Call Me Awesome

Yes, you did make an oopsie, the only means of combat mobility a Stone tank has without toggling off the mez shield is Teleport. IF you always have a Kinetic available you can mitigate that somewhat with Speed Boost, but again you won't be able to get over a curb.

Personally I dislike TP, but both of my Stone tankers have it for the simple reason that it's the best way to have mobility. Turning off your mez protection in combat is really not an option for any melee character and doubly so for a tanker. You will be running Rooted 100% of the time you're in combat until you reach 32 and have Granite (which ALSO includes full mez protection) or you'll spend a lot of time mezzed... and a mezzed tanker is usually quickly a dead tanker.

Acrobatics will do nothing at all for you; Rooted has WAY more KB protection than you'll ever need. I have occasionally been knocked DOWN while in Granite without Rooted by an AV... Diabolique is the culprit who comes immediately to mind... but never with Rooted running.

What I would suggest is picking up TP for mobility and Hover for use in zone travel... TP + Hover will prevent you from falling while traveling. If you have the 60 month badge I'd get TP first, then get Fly.

Additionally the "page up" button will by default allow you to rotate the camera around your character with the mouse.

Well, it finally seems to be time to think about retiring my old video editing laptop (that I also play COH on), I just lost the wireless card in it and other things are getting a bit unstable not to mention it's approaching 3 years old. I have some thoughts on replacements but I'm unsure about a few options. The last laptop gave good service until one of my um, less than dexterous crew dropped it (AGAIN) and killed the wireless card and severely cracked the case. The thing survived 3 years of being tossed around and rough handling, not to mention the tender ministrations of the Airline industry until it took one too many tumbles. I've been impressed with the durability of the Sager units.

On the replacement front I'm inclined to stick with something similar but obviously up to date technology.

First, looking at vid cards I seem to have a choice of a 460GTX or a 485GTX for <whew> $500 more. As the primary application for the machine is video work using Adobe Premiere CS4 and Photoshop CS4 is there any benefit to the 485 over the 460? Since I can get acceptable performance in CoH out of my old laptop with a 7950GTX (albeit at 1650x1080... the new laptop is 1920x1080) I'm not as worried on that aspect. It offers the option of dual cards in SLI but I'm leaning away from that.

Second, the CPU. I have a choice of:
Intel® Core™ i7-960 Processor (3.2GHz) 8MB L3 Cache standard
Intel® Core™ i7-970 Processor (3.2GHz) 12MB L3 Cache add $330.00
Intel® Core™ i7-990X Processor Extreme Edition (3.46~3.73GHz) 12MB Intel® Smart Cache - 6 Cores-12 Threads add $790.00

I'm leaning toward the 970 for the greater L3; is there any reason to consider the 990 at that price premium? The extra cores are attractive for the machine's "real job" of video editing but is it enough to justify the expense?

Thirdly, is the Intel® Centrino® Ultimate-N 6300 Wireless Card worth getting over a basic a/g/n card? It's only a $35 upgrade but I've no clue what it offers over the standard card.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be welcomed, I'm probably going to be replacing the old machine in the next month or so... I'm hoping to limp it along until after our next event. Obviously I'm not extremely budget limited but I don't want to throw money away either. Both the new unit I'm looking at and my old one have 3 internal HD bays and I'm moving my SSD and 750GB drive from the older one into the new one.

Yes, but only for 2 minutes after you've used Aid Other. The place for that proc is in Health or another passive power where it'll be on full time.

It's quite capable out of the box and with some IO investment it can get really good... my BS/SD is by far my most durable, highest damage scrapper. At the def soft cap he's tough enough for moderate tanking, I've tanked the ITF with him a few times, and he outputs considerable amounts of damage.

Now my build isn't cheap, but compared to some of the multi-billion inf builds I see out there it seems downright bargain basement at times; I think I have around 700 million in it at today's prices. At the time I built it I paid around 300 million but that was several issues ago.

I routinely solo +2/x8 missions on him; Carnies, Malta, Council are all easy enough to handle while Nemesis with that stacking Vengeance and Arachnos are a lot tougher.

On the IO front I used several sets of Gift of the Ancients in my armors to solve my endurance problems; Mako's Bite in my single target attacks and Scirocco's Dervish in my AOE attacks. For melee defense I leverage Parry; one hit will soft cap me.

If I'm working the numbers correctly Taunt should last (unslotted) a smidgen less than 20 seconds on a +4 AV. Slotting for duration you should get that into the 30-40 second range so as fast as he runs around until the blue tower drops the AI exploit of using the TP tether should work.

