Sovera

Not sure what flavor of tank will make a lot of difference. Heck, bring a Brute if you want to. No one who is doing these hard modes will do them with randoms so there will always be buffs and whomever is tanking will be at the caps. That said Tankers have more HP. I might say a Rad Armor for the absorb shield which is unique to them and adds a fat stack of 'fake' HP that needs to be taken down, or Shield for the big resistance to debuffs while having decent resists on top of good defense. Stone Armor/Invuln does have the HP buffer so they can be at or close to the HP cap that is almost the same as the shield Rad Armor has. Illusion will be useful with the immortal pets, but will not replace a tank since they cannot possibly grab agro from EVERYTHING. But they will help either to share agro or when the tank faceplants. I have a feel more than the flavor of tank it will be learning the mechanics and what can or not be face tanked, knowing when to kite, when to go in, and learning how to juggle defensives. @Lineahas a very good post on this though I don't recall where it was in order to link it, and where they speak about how they cycle defensives up to and including accolades and temp powers and T9s and when to fall back when these are in cooldown in order to survive normally near impossible content.

I arrive! Most durable would either be Ice Melee with Ice Patch, or Martial Arts and go around with 45% defense (40% without Incarnates). But trying to make the most durable Fire/Fire might be something like this: Some things to consider: - The raw stats in the slotting of Fire Sword make the slotting better for Greater Fire Sword, but then the +6.7% resists are only available when Greater Fire Sword is. - The build is at 85%-ish for the important resists such as S/L and E/N with one stack of the ATO in Fire Sword. A second one will finish capping the resists at 90%. If you were to indulge in incarnates I'd lower the resists to 77-78%-ish to take in consideration the 5% defense and resists from Barrier. - S/L defense is at 40%. Not many ways to improve it further without sacrificing something. Not taking Hover did not help since those 2%-ish defense had to come from somewhere. But it's good enough for exemplaring and for high level content Barrier permas it at 45%. - Psi, debuffs, and Toxic, will always be a problem. Kill fast, use inspirations, be ready to kite (the Martial Arts version mocks most debuffs). I know slotting can help but then something needs to be paid for it. This is a max level respec build. If wishing to level with it I can rearrange the order of powers and slotting.

Brutes are fixed by being removed. Okay, okay, put down the torches and pitchforks and hear me out: We all know the problem we currently have is that we have an amalgamation of ATs all stepping on each others toes. Brutes fighting for room against Scrappers and Tankers, Stalkers fighting for room against Scrappers and Brutes. Scrappers ahead by a paper thin margin thanks to their ATOs. I predict if Stalkers had had a small buff putting them ahead this thread would be from the Scrapper crowd in the Scrapper forums, same as we have here. The problem is simple: ATs were not supposed to mingle. Mingling added nothing to the game and only created headaches since then in terms of balance. As pointed out in this thread if playing a Villain then there would be no Tanker available so only a Brute could be used. Devs could now balance Brutes in term of damage and survivability in a Villain-side-only vacuum. There are no toes to step since Stalkers are not going to be a contender for the Brute's role and Stalkers would remain the top damage melee AT. Ranged seem to enjoy a clearer distinction: Controllers will focus on CC and buffing, but Dominators will focus on CC and damage. Simple enough, the person who wants to CC and buff picks a Controller. Defenders focus on buffing with a side of blasting. Corruptors focus on blasting with a side of buffing. Again it's a pick on which the person wants to play Blasters focus on blasting. Sentinels... well, they focus on... being a good class for first players 🙂 (I have one and play it, so take that in the jest it was meant to). So this is the actual solution to all these problems: remove the mingling of ATs. Red side ATs only play in redside and Blue side ATs only play in blue. This is a solution no one wants though, and for good reasons. A) Red side does not have enough of a population. B) Mingling sides for the end game TFs is good but might bring these balancing woes again. But despite not being wanted this is the solution the game needs for the long term because as it is devs need to be on a knife's edge balancing survival of one AT versus damage of another AT and this one heck of a card castle all because specialized roles were blurred by introducing hybrids. The more extreme solution would be scorched earth: actually remove the ATs, but this is dumb, and a waste of time and effort put in making the ATs. But in the end my belief is that only the min max minority is fussed. I'm nearly 100% sure that the average player simply picks their Scrapper because they like their big crits, the Brute because they like the ramping damage and no crit RNG (like I do), or their Tanker to be big and strong (and fly, and have laser vision, and have a cape).

