Invuln/Dark/Soul build critique

[Warshades]

Would appreciate a second look over on this build to see if there's anything I could improve/change. This is mainly meant to be a durable tank, the stats in the image are from 1 foe in range of invincibility and 5% res/def from barrier. Alpha agility to help with def and recharge to get DP perma. Soul mastery for the additional target AoE -tohit against mobs. Was considering taking DN for the -dmg debuff against AVs, but not sure if there's anything that I would actually need to use it for, maybe tanking LR in MLTF.

 

Tanker (Invulnerability - Dark Melee).mbd

[tidge]

Invulnerability is hard to "get wrong", I see a few things I do differently (which I've posted elsewhere), with the primary points of difference for me:

• I never slot more than 3 of Shield Wall
• I 6-slot Preventive Medicine on Tankers. There isn't much content you should need "perma" Dull Pain for, but I smell what you are cooking.

YMMV, but I like the Kismet unique in Tough Hide, and some Franken-slotting in Invincibility.

 

On the offense side, I personally don't like taking Epic/Patron pool attacks to complete an attack chain. Dark Melee can feel like a lot of "waiting around", at least to me. Touch of Fear doesn't suck on Tankers.

 

[Warshades]

1 hour ago, tidge said:

I never slot more than 3 of Shield Wall

I 6-slot Preventive Medicine on Tankers. There isn't much content you should need "perma" Dull Pain for, but I smell what you are cooking.

 

I tend to always go for 4 to get that e/n resist unless I'm just slotting the unique. I know it's overkill, but I still want to reach for high resist and soft cap def. The entire point of going with DM for this combo is that the additional -tohit helps in case of defense debuffs and DM also has an extra heal in Siphon Life. While I tend to avoid recharge boosting alphas, in this case proc chances weren't a big deal for me since the goal of this build isn't to maximize damage but durability. Even the 6 slotted purples were to get and build up the toxic/psi resist. I'll also normally 6 slot preventive medicine if I'm going to already put at least 4 slots as I did in my build, but additional slots felt hard to come by and I wasn't really gaining anything out of 6 slotting DP since it already puts me at HP cap and should be permanent (at least with incarnates).

 

1 hour ago, tidge said:

YMMV, but I like the Kismet unique in Tough Hide

 

I'm not normally against Kismet unique, but lack of slots and access to Soul Drain with some good recharge on the build makes it feel like I shouldn't need it. While not perma, it nearly is and with 10 targets would give more +tohit than I would ever need.

 

1 hour ago, tidge said:

On the offense side, I personally don't like taking Epic/Patron pool attacks to complete an attack chain. Dark Melee can feel like a lot of "waiting around", at least to me. Touch of Fear doesn't suck on Tankers.

 

The patron attacks were less about filling out an attack chain and more about getting a multi target -tohit in Dark Obliteration. I suppose this is probably irrelevant as with saturated invincibility, I shouldn't be at risk of having my defenses fail in most situations and AVs are resistant to -tohit debuffs so it would be worthless there. My 2 other considerations were Psionic Mastery to get Psi Tornado (would require dropping 1 power to get it) or possibly even Leviathan patron for Arctic Breath. Not a fan of cones especially on a tank, but I can't deny that the -res would be useful so teammates can kill faster. I'm open to changing the patron pool pick.

 

Did a quick swap of /soul to /leviathan to get Arctic Breath. Agility alpha may hurt slightly here, but hopefully not by much with a base 32s cooldown.

 

Tanker (Invulnerability - Dark Melee)2.mbd

[Zect]

8 hours ago, tidge said:

Invulnerability is hard to "get wrong"

 

Inv is hard to get wrong in the sense that even badly built invulns are still pretty tough in the easy content frequented by most players. A set with 90% SL res out of the gate and good defense is going to do well when most of what you fight are council, cims and farms. But inv is also hard to get right, in the sense of constructing a well-rounded build that leverages all of inv's strengths and patches up its weaknesses. Making an inv with permanently softcapped defenses, hardcapped resistances, perma-dull pain, high debuff resists, and strong rech and dps to make up for its lack of dps is a very technical endeavor. Most builds are only able to achieve a handful, or even as little as one, of these build goals.

 

9 hours ago, Warshades said:

Was considering taking DN for the -dmg debuff against AVs

 

Soul is a really good epic (good damtype, good proc opportunities and good debuffs) but DN is not good vs AV's despite fender numbers because of the way -dmg works. Most AV's have strong resistance to their own damtype which means they get debuffed less by -dmg. DN is good for the -tohit against exotic critters and especially ones that debuff you, like vanguard.

 

In the case of LR, and I assume the MLTF version, foe debuffs are weak against him because the orange tower phases him and the red tower gives him 100% SLE resist. So DN does nothing to him during the period when he actually has a chance of tickling you. The most critical tool for tanking this LR is ageless radial to ensure you don't get drained and detoggled by his channelgun which he can use from range. If you're really unlucky he will decide to zap you with it when you are not in melee with anything and have no def from invincibility.

 

Your build spends nearly all build capacity on def and res. And while it does this quite efficiently, there are other things to defend against when turtling up. For example,

• Debuffs - usually debuffs are what kills tanks, not raw damage.  You're already softcapped with 1 in range without barrier, so you can take ageless radial instead of piling on more def that changes very little. Instead of spending slots and a destiny on more def, you can get -def resist to help keep the def you've already got.
• Spending just 1 slot in SL for a +5 boosted healing common increases its lifesteal by a little over 100. At your present levels of rech, this is a pretty significant +20 hps.
• More dps would paradoxically increase survivability by killing off troublesome foes your mitigation doesn't protect against.

