Katie V

The market is down to prevent you from losing anything while they fix a major bug with enhancement/inspiration purchases.

I suspect that temporary powers are part of Pool A. The reason we're seeing so many of them is that many of the new recipes are in the "common" and "uncommon" classes, where the old temporary powers were in the "rare" class.

You're massively overbuilt for defense. With two defense IOs, the protector bots will give you about 11% defense to all. At the same time, your pets are underbuilt for defense, at less than 30%. I'd try to work Maneuvers from the Leadership pool in somewhere, and place the Edict of the Master and Sovereign Right uniques in one of your pet summons.

Unless you want Mace Mastery for thematic reasons, I'd drop it for one of the Patron Pools with a resistance shield (resistance is applied before bodyguard mode, so the effects are magnified). Mu Mastery has an anti-knockback AoE immobilize, so it's popular among bots masterminds.

Is it still slow at 32? My bots/traps is currently tearing through x5 Arachnos spawns fast enough that I rarely put down a second set of traps for a given group, and Triage Beacon is usually up for one group in three.

Your experience would explain the behavior of one bots/FF mastermind I teamed with: he never figured out his bot controls, and would grab aggro by brushing enemies with Force Bubble. Fine when you're alone, not so good when you're shoving them away from the tank and scrappers.

There's nothing inherently wrong with stone/elec. How about posting your build so far, so people can make suggestions?

Teleport is over-rated for stone tanks. Maps generally have plenty of ramps and notches to let non-jumpers get around. Yes, you'll need to take the long route at times, but I've never encountered a map where jumping was the only option.

Speed is only a problem if you want it to be. My stone tank currently has a top speed of 15 mph in Granite form (faster than unenhanced run); once I finish slotting, it'll be 22 mph (on a par with Swift or Sprint). Rooted Granite is still slow, but any situation where I need to have Rooted on is not a situation where I'm likely to be moving much.

To keep people from reading, of course.

As I recall, stealth is divided into four groups:

1) Stealth powers (cloaking device)
2) Somebody else's stealth powers (steamy mist)
3) Stealth as a side-effect (super speed)
4) Stealth IOs.

Stealth from any one group will stack with stealth from the other groups.

My observations, separate from the current discussion:

1) You're nicely over the softcap for defense, and you've got decently high resistances. You'll be able to stand up to any non-psi situations a team is likely to encounter.

2) You're in a bad spot for psi defenses. You don't have enough protection to survive psi-heavy fighting, but you've put so much effort towards it that your other abilities are suffering. I'd redesign the build for non-perma-Granite, but the hefty self-heal in Siphon Life may let you out-heal the damage instead. I'm not familiar enough with Dark Melee to know if this is practical.

3) You're slow. 12 mph is decent for a non-rooted tank, but it's not very team-friendly. 14 mph is unenhanced run; single-slotted Swift is 21 mph while single-slotted Sprint is 24. Teleport can work for tactical maneuvering during a battle (and is pretty well essential since you can't jump), but battles are generally too close together to toggle in and out of Granite, but not positioned so you can teleport between them. The easiest fix for this is to put two more slots into Swift -- that gets you up to 15 mph.

4) You'll have trouble pulling enemies off your teammates. A character's threat level is basically determined by (damage done * taunt duration * threat rating), and the character with the highest threat is the one attacked. Since your damage is so low, anyone with a taunt effect can get a higher threat level.

Most of your new loading screens are major improvements over the existing ones, but I disagree on your choice of views for the Steel Canyon one. The defining element of Steel Canyon is the skyscrapers, and you've almost completely omitted them from the loading screen.

I leave Pandora running in the background while I play. Sometimes the resulting music is highly appropriate (the Imperial March playing when the team encounters the Reichsman), and sometimes it's highly inappropriate (the Super Mario Brothers 2 music playing while fighting Romulus).

First observation: That's a slow build. You can get another 2mph just by sticking a run IO in Swift; you can get up to unenhanced run speeds by putting a second slot into Swift. I put a third slot into Swift on my build, but that's because one of my build goals was decent movement even with Rooted running.

Second observation: You don't have much global recharge. Most of the time, your collection of attack powers means this won't be a problem, but occasionally you'll need Taunt up faster. You can replace one of the IOs in Granite with a LotG 7.5%, but you don't have any other power that takes defense sets. Another possibility is to move one of the Ragnarok IOs from Fireball to Breath of Fire for the 10% recharge it'll give you and replace the other with something cheap.

Third observation: You're not softcapped without outside assistance. Most of the time, you won't notice the difference between 32% and 45%, but there will be times (such as if the fight at the control computer on the ITF goes wrong) where that last 13% is huge.

Fourth observation: You don't have psionic defenses worth mentioning. Most of the time, this won't matter, but certain enemies (Arachnos, some Rikti and Council) will shred you. There's nothing a perma-Granite tank can do about this, so it's simply something to keep in mind.

Final observation: That's a bloody expensive build. A full set of Ragnarok will run you a billion inf or so; a full set of Gladiator's Strike will run about 1.3 billion. I hope you've got the cash, because you can't get either set with merits.

Got a link to that information?