_Deth_

Wow, was wondering how tremor could be even remotely useful. I hate that power, going to respec out of it sometime soon, i think. Even with full fury, the damage is terrible, especially for a tier 9. But, I have it paired with WP, with burn/BA tho, I could see it being decent.

Once you get power sink it is pretty much a wash. It has a relatively fast recharge on it. I don't have end issues on my ElA or my WP, both have stam.

Yeah, MMs are pretty easy solo. My necro/poison was a beast solo, in teams I held my own and really shined in certain situations. Brutes are not MMs. They are good solo, no doubt, but shine more in a team, at least in my opinion.

Stone/Stone, yeah, your fury generation is going to be painful, unless you make heavy use of taunt and let the mobs beat on you. You are going to be hard to kill, and pay for it dearly. Some people like /stone, I don't. I hate the lack of mobility, and I hate that recharge is knocked to the floor. Yes, I am aware that there are now 15 billiion kins in the game, give or take. However, I do not like being tied to someone else in order to be efficient. Without IOs, this is the case. Sounds like you are in the same boat.

Willpower is a solid set, but it is not god mode. Every set has its drawbacks. Tough and Weave are easy to fit in, and you are around the level that I would be looking to get it into your build. You should use Mid's and post what you have now, maybe some of us can help you with it. Alpha's shouldnt be that big an issue, as High Pain Tolerance boosts your max hp. That is one of the big mechanics to fight that. It should be slotted with Health, not resistance, if you have it slotted for resistance anyway. I have a Stone/WP I just got to 50, and it is a beast.

SR you will hate. At least at first. It is a great set, but takes a long time to feel strong. Doesnt really shine til you get higher in level and fully slotted.

As someone stated previously, most of your complaints stop being issues once you get closer to 50. If they don't you need help with your build, and if that is the case, just ask someone here. Most of us are happy to help.

It may also be that brutes are not for you. They are not tanks. It takes a lot more to make them nigh indestructible, heavy investment in IOs and a solid build. It takes a lot of sacrifice within the build to make sure you get what you need for that survivability. Not all brutes go that route, some try to maximize damage by concentrating on recharge and bonus damage. Literally kill it before it kills you. Nothing wrong with that either. Either way, they are not MM's, completely different playstyle, and totally different mechanics. My first 50 was a MM, my second was a brute. I personally prefer the brute, as I always did like getting my hands dirty.

Like Speed_Force said, people build for def because it works. Nothing wrong with doing something different, but, you can get sick +regen AND softcapped S/L def. Did a little finagling with the build Speed put up.

It's only the path of the lemmings if people follow blindly. There is an article in the player guides that lays out why defense is the single most important stat for survivability.

anywho, softcapped S/L, some bonus damage, and higher regen than either of the builds previously listed. No purples.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.401
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Decent Tank: Level 50 Magic Tanker
Primary Power Set: Willpower
Secondary Power Set: Dark Melee
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leaping

Hero Profile:
Level 1: High Pain Tolerance -- Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(3), Numna-Heal/Rchg(3), Mrcl-Rcvry+(34)
Level 1: Shadow Punch -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(5), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(9), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(37), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/EndRdx(42), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/Rchg(43)
Level 2: Fast Healing -- Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(5), RgnTis-Regen+(7), Heal-I(17), Numna-Heal/Rchg(46)
Level 4: Shadow Maul -- Oblit-Dmg(A), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(7), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(9), Oblit-%Dam(21), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(25), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(42)
Level 6: Indomitable Will -- LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(A)
Level 8: Rise to the Challenge -- HO:Enzym(A), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(11), Numna-Heal(11), Numna-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(13)
Level 10: Air Superiority -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(13), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(17), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(43)
Level 12: Quick Recovery -- EndMod-I(A), Efficacy-EndMod/Rchg(15), Efficacy-EndMod(15)
Level 14: Fly -- Zephyr-Travel(A)
Level 16: Swift -- Run-I(A)
Level 18: Health -- Numna-Heal/EndRdx(A), Numna-Heal(19), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(19), Heal-I(31)
Level 20: Stamina -- Efficacy-EndMod(A), Efficacy-EndMod/EndRdx(21)
Level 22: Mind Over Body -- RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(A), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg(23), RctvArm-EndRdx/Rchg(23), RctvArm-ResDam(34), S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(43)
Level 24: Taunt -- Zinger-Taunt(A), Zinger-Taunt/Rchg(25), Zinger-Taunt/Rchg/Rng(31), Zinger-Acc/Rchg(33), Zinger-Taunt/Rng(34), Zinger-Dam%(37)
Level 26: Siphon Life -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(27), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(27), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(31)
Level 28: Soul Drain -- GSFC-Build%(A), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(29), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(29), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(33), GSFC-ToHit(40), GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(46)
Level 30: Heightened Senses -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
Level 32: Smite -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(33), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(37), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(39), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/EndRdx(45), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/Rchg(45)
Level 35: Boxing -- KntkC'bat-Acc/Dmg(A), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx(36), KntkC'bat-Dmg/Rchg(36), KntkC'bat-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(36)
Level 38: Midnight Grasp -- S'ngH'mkr-Acc/Dmg(A), S'ngH'mkr-Dmg/EndRdx(39), S'ngH'mkr-Dmg/Rchg(39), S'ngH'mkr-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(40), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/EndRdx(40), P'ngS'Fest-Dmg/Rchg(42)
Level 41: Combat Jumping -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
Level 44: Dark Consumption -- Oblit-Dmg(A), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(45), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(46), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(48), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(50), Oblit-%Dam(50)
Level 47: Tough -- RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(A), RctvArm-ResDam(48), RctvArm-ResDam/EndRdx(48), RctvArm-ResDam/Rchg(50)
Level 49: Weave -- LkGmblr-Rchg+(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet

