Sailboat

They shouldn't. If you're actually seeing that, it's bugged. LOTG +recharge does not conflict with OTHER 7.5% recharge bonuses, but it IS subject to the Rule of Five for LOTG bonuses, because it shares the name with them.

You should only be getting the benefits of 5 of them.

Well now, that depends on what you're known for, doesn't it?

Seriously, people can put a "player note" on anyone, and later on eyeball it before deciding to bring the player onto a team. You (the generic "you, not any particular poster) can't see the player notes over your own head, but that could explain why people seem to be avoiding you.

I am having a lot of fun with a Fiery Aura/Dark Melee Tanker. It's clicky; unlike a lot of Tanker builds you can't just let the tanker stand there while you mash your attacks. You've got 2 heals which are critical to keeping yuo standing; potentially 2 endurance stealing powers (not everyone takes both, though you could), and Burn and Fiery Embrace to consider when to click as well. Then there's positioning Shadow Maul's cone. But it feels like a "good busy" instead of a "bad busy" situation -- properly leveraging these tools makes for a pretty unusual but effective Tanker.

Psi trouble I understand...but why would Inv have problems with the two factions? I can't recall having had any issue with them myself. Remember that if you take one of the passives, Inv has decent end drain protection.

In their forums, it looks like they're getting ready to test an I-19 "inherent fitness" solution soon, so I'd guess they are planning to be ready for I-19.

Aett already corrected this, but it's worth emphasizing that there's a lot of misunderstanding in this post. You ARE soft-capped against anything up to +5. They may have a higher-than-5% chance to hit you, but you cannot reduce that any further by adding defense: hence the term "soft" cap...you can go over the "cap" but it has no effect on the chance to be hit.

Opponents with large to-hit bonuses will indeed hit you more easily, but a) there are not that many of them, b) you can plan for it and take out the bigger dangers first, and c) usually the amount of bonus is so huge that it's almost moot; it's really hard to get enough additional defense to make these bonuses useless, so most folks just play around the problem. And it's not as bad as it sounds.

Lastly, cascade failure happens to people without DDR (defense debuff resistance). Higher DDR can make these debuffs essentially ineffective. My Invulnerability Tanker, for example, runs about 5% over the soft cap with one foe in range, and has only 50% DDR, and rarely gets driven down to the soft cap even by masses of debuffing enemies. My SR Scrapper has 95% DDR and shrugs off pretty much all resistable debuffs.

I've never played Ice, and someone who has will know more...but it has 3 powers granting DDR, and one of those appears to be enhanceable, so it gets significant DDR. Coupled with the slows dramatically reducing the enemy's chance to stack click-type debuffs (like sword attacks), it should be pretty hardy against cascade failure.

Exceeding the soft cap does give you some protection against cascade failures, particularly if you have only a medium amount of DDR (it's not really necessary for SR's 95% DDR), but it does nothign to help you fight higher-level enemies, unless you're fighting above +5. In which case, good luck!

Word. Or actually most Defender builds too. I started on a Defender, but by blind luck chose one who had significant status protection (a Forcefielder, who gets good protection from 3 of the 5 primary status effects: stuns, holds, and immobilizes). Later, when playing other characters without status protection, I was shocked to learn all the types of critters that stun and hold and immobilize -- something that I'd completely failed to notice on my first character.

Scrappers are hardy adventurers and soloists, but they may give a newcomer a distorted idea of what's "hard," what's a standard amount of damage to do, and which mobs have which powers.

Yes, I've found that unless I want to pay big bucks for hot salvage, I cannot IO out a toon even with generic IOs in anything like a few days, and even if I overpay and get instant gratification salvage, I cannot zone to base, craft and slot ten, zone back and shop, zone to base, craft and slot ten more, and so on and have any time left to play in a given night. SOs on the other hand can be bought and loaded into slots in about the same amount of time some players are checking their laundry or getting a snack, and then I'm playing with my team again.

Shield Charge at 26 on a Tanker. Very nice if one is level-locking in the early 30s for rolling recipes, because you can still six-slot it (or 5-slot it if you stop exactly at 30). Not that I've looked at doing that or anything.

Sure, I know that. I'm not arguing the DPS is better. But a lot of the time, once I do the three Broadsword attacks, the foe is down, and the 0.66 second advantage of the Katana attacks is hard to feel as I scan the crowd for the other Sapper or wander off down the hall looking for more targets.

Time for a bump!

Well, to be perfectly honest, I'm defining "burst damage" mostly in terms of killing something in 3-4 attacks. Between Headsplitter, Disembowel (I know the attack-chain aficionados are hyperventilating reading that) and Hack, Broadsword cuts down stuff 1-2-3, and the enemy is often knocked down or up in the process, often without doing a lot of damage in retaliation. Looking at Red Tomax, to me it looks like HS/Dismbowel/Hack all do more damage in one single 1-2-3 cycle than their Katana equivalents -- or am I missing something?