Advice for Bio Armor on Tank

[Outback]

Heya heroes and villains! It's been ages since I've played a tank (had stone/stone and stone/kinetic 50s back on live) and recently decided to roll up a Bio/Ice tank yesterday. It feels fantastic, but I was hoping for some feedback on Bio Armor. On a brute, it makes more sense - mostly use Offensive Adaptation, switch to Defensive when the going gets tough, switch to Efficient when you're fighting jerks like Malta. Does this apply to Tankers as well? Any other advice folks might have? I'm fairly sold on the set, I tried Dark/Ice for a bit and it didn't seem quite as good.

 

Thanks!

[marcussmythe]

Bio on a Tank feels quite similar to Bio on a Brute.  I noticed offensive adaptation a bit more, likely due to the Tanks higher damage scalar and Fury’s tendency to drown out other damage buffs.  Similarly on Defensive - it seems it gives me a little more value than it does on a brute, likely because a Tanker is easy to get close to certain target numbers - that Defensive Adaptation will then put me over.

 

Bio vs Elec - very apples and oranges.  Elec can resist cap most things fairly casually, so will hold up better under endgame debuff storms (Of my melee characters, Bio is the most prone to cascade collapse - which is fair, given its power).  Bio has, of course, an outsized damage buff (I recall when testing it last summer, it seems offensive adaptation is doing two different things - both buffing the damage of the attack directly by a %, AND applying an independent damage packet.  I wonder if they were testing two different things and then left both in) but also a massive regen, espc with the T9 in a crowd.

 

The large tank HP pool is super good on a regen heavy set, and the CC from Ice will likely further help with this.  Should be great fun.  Enjoy.

[Xandyr]

On my bio/rad tank, I'm in Offensive about 90% of the time. The other 10% I'm in Defensive.  Hardly ever need Efficient.  I built my tank for +HP, Regen, and Defense. 

 Bio is my favorite Tanker primary. 

[Heraclea]

I tend to swap between Offensive and Defensive modes on my Torchbearer Bio/Spines tanker, which is the server where my richest characters live.  My Excelsior Bio/Kinetic tanker gets a lot more mileage out of Efficiency currently; you may too until you get all the +recovery IOs.  But you can't take one without the others.  Once you get to 50 the -resist in Offensive is easily ignored on normal content.

 

End hog secondaries like Spines, Stone, and Axe pair well with it.