mkay, the way things work now, and the way they worked way back in CoV beta are way different. Ice/Ice was available in beta. It was crap for generating fury because the mechanic worked differently then than it does now. This isn't speculation, this was tested.

If they reintroduced it, it would not have the problems now that it had then.

I want them to make it available as well.

Well that is not entirely true, but it's impact is very small now. When CoV was released, the fury mechanic was completely unfriendly to high Def sets. If you didn't get hit, you didn't get fury. Ice Armor, Ice Melee, and specifically the combo Ice/Ice would have meant almost no fury. The incoming damage would have been slow, and with the high def, if built right, almost non-existant. When they changed the mechanic, Def sets became viable.

Def can slow fury generation, you aren't getting hit as much, but is really not an issue if you have a competent attack chain.

I am sure someone has tried. Bust out Mid's, start with Kinetic Combats in ST attacks and Reactive Armors. Also 6-slotting enfeebled operation in an immob will get you @4% def.
Also, for reaching def cap, purples are worthless. They are great for damage, but terrible for def.

Nothing mitigates the negative effects of stone armor. Nothing. What you do to get past the damage, recharge and speed debuffs, it gets you back to zero. Not saying you can't still do excellent damage, or get your recharge to a decent amount, but, with the same slotting, any other def set will put out more damage faster. If you could negate this, there would be no drawbacks to granite at all. Call it nitpicky if you like, but that is the ugly truth of it.



Yeah, the Rooted thing almost makes it just not worth doing. But, he was talking about an IO build, so he won't be as slow, but he STILL won't be able to jump.

How are you not very survivable? Softcapped def is nothing to sneeze at, and he would still have @50% resistance to S/L. On top of that, he will have excellent regen from rooted and earth's embrace. Will he be able to go afk in a pack of 54 bosses? Probably not, but if he stays at the keyboard and facerolls, he will be just fine.

One of the reasons I got tired of Granite real quick.

ooh, you will be able to change colors........ yeah, still look the same. Unless they come up with new skins for granite, which they have given no indication of.

Using this to say that MM's are the redside tankers as opposed to brutes is well, stupid. There is one word in there that is key, that word is WERE. Yes, when CoV was released that was the intention, that changed pretty quickly.


If built right, brutes have only marginally less survivability than tanks. MM's, while being very sturdy, are easily taken out in certain situations, the AoE one being a very good example.

This is misleading, and well, kinda silly. Everyone reading this knows what the OP is getting at. Redside, for a melee toon with the most survivability out of the box, that is the brute.

Is a brute a tank. No, it is not. It is not a scrapper either. It sits almost dead in between them. It has damage similar to a scrapper true, but it has the survivability POTENTIAL of a tank. It has taunt available to it, which means it can control aggro well. Now, if you are willing to go crazy with IOs, you can make them tougher than a tank in SOs, with crazy damage to boot.

MM's, while originally meant to be the aggro management AT of villains, did not become that. The key reason being, a whole lot of people just never learned how to play them correctly. The player base tried to push brutes into it. They had sets matching tanks moreso than matching scrappers, and had taunt, so of course they were tanks(this is said with sarcasm).


