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If so, he just eclipsed dear old dad. I mean... Blaster... how? What? Huh? Well, I guess people do crazy things with Blasters. I may not understand it, but somehow it's possible. Very impressive.

Not having played Blasters since the early game, I have no idea how you pulled this off, but awesome job! 👍

Resistance itself resists resistance debuffs. So while 90% resistance is subject to cascading resistance failure, 95% resistance handles a 50% resistance debuff, and 100% handles a 100% resistance debuff. So there is still some value in overcapping resistance. Resistance debuffs are much rarer than defence debuffs, though, which is I think why this isn’t much discussed.

Shield makes it "easy". You'll be fine.

Shield/MA/Soul

Congratulations! It makes me so happy seeing people do this. I need to finish leveling and IOing and incarnating my Shield/MA and get back to this on live instead of beta. I know I can’t beat your time, but I know I can at least beat my own time, which will still put a big smile on my face. ITF +4x8 enemies buffed no temps no insps no deaths: 1 hour 28 minutes and 3 seconds I think two changes bought me the most time. I had been pulling and clearing the EBs and such around Rommy on the final mission before going in. But I realized that hitting the aggro cap before going in wouldn't just let me pick off the AVs one at a time, but it would also let me avoid pulling any of the EBs that surround him. It worked like a charm and saved some time. And once I was down to Rommy, I pulled him to the ambush door to delay the ambushes until after the fight, wiped out whoever came with him, summoned Longbow, and went to town. He went down much faster that way. I did use amplifiers. Who's next? How fast can we get this thing done? (I'm sure @Tsuko can beat my time by using amplifiers, and @nihilii was within spitting distance using only tier 3 incarnates.) Edit: Posting here because it doesn't seem worth necroing the thread, but I finally beat my old time by a significant margin, AND didn't use Lore this time. 1:24:06

I believe that every call for buffs has been a joke made by people who know how to make those sets into immortal godlings. I know that I at least was attempting to jokingly make the opposite point. I was praising the test while also cautioning against drawing overly-broad conclusions, such as thinking the mentioned sets needed buffs. I guess that wasn't as clear as I'd hoped.

That's crazy! I did not expect it to be that big of a jump. Interesting!

It buffs up pretty good.

Even if not 100%, Super Reflexes has very high base values, so the 2.48% additional enhancement provides 0.64% defense. It still sounds small, but it's taking us from 40.56% defense to 41.20% defense, and we're approaching the soft cap, where marginal improvements have an exaggerated impact. At 40.56% defense, an even level minion is hitting us 9.44% of the time. At 41.20% defense, that same minion is hitting us 8.80% of the time. The lieutenants and bosses scale proportionally. You could call that 100% - 8.80%/9.44% = 6.8% less damage taken, or perhaps 9.44%/8.80% - 100% = 7.3% more damage mitigation, depending on our definition of mitigation. Not huge, not insignificant, it's a bit better. But in the real world, where I would hope that even people playing with SOs have pushed themselves over 45% with pool powers, the extra defense from IOs would provide no extra mitigation outside of incarnate content.

I don't think of it as overslotting. Yes, people are unlikely to slot all of them in a finished build, but they'll also be slotting sets for set bonuses, so we're still rather underslotted in that sense compared to a true IO build. And giving some primaries 2 uniques and some 4 sounds like a strange way to compare them. To me it seems simplest and fairest to give everyone everything.

I agree. I'm interested to see hybrid SO/proc builds compared to each other, not to straight SO builds. And I was guessing that +2x8 would be a good difficulty for comparing them to each other, though that's just a guess.

A bit. 40.56% defense with 3 SOs, 41.20% with 3 IOs. That's about a 7% reduction in the number of hits taken.

Very little, I imagine. 3 SOs in an armor give 56% enhancement, 3 IOs in an armor give 58.48% enhancement, at least if you don't start +ing them.

Yeah, and I hope nothing I say suggesting changes or cautions comes across as impugning what @Galaxy Brain has done here. I think it's awesome, as long as we understand that it's totally unreasonable for me to conclude that we should... Buff Shield Defense and Dark Armor!!! 😉 (Though if you want to give Dark Armor a little DDR, I won't complain. Shhhh. It'll be our secret.)

