Archimedes

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Love the new 'deflected' instead of 'miss'.
Actual onscreen evidence of FF buffs etc having an effect.

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Wow! They really did this? Woot, as they say!

Now I wonder if it only applies to Defense buffs put on you, or if Ice Armor will see the "deflected" text. Or Super Reflexes will? (I would expect the latter would be a bug, or unintended side effect)

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Yes, it does apply to Ice Armor. I saw this when I was doing a little testing this morning.

Not really a test, but a good, quick and dirty gut-check kinda thing:

I was able (with my ice tanker) to tank Ghost Widow for approximately 5 minutes. Other than my own powers, the only buffs I saw that I was getting was Recovery/Regeneration Auras. She never one-shotted me (the whole reason I gave up trying to tank any AVs in the first place), and as far as I could tell, I only lost aggro... once? Maybe twice? For about a second, each time, if that long. She looked away, I taunted, she went right back to (trying, but failing) to take me down, while all of us continued with (trying, and failing miserably, but that's another topic) trying to take her down.

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So if i'm reading this right, defense still sucks at PvP?

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Only if you get into an arena match against non-same level opponents.

In all of the PvP zones, you're automatically set to a default level (which means you're boosted or lowered, depending on your character's level versus the zone's set level).

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This does not feel right to me, super reflexes are for doging, evasion. Not "rolling with the punch", that kind of thing should be under brawling. In Super Reflexes I want more DEF.

I go back to the source for my benchmark, and superheroes with Super Reflexes just don't get hit, at least not by bullets, laserbeams and melee attacks. Sure let the Area Effect stuff get them. The Flash, Quicksilver (even the Beast) just don't get hit unless the attack is big or launched with supreme accuracy.

It looks to me that this a poorly conceived buff. I thought we where playing super heroes, The bad guys should not be hitting a /SR hero very much at all.

Perhaps the right balance for the game is to have the missions alter based on the hero mix...



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The only problem with your request, is that there is a 5% hard cap on defense. In other words, you can never, ever had 100% defense against any attack; there will always be a 5% chance that an enemy can hit you.

So, even if you were to have your wish, with the high accuracy that Elite Bosses (EBs) / Arch Villians (AVs) / Giant Monsters (GMs) all possess, it is highly likely that they will still hit you.

While resistance also has a hard cap (95%), it works better than defense when it comes to handling damage. Defense is very binary; you're either hit, or you're not. Resistance, on the other hand, is scalable, but always works. Now, in the case of the afore-mentioned buff, this is an exception (though I do not know if this is still the case or not); regardless, it is far less of a roll of the dice when dealing with resistance than with defense.

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(Base To Hit + To Hit Buffs - (To Hit Debuffs * Combat Mod) – Defense) capped at 5% or 95% * Accuracy (capped at 5% or 95%, again)

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OK, here. Why must this be so very complicated? Having two different types of to-hits is a mess to keep track of, especially in terms of tryint to buff both.

If you fold Accuracy and ToHit into the same stat, and then divide the sum Accuracy by 1 minus the defense, would something like this

(Base Accuracy + Accuracy Buffs - (Accuracy Debuffs * Combat Mod))/(1-Defense), final result capped at 5% or 95%

not be a lot more intuitive? It would eliminate the annoyance of two different beneficial stats to keep track of, particularly when you don't have a way to increase one of them, and would make Defense do exactly what it is described as doing - before hitting one of the caps, 25% Defense would make 25% of the attacks that would have otherwise hit you now miss, reducing a sum 40% chance to-hit to 30%, and 80% to 60%, and 50% to 37.5%, and so on and so forth. Defense would be statistically the same in equal amounts as Resistance, and apply equally well regardless of mob rank and level - scaling perfectly.

The only downside I can see would be needing to rebalance the numbers for Defense powers, but a simple doubling would probably take care of it. And everything would be a lot simpler.

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The reason that there is both a To Hit and an Accuracy, is that this offers a finer granuality of control. In other words, it allows the devs to have base To Hits for each archetype, and also allows for two different methods of altering a character's chance to attack successfully.

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Kronos Won.

His blasts have a -regen component, plus babbage wasted a lot of time summoning cogs that were promptly one-shotted by the Kronos footstomp

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Kronos 4 t3h WIN!!!

