Sorciere

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In your example it sounds like you hit some buggy pathing and then your taunt's duration ended. You were out of agro range at that point, so the mob returned to its spawn point.

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No, I've done a LOT of testing of threat-related mechanics. Read what Sarrate posted for some further information.

My bigger point was, anyway, that the reset is not related to a tether/leash mechanic as far as I've been able to determine (in other setups, you can move the same distance from the mob and it keeps attacking). I've done more tests than the ones I listed here. If you have a better explanation that matches in-game data, by all means present it, but the one that you're currently providing is almost certainly not the right one.

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"Find the sapper and hit it until it goes away" works just as well.

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Not if your endurance bar goes kerflooey before the sapper goes splat.

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I don't have a problem with most of the PVE content. Mostly its when I'm doing MA mishes or on an sk and fighting Malta. The Council also has some pretty mean fire spiders or whatever they're called and they're also ripping through me like I was a wet noodle.

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I really think you may have problems primarily with nasty custom critters from the MA and/or poor teams. I've been on many a mission with my Invulnerability tanker, often side-kicked on an invincible team (meaning +4 or sometimes +5 mobs), and not having any serious problems. Mind you, that was with Invulnerability/Ice Melee, but it wasn't like I was using Ice Patch ALL that much. And that often without the exotic resists. And I just have trouble relating to your experiences. Malta, for example, were always boringly simple -- it's just a game of "find the sapper and put a hold on it" (admittedly, for that you need to have a hold or other mez).

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Sarrate: You can pull a mob all across a zone if you keep damaging it (thus resetting its tether). If you hit a mob once and run across the zone it eventually gives up (at its tether range) and returns to its spawn (or despawns entirely). So yes there is a maximum tether ... it just can be reset by periodically re-agroing the mob.

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This is not really an accurate description of how the mechanics work.

As far as I have been able to determine, there are two conditions (outside of exceeding the aggro cap) that must both hold for a mob to return to its spawn point:

(1) Your threat must fall below a certain minimum value.
(2) Its AI must not see any option to continue attacking.

Example: I dragged a Behemoth Overlord across half of Founders Falls with Taunt, stopped, Taunted once more. Its AI got stuck in just attacking with Swipe. I quickly moved around 20 yards out of range (with Sprint), it took a step towards me, and then started running back rather than taking the extra steps towards me. In other words, it was not tethered to the point I had dragged it -- it started resetting after I had just moved a few yards from it (for the record, my tanker was the same level as the critter, and I had turned my aggro aura off).

You don't have to drag the mob far from its spawn point, either -- I've been able to engineer resets very close to the original spawn point as long as the two conditions above held.

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About darned time you can have branching arcs, but I think that's what's being introduced, branching storylines, not 'true' side-switching.

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Since the press release claims that heroes can experience the Rogue Isles and villains can experience Paragon City, I think it's a bit more than branching storylines.

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that's why they take provoke

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Provoke is not quite up to par with tanker/brute aggro capabilities. Unenhanced, it's an 8.24s taunt duration for masterminds at level 50 (less at lower levels), the duration is affected by level-based resistance (a.k.a. Purple Patch), it requires a to-hit check, and hits a maximum of five foes at a time.

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a bots/ff can hit the positional soft cap and has something i dont think scrappers/tanks/brutes can get too easily - -regen

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The problem that such a tankermind has, though, is the near total lack of aggro abilities. Survivability on a team doesn't buy you much when mobs aren't attacking you.

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My migration is fine against most foes. But when meeting fireclowns or ice zombies or necromancer elves and whatever else there is in the AE, I go down. When I play offtank to the Granite tanker I see them walk through it all, as if it was nothing, as if their resistances and defenses were capped or at least very close. I'd really love to be able to boost my own resistances and defenses to that level.

