In your personal opinion...

No. You misunderstand.

While it'd be a bit of a stretch to say that "all" power choices for a tank are valid, disqualifying a tank as a viable build because of a choice like Aid Self is extremely shortsighted.

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Hold the phone!

I may be the resident Dark Armor proponent here, but I have to let you know that Electric has control: Power Sink and Electric Field. Used together, these powers can eliminate enemy endurance, effectively "controlling" mobs much higher in rank (LTs and bosses even). Dark Armor can only hit minions on its own.

That said, I still put Dark over Electric. You only get 15 seconds (or sometimes less) to kill a Dark Armor character.

You had to say his name. Didn't you!

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That's true but -End takes a while to work, stuns are instant and can be stacked with stuns from the Secondary, if going against mobs with debuffs this can be very important.
As you said though, you're the expert - if you say that -End in ELM gives as much control as stuns in OG that can also be stacked with a secondary then I'll bow to your greater knowledge.

Currently I'm running a DA/EM (only about L28) and stacking stuns negates a mass of damage.

What are your stats? Did you tank all 4 AVs at once? Did you have any buffs from teammates (including Maneuvers) or just plain heals?

My Fire/EM w/softcapped S/L def and around 30% E/N got squished tanking all 4 AVs w/no team buffs. Only 75% S/L resists though--I don't overslot the armors to try to get over 80%. Maybe that was the difference?

Slotted well, it takes two uses of Power Sink to completely drain everything that's not an elite boss or higher. If you're fighting +0s, they don't last long enough to be drained, but what's the point when they don't pose the challenge to begin with? You only need survivability against +3s or better, and they certainly last long enough to get use out of the -end.

Is it immediate control like Dark Armor? No. Is it limited to minions like Dark Armor? Also no.

Slight clarification, I didn't claim to be the expert. I claimed to be the Dark Armor proponent, i.e. "Usually I speak very highly of Dark Armor, but..."

In a debate between the survivability of primary powersets, I do not believe the secondary should be considered at all. It introduces too much variation.

I can understand why you would want to exclude the secondary from the discussion as it adds an additional level of complexity to an argument that's already complicated.

However if one Primary has an espect that can be enhanced by the usage of a particular secondary then personally I feel that it should be considered.

If some one asked what the most damaging AoE Controller Primary is it would probably be between Fire and Plant. However due to the direct nature of it's damage Fire makes better use of Kinetics to move ahead of a Plant/Kin.

Should the synergy of Fire and Kin be ignored?

Kinetics is the most offensive secondary and Fire Control is the most offensive primary. There's no awesome/clever synergy, it's simply the combination of two brute forces together.

Every primary has good survivability synergy with a certain secondary. At most you'll be able to close the gap a bit(which I doubt), but the other primary will still be more survivable than you.

The jury is still out for me. High end Dark builds are crazy strong in general, but I haven't really studied what the absolute best you can squeeze out of Dark is, relative to other sets. I do know that in a team with any sort of defense buffing, Dark's PBAoE auras and especially Dark Regen start to become extremely significant. And Dark has the best bounce-back rez in the game for a tanker if you do get killed every once in a while: as long as you're not dying constantly, death isn't a big deal for Dark. In fact, its probably better for the team for you to die and Soul Transfer back than it is for an Ice tanker to duck into Hibernate and live.

No, it shouldn't be ignored, but you can't say "Fire/kin does more damage than any other controller, therefor Fire/ must be the most damaging primary." It's not a logical leap. If we're defining the damage dealing capabilities of Fire, it should be without regard to the secondary.

Think of it this way:
All Dark Armor tanks can stun or fear minions.
All Elec tanks can sap bosses.
All Shield tanks have a PBAoE knockdown.
A subset of Dark Armor tanks can stun bosses and LTs.
A subset of Dark Armor tanks can recover endurance and fear bosses.
A subset of Shield tanks have a heal power.

