Hjarki

My thoughts: You might consider Brute instead of Tanker. My line of thinking is that there are two reasons to play a Tanker. The first is to be as ridiculously unkillable as a CoH character can get. The second is because you're exploiting some specific benefits of being a Tanker. I would not consider Shield/MA to match either of these criteria. On the other hand, MA/Shield as a Brute is a beast. The standard single target rotation for MA would be Storm Kick/Cobra Strike/Storm Kick/Crippling Axe Kick. You're going to lose a lot of damage tossing Thunder Kick into the mix (although I understand the temptation to not simply waste the power pick - a problem you wouldn't have if you follow my previous advice :). You are far too concerned about resists and not concerned nearly enough about factors like recharge. I'd strip all those toggles down to the bare minimum to ED their resist/defense and use purples in your offensive powers to boost your resist so you won't need Hasten. As a side benefit, this allows you to 6-slot purples for Toxic/Psi resist (the ones that might potentially penetrate your positional defenses). There's absolutely nothing wrong with a Shield Tanker who only has 30% F/C/E/N Resist. If you're going to take Gloom, you really should make room for Darkest Night. While MA doesn't need Gloom for a decent rotation (and, arguably, can't use it very well), Darkest Night is fantastic for the fights where you just need to be a bit tougher. You also might consider Obliteration. Aside from a great place to mule Ragnarok, it will seamlessly increase your AE dps.

I haven't worked through every possible rotation for every set exhaustively. However, almost all 10.25+ sec rotations that deliver strong dps tend to be of the form: Some Basic Attacks, Assassinate, Big Attack, Shorter List of Basic Attacks, Assassinate, Sniper Attack. You can either view these as 5.5 - 7.5 (or thereabouts) sec rotation where you're just swapping out Big Attack and Sniper Attack to deal with their long recharges, or you could view them as one 10.5+ sec attack chain. I tend to take the former view. In terms of procs, internal recharge is only a disadvantage when you have too much total recharge for that power. That's why you tend to 'proc monster' your faster powers while straight slotting (more or less) your slow ones - you're looking to build a rotation where each power recharges exactly when you need it. However, Stalkers have limited incentive to use procs (much). Consider Freezing Touch. A damage SO yields +63.7 damage per attack. A standard proc would be 64.575 damage per attack. Once you account for critical strikes, this means slotting Impeded Swiftness into Freezing Touch will not only make your damage less consistent, it will also make it lower on average than the alternative of just slotting for damage. Stalkers also need those set bonuses because their defenses/recharge/endurance is going to be woefully inadequate unless you shore them up with set bonuses - and most of the best set bonuses require 5 slots (only one of which is likely to be a proc). You simply don't have the slots to pull tricks like the Broadsword Tanker with his 5 procs + LotG in Parry.

Claws can do a sub-5.25 sec attack chain. Ice can do a just-barely 1/2 attack chain with Ice Sword, Fire Blast, Assassin's Ice Sword and Freezing Touch. Trying to do a 10.5+ sec attack chain is almost always going to yield poor results because there's just too much filler you're packing in. You do gain a small advantage as you head towards 10.5 because you can use a Sniper attack in your rotation (normally the recharge is too long) but it's offset by the enormous penalty of your heavy-hitting attacks being such a small part of the rotation.

Not on a Stalker. Genetic Contamination isn't a damage aura, so it's not nearly as essential as it would be on other AT. DNA Siphon is certainly nice, but it's not something you generally need for your build to operate. Parasitic Aura is marginally more useful than most T9 from Armor sets but it's still not a power I'd bother taking. So by level 20, you've got the core of the set.

It's really just a matter of tradeoffs. The general theory is that a proc delivers more damage than a damage enhancement. So if you want Radiation to do decent single target damage, you do the same thing you do with your AEs for farming: you 6-slot procs. However, doing so costs a lot of slots, so you need to sacrifice set bonuses. I tossed together a very quick-and-dirty build and I hit 90% FR (of course) with 27% F/C Def, which is more than enough if you're using your healing effects for +4.

