Call Me Awesome

Oh my yes, I remember the old Hollows being an "acid test" for the quality of your team. If your entire team of level 6 characters made it all the way to the mission door in the first try without drawing aggro or dying then you had a good team. If they came through the Gulch because it's shorter and still made it without getting splattered by the level 14 Igneous then you knew you had a great team.

All things considered it's a good thing that zone was revamped a few issues ago although it certainly did teach you about aggro range and how to dodge mobs.

Kind of on the same line would be the "level 1 races" where you started in Atlas Park with a brand new level 1 toon and the first one to the Portal Corporation courtyard on Peregrine Island (a level 40-50 zone) was the winner. I participated in a couple of those but never won... I always ended up getting nailed by something along the way and loosing time going to the hospital. They were fun, but very challenging. Every single mob you passed could, and would if they saw you, drop you instantly.

I think you're likely correct, and I do occasionally pop an inspiration even with my granite tanker while the red tower's still up if he hits me twice in a row. It goes one hit dropping to roughly 50%, earth's embrace to refill to full +HP boost then if he drops me to 50% again, as occasionally happens, I'll pop an inspiration. I don't use them very often on any tanker but the tower buffed LR is an exception. If I had a no inspiration, no buff condition imposed then unquestionably I'm going with a Granite/Rooted tanker; nothing else would survive absent a considerable stretch of good luck.

It forces all new accounts to start their FIRST character in Praetoria. After that you can start new characters in any of the three zones (Hero, Villain, Praetorian).

So you'd just create a new character and pick villain instead of hero or praetorian if you want to have another stalker. Go into the tutorial and you'll come out as a level 2. The Hero and Villain tutorials are more straightforward than the praetorian one and in my opinion the starting missions and enemy groups are much better for new players. The praetorian enemies are a significant increase in difficulty over the standard hero/villain ones; in praetoria you face mobs of a difficulty level you'd expect to find in the 30's or 40's heroside as a level 1-5 character.

In short the early levels are much more forgiving hero and villain side than they are in praetoria. It really seems to me that "yellow side" is designed for veteran players who know the game backwards and forwards and want more of a challenge with their new characters. For someone just starting out it can be brutal.

If I can make a suggestion, you may want to create a new Scrapper hero to learn on; a scrapper has great damage output so you'll kill things fast and it has enough durability to be forgiving of beginner mistakes while you're learning the game. It's very straightforward as well, you run up and smack the bad guy upside the head, then smack his buddies. Also, there are considerably more players hero side than villain side. When you leave the tutorial go to Atlas Park and say you're a new player on a trial account... you'll probably have several people willing to help you and show you the ropes.

Welcome to the game, many of us have been here for several years so there must be something right about COH to keep us playing year after year.

This is something that I could certainly see being a good option... kind of like Hibernate in that it works like a toggle but shuts off after a given duration or when you cancel it.

For now there's a way to avoid the problems with the temp power "ethereal shift", a 5 use click phase shift power. When unstoppable starts blinking you have ~20 seconds until the crash, hit Taunt and ethereal shift. Wait out the crash phased and eat a blue, retoggle and dull pain and you're ready to continue on when the 30 second phase runs out. I've used that temp on any number of characters as an "oh crap" button; it gives you a 30 second time out to recover from whatever's killing you. It's also dirt cheap to buy at Wentworths.

You know, back in issue 13-14 I did tank LR without unstoppable and with no or at least very few inspirations on CMA... I'll admit that I was lucky and at that time he didn't use his end drain attack in melee. I got a lot of use out of dull pain of course and my build at the time included aid self. I know I didn't have any purples or oranges in my tray but I may have used some greens, it's been awhile. I wouldn't try it now; that end drain would be killer if I allowed it to hit. That's why I make sure to have a couple of blues in my tray just in case he gets lucky.

Then again I've frequently used the odd green or two on my stone tanker with LR come to think of it. I need to run an STF sometime with my Shield/Fire tanker; he hit 50 over a month ago and has yet to run it. It'll be interesting to see how he handles it; I imagine taking the alpha with OwtS running and a purple he should handle it pretty well.

<knocks head against wall>

Dangit, I knew about that from using a kinetic to heal another tanker, why didn't I think of it? Tunnel vision I guess since I've always pulled LR back in the corner behind the green tower. Ok, I officially feel stupid now.

There's a fair amount of energy, but his really big hitter is all smashing, and it hits my Invuln with capped S/L resist for about 50% of my HP bar. I haven't had lots of issues with his E/N damage; yeah it hurts some but nothing like that KOB of his and I only have ~40% E/N resistance.

I'm sure Elec/Dark could handle it with insps or buffs, but until the yellow tower dies you're not going to hit LR with Siphon Life with any reliability. I don't remember off the top of my head just what it boosts his +def to but it's certainly enough to floor my tohit on any tanker I've tried.

Even at ~78% S/L resist (about what I recall Elec getting to with Tough) LR will hit like a truck and it'll be tough getting enough def to matter. I'm not sure it's really doable without buffs or inspirations.

Very strange. I haven't heard anything about this so either there's something odd going on or you've found a bug. I'm sure you've verified this, but have you made sure your boost is slotted? Try deslotting it and then reslotting and see if that makes any difference. This is kind of a shot in the dark but I'm reminded of the game sometimes screwing up the "hide from x" settings and resetting them fixing the issue.

If that doesn't work then I'm out of ideas other than the ever famous /bug.

Ah, people were assuming you meant the SATA data cable which is certainly one device per port. I can't imagine that multiple SATA drives off of the same power line would present a problem assuming you have the connections; drives draw fairly small amounts of power nowadays. The big power hogs in a computer now are the video card and CPU; everything else is peanuts by comparison.

