ninja surprise

I've never been one to try to solo TFs, AVs, etc. It always seemed like one of those things that Uber builds and combos do and I've always been more of a casual player. This Savage/Bio scrapper is vet level 32 with T4 in the Lore (BP), Ion Judgement and Melee Hybrid, but the rest are T3. This toon has a bunch of Winters and Scrapper IOs and is probably my most expensive toon. I was looking at my Accolades thing and noticed I'm missing two of the Freedom Phalanx TFs. Looking at my list of uncompleted TFs was Moonfire. That one's pretty easy so I figured why not? I dropped my diff to +1x8 and hopped in. It went swimmingly, except when I tried to herd a room of Vamps and got held and died. Long story short, I came back, kicked butt, and was surprised when Arkhan was an AV instead of an EB, but I vanquished her and got a fat load of whatever those things are that make you feel good! So this afternoon, looking for a way to keep busy while "watching" a Palo Alto firewalls training webinar I figured might as well see if an Eden was forming up. I LFG'q'd over to Eden, found myself alone with only Woodsman to talk to. He seemed so friendly... all he wanted me to do was defeat 200 Devouring Earth. I can do that! In a classic case of scope creep, as soon as I finished that he wanted me to go save 4 lesser heroes in the big cave behind him. The webinar was still going so I jumped in. But first, I'm no idiot, so I opened /ah and bought a bunch of Essence of the Earths to hold me up against the Titan. I remembered something about that from doing this on Live. Jumped in, started flying around looking for the vertical tubes to get to the bottom of this place. Started fighting some DE's to get more drops... and they drop Ambrosia. I bought the wrong Insps! So I kept fighting and collected a half dozen or so Ambrosias and hoped for the best. First I had to fight that big fat wall.. that took a while. Savage Leap doesn't work vs walls and that's where my Critical Strikes proc was! So I just cycled through Vicious Slash, Savage Strike, and Hemmorage (ugh) and Moonbeam. I pulled out my DE vetpets and we scratched away until it finally fell. The funny thing was that two of the Giant Monsters came up and wanted to fight, but I just ignored them. They didn't hurt me that I could tell. I just stayed in Efficient so I wouldn't run out of endurance. This took a bit less than 10 minutes. Both pets expired and hadn't recharged by the time the wall fell. I did some more hunting on the way to the Mold wall with those two idiot rockheads following me all the way! Luckily there was some kind of slope separating the upper area from the Crystal Titan's realm so they couldn't follow me there. Against the Crystal Titan, I did pretty well until about 3 minutes in my Ambrosia expired right when it did a footstomp and I died. I was surprised to discover I still don't have a self-rez on this dude so I hit Hosp and hoped it was a chamber in the tunnel... but got sent back to the entrance to Eden 😔 I mission-TP'd back to the door, hopped on the AH to buy a bunch more Ambrosias, re-entered, and flew back through the whole entire friggin map to find the Titan again. This time I moved my Insp tray closer to my attack tray and moved the menu thing down so I could see if the insp blinked before it expires (it doesn't that I saw). This time I pulled the Titan down into the mire off its pedestal so that if I died I could use a wakie. My DE vetbuddies and I brought the pain, and I think I defeated it before the buff-pet expired. Nice! Looks like I used 7 Ambrosias, so maybe 7 minutes? I was surprised to see that the Titan explodes into about 5 smaller bosses.. and they explode into tiny minions. I wish Bertha did that! Then I went and freed the stupid heroes who didn't even help me free the other heroes so I tried to lure some DE over to defeat them, then flew off to farm some bosses and get a bunch of Ambrosias to sell and store. Trial finished in 57 minutes with one defeat! I know what I'm gonna do next: Get myself a self-rez!

