Help, my ice tanker is squishy

This tells me that you either don't know what you're talking about or you're playing the game at a much less extreme level then I am (like soloing Heroic content).

I base this on my 50 Icer and all the Icers I've ever seen tank.

And for future reference, please don't take it personally when I happen to make a comment about a set you may or may not play. I'm not literally pissing in your Cheerios ya know.

This is very true and your secondary is often an important choice when choosing to play a defense based set such as Ice.

Unfortunately you usually learn this lesson after you've levelled up

This tells me you clearly have no idea on how to play an ice tank or don't know what you are talking about. I only ever play my ice tank on unyielding or invincible, depending on the team size to get maximum spawns for my AoEs. Maybe your much more extreme level is playing against enemies with high ToHit bonuses like Rularuu? Even Nemesis vengeance can be worked out if your team has any level of teamwork, just save the LTs for the last.

I never solo my tank because I have characters better suited for that kind of play. My tank excels in teams thanks to his AoE capacity. I really have no idea why you say an ice tank is squishy against normal content (anything without custom enemies). Against custom enemies the case could be anything from invincible to squatted in two seconds. Easy minions only vs extreme AVs only.

I base this on my 50 Icer and all the properly built and played Icers I've ever seen tank. Maybe you're not one of them?

I'm not taking it personally. I'm just trying to balance your stubborn arguments of ice being a squishy tank. You do realize, though that new people read these forums and might take anything someone says here for the truth even if it wasn't. Ice Armour is an extremely competent set and it shouldn't be belittled. You could just as well say that SR is garbage because it relies 100% on Defense which isn't even the case with Ice Armour.

And even just giving a quick glance on the scrapper forums, it seems that Defense based sets are the powerset of choice when it comes to doing extreme stuff. *Shrug*

Ahhhh a Scrapper in Tanker clothing ... I shoulda known by the sig.

First of all, Defense sets aren't the best to do extreme stuff for Tankers .. the two toughest sets are both firmly resist based sets with Defense added (Stone and Invuln).

Defense sets aren't even the best for Scrapper extreme stuff (Invuln taking it here as well).

The reason why people crow about Defense so much is because its what can be reasonably raised by IOs and whose hard cap is much higher then its soft cap which is easily reached by Scrappers and Tankers alike on many sets (which is why you hear about it so much on the Scrapper boards).

With regards to Ice Armor, a *great* IO build will do little to help it's survivability past hitting the defense soft cap (easily done) and HPs and regen (neither of which is realistically going to turn a squishy set into a brick) and recharge for HF. The main thing that Ice is lacking is resists and these cannot be appreciably raised by IO sets. Ice by itself is a *very* squishy set in heavy tanking situations (that's for the newbies) ... the random number generator, lack of resists and law of averages will bear this out.

Ice Armor when combined with a mitigation heavy secondary (which you may or may not have (didn't catch it)) such as Stone Melee or Ice Melee, can be made to be less squishy, and of course smart tanking will pull you through a long ways as well. However if someone were to ask me "I want a tough tanking set" Ice Armor wouldn't be high on my list, no.

Enough with the condescension. I have played scrappers and tankers enough to know what their differences are.

I'd actually say invuln is a Defense based powerset with Resistance added much like shields. The four core powers of invuln don't offer much in the name of resistance to anything else except S/L and even with all of the powers it would be crazy to expect the exotic resistances (E/N/F/C) to take care of more of the damage than the corresponding resistances.

Stone I have no idea of. I have never played it and probably never will because of Granite Armor. Yeah, it has great stats in it but the drawbacks including a generic look are too much.

I don't need you telling me that softcap is easy to achieve. I have four characters playing at the softcap of Defense and I know exactly how easy it is to achieve on some sets. I also know very well how effective Defense softcap is, it removes 95% of the incoming damage. If you do not consider that effective enough you're playing the wrong game because this one doesn't support a real godmode. Defense softcap is only a pseudo-godmode.

Ice Armor doesn't even need a *great* IO build. You can softcap an Ice tank with 22 set IOs with the rest of the build being SOs or whatever you want. This is considering the 2.5% from Combat Jumping.

Also you seem to be missing some vital pieces of information. While HP and regen alone don't turn Ice Armour (or pretty much anything else for that matter) into a brick, it's the combination of Defense softcap AND regen AND +HP that does. 92-93% (courtesy of higher level enemies) of attacks directed at you will miss, and often more than that because of the way streakbreaker works and on top of that you have active recovery, higher HP (which translates into resistance. Don't believe me? Ask Arcanaville or any other expert around here and they'll give you the formulas) AND the recovery tools of Ice Armour.

