The Living Glacier: Being the Ice Tanker
By
ArcticTeam,
Posted on: 2006-05-11 22:13 in Player Guides
Excellent guide - thank you! I've been working on an Ice/SS Tanker and learned quite a few helpful things from this, particularly regarding defenses and taunts.
Energy Absorption is right around the corner as the char is level 25, but I have to rework my slotting as I believe I have a pair of end redux enhancements in each toggle and at least one - maybe two - in each attack. This worked great for end pre level 20, and with stamina added at 20 I rarely have any endurance problems. This will be severe overkill, though, once I add EA next level. Thankfully I ran a respec mission last night so I'm all set to rearrange things at 27 when I can get the level 30 SOs.
Thanks again for this great guide!
Dern, it I thought I edited out that typo of writing "blizzard" instead of "hurricane" big offenders on scattered foes. Past max edit time too. I could have SWORN I edited that out, oh well...
Thanks for the write-up. Just got an ice/EM tank going. So far, he's lots of fun, but I'm only L6. The info in your guide has been great for helping me think through power selection as I level.
RagManX
"if the market were religion Fulmens would be Moses and you'd be L. Ron Hubbard. " --Nethergoat to eryq2
The economy is not broken. The players are
Wonderful guide, thank you. I was inpired by it and made an Ice/Ice tank, and I'm really enjoying it so far. What I really need now is a good guide to the Ice secondary as all the others appear to be well out of date. Any plans to write a secondary guide as well?
I'd like to thank you for doing an excellent writeup that wasn't heavily slanted towards PvP like almost every other Ice tanker guide I've seen out there 
I'm kinda looking to make soon after I7 hits, but I don't plan on doing the PvP thing. Considering it's my first real tank, a desciption of some of the powers and slotting advice is appreciated
So thanks
Neat guide, thanks for making it. I'm going to toggle this one.
Definitely a great guide. I have an Ice/Ice Tank at lvl 25 it's fun.
�The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion."
@Mr. Magnifico
Indeed. Good work on this.
Terrific guide. Now I have an idea of what to do with slotting and strategies for later levels. :3
I have noticed a general dearth of Ice tanker guides on the forums, so in an attempt to rectify that, I'm creating this guide on how to be a living glacial that can slowly grind anything in it's path down. Being a defense oriented tank can be a bit rough, you will take sour hits, you will see your HP drop suddenly. But while that defense holds you will scarcely take hits, which means you can dodge the bullet on some of the more unpleasant things that leave other tanks cringing. It's harder to get held, it's harder to get enervated by a sapper, you are just one hard person to pin down. All power information is pulled from the CoH & CoV Character builder by SherkSilver.
Defense and the You: A Primer on How Defensive Powers Work
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Defense is your bread and butter for Ice tanking. Being as such, I'm going to give you a bit of a rundown on how defense works in city of heroes. I warn you, up ahead lies a lot of math, if you are allergic to numbers performing obscene mambos across the page, then you might want to skip down a few paragraphs, don't worry, this section won't be entirely numbers.
Commence mathy bits.
Since, a majority of the damage eating you will be doing is based off the defense as an ice tanker. it's a good idea to have a rough idea on how this works. Based upon Arcana's Guide to Defense 1.1 you can see that the gist is this. The enemy has a percent chance of hitting you, your defense is a number that's subtracted from that percent chance.
So, if a hellion that is your level has a 50% chance of hitting you with that baseball bat, and your defense against smashing is 30%, then 50-30 = 20, leaving the hellion with a 20% chance of striking you.
Now, the base chances of a minion of an equal level striking you is 50%, LT's 57.5%, snipers and bosses 65%, AV's, Giant Monsters, Monsters, Pets 75%.
Now for every level the baddie has over you, it gains a bonus on it's base accuracy. While there is no precise number, Arcana cites it as being around 9% which seems about right from my experience.
At +3 levels over you, that red hellion is going to be swinging his at at a base accuracy of roughly 63.5% that defense of 30 will only cut it down to 33.5% for you.
Now, in I7, there's going to be a change to that. Come I7, that accuracy buff is going to be applied as a multiplier AFTER the defense is applied. In that instance, you get the 50% of a hellion minion subtract 30, for an accuracy of 20%, add in a 27% bonus and all that red +3 level hellion is going to be swinging with now is 25.5% since 27% of 20 is far less then 27% of 50. Of course the I7 system makes it harder to calculate in your head how often you'll be whacked, but I'm more then willing to live with that since it's going to make you tougher.
Now that we got all that math out of the way, let is talk about defense types, there's 9 types, smashing, lethal, energy, negative energy, cold, fire, range, melee, area of effect. Please note the toxic of toxic and psionic defense, there is none, the only way you can evade such attacks is through melee or range or area of effect defense.
