Best "Damage Sponge."

[11Troy11]

I've never ran a tank, so I'm looking at doing so. Damage is really not a concern as I really want to  be a true tank with two priorities: survivability and aggro management.

 

I was thinking War Mace could be good (all the knockdown going toward mitigation), but I'm open to ideas. I really have no good ideas on the primary except to say I really can't deal with the aesthetics of ice or stone.

[Redlynne]

My recommendation.

[Bopper]

hmmm... Best Sponge?  Perhaps a Stone/Dark/Soul tank. Stone armor can hit softcap defense to all types (psi is capped only in minerals, but you can't use granite armor with it). It can cap resistance to all types (psi can be capped with IO slotting and tank ATO, but it takes investment, everything else is easily covered by granite), it can hit Max HP and can have 400-600% regeneration with rooted (depends on slotting).

 

For a secondary, I'm torn between Kinetic Melee and Dark melee. With kinetic, you can debuff the enemy's damage which pairs well with capped resistances. However, Dark Melee can debuff to-hit (which helps your teammates more than it does you) but most important comes with Siphon Life which can act as your personal heal while not hurting your attack chain.

 

Finally, Soul because of darkest night. Target AoE toggle for 30% damage debuff and 15% tohit debuff? Heck yeah. Plus the attacks will also offer -to hit to pair with Dark Melee.

 

You can approach things differently like take a secondary that offers more knockdown, that's fine too. Personally I play Stone/SS/Soul, but if I were to chase maximum sponge, I think dark is the way to go

[Hjarki]

26 minutes ago, Redlynne said:

My recommendation.

I think Martial Arts is a bit superfluous with Super Reflexes. An SR Tank can easily hit incarnate soft-cap on positionals without Storm Kick. Super Reflexes is also a good-until-it-isn't set. If an enemy is hitting you with massive damage, you don't get a chance for the scaling damage resistance to kick in. Likewise, the Toxic/Psi hole means that you'll face attacks against which you have no defenses at all or attacks that hit for full 5% of the time.

 

Super Reflexes also doesn't scale well into Incarnate content due to the relative commonality of team defensive vs. team resistance buffs. A significant number of your allies will have Maneuvers. Probably half of the Defenders/Corruptors/Controllers/Masterminds you encounter will buff your defense in some fashion if they're anywhere near you. In contrast, buffs to your resists are far less common because most of the sets that buff crucial resists are rarely played.

 

31 minutes ago, Bopper said:

For a secondary, I'm torn between Kinetic Melee and Dark melee. With kinetic, you can debuff the enemy's damage which pairs well with capped resistances. However, Dark Melee can debuff to-hit (which helps your teammates more than it does you) but most important comes with Siphon Life which can act as your personal heal while not hurting your attack chain.

The difficulty with Dark Melee is that it's all single target attacks except for Shadow Maul. While Shadow Maul is considerably improved, you can't realistically debuff an entire spawn. That leaves you with single target -hit... which is likely to be heavily resisted by most single targets you'd be worried about. Siphon LIfe is nice, but I'm not sure you couldn't get a similar effect by just layering Call of the Sandman/Power Transfer in all of your Electric Melee powers. Siphon Life also only really makes sense if you're playing a set without decent healing.

 

Kinetic does debuff damage, but if you're sitting at 90% resist the addition of -10% damage is equivalent to +1% more resist. It's just not very significant, especially given KM's weak damage.

 

My personal vote for 'best damage sponge' would almost certainly start with Staff Mastery for the combination of enhanceable +15% M/L, unenhanceable +13% to all resists and soft control via knockdown.

 

37 minutes ago, Bopper said:

hmmm... Best Sponge?  Perhaps a Stone/Dark/Soul tank. Stone armor can hit softcap defense to all types (psi is capped only in minerals, but you can't use granite armor with it). It can cap resistance to all types (psi can be capped with IO slotting and tank ATO, but it takes investment, everything else is easily covered by granite), it can hit Max HP and can have 400-600% regeneration with rooted (depends on slotting).

