Unthing

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Hmm... No. He needs to do 1630,41 points of damage (lvl38, Warburg) (if the tank doesnt have accolades or EE). AS is a critical hit and critical hits are unresisted in PvP.

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Is the whole of an AS or a critical hit unresisted or just the extra bit ( 50% for a scrapper or stalker critical and 84% for a stalker assassin's strike )?

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Dark has Shadow Fall for stealthy needs though. Would you need invis too?

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Well pets are not always in the Shadow Fall radius, so Grant Invis might help there perhaps.

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- Stealth isn't really essential so choose as you prefer (Stealth and Grant Invis might be a nice concept build for a Ninja Master). The small amount of +Def will stack on your Ninjas.
- Smoke Bomb is well worth it as it grants the "Hidden" status that Stalkers use so your Ninjas can crit. Set a ninja to passive, Smoke Bomb, Send him next to a mob, and then tell him to attack. Instant pet Stalker!

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I was wondering whether Invis might give them Hide status allowing them to critical on their first attack. If not it probably isn't that much use except:
i) The +Def it gives might be more endurance efficient for 6 minions over 2 minutes than Maneuvers is ( haven't worked it out ).
ii) It could be used for moving pets into position before an attack or allowing me to stealth them through missions.

Either of those is a minor nicety compared to other things and would considerably change when I get the powers in my build. I guess I would then work in Smoke Bomb at 18.

My second attempt at a mastermind is a Ninja/Dark Miasma.

I have a question about the Ninja part.

Does the stealth pool help at all ( Grant Invisibility )?

Is the hide effect from the Smoke bomb power ( the one you can get at level 18 ) worth getting?

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Just a random challenge/query/intrest/
How long do you think or even know how long you've kept your fury br up at full power?

So far my record has been an entire heist at St Martins.

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Soloing, I can keep it up in the >80% region for most of a mission. In teams it is harder to build and harder to sustain as I have built my brute with the minimal of downtime.

The trick to building fury is to attack lots and/or be attacked lots. So having an attack chain with lots of fast attacks, the likes of Jab, punch, boxing and brawl can be used to fill your fury bar with between 1 to 3 minions, as there is no downtime waiting for attacks and they have animation times that are a second or less.

However since getting Rage and 2 damage SOs in each attack, Fury seems to make less of a difference than it used to. It is still very good though.

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Weave is probably not worth it for fire tanks, it is for most other tanks, as it stacks with any defence they get from their primary.

For example on Inv tanks in makes about a 25% improvement to sustainable damage. For Fire tanks it only changes it by around 10%.

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who cares about the extra 7% defence (3 slotted) that weave offers? Its costs ,3 end/min.
Invu/'s tough hide gives more defence and thats a passive! IMO its a wasted power choice.

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Obviously Weave is worse than Tough Hide and probably should be picked and slotted after Tough Hide. However my point is that when you start picking these powers and stacking them your survivablity goes up massively. I even picked Combat Jumping for its Defence ( before Weave in the mid-late twenties IIRC ). Weave by itself is a waste of time, however the difference between 13 base defence and 20 is a significant one.

Against 5 enemies you would have about 33% defence with my build ( weave, combat Jumping, Invinicibility, Unyielding and Tough Hide ). If you don't have weave you have about 26%. Against even level minions this means you would take about a third less damage, which means you last a third longer.

In this situation it isn't that important as they are even level minions but imagine you are surrounded by 50 enemies ( 17 attacking you at a time nowadays ). You have 46% defence with Weave verses about 39%. Against even level minions it means that you get hit less than half as often with Weave which could mean the difference between Dull Pain recharging to bring you back to full hitpoints or just dying.

I like Dark/Dark best. Endurance can be a problem at times, but the strange damaging AoE / self buffs ( Soul Drain, Dark Consumption and Dark Regeneration ) and the lovely fear powers ( Touch of Fear and Cloak of Fear ) combined with a rare damage type make it lots of fun.

However accuracy debuffs can really ruin your day.

I guess Booster would be up for it, after all, everyone likes a Kineticist, especially one as suicidal as Booster. He's level 29.

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maybe but its so depressing seeing what he has become since all the nerfs

add me as global friend mate id love to play with you even if its just with my alts or in cov

@mr cuddles I think or maybe @mr_cuddles can't remember.

[/ QUOTE ]Pah, for sure you can't herd full maps of +6 anymore but tankers are still very viable, you just need to adapt, all these people crying their eyes out because they are nerfed and gimped and 'Ah, those were the days..' are just too lazy to try and adapt!!
We all had to adapt, I lost 3 pets with I5, I had my AoE holds severly gimped but STILL you see loads of people playing controllers..They've been tuned down to the other ATs, maybe for tankers have been more dramatic because they were SO OVEPOWERED that it was ridiculous, so they suffered more for the loss, but ANY AT HAD TO ADAPT, WHAT'S WRONG WITH TANKERS THAT THEY CAN'T ADAPT BUT JUST CRY?!?!

