is ele/ tough enough to be worthwhile?

Ok, back at this after a long break

I never really liked my /ele brute. Sure this was before IOs and energise, and yes, brutes arent' tanks, yadda yadda

But my impression of the set was that it was so soft all around that it just wasn't worth the trouble

How viable is ele/ as a large team tank for pick up groups and TFs these days?

Any and all comments appreciated.

[edit] oh one more comment: I've played defence characters for years. I'm really not interested in IOing s/l up through the roof to make the build work. If that's what it takes to make an ele/ tank viable... well, I'll make something else.

I'd say it depends. I find mine more than adequate for PuGs - assuming some, if not all players, contribute a bit ; and if they don't, insps can make up for it just fine.

Granted, that's an answer that works for every powerset and for that matter, every AT, so I suppose by "how viable it is" you mean to ask "how does it compare to other tanker powersets, without building for S/L def" ; then the answer would probably be not so hot, because softcapped defense is just that good compared to something without it rather than because of any inability of elec tankers to hold up fine against most if not all content.

I always feel bad about things like this because the fact is, as the game is right now, defense beats resistance every single time, for tankers.

My suggestion would be to make an electric scrapper, where the recharge bonus from Lightning Reflexes will be more potent.

The goal is to make a tank I'd like enough to take to 50... something I've never actually done. At least in theory, anything but stone or ice would fit.

It's also not that I have anything against def, I've soft capped a lot of characters over the years... but I'd like to do something else now...

If it were me, and one of my goals was to make an electric armor tanker:

I'd pair electric armor with something that offers a lot of active mitigation, like super strength or stone melee. I'd use Lightning Reflexes as a spring board to get as much uptime on Hasten as possible and take super speed for my travel power.

Super strength would be especially fun, because you could stack a lot of rage at that point.

A lot depends on what content you like to run with your tankers. I tend to run a lot of task forces.

This means a lot of exemping down. Defense based builds, especially if they are relying on set bonuses, may not serve you well here. Shields especially does not serve you well on either New Positron, where you must have constant mezz protection.

Electric armor absolutely rules Synapse with a mighty hand. And it will serve you much better than shields or ice on Numina.

Defense based builds tend to work better in the late game, to be sure. The lower you exemp down to, though, the worse they perform relative to resistance sets. I specifically designed a fire tanker to take advantage of this; all the character's set bonuses are in place by level 40, and most by level 30.

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I'm in the process of levelling up an Elec/ Tank right now an I have my 50 build finished. It looks pretty tough Good defence and very high resistances, a bit of debuff resistance here and there and a nice self heal.

What the weaknesses are:

-without defence it really has no answer to some of the more frustrating debuffs. I'm mostly looking at -tohit. But against significant spawns it doesn't have enough debuff resistance to get through against anything that is en masse.

-with defence from IOs it is subject to defence debuff. Against those kind of foes it is going to crash, fast.

-low HP in general, at least compared to WP/Inv/etc. ~2200 vs ~3200 means a lot.

With 10+ billion inf you can put almost all of your resistances to the cap (even smashing/lethal) and still manage a mix of 20-35% defence across all types of damages. Of course coming up with that kind of inf may be tricky! That's well outside of my budget I'm afraid, but for some people I guess it is plausible. I think for building a Tank 'on the cheap' you're much better off with something like Willpower.

WB Spiritchaser.

I have a 50 Elec/fire tank, and I found that tough makes it a lot easier. Plus if you pick and choose your enemies you find you are more than tough enough to take on groups most people have problems ie. Malta (heh sappers), Carnies, Rikti...

Has anyone had any experience stacking res buffs?

Yes, I know, there aren't many, it's tough to get enough, etc. etc...

The costs are going to be astronomical

But... has anyone actually tried it?

Elec/DM is just dandy.

I leveled mine to 50, tanked for multiple task forces - including STF.

(Definitely grab tough)

I've got an Electric/Fire/Fear (Fear chosen for concept reasons) at 50. I use an AoE Speed build for running standard content (I'm looking to respec and tweak a little with what I've learned in the process), and a more Single target "Regen" build for Tanking Hami. I will say that a little defense goes a long way with Resistance sets. To which end you might want to check out Dechs's "Dark Armor Sucks" thread and Call_Me_Awesome's guild for ideas on building defense.

Electric Tanks really benefit from recharge. There were posts on this a while back (probably around pages 6-8 now). I'd say look at those and see what you think. The only thing That can really knock you down quickly is Toxic damage, which you'll have zero Defense and Resistance to. I wish Electric Armor had at least a little of one or the other, but oh well...

