Hjarki

When you consume Seismic with Stalagmite, it receives a 1:45 recharge. So while you do a ton of damage, you can't use it all that often.

My suspicion is that healing will be mostly useless. For healing to be valuable, you need to hit a very narrow sliver between "obliterated in an instant" and "I scoff at your puny damage" - and that sliver shrinks the more you ramp up difficulty. But a lot of other support mechanisms won't be all that great either. Consider Cold. This is one of the top support sets right now, but primarily for its debuffing. However, all of that debuffing is based on a hit roll - against enemies with +30% Defense against you. If you're using a Defender build optimized for +4/x8, that means you're only going to be hitting 40% of the time (presuming +75% accuracy from 5x purples or the equivalent) with abilities that have such a long recharge that you won't get a chance to re-apply them in a timely fashion. So while the bubbles are nice, they're essentially all the set has to offer for our purposes unless you're building specifically for Relentless (and, even then, overcoming that +30% Defense isn't going to be particularly easy). The same sort of reasoning applies across the defense sets. If you start with the assumption that heals aren't particularly useful and non-auto-hit abilities are unreliable, the value of a huge range of powers diminishes greatly. Compounding this is the reality that if the Tanker is struggling, there's no chance for anyone without an Armor set to risk being anywhere near the enemies. A 45% S/L/R soft-capped Blaster or Defender does just fine in that solo ITF. Against Relentless? Anything that so much as glances at them is going to kill them. This alters the design philosophy of such AT. Looking at the support sets, the two I see really shining in Relentless are Electric Affinity and Trick Arrow. Electric Affinity gives you very strong single target +hit/+defense (presumably for the Tanker) and a resist/status bubble for the team as well as some other various buffs to damage/end/recharge. While Trick Arrow is primarily a debuff set, the key debuffs are generally auto-hit (and often rapidly re-useable) while it also provides a resist bubble similar to EA.

Think about Lord Recluse on Relentless. You're nicely soft-capped at 45%. The tower requires another 30%. His Praetorian hit requires another 18.75%. Relentless requires another 30%. You have no temporary powers/inspirations. With Barrier Core Epiphany, you can probably survive 10 secs if you have a extremely high defense build. After 10 sec? You're probably toast without some significant help. That help probably isn't coming from Storm Kick either since there's a good chance you're not going to able to hit Recluse with it reliably. Most of the time when we're talking about 'Strongest Tank', we're implicitly using a model like "can solo ITF". Once you start getting into the extreme situations Relentless will open up, I'd argue it's far less about what you can do independently of others than how effective your baseline is for the support others provide. Right now, I'm definitely leaning towards the "Super Reflexes is King of Relentless". While there are a host of issues with the set, it can achieve sufficient native Defense against all positionals to deal with the run-of-the-mill challenges in Relentless - 75% Defense is not an unreasonable goal for SR. Against Lord Recluse, it can hit that 123.75% for 3 minutes. In theory, two SR Tankers could tank worst case Lord Recluse all day long.

I think it's a reasonable assumption that you'll spend charges on the chain jump faster than you can earn them. So when you get a Shock proc, you're getting 20% of the original power plus another 15% of Tesla Cage (although only multiple targets). On Charged Bolts, this would be 10.57 damage plus another 18.07. If you're running +150% damage, that would be 71.6 damage per Shock.I don't have a good model for the average chance, but it's a 100% at 0% End - which is a lot more than you're going to get from proc'ing out the attack. However, the real question isn't whether procs or Shock are better but what the difference between End Drain slotting and proc slotting would be. Again, I don't have a particularly good model for that. Against relatively weak foes, my suspicion is that you'll be killing them before you can zap their End - but you'll also be overkilling them with procs. Against tough foes, where you're near 100% Shock chance, the difference between slotting End Drain and not very likely means the difference between getting no Shock and getting frequent Shock. As you scale up the difficulty, your End Drain is subject to heavy resists. Also, bear in mind we're not talking about slotting Performance Shifter but sets like Power Transfer that are also +damage sets with decent set bonuses.

