Nihilii

IIRC and roughly, you need about 100% defense to get him to his minimal chance to hit (which is still 9% or so because he's +4). His attacks deal about 3000 damage each, and come with either a substantial defense debuff or end drain ; he deals smashing, lethal and energy.

Which is why I had to go with my ******** answer above, as for me tanking is "surviving and keeping aggro until the enemy is dead". Hence, tanking without support would probably imply surviving indefinitely the above, as you're not likely to kill him, and teammates killing towers, weakening his defenses definitely fall into "support".

If we're assuming a team is killing the towers (and here lies the problem ; some teams will be blazing fast at it and you won't have to handle the tough hits for more than a minute, some will suck terribly at it and you'd have to tank beefed up LR for 30 minutes - though it's likely it'll result in a wipe before that), I've found any Shield, Elec or Inv build can more or less reliably do the trick with insps. Without insps/temps/accolades, it's a crapshoot at best as you're looking at a period of time during which, unless you're a SR running Elude, you'll get hit every few seconds for 700ish damage (if res-capped) with defense debuffing on top. Keep in mind usual "gamebreakers" like Divine Avalanche or Siphon Life won't have any use before whichever tower boosts his defense to absurd levels is gone.

Given these circumstances, I'd go with Kat/SR/Body with Aid Self ; Elude during the first minutes, then popping CP and quad-stacking DA right before the crash as to keep some defense before you can toggle up. Still, with a ~9% minimum chance to hit things can go south quick, as each hit is going to put you at 1hp before the damage tower is gone. An awfully specialised build to do something other builds could do much more reliably with just a few insp.

I can't even come up with a tanker build that can tank STF Lord Recluse without support.

I usually put an attack on auto, follow a friend and take a nap. 15-minute duration is more or less my sweet spot, which is perfect timing for the respec as I'll be up by the time the final waves come in.

Glancing through the OP, both sides seemed equally rude to me, with the SG spammer starting/asking for it with his tell, and so I assumed the OP was the one who received the tell...

Reading the post further : heh.

I'm making the argument that IOed KM benefits little from +recharge because it doesn't require much recharge to reach its top attack chain. Other primaries can often enable better attack chains with additional recharge buffs.

I'll admit I didn't consider -dam stacking with -res, but again are AVs a big deal on a team ? Even in a TF skipping objectives, they don't make up most of the time spent fighting, and the few ones against which -damage (or -res ; point being, level 50 AVs just die in seconds to teams) will matter will most likely be +3 or +4, bringing down the effectiveness of -damage with the purple patch.

In example, take your level 54 LR, and say you only use the first three attacks to maximise -dam stacking. You're looking at 4 permanents stacks, or 5.63*4 = 22.52 . Now apply the purple patch, you're down to 22.52*0.48 = 10.8 . Now Recluse has 50% res to smash/energy and will resist damage debuffs, giving you a final 10.8*0.5 = 5.4% damage debuff. Even if it stacks with -res and other damage debuffs, it's so tiny it won't make a difference. Either you have tons of -res/-dam on the team and yours is a drop of the bucket, or you don't and the difference will be slim.

I don't choose primaries based on this or that, my only criteria is whatever I want to try at the moment ; but I play scrappers for killing stuff, not for utility, and as a side effect killing stuff is what brings exp/hour or faster completion, unlike a -5% damage debuff on Recluse. If my concern was bringing utility, I'd play a defender, corruptor, controller, dominator, any of which can do just that while still dishing out some damage. Thankfully KM still does top tier ST damage, looks good, is fun to play, and does just fine in teams ; still ranks firmly on the bottom spot for that purpose in my opinion though.

No. I have no issue with people genuinely believing they're helping when they're not, but if we're talking about someone purposefully using knockback to make things harder, forget it. The humor value I can find in that is close to zero and I'm not a RPer, so I wouldn't think twice before either giving the boot or going my own way with such a player on my team.

DM does more damage if you can keep SD fodder around, as well as healing you during the process and dealing a less resisted damage type.

I think KM's advantage of dealing the same, already great damage regardless if you're fighting 1 or 10 foes shouldn't be underestimated either.

So there's pros and cons to both, in my opinion. KM if you just want to jump in and whack things, DM if you want more survivability and are willing to adapt your playstyle in order to maximise your potential.

Probably going to use inherent Fitness to pick up maneuvers/assault/tactics, and so I'll get the endurance Alpha slot.