Stone is the classic answer for 'best tanking' due to Granite Armor. However, Granite Armor has a Psi hole. So if you're facing Psi, you need to switch to the rest of your powers. Which, unfortunately, means you're terrible against everything except Psi - and you're only 'good against Psi' in the sense that you've got defense against it. Your resistance would still be terrible.

41 minutes ago, Bopper said:

Finally, Soul because of darkest night. Target AoE toggle for 30% damage debuff and 15% tohit debuff? Heck yeah. Plus the attacks will also offer -to hit to pair with Dark Melee.

I'd agree Soul tends to be the go-to choice. Excluding Electric (which has abnormally hard-hitting single target attacks) and the combo-based sets, Gloom is almost always a strong choice for your basic single target rotation. Obliteration is also a decent enough AE nuke, especially given the minor -hit debuff.

 

In terms of the primary, I think the resist-based sets tend to do the best job because they're the most absolute defense against damage. If you've got 90% resist to a damage form, you're not going to take much damage. In contrast, it's unusual for a non-Super Reflexes Tanker to have Incarnate-level Defenses and there are ways that even seemingly comprehensive defenses. For example, a lot of Toxic damage comes from puddles that don't require a hit roll. Having a split second to avoid death and being able to go grab a cup of coffee before casually strolling out of a puddle is the difference between the people a Tanker protects and the Tanker themselves.

 

When I look at resists, I tend to separate them into 'important' (Smash, Lethal, Fire, Energy, Toxic) and 'unimportant' (Cold, Negative, Psi). The former are all primary (and common) damage types that you really want to heavily resist. The latter are less common and normally an attack is only half composed of the type (the other normally being smashing), so heavily resisting their damage is less important.

 

On the other hand, when I look at defenses, I tend to be highly concerned about Lethal, Cold, Negative and Psi because those are the damage types that carry significant debuffs.

 

Building to resist Lethal -defense debuffs is effectively impossible without a Defense-based set (which tends to preclude hitting the level of resists you want above). That's why sets like Staff are so incredible - you can easily reach Incarnate+ levels of Lethal Defense and simply soak -defense debuffs with raw defense regardless of what your primary is.

 

Dealing with Cold/Psi slow is a bit more difficult. Only one set (Ice Armor) has enough Slow resist to really permit you to laugh it off (arguably Stone Armor is inherently 'slow resistant' because you're not planning to move or attack much anyway). The rest vary between 0% and 45%, with a 20% unique IO if you want it (most people don't).

 

You've got -hit. Any Tanker can use Focused Accuracy to avoid this. However, that requires dedicating your epic/Patron pool to something you may not need. Otherwise, it tends to come down to an issue of how much you depend on hitting. Builds with heals/debuffs reliant on hitting the target can quickly fall apart when the shadow bolts start flying. With that in mind, I tend to view this as a low priority because the problem also exists with Force Field Generators or enemies with unusual defensive bonuses (Lord Recluse, for example). Since it is an infrequent enough problem, it's one that's more easily solved with Inspirations.

 

In theory, status protection is also a concern. However, sets tend to only come into two types: those with comprehensive status resist vs. those without kb/immobilize status resist. Since the latter is trivially easy to acquire via pool/IO, it's not a meaningful distinction.

 

The rate at which you heal/regen is the last layer of 'defense'. In general, you need stupendous amounts of regen to match even modest amounts of healing. A Fire/* Tanker can generally heal 50% of their health every 15 sec. To match this, you'd need ~800% regen. While regen is nice in that it doesn't require activation, it does mean that trying to out-Regenerate significant damage is normally a lost cause.

 

Covering all of what I discussed above is impossible. Indeed, one particular element - Psi Defense - is nearly impossible to cover with any set. Unless you're making "Psi Defense guy" who inexplicably has multiple ranged attacks and a pet on top of a set that grants Psi Defense, you're not going to soft-capping Psi Defense.