I find the whole Seismic Shockwaves ability clunky and underpowered. As a defensive mechanism, it's simply too unreliable to be of much value. As an offensive mechanism: Rock Shards. Ranged Cones are tricky to make work since you need your enemies to stay at range to catch them in the AE. When you're also forced to stay on the ground to use them, this makes Rock Shard very niche. Consuming Shockwaves so it can do half the damage of your second basic attack rather than a third the damage of your second basic attack doesn't really make this power worth taking. Seismic Force. Aim/Build Up abilities tend to be used as openers, especially in sets that have abilities like Sniper attacks and ultimates. But this is the one scenario where it doesn't work very well because you won't have Seismic Shockwaves to start the fight. So the benefit would really be confined to very long fights where you can wait out the (long) recharge of Aim and then use it rotationally. Stalagmite. These sorts of abiliites are almost invariably skipped in Blast sets. That's why when the Sentinel revamps were made, they were transformed into an actual attacks rather than underpowered control abilities. Having Stalagmites ramp up to a Blaze-style heavy-hitting attack makes it far more reasonable. Haviing it also gain a really, really long recharge when it does so tosses the pile right back on the scrap heap. When I look at design possibilities for this set, I'm probably not going to take either Rock Shards or Stalagmite. I'm also probably going to build for Hover-blasting since it provides a solid defense to remove flight from others while retaining it yourself and it has a ranged ultimate, while not losing anything because the core set mechanic is so pointless. Since -def is such a proc-friendly ability, I'm probably going to play something like Storm/Seismic. Which doesn't seem like the design intent at all. While the aforementioned Storm/Seismic would be a solid enough build, it seems strange to have a set where the best builds for it actively avoid the core mechanics of the set.

You might consider a re-design with the next Electric changes. While Defenders get 25% more End Drain, the Sentinel version of the set is enormously better at End Drain due to the rotation using high drain powers (rather than focusing on low drain ones) and the lowered recharge on Thunderous Blast meaning it's an every-spawn effect. So it makes sense to slot Power Transfer in your main nukes and Thunderous Blast and exploit the increased damage from low end enemies.

If Placate had a 12 sec recharge, this would permit it to be used rotationally to ramp up damage - essentially you'd be replacing a low damage maneuver with a zero damage maneuver that made your next (high damage) attack auto-crit. With a 60 sec recharge, it seems like it will end up being more like an Aim/Build Up for AE. However, with a 5 target cap, it's hard to find AE that works all that well. 5 targets in a 15 yard radius doesn't mesh well with 5 target AE (which are almost always Cones) - if you're surrounded by 16 mobs, there's a good chance you won't hit the Placated mobs with your AE.

30% over the cap without temporary boosts or outside support is still pretty difficult - Super Reflexes is pretty much the only set where you'll regularly see that. On an unrelated note, I've found the new Stone Armor to be an exceptional set. It's trivial to get well above soft-cap on everything but F/C (against which you'll have 90% resists in all likelihood) and there's a lot of offense added to the set.

