Call Me Awesome

I have to agree with this, while a Regen can complete the MoSTF it really IS more subject to spike damage suddenly killing it. With an unknown quantity behind the controls I'd be reluctant to have a Regen on a MoSTF myself; an Invuln, Shield or SR would be considerably less likely to get dropped than a Regen.

I do have and play Regen... two of my 3 level 50 scrappers are regen. Even so I wouldn't take either on a MoSTF run myself; I'd much rather take something where a split second of inattention wasn't going to result in a failed run. I couldn't play the character to it's ability without running too much risk of death... something I don't ever worry about in normal missions but something that's critical on a Master run.

So I can absolutely understand the reluctance to trust a regen on a Master run... I frankly wouldn't trust playing it myself and I like to think I'm a somewhat competent player. Yeah, I could probably do it, but I'd have to be much more cautious than normal which cuts down on the efficiency.

I've been one-shotted by AOE splash while we were taking down Lord Recluse with my Spine/Regen despite attacking him from behind with a good tank holding aggro. I've been one-shotted by Scirocco's tornadoes despite a good tank holding aggro.

While Regen is a good set it's just too susceptible to spike damage from the AV's. The odds are simply better on avoiding that sudden spike with a different secondary. MoSTF is very difficult to accomplish, even a really great team will have the odds stacked against them. Out of roughly 30 attempts I've gotten the badge 8 times.

I'd probably give it a try if the player really wanted the badge on that regen but I wouldn't put very high odds on success. Then again, I've only gotten the badge once on a PuG anyway... dealing with unknown quantities in a PuG are just asking for trouble. The one PuG success was really debatable if it was a PuG or not since everyone was a long time vet and everyone at least vaguely knew each other.

There's two places where most MoSTF runs fail... in the Thorn Tree room or facing Dr Aeon. I've only blown a Mo run twice in the last mission; once to Scirocco and once to Ghost Widow. Once it was the Regen who died and the other time it was a Controller. Oddly enough once you've blown it everyone seems to quit worrying and you'll end up with a bunch of deaths in the final mission... but if you're still good getting on the chopper you're likely to make it the distance.

I'll take you up on that; we just did a Manti on Sunday and there were no 40 PP's.

Now, that isn't to say that particular bug may not show it's ugly head after some future patch... it's appeared and been fixed twice that I know of in the last couple of years, but for now Manti is working correctly.

As for Reichsman I can't say... I did the TF twice shortly after it went live and found it so incredibly boring I haven't had any desire to run it again. He typifies the big boring bag of hit points... I never found him dangerous, simply tedious.

I felt much the same, the combination was marginal when I leveled it in issue 7; I just can't really see any need to play it now. I'm not about to delete a 50, but I did take advantage of the free transfers awhile back to move her to another server. It's functional, but that's about the extent of it. There's just too many other choices that are better, in some cases MUCH better.

I will admit I've been having a lot of fun with my Shield/Fire tanker; I hit 39 with him yesterday and he's quite competent. With so many other characters to play I just can't see playing one that's marginal. Heck, as of last night I have 14 at 50, 6 in the 40's and 5 in the 30's not counting the literally dozens in the teens - 20's.

Did you see in the screenshot that the character was 19? No exemp since the number was white.

Invuln/Mace should be quite competent; it has a decent amount of AOE and a fair amount of soft control with the knockdown in several attacks coupled with, in my opinion, the best all-around tanker primary. Built to the soft cap it can rival Granite for durability and really has no downsides. The much-discussed "psi hole" is far more fiction than fact in my experience since Psi is so rarely encountered.

I think you'd do quite well with that combination although I would suggest looking at my first 20 levels guide for the key aspects of Invuln.

This is perfectly normal, there's quite a bit to get familiar with in the game. Actually the easiest way to really learn is to simply jump in and start playing; accept that you're going to make mistakes and learn from them. I do think you may be well served to roll up a new character and play through all the beginning missions, they tend to do a decent job of orienting you. Try a scrapper, they combine decent durability with good damage... they're the best solo characters hero side and make a great learning tool. Any primary will work nicely and Regen or Willpower are probably the strongest secondaries in the early game. Others are better in the late game, but this is a character to learn with; you may abandon it after you have the basics down.

I'd have built a bit differently frankly, one of your key powers is Indomitable Will, a toggle power that will prevent you from being held, slept, immobilized, or stunned (commonly referred to as "mez"). This is perhaps the most important single power in your primary since a mez'd tanker is a helpless tanker.

Also there isn't any power called "areal assault", do you mean the power Assault from the Leadership power pool? Leadership is mostly wasted on tanks since they get rather poor benefit from it, there are much better choices for you.

Don't worry so much about these things for right now though; you're brand new in the game and you've a lot of other things to worry about... new players commonly go through several "throw away" characters before they find one that suits them. If you keep that tanker then yes, you will want to change your build.

