SPiNE

I agree that only a small percentage of the player population actually has the time and money to soft cap defense on a resistance-based toon or a Blaster. However, it's still possible to do this. I'm mainly still playing my level 50 Elec Armor Tank because I'm still working on soft-capping his defense.

If we're looking at just survivability here, resistance-based toon still has a much higher potential than defense-based toon mainly because of the possibilty to soft-cap defense.

Ok, well not useless but just simply doesn't benefit much from IO bonuses. When people go for IO bonuses, it's usually either for more global +recharge or more positional defense and maybe +regen.

This topic is more related toward toons with Armor either for primary or secondary, such as Tankers and Scrappers.

Resistance-based armors can utilize bonuses from IO's to reach the defense soft-cap. This pretty much gives them 2 layers of protection. However, defense-based armors can't get a soft-cap for resistance.

I don't know about you, but that seems blatantly unfair. An entire power set, dedicated to to defense can be matched by another power set that's not even intended for defense in the first place? Something's wrong with that. As far as I know, any resistance-based armor can reach the defense soft-cap with IO's. What about defense-based armor? They can't reach the resistance soft-cap with IO's.

Oh, but it doesn't end there. Even Blasters and other archetypes without an armor set can reach the defense soft cap as well.

Pretty much in my eyes, defensive-based toons are great...they just aren't that great anymore ever since IO's and set bonuses came out.

I've been wanting to roll an Ice Tank for the longest time. They seem to be amazing tankers in the upper levels, survivability as well as holding aggro.

Only problem is, what am I suppose to do when I'm tanking AV's? Don't AV's have pretty high base tohit and/or accuracy?

If so, AV's are bound to land several hits on me...and I wont have any resistance at all to withstand it. Sure, Chilling Embrace offers that -14% damage debuff, but that's all I have for mitigation besides my defense and the occasional Hoarfrost. I'm thinking it's going to take a good 50%-75% of my HP per hit from an AV.

I was thinking of going with an Ice/Dark tank, since Dark Melee seems to be the only secondary that has some form of mitigation against AV's, mainly the -tohit debuffs. I was just hoping that stacking -tohit debuffs along with my own defense would help me survive and that Siphon Life would be a nice 20% heal whenever Hoarfrost is down. Is there a better secondary for me to go with besides this?

Edit: Just another question. If Chilling Embrace debuffs a critter's damage by 14%, how does this stack or not stack with your own resistance? For example, if a critter does 100 damage, then Chilling Embrace would cause it to deal 86 damage instead. However, if I have resistance against the critter's damage-type, would my resistance kick in base on the critter's base damage of 100 or would it kick in after Chilling Embrace's damage debuff, which would mean that it'll work off the 86 damage instead of 100 damage.

I tried to /bind r "powexecname resurrect" on my empathy defender and it just doesn't work.
I've also tried /bind r "powexecname empathy.resurrect" as well as /bind r "powexecname defender.resurrect" and /bind r "powexecname resurrect.omgWORK!!" and it still wont work!

Also, I've checked all the aforementioned power names by just putting them inside squared brackets, such as [empathy.resurrect] and it's a valid command, so I don't see why moving that to a bind didn't work.

I'll suggest Fire/Shield but you will have an endurance problem unless you go Body Mastery. You'll need 2 reliable AoE powers if you want to effectively farm with a Scrapper. That being said, you're pretty much forced to go for Fireball and wont be able to go Body Mastery...unless you can somehow get your FSC's recharge down a lot with global recharge bonuses.

Personally, I would recommend trying Spines, since you don't have a Spines Scrapper yet. If anything, Spines is pretty well-rounded, decent single-target dps as well as AoE. Spines also offer 2 AoE's so you don't necessarily have to get Fireball, which means you can go with Body Mastery to help with the endurance problem.

Honestly, I don't see what's so bad about MA's damage at all...the only thing is that its AoE sucks. As for single-target damage, it's pretty much just below Fiery Melee. It's definitely better than Katana and Broadsword since it's Smash and not Lethal damage. MA also crits a lot more often for me as well.

Bump!

Got it, thanks!

Edit: Also, once Going Rogue comes out, do you need to already have CoH/CoV or does GR comes with everything?

I have a friend that wants to try CoH/CoV out and she's wondering if the 14 days trial include both access to CoH AND CoV or just one of the two. Does anyone know?

I wish you could tell how many people are on a server as well as how many are currently online on a server. I'm thinking it's a fairly simple process to add to the home page of coh.com

This way, everyone can just look at it and find out how many people are currently on out of the total population for that server.

I've always been curious about these "Clues" that you can find while doing missions from contacts but never remember to ask about it. Certain missions require you to actually find these clues in order to complete the mission.

However, there are several missions where you can complete the mission and exit it via the blue "Exit" button. I've stayed back on one of these missions after the mission completed, just to kill off a couple more mobs since I was very close to leveling. To my surprise I found a "blinky" and decided to click on it and received the "Clues Found!" message.

What I'm asking here is...do these clues actually affect your mission arcs somehow? Does it give you access to different missions from the same contact that would otherwise not show up if you didn't find the clue? I sure as heck have clicked the exit button many times right when the mission finishes without bother searching any further for clues...have I been missing out on these missions?

I agree, my Warshade was pretty fun to level with all the helpful binds and double Mire's :]. I would definitely make a WS if I didn't have one already.

I'm leaning heavily on the Ill/Rad side right now. I don't have any Illusion toons and I don't have any Radiation toons. After reading the Ill/Rad guy by Local_Man, I really want to make one now :]