Dechs Kaison

All tanker Abandoned Sewer Trial. Everything is at +2, we were the lowest damage dealing AT, stuck as level 40 characters, and the trial is timed.

It was cake.

I could swear it told me 20.

Or was that hero merit purchases?

To make an obnoxiously stupid nitpick, it's once every twenty hours.

EDIT: I'm wrong, it's 18.

For what it's worth, my standard practice is to pop Eye of the Magus mid leap towards Lord Angstypants. If it's not an Mo, I usually taunt first, and have it queued up. I drag him over to the green tower so I have a heal target for Dark Regeneration.

I ask the team to focus on blue tower first, since I actually have more mitigation from defense than I do from resistance. Once Eye of the Magus wears off, I pop one huge purple and orange until blue tower goes down, then keep a huge orange active until red tower is gone too. If it's not an Mo, I usually don't use the oranges.

If anything can work, then I'm pretty sure that means everything is in fact balanced.

Even if you're a super-squishy blaster, you have ways to deal with aggro. Knock them down, stun them, hold them, kill them.

You don't need heals if you don't get hit or the hits don't hurt. Buffs and debuffs in this game really are that powerful.

It just is. I've been on all tanker teams that just steamroll content, even difficult stuff. I've done an all kheldian ITF. I know that a Master of the Statesman TF has been completed by an all blaster team. You don't need optimal teams to accomplish stuff in this game. Maybe it's just not a difficult game, or maybe it's easy to become a superhero.

When you've got a team of nothing but buff/debuffers, you will see some incredibly awesome stuff.

The -tohit acts exactly like +defense on your character (and in fact, for your whole team), with two notable exceptions.

1) They have to be affected by it. This means your enemies need to be in range of the debuff and they need to be hit by it. Cloak of Fear has an accuracy penalty, so it takes substantial enhancement to overcome this.

2) The debuff can be resisted. This means CoF will start to lose effectiveness as enemy level increases. 20% of the debuff is resisted by a +2 enemy, 52% by a +4. AVs resist debuffs by 85% before accounting for level difference.

Trust me, DA and Fire Melee have enough mitigation. The DB knockdowns will be awesome.

A friend of mine runs a very effective DA/DB tanker. It's got a lot of AoEs, and the pretty persistent Blinding Feint buff has great synergy with DA's damage aura.

Meh, no more heavy on slots than anything else. Each resistance/defense armor only needs four slots, less if you don't care for set bonuses and just frankenslot to death. Soul Transfer and Oppressive Gloom are each perfect on just the base slot. Death Shroud and Dark Regeneration both beg for six slots, though. Cloak of Fear is slot hungry, but I really don't suggest taking that power at all.

You'll have plenty of slots to throw at your attacks. I'd say to make sure you have the Sweep and Attack Vitals combos.

Earth is great, it's what my tank uses. The sleep is a very wide range AoE for grabbing aggro, and it really helps in over the aggro cap situations. The sleep also can give you some great S/L/E/N defense bonuses in four slots. It's always nice to have a single target hold for those debuffing enemies. Quicksand is a great tool as well, both for holding aggro and keeping stunned enemies from wandering. It also has an autohit, unresistable -def effect to it.

Something weird is going on here, because I've not seen him ever summon pets before the nuke.

And I know I ask the team to put all anchor debuffs on the towers just to help them go down faster.

Hell, I wish he would summon a bane for me to heal off of every once in a while.

Do yourself a favor and forget everything you learned.

Listen to that something.

Any one where you're having fun.

All defender, corruptor, mastermind, and controller (or any sort of mix) teams are insane.

Any one where the leader says "We need X."

This.

Well, you did it. I've been convinced, and just respecced into Aid Other from repair. It caused me to move some stuff around, fiddle with a few slots, but I'm much happier with the build as a whole. I retain softcap to S/L/ranged, my bots keep their softcap to everything, and I even picked up two more +Max HP bonuses.

