Maelwys

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I'm in a mission at the moment full of enemies that do nothing but energy damage, been a few of those recently.
Had others with only neg-energy damage.

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Are those the Preatorian robots? I seem to remember that during the preatorian arc you get a few missions full of Neuron's robots and they tend to prefer to use their ranged energy blasts. They can still brawl when close up, they just do it very seldom.

Have had some time to think about it now, and "Spirits" are the only ones I can come up with that don't do either smashing or lethal damage... not sure if they can even brawl (never seen them do it). The CoT ghosts can Shadow Punch but the human spirits can't iirc.

Think it's safe to say that the vast, vast majority of the game features some Smashing/Lethal damage though... it's by far the most widely used damage type in PvE and is why there's so many INV tanks/brutes/scrappers kicking about.

And yeah, the Psi CW king is Fun! Have had the pleasure of tanking him on both my INV/SS and my PB dwarfie. Dwarfie actually had an easier time despite not having access to the Wedding Band temp power...

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My knowledge of interrupts come from trip mines and timebomb go into a pvp match with me and i explain to you about the chance of being interrupted and uninterrupted that has nothing to do with the calculation within aid self.

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If your knowledge of interrupts is solely base on trip mine then why are you commenting on Aid Self?

I've used the medicine pool on two of my level 50 toons and the interrupt chance works exactly as I have described several times in this thread already. I'm not going to rehash it again here since you claim you have read it and "know it all already".

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The way tanks often tank do little to help defenders, a tanker should provide the most easiest set up for a defender and many dont.

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???

I was under the impression that Tankers are not a buff class.
They shouldn't have to do anything for defenders other than protect them from aggro.

Why on Earth would a tank want to gimp themselves just to make defenders feel more useful when they throw them a buff? It defies all logic. A buff will still work on a sturdier tank unless they're already at the cap... You don't see Kinetics whinging at Blasters to drop Aim/BuildUp "because it makes Fulcrum Shift more effective".

Probably not Hammer, and that's sad for a PvE tanker who claims to know what's best for their team.

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Firetanks get res to toxic from healing flames (its not as good), they have more health points and part of their toughness lies in their offensiveness (-fight duration, which is mitigation, if its down its down). They are conceptually meant to drop and rise again and make up more xp/time to balance the debt.


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Ah. That's your problem right there.

I was worried that you'd gone off the deep end when in fact you believe that tanks are meant to die.
That would certainly explain most of what you've said in this thread and the neighbouring "Aid Self" one.

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The large bulk of the player base has this attitude “if i cant do it, no one can!” which is balls. What people dont say before making such remarks is “how?”. For me those kind of people dont deserve to know. Your one of them people.

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Unless I'm missing something... "How? If I can't do it, no one can!" doesn't make sense.

Good Tanker = Survivability + Aggro Management.
You claim to know this, yet also claim that others should take care of the "survivability" part for you.

I fail to see any logic in that.

Max out your survivability, ramp up your aggro control and then take any buffs as icing on the cake. When a defender doesn't need to spend all their time buffing and healing your squishy behind, they can spend time increasing the damage output of the team instead.

I can't claim authorship for that one but it's certainly been very useful!

Was playing my new scrapper yesterday evening and we got a cyst... The team must have included a kheldian earlier in the night. It spawned right at the back of one of the small side rooms in an indoor office map.

We just saw the Freakshow standing in the doorway, all view to the rest of the room was blocked. I had typed "Cyst!!!" in team chat as soon as I looked towards the doorway and pressed my target macro, but noone else realised it was there until it started spawning hordes upon hordes of unbound nicti...

"CYST dammit!!!!! - Fine then, I'll tank it."

Turns out that Spines/DA is very easy to solo a Cyst with.
Yay for double-damage auras, AoE heal and negative energy resistance!

Our tanker who hadn't noticed it was one-shotted by the BOOM.
I didn't stop laughing for 10 minutes...

I usually found myself tanking even WITH a competent tanker...

Properly-built tankers are more survivable than a PB dwarfie, but most Fire tankers (the ones without "tough") and some Ice/Inv tankers will have poorer survivability. Of course if a tanker can just hold aggro then you should be able to mezzle or kill the mobs before they get too badly hurt.

I met very, very few tankers that could spot a cyst/void/quantum before I did though.
But it's not all bad: once you hit 38 you can "tankmage" in light form and really show up your teammates!

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it is also fun to turn on Granite when above a group and canonball them

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Ah yes.... My Dwarfie used to play a game similar to that.

Energy Flight above a group, toggle on Dwarf Form and FootStomp as soon as I hit the ground.
It's fantastic fun, and often had teammates in stiches laughing.... "Dwarfie Bomb!!"