Which points are fair for comparison?

I find on high defense builds that its not normal DoT attacks that interrupt Aid Self the most, its either autohitting DoT (like caltrops) and more commonly autohitting debuff auras. Sonic disruption fields in particular are ironically highly annoying to my soft-capped SR scrapper because even though they debuff resistance which you'd think means nothing to an SR scrapper, they autohit, make me highly vulnerable to one big lucky hit, and prevent me from using Aid Self.

Actually, tiny nitpick, but if you have Powersink 5-6 slotted for endmod (yes, I know, over ED cap) with the Musculature Radial Paragon Alpha and Lightning Field, you can sap 100% of enemies' endurance with a single shot. For many builds that may not be worth it, but for others, that's a heck of a lot of control

Its a judgment call, because while there are situations where Aid Self can't be reliably used, to ignore it would be potentially significant because its so strong. I should also point out that sets without terrorize protection can find themselves unable to use even non-interruptable heals like Energize.

I normally count Aid Self when talking about comparing builds and what they can do in-game, particularly when there is strong evidence that Aid Self would actually work in the circumstances being discussed, like if Aid Self is part of an actual in-play build. I usually ignore it when talking about powerset to powerset abstract comparison, like balance ones.


As to the notion that Aid Self is a very uncommon build addition to tankers, particularly high performance ones, all I can say to that is that does not match my experience.


Since it uses a tier 9 power its technically disqualified from this thread, but over the weekend I decided to try my hand at making the strongest Granite build I could come up with, and guess what: it has Aid Self in it. Not even very well slotted, but its there. The only two tankers I think might go out of their way to avoid Aid Self might be Willpower and Dark Armor, both because Aid Self's benefits would be highly diluted in those sets given their huge intrinsic regen or healing.

Yes. Thank you. That has been driving me nuts. I have been trying to remember what I was fighting on my EA brute that gave me fits with Aid Self (I was trying to include it in the post you quoted). When I realized that the Nullifiers sonic field interrupted, on those instances where I got in trouble and I was between Energy Drain recharges, I'd have to jump away to get out of that field (which is likely a doubly good idea if I am getting overwhelmed).

If you do get the time, I'd be curious how that WP build I posted fares with and without SoW in your comparison thingy.

On the tangential subject of debuffs, Oppressive Gloom has to hit its target, as does Whirling Hands (which I'm assuming you're stacking with OG). Power Sink autohits. That can be important if you're tanking dark debuffers, or things with defense buffs themselves (or are just higher level and intrinsicly hard to hit). So while OG has its advantages, Power Sink has them also.

Holy crap! It worked!

Agreed.

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Why put Elec so far down? Especialy under Ice Armor who only has Def to live or die off. Especialy considering the new content Pure Def has a rough time in high end content.

I'm personaly not conviced on Willpowers surviability to put it in the top 4. If I wasn't having so much fun with mys crapper, Dom, and Cont atm I would start up a Willpower Tanker just to see for myself because what I have seen in game of Willpower tanks they do not equal the survivablity of the 4 I listed.

If I had to list them in pure Survivablility, putting them in a tier system because it makes mroe sense. (going by high end biulds...Not nessaryly 15 Billion biulds. Any set can be pretty incrediable once your packing 5-7 purple sets etc)

Tier 1:
Stone (no brainer here, hard to compete vs a IOed out Granite form backed by PPs)

Tier 2:
Inv - Elec - Dark

Tier 3:
Willpower - Shield

Tier 4:
Fire Aura - Ice Armor

* Fire Aura I almost put into Tier 3... its a hard call because I have seen Fire Aura able to do some amazeing things.

I might have put Ice Armor in tier 4, but its almost important to understand out of the box Ice preforms VERY very well. I just dont think pure Def sets get the biggest bang for buck out of the IO system since you really can't biuld for res (thier weakness) vs a Res set biulding up thier Def.