I have, Electric/Fire/Pyre, Electric/SS and an Electric/Dark Tanks at various levels and always enjoy running them. Remember on large teams you'll likely have access to buffs, so those will help compensate for any shortcomings while you're settling into the set (and likely give you ideas to refine the build). I've run ITF and most other TFs with my Electric/Fire/Fear and had no real trouble. Defense, heading for Softcap will really help if you're looking for that "Invuln" kinda' feeling". Otherwise, speed is your friend, and don't forget a Winter's Gift's 20% Slow Resistance as any slowdowns kill your speed.

For what it's worth back in issue 16 closed beta when Elec was first ported to tankers I rolled up an Elec/SS tanker that was level-bumped to 50. Bear in mind that the tank was slotted with SO's only.

For comparison I had an old, SO only version of CMA, my Inv/Stone on test. For both tankers I ran the same types of radio missions vs the same mobs on the same settings (+2/8 to simulate tanking for a typical 8 man team).

Here's the gist of what I found:

Against Carnies it was no contest, CMA was substantially more survivable. Groups that were no threat to the Invuln required lots of care with the Elec. Advantage: Invuln by a bunch.

Conversely against Malta it went the other way, if a Sapper managed to hide from my initial look through of a mob it was a minor irritation for the Elec/SS while the Inv/Stone could be taken out quickly via drain/toggle drop. Advantage: Elec again by a substantial margin.

Nemesis was an advantage to the Invuln since most of the attacks were S/L and Invuln caps at 90% (with Tough). Even so I wouldn't be too concerned with the Elec in this situation; it had no real difficulty. It's just that Invuln was better here. Advantage: Invuln, but Elec is perfectly adequate here.

Council weren't much threat to either tanker but the large numbers fed Invincibility to pump up the Invuln's defense dramatically. Invuln's better here but no worries with the Elec.

Circle of Thorns are a real mix of damage types; again Invuln had an overall advantage thanks to it's strong defenses but an Elec would have to be pretty careless or completely overwhelmed to have significant problems.

I didn't test against any other mobs so anything else would be strictly theoretical.

Overall I had the impression that Elec could really use another 10% S/L resistance to get it closer to the 90% cap; it's problems were all a case of far more attacks landing than on Invuln and most of those hitting for more damage. On straight SO enhancements in the end game Invuln is certainly a more durable tank all around.

Now, if you're throwing IO's into the mix then things will change... adding significant defense to Elec will boost it's performance by a huge amount and if you soft cap it vs S/L (I doubt it's practical to go for anything more) I could see it becoming a great tanker. On pure SO's though it's considerably below Invuln excepting a few mobs that play to it's strengths.

In the lower levels though an Electric tanker could well be a force to recon with; it gets good resistance to most damage types making it perform very well indeed in the <25 game.

I finally got my Elec/SS tank to level 50.

I actually ended up giving up on my goal of getting Footstomp´s recharge down to less than 5 seconds at about lvl 40, I didn´t find it to be adequate mitigation for my tastes. Unfortunately. It was great to see so many orange numbers floatin up from mobs.... and from a tank too!

Footstomp together with power sink certainly did improve survivability. Getting enemies drained of endurance really does slow the incoming damage down. Just not as much as I´d hoped.

I had most of the sets in place, so I did have a very good global racharge on him at the time (about 50% + 70% from hasten), so I think I got a fairly realistic idea of how the set performs.

I ended up going for S/L def, and X-Static is softcapped to that now. That together some reasonable recharge and HP bonusses (he has about 2500 with accolades) makes him very hard to take down..... He could happily stand in a spawn of freaks at +4 x8 without breaking a sweat, and tanking Rikti, Carnies and Malta is a doddle!

I do really like the set, especially combined with SS. But, like Dark, I´ve experienced that it benefits a lot from the addition of an extra layer of mitigation.

I am also in the process of leveling up an elec/tanker, this one elec/elec/ at lvl 30 I picked up tough on a Synapse TF, the thing was a beast. I plan to make it a big recharge build (no purples), with hasten up it has Energize every 36 seconds, 6 seconds off making that +regen Perma . with purples it would be easy to accomplish. The first 2 attacks also have a Chance for Self Heal slotted.

I also think electrical melee is a pretty decent pairing for electric armor. Many times during boss fights, the bosses endurnace was completely drained and he basically became my punching bag, and I have yet to pick up Lightning Field.