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Adapting an inactive character ( perhaps because they are lvl 50 ) to new rules ( ie nerfs or buffs ) is probably more of a pain than adapting an active character, like my tanker Golden Golem who was in his early 40s when I6 hit. It took me a good 2 weeks to actually want to adapt and when I finally did use it I was pretty happy with it. I like my tanker still, despite the fact that I perhaps only play him once a week.

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SS/INV for me.

nice fury building, and with perma rage on the damage is awesome then.

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Perma Rage is great.

I really like my SS/Fire, a good frequent self heal, no end problems since stamina, I don't have Blazing Aura or Consume yet though. I have Jab, Punch and Boxing as my fury builders and main attack cycle ( slotted 2xDAM, 1xEND) , with the occasional brawl as a filler and with Knockout Blow for SMASH! Haymaker is my next power pick, which should be a reasonable heavy attack.

I did try SS/DA as I reckon it would be a better choice, but I made some mistakes on SS power picks and gave up. Unfortunately DA matures much slower than Fire and has 3 resistance toggles rather than 2. DA also has a better self heal IMO. However from the mid 20s I'm sure it would perform better.

SS has 2 major advantages as a primary, the best single target attack at level 8 and the ability to have build up permanently on using Rage, so slotting Accuracies becomes redundant.

I'm got a level 31 D/D scrapper that I play as a scraptroller. I use cloak of Fear to fear any minions around the tank, add Touch of Fear to any dangerous enemies, normally bosses and then start scrapping. It is certainly more fun than the spine/regen role that I played for 40 odd levels.

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as for the xp, i just used heroestats to have numbers. it turned out that on my lvl39 brute i do an avg of ~ 300 per hour with ruthless, whereas i can do ~500-600 per hour on relentless. however i only tested for a short time, probably 15 missions.

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Just to clarify, are these in 1000xp per hour, 300xp per hour sounds too little for a lvl 39 character? 300000xp per hour sounds about right.

15 missions sounds long enough for me. I guess that you've proved my more enemies thing wrong. It does work for my tanker, but he has 2 strong AoEs that wear down whole spawns, so Minions are usually dead before he gets round to attacking them when soloing and Lts are often one-shottable by the time the bosses are dead. I will probably try my Brute on Relentless next.

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I only have 1 acc slot on my brute, and its on KO blow
Haymaker and footstomp have 2 recharges + 1 end redux !

I do miss a bit when figthing +3/+4 , maybe my acc drops to 75%,but i believe that someone whit 2 acc slots would also miss vs +3/+4 !
And i always have LOT'S of yellow insp, i keep forgeting to use them ...

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How on earth do you hit things w/o acc enhancements? Im not a brute specialist, but since i first tried a brute, i noticed it cant hit anything w/o enhancements. that was one reason because i just canceled my first brute at lvl7 or something, when i noticed corruptors taking out +1s, +2s or maybe even +3s, whereas i can hardly hit +2s without acc slotting.
compared to my corruptor, the brute needs ALOT more +acc slotting to hit. while its no problem to survive damage from +3s, you just stand there beating... nothing

am i doing something terribly wrong?

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I wouldn't advise taking on much more than +1s until you really can handle them, around the mid twenties for most characters. You get xp faster from defeating enemies quickly, so even for my level 48 tank I generally do my missions on unyielding against groups of +1s and +2s, even though he can take on +3s and +4s in most circumstances, he takes too long to defeat them. If you plan on taking +2s or more without a to hit buff ( tactics, invincibility or rage among others ) I would suggest slotting 2 accuracy SOs.

The superstrength set allows you to get the Rage power at level 18. This increases the damage and accuracy of all powers whilst it is active, by around +50% acc* and +80% damage. So when you have Rage active you don't need accuracy enhancements. If you slot Rage with 3 recharge SO enhancements it recharges just after it wears off, so it is effectively on all the time.

*A +50% to hit buff provides better accuracy than 3 ACC SOs, capping your defence against purple (+4) minions. The accuracy I received from Herostats against +1-+3 for an entire session has been in the 86%-100% region, which would suggest ( but not prove ) that the to hit buff is less than +50%.

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Something about that picture don't look quite right......

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Because we are missing this, due to some debt..

Gratz!

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Lots of tanks are fitting the medicine pool into their builds these days

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The medicine pool is a nice pool for tanks as a low recharge self heal makes a vast difference to survivablity. Also given that heals are based on % of total hitpoints a tank healing someone else may well be pretty effective even without heavy slotting.