Attack Vitals has a small advantage when I ran the numbers of just running the two sequences I was talking about. However, Empower also affects both the damage from priimary and any other attacks you decide to toss into the sequence. For Scrappers, some quick-and-dirty numbers: Nimble Blades: 52.55 in 1.188 Ablating Strike: 82.58 in 1.188 Blinding Feint: 50.05 in 1.452 Sweeping Strike: 106.35 in 1.452 If we assume 150% bonus damage, this would be (52.55 + 82.58 + 50.05 + 106.35 * 5) * (1 + 1.5 + 0.5 * 10 / (1.188 * 2 + 1.452 * 2)) = 2471.23 damage Vengeful Slice: 102.60 in 2.64 This would be (82.85 + 102.6 + 106.35 * 5 + 62.56 * 5) * (1 + 1.5) = 2575.00 damage So there's a small advantage for Attack Vitals. However, the bonus from Empower applies to everything. So you're also getting more damage from Mud Pots, more damage from Brimstone Armor and more damage from any subsequent attacks you make after Sweeping Strike (such as another AE). Scrapper criticals also creates a wrinkle. The additional damage from Attack Vitals can't crit, but the additional damage from simply having a higher +damage total can. Putting Superior Critical Strikes in Blinding Feint will mean you get the proc on both single target and AE, while putting it in Vengeful Slice doesn't do much for you single target. My suspicion is that the best possible AE performance would involve interleaving the normal (non-Empower sequence) Blinding Feint with a series of AE and not worrying about the combo system at all. Ablating Strike is a decent enough basic attack and Vengeful Slice is a mediocre basic attack - but spending all that activation time on attacks that only affect one target when you could be affecting 10 targets at once is unlikely to be all that productive.

I threw together a Stone/DB Tanker. My conclusion was that all you really needed was Nimble Slice, Ablative Strike, Blinding Feint and Sweeping Strike - and the only combo I use is Empower. This makes sense on a Tanker. You're forced to take Nimble Slice anyway and you've got twice the targets and 50% wider arc on Sweeping Strike. With the impact of Empower on the damage from primary, it's better than trying to pull off Attack Vitals. Sweep would do more AE damage, but it would require taking 3 powers that I wouldn't otherwise take. On Scrapper, I'm not sure this reasoning holds.

Why can you play a Claws/Stone Scrapper but not a Stone/Claws Tanker?

It really depends on what you mean by 'overpowered'. For solo performance, Illusion Controllers are in a league of their own. Phantom Army is just so overpowered coupled with certain support sets that you can do things most other AT can't even dream of doing. For influence/xp farming, Rad/Fire Brutes are unmatched. There really isn't any reason to play anything else. However, neither of those builds are particularly worthwhile on a team actually playing the game rather than farming or doing parlor tricks. For team play, Scrappers and Tankers are 'S' tier. Scrappers are the highest damage AT while also being tough enough to survive anything except the most extreme challenges. Tankers are the ones who can survive those extreme challenges, but they do so at the expense of damage. Blasters are generally just weaker than Scrappers. They don't do as much damage and they're far less durable. non-Illusion Controllers and Dominators suffer from the fact that Control sets just aren't useful in the modern game. You get a bunch of weak AE and some largely useless pets. Masterminds suffer from pet scaling. At even level, they're decent enough. As you ramp up the difficulty, the pets become effectively useless and you're left with a severely underpowered AT. Corruptors and Defenders have poor dps and the overwhelming majority of their buffs/debuffs/heals just aren't very useful. While they can potentially boost a team's performance a great deal, the availability of inspirations and other similar powers leaves the support AT concept a bit adrift. Essentially, to make support work you first need the ATs to support - but those ATs you're supporting don't actually need you. Stalkers are almost strictly weaker than Scrappers. While there are certain theme builds that work better on Stalker than Scrapper, these are not particularly powerful builds in the first place. non-farming Brutes don't have the sheer unkillability of Tankers or the dps of Scrappers. The various VEAT/HEAT tend to be inferior to the best builds from similar AT. And, of course, the Sentinel is 'balanced' - which means it tends to be weaker than the best builds.

In terms of Super Reflexes, it effectively bypasses most of the issues with Defense because you end up so far over soft-cap that, coupled with high -defense resistance, you'll still be capped against anything you'll conceivably face. With that in mind, I see two key problems with Super Reflexes. The first is end drain. Sapper attacks tend to be 'one shot kills' if you don't have End Drain resistance since they de-toggle you. While an SR Tanker is unlikely to get hit, that 1-in-20 chance of instadeath still isn't very comforting. The other issue is that when SR fails, it fails hard. It has no resist to either Toxic or Psi (coincidentally the two types of attacks most likely to bypass positional defenses). So you end up with a Tanker who is great against everything... except that one guy in the mission that you have no answers against. From that standpoint, I tend to steer clear of Super Reflexes because if I'm not going to be the universal Tanker, I figure I might as well just play a dps-focused melee AT.

