Frostweaver

I don't. Lots of people can get concealment and stealth IO's All those 'automatically see through stealth' for 'story reasons' is like your DM randomely killing one of the PC's that players have been working on for years just to 'prove that the story is serious'. When I play a Stalker I don't want to be a red shirt.

so overlevel it, see how it does, and then tell us about it 🙂

Rad/Bio can absolutely Farm well, although it's not quite in the same league as Rad/fire (5 minutes average, rather than 4 minutes 30) but there are some things you need to remember: 1) Bio use s/l farm instead of fire farm. It is slightly more fragile against s/l than /fire is against fire, so you might want to run it at 3/8 instead of 4/8 for faster run-throughs and less risk. However, once you get your Inc slotted well 4/8 is not really that challenging. 2) Bio makes up for this by being of far GREATER utility on all other content, especially praetorian and Dark Astoria stuff for incarnates as well as ITF's, itrials, and simply getting your accolades. 3) You are a brute. with a 600% damage cap. Once you get the inspirations ball rolling, It will be HARD to find time to clickie. 4) procs in the damage auras are nice, but pale in comparison to your primary set damage. When slotting procs in your primaries, go for 1 slotting a utility proc like -res or +recharge and use the rest of the slots to actually slot sets. 5) Use the keybinds from the 'farm fresh builds' post. Obviously you won't use the builds for Rad/Bio, but the binds literally cute my farming times in half. 6) Use your DNA siphon/parasitic aura as often as you possibly can. DNA siphon is NOT just a heal. and Parasitic Aura is more than just an absorb. DNA siphon is a pretty good place for Unrelenting, though. 7) Mu epic cages/ball lightning on top of brute damage bonuses are incredibly damaging. You might not even notice the lack of burn. 8: Always use Atom smasher right after fusion. even if it means changing your attack chain slightly. contaminating EVERYTHING is totally worth it. 9) Proton sweep sucks. 10) You have more ways of screwing with enemies than almost any other combination. Some of those ways only affect you a little, but ALL of them help a team. -regen, -defense, -resist, -damage, you ARE your own pocket defender.

Unlike most armors, Winter sets are not your got-to for survival. In fact, most melee sets have f/c resistance secondary to S/l resistance, which is kind of a nasty design flaw for IO sets that icers have to work around. CE takes 1 taunt and forget. go ahead and overlot your s/l defense, since even with 50% DDR that is a LOT of Lethal/melee debuff flying around. With both CE and spikes running, All your aggro belongs to us. Always. You are pretty much immune to cascade failure. Keep moving. if there's two or three spawns engaging your team, hop from spawn to spawn waiting a second for CE to kick in. You can meaningfully protect your team even way over your aggro cap. I suggest keeping sprint turned ON (or use a different prestige power movement if you like) since you blow through webnades and caltrops like they are not even there. The Ice Brute Theme song Icers are the true speedsters in this game. And with all the +recharge boosts you can slot into MA attacks, it's doubly true for ma/Ice. Oddly enough, the best builds are sometimes not the most expensive. This build is less than half what your average fire farmer will cost.

Nice way to convert a Porche 911 into a Ford Pinto "NO Goodtanksu!"

Yup, FF is the only set I feel comfortable wasting the power picks to get cross punch.

I totally get people hating on the FX. Heck, I won't touch Ice melee on stalkers because the swords look like ugly pieces of crap and the wind noises are insanity-causing, despite Ice's incredible overperformance. I am totally cool with it as long as people are willing to admit that it's FX, not performance, that are inferior 🙂

BTW, fire/kins aren't money anymore, since the pet recharge nerf. You apparently have some catching up to do :). they also nerfed all the old s/l farms by making them timed (and changing some of the mobs in many cases), so now you have to use AE for half the rewards. And brutes are the new kings of farming...specifically spines/fire or rad/fire. Although there has been a hint of challenge lately from savage.

