Seeking advice! Willpower vs Invuln for SJ.

ChallengerYura · Monday at 11:09 PM

Hello there!

I'm a new player that's been around for about a week now, I'm trying to build a hero that suits the roleplaying theme but I can't decide between these two powers. From what I gathered it seems like late game Invuln is sturdier and Willpower is generally well rounded but falls off at later levels in higher tier content, the tl;dr is that I'm rerolling from Brute and right now (at 14) it feels energy starved as SJ/invuln. If I take invuln will be struggling until I get very expensive end game IOs?

Apologies if this seems like a silly question to veterans I'd just really appreciate some advice! As a note I've already googled this, looked at different threads, found quite a few different builds (even some from 08 on gamefaqs) for each variant but I'd really appreciate some guidance from veterans!

Edited Monday at 11:38 PM by ChallengerYura

Warshades · Monday at 11:37 PM

If both armors work for your roleplaying theme, invuln is the stronger/sturdier choice in the end as you said. This isn't to say that willpower won't work, any armor set can be built to have no problem in 99.9% of the content. What makes invuln so strong is that it can be built to reach hard cap resists (90%) to nearly everything along with reaching soft cap defense (45%), meaning few attacks will go through and those that do will hardly do a dent to your HP bar once you're fully IO'd out. For tanks, because they have the useful Superior Might of the Tanker proc which provides 6.7% resist per stack and can be stacked reliably 2 times, you really only need to build to reach ~77% resist and you can let the SMoT proc get you the rest of the way. Invuln doesn't actually have a lot of toggles that it needs to run, but willpower does have the additional recovery passive that helps with endurance early on. Willpower gets a bit of resist/defense, but mainly focuses on regeneration which scales with the number of enemies near you. You could potentially build it to regen 140+ hp/sec when surrounded by enemies. This works well in situations where Rise to the Challenge is fully saturated, but against some difficult ST enemies, such as tanking Lord Recluse in MLTF, it will prove to be a lot less effective compared to invuln.

Consider slotting some endurance modification in Stamina and then further slotting some endurance reduction in your attacks. Endurance can be relatively easy to fix with IOs later on through set bonuses, incarnates (won't work if exemplared down below like lvl 45 iirc), and uniques (miracle +rec, numina +rec/regen, preventative med +hp/end, performance shifter +end, etc).

ChallengerYura · Monday at 11:49 PM

Thanks Warshades! I really appreciate the advice, that's about as concise an answer as I could ask for. I'll stop worrying and try out invuln now!

Warshades · Monday at 11:59 PM

This is a sample invuln/StJust build that I put together but never actually built. I will add that building to reach soft cap def with 1 foe in range of invincibility tends to get very costly with winter sets in attacks. Another thing to keep in mind when opening invuln builds, you may need to manually reset invincibility. There's a bug that if it's already on when the build is saved, you won't see the bonuses of it until you detoggle/set number of enemies to 0 and then put it back on and set number of enemies in range to 1.

Tanker (Invulnerability - Street Justice).mbdFetching info...

tidge · Tuesday at 11:13 AM

I see what the above Invulnerability slotting is trying for, but it is a different approach than my own. In particular, I approach Invincibility and Tough Hide somewhat differently to boost +ToHit. Tough Hide is IMO where the Kismet piece should go, waiting until a late Combat Jumping pick seems a poor choice to me.

I agree that for a LOT of content, toggles (and even Dull Pain) aren't "necessary". I absolutely recommend that Tankers include at least one Power Transfer %Heal piece in an auto-power. The bag-o-HP makes that piece a better self-heal than the Panacea's +HP (of course, the Panacea also provides +End)

MMV on how much of the Psi Resistance is actually needed. I also included a few other powers to see some other set choices I made.

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Warshades · Tuesday at 02:26 PM

On 3/25/2025 at 11:13 AM, tidge said:

I see what the above Invulnerability slotting is trying for, but it is a different approach than my own. In particular, I approach Invincibility and Tough Hide somewhat differently to boost +ToHit. Tough Hide is IMO where the Kismet piece should go, waiting until a late Combat Jumping pick seems a poor choice to me.

Expand

On 3/25/2025 at 11:13 AM, tidge said:

MMV on how much of the Psi Resistance is actually needed. I also included a few other powers to see some other set choices I made.

Expand

Both of these are good points. I was mainly aiming for high resists and including psi with that, but it is pretty rare to encounter for the most part and this is overkill. I normally mostly play lvl 50 content so definitely wasn't considering exemplaring, good call on kismet into Tough Hide as well!

tidge · Tuesday at 03:23 PM

My comment on Psi resistance was self-directed! I think my slotting ends up with a base +10% more Psi resistance than Negative, which I attribute to a habit from Live about "patching the Psi hole". A (possibly bad) habit I have is running Invuln Tankers with most of the toggles off... so I kinda get used to "burning some Green bar".

It's the small fraction of "extreme" content where my approach is slightly more panic-inducing than a heavy lean into across-the-board maximized resistances would otherwise be. For that content... some help from teammates is appreciated!

ChallengerYura · Tuesday at 03:45 PM

Oh, wow! Thank you both very much for the advice and the builds, it's given me a lot to consider I'll study them both closely! I really do appreciate the help I was quite lost before this thread.

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