Werner

Yeah, Martial Arts was my choice for the +10% defense to more easily hit the incarnate soft cap. And the AoE isn't that bad with near perma-Hasten, Shield Charge, and an incarnate AoE. Not top tier by any means, but fast enough to not be painful, at least to me.

Because it's a tanker forum? 😁 Haha, yeah. On my finished characters, I normally solo at +4x8 with no temporary powers or inspirations. Under those conditions, my Katana/Dark Brute struggled against Antimatter (died every attempt), Carnies, MoITF with enemies buffed, and AE mission 801.2. They were all much smoother on my Dark/MA Tanker, and I still put out enough damage that I didn't feel like it was a slog to beat things up.

I'm not sure it's unusual, but I'd want to get my energy and negative resistance high, so I'd be looking to fit a bunch of Shield Walls into the build. It's Staff rather than EM, and the DPS was pathetic during testing on the test server, so I never built it for real, but this is what I did with SR/Staff.

I've played a fully-built Katana/Dark Brute and Dark/MA Tanker. There's the obvious stuff - the Brute does more damage, the Tanker is more survivable. But I enjoyed playing the Tanker significantly more than the Brute, at least once fully-built. Enjoyment is subjective, of course. I sped through the leveling on both, and it was a while back, so I can't speak much to that aspect of them.

I liked the Invulnerability/Martial Arts I spent a lot of time testing on the test server, but I ultimately leveled a Shield/Martial Arts for the greater damage output at a minor cost to survivability. But this Invuln/MA didn't suck for damage, at least not single target DPS. It can still solo DPS some level 54 AVs, which was my damage target. It just didn't equal the Shield. Incarnate soft cap to SLEN and 50% to fire, cold, and melee with only a single target in range. Incarnate soft cap to fire and cold with 6 targets in range. If you don't do defense debuffing incarnate content, the defense is overkill, though. Suffers a bit in the resistance department, but with a second stack of the ATO (6.7%), once you start taking damage for the scaling resists to kick in (up to 10%), and if you run around with the defense amplifier like I do (7.5%), even Psionic will be 85% before you go down, though psionic and toxic damage are of course your weaknesses still since you have so little defense against them. In practice, as I would play it, resistance is fine, and it was better to spend the build resources elsewhere. My build does make compromises for damage output, so I won't try to claim this is the most unkillable tank besides stone, but I think this is at least the primary and secondary I would pick, and the build priorities I would have (other than damage), if that's what I was trying to build. Edit: I should qualify my answer - this is built to be played without inspirations, because that's how I play. Toss inspirations into the mix and I'd probably take some other primary since purple inspirations will handle the incarnate soft capping and defense debuffing on the rare occasions that's needed. Of what I have any experience with, maybe Dark Melee or Staff at that point if nothing but survival matters.

I do short forum export, formatting code type "official forums (vbulletin)", export data chunk as well as data link.

Rebirth vs. Ageless: On the surface, Shield's big survivability weakness is lack of healing and regeneration, so Rebirth is the obvious choice here, and was what I was first testing on beta in my survivability tests for my build. But what I found was that in content nasty enough to kill me, the typical reason I'd be taking more damage than my native regeneration could keep up with was that I'd been debuffed into the ground, and in such a case, usually Rebirth was only delaying the inevitable. By contrast, Ageless stopped the debuffs, and the 30 second duration of the highest debuff resistance usually got me through the trouble. It was counterintuitive and surprised me, but I went where my testing showed me I should go. The extra endurance and recharge come in handy much more often than the debuff resistance in more normal content, but I was mostly after the debuff resistance when I added it to the build. Energy Mastery vs. Soul Mastery: Gloom is great for DPS, but doesn't fit character concept, and better regeneration and endurance management are good things. And they reduce the argument for Ageless over Rebirth. DPS: Clobber. Clobber as often as possible. The best chain is probably Clobber -> Shatter -> Jawbreaker. The problem there is recharge. If you want to run that chain, Clobber must recharge in 4.488 seconds, Shatter in 3.432 seconds, and Jawbreaker in 3.96 seconds. You can drop something for Hasten, but you'd still have to alter some other slotting to get there. Another option would be to reduce the recharge requirements by taking and slotting up Pulverize as well, but that burns another precious power pick and slots too. Hasten is probably more generally useful. Otherwise I guess you're tossing a Crowd Control in there, a slow, low DPS attack. In any case, it doesn't looks like you're set up to take advantage of War Mace's high potential DPS. Or AoE to some extent, since the faster your AoEs recharge, the more AoE damage you do, even if there's no AoE chain to be had. Defense: I like being soft capped to incarnate content, not just regular content. That's of course a lot harder to do with War Mace than Martial Arts (+10% defense from Storm Kick), so would involve big compromises that probably aren't worth it. But I'd really want my melee defense at least in the 50s. Not sure where I'd grab that from. One fairly easy way to raise defense on your build is to take Hover, but that's surely against concept. I have a trash Shield/Mace build that has 67% melee defense without Hover. But I didn't realize at the time that Active Defense stacks, and there are big compromises on resistance, so I'm definitely not recommending this build. It still might have some ideas in it for raising your melee defense.