Ground effects won't bother me. My mastermind stopped using dated methods of travel long ago. Team Teleport is where it's at. "Surprise robot army on your toe!"

Erm... it's ... Dark Armor?

If you mean secondary, I use fire melee.

Glad to see my posts have the intended effect. Dark Armor is not that IO hungry. I spent most of my leveling time in DA on SOs. The IOs I did have, and I will admit to being "hungry" for are the Theft of Essence +endurance proc and some KB protection. Once you have those, DA is capable of amazing things.

Cloak of Darkness is a non issue. It doesn't lower your threat, and even though the stealth does not suppress, once the mob is notified of your presence, it's as if you don't have stealth at all. Gauntlet, AoEs, and even getting close enough all make that stealth effect disappear. Just to enforce the point even further: Cloak of Darkness has not once hindered my ability to gain and maintain aggro.

The control auras (my favorite being Oppressive Gloom) really shine when they allow you to deal with pesky debuffing enemy types much more easily than other tanker sets.

Just remember: If it can't kill you in 15 seconds, it can't kill you. Even if it can, if it doesn't kill you again before Soul Transfer recharges, it doesn't count and you've never lost your aggro.

Edit to add secondary synergies with DA:

KM is a personal favorite, and I wish my tanker had this set sometimes. The -damage, knockdowns, stuns to stack with OG would add heaps of survivability to my already tough tanker. On top of that, Power Siphon really boosts the damage aura thanks to the long duration of the damage buff.

Mace and Stone are about equal with each other in my mind. Stuns and knockdown abound. Dark Regeneration will cause redraw for mace.

Ice would be interesting. I always look to Ice Melee as the pinnacle of mitigation. Everything is flopping, or attacking with the ravenous pace of a turtle.

Dark Melee is (and I know I'm going against popular opinion here) wasted on a Dark tank. Dark Armor already has a great heal, making Siphon Life less needed as a heal. Granted, it's still the second best attack in the set. It's easy to overcome the endurance issues of Dark Armor and DA has end drain/recovery debuff resist, so once the endurance issues are handled, there's no purpose to having Dark Consumption. Soul Drain is an amazing damage buff, however.

DB is pretty. It also has heaps of knockdown and a lot of uptime on +damage to boost the damage aura. Dark Regeneration will cause redraw.

Empathy has nine powers. Only three heal.

Two could be represented as "heal over time," but the second is generally more useful for its recharge buff.

At most it gets a 4.5/9 for healing powers. I still wouldn't call it a healing set.

Edit: Like Master-Blade says a few posts down, I'm not saying healing or empathy is useless. Never said that. But I do maintain that anyone toting the title "healer" is useless. Even if you're an empath, I want you on my team for much more than just your heals. Please, keep my team's blasters with fortitude and AB, shoot a clear mind at them occasionally, and blast the hell out of the enemy.

How about AVs with ambushes? Say, for instance, in the Ice Mistral SF, Apex TF, Barracuda SF, LRSF, Lady Gray TF, and even STF just to name a few.

I've already demonstrated that even though all my awesome fuel is gone, my WS still contributes more to an AV fight than your PB. My Sunless Mire gives me more damage over time than your build up.

Correction: Radiation Infection is auto hit, along with plenty of other AoE debuffs (see what I did there?) that are persistent.

Listen kid, I've fought the level 54 Captain Mako, and I'll tell you that -def requiring a tohit check is completely worthless, especially when compared to tohit buffs that are so common amongst support teammates.

Just to be thorough, I've done the Master of Apex without defense debuffs on the team. Never missed them.

Unless anyone else on the team has those IOs. They don't stack at all. I'd rather have a sonic blaster in your place if that's all you have to offer.

-Recharge isn't offensive? Really? So when I'm making Honoree's godmode recharge slower, I'm not helping us do more damage?

When I'm making Reichsman fire off his deadly 100 mag stun AoE less often and keeping more people alive to do more damage, I'm not helping us do more damage?

