My Electric Tank SUCKS--is that normal?

A slighty past soft cap SR ignores defense debuffing.
The worst I have seen is from radiation AVs like Dreck, Positron and the like.
Having faced every imaginable debuff on a handful of SRs (spines/sr scrapper, em/sr brute, fm/sr brute) I can promise you debuffs are trivial. The real threat is significant enemy tohit BUFFS like Quartz emanators or Nemesis stacked Vengeance.

I have done the ITF numerous times on my Elec/SS tank and I do not have any IO's slotted for defense other than Weave, CJ and a Steadfast Defense IO.

The trick I have found on the ITF is Energize. Use it... Use it like mad.. mine is almost perma.. Keep you regen as high as possible. I use Footstomp constantly to give me some mitigation. You should have about 50% resistance to Neg NRG and thats nothing to sneeze at.. Just defeat the cyst as fast as possible. '

It is more challenging for a ELA but certainly not impossible... And trust your team. A lot of Tanks I see tend to fight independently. Not telling the team what they are doing or what they might need help with. If you have an weakness vs something TELL THEM.. Let them back you up while you take the brunt of the initial aggro.

In my experience, once you get your electric tank slotted up well for S/L defense, it´ll be very tough indeed. There was a video on the forum recently showing an elec tank up against +4 mobs to demonstrate this (great video btw).

When i origionally started planning my build for my Elec/SS tank I focussed on recharge, if I recall I got Footstomp´s recharge down to 4.5 seconds under ideal conditions. It was great on paper, but when I tried it out, I found him too squishy for my preferances.

As was noted earlier in the thread, the energy drain is a pretty good form of mitigation, which it is. But it´s necessary to fire it off two or three times before it really helps... a partially drained mob (or 16) is still attacking. But you have to survive long enough to use it.

I found that by adding S/L defense, it gives the extra time you need to drain or defeat the mobs.

Here´s the data chunk for the build. It may give you some ideas:


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In the end game, with IOs, I think the value of soft capping SL Def is self evident, it's literally beyond reproach.

While leveling? and especially with a character that needs to earn what they use?

It may not... probably won't be an option.

Sneaking up close to the SL RES hardcap is an option available to all.

No it won't protect you from debuffs, no it won't protect you from mez, and no it won't protect you from other damage types of multicomponent attacks.

Since you can't realistically HIT that hardcap while leveling (without PvP IOs) it won't yield quite the same returns that capping it would.

What it will do is provide low cost, HIGHLY reliable protection from what will probably end up being over half the damage you ever face.

I'm not suggesting electric tanks should do this with anything but sl damage, just do tough and charged armor.

And when you do get the cash to softcap that sl def (and in my opinion, consider at least some e/n def as well) then also consider what it would take to hardcap that SL res all the way to 90. It's probably going to be viable to do all the above once we get very rare alphas to play with.

Personally I'm not sure if I will or not. With all the res I've currently got on my build, I may be fine with modest def.

Another much cheaper option is to go for 32.5% to all positionals, and rely on team buffs/insps to fill in the gaps if needed. Pop a purp when needed to softcap your defense to all positionals, pop an orange when needed to cap your S/L resistance.

I found this gave me great flexibility, and enabled me to do some cool stuff like tanking hydra(the mob, not the tentacles). The sets that boost positional defense(mako's,obliteration, etc.) usually give a global damage bonus and a proc, so my offense got a nice boost out of it as well.

I went for S/L defense on my brute however, as the resistance to S/L is significantly lower than on my tanker.

I think I'll wait before deciding on just how much def I need...

I have this theory about what they might do to basic tohit numbers in some fraction of the upcoming content.

There was this other MMO... One with orcs... and towards the end of the second last tier of content in a given expansion, some tanks were very nearly unhittable, while other builds couldn't approach that level.

The solution? in the final tier of content, def numbers were debuffed substantially.

Run the older content? you had all your defence. Run the final bosses, and you got hit with the debuff. They had to adjust incoming damage levels lower to account for the extra hits (in CoH, they'd probably have to lower debuffs and mez too) but it restored some sanity and more or less balanced the field

This is rampant speculation on my part but given how those Tip DE appear to work, I wouldn't be surprised if a few more groups (almost certainly not all, but some) started getting more than base 50 in new content.

Ok I have to speak up on this issue.

My Elec/SS Tanker is my favorite Tanker to play, and most certainly DOESN"T suck.
3 Different times I have been on TFs someone confused me for an INV tanker because I was near untouchable. *which in itself is amuseing since thiers a bright red electrical field around me LOL*

At no point leveling up my tanker did it ever feel (Sucky), or underpowered. Yeah DEF is a weakness of Elec, but DEF is also one of the easyest things to add with Invention.

Combat Jumping, Weave, Tough are Automatics for Elec. But then again most of my toons always end up with those 3 powers on. Due to Elec non-END issues and Cardiac Alpha I also Run Manuvers.

ITF Rommy? Absolutly no issues with tanking him. Even the Negative Energy Spam part on the mtn top isn't that big of a deal. It hurts no joke.. but ether pop a Purple... Orange... or just use Power Surge and problem solved. In fact I find for the most part Power Surge is a rather... unless power. Elec has such high Res to begin with about the only thing Power Surge is really good for is Toxic and Neg Eng.

The Recovery bonus is kinda a joke.
I person would have loved to see Power Surge give like a DEF bonus or Damage bonus vs the Big Res bonus it has. Brutes might be the only ones that really get much bang out of Power Surge. Scrappers cap out to soon to make good use of it (like Tanks).

I'm not saying Elec is the end all be all of Tank sets. But more then any other Tanker set in the game Elec is crapped on the most by the player base for no other reason then many not knowing what the set can do.


Anyone thats on Infinity that wants to see What a Elec Tanker can do jsut let me know