Hjarki

You don't actually need 100% uptime on Rune of Protection because your goal is to fight at low health totals and capped resists. Rune of Protection does help with the initial engagement against an AV and is a place to slot the uniques. Toughness, on the other hand, is useless most of the time because it simply over-caps your S/L (only) resists. 2740 HP/320% Regen are hardly 'ignoring' health on an SR Tanker. It is, in fact, significantly more than the stats you linked earlier. I'm not sure how having 50%+ Defense is 'ignoring' Defense. The linked stats are also from a Staff Tanker - which means you can realistically expect +35% more Melee Defense if needed. Again, the defenses I posted are not dissimilar to the ones on your linked build so I'm not sure what the complaint is. It wasn't mentioned. Indeed, your response is a bit baffling given how little it has to do with anything I wrote. In Incarnate content you have Incarnate abilities. There's no actual difference in the number of incoming hits between regular content above the soft-cap and Incarnate content above the soft-cap with Incarnate abilities. I'd argue that's the proper design goal - not piling on ridiculous amounts of defense that you never actually use. If you're talking about extraordinarily difficult content, then you've got multiple stacking team buffs (not just Incarnates) that address your concern here as well.

One way to examine this question is to consider 'effective health'. For example, if you're at 70% health and have 25% resists, it would take a hit equal to .7 / (1 - .25) = 93% of maximum health to kill you. Super Reflexes and Reactive Armor add the wrinkle of scaling resists. Presuming you have both, some breakpoints (based on your resists without any of the scaling resists): 30% Resists. This is the steady state point where your effective health stops moving below 60%. A single hit is no more likely to kill you at 10% health than it is at 60% health. 40% Resists. This is the point at which it becomes advantageous to fight at low health. A 40% resist SR Tanker has the same effective health at 20% as they do at 100%. As you move above 40%, you actually have more effective health at low health totals (while also taking far less total damage that needs to be offset with healing/regen). 80% Resists. The "fight better at low health" category ends around here and you're better off just staying at maximum health. However, it should be noted that no SR Tanker has a particularly high effective health. A 90% Resist Tanker with 100% health can take 10 times their total health bar in a single hit. For realistic levels of resist on an SR Tanker (such as recommended elsewhere in this thread), 2.5 times is about the max. Super Reflexes also doesn't grant any bonuses to maximum health. An Invulnerability or Stone Tanker probably has 25% more total health than an SR Tanker. So our Invulnerability Tanker is probably going to have an effective health (vs. S/L) at 100% health five times higher than our Super Reflexes Tanker. With that in mind, effective health is primarily meaningful against AV. Against minions/lt/boss, no individual hit is hard enough to kill you outright so all you're really worried about is total mitigation. So if we focus strictly on AV fights, we can count the 8% from uniques (Shield Wall, non-scaling portion of Reactive) and 13% from ATO proc (presuming we place it in the right power). That 21% and our goal should probably be another 9% from set bonuses at minimum. With both ATO, we get another 12% S/L. As a result, I view Toughness on a SR Tanker to be a poor choice. Unlike the overwhelming majority of builds, you have no particular need for Weave - you've got more than enough Defense mules for every unique and it's nearly impossible to build a sub-soft-cap SR Tanker if you're not actively trying to screw up. With uniques and ATOs, you're already in the 30% - 40% range where your scaling resists cause your health decline to stall at low health. While obviously more resist is always better, all it's really doing is shifting the point you hit maximum resists to a slightly health total. Not taking Toughness means you save: A power pool. You've only got 4, so might as well not waste one. A power pick. Kick/Boxing are wastes of a power pick that you can't do anything with. Endurance. Not having to keeping those two toggles running is a significant endurance savings for a primary that has no endurance management. With that in mind, not taking Toughness also means you no longer have the ability to slot Unbreakable Guard, Gladiator's Armor, Steadfast Protection and Impervious Skin. Luckily, there's an alternative: Rune of Protection. To get to Rune of Protection, you can easily take Mystic Flight - it's a perfectly serviceable travel power that can be used to slot Winter's Chill (amongst other things). Spirit Ward is essentially a dead power - none of the healing uniques function in powers you don't use and you're not going to be using Spirit Ward. Arcane Bolt can potentially be effective. Eyeballing the math, Arcane Power probably only procs once every 25 sec or so. Once it has proc'd, Arcane Bolt is 66 dpa (higher tahn all but the hardest-hitting Tanker attacks) so it can be used to (slightly) increase your single target dps. It's also a good place to dump sets like Apocalypse if needed. You also gain access to Enflame. This allows slotting Ragnarok. Unless I'm misreading City of Data, this deals 26.415 (5.283*5) damage to 5 targets every 3 sec for 60 sec. The frequent patch dropping also means procs activate quite a bit more often than would otherwise occur. In terms of Rune of Protection itself, it provides about +30% to all resists while active (60 sec every 180 sec, no recharge reduction). This isn't useful for churning through endless waves of ITF trash, but it's quite handy when you first engage an AV and having yet gotten a chance to stack your ATO procs. And, of course, it costs zero endurance when you're not using it. Below are the stats for my current SR/Staff Tanker @100% health without ATO proc, Staff resist proc, or Rune of Protection. With all three of those active, I'd have about +56% to all resists.