(Then afterwards dancing about like a headless chicken trying to keep aggro... Usually worked...)

Wow. Surely ten different quotes in one post is a new record in unreadability?

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Yes but who in their right mind would sit there and keep spamming it without looking for ticks?

The power has to come back up. i tested it this morning, well i wasnt a spammer of it admittedly but everytime i felt a moment was right i went for it (which is something to try and look for).


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You can successfully use Aid Self in between the ticks of one DOT without using any interrupt enhancements.

When you're interrupted you do NOT need to wait for it to come back up before you use it again. You can literally hammer on a key several times a second and keep using "aid self" (and burning endurance) until it activates. When under heavy fire, in the vast majority of cases it will only need a maximum of two or three activations in quick succession to successfully trigger the heal.

Your other quotes and comments directed at me have either been answered already or are irrelevant to the thread, so I won't attempt to answer them directly (judging from past experiences this might result in a counterpost so long that it causes the server to crash).

I will instead say this:

If you get your mitigation from the team and a certain defender isn't available, how do you plan on tanking?
Will there **always** be a support AT to save you, or would you be better off increasing your survivability?

This is what you have to weigh up. Are you responsible for your own aggro and survivability or do you want to always have to sponge off others, even when those others might not have much to give you?

This topic is about Aid Self. When taken on a defence-based tank, Aid Self will greatly increase self-reliance.
I think that the fact that so many tankers take it speaks for itself... team buffs are often unreliable.

There's a few great teleport binds floating about, I've not taken Hover on either of my TP-self characters and they're worked out OK.

Does Hover work when you're in Granite Armor or Rooted? Can't say I've tried it.

The bind I use is a slightly tweaked variant of the one here

Basically when you hold down a defined key it zooms the camera right out (think mine's at 100-150 feet), brings up the teleport destination cursor and reduces the game's draw distance. The upshot is that you can hold down a button, left-click somewhere and teleport with minimal lag.

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some missions are missing smash and lethal altogether.

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Name one.

The only one I can even think of is the Psychic Clockwork mission from level 45-50, and even there the mobs can come into melee range and brawl the living daylights out of you.

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Firetanks are tougher than warshades and pbs, i tanked lusca with both tyvm.

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Cowpoo. Fire tanks are NOT tougher than Kheldian Dwarfs without taking tough.

Having played both I can attest to that: Both Dwarf forms get 59% mitigation to everything but Psi before you even factor in PB Essence Boost or WS Eclipse. Firetanks without tough sit on around 47% and have no toxic or psi resistance, they simply do not have that mitigation (though their aggro control is better when using Guantlet). Both have comparable self heals with Fire's now being up very slightly sooner than a PB Dwarf's due to the recent patch.

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I get mitigation from the team, teams support eachother, damage mitigation often cant be helped.

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Damage mitigation can only "not be helped" if you gimp your build by not taking pains to increase your own survivability. If you constantly rely on team buffs to survive you are being detrimental to team performance and will struggle when those buffs are not available.

If you get your mitigation from the team and a sonic defender isn't available, how do you plan on absorbing those alpha strikes? You take your armor and run it, then use self-heals after taking a beating to get your green bar looking healthy again.

What happens if you try to take on a spawn that's too big for you to handle the alpha from as a Fire tanker?
Will there always be a controller to save your not-so-thick hide, or would you be better off running Tough for 25% more resistance and taking nearly half the damage you'd otherwise take?

This is what you have to weigh up. Are you responsible for your own aggro and survivability or do you want to always have to sponge off others, even when those others might not have much to give you?

For a scrapper you're looking at +17.7% for "tough" when 3-slotted with +3 SOs. (11.25% unslotted)
On a /regen, resilience is 8.84% 3-slotted, 5.62% unslotted and 6.91% with just the default slot used.

Can therefore get a maximum of about 26.5% S/L resists on a /regen.

It's an old debate not to be rehashed here, but I disagree with Cog on the "single target = bad for teams" idea.

I wouldn't worry too much about underperforming, especially considering that you have a fire blaster in your group already and the fact that a Regen with Quick recovery can operate at "full damage output" constantly without ever looking at their blue bar.

Just make sure to concentrate your fire on the Bosses and LTs and leave the minions to the Blaster AOEs... the mobs should all fall quickly enough. And you'll be having a barrel of fun, which is the main thing!!

Yeah. I've not heard many teams above level 30ish say "We need an empath" unless fighting Psionic mobs.
It's still all-too-common in the Hollows though!

The other thing to take into account is the stretch of AVs in the 40s... my /regen felt very squishy when in melee range of them (he managed but it was tricky) but I'd bet a SR could survive with minimal support.

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The same concepts apply to an empath defender vs a forcefield/sonic defender.

