Call Me Awesome

Fire/Dark corrupter, it's quite good solo and a team of them makes for a steamroller. Fire/Rad corrupter would also be a good choice.

In general no, I don't find the Axe that useful. Here's my rationale:

• Sands is a cone AOE hitting up to 5 mobs (2-3 fairly reliably if you line it up)
• Sands has a much less resisted damage type.
• Sands deals more damage than the Axe.
• The foes that the Axe deals it's extra damage to, by and large, also have substantial tohit debuffs making it much less likely to hit. Against other foes it offers a widely resisted damage type.
• While the Axe has a considerably faster animation it's other drawbacks do not, in my opinion, make up for this.

For these reasons Sands is always my first vet attack. Yes, I have the Axe on a couple of older characters, it was picked up immediately after vet rewards went live without realizing the differences.

Well, I did notice that your video drivers are pretty old

For what it's worth back in issue 16 closed beta when Elec was first ported to tankers I rolled up an Elec/SS tanker that was level-bumped to 50. Bear in mind that the tank was slotted with SO's only.

For comparison I had an old, SO only version of CMA, my Inv/Stone on test. For both tankers I ran the same types of radio missions vs the same mobs on the same settings (+2/8 to simulate tanking for a typical 8 man team).

Here's the gist of what I found:

Against Carnies it was no contest, CMA was substantially more survivable. Groups that were no threat to the Invuln required lots of care with the Elec. Advantage: Invuln by a bunch.

Conversely against Malta it went the other way, if a Sapper managed to hide from my initial look through of a mob it was a minor irritation for the Elec/SS while the Inv/Stone could be taken out quickly via drain/toggle drop. Advantage: Elec again by a substantial margin.

Nemesis was an advantage to the Invuln since most of the attacks were S/L and Invuln caps at 90% (with Tough). Even so I wouldn't be too concerned with the Elec in this situation; it had no real difficulty. It's just that Invuln was better here. Advantage: Invuln, but Elec is perfectly adequate here.

Council weren't much threat to either tanker but the large numbers fed Invincibility to pump up the Invuln's defense dramatically. Invuln's better here but no worries with the Elec.

Circle of Thorns are a real mix of damage types; again Invuln had an overall advantage thanks to it's strong defenses but an Elec would have to be pretty careless or completely overwhelmed to have significant problems.

I didn't test against any other mobs so anything else would be strictly theoretical.

Overall I had the impression that Elec could really use another 10% S/L resistance to get it closer to the 90% cap; it's problems were all a case of far more attacks landing than on Invuln and most of those hitting for more damage. On straight SO enhancements in the end game Invuln is certainly a more durable tank all around.

Now, if you're throwing IO's into the mix then things will change... adding significant defense to Elec will boost it's performance by a huge amount and if you soft cap it vs S/L (I doubt it's practical to go for anything more) I could see it becoming a great tanker. On pure SO's though it's considerably below Invuln excepting a few mobs that play to it's strengths.

In the lower levels though an Electric tanker could well be a force to recon with; it gets good resistance to most damage types making it perform very well indeed in the <25 game.

Like many players the choice of what to take is HIGHLY variable from character to character.

I do see Leadership being more attractive in a lot of builds but for others it'll allow me to include primary/secondary powers I had to drop to get room.

For example, my Inv/Stone tank, CMA, will probably pick up an extra APP (Char/Fire Blast/Fireball); I'm still debating about the other two although there's a half dozen powers I'd like to have. It's a balancing act of cost/benefit for each power and slot I have to distribute.

Some characters will be unaffected like my Archery/EM blaster who never took fitness in the first place; frankly endurance was never an issue with him.

On the other hand my Fire/Rad and Ill/Rad controllers will be going back to the drawing board; both are huge end hogs (206% recharge Ill/Rad burns end even faster than a Fire/Rad). I'd really like to toss in Leadership but both of them are on the ragged edge with endurance as it is.

This new change is certainly going to be a great boon to the players despite the few whiners I've seen around complaining about not getting more slots. I swear, some people would complain if you hung them with a new rope.

Well, it sounds like a bad stick of RAM; I'd download Memtest86, (it should download a .iso to burn a bootable CD) create the disk and then boot your machine from that Memtest disk.

Let it run for several hours, it'll press, fold and bag your RAM and tell you if you have a bad stick. Just out of curiosity does everything run fine with EITHER stick?