Werner

The friends I tank for would happily tell you that I'm not the best at tanking. 😉 (I'm actually pretty new to tanking, and the build doesn't even have a taunt.)

What? I don’t know what you’re talking about! <whistles innocently> (I have been accused of being a masochist. Or one might argue a sadist since I’ve encouraged others to attempt it.)

For the ITF stuff, I don't remember seeing anyone complaining that the game is too easy or calling for nerfs. Well, maybe I implied it was too easy in one post when I compared what we can do now to what we could do in the old game, saying there'd been some power creep, but I don't remember calling for nerfs. You can still make the game hard on yourself if you want it hard. I do it for the fun of it, the challenge, and bragging rights. And the ITF is my favorite task force, so I'm glad it became the challenge du jour vs. some other one. It's set to AVs. I don't think you can get AVs to spawn as EBs on a task force, regardless of settings, but I don't think I've ever tried.

Agreed. It seems ridiculous that we can do it, but what I think doesn't matter, and I'm still really enjoying the game, so it's all good.

I've surely missed some examples, particularly as I'm pulling only from a couple of threads, but for solo +4x8 MoITF, enemies buffed, no temps, no insps, no deaths, I know of five people having done it, using two Scrappers, one Brute, and seven Tankers. Without enemies buffed, I know more people have done it, and with a wider variety of archetypes.

You dont have to thank me 🙂 it's @Werner build with just a bit of me inside 😛 Thank you, though Energy Melee vs. Martial Arts makes the build at least half yours. I'll need to figure Energy Melee out soon, though. A friend's favorite hero is an Energy Melee/Super Reflexes Brute. I designed his original build, so I'd like to bring it up to date. Hopefully he'll enjoy the Energy Melee changes. It sounds like he very likely will.

MoITF +4x8 no temps no insps no amplifiers no base buffs no Lore no One with the Shield no Darkest Night no deaths enemies buffed player debuffed completed in 2:23:36. It was tougher and slower without amplifiers, but not too much worse than it was with them. Still did it on the first try. The large group of minotaurs and cyclopes knocked me into the red a couple times before I accepted that I had to run and pull. I got lucky with the final AVs, and only had to fight them one at a time by capping aggro with minions and lieutenants. Rommy got one good shot in, about 2/3 of my hit points. I should have run, but I kept fighting.

We can largely remove this specific source of volatility. Hit the pylon a few times and wait. The moment it heals back to full, start.

What Tsuko said. You can run it without amplifiers and be OK for even extreme content, not just mortal-tier content. It is optimized around the defense amplifier, but most of the time you wouldn't even notice the difference. LIke the extra defense would only matter when getting hit by serious defense debuffs in incarnate content. It looks like I'm sitting at 88.77% DDR and 60.6% ranged and AoE defense, so without the defense amplifier... what's the incarnate to hit? 58.5%? So you can handle (60.6%-58.5%)/(100%-88.77%) = 19% in defense debuffs before incarnate enemies start peeling your defense open. But your DDR is still too high for much of a cascade to get going. You'll never drop below 45%, and we're talking about an extreme situation. Melee is even better at 63.67%, letting you handle 46% defense debuffs before dropping under the incarnate soft cap. I just want even better. I don't want anyone to be able to peel open my defense in any way, even in extreme incarnate content. Oh, also, if you're running it with Ageless Radial as intended, if the worst happens, you can still click that. But I wanted to reserve it for endurance and to-hit debuffs. See, most of my build testing and tweaking was done on content noticeably deadlier than the maxed buffed/debuffed ITF - incarnate enemies throwing out every kind of debuff under the sun while wandering ambushes keep you at the aggro cap of that for half an hour in a row with no chance to even breathe. Nasty, nasty stuff. Much faceplanting, tweaking, faceplanting, tweaking. When you get to that level of hell, something like the defense amplifier can make a pretty significant difference. For something "easy" (haahahaha) like the maxed buffed/debuffed ITF, it's not going to matter as much. I think I can do that without amplifiers by swapping to Cardiac Core and Ageless Radial like I designed for. Slower time, more caution, maybe have to hit One with the Shield now and then, I just haven't tried it yet. The 7.5% resistance from the amplifier is perhaps more of an issue, but it depends on the content. Smashing and lethal are going to hit the cap fairly easily, so outside of heavy resistance debuffs it won't make a difference, but for those, it's nice to have a buffer to avoid cascading resistance failure. Toxic and psionic are too low for it to make a noticeable difference. Where you might notice the difference in some fairly extreme content is energy, negative, fire, and cold. I mentioned energy/negative capping at around 1300 hit points left. Without the amplifier and Cardiac Core it wouldn't cap at all. But still, soft cap defense and 80% resistance isn't something that's easy to kill. The space lobster ambush is mostly ignorable on the maxed/buffed ITF, and I might get better times just rushing in and ignoring them than trying to pull. But maybe something could take advantage of 80% vs. 87.5% energy/negative resistance to hurt me. On paper that's a huge difference, it's just hard for enemies to put out enough damage to capitalize on that difference. Anyway, yeah, no worries running this build without the amplifiers. There's a big difference between being optimized around using the defense amplifier in the nastiest AE content, and actually requiring the defense amplifier in 99.99% of real content. But I have the influence to spare, so I figure why not.

