Sword_NA

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Except, unless I'm misreading him, _Castle_ said above that Gauntlet affects our auras as well as our attacks. Unless it only applies to damaging auras, but then Invincibility wouldn't be in that list.

If it is what gives us our taunt auras, then heck yeah I'd miss it.

- Laurentide

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Tankers have allways had taunt effects in their auras and attacks.

However, at some point, an extra effect was added. Which was called Punchvoke. This made it so that when you hit one target, the other targets nearby got taunted too. And it was made possible to slot Taunt in attacks.

Later, other ATs were also given additional game mechanics like this to correct imbalances. (I think the scrapper Critical effect was the first "inherent power" of all) So they went ahead and made it "official" by calling them Inherent Powers and giving them specific names. So punchvoke was re-dubbed Gauntlet.

Damn, didn't realize the link was broken. Well, the post by Buffy in this thread http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showf...Number=1295041 should have the numbers.

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FYI: Electric Shields' Grounding Power will have Immobilize and Knockback Protection added. The set will still not have a Heal power or HP Buff power.

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WHEEEEEEEE!

*jumps around and screams like a little girl"

Dude... that's like...


a LOT of numbers.



Yeah, I'm not one of these fabled Math Monkies

Gotta ask: who was the lonely mutant?

Heh. Way too late, but thanks for the link.

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3)be patient, keep grinding. Once you get invincibility, you'll probably forget all about this problem

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I have Invincibility, and it's very much not the point.

If I come and steal five bucks from your wallet every week, is it okay because you'll make more money later?

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Hey, I don't even HAVE Invince.

It's like you steal five bucks from my wallet every week, but it's okay because I could have gotten a job

I'm waiting for my team at the entrance to the vine area. This is my first run on thsi. So, anyone got a link to a guide? Or atleast some tips?

Can't agree on your view of Frost Breath. But that's an allready much-debated topic on the corr boards

I was wondering how you like to use the AoE dmg/debuff powers? As in what do you activate first and so on?

My tactic at the moment is:

Attach Snow Storm to a mob in the middle of a spawn and hide around a corner.

As they all line up and are about to round the corner, I target the mob farthest away and hit them all with Forst Breath to stack with the slow-effect of Snow Storm.

Then I place Ice Storm on top of em and hide behind the corner again, picking off the mobs that are closes to the edge of the Ice Storm.


How would powers like Sleet work into this? To get them as slowed as possible before they scatter?

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Would have to test, but I'm fairly certain that all resist numbers are added together and THEN multipled by the damage. Including -res.

So the person in your example would probably take 40 damage.

Have no numbers to back that up, but it's what makes the most sense to me from what I've seen.

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Your mistake is thinking that the underlying game-system is designed to make sense from a player perspective

OK, after reading that I'm even more convinced:

Trolls need to use the Gargantuan Male build! At least the bosses should. The description "bulge with oversized muscles" does not fit the trolls ingame. Except for the Supa Trolls obviously.

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what is the point in having unyielding, which supposedly prevents toggle drops, and then having a stalker come up and each time he hits dropping all of my toggles....that means that unyielding is useless. i wouldnt mind if they dropped my health and killed me that way but dropping my toggles is somthing that should not happen. unyielding doesnt work at all vs stalkers

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Unyielding does not protect from Toggle Drops.

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I think he just said that wrong (or didn't know quite what he was saying ). One of the main reasons to take UY (and the other mez-protection powers) is to avoid enemies dropping your toggles in PvE. My Inv tank wouldn't really be bothered about being mezzed once in a while, if it didn't shut off his toggles. Getting the mez-protection toggles is like: "Yes! Finally my toggles will stay up!".
The whole toggle-dropping mechaninc negates this and reduces us to pre-mez-protection levels of power. If you want to kill me, kill me by overcoming my powers. Not by randomly shutting them off.

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He is still stuck on the 3 minion = 1 hero.

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Slight derailing. As he explained in that post (allthough not clearly enough) is that the game is designed so that a hero/villain will usually wind up fighting 3 minions. In a solo mission when you enter a room, chances are there'll be a group of 3 minions there to fight (or 1Lt and 1minion). They can't change this (or at least it would be too much work to do so), so they need this to be challanging for a hero to fight sicne that's what the game will throw at them most of the time.

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and some rare time 4xDamage (when both crit chances kick in at the same time)

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I've never heard of a level 32 Scrapper power doing a triple Critical (or a quadruple critical for that matter). The inherent chance each level 32 attack has (Headsplitter, GD, EC) only adds to the normal chance of doing a critical hit. In all my time with playing Scrappers (which is basically all I did) I've never seen a triple or quadruple Critical. Ever.