This is only for even level minions. If you're fighting a +3 AV/GM, your floor would be around 10% (the same as resistance). There are also foes with innate +hit or +accuracy benefits that further minimize the impact of defenses. Defense debuffs are also significantly more effective than Resistance debuffs - there's no such thing as a 'cascading resistance failure'.

I'd argue Scrapper is a better choice. As you noted, playing a non-Resist Tanker is a tough choice because of that high resist cap. While a Shield Tanker will normally S/L cap, they'll have weaker resists elsewhere. Moreover, a large chunk of those resists will come from IO set bonuses that are the same for both Tanker and Scrapper. So while the Tanker will be tougher than the Scrapper, it will be more like 30% vs. 40% resist rather than 75% vs. 90% resist. Scrappers have a higher base damage and get more benefit from Against all Odds. Battle Axe has a terrible first attack (which Tankers are forced to take but Scrappers are not). Pendulum is the same arc on both Tankers and Scrappers (Tankers can hit twice as many targets, though). That being said, I tend to reserve 'Tanker' for builds where I'm going to pursue builds that are designed to withstand almost anything - Recluse, Reichsman, Hamidon, etc. - while I go with the more damage-oriented AT on anything that is merely decent at surviving most things.

Force Feedback in AE is normally a non-brainer because the large number of targets makes the proc chance near 100% even on short recharge powers. That being said, Shield Charge isn't a particularly good choice due to its the extremely long recharge. Getting 5 sec of +100 recharge on a 14 sec recharge Dragon's Tail is a near-perma +100% global recharge. Getting 5 sec of +100 recharge on a 90 sec Shield Charge is more like +10% global recharge... if you're charging on Cooldown (which you probably aren't).

The problems I experience with SR: It has no resist powers. While it does have the scaling resist, the real issue is that it doesn't have powers to slot resist sets. Every unique resist IO has to be packed into Toughness and you can't use non-unique resist set IOs (such as for bolstering Psi resist). When it fails, it fails hard. All sets have a 'hole'. But most of the time, that 'hole' just means not being hard-capped/soft-capped against that particular attack. With SR, the 'hole' is extremely narrow (non-positional attacks) but SR is completely defenseless against them. So instead of struggling against certain enemies, it simply faceplants against them. No endurance management/protection. Not having endurance management is a nuisance. Not having any endurance protection means that 5% of the time, the sapper effectively kills you by knocking down all of your toggle. SR on a Tanker is also a bit over-the-top. While you've got completely unassailable positional defenses, you'd be in essentially the same place on most other AT. Certainly, they're not quite as tough (lower health, smaller scaling resists), but you're not really gaining much advantage as a Tanker so you might as well just be a Brute/Scrapper/Stalker/Sentinel.

This actually surprises me. When I was referring to melee Cone AE, I was referring to things like Shadow Maul. Frost (and the narrower Fire cone as well as the Claws final attack, etc.) are actually ranged Cone AE (although traditionally they could not slot range IOs except via IO set pieces). I wouldn't have thought ranged Cone AE would be affected by the Tanker ability, although this was really little more than an assumption because I never tested those particular Cones.

I don't believe this is correct. The melee cones I've tested have both an arc and a radius increase for Tankers.

One iteration of my Ill/TA build is here:

Fire also grants a fire damage proc to all of your attacks. Taken together, Molten Embrace will provide more overall damage than Bio Armor will.