When you have multiple defense increasing effects, the defenses of the same type stack up.
So, let us presume you have frozen armor running and it's granting you 20 defense to smashing and lethal attacks. Now lets presume a force field defender uses deflection shield on you granting 15 defense to melee, smashing, and lethal attacks. This raises your smashing and lethal defense to 35, and your defense to melee to 15.
Now, if you are hit by an attack, the game looks over all the defenses that applies, and picks the strongest defense to the attack. So, if a clockwork uses its electrical brawl against you that attack is melee, smashing, and energy. If we use the figures from the previous example, then the game would see that your melee defense is 15, your smashing defense is 35, and your energy defense is 0. The game would apply your smashing defense and it would subtract 35 from that clockwork's accuracy. This is one of the key strengths of defense, like horseshoes, almost counts. The more components an attack has, the easier it is to counter.
Either way, no matter how good your defense is, the attacker is always given a 1 in 20 chance of hitting. No defense is 100% perfect. If the accuracy is less then 5%, the game kicks it up to 5%.
Endurance and Toggles
======================
As an ice tanker, you're going to be running a lot of toggles, there's no way around it, you need to. Toggles burn some endurance as upkeep, most toggles drain their endurance on a half-second tick. A majority of ice tanker toggles suck .2388 endurance out of you every second. Now, if you continuously run an attack, it drains out more endurance. If you shift+click frozen fists, you'll find yourself using about 1.5 endurance per second. Yes, attacking is a bigger toll on your system then running the toggles, yet either way it's a game of endurance balancing, multiple toggles add up, with chilling embrace, frozen armor, glacial armor and wet ice, you can easily find yourself running almost 1 endurance per second on toggles alone. Now every second you recover 1.667 endurance (you can see they love nice round numbers), so, four toggles can suck more then half your endurance recovery away.
You can slot your attacks to endurance, and that will help your endurance recovery on the short run. If you slot your toggles for defense you give yourself better recovery when not attacking. I have heard seasoned players suggest both tactics, both have their merits, but I went with slotting my toggles, it has worked with me rather well, once I got past 20 I never really had endurance problems.
That being said, Ice tankers have two counters for their endurance woes. There is the ubiquitous stamina power out of the fitness power pool which can grant as much as an entire extra point of stamina on to your recovery per second, which goes a long way. There is also energy absorption, I will go more in detail on EA later, but the power is excellent for endurance management. There are ice tankers out there who completely skip stamina and do ok without it by allowing their EA to grant them refills. It always hits, and if you tag three baddies with it, you'll refill most of your endurance bar, if you hit four or more, it's a free refill, and these are my observations before dropping in endurance modification enhancements.
The Powers
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No guide to ice tanking would be complete without a rundown of the powers. So here it is.
A word on defense messages. In I7 when a defense blocks an attack, it displays a message floating up from your char based on the power that blocked it. I'm going to include these messages based off of what they currently are on the test server to try to make this a little more I7 compatible.
Frozen Armor
Level: 1
Cost: .2388 endurance
Activation time: .7 seconds
Recharge: 2 seconds
Defense: 17 smashing/lethal (19.5 with 3 defense training, 22.1 with 3 defense Dos, 26.5 with 3 defense Sos)
Defense message: Deflected
Resist: cold 30%, fire 12.5%, Defense Debuffs (scales with level)
Takes: Defense Buff, Endurance Reduction, Recharge Reduction
Comments: This power is a must get if you want to tank. Smashing/lethal is the most common damage type in the game, especially when it comes down to melee. Take those clockwork for example. Sure, they have a lot of energy attacks, but if you dive into melee range, they start fighting with smashing/energy attacks, and vs that, you get to use all of this power's defense against it. I strongly suggest picking up this power, get 3 defense enhancements into it. Since pre-DO levels (level 11 and under) defense enhancements barely affect powers like this, I suggest concentrating on buffing your attacks up at those levels, and later getting 3 slots into this baby for defense enhancements. I prefer to drop an endurance reduction in this power since I tend to forget to turn my toggles off during downtime. Do not try to pop more then 3 defense Sos into this power, the best you'll get is 1.5 defense, it's just not worth it. Put those slots somewhere more useful, like into an attack.