"Based on that Logic"? Apparently You and I have VERY different Ideas about what logic entails, because your example of expanding the analogy is patently ridiculous. So please, use your own words instead of attempting to 'explain' mine. It is, in fact, EXACTLY like making the Mona Lisa in minecraft. You get a crap ton of recipes and salvage as you play, so you literally have to REJECT a decent set of building blocks in order to keep your build 'old skool'. Why even bother asking which tank is the 'best Tank' When you are already intentionally and willfully crippling it? Why not ask what is the 'worst tank' instead since you seem to be focused on increasing your challenge level for no real purpose? The best Tank for using SO's is the one that chooses to use the recipes you recieve as a matter of course, and change to a generic IO tanker on it's way to getting real IO sets. You are not going to be able to take ANY of the higher-level content, and will Handicap any high-level content team you join as they are forced to compensate for your comparative weakness. As a Historical question, however, the old school 'gold standard' for tanking during the limited period in between ED and IO's was a Stone/Fire. Fire didn't offer any extra mitigation, but combustion paired with mud pots tended to stick aggro to your crawling body without constant taunting, and if your blasters (also ED capped SO's) waited a decent interval (and you would have to team up with blasters prior to their upgrade) about 15 seconds, they would be unlikely to peel aggro off of you... assuming that they also chose not to chain aoe and big hitters, voluntarily lowering their DPS. Of course, there's no way to 'simulate' the pre-ED and pre-aggro cap, when invulnerability could herd disgusting levels of self-buffing mobs, so you have to leave Invulnerability out of the question. And of course, wp, Dark, electric, Bio, and Rad were not a thing yet, so your only real competition was fire (known at the time for being a faceplant-fest) Ice (when it still sucked) and Invulnerability (still suffering from the massive ED and cap nerfs). If you want to recapture that limited period, you will probably have to design a set of AE missions using Mobs you have 'rebuilt' to resemble the older factions. or maybe you could look around to see if someone has decided to run a super old version of the server, or maybe even run one yourself... when you could 6 slot hasten with recharge. Of course, during the pre-ED period, Invulnerability was the undisputed master of tanking, PLing required 'bridges', and claws/regen scrappers (with instant healing toggle) were the farmers. Many of the newer sets were built specifically with IO slotting in mind. They just don't WORK without it.

Icicles is so low damage, though, That I find myself skipping it in favor of something else, especially when I don't need a very rare mule.

I am working more and more with Ice armor on scrappers, and I hate to admit it, but it's actually better on scrappers than on tankers! In point of fact, I am starting to realize that it might actually be absolute top tier on scrappers, once you account for their 75% resistance cap and hit points. DM/Ice is pretty darned near unkillable, although I am finding that, unlike tankers and brutes, scrappers might want to skip spikes in favor of something better.

TW/anything. Just because hitting people with a rocket-powered sladgehammer kicks butt.

I wouldn't pair Bio with TW... Not because it doesn't have synergy (it does) or because bio cannot handle TW's end management (It can, easily), but simply because all those doggone clickies interfere with momentum combos... and sometimes you REALLY need to click something NOW while in the middle of a badass animation. TW on brutes pairs best with something with minimal clickies and great end management. WP, Ice, electric, Fire, and Energy Aura are prime examples, and all of them can benefit from the extra seconds of damage slowdown that TW offers, as well as it's absolutely DISGUSTINGLY huge radius on it's melee aoe's. STJ is just... awesome with everything. But it works best when using it's ST attacks to build up attack chains. It doesn't need -rech as badly as some sets, and combo points last a LONG time, so it's best pairings tend to be Bio, Shield, rad, and inv... stuff that will crank up the dps of the set and help bring as many enemies into 'close' melee range as possible. For an example, I copied my TW/Ice build. It's darned fine for all content (disgustingly destructive) and I also Farm it on a custom snow farm (smash/cold) very similar to Fire farms, where it runs 4/8 49+EB at about the same speed as most fire farmers. (without Burn, of course, but TW almost makes up for it) Everything is much more accurate than Mids shows, because it doesn't calculate accuracy debuff resistance and end drain/end discount from Brute sets correctly.