My general approach: Entangling Arrow (Gravitational Anchor). This is a mandatory pick and it's not horrible, but not great. It's only a Mag 3 Immobilize, so it's not actually much good as an Immobilize. While you can theoretically lock down an AV/GM eventually and it can slot another purple set, it's primarily a -resist debuff for hard single target fights. Flash Arrow (4-set Cloud Senses, no proc). This is one of the key powers of the set and it will normally floor an opponent's hit unless they have ways to significantly resist -hit debuffs. Glue Arrow (skip). Aside from being a weak effect, it doesn't have good slotting options. Ice Arrow (4-set Basilisk's Gaze). While I don't actually use this much as a Hold, it's one of the best single target debuffs in game and it can slot the excellent Basilisk's Gaze. Poison Gas Arrow (skip). I want to like this, but it just doesn't do enough. Any time I'd be tempted to use it, Flash Arrow is the better option. Acid Arrow (procs). This can be used as an AE by slotting a host of different procs into it. Even on sets where you don't have Energy/Fire damage, this can permit igniting oil slicks. Disruption Arrow (nothing or Preemptive Optimization). The Endurance component of this power doesn't do much but permit slotting a set into a power that otherwise doesn't need slotting. However, it's a great -resist debuff. Oil Slick Arrow (various AE damage options). This does as much damage as most ultimates (albeit without Aim/Build Up) and can take a host of procs. EMP Arrow (4-set Basilisk's Gaze). The primary use I have for this power is actually the 'bubble'. As an offensive effect, it's narrow to the point of uselessness. However, being able to mule Hold sets and lay down a status protection effect makes it a strong pick. Overall, I think Trick Arrow is one of the best sets because it has massive debuffing, exceptional slotting opportunities and covers a traditional weakness in Control sets (AE damage).

FIre/Dark is a fairly strong choice as well.

Precise Strike. This is an ideal place to put the +50% proc because the standard rotation - PS, Serpent's Reach, PS, Skysplitter - always follows it with a very hard-hitting attack. Putting the proc into the damage aura means that it applies somewhat randomly rather than at the optimal point in your rotation. Guarded Spin. This can take LotG recharge (and generally should). That leaves 5 slots for either Avalanche or Armageddon, although various frankenslotting options work as well. Eye of the Storm. Force Feedback proc is ideal here and dramatically increasing AE damage. Serpent's Reach. This is inevitably going to take some of Apocalypse, but the 6-set bonus isn't particularly useful. It can also take up to two additional procs if you're willing to forgo the recharge bonus. Cloak of Darkness. Another good place for LotG Recharge. Cloak of Fear. The accuracy on this power is problematic, as is the endurance cost. However, as long as you accept that you'll only use it situationally, it's a great place for Cloud Senses (recharge, ranged def). Oppressive Gloom. This stacks with the disorient from your attacks, so can come in handy. It can also slot Absolute Amazement. To achieve the rotation I mentioned above, you'll need +225% recharge for Skysplitter, +203% recharge for Precise Strike. This means you'll almost certainly need Hasten. I haven't tested it out, but something like so might be a good baseline for ideas:

Very few enemies are purely ranged. The only ones I can think of off-hand would be things like Rikti drones or various floating Psionic enemies. Almost everything else has, at the very least, a brawl-type attack. But there are plenty of enemies that are mostly ranged. These enemies will try to exhaust their (good) ranged attacks before they resort to any sort of melee attack. Even with multi-tanking, you're running afoul of the target cap. While you can certainly pack 100 mobs into a small area, that doesn't change the fact that you're only able to damage 16 of them at once (and frequently less than that). So you need some sort of synergy effect to justify doing it over simply having each tank take their own little group. There are certainly reasons to do this. If you have a Kinetics players in your group, they can only pick one direction to go but they can buff the entire team. So it may prove more worthwhile to keep the entire group together so everyone can get the +damage buff. However, even then, trying to do much more than simply maintain at 16 (which may involve grabbing other groups before the current one is dead) doesn't make much sense.