Hoarfrost
Level: 1
Cost: 14.56 endurance
Activation time: .73 seconds
Recharge: 360 Seconds
Duration: 120 Seconds
Resist: Toxic 20%
Takes: Endurance Reduction, healing, Recharge Reduction, Damage Resist
Comments: It happens, when you ice tank, you take a sour hit and your health goes crunch. This is what you use to bounce back. You tap into this power and you'll heal back 40% of your max hp. Not only that, it increases your maximum HP by 40%. More hp does not only mean you can take more abuse, it also means your hp recovers faster. You use this power when you are up against the ropes to get back in the fight, this in essence will be your panic button. What's more, you can increase it's healing factor and the amount of HP it recovers by dropping in healing enhancements. Bear in mind, of the max HP boost, only half of it is enhanceable. So, if you have 3 Sos heals in this power for roughly a 100% boost (actually it's more like 95% but we'll say 100% for ease of math), you'll heal 80% of your hp when using this power, but only gain something akin to a 50% boost on your hp. Either way, this is another power I suggest strongly getting. Without it you have no means of recovering your HP if something goes wrong. The toxic resist helps a little, but I have generally not found it worth slotting for toxic over slotting for healing and recharge. Every time you got an extra slot you need to drop somewhere, drop it in this power and work towards an eventually 3 recharge and 3 healing in this power, fully slotted up, this thing can near completely recharge you and render you a lot harder to drop.
Chilling Embrace
Level: 2
Cost: .2388 endurance per second
Activation time: .73 seconds
Recharge: 2 seconds
Debuff: damage -14%, recharge -32%, to all foes in the effect
Takes: Endurance Reduction, Recharge Reduction, Slow, Taunt Duration
Comments: This, ladies and gentlemen, is what separates the ice tankers to some tough chump who likes to fight in close. Gauntlet and taunt alone only go so far in grabbing hate. This power takes it a step further. The power surrounds you with a field that extends a little outside of melee range. Anything that steps into the field will not only receive the above debuffs and have its movement rate reduced, the target will get taunted, automatically. It can take a second for the actual taunt to kick in, but anything that hangs next to you with this power activated is going to turn and agro on to you. Once it's agroed on to you, nothing will take that agro away from you short of someone using a taunt power on that foe, or someone physically removing the foe from the area of affect through the use of knockback or teleportation. This is the best hate grabbing aura of all tanker auras. Not only does it grab hate, it interrupts interruptables in PvE. My Ice tanker has never had a Vahzilok zombie explode in his face, sure, they TRY, but they find themselves locked in a loop of having their explosion attempts fail due to chilling embrace, same goes for circle of thorn mage suicide attempts, skyraider shield deployments, Crey radiologist radiation infections (yes the Crey version is interruptible thankfully), and all other interruptible powers that various enemies can attempt to use. Since all the baddies in the affect are getting a 32% reduction in recharge, this means they are throwing less attacks at you, if they are throwing less attacks at you, then you are taking less damage, and if that wasn't enough, they are having their damage debuffed on top of that, further adding to your power to resist attacks thrown at you. Running chilling embrace will not only keep agro off of everything around you, it allows you to stand up to that agro better. I will note, when something first enters into this area, and it has multiple different attacks it will still fire off its attack chain unhindered, once it played all it's cards, its going to have to wait a while before it can try that trick again. That being said, I strongly suggest taking this power, its one of the lynch pins of being an ice tanker. The slotting is up to taste, by slotting in more slows you can increase the control aspect of this power, though I suggest getting in a couple taunt durations so the lingering hate of this power sticks to baddies more if they get knocked out of this power's area of affect via knockback (and you WILL deal with a lot of knockback in your career). Just remember, slotting slows into this power only reduces movement speed of those in it, it does not affect the recharge debuff.
Wet Ice
Level: 6
Cost: .2388 endurance per second
Activation: .7 seconds
Recharge: 2 seconds
Defense: 1.1 Lethal, Smashing, fire, cold, energy, negative energy
Resist: Cold 30%, Sleep, Hold, Disorient, Immobilize, Knockback, Slow, and Defense Debuffs (Scales with level)
Takes: Endurance Reduction, Recharge Reduction
Comments: Once upon a time, when City of Heroes was quite young, ice tankers were only able to run one toggle at a time. Wet Ice was the general purpose armor, that provided status protection and a broad range of defenses but not at the power of the specialized armors. As issues rolled by, Ice tankers were allowed to run multiple toggles, and the stacked defense between this and frozen armor and glacial armor resulted in obscene defense values. In order to combat this, the devs nerfed it's defense down to the vestigial 1.1 that you see today. Thankfully, they did away with slotting this armor for defense so people wouldn't waste their enhancements on such a low defense value. While taking this armor for defense is a joke, it gives rather excellent resistances. In fact, ice tankers resist more then a lot of the tanks out there. Stone tanker's rooted does not provide the slow protection, in fact the power itself rather slows down their mobility. Fire tankers don't resist holds or knockback or immobilizations. Invulnerability's Unyielding doesn't protect against slows either. Yes, the ability to shrug off a slow is unique to an ice tanker and it's key in this power. With this thing on you will scarcely notice when something hits you with an ice storm. Those psionic bolts will hardly slow down your attack chain. You can run through those tsoo caltrops as if they were not even there. What's more, all those annoying mezzes go bye bye, unless a bunch of things try to hold you en masse (which has happened to me, damn tsoo, always carry an emergency break free). You need this power, if you get mezzed, you lose a load of toggles and all your defense, this thing keeps you running. This power is a definite on the list of powers an ice tanker should snag. Not much you need to do with slotting, you can drop an endurance reduction in the slot it comes with, but it really doesn't need slotting.
