Warshades

This is the rework of the first stone/rad tank I posted. I decided to sacrifice the slots in EE to have room for a few more procs and end mod buffs. Reaches 45% def, has 3 power transfer chance for self heal procs for additional sustainability, and should fix endurance problems to be able to run with musculature core alpha (though I've not tested that yet and mids build has radial side). I will say again that this is a cheap-ish build, but that's also intentional. I found that the hybrid assault radial side provides a better boost for me, though that may be because I have more damage buffs from the 3 Armageddon pieces in Atom Smasher. Tanker (Stone Armor - Radiation Melee)farm4.mbd

I don't quite recall if that build has Musculature Core or Radial in mids, but definitely go with the Radial side to fix endurance. I will second what @Maelwys said about it being endurance heavy. It would progressively get lower on endurance so I went for the radial musculature and it fixed the endurance issue for me. After getting the alpha T4 though, it is able to sustain with AS on auto for me. I do plan on reworking that build a bit to get the fire def to 45% without running it with a second account to double stack maneuvers. You'll get better inf earnings by AFK farming the map solo. I will say that starting out, it was useful running 2x of that build together. Did it on +3/8x initially until I got the first lvl shift with T3 musculature and then bumped it to +4.

I kinda figured, which is why I didn't add more purple sets like Armageddon lol. I'd still say it's worth getting the Apocalypse/Unbreakable dmg procs for Tesla and maybe mixing in some acc/dam and acc/dam/end from sets to get the accuracy up. Doesn't really need to be winter sets, but they do offer some of the better bonuses for 2-3 pieces.

For end game, -res is probably the most useful debuff, sets like Poison, Sonic, and Cold are all excellent at this. Regen debuffs don't make as big of an impact except for GM fights where the enemy has massive HP values. Similarly for end game, things like -tohit don't have as much of an impact when everyone's builds are finished and incarnates are considered. You will get more value out of it at lower levels so it depends on if you exemplar often or not. Once again, with a few exceptions of where mobs have defense buffs, -def debuffs aren't very impactful since you should aim to have 95% acc on your powers to +3 enemies. How survivable those sets are is a different discussion. I'm not as big of a fan of radiation because of the time it takes to cast and reapply the toggled debuffs. Not an issue for longer fights like AVs and GMs, but not useful/fun if you're in a team that's steamrolling through mobs. Darkness affinity on controllers is a good pick if you want to make a really survivable build with high resists and soft capped def. It's not as great at debuffing as the other options, but does offer good defense, resist, regen, and recovery support for allies. Can easily be built for soft cap positional defenses with fairly high resists accross the board. For MMs, I would probably go with a demon/marine combo. They just pair extremely well together, demons can add more -res, and the set combos quite well and you can even solo at +4/8x with little difficulty for when you're not teaming. Again, marine wouldn't be the best debuffer, but the combo is near unkillable with a high recharge build. If you're not specifically focused on debuffing and taking down single tough targets like AVs/GMs, there's a strong argument to be made that kinetics is the best debuffer through buffing. Fulcrum Shift is just OP in the +dmg that it provides. What's the point in trying to debuff enemies when you can buff yourself/allies and kill them quicker than debuffing them would allow? Speed boost is always appreciated by everyone. Don't know much about some sets like Nature, Traps, and Trick Arrow, just never liked playing them personally so maybe others can chime in.

I made some small changes to the build, though it does increase the cost a bit. Changed Sentinel's Ward set to Zapping Bolt and made it superior (the cost IIRC is the same regardless if you buy the superior version or not). Gave BoL the Ragnarok set instead (the knockdown proc is useful here and can be a nice opener as you enter to do Short Circuit and Power Sink) and did a 2 piece Superior Opportunity in Charged Bolts instead to get the 10% range boost. As @Black_Assassin stated, the accuracy in Havoc and Tesla are below 95% at +3. Switched out 2 procs to get the acc/dam and acc/dam/end winter set IOs here. Did a 3 piece winter set in the nuke with 3 damage procs, does bump the average damage. Moved a slot from Power Sink to Charge Up for a recharge IO to get the recharge more in line with the nuke. 1 end mod/rech HO is plenty for Power Sink, you could leave it at lvl 50 initially and bump it to 53 later when you have more inf. IIRC I got them for 12 mil a piece when IO'd my Sentinel 2 days ago. Overall this bumps the accuracy on Tesla and Havoc to reach 95%, gives you pretty good recharge debuff resist at 90%, ups your fire/cold resist, and you get a slightly higher melee/s/l defense from using the superior version of Sentinel's Ward set. Sentinel (Electrical Blast - Electric Armor - Electric Mastery) pre50 v1.5.mbd