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I dunno. I'll admit I'm not a scrapper guru or anything. I've only got one over lvl32, my MA/SR. When I got Eagles Claw, I heard it had a higher chance to crit. I assumed it was what most people seem to be saying: higher chance of the Inherent AT Power to kick in. But then I had somone in one of my chat channels ask if it was possible to do doubble crits with Golden Dragonfly (I think that's the Katana equivalent?). I said no, but then he pointed out that the attack did two types of crit: the one inherant to the power, which just doubbles the damage without the "CRITICAL" floating up over the target, which has allways been there, and sometimes it's the Inherent AT Power that doubles the damage and does make the text float up. So, once in a while both kick in.
So I started paying a bit more attention and noticed that the range of damage Eagles Claw did was weird. I just thought it was a cool addidtion that you could double crit on it. I just assumed it was common knowledge over in scrapper-land.
I dunno, it's starting to be a while since I played my scrapper actively. I just assumed this was how it worked and moved on.
Never really considered the implications for Stalkers though...

I'd say this is working as intended. Many (if not all) Scrapper sets have allways had this ability, long before the concept of AT Inherent Powers existed.

Eagles Claw for example:

sometiems does normal damage

sometimes 2xDamge (if either its natural crit chance or the Inherent Power crit chance kicks in)

and some rare time 4xDamage (when both crit chances kick in at the same time)

Now, Stalkers have more control over their Crits than Scrappers have, but they still have no control over the crit chance in these particular powers. From time to tim powers like Eagles Claw will do crazy damage. That's how they were designed back in CoH Beta. They're balanced around having an inherent chance of doing double damage.

Well, for this power to work in coherency with the rest of the set, it has to protect against all damage types except Psi. As far as we know, there is no way to eliminate one Type Defense from a Positional Defense. So, I'd say the chances are pretty good there really isn't a difference in melee and ranged Def. It's just +Def all except Psi. Doesn't matter if it's Melee, Ranged or AoE.

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Hagis hit the nail on the head IMO

My Ice/Axe tank keeps groups safe by keeping dangerous boss mobs on their [censored] for the majority of the fight, I can't tank the whole spawn but do I really need to tank Minions?

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So, if Scrappers are the Dev-appointed Boss-killers, then the Tank's role is to protect the Scrapper so that he can do his job?

Hands up, any Scrappers in the audience: do you need a bodyguard to kill a Boss?

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Well, if a Scrapper couldn't do that, he wouldn't be able to fulfill HIS team-role

Question is: "could the scrapper reliably hold the bosses aggro while killing him?"
Because on a team, that's a much bigger question than "can the scrapper kill the boss?"

Heh, I find it funny how people go from "Statesman knows too little about his own game!" to "Statesman knows too much about his own game!"

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Should a skilled Tanker be able to corral EVERY mob? With a lot of skill, it should be possible - but it's certainly not required to be a good Tank. As long as the Tanker can hold onto aggro so that his teammates are facing less than they'd normally face (i.e. 3 minions), then the team has an advantage. Namely, each teammate can quickly eliminate his opposition...and then come to the Tanker's aid at the end.


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Ah, that's pretty much what i was trying to say. You lessen the amount of aggro spread around, amking everyone else have an easier time of the fight by not having to deal with everything at once.


Hey, while you're here: any hope of ever evening out the resists in Invuln? Most people that take the set do so for its generic nature. Now it's suddenly defined as the smashing/lethal set. The problem a LOT of us had with I5 was not the overall lowering of our tanking ability but the concept and feel change of our sets. I'm not looking for "immortal" but rather "ok vs all damage but not great against any". Sorry for the plug, but we're still hoping for this

Hm...

I'd say our role is still pretty much what it allways was: take the hits for the team.

But now you're a bit more limited in how many hits you can take for the team. In a large fight, you basically play scranker. You try to hit as many enemies as possible, to hold their attention. You should keep an eye out for targets that are particularly important, like mezzing lts for example and make sure that you get them. Also, you need to keep an eye on your teammates when you can and be ready to pull some aggro off them if they get in too deep.

The point is that you have to know the limits of what a single tank can handle. Don't go into a 8-man team mission expecting tank everything for the team. Same as a defender can't go into a 8-man mission expecting to keep everyone alive no matter what. Teams have to work WITH their Defenders to really benefit from them. Tankers are now the same. What you do, is try to lessen the amount of aggro your team takes. But you have to know when you've reached your limit and will die if you get any more aggro. Once you're at that limit, you're basically doing your job. You have to trust your teammates to be able to handle themselves as well. The days of babysitting teammates is over.

