Xaeon

Due to the def crash, Super Strength does not really go well with any defensive based sets. Shield is unfortunately a defensive focused hybrid defense set that even on tankers struggles to cap more than S/L resistance or perhaps F/C if you go ham on purple sets. I'd recommend street justice if you want a set about punching people, martial arts if you want a set with a similar design philosophy (mostly ST with an AoE and mostly smashing damage), or war mace if you want a set all about brutally hitting people in the face for massive damage with tremendous strength. War Mace is in a really good spot right now, I highly recommend it as a companion to shield defense. Martial Arts also has a synergy with Shield Defense from Storm kick buffing all your positional defenses, which is extremely nice. You can also replace the kick animations with punching ones for Storm Kick, Cobra Strike, Crippling Axe Kick, and Eagle's Claw.

I specifically brought up One Punch Man and MHA/BNHA. :P

I've had good fun with /Dark on my Necro MM. It's thematically fitting and it also gives you an extra pet at level 38. Not to mention it's got a bit of everything you'd want out of a support set as well as a good soft control in Fearsome Stare.

Also true. Still, I can't imagine a scenario where Anything/Willpower could have endurance issues. Even titan weapons with willpower never needs to pop a blue, it's one of the most endurance efficient secondaries. I think the OP is missing Quick Recovery. Gamma boost IIRC actually gives more endurance than Willpower or Regeneration's Quick Recovery powers when at full health. Not sure how Bio-Armour's Inexhaustible compares though. Though WP overall is a very forgiving set endurance wise as it not only has an endurance boosting power, it doesn't consume very much endurance itself due to how much of its powers are passives or are only used rarely. There's your problem. Focused Accuracy is something of an endurance hog that doesn't really give enough of a bump to your DPS to justify the endurance you pay, the slots you invest in it, or the expense of spending one of your precious 24 power picks. Like, it's only edge use is if you really like the set bonuses from +to hit sets and tactics and build up aren't enough for you.

Atomic Control: You make use of the power of the atom to bind, intoxicate, and manipulate your foes and even calll forth irradiated allies to your side. Atomic Control tends to reduce enemy defences and oft bypasses conventional defenses. Design Intent: This is mostly for thematic's sake and to be in a way; the mirror universe counterpart of dark control (highly pet focused for a control set, but focused on making enemies easier to hit rather than making it harder for them to hit you) T1: Electron Shackles (As per Atomic Manipulation) T2: Positron Cell (As per Atomic Manipulation) T3: Neutron Burst (Targeted AoE, Immobilise, similar damage scaling to Living Shadows, DoT, -Defense, small -Regen) T4: Radiation Sickness (Infectious -Regen, -Defense, -Speed, -Recharge speed) T5: Neural Cancer (Short Ranged Cone, about 1/2 terrify's damage scaling, Foe Disorient, -Defense) T6: Make it Glow (Medium ranged Targeted AoE: About 3/4th's terrify's damage scaling, Fear, -Defense) T7: Radioactive Parasites (Foe Targeted, summons two pets with the following resistances ( S20 L20 E20 T20 ) and the following abilities, X-Ray Beams, Contaminated Strike, Self Destruct) T8: Radioactive Cloud (As per Atomic Manipulation) T9: Irradiated Monster (Summons a radioactive monster with the following resistances: S25 L25 F35 C15 E50 N15 P20 T50 and the following abilities: Contaminated Strike, Radioactive Smash, Electron Haze, Electron Shackles)

