Call Me Awesome

Personally I treat JL the same as Sands of Mu... it seems to have roughly the same AOE. Yes, it requires lining things up to get the benefit but it isn't a bad attack... my complaint with it actually is the end cost and a somewhat lengthy animation.

At this point my Ice/Elec tanker is 37 and while elec is a competent set I'd have to admit that it isn't my favorite. I do know of course that Lightning Rod will make a noticeable difference in a level or two (to get it slotted) but the rest of the set just doesn't really seem as strong as, say, our other AOE focused set Fire melee.

Oh, and I certainly agree that Build Up is a low priority power on a tanker... there's just so many other powers that will offer more benefit to a tanking tanker. Yes, damage and attacks are good, even essential to have but a 10 second damage buff every 60-90 seconds is less valuable than several other things. In the final analysis as a tanker you're there to manage aggro and set the pace of the team; the big damage numbers are the responsibility of your teammates. You have decent damage, but outside of a few edge case builds you aren't going to be a main damage dealer. Focus on your strengths.

I don't know, does it need changes? I've never played it but I've a friend who loves the set... he's taken MA/SR scrappers to 50 twice and teaming with him on the way he's quite effective. Yes, it's strongly single target focused but then again so are several other tanker sets.

I'll probably roll one when i21 goes live unless the set really falls on it's face when it leaves beta. My main question is the taunt aura... hopefully it isn't some worthless thing like Willpower's.

Let me emphasize this, I don't think I've EVER heard this kind of thing on these forums, and even if it did happen the rest of the population would bend over backwards to make it up to you. The players here, and especially the forum goers tend to be intelligent, educated and mature adults. Most of us are in our mid 20's to mid 50's and the younger kids who play (ok, I guess I'm one of the... ah, experienced players in that I remember when Dad brought home the brand new Pong game... that actually plugged into your TV!) tend to be quite mature and good players. It's the community here that keeps me playing for going on 7 years now. Everyone was a new player at one time; that's unavoidable. And nearly every one of us ran across someone in the game who helped us learn our way around. Because of this we're pretty big on paying it forward by helping new players.

In game you will run into the occasional jerk but they're few and far between on most of the servers. The majority of players will be more than happy to welcome you to the game and show you the ropes.

There's several things that you may find strange if you're used to other MMO's; for one there is no dedicated "healer" class... and in fact pure heals are much less valuable than the buffs and debuffs that our support characters have. Those buffs and debuffs are far more powerful than in most games. As a for instance, you can have one character who can heal 1/4 of a character's hit points or another who can make 19 out of 20 enemy attacks completely miss. Which of those is the more valuable?

Another difference is that there's no "holy trinity" of tank/DPS/healing, virtually any combination of characters can succeed in the game quite nicely. Yes, some combinations are better than others but nearly anything will work, and many will work much better than the traditional holy trinity. A team of all controllers? It can absolutely destroy the game between the control, stacking buffs and debuffs and damage. Oh, did I forget to mention that not only are buffs and debuffs very powerful but they can stack from multiple characters to absolutely massive levels.

Welcome to the game, and I hope you enjoy your stay as much as I've enjoyed mine.

None of the numbers have changed; the only real change that affects the guide is the inherent Fitness pool change in issue 19. Incarnate buffs also are a factor but obviously only for level 50 players.

Mako is a ranged defense bonus with only a smaller E/N as a secondary effect; it's not a set I'd use on an Invuln. I don't have time to go over your build right now... I'm about to head to that lovely 4 letter thing called "work". If your defense is squared away consider another Crushing Impact set for the 5% recharge.

Boot to the head.

This is a good point; Psi damage really is very rare... and in most cases where it becomes somewhat prevalent it's usually fairly low absolute damage. 9 out of 10 times you face Psi your innate hit points, regen and the occasional Dull Pain are all you need. If it gets beyond that, well, that's what your inspiration tray is for.

Oh, as an added bonus of building for the 45% defense soft cap to S/L/E/N damage (F/C is much lower priority) you'll also be building a fair amount of positional melee/ranged defense that will also apply to most Psi damage. I don't have my build in front of me right now but my soft capped Invuln has something around 20-25% melee/ranged defense; all as a byproduct of building typed defenses.

We want our Patience and we want it RIGHT NOW!

Not on the Stone side; unfortunately I've never even rolled a Dark Melee toon, much less played it so anything I'd say there is theoretical. I wouldn't call the problems super serious although with your Granite slotting you're a fair bit less durable than you could be. You'll still be tougher than most tankers though.

Oh, I just noticed something... did you realize you slotted the Steadfast KB protection in Stone Skin? That's really a waste, Rooted has all the KB protection you'll ever need.

I skipped Crystal on my stone tankers and slotted Stone Skin in at 22, immediately after Stamina. Of course that was pre-issue 19. I had to do more pick and choose on attacks; in your case I'd give consideration to dropping possibly Smite or Touch of Fear.

I realize ToF is giving you a recharge bonus but I question just how useful the power itself is to you; as a stone tanker you really don't need the mitigation. I'm generally not a big fan of devoting a lot of slots for an IO mule power I'm not going to use, I'd leave the fear to your dark defender/illusion controller teammates... I think the slots and power choice are simply more useful elsewhere. That would let you move Stone Skin up and give you 4 slots to use in Granite & Swift. In place of ToF you could pick up Fly to use for zone travel. In fact that would allow you to drop Hover as well freeing another power slot. My solution for zone travel on a stone once I had City Traveler was simply to pick up Fly and use it instead of TP. TP I use strictly for combat mobility.