-Regen isn't very useful. -100% Regen on an endgame AV/GM is roughly equivalent to 15 (non-scaling) dps. Certainly, it's great if you're trying to solo even-level AV/GM for kicks, but for teams it's mostly superfluous. +damage/-res are definitely useful, but it becomes a calculation of how much dps you lose vs. how much dps you gain. More importantly, the melee AT brings these abilities as well - they're just lower numbers. So while you can theorize about some perfectly structured group full of defenders, it's a lot easier to just grab 8 melee AT who can all operate effectively independently of one another and who synergize in any combination when you stack them.

To amplify this comment a bit, Super Reflexes is... different. A lot of the approaches that players are used to from other sets don't really work all that well with Super Reflexes because they just end up with ridiculously over-capped resists without ever bothering to take advantage of those resists. While I agree on the "build for health" approach, there's only so far you can go with this. Exploiting these virtues to amplify offense is a lot easier and you can still make a very tanky build. One of my more elegant builds is below. It's the sort of build you can only do with a Tanker and while it can't tank everything that could ever be thrown at it, it can do pretty well against most content while still having fairly decent offense. In terms of the rest of the primaries, I tend to view them as: Super Reflexes/Shield. These tend to share the same strength/weaknesses and both can be justified for certain builds. Bio/Stone > Invulnerability/Willpower/Ice. These hybrid sets tend to have similar build structures, but Bio/Stone just do it better with fewer holes and more supplemental benefits. Radiation/Fire/Electric/Dark. Classically, the rule was "Resist for Tankers, Defense for Scrappers". However, the way IO sets are structured makes it very hard to build from a base of a pure resist set (at least on a Tanker). Defense toggles let you equip 5xLotG, the other uniques and only take a minimal number of slots to deliver their benefits. Resist sets tend not to be particularly good at buffing anything you're likely to need - Melee and F/C Def are perhaps the least useful forms of defense and the only stackable Resist special is the not-terribly-useful Psi Resist. I actually think these are more useful for Stalkers since they get Hide and Shadow Meld on even zero-defense sets. However, it's really more about the combination of primary/secondary working synergistically and it's tough to say "X is good" without referencing what it's paired with.

No, it's assuming you're playing the actual content in the game. The fact that you can set up an AE mission using parameters found nowhere in the game to create a challenge doesn't alter the underlying reality that support archetypes just aren't very useful in the game because they're buffing allies beyond what is needed. Even running with no temporary powers/inspirations/etc., there really isn't a need for more than what well-designed melee AT can do defensively.

Staff is weak single target, but an AE powerhouse. There are three forms: Body, Soul and Mind. You can get up to three stacks. Body provides +15% damage, Mind provides +15% recharge and Soul provides +33% endurance discount. You can also spend these stacks for slightly elevated damage with two 'finisher' moves which give different benefits: Eye of the Storm grants -resist, -defense or -recharge/slow. -Resist is far and away the best of these, but Eye of the Storm itself is the weakest of the AE attacks in the set. Skysplitter grants +resist, +hit or +recovery/regen. Of this, either +resist or +recovery/regen are strong choices. You also get a bit extra smashing, psionic or energy damage (depending on stance) but this is trivial. Personally, I view Staff as a set you take for the purposes of tanking - and it works better on Tankers due to the Cone-centric emphasis. While it's not great at single target damage, it solves so many potential problems with a build that it just makes almost any build easier.

Bio Armor, Radiation Armor and Energy Melee can all debuff regen. However, it's probably not worthwhile to use Energy Melee for this purpose.

As I see it, the problem with support AT is that the game simply runs off the rails at the high end. When almost anyone with a defense set can hard-cap resists and soft-cap defenses, there isn't much need for these sorts of buffs. Moreover, the stacking nature of these sorts of buffs means that even if you shift the goal posts a bit, you merely end up in a situation where you only need one. Buff/debuffs also aren't created equal. Even significant amounts of -damage barely make a dent in the damage output of serious enemies because of the way the scaling works and their resistances. But even minor amounts of +resist can slice damage taken into a fraction of its value (presuming they're not already hard-capped). Ultimately, I think the only solution is to scale almost everything logarithmically and remove most of the inherent resists to debuffs. On such a scaling, you'd never be able to 'cap' anything - each subsequent buff/debuff would provide less and less benefit - and increasing/decreasing a stat would have the same overall effect with the same numbers. However, this would be a radical departure from the fundamental game mechanics, require everyone to re-build their characters and dramatically change a huge array of playstyles. You'd probably no longer have those +4 Fire Farms and you'd find much of the content far harder than it is now.

