Redlynne

Pretty safe to assume that's the case.

Pretty sure they do ...

You're not doing something wrong. For whatever reason, build exports will NOT include the alternate slotting of enhancements on builds ... which is very frustrating. The Save file will keep the alternative slotting, but the Export to text will not. This means that whenever I get around to reposting all of these builds I've written up using a future version of Pine (or whatever replaces Pine) I'll need to have TWO code hash chunks posted so as to give the Main + Alternative Slotting options to everyone.

City of Data: Eagle's Claw Cast Time: 2.53 seconds Critical Hit Buff lasts 2 seconds starting 1.2 seconds into the animation of Eagle's Claw. This means that from 1.2 through 3.2 seconds after starting Eagle's Claw's animation, you have a +33% Critical Hit chance buff ... but Eagle's Claw is still animating until ~2.5 seconds after initiating the attack animation. This means that once Eagle's Claw has finished animating, you'll retain the +33% Critical Hit buff to your "next" Primary Powerset attack for 0.7 seconds ... which is shorter than the animation times for ANY Martial Arts attacks, meaning you get the buff for only ONE follow up attack after using Eagle's Claw. In practice, thanks to latency/lag and other issues, this essentially means that the only way to "score" this increased Critical Hit chance on the attack following Eagle's Claw is if you cue your Martial Arts attack "halfway" through Eagle's Claw animating for 2.5 seconds so as to ensure that the Critical Hit buff "counts" on your next attack due to how game mechanically everything Resolves First And Animates After. Storm Kick has a natively increased chance for a Critical Hit and therefore gets the "most" benefit out of following Eagle's Claw against a single target. Use of Dragon's Tail to follow Eagle's Claw results in an increased Critical Hit chance against every $Target caught in the PBAoE which can dramatically improve the damage output/throughput of Dragon's Tail when dealing with dogpile situations. On a Tanker, since Tankers don't get Critical Hits, the Eagle's Claw buff to follow up attacks is changed to having a 3 second duration, instead of merely a 2 second duration, and instead adds +33% damage for that duration. This means that the damage buff duration extends from 1.2 to 4.2 seconds after Eagle's Claw begins animating for ~2.5 seconds, leaving about ~1.7 seconds clear for follow up attacks. It is possible with the use of attack queue techniques to squeeze THREE attacks into that window of opportunity after an Eagle's Claw finishes animating. You can fit Thunder Kick, Storm Kick AND one other Martial Arts attack into that 1.7 window of opportunity to queue up attacks while other attacks are animating (thereby securing the buff effect onto them) even though the animation time for all three of those attacks combined will easily exceed the ~1.7 second window when the buff is in effect ... thanks to the Resolve First Animate After system used for game mechanics.

You're probably going to hate me for this answer, but ... It Depends™ ... on the situation and the opposition you're facing (and how many allies you've got at your disposal to attract attention Away From You). It also depends on what Level you're playing at, since Exemplar can restrict what powers you have access to (and the amount of Enhancement value you get out of your slots). Unlike some people, I don't just assume that once I reach Level 50 I'm never going to play anything Level 1-49 ever again. So the answer to the question CHANGES depending on what is "needed" at any given time. You play differently in a target rich environment when there is no Mez coming your way than you do when there's lots of Mez coming your way (for example). There are more complexities involved in the actual gameplay under a variety of circumstances than a One Size Fits All answer will provide you. Which I suppose is a rather long winded way of saying "git gud" and you'll enjoy yourself a whole lot more with the toolbox that Time/Dual Pistols/Dark makes available to you. The only challenge is ... can YOU (the Player) keep up with figuring out, from moment to moment, which options lead to the best advantages as situations and circumstances evolve? If you can't, you might enjoy playing something else that doesn't require as much mental agility and situational awareness to play at a high level of skill ... and the loss of a potential for Scrapperlock while playing a Defender. Trust me, when you're IN THE ZONE of Scrapperlock it can become a VERY addictive feeling!

Did you miss the melee, ranged and AoE defense being around 60% Well I know I didn't miss that part ...

