Hjarki

I think this really needs a clarification on what constitutes 'best'. Ice is one of the most durable secondaries available to Stalkers, largely due to its excellent T9 power. However, I'd argue that trying to make the best Tanker you can as a Stalker is frequently counter-productive. Instead, I'd think more about how your secondary supports your primary. Sets like Bio or Shield can add to your damage. Fiery can give the notoriously AE-light Stalker primaries another great AE damage option. Electric, Super Reflexes and Energy all give you a free +20% recharge and Electric/Energy both make endurance management much easier.

You've got it backwards. Soft-capped S/L/M without DDR is meaningless against defensive debuffs - that's why it's called a 'cascading' failure. The difference between having soft-capped defenses and no defenses at all is meaningless in such situations, so it all comes down to resists/healing/regen/control. Builds which emphasize the latter have a much easier time with defense debuffs than builds which don't. You're also overlooking the fact that Soul Mastery effectively gives me soft-capped defense to everything if I so choose via -hit debuffs and an additional -20% damage. So, yeah, I'm 'dusting off the damage they do'. I very rarely use Darkest Night, I use Obliteration primarily for damage and Storm Kick is generally only used once a spawn is down to single target, but the options are there. I don't actually use the Heal much myself - the constant regen from procs is normally sufficient because I take almost no damage in the first place. What I'm trying to point out is that your 'layering' strategy is relatively inefficient. It definitely won't protect you against defense debuffs and your total mitigation is lower than it could be because you're dividing your attention between various different forms of mitigation rather than taking advantage of unusually strong powers and super-linear scaling. Toxic can easily be hard-capped if you've slotted the heal with enough recharge/resist. That's part of the reason I only 5-slot the purple sets - the additional damage procs are always useful, while additional Toxic/Psi is only rarely useful. The issue with the ATO is that while you can easily get two stacks while you're standing in a crowd, you'll probably lose one of those stacks running to the next crowd and consistently getting those stacks against a single hard target (such as AV/GM) isn't reliable. In other words, a dependence on the two stack fails you when you need it the most. In terms of Barrier, I'm having trouble with this argument. Yes, Barrier can give you some resists. But it gives you ridiculous amounts of Defense - far more than you could even hope to get via IOs. If you're activating Barrier, your focus on resists matters a little bit - and your focus on defense matters not at all. As I noted above, the 'toxic hole' isn't actually a hole - you just need to be proactive about it. Between Combat Jumping and Burn, you should be almost completely immune to Immobilize. For Posi 1, I would drop to ~70% resists (which means I'm taking triple the damage I ordinarily would). However, this wasn't a particularly big deal. The big deal was the ghosts. As fliers, they're not subject to the implicit damage reduction from the KD in the PBAoE (which tends to reduce damage by half or more). They also tend to stay at range, meaning that I have to take them out one at a time rather than being able to blast the entire spawn. Since my accuracy is built around 95% hit chance at 50 for +3, scaling back the accuracy slotted into powers can be a big deal at that level - builds with Tactics tend to exemplar a lot better (presuming they manage to take Tactics before that point). However, even with all those disadvantages, it wasn't an issue of getting outright killed but slowly dying and not being able to kill enemies fast enough solo.

Consume gives you End Resist. You just need to use it before you encounter enemies that End Drain. In terms of the rest, I think you might be making a mistake pursuing S/L Defense. Fiery Aura is a resist/heal-based set, so getting to hard cap is more important than optimizing defenses. S/L Defense also isn't all that important if you've got S/L Resist maxxed. For comparison, my Fiery/MA:

Unfortunately, when you don't slot KB->KD, you kill the damage potential of Tornado because it flings enemies away before it gets a chance to do any serious damage.

Shield Wall and Reactive Defenses are globals, not procs. It doesn't matter where you place them.

