Call Me Awesome

Guardian's always been a decent mid-population server with a good community; I've called it home (with occasional forays to Pinnacle and Infinity) for going on 7 years now and it's a nice place to be. Usually a bit higher population than Pinnacle (which is also a good place to be) but I doubt you'd be disappointed in either server.

Let me underline the comments about global channels though; they really are your best resource for teaming and general socializing. On Guardian the big ones are "Guardian", "Guardian's Team" and (once you reach 50) "Level 50". "Guardian Incarnates" is growing, but it's pretty much a level 50 only channel.

I've leveled one character to around 30 on Virtue and frankly I found the jerk to good player ratio swayed a bit too far the wrong way. It's a lot better than Freedom but I still ran into more jerks from 1-30 on Virtue than I have in the last 3 years on Guardian. Of course it's also the only server where someone else has my namesake (grumble grumble). I made sure to snag "Call Me Awesome" on all the others.

Thanks for the answers guys; so you consider OG the better choice? Hmm, that might free up some slots; my current thought was 5 Siphon Insight in CoF for the 3.75% S/L def, although I realize that's more "set mule" than effective slotting with the low tohit debuff. Moving those will give me the slots for a Mocking Beratement or Perfect Zinger set in Taunt which comes close to the S/L bonus while giving better overall bonuses.

My DR slotting shows 56% acc/80% heal/58% rechg/53% end... I think I'll play with that a bit to get the recharge/end up a bit more.

Rangle says:

I have a load of irons in the fire right now with no less than 4 tankers between level 12 and 40... not to mention about 15 other characters I'm also working on. I find that if I don't come up with a build that looks really cool I don't get motivated to actually level the character and it sits unplayed until I work out what it's going to be when it's finished. So, in order to rectify that situation...

I just dusted off a low level Dark/Elec tanker I rolled up awhile ago and I've been trying to work out a build for him and had some questions for some of you more experienced dark tanks.


First, I assume for Dark Regen you want to maximize acc/heal/recharge and if you've room toss in the Theft of Essence proc? I'm kind of leaning toward a mix of Theft of Essence & Miracle there.

Secondly, what's the consensus of Cloak of Fear/Oppressive Gloom? I'm thinking right now of grabbing CoF and tossing in 5 Siphon Insight for the S/L def and leaving OG out; is that a mistake? Slots are getting pretty tight to take both and slot them adequately.

One other thing, does Cloak of Darkness suppress in combat like other stealth/defense powers or does it keep it's full defense amount?

Thanks for any thoughts you have.

My top choices would probably be Invuln or SR... I'm working on a baby SR/MA tanker now and at level 12 I have ~35% Melee/Ranged defense. Yeah, that includes the 10% buff from Crane Kick but it's still mighty nice. Heck, I had over 30% to Melee at level 4!

Unless SR falls on it's face later on; something I can't see happening; it should be a very nice set.

Well, take it with a grain of salt as the only tank I have it on is level 25 but it's a pretty nice attack. I believe it's just a bit less damage than Shield Charge to roughly the same AOE and recharge. Once Mid's gets updated for issue 21 I'll be trying to shoehorn it into several builds.

Right now my baby SR/MA tanker is looking longingly at it and waiting for the day he's big enough to take it

Slight threadjack, but has anyone else noticed just how tough a baby SR/MA actually is? I'm level 12 and sitting at (with Crane Kick) ~34% Melee/Ranged defense. I've never had a baby tanker that unkillable before, and the only defense powers I have are the Melee & Ranged toggles, Practiced Brawler and the 10% boost from Crane Kick.

I've found that Invuln is decent in the really low levels (below 15) and starts coming into it's own at 18 with Invincibility. By the time you're around 25 you should start feeling pretty dang durable and with some IO's in the mix you can become godlike in the later game.

In my opinion a well built Invuln with a soft capped S/L defensive build is probably the second most durable tanker in the game, just behind a Stone Armor tanker in Granite. No, you aren't going to surpass a decently built Granite tank but you can get pretty close, and you don't have to deal with Granite's penalties. I've taken Invuln, Stone and Shield to 50 and Ice to 40... of those tankers the Invuln is the best all around. It has mobility, good aggro abilities and it doesn't have the penalties of Granite while being considerably tougher than Shield, Ice or Fire. (Be aware that some posters have managed to make absolute monsters with Fire tankers and over 10 billion influence)

Hard cap (90%) your S/L resistance with Tough and soft cap (45%) your S/L defenses and boost your E/N defense as much as you can (ideally to 45% as well) and you'll have something capable of handling anything the game can throw at it.

The key, of course, is building it right and playing it well. My first 20 levels guide will give you a solid framework to start on and my soft cap guide will give you a reasonably inexpensive method to get great durability as your tanker matures. In the playing it well category I believe Dechs Kaison wrote a good primer on general tanking.

This alphabetizing of storage (salvage racks, enhancement tables) is a LONG overdue improvement; it makes it so much easier to find things.

I currently have 4 racks of common salvage, 2 of uncommon and 2 of rare in my base and before if I needed, say, an Ancient Bone I had to scroll through the entire contents of a rack to know if I had one. Now I know it's going to be at the top. Likewise a Temporal Analyzer will always be down below the Spirit Thorn.

Frankly I can't see any organizational purpose in "sorting by icon"; you look at your recipe and know you need a Temporal Tracer so you scroll down until you get to salvage starting in "T". Trying to find it by icon is considerably slower.

Now if they'll only fix the SG emblem bug they just introduced... I use floor plates to ID the salvage bins and I want my "C", "U" & "R" back on those plates for the Common, Uncommon and Rare bins.

I'm not sure if this has already been covered, however a cursory glance didn't bring anything up.

