dave_p

Nice. I got a bit over S/L cap, but only around 20% for ranged. I should work on that a little more.

Edit: Is that build using the PvP IO? Even though I can afford it, I refuse to pay 500M for the stupid thing, or whatever it's going for these days.

Please tell me in what situations exactly the extra 5% of S/L def will help you when the other typed def are already at cap or near it, and then tell me in what % of those situations you can't just grab an extra mob or 3 to get to S/L cap anyway.

Pure S/L? At 39% def and 90% res, you're only taking on average 1.1% of incoming damage. At over 300% regen (which is where my build is at), even if you can't cap your HPs, you're still regening something like 42HPs/sec, not counting the DP healing. So to be overwhelmed, you'd need to be taking almost 4000 points of damage per second, just for your health bar to move lower. Slowly. Yes, at 45% def & 90% res, that number skyrockets to 8400/sec, but seriously, how often are you taking that much damage and you can't get 3-5 mobs in range of Invinc? Again, that's per second, just to tick your HPs down, slowly. Just to get a scope of how much pure S/L damage both our builds can survive, think about how many tricked out scrappers it'd take to get to 4000DPS (much less 8400). I think we can safely assume both builds are pretty much covered against pure S/L in 99.99% of the game.

Debuffs, like in Cim? Debuffs hurt both builds, and certainly having a higher starting number helps, but as def decreases even at the same rate, the differences in efficacy shrinks. 45% is 2x as good sa 40%, but 40% is only 1.5x as good as 35% and so forth.

Mixed exotic damge w/S/L? Anything w/an E/N component is capped so same as having capped S/L def. F/C is near cap at 42%, and again easy enough to cap w/3 mobs in Invinc. Again, you might do slightly better w/capped S/L-only def with like a battalion of Fire Sword wielding mobs, but by such a slight margin, it's hardly worth mentioning. In fact, make it Fire Blast, cuz Fire Sword's melee in range of Invinc. Of course there's that 44% ranged def too (yeah, whole 2% higher than just F/C!), so I guess if you're facing an army of Fireball wielding mobs who just won't close to melee, your build would win out. Slightly.

Pure exotic? Your build loses out considerably against any pure E/N/F/C damage. It's not even close. Pure exotic happens a lot more than you seem to be giving it credit. Flamethrower, Burn/Ignite patches, most elec blasts (Mu, Freaks), etc, etc.

Psi will absolutey shred your build. While mine isn't foolproof against it, it'll at least hold its own against a great deal of it. In truth, your build is tough enough that it'll handle pretty much everything describe above (tho you may have some problems w/pure E/N/F/C damage too), but here, you really run into pain.

Are these last two rare in the game? Maybe, but they do exist whereas the times when just having capped S/L def is clearly superior are, well, non-existant because you can still always get mobs in range of Invinc.

I'm sure we're not going to agree on this so this will be my last say in this topic, but hopefully the OP and others can look at the numbers and make their own decisions--maybe even try out varying builds and see what they think is best.

I'll repeat once more--plenty of my other tanks and scrappers eithr have S/L capped defenses or are working towards that goal. WP, Dark, Fire, out-of-Granite Stone, I play them all. They rock w/capped S/L defenses. Invul doesn't need it.

That's also not true. I normally hate AE farming, but on a dare, I followed in a Fire/Ice tank into one of his AE farms w/my Ill/Kin, who's not even close to a farm build, but has high def (not quite capped once SI in suppressed to 1/2). Since PA quickly hits the aggro cap in a room w/like 200 mobs packed in, that's completely out of the equation, and Phanty pretty much died instantly, but I survived a really long time while pumping out FS'ed Fireballs as soon as they recharged, and only really died cuz I got careless during an unlucky string of hits.

Now, obviously, the tank doesn't have to worry about such an unlucky string, which you're going to run into sooner or later, but a properly built Fire/Kin could prolly farm w/the best tanks w/just a few trips back from the hosp, which is really very close anyway. And the higher damage output (FS'ed HF, Fireball, Cages & Bonfire) would prolly make up for most/all of that travel & zoning time.

Just to clarify (because I think there's still room for misunderstanding here):

AVs have a x1.5 multiplier to hit. Bosses, Lts, GMs all have a different multiplier, but let's just stay w/AVs for now.

Your softcap defenses are 45% to everyone, from minions to giant monsters. What AVs (and others) do is apply that 1.5 multiplier after all defenses (including to hit debuffs) are factored in. So if you have a 45% net defense, the AV has a 5% base chance of hitting you x1.5, which comes to that magic 7.5% number.

This does NOT mean that you have a 42.5% "cap" for defenses against AVs. You still have a 45% cap. If you lower that to 42.5%, the AV will have a 7.5% base chance to hit you x1.5 which comes to an 11.25% hit rate. What that means is that over time, you're taking 2/3 more damage than if you'd capped your defenses.

