Sovera

No Blazing Aura, no Fiery Embrace.. *clutches chest*.. Mah heart... How is Blazing Aura a waste of time if it's on all the time? Did you mean waste of a power? But it's a damage aura... it's a prized commodity. And Fiery Embrace boosts all damage, not just fire damage. I do a ton of damage on my favorite, so I'm biased. It's a Tanker as well. I haven't tried the new DM though but I don't think a second AoE will change my mind much other than being pretty spammable. I foresee easily Siphon Life, Shadow Maul, Touch of Fear, Siphon Life.

There is plenty of money to be made. I documented an experiment in the build thread of my signature where I leveled without any money as an extreme example (having absolutely no money is like being the very first time logging into CoH. Other than one event of logging into CoH for the very first time any character leveled gets -some- cash and merits in). Check my signature's other link, the guide, and feel free to spread it for other newbies you find. If you are interested enough to log into the forums and look at things then you are at a level where there is no reason to have made a character and have earned 3-4 mill in the first hour of playing the game. It just keeps on adding after that first hour so the sums on SOs are paltry seen from that angle. In my experiment I ended the first day of playing a character at level 44 and with, I believe, 27 mill in money with several IOs worth 10+ mill bought and slotted. And it started with zero cash. There was no chicanery involved or staring at the AH and crafting. This is not a brag, it's me telling you that it is (easily) doable and repeatable for every character. IMO there is also nothing wrong or objectionable about a new player having no clue and no money to buy what they need. This may sound callous, but it's a game. We already have a ton of cheats incorporated. We don't need to have every new player logging in like in an asian P2W MMO to find their mailbox overflowing with pets, XP scrolls, a free mount and a full set of armor every ten levels. Not knowing things is part of the experience. Anyone who cares enough will raise their voice and ask how to afford those SOs (just like you did, welcome to the game!) and this community is super helpful and someone always will answer. Just like you were a couple of times in this thread though instead of asking a bit further on what you ought to do you were all -_- about it. But this change while great for low levels is also a damned duck trap. People will get fixated on the comfortable and level without IOs. While I personally do not bother with slotting TOs and DOs I do, sometimes, bother slotting level 10 IOs. They don't do much (10%) but on important powers why not? An example of this was Seeds of Confusion. We get it at level eight, it's important, so I six slotted it as soon as I could with six level 10 recharge IOs. That gave it a nice 60% recharge boost. The trap is that SOs -still- go bad after a few levels, and those levels fly by with double XP on, while IOs do not go bad and are a one time purchase much cheaper than upgrading SOs all the way to 50. The large increase in power from low level SOs makes them better than generic low level IOs, but once at 22 stop using SOs and stop hurting your wallet.

The idea that people organically find the badges is sheer nonsense, sorry. Just looking at the badges needed for the four accolades that give HP and endurance shows the insanity of expecting a player to actually find all the plaques and badges on their own as they happen to explore or by following vague hints (I'm not even 100% sure badges do come with hints?). Heck, the first times it took me easily two hours and that was -with- coordinates and screenshots. Now I have it down to less than 40 minutes by dint of sheer repetition. The only thing that will happen is the devs telling the players to find the badges and the players will goggle them or use Videots. At this point we need to consider what is the purpose of badge hunting for this particular task at hand. Is it to time sink? Do we need time sinks if we are not playing a sub? Is it for the lore? I don't think players rushing to get their teleport unlock are really going to care about it. Will the badges be in evidence that it does not require a quick trip to paragonwiki to uncover their location? There is a balance to be made between just giving away stuff like a cheat code and offering something players can work for, but if it involves just copy pasting coordinates from a third party site is it really that involved? Now if Videot was part of the base game, then yeah, okay, and actually why shouldn't it be? Does anyone believe for a second any badger is actually organically exploring the game content and uncovering all the possible badges? Make it a little checkbox in the map that reveals all badges and then badge involving quests can be added in more naturally.

Having a 'goal' or being 'unique' is fine and dandy, but that does not mean it is useful. Some people feel 'useful' by having the -regen Interface and are ready to swear that they/it makes a difference, except the math does not back it up. There is always someone who took Stun or Touch of fear even if the crushing majority did not. Try not to twist my words just because you like throwing stuns and being a melee Controller. It's fine that you do, hey I'm happy for you to have found your niche, but to do it or not to do it makes little difference in actual game-play. It's flavor, it's theme, it's fine. It is fine. But lots of enemies are where the danger lies even in high level content. Lots of enemies = AoE time = the time for the stuns to shine and gain a few seconds. Even with the improvements the set still doesn't have great AoE so gaining those seconds in an AoE situation would help.