Without seeing your build, it's bit hard to say, but some general advise:

Mix selection of prim and sec powers about 50/50. Edit: and slot attacks with several ACC and EndReds. Fury will give you the damage, all you need is endruance to keep fighting and the accuracy to hit.

Set Brawl to auto attack. It's your best fury builder.

Use Brawl and your fastest attacks as your Fury-building attack chain. Attacks like Jab (SS), Stone Fists (SM) and Barrage (EM) are good examples.

Don't use your big attacks until you have high Fury. Only use them on enemies that have a lot of HP or you're just wasting endurance.

Keep constantly moving. Never stop fighting unless you're certain another fight will kill you.

Use Rest when you're forced to stop. Try to be ready for it, by clicking rest just as you kill the last mob in a group to loose as little Fury as possible.

Edit: Oh, and use inspirations constantly. Anything that can keep you going jsut a little longer is good.

Low endurance and all you have is a Luck and a Heal? Turn off your armours, pop the luck and be ready to use the Heal.

Basically, do whatever it takes to keep moving and SMASHING!

AH, thanks. Hadn't spotted those errors. Hm, will have to edit that in the next draft. Damn this board and its 1 hour edit limit :/

Invulnerability Tanks: The Basics

(Special thanks to Alida, BuffyASummers and DarthMord for the numbers taken from this thread: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/show...fpart=1#3870190 )

Ok, this is my first draft for a I6 guide. Since things are on test, things may change, but I honestly don't expect them to.

Disclaimer: This is not a be-all and end-all guide to the set. This is mroe of a "Invuln for dummies". You start here to get the groundwork to understand the discussions going on on the official forums.


Ok, I'll start with a small definition of the CoH mechanics concerning "damage mitigation". There are two stats that protect you from being killed. These two are not to be mixed up, since they perform very differently.

Resistance : Your Resistance lowers the amount of damage you take. If you have 20% resistance, you take 80% of the damage you should have taken from an attack. Your resistance is split up into different damage forms. These are: Smashing/Lethal, Fire, Ice, Toxic, Energy, Negative Energy and Psionic. You have to have resistance to the damage type you ar being attack with for it to help you. If a guy is pointing a flamethrower at you, haveing 90% Resistance to Smashing/Lethal won't help you one bit.

There is a hard "cap" to the resistance stat. You can not get above this number, no matter how much resistance your powers are supposed to give you. The cap for tankers is 90%, the cap for everyone else is 75%

Defense : Defense is the chance of being hit at all. If you have 20% Defense, it means the guy attacking you have a 20% smaller chance to hit you. If he actually hits you, this power will make no difference.

There is no hard cap to defense, but all enemies ALLWAYS have a 5% chance to hit you, no matter how much defense you have. So even if you are level50 and have 300% defense, a lvl1 Hellion still has a 5% chance to hit you.



Ok, on to the powers:

Notice that no power in the set protects against PSIONIC damage. That includes powers that give Defense. As a Invuln character you are completely vulnerable to this damage type.


Resist Physical Damage : (RPD) This power is one of your three Auto Resistance powers. It is allways on and costs nothing. To make up for this, it's pretty weak. By itself, you won't really see much of a difference in having or not having this power but it can be decent to have when combined with Temporary Invulnerability.
Base Resistance: 7.5%
Slot 1: 1.5%
Slot 2: 1.5%
slot 3: 1.275%
slot 4: 0.225%
slot 5: 0.225%
slot 6: 0.225%
6 slots(with even con SO Damres)= 12.45%


Temporary Invulnerability : (TI) This is a great power for the early game. I advise people to take this as their first power. It costs a bit of endurance to have running, but to make up for that it gives a really high amount of Resist to Smashing/Lethal.
Notice that it's ONLY smashing/lethal though. Running this power while fighting an enemy that uses another form of attack will only cost you endurance without helping you. This power can be run at the same time as the power Unyielding.
Base Resistance: 30%
Slot 1: 6%
slot 2: 6%
slot 3: 5.1%
slot 4: 0.9%
slot 5: 0.9%
slot 6: 0.9%
6 slots(with even con SO DamRes)= 49.8%

Dull Pain : (DP) This can be a very good power to have. This is a click power, which means that when you click it, it does its thing right away and then start recharging. What it does, is two-fold. First, it increases your max HP, so you'll see your greeen HP bar go down first. You're not actually loosing life, it only becomes smaller becuase you make room for more HP. Then it heals you up a nice bit. It's a good "Oh ****!" power to use when you suddenly realize you're taking too much damage.

