Tanker Invuln's Invince

I should have asked you the same question I asked Starsman, just the set alone, or does this include the effects of things like Tough/Weave?

I'd say that the top three survivalists with an IO heavy build is Granite, Invuln, and WP. I don't doubt that Shield would be plenty survivable, but it's not Invuln/WP tough.

A WP Tank and a WP Brute are completely different ball games because:

*) MaxHP - With equal +maxhp in the build, a Brute has ~2570hp compared to a Tanker with 3212. That's ~25% more hp/sec regenerated as well as ~25% more health. (A Scrapper would have ~2292 hp. Tanker has 40% higher regen and health.)
*) Higher res numbers - This is the difference between ~70% s/l res and 52.65%. (Tanker takes ~63% the damage that the Brute does.) It is also the difference between 90% s/l with SoW and 81.9%. (Tanker takes 55% the damage of a Brute.) (A Scrapper would be capped at 75%, the Tanker takes 40% the damage.)
*) Higher def numbers - This makes it much easier to stack large amounts of defense, even softcap everything everything except psi at the most extreme cases.

Combine all those together and WP on a Tanker is in a completely different league than what you experienced. It's one of the sets that loses a lot more than the 1.0 -> 0.75 defense mod would initially imply.

(On second thought, you probably know all of that, anyways. I blame this post on a slow work day before the holidays. )

I was figuring an optimum SO build which, yes, included Tough/Weave and CJ.

Yep, I "knew" that in a theoretical way, but I'll admit my experience with WP is as a Brute so that may very well be coloring my perception somewhat... that 50 Fire/WP brute is adequate as a scrapper type character but it 'ain't no tanker, even with substantial IO investment. IO'ing a brute is substantially more difficult due to the terrible availability of the redside market... Kinetic Combat for example does not exist. I've had bids in on the redside market for over a month now... most of the recipes I'm looking for haven't even sold on the market for a month or more. With only the Smashing Haymaker/Reactive Armor IO's available soft capping looks out of the question.

My BS/Shield scrapper on the other hand IS tough enough to be a main tank (soft capped defenses of course), and the performance of that character is what I'm basing my thoughts on a Shield tanker... at 27 my Shield/Fire is really starting to get good. I'll have to wait until he approaches 50 to really know what it's capable of in comparison to CMA but I'm anticipating a highly capable tank.

I do have a dark tank, and yes, I just went back and I made a mistake posting that. I did tell my calc to only slot the power for 3 acc/3 end, no recharge, no healing. After all, only 3 hits make the thing a 90% heal. If possible, I'd slot the thing for 5 end redux and just one acc enhancement.



Done. Only issue is these spreadsheets require me to keep multiple copies for each variation, meaning an update to one forces a manual update to the other. It can easily become a huge headache to manage them all.

Thats an epic definition of lame. "

Here is the base chart:
And here with the pools:

I can jump into an open discussion on it in a separate thread, only reason I would not love to do it is because I am now working on an entirely new approach at benchmarking and have left this project behind, not because it's bad but because my expectations have expanded beyond what spreadsheets can handle.

I can tell you a basic though:

The first chart takes all mitigation, no healing, and then weights this mitigation against rarity. The rarity I did based on extensive amounts of enemy data and the damage types they use. Smashing, for instance, is the most common type you will encounter therefore gets the highest weight. I tweak down the impact of the rarest types then sum them all then divide by the sum of all weights to get an average mitigation "to all situations". You should never see a 100% in that table.

The second table does similar only it also accounts healing (regeneration and heals.) In this table, 100% equals a naked tanker with no buff and no powers, just base HP and base regeneration. If you gave that character 2x the HP, he would go 200%, if you gave him 50% resist to everything he would also note 200% (if i didn't account for weight) In the end, 1000% means it can survive 10 times more DPS than the base tanker. It's a "basic" weighted immortality line calculation but one that really represents truthfully how much you can take. After all, no one cares how fast they will die, they just want to know how much they can take without ever dying.

Odd, I use Kinentic Combats on my dominators (i slot them to cap their smash/lethal defense) but I'm willing to take a few levels of difference too. There are always merits, too.

