The Tank Gods. . .

[Werner]

2 hours ago, Tsuko said:

ONLY AT POWERS

Absolutely insane. Congratulations! 
 

So, uh... apparently Energy Melee is awesome now and everyone loves it. I guess I need to figure out a build and play around on beta. Honestly, I hope I still like Martial Arts more, because I’m not sure I’m up for another Tanker slog to 50 right now. At least on another Shield Tanker - too similar to what I’m already playing and loving. Eh, there’s my answer - I’m loving it, just keep playing it. 🙂

 

Other than Tanker, what’s EM best on? 

[nihilii]

7 minutes ago, Werner said:

Other than Tanker, what’s EM best on?

Scrappers get a lot out of it. ET heals on a crit, and with TF 20 base recharge and the Critical Strikes proc, you get the choice to crit at will.

Low DPE (ET costs 0 end) and lenient recharge requirements (EP/BS/TF and slow ET all have great, mostly similar DPA) gives scrappers a chance to grab Barrier or Rebirth, too, rather than Ageless.

[Bill Z Bubba]

1 hour ago, Werner said:

So, uh... apparently Energy Melee is awesome now and everyone loves it.

I used it. I used it well. I do NOT love it.

[Tsuko]

1 hour ago, nihilii said:

Scrappers get a lot out of it. ET heals on a crit, and with TF 20 base recharge and the Critical Strikes proc, you get the choice to crit at will.

Low DPE (ET costs 0 end) and lenient recharge requirements (EP/BS/TF and slow ET all have great, mostly similar DPA) gives scrappers a chance to grab Barrier or Rebirth, too, rather than Ageless.

i m ok but i still prefer EM on stalker for dps : Assassin and energy focus works so good together, as it is for STJ.

 

But it's on tanker that i feel EM the best.

[Tsuko]

2 hours ago, Werner said:

Other than Tanker, what’s EM best on? 

EM is awesome on armor who dont need active defence, Granite, invul, shield, SR and so on.

 

It works really well on Rad but for team content : i have a Rad / EM one with 80+ psi resist : she's the perfect team meatshield but is far far less tanky than shield or even invul.

 

During my testing for this only AT run, i first try on Invul and to be honnest it was a blast : my shield EM can solo Romu but she can die a any moment ; i forgot once my invul / em tanker only AT in front of romu nictus lvl 54 with NO auto power... i came back 1 hour later, she was still alive.

[nihilii]

I took the stone/em on a MoSTF spin today.

 

 

Now, technically I brought a couple alts on the team. It was set at +0/x1, and I didn't lock inspirations either. But in spirit, I wanted to behave as if this was a legit no insps/temps solo attempt. The alts were there to leech a reward, and also incase I hit a brickwall at some point. I didn't use amplifiers.

 

The first missions went fine. This was an interesting test in itself because the STF makes you move a lot, and vertically too.

 

Combat Teleport is truly a game changer for stone. Even against the Thorn Tree, it was no trouble to remove all the vines in time. I have left shift bound to combat teleport to my selected target, so it's just one tap to get there.

 

The various psi AVs were no trouble at level 51/52. Sometimes I'd swap to minerals, really more for the extra damage out of Granite than out of need. 1 on 1, they're fine. It might be different on a hypothetical +4/x8 attempt; if nothing else because you'd have to make sure to clean the AV's posse before damage and debuffs stack too much.

 

I was weary of Aeon, even used Earth Embrace preemptively. Sometimes one of the clones lob radiation defense debuffs at you, and cascading railure rolls down fast. Stone has DDR, but I'm only running about ~49% defense on my build, not much of a buffer. Anyhow, the Aeon fight went without a hitch.

Last mission gets interesting - of course! I first tried to pull Mako, hoping to get either him alone or him + Black Scorpion.

 

Mako came alone.

Then Black Scorpion followed 20 seconds later.
Followed by Ghost Widow a few moments after. Ohhh boy.

 

Now this I was trying to avoid, because even stone is at the mercy of a lucky Soul Storm. And with Black Scorpion taunting you, you can't focus on Ghost Widow first.

 

Nonetheless, I tried to play it out. I had no real plan, save that I didn't lock my insp tray. So I figured if I got hit by Soul Storm, I would "betray" the challenge and chomp on breakfrees. But in retrospect, I think you need a whole bunch of breakfrees to break out of Soul Storm, so I probably would have died!

 

It did play out lucky. Black Scorpion was about to go down, and then I saw Scirocco come closer. This would have spelt disaster, because while it's possible for Ghost Widow to miss her Soul Storms long enough against softcapped defense, Scirocco and his autohit tornados would reduce my defense to the point landing a Soul Storm would be inevitable.