Resist Elements : (REL) This power is pretty much just like RPD. It's allways on and costs nothing. It gives more resistance then RPD, because Ice and Fire is used less by the enemies than Smashing/Lethal. Good power to have, since it allways protects you, but like the other Auto Res powers it's not crucial to have.
Base Resistance: 7.5%
Slot 1: 1.5%
Slot 2: 1.5%
slot 3: 1.275%
slot 4: 0.225%
slot 5: 0.225%
slot 6: 0.225%
6 slots(with even con SO Damres)= 12.45%

Unyielding : (UY) Take this power. It's basically the cornerstone of the set, sicne the rest of the set can easily be shut off if you do not have this power. The main benfit of this power is to protect against all status effects. I cannot stress enough how extremely important this is to have. If you have no status-protection, you can be destroyed by just about any enemy that uses status-effects.
In addition to this, the power gives some resistance to all damage types (lessto Smashing/Lethal) and a slight debuff to defense. Meaning you'll be able to take a bit more damage, but also will be hit a bit more often when using this power.
Defense Debuff: -5%
Base Resistance (non-Smashing/Lethal): 10%
Slot 1: 2%
Slot 2: 2%
slot 3: 1.7%
slot 4: 0.3%
slot 5: 0.3%
slot 6: 0.3%

Base Resistance (Smashing/Lethal): 5%
Slot 1: 1%
Slot 2: 1%
slot 3: 0.85%
slot 4: 0.15%
slot 5: 0.15%
slot 6: 0.15%

6 slots(with even SO damres)= 16.6% all but S/L/psy, 8.3% S/L only

Resist Energies : (REN) Exacly same as Resist Elements. Allways on, costs nothing. Gives resistance to Energy and Negative Energy damage.
Base Resistance: 7.5%
Slot 1: 1.5%
Slot 2: 1.5%
slot 3: 1.275%
slot 4: 0.225%
slot 5: 0.225%
slot 6: 0.225%
6 slots(with even con SO Damres)= 12.45%

Invincibility : (Invinc) This is the other cornerstone of this powerset. It is a bit complicated to understand, but can give you a huge benefit.
The power has a taunt radius. All enemies in melee range will be aggroed by this power and start attacking you. This is great for keeping enemies concentrated on you and not on your weaker team-members.
It gives you a boost to Defense (note: not Resist). The boost in itself is very small, but it gives an additional boost for each enemy in melee range of you up to a maximum of 14 enemies. So, if you have a lot of guys pounding on you, they have a lot smaller chance of hitting.
It also gives a boost to your accuracy in the same way. So if you have a lot of enemies near you, you will not even need +ACC enhachments in your attack powers.
Notice that since this power gives you Defense instead of Resist, it makes you much more powerfull. The other powers make you hard to hurt. With this power as well, you are also hard to hit.
Numbers on this power are, as allways, hotly debated. I have yet to see any confirmed numbers on this set, but this should be somewhere in the right ballpark:
Base Defense: 1.5% per enemy
Slot 1: 0.3%
Slot 2: 0.3%
slot 3: 0.255%
slot 4: 0.045%
slot 5: 0.045%
slot 6: 0.045%
Total 6 slotted with defense: (no foes in range): 2.49%
Total 6 slotted with defense: (14 foes in range): 15.36%

Tough Hide : (TH) This power is a Defense-version of your auto-resist powers. It gives you a small boost to Defense vs everything except Toxic and Psionic attacks. Might be nice to take to off-set the -5%Def from UY. Same as the other Auto powers it's more of a "stick in where you can" power than anything you worry about getting at a specific level.
Base Defense: 5%
Slot 1: 1%
Slot 2: 1%
slot 3: 0.85%
slot 4: 0.15%
slot 5: 0.15%
slot 6: 0.15%
6 slots(with even con SO DefBuff)= 8.3% defense

Unstoppable : (US) This is your big "OH *****!!" button. When the brown stuff impacts with the swirly thing, this is what you push. It gives you a massive boost to all your resists, except Psionics, for three minutes and gives you higher Endurance recovery. It also gives you extremely high protection against Status Effects. So with this on, you have to be facing something truly terrible to be killed. The downside is, of course, that after the three minutes are up you drop to 10% health and 0 Endurance. Notice that since you drop to 0 End, all your toggles will drop as well. So you'll be completely naked. You use this power to postpone your death by three minutes and see if you can either get lucky or get away.
Base Resistance: 70%
Slot 1: 14%
Slot 2: 14%
slot 3: 11.9%
slot 4: 2.1%
slot 5: 2.1%
slot 6: 2.1%

6 slots(with even con SO damres)= 116.2%


BUILDS

I'm going to outline some different ways to build an Invuln tank and their pros and cons.