I'd go with Bio. Aside from being probably the most universally top tier set across all AT with armor sets, it meshes with Ice better. The major weakness of Bio is the S/L defense and lack of DDR - which Ice Patch nicely covers in many ways. You also get the stacking Sleeps (although I wouldn't depend on this too much since Frozen Aura breaks the Sleep from Genetic Contamination and the latter only has a 85% chance of applying non-stacking Mag 2 every 4 sec).

They do less single target damage. In actual game play, they deal significantly more AE damage due to the ultimates. Because the ultimates cram so much damage into such a narrow window of time, you can benefit from both Aim & Build Up while burning off the long recharge between spawns.

I've seen this comment a fair bit and it's always puzzled me. I see no behavior difference between Scrappers/Blasters in farms and Tankers/Brutes with regards to runners. Likewise, in actual gameplay, enemies run away from taunt auras all the time. Are people confusing the -range effect on the power 'Taunt' that forces enemies to come into melee range with the Taunt effect (which, as far as I know, has no effect beyond controlling what target enemies select)? Or am I just not noticing some game effect that's obvious to everyone else? In terms of the actual topic, I think it would be tough to beat */Shield for raw damage. With that in mind, I think staying allive as a */Shield Stalker in a +4 fire farm would prove tricky. Probably the best choice would be something like Claws/Bio/Dark where you simply Hover-blast with a bunch of ranged cones.

For me, the larger issue is that T1 pets tend to get hit with a double whammy by purple patch where they lose damage both from the damage penalty and the hit penalty. It just doesn't make much sense to me. If it's appropriate for T1 pets to be more fragile and do less damage, just make them even level pets with less durability and damage.

It's more than just indoor missions. You can think of (most) ranged Cones as having a 'minimum range' attached to them. However, when you've aggro'd an entire spawn, they're going to make a strong effort to violate that 'minimum range'. Unless you're just alpha striking the entire spawn, it's pretty quickly going to fall into a shape that you can't manage with the Cone. Nor do most controls work very well against this because they just spread the spawn further. Hitting a spawn with a Mag 3 immobilize means that the minions/lieutenants will stay nicely in place while the bosses keep on trucking. Even worse, as you shift up the difficulty levels, hard controls like Immobilize get significantly less effective. That being said, Sonic Blast's Cones are unusually well-suited to avoiding this problem. You can slot both Overwhelming Force and Ragnarok into Howl, giving you about 44% chance to knockdown. Coupled with the double knockdown of Shockwave, that gives you about 2.44 knockdowns every 5 sec. Moreover, unlike hard controls which fade into uselessness as you level shift, knockdowns pretty much remain knockdowns. About the only enemies you'll face where knockdowns don't work are fliers and AV/GM. AV/GM aren't going to be subject to your hard controls anyway and most fliers will politely stay at the range you want them to be since they're ranged themselves. Note: While slotting Ragnarok into Howl makes some sense, slotting Overwhelming Force will normally be a bad idea because you need it for Shockwave to suppress the KB. Both of these attacks have a lot fewer slots than you'd prefer - if you had 9 slots available for them, you could usefully fill them - so throwing away a slot on Sudden Acceleration normally isn't feasible.

Ranged cones are hit-or-miss. If you slot them well, you can cover certain spawns that no conventional AE could cover. You can nuke entire trains following you. Unfortunately, there are plenty of places where this just doesn't work. The ceilings are too low, the corners too tight. You end up trying to use your Cone as a PBAoE that covers 1/12th the area of a normal PBAoE. As a result, I think Cones only work well when they function in non-optimal circumstances. This is more common with melee sets, where certain sets have Cones that do enough damage to justify using them as part of a single target rotation.

Brute base damage is so low that damage procs deliver more value than damage IOs. As a result, you want your powers slotted with pure procs if you can. On Radiation, this tends to be easier because -defense powers have two possible procs (vs. one for slow powers). -defense powers can also potentially slot Achilles Heel for -resist debuffing. Irradiated Ground is also fantastic for procs because it pulses twice as fast as Quills. You drop a patch every 5 secs and each patch pulses at the same rate as Quills (or Blazing Aura). Atom Smasher and Spine Burst are a bit of a wash as basic powers, but Atom Smasher provides more damage mitigation (via its disorient component) and it has the proc advantage above.

Villain groups like Arachnos, Rikti, Rularuu and Carnival are all good choices for testing how Tanker-ish you are. Aside from this, whether or not you can tank Hamidon is a good thing to check.