I'd love to actually test this out, as my tanker is close to fitting the bill (L42 ice/ss). However, I'd like to try a different approach. Instead of going for max damage, I'd like to try a stab at rhythm disruption. Thus, I'll be looking at a Ice/SS/Ice setup. Why? With all of the slows, holds, disorients and knockbacks, my idea is to blow through an opponents status protection and leave them bare to a full-on assault. Of course, it'll be difficult for me to test this, what with my connection being utter crap for now (and for who knows how long, Comcast is jerking me around something fierce). Because of that, it'll be a long time before I can get my tanker up to L50. But what do you think, Darth? I'd like your opinion on that.

Heh. I will SO laugh if I somehow manage to win.

The Courageous, Unbreakable Halley's Comet!

Close up time!

These are just my observations, from what's been put on the boards and such.

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- Only one raid attempt can be made within that time. That means you could have your buddy, raid your base each day with his 1st level healer, fail miserably, but be able to block anyone else from raiding you.

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My understanding is that the multiple groups can make appointments to raid your base; having one group fail doesn't make the defenders inaccessible from any further attacks if they fall within the timeframe.

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- We also know that each base will have teleporters, objects that can block phase shift and stealth, turrets, and tons of other defenses. Meaning, it could be very possible that a 10 team party of heroes could raid you at 4am, find no one, but get killed from the base defenses before getting to the item of power.

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And all of those automated defenses are probably expensive. Only a few of the most powerful SGs are going to be able to afford to have enough defenses to hold off a full on assault. At best, auto-defense will have enough offense and defense to buy the defenders time to get back to the base so that they can be there to defend the item. Speaking of which...

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- Since bases can have teleporters, there's really no need to gaurd your base. You can do missions or whatever, and have your super computer notify you and teleport to your base to defend it on the fly. *No need for camping*

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My impression is that the porters won't be able to grab the characters from anywhere on the map. Rather, there will be specific spots in every zone (the trams would be ideal) that a person must go in order to return to their bases. After all, eventually the devs want to add vehicles; what good would they be if the transporters could do so much more?

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So I was on with my SG on Champion a while ago, and we were doing the Positron TF. At one point, we were ambush right in front of Positron and Valkyrie. So here's all these guys shooting at us, trying to kill us, and Mr. Bigshot "I got my armor upgraded" and Ms. "I have this fancy spear that none of you can get!" are just kinda standing there watching.

THANKS A LOT, LEGENDARY HEROES!

Seriously, though, it would be cool if the trainers got some sort of automated power similar to the police drones. There's just something wrong about the eight most famous heroes in all of Paragon city standing there watching you get pounded on.

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All that crap is grey to me, no XP.

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BUWHAHAHHAHAHAAHAAA!!

Something I'd really love to know at this point:

With all of their datamining tools, do the devs have a way of telling if people are abandoning their characters? I'm not talking about deleting some alt. I'm talking about taking a character in the mid L30 range and above and just not playing them anymore.

I know I'm not the only one that has given up their Ice Tanker as being unplayable with the release of I4. And there aren't that many Ice Tankers to begin with in the first place.

Maybe someday the devs will get their heads on straight and do something to fix them. But at this point, I'm beginning to doubt it. If they're not even going to take the time to post that they're still watching and paying attention, then the problems will just be forgotten again.

It's pretty sad, really; all of the threads that were discussing the problems with ice tankers in the Tanker forum have slipped off into the lower pages. The official Energy Absorption thread has already slipped to the second page in this forum.

Just goes to show that once people figure that nobody in an official capacity wants to hear their concerns, that it's time to move on.

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Many times, if you do not see a response from the dev team about an issue then either investigation is ongoing and no conclusions have been made yet or the dev team is satisfied with the issue as it is. I want to stress that even though this may be the case, they are always reading your feedback and taking it into consideration.

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The only problem with this comes when certain powersets have long-standing issues.

Case in point: ice tankers (yes, I am getting back on my soapbox). I have been trying, since beta, to get the disparency between ice armor and the other tanker primaries fixed. Between Circeus, Havok and myself, I feel we've more than proven that ice armor underperforms pretty dramatically; in fact, an invulnerability scrapper can often do a better job tanking for a team than an ice tanker, especially with team buffs.

