Sovera

Mmmmmmyeah, 'dare' to disagree. Is that what your ShardWarrior-vision shows? I must be wearing different glasses.

I've been thinking the same as I browse the forums each day. There has been no news in a while.

You remind me of the bonanza that was having a bunch of my converters selling for 8.5 mill each.

It very much is. I only read part of the first page before deciding there was no point in continuing. I made the same suggestion a few months back and got the same reaction: it takes no time at all to sell. It does not bother me. Man you must be really lazy. Considering the OP (and I a few months back): - Did not advocate for a forced change affecting everyone. - Did not tell people not to sell or use their salvage. - Suggested something that already exists (P2W option to reject white recipes who are worth 100k ish a pop instead of 100 inf). then why are people bothering to come and say how it does not bother, and how fast it is to sell, how lazy the OP is? In WoW and other games like it there are grey items with no point or use other than being sold to a vendor (and cluttering the inventory). A commonly mentioned addon for new players is one that auto sells these grey items so that they don't need to check their inventory slot by slot and sell one by one. Lets not even speak of the bug that prevents rapid clicking to sell stuff to a vendor here since the window loses focus and we need to re-click on the next item on the list which forces to right click and spam E to sell stacks instead. Here it's a forum game to sniff haughtily at the same suggestion, never mind the fact the option is going to be hidden away and will require someone mentioning to a channel/friends/forums how the volume of near useless white salvage is annoying for one of them to point how they can use the P2W to remove that (just like we helpfully pipe in when someone mentions how they keep running into walls when they get Speed Boost). Never mind the fact that we already have one such recipe in the game and that, to my limited coding knowledge, would require copy pasting it and changing 'white recipes' to 'white salvage' (actually more like copying the entire list of white salvage and pasting over the entire list of white recipes that is to be rejected).

My Archer/TA has 45% defenses to S/L/E/N and ranged on top of hovering out of range. That is very definitely tanky, but not a Tanker. That said it's plenty enough to lay waste to all in perfect security since out of melee thanks to the all ranged setup offered by archer/TA.

Self healing is not good and endurance consumption is heavy to the point we are expected to throw EA every fight or so and in singe target situations we need to detoggle to not run dry. I suggest either Dark Melee/Ice or Savage/Rad. Rad Armor isn't terribly interesting for Scrappers due to the 75% resist cap but the set has two heals and it can be made to work as long as working towards reaching the cap and not stay at middling ranges.

Yeah, that's ten seconds we'll never get back.

Logging in and out fixes this as nihili says.

Hjarki has already given a comprehensive answer, but I would disagree on not using Siphon Life. Energize is a slow ass 35 second or more heal that does not particularly heal a lot. Siphon life shores that long ass recharge until it comes back up. I'd trade Midnight Grasp long ass animation for Siphon life. Less damage, but interim healing.

I feel your questions are a bit too generic to be easily addressed. As a rule of thumb every Tanker primary can do a good job at keeping you up, but you need a build. If your tanker is regularly dying it can be placed down at the feet of the build not being complete or just plain not being good. Dying once in a while is fine. It happens. The game tends to cheat a bit to keep things interesting. But simply throwing defense or resistance into your shields is not enough. Sometimes you need to worry about endurance sapping, other times about recharge debuffs stacking up, and you absolutely need to worry about reaching certain number caps in terms of defense and resistance. Now the good news is that there are plenty of builds in these forums that you can try it out. I currently have a little beast of Rad Armor/Martial Arts that took reaching level 43 and do an ITF while still not having slotted my shields to finally die for the first time. Once at 50 and having slotted everything an ITF will hold no particular terrors to it which is how things work. Dying while leveling and underslotted happens, but once at 50 and everything shored and in place you should be fine.