I can't think of many comic book heroes that look like Fire Armor, Ice Armor, Dark Armor, Stone Armor FX. If anything, supers using these kind of powers usually have a look that can be replicated with the costume creator ; so, the "it doesn't make sense" argument against minimal FX is pretty weak in my opinion.

I'd like for, as suggested, these godmodes to have maybe "half" the current effectiveness they have now (which would make these actually much weaker than half when dealing with, say, resistances) ; but at the same time, have the power give some kind of offensive boost to the enemy, be it tohit, damage, recharge, or all three. So instead of being super slow to kill (which ends up just being tedious), they'd be a bit harder to kill and more threatening.

I'd say it depends. I find mine more than adequate for PuGs - assuming some, if not all players, contribute a bit ; and if they don't, insps can make up for it just fine.

Granted, that's an answer that works for every powerset and for that matter, every AT, so I suppose by "how viable it is" you mean to ask "how does it compare to other tanker powersets, without building for S/L def" ; then the answer would probably be not so hot, because softcapped defense is just that good compared to something without it rather than because of any inability of elec tankers to hold up fine against most if not all content.

I see more complaining about supposed complainers than complaining about inherent Stamina.

Building for psy def/res specifically tends to yield subpar results considering the relatively small amount of enemies using psi (unless you fight these very specific foes more often than usual). Working towards the S/L/F/C/E/N softcap tends to give significant ranged/AOE defense as a side benefit - which will work against many psi attacks.

No endurance management power (do VEATs get hero epics with GR ? haven't checked yet, if so, then it would be a non-issue) ; low max HP for widows/banes, no DDR for banes/crabs.

In my opinion, KM is great as a single target set. You'll want the 3 first attacks and the final one, as well as the "build up" (Power Siphon).

The PBAoE, Burst, can be decent as it has a good chance to knockdown, but that said it's not fantastic as the animation is slow and the radius low (standard I know, but 8" isn't enough to me ). As for the KB cone, well... It's a KB cone, enough said ; and the Focus clone (Focused Burst) has a slow animation, making it not worth it in the ST chain for pure damage - although the range and guaranteed (I think ?) knockdown can make it valuable for some leveling builds.

Kinetic Melee - Burst does knockdown but doesn't take knockback enhancements or sets. On the other hand, it takes stun sets yet lacks a stun effect.

My planned attack chain for KM is T9, T3, T2, T1, T3, T2, repeat (I don't recall the names). It doesn't require too much recharge assuming Hasten and fits in a 10 second window so enough to hit the siphon cap, and using the T9 (longest animation) at that point should ensure I'll use quick attacks near the end of Power Siphon and get buffs for a longer time that way... I think.

So I hit 28 a few days ago and played a little with Burn, and... Ironically, the change is barely noticeable, for me.

Without aggro capabilities like Gauntlet or an aura such as the one WP/SD/Inv get mobs tend to run for the hills as soon as one of them dies, esp. if there's DoT damage around. The new initial hit in Burn is very likely to kill at least a minion, so they flee like before as soon as I use it.

Probably not a surprise for anyone else, but after playing the aforementioned three secondary powersets more or less exclusively for a while (precisely because I dislike seeing a whole group scatter to the four winds as soon as I look at them), I wasn't expecting that, heh.

Seems like Brutes are the big winners with the FA changes, aren't they ? FE boosting base damage looks great with Fury, Burn shouldn't make things run thanks to their mini-Gauntlet, and of course they still enjoy the 90% fire resistance. I could see Fire/SS tankers being very powerful too between Rage stacking and Bruising.

Sort of going offtopic there. My point, if I had any, is I'm wondering why aggro capabilities don't seem to be considered into balance. It certainly makes a tremendous difference in the solo AoE potential of powersets, to the point that it's often preferable to forgo sets with added damage and pick something with an aggro aura ; i.e., you're probably going to perform better on a Spines/Inv or Spines/WP than a Spines/ELA, Spines/DA or even Spines/FA, which strikes me as wrong as you also enjoy better survivability.

Even if FA was numerically equal to Shield (which isn't desirable anyway as Shield is quite a bit too much still), I believe it'd still be way behind as an offensive set due to the lack of aggro capabilities. Granted, this is mostly solo, but even on a team with aggro management powers there's a distinct benefit to being able to keep your own aggro as a scrapper - you can jump in first, you can take on a second group, you can protect squishies while the tanker is already at target cap and far away, and so on.

At 28, I like it, although it doesn't perform as high as I expected, as I mistakenly assumed there wasn't any hard cap on the number of siphon stacks you could have.

Having three of your staple attacks by level 4 makes for a great lowbie experience, and I can see myself rerolling more KM in the future.