This is not to say that I want to see anyone nerfed at all; I say this every time I bring this point up, because I want it absolutely clear. I would much rather see ice armor brought up in some manner.

Then there's the EA nerf. It's the ice tanker's best ability, one that we have to wait 26 levels to get (unlike invulnerability and fire, which only wait until L18). With pre-I4 EA, an ice tanker could get close to the capability of the other sets, as long as AVs/Monsters were not in the equation. Now? Much less likely to survive such, especially in the post L40 game with the many ways that enemies have for vastly increasing their accuracies or debuffing ice tanker defense, to go along with their already-high base to-hits.

When the thread was started on the test server forum, geko came in and explained his reasoning for the nerf. In turn, testing was done to show how incorrect his reasoning was in light of the in-game experience. We even provide detailed spreadsheets to show how much the nerf would hurt us.

But it still went live, without another word.

So you'll have to forgive many of us ice tankers when we're skeptical about if the dev team is really listening to us anymore. Myself included.

Well, we tried folks. But it seems almost certain that I4 will be going live tomorrow.

So much for getting anymore play out of Halley's Comet. Almost breaks my heart.

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1) that, in pvp, even Blasters with Aim and Buildup can almost always hit any other character, and theoretically, an Ice Tanker in PvP could somehow jump into the middle of a 64v64 SG battle and get thousands of percent of defense (personally, if that's all the devs were worried about, I'd consider that a fair compromise for Ice tankers to have uber defense, but it may very well be what they were thinking).


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Whether this is what the devs believe or not, I just have to expose a rather gapping hole in this argument:

The whole reason that EA works as well as it does in PvE is because of Taunt and/or Punchvoke. The taunting effects from this powers forces the AI to move close to the tanker, thus maximizing their potential defense gain.

On the other hand, in PvE there are very few (if any) chances for an Ice Tanker to gain defense in the hundreds as you would suggest. At best, if the Ice Tanker can draw some of the pets to themselves, they're get few opponents to hit. But the human opponents do not draw near when taunted. If they are melee, they will use their ranged attacks (if any) from outside of EA's range. Anyone else simply uses their ranged AoEs on the tank, safely outside of the AoE of EA.

SRs with Elude, on the other hand, merely click a button. The power requires no enemy interaction whatsoever. It just gives tons of defense.

So your example is heavily flawed in this regard.

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Just a bit of friendly advice, don't go by someone else's build. I've been told SR Scrappers need Tough to mitigate one shots. The only attacks I've been one shotted by without Tough would've killed me with Tough. This may not be true for EA, but then that's someone else's build. Also, I was told all Scrappers need Hasten, but testing it on Test, I didn't have that much different of a damage output, and I simply used more endurance, because of its drain. I needed to put 4 extra slots in it to make it permanent, which as an SR, I prefer in other places. Back when Elude changes occurred, people said respec out of your toggles, but I didn't believe them. Now more and more people on the boards are saying use Elude in addition to your toggles.

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While I do understand and agree with you (thus why HC doesn't have Hasten or Tough), that doesn't mean the majority of the playerbase does. And as long as people come under the impression that certains sets are better than others, and that certains sets are required to have certains skills to be useful (Taunt, anyone?), and that mindset is the majority, things won't improve for Ice Tankers. We'll continue to be thought of as 'less than a Tanker, and barely a Scrapper' (yes, another wonderful quote that I saved, just before I was booted from a team in favor of a another tanker.)

Bitter? Yeah, but I kinda think I have a right to be, by this point. Still, I try not to let it seep too much into my posts.

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Yeah. Besides 6 slotting for DEF when you have perma-Hasten is not the most efficient slotting for sustained defense. It will get you higher DEF sure, but not for nearly as long as other slottings will go. The best sustained DEF with perma-Hasten is when you slot EA for 1 End, 2 Recharge and 3 DEF.


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I honestly hope things don't come to a point where an Ice Tanker (to be seen as viable) has three power pool selections that they must have: speed (for hasten), fitness (for stamina), and fighting (for tough).

