Warshades

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's completely fair. I'm currently looking into running something like this for my regen/ss based off of your build, will see how it goes whenever I manage to finish building it. I never really fell in love with Cross Punch so opted for Fire Ball instead and Melt Armor for additional -res. Did change some of the slotting to try and get more max HP to hit close to cap with accolades. My only current concern is endurance and how that will go. Tanker (Regeneration - Super Strength).mbd

Excellent looking regen build as always. I think the only power I'm thinking of skipping for regen on tanks is Second Wind. Tanker version of regen very nearly caps max HP without it and the revive would be incredibly rare and situational in usefulness. Could open up a power slot if you wanted to pick up anything else like Melt Armor.

You do realize that tanks just got EA? There was no previous version of EA that tanks used to have that got changed to qualify as a nerf as this is their first iteration of it. EA was nerfed on other ATs by those changes but for tanks specifically, only changes from this current form could be quantified as a nerf or buff. Hence the part after that quote where I stated "at least as far as tanks go". We'll just have to agree to disagree. In my opinion, Power Armor is a superior passive buff and more useful than Energy Cloak would ever be for tanker version of EA. As I said in previous post on this thread, I'm all for Energy Cloak being added back as a mutually exclusive option in place of Power Armor for those that prefer that option, but I view Power Armor as an improvement for the tanker version of EA.

That's a fair point and like I said, I can understand EA struggling if you're playing without set bonuses. If I build a char and intend to play that char often, I will work on fully IOing and decking them out to get the most that I can out of them. With regards to limited resources, there are ways to earn influence through the AH or farming, though even playing naturally you will eventually earn enough influence to fully build out a char. I don't really look at how well a set performs without set bonuses and IOs. To me, that's like comparing 2 completely different sets and you could say that a lot of sets will feel weak and underwhelming without bonuses. Like playing illusion controller without perma PA is a night and day difference in what they can accomplish. I'll provide a quick example of EA tanks with and without set bonuses. With just regular lvl 50 IOs, it's nothing impressive. Once you actually throw in sets and get bonuses (I did have resilience alpha slot on, but that was the only incarnate added), it looks very different. It really depends on what perspective you're looking at for power sets and builds. I prefer to look at the final build that I have planned out for a character. Looking at how it is to play that character from 1-50 without sets is a different perspective and you'll have a different experience out of it. The final product of EA can be extremely tough, but that takes time and investment into it.

In many ways, the alternative Power Armor that we got is significantly more useful in that the set already easily over caps most typed defenses (except toxic/psi) and the new power provides more useful resist and max HP buffs that makes EA sturdier than just another defensive toggle. What they could've done is made Energy Cloak a mutually exclusive power where you get a choice between it and Power Armor. Energy Cloak certainly wouldn't break EA nor is it the first tanker set that has a stealth toggle as Dark Armor already had that and it would've satisfied the players that preferred to keep it. I can see the comparison, though I like to compare it more to a typed defense version of Shield Defense. Shield has it's advantages, positional defense is better than typed defense, it also gets Shield Charge and AAO to boost damage output. Comparatively, EA on tanks has an easy endurance management tool in Energy Drain and a reliable heal/regen tool in Energize. I am not sure how you were testing it. I could see EA struggling if you didn't do an IO'd out set build. I ran mine through several Arachnos and Carnival +4/8x missions and didn't feel like it struggled to survive at all. I do tend to build more towards survival so that may be part of the reason. EA doesn't really need to focus on building for defense as it already gets rather high base numbers. Focusing set bonuses towards resists helps out a lot as you can easily hit 70-90% resists to most damage types on top of having soft capped to def to all but toxic/psi, reliable heal, and decent regen with Energize active. It can become really sturdy when built to be so. I'm also not really sure what significant nerfs you're referring to, at least as far as tanks go. IIRC, the defense scale of Energy Drain and Power Shield were slightly lowered. This makes little to no impact for tanks who already start with higher base defense values. If anything, replacing Energy Cloak with Power Armor buffed EA even more as it makes it easier to reach near capped max HP, improves regen from Energize due to higher max HP, and gets higher resists.

I wouldn't say that Overload is really essential. The set has very solid defenses to all but psi/toxic and gets solid resists across the board if you go for resist set bonuses. It also has high DDR which you could boost further if you decide to go with radial ageless destiny. At minimum, the 21% DDR from ageless radial + 64% from the armor set would put you at 85% DDR, with additional defense stacks from Energy Drain, you should never have to worry about defense failing for you which makes Overload pointless besides providing toxic/psionic defense. I didn't have the set on mid's to play around with various set bonuses and it's a tiny bit different than the brute/scrapper versions which have Energy Cloak. I did do some IO sets to see various defense/resist values I could get on beta and posted a screenshot on the focused feedback page if you want to take a look. It was hovering around 60% to s/l/e/f/c defense, just a bit lower on negative. This was before factoring in any defense from Energy Drain.

This is a quick brute build that can also reach 90% f/c resist and 45% f/c defense from the template of my tank, but it needs to run a lot more winter purple and regular purple sets and would cost quite a bit more to build. There may be cheaper ways to achieve those numbers on a brute, I only did a very quick rework based off of my tank. Brute (Radiation Melee - Stone Armor)farm.mbd

You'll find it a lot easier to build an AFK farmer by making a stone/rad tank instead of brute. Tankers higher base resist values make it far easier to cap f/c resist that you'll struggle to do on a brute. The 2 powers that provide f/c resist (Stone Skin and Brimstone) when slotted similarly as the build I attached below will provide 47% f/c resist to a brute compared to 62% for a tank, that can be a big gap to make up while still getting enough f/c defense to hit 45% on the brute. Even with the upcoming changes to tanks, they'll still be more reliable at AFK farming due to them being easier to keep alive than the equivalent brute (unless you decide to use Granite, but that has it's own negatives of decreasing recharge/damage and not having the bonus fire damage from Brimstone and bonus recharge from Minerals). I've uploaded a stone/rad tank that I use for AFK farming. It's relatively cheap in that it mostly avoids purples (except the few Armageddon pieces in Atom Smasher), but will still cost a bit because you will need a few uniques/globals. It hits 90% f/c resist and 45% f/c defense, has enough regen to survive. I do not toggle Rock Armor/Tough as they're not useful on fire farms and are only there for bonuses and to get Weave. Tanker (Stone Armor - Radiation Melee)farm5.mbd

The option is still available, it has just been moved to the inherent power section called "Current HP" and you have to have a power that provides HP scaling effects before it appears in the inherent section. Now moving the slider will affect the resistance gained from all the SR passives which makes it a lot easier than having to individually adjust all of them.

I'm definitely rolling an energy aura tank, but I haven't decided on a secondary for that one just yet. My regen tank will be either battle axe, SS, or MA secondary. Will maybe do a psi/ice melee for the ice patch, but not sure if I really want to make a psionic armor tank.