ClawsandEffect

@oldskool Could never get into DP on a Sentinel, but my DP/Martial blaster is one of my favorite characters to play. I intentionally built him with no set attack chain in mind so I could just hit whatever power happens to be recharged and in range. He's a teleporter, so that includes the melee attacks. He looks like an over the top action movie when I play him. My favorite Sentinel is my Dark/SR. I managed to solo a MoITF run with her before Sentinels were buffed. She's insanely good now.

For someone new to both the game and tanking in general, I'm going to second the Willpower suggestion. It's a purely autopower and toggle based set, so you don't have to worry about remembering to click a power to keep yourself alive. That frees you up to focus on learning how to position yourself and work on aggro management to help keep your teammates alive. As far as your offensive set goes, pretty much anything will work pretty well with Willpower. I have a Willpower/Dark Melee tank that just doesn't die. Ever. The insanely high regeneration in a mob paired with a self heal that you don't have to think about using because it's also one of your better attacks is just gold.

SD/StJ is a pretty great combo for tanks in general.

I've really been enjoying my Fire/Nature Corruptor. It's great for players like me who hate clicking on teammates names.

I'll throw out an out of the box suggestion: Sonic Corruptor. -res combined with Scourge could be tasty. If you're shooting for something like a Pylon test or an AV fight where you have a large pool of HP to whittle down, a Sonic Blast Corruptor would exponentially increase its DPS as the health bar of what you're beating on goes down. -res on every attack combined with a chance to crit that increases the lower the health of the target should lead to some pretty crazy DPS numbers. It will start slower than other things, but toward the end of the fight it would ramp up pretty fast.

My BS/DA scrapper from live disputes your not optimal assertion. He was stupid good.

Who skips Death Shroud? If I'm skipping anything in DA it's Cloak of Fear and/or Oppressive Gloom.

I can't give you any specific build advice because I've never played that particular combo, though I know BS/Katana pretty well. However, I can give a quick bit of leveling/respec advice. You can lean on Divine Avalanche early on before your build matures and drop it from the build after you have Invincibility and Tough Hide. The fact that DA gives you primarily melee defense and Invuln revolves around typed defense means they don't really synergize that well. Look into sets like Kinetic Combat, Eradication, and Aegis for your defense needs. You need no more than 4 of each to get the defense you want, so you have room for a couple more enhancements to shore up the deficiency in the sets.

My wife and I both have characters that are "us" in-game. I'm a Willpower/Dark Melee tank. He's an extension of my "me" character from live whose backstory was he ordered a replica broadsword from ebay and ended up receiving a demonically possessed one instead (BS/DA scrapper). He wielded the sword for so long he absorbed some of it's dark energy and learned to use it. My wife is a Beast/Kinetic Mastermind. She's a licensed veterinary technician by profession, and we have a concerning number of pets. So I keep the baddies away from her while her and our small army of pets tear them apart. I'm strongly considering doing another "me" with Street Justice because it's pretty representative of how I actually used to fight on the rare occasions I had to in my youth (minus the big roundhouse kick, I was never that coordinated). Edit: After thinking about it a little more I think I will make my next tank a tribute to my dad, who I also lost to cancer almost exactly 5 years ago. I'm not sure exactly what the build will be, but I know exactly what his costume will look like already.

I've got a Fire/MA that is fun. Not especially fast, but if I'm not still having fun while farming I'm not inclined to do it. I have a max of about 3 runs before I get bored and want to do something else.

Gotta throw some love for Dark Armor. My wife has a Dark/Fire that she runs that didn't die for over a year. I'm working on a Dark/BS that on paper should be just as tough. And a Shield/StJ that I'm having a lot of fun with. I've got Rad, Electric, SR, Willpower, and Fire that are all pretty good too. I built the Electric/Psi tank specifically for running Synapse TFs because there is no better build for that particular TF.

