Werner

Thank you for the build and comments. Good to know about the Tanker damage buffs. And I gather Titan Weapons is due for "significant adjustments" on page 6, which sounds like code for "we're lowering the DPS because it is a clear outlier", at which point a DA/TW Tanker might not put out sufficient DPS for level 54 AVs. Maybe I'll hold off until until page 6 and see where things stand, rather than level up and IO out and incarnate and accolade a new DA/TW Tanker just in time to be nerfed back to something I'm perhaps no longer interested in playing. I do have my level 49.7 DM/SR Brute to finish up. I doubt he'll compare favorably to my main, but I want to finish his build and see how he performs out in the real world. There's a lot to be said for incarnate soft cap with 95% DDR. I suppose I should have an actual Tanker in my stable, though, for when my friends want one and nobody else is running one. Or maybe even if he doesn't have level 54 AV DPS, all the knockdown and AoE will be so satisfying I'll prefer playing him. Or maybe a TW/DA Brute. So much Dark. So little time.

Yeah, almost all the good builders seem happy to share their builds, experience, tips and tricks. Alas, I have no TW/Bio build of my own to share, and my only experience was leveling up a TW/Bio Scrapper. The low levels weren't fun, but the high levels were with all the AoE and knockdown. That's all I got, sorry. 🙂

That's awesome. It sounds like your DA/TW Tanker does better DPS than I do. Have you done Pylon runs? It's hard for me to imagine that you don't also have better damage mitigation. I'm going to have to play around in Mids'. Can you post your build as a starting point for me customizing it to my tastes? I'll want more than sustainable endurance without temps or insps to handle endurance draining enemies, but I may not have to lose much to get there. I have a TW/Bio Scrapper at 50 that I've not figured out what to do with even though Titan Weapons is lots of fun with all the AoE and knockdown. I may reroll him as a DA/TW Tanker. That combination would suit him better anyway. I have to educate myself a bit on Tanker DPS. Bruising in the tier 1 attack, right? So I have to spam Defensive Sweep? Except that it's a low DPS attack. Probably Ageless Radial, since I should be able to pull off 90% resists to all but Toxic, so then Barrier would only be helping defense, which is mostly only going to matter when suffering from cascading defense failure, which Ageless Radial should do a better job of keeping under control. Do I need Musculature for the DPS? With Ageless Radial rather than Core, losing Cardiac or Agility will also make endurance management tougher. Hmmm. Well, I won't know much until I start poking at it. Thank you for giving this a shot and posting your results, approach, and experience. 🙂

This is a quick attempt to combine two of my Brutes, StJ/SR and Katana/DA. Notes: Maybe drop Focused Accuracy. You have more to-hit than 99% of the game requires. Might be a good way to pick up Oppressive Gloom or Cloak of Fear. Add more or remove some knockback protection. I still occasionally get knocked back at 10 points. I know 12 is good. Not sure about 11. I've not checked if the build has the recharge, but you want to run (Rib Cracker -> Shin Breaker -> Heavy Blow) x 2 -> Crushing Uppercut. A quick eyeball says it's close but I could be wrong. Won't work when Hasten is down. Swapping Crushing Uppercut slotting with another attack may fix it. You can swap in Combat Jumping and Super Jump, but you lose Afterburner as a set mule for recharge. But you could pick up Acrobatics and get rid of some of the knockback slotting. If you swap in Leviathan mastery, you won't have the endurance for your attack chain as currently slotted. An easy fix is Ageless instead of Barrier, but I think it'll lower survivability. You have survivability to spare, though. I'd want to fiddle until I hit 45% smashing/lethal defense, or possibly 45% melee defense, or both. Less than 1% to go on melee.

Four deaths isn't bad. Grats! I used Lore, but I don't think my experience would have been any different without it, and if I do it again, I won't bother. Me no good with pets. No jousting with the Brute, of course, just get in melee range and tank the damage while putting out merely sufficient DPS that meant probably over an hour in the final fight. Perhaps most frustrating was the first ambush when I was finally down to just Romulus, and in fighting off the first ambush, Romulus healed almost to full again.