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Agree completely. It's why many such defenders will take pains to increase their capacities for both flat and proportional (or "situational") damage mitigation.

Just as a /Regen will greatly benefit from taking Parry/DA and a /SR will benefit from taking "Aid Self", a Forcefielder or Sonic can take the Medicine Pool and an Empath can heavily slot up Fortitude for +defense.

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If you're interrupted, you can use the power again immidiately. So if you're under fire, spamming an interruptable power can drain your whole END bar in a second. Endurance slotting in aid self is thus very useful.

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Quoted for truth just in case Shannon misses it or accuses me of more pointless waffling.
Emphasis mine, and thankyou MaX.

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Maelwys i know about everything you are waffling on about repeating yourself. Making an argument out of nothing.

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How hard is that for you to understand that that is all i have said.

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Name calling is not likely to make me believe that you have comprehended the facts.

The BASE interrupt time on Aid Self is one second. This is not activation. This refers to a time window DURING the activation time- within which if you get affected by an enemy then the power will fail to work.

If you slot interrupt reductions into Aid Self, you will decrease the aforementioned time window. Therefore if you are recieving a constant stream of damage you will likely be able to use the power successfully more often.

The original poster wondered "I`m guessing this makes it possible to resist interrupts" which it doesn't. It doesn't allow you to "resist" interrupts at all. Your posts appear to suggest the contrary (you even stated that you were confused) and I attempted to clarify the issue.

The point is that in this instance, on an INV tanker it makes very, very little sense to attempt to reduce the interrupt time. You will almost never encounter a situation where it will make any difference to you because of Invincibility's defense buff.

INV already has endurance issues and you will certainly encounter endurance problems if you find yourself having to use the power regularly. Therefore End Reduction slotting is a good idea.

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If something is barely worth having then rely on other things.


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Why rely on it? Because it's a tool that increases your survivability.

Survivability is what a tanker is all about. When played as the typical team role you are an aggro-magnet and every power that helps to keeps you alive and control aggro is worth taking.

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Nope dont go to that extreme. How else will you deal with alphas?

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This is the very point I'm making.
Your survivability suffers when you don't take pains to keep yourself alive.

If you need to rely on always having your precious buffers to do your job, then your tank is a BAD TANK.
That's not to say you won't have fun, but you won't perform anywhere near as well as a sturdy aggro-magnet.

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SR doesnt scale per mob it scales per critter so the more crits in mobs the higher chance you have to get hit, even thou each crit has the same chance to hit you the more in mob the more you will be hit.

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I'm not sure what you're saying here...
To my knowledge, SR is a straight defence% increase to Melee, Ranged and AOE.

That essentially means that for every attack aimed at you, you have a good chance of dodging it. Factoring in the scaling damage resistance from the passives, you can also get up to 60% damage resistance to everything when at low HP.

Consider a Boss, hitting you for 500 damage with every attack. Now consider 5 minions, each hitting you for 100 damage with every attack. Same damage mitigation, except that a boss will have a slightly better chance to hit you due to a "rank accuracy bonus".

ON AVERAGE OVER TIME you will take identical damage, but in practice the Boss could concievably not hit you until you kill him, whereas the minions will probably be steadily hitting you at a much lower rate. Attacks also play a major factor, since you can keep a single boss knocked down/mezzed more easily than 5 minions.

There's a "Sustained Damage Comparison" tool knocking about that compares toons in different scenarios.

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Afaik you don't lose endurance if youre interrupted.


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You did last time I tried it on Red Noise (last Defiant Hamidon Raid).

IIRC it takes endurance as soon as you start the animation, not when the heal hits or you get interrupted.
I certainly remember mashing it in CoT maps and being stripped of endurance very quickly.

True. Tanks don't "need" the fighting pool.
But a scrapper doesn't "need" attacks. And an empath doesn't "need" heals.

There's a difference between needing and not being able to routinely perform your team role adequately. As Sin says, I don't think a fire tanker could reliably tank for a large team without taking tough... they would certainly need considerably more support from other toons to do so.

Now certainly INV, Ice and Stone can tank in groups without the fighting pool, but they'll usually get more damage mitigation with the pool than without it (only exception: Stoner in Granite with Stone Skin doesn't get a benefit from Tough, only Weave). It's a tanker's traditional job in a team to be an aggro sponge and therefore more damage mitigation is a Good Thing (tm).

Even WITH the fighting pool, I wouldn't like to see anything but Granite (or maybe a well-built INV) tanking the likes of Lusca without **major** support. That's the whole point of GMs.

If you examine the Stone set, you'll find that when out of Granite armor it has got mediocre defenses. The point of taking the fighting pool on a Stoner would be to increase their defences when out of Granite, and be available for those rare occasions when you need more mitigation than Granite alone can offer.