While not relevant for Corruptors, the Mastermind ATOs also buff the FFG.

You should have hard-capped Fire Resist with even SO slotting. This should enable you to farm at x8/+0 to level up. Probably the fastest/cheapest way to boost the difficulty (and thus the speed) is the Aegis set. This is a resist set that has a F/C Defense bonus at 3- and 5- slots. You can also pick up Steadfast Protection +Def (relatively cheap) and Gladiator's Armor +Def (less cheap) to slot in your resist sets. In the process of leveling, you should get plenty of recipe and salvage drops. Rare salvage tends to sell for about 500,000 influence. Recipes require a bit of experience, but PvP and purple recipes all tend to sell well. There are also certain other recipes, such as Luck of the Gambler, that sell very well because they're used in almost all builds.

IO sets work the same for whomever equips them, regardless of archetype. The armor sets have the same modifiers attached to them. The main differences: Scrappers have two ATOs with recharge while Brutes only have one. In most builds, this translates to Brutes only using one of their ATO sets and more complicated/difficult builds. The second Brute ATO does allow them a slightly better amount of E/N Resist than you could obtain on a similar Scrapper build. Scrappers have access to Sting of the Manticore, which Brutes do not. Scrappers are less likely to need to mule powers due to the combination of dual recharge bonuses in ATOs and Shadow Meld in Patron pools. Scrappers have a 75% cap on resist rather than a 90% cap on resist. However, this doesn't normally come into play without external buffs since so few power sets can push resists in general above the Scrapper cap. Fiery Aura is certainly better on a Brute if you're in a Fire Farm, but having hard-capped 90% Fire Resist while having 68% on S/L/E and other meaningful resists is no better on a Brute than a Scrapper. Brutes have about 12% more base health. However, none of these are particularly major differences - certainly not remotely in the same league as the Tanker's 33% better armor sets or 25% more base health (than Brutes). As a result, Scrappers and Brutes tend to be defensively equivalent unless you're talking about a specific power set that has unusual features that benefit one AT over the other (or only exists for one).

Armor sets are the same for Scrappers and Brutes (75% of Tanker values), so the only time Brutes have better defenses is when you're exceeding the Scrapper resist cap. Brutes do have slightly more base health, but it's a marginal advantage compared to the massive gulf between Tankers and Brutes.

Right now, I think Brutes aren't in all that great of a place. For most possible sets, Scrappers will generally deal more damage with similar defenses. Scrapper ATOs are also easier to build around since they both provide 10% recharge bonuses while only one of the Brute ATOs does. So you'd really want to be looking for sets that either exploit the Brute's 90% resist cap or have special features not present for the Scrapper version of the set. For example, Storm Kick (from Martial Arts) grants defense on a Brute but not on a Scrapper. A combination like MA/Invulnerability would probably be best played on a Brute because you get the defense, you're not forced to waste a power on Thunder Kick and you can (probably) hard cap S/L at 90%.

Bear in mind, it only takes one attack to effectively kill you. That single disorient is likely to lead to a corpse on the floor. No matter how you spread the spawn around to avoid concentrating attacks, a defense that relies on avoiding 100% of melee attacks and soft-capping against range is going to be more reliable - especially at low levels - than a defense that relies on 20% defense against some melee attacks and soft-capping against range.

20% S/L is still pretty weak for jumping into a mass of melee enemies. If your build is structured around the expectation of being in melee range, your going to have a lot of weak/useless abilities in many circumstances where the pure Ranged Blaster - who has every bit as much Ranged Defense as you - would simply be doing what their build is designed to do.