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Ah, I see now. Yes, custom critters in the MA can be pretty rough, and much more damaging than normal missions (I was duoing some on a Willpower tanker with a friend the other day and went through inspirations by the truckload, and we didn't even dial the difficulty all the way up). Granite tanks do indeed have the perk of having high resistance and defense and bonus regeneration, but obviously at the price of offense and mobility. To get to a similar level, you will have to invest in IOs.

However, the bigger point is that this kind of MA content IS meant to be a challenge and generally assumes that you're playing with competent support (or, alternatively, have a fine-tuned IO build or use lots of inspirations).

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And I felt that my build was quite good. I wanted all the primary powers first, since it is the defensive which is the most important.

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Are you sure of that? Secondaries are important for mitigation, too.

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From secondary pools I need stamina, for endurance. I want a travel power. And fighting gives tough and weave, which adds more to my defensive force. I simply have no idea where to get more power slots from (except levelling), that will allow me to get more from my secondary. However the plan is to focus on the secondaries, since my defense is now built to maximum (I think).

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You shouldn't need more power slots, really. If you have survivability problems with that much mitigation, something else is wrong.

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i would fear more for dominators of any at. they would be totaly pointless. permadom isnt a cheap thing to get on a 50 dom

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I think you missed the part where Castle is buffing non-Domination damage to current Domination levels.

Your build with its lack of offense looks like it was made for team play, yet you sound like you're getting very little support on a team.

I suspect that it isn't just the wrong damage types that give you problems, but specific enemies (such as Earth Thorn Casters with their -defense).

I also wonder if you aren't sacrificing too much of your secondary; not necessarily because of damage output, but because of the control potential. Knockout Blow and Foot Stomp can make quite a bit of a difference.

As to your defense, that should be quite a bit higher with at least one foe in range. Positioning yourself correctly within a spawn can make quite a bit of difference when it comes to your survivability.

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I don't know. By level 40+ you have 20 insps slots, inspirations drop often, you can combine everything into purples.

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Inspirations don't drop THAT often, and all too often inspirations are of the wrong size to be combined.

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With side-switching actually on the way, how do you think this will impact tanks?

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Not very much. Tankers are still the one-stop-shopping AT for tanking purposes. I'm honestly more concerned about Corruptor/Defender or Scrapper/Stalker balance. I also expect to see a lot of Masterminds blueside for soloing purposes.

Technically, Scrappers and Brutes have a lot of overlap (very similar survivability and damage output), but the playstyle is so different that it will probably come down to preference.

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SuperJump: There's a learning curve, where you learn to not accidentally jump into big groups of purple-con enemies. There are occasional "missed the jump" or "can't quite get that high" moments of irritation. Other than that it's quite good. I don't like leaving my finger on the spacebar for the WHOLE TIME but I may be a tiny minority there.

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You can use "/up 1" to start auto-jumping and "/up 0" to stop auto-jumping. Saves some wear and tear on the space bar.

(I still prefer flight myself, though.)

RttC's taunt has a static 1.25s duration against even-level mobs, regardless of level.

The duration of all other aggro auras scales with level, with Invincibility getting a 25% bonus to taunt duration. Most aggro auras cap out at 13.5s duration at level 50, Invincibility at 16.875s (the formula is 0.3*(level-5) for non-Invincibility, non-RttC auras, 0.375*(level-5) for Invincibility).

Note that furthermore taunt duration is reduced by purple patch resistance. Thus, unslotted, RttC's taunt is reduced to 0.8125s against +3s and to 0.6s against +4s. Because the taunt is refreshed only once per second, that creates aggro problems, unless RttC is slotted for Taunt duration. (Against +5 or higher mobs, it is all but impossible in practice to get the effective taunt duration up to 1s+.)

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3) Game balance and realism rarely are able to connect. Naming something "invulnerable" means they cant be hurt at all, while "willpower" means you can lose weight easily by just not eating what you like.

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So that is why my Willpower tank has an hourglass figure, even with the waist slider being pushed to the right! Never saw the 90% chocolate resistance in SoW until now.