I can take a look later when I'm off from work, but after fully IOing my elec/energy/elec and testing a bit, I would strongly suggest considering the AoE immobilize (chain fences iirc?). Once you sap a mobs end, they will start running all over the place. Should not be an issue in a team environment as the minions/lts will die to quickly for them to run away far, but if you plan to solo then I would recommend it. If you primarily play in teams, you can go for Havoc Punch to get another high dmg ST attack which really packs a punch when proced out. I think I personally prefer defensive sets for Sentinels, they just don't have a lot of HP to take many hits on a resist armor set, but I'm sure electric armor will be equally effective as energy. Once enemies are drained of their endurance, you won't have many attacks coming your way.

You could consider making a version without Granite, although I can also take a look at putting one together tomorrow. While Granite makes you nearly unkillable, there are a lot of negatives associated with it. You can achieve similar lvls of survival without Granite and not have to suffer all those penalties (recharge/dmg debuff, travel restriction, unable to see costume, etc). I think a lot players tend to build stone without Granite since the changes to stone armor on homecoming. Rooted also doesn't slow you down anymore and has no travel power restrictions. While you can build stone melee to be a pseudo controller with stuns/holds, there's also no reason to ignore it's ST dmg capability, something that you can take advantage of by avoiding Granite. There are a lot of benefits to running Brimstone for the dmg boost and Minerals for the recharge boost. It's also worth noting that not all dmg types are equally common. Ice barely exists outside of winter event and a few rare enemies/AVs. Fire also isn't extremely common. Even if you do face these, being near/at resist cap with Brimstone is plenty to survive those encounters without going for Granite to try and hit hard cap resist and soft cap def. You can also still hit near/at hard cap s/l/e/n (the most common damage types) resists and soft cap defenses without Granite. Edit: also worth adding that Stalagmites only has a 10% chance of inflicting stun.

With regards to attack sets: Energy: great for ST damage, average at AoE. Fire: near the top for both ST and AoE, great overall choice. Electric: fairly good AoE, bad ST damage unless you choose to run it on a stalker (assassin's strike + patron/epic snipe help a lot with ST damage). Elec/shield stalker is an excellent combo if you want to use electric melee. Axe: great ST and AoE damage, also a great overall choice. SS: revolves around rage, but easy to proc bomb. Excellent AoE nuker when paired with rad armor. I'd go with rad/ss tank for this combo (nuking mobs quickly actually hurts building/keeping up fury on a brute). Stone: great ST damage, okay AoE but not top tier imo. Claw: another good overall set, but a bit below fire and axe imo. Those are the main contenders to consider. For armor sets: Stone: great survival with a good damage boost, no need to even run/pick up granite to max out survival. Shield: great survival, higher damage boost than Stone (AAO + shield charge). No heal and lacks the regen boost that rooted provides to stone armor. Bio: higher offensive boost than stone/shield imo, still very survivable but relies on cycling between your absorbs and regen click powers. Fire: arguably the highest offensive boost, but also the lowest survivability compared to the 3 above. Radiation: another strong damage boost (2 procable AoEs, meltdown crash is easily manageable and can be picked up for it's offensive boost). Good survivability, but not quite at the level of stone or shield imo. Also worth considering if you want to exemplar well, some sets can be very late bloomers like SS not getting foot stomp until lvl 30 on tanks.

You had sprint toggled on in the tanker build, which accounts for a decent chunk. Different slotting in Maneuvers accounts for another ~0.1 end/sec drain. If you detoggle Sprint and slot Maneuvers the same as you had in the brute build, the end drain should be identical.