I'll wait until I run through an ITF before I make any serious judgement on its tanking ability. Already though, it feels much more durable than my fire/fire tanker.

Thanks for all the attention guys

I think I'll give my FM/Ele a go... We'll see.

I've got everything I need except the very expensive PvP enhancemtns here, and I've got a dozen or more sets of KC enhancements from before I left, If I sell them all I hope to have nearly enough for something like this:

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.803
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Magic Tanker
Primary Power Set: Electric Armor
Secondary Power Set: Fiery Melee
Power Pool: Fitness
Power Pool: Flight
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Speed
Ancillary Pool: Soul Mastery

Hero Profile:
Level 1: Charged Armor -- ImpArm-ResPsi(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam(3), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx(3), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg(5), ImpArm-ResDam(34)
Level 1: Scorch -- GS-Acc/Dmg(A), GS-Acc/Dmg/End/Rech(11), GS-Dam/Rech(11), GS-Dam/End/Rech(13), GS-Acc/End/Rech(17)
Level 2: Conductive Shield -- ImpArm-ResPsi(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(5), Aegis-Psi/Status(19), Aegis-ResDam(19), ImpArm-ResDam(21)
Level 4: Lightning Field -- Sciroc-Acc/Dmg(A), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg(7), Sciroc-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(7), Sciroc-Dmg/EndRdx(9)
Level 6: Static Shield -- ImpArm-ResPsi(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam(9), TtmC'tng-ResDam/Rchg(13), ImpArm-ResDam(15)
Level 8: Grounded -- ImpArm-ResPsi(A)
Level 10: Swift -- Flight-I(A)
Level 12: Hover -- SW-ResDam/Re TP(A), LkGmblr-Rchg+(17)
Level 14: Fly -- Winter-ResSlow(A), Winter-RunSpd/Jump/Fly/Rng(15)
Level 16: Energize -- Dct'dW-Heal(A), Dct'dW-Heal/Rchg(31), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(37), Dct'dW-Heal/EndRdx(42), Dct'dW-Rchg(42), Dct'dW-EndRdx/Rchg(43)
Level 18: Health -- Numna-Heal(A), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(21), RgnTis-Regen+(33), Heal-I(46)
Level 20: Stamina -- P'Shift-EndMod(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(29), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(37)
Level 22: Boxing -- Amaze-Stun(A), Amaze-Stun/Rchg(23), Amaze-Acc/Stun/Rchg(23), Amaze-Acc/Rchg(27), Amaze-EndRdx/Stun(34), Amaze-ToHitDeb%(48)
Level 24: Tough -- ImpArm-ResPsi(A), ImpArm-ResDam(25), TtmC'tng-ResDam(25), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx(27)
Level 26: Power Sink -- RechRdx-I(A)
Level 28: Fire Sword Circle -- Armgdn-Dmg(A), Armgdn-Dmg/Rchg(29), Armgdn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(31), Armgdn-Acc/Rchg(31), Armgdn-Dmg/EndRdx(33), Armgdn-Dam%(33)
Level 30: Combustion -- Sciroc-Acc/Dmg(A), Sciroc-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(34), Sciroc-Dmg/EndRdx(45), Sciroc-Dmg/Rchg(46)
Level 32: Hasten -- RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(40), RechRdx-I(42)
Level 35: Fire Sword -- GS-Acc/Dmg(A), GS-Dam/Rech(36), GS-Dam/End/Rech(36), GS-Acc/End/Rech(36), GS-Acc/Dmg/End/Rech(37), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg(50)
Level 38: Greater Fire Sword -- Hectmb-Dmg(A), Hectmb-Dmg/Rchg(39), Hectmb-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(39), Hectmb-Acc/Rchg(39), Hectmb-Dmg/EndRdx(40), Hectmb-Dam%(40)
Level 41: Soul Tentacles -- GravAnch-Immob(A), GravAnch-Immob/Rchg(43), GravAnch-Acc/Immob/Rchg(43), GravAnch-Acc/Rchg(45), GravAnch-Immob/EndRdx(45), GravAnch-Hold%(46)
Level 44: Lightning Reflexes -- HO:Micro(A)
Level 47: Gloom -- Apoc-Dmg(A), Apoc-Dmg/Rchg(48), Apoc-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(48), Apoc-Acc/Rchg(50), Apoc-Dmg/EndRdx(50)
Level 49: Build Up -- RechRdx-I(A)
------------
Level 1: Brawl -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Sprint -- Empty(A)
Level 2: Rest -- Empty(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet
Level 1: Ninja Run

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