If geko is basing his observations of EA on permahasten, where does that leave those of us that abhor it? I have no characters that have permahasten. NONE. I don't see the fitness line as being out of character for any superhero, and I take it with every character I make. But Hasten... I won't go further, I think it's pretty obvious by now that I don't use it.

Hey, none taken! Better to have the facts straight then to be mislead by incorrect assumptions. I had to take what I knew from the boards because I just don't have the time to go and make a version of every AT to become familiar with how each power works.

Even so, the disparency is still there, and still rather bad. As I showed in my version of Circeus' spreadsheet, just one 25% defense buff makes Ice Armor's ability to floor a boss' accuracy moot. Factor in additional defense buffs and an AV/Monster's much higher base accuracy, and things slip further apart between Ice and Invulnerability. I don't imagine it gets much better when comparing the other sets to Ice, either.

And I'll restate this again for the record, though I know I've said it numerous times before. I do not want the other Tanker primaries nerfed at all. While I may not like Invulnerability, that doesn't mean the users of that set need to suffer the same way Ice Armor tankers have. Sharing the misery only makes more people unlikely to play the AT in general; I'd much rather make Ice more appealing, so that there is more viability for the set in the post 40 game.

And to add my own personal thoughts: I spent the first 35 levels almost completely soloing Halley's Comet. Aside from a few runs through Bastion's TF and Sister Psyche's TF and one trip through Manticore's TF, I've never been been able to group with her. Most times, when I've told the team leader that I was an Ice Tanker, the offer to join the team was retracted. Or, even more embarassing and frustrating, I'd make it onto a team only long enough for the leader to find a 'real tanker', and would get summarily dropped without so much as a 'sorry'. I was so looking forward to finally hitting L35, and getting involved in the AV fights.

But beyond the Envoy of Shadows, it's exactly the same as it was before. I don't get invited, or I get dropped. And so HC is on the shelf once more, at just the time when I'd been hoping so much to get into the big team fights.

On top of what has been mentioned on here, I'll add something that my own research has pointed out, rather painfully.

Even though the other three Tanker primaries cannot gain near the level of defense on their own, they don't need that much. Because Invulnerability, Fire and Stone already have the ability to resist Smashing, Lethal, Fire, Energy and Negative to a workable degree (where as Ice can only do so with Ice and Toxic), it only takes a couple of power pool selections, a single non-slotted buff, or an inspiration to easily overcome that difference.

My research also find a depressing disparency when it comes to buffs: there are far, far more defense-based buffs than resistance-based.

-Between inspirations (Lucks/Ambrosias/Kora Fruit), power pool selections (Hover/Combat Jumping/Hasten/Weave/Stealth/Invisibility/etc) and buffs/debuffs (Force Field power set/Fortitude/Radiation Infection/etc), there's over 20 different ways to gain defense.

-On the other hand, if one wants resistance, you have one power pool selection (Tough), no inspirations, three true buffs (Increase Density, Shadow Fall, and Steamy Mist), and two powers that work as resistance (Siphon Power and Fulcrum Shift).

That's over a 3-to-1 ratio. Given that any 8 person team is going to have at least one controller and one defender, that means that any other Tanker will have multiple means to gain more than enough defense with the resistances already within their sets to do well against almost any AV outside of Psionics.

Ice? Good luck. Increase Density has a short duration and a long recharge time. Steamy Mist is a PBAoE toggle, requiring the user to both keep it active and keep within melee range of the AV/Monster just to give the Ice Tanker the benefit. Shadow Fall is a targetted AoE toggle, and the range isn't that great (I have a baby D3 that I've tested this with). It also generates aggro, which means that the AV/Monster could turn to the Defender long enough to take them out of the fight, leaving the Ice Tanker without the benefit of those resistances. Siphon Power and Fulcrum Shift are both short (melee) ranged powers that require a to-hit roll. While it's rare for them to miss in the post+35 game, I have seen it happen. Plus, if the AV/Monster hits the Kinetics user before they hit them with the powers... splat.

All of this can easily be proven by adding the modifiers these skills provide into Havok's sheet, even at base values without slotting of these powers. But nobody leaves a slot blank, and the disparency only gets uglier for Ice Tankers from there. If you want numbers, you can get them for every thing but Increased Density here. Increased Density's base is 25% to smashing/lethal (learned this from talking to several Kinetics users).