Yes, if you plan on running a brute, you will want to actively play. This does depend on the situation when dual boxing though. If you have a better dmg dealer then you can just have your spine/fire brute on follow with a power like Spine Burst or Burn on auto. The main point is that a Brute is no longer able to really afk farm. Asteroid map is small with walking patrols. When referring to afk farming it's normally to this Asteroid map and setting your farmer in the middle of the map with a aoe on auto (rad melee is best here since Atom Smasher has higher DPA, you get bonus contamination dmg, and you also get a dmg aura similar to spine). A brute would likely die in this situation where a tanker can survive being afk. These maps usually have a 10min timer so it kicks you out of the map and makes it easy to reset. You can (and should) summon the BP lore pets as it's on a 10 min timer and the unkillable one will provide some dmg and res debuffs. Similarly you can fire off Ageless and toggle hybrid at start. For lvling my own alts, I'll normally run xtomic carnival map (has EBs as well) on +4/8x with my spine/fire brute. While actively playing, you won't have issues staying alive even without another support/box account as long as you're at 45% fire def. You can either do so with a cheap build or do a more expensive one (these normally prioritize the normal purple sets that have 10% recharge bonuses to maximize recharge/dmg). You can also craft temp power def boost to make up lower fire def, though I prefer the cheaper version with built in 45% def. I only use the farmer when I need to lvl up an alt, I don't actually farm for fun. Afk farming can be nice for passive inf earning. You can play the game with your mains, do TFs and such and only need to check back and reset the farm every 10 mins. You could technically lvl alts that way also by taking super speed at lvl 4/stealth at 6 and slotting a celerity stealth IO so you don't incur debt with the patrols. Can't compare atm as I'm at work, but can do so later. I will say that you should have no end issues after Ageless core destiny. You also get consume that you can use towards the last 30 seconds of Ageless when the rec buff is lower until it Ageless is back up.

I will say that if you don't care about speed in particular, then aiming for +dmg bonuses isn't really that necessary. But do as you like there. In terms of survival, you don't need to focus on max HP for active farming, getting to 45% fire def and actively farming will keep you alive. For AFK farming, you really want to use a tank which have higher base HP pools and can more easily survive. Since the changes that @Meknomancer mentioned, I don't think Brutes are able to survive AFK farms well, at least at +4/8. There was a recent topic on the Tanker side of AFK farming (stone armor is actually best for this as Rooted adds regen and Brimstone boosts dmg). Perhaps I'm missing something, but why would a Tank version have end problem where the Brute version would not? Regardless though, Ageless core destiny will fix any end issues and you want it for the +recharge boost it provides. Make sure you're running the most updated version. Other than that, if you have procs turned (force feedback +rech in particular) and/or Ageless on (first few seconds give a big rech boost but it degrades over time), it can end up showing you at recharge cap which would make it appear that any more recharge enhancements don't do anything.

It's a very expensive build for what it will be doing. I would at minimum 2 slot hasten with recharge IOs. I would also avoid going for winter sets, those can cost 16-17 million per IO and there are much cheaper ways to get fire def. The build below is a quick one with a focus on reaching 45% fire def without spending to much inf. You could potentially rework it and add more powers from concealment pool to mule 2 more LotG for some more recharge. Armageddon set in Burn can be replaced with Obliteration for a cheaper option. You will want to craft Ageless core destiny as the first incarnate power to fix endurance issues. I've also filled in the other ideal incarnate powers for all slots for farming. You can make an expensive build that prioritizes recharge to get perma Hasten, but imo it's not worth it (particularly when you're just starting out and need something cheap that can handle the job). Brute (Spines - Fiery Aura).mbd

Not sure about Sents for Storm Blast, but my understanding was that the set worked best on corruptors because of scourge.

Does it need the accuracy slotting? Mids is displaying it as having 96% base against +3 already and 156% after all set bonuses. Was going to do the dam/end instead.

I actually started going in this direction after mentioning it in my last post, definitely more efficient and still does a high amount of drain with good recharge. Went with 2 HOs, but will likely move that 1 slot when I find a better place for it. I am liking all of these, thx for the suggestions. With KD procs in both BoL and Short Circuit should also help with a lot more mitigation. Ended up with this after implementing your changes. Had an extra slot that I put into Charge Up for a recharge IO. Sentinel (Electrical Blast - Energy Aura)2.mbd

Appreciate it, I normally play melee chars and tend to build towards survival. Love shield wall for that reason since it gives large amount of e/n resist. I'll mess around with some stuff and see if I can make some tiny improvements. With regards to Energize, I would love to have the slots for it but it's hard to find places to take them from. I'm hopeful that with all the global recharge and high resists, I will rarely need it and 2 slots will be sufficient. I do agree that I could use a Kismet somewhere and will see if I can find a slot. I guess I could also choose to just frankenslot Power Drain and transfer a lot of those slots to energize. Also, is there an ideal power choice in elec blast for the Sentinel ATO sets? Looking over it again, would opportunity strikes be better in an AoE like ball of lightning so that the opportunity proc has more chances to go off? Only other thing I wish I could find room for is Voltaic Sentinel (I've heard it's pretty decent for Sents), perhaps instead of Lightning Field? Not sure what else I could replace.

