Estarriol_EU

To the original poster - take, slot and use Fortitude religiously, and you'll have much more time for blasting. It's arguably the best power in the set, buffs and debuffs are godlike in this game.

Also, don't hang out with teams that only play on invincible. Sadly, such teams are massively attracted to Empaths.

/hide is your friend.

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Earth
* Salt Crystals, AoE sleep.
* Stone Prison. Single target Immobolise.
* Fossilize, a hold. Nice.
* Stalagmites, AoE damage, small chance of disorient.

I can't see the attraction of Earth apart from theme.

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I have now tried all tanker epics for at least a month apiece on John Wednesday, and I settled on Earth even though it seemed counter-theme at first. Here's why (and I hope I'm not letting too many cats out of the bag):-

- Mass Sleep is really, really useful, and I speak as someone with lots of damage AoEs that break it. Sleep is a strong contender for "most unfairly underestimated effect" among players as a whole. I took a team of scrappers and blasters through the Mother Mayhem mission largely on the back of Salt Crystals. With good slotting and hasten, it may be possible to perma-sleep, I haven't tried yet. Even where sleep isn't necessary, it's a mass defense debuff, a very notable one.

- The immobilise is Mag 4. Nuff said?

- The hold is obviously good, and comes out fast.

- Stalagmites I'm neutral on - it's mass damage (and 2nd best mass damage after Fireball), but the stun doesn't come out much. Although, like Salt Crystals, it's a mass large defense debuff if nothing else.

- Defense debuff is a great secondary effect against many 40+ enemies.


Incidentally, Ice Storm is good for area denial/buying time for Healing Flames to recharge, although a mass slow is always good.

I have a Storm/Psy, and a /Rad for comparison. Both are in their 20s.

Without the shadow of a doubt, /Rad is the more rewarding set early on. Neutrino Bolt is an *excellent* power, the eye beams are good, Irradiate is a fantastic defbuff for the whole team, etc. The secondary effect is excellent - once you tag them, you won't miss after that. Energy damage is not often highly-resisted. It's a great set and hard to go wrong.

/Psy is a late-bloomer, and has several issues that make it harder to play well... some creatures have 90% resistance to it (the council robots mission with 2 x Storm/Psy was *long*), and it has inconsistent secondary effects that make it harder to fire-and-forget, and it has no coherent "1-2" attack (you can't just get by in single-target with the equivalent of Neutrino Bolt and X-Ray Beam).

That being said, extra range is fantastic if used well, the psionic snipe is very tasty, and having a mixture of secondary effects rewards competent play well - the mixture of recharge slow, immobilise, sleep, stun and knockback can really mess with single targets, and the recharge slow on Psychic Scream is *huge* - comboed with Snow Storm, it will floor recharge times on multiple enemies and thus massively decrease incoming damage.

You should also ask yourself whether you consider firing green "laser" beams out of your eyes to be cooler than froopy pinkish rings. Again, having played both, they both have their charm, but I know many players feel otherwise!

In essence though, it boils down to:-

Easy-to-play, fast, uncomplicated, low-maintenance set

vs

Slower, harder-to-play, complex set that rewards careful slotting and use

Fitness is a bugger to fit into low-level tanker builds.

My advice, if you're teaming 90% or more, would be to forego all attacks bar Scorch and Combustion until your 20s. Consider delaying Taunt until then also, relying on Combustion and Invincibility to hold aggro.

If you solo significantly, I'd advise leaving Taunt until later and taking Scorch, Fire Sword and Combustion for damage.

I wouldn't call 3.75% defense "pants", it's definitely noticeable and against everything including psionics. I agree that the Resistance is a higher priority for slotting though.

Yes, it's doable, my initial build for John Wednesday about 30 months ago had no powers that involved drawing a sword - it didn't seem right for him at the time. However, at that time Burn was the best damage power in the game.

It's a hard call. I don't personally rate GFS much, but FS is good and FSC is great. If you were to live without, I'd suggest dropping into a pool for another Single-Target attack, and consider Breath of Fire (I appreciate many - most of whom have never tried this power - do not like it, but it's really not bad).

I have a Grav/FF

If I were to do it again, she'd be Grav/Kin or Grav/Storm, probably the latter. Take from that what you will.