Permafrost
Level: 8
Automatic power
Resist: Cold 20%, Fire 12.5%, Slow
Comments: Taking this for the cold resistance really doesn't do much for you. The maximum resistance a tanker can have is 90%. Between wet ice, frozen armor, and glacial armor you easily reach that 90% mark. The slow resist while nice, is not that dramatic on this power (though it does add a little to wet ice's resistance). This power does do one thing for you, it gives a little extra fire resist to stack on your frozen armor's resistance to give you a passable fire resistance. Three slotted for resistance and the total fire resistance of this and frozen armor combined amounts to roughly 30%. 30% resistance is nothing to write home to about, but it's certainly better then nothing. That being said, this power is rather optional, if you want that little extra protection vs fire go for it, otherwise go for another power.
Icicles
Level: 12
Cost: 1.04 endurance per second
Activation: 1.67 seconds
Recharge: 4 seconds
Damage: Lethal .5556 brawling damage per second
Accuracy: 75%
Takes: Accuracy, Damage, Endurance Reduction, Recharge Reduction, Taunt Duration
Comments: This is your second chance to get an agro aura if you did not snag chilling embrace. This power is not as good at snagging hate as chilling embrace is. But it is however more offensive then the two. Essentially, everything in melee range is attacked every second by this power automatically. The cost is the same as firey aura, the damage however is slightly less, not only that, it's in lethal damage, which far more things resist. Ice armor is not as offensive as the fire armor powerset, so icicles will never be as potent as firey aura. It's not entirely bad, but you're going to be second fiddle to the fire tanker's damage aura. If you do not grab chilling embrace, then you should definitely grab this as an agro aura. I suggest chilling over this however for the purpose of snagging hate. Chilling embrace does work well with this power in that with some slows slotted into it it helps hold the victims in the damaging icicles longer if they try to get out of range. Other then that, this power is optional, it's all a matter of how you want to dish out your damage, it may not be as good as firey aura, but it's not entirely bad either. Getting an endurance in this power helps run it continually, though 1 accuracy, and damage slotted to taste can help a lot, like most attacks, you can help it's agro grabbing properties by slotting in some taunt durations.
Glacial Armor
Level: 18
Cost: .2388 endurance per second
Activation: 2 seconds
Recharge: 2 seconds
Resist: Cold 30%
Defense: 17 energy, negative energy (22.1 with 3 defense Dos, 26.5 with 3 defense Sos)
Defense message: Deflected
Buff: +perception
Takes: Defense Buf, Endurance Reduction, Recharge Reduction
Comments: Atrociously long startup animation compared to the other shields, but at least it looks flashy. This armor provides defense to your energy and negative energy type attacks. This comes into play far less then your frozen armor but it's needed none the less. With this, you'll finally get defense against those electrical attacks without having to force the baddies to melee. This and Frozen armor form the foundation of your defense however, generally an ice tanker should run these two shields together, though prior to getting your endurance under control, I suggest only flicking this shield on as needed, watching out for energy attacks. The defense from this power comes into play less, but when energy defense comes into play, boy does it come into play. There's plenty of times where I saw a ton of baddies attempting to zap me into oblivion only to fail, and this power offers a degree of evasion against those dreaded malta sappers. Not only that, the perception boost is handy when spirits and ghosts try to go invisible and run, and if you are a PVP player, it helps in spotting stalkers. All in all, I suggest this power soundly, it's not as necessary as Frozen armor, but it's still very much needed. Slot it up in the same manner as Frozen armor. By the time you get this power, you'll be at least level 18 and have access to dual origin enhancements or better. Get three slots of defense in this power and perhaps an endurance reduction.