I'd love to include a double stack of it, but since it requires attacking, I don't see how to include it within the confines of the way the test is set up. You could run the defense amplifier. The extra 7.5% resistance is similar to a single stack of the ATO, and most people are going to get more defense from bonuses, so another 5% defense isn't unreasonable.

And +6% defense and +8% to +18% scaling resistance from the defense and resistance uniques, which I tend to slot even on lowbie builds. And while few people would slot all of these, you could go nuts with uniques to at least get some semblance of IO benefits without the complexity of an IO build, still keeping the slotting completely standard across the primaries. Shield Wall Reactive Defenses Numina Panacea Preventive Medicine Regenerative Tissue Unbreakable Guard Steadfast Protection Gladiator's Armor Impervious Skin Power Transfer Call that your mid level test, maybe, instead of what I was saying I use as a baseline. And then there's the Tanker ATO, but that's harder to fit into a test like this, so I guess set that aside. I think the results would be you'd need to bump the level of the test up to +2 to continue to see a meaningful spread of results, and that you'd see a lot of shifting around in those results, though I won't even try to predict the order.

I think your mid level might be the baseline I mentioned, adding the defense and resistance uniques, Combat Jumping, Tough, and Weave. I fear your testing method would start breaking down at that point, with most of the sets proving to be immortal. And I can't imagine any well-built endgame Tanker not being immortal against this test, even set to +4, if potentially requiring active play to stack the ATO or heal or respond to debuffs or whatever on some sets. For giggles I just took my Dark Armor Tanker into a fire farm at +4x8, and there's no issue with going AFK, even as the minions and lieutenants slowly melt, leaving mostly bosses pounding on me. Endgame Tankers are completely different animals from slotting only SOs and depending only on your primary. I think high-level testing would be real-world challenges on real-world builds, such as the no temps no insps enemies buffed +4x8 MoITF. But in the real world, most people use inspirations, and most people are tanking for teams, and most people's builds aren't carefully optimized, and have goals other than pure survivability, and enemies aren't buffed, and none of these tests will do a particularly good job of reflecting actual play experience. Still very interesting and worth doing and discussing, as long as we understand that it's all somewhat artificial. Random comment on Dark Armor in this test - since a single heal takes it from 0 to full, hitting the heal at 1/2 health may be limiting performance.

I really like how you did that.

When I want to compare baseline performance in Mids, I slot SOs, take Combat Jumping, Tough, and Weave, slot the defense and resistance uniques, and the Tanker resist ATO. That then gives me a good idea what I’m looking at needing for additional mitigation from the secondary, IOs, and incarnate powers.

I’m a Tanker primary now? I like it. 😉 Anyway, IOs and incarnates and a secondary are a different sort of test. This is just a primary and SOs. It’s interesting at least.

And no temps no insps. Fastest time looks like 1:29:55 by @Tsuko's Rad/SS Tanker. @nihilii got 1:31:37 on an Invuln/DB Tanker. I was off the pace at 1:36:36 (unposted) on my Shield/MA Tanker doing 334 DPS. But I also agree that...

Awesome! Congratulations!

It's Invuln/MA instead of Invuln/Staff, and I don't know what your energy/negative resistance is now, but here's a build I was testing on beta that seemed slightly harder to kill than my Shield/MA. Assuming two stacks of the ATO, you're at 75.8% EN resist. Best used with the Defense Amplifier taking you to 83.3%. Then you still have up to 10% scaling resistance, so you'll be hard capped at 33% hit points, which if you have Dull Pain up, will still be almost 1200. Anyway, perhaps a useful reference.

Yeah, go ahead and try the ITF challenge in the Tank Gods thread. A well-built Invuln/Staff should be able to survive it. I'm guessing the problem would be getting enough damage output from Staff to put down level 54 AVs in a reasonable time frame. But there's no time limit, and I encourage anyone to try. Misery loves company! 😉