I'm definitely on the side of resists > defenses. However, it's a situation where half-measures don't cut it. If you've got 60% resist to a damage type, then you're only taking 40% of the damage dealt. If you hit 90%, it's a mere 10%. If you have 2000 health, this is the difference between having an effective health of 5k and having an effective health of 20k. The benefit of resists is that they always work. You can't get 'unlucky' with resists and you don't run afoul of situations where defense debuffs or abnormally high hit chances negate your primary mitigation strategy. In almost any situation that would be considered a tanking challenge, you really want that resist-based Tanker. There's also the issue that as you scale up difficulty, you're going to get a lot more support from others for your defenses than your resists. Maneuvers (and to a lesser extent, Grant Invisibility) are abilities anyone can take - and large numbers of players do (since it provides their own defense). Defense-based support AT tend to be more popular (for unrelated reasons) and the resist-based support AT tend not to cover the holes of defense-based armor sets very well. However, building the 90%-to-most resist-based Tanker tends to be difficult. Most of the time, you're going to depend on the ATO proc. For non-Electric Tankers, you're probably going to need to put a lot of effort in Energy resist. Almost all Tanker builds have either a Toxic or Psi hole - hitting 90% on both is nearly impossible without making serious compromises elsewhere. Defense and Regen/Healing strategies do tend to reach acceptable levels of mitigation faster than resist-based sets. But once you've slotted everything up, the resist-based sets tend to be significantly tougher.

I've made the comment before that you generally want to resist S/L/F/E/T and defend against C/N/P. However, when building a Stalker, survivability is rarely my primary concern. I'm not looking to tank Incarnate trials or being impervious to all harm, but amplify my ability to deal damage - because that's why you bring a Stalker along. So with a Stalker, I'd generally take Fiery Aura over Radiation - despite Radiation probably being the stronger 'tank' set - because Fiery Aura gives me an additional AE to complement notoriously AE-light Stalker primaries. I'd probably avoid Bio because losing the -resist field puts it behind Shield for personal damage augmentation. Super Reflexes have more comprehensive defenses than Energy Aura, but they both have a recharge bonus but Energy also feeds you endurance. And so forth.

I tend to 'under-estimate' Snow Storm not because it doesn't do a good job of what it intends to do, but because it is so narrowly useful. Consider a theoretical power that reads: "Instant kill target whose name begins with 'L'". Now, against targets whose name beings with 'L', this is clearly an overpowered ability. But how often are you really going to use this power? It's not very relevant for minions (or even lieutenants) since you can do basically the same thing with standard, universally applicable powers. Unless you're planning to build an 'L'-farmer who only kills 'L'-named mobs, you're probably not going to take this power despite the fact that's ridiculously overpowered if you like fighting Lusca. Snow storm tends to fall into that category (albeit with a bit less extreme results). The -recharge is only relevant if you're fighting enemies for a long time - which normally means AV who resist it so heavily you might as well not bother. The slow effect is useful against large groups that don't have AV-level debuff resistance, but it's also superfluous considering your have the far more generally useful Freezing Rain. I've played Storm Summoning quite a bit and I've really only found two good reasons to take Snow Storm: You have to. You need 3 powers from amongst the first 3 primary and first 2 secondary powers. The first three Storm Summoning powers are all underwhelming. They're not useless, but they're definitely not why you're taking the set and they're frequently taken as pure throwaways - you don't slot them and you don't have them on your bars. But since you have to take one or more of them, you might as well try to get some use of out them if at all possible. To ground fliers. I already explained why the primary effects of Snow Storm weren't actually all that useful. However, this seemingly minor secondary effect is actually quite useful because Storm Summoning as a set completely breaks down against most fliers. You can't Freezing Rain a flier and Tornado travels along the ground. While fliers aren't terribly common, the fact is that Storm Summoning is almost completely ineffectual against groups like Sky Raiders without this power.

Storm has two Slow powers that can drive enemy run speeds down to 5%. You can also grab an Immobilize from Epic/Patron pools for AV fights.

The key issue is 'damage cap'. There are three ways Corruptors beat Defenders on damage: Damage Scale. Corruptors have a 15% higher damage scale. Scourge. Corruptors have this damage-amplifying special ability. Damage cap. Corruptors have a 20% higher +damage cap. However, most Corruptor builds really only get the first advantage in most cases. Scourge generally has minimal impact except with Rain effects and against AV/GM. The damage cap tends to only be relevant with Kinetics since you can't reach even the Defender's +damage cap under normal conditions. So it's a 15% damage advantage for most builds. That advantage is rapidly eaten into by superior -resist and +damage debuffs/buffs. Defenders also have a significantly easier time meeting defensive breakpoints, allowing them to slot more procs. You also run into the 'middle child' syndrome. If you're talking about situations where the +damage cap matters, then Blasters absolutely destroy Corruptors for damage output. If you're talking about situations where you primarily care about the support aspects of your set, the Defender advantage multiplied across a group grants them far more effective damage than Corruptors can possibly make up with their personal damage advantages.

