I19 and the Tanker

1. If the scrapper has wiped the spawn, there's no aggro to pull.
2. A Stoner versus an Elec/Shield? Yeah, I could see that. Remember, it's all about threat level. Taunt or no, if the scrapper is vastly out-damaging the tank (and a tank in-Granite isn't necessarily a massive engine of damage all the time), and the scrapper got to the spawn first, yeah. It's going to be damn hard to strip aggro from the scrapper.
3. Note: Please note that CMA said "aggro management tools". There's a difference between aggro acquisition and management.

Yep. But you DO have Taunt. A nice AUTO HIT tool. Not Confront (which requires an Acc check). One that WILL strip aggro from another player.

Yep. Some of it is play style. Some of it is build. Some of it is the player.

Do you get frustrated on your level 30 SO'ed scrapper when some billion-inf-build level 50 Brute comes in and makes you feel like a Defender?

Okay, if you're a tank, Death is a regular companion. You should, ideally, be the first one to die. If you're the last one on the team still standing, you've technically failed.

Playing a tanker requires something that isn't really encouraged by Scrappers and Brutes. Patience. Scrappers and brutes are meant to kill stuff as fast as possible as a form of mitigation, since they aren't as durable as tanks. Brutes have the additional incentive of chasing fury that offsets this as well.

At the top end, the differences between heavily IO-optimized tanks, brutes, and scrappers in terms of durability are somewhat negligible. But you can't really compare the so-called billion-inf builds. Because they're heavily abusing other systems in the game to offset inherent holes in each AT's mitigation schemes.

Sure, if you're going to spend 10+ digits on IOs, then your scrapper and brute are going to massively out-damage your tank. Period. However, the scrapper and brute are still going to be more fragile. Their debuff resists, and overall hit point totals mean that they're unable to absorb the same massive spikes in damage as tanks when "lucky shot" syndrome takes over (try fighting a couple 8-man-team spawns of Level 54 Rikti if you don't believe me).

Also, if you want to be accurate, you have to compare like-to-like. Trying to compare a Fire/Fire tank to an Inv/Fire Brute is relatively pointless. Sure, they both have the same damage mechanism, but the Brute has better passive damage mitigation.

Just remember, while defense is king, it's not complete protection (ask any SR scrapper). You DO still get hit. It's the tank's ability to soak damage, even after taking resists into account, that still sets it apart from brutes and scrappers. That and the fact that said greater HP totals means they get more out of HP regeneration than brutes or scrappers.

That's just it, they aren't the same. Superficially you all have similar numbers for defense. But that big-*** ocean of HP and the even higher resist cap is what sets you head and shoulders above a scrapper or brute when the fit hits the shan.

Depends. You farming -1's in your preferred damage type? Go with the Brute or Scrapper. Simply put, you kill stuff faster.

Tanking Hamidon? Lord Recluse? Reichsman?

Tanks are still preferable. You're more survivable against all but the nastiest run of bad luck on the RNG (and yes, I've had a defense-capped Stone/Fire tank get three-shotted by tower-buffed LR when the RNG has hated me).

Don't tell that to an EM tank.

Yes. The tank is still the preferred aggro-management specialist on a team. Now, in a steamroll situation, where you're mowing down stuff as fast as you can, aggro management is less important. But you aren't always in a steamroll scenario.

There's a lot of stuff. Much of it already mentioned.

Remember opinions on this are like ********, everyone has one.

Okay, while stone is the baseline benchmark for tank durability, it's also the poorest selection in terms of damage output (granite's damage and recharge debuff pretty much insures that).

Fire/Fire will likely rule for damage output (since Fire/*'s main damage mitigation IS damage), but it's not necessarily the most survivable next to Shield, Inv, and Stone.

Shield/Fire would probably be your best bet for raw damage output, though the Shield/Super Strength would probably be nothing to sneeze at. Think about it, the combination of +DMG from both Against All Odds and Rage (or even better, Rage that's got enough recharge to both be perma and overlap.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

How is it a different story? Scraps and Brutes have the same res and defense values, you have to invest about the same amount in both to get almost the same suvivability while Brutes get a minor Hp increase over scrappers, they do have a higher hp cap, but as said by others, not many outside buffs from other ATs increase HP.

The resist debuff is nice, I will give it that, but it's a bonus for having a single tanker, and again I said in current content. You aren't fighting hard enough single targets regularly enough in the current game for bruising to make an enormous difference vs grabbing someone else.

