Tanker solos Giant Monster - Film at 11!!

I don't think you should exclude lore pets from soloing at all. It's obviously a player power and should be treated as such.

If the game gets "easy" once you get lore pets and a lot of players can now solo GM's and Pylons, that's our fault for not coming up with better challenges. I remember in the Rikti Pylon thread someone already cleared the entire RWZ of Pylons in time to lower the Mothership shields solo. That could be the new DPS achievement.

I've done pretty much every GM except Lusca and Hamidon since I got my incarnate pets on my tanker.

And even without them, it's nothing a few envenomed daggers won't fix.

Congrats, Silph.

However, I personally don't think this counts as soloing. Insofar as any other AT could arguably do the same, since the main deciding factor is doing enough DPS to beat the GMs regen, which is almost entirely the Vicky. Yes, its only the Tankers powers doing it. Yes, they're not temps.

I'm well aware its an arbitrary line to draw, but this is where I personally draw it. To explain it a little, being able to solo a GM in this manner doesn't speak to the strengths of a well-built and/or played Invuln/SS, so much as that Lore pets do enough damage to drop a GM if you keep them alive.

Congrats you've done something incredibly foolhardy. Did you know that GMs originally didn't scale they had a set level just like ordinary monsters. High level tanks defeated them solo all the time. The GMs didn't like that. In fact the whole Monster scaling system was created just to prevent that. Doing what you did is the same as asking them to buff all GMs to include pets as part of there scaling. If that happens I'll be sure everybody know who to blame. :P

Good job! Of course, you had your incarnate powers so I'm not as impressed as I would have been before but it's still a damn nice job.

Let's assume I take all of the numbers above as given. Let's further assume that I start with a team in which every single player on it can outdamage a comparable tanker by 93% as the calculations above imply, and lets further assume Bruising has zero benefit.

In a proportional sense, then, replacing one character with a tanker would be changing the damage output of the team from 8 * 945 = 7560 to 7 * 945 + 488 = 7103. That's a reduction in damage to 7103/7560 = 0.94, or 94% of the original. This assumes tanker aggro control has zero benefit, bruising has zero benefit, and everyone on the team outdamages the tanker by the same 93%.

Now, bruising is a single target effect not an AoE, but what would the effect of bruising be if the entire team was focused on a single target? The net result would be, usually, that the total damage of the team would increase by 20% of their normalized output before any other resistance debuffs are counted. Which means in that specific case, total damage becomes 7103 * 1.2 = 8523.6, which is higher than the original. This is true even if the team itself is packing resistance debuffs, unless all the targets are debuffed to the resistance floor of -300%. What percentage of the total number of targets the team is engaging simultaneously would bruising have to hit for the effect to break even? Its about 30% of them. In an AoE-heavy environment even that might be difficult, but the odds are that bruising would still manage to close that 94% gap sigificantly.

In any case, its unlikely any team of any strength, and ironically especially very strong ones, could detect the difference between a single tanker and a single scrapper in normal play. The difference would be less than ten percent, and probably 5% or less most of the time. And it is mathematically possible that the tanker could increase total team damage by more than a comparable scrapper in situations where the team is focused on less targets at one time, particularly in situations such as the LRSF and the STF archvillain fights.

That's the thing about -res debuffs that are dangerous to calculate around. +DMG only affects you (unless its a team-wide buff). But -RES affects the damage output of everyone that shoots at that target. That's why resistance debuffing defenders can have a much larger impact on total team performance than their own individual damage would suggest: in teams they are contributing their own damage plus a multiple of everyone else's damage. The same thing happens with bruising. 20% doesn't have to beat 93%, 20% is actually competing with 100%. Which is to say, if you are providing a resistance debuff that effectively contributes 20% of one player's damage per player, then in a team of more than five that debuff will equal the damage of any one player no matter how much damage they do. To put it another way, a defender that debuffed resistance of all targets by 20% is contributing by themselves 140% of the damage of a single player via that debuff in a team of eight even if they themselves do zero damage (7 x 20%).

For a tanker to reach the same total damage contribution of a scrapper that does about twice its damage, all bruising needs to do is, factored across all the other players on the team, end up contributing half the damage of one player. Which is what happens when it affects about one third the targets the rest of the team is attacking at that instant of time.

On average the scrapper might still end up contributing more damage than the tanker, but the difference is small enough that anyone discriminating between the two would be doing so for purely antagonistic purposes and not objective performance ones in my opinion. Even if you consider the numbers above to be the best case against tankers, that best case is not strong.

Just for the record, I don't believe that tanks are useless AT's or even one of the least useful. There always are emp fenders, masterminds, dominators, which really are much more of a waste of a spot for 'cherry picked' TF teams. In fact, a majority of the blasters on the server fall into that category (since there really are SUCH few well made and well played blasters).