I slot my Divine Avalanche 2 Acc, 2 Defbuff, 2 Damage, which I find to be an excellent overall effect. I used to have it slotted for recharge and 3 Defbuff but the difference in defensive power is (in 99% of practical situations) negligible, whereas the 2 x Damage improves my DPS noticeably, if not to a world-beating level. If I really need more defense, I pop purples or hit Hasten.

Katana/Regen is an extremely tough combination if you take DA and all the options. I don't have MoG yet (and I will), but even without it my defensive options are layers of DA, Reconstruction, Dull Pain, Instant Healing and Hasten. Of all the characters I have, it's the one that possibly benefits most from Hasten - with Hasten on, I can pretty much chain the 3 heaviest attacks with DA between each one, and Reconstruction comes back very quickly. It's a great character to play.

They're about 6 IIRC. I'll be carefully monitoring the aggro-holding capability level-by-level and will report my findings back here.

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CE seems to be working fine on my Icetanker, of course any blaster that so much as thinks anywhere near me draws all the aggro but that just means I hit someone, or pop taunt/icicles for an extra bit of attention grabbyness.

Of course a lot of the time my taunts cannot stop something that a blaster has blastvoked.

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What level is your Ice Tanker?

There's no "of course", the mechanics of Taunt effects work in such a way that any Taunt effect completely overrides damage or other effects for the purposes of grabbing aggro for its duration. Blasters being able to override Taunt is a myth arising from a misunderstanding of the Taunt effect; even if a Blaster were to inflict 99% of the hit points of a target to them, a Taunt effect would still maintain aggro for its duration. This is eminently demonstrable through simple testing.

What I'm reporting here is that there doesn't really seem to be *any* Taunt effect of useful duration in Chilling Embrace at low levels; if there were, there's no way my Scrapper and Blaster pals I'm playing with would have any aggro ever from anything near me.

Interesting. I wonder if it's intentionally not a strong taunt effect at low levels in order to stop Ice Tanks getting murderated before they can handle the damage?

I'll investigate further, thanks guys.

I recently started 2 Ice tanks (the second to make sure it wasn't a character-specific problem) and of course took Chilling Embrace, expecting it to be the rock-solid aggro control I know it to be from teaming with many Ice tanks in the past 30 months or so.

On both of these tanks, it's only giving very weak aggro management if any at all - occasionally enemies will turn their heads towards my tanker mid-fight, but it's only for a fraction of a second and the attacks still go to my teammates; any aggro control I have appears to be merely the ability to take the alpha by jumping in first with a slow effect and gauntlet.

Is this an intended property of early-level Chilling Embrace, or is the taunt effect still broken on it? Can experienced players of Ice tanks please give recent anecdotal evidence?

If SS suits the concept, take it, it's a strong primarily-Single Target set with good damage, nice secondary effects (stun/knockdown) and a nice chain.

To round out the attack chain for low-to-mid levels you could take one of the pool attacks (AS is popular, but they're all good really), having a nice constant attack chain is key to feeling super IMO. It's easy on SS though as Jab comes out fast and recharges fast; other sets like Axe have a hard time with constant attack chains.

I applaud you for perceiving a possible group-thinning use for Gale - I have been mulling the same question about a similar use for Dimension Shift/Black Hole for a couple of years. ;-)

IMO, decide how you will best benefit from it in your overall game and slot it accordingly - some accuracy or lots of accuracy. Then, when you get a game-changing power like Hurricane, re-evaluate. This flexibility and ongoing change is one of the things that makes this game great.

On my level 22 Storm Defender, I used Gale a lot until I got Hurricane, and now still use it a lot - just in a different way - it now supports my hurricane in much the way Lady L suggests above. Hurricane's Repel has been toned down, and Gale is just the tool to give it a helping hand.

Gale is much-maligned, but I think that's just because people don't use it very carefully on average. It's a good power.

There's a chance - slim but real - that I'll be there with my level 22 Invulnerability Tank, Captain Malta.

No promises at this stage!

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Calling the Wolf, well ive never been a fan of a scrapper with taunt powers so I defo wont be taking this. Its just a personal pref but I can see its uses in arena matchs to keep agro off your partner etc....