Oh lord. Your blue Bar must look like winamp's music monitor playing "We will rock you"

meh I guess someone's gotta replicate the Mona lisa using minecraft Blocks. Cannot say that I understand it though, especially since even vanilla content has been made more challenging since I5

But why? It's like asking what sort of black-powder rifles you should buy for your modern military.

Welp, if you need a fun build... But about being 'top league', I am not sure that there is such an animal, or even what exactly that is supposed to mean. +4/8 content? Trivial. Incarnate trials? no sweat. STF? done that. ITF? Cut my teeth on it. MSR? Three times a week. Alphas? Never met an alpha I couldn't blow off or click through even with a dry insp tray. Maybe you could define 'top tier'? Because right now, I have a strong suspicion that 'top tier' means "The Tanker I grew up with" and everything that is different just doesn't make the grade. And, no offense, I LOVE Bio armor, But it's not in the same League as Ice Armor. Not even close. My Bio Tankers have to work ten times as hard to hold aggro and simply SURVIVE as my Ice tanker ever has, and soloing speed against hard content is 10-30% slower, easily. Yes, Bio CAN survive, but it's a stressful click-fest rather than smoothly bouncing between spawns and only occasionally popping a self-heal when your HP reaches 50% and freezes there. Not to mention offensive is vastly overrated for anyone but stalkers. Obviously It cannot mean solo speed (Or stone would be at the bottom of the list) or simply survivability against EVERYTHING since standing around staring at a Dead team is the hallmark of a bad set/build for Tankers. It's obviously not synergies, or having the end management to support ANY secondary, and clearly it's not farming speed. What are your demands for top tier? That you be able to fall asleep while fighting Recluse or Hamidon and still win? Because That means NO tanker can be top tier. I mean, you seem to have some sort of nebulous and unmentionable qualifier for 'top tier' and I can barely figure out what it is NOT, let alone what it IS. What, exactly, is the problem? Is it it's reliance on IO's? because by that Metric, SD would fall dead last. And a set's performace with SO's only hasn't mattered since I5. Is it the primarily defensive/regen nature of the set? Again, I would point out SR, SD, and even stone outside of granite. Please son, give us your EXACT definition of 'top tier' and take the castors off those Goalposts. Or bite the bullet and simply admit that it has nothing to do with performance, and everything to do with appearance and sound effects... If you don't like the special effects or the irritating sound effects, I totally get it... but that is entirely subjective and has NOTHING to do with it's performance as a set. Heck, I totally HATE ice melee for stalkers even though it's arguably the most powerful stalker set in the game. Not because of it's performance, but because the ice swords put the 'ugh' un ugly, and the blizzard winds sound effects set my teeth on edge. (arguably means I admit that there are probably valid arguments against it, not that it's time to argue with me about it in a tanker forum, hehe.) But that I will freely admit that that is utterly subjective, and has nothing to do with performance.

I figure this is not I5. End game results with full IO slotting are the rule, not the exception. Basing primary utility on what it's like with only SO's seems.... really foolish. Some sets gain dramatically in power solely based on some special IO slotting options that more 'powerful' sets simply don't have.