Experimenting is the best thing. It's common to overthink endurance problems for example. We overslot and overcompensate and discover we actually do not have endurance problems. This can be because Ageless is a *very* common Destiny and it's common to be under its effect all the time from someone else in the team who fired it. That means you don't need to take it, that means your endurance is pretty much always solved. This is something you find as you play. Another thing for example is 'CoH is an AoE game' which is a view I espoused as well. But as we play we realize a pack melts from enthusiast AoE and that a strong ST with fluid animations is actually a nice thing to have to take care of the leftovers, not more AoE. Now, regarding Tactics and the use of Gaussian. What you have here is a spreadsheet VS practical use scenario. In spreadsheet terms the Gaussian term will go off X times a minute without intervention from the user making its slotting there palatable. In practical terms the Gaussian going off will be random. It can happen while running to the next spawn, it can be while fighting a minion, it can be when fighting a boss at 10% HP. I feel it better to have the thing when I need it. Even not fully slotted my little tanker manages to kill most, if not all, +2 minions in a spawn by running to it, Focus Chi + Gaussian, Dragon's Tail, Electrifying Fences, Ball Lightning, Dragon's Tail. Or there's something like a Sapper, or a Surgeon, or a Paragon Protector at 30%, and that damage boost ensures they go down presto. Again, as you play you decide your own playstyle, there is not one size-fits-all. I do things how I like, others do as they like, and you can be that third way of doing things and none needs to be accounted as being a wrong way. Respecs recipes are cheap at 1-2 mill so just horse around and play with slottings, do group content and refine things.

It's a 'worryingly' widespread thing because people tend to not budge their difficulty slider. It's super common even at level 40+ to see people running TFs at +0 +1. Get rid of the 5%. If it's a worry for NPCs then let them keep it. If it's a worry for PvP then PvP can keep it. In the 'quite frustrating scenario is lenghty animations that miss, with a special place in hell when the animation SHOWS that it will miss AKA me using something like Flaming Arrow and the character is nose to the target (sometimes a box I need to break), AND THEY DO THE SLOW ANIMATION TO THE SKY BEFORE SHOOTING THE CEILING!

Meltdown is not needed when resists are hardcapped and endurance is positive. Ground Zero is more damage than Ball Lightning (124 damage every 10 seconds VS 430 proc filled every 30). As mentioned I just don't like mini nukes (especially with 3.1 animations) but it's a choice. Probably not, but it only cost one slot and I'm not starved for them. I could switch to Preventive Medecine instead of Panacea and get the absorb proc into the build. That would give me more S/L resist than I need so I could change the slotting in Tough. Overall it is for single target situations that ToE is slotted in though. I'll have to see how well the build handles long stretches of hitting things. In AoE situations my endurance depletes much faster and I need to use Radiation Therapy more often, but AoEs chug endurance and in AoE situations we are surrounded by enemies anyway. The ST attacks are much cheaper. Hmm... Yes, you're right, I should test this.

I go with +3 as well. I'm more and more pretty disgusted with the 5% chance of failure when I see it happen three times in a row so at some point I'm just well #$& it. Aim for +3 or aim for +4 I still get deflects and misses. So wasting stats in more accuracy is just meh.

I tried really hard to like Eagle's Claw. The animation is fun looking and the numbers are good, just as @Sir Myshkinmade a very compelling argument to take it because of the long term endurance costs and the damage buff it provides... but I cannot make myself to like long ass 2.8 animations and it kills my enjoyment to even press the button. So I returned to the good old Crippling Axe Kick. The ST rotation becomes Crippling Axe Kick, Storm Kick, Crane kick, Storm Kick. In a team while under recharge buffs I found myself not needing the second Storm Kick which increases the overall damage. In order to get some slots back I dismantled Gamma Boost and spread the slots around which keeps the hasten still at 130 seconds (one target in range) the same though loses some (hidden) recovery. Radiation Therapy is just that powerful though, and Particle Shielding can be used on CD simply for the recovery aspect so all is well though I have not tried a pylon to see if the endurance bar survives wailing solo on something for 3-5 minutes.

