Aett_Thorn

So you're basing it only on heals? The reactive form of mitigation, instead of all of the PROACTIVE ways that the other sets have to not take damage in the first place?

Traps can stun most of a group before it even fires off a round, has +Def and a mez protection power. Then it can reduce the enemies to puddles with the other debuffs.

Cold can knock a spawn on it's backs while reducing its Def and Res. Has +Def, +Res, and the ability to sneak up on enemies. "Only slows down the enemies a little" is severely ignoring the features of this set. Cold Domination can take down GMs solo...that's pretty much the pinnacle of soloing.

Storm has a TON of proactive mitigation in several powers, and the ability to basically keep an entire spawn on its back for an entire fight.


Emp can do none of those things, has no defense, no debuffs, and relies on healing damage only AFTER you take it as its sole form of damage mitigation, which is pretty much the worst way to do it in this game.


My Dark Defender has a heal, but almost never uses it solo, because my enemies never hit me in the first place. Can your Emp do that?

Rikti costume parts would solve all of those issues, I believe. And I'd /sign for Rikti costume parts.

OF COURSE TANKER OFFENSE IS INFERIOR TO SCRAPPERS! That's the way it should be! Because Tankers ARE stronger than them defensively. And I have played Scrappers that needed to bring along purples or oranges to fight enemies because I couldn't like long enough to take down the bad guy before he did me in. Meanwhile, I've survived them no problem on my Tankers, but the Tanker may have needed to bring some reds to do more damage. How is that not balanced?

If it takes that same mook being lit on fire several times before they are arrested, is that problematic? How about me electrocuting things several times before they stop hitting me? Or freezing them in ice having remarkably little effect on their organs' ability to function?

Super Strength may not live up to its name, but then neither do a lot of other sets live up to realistic expectations of theirs.

Because I don't think even the devs know how this will affect intra-AT balance. If people still don't take Tactics, then Doms aren't likely going to have a perma source of FastSnipe, so there would be little change in effectiveness. If there is little change in effectiveness, then there's no need for a rebalancing.

However, if there are some more "cultural" changes because of this, and you start seeing Tactics more often to get the FastSnipe on teams at least, then it may be a balancing point that will need to be addressed.

So I think it's smart of the Devs not to say anything, because if they do say that Doms may get looked at, people will come back a year from now asking why Doms weren't, even if the situation never arose that would have required a look.

Basically, you can run the morality missions as many times as you want, but there's only so many of them. So if you keep running them, you'll get repeats.

So it seems like they mainly have enhanced strength, senses and durability, with very limited mind powers.

I know that Stalkers might not make complete sense, but /Ninjitsu seems to work well for this concept, highlighting their heightened speed and senses, comes with a limited Confuse power and several other tools that can be explained by police-force technology (caltops, smoke flash [flashbang], and Kuji-In Sha).

Dark Melee would go well with that.


Or perhaps even a SS or StJ/Dark Armor character (either Brute or Tanker). Oppressive Gloom could be seen as causing the enemies to be too conflicted to attack, but the higher-conning enemies just know better.

Agreed. However, usually the lower-damage AT gets something else in return. Look at the Blaster/Corruptor/Defender trio with their blast sets. Blasters do the highest damage, but have lower values on their effects (for the most part). Corruptors do middle damage, and have middle values on the debuffs. Defenders do the lowest damage, but have the highest values on the debuffs.

Now look at Stalkers, Scrappers, Brutes, and Tankers. It looks like I was wrong in some cases, and right in others. For some attack sets, Tankers actually have WORSE effects, some have the same, and some are better. It seems to be based on effect, too.

-Def and -ToHit seem to favor the higher-damaging ATs.

-Res and -Dmg seem to favor the lower-damaging ATs.

Status effects are the same across the board, for the most part.


-Res and -Dmg might be because these effects would be tied to the Res values of the AT, but that doesn't make much sense because the self buffing and target debuffing should be tied to different values. We may need to summon Arcanaville back to explain that. Anyone got one of those summoning stones?


But I do take your point on the Survivability-per-Endurance issue, but I still feel like the issue with Tankers is that they don't get much out of trading less damage per attack the way other AT exchanges do.

Possible? Yes. Plausible? That's a different story.


Giving Tankers some sort of AoE benefit would seem to fit, but how easily that is to do is a big question mark. Would it mean taking out a single-target attack out of sets? Would that mean that sets would lose higher damage ST-chains to gain this AoE ability? Would Endurance costs go up to compensate for potential splash damage? Target caps are likely out, but higher radii might not be.


Personally, I believe that the issue with Tankers lies in their DPE. They get significantly lower DPE than the other melee ATs with absolutely nothing to show for it. Unlike the difference between Defenders and Corruptors, where Defenders have lower damage values but (typically) have better debuff values on their attacks, Tankers share the same values with Scrappers, Stalkers, and Brutes on their debuffs. This means that while they are doing less damage, they get the same debuffs/effects from their attacks.

I would love it if Tanker attacks applied the secondary effect of single-target attacks to anything hit by Gauntlet. Though this would mean that the various secondaries would gain different benefits from this, for many sets I think it fits. Imagine a /KM Tanker applying the -Dmg debuff on 5 enemies instead of one. Or the KD from Stone/Battle Axe/War Mace/SS. /Fire doing slight AoE damage on each attack? Dark Melee applying the -ToHit? /Energy Melee with a bunch of basically AoE stuns (then even if you corpse-blast an enemy, the AoE could still go off at least)?

On the flip side of that would be something like Ice Melee, which has a dubious secondary effect anyways. Making that AoE wouldn't help much. /Elecs sleeps and end drains? Again, not quite as useful. Dual Blades has some ST attacks with no secondary effect at all. So it would be difficult to balance these sets, or it might make the Devs look into them a bit.

I just think that for most sets, it would thematically fit what a Tanker is doing. Sure, I hit you less hard than my friend here, but I hit you in a place that it's affecting your buddies as well! Imagine using Jawbreaker from /Mace and seeing five enemies go up into the air. Sure, you're only damaging one, but that would still be visually impressive.

But this is likely a pipe dream as well.

You can turn off the huge armor if you want. So that shouldn't be a huge problem. I could see going Claws/ with it making some sense, or any of the punchy sets with the armor.

Really? I haven't had to pay for anything in several months outside of my subscription. Didn't want Beast Mastery, so saved points from that to buy Water Blast. Have also bought several costume option sets and a rename in the past few months. I didn't have to pay anything other than my subscription to get all of that.

Hmmm...an interesting choice. Would help with Range, too, which would help with all of the cones in this combo.