It's problematic since straight SO slotting is probably no longer the norm for most characters, let alone a tank. My dark tank hit 50 last week and Dark Regen just BEGS for frankenslotting. It's the biggest self-heal in the game, has to roll to hit and costs 33 END. I have it at about 90% recharge and 90% end reduction with good accuracy (close to 40% on top of 41% global) and some healing (I can't recall how much). I don't have my build in front of me, but I think I have pieces of 5 different sets in it (6 slots total). Money was no object for such a power. I have the Obliteration quad in it, since that hits accuracy, recharge and endred.

There's a lot of places where there just isn't a 'standard slotting'. With SO's, I'm sure we all agree on 3 heal / 3 recharge for Dull Pain, but for something like Dark Regen - yoiks.

Gotcha. It's been a while since I've played my Ice/SS and my WP was in SOs, but I personally felt that WP was tougher than Ice. I think it may be that the WP has very few "RNG hates me" deaths, which is what usually gets my Ice Tank.

I hear ya on the villain market. It's actually a pretty big disincentive for me to make villains atm. Even if I design the best build ever in MIDs, the chances I'd ever finish it the way things are currently are slim to none. Without the ability to get critical sets like that, WP will definitely "suffer." (It's funny, a friend of mine made a WP Brute and designed him to take a beating with softcapped def, but was still a bit disappointed. Then again, he was mostly testing it in the ITF..)

Compared to a softcapped Shield Scrapper (Parry is hax!), I can see why you'd consider Shield to be superior.

Hah! I hear, on good authority, that the Theft of Essence: +End proc is worth its weight in gold in Dark Regen.

That looks more like what I'd expect. Ice looks like it has a higher weight than I expected, but its sustainability seems about where I'd expect it. (Not sure if the weight counts CE and the weight/sustainability counts Hibernation.)


Nah, I don't think you need to start a whole new thread about it, especially if you're working on a whole new method of measuring performance and will be deprecating the spreadsheets. I just wanted to know what they actually *meant* rather than using the numbers as a relative ranking. So thanks for giving me the skinny

This statement perplexes me a bit. On initial read it makes sense, but the more I analyze it, the more I furrow my brow.

For example, in your list, you give Ice a sustainability of "02,500%" (Is that 2,500 or 2.5?) compared to a naked Tank being "00,135%". That implies it can sustain ~18.5 times as much incoming fire before buckling. However, if the RNG doesn't play nice, it die a lot faster than that. It implies the tables above don't measure "how much they can take without ever dying."

I bring this up because when I switched from Regen to Invuln, I noticed a significant decrease in my "how fast I will die" time, even if it was a decrease in my ability to sustain myself for long periods without aid. If I can survive a nasty burst of damage, then I can live long enough to act/retreat. Afterall, if I have the possibility of dying real fast, I may not be able to react at all!


As strong as defense can be in the game, I still like having some form of resistance behind them to give some stability.

Disclaimer: The following is just my opinion/preference, not a slam on people who enjoy Stone Armor / Granite.

At this point in the game, I don't think I'd play Stone Armor even if it made you completely impervious to damage. Sure, you have the best survivability in the game, but you almost never get a chance to use all of it as it is. Not only that, but you have to trade even more offense/flexibility for that overkill survivability. That makes the character far too one dimentional to me. I'd much rather still be a "mortal" Tank and be able to perform well in a wide variety of situations than be locked into a single role.

The last time I can remember dying? A few days ago soloing a +1/x6 Rularuu mission. I only died because two spawns saw me and I was trying to ironman it without inspirations. (If I played a hair smarter / used inspirations, I could've pulled it off.) Before that? I can't even remember. Might've been fighting the patron AVs in RV under the new PvP rules.


(Considering the discussion I was in about Brutes vs Tankers in the ArcheType & Power forum, the irony of what I just wrote isn't lost on me. )

Not even looked at my dark armor. That set was not around when I made her and never consider that in her growth plan. I may look into it once I decide to sit through her again.


CE is used and assumed to hit all foes. My calc can simulate situations where the foe is higher level (purple patch) but it's not trivial to see the impact on larger groups that don't fit CE (either cap or area.)

No tier 9s are used in the calculations (other than the isolated Granite benchmark).