I've switched from Tankers to Brutes and been playing these for a year now as the shift in my threads shows. People want to iron man in a vacuum and that's hard to argue with or against. But my Brutes start soloing Posi 1 at 0x6 or 0x8 by the time they are level 20 (liberal usage of purples since CoT suck). My Tanker does the same (even in regard of inspirations). Then they move to +1x8 at Synapse, and again same for the Tanker (both need the occasional inspiration as they are slowly whittled down, but more so the Brute). By Yin the Tanker can probably no longer use inspirations (except at the AV because -def sucks). Moonfire can require the -very- occasional inspiration (because Vampyr stacking -ToHit and doing negative damage suck) from either AT but in my experience the Brute who has a Build-up will just tear them before they get many hits in. By Citadel and onwards until ITF neither uses inspirations again. Take this with a gain of salt but anyone who pays attention to my posts knows I've done a cool several several dozens of these runs with either AT which lets me speak of my experiences and not on an isolated case (Stone Armor Brutes ignore inspirations pretty much since Posi but still require them for that specific TF because of the -def, but from Synapse up they no longer need or touch them). The Brutes are definitely squishier than the Tankers, but for 80% of the content it does not matter (while I'm soloing at +1x8). The other 20% I use inspirations where needed. And this is the iron man part I talk about. When someone posted about doing their +0x2 duo and occasional Brute deaths my question is where are the inspirations? I have tried to compensate for the Tanker's damage by gobbling reds. Keep one read going at all times until the mission ends and then replenish. Didn't make a discernable difference to be honest. It was my infamous Stone/MA Tanker with mind blowing numbers but it slowly sanded +1 enemies to death even with the reds. -I- get a low more mileage from the occasional as-the-situation-demands inspiration for my Brutes (at least until the defences are consolidated and then they stop being needed) while doing more damage than I got from the Tanker keeping a red going at all times. Stone Armor in particular is disgusting with Tanker level survival and HP in terms of soloing while having Brute damage (AKA not even using inspirations while soloing and leveling at near softcap). The insistence in this thread is finding some mythical perfect niche for a Brute while ignoring the game does not behave like that. We have Scrappers and Stalkers and Brutes who are all only slightly different flavors of the same (Stalkers in particular have no niche ever since stealth became nothing more than the initial strike for every fight and then not coming into play until the next one, in the meanwhile they scrap like Scrappers). What can I say? Nothing. I don't even understand this thread. This is no other MMO where Rogues get nerfed and people are upset because if they want to keep up they should play a Shaman and that means switching to ranged and/or learning a whole class and its nuances. Here people who put Tankers in a pedestal can just switch to one, no difference in playing from their Brutes. Asking for more damage will be difficult with the last pass actually slightly nerfing the damage cap. An useless tweak since only in spreadsheets does a Kin manage to put a team at damage cap. In real life the mobs are blown to pieces before the Kin can get close (I know, I've played a Kin, and got tired of it (caveat, in the new content mobs do live long enough for a Kin to throw multiple FS' per fight making this relevant. Long term planning from the devs?)). Asking for more or better survival might be iffy as well since they are pretty tuned per tests ran. The ATOs are definitely crap, but they are so easy to obtain that their effects might as well be baked into the AT instead of 'but what if the <AT> is not running their ATOs??'. This is not my purview though, it's going to be the devs figuring it out. Am I against Brutes being buffed? Crap on a stick, it's the darn AT I play, of course I am not against it! Am I against Tankers be nerfed? I don't even play them seriously so it's no big deal but on principle yes. I don't need to remind anyone how Tankers were a crap AT and people's immediate advice was to not roll a Tanker but do a Brute instead. Is the hard content harder on melers? Why yes, you're paying for the ease of leveling, ease of soloing, and immunity to CC. CoH is pretty bad at teaching people to manage defensives or positioning since the game teaches to just square one's feet and gird one's loins and then facetank everything without moving. Any other game would be 'hehe no, you move out of the glowing shit or you die', so of course hard content is particularly hard when we've been conditioned to just passively take on things. Look at Linea's post where they mention how they play the 801 series and stagger defensives, accolades, temp powers, T9s, or in some cases stack them, then keep track of all cooldowns and be ready to bounce off to kite until the next cooldown is up. Can those who are having a hard time with the hard content say they are doing the same? Am I tired of the forum PvP that has been developing? Yes, yes I am. Am I partly to blame for it? Also maybe, yeah, sure. I apologize to those I've ruffled the feathers of, you're all good people and I enjoy talking and discussing things even if we seldomly actually play together. Devs are the ones who need to be talked to and convinced, not other players.