 

Likewise, you generally have to choose whether you have a Toxic hole or a Psi hole for resists. Again, you could potentially build a proof-of-concept Tanker who had 90% resist to both, but you'd have to make so many compromises elsewhere that it wouldn't be worth it.

 

Given everything, I'd argue the best choice for a Tanker would normally be Radiation Armor. While it does have a Psi hole, it has generally solid resists across the board (including the critical S/L/E resists). But Fire, Electric and Dark also have a lot to recommend them.

[Bopper]

17 minutes ago, Hjarki said:

While Shadow Maul is considerably improved, you can't realistically debuff an entire spawn.

True, and I'm not really looking to debuff an entire spawn, just the guy I feel does the most damage. I would actually open with Dark Obliteration then Shadow Maul to get the entire mob (or much of it) debuffed. That's a quick 10.5% to-hit debuff fairly quickly, assuming you did not enhance. Throw in Darkest Night, and now you have 30%+ To-Hit debuffs on a fairly good size of the mob. Even against +4 enemies, you're getting ~15% debuffs on the mob.

 

20 minutes ago, Hjarki said:

Granite Armor has a Psi hole.

It does, but Stone Armor does have Minerals which gives you the option (though one I don't ever take) to softcap psionic defense (then turn on all of the other armors for some additional protection to other attacks). Also, despite having no psionic resistance in the set, you can actually achieve 80%+ resistance to Psionic damage if you choose to slot for it. Throw in the Tanker ATO and you can hit 90% resistance with one or two stacks. The nice thing with granite, you can get to this 80-90% psionic resistance easier than other armors that have 0% psionic resistance, thanks to much of the other armors essentially acting as mules. Between Aegis unique (+5%), 5x Imperium Armors (+6%), 5x ATO and Purple set bonuses for Toxic/Psi (+6%), you are already at 65% psionic resistance. Throw in the Reactive Defense (3-10%) and the Shield Wall (5%), that gets you to 73%. From there, you can call it good and rely on keeping up 2 stacks of the Tanker ATO (2x 6.7% = 13.4%) to get you to 86.4% resistance, and maybe throw in a couple of 2-slot taunts to get you to 90%.  Now you're looking at capped psionic resistance while in granite (after some buildup with tanker ATO) and if that's not enough you can switch to Minerals for both capped defense and capped resistance in psionic damage.

 

36 minutes ago, Hjarki said:

Given everything, I'd argue the best choice for a Tanker would normally be Radiation Armor.

I do agree with this. Although you will be vulnerable to Defense Debuffs and you will probably only be able to build to softcap defense in S/L/Melee, but you can hit 86.5%+ resistance to basically every other debuff imaginable in the game (you'll need Focused Accuracy for To-Hit debuff protection, but it's available). Factor in the ability to resistance cap most types of damage (Cold you likely won't, but that's also one of the rarest damage types to face), the absorb shield, the heals, the regen. Rad Armor is a beast of a damage sponge. Rad Armor is so good, it has arguably the best T9 Armor power in the game, and I see builds still skip it because they already have their survival covered.

 

And best of all, you can jump up onto a curb. That alone makes Rad Armor OP.

 

[Gobbledigook]

Radiation melee could work well with Stone armor. It would give an extra damage aura that can proc debuffs/damage and has a heal in the set also.

[marcussmythe]

If your focused on pure survival over all, I think stone probably still takes it - though at huge cost.

 

Invuln can probably catch up with Rad on resist, while offering more DEF and DDR.  You just give up all the other goodies rad gets, and will probably need to pair it with something offering a heal to finish closing the difference.  Heraclea, whose opinion on all things Tank I deeply respect, considers Invuln/Dark Melee to be the go to answer.