3:06 for 334 DPS average across 10 Pylons with Offense Amplifier, Musculature Core, and Ageless Core.

They're at the pay to win vendor. I forget where exactly in all the lists. The defense amplifier is 7.5% resistance and 5% defense to all, plus 4 points of mez protection, for instance. Very good for squishies who don't have mez protection, or for builds that need that last little bit to be bouncing off the resistance or defense caps. Also expensive: 2.5 million each for an hour, with a maximum of 8 hours. So you can quickly burn 60 million on them. But they're almost free at low levels, so I always load up new characters with 8 hours, and generally purchase more during the early levels. Anyway, when I say I built around the defense amplifier, part of that is me being willing to pay 2.5 million per hour for the privilege, though I'm sure I earn more than that most of the time. The game doesn't consider them temporary powers for some reason. It's a result of the Reactive Defenses scaling resist damage. It scales linearly between 3% and 13% from full health to death. Mids counts the 3%, so what's left is scaling from 0% to 10%. The hard cap is at 90%. I think of it in terms of how much health I have left when/if I finally hard cap. If my resistance was 80% at full health, I would hard cap at the moment of death. If my resistance was 89% at full health, I would hard cap when only 10% down. So if those last few points involve too many compromises, I don't sweat it, and just figure I'll be capped when the chips are down.

Yeah, I was building and testing Shield/MA and Invuln/MA in parallel in Mids and on beta. The Invuln was a little tougher than Shield, but even with Gaussians in Invincibility, it couldn’t compete on damage. Eventually I decided to level up the Shield, but it was close.

Like this. For some reason I thought I'd posted it earlier, but it doesn't look like I did. That's how I ran it, plus all the amplifiers. But the intended "real" build is just the defense amplifier, and running Cardiac Core and Ageless Radial. Lower damage, better survivability. Smashing/lethal resistance would then be enough over the cap to provide a bit of a buffer to resistance debuffs. Energy/negative resistance with the amplifier and a second stack of the ATO gets you to 84.3%, so caps at 43% of your hit points, when you still have 1300 left. Fire/cold resistance not quite there, but more rare. Toxic and Psionic are holes. Defense debuffs are no problem due to Active Defense double stack, high defense, and the amplifier getting you enough over the incarnate soft cap to not worry. 95% recharge debuff resistance. Ageless Radial for endurance debuffs. One with the Shield and overcapped smashing/lethal resistance for resistance debuffs. You could also swap out Assault Core for Melee Core, but that was going one step too far in my mind. Though most of the time I'm not running it as intended, but instead running it as shown above, and without the defense amplifier. One quality of life thing I really like even if it means pretty much nothing in terms of what you can accomplish is the way the recharges and activation times on Dragon's Tail, Shield Charge, and Focus Chi align: 4 DT = 1 SC = 1 FC, or at least close enough to not notice a difference with other things going on. Also easy to miss is the detuning of recharge speed on Dragon's Tail, Gloom, and Crippling Axe Kick to try to get the most out of their procs. Attack chain is Storm Kick, Crippling Axe Kick, Storm Kick, Gloom, Thunder Kick. It does 300 DPS set up for survival, at least when surrounded. I haven't tested with Musculature Core and Ageless Core, but more, obviously. I fight the fluffies in the ITF while surrounded, then kill everything before taking on Rommy, so the final fight is the slowest. But it's still enough DPS to work ok while debuffed. I'd want a little more accuracy if I was building for being accuracy debuffed, as it often dropped into the mid 80s on the debuffed run. But I'm not going to build around that debuff.

Grats!

I haven’t looked into how bad it is. Rebirth and/or survival amplifiers?

I bet! I went Martial Arts for the extra defense for incarnate content, but it’s wasted on the ITF.