I notice my own replies seem to be falling into goalpost shifting and maybe I should just shut up. I'm using my tests as a basis but they are not min maxed for damage which is how my Scrappers end with 2:30+ pylon times because I never take the snipe. If someone does go all damage and gets better times I can't whine that their build is not balanced if they are doing the content anyway.

I am not. I never did look deep into it since he did not post the Fire/Sav build which was the one that piqued my interest. SS I already knew that double stacking Rage in a vacuum is very strong. But it was two minutes faster than my own Fire/Savage tests so I see three possibilities: - Some deep RNG involved. - incarnates were involved. - Epic pool powers for extra AoE (Savage already has two PbAoEs so it's good for clears). Two minutes seems rather deep and I did try some strong proc approaches that turned into a wash. But those 'strong proc approaches' were still trying to keep the build rounded, I suppose if just ignoring making a stable build and just stuffing procs everywhere might work, but that's looking like those pylon specialized builds that never come out to play. If it was because of using extra AoE from epic pools then that's fair and does not merit being called 'a pylon build'. Some people do want that extra AoE for when they solo, but in my experience in a team that extra AoE serves no purpose since we all aware at the pace that teams steam roll in the initial AoE volley. This is why I wanted to look at the build at the time since there could be something to learn from.

You are experienced enough in CoH to be aware of how +damage buffs have more of a benefit for other ATs than for Brutes. Double stacked Rage does wonders for Tankers and has much less effect on Brutes, You are aware of this. Are you going to do Bill's thing of becoming upset when I mention this mechanic we all know of? Do you have any other example that is not SS at least? There are two sets that make the AT shine and one involves SS with double stack and the other involves Rad Armor with lots of damage procs. A few months back this was the equivalent of Bio/TW. But Bio/TW or Rage Stacking with one set or proc abusing with a specific other does not make an AT OP outside of those combos. We can hinge the whole argument based on those as long as we agree that they only happen with those particular combos.

As long as people think that the 'AoE buff' matters things will always lean towards how Tankers got it so much better. And yet Brutes clear maps faster than Tankers, uh, almost like the 'AoE buff' is useless outside farming (and even then Brutes STILL finish maps faster). A Brute in hard content that has buffs from the team is as hardy as a Tanker. The Tanker just (most of the time) does not require buffs from the team. These discussions invariably are about feels which makes arguments complicated.

This is not a Tanker issue. It's a City of Heroes issue. It's true that ST is more interesting than AoE unless solo heavy. Anything and every thing melts when a full team unleashes AoE and then what? 3 mobs still alive? No point AoEing them down. With mass immobilizes and knockbacks there is not much to be done other than ask not to. If people persist then politely excuse yourself and go do something else. They want to have fun exploding mobs and Controllers want to feel useful and hit their mass immobilizes? That's fine, more power to them. But you don't need to be there. If after asking people continue then I abandon a spawn if I people mass immobilize or, worse, AoE KB back the lot. I just move on to the next one and let them deal with their actions. True that people don't like being told not to play. I've had a Controller doorsit in a TF because I requested once too often to go easy on the mass immobilizes. Fine by me though, between dealing with fly trapped mobs or play with one less person I'll take the second option. This is not a popular opinion nor is it welcomed by Controllers who want to feel useful, but unless at max level and fighting hard mobs I find CC just an hindrance. Fears, mass immobilizes, mass stuns, mass whatever, mobs just stop, wander around, whatever, instead of being glued to me. Controllers do have a place but it's on hard content and outside of that being ST focused and buffing/debuffing is just more helpful. But I accept it is not FUN so the last resort (which I never bothered going for) is forming a team and not taking them. I felt the same, but it requires taking two extraneous powers to reach it, or to dump our preferred travel power and use Teleport. Also at roughly 30 seconds it is only up every two spawns for most teams. I would give someone's left arm for it to be a one power wonder pick even if I had to redo builds to make room for that fourth pool.

The builds you see in the forums will too expensive to begin with. I suggest reading the guide in my signature on how to make money because you can play the game as you'd like, be it running missions or doing taskforces, and still earn with what to buy gear. But at the start you will want generic IOs (invention origins, and yes, it's a silly name). Something like two accuracy, three damage, and one recharge or endurance reduction. These are super cheap. I'm a big fan of flying so I read you. You get to have Flying, Jumping, Super Speed, Teleport for moving around in the game. You also have more-of-the-same-but-with-a-different-flavor such as Mystical Flight (which also lets you teleport) from the Sorcery pool, a clone of super jump from Force of Will pool (which allows to knockdown enemies when used), a clone of super speed from the Experimentation pool (that lets you run through NPCs and cars and also do small teleports). As a rule just swap which ever you see (Leaping/Speed/Teleportation) for Flight. Some small changes in the build will be required but it's not too complicated to fit everything in.