If anyone has played elec/energy, could I get some critique for this build? My goals for it are to prioritize sapping, damage, and survival. Will likely run it with Barrier destiny to get more def/resist since endurance shouldn't be an issue. Sentinel (Electrical Blast - Energy Aura).mbd

It's hard to reach similar survival levels to that of a tank since they have higher base defense/resist values along with a much better proc in SMoT that also helps a ton. Taking fold space also uses up a lot of power slots that could go towards things like Maneuvers and Combat Jumping that would be helpful in getting soft cap def more easily. You can take a look at the build I put together and compare it to yours in terms of survival, adjust the levels that powers are picked at as you want. It's designed to run with Ageless to fix endurance issues as it was hard enough to slot of survival and procbomb without adding endurance to the things to fix. It's nearly at s/l soft cap but e/n is a bit low. Brute (Super Strength - Stone Armor).mbd

You can always switch to a second build and make that your farm build. The stone/rad I posted was a very quick build that I put together, I intentionally tried to avoid using purple sets wherever possible and get any cheap sources of global recharge. Theoretically, for AFK farming the global recharge isn't a big deal unless you plan on setting alarms so that you can reset runs without wasting time and having gaps in between. The difference between a cheap build and more expensive with more purple sets might be maybe 2-3 minutes extra time to clear the asteroid map for the cheap version. There are probably a few things that can be more optimized if I spend more time on it which I can try to do later if you're still interested. I'd definitely suggest just using a second build for AFK farming though as the build ignores a lot of stuff besides capped fire resist, soft cap fire def, and cheap sources of global recharge and enough tohit/acc buffs to get accuracy of Atom Smasher to 95% at +3. It's not something I would ever use for general content.

To me, it is down to the set choices. I will only ever choose to focus on offense for a tanker if the primary helps to somehow boost damage in a significant way and I've paired it with a good damage dealing secondary. Imo, it comes down to rad, bio, fire, shield, and stone for armor sets that can significantly boost offensive damage output. For other tanker primaries, I prefer to focus on building for survival as they just don't increase damage in any significant way (and I don't count a damage aura from sets like dark, elec, and ice as being significant damage). I've not played ITF with a dark/energy tank (I don't think I've even fully IO'd a dark tank since CoH was live), but IIRC the mobs have some significant mez protection so you're really climbing an uphill battle when your stun mitigation is nullified. More than anything, I suspect this was the main reason for your downfall, other than possibly fighting against +5 mobs if leader had the difficulty set to +4. Dark armor gets good mileage out of Oppressive Gloom since mobs are largely made up of minions which will get stunned just from the toggle itself. When this doesn't happen and every attack is hitting you because of the massive defense debuffs, then it comes down to your resists and low HP pool since dark armor has no max HP boosting powers.

It can be, as long as procs are slotted in good powers that provide high proc rates and aren't boosted with any recharge enhancements (or recharge boosting alpha incarnates). Your tank's Atom Smasher is shown as dealing 238 DPA. If you open the stone/rad I posted and look at Atom Smasher, it has a DPA of 521. With musculature turned off since your build has cardiac, it still shows on average 484 DPA, a lot of that is coming from the high proc rate chance since the power has a long base recharge and isn't slotted with any recharge boosting enhancement. You end up running into 3 main issues if you try to frankenslot and proc out powers: Fewer set bonuses. This may mean less global recharge, less defense, resists, etc. Lower accuracy, this can be offset by looking for sets that boost accuracy, picking up powers like Tactics/Focused Accuracy, slotting Kismet unique, etc. Lower damage enhancement in powers. This can partially be offset by using musculature or other damage boosting alpha incarnates, only partially procing out attacks and including some damage enhancements from sets or even using the acc/dam HOs, and having access to powers that can help offset damage enhancement (SS does this best by double stacking Rage, which also fixes the low accuracy and allows it to pretty much fully proc out attacks). To make it worthwhile, you still need a lot of global recharge in the build, so the ability to 4-5 slot LotG +rech procs or even FF +rech procs becomes useful as most sets have global rech bonuses at 4+ pieces. Edit: some powers with extremely long base recharge can take recharge enhancement and still have max proc rates. You can actually easily check if you can slot a recharge or not by having procs turned on and putting a recharge IO, or maybe something like acc/rech from an IO set and see if the DPA goes down.

It will survive and won't be at risk of dying. All you need to really survive is 45% fire defense and cap, or very close to cap, fire resist. With AFK farming, regen can end up playing a role as well. In terms of damage dealing, that's an entirely different discussion. If you wanted to AFK farm, you could simply adjust the slotting on Atom Smasher. If you're looking to actively farm, you're better off with a fire armor farmer.

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