Call Me Awesome

In general I think the Tanker AT is pretty well where it should be in terms of durability and damage. That isn't to say that we don't have some sets in need of tweaks but the overall AT seems to be in good shape.

With that said I agree with the thoughts on expanding the Tanker's aggro generation abilities in order to separate them from Brutes & Scrappers... I like the idea of an increase to the aggro cap and possibly the Taunt target cap. I don't think we need anything huge, but moving the aggro cap up to ~22 or so would be about in line and possibly buff Taunt's AOE to as many as 10 targets.

Most of our secondaries are pretty well where they belong damage wise although there's room for improvement <cough, EM, cough>. I do think Willpower and Super Reflexes badly need their taunt auras adjusted to be in line with all the other sets; those two are such obvious cellar dwellers in aggro generation that to my way of thinking they're broken. I can say from experience that an SR tanker has extreme difficulty holding a spawn's attention from an Energy Aura brute. You get the attention of what you hit with Taunt and everything else peels off and goes for the Brute. Even Gauntlet from AOE's isn't enough to hold the aggro.

For me the bottom line is that a Tank is defined by it's durability advantage (check, we're good there) and it's unmatched aggro abilities (we could use some work here). Damage is good but the AT isn't about doing the most damage, it's about having the most durability. I think we're about right on the damage side... I certainly don't think we need any major buff there.

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And Johnny, Tankers aren't intended to do "sick damage"; that's the province of Scrappers and Brutes... that's what they get in return for only having 75% of a tanker's durability. Think about it a second, if Tanks had Scrapper damage and Tank durability what advantage would there be to playing any other melee character? We have roughly 25% more durability and they have roughly 25% more damage. Sounds fair to me.

While I don't have a TW character all other powers I know of that say something to the effect of "must be on the ground" won't work with Hover. I would assume that Arc of Destruction works the same.

Is that thought process still with us? Whenever I'm putting something together my default answer is "bring what you like and we'll make it work." I can't offhand come up with much where a team would NEED an Emp... and if they insist they do then it's probably not a team I want to be on.

Of course it has stacked since at least issue 3 when I rolled my Dark/Dark Defender. If that changes get your pitchforks ready all!

Absolutely this. I've never found Psi to be particularly dangerous even to my Inv tanker... even pre-IO when I had zero def/res to it the occasional psi mob was usually not much more than a speed bump. Heck, even the half dozen or so pure Psi missions that existed back then weren't all that tough to tank since with the exception of the AV (candy/team buffs handle that) the damage tends to be low.

With a few rare exceptions Psi damage tends to be low damage and easily dealt with via Dull Pain or the occasional bit of candy. With an Invuln working for high defense to common (S/L/E/N) damage types you'll also get non-trivial amounts of positional that covers all but a handful of attacks; and those it doesn't cover generally don't hurt very bad.

It depends on the set and the pros and cons of it. I'd need to know more than just a set's name before knowing if I was interested in it... at least a list and description of the powers would be essential.

Shield's good but it isn't in the same league as Invuln. I have both at 50 with pretty maxed builds and while Shield is certainly up to the job there's just no comparison in overall durability... Invuln takes without strain stuff that makes Shield grab for the candy or hope for team buffs to survive.

The one corner case where Shield has an advantage is vs Psi that has a positional tag (remember, not all Psi attacks have a position and will bypass Shield defenses). In all other situations the Invuln has a pronounced advantage.

Remember Invuln can also put up soft capped defense numbers AND it has considerable resistance backing it up along with a massive heal/+HP power in Dull Pain. Defense WILL fail on you and the bad guys WILL get massive attacks through your defenses. Where Shield falls short is lower resistance and no heal power to fall back on when defense fails.

Nothing can die faster than a defense tanker with a run of bad luck; you'll either be full health or dead before you can react. Invuln has those resistances to blunt damage that breaks defense and Dull Pain to recover quickly.

Ugh, no thanks. That takes me back to the early days when armors didn't stack and Jack had his great vision. You'd spend so much time clicking on your defenses you wouldn't have time to do anything else.

I'll give it points for being WAY out of the box but it just sounds like a major chore to play and a seriously underperforming set. Click defense, click defense, click defense, maybe make one attack, click defense, click defense, click defense, maybe attack again and repeat. You either have no protection at all and are able to attack or you have protection at the expense of doing anything else.

The level of a proc has nothing to do with how it functions, the only thing it controls is when you can slot it and how far it exemps. Because of that the lowest level procs tend to be more in demand.

On the A Merit buy/sell you may want to consider the Kin Combat Dam/End (or Dam/Rech), they only cost 1 merit and I recall seeing at least one of them selling in the 70+ million range.

