Throwing my two cents in here:
My level 50 Crab is soft-capped for ranged Defense, with all other damage and position types having Defense amounts of around either 20% or 30%. It's taken a lot of time, effort, and infamy to get there. And yet, I make it a point to activate Serum whenever I can and make liberal use of Wide Area Web Grenade to keep enemies at range. Why? Because it does NOT take much for enemies to start a Defense cascade and absolutely shred me if they can get in close, Damage Resistance be damned. If that character really were a Tank Mage, I wouldn't have to stay on my toes and be as active as I am about keeping enemies away from me; I'd be able to take care of them with little worry regardless of their position relative to me. That's a BIG decider about whether or not some class is truly a Tank Mage: every class in every MMO has certain circumstances under which they're exceedingly hard to beat (via defenses, control, overwhelming damage, or any combination thereof), but Tank Mages are almost always exceedingly hard to beat.
Also, note that I haven't even mentioned exemplaring. With only one purple set slotted, most of that character's set bonuses will cease to function at certain levels. Tank Mage? Far from it.
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I'm not 100% sure who you're calling squishy. Unless my Archery/Sonic Corruptor that can solo +1/x8 Council, with Vamps and Wolves scattered about in it, is now being called squishy. He has a harder time with Romans and their lack mezzes (and thus harder hitting and def debuffing) than most mezzing. I'm not saying this to a full front for all enemy groups, just the obvious differences between one with some mezzes versus one without anything but def debuffing.|
Originally Posted by Mattwo7
Squishies don't fit the tank part, sorry.
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As for my Storm/Dark Defender, he's just fine against everything if approached correctly. Yes, he has to take more defensive position with mezzing groups (mostly carnies), but if he is fine after the first 5 seconds, he's likely to be good the entire rest of the time. However, soloing a +0/x1 is easy due to the lack of many mezzers from carnies (or anything). On teams, he can roll into mobs without much problem. Guess that's the plus side of having upper 20% defenses on top of THD and controls of both hard and soft.
My Dark/Elec Defender is just fine against most enemies. He worries more about heavy hitters (warwolves) than mezzers most of the time. For the most part, if he can last the first 5 seconds of the mob that he's soloing (at x8), he'll eventually win the battle.
Then my Earth/Cold is pretty much a tanker due to the controls and the defense she's set up; however, when teamed she becomes probably slightly less effective than the rest of the team at being a tanktroller. The only problem with that is I tend to be really aggressive and thus jump at mobs first. There's no reason to wait about if I'm just as capable of taking alpha then them.
Yes, Mezzing can be a problem, but if you know your character, the enemy group, and how to approach these situations, you can go quite far regardless. I'm excited about my Rad/Ice Blaster, since he's going to be doing a lot of different things, but this is where I'm shooting for Scrapper level defenses instead of Tanking level defenses. Who needs to tank when they can do everything else?
50s: Bla- Arch/Mental Cont- Mind/FF, Earth/Cold, Ill/Therm, Earth/Rad Dominator- Plant/Psi, Elec/Earth Corr- Fire/Storm, Arch/Sonic, Rad/Kin, Beam/Sonic, Psi/Time Stalker- Elec/SR Def- Storm/Dark, Emp/Psi, Dark/Elec, FF/Arch, TA/Ice, TA/Elec, Kin/AR, Cold/DP, Traps/Psi Scrap- Fire/Shield Tanker- Dark/Mace, Ice/Kin Brute- Claws/WP, SS/Energy, BS/Elec
I wouldnt call my Crab a Tankmage.
More like an APC/Mage maybe.
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