The Medium build :

TI: 3DamRes
DP: 3Rech 3Heal
UY: 3DamRes
Res Ene: 3DamRes
Res Ele: 3DamRes
Invince: 3DefBuff (Add TohitBuffs if you feel like it)
Unstoppable: 1-3 Rech

This is a build that will pull you through your average mission and team. It gives ok resist vs most damage types and pretty good Smashing/Lethal resistance. It doesn't try to eke as much survivability as possible out of the set, but it gets the most bang-for-your-buck when it comes to slots and powers.


The Meatshield build

RPD: 3DamRes
TI: 3DamRes 1EndRed
DP: 3Rech 3Heal
UY: 3DamRes 1EndRed
Res Ene: 3DamRes
Res Ele: 3DamRes
Invince: 3DefBuff (Add TohitBuffs if you feel like it)
Tough Hide: 3DefBuff
Unstoppable: 1-3Rech

Tough: 3DamRes
Weave: 3DefBuff

This build gets you up to about 87% Smashing/Lehtal Resistance. Which is pretty darn close to the 90% cap. Weave also offers an aditional 6.8% Defense. The down side is obviously that you have to use the Fighting Pool to get Tough and Weave. This will however get you pretty close to immortal when fighting smashing/lethal damage.


The Scranker build

TI: 3DamRes
DP: 3Rech 3Heal
UY: 3DamRes
Res Ene: 1DamRes
Res Ele: 1DamRes
Invince: 3DefBuff 2-3ToHit
Unstoppable: 1-3 Rech

A step below the medium build in survivability. This build only slots powers that give a very decent return per slot. This leaves you open to spread a LOT of slots into your secondary and pool powers. This build might have some serious problems tanking for a big team when not fighting priamrily smashing/lethal.


Ok, a little bit on playing a tank in a team.

Your main task in a team is to protect your team. If somone dies you should take it personally. The other ATs are known as "squishies" or "pets". Protect your pets

First of all: anyone who claims you should just stand there and be beat on does not know what he's talking about. You are NOT a meatshield, unless that is what you want to be (few do).

Your job in the team is to keep all the enemies concentrated on you. You have a few different tools for this job:

Invinciblity : This power has a taunt aura. It continually pulses taunt at all enemies close to you. It's not very strong, but it's still a big help, since you don't have to actively do anything for this to work its magic.

Taunt : All tanker secondary power sets has this power. It is a ranged AoE auto-hit attack that creates massive aggro in all it hits. This is a great tool for pulling back enemies that are running away from you and towards the squishies. It is allso your earlies aggro-management tool. This is the only power you have at low levels to actually fulfill your role in a team. Notice that Taunt has a max of hitting 5 targets. At higher levels, it's a good tool to use on really dangerous enemies sicne you're guaranteed to hit the one you are targeting.

Gauntlet : All the attack powers in the tanker sets have this effect. What it does is make all the enemies go "Wow! Look what he did to my friend! We have to take him down!" Basically, when you hit a mob, you create a AoE aggro effect. The AoE and the magnitude of the aggro is increased the more damage the attack does. So, by simply beatin stuff up, you are managing aggro. PBAoE attacks ar particularly good for this. Since it hits a LOT of guys and therefor creates a lot of aggro. In most fights, once you have the enemies neatly packed around you, you don't really need anything more than to run Invincibility and keep hitting them.

Provoke : This is a power in the Manipulation Power Pool. It basically works like Taunt. The difference is that it is NOT auto-hit. Meaning that you're not guaranteed to aggro what you use it on. However, it can hit more targets than Taunt. So with 1-2ACC slotted it is actuallt better than Taunt when it comes to grabbing a large group of enemies attention.

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In case people haven't seen this yet...

OPERATION: Statesman's Strike

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We have received confirmation from Manticore about Operation: Statesman’s Strike. The greenlight has been given, and the mission is a go. The Longbow tactical assault teams will launch at 7:00 CST (8:00 Eastern, 6:00 Mountain, 5:00 Pacific).

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Probably a dumb question, but hey I didn't that dumb time-system of yours , is this PM or AM?

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That would be PM

Strike

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Ah, so the attack will be 2 in the morning for me. Yeah, figures. Damn you americans and your pesky time zones!