Almost all of the "superhero mania" in mainstream culture is really just driven by the MCU stuff. If that falters, expect superheroes to largely disappear. It's not like superheroes movies didn't exist until Iron Man. They did, quite a bit, and remained niche. What's not niche is MCU, but don't expect it to bleed over to superheroes as a genre. The DCEU has done rather well for itself after finding its stride at last and banishing away the influence of Snyder, and both Marvel and DC's television efforts have proven to be highly successful. Meanwhile swords and sorcery fantasy's last big attempt at the box office was the Hobbit Trilogy and the Warcraft movie; the former of which made money but sucked, the latter of which was only saved from box office failure by China. My hero academia is also the current new hotness in Shonen Anime with a highly active and deeply involved fandom, and One Punch man was also a significant phenomenom in Anime circles; meanwhile most western fantasy influenced animes just come and go with little long term noteworthiness. The idea that it's just Marvel or that Fantasy is a more popular aesthetic outside of nerd spaces simply doesn't bear with reality. Tabletop and Video Gaming (and non-visual literature) are Gygaxian Fantasy's primary redoubts and always have been. But games traditionally move far fewer units than film (they make more money because unit prices are higher and because of microtransactions, but far more people watch a movie that grossed a billion than played a game that grossed a similar amount). More people watched Aquaman than have ever played world of warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar; the two big tabletop fantasy games (for role playing and wargaming respectively) likely count playerbases in the hundreds of thousands to single digit millions at absolute best. And even in video gaming: swords and sorcery faux-medieval european fantasy is...kind of middling in popularity at most? The current hottest games are by and large set in either modern (or faux-modern/fantastical modern) settings or have a vague sci-fi or outright space fantasy aesthetic. Aesthetics that allow for guns are like; the big thing in gaming and have been for years.

Tankers and Brutes have the same 90% resistance cap. Tanekrs just get higher scalars for protective powers.

As compared to sword & sorcery fantasy, yes. Endgame alone made more money than the entire lord of the rings trilogy combined and the box office for any fantasy series besides that drops incredibly sharply; while the Superhero genre dominates the box office with billion dollar hit after billion dollar hit. The MCU is so ridiculously dominant in the box office it's even completely eclipsed Star Wars as a box office draw. There hasn't been a swords and sorcery fantasy film anyone's really given a damn about since the third Hobbit movie while Marvel continues to be the unchallengeable God of the box office that none have come even remotely close to unseating. I'd say swords and sorcery fantasy is the niche nerd thing that has traditionally struggled with transitioning out of its home genre of tabletop and video games (swords and sorcery fantasy owes far more of a thematic debt to Conan the Barbarian and Vance's books which Gary Gygax cited as his primary influence when he made D&D in the 70s; than it really does to Tolkien. Tolkien's influence is rather literally skin deep aesthetics) while Marvel is so successful they can market absolute nobodies like the Guardians of the Galaxy and Antman and still make a megahit that the fantasy genre as a whole could only dream of. If it were about name recognition; the Warcraft Movie would have outdone Guardians of the Galaxy at the box office. That was rather demonstrably not the case.

The lack of AK-47s and FN-FALs is an unforgivable travesty.

During Twinshot's storyarc when Flambeaux is supposed to follow & fight alongside of you, she keeps losing track of you & asks "where are you?" until you turn off Shadow Fall. To be fair, Flambeaux is rather explicitly one of the dullest tools in the proverbial shed.

The Khalisti Office tileset in Architect Entertainment is really snazzy and modern looking and I'd love to see it used in future contacts.

They held a crap ton. Core offers boat loads of damage and Radial offers about half as much damage in exchange for a literally invincible pocket support.

Shield's taunt aura is basically doubling up on Fury and while some will say that it's wasted on Brutes due to their low base damage scaling (which does affect shield charge mind you), you probably weren't at the damage cap unless you were running with a Kinetics support team mate anyway. Shield is a really good hybrid protective set with an emphasis on Positional Defense while still offering respectable resistance. You can't really go wrong with it. Work to cap your positional defense and bulk up your resistances and max HP and you'll be golden against nearly anything; and with Fury and Against all Odds bulking up your damage you can basically consider +damage a dump stat.

The paragon studio devs themselves recognised that "big ugly crash" protective T9s were hugely unpopular with the fanbase and very rarely taken because a giant buff like that is simply not worth essentially suiciding your character after its done; certainly not worth spending the power choice and slots on it. It's why Meltdown offers a significantly smaller buff but also a far less severe crash; it was meant to be a model for a new approach to protective "god mode" T9s. A potent but not over the top temporary buff with a far more survivable crash, and honestly with rad armour's +endurance you're likely to not even notice Meltdown's endurance crash. Bio-armour also went a completely different direction by going for a PBAoE that can give you a nice chunk of Absorb instead of the usual "push 9 to godmode". If the game went on, I'm sure Unstoppable et al would have been rebalanced to be more like Meltdown so that people would actually consider using them more. As it stands, you should probably pretend that Invulnerability doesn't even have Unstoppable.