Hopefully no one minds if I dump it here. I suppose the Shield slotting might be translatable to War Mace, though nothing ever translates exactly, I've found.

I'd personally do a Shield/Mace Tanker. While the resists are admittedly not as high as on a resist set, they're not bad on a Shield Tanker, plus soft capped defense and high DDR and high hit points, plus the damage boost and Shield Charge so that it's less painful doing Tanker damage. Here are my resists with one Tanker ATO on my Shield/MA. The psionic hole could easily be plugged better. It was my dump stat. Still not too bad most of the time since soft capped defense. If not Tanker, I'd probably go Scrapper and try to max out the War Mace damage without making myself too much of a glass cannon.

Looks pretty good. Here's mine for comparison. It's fairly similar I think. I use Kismet for the to-hit buff, and Focused Accuracy if I'm to-hit debuffed, as I like to hit, and I like to keep my defense up. I have Hasten for recharge. More healing in Dark Regen specifically for uplevel AVs if I'm unable to have a crowd around me. Lots of recharge resistance as I hate being recharge debuffed. Oppressive Gloom only because it's easier on the endurance. Our weakness is defense debuffs, but there's not much to do about that on Dark Armor. Barrier or Ageless I guess. If going Ageless, probably Tactics rather than Focused Accuracy to help the team more and because the debuff resistance won't be as important. I went Barrier. Well, ultimately I went Shield/MA to solve my defense debuff problems, but until then, my Dark/MA was my favorite character.

In the current game, my Katana/Dark is a Brute, and my old Katana/Dark Scrapper build isn't designed for the current game. So I don't have a build, but yes, Katana/Dark is a solid combination for Scrappers or Brutes. Including the old game, I've leveled three of them to 50, and outfitted all of them with the best that influence could buy. Although I was playing starting in beta, I didn't show up on the forums until about 2 years in, and by then, the Scrapper Challenge Rules were already a thing, so I didn't have any part in coming up with them, but they were and are my favored style of play! On fully-built 50s, anyway.

Just your character against an AV, AV drops, you don't, anything goes. But everyone has their own personal style or restrictions. For me, that's usually +4, no temps, no insps, no Lore. But I've occasionally used Lore, and my main (SD/MA Tanker) usually walks around with all the P2W amplifiers running. They last for 8 hours, the game doesn't consider them temporary powers, and influence falls like rain, so I treat them like part of my build. I'm sure I'm in the minority on that, but I think the important thing is honesty. "Hello. I'm Werner. I'm a filthy amplifier user." 😉

I fail at altitis. Only three, and I only play the first. Shield Defense/Martial Arts -- 50 Dark Armor/Martial Arts -- 50 Super Reflexes/Staff Fighting -- 29

I'm not death = delete serious, but taking death seriously gives me extra satisfaction when I survive, and is part of my enjoyment of the game.

10% for Core or Radial. I like Radial for the debuff resistance. But in terms of closing the Hasten gap, all the shorter time ranges with higher buffs do still help. I'm sure I calculated the average contribution, but I forget and I'm feeling lazy this morning. Upper teens as I recall. I checked my own flying demon - I took Hover, Fly, and Afterburner. They're all serving as set mules, which was enough of an min/max excuse for me to take them, though I'd have taken them regardless. Just easier to justify with an excuse.

Do eeeet! I did. I found that in the nastiest content, if my basic regeneration couldn’t keep me standing, even Rebirth often wasn’t enough, because I’d been debuffed into the ground in some way. Ageless worked better in practice, much to my surprise. And closing the Hasten gap plus affording the endurance for Assault gave me a mild but noticeable DPS bump. I’m a no travel power guy too, surviving on jetpacks. But a winged demon’s gotta fly. Bringing it back around to something closer to the original topic, that can be a way to get an extra power pick to take Taunt.