Methinks you should try actually playing ice armor in end game content... I think you would be pleasantly surprised, since the whole set is bells and whistles. It is hard sometimes to see in mids, but it is utterly a hybrid set, and is all about the classic 'layered defenses' -15% damage (this is separate from resistance, and stacks with it, providing damage reduction above the resist cap) -30 recharge (again stacks with resistance and damage reduction, mitigation above cap) Both of these things help your PARTY, not just you... and with their huge duration (up to 15 seconds) and the fact that Ice is almost impossible to slow (80% speed debuff resistance) you can reliably run around and cripple 3 spawns at once in case of an overpull. Not to mention the slowing effects... you have no idea how much running around in slo-mo and occasionally taking potshots from range protects your team from incoming damage. 50% DDR and the tools to overload s/l defense to take advantage of it. a perma-able DULL PAIN CLONE. You would be amazed at the amount of mitigation that having 3000+ hit points offers. It must be experienced to be understood. And because of your defense nature, you are not under the pressure to slot sets simply as LOTG mules. medic is absolutely worthwhile, and can help you and your team.... and it can heal 1200 hp per pop. TWO taunt auras. Nothing peels aggro off of you. Ever. Not brutes, not blasters. a lot of people don't understand that CE is, hands down, the most reliable and powerful taunt aura in the game. And definitely the most versatile. Not to mention I have my two loaded up with no less than SIX procs and boatloads of extra Taunt. One of the better end management tools in the game...permanent out-of-the-box, it also caps your defense when you are facing lots of mobs. +perception out of the box. No need to get tactics, pop yellows, or throw in a rectified reticle to deal with those irritating mobs that throw smoke grenades or hide. no holes in it's status protection. not even situational holes. And because of it's defense, status protection is vastly magnified by misses. And, if you care to take it (Many people don't bother, ice is enough) a tier 9 phase shift that also jacks your heal and recovery through the roof... and with most builds, it's up about every 30 seconds, and if you are in trouble, you can usually hibernate, get back to full, and drop back out before CE even wears off! It's like tanking while using rest. I would love a buff to ice, but any buff you could offer (except maybe taunt sets in ce/icicles) would probably make it OP. But Ice armor is definitely one of those sets that people that haven't played it have trouble understanding. It is simply impossible to understand what being able to reliably cripple 40+ mobs is like. Anyway, that's my 2 cents... I think Ice is literally the most underrated set in the game. And frankly I don't expect that to change, and it's kind of fun the shocked reactions you get from people on your team that have always been told 'ice is underpowered' when they see what you can REALLY do! It's worth just trying out, if only for the fun factor when you make converts. It's biggest downside is that EVERY power is extremely useful. People skip hibernate... not because it's not extremely useful (it is) but because ice can be a little slot and power selection starved, and some folks HAVE to have combat jumping, Hasten, and ball lightning. What's even more (evil) fun is when you put it on a brute though and (ahem) leave the tanker standing there all by himself feeling like a punk because you just out-tankered the crap out of him, taunting desperately to try to get at least a little aggro. Or when you 'take a little break' in the ITF while getting pounded on by dozens of kheldians and minotaurs in order to tport, rez, and heal a fallen comrade who got a little lost. and you can practically feel that empath finding a sudden inspiration to try out traps or trick arrow.

