Frostweaver

Dark/SD FTW

I don't get dropping fusion because of st explode damage after a fusion/atom smasher contaminates EVERYTHING. Leveraging contaminated explosions with procs is how my rad/rad tanker can approach brute farming speeds on s/l farms. It's not about the buildup, it's about the contamination.

What's wrong with your list is that it's for scrappers, not tankers. Tankers have a different focus, otherwise they'd be brutes Primaries: Indefatiguable- Invulnerability, Radiation armor, Dark Armor Above Average- Stone Armor, electric armor, shield defense, Bio armor Average- Ice armor, Willpower, Fiery Aura Needs a rework- Super reflexes. Unlike Brutes and scrappers, Tankers have THREE separate factors that need to be considered. First and foremost is Damage management... Not just for yourself, but for your team as well. Obviously personal survival is slightly more emphasized, since a dead tanker cannot protect anyone, but team damage management is only slightly less important. Secondly There is continuing utility, meaning stuff that helps you stay in a fight as long as possible like endurance management as well as how 'convenient' the set is to use... Sets that require constant management, complicated keybinds, and lots of 'click this not to die' lose some team utility due to attention split away from damage menagement. Third, and distantly last, is soloing/damage maximization. This is NOT a primary criteria, but it does weigh in on a set's utility in general. Great damage for a tanker is still great damage "FOR A TANKER". that Blaster you are protecting is going to be able to dish out vastly more than you no matter how awesome your personal damage output is. Secondaries, contrariwise, cannot be weighed in a vacuum like that. While TW is indisputably top-tier in both damage and utility, it's endurance and unweidly mechanics can dramatically REDUCE the value of some highly rated primaries. Some low performers can also boost an otherwise mediocre primary into being top-tier if they are used effectively... Icey Melee, for example, while definitely low-damage, can dramatically boost both the damage management of firey aura as well as it's team utility and survivability. To be blunt, the chart is simply a poor substitute for a listing of primaries and secondaries paired together with synergies, and I truly hope that someone who is relatively new and interested in playing a tanker doesn't simply fish from the list expecting to be a good by picking from your extremely subjective 'top tiers'. Bio/TW, for example, is probably the tanker combo abandoned most often in their early 20's, and if I got a WP/MA on my team, I'd follow the dominator instead.

Any Tanker back in I5

Yes, and that there is a reason WP sucks, as well. SR and wp are great for soloing. Not sure why you are playing a tank in that case. Brutes do it better. The exception is TW for WP. TW has a huge number of team protections as well as disgusting Damage... WP has the end management and lack of clickies needed to keep it rolling well. SR doesn't have a synergy of that sort. Sure, it can survive most stuff. So can every other tanker primary. Heck, my fire/ tanker, even with a primary that is widely known as the most the most squishy in general content, can tank the crap out of the hardest incarnate content in the game, just like every other Tanker. SR is amazing on stalkers, decent on scrappers and sentinels, kinda meh on brutes, and brings nothing whatsoever to the table for tankers. It should have been thought through far more thoroughly before being ported. The scaling resistance is a pittance in the face of +4 incarnate content. It has no tools for dealing with overpull. Sure, you can grab a primary that will shore up that weakness, but it is in exactly the same position Energy Aura was ten years ago... you can shore up the weaknesses with a primary, but that primary would simply be better with something that never had those weaknesses. Any secondary you pick would simply perform better in a team environment, where tanks live, with almost any other primary. It's not that SR is the bottom of the list (It is) since SOMETHING has to be at the bottom, it's that, in it's current form, it simply doesn't belong on the list at all.

Okay, Bye.

Call me old fashioned, but I expect a little more from a Tanker than being a third-rate scrapper with a slightly better taunt. If I am going to take the massive damage hit from playing a tanker instead of a brute, who can do it almost as well (unfortunately) having decent incoming damage management for more than just myself is my price. Being the sole survivor isn't much of a victory.

What do they do for your team?

bs/bio, and Ice/shield. Auto-Hasten is overrated.

They don't wind up in the same place at the end of the day. Their tools and secondary effects are very, very different. That's why i despise SR on tankers so much. because they HAVE no tools or secondary effects.

Yah, I still have defensive sweep on my 50, it helps cap defenses that otherwise I'd have to use set IO's for, which would cut into my recharge. Not to mention being a decent Mule.

Like Narminian said, but simpler. a fully IO'd out 'uber farmer' is the difference between running 3 full sets of comicon runs (15 missions) in the hour between getting home and having dinner, and running 1 set and maybe another mission or two. 40 mil vs. 150 mil is a rather serious difference in my book. the difference more than pays for itself.

despite the badmouthing of defensive sweep, it's actually a very solid power. Don't respec out of it until about 35, because before that it's one of your better ways of dealing with trash mobs and keeping yourself healthy and swinging instead of clicking emergency buttons.