Energy Absorption
Level: 26
Cost: 13 endurance
Activation: .7 seconds
Recharge: 60 seconds
Duration: 45 seconds
Resist: Slow
Defense: Lethal, Smashing, Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative Energy 2 for the first target .5 for each additional, to a maximum of 9.5
Defense message: Absorbed
Takes: Defense Buff, Endurance Reduction, Endurance Modification, Recharge Reduction, Taunt Duration
Comments: If you want to be an ice tanker without stamina, this is how you do it. Firing this power affects everything in a tight PBAoE, slightly larger then chilling embrace. The first target gives you the +2 bonus on your defense, each additional foe gives only .5. AoEs at top can only affect 15 things. The defense bonuses from this power is not spectacular, but it does help tweak that high defense of an ice tanker towards that 1/20 miss rate. Just 4 or more baddies and you got yourself an instant refill on endurance, this power is marvelous for refilling your endurance. If you are using this power primarily for that endurance boost, then you will want to to slot it for recharge and endurance. If you are using it for defense, then a single recharge SO will be enough to keep it up just about permanently, 3 defense SO's can be used to kick it's max defense bonus all the way up to around 15% if you can find 15 things to drain. This power depends on your ability to find large groups of enemies, but if you find them you can really help your defense. When tried on the I7 test server with large groups of foes, I found the "absorbed" message popping up quite frequently, showing it was doing a fair share of work. Not only that, firing this power off tends to anger everything in it's area, which is useful for grabbing the attention of a cluster of foes. No matter how you intend to use it, I suggest taking this power, there are numerous ways to make it work for you, all of which are good. Slotting depends on preference, viable configurations are, 3 recharge, and 3 endurance modifications if you want to use it to keep your blue bar full. If using it for defense, 1 recharge and 3 defense and 2 endurance is a nice way to go. When using it for defense you want to use it less often generally because things tend to die as the fight goes on, so you want to hold on to that large defense bonus from the start of the fight as long as possible. I run an ice tank with stamina, and I use the 1 recharge 3 defense setup, and I never run into endurance problems.
Hibernate
Level: 32
Cost: .2388 endurance per second (you recover a lot of that off though)
Activation: .07 seconds
Recharge: 120 seconds
Duration: 30 seconds maximum
Takes: Endurance Reduction, Endurance modification, Healing, Recharge Reduction
Comments: This is your second panic button. Click this power and you essentially become invincible and rest. Your endurance and health refill at an astounding rate until you exit this nice little toggle. There is a cap on the amount of time you may remain in hibernation and that is 30 seconds, after that, you need to come up for air. Generally speaking, 30 seconds is MORE then enough time to completely refill with this power, it's essentially a rest that can be used in the middle of combat. Chilling embrace may be active at the same time as this power is, but it's effect is suspended, it's just left on for the convenience of not having to turn it off when entering this state. That being said, if you remain in hibernate too long, everything you agroed will decide to pound on something else. Generally speaking, you still get a fair amount of time to recuperate, especially if you slotted your agro aura for taunt duration. I strongly suggest getting this power though, just like hoarfrost, you need a panic button for when you take a sour hit. Unlike hoarfrost however, this power recharges at a rate that makes it more reasonable for using once a fight or so. This power combined with hoarfrost allows you to tank without having to lean heavily on a medic. As for slotting, recharge should come before anything else, 3 slots of it. Once you get to that point, make a decision on what you use this to recover more often, health or stamina, drop enhancements of that type in to taste to reduce the amount of time you have to spend in hibernation, I generally find it's recovery rates good as is though so you can always drop those other slots elsewhere.
Now as for your secondary power set. I'm not going to cover that much, I figure it's better to get a generalized Ice tanker guide out first. Either way, here's a word on one power every single secondary set shares.
Taunt
Level: Ice, fire, ax, war mace, energy, 4 earth, super strength 10
Activation: 2.17 seconds
Recharge: 10 seconds
Range: 70 feet
Takes: Range Increase, Recharge Reduction, Taunt Duration, Accuracy (I7 and higher only)
Comments: You don't have to get this immediately, I even waited until 22 with my build, but it's going to make your life a hell of a lot easier. This thing is not potent enough without some intense slotting to constantly taunt a huge cluster of foes around you. It gets five things in a single go, the five nearest things to your target. This fact will make it difficult to keep a tight mod of 20 baddies constantly trained on you. Though, combined with an agro aura, like Chilling Embrace, and this thing becomes a nice contingency. You fire this power off whenever something is hammered with knockback out of your aura of hate to make sure it comes back to you. You can use this to keep that one or two stray guys out in left field agroed to you. With this, you can cement your status as agro taker. There's two ways you can slot this, if you are doing PVP in I7 or higher, you probably want some accuracy in this since without accuracy, you only have a 50% hit rate in PVP. In PVE the hit-rate is 100% so you don't need accuracy, slotting for this falls along two things, either you can work it for speed, or you can work it for duration. The power is pretty potent out of the box however, I am satisfied with it with only 2 taunt durations in it, though slotting extra speed into it helps keep more spread out foes under control by allowing you to taunt a heck of a lot more often, that 10 seconds seems like an eternity in the heat of battle.
While I don't know every secondary power set for tanks intimately, I can give some comments on them. Everything is viable though in it's own ways.
Ice Melee: Lower damage, high control, has a PBAoE trip zone that can be kept up constantly, a melee hold, and a PBAoE sleep. Attacks are prone to -recharge and -speed.
Battle Axe: Decent damage, but a commonly resisted damage type. Prone to knock things off their feet.
