achilles proc also) debuff while the latter has Psionic Tornado which you could slot with a FF +rech proc. Even soul patron is an option since you'd only need 2 powers to get the target AoE attack and it would give you an additional -tohit attack if you want to stack more with Beta Decay. I've provided a sample build with soul patron since it only required 2 powers to get the target AoE, though you could change it to fire or psionic epic if you prefer and can find another power that you can do without. It still has 6 extra slots you can distribute to whatever you want for uniques/set bonuses. I've not really played the new rad armor in depth other than testing my old one and Rad Therapy proc chances have really been heavily neutered. I kept a 3 piece TotN just to get the accuracy bonus, but IMO it's not worth slotting much beyond chasing for set bonuses that you may want. Tanker (Radiation Armor - Street Justice).mbd

This may require some tweaks to it since accuracy is a bit on the low side, but should be able to do well enough on PUG content and still be able to do S/L farms. The goal to have sustainability in a farm is to reach 45% defense and 90% resist against whatever damage type you're farming against (at least for Brutes/Tanks). Some additional considerations are needed if you plan on AFK farming with an AoE like Atom Smasher on auto (in this case, regen needs to be built up some to have continued sustainability, not an issue for WP) or active farming where it's more easy to pop a heal like Healing Flames or Earth's Embrace and regen rate can be ignored. WP can easily hit 90% S/L resist but requires some specific set bonus chasing to reach 45% S/L defense. Personally, I would just suggest making this char into a regular content tank and create a second account that you can level a dedicated farmer on to then use and power level your main account chars. Willpower lacks any offensive buffs/damage auras that other armor sets, primarily stone armor and fire armor, can provide to make farming faster. Good luck! Tanker (Willpower - Radiation Melee).mbd

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).

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