A Sonic that skipped Scream and Shout makes me sad. I ran a Sonic/Devices on live that could complete whole missions without even being attacked, let alone damaged. And he had enough damage output that he didn't lag behind on teams either. My build was very different from yours though. I originally built him as the answer to a forum challenge to find a build Time Bomb wasn't completely useless on.

It's all in how you craft the character and their backstory. My main in the before times was claws/regen. Sounds like a Wolverine ripoff (except Wolverine is mechanically a Willpower scrapper, it's weird), until you read his backstory that states he is a cyborg whose nanomachines perpetually repair any damage to his body to the state it was in when they were introduced to it. Personally, Ninjitsu seems like a solid choice. Defense based sets are generally better for scrappers than resistance based sets, and Ninjitsu has a heal, which SR lacks. And positional defense is almost always better than typed.

My main was a claws/regen for 7 years. Some of you old timers might remember me from the forums back then. In order to be successful with /regen, you really need to know what the enemies can do. -recharge will get a /regen killed faster than anything else, especially since the things that do it are difficult to get defense to from set bonuses. Back in the day I was arguably the most successful /regen scrapper on my server (Pinnacle, so big fish/small pond), and it was entirely because I knew exactly what every enemy I was facing was going to throw at me. I had also managed to softcap S/L defense, which covered probably 70% of the attacks most enemies threw at you. Most of the time that defense was enough that my stupid high passive regen could carry me through most fights. Major caveat here: This was after playing the character consistently for 7 years and a LOT of trial and error with getting the build just right. I did not start out that good by any stretch of the imagination. It also meant I was not killing things as fast as other scrappers, because I dedicated so much of my build to keeping me on my feet. I justified that to myself with the knowledge that a living scrapper kills 100% faster than a dead one. Regen can be good, but pretty much every other set is better with the same level of investment. That much is true. Come to think of it, I kinda want to try and build a Regen to that level again. The good sets are so much more accessible now than they were when I did it before, and ATOs didn't even exist yet. Challenge accepted.

Late to the party, but I'm going to address the "hot garbage in the hardest content" comment from earlier. My Dark/SR Sentinel proudly wears the Master of ITF badge that I soloed. That combo is generally not one of the higher damage output builds, and it isn't a proc build. But I still pulled it off solo. I've played that character a little bit since the buffs, and in my estimation it would be easier to do now if they hadn't changed the requirements for the badge.

I've got one I've been slow burn leveling. One thing I noticed is the chance to gain endurance every time you hit with most of your attacks offsets DA's end hungriness nicely.

My StJ/Bio is an unkillable god.....as long as there aren't any defense debuffs coming in. He's softcapped to all types, so he plays a lot like an SR against certain enemy groups. If he's being debuffed, it turns into I have about 30 seconds to kill this thing before I die, because that's my cast cycle on my absorb and heal.

Mine is either: "Guys, I killed your intern. Coffee's gonna be late" Or "Bring your kid to work day!"

230,880,000,000 That's my guess.

I've actually really enjoyed the PuGs that went spectacularly badly. They are often far more entertaining than the teams that run like a well oiled machine. Those teams that just have a really bad mix of ATs and powersets are fun, especially when you actually manage to complete whatever it is you're doing. Granted, most of the characters I bring on those teams could probably do it by themselves, so I'm in little danger. It's just entertaining to watch things go sideways in epic ways.

If you're going to do your namesake in the game, he's an Invuln/War Mace.

I can confirm. Mine can, but it takes a long time. He's not really in any danger of dying, but his DPS is just barely enough to whittle him down over time.

Well. Nothing else for it. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

My Street Justice/Bio scrapper can do it, and he's not really that optimized for damage since I chased defense to get him softcapped to all types (and succeeded). I still use Envenomed Daggers in most fights just to speed it up some, since it takes him ages to take down a GM otherwise.

If we ever get Carnie costume pieces I would like the masks at least made available to male characters.