Sailboat

This, most assuredly.

...because if you already have some typed defense from your powers, it makes sense to stack the set bonuses on top of that, rather than starting from zero positional defenses and wasting bonuses just catching up to where you started on the positional side of things. And vice-versa, of course.

If your powers offer NO defense at all, you could go with either typed OR positional, but once you pick one (and there are some nuances involved in that decision, as other posters have described) stick with whichever one you started building toward.

I get the sentiment. But as a longtime player of Fire and Stone tankers, I think "95%" is a stretch. "Most of the content," sure.

I personally found 32.5% to s/l/e/n works very, very well for my purposes, without needing to stretch toward 45%. I seldom need to hit that purple insp unless I'm facing debuffs or a large level difference.

I would like to suggest another source of mitigation available to you -- your secondary. I've got a very survivable Fire Tanker who uses /Fire for damage. By contrast, /Stone offers excellent mitigation and should be MUCH tougher. I recommend slotting up Fault all the way. Frankenslot for stun duration and recharge (and some accuracy of course).

It's feasible to get it so it recharges faster then the stun duration wears off. Aside from the excellent knockdown, maintaining that stun will completely shut off damage from all minions and 50% of LTs (possible more than 50% one you get to stacking it). You can also shove a lovely Force Feedback +recharge proc in there.

Mid-range or better defense vs s/l/e/n damage types, decent recharge, and consistent application of Fault ought to make you monstrously harder to kill.

Don't forget to frankenslot Healing flames to get recharge and heal values to the ED cap -- you can do it with level 30+ healing sets, using doubles and triples, or 5 level 50 Doctored Wounds (alllllmost the ED caps but a little global recharge too).

Sounds likely. Yet we still hear people saying "My using an exploit doesn't affect your play." Well, those of you unhappy about this change: the exploit-users ruined it for you.

That's nothing new. Years ago, before the ability to flash back to old arcs was added with Oroborous, people used to pay big bucks to lowbies for a spot on their Fortuneteller mission team. If you'd missed the Fortuneteller mission when leveling up, which is frankly pretty easy to miss, you couldn't get the Atlas Medallion accolade. I know someone who routinely hired himself out to as many high-level types as he could find every time he got a new character to the level for the mission.

Hey, nice reference! I didn't even notice it was a hotlink at first. I'll have to listen to those when I get to a place I can turn the sound up.

Typical Tinfoil Age conspiracy-mongering.

Looks like Issue 22 will bring us Echo of Dark Astoria. If the beacon works the same way you could have one telepad got to both echoes, restoring the number of beacons to even. Although new Hacked telepads will be able to go to up to six destinations. That doesn't divide evenly by the number of "echoes" but it will probably save you some telepads by itself.

Regan, not Invulnerability?

It doesn't annoy me. I like it. It clearly improves balance, making the game as a whole better. When there's only one choice that's clearly the best, and the other choices are suboptimal, a game feels badly designed -- because it is.

And I have more Shield characters than any other single Tanker/Brute/Scrapper set. And Shield is still strong.

Well, this is weird: It shows 75.7% smashing defense with Shadow Meld turned off. When I click Shadow Meld ON, it shows 95.9% smashing defense.

With EVERYTHING turned off -- even Critical Hit, which can't be slotted, it shows 60.4% smashing defense.

With every single IO removed from the build, Mid's shows 30% smashing defense (30% to all, actually.)

THE SAME Mid's on the same computer works normally with all my own builds, both before and after loading your build.

You might need to explain this to the new guy. I'm a multi-year vet and I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. If you mean the rez power, Howling Twilight, it does indeed stun...not sure what air has to do with it though.

In case you're wondering, BAF is a special case. In fact, if you have trouble with a trial or task force, you could try to learn about it before launching a complaint into the forums.

Paragonwiki article on BAF

I refer you to "Phase 3:"

OK, that sucks. But that's the only trial or task force in the game where that happens to any enemy rank less than AVs, GMs or EBs.

There are trials with things that cut right through the defenses or resistances of Tankers too. Controllers are not being singled out in having to face weird "exception to the rule" challenges on trials.

But Shields WILL have high levels of DDR even after this fix -- I think the second-highest possible in the game. Substantially higher than other defense-heavy sets like Invulnerability and Willpower.

It just won't have the same level as Super Reflexes.

Since SR is just one set, what your quote is really saying is you feel that Shields should have the highest possible level of DDR, despite having layered mitigation SR does not get AND being massively better offensively.

Because Shields with the nerf/fix/change will still have better than every other set EXECPT SR.