You use this program to open the builds you find in the forums, or to build your own: They will usually be max level builds and not for leveling, but asking can net you a leveling version.

Welcome back. My signature has links you might find of use for the money and some tips and tricks. As others have mentioned above the reason certain misions are harder are all due to the factions that you fight. A armor set strong against fire will do well against a faction that focuses on fire attacks, but if weak against psi attacks then a faction heavy on psi will be a problem. IO builds usually focus on fixing these holes. For a new player I usually recommend a fire armor/ice melee tanker, but tbh anything will do as long as the difficulty setting is kept low. Brutes will do more damage and substantially more so until level 20 but the tanker will plod on doing decent damage. A fire armor tanker in particular has Burn to narrow the damage gap, but at best an offense oriented tanker will match a defense oriented based brute.

Respecs are cheap so just give it a try. Tbh most of min maxing will just fly unnoticed. Another X% resistances or Y% recharge more (or less) in a game with 5% whiffing is not something blatantly obvious.

If you feel like stepping outside of your first picks then Martial Arts is a pretty combo with Bio as per @Gobbledegook's suggestion. You get to semi easily cap S/L thanks to the extra 10% defence it brings and the built in soft CC and two good places for FF procs will speed the defensive cooldowns that Bio survives on.

*10, but yes, barring self imposed iron man challenges it's best not to fight against slotting at least the procs. Few ATs get game changing ATOs like Stalkers.

Then the Tanker is ahead. So far the argument has been that the Tanker levels faster than the Brute because the Tanker can up the difficulty and reap more XP and thus reach 50 faster. My counter point was that the Tanker is already slower than the Brute to begin with and higher difficulty will just make it more so making the Brute do more content per minute. I could be wrong. Maybe the Tanker finishes in the same time of the Brute and gets more XP on top of that. That would put the Tanker frankly ahead while leveling. It's not my experience though. Tankers clear slowly, the AoE buff is worthless, and Brutes, without the AoE buff, still finish first. Now adding more difficulty makes the Tanker clear even slower. If +2 was double the XP of +1 then I could see the point, but as it is more content per minute wins out. I don't have a horse in this race. I haven't even played Tankers in the past year having focused exclusively on Brutes, so it's not like I'm trying to protect the AT since it is my main or whatever. I just don't see this perceived OPness of Tankers since they are overbeefy for regular content and only get to shine once harder content is attempted.... which is alright in my book. That is why they exist. For the harder content.

It's still just a matter of % though. If Trapdoor is not good enough (and to be fair it is not in the particular metric of leveling) then pick a mission and run it on a Tanker at +2 and a Brute at +1 and compare times. They are not brought to solo dungeons or raids for their damage but their vampiric tanking. If they can survive they can whittle an enemy down since mobs in WoW don't have the insane regen CoH has. You've become more and more abrasive as time goes and your white knighting for Brutes to return to being the undisputed OP AT is not satisfied. What used to be a good argument has turned into... this. I'm bailing out and frankly not engaging anymore until this new cantankerous fad of yours passes.

Not sure what you're disagreeing with. I said in my experience a Tanker finishes a TF ten minutes sooner. You must be one of the few that does not need a quadrillion TFs to level from 1 to 50 though. Heck, most people I know require two thousand TFs just to reach level 50. Hyperbolic funsies aside. If you want to see a single mission then look at the Trapdoor tests. Plenty of Brutes and Tankers have tried their hand and left their results there. Double stacked Rage and procced out Rad Armor skew the numbers just like any AT comboing TW and Bio used to skew the numbers. My own best times with a Brute were 4:42 and for a Tanker six minutes. Neither were in any particular danger. My worst time on a Brute was 6:13 having traded offense for defense. Again, what was the point? +4x8 Arachnos were not difficult so the trade was not worth it since the squishier build was still safe. Anyone only doing that sort of content will naturally gravitate to the 4:42 side of things instead of the six minutes. Anyone who wants more sturdiness for harder content will trade that minute and fifteen seconds for the survival of a beefier AT which is how we return to this point in the conversation. For most easier content (especially in full teams who obliterate and invariably have buffs) the Brute is still the 'best' choice in a world where people pick CoH up and play only the best and not what they have fun with.