Super curious now. Yeah, Titan Weapons might be the best way to get the DPS from a Tanker, and Tanker Dark Armor is crazy good. If they can be merged well... oh, my. Yes. Yes, please. Do report back! 😀

Woohoo! Grats! I'm glad I inspired you. 🙂

Yes. I don't personally think it's a good thing that I was able to make a build and go out and do this on the first try. Or the 100th try. I think the game would have been better if it wasn't possible. But that's not the same as saying we should change something now, and I don't think that IOs ruined the game. I'm sure for some people they did ruin the game, but when they were introduced, the additional complexity they added to builds was exactly the kind of puzzle I needed to make me fall in love with the game all over again. And I don't think power levels at the time were excessive, though some may think otherwise, and that's fine too. It's all subjective. Of course we'll all have different opinions, and that's just fine. I think incarnate powers are the main thing that pushed power levels way up in the current game, but then, I'm guessing that was the point of them. We were becoming incarnates, becoming much more powerful. Look at how amazing we are now, wow! We are teh uberz! Then boom, hit us with much harder content to humble us all again and bring the challenge back. I'd have loved that if done right, though I had my fears about whether it would or even could be done right. But with the game ending suddenly, we never really got the challenge back, leaving us too powerful for some people's tastes, including my own. Definitely not to the point of me disliking the game - I still love the game. But I think I loved it even more before incarnate powers, loved it more when the Rikti War Zone Challenge was hard for me, when soloing AVs was hard for me. I'm not advocating for the removal of incarnate powers, mind you, as I think removing them at this point would annoy far more people than it pleased. Also causing power inflation is the introduction of new sets. The winter sets for instance are very powerful, similar to the purple sets. I think we'd have been better off without new sets in the new game. But again, I'm not advocating for their removal, and for the same reason as before. Also causing power inflation, yet at the same time a solution to other issues of the game, is the sets offering much more resistance than before. I think this is probably overall a good thing, as it seems like you should be able to buff resistance on resistance sets as easily as you can buff defense on defense sets. But it does contribute to the power level problem. It would have at least been significantly harder to do what I did without those resistance changes. Also causing power inflation is enhancement boosters, though less so, particularly from an influence to benefit standpoint I think. But again, they're here now, and it'd probably cause more grumbling to remove them than to keep them. So this might frustrate some people, but I'm making no suggestions at all to solve any perceived power level problem. I think we're better off at this point not solving the problem at all, and of course plenty of people probably don't even see it as a problem. I think we just need to avoid making it any worse if possible. No more new sets. No more power creep. Just draw a line in the sand before we go any further. But I doubt many people in the game at large would agree with me on that. People tend to want new shiny things. And if that's what most people want, I don't want to stand in the way. Back on the original suggestion, I don't think account binding purples and only getting them through drops would improve the enjoyment of the game for most people. I think more often it would just widen the gulf between what people willing to grind endlessly can accomplish and casual players can accomplish, and lead to louder grumbling about overpowered characters. And I think City of Heroes has always occupied a casual niche, and should continue to do so. I like that I can go out and accomplish something, then post a build, and without huge effort at least, anyone can quickly level up a new 50, buy some IOs, grind out the incarnate powers, grab the accolades, and go do exactly what I did. On the old Scrapper forum, we'd always played this strange game of king of the hill where instead of trying to push other people off the hill, we were trying to get as many people as we could to join us on the hill. Look what we can do! You can do this too! And you can. Yes, it still takes a little time and investment unless you're willing to do it on the test server only. But it's not a huge investment of time and effort. I think it's good that people can fairly easily duplicate anything I do, not bad. I'm not special. My build isn't secret or unique. It didn't take 3000 hours of grinding over the course of years. And I don't want to add more grind by making purples account bound and drops only. Again, this is all subjective. I'm calling it "grind", but I personally enjoy "grinding" and I know lots of other people do too. Despite the odds against grinding out a full purple set, I'd probably still eventually do it on my favorite character, eventually slightly improve my character that way. Or maybe not. But lots of people do get a sense of accomplishment from spending a lot of time and effort to accomplish something, and many MMOs cater to that. But again, City of Heroes has always occupied a casual niche, and I'm personally OK with that. I think that's the niche it should continue to occupy. And I'm also glad that people make suggestions. And I can dislike a suggestion while still being happy that the suggestion was made. So thank you, OP, for making the suggestion, even if I don't personally like it, even if I personally think it would make the game worse not better. But you're trying to improve the game. That's a good thing. Thank you. It's unfortunate that people have gotten riled up, but I can understand it - we're passionate about the game. That's also good most of the time. 🙂

Thank you for doing some napkin math. It sounds like L54 AVs would be difficult to impossible without help that I don't want to resort to, such as inspirations and Envenomed Daggers. My previous build had 180 DPS. I couldn't put down a level 54 AV even with Lore pets. I could do damage while the pets were up, assuming they didn't kill themselves, but the AV would heal back up while the pets were down. At 280 DPS I didn't need Lore pets at all for the few AVs I've tried, which is good since I lack Mastermind skills and they seem suicidal.

Shadow Maul is much improved, at least. It still doesn’t excite me, but at least it normally hits a few enemies. I took it and I use it.

Well, OK, I’ll at least try when he’s built, so we’ll find out soonish. Trying to avoid being a one trick pony, I pushed his hit points and resists and regen as well. I’m thinking Rebirth, that even with high regen and Siphon Life, it’s still more healing that he’ll need. Not sure. I may experiment. In the old game, my DM/SR was simply weaker in most cases than my Katana/Dark. I predict it’ll be the same here. But I liked playing both.