The active recovery here is the important thing. With high regen and high Defense you won't get hit often and you will regenerate a lot of HP before you get hit the next time. It's one of the key features to survival, much like high HP on anything relying on Defense. A big hit gets through? Shouldn't bother you at all if you had some HP.

My Icer for example, is sitting at the softcap (and often over), has 2600 HP and regenerates 37 HP per second. That's nearly always enough to take care of me. And as a tanker you always have the team. Anything in the team will help your tanking: buff/debuff helps you stay alive, damage dealers take down enemies before they get too many blows at you, control keeps the enemy mezzed and unable to deal damage, other tanks can and will share the incoming damage with you.

If you're hellbent that without ANY team support a tank should be able to solo Invincible spawns set for 8 just not to be squishy I don't see why or how anyone could even convince you that 99% of un-IO'd characters in this game aren't squishy. The situations where your tank has to be able to take down a spawn like that don't exist outside AE because to generate such an environment you need a team. And a team doing nothing is just deadweight that harms my gaming experience so I'd kick them/quit anyway. (P.S. my Ice tank is capable of this if the enemies are right which means no excessive +ToHit or Psy damage).

Mitigation heavy secondaries help any defensive primary set. Be it resistance, defense or regeneration as the main survival ability. My Icer is an Ice/SS, and while I recognize the survival perk Foot Stomp gives me I have no problems at all tanking KB resistant foes. None. I treat Foot Stomp as just another damage AoE in my arsenal rather than a survival tool. EDIT: Also it is kind of stupid to say that Icer without a mitigation secondary is squishy because Fire Melee is the only secondary not offering some kind of mitigation. Most of the sets offer area KB/KD, Dark Melee gives you -ToHit and a self heal, DB has a -ToHit combo and KD, Mace has stun and KD, Energy Melee has (even if a bit unreliable against groups) stun, etc. Fire trades all the mitigation for faster takedowns, this translates into shorter fights which, in turn, translates into less incoming damage over a fight./EDIT

If someone were to ask my about my tank of choice, that would be an Icer for anything except an STF because I know the situation against LR. Insane +ToHit from one of the towers which totally nullifies any protection the Icer can have on their own. Much like I'd never pick a /Regen to try and beat an enemy with insane -Regen and -Heal that would totally nullify the Regen's survival abilities.

The point of my "nerdrage" or whatever you want to call it, is that Ice Armour isn't squishy. Granted it isn't as sturdy as Granite, it is much tougher than Fire Armour and it can outsurvive Shields and even WP or Invuln. I would add to that: a tough tank does not only consist of the right powersets, it also consists of a good build and a player who knows his business; what he can take on while watching TV, what he can't even when popping insps and the situations inbetween.

This is about the only thing you've said that I can really agree with.

Ice Armor isn't "squishy" ... but it isn't as reliable as other Tanker sets either.

To that end, the OP should know to expect this with his/her Icer build and that it is not their "fault".

End drain to say a third of total like this is not mitigation. For an Ice Tank its the +defense from EA not the end drain. UNLESS you take a foe down to 0 endurance and slap a little -recovery so they do not regain any endurance for a short time. As soon as they get the first sliver of endurance back, your normal (ie outside of MA) foe will be able to use any attack/ ability in its arsenal. So unless you have 2 or more toons with an end drain power or toons with more than 1, you are not granting any mitigation by almost draining all endurance.

Absolutely.

However the scope of this conversation was started with "my Ice Tanker feels squishy *at times*" and has quickly devolved into the merits of Ice Armor on its own and stacked against other Tanker primary sets.

Without saying that the OP totally doesn't know how to play his/her toon (which I couldn't possibly know and wouldn't be inclined to say unless given some wildly outrageous set of circumstances) I tried to indentify why they might be seeing this on their Icer and in what circumstances they might find themselves having issues in (based on personal experience).

Neither right nor wrong ... just stating what I've experienced (as is Darrow ... our experiences just differ apparently).

Having said that, I agree that any of the Tanker primaries can be taken through all of the content in this game if driven by the right player/group.

P.S. - I don't think the devs *know* that Tankers are not supposed to be able to afk on CL5 (re: Stone and Invuln, both of which I can afk on most any content in this game) but rather were trying to come up with novel approaches on the same role and something I think they've done a pretty good job at overall. But the by-product of this development is that some sets are more durable out of the box then others.

That's all well and good (and I agree from a personal standpoint) but doesn't go far in answering the OPs question.

Assuming the OP wasn't looking for metaphasic hooplah of course.

I can only touch on the subject tangentially, plus blaming the team may not be it, sometimes the help required can come from oneself simply by knowing who to put out of action at the start of a fight.

You speak vile lies!

Well, that figure was off the top of my head, a more accurate number of what a tank has with only the +20% HP from Accolades and nothing else (no IOs or powers with +HP) would be about 2250HP.