But strangely enough, Scirocco stopped about ~60 feet away from the fight, looking at us and not doing a thing. I've seen him bug out like that before, and it seems to play out the same way. When you're far enough from him and don't damage him, it's like his AI gets stuck on a particular power that is out of range or somesuch.

Black Scorpion went down. Ghost Widow went down. No Soul Storm, whew. Then I went to town on Scirocco and Mako. Not much to say about these two. You'd think Mako might prove difficult with a proc build barely reaching 95% accuracy against +4s, what with Elude and all; but fishboy truly is the Aquaman of CoH. His Elude cycles last roughly, I think, 1 minute, and he ate dirt after his second Elude.

TOWER RECLUSE. Now this part I didn't know what to expect. Was I about to get obliterated? I went in with my Banished Pantheon and Assault Hybrid up, shooting for the blue tower first to remove Recluse's recharge buffs.

This is probably no surprise to stone tankers aficionados, but playing generally squishier characters myself I was pleased to see Recluse could dent my life a little but not overly so with Earth Embrace and Rooted. It could get iffy with Energy Transfer's -HP whenever he landed a defense debuff, especially when the Arachnos Flier threw down hordes of Bane Spiders on top (yet another thing that would be much harder at +4/x8).

A bigger problem was endurance. Despite Rooted's significant endurance protection, while the Blue tower is up Recluse did enough -recovery to severely slow down my pace during the second minute of Ageless.

Once the repairmen come, there's no shortage of balls to juggle. Got to punch these guys down in time, got to make sure there's enough end, got to keep an eye on that HP bar, and so on. The repairmen were hell to deal with. Whirling Hands is just too slow to activate, and all too often it would miss one of the two repairmen. TF is obviously too slow for a single target attack. Gloom delivers too much of its damage in a DoT. So I was left with EP and BS, the issue being that if I need to clean a duo and either of the two misses (or god forbid, both), Stone being Stone I'm left waiting for recharge / using Gloom.

There was a loooooot of frustrating back and forth on that first tower. I actually broke the no insps rule there. I used blues first because I wasn't expecting that level of -recovery despite Rooted, and it took me a while to adjust my pace to be sustainable without insps. I used a purple here and there when the Bane Spiders swarmed me while Recluse landed a def debuff.

On that note, the Arachnos Flier is definitely a pain in the ass with repairmen. Stone can survive the damage with some care, even without insps, but that's not the question. The problem comes down to targeting those repairmen in time while a bunch of Bane Spiders vampirize your tabbing and clicking. I actually tried to make a bind (midfight!), trying "targetcustomnext alive Arachnos Repairman", but this seemed to select the corpses still and wasn't as helpful as I wished for.

So in the end I pulled back... and thought, hey, why shouldn't I try taking down the Arachnos Flier anyway.

 

Thankfully, Combat Teleport binds are more reliable than targeting repairmen. I looked like a bozo spamming Combat Teleport to land a hit, falling down to the ground like a rock, rinse and repeat. Essentially the attack chain looked like Combat Teleport -> Total Focus -> Combat Teleport -> Energy Transfer -> Gloom -> Combat Teleport -> Bonesmasher.

You'd think this cuts pretty bad into DPS, but against a level 50 Arachnos Flier, this is still enough to get the job done. At last, I was rid of the pest.

 

Went back to the blue tower. Let's do it no insps. Lore pet up. Hybrid up. Making good progress... Letting the Banished Pantheon Ravager deal all the damage to the tower, so I can put full focus on eliminating repairmen the second they pop. Even then, still some frustrating moments with 2 misses in a row and whatnot. But we're moving forward. 30%. 20%. 10%. That lifebar is shrinking and shrinking. 5%... 3%...!

And then my Lore pet disappears softly, its 5 minutes up.

I let out a loud, elaborate curse in English that must have puzzled my non-English-speaking family (yay Christmas).

 

Nothing to do but to carry on. I start attacking the tower, splitting my attention between dealing enough damage, killing the repairmen, managing end, surviving Recluse...

And it went down. It went down as I had maybe 600hp left. Which isn't as scary as it would be on a character without 90% RES. The average Recluse hit, even with red tower help, is in the 300 range. But still. I Combat Teleported the hell away to save my precious, precious future badge.

 

Came back to it. Red tower this time. At this point, Recluse wasn't a danger anymore. Even the end drains became next to irrelevant, without the Blue tower he doesn't spam them enough to really matter.

