Call Me Awesome

Fear the Rabbit!

I like the format and you've good information there. It's a good basic guide on what any good tanker needs to do without getting bogged down in the details of various techniques on how do do it.

I'd maybe suggest a companion guide, or possibly series of guides on various techniques. For example, how to bunch up a group of melee enemies, how to bunch a group of primarily ranged enemies and positioning yourself and the enemies (you touched briefly on that) and all the other techniques any good, experienced tanker will use to handle a specific situation.

As we all know there are groups that are dead easy to bunch up and handle like Warwolves and others that can be a pain in the butt to bunch up like Malta. Different techniques should be used in different situations.

I also strongly agree with your statement "the tanker who's the last man standing has failed"; it's almost impossible to overstate that.

I'm of the opinion that, absent compelling reasons for another Alpha, Cardiac is the default choice for any character who has any endurance concerns at all; I likewise have the 45% tier 4 on my Invuln tanker. It's hard to go wrong with more endurance.

On Interface I haven't really studied the current situation since Reactive got hit by a tac nuke of a nerf but it's still a good choice with the 75% chance for more damage.

For Destiny it's really hard to get anything other than Radial Rebirth; even on the low end it's a ton of regeneration and another (AOE even) large heal can be useful when things get really tough.

I actually find myself anymore using Dull Pain very infrequently; between my resistance, my S/L/E/N soft capped defense and the regen, both natural and from Rebirth, that I very seldom find my HP dropping below 75%. The exception would be Lambda with those Augers and the occasional lucky shot from Lord Recluse while his towers are still up.

I usually zone in faster than anyone else since I've plenty of RAM and an SSD so I always get Impy. The very first thing I do is lead him over to a group of mobs off to one side and leave him to have fun. He gets killed and we don't have to deal with his hand clap scattering all the mobs.

It's been awhile since I ran an ITF where we didn't get Impy killed right off; he's way more trouble than he's worth.

I'll agree with the comments about your repair shop, they're trying to really screw you with 3-4 year old parts while charging you for new, higher end parts. I would strongly suggest you run, don't walk away from that shop and either do it yourself or find someplace reputable. That shop has proven by the system they quoted you that they cannot be trusted.

1. With Stone Armor you want ideally a fast recharging secondary with good ST and AOE damage in my opinion. Having played it to 50 Stone/Fire is a great combo; even in Granite I still have a full ST attack chain and my AOE attacks are up very often. I've also played (pre-nerf) a Stone/Energy to 50 and it was marginal then and frankly terrible now. I would NOT suggest energy as the secondary.

I'm currently leveling an Ice/Elec tanker; at 38 I'd say that Elec is ok but not fantastic... I think /Fire is the better choice.

2. I went Spiritual on my Stone/Fire; in my opinion the two stand outs are Spiritual and Cardiac depending on your endurance use. Since Fire Melee is very end-light it made it an easy decision. This is something you'll figure out for yourself as you play your tanker through the levels and will depend on your particular playstyle and build.

3. For epics my choices are either Energy if I need Conserve Power or Pyre if I have room for Char, Fire Blast & Fire Ball.

4. You will want it

5. For pools on a Stoner I'd say TP (hate it but it's pretty much a necessity) and Hasten. Hover is handy for zone travel so you don't fall out of the sky with TP. Tough/Weave are optional... you'll want them if you're aiming for high defense so you can use Granite only on an "as needed" basis. If you're planning on more or less living in Granite then they're relatively pointless. With some thought and a few bonuses you can fairly easily soft cap S/L/E/N without Granite; this is enough for most general purpose tanking and if you get in over your head Granite's only a click away.

Overall not bad, it could use some proofreading and a bit of polish (and another font/color choice) but it has good information.

In several places your sentence structure is a bit awkward, for example:

Ok, looking over the build I see the following:

1. As Hyper noted accuracy is really lacking and damage could be better. I'd add a Crushing Impact Acc/Dam/End or Acc/Dam/Recharge to all the ST attacks to make up for that.

2. I'm not a fan of hover tanking, particularly on Invuln. You want to be in melee so you get the buff from Invincibility. I'd drop Hover and snag Air Sup for the Fly prereq myself, or just go with Combat Jumping/Super Jump. In any case I'd find better places for the three extra slots.

3. I seriously question the slotting on Invincibility; that's a lot of slots for very little return. Your optimal slotting is 3 Cytoskeleton HO's; baring that I'd go with either 4 Gift of the Ancients or 3-4 Luck of the Gambler.

4. Personally I'm not a fan of Build Up on a tanker but it's a valid option if you like it.

5. Fire Sword Circle is sub optimal in it's slotting; I'd go with 3-4 Eradication and finish off with Scirocco; that gets you another +endurance bonus, 3.125% more E/N defense and 10% +regen. Mix and match the IO's to taste on enhancement percentages.

6. I'd swap Res Elements with Res Energies, it's much less useful and can wait until very late in the build.

7. I'd consider swapping out one or two sets of the Kinetic Combat for Smashing Haymaker; they're far easier to come by and MUCH cheaper. Since you're already well over the S/L soft cap you won't be loosing anything. Come to think of it you could drop one set entirely, replace it with 5 Crushing Impact and get another 5% recharge while still staying well over the S/L soft cap. Dropping two sets of Kin Combat for Crushing Impact still has you at 44.6% S/L defense, just barely under the soft cap, and gets you 10% recharge... also a valid choice.

8. Along those same lines you could steal a couple of slots and finish the Mocking Beratement set in Taunt for 7.5% more recharge. Those changes get you perma dull pain and about 20 seconds off of perma Hasten.

That's what occured to me looking over the build; there's lots of different ways you could go. For example you could get another set of 5 Posi Blast in Soul Tentacles (and keep two sets of Kin Combat) to get slightly more recharge and keep your S/L def soft capped. In any case you're going to have a tough tanker; the build just had a fair amount of room for improvement.

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Starting with your build I'd consider something like this:

Having a Stone/EM tanker at 50 I'll say that there's very little upside to the /EM set anymore, I consider it the worst choice in tanker secondaries now. Everything else either offers more damage, more AOE or better secondary effects... in several cases all three at once. Prior to the ET nerf /EM was a borderline performer, with the animation change to an extremely slow activating attack I find it more often than not hitting something the team's already killed. Having both of the good damage attacks in the set being so slow really cripples the build.