Kaballah

The really blatant IO uniques are: - Gladiator's Armor +3% all def - Steadfast Protection +3% all def - Shield Wall +5% all resist - Reactive Defenses "scaling resist bonus" - Unbreakable Guard +7.5% life Practically all of my characters slot all of these regardless of their AT, they're just really strong as Novacat says Blessing of the Zephyr 4 pt KB protection for characters that don't have it built into their primary/secondary sets

I get it that Fire is not the best in one category or another, but you're saying that 4 sets are better wrt endurance drain and the other 7 are worse. Every set has some sort of hole or drawback. The point is not that Fire is "better" than the other sets at whatever specific category, but that it's good enough for the great majority of content, and has problems with a few things the way most sets have problems with a few things. Even my electric armor tank can eventually get overwhelmed by big enough piles of malta, even my ice armor tank would get mashed by stuff like Rularuu mobs. e: huh I just noticed Fire/Temperature Protection also has 20% -recharge resist, go figure

What's your point?

Fire armor actually has 50% end drain resist on Consume while it is up (2 minutes, easily perma) and practically no sets have any -recharge resist (only Electric Armor that I can think of). Only a couple of sets have tools vs psionic dmg. What does "lesser mez protect" mean exactly, you have the same 13 points of status protect vs everything except KB as other tank sets? and the KB you can easily fix with gear anyway e: well okay not vs "everything", no protection vs confuse or terrorize, but I cannot recall that ever being a big deal

Sad that this doesn't work any more 😞

I agree my fire armor tank feels very capable vs. almost all of the content, except the stuff that most other tanks have problems with (malta, some combinations of IDF spawns, the like)

I made a fire/fire/pyre tanker to examine this and while I'm sure my build isn't hyper optimal, it's reasonably comparable - inf/hr is something like 80% of my spine/fire brute, using no insps or outside buffs. However if you have some method of keeping your dmg bonus high without effort I have no doubt they'd be very comparable or perhaps the tanker would end up being even better. The tanker is way more comfortable to drive though, can go AFK in a crowd of elites and has better endurance sustain despite having an attack chain that on paper should be more expensive.

Fire/Fire/Pyre went from one of the most frustrating combos pre-I24 to one of the best. Bonfire + Sudden Acceleration is extremely good, powerful soft CC, it's so good I have to force myself not to take it on all my blasters. Consume can be fitted with the Energy Manipulator proc piece which turns it into a pretty reliable PBAOE stun. It won't stun bosses and isn't going to stun 100% of a full group of enemies but it definitely will stun most, and you can also put a Fury of the Gladiator -resist proc piece on it to make for a very good opener for your nuke.

I put a higher priority on capping s/l resist than a defense, and if you're exclusively teaming with your blaster imo the defense you'd be better off stacking is AOE, unless you are regularly doing without tank/brute and/or CC.

The P2W self rez powers have a 30 minute cooldown that ignores recharge bonuses, Rise of the Phoenix has a base cooldown of 5 minutes and that can be shortened with recharge bonus to something like 90 seconds.

re: 1, Yes I'm pretty sure you can. re: 2, I have no idea but considering you just died that's not a really big concern, put health (unslotted it only heals you for 50%) or something on it the cooldown is much shorter and the untouchable period is EXTREMELY useful, the P2W self rez is a little bit better than using an awaken insp but only a little bit.