Stalker is pretty okay, but Stalker /Bio is mediocre. You were not surviving due to the Bio part but because of the Stalker part. Stalkers have reduced agro that means the mobs will pretty much focus on everyone but the Stalker. Glad you're having fun though, but don't try hard(er) content expecting to solo it by face tanking with Bio. The good news is that 'hard(er)' content means debuffs and only some factions do it. Cimerorians in the ITF will eat you alive and spit the bones, but Council are fine.

I have not tested the changes myself, but reading what others have said I don't see what the point is for a ST stun. Controllers are already sad that their CC is not needed and adding a flavor that is CC leaves me cold. I don't see the benefit, that is all. We kill things that need killing, the fact that they were previously stunned makes no impact. Maybe for a squishier AT. Doms might not mind their arsenal accrued by an extra ST stun. But for Tankers the addition is flavor at best, useless at worst. A Tanker does not mind having a boss hitting them on the face, they are a Tanker. Give that chance to WH instead. I have leveled a ton of tanks these past months, a ton, and my summary of the AT while leveling is: - Build-up early is very important for survival. Sets that have it as low as 20 instead of 28 do a lot better since they can initiate combat and kill most minions. A tanker rarely fears one single strong enemy but tends to go down under a flurry of papercuts when surrounded by a swarm. - Early AoE is important for the same reason. All sets with late AoEs (Radiation Melee, Super Strength, etc) suffer like pigs to the slaughter when it comes to surviving death-by-a-thousand-papercuts. As much as so many people are poo pooing on homogenization as a bad thing allow me to be the devil's advocate for the reverse: all sets should have a real AoE early on. Fighting three or more enemies one at a time is bad, real bad, terrible when it comes to things like kill alls and damn Clockwork bosses spawning little gears that have to be chased. And yes, I don't count crap cones as AoEs. Having ST CC (such as War Hammer has) does not make a huge impact in this survival list. Using the new mechanic to substantially Increase stun chance in Whirling Hands (maybe not 100%, sure) would help with survival. P.S. For an attack whose text is 'By focusing your energy into the muscles in your arms, you can launch a dizzying flurry of attacks against every foe in melee range' the animation is completely dummy. Consider swapping it for the Whirlwind animation of the Speed pool and instead of a single hit make it a quick flurry of DoTs over the animation period. That would fit a lot better.

Meh. Leveled one a while back. Nothing about it was impressive, neither AoE nor ST. Perhaps with the new ToF though. Fire/Rad was my favorite with a much beefier heal and the impressively good passive AoE. Irradiated Ground at 28 spoils it a bit, it should be 20, and then Gloom instead of Devastating(gly) (slow)Blow.

You can also test it against a pylon. My own tests showed no difference either way. The pylon went down in the near exact time frame but it is difficult to tell when whiffing can change a run. But if three minutes hitting a pylon with the +damage and three minutes doing it with the Doublehit resulted in the near same time then at least Fire/Claws didn't care for it (more testing might be needed). In a much more practical point of view the +damage counts per enemy hit, so once outside the scenario of hitting a single target throwing a single AoE surrounded by enemies has a good chance of capping the damage buff.

I must... must have Fold Space. But I won't. No way I'm dropping out of Fly to pick Teleport and then throw three powers at it for that one skill. Which is a pity because I must... must have it...

Happy wives are worthwhile goals.

Looking much better. Everything is nicely in place. I personally mourn dropping Afterburner. I suggest taking Combat Jumping and Superjump instead but that's theme. One last note is that rain powers like Ice Storm take real badly to procs. I mean, really really badly. Waste-of-slots badly. I suggest a full Bombardment set instead for a bit more recharge, accuracy and S/L/E/N resistances. You might as well also change the Titanium resistance/recharge from Tough for a Titanium resistance. Something that you can also do is dismantle Ice Sword, Frozen Fists and Frost to add more damage procs (do try to keep the damage and accuracy up, but not adding recharge) because global recharge chasing is not bringing particular benefits. The build has no worthwhile clickies other than Build-up after all, so more global recharge for perma Hasten is not really adding much. Chasing perma Hasten is usually a goal, but builds tend to have important clickies that benefit from it such as endurance clickies like Consume or heals like Healing Flame or even nukes. For example. This build loses 7 seconds off Hasten, but increases the damage by a fair bit: - Frozen Fists goes from 152 to 189. - Ice Sword goes from 211 to 232 (the smallest change and hinting we might as well keep the 4 Might of the Tanker in the original slotting). - Frost goes from 211 to 310. - Frozen Touch goes from 476 to a mini nuke of 658. It does go from 4.4 recharge to 6.3 though.

