Infinitum

It's been a rough year my fellow heroes. I am very sorry I haven't been around. I'm still not able to dive into the game like I would like to. I wanted to explain how my year has been because you all deserve to know why your requests have gone unanswered the last few months At the start of the summer I had a really bad shingles outbreak which also made my long running gastro issues worse -inflammation throughout my body. It took me from May to late July to get it under control. August was just recovery mode and kids back to school and things started returning to normal just in time for Hurricane Helene to hit late Sept. We were right in the middle of the worst hit areas. Not as bad as parts of NC but things are just now getting all of the debris off the roads where we are. Next up my Mom had a hemorrhagic stroke Nov 11 and passed away Nov 13. Totally unexpected -she was seemingly in good health. It hit hard and for a few days was very very crushing, but I'm good now and at peace with it. Still miss her though. I really have wanted to be back in the mix of this but life just isn't allowing it right now -don't give up on me though please. I'm tanking life like a boss right now and still winning at +4/8 with a team wipe around me. 🤙😉. But it is doing damage -not going to lie. I could use a stretch of easy right about now. I will be back. Just can't game right now my friends. Thanks for following and keeping up with my crazy.

I prefer a different metric. Anything can kick butt. Only a tanker causes broken attack deployment - fists, legs, swords, shields... Lamp posts. Etc. All with our just our faces even. I have had the enemy actually give up before and take to heavy drinking because their attacks ran dry while I made myself a sandwich.

Taunt is a good and useful power. Having said that - Tanker Gauntlet is strong enough in my opinion that if you want to skip taunt for another attack or pool power it is perfectly acceptable to do so for 99% of the game. If you continue attacking especially with aoe - it's going to keep the enemy grouped around you. The only thing that will peel enemy off is another tanker with taunt. The only potentially dangerous situation that might arise is if your group over aggros - which will happen but the game is so insanely forgiving - even that is only a minor hiccup. More often than not steamrolling with even half a team of proficient players will succeed without taunt. Hardcore might be an exception to taunt being a requirement - I can't say for sure because I have never played hardcore. Not my cup of tea.

How is your build working out? - it looked pretty good from first glance - but how does it handle Endurance - Knockback etc?

Sorry it took so long to get back to you - I am actually recovering from the shingles the last 2 weeks in addition to EoM at work a few weeks ago. Been a hectic rough stretch but I am still here lol. Try this build out - I ticked all the boxes for great survivability for Elec Armor - and went with a more ST route with Battle Axe - you could always switch one of the ST attacks out for Pendulum if you would rather go that route instead. Hope this helps! Tanker (Electric Armor - Battle Axe).mbd

I sent a PM reply for this you had requested there. Hope it helps - should be pretty strong though.

@Tiresias and @Semler I promise I have not forgotten you. Just going through a crazy busy EoM work period. I will be able to assist better next week hopefully. Sorry for the delays.

Frank Reagan.

I think a lot of the problems with boxing and kick are how ugly and underwhelming the animations are. If boxing had the animation of either initial strike or heavy blow from street justice - it would be feel little less boring. Kick - should be something like crane kick from MA or storm kick from martial combat. As is neither look impressive enough to fill an attack chain.

Well, I'm going to stick with none of that matters enough to lose sleep over - because all sets involved are working well without any outlier level variances.

Changing it one way or another would result in invul being slightly OP if added there or shield and SR being underpowered if it was removed. None of that would make sense given how close the performance is currently. As I said earlier Invul has one extra tier in dull pain - so chalk it up to that for consistency sake.

Have to disagree here because each of the other powersets have a self heal/HP buff, endurance boost/defense click etc. Which is 3 tiers of mitigation in most cases - Bio has all 4 Shield and SR only have the defense and resistance categories to work with so it wouldn't make sense to not give them the ability to come close to capping DDR or capping it in SR case. Naturally they should be the best at it and have the best ways to protect it. It's not like they are extreme outliers - invul is only ever so slightly behind them - because it has dull pain and slightly higher resistances to mitigate incoming damage.

Without looking - I am pretty sure it has a whole set of Shield Wall in it.

Here are a few Screenshots from my Res Tankers - all very good also. Electric Armor Dark Armor Radiation Armor And Fiery Aura I know they don't get DDR but I have built each one to have Softcapped+ Melee defense to help absorb the alpha and any effects that might come with it.

This is how the SR Shield and Invul compare by the numbers - my builds Invul - with 10 in Invincibility - and one stack of Might of the Tanker Shield - one stack of Might of the Tanker SR - one stack of Might of the Tanker/Agile Dodge and Luck set to 0 Sliding Scale Res SR - one stack of Might of the Tanker/Agile Dodge and Luck set to 50% Sliding Scale Res SR - one stack of Might of the Tanker/Agile Dodge and Luck set to 100% Sliding Scale Res SR never gets that low on my tanker - the 100% slider value - normally under extreme duress it is in between the 50% and the 100% and fluctuates - it looks very scary but is super safe at that point. All of the above is so close in performance it splits hairs - and Invul is right there but there are larger fluctuations due to the DDR - but it has the slightly higher res - and also dull pain which equalizes the situation quickly and stabilizes as any heavy enemy group has to chew through a greater HP/Res wall.