On most of your attacks, you'll be running +150% or so damage. Adding another 15% would take it from a 2.5x attack to a 2.65x, or a 6% boost. Are you sure this isn't what you're seeing? In any case, if you've got the endurance and the power slot to spare, there's little reason not to take it. Unlike Maneuvers/Tactics which mostly serve as self-buffs (since your group mates will have already capped their hit/defense without your help), Assault is almost always a benefit for the entire group.

Willpower and Bio both offer Psi Defense.

P2W, inspirations and other temporary powers fall into the same "renders the question moot" category as Incarnates. Rune of Protection is more situational. Ultimately, the reason you need status protection is that the 5% - 10% of the time when Defense fails against status effects, it's utterly crippling. Rune of Protection transforms those odds to more like 2.5% - 5% due to its uptime.

If you're talking about with Incarnate powers, it's mostly all the same. If you're talking without them, then status protection tends to be the most important aspect of 'tankiness' since that's the one thing you can't get from IO sets or pools.

The concept of 'endgame' doesn't really exist in CoH. In most MMORPG, 'endgame' is the most challenging content that delivers the greatest rewards. But if you want the greatest rewards CoH has to offer, all you need to do is go sit in a Fire Farm - it's a lot more efficient than actually playing the game. Likewise, the traditional candidates for most challenging content - such as Incarnate Trials - are actually quite trivial to beat. So you end up with a variety of make-your-own-fun arbitrary challenges that differ from player to player. As a result, when you're asking about optimal builds, you're going to get different answers based on that particular player's (often unspoken) criteria for what content is worth doing. My personal criteria: Must be able to exemplar smoothly across a wide range of levels Must be functional in a variety of group sizes from solo to full raid Shouldn't require Incarnate abilities to function effectively in non-Incarnate content Shouldn't require the use of temporary powers or outside buffs to function effectively Should be the best implementation of that particular power set combination Given the above, some general observations on Stalkers: Stalkers will almost always have worse AE damage than other melee AT. Stalkers are competitive in single target damage over the span of all melee sets with Scrappers but this competitiveness largely takes the form of a higher floor and lower ceiling. That is, Stalkers transform many 'bad' sets into 'good' ones, but rarely elevate 'good' sets into 'excellent' ones. Stalkers lack the ability to tank hard targets such as AV/GM. While they're normally just as good as Scrappers (and, often, Brutes) at mitigating damage, they lack the taunt necessary to control such targets in a group setting.

Phantom Army is unaffected by buffs. Phantasm can be buffed/healed, but it's a relatively unimportant part of the kit. As a result, most Illusion builds are debuff based.

Neither is particularly useful. Most of my farming is done semi-afk - I'm just letting autofire powers and auras do all the damage. Actively playing the character would speed up the process in real time at the expense of massively increasing the time commitment I'm personally making. However, when I do actively farm, I have macros to endlessly convert/chew reds. This means I'm running at/near the +damage cap anyway. Moreover, it means that every character who isn't actively contributing is cutting into my Inspiration drops.

I suspect the reason you don't see much endurance slotting is that builds only spend so much endurance - and this amount is predictable. So once you hit the point where your build sustains itself, there's no point in more endurance regeneration. I do - from time to time - slot powers for endurance I don't need, but that's mainly an issue of set bonuses. However, the set bonuses for endurance sets aren't particularly good for typed defense armor sets.

While we're on the subject of Bio, I've linked my Bio/Staff below. One of the key advantages of Bio is that you don't need quite as much single target damage due to DNA Siphon (and it's -regen) against most foes. So you can go for a more purely 'tank' build to leverage the multiple taunt auras. The build below is S/L hard-capped, F/C/N/E/P soft-capped (or nearly so) while having exceptional AE damage with Staff's enormous radius/arc on a Tanker. DDR is largely unnecessary since stacking Guarded Spin pushes Lethal Defense well above the point where enemies can reasonably debuff you. As you shift into Incarnate content, Barrier lets you stay relevant and your defense + regen can hopefully deal with the relative weakness of non-S/L resists

You get an average time for your particular interpretation of a set and how it synergizes with another particular set. It doesn't necessarily tell you anything about the set itself in isolation. You also bring a degree of subjectivity with the player and the choices/abilities they bring to the table. You can eliminate these factors - if you have a large enough data set. Unfortunately, we don't.