I certainly enjoyed making other Tankers "cry" on Tanker Tuesday ITF runs where NONE of them could pull aggro off me (or get any of their own, because I'd Taunt whatever they tried to draw the attention of). To play Ice/Ice "properly" to its full potential, you need to be playing your Tanker more like a Brute (who doesn't worry about Fury). You want to be the center of attention like a eye of the storm of a vortex of flypaper keeping everything locked up on you where they will Exist To Death on your Icicles and Chilling Embrace and Frozen Aura stomping and "hop 'n' pop" use of Frost to convert Frost from an attack that only hits 1/4 of the pie on one side of you into a DOWNWARD facing cone that hits EVERYTHING clustered up around you. You don't do this with Frost (in 2D) ... Instead you do THIS with Frost (in 3D!) ... That gives you 1 Debuff Aura (Chilling Embrace), 1 Damage Aura (Icicles), 1 PBAoE Click (Frozen Aura) and 1 Cone turned (range enhanced!) PBAoE(ish) Click (Frost) "ruining the day" of everything clustered up around you. That's a pretty decent amount of "output" for pretty much ANY Tanker, AoE-wise, before including just how much Recharge debuffing all of that is doing to help keep You (and therefore everyone around you) from taking damage from the dogpile flailing away around you. To borrow a popular phrase often said in (decidedly) other contexts ... it's not the SIZE, but how you USE your Ice/Ice Tanker that makes all the difference in the world. I'm of the opinion that HOW you play your Ice/Ice Tanker may be perhaps the most important limiting factor in getting the "most" performance out of the potential hidden away inside of the build. You need to play VERY aggressively with an Ice/Ice Tanker, to the point of achieving Scrapperlock in your single minded determination to draw EVERYTHING into your Vortex Of Doom™ (+3!) where you can drain them of everything they've got (including their dignity!). However, if that's not the way you like to play your Tankers, then Ice/Ice may not be for you ...

Counter-proposal for Force Bolt. What if the coding used for Propel in Gravity Control that allows a "knockback splash" around the single target were ported over into Force Bolt?

Trick question(s) ... Are you still in Bodyguard Mode or are you commanding your Ninjas to Attack? Are you keeping your Ninjas clustered around you or are you letting them run off to commit suicide on their own beyond the Pet Defense Aura IOs radius of effect? Time's Junction? Distortion Field? Farsight? Do you use Provoke to draw aggro which causes your Ninjas to counterattack on your behalf, followed by an immediate use of Temporal Mending to "soak" the incoming damage not only to yourself but to ALL of your Ninjas (via Bodyguard)? Do you use Smoke Flash (at all)? Who do you use it on (by default)? How far are you from finishing out your slotting of Set IOs? I'm thinking that most of the answers to your problems will be found in these answers to these questions.

Yes ... it's possible.

Test server is ThatAWay ...

What you're really asking for is PvEvP ... where instead of Players attacking each other DIRECTLY, they are instead competing against each other through the use of a medium in the environment. Tug-of-war is an example of this, where the two teams are competing against each other, but doing so through the medium of a rope, rather than directly attacking each other. The old suggestion of making a Big Red Ball™ which could then be used for soccer styled gameplay involving "goals" on either end of a playing field is another example of this. Rather than launching your attacks against other Players, you're instead "attacking" an environmental object (the aforementioned Big Red Ball™) to influence its movement and trajectory in order to score points in the game. Both of these scenarios are examples of Indirect PvP in which Players "compete" against each other without directly attacking one another. Personally speaking, I've always thought that the best option for this sort of thing would be a Capture The Flag/Storming The Castle type of scenario in which the objective is for the PC to support the NPCs the PC is aligned with in achieving their objective(s). So rather than attacking other PCs directly, you attack the "pawn" NPCs of the opposing faction(s) in order to help "your faction" of NPCs win the capture. And that would be a PvEvP scenario, since different PCs could align themselves with different NPC factions for the event.

Specifically, the Baron Jacket which hangs off/outside the body at the waist. There are no doubt some other examples where you needed to use and overwide belt like that to avoid clipping issues.

That seems to be a general consensus around nearly all of the builds I've posted (for some reason) ...

Crushing Field is a huge endurance sink, even with slotting. Try not to spam it every time it's recharged. The duration on the Immobilize is pretty decent so you don't need to be recasting it all the time. That was my biggest lesson to learn while playing Gravity back on Virtue. Just because a power is recharged doesn't mean I had to use it (right now!). I kept wondering the same thing, why is my endurance drained to nearly zero after EVERY fight? Then I stopped using Crushing Field every time it was recharged and a huge chunk of my endurance deficit problems just evaporated.

Why would anyone want to play a 404 error?

If you want Force Bolt to do DAMAGE you slot it with Damage Procs ... not with Damage Enhancement ... because twice nothing is still nothing.

You could always start by doing what I did on my Crab Soldiers for Pet slotting.

Control that just happens to also do damage ... or an attack that also happens to do control. The former is a better framing for how to think about Force Bolt than the latter.

powexectray A B A = the power number inside the tray B = the tray number so if you want to bind the 4 key to activate power 4 in tray 1 you do: /bind 4 "powexectray 4 1" This lets you bind keys to positions in trays so that whenever you reshuffle the arrangement of powers in your trays you don't need to rewrite all of your keybinds for those trays to compensate.

Why yes ... yes I do ... ^_~

We make every pretense of competency around here ... ^_~

Feel free to cross-post those Brute builds over in the Brute Forum. Might spark some interest in the combination over there (too).

The problem with sending inspirations to pets is ... you have to pick which pet you want to give the inspiration to. I was able to rig that as a function of my Mastermind bindloadfile structure, which you can refer to HERE.