Sailboat

Right. So once you've spent it, it's like you didn't earn it. :P Earn it and burn it!

Jab is the worst Tier 1? Worse than Frozen Fists? (Not sarcastic; I don't really know what the worst Tier 1 is, not having made a point of looking for it). At least Jab has Rage going...it seems wasteful to hit Build UP for the other Tier 1s.

Pro tip: slip a proc in too (I like Hecatomb here unless I am trying to uuse the set intact somewhere else).

This is an exaggeration. Inspirations only help you overcome mild, limited defense debuffs. At 8-player settings, Longbow Nullifiers will put your defense numbers deeply negative, and chewing on some medium purples won't bring you back up unless you're chewing on 4 or more, and how often can your tray sustain that? In the ITF, last night, I tried this exact strategy, and they blew right through various combinations of purple inspirations unless I pretty much dumped my tray out each encounter...and I had good lethal resistance (70-75% on a Fire Tanker) and a fast-recharging heal.

Defense debuff resistance is enormously valuable to enduring such attacks. Electric and Dark do not have it. Only in carefully-selected environments do they get to keep their defense.

I'm not saying they're weak. But externally-added defense is fragile without debuff resistance and it's not "easily" offset. The alleged power of resistance-only sets with large IO investment is partly an illusion.

Well, I tried your spelling in the Merriam-Webster dictionary (M-W.com):

I can't believe it won't affect the damage caused when I hit the now-relatively-lower-level foes. Surely I do more damage if I conn higher.

My Tankers have routinely received 6-10 shards per ITF, weighted more toward the high end of that range (only gotten 6 once).

I'm going to chalk this one up to random distribution.

Does it show anywhere on my own character screen?

Holy cow, I'd hate to get my to-hot bonus debiffed.

Uh...it must have been late.

I'm not sure that's disagreeing. When I said WP was usually ranked 3rd/4th, I didn't go into detail; but usually the ranking I recall is Granite, then Inv, then WP or Elec or Dark or perhaps Shield, depending on the poster. If your post could be interpreted to mean you rank Dark and Elec third, there's room for you to put WP in 4th place and be in rough agreement with me.

I'll mention that Inv has some utility tools as well, albeit ones we are so familiar with we may no longer think of them that way. There's the to-hot bonus in Invincibility; there's several debiff resistances, including the third-best defense debuff resist in the game, giving the set's defense solid protection, and significant end drain protection. Then there's Dull Pain...a huge heal (admittedly on a long recharge) and monster hit point buff.

Also, I hardly ever notice the "psi hole" affecting the outcome, unless I'm taking the alpha of the Clock King or multiple Carnie bosses.

No question the sets you mention are strong; in fact, any Tanker set can be made quite hardly with a skillful build.

I'll suggest trying out a defense-oriented IO build (if you're into numbers you can make it in Mid's and review it without spending a penny) on your existing Willpower Tanker; you might be pleasantly surprised.

Yeah, I'm not sure about that either. Footstomp hits more enemies than Axe's Pendulum, but not more than Mace's Crowd Control. My Axe Tanker can chain together Cleave, Pendulum, and Whirling to keep attacking almost constantly (especially if another AoE from outside Axe is thrown in, but SS can get those too). I know Footstomp is better than any one of those but I'm less sure that Footstomp + pause beats that whole chain.

Eh. All the ranges are pretty short. The default base range for most ranged attacks seems to be 80 feet. Military engagement range has been much longer than that since at least the US Civil War -- and that's only because, before that, smoothbore muskets had a short engagement range. The old composite bows used by Assyrian charioteers outranged 80 feet.

It's a compromise, possibly based on keeping the combats smaller in area to reduce processor burden, for all we know. At least you're able to shoot 80 feet; the super strength guys can't even pick up the dry leaves that fall off the trees, let alone a car.

They are all, all, honorable men.

edit: If you mean "buffs" when you say "global boosts" then the cap indeed is a limit on the sum of both enhancement slotting and buffs.

And of course Cole's Law is shredded cabbage in mayonnaise.

To be fair, when they eventually do shut the servers down, the players who want to destroy the universe will at last have their moment of triumph.