Dechs Kaison

I saw "and then there's the resistance sets" and got all indignant. Sorry I misinterpreted.

Well, let's go back to SOs then, where by Arcanaville's calculations (granted, they're from i7 and for scrappers), Dark Armor seems to outperform everything but regen all the time, and sometimes regen. This is without a way to factor in Oppressive Gloom. I'm paraphrasing a great deal here, so I encourage you to read the thread.

I don't have mids here at work, so I can only give general advice now.

The one IO I really encourage is Theft of Essence Proc. It's worth whatever you have to do to get a hold of one. I'm talking the "emo catgirl selling herself in Pocket D" kind of whatever.

Cloak of Darkness is optional early on, for sure. You can get the same immobilization protection from combat jumping. It's much more endurance efficient than Weave, though, and putting the two together will give you about 16% in defense to everything. Add combat jumping for another 2.5% and you're doing very well for a resistance based set. With the cheap steadfast +3% defense IO on top, you're in the range of defense doing tremendous things for you.

The stealth has never really been a problem for me. It doesn't make you invisible, so once you're close you'll still be seen, especially when you start going all Zeus lightning from your hindquarters.

Speaking of elec melee, it's a combo I wish I had done for my tank sometimes. The knockdown and stuns to stack with OG would have been awesome for survivability leveling up. Once I hit the softcap, this became much less of an issue, though.

I really recommend Oppressive Gloom, doubly so because of your choice of elec melee. I respec'd out of it to be able to hit the softcap, and never really missed it. When fitness being inherent I got it back and I can definitely say it was a worthwhile addition. All those nasty debuffing minions (gorram longbow) are no longer a problem. Ever. The alternative, Cloak of Fear chews up too many slots and too much endurance to be useful to most people.

Definitely get Cloak of Darkness before you get Weave. It has the same amount of defense for less endurance. I don't know whether E/N or S/L softcap is really more important. I think if I had to choose on, I'd keep E/N. At the S/L cap with my 70% resistance to it, I hardly ever need to heal. I'm actually looking into dropping down to 40% S/L to pack a harder punch and get more recharge. The problem with that is how it doubles my weakness do defense debuffs.

What I'm afraid you're missing is that most of us are not saying that PBs are not playable, or that "X is better so you shouldn't play a PB."

I know a PB can be built to do pretty well. But no matter what kind of build you come up with, your results would have been far more effective put into any other AT. The comparisons we're making are only with the intention of seeing Peacebringers buffed.

You can say that a PB is a "jack of all trades," but the truth is that every other AT is already a "master of all trades."

I don't know. I think giving stalkers an endurance power is simply unnecessary. They have fewer AoEs, which are the endurance intensive powers, and they don't lend themselves well to large sustained fights. A stalker's job is to kill things quickly. Much like a blaster, health will usually run out before endurance.

I am shocked that you not once mentioned Dark Armor, which can easily surpass the survivability of even your invuln tankers in many situations, S/L damage included.

Resistance tanks pretty much follow the exact same guide lines that defense tanks do: "Add as much defense as you can, until you hit 45%"

The cool thing, though, is that resistance sets become ridiculously tough when defense is layered on top. Just for an example, check out my Dark Armor Sucks video, or the Elec Armor thread that's in the tanker forum near the top right now.

My bad. It's 2.44 times more damage. Hyperbole spotted. Honestly I think it should do at least five times the damage. The PB's blast powers are just too damn anemic.

And yes, having over twice the base damage makes up for having no status effect. I'd imagine doing 26.7 damage (17.8 x 1.5) would be what the power would be reduced to to add the Mag 2 stun. Would you be willing to take away that damage from a PB to give it a stun in its Proton Scatter?

I think I would.

But really, congratulations. You've highlighted yet another reason why PBs are inferior to their cousins, the WS. Warshades have two powers with guaranteed AoE stuns (granted, one is a toggle), and a third AoE power that has a 50% chance to stun and does a ton of damage (granted, that one requires a corpse). The PB has no such capability.

Give my guide a read through, and have a respec ready.

I promise it'll make a difference.

If you want to get picky, there's all the EAT sets and any Mastermind primary.

But... what sense does it make that the only people who can use illusions are controllers? Why is it that only tanks can defend themselves with ice? Why can't I make a poison corruptor or defender? It just doesn't make sense.

Because the Peacebringer version does about ten times the damage.

My mastermind doublestacks his proctrops. I'd love to have even more, but the issue is the devs have a thing against duplicate powers. I can't really blame them.

You mean like the heal, the mez protection, or the Tier 9?

Except hibernate doesn't remove taunt. A good Ice tanker is still getting attacked, despite hibernate.

A ninjitsu tank (with smoke flash) would quite literally be an anti-tank.

These are clever ways of saying you would like your PB to be on par with the other ATs, and that's OK to say.

Peacebringers are not unplayable or a wasted slot on a team by any means, but they've been punished too hard for their versatility. As things progress into the end game, that versatility ceases to be unique.

*Herds up room, smokeflash, teamwipe.*

"U n00bs suk!"

Tweaks? No real tweaks needed, except maybe to turn hide into a Cloak of Darkness clone, then move it up a few levels and the other stuff down.

Hey, I'd like to see how tired you get after pulling that many bullets out of your... whatever.

Argh, I rushed through this, but I'd like to expand a bit.

Dark Regeneration heals almost one third of your health bar. With any kind of heal slotting, three enemies hit is going heal more hitpoints than you have. This means that, once you're in a crowd, Dark Regeneration is only limited by how fast it recharges and how much health you have missing when you use it. To that end, accolades and +HP really help you out.

Dark Regen takes 1.17 seconds to animate, and grants your health 0.25 seconds after that. To get the most out of it, you should be activating the power two seconds before you die. Few people are going to be able to pull this off consistently. Hell, I know I can't. The longer you can wait, though, the better off you will be.

To know how long you have before you die, you need to know how fast your health is dropping. This is why you shouldn't even think about using Dark Regen before your health hits 50%. Without watching your health fall, you can't get an idea how long it's going to take before the last hit kills you.

The best part is that you can be a bit more risky as long as Soul Transfer is ready.

One of the most important things I can tell you is "Don't use the heal unless you're well under 50% health." Too many people panic as soon as the health bar stops being that vibrant green and may actually waste the heal. It's even more important for users of Dark Melee, who get a pretty regular heal in the attack chain.

Until your health hits 50%, you can't judge how fast you're losing it. A good Dark Regeneration happens at 25% health. I know I've managed to time it at 10% pretty regularly while I was leveling up, but that was on a tank. There's a little more room for error.

Damn technicalities. Very true though, I can IO out a PB and play it well enough to survive a lot more than "some" tankers. Put that same budget/effort into a tank, though, and I guarantee that the tank will survive more. I'm not saying a PB should be able to survive as well as a tanker, of course.

I'd blame this more on the fact that the tanker taunted everything. Once he was down, the aggro became shared on the whole group.