I disagree, SR will have the same chance to get hit regardless of how many mobs are attacking it.

Though it will probably be getting hit faster and more often with more mobs, the same percentage of overall hits will get through. Regen simply works better against higher accuracy critters, or those with lower spike damage.

Perhaps the reason why you're seeing your kat/regen do better than your kat/sr is due to katana's +def in Divine Avalanche, not your secondary?

(High Defense + Regen) > (High Defence + SR)
Take "Aid self" on your SR and watch your survivability skyrocket.

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The shorter the interrupt time the less of a window of opportunity there is for an attack to interrupt.


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This is Semantics.

Interrupt reduction slotting does not work like resistance by reducing the likelyhood of your being interrupted when you get hit. It is not a "-XX% chance to be interrupted"- it is a "shorten the time window during which you will be interrupted if hit".

If you're getting hit very rapidly (example: recieving more than one "damage over time" effects) there is virtually nothing you can do to prevent being interrupted and you'll waste more endurance trying.

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You have people in the team that are there to support you, how about concentrating on supporting them and let them support you?


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What relevance does this have to slotting Aid Self? A defender won't care if you have it slotted for interrupts or endurance reduction. Usually they can increase your defence or endurance, or even throw you a heal...

It also assumes that you're teamed and have support toons in the team.

Taken to the extreme it could mean that no tank should need anything other than aggro-grabbing powers, because the "support toons" will keep them alive.

If an attack hits you within the interrupt period, no matter how long or how short that period is, it'll still interrupt you.

Aid Self has about 1 second of interrupt time. The only time you should have major problems getting it to fire between enemy attacks is if you're surrounded and taking a severe beating. INV get invincibility, which improves defense when surrounded therefore getting hit before you can fire Aid Self off becomes much less of an issue.

The idea with EndReds is that every time you hit Aid Self, you lose end. Whether or not it gets interrupted. If you find yourself in a "oh [censored]" situation then you can hammer Aid Self until it activates successfully whilst taking enemy hits, but doing this costs a lot of endurance.

INV/ doesn't get endurance recovery powers such as consume (fire) or energy absorbtion (ice), and it doesn't get end drain resistance (stone). All its defences are toggle based and it has no -recharge to stop it from attacking flat out (stone). Therefore it tends to have high endurance usage.

Stone Skin is the only Armor that'll stack with Granite. It's the auto-power (not a toggle) and combined they'll Cap S/L at 90% easily, the rest are about 78/79% resistance.

Might be worth considering taking Tough And Weave instead though, both work in and out of Granite, you should have a few spare power slots and it's somewhat useful to have that extra defence when you need to tank Psi mobs. I imagine that only the toughest AV/GMs would require you to run Tough/Weave when in Granite.

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Tough and weave arent as high as you may think. They are listed as endurance per tick on herobuilder and not endurance per second. In endurance per second terms both use .16 of an end point, 16/1000ths of your end bar.

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Incorrect. They're listed in Sherk's Hero Builder as endurance per second. Each tick costs 0.1625 Endurance and happens every 0.5 seconds... so that's 0.325 Endurance per second, each.

Running both Tough and Weave unslotted will nearly take all of the bonus endurace that a 3-slotted stamina grants you. I'd certainly slot two endreds in both of them, beyond that you'd get more return from slotting your INV powers with one or two endreds.

Temp Invunerability and Unyielding Cost slightly more endurance than Invincibility, so it might be worth moving the spare endreds from Tough and Weave into them.

I agree with Shannon that the Defense from Combat Jumping is very slight, Would only stick slots into that if you've nowhere else to put them. A Defbuff in the default slot works fine.

Only other thing I can see there is that Kick is usually a worse choice than Boxing for the fighting pool prerequisate. Boxing occasionally does Disorient, which you can stack Stone powers with. And Kick does Knockback, which is BAD for Invincibility's buffs.

All interrupt reduction does is shorten the window of activation time during which you can be interrupted. It doesn't actually reduce the activation time, recharge time or make an attack less likely to interrupt you if it hits.

On an INV you shouldn't need interrupt reduction due to Invincibility giving you high defence when you're herding... and if you're fighting an enemy one-on-one it's very easy to time Aid Self so it doesn't get interrupted anyway.

Endurance usage is fairly heavy on INV primary... I'd plump for one or two endreds over interrupt reductions unless you find yourself actually having difficulty timing it right (or fighting very high accuracy enemies!).

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Also Couldnt help but notice Xanthus lieing on the floor for a long time after the raid what happened there?


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I believe that was a case of "One HO too many".

The PPD cops neglected to file Drunk + Disorderly charges, possibly because they were laughing too hard...