Call Me Awesome

If I've invested the time and effort into getting a character above 35 (much less 50) then I'm not going to axe them. I do have a couple of high level toons that I haven't touched in 4 years but I've moved them to other servers to wait on either my interest to change or, in the case of the 50 Stone/EM tanker, for power changes to make them fun to play again.

By the time I've taken a character to 50 I've anywhere from 80-250 hours invested in them... and I wouldn't have gotten them past 30 if I didn't enjoy the character at the time. Things change, friends may want to run something where "X" character is the best fit and, of course, the game changes and suddenly something becomes fun again. I don't PL my characters to 50 in 10 hours; I actually play them up the long way.

As an example earlier this week I dug out an old Kin/Rad defender who had been sitting unplayed at level 35 for over 700 days. A respec to bring her up to current conditions and I'm having fun with the character and have leveled her up to 38 over the last couple nights. If I'd deleted her then I'd have had to start fresh at level 1 if I had an urge to play that set again.

Interesting; I apparently haven't seen that bug myself <knock on wood having only logged in about 7 out of 50 toons> but it sounds like a real doozy.

Hopefully Support can get the missing stuff back.

Lots of characters at their peak level of performance can manage solo +4x8 missions with most mob types, but they aren't going to be steamrolling by any means. If you define "manage" as "can complete the mission without too many deaths using all available methods of mitigation" then probably most Scrappers, Tankers and Brutes can handle it as can some Blasters and many Controllers. I wouldn't be at all surprised if every AT in the game has at least some build combinations that are capable of that trick.

However one thing none of them will be doing is running QUICKLY. It simply takes longer to kill +4 mobs than it does to kill +2 or even level. No build in the game will be able to kill +4 mobs as quickly as it can kill +2 mobs. Yes, a few corner cases can move efficiently enough to make the time/reward ratio favorable but those are very few and far between and they'll still take a good bit longer to complete the mission.

One thing that jumps out at me is your attack slotting. The Smashing Haymaker set works great for an Invuln tanker and provides a decent S/L def bonus at a fraction the cost of Kin Combat... however it has lousy accuracy. You really want a 5th slot in your attacks for an Acc/Dam/Recharge or Acc/Dam/End from another set to get good accuracy and ED cap your damage.

Another thing is that Foot Stomp would be better slotted with 4 Eradication and a couple of Scirocco than with the Oblit set. The Oblit is a good set, but it's strength is melee defense... it only provides half the values for S/L making it a poor choice for Invuln. Making the change I suggested will give you 1.8 endurance, 3.13% E/N defense, 2.25% HP and 10% regeneration.

Looking at your bonuses you can loose one set of Smashing Haymaker and still remain soft capped; I'd pull the slots from Boxing and use them to add that 5th slot in Jab, Haymaker & KoB.

I also think you could do better yanking some slots from Stamina & Health... I see you're looking for recharge bonuses but I'm not sure they're worth the slot expenditure.

Looking at your primary I'd slot Invincibility differently; if you're already 47+ then it's hard to do better than 3 Cytoskeleton HO's. If you're still leveling then think about the Luck of the Gambler or Gift of the Ancients sets... both of them have good arguments for going there.

Resist Elements is your least valuable power (other than Unstoppable if you're soft capped) so I'd move it way back in the power order and use Res Energies for the Reactive mule. Personally I'd toss it in at level 49 and move the Fighting pool up accordingly or possibly put Spring Attack in there as an AOE attention getter. Speaking of SA you'll definitely want accuracy and recharge there; it's damage is kind of ordinary but it will work nicely to get the mob's attention on you.

Here's a quickie revamp based on your power selections. There's room for improvement but it ends up with higher regen, better E/N defense, better endurance and endurance recovery and retains the S/L soft cap.

A small update on my SR tanker; last night I was playing with a friend's StJ/Energy Armor brute and noticed a disturbing trend. I was first into melee and had the mobs clumped tight then he'd attack and I'd immediately loose about half the spawn. I've NEVER seen that happen with an Invuln tanker and I conclude that the SR taunt aura must have gotten the Willpower treatment; it doesn't appear to hold aggro well.

