AnElfCalledMack

Because Blizzard e-mails you when they lock your account, with a reason for the ban and actions you may be able to take to recover it. Happened to me, too, and the account had been inactive for over 12 months - WoW isn't even installed on my current computer.

No problems with NCSoft, though. I'm sorry to hear some of you are having issues here as well.

50s do care about debt. It cuts into influence gains.

Not that that stops me tackling hard spawns by rushing a couple of troublesome enemies, dropping, and RotPing for a nice big stun and a few dead troublemakers.

The key thing about frankenslotting is that it is cheap. The market forum has dozens of was to make a million influence in a couple of minutes, and a million influence will get you a lot of cheap recipes and underpriced salvage. It wouldn't surprise me that you could get a frankenslot build (shopping a little carefully to avoid rare or high-demand salvage) for less than a store-bought SO build. The basic idea of frankenslotting is "slot whatever you can afford that helps" - if that's a damage SO or common IO, then so be it.

And I'm not recommending you run around with empty slots. My Fire/Earth Dominator is about two-thirds frankenslotted. I still need some enhancements to finish it all off, and there are SOs in those powers. It's still cheaper to not need to replace the enhancements until I start trying to assemble a final IO build, and I was able to grab some cut-price Basilisk's Gaze sets for the holds and a Stupefy set for Flashfire, because I knew I'd need 'em eventually.

As far as hover goes, I'd consider a second "luxury" IO - the Karma Knockback Protection IO. It gives you a little KB protection while domination's down, which will be a while for a SO build. And being KBed when you need Ice Slick or Drain Psyche *right now* isn't fun.

Actually, many high-end Dark Armor builds skip both mez toggles. Cloak of Fear is a massive endurance drain, and if you're soft-capped, Oppressive Gloom does more damage to you over time than just letting them attack. What makes the set so spectacular is strong resistances to everything but Toxic damage and the game's largest, and one of the fastest recharging, self-heals.

Now, without a lot of work, the endurance cost in Dark Regeneration and your extra toggles, along with the heavy costs of Spines, are going to cause massive endurance problems, even with the Body epic. The Theft of Essence: Chance for +Endurance proc can entirely negate the endurance cost of Dark Regeneration (if it's saturated and slotted to the ED cap for endurance reduction). The Cardiac alpha slot can be a huge help. Combined with the Body pool and the +MaxEnd accolades (Atlas Medallion, Portal Jockey), you can achieve endurance sustainability. Combine with a soft-capped IO build, and you enter god-mode. You avoid 95% of attacks, take half damage from the ones that get through, if they can't kill you in 20 seconds you're back at full health, and if they can, then they have to do it twice.

Before all this investment, though, Spines/Dark is going to suck a lot of wind, and without a taunt component to your damage auras you're going to chase a lot of runners.

The day we get Spines/ Brutes, though, we might just be looking at the ultimate solo character. Spines/Dark with two taunting damage auras would be kind of crazy, as would Superior Conditioning.

No, the endgame requires running raids, and may require grinding some level 50 content (which doesn't have to be raids). One ITF is always one Ancient Nictus Fragment, and it's not like you need twenty of them to forge into the Ancient Nictus Hammer. You really only need two or three for a Very Rare alpha boost.

Now, grinding up the shards for a Favor of the Well, that takes some doing. But that can be any level 50 content, so it's not like you're forced to run STFs in the hope that one of your pieces will drop and none of the other players will need it - and that Kahn that's forming is useless to you, because you already have as good or better stuff than what it drops.

We have it good here.

Just to confirm, the -KB IOs and Acrobatics do not bestow knockback resistance, just protection. My Fire tanker gets knocked back by Lord Recluse's cone attack through Acrobatics and one such IO, which together are mag 13 protection. On the other hand, she barely flew a couple of feet before she got back up again, which helped a lot with keeping aggro.

Depends what you're farming. Fire/Fire/Pyre is a great all-around farmer - I run mine on x8 and just do whatever I feel like, and it usually works out. IF you're going to farm specific missions, though, Fiery Aura's best farm map is the Demon farm, but the demons resist Fiery Melee pretty heavily, so SS or Mace are better options. SS has Rage, of course, but if you don't like Rage crashes in your farming, War Mace has plenty of AoE and doesn't do Fire damage or crawl against bosses.

That's certainly an option, and most teams will have at least a little healing available. But it's far from essential, and "healing" isn't really something you need to look for in teams. Support is far more useful for its range of long-duration or permanent buffs, and several powerful debuffs. And running a team with no real support is not just viable - it's the entire point of Tanker Tuesdays, an all-Tanker teaming event. Not many friends who can heal here,

Tanks make some of the best soloists around thanks to sheer durability. A high-end build can run spawns scaled for 8 people by themselves; the really hardcore can run +4/x8. And Shield Defense is a great solo set thanks to the huge damage buff and extra AoE attack, along with being easy to softcap.

As far as weaknesses go, Shields has the classic defense set problem at low levels. A small amount of defense is very unreliable mitigation, so spikes of damage will kill or nearly kill you fairly often on the road to the low 20s, and you don't have a heal to protect yourself like Ice or Stone (which both have Dull Pain clones). Once you get it softcapped it stops being squishy, but still lacks the heal - one of the reasons SD/DM (and the Scrapper cousin DM/SD) is so popular. And an Invulnerability tanker, built to the softcap, is flat-out going to be tougher - but Shields should be tough enough for almost any content currently in the game, and has more damage through AAO.