As someone who farms with both, I'd like to think I have a pretty good grasp of how both sets work in a real, high-stress environment. It reliably hits all targets that are in melee with you. At least as reliably as rad. The reason Rad edges out STJ for farming is very, very simple... and it is not contamination or irradiated ground's damage. it is the -defense from IG, plus the fact that you can slot both fury and achilles -res debuffs. Spines can only slot fury -res in quills, which is why it is only ever-so-slightly behind rad in clear times. about 2-3% on average STJ doesn't have a proc aura. which places it squarely in the same category of 'almost as good as the ultimate farmers' as claws and savage. Contaminate is nice. and can be leveraged quite a bit... but that leveraging is functionally identical to (and slightly below) STJ's combos, and slightly behind Savage's rage and Claws...well... insane spin cycle. But that is for standard content... in farming content, the rapid fire combination of Mu blast/cages and a PBAOE combined with burn are what truly matter... you just cannot justify ANY single target attacks during your spin cycle, not even to leverage contaminate or follow-up, combos, or bleeding, especially since you are almost always at your target and within a few % of your damage cap (about 500% caps your damage once you add in enhancements/inc boosts) Recharge IS god for farming... and being able to dish out your higher-damage set pbaoe's more often is what really matters. Heck, even hitting Build up or firey embrace will cost you time you could be using for dumping aoe's and you are already close to damage cap. You usually just use them for boss-clean up or an accuracy boost just before popping into a new spawn. But in the looser world of open content, you are not as target saturated, fury buffed, and insp-bloated to damage cap. The Radius difference makes little difference when you are unlikely to catch more than 8 targets except in your VERY FIRST aoe (which almost always shreds all the minions) and the difference between a 6 and 8 foot radius makes almost zero difference. THAT is when you can start leveraging secondary damage, and rad's explosion is actually less telling than the combo effects from both stj and savage, due to it's 5 target cap, lower damage addition, and extremely limited radius, and all three outpace spines. That is also when decent and fast ST damage can actually outdamage AOE consistently. Basically, any set that has that initial high-damage PBAOE to open a spawn has 'good' aoe in standard content. That;s why foot stomp is considered the gold standard...not because it is good (it's actually one of the lowest performers) but because rage, in open content, puts that very first opener PBAOE at the same sort of levels it would be in a farm, while it is surrounded by minions that it smashes flat instantly. After that opener, however, a decent melee cone is what 'adds' to your aoe...and realistically, cross is a MUCH better cone than rad sweep when you can leverage combos (although, to be fair, that's also when contaminate starts to shine, and why sweep is often skipped... because it has NO leveraging opportunities, and is nothing more than a slow, 5 target melee cone that can only contaminate stuff that is probably already contaminated from your initial built up pbaoe) Dark is considered 'poor' aoe because it doesn't have that opener. Dual Blades, Spines, and MA (and some others) are considered 'light' because their initial pbaoe is below 50... while the 'heavy' aoe sets are above 60. What sets STJ apart though, is that not only does it benefit hugely from it's buildup clone but while combat readiness only adds 50% damage (which shows up on mids) It also gives an extra 30% damage from it's combo... and that 30% damage does NOT show up in mids. That combo bonus 30% is also NOT a damage buff, it is almost like a second attack, which means that occurs outside of the damage caps. Much like Rad's explosion, except it affects every target hit by 30% rather than just exploding off a single target for 10%. Now, that being said, two weeks ago Rad DID dramatically outperform in open content... because two weeks ago, Proc effects were propagated across explosion damage. So if you slotted poison, chance for buildup, and chance for -recharge into your ST attacks, and were careful to use your buildup and spin to contaminate EVERY target around you, each and every single target attack had SIX chances to pop a proc.... I built my rad/fire farmer with that principle, and for a little while my clear speeds were utterly disgusting WITH single target attacks instead of mu. But last week, the devs stated very clearly that was a bug, and removed that effect. I literally had to rebuild my farmer because it's performance took a nose dive. It still performs amazingly well in both farms and open content, (It IS still rad, after all) but to exel in each, I had to create a different build... and the 'broken uber' kinda faded. It performs nearly identically to STJ now in open content, which was, I am sure, the intention.

It is not, but DPA directly affects mitigation through destruction, as well as how many attacks you can cram into the space of a single buildup, which can affect your DPS.

Now, I need you to build me a good water/ice blaster (grin) I just wish that there was a way you could put in a 'super breath' cone AND laser beam eyes. As for me, personally, I just don't much care for invulnerability. I am well aware of it's strengths, but it always feels sorta one dimensional... and since I love doing MSR's, it just feels like too much work to close up it's psi holes to make a good MSR puller.