 

In the alternate, the Rad/Staff approach sounds like a real winner, and one I had not considered.  Good advice, folks.

 

(aside - I have not explored the design space for stacking resist on the positional defense sets.  Its possible that you could pump solid resists onto the DDR capped Positional DEF capped SRs or Shields to match the resist set numbers above - though both of those sets lack the healing power of Rad Armor, so your again going begging to Dark Melee or Aid Self)

 

 

 

[Keen]

8 hours ago, Bopper said:

I do agree with this. Although you will be vulnerable to Defense Debuffs and you will probably only be able to build to softcap defense in S/L/Melee, but you can hit 86.5%+ resistance to basically every other debuff imaginable in the game (you'll need Focused Accuracy for To-Hit debuff protection, but it's available). Factor in the ability to resistance cap most types of damage (Cold you likely won't, but that's also one of the rarest damage types to face), the absorb shield, the heals, the regen. Rad Armor is a beast of a damage sponge. Rad Armor is so good, it has arguably the best T9 Armor power in the game, and I see builds still skip it because they already have their survival covered.

 

And best of all, you can jump up onto a curb. That alone makes Rad Armor OP.

Having built a Radiation Armor Tanker recently with all resistances capped but Cold (82%), I agree with everything in the above. That includes skipping the T9. It also makes a heck of a Hamidon tanker due to capped toxic resists, endurance drain and slow debuff resists.

 

Edited May 22, 2020 by Keen

[11Troy11]

So then, taking the above into account, the toon I'm looking for is a Rad/Staff tank.

 

Now I've just got to come up with a concept 

 

Thanks all

[Gobbledygook]

1 hour ago, 11Troy11 said:

So then, taking the above into account, the toon I'm looking for is a Rad/Staff tank.

 

Now I've just got to come up with a concept 

 

Thanks all

Toxic Avenger

Look him up.

[Bopper]

6 minutes ago, Gobbledygook said:

Toxic Avenger

Look him up.

Oh man...such a horrible *yet great because of how horrible it is* B-movie. Things in that movie I can't unsee. 

[Gobbledygook]

1 minute ago, Bopper said:

Oh man...such a horrible *yet great because of how horrible it is* B-movie. Things in that movie I can't unsee. 

Exactly why OP should base his character, or at least a costume slot, on Toxie, lol.

[Bopper]

9 minutes ago, Gobbledygook said:

Exactly why OP should base his character, or at least a costume slot, on Toxie, lol.

You are not wrong.

[Psyonico]

29 minutes ago, Bopper said:

Oh man...such a horrible *yet great because of how horrible it is* B-movie. Things in that movie I can't unsee. 

They actually made an off-broadway musical about it... It's amazing.

[Call Me Awesome]

If you want to grab aggro fast and hold it tight the best primary is Ice, nothing else is it's equal in that department.  It is NOT the most durable primary but a good build will be good enough for most content with your inspiration tray picking up the slack when you run into the rare encounter that's over your head.

 

For absolute durability Stone Armor once you get Granite is the undisputed king, it pays for that with a ton of penalties to mobility, recharge and damage.  A half step down from Granite is Invulnerability with Shield slightly below that, both of those can be built to near Granite durability with none of the penalties.

 

Whichever sets you choose you'll certainly want Taunt and a good variety of attacks, particularly AOE attacks.  Your aura will help draw mobs in to you, Taunt will grab mobs that are out of your range and attacks will keep mobs glued to you.  One pointer, Taunt acts as an aggro multiplier, so an attack + Taunt will get MUCH more aggro than either alone.  I recommend getting a ranged attack or two at some point, if your secondary doesn't give you one then Pyre Mastery is a good choice with Fire Blast and Fire Ball.  AOE's are always a good choice for getting and holding aggro as well as for pure damage.

[Bopper]

31 minutes ago, Psyonico said:

They actually made an off-broadway musical about it... It's amazing.

Wow...this is why I love the forums...these nuggets right here.