Ice is like Energy Armor for Tanks - defense + utility. Easy to soft-cap to the big 4 S/L/E/N, and a bunch of utility powers to buff your hit points and endurance. I think it works best with Stone Melee. Stone has fast attacks so you can use your heal in a pinch, and Energy Absorption gets all your endurance back with a nice +def buff to boot. Stone's knockdowns help keep you on your feet. And you can make the Crystal rocks look kinda like ice. Or with Ice Melee, dropping Ice Patch prevents ITF dudes from hacking away your defense. The snooze in Ice Melee's foot stomp helps too. It works just fine for most stuff. Sure, Rularuu will poke you in the eye instead of vice versa, but Carnies and Sappers will usually miss you with their end drain and you can still tank just about everything. We don't know what build that guy in the ITF had, whether he was soft-capped or had resist bonuses. Ice is great for exemping the low-level TFs too. That said, I like it but usually wind up playing my other alts. Right now I'm on my Fire/Savage tank and having a blast. Fire Armor isn't the toughest either but still fun.

Does Melee AoE get classified as Melee or AoE or both? I agree that straight up single target ranged is pretty low... just a couple Crey or CoT standing off to the side throwing bolts. Melee would be anyone who can reach you trying to punch/stab/etc. But then there's all the AoE from melee and ranged, direct and splash damage, coming in from all over. ...What was the original discussion? 😆 And don't Tanks have a boost on top of that, to 180 degrees or something? On my DM tank I don't have to stress about picking a target in the center because the arc's so wide it'll hit everything regardless.

Good suggestion. An alternative is to keep your text in a text editor and paste it from there into AE.

Yep, that's what I do. I make it a very translucent color so it's barely visible. But it still does weird things to some animations like Beast Run, and makes female toons do a weird scream instead of the "Ha!" when taunting. It'd be cool if there were a scale slider on the shield to make it small.

It seems odd that Barrier Radial, with its +Def and +Res buff, also has Ally Rez powers. Rebirth is named Rebirth, which I assume means born again, and does Ally Heal, +Max HP on the Core side, and Ally Heal, +Regeneration on the Radial side. Why doesn't Rebirth do rezzing? Can it be added? That'd be sweet AND thematic.

It's too easy to get carried away here! I was thinking we should really have an electricity-based armor and started brainstorming how to cobble a set together... then remembered there already is Electric Armor 😆

Also, a No FX version of Shield Defense where you just don't have a shield and all the normal attack animations (and female taunt) happen. Conceptually the "shield" could be power armor, force field (aura), magical belt/bracers/necklace, or Monk-type diamond skin... anything besides that massive shield on the left arm.

Yep, you can build anything you want with every enhancement imaginable on test in less time than it takes to run a DFB. If you want to build and play alts that's the place to do it!

Or with set bonuses, since homeboy was worried about end consumption and Weave/Maneuvers is two more toggles to run. Plus you get to see your costume with SR.

I have one, and it's one of my favorite toons for concept and playstyle. But I have so many other alts to play too! With the variety of AoE and melee attacks in Staff it's easy to get the sets to soft-cap SR. Then you just go crazy hitting things with a 10' pole. Lots of KD so things can't try to hit you back. It's fun.

Also you won't run into a bunch of clones of your powersets, which is always award. I haven't seen Shield/SJ very frequently at all.

Yep and the only mission that's a pain in the butt -- a defeat all of Crey tanks and Scorpion dudes -- can be autocompleted to speed the whole arc up.

Shield/Stone Melee is a blast and hits hard with dirt clods flying off the face of everything you hit. It would go great with Ice Melee too. Probably a good unbeatable combo is Invulnerability / Dark Melee. They buffed DM so your AoEs are massive. Shadow Maul hits people standing nearly behind you, up to 10 targets! Even Touch of Fear is a AoE and hits everything around you. Invincibility + Soul Drain gives you massive +tohit and damage buff. My personal favorite right now is Fire Armor / Savage Melee. It's a blast leaping in, lighting everything on fire, and ripping it up. It takes some inf to buy all the IOs it needs to be tough though.

It goes back to the question of "what are you doing to revive PvP?" If you know people aren't going to do it for fun or just for the sake of it, are you organizing events, giving prizes, writing guides, etc? How are you making it rewarding for people to participate? Why would someone want to go get ganked by a min/maxer with a billion dollar build? If we assume that most people either don't care about PvP or don't want to, then changing the game to force them to do it will just alienate them or drive them away. You need to entice them with rewards. If Homecoming team doesn't have resources or motivation to recode the game to make PvP attractive, then it's up to you, the PvP players, to talk people into it.