Go onto the test server and roll up a character with Electrical Affinity. Buy a Power Analyzer from the P2W Vendor. Go find some random Hellion, use the Power Analyzer and then hit it with Shock multiple times. You'll notice the effect stacking (until you floor their regen).

The +recharge is 62.5% no matter how far down the chain you are. The first hit is full strength, all other hits are half strength. Shock/Discharge can stack similar performance to Heat Exhaustion in terms of -regen/-damage if you so choose. You rarely would (because these aren't actually all that useful these days), but you potentially could. The -defense is irrelevant since you're already hitting 95% of the time in almost any reasonable build. In terms of the importance of AV/GM, speed is rarely the issue. Survival is the issue - and EA has the advantage there.

Slotting Call of the Sandman into Frozen Aura makes some sense in many builds. Slotting it into Genetic Corruption makes almost no sense because Bio is already a regen-intensive set. That being said, Fortunata Hypnosis Placate doesn't make a whole lot of sense either. It's a Mag 2 Placate, which means that every now and then you get auto-crits on... minions. I'm not going to say that's completely useless, but it's awfully close. About the only reason I can see for slotting it would be because you're muling the power for set bonuses.

Amplifiers only work for the player, not their pets.

The long recharge/duration on the debuffs tends to mean that they're only useful on AV/GM fights. For chewing through trash, EA is going to move at the same speed or faster. Even on a boss, there's a reasonable argument to be made that the recharge can be more valuable than the -resist in many situations. I think the larger issues: EA is significantly 'tankier' than Thermal for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that all of its abilities can also apply to the user. EA requires more discipline than Thermal. When your demons run amuck all over the place with Thermal, they retain their resists. When they do so with EA, they don't. However, since your demons-run-amuck also lose all their def/resist buffs from uniques/Supremacy (albeit at a slightly longer range), I'm not sure how much of a disadvantage this really is. I don't really agree with this approach, since it's an effectively an 'everything is all the same anyway' type of argument. The 2.5M/hour cost also adds up quickly when you're talking covering a weakness that you need to cover 100% of the time. In addition, I don't believe amplifiers affect pets.

In a simplistic sense, an AF stack is worth 33% of Assassinate dps. So the question becomes: is the dpa of your replacement attack plus 33% of the dpa of your Assassinate greater than the dpa of the Sniper attack? In the case of Ice, the answer is no. The dpa of Ice Sword is ~50 while the dpa of Assassinate is ~83. The dpa of the sniper attack is ~140.