I was a little surprised too. Well, I did expect it to be very sturdy with Rebirth Radial, since what Shield is clearly missing is healing. But I was wrong. It is so sturdy that it just doesn't need more healing, and it benefits more from Ageless Radial to deal with the occasional weird debuffs and provide a little extra endurance. I did settle for a psionic and toxic weakness so it's not as sturdy there. The psionic weakness got me killed once in two full groups of +4x8 Praetorian psychics and Malaise while trying to grab back aggro for a team that had over-aggro'd and I wasn't paying enough attention to my own health. But I was in full assault mode with my incarnate choices at the time, and not paying attention. The second try while paying attention went perfectly smoothly. And you can mostly plug those holes - I just chose to be better against more common damage types instead.

i think the trend is the playstyle everyone prefer, i mean really prefer and play the best : Agreed. I've done the max buffed MoITF with a Katana/Dark Brute, Dark/MA Tanker, and Shield/MA Tanker. So it might look like Dark Armor is a great choice for this from that small sample, but I promise it isn't. It can work, obviously, but it's slow and rough due to having no DDR. Dark Armor and Katana are just the sets I have the most experience with by far, and I wanted to see what I could accomplish with them. Dark Armor is very good, and I wouldn't try to talk anyone out of it in general, but its main end-game weakness is exploited by the main enemies on the ITF, so ouch. On the other hand, my Shield/MA Tanker made it easy for me despite my relative lack of experience. I could have ignored my health bar - it never dropped below half. And while I'm not sure what would be better, it wasn't built specifically for this challenge either. They can't even hurt you with a good Shield/MA build, so you could definitely clear it. Well, admittedly I was using amplifiers. They can probably hurt you without them for a little bit of challenge. But I could also swap out Musculature Core for Cardiac Core and probably be fine, just slower. OK, they can hurt you - you do need to keep Storm Kick's defense and the Tanker ATO resistance up. Probably if you max out a crowd and walk away to go grab a drink, you'll come back to a dead character. But the skill requirements are low compared to a lot of Tankers, and definitely compared to Brutes and Scrappers. Yeah. I didn't build the Shield/MA Tanker to do this specifically, but it might be the Tanker I'd choose to do this even if building specifically for the challenge. Against All Odds was definitely helpful in countering the debuff.

Haha, now if only I knew how to tank! My friends are trying to train me, and must frequently remind me that I’m not a Scrapper. They mentioned some power too... was it Taunt? I think that was it...

Thanks! Though I think the Scrapper runs were much more impressive. Suvivability isn't affected by the player debuff, mostly accuracy and damage, so the only thing extra it shows is that my Tanker has good DPS. I need to take a crack at some speed runs without the player debuff.

MoITF +4x8 no temps no insps no base buffs no Lore no deaths enemies buffed player debuffed completed in 1:53:34. I did use amplifiers and my other incarnate powers. Leveling up and kitting out my Shield/MA Tanker took much longer than I'd hoped. But he's finally finished, so it was time to ITF. First try, mostly smooth run. One mistake in mission 3 when I got so focused on killing a crowd of Surgeons that I forgot to hit Ageless Core and partly detoggled. I fortunately managed to escape, so it only cost me a little bit of time. Another mistake later in the run, when final Rommy's health was moving more slowly than I wanted, so I had the bright idea of pulling in some 5th Column to bump up my damage. Instead, Rommy bumped up his defense, so I had to kill my adds. Between going to get them and killing them, and my debuffed damage, I probably added 5+ minutes to my time. Ah, well. I always mess something up. No big deal. It might be possible to do it without amplifiers. I built around using the defense amplifier, but survivability was a non-issue, so maybe I could survive without the defense and survival amplifiers. Maybe. And it'd be harder to hit and I'd do less damage without the offense amplifier, but Rommy went down fast enough that maybe I'd be able to slowly whittle him down anyway. To be determined.

I think it's a good choice. Maximizing DPS on my Shield/MA Tanker actually involved dropping Eagles Claw, so getting less benefit from its damage buff on a Brute just makes that decision more clear. If you want to incarnate soft cap, which I'd try to do an a MA/Shield Brute, the 7.5% defense will be very helpful. I would be sad "losing" the extra damage from Shield on a Brute, which might push me more towards something like MA/Invuln, say, if I were starting from scratch, but that obviously doesn't work with your concept (well, what I'd actually do is make a Shield/MA Tanker, since that's what I actually did). I think MA/Shield would be just fine on a Bute, just maybe not quite optimal enough to bring out all the min/max discussions.

The space lobster ambush? It’s great! It’s fun! I just want to avoid it if speed running or doing a difficult version of MoITF. But the Cimeroran ambushes while fighting Rommy seem just annoying and tedious to me.

Yeah. I don't think buffed maxed no incarnate powers is at all is doable for any of my 50s, but maybe my Shield/MA will be able to do debuffed/buffed maxed when he's complete. Worth some attempts. I'll probably start easier with merely a debuffed maxed so that I can check my AV DPS before I start bashing my head against surviving to even get to the AVs. Well, I'll start much easier if you include the -1x6 MoITFs I've done while I'm still working on my incarnates and accolades. Incarnates I can probably buy at any time now, but I hate grinding out the accolades.

I finally checked on what player debuffed means. It looks like it's -50% accuracy, -50% damage, -100% taunt/placate resistance. So a build with high accuracy and high damage could probably add that to the list, just taking a little longer.