Sailboat

Matter of opinion. My experience is that the character (properly built) does indeed waste things fast enough it provides mitigation. I've had Blasters express surprise at how fast the character can lay down the hurt.

The Fiery Aura set is a compromise between damage dealing and durability. As to your complaint that a tanker more specialized for durability works even better when coordinated with characters more specialized for offense -- well duh, so to speak. Is that a surprise?

IN a game where people have abandoned their favorite level 50s because one or two attacks had their animation times extended a bit over two seconds, 5-10 seconds sounds like an eternity to me. Don't people spend tons of Inf shaving a few tenths of a second off their recharge?

A little bit. But I do avoid the trip back from the infirmary my Blaster makes.

Dude, this comes across as a personal attack. I've been trying to be analytical about this.

Well, yeah, but if you've built it right, you still have good resistances AND a fantastic heal -- the same things a non-defense built Fire Tanker has, and the game was designed to make THAT viable. And in 8 seconds or so, the debuff from a machine gun wears off and your defense returns. It's not that I expect the defense to be solid in all cases and that I'll never be hit, it's that, if you do it right, the defense is on top of the existing mitigation and you don't have to give up too much to get it (in my case I went with 32.5% typed; might have to give up more to get 45% positional).

It's much worse than that. I grabbed aggro early and got a mass of the Dark Novas and other baddies surrounding me, but the team members ran around me in a big ring and appeared to be mostly trying to AoE all the baddies they could find, and some of the team went to the edge of the platform to make sure they got aggro from newly-arriving reinforcements. The Scrappers were mostly Spines, 3-4 of them at least (odd team) and either pulled aggro off me or found enough of their own to get nailed. We also had one of those controllers who area-immobilizes things while they're still spread out.

The team recovered quickly and got back into things; I held aggro much better after that, maybe because I got the (now smaller) group of bad guys clustered tightly around me and very mad at me before the team reassembled.

Titan Sentinel can quickly export any in-game build to Mid's.

Kitsune is right. As has always been the case, all farming for drops is always most efficient at the lowest practical difficulty (usually +0 due to the undesirability of lvl 49 drops). The people who fight at +2, +4 or whatever are either PLing or banking prestige (I suppose they could be farming influence/infamy, but not efficiently -- they'll be losing out due to the slower drop rate and the very high inf value of drops) or just taking on a challenge for the fun of it. Nothing wrong with that, but it's demonstrably not the best rate of drop production.

Infinity is consistently one of the most active servers.

Not if you make a big freaking Super Strength Tank Cow and give him the Revolver temp power so he can pull it out whenever someone complains he's not gun-themed. Bonus for making his hand as huge as possible so the gun looks comically small in his oversized mitt.


My Stormies usually avoid O2 boost, as it's the only power in the set that requires you to monitor your teammates and take you eyes off Hurricane-herds. I just take all the other powers and view my role as "do unto others."

I like to say things out loud, like yelling "SEE YA!" as they disappear over a ledge and sail flailing into an abyss.

Does that work? I assumed it not only didn't take recharges, but also didn't come back any faster from +global recharge or Hasten. But that was an unverified assumption.

I have come to agree with this. In fact, I personally think a Corruptor or better yet a Defender are the best starting ATs for learning the game; you learn the value of buffs and debuffs; you learn which mobs have which mezzes and how painful mezz can be; you learn to appreciate what the squishy ATs bring to a team and at the same time you learn how much a Tanker can help you; and every other AT you play in the future will do more damage or be tougher, or both.

Wonder if the veteran buff pets do that...haven't checked.

That's probably it, then. Thanks, everybody.

I guess I shouldn't have WWII- and US-Civil-War-inspired characters, by that logic? And out of respect, we should all refrain from running the Terra Volta trial.

Great link, worth reading all the way through.

Yeah. I've participated in puppy mill protests, and inevitably, every time, a few people who come by and say "HOW can you be doing THIS when there's still [my own pet issue] in the world?" The issue they are concerned about changes with the individual -- "children," "hunger," "poverty," "a religion they support," "a religion they hate and want to bomb," or whatever.

The relevance of this is, the people stopping by to berate me for "wasting time" on the suffering of animals when there are MORE IMPORTANT crises are never, themselves, actually fighting for their own cause at the time they yell at me -- they're usually shopping. There's a wine and beer store right next to the puppy mill protest site, and people would come out with a keg of beer, stop, and berate us for not helping children. Sometimes I'd ask if the beer was for the children.

We're all doing something other than helping, most of the time.

I say we name this thread "EU_One global one server list once more EU is told they are loosers!" and the other thread "US_One global one server list once more EU is told they are loosers!" and piss everybody off.

Well, that would be "Footstomp," wouldn't it?

Ok, that I'll grant.

"Almost every attack" is slightly different from "heavy debuffs," but here goes: the ever-popular Cimeroran Wall, Longbow Nullifers, and Arachnos...somewhat less spectacularly: COT (although I admit some COT defense debuffs are unresistable), Possessed Scientists (also have some unresistable debuffs), Rad-using Paragon Protectors, most gun-wielding mobs (Council and Family stand out for this), and many, many Architect Entertainment missions.

You'd think so. I mean, it sounds sensible. I would have agreed with you before I actually played the sets. But in actual practice, Invuln's mere 50% defense debuff resistance leaves the character with solid defenses even under heavy pressure, and in the exact same situations, Fire (and I assume the other identically-protected resistance sets) collapses into the negative and the heal is unable to keep up.

I experienced this again this week, running a level 50 Incarnate Fire Tanker and a level 50 Invulnerability Tanker through ITFs and missions with Nullifiers. Both are IOed for defense; the Fire Tanker uses a setup I believe is like one you have recommended on these boards (32.5% s/l/e/n defense and a belt with purples in it).

The Fire Tanker repeatedly had to retreat when defense and life bar collapsed, despite hitting purples and the heal; the Inv tanker stood like a rock, even when a Willpower Tanker on the team died, even against massive negative energy attacks (which he resists "poorly") coupled with heavy defense debuffs (Romans and Nictus-types all mixed together), even when the rest of the team died, fled, or left the area, and team support wasn't an issue.

The resistance Tankers are good tankers and can do a lot in this game. I like my resistance sets. They get as much or more playtime than the Inv and Stone sets. But claiming that IOs make a set without DDR "stronger" because defense is "so easy to get it doesn't count" doesn't match my experience in game.