For Shield with one stack of Active Defense - its a click power with 2 stacks of Active Defense - there is about a 20-30 second gap usually for this but its not noticeable. SR - always capped Like I said earlier these two do not get a dull pain type power like Invul - so that goes a long way towards equalizing this DDR deficit Invul has - but Shield and SR (rightfully so because of the absence of a self heal/HP Boost) experience less hiccups to the defense fluctuating - still happens, but all depends on how high you build the defense.

I would say there are no purely defensive sets anymore - because just taking a power on any of the sets I will mention below results in res, defense or both on one power. I would call any set inherantly possessing 3 factors a hybrid. 1. Resistances - Shield SR and Invul all do 2. Defenses - Shield SR and invul all do. 3. DDR - this is the game changer - yeah you can add defense to any set - but IMO it's only a defense set if it has DDR. Energy Aura, Stone, Ninjitsu, and Ice would also be included in the above IMO. You could also make the argument for Willpower - regen/res/def Bio - regen/res/Def - no ddr though but I think it still fits. So yeah, I'm not sure any defensive set is purely defensive anymore. Resistance sets are purely resistance - with Dark having a slight exception of defense in Cloak of Darkness - very limited and no ddr though.

Alas, no... I unfortunately discovered making cars fast and was distracted by drag racing for about 5 years and never went further than a bachelor's degree that I never did anything with. But I did learn how to be a really good mechanic, better people interaction, met my wife, and am a more well rounded geek ever since. Plus - those skills literally saved me 2k plus last week when I had to repair the sunroof mechanism in my truck. Had to strip the interior down to the airbags and yank the whole assembly out to rebuild the track then reinstall. Lifes funny where it takes you... And why

With one stack of Might of the tanker you can have S/L capped on shield and the rest around 70% and that's going conservative fairly similar to how invul looks with a similar build. On SR I would need to look the numbers up in a sec, but they can get fairly high also. Either way neither are what you would consider pure defense builds.

Nope completely incorrect here. Go start an ITF +4/8 - open the power monitor and watch your base defense - then get back to me on anything over the softcap/incarnate softcap not mattering - its why barrier is such a popular option for hard-modes. The lower your vectored defenses are at the initial engagement - the more the initial hits to your base defense will lower them - it will cascade much faster. They may not offer much initial value - but the more there is to drop the less chance they will drop to a critical point (like wearing layers in harsh winter conditions) - for instance - if your defenses are at 70% and you get dinged for 10 percent - you are still at 60% right at the incarnate softcap. If you are at 55% and get dinged for 10% - my friend you are now sitting at 45% and actually lower if it is incarnate content because of the increased +tohit of 14% - so that in essence puts you at 31% and experiencing a cascade that your resistances can't overcome at that point. Like I said earlier - I have tested all of this - I could demonstrate any of this. I have found 65-70 is a good spot for anything not Hard Mode the game can throw at it - Shield and SR strictly speaking also. Edit - well you can get by with less than that - 65-70 is like worst case scenario type of stuff - most of my shield tankers don't run op to 65 and in some cases 60 either and they do just fine - 65-70 is if you don't want to see any drastic fluctuations in your HP Bar.

Anytime - I looked it over and I would probably go this route - dropped power crash - fully slotted bone smasher then two slotted taunt. If you wanted more AOE just drop bone smasher for taunt and use the same enh I have in taunt in this build. Hope this helps and enjoy! Tanker (Shield Defense - Energy Melee).mbd

Awesome! I am glad you enjoyed. That makes it all worthwhile for me. And nope you definitely aren't talking about me personally with physical perfection. I like cake too much. I'm not unfit but I'm not hanz and Franz either. 😄 For Magnus - I am not near a computer but let me ask you. Does it have hover? If so I would swap taunt for that. You wouldnt want to lose physical perfection. I can't remember if I updated or not but on all my SD and SR characters I have switched to ageless core for the end boost. Physical perfection will allow you to hold out long enough for the next run of ageless basically. It is very much an endgame build with ageless in mind to run all of the toggles including tough Weave and focused accuracy. I will take a look when I get home either way for you though.

You do know Shield and SR are hybrid also right? They both utilize defense and res also. In more ways than one - better than invul 1. Shield is capable of reaching better defenses than invul that has no saturation limitation like invinc has. 2.Shield has resistances very similar to invul. 3.SR has far superior defenses than invul 4.SR has a great sliding res based on HP level that can see very high Res numbers also. 5.Both Shield and SR have far superior DDR than invul which means their defense will not break as often and then not as bad when it does break as invul will. The above is the simplest way to reach the logical conclusion why they are ever so slightly better than invul.

Yeah unstoppable could use a revamp because - aside from some lower level non IOd builds I would never take it. On good IOd builds there's nothing unstoppable could do to make the situation any less trouble if you find yourself in trouble.

Nah. Probably just Olding like me. lol