Heck, if you've regular merits to burn there's good money to be made in buying the Kinetic Combat Acc/Dam... it's uncommon so it's only 50 merits from the vendor and tends to sell upwards of 40+ million.

So enjoy it while it lasts.

Frankly I haven't run across any tanker that's well built who can't handle +4 Arachnos and Longbow. I certainly can on my Invuln/Stone, my Shield/Fire and my Stone/Fire. Heck, I don't have problems with those mobs on my BS/Shield scrapper, my Spine/Elec scrapper or, if I'm careful and use my insp tray, my Spine/Regen scrapper. None of my tankers have ever been in any real danger of dying, it just takes a little time to actually kill +4 mobs.

I've done it with my Fire/Dark corruptor and my Fire/EM blaster as well although it's much more touch and go. My Ill/Rad controller is easy mode of course albeit a bit slow due to it's single target focus.

If you're having problems then you may be approaching something wrong. I assure you that Invuln and Electric will have no problems... if my Spine/Elec scrapper can mow them down then an Elec tanker should have no problem.

Absolutely. There's a few tip missions I ALWAYS drop because they have that moronic escort... the "Rescue the Debutantes from the Carnival" I don't even consider running... THREE escorts?

Back to the OP, I'll bet you have some form of stealth running, either an IO or something like Shadow Fall or Steamy Mist. That's typical behavior in that case as the hostage can't see you if you're more than 10' away. Blind as a bat and dumb as a post.

I'm not sure there's a walkthrough but they aren't any more complex than the typical radio/tip mission so you shouldn't have any problems. In general terms:

Skyway City - SSA #1 (caps at 20)

Mission 1 - run to the end room, kill the boss triggering a timer, run back out before the timer runs out. You take the side door to the left of the exit door to get out of the mission.

Mission 2 - run to the end room stopping to get the three glowies along the way. Kill the boss and exit mission.

Mission 3 - run to the big obelisk, kill the mobs around it. If you have problems with the EB just lure him into the lava that's all around and watch him melt. Wait for the ghost to arrive and complain about how you can't get good help anymore, kill the reinforcements when they arrive and watch the cutscene. Take your hero merit. Once you figure it out you'll be running this entire arc in 10 minutes or less.

The other two arcs are similar although slightly longer. The second arc typically takes 15-20 minutes and the third arc usually runs 20-25 minutes.

The easiest, or at least quickest, is definitely the first one in Skyway... my characters average a little under 10 minutes for the arc while my fastest characters can run it in just under 7.

It's in your best interest to run all of them at least once; you get an alignment merit (provided you've REINFORCED your hero or villain status) for each of the 3 arcs and you can also get another merit once a week from running one of the arcs... that means if your character hasn't run any of the arcs you can run the first (Skyway) twice for two A-Merits, then run the second (Talos) for a third A-Merit and run the third (Founders) for a fourth A-Merit.

Really you won't have any problems if you've any experience with the game's other story arcs. Yeah, it'll take you a bit longer the first time as you're figuring it out but you'll be fine.

Here's the launcher; the game is a rather large download, something over 3GB. If you've access to a machine with the current version already installed it's faster to copy that to a flash drive and then to your new machine.

I believe the newest version of the game in stores is Going Rogue, which is several issues old.

Have you decided on your new hardware yet? You may want to get a second opinion unless you know hardware as we may well be able to get you more bang for the buck. I've noticed that a typical store bought PC tends to give you a lot of RAM (dirt cheap, 8GB goes for under $50); large (but usually slow) hard drive which is (or used to be, dang flooding in Taiwan) cheap while skimping on CPU (expensive) and especially video card.

I've seen a typical store bought PC with loads of RAM, big HD, outdated CPU and integrated video card actually sell for more than a good machine with a current CPU and decent video card.

As a suggestion you may want to post in the Technical Issues board about a new computer... the folks there will be able to advise you on what you'd want to get based on your budget.

Assuming you're going to keep your old monitor and miscellaneous stuff (keyboard, mouse, speakers and so forth) you're probably looking at something capable of playing COH starting in the $400 range up to a top end powerhouse around $1,500. A good middle of the road machine would probably come in around the $700-$800 range.

Remember that COH is a very power hungry game and isn't going to run well on integrated graphics... the video card is one of the most important parts of just how it'll run. Budget a minimum of ~$100 for the video card alone.

And I can assure you that Win7 64 bit works perfectly with COH, I've been playing on that since shortly after Win7 went to a release candidate status.

I would hope so, but I'm reminded that we thought much the same when WP came out and we noticed it's taunt aura... or more to the point lack of same.

Still, I'll bug it in game next time I'm on that character and hope for a fix to it.