Many people play Brutes as a tough melee character, not to fill the Tanker role on the team. It can fill that role if desired, but a Tanker can usually fill it better. Also, City of Heroes is pretty lax on building for roles on a team. Most any team can work. For Street Justice, I would take Heavy Blow, Rib Cracker, Spinning Strike, Shin Breaker, and Crushing Uppercut. That leaves you with only two single-target attacks for a long time. You may want to take Initial Strike and/or Sweeping Cross to fill in the gaps, then possibly respec out of them later. Most people would probably recommend Combat Readiness as well. And if you want to play the Tanker role, then Taunt as well. And that's your whole primary. But I only took the five powers I mentioned on my Street Justice/Super Reflexes. For Willpower, I suggest taking all but the last two powers. I would add Tough and Weave, and either Combat Jumping or Hover. I would also typically add Hasten, Maneuvers, and Tactics, but I feel those are more optional.

Thanks! I didn't know there was an autohit fluffy. I guess 87.4% negative resistance made it mostly irrelevant then, and focusing on resistance rather than defense was a good build choice, at least for that fight. It was meant as my general-purpose build, not a specific ITF build. I guess I shouldn't try this on my Dark Melee/Super Reflexes Brute when I finish leveling him and getting all the goodies for him. Sounds like he'd get destroyed.

Quoted for emphasis. Everyone should consider this when building a Brute, because on most builds 10% smashing/lethal defense is more valuable than the other bonuses. But here, for this specific build, I wanted recharge and mostly smashing/lethal resistance even more than 10% smashing/lethal defense. The conditions are peculiar to the rest of the build, though. On most builds I'd split the set.

Haha. Yes to everything you said. Quoting myself from a private conversation on this exact subject: "If I were making a Dark Armor Tanker, I think I'd go with Martial Arts for the extra 10% defense to all instead of Katana's melee/lethal, and focus on positional defense. Not sure, but that's what I'd be curious about, what I think would work well. I think by again accepting a partial energy/toxic hole, you might, just might, be able to incarnate soft cap defense and cap the other resists without too badly gimping the rest of the build. Your build makes me think it might be possible, as does marcussmythe's in this thread where he hits the regular soft cap with Fire Melee. Add another 10% to that, and you're within spitting distance of what I'm hoping is possible. Those are honestly the only two Dark Armor Tankers I've looked at, and I don't play with Tankers enough to have a good sense for how good the builds are. And I probably won't fiddle with it myself, because it just isn't what I want to play. But yeah, I'd say Martial Arts over Katana on a Tanker. Maybe see what you can do. 😉" Probably so. But I might still give it a look. I'm doing 280 DPS on my current build. If I can hit that number on a Tanker and also get higher survivability, that's hard to argue against. Except that if I'm on a team, people might expect me to... well... tank. On a Brute my friends still let me get away with Scrapperlocking. I think they'd be less forgiving if I was on tauntless Tanker. 😉 But maybe I can fit Taunt in there. Maybe I can learn to tank. Maybe I wouldn't hate it.

He's using Unstoppable, I'm guessing the Tanker version for 3 minutes of 70% resistance to all but Psionic. Plus I think Temp Invulnerability for another 30% resitance to smashing and lethal, probably capped at 90% resistance, so you're doing 10% of your normal damage. 3 minutes is annoyingly long, but not forever. Insulting him makes the time pass faster. 😉

Yeah, it is certainly a bit of a slog. I have more fun casually teaming with friends. Thanks! I'ma killin' 'em as fast as I can! LOL. He's just not a big AoE character, and wasn't really meant to be. I went Katana/Dark long, long ago for the AV soloing. Now I play him because, well, I just like to. I have more efficient killers. But I just find him fun and think of him as my main. Anyway, Oppressive Gloom is probably what I'll do rather than adding more AoE and turning him into something he isn't. Vengeance is just muling Luck of the Gambler, and may be the least painful thing to trade for it. Oppressive Gloom works fine with a single slot, and costs very little endurance. The real cost is the hit point drain, but a slow drain to avoid cascading defense failure is really not a serious problem when you have Dark Regeneration, particularly when the stun prevents most minion damage. Maybe not a lot from minions and with my resistances, but probably more damage than it's causing.

Thinking further, I think the build has several issues that made this more difficult than it needed to be, and I may try solving in a future iteration of it. First up is that I didn't take Oppressive Gloom. I think this may have been a mistake as I suspect the Cimeroran minions debuff defense as well? So perhaps with them stopped from attacking, I would have had fewer instances of cascading defense failure, which was the main threat during the run. Another problem was that 10 points of knockback protection wasn't enough. I know 12 points is enough from experience. I wonder about 11. It was more of an annoyance than a threat, though, perhaps since I took Hover over Combat Jumping. And as mentioned earlier, a more defensive slotting of Divine Avalanche might be nice. Or it might not, because it would lower DPS when I'm using it to prevent cascading defense failure.

