AnElfCalledMack

Sorry to hijack someone's thread, but I'd like to know what people thought of pairing Super Strength with Energy Aura. It seems like EA could mitigate the Rage end crash and the very expensive attacks, while the stealth aspect of EA lets you use the great ST attacks in SS on a manageable number of mobs.

It wouldn't be a great farmer, but it seems like a decent levelling/soloing combo.

Wow. Thanks for all your help, everyone. I hadn't even thought of the to-hit buff Inv gives you.

I'm thinking of rolling up a Dual Blades tanker. I'm something of an altoholic, and have yet to get a character to 50. As such, I have two questions:

1) Is /DB still fun to play in the lower levels, or does it really need a mature build and possibly IOs to shine?

2) What primaries would work well with /DB? I'd quite like to try Inv or DA on something, but I'm suspicious that DA would be far to Endurance-hungry. Is Inv/DB a good idea?

I'd read your guide - it's one of the reasons I made a Fire/Fire in the first place - but I solo a fair bit, and I've passed up Taunt to this point. That'd probably be why I'm having aggro problems, wouldn't it?

As far as the off-tanking thing goes, I have Blazing Aura, Fiery Embrace and Build Up, but I still struggle to hold aggro on large teams, especially if there's another Tanker around. It might get better with Fireball, but I'm not all that sure. As such, I wind up off-tanking a lot, and that's where my experience with RotP has come from.

One thing I have taken up, though, is taking the alpha for tank sets without a self-heal. I can't hold up under the sustained damage, they can't always deal with the burst, but by trading off, we get a very efficient system.

I've been lurking on these boards for a while, and my Fire/Fire Tanker just hit level 32. Against all advice, I took Rise of the Phoenix, and I've found it to be a really useful power in a variety of situations, at least for a pre-50 build in common IOs. Solo, it's been extremely useful against Endurance drains - I can just drop, Rise, and get half a blue bar and a 17-second mag 4 stun (one Stun Duration slotted). In small teams, it's the difference between a wipe and a minor nuisance, and with a crash-or-crash-through build like Fire/Fire, bad things do happen.

The big edge I've seen, though, is in large groups. I don't know if it's just luck, but I often seem to wind up with another Tanker in the group on big teams, and they're invariably much better at the survival side of tanking. As such, I wind up going for damage and picking up stray aggro. However, with Rise, I've picked up another sideline - suicide tanking. Sometimes, things go wrong. If this means someone is going to faceplant, it isn't going to get better. With Rise, I can volunteerfor the dirty jobs, then get back up at no loss to the team. I take a little bit of debt, but it's better than wiping, and usually gone by the end of the same fight.

I think the best example of this happened in a sewer map. As sometimes happens, there was a second spawn standing directly above the boss. The main tank, a Shield/Mace, didn't think he could handle them both, so I dived into the top spwan while the other seven took on the bottom. I lasted all of twenty seconds, but in that time, the rest of the team had the other fight under control, so when Rise sent half of the top spawn down to them at half health and stunned for fifteen seconds, they were able to deal with it, and I was able to hold the other half.

In short, I can see how, for someone trying to hold aggro in a high-resistance build, Rise of the Phoenix is a poor choice, but it can also enable some crazy plans - especially if someone happens to have Vengeance.

The Black Scorpion PPP has Scorpion Shield, a S/L Defense toggle. It's also a pretty good thematic match for Traps, giving you even more gadgets to play with.

Thanks. Is there any order I should be getting these powers in? Any that should be put off until after Stamina, or taken as early as possible? I assume that Stamina's still a very good idea, as it is for nearly any build.

To clarify, the defense hard cap is the point beyond which the game mechanics will not let you have more defense. The soft cap, on the other hand, is the point beyond which more defense will not lower your opponent's chance to hit you, and is only useful so that any -def effects that do land do not drop you below the soft cap. Remember, any attack always has a 5% chance of hitting you, regardless of +def or -tohit.

No, from my limited experience, you're going to like the -Rech on Ice. Traps is great at keeping people out of melee, but against ranged opponents, you'll be losing a lot of health quickly. If they're shooting slower, that's extremely helpful - I use Cryo Rounds as my default ammo on my DP.

I've recently rolled up an Ice/Axe tank to contrast with my Fire/Fire, and I was wondering which of the powers from Ice/ and /Axe are needed for levelling. All the guides I can find for /Axe in particular seem to be from before a major reshuffle of the powerset, so I'm not really sure what I should take when.

Also, all of the Axe attacks describe themselves as AoEs, yet I've never seen any hit more than one enemy. I've tried clumping them, lining them up... what does Beheader's 5.8ft area actually mean?

I'm playing a DP/Traps myself, and while I'm still a lowbie and haven't got FFG yet, I will say that Traps has fantastic mitigation. Mobs caught in Caltrops will try to run out of the patch, and since it also floors their movement speed with absolutely no slow enhancement, this means great mitigation, especially against melee mobs.

Traps is not FF. Traps needs to plan its fights a little in advance, setting up unpleasant surprises for the enemy. So while your defense numbers will be a little on the low side, you have great options for simply making your opponent not attack, or not attack effectively. However, some teams won't always appreciate the scattering and waiting times involved in this. It's their loss, really.

As a D&D min/maxer myself, I can give you a bit of the etymology. A "min/maxer" looks to maximise their strengths and minimise their weaknesses. The first is the more obvious side - in CoH, that means good attack chains, good set bonuses, and an appropriate distribution of enhancements. It might also mean having the right team around you for something like a Hami raid.

The minimal weaknesses thing, on the other hand, is more subtle. A shorter attack chain, for instance, is good because it needs fewer power choices. That frees up options for other power selections. On a solo-oriented "squishy" character, Hover is an incredible defensive power, because with one selection and 0.25 end/sec, you've eliminated most of your problems with melee attacks. The point is to either shore up your weaknesses, or to make them irrelevant in normal play.