Your friends really didn't do you any favors there; you needed to take some time to learn what you were doing before jumping into the deep end of the pool. Yes, the early missions are pretty boring to veteran players since most of us have been through them dozens of times but they do serve the purpose of orienting new players. Oh, and it really doesn't matter which starting zone you choose; Galaxy City is much less popular than Atlas Park but the missions are much the same, just fewer people playing in that zone. The only thing it really affects is your starting contact.

Now this is a fairly loaded question but in general terms a tank leads the team into battle, is the first one to jump into the group of baddies and keeps their attention on him instead of on the rest of the team. You do this with a combination of your attacks (area of effect attacks are best for this... which isn't Dark Melee's strength), your taunt aura (an aura that taunts mobs close to you, in your case Rise to the Challenge, also not really Willpower's strength) and the power "Taunt" (which forces the baddie you targeted and up to 5 of his buddies nearby to focus on you)

At your level though you really aren't all that tough so tanking is partially theoretical. With better power selection you'll be tougher and more able to handle the job but tankers generally don't come into their own until after level 22.

You have a map (by default "m" will bring it up, and you can detach it and move it wherever you like on screen and resize it) which will show you the zone you're currently in as well as points of interest such as the train, stores, contacts and trainers. There are also zone connections (green or red dots on the edges of the map that mark an entrance to another zone of the game).

At the bottom of your chat screen you'll see a bunch of letters (L, B, T, R etc) that correspond to different channels. L is Local which is heard by anyone nearby, B is Broadcast which is heard by anyone in the zone, T it Team which is heard by your teammates no matter where they are, R is Request which is basically Broadcast in another color. There are also Global Channels which you can join but I'd suggest worrying about those after you've gotten your legs under you in the game.

Influence is money... although the game lore tries to deny this. You earn influence by killing mobs and completing missions, selling items to stores or at Wentworth's (Please note that many pieces of salvage and recipes are worth FAR more to other players at Wentworth's auction house than they are to a store). You use influence to buy things in the game such as enhancements, inspirations and items at the auction house. In my opinion anything you use as a medium of exchange to buy or sell items is money no matter whether you call it dollars, pounds, rubles or influence.

Well, because she's kind of an in-joke about the ever-elusive Nessie.

Well, as I said earlier this is perfectly normal, all of us have gone through the exact same thing when we started out. I would advise starting a scrapper though and stay solo while you run missions and learn the interface and how things work. Once you've a handle on how things work then you can worry about actually leveling a character and how he should be built.

But run around the area, do some missions and play around with the interface. Do some exploring and don't be afraid to ask questions. You're new, you're supposed to do these things. I promise you that you'll get the hang of things quickly... and you'll have a lot more fun once you get some of the basics down. Staying solo while you learn the basics will take the pressure off of you.

If you have any further questions please let us know; we're a pretty friendly bunch here in this game. Enjoy your time with us and always remember the primary rule: Have fun.

THIS is exactly my own opinion on the matter... tanking is more about attitude than anything else. That first one in, "you'll get to my team over my dead body" attitude is what makes a competent tanker into a good one. Adding that attitude to aggro management skills turns a good tanker into a great tanker.

Technique isn't all that hard to pick up, but the true tanker ATTITUDE is much harder.

I'd have to agree with this... while I don't personally have an Ice tank I have teamed with many and as long as they're well built and well played they are perfectly capable of handling anything... and they're aggro monkeys par excellence.

Like ALL defense sets they do struggle early, and if they aren't built right then yes, they can be squishy. A good build in the hands of a competent tanker can handle anything. Actually, I'll go ahead and say that any tanker with a good build and a competent player can handle anything. Some require more work than others and some require more player skill but I have yet to find a tanker primary that can't do the job with the right person behind the controls.

I've main tanked the ITF with my BS/Shield SCRAPPER... if a soft capped Scrapper can handle it then for damn sure an Ice tanker can if he has any kind of decent build and isn't a total idiot. Now it did help that a Shield scrapper does have a very nice aggro aura for that job, something like an SR scrapper would survive just fine but have problems holding aggro.

Guardian and Pinnacle both have good communities with a large number of friendly helpful players. Both tend to have a pretty low number of obnoxious and/or rude players so she shouldn't run into very many players who'd treat her poorly. It's very rare that I meet a jerk on either server.

I've only played a limited amount on Freedom but it's literally night and day the number of jerks I've encountered there.

Yep, I was just thinking about an ITF I ran recently and the "tanker" was such a worthless cowardly waste of space that I had to take over his duties with my Dark/Dark defender. He was Invuln/something (never saw him actually USE anything but Jump Kick) who at level 50 had exactly 3 powers from the primary, RPD, Resist Elements and Unstoppable. Of course trying to suggest (via tell to avoid embarrassing him in front of the team) he may need to rethink his build resulted in the famous "I know what I'm doing NOOB". Ah well, adapt and overcome for the duration of the TF and 1 star the idiot for the future. It WAS one looooong ITF though.