I'll take issue with this. I've been trying a positional defense build for my Fire/Fire tank, and I've bought a lot of Obliterations, Mako's Bites, and Scirocco's Dervish sets. Obliterations are moderately pricey, but I can comfortably assemble one for under 60 million, over half of which is the quad recipe and the rare salvage. Scirocco's and Mako's are dirt cheap - you'll spend more on the salvage than you will on the recipes, comfortably under 40 million a set. The Steadfast Res/Def seems to be going on a huge price spike right now (50 mil or more for one IO), but it's only 125 merits, and the WST means a lot of characters have merits even if they're aiming for incarnate content.

The big-ticket items, as always, are the +recovery procs and the Luck of the Gambler +recharge - and it's my own fault for planning a build with all three procs and three LotGs, so I'm not going to complain about sinking over a billion inf into the character. The results (one small purple to a full positional softcap, almost 300% regen and 45% global recharge on a resistance/burst heal primary) should be worth it.

Is Hro'Dtohz really that hard to spell? Also, they're generators. Pylons are much, much tougher.

59%. And relying on just defense against DE is always a bad idea, because a Quartz you don't notice/drop immediately will ruin your day.

And for the Apex/Tin Mage/Trials, I'd say it's probably not essential to softcap yourself against them unless you're planning a solo Apex. You can probably get some defense buffs, even if it's just Maneuvers from the Scrappers and VEATs. And if you're already at 45%, picking up 14% in team buffsis very, very possible.

More hit points than Shields. More resistance than Ice (even accounting for the -dam in Chilling Embrace). You know, it sounds to me that Invulnerability is tougher than the other defense sets. Not by a huge amount, no, but genuinely harder to kill.

And yeah, if you're just scraping through encounters then you might want to make your build a little tougher. But we're talking layered mitigation here - being at the HP cap, then only taking 10% as many hits as a no-defense tanker, then only taking 70-75% of the damage from the hits that do land. Layer on a bit of regeneration from sets and procs, which leverage your high HP, and you have something that is very, very tough - mitigating 92.5% of the damage they'd do to a defenseless squishy (even against pure F/C/E/N) before it even lands, then recovering that 7.5% that got through very quickly. Yeah, Invuln doesn't get that capped resistance against Praetorian Clockworks like it does against Romans, but at least Clocks don't debuff defense.


"Most powerful and most popular", and you call out Electric Armor? I abandoned both my Elec tanks in the teens (Elec/DB and Elec/Stone) because they kept running out of endurance, and never running out of end is kind of Elec's thing. And is "A well-build Elec is one of the toughest tankers around" practically a truism on these boards?

Maybe it deserves to be, but it isn't yet. And honestly, unless something's draining Endurance or throwing out heavy Psi, I'd rather have a Fire than an Elec, Yes, Elec is a little tougher, but Healing Flames is up a lot more than Energize. On a long, drawn-out fight the Elec has better survival, but Fire has tools to make sure the fight isn't so drawn out and is great at mitigating an alpha or similar damage spike.

Anyway, I'm not trying to belittle Shield Defense, Ice Armor and Electric Armor. They're great sets. But as Sailboat put it, Invulnerability is tough - it gives up any offensive boosts or utility powers in return for great survivability against nearly anything. And Dark Armor, as many people have shown us, is stupidly hard to kill and even harder to kill twice. If you're avoiding 90% of what would otherwise hit you, resisting even 30% of what lands, and have a full heal on a base 30 second recharge, as well as a rez on a 5 minute timer, they have to be putting out a huge amount of damage before you stay down.

I run a Fire/Fire tank. No mitigation whatsoever in primary or secondary. And I can tank Lord Recluse with a little support. So if your fire tankers couldn't take the alphas on a LGTF, that's either their fault or the Riders fights - Fiery Aura has no fear protection, so you sould really avoid Pestilence if there's no mez protection from the support.

Yeah, a Fire tanker can't stand in the midle of a spawn and let their aura do the killing. That's why you get tools like Burn and Fiery Embrace. They're improtant tanking tools - an enemy you defeat is dealing no damage and causing no buffs, debuffs or mezzes. And soft-capping a Fiery Aura tanker is hard, but applying 20-30 points of defense isn't out of the question, and it's still a big boost to survivability, especially if you happen to run into a Cold, Emp, FF, Shield Defense, or random melee type running Maneuvers. Or, y'know, eat one or two purples before a big spawn.

I run +0/x8 on a Fire/Fire tanker without the Fighting pool. I need special tactics for Carnies, Arachnos, and I occasionally corner-pull DE if they get a bunch of Cairns and a Quartz in one place. Everything else, I dive in. Can I sustain the damage of an 8-man spawn? Not for very long. But with Burn, FSC and Fireball, I don't need to. Dead mobs do no damage, and I'm very quickly fighting a couple of bosses, rather than a massive mob. It even leverages Healing Flames - it's at its best overcoming burst damage. If mobs make one attack and then die, they're effectively burst damage, not sustained.

Granite-level tough? Hell no. Same conversation as other tankers? Absolutely.

Well, it depends if you have other goals. I have a build for my Fire/Fire tanker with the Numina's proc slotted in Healing Flames, but I needed a full set for AoE defense and was verry tight on slots, and HF is something I fire much more than once every 2 minutes. I thought being one Luck away from a full positional softcap was worth a few sacrifices.

CoD (and EnA's Energy Cloak) aren't suppressed at all by combat, and are on much tougher archetypes than Cloaking Device. And CD loses over half its stealth when it attacks, so keeping a little when you click glowies seems fair enough to me.