Tank Farmer

Was looking into getting a tank for farming purposes. something to knock off the monotony of fire/kin trollers. So i have been looking into primaries and secondaries with high damage potential and still real survivable.

Ice and Shield were my initial thoughts on primary. Ice having the icicle damage bonus and Shield's against all odds damage bonus. So figured those were probably best options but am up for any suggestions.

Secondary I was really looking at Fire. I know SS has rage and so forth..but for pure damage i was liking the aoe with fire a lot better looking through the builds.

anyone have any suggestions on which way to go.. or maybe an entirely different selection altogether if i'm really off base here.

feel free to post your builds as well for me to look through if you like.

Thx for the help.

Tank and farmer don't belong in the same sentence, unless it's "Tanks are not good farmers." That being said, if you're set on a Tank you'll want Fire/SS/Pyre or Shield/SS/Pyre. Really I'd go with a Spines/Fire Scrapper.

Shield/Fire scrapper or Shield/Fire tank. Scrapper is faster, but more susceptible to the lucky hits. Tanks are slower with the higher con mobs.

I would run the scrapper at +3/8 and the tank at +1/8, with no bosses for the fastest runs.

I have both and the scrapper is much better at faster farming. The tank is just slower b/c of lesser damage. Both can be soft capped, the tank is just easier to do. Hasten is not needed with IO's for recharge.

Ice Ember

Tanks do make good farmers, and a different style of farming to boot.

Personally I prefer Fire or Shield for a primary. Fire is an early blooming set that has all the tools you would ever need for Solo farming and great burst damage potential in Fiery Embrace. Shield also brings a good amount of offense as well as Shield Charge to leverage the damage bonus.

For offence you cannot go wrong with Fire. My pick in the past has been SS, just for the extra damage you can put out with Rage. SS goes very well with Shield, as well as Fire.

Lately I have grown to really like Electric for a secondary when paired with Shield. Double Tele-AoE, lots of multi-target attacks, and a good damage type.

You can farm just fine with stone/fire. You need five things:

1) Granite
2) Rooted
3) Mud Pots
4) Fire Sword Circle
5) A good book.

Set the difficulty to +whatever/x8, turn on Granite and Mud Pots, and enter the mission. Walk up to the first spawn, turn on Rooted, and set Fire Sword Circle to autofire. Start reading your book. When you stop hearing Fire Sword Circle hit things, turn off Rooted and move on to the next spawn.

Wow. Where to begin?

Guess I'll start with this: It's a fallacy that a tank cannot kill quickly. There are a number of primaries and secondaries that offer the tools for constructing a durable farming build.

There are two basic approaches to be followed in achieving this goal. First, a build that offers sufficient endurance to ensure an almost unbroken series of attacks, regardless of the primary being employed. Fire, Dark, and a couple of other primaries have endurance draining powers that make such an approach possible. My personal favorite primary for such a build, however, is Willpower, which offers both Quick Recovery and Stamina. Couple Willpower with a secondary such as Fire or Super Strength, add Hasten, put Foot Stomp on auto-fire, and then jump into a large mob. Coupled with Willpower's regeneration rate, you have a first rate killing machine. My claws-scrapper fanatic son and I teamed up once for a level 50 arachnos mission, and the speed with which that build could kill left him bug-eyed.

The second approach is to select a primary with a strong damage aura and couple it with a high damage secondary with strong AoE attacks, such as Fire or Electricity. While I find the Fire Primary to have a gimpy feel in terms of survivability, that is more a matter of personal preference than anything else. Fire has a strong self heal and endurance recovery powers. With Hasten, and prior to the arrival of Shields, no tank build killed like a Fire/Fire build.

However, since the GDN of issue 3 there has been quite a bit of complaining about the slow killing ability of the tank alts. This complaining was continuous, at least by some, and at times vociferous. The advent of the Shields primary is, in my opinion, an unspoken admission by the developers that the tanker primaries were a bit gimped in the damage department. Shields has a power available at level 6 (Having a brain fart; can't remember the name of the damn thing.) which, when fully slotted with SO enhancements, pumps up the damage of the secondary's attacks by 80% when surrounded by 10 foes. Couple that with Shield Charge, and you have scrapper level damage output, depending on the secondary being utilised.

In return for all this, you get a measure of survivability when standing in the center of the intense furnace of a mob's hatred that no other alt can match.

You might also check out rolling an Elect/Fire/EM or Pyre, not only are they stacked with AoEs but also get an additional +20% Recharge if you take Lightning Reflexes. You also get a great End Drain/End Refill power that recharges quickly, and the Taunt Aura helps keep the goon's End low whilst you finish them off. It's a very flexible set and allows a great deal of room to customize as you see fit.

My Fire/Fire/Pyre does pretty well at farming even though he wasn't planned on being a farmer. Currently sitting at 27% s/l defense and 70% resists he survives quite nicely while mowing down mobs with his AoEs. Not the quickest I'm sure, but he still does pretty well.

my shield/ss/pyre is a pretty great farmer. it falls short of elec/shield scrappers and fire/kin trollers but I would say it is near the top of tier 2 farm builds. It is silly easy to soft cap defense so it leaves you open to a lot of recharge. it is faster than my broadsword/shield/fire and comperable to my GF's arch/nrg farmer

I still don't understand the point of farming +4s.

I farm decently on my ice/ss (and a few other tank builds) . Not sure why shield/elec keeps coming up as a softcapped elec shield is almost as survivable and does way more damage.

Yes, Tankers can farm. If the OP wants to farm with a Tanker there are several (relatively speaking) good options for farming Tankers.

But if the OP just wants a farmer that isn't a fire/kin controller and is leaning towards melee, they should make a Scrapper, not a Tanker.