My main worry about tankers is that if you design content requiring buffs to tank, which is where the higher tanker caps will normally come into play (beyond invuln and stone), you end up with a situation where the survivability difference between these melee ATs becomes less important rather than more. There's nothing stopping a buffed scrapper or brute from taking taunt and easily handling aggro from a single large enemy, and tankers won't have much of an aggro advantage given that punchvoke doesn't really work on AVs.

Yeah tanks have definitely gotten a bit better, and it's the reason I made the KM/WP instead of an ill/rad, but let's not exaggerate; I don't think the nerfs had much of a practical effect on the way the game is played.

Luckily enough the game is designed so that even if your AT is a little less than optimal there will still be room for you, so I personally don't think the imbalance is a huge deal. But I definitely believe it's there, even with the changes.

True but you also have the fact that scrapper attacks generally recharge faster. I was looking at the DPS results that top end scrappers are showing in the scrapper forum compared to top end DPS of tankers. A few edge case scrappers are managing ~300 dps; I don't offhand know of any tanker builds that can top ~150 dps. That's what I was basing my statement on top end scrapper/tanker damage. Do you know of any tanker builds that can top 150 dps? The best I can come up with, Shield/Fire, comes in somewhere in the 130's with a ton of recharge.

On the other hand if we compare average scrapper vs average tanker damage then you're probably pretty close to right in overall dps comparison. I think that the Scrapper forum's only come up with a very few combinations capable of turning in much over 200 dps.

Doh! Yes, you're right; I did screw up my numbers a bit going from memory. Still, I was understating the advantage if anything.

the investment is about the same, but the higher base hit points can make the difference, especially when built up with IO bonuses.

The Scrapper forum is a hot bed of edge-case builds. Going from memory, most if not all of the really high Scrapper DPS numbers posted in that Pylon thread come from DM/* and/or */SD builds with fully saturated AAO and/or Soul Drain. Even if the players in question routinely play to maximize those abilities, we are by definition talking about exceptional style of play.

Then we have selection bias: Tanker players (going by the forum) are less inclined to maximize DPS to begin with -- and in those cases where Tanker players do maximize offense, they're less likely to care as much about single-target DPS. From what I've seen, Tanker players are generally less inclined to maximize their builds at all (whether it's for defense, offense, or just generally) than the average Scrapper-forum poster.

And then, of course, there's the most obvious factor: Those numbers are posted in the Scrapper forum. How many Tankers even showed up there to report their numbers?

All of that said, and if we just look at the system logically, there's no reason to assume that the IO system generally favors Scrapper offense over Tanker offense. If anything, the IO system tends to favor Scrappers defensively -- in the sense that Scrappers can enjoy a larger proportional defensive gain than Tankers can. Damage procs favor Tankers more (proportionally), because their attacks have lower damage to begin with, and Tankers generally have access to more damage procs per attack (we can slot Taunt sets in every attack). Global damage bonuses tend to favor Scrappers, but they're hard to stack to a meaningful level.

And obviously -- as noted previously -- for a given defensive build goal, the Tanker has an advantage, which means that the Tanker is likely to have more build resources available to spend on offense.

If what you say is true about Scrapper attacks generally recharging faster, then +recharge bonuses would also tend to favor Tankers. But I don't think your premise is accurate. Attacks are balanced based on a formula. Yes, it's true that Tanker sets are more often characterized by one or two very slow, very heavy hitters (like KO Blow and Total Focus), but DPS is damage averaged over time, and so that metric shouldn't especially penalize those big hitters. Quite the opposite.

And lower-tier Tanker attacks generally aren't inferior to Scrapper analogues, leaving aside the difference in the AT modifiers. If we compare like-to-like -- that is, sets with similar mechanical strengths, like Martial Arts versus Super Strength -- Tankers do pretty well, even at the high end.

Are there are exceptions? Yeah, and I acknowledged that. Powers like Soul Drain and AAO are more impressive on Scrappers because Scrappers have a higher AT mod to build on -- but the proportional difference assuming equal investment and equal play styles remains the same. If Scrapper damage is ~50% higher at base, then adding another 50% to each doesn't change that: 1.5 * 1.5 / 1 * 1.5 = 1.5.

I wouldn't put much stock in the highest DPS numbers in that thread, is all. They're neat to read, and they give you a decent idea of what is achievable under certain circumstances with a certain build -- but they're a far cry from proof or even evidence that high-end Scrappers necessarily out-damage high-end Tankers by a factor of two.

Yeah, not a hard mistake to make.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

You're correct of course, and I agree that average to average on tank/scrapper damage it's probably going to end up not too terribly far from a 50% advantage to the scrapper. The OP was talking about the maximum attainable however, and that really skews things when you start talking about the bleeding edge.