You get the point. Basically, once you are within reach of the caps, you can gain a lot by looking beyond def and res to diversify defenses.

[tidge]

3 hours ago, Zect said:

Your build spends nearly all build capacity on def and res. And while it does this quite efficiently, there are other things to defend against when turtling up. For example,

• Debuffs - usually debuffs are what kills tanks, not raw damage.  You're already softcapped with 1 in range without barrier, so you can take ageless radial instead of piling on more def that changes very little. Instead of spending slots and a destiny on more def, you can get -def resist to help keep the def you've already got.
• Spending just 1 slot in SL for a +5 boosted healing common increases its lifesteal by a little over 100. At your present levels of rech, this is a pretty significant +20 hps.
• More dps would paradoxically increase survivability by killing off troublesome foes your mitigation doesn't protect against.

You get the point. Basically, once you are within reach of the caps, you can gain a lot by looking beyond def and res to diversify defenses.

 

Hard agree about the debuffs. I used to make a point to take my Invulnerability armor characters into the Shadow Shard and Cimerora for some solo +4x8 map missions to get a feel for their performance. In most cases it "more offense" is the answer to whatever problems the game might throw at us.

[Warshades]

12 hours ago, Zect said:

Soul is a really good epic (good damtype, good proc opportunities and good debuffs) but DN is not good vs AV's despite fender numbers because of the way -dmg works. Most AV's have strong resistance to their own damtype which means they get debuffed less by -dmg. DN is good for the -tohit against exotic critters and especially ones that debuff you, like vanguard.

 

In the case of LR, and I assume the MLTF version, foe debuffs are weak against him because the orange tower phases him and the red tower gives him 100% SLE resist. So DN does nothing to him during the period when he actually has a chance of tickling you. The most critical tool for tanking this LR is ageless radial to ensure you don't get drained and detoggled by his channelgun which he can use from range. If you're really unlucky he will decide to zap you with it when you are not in melee with anything and have no def from invincibility.

 

Appreciate this, I do know he can end drain really quickly but didn't know the specifics of his resistance to -dmg. Since I am soft capped with 1 foe in range, I may as well go radial ageless for the debuff resistance as you said. It does drop my resists a bit, but still nearly hard capped with 2 stacks of SMoT so I can settle for that.

 

12 hours ago, Zect said:

But inv is also hard to get right, in the sense of constructing a well-rounded build that leverages all of inv's strengths and patches up its weaknesses. Making an inv with permanently softcapped defenses, hardcapped resistances, perma-dull pain, high debuff resists, and strong rech and dps to make up for its lack of dps is a very technical endeavor. Most builds are only able to achieve a handful, or even as little as one, of these build goals.

12 hours ago, Zect said:

• Spending just 1 slot in SL for a +5 boosted healing common increases its lifesteal by a little over 100. At your present levels of rech, this is a pretty significant +20 hps.
• More dps would paradoxically increase survivability by killing off troublesome foes your mitigation doesn't protect against.

 

I'll look into reworking some things around radial ageless and fitting a heal IO into SL. With regards to more DPS, I don't know how worthwhile it is going in that direction. Dark melee can have a good ST rotation going, but when most of it's AoEs with the exception of ToF are on ridiculously long cooldowns, I figured that damage is the one thing I would be sacrificing with this build. As you said, it's difficult to build and excel at all factors, I tend to leave focusing on damage for armor sets that help directly boost it like shield, bio, radiation, and fire. I'm okay with that as I'm not really looking to use this thing to solo +4/8x content, just be able to sustain until the team kills off the mobs/AVs, which thankfully won't be indefinite to where debuffs would kill me. I appreciate the help and pointers. Will post an updated version soon with the changes.

 

8 hours ago, tidge said:

I used to make a point to take my Invulnerability armor characters into the Shadow Shard

 

This is always a good test with all the debuffs and exotic damage that they do. Shadow shard mobs at +4 are no joke.

[Warshades]

Well, I might have to try rebuilding this from scratch and see if I can get something better up as it feels like there are very few changes I can make without impacting some part of the def/resist that I built. For now I just swapped the sets in MG and SL and added a slot to SL from temp invulnerability since I could afford losing some s/l defense to put in the heal IO. Also replaced the 2 piece superior avalanche in dark consumption as I realized I was well over the 100% recharge debuff resist. I may change the 2 obliteration pieces to fury of the gladiator so that I can remove the slot from SJ and put it elsewhere. A 3 piece gladiator armor set in tough or resist physical damage is tempting to get a bit more KB protection built in, or even just a kb resist unique. I'll try this build out with leviathan mastery for now and see how it feels, if needed I can easily respec back into /soul later if I don't like it.

 

This is where it's currently at with ageless radial (>60 seconds past) and 1 foe in range of invincibility. Thank you both for your inputs into the build @tidge and @Zect

 

Tanker (Invulnerability - Dark Melee)3.mbd

[tidge]

When it comes to Tankers, even if I make suggestions about "What I'd do" more than any other AT I think Tankers fall on a spectrum of "if it satisfies the player for the content they want to play, all is good." Beyond having fun, I don't think day-to-day I'd consistently rank "what is important" myself, let alone agree with others!