The last three powers are all nice to have, but all skippable if needed. I skipped them all on my most recent build on my Katana/Dark. My memory is that it’s numerically better to take Death Shroud and attack less if needed, but my memory may be wrong, and it’s less fun just standing there letting your aura do the work. (Edit: Just checked the numbers. Death Shroud does very slightly better damage per endurance than Initial Strike and Heavy Blow, but it's an AoE. So yes, from an endurance standpoint, take Death Shroud and twiddle your thumbs if necessary. Only Crushing Uppercut does more damage per endurance, and still loses by a mile if there is more than one target.)

I’ve been unable to finish off Marauder at that point before. But he’s slow, so my approach was to just kite until his buff dropped, taunting him the whole time - not my character, me. “Awww, didja need your tier 9 to keep from getting your ass kicked? You can get me big guy, I’m right here. No, now I’m right here. You really going to let me just jump over your head like this? Awww, you threw a rock. That’s cute. Is that really all you got?” And then when it dropped, I’m like, “Oh? Oh now you’re tired? Well, this is gonna hurt.” So yeah. Kite him till it drops. That’s my advice. But I know you were looking for build advice instead. I doubt an epic attack or two are going to do much good against him. I’d focus on the basics of doing more damage and improving survivability. And I’ve never done this, but I suspect the Envenomed Dagger temp power would help if you don’t want to just kite the occasional EB.

I just finished a solo +4x8 Master of the Imperious Task Force (zero defeats, no temporary powers) with the additional restriction of using no inspirations. Succeeded on the first try. Katana/Dark Armor. I remember when the Rikti War Zone Challenge was difficult, when soloing a single level 50 AV no temps, no insps was difficult. I think this game has experienced a bit of power creep. My build. I finished assembling it this morning. Inspired by and some slotting from @Sir Myshkin. A previous iteration of the build found the Cimerorans easier, as it had Divine Avalanche slotted for defense, and so it was very difficult for them to start a cascading defense failure. This one suffered from that a lot. Less so once I settled on an attack chain of Divine Avalanche -> Soaring Dragon -> Divine Avalanche -> The Lotus Drops. I used Barrier when that wasn't sufficient. And I ran away a few times when Barrier wasn't sufficient. The previous iteration of the build didn't have anything close to the DPS required for level 54 AVs, though. The Nictus were pretty simple once I realized that only the Bright Novas were debuffing my defense. After that I always took them down first. The times I came closest to dying were a handful of cascading defense failures, and one time fighting Minotaurs where I wasn't paying attention to my endurance, then noticed it when there was just a sliver left, just in time to not detoggle. And then during the final Romulus fight after it had gone on for probably an hour, my mind drifted off to think about other things, and I wasn't even conscious of the screen or what I was doing for maybe 15 seconds. Fortunately my fingers knew my attack chain, and nothing bad happened, but oops. Attempt these things when you've had a full night's sleep and didn't do a bunch of yard maintenance during the day. I successfully hit Barrier shortly before each Nictus fell during the Romulus fight, and I have a lot of stun resistance. I was pretty worried about it, but I don't think I got dropped below half health during the stuns. I didn't treat it as a kill all. I stealthed where I could. I used Lore pets, but they were mostly suicidal and didn't help much. Have others done or tried this? What primary/secondary/archetype? I don't really know what's possible in the current game. Apparently a lot.

Yep. Slotting for resistance is viable these days. Go into Mids'. Window. Set Bonus Finder. Scroll down to Res(Smash,Lethal). Select it. All the sets that offer smashing/lethal resistance are then shown in the window, along with how many of the set you need to get the bonus. You can also select the bonus you're looking for, so I tend to start by looking at the biggest possible, then work my way down the list.

I don't know Psi, so can't comment, and can't furnish a completed build. But Dark Armor for Brutes is very, very nice, at least once fully-built. I admit that endurance while leveling an be a problem. Have a look at my endurance management tips over here: I'm still fiddling with it, and it's Katana/Dark, but you might pull some ideas from this. Endurance shouldn't be a problem, even for the most part endurance debuffs. Barrier to cope with defense debuffs and the energy/toxic holes. Credit to @Sir Myshkin for the inspiration and some of the slotting in this iteration of my build.

Heh, yeah. Sometimes so. When hard pressed, you want to optimize your use of it, so you let your health dwindle to scary levels, and then you're watching your health dwindle again and watching the countdown on the recharge and crossing your fingers it recharges in time. But hey, if you don't die, how can you use Soul Transfer? Kinda worth it. 😉

Oops! Fixed. Thank you.