My apologies, I guess that had gotten further under my skin than I'd thought.

I suppose in the last 5 years I've teamed with about 10% really good tankers, 60% competent and 30% of varying degrees from poor to useless. In the mid-upper levels you tend to find the best ratio of competent/incompetent... most of the truly bad ones don't last past the 20's.

Provided of course that the tanker is competent... unfortunately that particular item is much less common than many of us like to admit. A GOOD tanker is a treasure for a team and will enhance any team's performance. A mediocre or worse tanker can easily end up being a drag instead of a help and I run into more of the latter category than the former.

There are good to excellent tankers out there however... and if you're one of them you tend to be remembered and people will look for you to team with in the future.

Indeed, Set IO's have added immense complexity to the game, with them you can alter many things about your build... do you want 200% global recharge, equivalent to almost three stacked Hasten buffs permanently? IO bonuses can do it. Do you want to soft cap your defenses and achieve godlike survivability? IO bonuses can do it. How about increasing your runspeed or recovery or regeneration? Once again IO bonuses can do that.

It gets complicated in a hurry, but slotting a set of IO's into a power gives a bonus... let's take as a scrapperish example the Touch of Death set which can be slotted into any single target melee attack. Slotting two IO's in the set (into the SAME power) grants you a small, and worthless, resistance to immobilize of 2.75%. Slotting a third IO grants you 1.5% additional hit points... in the case of a level 50 that's a smidgen over 20 HP. Slotting a fourth grants a 2.5% global damage buff while a fifth grants another worthless resistance to holds and the sixth IO in the set grants you 3.75% Melee defense... undoubtedly the bonus you are after.

Individually these bonuses are quite small, but you can stack them up to 5 times so theoretically if you slotted the set into 5 powers you'd have 18.75% Melee defense (and the other bonuses would stack as well). There are a HUGE number of IO sets available and they work in different powers... a set for a single target melee attack won't work in a ranged attack and a set for a melee AOE attack won't work in a ranged AOE like Fireball. There are several sets to choose from for every power in the game and they all offer different bonuses, the trick is to stack the bonuses you really want in order to maximize your abilities.

We also now have Wentworths, which is the market where players list unwanted items for sale and other players can purchase them. As you may expect some IO sets are more valuable than others... a handful of them top 200 million per IO while one or two are so valuable and rare that they sell off market for over the influence cap of 2 billion.

Don't sweat the prices too much though; first because it's entirely possible to outfit a full build with very effective sets, if not necessarily the super-popular ones, for much less. Most of my builds come in under 150 million nowadays and perform extremely well. Another thing to consider, the earning power of a level 50 in today's game is simply phenomenal... it's not just the defeat and mission influence but all the various IO recipe and salvage drops you'll get; many of which are worth big bucks on the market.

It's not at all unusual for one of my 50's to make over 10 million in a typical 2-3 hour playsession, and every now and then you get one of the "winner" drops that sell for 100 million or more.

You are getting into real edge cases here, but I agree with your comments; my experience in the issue 16 beta with a level bumped 50 Elec/SS tanker was... less than stellar on pure SO enhancements. At the same time I did work out a near-soft capped build in Mids for that character that looked to be very good in theory; I lacked the resources on Test to actually make it reality. I've no doubt that it would have been extremely effective with that added defense. Expensive, but effective.

You are talking about a Fire tanker build that's just a bit of an edge case itself there though Severe... just how many billions do you have in that thing now?

If you compare similar builds you'd probably find that the Shield/Fire killed faster... I know my 38 Shield/Fire kills significantly faster than my 37 Fire/Fire; both have roughly comparable shinies in their builds. The Shield/Fire is also considerably more durable.

I know your Fire/Fire is a monster, but you've invested so much into that build that it had better be. Honestly though, could you obtain better results on the Fire/Fire than the Shield/Fire if you only had 200 million to devote to each build?

I've found that keeping a sizable amount of AAO fodder isn't that tough on my BS/SD scrapper; my tank has leveled exclusively with SG buddies so I haven't really run him much solo but it isn't a real problem to gather enough mobs together for Combustion/Shield Charge/Fire Sword Circle. True, after that combination and the pain the rest of the team dishes out there's not much left so you move on to the next group and rinse/repeat Combustion/FSC until SC is up again.

I can see how massive amounts of recharge could alter that formula, but that's a bit outside the norm. I've only built a truly MASSIVE recharge build once, for a perma-PA Ill/Rad controller. Generally I've too many characters I'm working on to devote that kind of expense into one character's build. Heck, CMA's soft cap build cost me about $30 million when I made it and could be replicated for about 100 million today.