Recharge is certainly useful, but I'd think that it's less so than more movement in Swift and better slotting in Granite. It's a trade off that can be argued either way. To an extent you can regain recharge by the Spiritual Alpha slot but of course that requires you to first get to 50.

On Rooted I think it's quite useful for regen... with your defenses and resistance the regen will usually keep you topped off on HP without needing Earth's Embrace. Oh, that Regen Tissue unique isn't doing a lot there; it's only active while Rooted is and the 4% runspeed bonus isn't that great. FYI adding another slot to Swift will give you ~12% more runspeed and adding 2 slots will give you ~20% more runspeed. I would probably put 3 Numina into Rooted, Heal, Heal/End and Heal/End/Recharge. If you find a 4th slot toss a Heal/End from another set to max regen and give more endred.

On my Stone/Fire tanker I called Mud Pots good with 4 slots of Scirocco's Dervish. With your goals I'd keep the three Eradication. You could loose one slot of Multi Strike and still have most of the effectiveness while giving you another precious slot to play with.

For a few ideas here's how my Stone/Fire currently sits on Live. I guess I was incorrect, apparently I did respec him for issue 19. I didn't worry all that much about recharge while still getting decent numbers.

I don't use that bind myself but I think it went something like /bind shift+lbutton "powexec_name teleport". Since I play with a game pad (Belkin Nostromo N52) I always have my travel power in position 6 on the bottom tray so I just tap that key on the gamepad and then click on the spot I want to TP to. Adding Hover is another matter; I'm not sure it's possible with the game commands to bind two power activations on one key. I get around that by clicking on Hover before I start TP'ing across a zone.

This one is easy, it's an adaptation of one I use on every character with Super Jump to toggle between Combat Jumping and Super Jump. In your case it would be /bind whatever key "powexec_name rooted$$powexec_name sprint". Whenever you press the key you'll toggle from rooted to sprint and back again. Beware of dropping your mez protection in combat though!

This isn't possible with the in game bind function, you'd need a third party macro program. A game pad can be set up with complex macros to do many things at once; I set up a macro that for example would allow me to activate all the toggles on an Invuln tanker with one button. It did get pretty complex with the activate power x, delay y period, activate power z, delay... you get the picture. Alas that isn't possible with the tools we're given in game.

I do have a bind to toggle between Rock Armor & Granite, it works the same way the travel one does. /bind key "powexec_name rock armor$$powexec_name granite armor" Unfortunately you'd have to manually activate the other armors. One shortcut may be to bind the Rock/Granite one to say x and bind crystal armor to c and minerals to v... that way you hit x, c, v and you're armored up.

Hope that helps.

I wasn't contradicting, I just hadn't seen the official word. In fact I was assuming that would be the case anyway.

On the whole freedom bit I'm a bit ambivalent about it although I don't see any major danger signs. Personally I'll be maintaining my sub anyway so most of it's a moot point for me. I understand that subscribers aren't going to be loosing anything.

You're right, it's been awhile since I played that arc and I was miss-remembering. I do remember that Maestro was a total wimp of an AV that I soloed with my issue 5 era Broadsword/Regen scrapper.

As has been said the Beta server is special invitation and very hush hush about just what secret new additions to the game are currently being tested, broken, fixed, adjusted and tweaked.

Like probably 90%+ of the game's population you're not allowed on that server. Really, you don't want to play there anyway as lots of things are going to be in, shall we say a "less than polished" state and there are always major bugs in new stuff being tested. Generally the players invited into a closed beta test will be experienced players who are there mostly to try and break things so the Dev's can find the problems and fix them before it goes live.

Having been in several closed beta tests trust me when I say that it can be a frustrating experience and many things just don't work quite right.

Let me welcome you to the game anyway; you'll find that this community is extremely welcoming and more than willing to help a new player to learn the ropes.

We assume; I'm not sure I've seen this specifically addressed by a redname?

It's very often useful to have a ranged attention getter. For example, you're holding a group nicely bunched around you and either a patrol/ambush wanders by or someone accidentally aggros something. Do you run over and punch the new mobs, while at the same time tending to scatter your current group or do you simply toss a Taunt on the newcomers and welcome them to your private party?

In my opinion that's the primary purpose of Taunt. No, it doesn't happen every mob but it happens often enough that it's a valuable tool in your tanking toolbox.

In that case you should be able to have 3 tips, both morality missions and the two special tips at the same time. I just haven't had either the Halloween or Kal tips on any character before so I hadn't seen that situation.

I can't speak for the Halloween or Kal tip but you can certainly have 3 regular tips and both morality missions at once; I had that on a character last night.

The question is if Halloween and Kal tips are counted as standard tips or not, if they are then I'd expect them to follow the "3 tips at once" rule.

Yep, it works. This afternoon I got my 10th tip done, then got the Spider morality mission (which stinks but for some reason it drops much more frequently)... I street killed until the Unusual Suspect morality mission dropped at which point I had 3 tips and 2 morality missions in my list.

There is, or at least seems to be anyway, a bug where if you're teamed sometimes you simply cannot get a morality mission to drop. By quitting team temporarily I've always gotten it to drop in a minute or so... sometimes after 5+ minutes with the entire team sweeping for it with no luck.

Actually a morality mission does not use up one of your three tip slots; you can have 3 tip missions AND both morality missions at one time.

For the OP the only way this could affect you negatively is if the new player's morality mission was different than the path you were working on... for example if he did a Vigilante morality mission while you were working on Hero missions. Otherwise you simply got credit for another hero tip and are now ready for your morality mission to drop.