Okay, here's the deal- The character is incredibly tough. It has partial immunity to getting slowed by stuff like green ink men, and in-combat it Hovers incredibly fast. It has fly 'at the end' mostly for the cool fly poses, but it's flight speed is more than capped even without Afterburner. (I hate anything that requres me to alter my stance if I decide to cap a sniper) While it has capped s/l resistances, it's defense are not capped. But it has truly disgusting hp (tanker-level) and outrageous Regen (60hp/sec) without you having to click a single defensive clickie, as well as quite reasonable (50%ish) resistance to almost everything. Unlike many wp builds however, you are not stuck using greens/purple for the rare emergencies you may encounter. It will respond EXTREMLY well on MSR's, since it has no holes that archmages or mentalists can use to kill you. It also has extremely capable energy defenses and insane end, so the really 'killer' endgame groups... arachnos, Malta, Carnies, and Dark Astoria stuff, you can practically have an emergency bathroom break while fighting them without getting hurt too badly, even at high difficulties. It has the accuracy to support high difficulties, and I kinda specifically meant it to deal with the unique survival challenges of MSR pulling, with it's multiple EB alphas and massive weird damage types. The psychic damage procs ensure that you aggro more with Taunt than the default 5 for pulling to the hole, and your defenses tend be high enough to deflect a lot of the mez overload. It uses some nonstandard Incarnates, because it can actually benefit from them, but if you prefer to change to the good ol' standard muscle/agility and ageless it will not hurt you any... But Barrier is there for the very rare emergency like getting hit with a sonic grenade and sword attacks at the same time, or something, as well as to resurrect your team when the dominator decides that you are the same thing as a tanker and can peel 3 spawns worth of aggro off him after a raw nuke (You cannot, that's not your job). I left your Interface empty, because the one that would work best, reactive core, comes with a visible fire damage proc...and you were trying to remain 'fisticuffs'. Although to be fair, sweeping cross still has a fire Proc, but I figured that was because you swing your fist so fast that the friction alone catches 'em on fire :)/ That's why I also used energy epic, because the others all did some clearly supernatural effect. But if you want laser beam eyes, replace physical perfection... The minor buffs from miracle won't make that much difference with your HUGE end and regen total, and 2 slotting a very rare set at +5 (damage and damage/end/rech) will make it do loads of damage. And melting someone's face with laser eyes while giggling maniacally is always fun. You could also replace the epic with leadership, if that fits your style better. Dumping physical perfection for Maneuvers would boost your defense a couple of points, cap some, and let you put in another LOTG -recharge. tactics will help if you get smoked or against stealthed enemies like banes, as well as improving your utility against incarnate content at +4/8. Just be careful about calling yourself 'Tighten' or 'Homelander' hehehehe. Quick note- This is not a 'Farmer' as such, but once you hit 50 you probably won't have to double box... clearing s/l or even fire farms at +2/+3 /8 will be reasonably fast without any help, for building up Vet levels and incarnate rewards. I did one myself in about 16 hours solo using level 1 EB farms to get to 50 (about 8 hours) and then regular increasingly-difficult s/l farms as I enhanced him out to uber. As always, I would like to note that I have made slightly less perfect design choices in order to try and maximize your 'theme'. But nothing particularly painful. This build CAN be improved, or altered, but it was the best I could do to stay within the style and still maintain efficiency.

If you'd like I could whip something up. It definitely is NOT a tanker, though. I have an STJ/wp, but he's a jumper. will take some minor changes, but I figure I can kitbash my 'vampire hover' and 'captain Incredible' builds in a few minutes. Do you prefer flight/hover/afterburner (more powers) or 'vampire/deity hover'? It doesn't require that you turn off hover, but like all melee sets, you have to hover at ground level a lot... which means things like caltrops CAN ground you, but that's the case for all melee flyers. Bear in mind wp doesn't cap easily... Instead it uses the 'combined defense' approach of a mixture of medium defense, medium resistance, lots of hp and lots of regen... You cannot pull off 'no hitsu' like some brutes, but I have fallen asleep in the middle of a 4/9 farm before and woke up with everything dead. I take it you are looking for like... a Greatest American Hero type? And do you want it level up friendly or ouroboros friendly?

It's like getting a big old sundae with all the fixins... three kinds of ice cream, peanuts, chocolate syrup, pineapple, whipped cream, sprinkles and a cherry on top. And then smashing it into Robert DeNiro's face. It's just all around amazing and great fun, but a lot of work.