Fast time, too. But no buffed enemies? I am disappoint. 😄

I was involved in an earlier Regen thread that eventually got locked after things got heated. I was initially in the camp that Regen was in a pretty sad state compared to other sets in the current game and could use a look. But the thread and people with more recent and more relevant experience convinced me otherwise. I will probably just leave it at that. And if I do end up pulled into another discussion, my only recent experience is casual leveling of my old namesake Katana/Regen Scrapper, I think in his 30s now, so I'm not in a position to intelligently debate the pros and cons of specific suggestions anymore.

My version of hopping in and getting busy is to charge through the crowd. By the time I hit the AVs, I'm at the aggro cap of trash mobs, allowing me to fight the AVs one or sometimes two at a time while maximizing Shield DPS. I can handle all four at once, but see no reason to.

It's been a long time since I've fought Rularuu in earnest, but I'd think anything with high resists and healing would be the counter to extreme to-hit. But Bill mentioned doing Storm Palace laps on a Claws/SR Scrapper, and I've done the same on several Scrappers, so I'd think any decent Tanker could handle at least that much.

I suspect that's the explanation. @Bill Z Bubba has done the ITF solo at +4x8, no temps, no insps, enemies buffed, no deaths, on his SR Tanker. As far as how to build SR, treat it like a hybrid defense/resistance set. Sure, yeah, get to the incarnate soft cap for defense, but also crank your resistance. I'd focus on smashing/lethal and energy/negative for general play, and it just happens to be what you need for the ITF as well. I'd target around 50% resistance to at least those with one Tanker ATO. Not easy, but possible. Get yourself some extra hit points, some extra regeneration, primaries with heals would be great but are not required. You're probably double stacking the ATO for 57% resistance. Say you have 2700 hit points. At 900 hit points you have about 27% scaling resistance from SR, 7% from Reactive Defenses. Now you're hard capped for resistance, and soft capped for defense, with all the DDR you need, and you probably won't spend much time that low on HP. Another option is the full @Linea, and cycle resist powers like Rune of Protection and Melee Core. SR is very, very solid when built right. This is all end game, incarnates, accolades, high budget, but I suspect SR is comparatively even better while leveling and with low to moderate budgets.

Haha, yeah, I don't think you'll need amps. SR is tailor-made for this. I assume you built for a good smashing/lethal resist baseline so that you'll cap it before you're too low on hit points. And they can't debuff your defense. On enemies buffed, they're still hitting you significantly more often, and for significantly more damage, but they're still hitting 90% resists. I'm not sure how much the bosses do, but even on enemies buffed, I wouldn't think it would be enough on a Tanker to make a huge dent in a single hit.

I generally skip Taunt, then get friendly abuse from my friends for sucking at tanking. I may be ridiculously hard to kill, but I'm not so good at keeping them alive. Particularly Pete, but he's exceptionally skilled at dying. I don't know if this is actually true, but I feel like enemies hate debuffers, so I use Darkest Night instead of Taunt on my main. But I think my advice for someone new to Tankers would be to level up with Taunt, get a good feel for it, and then when and if you make an endgame build, decide if it's something you can drop.

Shield/MA. Top tier survivability without having to work hard since I'm lazy. I hate defense debuffs. Shield Charge is a fun AoE. Good DPS - not top tier but sufficient for many level 54 AVs.

Yep. I think if you like going AFK in a crowd of defense debuffers, SR is your primary of choice, but I just did this with my Shield/MA: +4x8 ITF Cimerorans, 20 minutes AFK. To be fair, I use defense amplifiers full time for 5% melee defense. But if I hadn't built around defense amplifiers, I'd probably have grabbed that 5% some other way. Now I'm curious how much I can push it. 2 groups with enemies buffed? Dead after a few minutes. 2 groups not buffed? Dead after 19 minutes, LOL. Without being able to manually click Hasten, my DDR drops to only 67% for a while when there's only one stack of Active Defense. Aggro cap of Cimerorans may get cascading defense failure started during that period, but usually the double stack returns fast enough to keep things from getting life-threatening. But occasionally it doesn't, so going AFK is contraindicated at the aggro cap of debuffers. There's no problem in actual play, though. I keep hitting Hasten manually for a near permanent double stack of Active Defense, and Storm Kick adds 10% to defense, though that's specific to Martial Arts. So I'm normally fighting with 69% melee defense (66% ranged/Aoe) and 89% DDR, which prevents cascading defense failure in incarnate content as well. Edit: I forgot to hit them with Darkest Night. That got me half an hour AFK at the aggro cap of +4x8 "Enemies Are Buffed" Cimerorans. I'm sure they could get lucky, but they'd have to get lucky. I rarely think to use Darkest Night solo. But it's a good thing to slap on someone before going AFK.