I've never used this method myself, I've always faced him in melee with my tankers and come up with tactics to accomplish this and survive. Still, Taunt's duration should be sufficient particularly with some slotting; and the taunt IO sets are too good and too cheap to leave out of a build.

For Reichsman in the final mission the easiest way is to have a durable, competent tanker and 7 teammates who know what they're doing. The tanker's job is to hold all the aggro while the team kills Reichsman. If your team's good the easiest is to kill Reichs while the tank holds the aggro of all 5 AV's, then kill the AV's one at a time. This isn't a real problem for a good tanker; but if your tank isn't confident then use a variant where you pound on Reichs until an AV releases, the tanker taunts the AV and the team switches to that AV until it dies while the tank holds the aggro of Reichs and the AV. Rinse/repeat until everything's dead.

I generally use the first method when I'm tanking; I taunt and attack Reichs until the first AV releases... then taunt the AV over to join the party while the team continues working Reichs. As the AV's release I add them to the party... you get the benefit of all the AOE splash damage directed at Reichsman softening up the AV's. Frankly none of the AV's, including Reichsman, are all that dangerous to a well built tanker... sometimes I need Dull Pain on CMA but I'm never in any real danger. Yes, that stun from Reichsman will very occasionally hit me but it's very short duration albeit high MAG (High enough to penetrate even a stone tank's Granite+Rooted protection, possibly up with Ghost Widow's MAG 100). If I get stunned it's about a 5 second time out and if I've been doing my job I won't loose aggro.

I've qualified for MoKahn probably 20 times; I generally don't bother setting for it anymore but if the team's good it's not unusual to get it by accident. A couple of nights ago we got it on a 24 minute speed run. It's by far the easiest Mo to get... certainly MUCH easier than MoSTF, MoITF or MoLGTF.

Yeah, there's room for improvement there. Is this the build as it currently is on Live? On a well built Invuln tank the ITF is a cakewalk... it's been probably 5 runs since I even needed Dull Pain more than once in the TF and I've never dropped below 50% since soft capping S/L/E/N def.

First, loose the Status Resistance IO's... they're doing nothing of any value for you. Pull the Steadfast set (leaving the unique of course) and slot another set of Reactive Armor. Toss the Titanium Coating for Reactive Armor.

Pick up RPD, you need it to hard cap your S/L resistance. Yank the slots from Res Elements for RPD, stick the Steadfast unique into Res Elements in the base slot if you keep the power... it's about the most skippable power in the set.

Fly is at the speed cap unslotted so there's no reason to waste extra slots there, and the set bonuses in Winter's Gift aren't worth a lot to you. Leave the unique in the base slot and call it good.

I'm not that impressed with Red Fortune for Invincibility... if you can't get the Cytoskeleton HO's for it then a good alternative would be 4 Gift of the Ancients or Luck of the Gambler.

Whirling Hands is better with 4 Eradication and 2 Scirocco; that gives you more E/N defense.

Move the slots from Unstoppable into Tough... you don't need more than the base slot in Unstoppable. If you drop Res Elements then the Steadfast Unique would fit there nicely.

ET is better slotted with either Kinetic Combat or Smashing Haymaker... ditto for TF. Add an Acc/Dam or Acc/Dam/End IO in a 5th slot in all your single target attacks... both Kin Combat and Smash Haymaker are low on accuracy.

Drop Melt Armor entirely, the numbers a tanker gets from it are nearly worthless. Get Fire Blast and preferably 6 slot it with Thunderstrike. Char is likely just a prereq, I leave it at the base slot.

Here's a very quick & dirty rework of your build... I could improve it further but not without making some power selection changes. One of the bigger improvements would be finding another 4% of E/N def but that would be tough without a bit of rearranging. The easiest way is to snag Combat Jumping, but since you want to keep Fly you'd almost need to drop Hasten to get room.

On a speed run I use that same method; someone with invis/tp heads to Reichsman's room and TP's the rest of the team there. Once there if we have a competent team... something that's fairly obvious by the final mission... we do stay on Reichs and the team ignores the AV's while the tanker taunts and holds aggro on all 5 of them. This tends to gather all the AV's in tight to the tanker and into AOE range of Reichsman. Once Reichsman dies we take down the other AV's and collect the reward.

Any decent team should be able to punch this TF out in under an hour; good teams should typically do it in under 45 minutes. My best time so far was last night... we managed it in 23 minutes... although my average time is probably in the 35-40 minute range.

I know that the "shortcut" from PI to Talos has been there since issue 3 at least; and I've noticed that using it now does tend to land you outside the war walls in Talos. Frequently /stuck does nothing at all, but there is a reliable (in my and my buddies experience) way out. Just back up until you fall off the map, then once you hit the bottom /stuck will put you into Talos at the zone in point from Praetoria.