Incarnate options for Tankers

It seems to me that tanks have the most difficult decisions to make when choosing what to put in the Incarnate alpha slot. Most other ATs have obvious choices -- they want endurance or recharge or damage -- but tanks can use all of them.

Case in point is my DA/Ice tank, Sponge. She isn't very IOed out; I only bought her the Panacea proc for dark regen, a couple KB protection IOs, and all the +recovery procs for Health to help with her endurance problems. After I respec out Stamina and put in Cloak of Darkness, she'll be sitting at 68% Slash/Lethal resistance and around 18% Melee Defense. Which isn't bad, but it's not the peak.

You might say that since she had endurance issues, the Cardiac Boost is an obvious choice, especially since the higher versions also pump resistance. But all those IOs eliminate the endurance problems; she doesn't have them anymore. The resistance boost will be about +5-8% -- the portion that ignores ED. About all the Cardiac Boost will do for me is let me drop a few slots from Health and sell the expensive IOs. There is a tertiary benefit of increased Fear duration later on in the tree, but that only helps one of my powers.

A better choice might be the Spiritual Boost, which increases recharge and healing. My Dark Regen is not capped for recharge, and with both Health and Physical Perfection I could get a significant boost to my base regen. Tertiary benefits on the Spiritual tree are Stun duration and Slow, both of which I could use. But would a global recharge buff bring back my endurance issues?

There's yet a third option: Nerve. That boosts accuracy and defense, which could allow me to move accuracy slots or replace them with endrdx or recharge. I'd also get closer to softcapping defense. The tertiary buffs to hold and taunt would not be wasted either.

How are you planning to use the Incarnate slot? What do you expect your tank to get out of it?

I'm in a similar boat. I'm leaning toward adding accuracy and defense to my fire/EM tanker, but I waffle. A lot.

It doesn't help that I've got an adjusted plan of what IOs I want and haven't bought or slotted all of them yet -- I suspect once that happens I'll have a whole new landscape of strengths and weaknesses to look at. Maybe I'll take Cardiac, and then respec out of the Energy Mastery APP...but I'm really starting to love Laser Beam Eyes.

See what I mean about the waffling?

Theft of essence Proc is a lot cheaper than Panacea, works just as well. Cash out that one and redo a whole toon with the cash.

No brainer for me.

Shields, Ice Tanks, Dark, Inv will get Cardial Boost End redux/Damage Resistance
Fire/Fire will get Accuracy and Defense Buff

For an IO'd build, I'm just going down the powers and surveying how many powers have aspects enhanced well below the ED/DR line and going that direction. For example, I have a Dominator who uses Kinetic Crash and Entropic Chaos. The tons of recharge means I have no endurance problems, and even the largest +recharge from alpha slotting would be barely noticeable. However, I will get the full effect from +damage as I go that route. I have a Scrapper whose sets are short endurance reduction. That's the way I'm going.

For your case I'd say Spiritual. You imply in your "Nerve" option that your powers are shorted on +Recharge. To solidify that choice, I'd take your guy out to a pylon or the test dummies in RWZ and time how long you can attack without running out of endurance. If it's ~3 minutes or less, Cardiac may just be the answer after all. Mo' recharge mo' endurance problems.

This would gauge how long you'll last against AVs and such, where the proc in Dark Regeneration isn't going to save your blue bar.

I'd suggest trying all of them. From what I understand of the incarnate mechanics, if you don't use your powers for 5 minutes you can switch between incarnate abilities. You should be able to switch between, say Cardiac and Spiritual slotting. (please correct me if I'm understanding this wrong.)

Start with the ability you think will help you the most and see if you like it. If not, get a different one until you find the tree that works best for your character. If you run task forces a lot it shouldn't be hard to get the common alpha boosts fairly quickly.

Heck, depending on how deep into all the trees I get, I'll probably switch out the alpha slot to match the team I'm on.

Don't forget the Incarnate abilities aren't supposed to exemp down. So don't create your build to rely on them if you're going to exemplar down a lot to run task forces/missions etc.

I will not reslot ANY of my builds around the Alpha Slot. They will be used to shore up other areas of my builds.

Spiritual for my Willpower/Fire tank. Recharge is always nice and the +heal is great for regen and extra HP.

I plan on going Musculature for more damage, at least initially. On any of my tanker mains, I'm already fairly happy with where I am in terms of endurance and defense, because those have always been my longstanding priorities.

I may take the accuracy boost on my Fire/DB tanker, though. The thing about Accuracy is that it makes builds focused around Kinetic Combat / Smashing Haymaker more attractive, since accuracy is one of those sets' weaknesses. This would free up frankenslots for elsewhere. But since that tanker is my specialized build for running low level task forces, reslotting for alpha slots may not be effective.

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I had planned on going for extra damage on my Fire/EM/Fire, but I'm thinking the extra end reduction (and small amount of DR) may be the way to go in case the fight drags out.

going the +recharge on my ss/inv. Im just shy of perma dull pain which means if i get it il be sitting on 3300 hp perma!

I have 2 serious tanks. My Electric/Fire is a pure resistance build, and would LOVE Cardiac Radial to FINALLY hard-cap smashing/lethal, but hasn't had a sinlge end issue since taking Power Sink. (45% recovered per melee oppenent every 31 seconds will do that). The alternative would be Spiritual Radial: Damage leaks through and More Healing Good, and cranking the recharge on Energize is Bonus.

My Shield/Mace tank is absolutely Spiritual/Radial. Shield is weak on recovering HP, and I'd never turn down a speed boost on Mace.