My first toon redside, which was the first I got to 40, then 50 redside, was a MM. Could I tank with him, hell yes, very easily. I mostly duo with my gf, her first Villain was a brute. We kind of traded off on tanking duty. She would jump the toughest one while I mauled the minions and lt's. If there was a type of mob that was particularly painful for her brute, I would stomp it. My second 50 was a brute, which I can quite easily tank with as well.

Villains plays differently than Heroes. Unfortunately, when villains was released, the player base tried to make a square peg fit a round hole. When it comes to tactics, Villains is offensively oriented, and Heroes defensively. This is the reason there was no traditional healer set when Villains was released. You kill it before it kills you. Some people still try to make the square peg fit in the round hole.

It is more than feasible. Especially being SS.

Well, I will say this, I worked my way up on a similar build on my DA tank, and my WP/EM tank has not identical, but very similar slotting, filled with SOs. That toon is a beast. That said, I can completely understand using a standard SO build til you have the funds/IOs ready. I just hate respecing, so I slot for the IO sets and fill as I go.

That is the thing, the hole of a good self heal is being filled. And I agree, sapping used to be very useful as a mitigation tool, now it is crap. When ElA was still new, my gf and I sapped Deathsurge to 0 end and kept him there til more people showed up to help us kill him.

Also, I always assume Tough in brute builds. Weave too. Yeah, I know, some folks don't take them, but I always do, and with tough you are talking about +or-60% resistance to S/L, which is better than anything short of Inv and Stone.

Yeah, as much of a min/maxer as I can be sometimes, I agree totally with this. As far as IO builds go, I will set them up as I level, but I won't start filling slots with IOs til I know for sure I really like the toon.

There is no real reason you can't have both. With proper slotting you can get tank like survivability AND a lot of extra damage. There is nothing wrong with going for hp/regen/recharge instead of def, it all depends on how you play, and what your goals are.

I like to take on enormous groups, and fight the toughest things possible. Lots of defense on top of lots of bonus damage. The build I posted has this. It may not have as much recharge, but it also should never run out of end.

The regenerative tissue shouldn't be too bad, saw them up for 10 mil the other day. When you only have 500,000 that seems like a lot, I know. I took a long break from the game, when I left, 100mil was a fortune, I only had maybe 50mil between all my toons, and I had 2 accounts with 2 50 villains and 4 50 heroes.

It definitely won't happen overnight, unless you have massive funding. But, once you get there, you will be almost in awe of what you can handle.

Okay, maybe that is just how I felt when I started getting deep into my IO build on my DA tank. I love that toon, and am just amazed at how powerful it is now. That says a lot because I thought it was tough when I was still slotted with SOs. When I first started figuring out it's slotting and build, I felt just like you, and things like slotting brawl were just insane to me. But as I saw the effect in game, I realized I had to change the way I thought in order to see the full potential in my toons.

Anyway. When using mid's building your toons is pretty easy. I will open the view totals window, and slot my powers according to what stats I want to increase, and when I hit my main goal, I start adjusting to get as much as I can out of it in it's other strong suits. Just start simple, one stat. With WP, i have seen a lot of people want to stack max HP, or regen. That is perfectly plausible. I chose defense. Won't go into it here, there is a post in the player guides that explains why def is the most important damage mitigation form there is, and it does it WAY better than I could.

If it weren't for the current mechanics of taunt, I would agree. The fact that if I am already aggro capped, hitting taunt on a mob going after another teammate is useless. Sometimes it takes multiple hits to get its aggro. When I played WoW, one of the great things about tanking was that I could hold all the aggro, I just had to work for it. And if one did turn on another team member, there wasn't an arbitrary cap that kept me from getting it's attention back.

WP has high regen, pumped up being in a group. Fire is highly resistant to........fire. Dark has a monster of a heal to deal with the incoming damage. For not liking your /ElA for reasons other than a heal, the big difference between it and the examples you gave are.........a heal.
Aid self doesn't count. The heal itself is garbage, the recharge is terrible, and if you get interrupted, you still get hit with the end cost.

You also used it's biggest hole for your example. Great resistance to s/l/e/n, crappy def to f/c. With proper slotting and IOs, the addition of a heal turns Ela into a beast.

Nothing wrong with that at all. I don't mind either of those when I am not on one of my tanks, but I do like to be told first. Just like I won't just mindlessly go start pulling the whole map unless someone else brings it up and it is agreed upon. Then I am more than happy to oblige.