Sell orange salvage and turn your merits into enhancement converters and sell those on the AH. It's far more inf than you'd get through killing mobs anyway and it's let me give my level 34 shield/sword tanker mostly attuned enhancements and almost reach the def soft cap already among many other stories of making levelling a smoother experience overall than bumming aroud with generic IOs or SOs. Though nearly being at the Def Softcap isn't as great as you'd think since right now I'm going through Night Ward and it feels like half the enemies there just flat out ignore positional defense. :U

Longbow exists because NATO is too cowardly to fight Arachnos itself so it props up Ms.Liberty's private army of crazed international terrorists instead. (You can't) change my view.

Wanting the 'state of gaming production to change to smaller companies' and 'wanting all the large corporations to die', IMO, are two different things. One is an evolution that involves people spinning out/off these smaller companies as they are viable and creating more games, IMO. The other is simply a irrational, emotion based viewpoint to punish the evil corporations for not giving someone the perfect game, IMO. Project CD Red (I think that's what it's called) shows us this can be done, without the need to put artists and programmers with children and mortgages on the street. How things are done matters, it impacts real humans. Flippant talk of killing off game companies is silly, it's like ranting about communication companies while using the network all day. Small companies make bad games too. WoW keeps a lot of gamer geeks employed. CDPR is widely hated by its workers for its low pay and its abusive practises towards its labour. It is not a company to admire nor should it be held up as a standard for anything.

Even if it were possible to perma, the buff it gives is not worth basically dying every 180 seconds.

The Gauntlet "power" is a placeholder. Gauntlet is just the name for an effect that's coded into every Tanker power. Bruising, similarly, is something triggered by Tanker secondary T1s because of how those powers are written, not because of the Bruising power itself. I meant that the Bruising Effect would trigger on every enemy that Gauntlet successfully procs against. Given that this isn't self stackable and is resistable but can be stacked between multiple tankers, it wouldn't be a huge effect but it would be appreciated and it'd make having more than one tanker on a team feel like less of a waste of a slot on a team. As for why brutes have 90% resists; Brutes are meant to in essence; be the Incredible Hulk. Who only works as a character in a fight if he manages to stay in it long enough to get mad enough to win the fight. Scrappers deal their damage immediately but Hulk needs to ramp up to the level needed to win an encounter; and that doesn't work if he's as easily taken out as Spider-Man. Brutes are meant to be endurance fighters while Scrappers and Stalkers deal their damage quickly and immediately; so they need the survivability to "endure" their way through battles. Personally I think fury is gained and lost too quickly and the effect is ultimately not really noticeable enough to get that Incredible Hulk feel across properly. It should ramp up slower but have a more dramatic effect. By the time you have your offensive T9 you already don't really care about fury because you're basically automatically brought to 75% by being in any fight at all and that's just not what Fury should be like. It's certainly a noticeable damage boost, but it's not that huge in the grand scheme of things and its taken for granted.

Mocking Beratement has a good set bonus though. I myself would go for Radiation Melee because I'm kind of a basic bitch who likes to pair sets like that.

Plenty, mouth covering headgear pieces are usually in the last detail slot for the head.

ur dad have the triple big lesbian Okay got that out of my system. It's certainly a thematically weird combo and many people side-eye using SR on brutes and tanks, but from my napkin math it seems like it'd definitely be workable; if a bit painful to level solo until you get to the soft cap. Titan Weapons loves recharge bonuses like Snowflame loves cocaine, and SR does give out a good chunk.

I'm 99% sure that cysts weren't removed for the Kheldian's benefit but more because of the complaints of people who teamed with them and didn't like bumping into what amounted to a surprise object with AV grade durability that constantly spat out boss level Nictus mobs even after they were no longer teaming with said kheld. The quantum gunner just affects the Kheldian themselves and for non-Khelds they're usually less dangerous than the mobs they replaced. The Cysts in particular though; were hated because they were felt to punish the rest of the team for just having a Kheldian with them. As for Void Hunters, I vaguely remember forum complaints about how they "leeched XP" when they spawned next to hostile factions like the Rikti or Devouring Earth and the two would fight.

The T9s definitely need major updates because nearly all of them are skippable outside of a handful. Anything with a big crash at the end is basically never used outside of PvP duels. Meltdown offers a much better template for T9 clicky god mode powers.

Rad is probably the overall stronger set at the moment. Elec is more purely a protection set while Rad offers other utilities.