I actually would love if it was easy to just make people trust it as a relative benchmark because that's sort of the point, but understand that many would love to understand the meaning of the numbers (I know I would be curious myself :P)



The only thing that can truly kill a def set faster than that is not the RNG playing nice, but pure luck. I know i know "same thing" but my point is that in average, the ice tanker WILL avoid enough attacks to survive normally, unless facing something like Lord Recluse that has one attack that can two shot you. Lets say you have a foe that has 10 distinct attack chances per minute. 9 of those chances just deal 1 point of damage, though, and one can deal 1000 points of damage. The RNG can easily make you miss 9 attacks and get hit by the one that can kill you. It's not bad on the RNG but actual bad luck. This is a scenareo that I think is common specially at lower end of the game and while facing certain AVs and monsters, it certainly can increase mortality but cant be averaged out properly (your luck may do the entire opposite and always make you miss the one big hit so in averages it wont work.) That's one of many things I hope to explore better with my new approach, that is more simulation based.

Regen is a different matter, but thats also why I inlude the first set of data. It does not only represents how well you take an alpha but how vulnerable you are to spikes in damage input. The case with defense is different. When talking about big spawns it's not the same as you split damage into multiple dice rolls, when facing a single tough entity with huge hitters, then things get complex but still "average-able" in theory.


I agree. +HP or Resist either helps a lot, at least as tankers. Scrappers are a bit different. I wish they increased the uptime of dull pain and like powers (hoarfrost/earth embrace) without increasing the healing.

While that may be acceptable for certain sets (like Invuln), I think it screws the results for Ice, since it's a T9 with a high reuse rate (it can be used every 2 minutes). Still, that would be a bear to try to compute, since it's not just the regen, but up to 30s of complete immunity as well.

It's not just AVs, though, any "spike rich" encounter could do that. Even the Romans on the ITF can crit for around 500 to 700 damage. That's 1/3 to 1/2 an hp capped Tanker's health from just two hitting at the same time. That's the problem with defense, anytime attacks are around that can kill you, your life is riding on each dice roll. On average, you're correct, you'll be fine, but it's not a guarantee - it's still heavily based on luck.

Something I thought about when reading this: I'm guessing the first table doesn't include +maxhp. While it doesn't increase "mitigation," and it's already factored in for regen, it doesn't measure how resilient a set is to burst damage. There is a significant difference between what an Invuln with DP up can take compared to when it's down.


Well, that would be nice, but unecessary. They're already up 2/3 the time out of the box. Even with only moderate IO investment you can bump that up to 80% of the time.

When you say "without increasing the healing," you mean decrease the recharge but lower the heal amount so it averages out to be the same over time?

Yea, hard to calculate with spreadsheets, not to mention many would still call foul on the T9 usage. The immunity is not that big of a deal as is the entire inability to attack or protect allies.

I have not run much Roman content with my icer to comment on them but in the end I'd say its an issue with critter design more than with powerset issues. The content does not accommodate properly for purely defensive sets in a few situations. As popular as the ITF may be though, it's still the minority of the content.


I thought you knew me enough by now to know I treat HP as a form of universal damage resistance and am against measuring it as a "regen booster." +HP is accounted for in the first chart, but averaged for uptime meaning that during uptime of these buffs the set may be better than what I show and during downtime worse, but in average, that.

For the sets that have it, it's so important that I personally dislike the fact that it's not perma with 3 SOs. Although the idea of decreasing timer and healing power to have more regular healing bursts appeals me, I think it's too disruptive with play-styles and therefore would just prolong the duration of the +HP.

There is the issue of stacking but the cap is low enough for it to be a non-issue, so far that they may also as well flag the attribute non-stack-able.

Yeah, but unless they invent or proliferate more sets, I'm going to run out.
I just started a WP/ice and figure I'll do elec/elec next.

I don't have in front of me my preferred slotting for Dark Regen (worked out after agonizing over the sets for a long time) but wound up with two triples from the accurate healing sets and some Numinas and other heal IOs to get:

94.6% end reduction
94.6% recharge
36% accuracy
38% heal

and the TOE Proc, and 10% and 12% regeneration set bonuses.

I think that's about the best I could squeeze. The 12% regen bonus could be traded for 2.5% recovery by using a pair of Miracles, if one desired.