War mace: Step above ice on damage, but a commonly resisted damage type. Prone to disorient things.
Energy Melee: Nice damage, high end moves are devastating with a trade off, such as damaging yourself, or disorienting the attacker. Has a tendency to disorient.
Firey Melee: Nice damage, attacks are prone to do extra damage over time that causes it to be a rather damaging power set.
Stone Melee: Decent damage, but from a commonly resisted type. Attacks tend to knockback, but it does have a hold, and a ranged attack as well as a PBAoE disorient.
Super Strength: Decent Damage, attacks tend to disorient. Has a PBAoE disorient move. Has rage instead of buildup, which lasts for two minutes granting a nice bonus to damage and accuracy, but when it wears off, the user crashes for a few moments. 3 recharge in rage can keep it up near constantly.
Scrounging Defense is probably going to be something on your mind at some point, and there are various ways to build up your defense in the power pool sets. Power pool powers generally grant melee, ranged, aoe, smashing, lethal, ice, fire, energy, negative energy defense. Here's a look at the powers that can buff your defense. If I don't note defense type, presume it's the above.
Concealment: Stealth
Cost: .3203 endurance per second
Activation: .7 seconds
Recharge: 20 seconds
Defense: 2.5 initially, 1.25 after attacking
Comments: Like most power pool stuff you will see that this grants only 2.5 defense, which really isn't much. When you slot this power up, the defense gets as high as 3.9, which will half down to 1.95 when you actually attack. The power will reduce your speed to but at least you got stealth.
Fighting: Weave
Cost: .3425 endurance per second
Activation: .67 seconds
Recharge: 10 seconds
Defense: Melee, Range, Lethal Smash 4.33 for tankers, 3.25 for scrappers, 2.5 for everyone else.
Comments: Yes, tankers get a bonus to this power, it's probably the most defense you'll see out of a power pool set, but it's not without a price. It's the fourth tier power out of the fighting powerset, which means you must take 2 other powers out of it. At least the "Tough" power from the set gives 15% resistance to smashing and lethal. With three slots of defense Sos you can get up to 6.25.
Flight: Hover
Cost: .1791 endurance per second
Activation: Instant
Recharge: Instant
Defense: 2.5
Comments: Not too bad, it's cheap, and it offers air mobility as horrifically slow as it is. If you slot this power with 3 SO flight speeds it's air speed isn't too bad.
Leadership: Maneuvers
Cost: .4026
Activation: 3.7 seconds
Recharge: 15 seconds
Defense: 2.5 aura to all allies and self
Comments: If you are looking for defense for yourself, this is miserable. It's cost is expensive and it's activation is rather long. The defense bonus it's granting to squishies isn't going to help them too much.
Leaping: Combat Jumping
Cost: .074
Activation: Instant
Recharge: Instant
Defense: 2.5
Comments: This thing is as cheap as they come, any cheaper and it'd be free. Like the others though it gives a measely 2.5 bonus but at least the boost to jumping allows you to get to some places a little easier without flicking on a travel power.
Honestly, none of these 2.5 defense powers do a whole lot for you, it's just a little bit of defense. When I tried runnin combat jumping on the test server it's dodged message rarely came up. If you took 3 of these at once all 3 slotted it may be fair defense on top of your solid Ice tanker defense, but that's 3 powers that could be put elsewhere, like attacks that'd help you put threats down faster. The longer the enemy stays alive, the longer it has a chance to lay more sour hits on you.
Tactics for Tanking
==================
Tanking is a rough job but satisfying. It's no less different behind a sheet of ice. Tanking is not about standing up to the boss, it's not about standing up to a few minions. No, tanking is about taking 2 bosses and their extended family and LTs. Yet, I often see a blaster get up in the face of a boss survive and claim he was "tanking".
It's a throwback from other MMOs where fights are more of a one baddy vs the whole team sort of deal. In City of Heroes you face groups, it's your job as a tank to keep the fight tidy and neat and efficient.
Every tanker has an agro aura, ice tankers have two, Chilling Embrace and Icicles. Generally, when taking on groups, you want to get in there, aura on, brush up agianst everything in the room, like a cat, and then rush for the nearest bit of cover while everything in the room rushes in to try to pet you.
Why duck behind cover? Because that breaks the line of sight. By doing that, you force everything to run up nice and close to you, so they are in your agro aura, and you force everything in a tight cluster.
You want things in a tight cluster, you want everything in melee. Everything in melee has debuffed attack speed and damage, making it easier for you to survive if you are playing chilling embrace. If you are playing icicles you'll be dealing damage to all those baddies and whittling them down. In both cases you'll be pulling and keeping the agro of all those things on to you. In doing that, you allow the blasters and controllers and defenders to deliver their Area of Effect attacks. This is good, because they get to dump out a ton of damage with impunity, no fear of anything turning and attacking, and debuff the entire cluster of baddies wholesale, thus increasing your survivability.