Not in my experience they don't, and both have a 2 second tic rate on their auras which also makes them inferior to Ice. Chilling Embrace has a 0.5 second tic rate and is autohit with a 13.5 second duration and a healthy damage debuff; for aggro purposes it beats any 2 second tic damage aura easily even ignoring the tohit roll. In fact it effortlessly beats any aggro aura in the game.

Nothing in the game grabs aggro as well and as fast as an Ice tank. This is fact, not supposition. Once an Ice tank has aggro it's impossible to get it away from him as well. I have stripped aggro from a Dark tanker with my Invuln, nothing can strip aggro from an Ice tank short of that tank deactivating CE.

Now I won't argue that Dark & Fire are quite competent at getting and holding aggro but their auras aren't as efficient as Ice. If you don't believe me then team with an Ice tanker and try it out. Both of you jump into a group and see who gets the aggro. I guarantee it'll be the Ice tank. An Ice tank is as supreme in his area of excellence as a Granite tank is in his.

BU + FE is only available every 90 and 180 seconds (base recharge) and only operates for 10 seconds and 20 seconds respectively. Against All Odds is a permanent 15.5% damage buff for the first foe in melee and an additional 5.5% damage buff for each additional foe. Fully saturated it's a 65% damage buff. The bottom line is that Shield gets more benefit thanks to always having it's damage buff over having a greater buff only available for short durations on long timers.

Shield is also much more survivable than a Fire/Fire tank... and I have played both. AAO really IS that good, and it's your taunt aura so it isn't costing you a power pick simply for additional damage.

You cannot slot enough accuracy to avoid missing 5% at minimum, and against foes with defense buffs the effectiveness drops off dramatically... just try holding Lord Recluse's aggro while the Orange tower is up with your aura; you won't be able to, it won't hit him. Nemesis are another problem; let them get a couple of stacked Vengeance buffs and again your aura won't reliably hit them.

There's another reason why Death Shroud and Blazing Aura aren't as good as Ice, Invuln & Shield as aggro holding tools; their tic rate is 2 seconds vs 1 second for Invuln & Shield and 0.5 second for Ice. By the way, this is also why Stone's Mud Pots is inferior at holding aggro to Ice, Invuln & Shield... tic rate and duration. The faster an aura tics the faster it grabs aggro and the longer the duration the longer it holds aggro. Nothing tics faster than Chilling Embrace and nothing lasts longer than Invincibility and Against All Odds.

You do have an argument with Dark's three auras, but very few tankers will run all three in the first place due to the cost and they tend to cause mob scatter. You will still take twice as long to acquire aggro as an Invuln and 4 times as long as an Ice. Burn really doesn't count as an aggro aura due to it's transient nature and the extreme scatter it causes.

It's unquestionable that WP's aura is pathetic holding aggro compared to all other primaries. For one it has a duration of 1.25 seconds with a tic rate of 1 second! That means it won't even last the duration of the tic on a +2 mob. The shortest duration of any other aura is 13.5 seconds. For another WP's aura is only MAG 3, all other auras are MAG 4. It's for this reason that WP has to rely on it's secondary to manage aggro, the aura alone will NOT hold aggro. I've easily stripped aggro from a WP tanker with a blaster and a Shield scrapper is guaranteed to strip nearly all aggro away in an instant.

Buy a good brand name, Corsair and Antec are well regarded and I've used both... of the two I'd give the nod to Corsair; I've had one Antec fail and never lost a Corsair.

Think overkill on the power supply too, 600W would probably work but a few dollars more would get you a 700 or bigger; I've found it's always better to have a unit that can easily handle the load than one that's just enough, the less it has to work the longer it's likely to live.

While I typically buy components from Newegg I have picked up some items from Best Buy in your situation... something dies and I'm too impatient to wait for it to ship. I know Best Buy carries a decent line of supplies including both Corsair and Antec.

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Ah, I type too slow. Yeah, that's good advice to look for over 42 amps at 12v. I always tend to overpower my machines so I don't have to worry about the PS for a couple of upgrades.

It's always nice to see new players starting the game, obviously many of us think the Dev's have done something right for us to keep playing... I personally have been here for 5 years and I'm scarcely the longest playing. The game still keeps me logging in most every night even after 5 years playing.

I hope you enjoy your stay, most of us are quite willing to help out new players and don't be afraid to ask questions, we've all been there and we've all been confused by things only to feel like idiots when we figure out what we've done wrong

One thing that everyone has done (not that many will actually admit it) is thinking that the trains are broken because we're desperately clicking on the "exit" door instead of the entrance. In case you haven't yet seen the train there's a big entrance in the middle and a small exit off to the side.

Remember though that it's a game and the object is to have fun. As long as you're having fun then "yer doin' it right".