Stone melee / bio armor brute

[Lionroar]

Hello heroes and villains. I’ve tried building a stone melee / bio armor brute, and after spending 6-700.000.000 inf, I just suck at building. I’ve put in some dark patron powers just to get a few more AoE/ranged attacks too, and after messing a bit with the colors, it really matches the theme all around. But to be fair, the stats sucks. But I can’t find any builds with stone melee / bio armor, so I was hoping somebody could help me? Inf is not an issue, and thematically I’d like to keep a few of the dark attacks. The 2 hammer attacks and seismic smash is a must have. Endurance is not that big of a deal after I’ve unlocked the incarnate powers and got the ageless one. Other than that, what my build lacks is resistance, I’d like to get as close to 90% as possible, against as many kinds of damage as possible. Hopefully someone can help me out. Thx in advance, and happy hunting 😁

[PapaSlade]

I am going to preface this response by being upfront that I am by no means a min/maxer when it comes to builds.  I build for running everything, not end game content.  More than a few folks I run with on regular Tanker/Brute exclusive teams wonder how I make anything work with my "build by feel" approach to my toons but I will take a stab at a quick discussion on this topic because I am a huge fan of max resistance builds (prefer resist to defense in most all cases).  I am also a fan of bio armor and have a Stone/bio brute currently at lvl 36 that I really enjoy playing as much as the Bio/Broadsword Tank I have about the same level.

 

All that said, maxing resists is tough on a bio build.  Mostly because you are starting at Zero on everything but Smash/Lethal/Toxic.  Trying to build resist on a foundation of set bonuses is gonna be a tough hill to climb.   Bio is a hybrid armor.  It has lots of tools available to build survivability in different ways.  My approach has been to pretty much run  Defensive Adaptation all the time, max smash/lethal resist, build for end recovery, recharge and regen (where it fits).  I look for damage bonus where I can and run assault to cover the -25% damage nerf defensive adaptation saddles you with, fury also helps mitigate that but I like to have it covered without fury.  I then consider Ablative Carapace and Parasitic Aura as my "extra resistance bucket" and try to always have one of them available to use whenever the absorb cushion wears off (extra recharge comes in handy), with DNA siphon as additional back-up.  things can be going south with damage beating your defense focused areas and DNA siphon followed by one of the absorb options will get you right back to full strength with that nice additional HP I consider my bonus resistance.

 

I have a Bio/Fire tank fully built out with resist maxed for Smash/Lethal.  Toxic is at about 60%.  Fire/Cold/Psi 28%.  energy/Neg 18%.   Running base armors with Defensive Adaptation/weave/maneuvers gives me melee defense at 31%, Ranged 20%, AOE/Toxic 17%, Smashing/Lethal/Psi 32%, Fire/Cold 43%,  Eng/Neg, 46%   I took Melee Hybrid for additional Damage resist and Regen.  Musculature to further boost damage.  Ageless if I need a quick shot of end.  Assault and  three damage bonuses from sets get me exactly back to even on the nerf from defensive adaptation.

 

I am sure there are more than a few folks that can produce way better numbers than I do especially on defense but, As I mentioned, I kinda build by feel as I level up and I always hated defense based armors because I often felt helpless when there was a cascading defense failure.   I was just dead.  Resistance armors, with a decent heal, always felt more manageable and many resist focused armors can cap on multiple damage types while still getting respectable defense numbers.  Even though alot of the mitigation on bio is in the damage type defenses, I felt like there was enough tools there to mitigate when those defenses evaporate -so i leaned into making those tools as useful as possible and covering the damage hole. 

 

I am sure there are half a dozen other ways to make bio work, which is one of the great things about this game, but that's more or less how I make it work for me.