If you wish to truly contribute to the discussion, we've moved it here.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure if you are aware of this or not, but contrary to what the game manual states, Energy Absorption does not provide any defense against Psionic damage. Testing by both myself and Circeus seems to have proven this pretty conclusively, though I've asked for this to be confirmed in the other thread.

I believe you've misread the information provided by the website. This is the paragraph, correct?

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Matters were growing more desperate with each passing month, so the Vanguard, led by Hero 1 in November 2002, decided to try Dr. Science's daring plan. They assembled the best and brightest heroes in the world, leaving only skeleton crews to man the defenses. They then split into two teams, one led by the Statesman, named Alpha Team, and one led by Hero 1, named Omega Team. Alpha Team was much larger, consisting of over 1000 heroes from across the globe. They launched a full frontal assault on the Rikti main troop concentrations, drawing as many alien troops into the fray as possible. This was a dangerous ploy, and it proved costly. In the ensuing titanic battle, 800 of 1000 heroes died, along with some 50,000 Rikti soldiers.

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However, you missed this bit of information, a couple of paragraphs ahead:


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The Freedom Phalanx was down to just Statesman and a handful of the toughest, most powerful heroes in the city. The Dawn Patrol, Midnight Squad, Regulators, and Hero Corps were in similar straits. With its decentralized command structure and international recruiting base, only the Vanguard (which included Statesman as well), remained a viable, organized fighting force. Even when the Rikti destroyed the United Nations buildings in New York and Geneva, the Vanguard kept up the fight, quickly training and organizing super powered defense teams to hold the aliens in check.

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Wish I could give you 5 more stars, tpull. Bravo. Perfect.

Certain people on this board need to read this and take it to heart, and then get off their high horse.

Want hard numbers showing how much more survivable Invulnerability is to Ice?

Here you go.

Furthermore, this discussion has never, ever been about Ice Armor's ability to take on any villian of Boss level or lower. It has always been about our inability to successfully tanker AV or Monster class villains.

But perhaps if you'd, you know, actually read the thread instead of using your experience as a SR to say you understand how we as Ice Tankers work, you would understand this, and you would have never brought up your incorrect points in the first place.

We don't need testing to show AVs and Monsters can one or two shot us. It happens all of the time on Live now.

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No one needs 500% defense. Nothing has accuracy that high.

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Then care to explain to me how as a L41 SK'ed up to L47, a L48 version of Battle Maiden was able to two-shotted me while running Hoarsfrost, with Frozen Armor (3 def SOs), Wet Ice (1 def SO), and the def gained from hitting 6 enemies (3 def SOs + 18.7% * 6)?

Sorry, but AVs and Monsters have crazy amounts of accuracy, and many have defense debuffs.

What you've failed to see is that Ice Tankers are fine with their abilities against any Boss-classed and below.

The problem for Ice Tankers is trying to tank AVs, Monsters and Titans. Ice Tankers just can't do them, not without heavily dipping into the power pools; and even then, picking up Tough only helps for a small portion of those fights.

Even with EA as it stands on live now, Ice Tankers are getting one- and two-shotted by AVs and Monsters, but at least on live we can keep our defense up against defense debuffing attacks and the exceptionally high accuracy bonuses these villians have thanks to EA.

This change isn't balancing; Circeus, Havok and myself have all proven that the Invulnerability and Stone have much more survivability that Ice possesses. Myself, I've shown how easy it is to get a Ice Tanker's level of defense through a few buffs (or even one Kora Fruit), thus negated that slim advantage. And since the other three Tanker powersets all have multiple types of useful resistances to go along with the ability to get as much defense as they need, the idea of a maxed defensed Tanker build is broken.

And now the devs want to put a cap on the one ability that only begins to close the difference between Ice and the other sets, one that Ice Tankers have to wait an additional 8 levels beyond which the other primaries get their set-defining ability.

The change to EA is very akin to kicking a dog with a broken leg, when what really needs to happen is some serious attention to fixing the problem.

Resist Physical Damage, first auto power from the Invulnerability line.

Null sheen, Havok. Happens to the best of us.