If you look at all the possible primary/secondary conditions, most of them will involve making serious compromises if you don't operate in melee range at least some of the time. Likewise, if you're looking for the highest possible single target dps Blaster build, it will come as a result of combining ranged attacks in primary with melee attacks in secondary. Those ranged primary attacks are the high dps part of a purely ranged rotation while the melee attacks replace the low dps part of your rotation. For example, Fire Blast is ~46 dpa while Charged Brawl is ~103 dpa. If you can get away with not using Fire Blast because you can use Charged Brawl instead, your dps rotation is going to deliver a lot more damage. Using melee attacks also permits you to use Hecatomb for its 10% recharge bonus and exceptional damage proc. Moreover, many of the critical abilities in secondary require melee range. Soul Drain is a potentially awesome ability - but requires you jump into a pile of enemies to use properly. Unfortunately, Blasters don't really get much to help them survive in melee range. With full IO set builds and Scorpion Shield, they can S/L/E/R soft-cap and not immediately flop over dead in most content. But there are few good ways to get status protection and you're not going to see Blasters solo'ing +4 AV without a whole lot of temporary powers and other widgets. As a result, 'Blappers' tend to exemplar poorly and don't scale well into difficult content unless they've got someone with support abilities to keep them operational. You can build them for specialized content (such as fire farms) or for intermittent bouts of trouble (such as with Rune of Protection), but you can't really make the dps-for-all-seasons type of build you could with, say, a Scrapper. This tends to lead to the "why not Scrapper?" question. After all, Scrappers can use ranged attacks just like Blasters can use melee attacks. This survivability issue also means that almost everyone starts out with a 'Hover Blaster' - a character designed to operate purely at range and blow stuff up before they can be blown up through their very narrowly focused ranged defense. However, certain Assault sets tend to open the possibility for 'Blaster Controllers' - Blasters who can operate in safety not just because they're (primarily) at range but also because they have the ability to neutralize spawns in some way. Not having to take Mace or Cold Mastery also opens up significant control options in Epic/Patron pools. This sort of approach trades off single target dps for often better AE possibilities and better scaleability across the range of all possible content.

The damage is reported per target. It's fairly difficult to get a good model of how much increased area/larger target caps impact actual dps, but it can be fairly significant. Just from eyeballing it, my guess is that Spine Burst is usually hitting about 8 targets while Burn is usually hitting about 3. Indeed, while I'd recommend Rad/Fire or Spines/Fire for a playing just starting out - largely due to how quickly they ramp up and can self-farm themselves to 50 and beyond - I think for a long-term 'farm' character, you're often better off with a Tanker due to the increased target caps/radius coupled with the fact that your 'farm' character can also be an actual playable character in game.

The damage I listed includes the ongoing DoT. Also, I think you're imagining that you kill a spawn in its entirety before moving onto a completely fresh spawn. You shouldn't be doing that. You should kill the minions/lieutenants and then either summon or move to that fresh spawn. If you do it that way, the only time you ever get to the situation you're describing - fighting a small number of bosses - is at the very end of the entire farm. In multi-farmer situations this is especially important because multiple farmers can hold truly massive spawns - you should never be in a situation (except, again, at the very end) where you don't have more than enough targets even for a 16 target AE. The reason you don't put Burn on autofire is because you've got better choices - those 10 target AE in your primary.

Burn does 80.5374 damage to 5 targets every 25 sec. For comparison, Atom Smasher does 64.649 damage to 10 targets every ~25 sec. Spine Burst does 49.4569 damage to 10 targets every ~20 sec. Both have larger radii as well. For afk farming, it's tough to be completely afk since even farms like the moon don't necessarily path into you. Using something like Fold Space can mean you press a button only every few minutes. Also, if you're afk, you're not getting value from Burn so you might find Electric a better option since you get a slightly weaker damage aura but a recharge bonus. For follow farming, I'd recommend at Bio/* Tanker. Not only do multiple players hold large spawns better, but the -resist affects you as well as the player you're following. Tankers are also better than Brutes as long as you're fighting large packs due to the 16 target cap - but that also means sets like Claws or Martial Arts that have good click PBAoE (since Irradiated Ground and Quills don't get a target cap upgrade). Shield is also a decent choice for 'Tanker farmer' since it gives a significant damage boost if you're surrounded by enemies. That being said, part of the reason that Rad/Fiery and Spines/Fiery are so popular is that they're cheap and easy. You don't need to layer in purple sets for recharge bonuses and you can start farming early on in the leveling process due to how quickly Fiery Aura caps Fire Resist.

The hardest hitting part of the ST rotation isn't available until level 20. Admittedly, most Tanker secondaries are a bit dysfunctional since the first power for the bulk of the melee sets is trash, but you've still got a big gap to fill even if other sets have a similar gap.