I've noticed that while the new AP looks very nice it's an absolute pig on performance. Everywhere in the game I'm sitting at 50-60 fps while running, flying or fighting... except for AP. The instant I arrive in AP my framerate instantly tanks to 25-30 fps just standing motionless. Flying around in various areas it drops to sub-20 fps at times.

This is on the same computer, same settings and same character. Zoning from Talos to AP I get an immediate 50% framerate loss the instant I leave the train station.

I can deal with a 30fps zone, although I will avoid it as much as possible, but I also have a machine considerably above the average. I'm afraid that the new AP will be borderline unplayable due to these performance issues by a considerable number of players. I have some friends who struggle with 20fps in the majority of the game... I hate to imagine what AP is like for them... based on my experience they'd be under 10fps.

In short it looks to me like there's a serious need for optimization of Atlas. It's pretty, but it takes twice the computer horsepower to run as the rest of the game.

I ended up with a double whammy; first I got the "bad password" error on the forums and then I got yet another with the master account login demanding the city/road you grew up in refusing to accept the correct answers.

Finally last night the master login deigned to accept the correct login info and I was able to reset my game account password. It's been just a mite frustrating.

As with most I was still able to get into the game without any issues... well other than the new massive lag.

One way to make some serious inf, if you're willing to devote some time to it, is to look at the market and find an IO that you can buy the recipe cheap but the crafted IO sells for a lot; then you buy, craft, sell and rake in the profit. Make sure to allow for salvage costs but there are quite a few recipes I've seen that sell for under a million but the crafted IO sells for 40 million+. It's a bit of work but lots of players are willing to pay a premium for crafted IO's so they don't have to bother with crafting. If players are willing to overpay by a factor of 10 for that privilege then you may as well take their money... someone will and it may as well be you.

I suggest running 5 tip missions daily to acquire alignment merits; you can get one A-Merit every other day this way and trade them in on the high dollar stuff you need. One A-Merit will buy most recipes although a few of the best ones cost two merits (LotG 7.5% recharge, Miracle & Numina unique and the like.) Alternately you can buy 5 random rare recipes with one A-Merit... more often than not you'll net over 50 million that way and sometimes you get lucky with 500 million+ worth of recipes. Of course there's always the chance (happened to me last night) to get 5 worthless recipes that aren't worth vendor price.

I typically run a couple of characters through 5 tips a day and save up my A-Merits; then when I need _X_ that's extremely expensive on an alt I can pull up one of my tip runners and buy that IO. Most tip missions can be soloed in 5 minutes or so... after a while you learn which ones are good and which ones suck (cough, Sister Jocasta, Rescue Debutantes, cough)

Off the top of my head the really expensive IO's (non-purple... those are always high) are:
Luck of the Gambler 7.5% recharge - 150-250 million
Miracle +recovery unique - 200 million
Numina +regeneration/+recovery unique - 150 million
Kinetic Combat - several of them are 100-200 million

There's a few more that tend to be pricey but most everything else will be 40 million and below... usually MUCH below. Unfortunately sets that give a good recharge bonus tend to be expensive; the Decimation set for example (ranged damage, gives 6.25% recharge and 2.25% endurance) costs a LOT more than the Thunderstrike set (ranged damage, gives 3.75% ranged defense, 7% accuracy and a recovery bonus). Likewise the Positron's Blast set (targeted AOE damage 6.25% recharge, 9% accuracy, 2.5% recovery) is much more expensive (and frankly the only decent Targeted AOE set in the game) than the Detonation set (no really useful bonuses but it does provide good enhancement value at dirt cheap prices)

200 million will not build a high end controller but with some picking and choosing it will give you a foundation to work from. At a very conservative guesstimate the build you had in your OP will cost over 3 billion inf and it isn't ideal. I haven't tried to work out a build for a plant/therm but a good, non purple build will probably run you somewhere between 500 million to 1 billion.

Don't despair though; there's nothing that says you have to get all the shiniest stuff right away. Plan out your build then ask for suggestions to improve it. As you get things finalized start buying what you need and fill in the holes with cheap stuff until you can afford the good stuff. Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't need the highest level IO's... almost all the time there's no real improvement in buying level 50 over level 35 and the level 35 is frequently considerably cheaper... not to mention it exemplars better.

In my opinion your build goal really depends on your powersets. As an example an Illusion 'troller will want to get as much recharge as possible so that PA will be available as much as possible... since the Illusionist will tend to be at range and have PA to handle aggro he has less need for defense. On the other hand a Fire/Rad controller will spend most of his time in melee, AND he's going to be running some very high end toggles. For him recharge is less important than endurance and defense. That shouldn't be taken to mean "ignore recharge bonuses"... just that a Fire/Rad has a higher priority for other bonuses.

Play your character and as you level up evaluate your needs. Do you have a game changing power on a long recharge you want available all the time (for example PA)? Build for recharge as your primary goal. Do you go through massive amounts of endurance? Build for endurance and recovery as your primary goal. Do you spend a lot of time with significant aggro on you? Defense may be what you need the most.

It's always hard to argue with +recharge on nearly any character but you need to decide what would help your particular character the most. On many controllers that really is +recharge but there are always exceptions to the rule.

As I mentioned, play the character and ask yourself what your biggest needs are, then look for IO bonuses to fill those needs. You do need to beware of the trap of seeking bonuses without concern for enhancing your powers though... do not neglect the primary functionality of your powers by tossing in IO sets that give you poor enhancement. An example of that would be using a sleep set in Blind... yes the power accepts them but it's primary purpose is a hold, it's secondary purpose is damage and it only has a chance to sleep a nearby mob to your target making that worthless to enhance.

The most Jelyll & Hyde I've teamed with would probably be Earth/Rad or possibly Earth/TA. Very limited offense but massive control and debuff making it a great teammate but extremely slow solo.