Call Me Awesome

- I hit 50 on CMA and went to my very first Hami Raid and how completely lost and confused by everything that went on.

- How much fun the social event of the old time issue 4-8 Hami Raids were; leading the Taunt team; providing Group Fly for the Drop team and the carnage of the Mito ball.

- Herding up the entire main island of the Drek map in one pull, stacking them all around a corner and wiping out 200+ with one Seismic Smash loaded with 6 Nucleous HO's.

- Running my very first TV trial and trying to figure out how to find the red shield.

- The GDN and the meltdown of the boards and game chat in the aftermath, followed by Statesman's comment that no more power adjustments were planned... shortly before ED hit.

- Trying to get back on the train and thinking it must be broken, not realizing that I was madly clicking on the "exit".

- Getting my first character to 20, thinking about just how much it sucked always being faceplanted (Fire/EM blaster) and rolling up a tanker so I wouldn't die (CMA)

- The stores only sold the "power 10" enhancements and you had to wait until 30 for all the DO's to be available in a store and all SO's weren't available until 40. You had to pick a contact of your origin and do a ton of missions for them before they'd sell you that Fly SO you needed.

- All the friends I've made in the game, and the few who are still playing.

I'll offer my $0.02 on KM based on some (admittedly limited) testing with a level bumped 41 KM/SD scrapper loaded with level 40 SO's and a level bumped 41 BS/SD scrapper also loaded with level 40 SO's. Both scrappers had identical secondary builds and power pools.

First the subjective on KM/SD. It really does feel slow, slow to attack, slow to kill and generally the animations (and the Nascar sounds) really bothered me. I felt like I'd make an attack, wait a while as my character conjured the ghost of Dale Ernhardt and finally decided to hit the mob then repeat the process.

Performance wise I was fairly underwhelmed, it was, of course, capable of soloing radio missions at base difficulty but it still seemed very slow. The animations are pretty, but they take all day and the damage seemed lacking. As a test I ran both scrappers through several radio missions facing the same type of mobs in similar missions. I ran Carnies, Council and Nemesis, all missions were the typical "kill boss x" and I ran them as kill-all.

In every test the BS/SD was considerably faster killing the mobs than the KM/SD. According to my stopwatch it usually took the BS/SD about 2/3 the time to clear each mission as the KM/SD with both facing 0/0 mobs, or base difficulty. Ramping things up to +2/4 it got much worse with the KM/SD taking twice as long on average as the BS/SD.

I ran each scrapper through 3 radio missions at 0/0; once vs Carnies, once vs Council and once vs Nemesis. I then ran 3 more radio missions with each against the same mobs set to +2/4.

Based on my experience I'd have to say that KM/SD is certainly playable, but it's far from optimal. It's capable of running +2/4 with rather a lot of care (both had roughly 24% def... the BS/SD pushed the Melee to ~43% with Parry, over the soft cap with it stacked) but KM really was outperformed by Broadsword.

As things stand right now I have no intention of rolling a KM on live, if the set gets some changes I may change my mind later. Unfortunately in it's current state it doesn't interest me.

In looking over your build I have to ask, do you have the 60 month veteran badge? If you don't your build will not work as you've picked Teleport without any prereq at a level before it's available.

Have you already bought the Kinetic Combat IO's? They're very expensive and hard to come by; some of them I've seen in the 100 million or more price range. Frankly on a Stone tanker I prefer slotting Crushing Impact for the recharge bonus than working on more defense.

For another thing, I would strongly suggest different slotting for Earth's Embrace... my favorite slotting for all powers of that type is 5 Doctored Wounds.

Stone Skin works just fine with a single slot, I toss the Steadfast Res/Def unique in there and call it good. I also delay Stone Skin until later in the build but that can be argued either way.

In my opinion you're probably overslotting Health; the uniques are nice but I'm unsure just how useful they are to you.

Uh, Rooted at 22? I'd really suggest moving that MUCH earlier; I've never delayed a mez shield on a tanker past level 10.