After a couple of missions I grabbed my StJ/Invuln scrapper and had no difficulty holding aggro from my buddy. Mid's claims MAG 4 on SR's aura... seems like the Dev's set it's duration extremely low. I do notice Mid's mentions a 1 second duration for Evasion (the taunt aura/AOE def toggle) and a 0.75 second duration for the other toggles. If that's true then SR is actually worse than WP for aggro.

Spring Attack would be useful as an aggro tool if nothing else but there's no way I'd dump KoB for it. Instead dump Assault and lightly slot Spring Attack. Another PBAOE taken early is nice to have for tanking, particularly if you exemp down below level 33 for a TF or just to team with friends.

I'll second the suggestion to put the purple set into Foot Stomp if you can afford it. I'm not a fan of slotting the FF proc or the -res proc at the expense of basic functionality of a power... the purple damage proc will do more for you. Also I really like Fire Ball on any tanker; it's a great AOE and a nice big ranged attention getter.

Personally I loathe energy melee since it's almost exclusively single target and it's only two decent attacks have such massive animation time. I've a Stone/EM tanker at 50 that I rolled up in issue 7 and took to 50 pre-IO. In that era before the nerf it was, IMO, barely adequate since ET was so fast. Post nerf I tried the character several times and found that on a team I was virtually guaranteed of corpse blasting with both ET & TF every single time I used either attack.

YMMV but for me the set went from marginal to bad with the ET nerf. Twice over the years since the nerf I've pulled that tanker from mothballs and run a few TF's with her, each time I've come to the conclusion that I hate the set. I keep hoping that sometime the set will change and become fun again; that and the fact that I can't bring myself to delete a 50 are all that keeps that tanker around. I did move her last year when we had free transfers to a server I don't play on very often.

Team with a Cold defender/controller and have them keep Frostworks on you... that's about the only way to cap your HP.

Frankly you're better off building defenses than chasing for HP bonuses... all the IO bonuses are really small, on the order of 1.5% or less. By really sacrificing you MIGHT get another 15% over your accolades; no way you're getting even close to the ~65% you need to approach the cap.

Well, you're greatly underslotting for resistance and, IMO, wasting slots in several places. For one the Panacea set really isn't that compelling for a tanker, particularly at that high a slot cost.

Your attacks are underslotted as well and I think you'll miss Havoc Punch and Chain Induction.

Really you're spending immense amounts of inf chasing perma DP; a high defense Invuln has no need for it. Frankly I may use DP on my Inv/Stone two or maybe three times a night tanking the high level TF's; I've no need at all to perma it.

I would dump the hideously expensive PvP IO's and go for a more conventional build; you'll free up a bunch of slots you could put to use elsewhere for more benefit AND you'll increase your S/L resistance by 10% to the 90% cap. I'd dump Maneuvers entirely; Tankers get lousy mileage out of it and it's very high endurance. The purple sets are up to you but they aren't providing you a whole lot.

Focused Accuracy is, in my opinion, a wasted power... it's tohit values are way too small for it's massive endurance cost. If you want the tohit then slot a Kismet 6% Accuracy IO (mislabeled, it's actually +6% tohit).

I've found absolutely zero need for Unstoppable since I soft capped my Invuln; I kept it for a full issue and never hit it once that entire time. I dropped it and haven't ever regretted it.

For comparison my Inv/Stone has a drastically less expensive build and manages to put out the following numbers:
S/L/E/N def - 45%
F/C def - 30% (pretty rarely encountered and I've never had an issue)
S/L res - 90% capped
E/N/F/C res - 35%
Regen - 208% (no real need to chase more due to the opportunity cost)
Total recovery 3.52%
Total endurance 113%
I do have a couple of purple sets, more as a gee wiz than anything else but they don't contribute materially to durability.