In general purpose play, the reason for being a Tanker is so that you can tank everything. If you just want to build something that can mostly jump into random trash spawns without too much worry or you want to tank one specific fight, then you've got a host of other (often better) options. There are three basic layers of mitigation: resists, defense and healing/regen. Tankers (and armor sets in general) are horrible at healing/regen compared to support sets. Armor sets will have heals on long recharges that can be easily matched by heals support sets can toss every few seconds. Healing/Regen-centric sets tend to deliver 3 - 4 times the performance of what any Tanker would get just from IO sets/uniques. While nice, this isn't remotely close to the level of mitigation than can be achieved via Defense/Resists. In terms of Defense vs. Resists, Resists tend to win. Resists are far more universal than Defenses and hard-cap is a lot better than soft-cap. Moreover, it's a lot cheaper to get Defense from non-primary sources than Resists. There's a single pool Resist power. There are half a dozen Defense powers. Resists are more 'expensive' in set bonuses than Defenses are. You've got numerous Defense-adding attacks. There's a single Resist-adding attack and it requires a combo to achieve (rather than merely a single attack). Defenses can be debuffed - often catastrophically - while Resistance debuffs don't change the value of Resists. That being said, the different attack types tend to favor either Resist or Defense. S/L/E/T are all attacks you want to Resist. Either they're incredibly common or, in the case of Toxic, there isn't a typed defense against them (and they often bypass Defense entirely). C/N/P are attacks where you normally want Defense because they carry potentially annoying secondary effects. However, Cold is a rare damage type, Cold/Psionic are almost always partial Smashing attacks and Psionic isn't actually much of a worry for a character with strong status protection. Negative can be quite a nuisance, but it's fairly common for builds to have some attacks that are just barely at 95% while having others that are seriously over-cap due to the discrepancy between franken-slotted and straight-slotted attack powers. Given, the above, I tend to view Radiation as the top set for pure Tanking, with Fiery Aura slightly behind. Dark and Electric both have their virtues, but they also have critical holes (Energy and Toxic) that are hard to address. Stone deserves a bit of a special mention because it can be nearly indestructible with a single power. However, the drawbacks of Stone are sufficiently enormous that it's hard to recommend. Most of the rest of the sets don't really make you a 'Tanker'. They're more appropriate for more damage-oriented melee AT, in my opinion. In terms of secondary, I'll call out some specific sets of note: Dark Melee. The major virtues here are the heal and Soul Drain. Something like Fiery/Dark is actually an excellent 'farming spec' because it's so effective against large crowds. The heal is useful for its exceptional slotting options (Including Theft of Essence). Electrical Melee. This is one of the better single target dps sets with some strong AE. You can also slot Power Transfer everywhere if you like the idea of self-healing and the major AE can slot Force Feedback. It's not nearly as good for farming since its PBAoE is actually a targeted effect (and you can't auto-fire it and go make a sandwich). Martial Arts. This has a KB AE, which is nice. It also has a high dpa +positional defense move that is the major selling point. Unfortunately, almost everything else offered by the set is mediocre. Savage Melee. This is one of the better single target sets, but it has a long wind-up time so the single target is less useful for chopping down the surviving boss than it is long AV/GM fights. Its AE isn't all that great. Spines. Atrocious single target, but very good multi-target. One of the main reasons to take Spines would be to get a damage aura to pair with a set that doesn't have one. Staff. Arguably the most 'tank-ish' of weapon sets, this is where you get the sole +resist attack from a secondary as well as enhanceable/stackable L/M defense. It has great AE damage, but somewhat weak single target damage. Stone. High single target dps and the ability to slot Force Feedback virtually everywhere. It only has a single damaging AE, but it's a very good one. Titan Weapons. This is the highest single target dps set, with solid AE dps. It also has a stackable/enhanceable defense move, but it's not a very good one (albeit on a Tanker, mandatory) since it affects S/M rather than the more useful L/M. If I had to pick a single 'perfect Tanker', it would probably be Radiation/Titan Weapons. But it's a very late-developing build that will be painful to level. Something like Fiery/Stone is incredibly easy to level and will provide similar performance at 50.

Honestly, just put accuracy/recharge (as needed) into it. Slow sets are almost universally terrible, with a poor distribution of attributes enhanced and weak set bonuses. Lingering Radiation is really just a -regen debuff and there's nothing that improves that.

Innocuous Strikes isn't all that great on a non-Tanker Stalkers don't need to waste a slot on Staff Mastery Stalkers get Build Up; Scrappers don't Stalkers can crit with Burn; Scrappers can't So while Scrappers will generally do more AE damage than Stalkers across-the-board, something like Staff/Fiery is at the low end of their AE advantage.

I wrote a long diatribe about this elsewhere, but the end cost of toggles isn't why you run out of endurance. Maneuvers costs 0.39 end/sec. That's obviously quite a lot when you consider that purple sets with their 4% Recovery are restoring 0.07% End/sec. Let's say we have a rotation of Incinerate -> Scorch -> Greater Fire Sword -> Scorch (not sure if this is an optimal rotation, but it's just an example). That entire rotation would cost 6.86 + 12.69 + 4.37 * 2 = 28.29 endurance. It would cycle in 1.848 + 2.508 + 1.188 * 2 = 6.73 secs. So your endurance consumption from this single target rotation would be 28.29 / 6.73 = 4.20 end/sec. That's an order of magnitude more endurance than you're spending on Maneuvers. Indeed, running all of your Ice Armor toggles is only 1.56 end/sec (about a third of that is Icicles). If we slot a single level 50 endurance reduction IO into Greater Fire Sword, the cost of our single target rotation will drop by 0.56 end/sec - more than enough to 'pay for' Maneuvers. While slots aren't perfectly fungible, Maneuvers itself is likely to save you that endurance reduction slot because you can use it to mule Shield Wall/Reactive Defenses where you might otherwise have to spend a slot in another defensive power. You can realistically consume up to 7 different defensive powers just on 5xLotG and the 2 global uniques.

Getting defense from an AE 'drain'-style ability is very unreliable. Given that Ice can get Incarnate-level S/L/E/N defenses without it, the value for the purpose of defense has never been high on my list. In terms of the end return, that really depends on your overall endurance structure. But, again, the AE drain methodology is problematic - normally your biggest end problems come during protracted single target fights rather than intermittent AE fights.