It's difficult to mess Super Reflexes, but what are your goals? If just what you've mentioned then you've exceeded the defensive parameters by a metric ton. Even Incarnate content (which is not mentioned in your original post) only requires as much as 59% defense and you have as high as 72%. Anything more 'casual' and 45% is the goal. Once you go down to 45% (or even 59%, but tbh I run Incarnate content at 45% and don't really notice the difference since despite being a defense hole it is also content we run all Incarnated and buff like demi gods) your slotting is a lot more free. Again, more damage = more damage procs. Your better half might notice the lack of a heal (or not), but green inspirations and Rebirth are always there if needed. Now despite SR not increasing damage it does allow to cap defense so easily that a lot of slots can be dedicated to adding procs to attacks. You are not doing this. Frost is excellent and you're missing out in not taking it. As a bonus despite not being ideal it also can be as a ghetto ST power (it's not really made for it, but it is really wide and long and so it 'cleaves' damn well. Plus it takes a -res proc that helps with the damage). You're making the poor woman level without an AoE to 38 and never flashback lower or be back at killing things one at a time. You have the +res proc in the level 38 AoE attack. AoEs are never used in single target chains. It is better off added in something like Frozen Touch (or even Ice Sword so it is available much sooner). Frozen Touch is so good and does so much damage I would not recommend proccing it to hell and back. Instead five Hectacomb and the purple damage proc from the Hold sets will give a fast recharge to spam it and two purple damage procs to enhance its damage further. Basically FT is the only real power worth using and everything is a filler until it comes back online, so recharge it for what it is worth. You have Fly but not Hover or Afterburner. That is almost a waste. Might as well use the P2W jetpack though I understand Fly is being taken for theme, but Fly without Afterburner is a waste... ...which leads me to how you have two useless powers in Chilblain and Ice Blast just to reach Ice Storm. Again, theme, I understand, but, the build will be hurting for endurance. Ageless is a good fix for it but you did mention flashbacks and that means it will not be available all the time. Pushing back things you could take Conserve Power and Physical Perfection at 35 and 38 if you switched to the epic Energy pool. Ice Storm is pretty darn gosh thematic though so I would excuse the drop from a min max approach (do tell your better half to stock up Recovery Serums. They are super cheap and can be used straight from level 1 on). Greater Ice Sword is pretty crap and honestly you don't even need it. FT recharges in 4.4 seconds. Ice Sword recharges in 1.6 seconds with 1.6 animation. Frost is a 2.5 second animation. That means you can do Freezing Touch, Ice Sword, Frost, Ice Sword, Freezing Touch and just repeat. Frozen Fists is also crap but if exemplaring I guess it has a use to help with filling the attack chain gaps. GIS can be thematic, but you did mention min-max and so that's my advice. You took Agility for the Alpha, but why? Does the build look like it needs more defense? Now that said I was messing with the build but I did not have enough room for everything. It was either remove Afterburner or remove the Artic epic pool. We -do- only spend 5% of the time moving between missions so removing Afterburner is acceptable. That said you had Ice Storm as an extra AoE which Frost now replaces so the need for Ice Storm is lessened. So with that said this is what I would do: - Take Frost. Leveling up to 38 without an AoE and not having it once flashbacking is torture for me. - Drop out of the Artic epic pool and take the Energy pool instead. Conserve Power and Physical Perfection (and liberal use of the Recovery Serum) will help with the endurance which... - ..allows to drop out of Ageless for endurance purposes letting her use Rebirth instead for a heal (the build's sole heal really). Possibly Barrier (not that she needs more defense, but it would boost her resistances. If you're duoing one can have Barrier and the other Rebirth so you're buffing each other). - Frozen Fists is taken as a mule and for Flashbacking purposes. As a rule it is not really needed though using it instead of Frost is an option as well. - Weave is a mule and for Incarnate content. Outside of Dark Astoria or Incarnate content that toggle can stay off. This is not gospel, just see what ideas you can or want to incorporate in your own build:

We need to petition so Werner can have an unique forum title as Tank God.

You're not wrong since it's 120º base and Tankers get a 50% buff. Enjoy your 180º mix of Dhalsim and E. Honda!