By getting every single thing attacking you, you ensure that only one thing in the team is taking damage. This makes the defender's life easy, he or she has to only concentrate on keeping one thing on it's feet. Not only that, since you are more robust then the squishes, the damage is being applied slower, thus reducing the amount of time, and endurance the defender has to spend on keeping the team on it's feet. This means the defender gets to attack, which is good because that's more damage, and more things falling over, and faster experience. In fact, I've been in teams as a tanker where the defender was going to waste because I wasn't taking serious damage, the rest of the team wasn't getting hurt, the defender was just sitting there in ctrl+shift on healing aura mode. I finally go, "Just shoot something."
I cannot stress how important it is to get everything near you by using cover. I've seen tankers who let that one cluster of freakshow juicers hang out in left field, unattended, and those guys will always go for your squishes, unattended foes can smell a squishie from a mile away.
If you are going to play the pulling game, make sure the puller fires his or her shot and ducks around a corner or behind some other bottleneck. All you have to do is just sit there in the way of the bottleneck with your agro auras on. The baddies won't make it past you and won't get their shots on the puller.
Use taunt to keep those strays agroed on to you, this is especially handy if someone hammers knockback on them. And of course clobber the worst foes you got in range.
Since your toughness is based off of high defense, a few sour hits can make your HP plummet like a rock. Sometimes bad luck just hits you at the wrong time. Plan around this, always keep a panic button power, like hoarfrost, and always be ready to use it at a moments notice. A couple of luck inspirations can go a long way in giving you some survivability in a tight situation, of course that 1 in 20 chance might be right around the corner. I find hitting a purple and following it with a green is a nice way to buy myself some time for either the team to trash the big threat, or the defender to rectify my HP problem.
If the foes are already in a tight cluster to begin with, feel free to just leap in and let the auras grab'em all. I find Energy Absorption gives fair taunt on a slightly broader area of affect if you want a little extra wallop on your initial taunting. If you are daring, you can run through several groups in a big room while instructing the team to wait at the entrance, and then duck behind some cover, like a crate or a door frame and force the entire contents on the room to rush into melee range with you, then tap energy absorption if you have it for a nice thick armor boost and let the team unload.
Know your limits. Defensive powers have this tendency to work really nicely up to a certain point then *POW* once you step past that line of "too tough for you" it hurts really bad. Come I7 this is going to be addressed. Until then, know what renders you into a bloody pulp and try to warn the team if you run into it. If you fleshed out your defenses with Sos then you should have no trouble taking up to reds. If you walk into a mission and the coloring of the enemies is red and purple exclusively, then that's the color you might end up as if you aren't careful. Certain types of defenders can really boost your powers here, more on this later.
You want everything near you, this is important, scattered foes are bad. It's hard to keep all them agroed, it makes the battlefield chaotic, squishies tend to die when things get scattered, it takes the control away from you. To this end, don't let team mates use powers that scatter the battlefield. Uncontrolled gale and blizzard use are big offenders, for some reason storm defenders seem to think that I don't want to be swarmed as an ice tanker. Generally speaking, if you slotted your agro aura for a little taunt duration, you can hold taunt after a knockback, granted the offending knockbacker doesn't press the attack and shover the whole cluster away from you for a prolonged period of time. If it comes to a few baddies being knocked out for a long period of time then you always have taunt.
If you lack taunt, but have chilling embrace, you can try to keep spread things taunted. Generally if you just get in range enough for CE to kick in, the baddie will get that blue cloud on him, and then he'll be agroed to you for a few moments, it won't be long, but if you jump between a few baddies constantly brushing your CE aura on them, you can juggle the agro of several things, doing this can be tricky though, and you'll find it hard to attack while doing this act.
Like the defender, you should always keep your eye on the health of the team at all times while being an tanker in general. If someone starts taking abuse fast, something is wrong, try to fix it. If the blaster is taking a lot of abuse, he is distracting the defender. The defender is now busy healing frantically and therefore isn't able to fight back efficiently, the blaster is probably running like hell or frantically trying to fight off the problem, and therefore isn't concentrating on the juicy cluster you have gathered up, this hinders party efficiency. Anytime someone takes heavy hits, try to step in and save their kiester, the defender will thank you for it. If the squishes get trashed and you're still at full health, either they did something cataclysmically stupid (which is entirely possible, give someone a bunch of AoEs and it can go straight to their head). Or you messed up something. Just make sure the blasters know that it's a wise idea to let you get into position before dropping those AoEs.
Helpful Allies
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There's just some things that are very helpful to the ice tanker. Here's some of them. Though it's impossible for me to list everything that's really sweet with ice tankers, I shall at least try to get the tip of the iceberg.