Well, I doubt I could solo LGTF +4 with that build. But against most content it does fine.

The two Cones in Staff do work a lot better on a Tanker than a Brute/Scrapper (Stalkers only get the one Cone and it's primarily for +defense buffing anyway). So you'll probably see your Tanker version doing competitive AE dps vs. Brute/Scrapper, but still falling short on single target. In terms of hard-capping Resists, let's consider S/L: Toughness/Fire Shield = 45% +55% Enhanced = 25% Defense set uniques = 8% (scaling) ATO proc = 6% (potentially multiples) ATO set bonus = 6% (presuming you split the other ATO for E/N resist) Skysplitter = 13.3% That's easily over the hard cap For E/N, you'll have to put in a lot more work. Plasma Shield = 30% +55% Enhanced = 16.5% Defense set uniques = 8% (scaling) ATO proc = 6% (potentially multiples) ATO set bonus = 12% (presuming split ATO) Skysplitter = 13.3% So that would leave us 4% - 5% short on E/N, which you can probably bridge with something like Shield Wall 4-set. Toxic is trivial - you can layer Healing Flames and stack its bonus multiple times. Fire is hard-capped from the three stacking FR buffs (and you don't really need Temperature protection). So you're left with weak Cold and weak Psi - and you haven't done anything but slot attacks/toggles pretty much the way you'd slot them anyway.

Fire is actually one of the better resist sets out there. That being said, I'd argue that you've picked the two melee AT that you don't want to use for the Fire + Staff combo. A Fiery/Staff Tanker can easily be built for hard-capped S/L/F/E/N/T and soft-capped L/F/C/E/N/M. By exploiting Staff's combination of L/M bonuses and +resists, you can have a full-fledged Tanker. The Tanker version of Staff also has much stronger AE damage than other versions of the set due to arc/radius buffs. A Staff/Fiery Stalker can use a 'fixed' version of Staff with serious single target damage and combine it with Fiery's additional AE damage to make a fairly comprehensive melee dps build. In contrast, the Brute and Scrapper don't really bring much to the table. You can't make your Brute as comprehensively tough as the Tanker and your AE isn't as good. You can't make your Scrapper deal the kind of single target damage your Stalker would.

Notes: Soul vs. Pyre Mastery. This is really more of a 'Soul Mastery' build since you've got a weak attack in your chain and you can circumvent recharge difficulties by including Gloom. Soul Mastery is also a strong choice for most Tanking builds due to Darkest Night and the -hit it provides. Slotting. You've over-slotted pool powers and under-slotted your main defense toggles. Hitting 40% E/N defense on an Ice Tanker is... pathetic. It's not unreasonable to hit Incarnate levels (59%+) on S/L/E/N plus regular soft-cap on F/C (45%) with Winter sets and Aegis. Superior Might of the Tanker. This normally goes in the damage aura so you can just leave it on and forget about it. Hoarfrost. I normally split a power like this half resist/half healing. This allows you to better optimize the power itself. Taunt. This is normally a one slot wonder unless you've got a very good reason for the taunt set, which doesn't appear to be the case here. Tough. This is way underslotted. You want to push this to the limit because you've got so few resist options. Permafrost. The power itself is unnecessary. If you want to take it as a mule, you should mule something much more useful. Energy Absorption/Hibernate. I usually wouldn't take these. Energy Absorption tends to be unnecessary (with a long recharge). Hibernate just doesn't work all that well on a Tanker since it prevents attacking (and makes holding aggro difficult). Super Jump. Slow Resist (from the Winter set) makes more sense than additional KB protection here. Health/Stamina. I tend to almost universally three-slot each of these for healing set uniques and Power Transfer EndMod/+heal alongside Performance Shifter +end. Non-Rare sets. A good rule of thumb is that you want as many powers slotted with ATOs, Winter sets and Purple sets as possible. For example, you've got 3 melee attacks. Ideally, you'd have the Winter set in one, Hecatomb in another and an ATO in another. You've got 2 PBAoE, which would likely mean Armageddon and the other ATO (the Winter set for PBAoE doesn't match your defensive needs well), etc. This is incredibly expensive, but it's how you pile up the largest bonuses. Build Up. This is a great power for burst dps builds. But you have no abilities worth Building Up. It's just all standard rotational damage, so Build Up will normally be worse than just taking Assault.