As for using debuffs to hit cap, unless those debuffs are unresisted (rare) or very large, they'll largely be ineffective against AVs and such who usually resist them to a great degree. Just as an example, my Fire/Rad w/maxed out RI for To Hit debuff, still needs around a 39% defense to hit cap vs. even level AVs and GMs, which means his RI is only debuffing away a paltry 6% of their to hit values instead of the 39% debuff it presents to even level minions. If you're facing higher conning AVs, that just gets worse. RTTC has a paltry debuff value, only 15% effective as RI so I really wouldn't count on it for much, if any effective mitigation against AVs (fully slotted, it'll net you like 1%).

Oh, FWIW, I fully cap both my WP/SS & DB/WP for S/L damage and it works out great.

True, but w/the CP changes, I foresee Elec being the same way, w/its T9 being about as skippable as Elude, which is to say you don't want to, but if you have to skip one...

And I'd still take SJ.

No reason not to do both. Sounds like a good place to 5-slot Doctored Wounds.

As for LR, a lot of SR scrappers seem to wanna do the "no travel power" thing, which involves slotting Quickness as well as like Sprint & Swift. I'd rather just take SJ myself...

Combining this w/what Sailboat said, I very frequently leave the current fight w/my tanks (and only my tanks) to start the new fight. If you're a main damage dealer, it's your job to finish the current fight, but as soon as I see that the fight's in hand, I go forward to start the next one. Why the tank and not the scrapper or controller? Because they're not as good at *both* 1) surviving the alpha, and 2) prepping the next fight for the team. Sure, I have plenty of controllers & scrappers (and defenders and blasters for that matter) that can survive an alpha, and can even round up a crowd for the AoE dealers, but none of them can do both jobs as well and as quickly as a decent tank. Obviously, if there's no tank, then a scrapper or controller should take this role.

Over 2XP wknd, I was playing my Dark tank w/a quad-boxed Spines scrapper (x3 + 1 Fire/Rad) and I was taking the lead and constantly pushing the pace so that as soon as she killed off the last crowd (and very quickly), there was another nicely packed crowd ready for him. At the end of our runs, she said to me, "that was intense," which I took as a decent complement at my pace setting. I hate tanks that wait for every last mob to fall before jumping into the next fight, and if I were playing a scrapper (or controller) on those teams, I'd in fact be very tempted to move on ahead of the team... though I usually don't.

Also, a really good point above about 'aggro bleed" too. After soaking the alpha, I really don't mind if some of my mobs start heading towards "squishies" and I only bring them back if it gets out of hand (like seeing a blaster's health in the red). I always chuckle when I see a tank abandoning a big crowd he's got packed around him to chase a lone mob running towards my controller, as if I'm even in the slightest danger. Competent players know how to manage their own aggro, and if they don't, they need to learn anyway.

Yeah, I'm *very* excited about this change. I'm going to just assume now that its effects won't be fully enhancable--hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they pull a SoW-like "no recharge allowed" on us, cuz if it is, I'm so making it perma.

Edit: On further reflection, w/PS, there's really no reason to make this perma (and potentially wasting the heal), but I'd still get the recharge down as much as possible.

There's a clear demarcation bet (1) (and maybe (3) & (5), but everyone can do (3) & (5) to varying degrees) and the rest. The fact is, no matter how much passive (Stam, QR, RA, Heat Loss, etc) or active (Transference, PS, Consume, etc) recovery you have, if you get drained to zero, you lose your toggles, you can't fire anything off (like PS) w/o swallowing a blue, and your odds of survival rapidly diminish. Now w/enough recovery (passive & active), you likely can deal w/stuff like Carnies and elec wielding mobs (Mu and the like), but against Sappers, you will get drained if you don't take them out first.

Actual end drain resistance is clearly the best solution against any of those enemies (and especially Sappers), and WP lacks it. In fact, since it also lacks PS, Consume or any other real active recovery mechanism, it's actually a bit hard pressed to deal w/even massed Carnies or Arachnos sometimes. Not to say it can't handle it, but it fares worse than Stone here as well.

As for the claims of "equivalence", I didn't mean to put words in anyone's mouth, but the rather cavalier tone that you (or whoever) took to wave away Rooted's end drain resistance advantage over WP gave me that impression. Not only is there no equivalence, it's not even close.

Again, not dissing WP--I love my WP toons, but it's a clear cut advantage for Stone that ppl are glossing over. WP also has its advantages over Stone, and QR is certainly one of them, but not really for the situations described above.

Yeah, I know it's a mag 100, but it's a lot easier to get to 100pts of protection w/Stone than WP, though both need significant buffing, since you can start at like 34~35 instead of 12~13 (again, SoW gets you to 35, but isn't perma, and a lot of ppl skip it anyway). As for Malta, I haven't actually gotten mezzed playing my WP tank (or any tank), but you're only talking about like 2 points of difference, so really, it's just 1 extra attack that gets stacked on you. I certainly have been mezzed though 12 points of protection on tanks before so the option of going into "full defense" is nice to have. In this regard, I don't think we're disagreeing any.

Alabaster12:

You seem to stress that you're a Stone/Fire that doesn't run out of end. My Stony never does either, but I suspect both our tanks are rather well IOed out. I just wanted to point out that Fire Melee has the highest DPE of all the tanker secondaries. In fact, Fire anything generally has more end efficient attacks, because of the extra damage it does.