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I took Calling the Wolf for concept recently on my Kat/Regen... and I have to say that I've been absolutely loving it. The animation is just amazing, and it comes out very quickly, and unlike the tanker taunts recharges very quickly too. Primarily I'm using it to add to team aggro control (as a Katana/Regen with DA, DP and IH I can really take a beating and keep going), but it's also superb for single-target pulling... seems to pull very cleanly, although admittedly I'm very practiced in pulls. It's just nice to have something free and effective that I can do at range.

Just thought I'd chime in with that... like many of the less popular powers, scrapper taunts are more useful than they may at first appear.

Sounds like I'll be there.

No need for a travel power at all. You'll find yourself using IR primarily if you go that way, simply because it doesn't need an attack.

It's an awesome power, integral to the effectiveness of the set.

In terms of buying time to use Aid Self on a Tank, in addition to the above noted strategies, I've found the following powers or strategies will buy you enough time in a fairly reliable fashion:-

- For Fire Tankers, the fear effect on Burn is perfect for small-to-medium sized groups.

- Epic pool powers that cause Fear (e.g. Ice Storm) or mass mez (e.g. Salt Crystals - a much-underrated power for a tanker).

And, of course, the old reliable of running around a corner.

I'm only an occasional PvPer, but I can tell you that Energy Melee is generally considered to be the PvP melee set for Tankers - it has a lot of high-damage single-target attacks with a great secondary effect (stun), and is of a damage type that is not so easily resisted.

Although Fire damage is hard to resist, Fire Melee has no useful PvP secondary effect, and lacks major punch in its single-target attacks. IMO it's a great PvE set, but not what you want for serious PvP.

Super Strength seems to be reasonable for PvP too - Rage and KO blow are both very good, but it's all smashing damage which is very commonly resisted.

I can't really say too much about armours, except that I don't rate Fiery Aura for PvP (not enough overall defensive capacity for PvP, nor anything much else to really sell it, other than effectively stacked build up), nor really Invulnerability (not the best defensive set, and Invincibility relies on having multiple enemies very close, which simply doesn't happen in PvP).

Stone has a good rep in PvP in that it's very challenging to kill a Granite-Formed tanker (usually requiring good debuffs and multiple attackers); however Granite does lower offensive capability.

I hope that medley of comments helps you somewhat.

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Here we go again
What is it with all this anti Empathy stuff??
Every couple of months this seems to happen.
Threads like this just make me wish I still had Kah-Ra Kaah....Still there is always the mini version of her I could dust off.
Empaths.. We are here to patch up others mistakes

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Of all the bad defenders I've teamed with, by far the majority have been Empaths. Most non-Empath defenders I've teamed with have been competent and useful. Although I've had the pleasure to know some excellent Empaths, and am not bashing them generally, I tend to be very wary about them for this reason.

It takes a certain maturity in a player to understand non-Empathy defenders (who are largely based on buffs and debuffs); for this reason many newer players look down on non-Empaths (or should I say "non-healers" ), and that doesn't help their reputation with experienced players either.

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For a start, unless you want to solo, (in which case why did you want to be an empath?) why do you want to spend the time and endurance firing off your pitiful attacks when you should be focusing on being a buff/heal-bot

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Well, at least a couple of the attack powers in each set *are* useful if your goal is keeping your team alive. Dark is a perfect example - Tenebrous Tentacles, Night Fall and Dark Pit are all AoEs that, even with medium-slotting, will significantly reduce the damage your team is taking. Of course, you have to use them with some care so as not to draw too much aggro, but that's what skill is about, eh?

Wow. Another good reason to play an AR corruptor!

I have a level 26 Empath who has all her primaries, many useful support powers from pools and no attacks. She has never inflicted damage or a debuff or mez effect, and that's even though I started her back in the days before you could skip the tutorial. That is a 100% pure empath.

Pretty much nobody ever dies when teaming with her, unless suicidal. It helps that I watch the battle and start casting heals before the damage hits, of course, but still, in pure stat terms she's an amazing buffbot with heals too.

Nonetheless, I don't consider that to be the most effective way she could be built for her level. Tenebrous Tentacles & Night Fall with some ToHit Debuffs and a well-slotted Dark Pit would go a long way to mitigating incoming damage. I consider her to be a concept character (proving that one is able to get to 50 and contribute fully to a team without ever having inflicted damage), one of my characters that I have somewhat gimped for the sake of roleplay.

Thankfully the way we play this game is our choice. I am glad that I have these options and that there is more than one way to slice an orange.