*polishes the last Rad Armor/MA build* When I made the original linked in that post I thought I had made something incredible but received only polite interest and a flood of well meant persons doing their own spin upon it. To this day I don't have a particular clue about the servers having been flooded by copies of that build but from the lukewarm reception in the forums I doubt it. Unrelated, what amuses me most about this threads is the sudden arrival of a random saying how we have a problem, we don't know we have a problem, but they will enlighten us, and teach us the way to be without this problem that we did not knew we had but that they came to inform of us of. No travel powers until 14 and being sent to cavalcade across the areas having to dodge purple mobs using only Sprint was a problem. Fitting three powers (two of which semi useless) to have Stamina so that we were allowed to play the game was a problem. Taking one power if we want to or not (unlike Stamina) at whatever level we want to for a 40% recharge benefit is not a problem.

You get good Contaminated out of Irradiated Ground, Devastating, and Fusion. Siphon is so good you might not ever feel a need for Radiation therapy/Shielding. But you're correct that Rad Armor supplies your needs in terms of defense. While Rad/Rad may be more thematic some mix and matching might have worked better with a secondary that could have used the extra Siphon heals (elec armor for example), or a primary without them (Shield for example). I've personally been on a Rad Armor binge and found I never take Meltdown but that's a personal thing since I dislike mini nukes (and nukes) due to their CD. I've also stopped playing Rad Melee since I loathe slow animation. As for a substitute... well.. Maybe Air Superiority from Fly, and I hear good things of Cross Punch.

Good damage and a fat heal? Yeah, sorta. More importantly what would you replace it with? Devastating, Smash, Siphon, Smash is a good rotation.

Not sure it this is the right thread for that. The thing is Burn. It's not the heal or the midling resistances or the lack of any debuff resistances. Burn is why Fire Armor is taken, and Burn makes the enemies flee, which means only an AT with an agro aura manages to leverage burn... which means Brute or Tanker. And this is why you don't see many (or any) Fire Armor builds for Stalker/Scrappers.

The difference is not as large now, and once we enter the 50s range, everyone slotted, incarnated, even in solo mode a Tanker can quickly kill half a spawn and it is not the 3-4 remaining lieuts and a single boss that will be a problem (this applies to Brutes as well). Where the survivability comes in is versus tricky enemies. Bio armor VS ITF will eat a Brute alive trying to solo a spawn where a Tanker will handle it. As you mention there are subtleties. A team helps, a team that helps killing faster helps even more. If we are down to 2-3 enemies after the initial AoE volley what is there to fear? If we are solo even at +4x8 we decimate all the minions be it Brute or Tanker. What sort or enemies? Council are complete pushovers and have become CoH's XP fodder, but no one dares to do that with Carnies or Devouring Earth. The factions 'no one dares to' is where the extra survival would make a difference. While leveling is where we notice the defense differences more. Once at 50, everyone with a nuke, everyone with a party wide Destiny, everyone IOed to the gills, what is there really to fear?

You guys have a lot more patience than I do. I'm currently leveling a Rad/MA Tanker, and yes, it's not fully slotted and I'm fighting +2 and +3, but, ugh, so slow. Hitting for 150-200 with my high attacks is like watching paint dry. I've soloed Synapse as a I leveled (just +0x1) but even then, sloooow. It got better when I lightbulbed into pulling the whole floor and AoEing it down instead of fighting a spawn at a time. I can't imagine the dullness of trying to soloing a +3 or +4 AV. This is a bit like the whole Brute VS Scrapper argument and me who got into the habit of throwing my new alts into the AE and have my alternate account do a couple maps which puts them at 23, allowing met to slot everything before starting with Posi and move on up. I started doing it with my Fire Armor/Psi Tanker because I can do attack chains that are only AoEs (Mass Levitate, Electric Fences, Ball Lightning, Burn, Psi Sweep. repeat). But on a whim I decided to try my Claws/Bio Scrapper and despite not being completely Incarnated (just T4 Musculature) and having to use my heals once in a while (40% defense since I did not get Barrier yet) I found it kills as fast, or faster. When I do Follow-Up, and get the Scrapper ATO crit, and do Shockwave and Spin and both fit in the ATO's proc the crits, omfg, it tears through the spawns. To me soloing stuff ends not being about surviving, but managing to keep my interest as I whittle through enemies.