Unfortunately, the design space is simply too complex and the data points too sparse. For this sort of statistical method to have much value, you need an enormous body of data - far more than is contained in a few popular threads on this board. Even then, you're falling squarely into the McNamara Fallacy by focusing on metrics which aren't particularly reflective of actual game play. To put this in perspective, even with the vast amounts of data provided by warcraftlogs, a much simpler design space and far more limited target content, projecting that design space onto a single dimension is still nearly impossible. To do so in CoH with a few data points? You're unlikely to get answers you didn't already know.

I have something similar with Stone/Energy, although it's more of an 'additional feature' to a build that's structure around damage.

What I'm getting from this line is that 801.7 has no psi damage. 🙂

I don't like 'tier lists' for melee because they tend to overlook the synergy between primary and secondary. For example, my current (non-farming) Brute is Staff/Stone. I would consider it one of the best combination possible on a Brute for general purpose play. But I'm not sure I'd consider either Staff or Stone 'top tier' in isolation. Staff has relatively weak single target damage while Stone has serious endurance problems. However, the combination of two sets that can each fix the problem in the other makes it a top tier combination - I can tank pretty much anything with confidence while also dishing out more damage than other comparably tank-y builds can generate and I can do it without Incarnate powers.

I've linked one of my builds below to amplify my thoughts on what Ill/TA 'should' be. Holds (Blind, Ice Arrow, EMP Arrow). I don't actually use these all that much. While I could theoretically lock down a single target pretty well, it's normally superfluous. These mainly exist as mules for Basilisk's Gaze. EMP Arrow I primarily use defensively - for the 'bubble' effect - and then generally only on major fights (even in a build like this, it doesn't recharge fast enough for every spawn). Additional Controls (Deceive, Spectral Terror). These are also mules for excellent sets. I don't use them all that much because they're unnecessary in most cases. However, they're nice to have as an option. Single Target Debuffing (Entangling Arrow, Poisonous Ray). These generally only come out against an AV/GM encounter. Entangling Arrow can theoretically set Containment, but I do so little personal damage that it's not all that meaningful. Since all of my knockback is suppressed, I don't need to lock enemies in place either. Multi-target Debuffing (Flash Arrow, Disruption Arrow). These are really my bread-and-butter debuffs. Flash Arrow shuts down most everything and makes Ill/TA the ultimate Stealther - you can even manipulate clickies right next to a spawn. Disruption Arrow is an every-spawn damage increase. Note that, as with virtually everything else in the build, these are slotted primarily for recharge. AE Damage (Oil Slick Arrow, Disruptor Blast). Oil Slick does massive damage, but needs something to set it off. Disruptor Blast not only sets it off, but lets me slot Force Feedback to reduce its recharge even more. AE damage is normally a big hole with Illusion and being able to patch that hole is a major reason why Trick Arrow pairs so well. Pets (Phantom Army, Phantasm, Tarantula). All of these are perma-pets at the levels of recharge I run. I have all four pet uniques slotted, but the Phantasm/Tarantula are primarily relying on the PA taunt and Flash Arrow to stay alive. I've suppressed the knockback on Phantasm to avoid scattering spawns. The Tarantula is particularly nice due to the -fly on attacks bringing enemies into my ground AE and removing them from my sky. Defenses/Utility (Fighting pool, Flight pool, Leaping pool, Speed pool). There shouldn't be many surprises here. I don't aim for pre-Incarnate soft-cap because my primary defense is Invisibility + Flash Arrow. In those rare circumstances where I can be spotted, Evasive Maneuvers will normally give me enough defense to lay in a Flash Arrow. I'm mostly unconcerned with resists because I can't get them high enough to make much difference and I'm expecting my PA to tank most anything I can't dodge. This approach is not for 'farming' (although I suppose it's possible). The goal is to avoid as much fighting as possible and focus on hard targets for mission completion while bringing significant support to a team (if one is present). My main method of managing endurance is the simple expedient of not doing stuff. Mostly I support the pets as they do their job. I open with Flash Arrow followed by Disruption Arrow. If I want to AE, I lay in an Oil Slick and ignite it with Disruptor Blast. Against AV/GM, I'll use Entangling Arrow and Poisonous Ray to further reduce their resistance. EMP Arrow is an option for tough fights to provide safety from status effects.

With my Ill/TA, I don't really spend much effort - if any - on single target attacks because none of them are really worth the endurance compared to just letting the Phantom Army rip up my enemies. With Ice Arrow in particular, having an attack that I'll rarely ever use at the expense of +2.5% E/N defense and +7.5% recharge from Basilisk? Not remotely worth it.

Staff Mastery is another option for endurance mitigation, although normally it's used for damage amplification/mitigation instead.