You almost win here, except that my WS has just as many holds as your PB.

As stated, my Warshade is just as good against an AV as your PB. So we go from awesome to "as good as a PB" when we get to the AV. Thanks for the insult.

One foe is easy to tank and spank. Large numbers that exceed the aggro cap and multiple ambushes of debuffing minions, not so easy.

I've got one for you, please list the amount of time you spend fighting through the missions in all those task forces compared to the amount of time you spend fighting the AVs in those task forces. I'll wait.

Hundreds of hours of playtime later and this has yet to be a problem.

For tanking, maybe, but a PB tank is still no where near as good as a real tank. Likely, if your team needs a tank, they don't want a kheldian for that role, and they'd be right. I wouldn't want a PB or a WS to tank for my team (assuming we felt we needed a tank) because that gives us a crappy tank and hamstrings what the PB can do.

You must not have ever played a Warshade if you say something like this. Not only does Black Dwarf have one more attack than the White Dwarf, saturated mires push damage way into awesome. Against an AV, the tank isn't expected to do much damage, and anyway, the kheldian should not be the tank for the team. If it's a tankless team that just wants a beefy guy to taunt the AV, then fine. Both my warshade and your PB will perform the task equally well.

Wait, a WS dropping to eclipse is silly, but a PB dropping to heal is safe?

Excuse me, but BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Ok, Nova form has a higher damage modifier than a blaster. You even have a damage buff. The blasters attacks still all do more damage. Don't forget defiance either.

I beg to differ. A blaster can reach levels of survivability via softcap that a PB cannot reach as easily.

Survival means nothing if you can't kill what you're fighting. If a blaster survives against a larger group of enemies because he can defeat them all before they kill him, and a PB cannot, who was more survivable?

Except you're wrong here. Ok, my WS can't PvP very well, but PvP is broken anyway. When it comes to AVs though, as I have demonstrated, we're on equal ground. If one AT does 70% of the game better than another AT, 20% as good as that AT, and 5% worse, don't you see a problem?

Where was I asking for PBs to be more AoE-centric? I think they are plenty AoE capable, meaning they have the powers. I just want to see them do more damage. Right now it's downright anemic.

And get some kind of fix for Photon Seekers.

Actually it does. As soon as you said fast TFs, you need to be able to clear large spawns.

Not only that, but thanks to dual builds, you could have a psy dominator and a claws stalker, both with high defenses and awesome team buffs, all in the same character.

I use repair regularly. I've thought about speccing into aid other. It would work well to top off my bots, but the protectors already do that. Usually, when I need to heal a bot, it seems he's close to death and a little top off won't help. Repair has range, and always heals to full. Then again, repair can't be used on teammates. Then again, who gives a crap about teammates, I am my own army. Then again again, 10 second base recharge is much much better than 120. Then again again again, Aid Other is interruptable. Then again again again again, I have defense buffs coming out of my ears...


See my dilemma?

Ridiculous amounts. 126.25% before Hasten, if memory serves.

Actually, Dwarf Mire is easier to make persistent than the human version. It has an uptime of 10 seconds and takes only 20 to recharge. With ED capped recharge, the buff is up all the time. Anything after that and it starts to stack with itself.

The Human Sunless Mire has an uptime ratio of 30/120, so it requires 300% in total recharge to become permanent.

That's kind of my point. When it gets down to the AV in a team setting, my WS is doing just as much good as the PB, even without all my "necessary fuel." If a PB can solo an AV then his argument has half a leg to stand on, but it still is just a minuscule fraction of the game that a PB can do that a WS can't, where the WS is vastly superior everywhere else.

Build Up only lasts 10 seconds. To get the most of it, you should be in nova. Thanks to animation times, you only get about 5.5s of use, or around 2 attacks.

My Sunless Mire lasts 30 seconds and recharges in 30. It does damage of its own, and doesn't waste most of its duration in the form swap to nova to capitalize on it. Sure it's only 11.25% for one target, but it's always there.