Force Field Defenders: Deflection shield + insulation shield + dispersion bubble = more defense then you can ever dream of obtaining on your own. And that's before you turn on your icey armors. Yes, one of these guys with the 3 shield buffs can render an entire party with more defense then an ice tanker. Of course, you're the one with the enhanced HP and the self heals that allow you to stand up to any sour hit that gets through that rock solid defense. The two shields stack up to form a nigh impenetrable defense. I had my ice tanker standing up to a +5 level paragon protector (long story) because he had a good FF defender behind him. The thing just couldn't hit. Be sure to stay in the dispersion bubble whenever possible when playing with these fellows, the bubble almost doubles the defense of the single target bubbles. The defense bonus on controllers with this powerset isn't as nice, but it's still flat out better then your armor.
Dark Defenders: Darkest night is a real nice debuff. It takes a big bite out of the foe's accuracy, and any attacks that do hit suffer from greatly reduced damage. As an ice tanker, it's a simple matter of getting everything in a tight cluster as the dark defender debuffs them. Once that's done your high defense combined with the foe's low accuracy will result in a wiff fest.
Kinetics Defenders: By keeping all the baddies in one spot, you keep all drainable targets in perfect range for those kinetic heals. By keeping all those baddies clustered around you, you can set up some rather sexy fulcrum shifts. What's better is that speed boost. Speed boost is beautiful stuff, it's the benefits of haste and recovery aura and some good old super speed thrown in to boot, it's just a beautiful beautiful buff you should snag it as an ice tanker. The increased mobility helps immensely with trying to control the battlefield, you can run off and tag a foe much more easily with a punch to play off gauntlet and then dash back to the cluster of foes you had agroed on you previously. The more often hoarfrost and hibernate recharge, the better.
Radiation Defenders: Just like dark defenders they got an accuracy debuff in the form of radiation infection. Accuracy debuffs are an ice tanker's best friend, see Dark Defenders. And they got a recharge buff too.
Storm Defenders: Snowstorm severely slows down anything in it's wake and reduces recharge. This stacks rather beautifully with chilling embrace to absolutely lock down everything around you.
Fire Tankers: I hit upon this accidentally, you see when you got chilling embrace slotted with slows, you can severely slow down anything near you. Now fire tankers got that rather devastating burn attack, yet everything tends to run out of it. Now if a fire tanker drops a burn, and you stay in there to hamper the foe's retreat, the fire and ice can really ensure that they get sizzled properly, this is particularly devastating if one of you have "ice patch". The true beauty is that while the foe is trying to run away, very slowly, the foe is not attacking, which means neither of you are taking hits during any of this.
Another Ice Tanker: Those chilling embraces can be stacked up to good affect, debuff the living daylights out of that AV.
Worst Enemies
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There are just some things that really rip you apart, here are some things to look out for.
Vahzilok: The Vahzilok zombies love to use toxic barf attacks that pack a wallop. The only protection you have from toxic is the 20% resistance that hoarfrost provides combined with the debuffs from chilling embrace. Prepare to be dissolved into a pulpy mass around these zombies. Try to keep the groups you agro as small as possible to mitigate this problem.
CoT Earth mages, and Tautha Lt and bosses: These things use quicksand, quicksand is a nasty defense debuff, which essentially nullifies your armors. On the plus side, your slow resistance allows you to rush out of a quicksand affect quickly. Unfortunately, this leaves a lot of baddies unattended to go turn on the rest of the team. Having hibernate on tap for every fight helps a lot, just be ready to hit your panic buttons when dealing with these individuals.
Devouring Earth: DE has two nuisances, those damn insect swarms, and those quartz eminators. The insects just whittle away your health completely bypassing your defense, while one swarm might not be a big impact, enough swarms will just suck away all your health, try to catch them early in an AoE attack to whipe them out quickly. The quartz is also a severe nuisance. The Quartz is a small beacon dropped by DE Lts that grants a strong to-hit bonus to everything in their area. This makes it rather easy for everything near the quartz to pummel you, bypassing your defense. As soon as you see this stuff drop, get on top of it and pound it to dust. Be sure you let the team know about this stuff so they can help.
Crey Radiologists: Crey radiologists have a version of radiation infection that's interruptible. If you get tagged with this power it debuffs your resistance and you'll start taking a lot of hits fast. A good way to counter this is to just get neat these guys with chilling embrace. The CE will force an interrupt of that power and allow you to avoid becoming radioactive.
Anything with Psionics: Like most tankers, ice tankers just don't have much in the way of psionic resistance. Thankfully few things outright attack with psionics. The Rikti monkeys don't hit too hard, and use a smashing melee attack in close. The lost can be forced into non-psionic methods of damage when you get into melee with them, your wet ice thankfully mitigates any holds they play. The Carnival of Souls is just evil.