Again, nothing wrong with that. Different people find fun in different ways, just wish more people would see that.

I would be cool with those kind of numbers. While you may not see the point, or it may not matter to you, to some of us that would be a welcome change.

I duo with my gf a lot, we both switch off from tanker to support role. Taking on single groups is not fun for us, however, because not all spawns are the same size, when one of us gets over the cap, it's not unusual for the other to have to run or faceplant. This isn't a lack of skill.

This I have no argument with either, but for those of us that do enjoy it, having the option would be nice.

And I was asserting that what you are stating is not true.

Herding was not more rewarding. The perception is that it is more rewarding. The rewards for killing the mobs is exactly the same as it is for those that don't herd. Instead of getting those rewards steadily over a period of time, there is a period of time with no rewards, and a period of time with a lot of rewards. Some people find it entertaining to see lots of big orange numbers fly through the air. Some people find it more entertaining to see lots of things die in large piles.

The devs stopped herding because it was part of the risk vs reward argument. At the time, one tank could herd up a whole map, and kill it all at once, all by himself. If you added a blaster to the mix, you could do it incredibly fast. This did not give larger rewards, it gave the same rewards it would have if the whole team killed everything one group at a time. The major issue was, 6 or 7 people could essentially sit at the door and do nothing, with all the risk being on the tank, or tank and blaster. It was just a lot more efficient. With the GDN, ED, and the aoe cap, this is no longer possible. Aggro cap or no aggro cap.

Saying that this was not entertaining, well, it all depended on what part you played in this whole equation.

When it was possible, it was very entertaining, at least for the tank. For the people sitting at the door, not so much. And to be honest, if I did have people sitting at the door it was people I was friends with, so we were shooting the breeze and entertained across the board anyway.

At the end of the day, if you ran missions with your friends, and were a competent group, you could achieve the same thing the farmers did.

The same is the case with the AE, sort of. The big difference with the AE and the old school PLing and farming, to be efficient, the entire group has to contribute, and actually has to be good. If you are on a crappy team, or there are doorsitters, it becomes less and less efficient. On top of this, again, the rewards are the same as normal content, the mobs are just not distributed the same way. Instead of minions, lts and the occasional boss, they are all bosses, of maximum level. If normal content had the mobs in it distributed the same way, the rewards would equal what can be gained in AE.

Either way, amending the aggro cap will have no real affect on either of these. It won't bring back pulling full maps, and it won't turn AE farms into the old herding mishes.

What it will do is allow those who enjoy pulling large numbers of mobs to do so in a team setting.

This just makes no sense whatsoever. Some of us have found a way to make the game both entertaining and rewarding. The point many of us are trying to make is that the aggro cap takes away from our entertainment. Why would anyone that doesn't find something entertaining keep doing it. Seriously. I don't farm all the time, when I get bored, I do something else. The risk vs. reward argument is moot. The risk in herding up large numbers of mobs is greater than fighting them one group at a time. The rewards are the same. Is it faster? It can be. When in a group, tearing through the same number of mobs one group at a time is faster. When I am solo, I could probably kill everything off faster if I stayed under cap, but it wouldnt be fun since it takes longer, and is less of a risk. However, when solo, the aggro cap is not an issue, as I can herd up as many as I want. When in groups, with much larger spawns, and spawns that are sometimes very close together, pulling enough mobs to get over cap is not even a matter of herding them.

I won't even get into how the whole "AE farming has too big of rewards" argument is complete garbage.

Again, this is not about farming. I can farm quite well without herding, and can herd quite well when I am farming solo.

Putting your own amusement over someone else's is just as selfish. Try compromise.


This would be an interesting way of going about the issue. But the time of the bonus would have to be longer, you would lose any bonus just during the activation of certain attacks, like ET.

You are comparing apples to oranges, they removed herding because certain Devs, specifically a couple that are no long associated with CoX anymore, didn't like it. As opposed to the other changes put in place because they were either imbalances or just plain errors in coding. Funny thing is, since those developers left, they have implemented a lot of things that would never have happened while they were here.

And if target caps killed exploitable herding, that is even less reason for aggro caps to exist.

Personally, I like the idea of an AV farm. However, farming is about efficiency, not challenge, and well, it would be inefficient to farm AVs. But, as has been stated, this isn't about farming, it's about a style of play, and specifically styles that we find fun.