I'd change your power order around some and get Fire Sword Circle much earlier... I'd slot it up better as well. My personal feeling is that as a tanker there's always better powers available than Build Up; I never spec it in a tanker build.

Brimstone and Crystal armor I've found to be entirely skippable in leveling two Stone tanks to 50... I never had either power and never had need for either power. Minerals has it's place, but I don't see a lot of use for it below level 41... there's not a lot of primarily Psi baddies out there and nearly all of them are in the 40+ game.

My Stone/Fire tanker's been mostly retired for the last several issues and I built him with a somewhat different build philosophy. As I look over my build there's things I'd change now but it's already extremely capable as a tanker and practically unkillable... if Lord Recluse buffed by his towers can't do it in 10 minutes (unassisted by the team and only using 4-5 inspirations) I see no reason to build for more durability

Just for comparison here's Granite Flame's current build:

If you soft cap it any Shield combination is capable of handling high level TF's... my 42 Shield/Fire tanker had no problems at all tanking the ITF a couple days ago, and I was the lowest level character on the team.

Like all defense based sets it struggles early; it will be very squishy until your defenses climb into the 25% range (around level 22 and SO's) and you won't feel like a tank until they get into the 35% range. As it approaches the 45% soft cap it suddenly becomes godlike.

That Shield/Fire tanker actually kills at a near-scrapper speed... he doesn't kill as fast as my 50 BS/Shield scrapper but he's not far off of the rate of my 50 BS/Regen scrapper. It's certainly far faster than any other tanker I've leveled including a mid-30's Fire/Fire I abandoned back in issue 7.

Ooo, I know. NickOfTime! You can then be Justin the NickOfTime

Even if it DOES work you're asking for trouble reusing a Windows install from another machine; you're very likely to find something working strangely or corrupted registry entries on something else.

Every time I've ever tried to shortcut an install by reusing or upgrading I've had problems... I always just make a fresh clean install of Windows and start over. I haven't tried with Vista (the only machine I had with Vista got upgraded to XP right away) or Win7 but it's been problematic on every OS I've run since Windows 95 (95, 98, NT, 2k, XP)

We had the same happen on an ITF last night, nobody was able to call in the TF. Everyone on the team got "I must speak with the leader", then as people quit one at a time each new leader got the same thing.

Well, your build so far doesn't look too bad at a glance, what are you wanting to do with it? Rival a Granite tanker's durability without any of the negatives? It can be done by building for the soft cap as explained in my guide.

20 million won't go all that far in today's market unfortunately, at the time I wrote my guide you could soft cap an Invuln tanker for little over 10 million... nowadays it would probably take on the order of 50-70 million. I can make a few suggestions for priorities though.

First, the Reactive Armor sets will offer you decent bang for the buck... don't feel you NEED the highest level IO's either, slotting 25's is only 0.2% less resistance than slotting 40's and they're considerably cheaper.

The Taunt sets Mocking Beratement and Perfect Zinger are EXTREMELY inexpensive... Zinger does use some pricey salvage but Beratement even uses cheap salvage.

Smashing Haymaker is inexpensive and offers a nice boost to your S/L defense.

The Steadfast Resistance/3% defense unique is expensive... but it's also a common low level drop. I'd run a few Architect missions to gather up a couple thousand tickets and roll Bronze recipes in the 10-14 range... they're CHEAP and there's several winners there including the Steadfast. Vendor the trash and craft & sell the good ones. I typically get a winner out of roughly every 6 rolls. Steadfast Res/Def unique, Steadfast KB protection, Karma KB protection, Regen Tissue Unique... these are some of the winners in that range. Toss the junk and keep the good stuff.

For difficulty it'd be hard to beat Nosferatu, his regen is pumped up to 11. I doubt you'd have a lot of trouble surviving, but killing him is another thing altogether. Madam of Mystery is another with the regen turned to "stupid", and she's psi.

Easy ones would be ones like Battle Maiden, Bobcat (but if she connects it tends to smart) and other fairly vanilla AV's.