PS - So glad someone else mentioned -End/end draining as valid control . Like I said being able to bottum out Mobs End Bars is such a underrated ability.

PSS - As to Aid Self comments, thier are some valid points about it.

You said it yourself:

It seems Auroxis was thinking about out of the box non-IOed strength, because of this phrase right next to Ice Armor:

As to defense sets in general, its a question of cost. From millions of inf to tens of millions of inf, defense sets tend to get more out of the invention system than most other sets, because they are within close striking distance of soft-capping. But when you cross into the hundreds of millions or billions of inf builds, you start entering realms of getting so much defense that even non-defensive sets can soft-cap to some or all types, and at that point even *having* defense becomes almost irrelevant. The difference between my SR scrapper and other really tough scrapper secondaries is not that I have defense and they don't, its that I have defense and I get to keep it almost all the time. Theirs will fluctuate when stressed by defense debuffs.

My guess is that no 50 million inf Electric build is going to out-tank a 50 million inf Invuln build. Its when we're talking about 500 million inf builds or 5 billion inf builds that the scales equalize.

Totaly argee

Ice and Inv are very friendly sets right out the box.

Gonna put this back up again in case people missed it....

I have some corrections to the original numbers I posted. I made a mistake when I just hacked in the numbers quick and dirty: I entered actual defense numbers when I should have capped them to 45% (to honor the soft-cap). That shifts things slightly. I also added in your Willpower numbers from the second build. Here's the relative standings, in composite numbers: Willpower, then Electric, then Invuln:

Sustainable: 35.43 26.36 18.80
180 seconds: 24.24 17.71 14.31
60 seconds: 17.39 12.42 11.55
30 seconds: 14.12 9.89 10.24

The Willpower numbers beat *everyone*, before I even add in SoW. Why? Two reasons. One: your build nearly perma-caps health. That's a huge advantage that partically makes up for your lesser resistances. Two: the composite scores presume you're going to see a constant barrage of all the damage types, 66% smash/lethal, and all the rest evenly distributed (with half the psionic damage being non-positional). This means ultra-high protection in one area won't compensate for massive weakness in another: think of it as leaks in a dam. A lot of small leaks is better than one big one. If you have one big one, it doesn't matter if you seal the other leaks completely. Willpower's performance is a bit more even, which means it doesn't have the one big leak in damage.

Consider, these are the damage numbers for the 30 second window for Willpower:

Smash/Lethal: 8056.46
Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative: 2490.52
Toxic: 741.24
Psi/Non-positional Psi: 1955.16

Compare to the Electric build:

Smash/Lethal: 8996.90
Fire/Cold: 1161.16
Energy: 16464.33
Negative: 3292.87
Toxic: 505.16
Psi: 830.53
Non-positional Psi: 328.18

And Invuln:

Smash/Lethal: 17635.53
Fire/Cold: 3019.78
Energy/Negative: 2676.10
Toxic: 546.14
Psi: 328.18
Non-positional Psi: 328.18


In a completely smash/lethal environment, Invuln crushes them both. But in an environment where only 5.7% of the total damage is psionics, Invuln has problems compared to Willpower that blows them both away.

One issue with my composite score is that its a bit naive relative to true damage type distribution. It assumes that s/l is 66% of all damage (which is probably close to the truth) and the rest is evenly distributed (probably not so close to the truth). But since we're talking about slicing up 34% of the damage in different ways, that's usually not a bit deal. And actually psionic damage is probably under-represented, which is actually depressing Willpower's scores relative to the other two sets.

So why do so many people think Willpower isn't in the same class as Invuln or Electric? Probably because few people have seen a health capped defensive soft-capped Willpower Tanker with 665% regen. And that's with one thing in RTTC. With RTTC maxed out, its a ridiculous 1096% regen. Its also true that these numbers don't factor in endurance drain as mitigation, although that's probably not strong enough to shift the numbers radically without Power Sink.