The only passive I really rate is Tough Hide. In my current build I took Boxing at 22, tough at 24 and tough hide at 26. However I didn't take Resist Physical damage at all, leaving me about 10% shy of the S/L cap. Resist Elements and Resist Energies are my last 2 powers to be taken at 47 and 49, they make almost no difference and I am considering not getting Resist Elements at 49. The Resist E passives are only going to get you 12% resistance, meaning the difference between 16% and 28% resistance if you can slot them. You will take 85% of the damage with the Resist E powers at the cost of 2 power picks and 4 slots. It doesn't seem worth it to me.

With Invincibility, Tough Hide and Combat Jumping giving defence, Weave actually provides significantly better protection than the Resist E passives. With all 3 slotted you have about 20% defence against one opponent. Against a group you can floor the enemies to hit. This means that you end up being a defence based tanker. Against enemies like AVs defence is not as much use, however the shortfall can be made up with a tray full of Luck inspirations.

One problem with thi is there are a few enemies that are a real pain to deal with when you have little resistance to their attacks. The worst in the late 20s to mid thirties for Inv are Fir-bolgs*, however by going for tough you will find that Redcaps are nice and easy, an enemy which are normally pretty nasty.

* I actually dealt with these in I5 but as I hadn't slotted Unyielding by then I was probably in a worst situation than you.

Recharge seems pointless, as I have a workable attack chain for building up fury. Jab, Punch and Boxing seem to fine with the occasional use of Brawl. Currently I have slotted boxing, jab and punch with an accuracy DO and an end reducer DO. I also have a damage TO in punch. Jab also has an empty slot. However since I got perma Rage it seems pointless to slot accuracy in any of my attacks as I always hit anyway, +50% to hit buff ( from what I've read ) is somewhat excessive.

How do you slot superstength post perma-Rage.

I have 3 slots on punch, jab and 5 on knockout blow.

I haven't worked out how to slot them yet. Any suggestions?

I got rage, now I have no fear. Or spellling. Or grammar.

Gratz to Lumi!

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I think there needs to be another option.

Steamroller: Run into the mission and build full Fury on the first couple of mobs, then roll through the rest, never stopping for a break unless its absolutely necessary. Best for solo play.

That's me

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Me too...

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Get Freezing Rain as soon as you can. It's a superb power. But its a Rain power so be aware as soon as you cast it the enemies are going to try scarpering out of it. Not au fait with Electrical Defender set but if you have an immobilise available a one-two with it is great.

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/Electrical is awesome on my defender. 2 applications of Short Circuit with 3 end mods will drain any reasonable level Minion, Lieuteneant to Boss to zero endurance and prevent them from recovering it. I use it on my Kin/Elec meleefender excessively, along with Ball Lightning and the kin end drain powers. If you have something that prevents aggro from being a problem it can do wonders in a team situation.

Also as far as defender primaries are concerned, I think all of them are capable of making teams far more effective if used correctly.

Weave is probably not worth it for fire tanks, it is for most other tanks, as it stacks with any defence they get from their primary.

For example on Inv tanks in makes about a 25% improvement to sustainable damage. For Fire tanks it only changes it by around 10%.

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And even then I had spare slots to put in silly things like combat jumping :-P

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Why is slotting Combat Jumping silly? Combat Jumping provides 2.5% defence, half that of the 3 passives ( 5% ) but protects against Melee, Ranged and AoE damage. So putting 2 slots in Combat Jumping is the same as spending 1 slot in each of the passives. Combat Jumping also has a neglible endurance cost.

This post was brought to you by the Combat Jumping appreciation society.

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Since i tend to avoid soloing because I think that paying to play a game like it's offline is a bit dumb, I'm talkin from the team view of my build because if I have to solo, I play something else..

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I tend to solo for the first mission of a session, until I get an invite. It happens rarely now, but there have been periods when I have soloed more. Tanks seems to be in pretty high demand in the 40s, either that or I'm on lots of peoples friends list.

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....
That said, I'm happy to see that I finally reached a build that both works well(because i still get help request, despite how much tankers are disliked in these days)and with wich i have fun!

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I think tankers provide a very useful role and still seem to work well ( mine does and from the look of your build I'd imagine yours do too) however I can't see them being that quite that good early on in the game. Also the 'accepted wisdom' is that you need a tanker for AVs, I don't know whether this is actually true.

The way I judged it was unless I was up against AVs, I would be better off with Weave than the appropiate passive. However generally you know and AV is coming and can deal with them using inspirations.

Yes, with Rularuu, sensible pulling works. However this is the only enemy where I had to do this whilst soloing since the early levels. The other strange one is Malta, where I had an odd tactics of superspeed, target Sapper, hit follow, Incinerate, Greater Fire Sword. This is an example of using my secondary as you stated. However if I had slipped either of those 2 powers I would have had big problems doing the 3 or 4 malta missions I soloed as this was before I picked up Unstoppable.