As a rule everything from Interface stacks five times. Period. So five stacks of -HP, five stacks of -res, etc, etc. It is not per character though (5 stacks from player A plus 5 stacks from player B equal 10 stacks). It's just five stacks on a given enemy. Usually a single person can get those five stacks going depending on how fast their recharge and animation is, so more players with the same Interface just means that the five stack limit is reached faster. This is usually the reason why there is this sort of underground advice about diversifying the Interface choices so more effects come into play instead of stacking the same -HP or -res effect. But. This advice fails to register how pretty bad the other Interface choices are. People will happily say how they are using the -regen one and how they are helping the team, but without having followed the math that shows the -regen is pretty damn low in the first place and then further falls off the higher level enemies are. A +3 enemy resists the effect by a fair bit and AV/GMs (the enemies for which -regen would be useful) on top of the extra levels giving resistance also have a baked in extra resistance to said debuffs. So small numbers + resistance = inconsequential results despite 'gut feelings'. This applies to the -ToHit one (same deal of weak effect + resistances), the -recovery one (does this even do anything? I tried hitting level a level 54 boss and it died without its blue bar having moved), etc. This is why despite the underground advice we still all focus on the -HP and the -res Interface choices. Partly because the other choices are just bad, partly because whenever we split up, or solo, or are taking an isolated mob over that corner of the room there while the team is wailing on the other enemies over the other corner, then those stronger Interfaces still kick in.

If you're going with the Rune of Protection approach I'd say look at Shield instead. While it has less DDR than SR it still gives heaps of it (the CC protection clickie is where the DDR comes from, and it stacks) and Rune of Protection can be alternated with One with the Shield (very minor crash) with minor downtime (if not mistaken RoP - OwtS - RoP is doable)

When stunned toggles drop. It's verbatim what happened to my sole run buffed enemies. Killed fluffy, got stunned, instagibbed.

You say every bit of resistance matters, and then drop your proc in Atom Smasher? Doesn't that seem like bad planning when you want those procs up and going all the time?

The -HP effect on mobs with lower HP than AVs/GMs is less felt than the -res + DoT. On a pylon Degen sliiightly edged ahead but on such a small scale it is hard to differentiate from whiffing. And then yes, the matter of stacks reaching max immediately on a full team and only the Dot bringing something. Without a DPS meter I can't say how much the DoT actually brings to the table, but why skip? Musculature 45% is also a 15% damage increase so not much, and Leadership's Assault in the same vein isn't much either. But when all are piled together it starts showing.

Damage all the way. Including Reactive instead of Degenerative. The only real important one is Barrier for panic buttons and combating debuffs.

They are certainly entitled to their opinions and/or self-imposed restrictions. Nothing wrong with that.

In a game with the ignore function 'toxic' people have exactly as much power as we are willing to give it to them. This includes refusing to use the teleport prompt function.

I had to go and read about this Twixt. I can't really take it as a 'social experiment'. Guy knew what he was doing and was having his fun. But, we can't blame him. It's true that TP enemy was valid since it was in the game. But talking loudly, burping sonorously and spitting on the floor while at a restaurant can be argued as 'I'm not doing anything against the law' (it might actually be, it's just a random example so don't get sticky to it) and still not be acceptable behavior or behavior we want around us. It is why rules (laws) need to be made. For years and years and years smoking at a restaurant was a filthy habit spoiling the meal of non smokers but since it was not 'against the law' it was acceptable and relied on the good will of smokers not to do so to not bother others with their cancer sticks. Once we (finally) got a law about it it stopped being about good will and was enforced. If the devs had a better handle on the game they would see the tactic was not welcomed and made a 'law' (changing how TP foe or the drones worked, or implementing some sort of simply anti-TP foe) to stop it. They didn't. So they were fine with it. But it really boils down why I loathe PvP. For everyone who sings the fun of PvP and how it is a clash of skill and wit there are five who will come in a group to kill a straggler, or solely play stealth classes, or do -everything- possible to win like the very common 'wait until someone is at 50% while fighting an NPC and then stealth attack and claim 'victory''. Still, it was amusing to see this sexagenarian do a long worded dissertation that boiled down to 'but it was just a joke (social experiment) brah!'

FIRE/CLAWS! No, seriously, I hardly notice Arachnos. They are pretty squishy compared to some factions out there. Fire is resistance based so the defense debuff does not hurt (as much) and Focused Accuracy allows to ignore the blinds. Consume allows to pass on the woes of the Mu for the most part.

The trick is not being passive. I find my teams (granted, not all times) by advertising what I am going to do and asking if someone wants to join. Asking instead to join existing teams is iffy. I don't invite people who state they are looking for group since I don't know what they are in the mood for or how much time they have, or if they are interested in the content I am running. There is also the fact that TFs and Ouroboros field trips do not allow to invite once the journey has started. So basically do make an effort to make your own teams: '/lfg Running missions arcs at level 30, anyone is welcome to join' '/lfg Going to run a Synapse TF. Who wants in?'