I'll just add that soloing difficult content has always been the realm of tanks. When some people do world firsts solos of dungeons or raids in WoW they don't take a Mage, or a Warrior, or a Shaman. They go at it with a Blood tank so that they survive the damage and heal up. The goal is not to do big damage but to survive and then whittle the enemy down. The one time it was done with a Rogue wasn't for the DPS but for the teleport so that they could teleport up a and down a ramp while the raid boss walked the distance giving time for cooldowns of potions and defensives to reset.

I do have a thousand missions under my belt and extensive Brute and Tanker soloing. This is how I see it: - Tanker always finishes around ten minutes slower the same TF despite much vaunted AoE buff. - Attempts at increasing the difficulty will increase the gap so that ten minutes will be 15 or 20. - Brute finishes 10 minutes earlier (or 15, or 20) and starts the next leg of the trip that much sooner. Educated assumption: going from +1 to +2 will not be 100% more XP so the Brute remains ahead and does more content per minute than the already plodding Tanker now plodding even more because higher difficulty = less damage dealt. It's just an assumption though. Maybe the Tanker will pull ahead. It's not my experience though. It takes tougher factions for the Brute to falter and this is under the self imposed rule of not using inspirations because the faltering is propped up.

Tankers are like Sentinels. Everyone brags about their survival and then ditches them to play something stronger and faster since the IO game makes damage and not survival the goal. In all tests Tanks are slower so it is perfectly normal that the playerbase that sticks to regular easy-ish content goes to play something else since whatever other pick can do the same. When the content is no longer easy, such as soloing some TFs at max (not even all of them) then Tankers shine once more. Tanker buff for AoE is useless despite being mentioned so often. It serves no purpose since rarely do the initial mobs survive more than a couple AoEs and only in farming there are enough enemies to keep streaming in, and sometimes be so many in number that they cannot physically get closer. And yet despite this Brutes are -still- factually faster at AoE clears. I'm not even sure why this keeps on being brought up. In a team a Brute only loses to a Tanker because of 500 HP, otherwise the first AT that throws a bubble or a shield caps a Brute's resists and/or defenses. Difference being the Tanker can do it alone, but then the buffs are semi useless to them since they can reach the cap themselves with a good build.

There's two ways to look at it. One is that Sentinels are subpar damage and bring nothing to the team. The other is that at max level no AT matters since a full team of incarnates melts content. Tank? Controller? Scrapper? Does not matter since an avalanche of AoEs and Judgements clears the floor. That's my experience with both. It -is- true the Sentinel is a subpar AT that brings nothing (special) to the team, but it is also true that at max level we can barely get a few hits in before all mobs are dead. At that point the secret sauce is 'play whatever you care because in what universe does a full team usually fail to finish a TF?'. The new difficulties do bring a new wrinkle, but because we lack DPS meter addons we don't get the full tale either. Yes, higher difficulty means more and better damage needed. But also yes, the previously scoffing Blasters and Scrappers (and, tbh, any melee in melee range) is being hit by patches of resist lowering debuffs, huge unresistable explosion damage and whatever else the sadistic devs have cooked up. In the meanwhile the Sentinel has good basic defense and resists, is (usually) hovering, and in this particular build's case is 100% ranged and not going into melee. Now, again, without DPS addons what do I know? Maybe I am wrong and at the end the Sentinels would be shown to still be doing subpar. In WoW I'd look, see my damage on trash, see my damage on the boss, and see how many deaths I had. Then I could compare and see if I (or my class) had behaved well or was really dragging my team down. Here we have feels. Or have all eight running @Carnifax's log parser and then compare. But the game is not yet at the point where super min maxed teams are needed, but if it was then yeah, just like in WoW a Hunter/Sentinel would need to fight for a place because another class/AT would be preferred. Even if the piloting mattered more than following a meta.

Been toying with the idea of a FA Scrapper/Stalker with the very idea that dropping Burn is actually a defensive since mobs will stop hitting me to scatter.

What difference would this make to you? Us players just bump accuracy which works against everything be it typed or positional. Most builds that are planned via Mids will have 95% accuracy against +3. So what gain do you think there will be if your 95% accuracy goes against S/L, E/N, or Ranged, or Melee? 95% is 95%.

I went through all of this in my initial Sentinel fad. Eventually I had to accept that the mass immobilize was not cutting it (I speak only for myself, if it's working out for you then do carry on). A few misses and some of the mobs would run to me anyway and then they would start scattering, some of the mobs would just be resistant to being immobilized because boss, and of course each click was less damage being done. Eventually it was as much the low damage as well as the runners that made me stop playing Sentinels. Even now with this build that I am satisfied with I still reserve it for teams only and don't solo with it. The game being fundamentally what it is solo is more of a melee thing, and that's for the agro control as much as anything else.