Have to agree with most of this; I'm currently working on an Ice/Elec tanker and at 30 on SO's it's starting to come together nicely and it's fun to play. No way it's going to match the toughness of Stone, Invuln or Shield but it looks to be a good, solid middleweight tanker.

I've teamed with several ice tanks at 50 and it seems to perform quite well provided it's built well... I've also teamed with a couple of icers who couldn't survive ANYTHING. We had a KTF a few days ago with an ice tank who was squishier than the electric scrapper; there must have been something seriously wrong with his build. I spent most of the TF wishing I'd brought CMA in and we ended up failing when the tank couldn't survive Reichsman for longer than one minute WITH an empath... who must not have been overly competent. I went back to the KTF the next day with CMA and had absolutely zero issues with anything. Reichsman was a total pushover, and I also was tanking the add on AV's as they were released. Heck, I had a run at Reichsman with a buddy tanking with his Ice tank and somehow he didn't have problems surviving.

To be even handed I've also seen Invuln tankers who were almost as squishy; I even remember a stone tank WITH granite who was still managing to get himself killed with great regularity on the ITF. I have no idea how he was managing it but he died three times in the first mission alone while running granite AND rooted. I would have expected better durability even totally unslotted but this dweeb managed the trick somehow.

The all time worst bad build tanker I've ever seen though was an Invuln I had the misfortune to team with back in issue 7 or 8. This idiot had, at level 50 mind you, Resist Physical Damage, Resist Elements and Unstoppable from the primary. That's all, just those three powers from the primary but by god he had all four travel powers including Team TP and Group Fly. I've forgotten his secondary but I remember equally bad choices there as well. I tried to mention that he might want to respec and select a few key powers but was told that HE was the 50 tanker there, I was only playing a 45 defender so what could I possibly know about the arcane intricacies of tanking. Unfortunately this was on a TF so I was stuck with the idiot for the duration... I ended up doing all the tanking with my dark/dark defender since he was incapable of surviving if unstoppable wasn't up and couldn't hold aggro at all.

I still even remember his name even though I haven't seen him since. Some things no amount of Jack Daniels can erase...

Here's the build for Granite Flame as it currently sits, I haven't had a chance yet to respec for i19. It works very well as a pre-i19 build.

I haven't played him much recently; he's on a server I haven't been playing on much in the last year. Looking over the build with today's game in mind I can see a few changes I want to make; fitting in Weave comes to mind.

I have tanked LR without insps on my Stone/Fire tanker unassisted while the rest of the team killed the towers. Yes, I used Earth's Embrace and I have a pretty good build but stone is still the toughest tanker out there. Yes, a kin is always nice to have on any character but I by no means require one on a stone tank. Granite + Rooted on a well built stoner can manage LR on SO enhancements... I did it many times right after issue 9 hit and I had a SO/HO build at that time... it sure as heck can do it with an IO build.

I've tanked him with my Inv/Stone unassisted many times, but I DO use inspirations there. More often than not I don't have any heals when I'm tanking LR, since I can take care of myself and the faster the towers go down the less I have to survive.

I did snag it at the base slot in my last respec for want of anything better to take. So far I haven't used it yet on a LGTF, STF, ITF, Apex and Tin Mage but I couldn't think of anything else I wanted to add that wouldn't need more slots.

Take it for what it's worth, I've yet to use the power but I did grab it since I didn't need any slots for it. In my respec I used the three freed power selections for Aid Other, Aid Self and Unstoppable. I've gotten a fair amount of use out of Aid Self (3 slotted with Heal/Recharge IO's), Aid Other was a throwaway prerequisite and Unstoppable was a filler I had no slots for. It's there if things should suddenly go pear shaped and drop into the pot but a soft capped Invuln is tough enough so that doesn't happen very often.

You may be able to do it for that with a little patience. Remember you don't need max level IO's... when I figured out the difference between slotting level 25 Reactive Armor and level 40 it ended up being just over 2% in total resistance. When you consider that level 40 reactive costs far more than level 25...

I wouldn't doubt that a bit; when Elec first ported to tanks I tried it out in the beta on a level bumped 50 Elec/SS tanker. I was dealing with SO enhancements since I was too lazy to copy/strip enough characters from live to get IO's and the test auction house is pretty limited. I found it to be weaker than an SO'd Invuln tanker but it wasn't bad... my impression was that adding some more S/L resist or adding a bunch of defense would create a monster.

I've been playing around a bit with a Spine/Elec scrapper; at 35 it's starting to get pretty good even though I haven't gotten serious about IO's on it yet. Right at the moment I have WAY too many half finished projects in the 25-35 range; a couple of them monkey babies. Yeah, I confess, I took advantage of that to PL a few sets I wanted to try into the mid-20's. Sometime I'll get around to actually playing them.

I'll have to give a "it depends"; the scrapper will kill things much faster than the tanker but even soft capped... and it costs a LOT more to soft cap a scrapper than a tank... he's quite a bit squishier. The SD/Fire tank cost me less than 20 million for his soft cap build (the defense building IOs only, I've considerably more in other non-survivability bonuses) while the scrapper cost over 500 million and isn't done yet.

Since I'm more of a tanker player than a scrapper player, even though I have 4 of each at level 50, I'd probably pick the tanker. Of course that's ME, you need to decide what's the right choice for YOU. As I mentioned either can pinch hit in the other's specialty, the tank has great damage... for a tank. The scrapper has great durability... for a scrapper.

One thing to consider, the tanker has more AOE than the scrapper since the scrapper version of fire melee trades Combustion for another single target attack.