Everything is definitely looking nice and neat. We follow different paths but that's fine too. I still feel a Tanker's damage is still a bit too anemic and thus would never pass on slotting Musculature and damage procs. At most the 33% version so it buffs endurance a bit more. In the same vein I would not pass on my Build-Up power. Taking Ageless would fix any endurance woes you'd have and allow you to drop out of Conserve Power and Physical Perfection and instead pick extra AoE (which may or may not be useful) or Barrier for another 5% defense and 5% resistance (further allowing moving around the slotting). I would personally not worry about DDR. Your defense is a secondary layer and you are primarily a resist based character with a potent heal. If you haven't you could take a look at the Rad Armor/MA build I posted somewhere below these forums. The only thing I did not pick compared to yours is Tactics which is of dubious use at 50. I had to twist a bit more to reach 45% defense since I did not have Cloak of Darkness to help things, but managed to squeeze in a damage proc for most attacks, picked Musculature, traded Tactics for Focus Chi, picked two extra AoEs and still got my 45% and 90% goals (except psi and cold). We don't *need* to follow the trope of Tankers being sturdy low damage dealers. That said these are personal opinions. Your build as is will eat all content, kudos 👍

Remember to pick the unofficial update to HD over the Tools section of the forum as it fixes the +resistances from the alpha.

You have everything in place though you could probably refine the slotting a bit more to save some slots here and there. Dark Regen is so powerful it is almost not mandatory to search for capped resists, but, things you can try to consider in the further refining of the build: - Remember than you can boost IOs (right click as if to choose a new OP, then press + five times). Hasten went from 143 seconds to 138. Same applies to the end mod in Stamina, Conserve Power, Assault, etc. - Dragon Tail can be taken at level 20. Don't level to 35 without it <_< It is also a *marvelous* place to stick a Force Feedback (much like Crane Kick) proc since hasten at 138 seconds is a bit slow. The Gladiator -res can go into Death Shroud and Crippling Axe Kick can take the Achilles -res (despite HD not allowing to slot it). - The Theft Essence proc pretty much negates Dark Regen's endurance which is the real big hog of the build. It almost turns Dark Regen into an endurance recovery tool which is nutty, but try it. - If you manage to, er, manage, your endurance you can move away from Ageless. I bring this up because having another build wide 5% resistance to all changes slotting a lot which brings me to my next point... - ...which is you have too much in the way of resistances. You're 15% overcapped in S/L with just one stack of the Tanker's Might proc. It stacks twice more for another near 15%, so you might be overcapped as much as 30%. Putting the proc in a toggle is not the best choice due to procs-per-minute. It will go a lot better in a single target attack you are bound to spam. My own choice where to put it is Storm kick since we will be spamming it for the +defense. This is part of the build refining I mentioned. If you trim all you can to absorb the slots giving you excess resistances (for example Tough can do with just its single native slot, and the Reactive Defenses in Weave giving 1.5% S/L) you can spread them over your other powers. This also applies to Fire/Cold (but not much to be done there) but not to Energy/Negative and Toxic/Psi. The reason it does not matter for those is that they are tied together and one is severely buffed by Dark Armor but not the other which forces severe overcapping in one so the other can be capped. This is normal and nothing to be done about, and Energy being very prevalent in end-game I'd say to keep on pushing even at the cost of Negative being crazy overcapped. Same reasoning with Psi/Toxic. To be perfectly honest Dark Regen is so powerful you can skip the previous advice. If you do intend to follow it consider that activating any power where you put Tanker's Might will give the build near 7% resistances to all. The safe thing is to consider that two stacks are easy to maintain. That means activating the power it is in (in this case Death Shroud) and aiming to have 83% resistances instead of 90% will have the second stack push the resistances to 90% by itself.

Yes, I've seen this advice so many times and I don't understand it. Perhaps under level 20 I'd use something that has no slots but even then.