Sailboat

Indeed. Many times when a team suddenly loses control of a situation, I've thrown Tornado out. This is especially good if you can cast it through a doorway into the next room...it will rampage around keeping everything busy while your guys fall back and get reorganized.

Energy Torrent in the Tanker/Scrapper masteries does knockDOWN, not knockback, specifically so that it doesn't knock foes away from a melee player. Energy Torrent in other pools/sets still does knockback, so confusion is understandable.

I agree. The purple sets give great global recharge (and global accuracy) bonuses. But some builds don't get much from those, or prefer to get other bonuses not typically found on purples. Defense is probably the archetypal (heh) example of this -- for all practical purposes, the purple sets don't give you significant defense* and most tankers probably want defense more than recharge.

And as noted, some builds get very little benefit from recharge...Willpower is the easiest example offhand. All its powers are passives or toggles except the Tier 9, One With The Shield, which is one of the few powers specifically set not to benefit from recharge.

Get purples if they help you and you can afford them, but don't get them just because they're the most expensive thing you can find to spend money on and assume that means you've got a good build. (I'm addressing that to a certain subset of players and not you specifically).

* Two of the purple sets give Ranged Defense, I think, but they're Mezz sets (one is Confuse, iirc) and hard to fit onto a Tanker.

Maybe color the top part of the bar, the normally-all-but-impossible-to-achieve part, a bright red? So it looks like the overdrive/redline part of a tachometer? Brutes could still get there but would understand the situation is an extreme.

I have that exact same slotting and it sure seemed to go off a lot for me back a few issues ago when I played the character heavily. It could have changed but I doubt it. It gets to roll the proc on more guys if you clump them up tightly instead of scattering them (Lightning Storm has a tiny AoE); maybe that accounts for the difference in our observations?

In Mids', got to the top menu, select "Window," select "Sets & Bonuses." Or use the hotkey Ctrl-B (as in "bonuses").

That will tell you in red if you exceed the rule of five anywhere.

No, that's a reference to Very Rare Invention sets, the names of which appear in purple.

Interestingly, I think all the target caps work that way. Pedulum, the axe cone attack, is capped at 5 targets, and has a 50% chance of knockdown.

In large crowds, uf it's picking out 5 enemies, making a to-hot roll on each, and then making a 50% chance of knockdown on each one, we'd expect to often see fewer than 5 foes hit and usually only 2.5 or so knocked down.

But the actual power in use almost always knocks down 5 enemies if the crowd has substantially more than 5. It behaves as if it's checking 50% knockdown on each guy and just keeps rolling until it collects 5 or runs out of enemies in the crowd, whichever comes first, then stops.

I don't know for sure how it actually works, but it sure looks like that's how it works. The implications seem to be that AoEs will work better than one might expect from their descriptions.

I myself and really liking the new Burn, but the character I'm using it most on has 3 other AoEs and a damage aura, so I am throwing Burn into a chain and not relying on it for all my AoE.

Well, Burn works with the same number of targets it did before the change. And the same number of targets it has for years. Now, it's true that in the distant past it affected more targets, but that's kind of outside the scope of the OP.

After some testing I see that Burn adds the FE damage to the initial large pulse (reported in the regular combat log) and does not appear to add it to the DOT patch (reported in the pet damage log). That's okay by me; it's nice to know I am not "wasting" Fiery Embrace time if I hit Burn.

It's good that your character has powers you like and not the same powers as everyone else...but a lot of people find Dark Pit useful (it stuns bosses if you have any other stun power) and Nightfall is a very good power for general combat (perhaps not so much against AVs, though, which seems to be your specialty).

I don't think they do. Why on earth would anyone farm at +4? The purpose of farming is killing rapidly in bulk for rewards, something that's difficult to do at +4 and if you CAN do it at +4 you can do it FASTER at +0. And the rewards are no greater in terms of drops and it's questionable whether influence from defeats is any better, since it's slower.

Now some people do fight at +4 to power level someone else, but we already have a term for that. It's power-leveling, not "farming."

Plenty of people play missions at +4 for the challenge or for bragging rights, which is just dandy...but if they claim they're "farming" they're doing it suboptimally. Farming is by definition not about increasing challenge.

No disrespect intended -- I'm the poster who called Stone "the king of 'I'm still standing'" above. I was just showing that some sets, properly built and played, can reach the durability a high level Stone tanker already started at.

Impressive. But some other builds can reach that level.

Ironclad, my Civil-War-themed Invulnerability Tanker, did exactly that. Surrounded by negative-energy-using Black Dwarfs (remember, Inv does not get especially good resistances to negative) and defense-debuffing Romans, he made his stand while the res of the team rezzed, wiped again, and hospitaled. When they returned, he was on his third or fourth recharging of Dull Pain and the team's brute sent a tell: "HOW are you STILL ALIVE???"

I'm not disputing your finding Stone (or any set) not to your taste, but really, in what way did ED affect Stone's survivability relatively more than other sets? Is it not still the king of "Hey, I'm still standing!" regardless of ED?

Some particularly useful low-level knockback resist IOs have been selling consistently for 20-30 million (more of those sales at 30 than 20, to be precise).

Last week I picked up two of those for 300,000 each.

How do I do it? Mind control, baby.