I did see a post by one of the scrapper regulars on DPS from a tanker:

So I guess 150+ dps is possible on a tank, at least under optimal conditions and undoubtedly an absolutely optimized build.

On the recharge front looking at two sets I'm familiar with, Broadsword and Stone Melee... both considered slow sets. Here's the times for the top three ST attacks in each set:

BS - Hack 8s, Disembowel 10s, Headsplitter 14s
SM - Stone Mallet 8s, Heavy Mallet 12s, Seismic Smash 20s

Hmm, looking a bit closer I see that Headsplitter has a base damage of 187 while Seismic Smash has a base of 158 so it looks like you may be correct.

We are however drifting into the realm of theorycrafting instead of practical applications. I think the original premise, that scrappers have roughly a 50% damage advantage, is as the saying goes "close enough for Government work"

I think just as a common-sense matter, the max attainable will always tend to favor the higher-damage, lower-defense ATs simply because there's a threshold beyond which a player is likely not to care anymore about his defenses -- unless he is a group-minded aggro-management kind of player, in which case he's probably not going to care all that much about DPS.

I don't know Iggy personally, but from what I've seen he doesn't mess around. I'm sure his Tanker build has a good deal of influence invested in it -- but I don't know that he's gone out of his way to optimize his Tanker for offense to the same degree that he has his Scrappers. I'd be inclined to doubt it.

As for what's possible, here's a build I drew up kind of haphazardly, with some napkin-calc theory thrown in for good measure (the slotting for Health/Stamina is thrown in just cause I'm using the unofficial I19 Mids' patch, so you might not be able to see those powers on import):

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.81
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Click this DataLink to open the build!

Level 50 Natural Tanker
Primary Power Set: Shield Defense
Secondary Power Set: Super Strength
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leaping
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Soul Mastery

Hero Profile:Level 1: Health

• (A) Miracle - +Recovery: Level 40
• (40) Numina's Convalescence - +Regeneration/+Recovery: Level 50
• (48) Regenerative Tissue - +Regeneration: Level 30

Level 1: Stamina

• (A) Performance Shifter - EndMod: Level 50
• (48) Performance Shifter - EndMod/Recharge: Level 50
• (50) Performance Shifter - EndMod/Accuracy: Level 50
• (50) Performance Shifter - Chance for +End: Level 50

With that build (or some variant of it; I'm sure it could use a lot of improvements), you can run a chain of: Jab, Gloom, KO Blow, Haymaker, Gloom, Punch, Haymaker -> repeat. With the above slotting and with fully saturated AAO and one instance of Rage, that's 2056.34 damage in 11.22 seconds, or 183.274 raw DPS.

(Incidentally, the best Scrapper on the list is at 291 DPS, which is about 59% higher than 183.)

If we account for Bruising, then our number jumps to:

((2056.34 - 153.69) * 1.2 + 153.69) / 11.22 = 217.19 DPS for the first attack chain (not counting the debuff for the first Jab), and 219.9 DPS thereafter.

But then we have to take into account Rage crashes. If we assume that the player in question has Rage timed exactly to give one copy of the buff and no more than that, then we're looking at a damage modifier of basically 120 / 130 (you can't attack for ten seconds out of every 130), or 12/13.

217.19 * (12/13) = 200.5 DPS

Which gives the 291 DPS Scrapper on that list a ~45% advantage.

I'm not even going to get into the possibility of perma-double-Rage, which is possible on the above build (or some slight variant thereof). With all of that extra +damage from AAO, the second Rage isn't going to add all that much proportional damage -- i'd imagine barely enough to offset the increased crash frequency (12/13 falling to 6/7).

Likewise, we could get cute and talk about how Pylons don't resist psionic damage (they have 20% RES to all other damage types), which would theoretically lower this build's time-to-kill number (because of psi procs), but wouldn't alter its DPS. I'm pretty sure Iggy posted before Bruising was introduced, come to think of it. I'd have to go dig through the Pylon thread to be sure, though, and that's definitely a task for another night.

Build Theory Disclaimer: I'm not a Shield Defense player. I'm sure that build could use some work. In fairness, I admit up front that it doesn't have infinite endurance sustainability; by my rough calcs, the above attack chain should drain the build's endurance in about 125 seconds, which is good enough for any regular player, but doesn't quite meet the standards of a lot of hard-core Scrapper-build posters. The main point was to emphasize some of the non-standard Tanker slotting options that are available to increase offense.

Yup.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

Headsplitter has a base damage of ~162.66. I'm betting you're looking at MIDs, which is averaging in its static 15% crit chance.

Dangit you're right; I downloaded the new version and forgot to change the default settings.