At this point, almost every single Tanker can cap most resistances and all defenses. And at the same time, crank their damage, recharge, regen, taunt, and HP through the roof. So... What exactly does stone offer for paying in damage, speed, and power pools for the similar ability? Oh right. a cheap yellow-io build. which you outgrow in like 1 farm. It needs only 2 changes. Rooted should be changed to 'grounded' which reduces it's protection when you are not touching the ground (like you cannot click burn when you are in the air) but doesn't de-toggle. and the damage penalty should be removed. That would make it roughly equal to bio, which, while not top-tier in all situations, would still make it the premier ease of capping set while allowing the other penalties to be overcome with expensive IO sets... just like every other tanker set. Make Stone Armor Great Again.

Well, I remember back on boards over a decade ago a few tanks were purposely built to kind of ignore their damage stats, like stone, but then IO's happened. I haven't seen hide nor hair of low-damage tanker since.

I have been playing in ice/rad 'nuclear winter' lately. The combination is weirdly synergistic and surprisingly destructive. Because you take things at a slightly slower pace, EVERYTHING you fight is generally contaminated and the explosion damage is quite telling. It's only a shame that they changed rad's 'proc bleed' effect. the aggro control is even more disgusting than Ice's usual overkill.

The closest thing I have heard is that 'tank damage is secondary to their aggro control and survivability" And this is not a comment on their playstyle, but a clear statement of the AT design.

Other bodily emissions that some people eat, if you enjoy them.

Welp, since XR Squared isn't going to say a word, apparently, I think I am going to use the build myself. With some improvements, of course. I am cool with the theme, but tweaked the vampire to have a 'renfield', a widow, of course... I have never liked big cone holds for Vampires, too Japanimation-y. I am sorta getting used to the levitate, too. And, of course, moonbeam is always worth the space for a stalker, even with the snipe changes. And, of course, Shadow meld is basically a lot like a free tier 9 that's available every 30 seconds for 15 of those seconds. MOG would be proud. I don't expect anyone to ever need soul transfer, but it's a decent enough regenerative tissue mule, which brings regen to 13 points/second... Not in the class of /regen or /wp, or even /bio, of course, but still quite respectably vamp-y.

Exactly, Quietkane. I honestly don't think it should have been ported the way it was. It simply doesn't have any utility besides a moderate speed boost, nothing to help keep your team safe from the extra spawn your aggro cap cannot handle, or to help THEM deal with that stray spawn more effectively. It is a scrapper set. Designed that way from the beginning, and porting it to tankers just makes you a scrapper with crap damage. A lot of the same arguments for willpower being a scrubby tanker apply to SR, except that at LEAST WP gets a -to-hit aura that helps the team. Not to mention that one of the things that tankers bring to the table, being nearly unkillable, just does not apply to SR. Great, so you can ignore longbow debuffs if you so happen to be a redside Tank. That's useful for like 10 levels and rarely thereafter. To even start to come close to the realm of 'tough' tankers, you need scads of IO's to deal with your resistances. At least ice/ has chilling embrace, which gives a hefty -damage and -recharge to get your 'stacked' mitigation types a start, as well as a rather decent heal and TWO major taunt auras. Most Ice tankers I know in 'overpull situations' can keep 3 full spawns massively debuffed and their team fairly safe, even if they are nowhere near as unkillable as a dark or electric tanker. Even EA would have been a better choice had they ported it, because at the very least it has an end drain. SR needed a LOT of adjusting before it was ported to tankers, and it never got that adjusting. What it it get? 'lucky'. It simply isn't a good tanker primary. That's (one of the many reasons) why it's not popular. SR as a set is very selfish, and if Tankers were selfish, they'd be Scrappers.

meh, I wanted to try REGEN as a Tanker 😛

There is nothing edible that does not belong on a pizza. You just might have to change the sauce.

I am using a wm/shield, and I hear ya... but I do miss the insane amounts of aoe. even with shield's damage boost, whirling just feels like a pretty minor league attack to hang your aoe hat on.

Weirdly enough, blappers are STILL a thing. I am working with an electric/atomic that uses the whole fighting pool. Cross punch is surprisingly underrated when boosted with boxing and kick. I am starting to think that some primaries/secondaries are deigned with blapping in mind. It's no brute, but it certainly pulls scrapper-level numbers under the right circumstances. if it weren't for the recent Nerf, /MC would be almost ideal.

which basically makes it awesome on blappers 😛