Shield/Street Justice, how to slot?

[NemeanLion]

So, I've never actually done much with IO sets and set bonuses. I've never used MIDS or PINE or any of those programs. I'm a very casual gamer and always have been.

 

However, my first 50 is rapidly approaching as a Shield Defense/Street Justice Tanker and I honestly have no idea what sets I should go for and why. I don't have mountains of inf to spend, so I'm not reaching for absolute top-tier. Just goals to aim for as far as sets and appropriate set bonuses. Any help from the experts here would be greatly appreciated. I tried looking for Shield/Street builds/guides on here, but couldn't find any.

[Call Me Awesome]

I'd go for set bonuses to get your defenses to melee, ranged & AOE to 45%, then I'd look for recharge, accuracy and endurance recovery with a fair amount of regeneration.

 

Remember, you can only get a given set bonus a maximum of 5 times.  So if you've gotten 5 bonuses of "increase recharge by 5%" and you slot another set with that bonus you'll only get 25% recharge, not 30%.  Mid's /Pine will do the heavy math for you however.  A set IO build can be extremely complex so it's HIGHLY recommended to work it all out there before you start buying your IO's.  Mistakes once you've started shopping can get expensive.

 

You may also want to factor cost into your build as well, it's often possible to end up with nearly the same numbers on the final build with some careful use of less expensive IO's and save hundreds of millions of inf.  Back on Live my Inv/Stone tanker, Call Me Awesome, had a build that would have cost around 3 billion inf at the prices then, however the guide I wrote on building an Invuln got about 90% of the value while only costing 15 million or so in 2011 inf.  It's the last 10% of the build that gets expensive.

 

While I don't have Mid's in front of me I had a Shield/Fire tanker back then with around 50%+ defense to all, enough recovery to go full bore almost indefinitely and enough regeneration to patch up the damage that got past my defenses.  Heck, I had a Broadsword/Shield scrapper with the same numbers who was capable of tanking the ITF unassisted.  IO set bonuses can fill in a lot of holes, it's a question of desires vs budget.