In the costume creator there's Costume Sets for various themes and then there's all the other options you can choose. Can Sets be added for some of the animal combinations? There's Insectoid, Reptilian, Lizard... I think that's it for the animal-themes. No bird, fish, cat, wolf, or minotaur sets. Would it be possible to add them in with their legs, tails, wings, etc?

Welcome back! In case you didn't know, there's Mid's Reborn hero planner where you can plan out your power picks and enhancements. There's a Test server. On Test you can boost your Tank to level 50, and use a pop-menu to give it all the enhancements you'd ever need. Then you can try it out on some radios, solo task forces, etc, to see how you like it before creating it on Live. Here on the forums there's already a ton of threads with build suggestions for most power combos, and definitely for every primary/armor set, and you can use those for ideas.

@Bopper For me, I can't figure out how to build a Widow/Fortuna. I don't understand how the powers stack. When I look at it in Mid's it seems like it has a ton of low-buff leadership-like toggles and I don't know what to do with them. Your build is amazing though and I'll give it a try on mine. I think Pokey McPokesalot is in the 30's so can choose a path on respec and get a decent start on being strong. My first main was a SR/DM on Live. It was my second 50 (first was Grav/Kin Controller) and my first Incarnate. After CoV came out it was still a long time before I dabbled in redside since my own SG was on Blue. So I built a lot of SR toons and never really got around to learning the redside Vet ATs. However, I absolutely LOVE it when there's Widows on my team. Holy cow are they force multipliers or what!

It's worth noting that much of the time the damage output won't make a whole lot of difference. Minions will still go down while you're doing your attack chain on the boss, mixing your AoE with ST attacks. Bosses might take 4 or 5 attacks instead of 3 or 4. It's only in really long fights against very tough opponents like Pylons, GMs, AVs, etc where the time to defeat stretches out by a minute. And that's only when you're solo. On teams the difference shrinks again. SR is easier and cheaper to softcap. Bio requires a lot of expensive sets to max out recharge, resists, defense, debuff resist, healing, etc. Also you have to click the 3 Bio clickies every time they come up to stay alive and that interrupts your attack chain and forces redraw. With SR you can basically just click Practiced Brawler at every 2 minutes, or wait till you get held before clicking, and spend all your time attacking. Or leave it on auto and let it fire when you aren't attacking. It's trade-offs on what you consider fun.

Weird thing is I just played my Psi/Savage Dominator who happens to have Evasive Maneuvers. I turned on power monitor and attacked stuff in Dark Astoria and the 17% def buff was listed while attacking and being attacked. Would the number disappear when suppressed or just the effect stops applying? Edit: Yep, it's misleading. In the itemized Combat Stats it shows every bonus possible, but the total changes. So out of combat I have 27% ranged defense, but when I attack it drops to 7.55% even though it still lists all my power bonuses. Good damage, but you'll need buffs / assistance for GMs. Temp powers, P2W pets, etc.

Hmm... Just realized I have a few hundred more slots for alts. Gonna try this!

Does Evasive Maneuvers give any defense buff during combat? I can't tell from the description whether it totally suppresses.

What amazing builds! But now I have to decide whether to abandon my Bio/DM, SR/DM, or Shield/DM tanks and use their IOs to build this one out 😰

I thought we'd have to get @Hyperstrike in here to CinemaSins ding the Brute discussion!

This discussion comes up somewhat frequently. Back on live the people really good with math and stats ran the numbers on running with Confusion vs No Confusion. If you let a confused mob entirely defeat another mob without you doing any damage, then you lose the reward. HOWEVER, as long as you are doing any damage at all to a spawn, Confusion increases your overall speed to defeat and rewards earned. You don't have to spend as much endurance or time attacking to defeat a spawn but still get rewarded for defeats with drops, exp, and inf (unless you've disabled them of course). And the mission completion XP bonus is the biggest reward. With mass confusion you can complete missions quicker and get more of those fat bonuses. Plus your team can handle bigger spawns at higher difficulty for bigger rewards. Confusion is good for a team, if you can believe it.