To be honest, at this point I was 1h50 in. With Lore still recharging and the realisation there was virtually no way I would die, I decided to cut on the grind and brought a second character for the remaining towers. Said character was a stone/rad tanker, which definitely made handling the repairmen easier. With a second Mud Pots and a procced out Irradiated Ground, they will die reliably each and every time before they get a heal off. At least during the length of time it took me to clear the 3 towers.

 

(Which brings to mind the question, would stone/rad be better than stone/em for a MoSTF? /rad also has the advantage of a selfheal. However, it is very very endurance heavy compared to /em, requires much more aggressive procs to perform, and will deal less ST damage in any case. /rad is undoubtedly a better choice for the tower phase, but it remains to be seen whether it can kill patrons fast enough before Ghost Widow gets lucky with Soul Storm. Tradeoffs.)

 

After the towers went down, I stuck the stone/rad away and took on Recluse 1 on 1 with the stone/em. That fight went fine, with Lore on his back so he doesn't AoE them into oblivion. Took maybe 3-4 minutes all in all. Perhaps I should have moved the other tanker wayyy out - you might see in the screenshot that he aggroed the respawned Flier, which could have made the solo Recluse fight more interesting.

So that was fun. I might try a proper solo attempt at some point, either with that stone/em or with the stone/rad. I'm also left contemplating what might be the best possible tanker for the task. Perhaps Invul/Rad? Invul pays less of a damage tax than Stone for its survivability, and still retains 3000+ hp, softcapped S/L/E/N, strong resistances, some defense debuff and some endurance drain resistance. But Energy resistance might be a little low while Recluse is tohitbuffed. I'm not comfortable with Elec, Rad, Dark... Great +recovery and/or end drain tools, great capped resistances, but the lack of defense debuff resistance has often spelled disaster for me. Shield/Fire/Bio/SR I can't see as sturdy enough while Recluse is tohitbuffed.

 

Although, amusingly, perhaps SR could run a near perma Elude build, complete with Burnout for a 6 minutes stretch. This would add the benefit of a reliable solution against Soul Storm that isn't just "pray for good luck". 6 minutes is a long enough stretch of time with modern Tanker DPS, especially with Lore pet support.

 

Edited December 26, 2020 by nihilii

[xl8]

On 12/26/2020 at 11:04 AM, nihilii said:

"targetcustomnext alive Arachnos Repairman"

More Arrrg perhaps... "targetcustomnext enemy alive Arachnos Repairman"

Edited February 2, 2021 by xl8

[StriderIV]

Does anyone feel that there is a very synergistic primary to go with EM currently on tankers? @Infinitum has spoken very highly about Fire/EM as a fantastic combo. @Sovera had tested it as well. 
 

Also, how does Katana work on a tanker? Any primaries that go well with it? I’ve seen some people mention Dark/Katana in the past. Seems particularly edgy =P

[Sovera]

2 minutes ago, StriderIV said:

Does anyone feel that there is a very synergistic primary to go with EM currently on tankers? @Infinitum has spoken very highly about Fire/EM as a fantastic combo. @Sovera had tested it as well. 
 

Also, how does Katana work on a tanker? Any primaries that go well with it? I’ve seen some people mention Dark/Katana in the past. Seems particularly edgy =P

EM has poor AoE and its heavy hitter only comes at 38.

 

Oh, hello there Fire Armor...

 

Katana works very well. Hard hitting, nice place for FF procs. Decent AoE. It's main sin for me is that it exemplars like crap with both heavy hitters at 35 and 38. One of those should have been at level 28 to space things out. But if you don't intend to exemplar its otherwise great. Pair it with resistance armors for extra defense (doesn't stack unlike for other ATs) or just ignore Divine Avalanche on a defense based set.

[StriderIV]

8 minutes ago, Sovera said:

EM has poor AoE and its heavy hitter only comes at 38.

 

Oh, hello there Fire Armor...

 

Katana works very well. Hard hitting, nice place for FF procs. Decent AoE. It's main sin for me is that it exemplars like crap with both heavy hitters at 35 and 38. One of those should have been at level 28 to space things out. But if you don't intend to exemplar its otherwise great. Pair it with resistance armors for extra defense (doesn't stack unlike for other ATs) or just ignore Divine Avalanche on a defense based set.

Haha nice! I know you’re knew Brunker is Fire/MA however =P but Fire/EA sounds like it’d be up there as well.

 

And thanks for the advice on Katana! I’ve always enjoyed seeing Kat, but haven’t played one of my own. It’s been tough for me to choose and Archetype to play it on, but everyone keeps saying tankers are in a great place right now...