Just in: new Tank powersets

I have a Minsc tribute DB tank on Freedom. He's fun, but Broadsword would have been sooo much better.

Evil, meet my sword, SWORD...MEET...EVIL!

I am forced to agree with this general assessment as well.

Go try tanking something like Devouring Earth or Veng buffed Nemesis with an SR and see how long you stay on your feet.

The things that can ignore defense are getting more plentiful in this era of the game. That's going to suck for a tank who is expected to hold the agro of those things with nothing BUT defense to rely on.

Sure, it will be a solid set for a lot of things, but if I'm about to start a DE arc, I'm going to boot an SR tank in favor of something that can survive the agro in a heartbeat.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I like it when I meet some one else had played that game.

Lets do this quick and painful.

If you're on a team, wouldn't the team beable to cover the times when the SR Tank is at their weakest?

For end game, I'd just say go with Rebirth for the +Heal/+Regen.

Also there's inspiration use for the Tanker to use.

And again, the team to cover the Tankers back. Like a Sonic, or Emp or Thermal!

Not on Hami raids.

Doesn't really help when stuff bypasses your defenses and hits for 90-100% of total damage output. Even on a tank that hurts, and you can't bolster your regen far enough to account for that sort of thing.

You can carry 20 inspies. Even if they're all larges, that's still only 20 or so fights. Yeah, a 10-15% resistance boost from a small orange would increase survivability, but not that much.

So back to the days of "SB pls!".

Nah. Pass.

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I recently tanked the Faathim TF(Heavy on Nemesis and Rularuu) with my SR scrapper, and with team buffs, inspirations, and temp powers we cruised through. As for Hami, all that matters there is having high HP(all tankers can have high HP), Regen (hello rebirth), and Taunt.

I love SR on scrappers because I get plenty of spare slots, which can be used to get more damage bonuses and recharge bonuses. I can imagine the same for tankers, except instead of damage and recharge you can aim for the incarnate softcap, HP, and Regen.

I been doing HAMI for a long time and been HAMI bait for most of that time either on my Fire/Fire tank, or my WP/SS tank and yes u do need help from your team mates IE if u have a couple of emps casting RA on you then u should not need the EoEs. Last night I was HAMI bait once again and had 3 emps on my team that kept RA on me and I maybe used 2 EoEs when they where busy, while Monday I used a lot of EoEs because the emps was not casting RA on all the time.

An SR tank will have significantly lower HP than most other tanks, and less ability to absorb damage than all of them.

Ice, Invuln, and Stone all get a Max HP boosting click power.

Willpower and Shield both get a HP boosting

Fire, Electric, and Dark don't get max HP boosting powers, but they do all get solid resistances and a self-heal. Additionally, you can add survivability to those sets by adding defense. SR cannot add resistance the same way.

SR has no real resistance to speak of, and it doesn't get a self-heal. It also has no way outside of IOs and Accolades to boost it's HP total.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think it will be a BAD set for tanks. It's just that SR will do what many tanks can already do (softcap defense), and it doesn't have much else going for it.

A set that gets good resistance values AND is softcapped will survive much better than a set that is JUST softcapped. I think with the sheer number of enemies a tank is expected to have on them at all times, you're going to see the RNG screw SRs on a regular basis, and SR doesn't have much of anything else to fall back on once it's defense is breached. Anything other than S/L damaghe is going to be hitting at full strength, and some of the tougher enemies in high level content hit REALLY hard when they land a blow.

I don't think SR on a tank will outright suck, but I don't think for a second that it's going to be as ZOMGAWESOME as some are thinking it will.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

You need more then High HP, and not all tanks take rebirth. I do not have it on my tank plus if you are getting hit by the green mitos no kind of heals will heal u even rebirth, granted it will help u get regen but u have to remember it takes 5 min for it to recharge, I prefer getting RA from the emps.

This is all assuming you know what you're doing and you have buffers boosting your regen. I should have been more clear.

Like I said, SR has its strength in spare slots, so while you can't get significant amounts of resistance you can still get HP, Regen, and most importantly the incarnate softcap.

And I agree with you, I was trying to make the point that it won't suck.

True enough I personally see both sides on that, and I am thankful for the EMPs that I do have on my team who knows what they need to do. Like I said in my previous post the 2 Hamis I did this week and the deference in the out come of keeping my tank up.

1. Your SR scrapper might have more actual health than standard tanker health without invention bonuses and accolades, situations SR has to function within. My SR scrapper at level 50 has 1922 health. Tanker base health at level 50 is 1874.

2. Your SR scrapper probably has tough which not all SR tankers will have. I'm typically running around with about 20% resistance to smash/lethal total, about 17% of that from tough. Working backwards, my SR scrapper can take a smash/lethal alpha of up to 2402 damage before dying instantly. Compare to the standard SR tanker without tough and without invention bonuses that can take 1874. Check your own build, and see if you really are less alpha-capable than what the standard base SR tanker will be.

3. Your SR scrapper probably has much higher regeneration than non-endgame tankers and aid self. Which means you will be able to recover from an alpha far faster than the standard SR tanker will be able to.

Bill, our SR scrappers are probably *far better* than base SR tankers will be, and probably have been for quite some time. All they were going to get on us was 40% more health than scrappers, and I currently have 43.6% more than base health. You're thinking the best end game SR tankers will be stronger than us, but my worry is that the standard SR tanker will almost always be significantly worse than us.

I'm not worried about end game SR tankers. They will be us literally on steroids: far beefier and just as unhittable. But the situation is going to be a lot different at level 40, 35, and 30.


It'll be a little harder than that to soft cap. At level 22 you'll have 13 power choices and 20 discretionary slots. It takes 7 powers (six SR defenses and a power pool defense) 4-slotted (unless you plan on running out of endurance in ten seconds running four toggles) to get to the soft cap or near it. That's 7 powers and 21 discretionary slots.

Powering four toggles in those levels won't be easy, especially if you've devoted all your slots to defense and can't slot attacks for endurance reduction. In fact, if you slot stamina itself you won't really be able to effectively soft cap an SR tanker until level 25 or higher.

Hypothetically if I were to sell out an Invuln Tanker on mitigation in the same way I might consider RPD, TI, Uny, DP, Invinc, and Combat Jumping. By level 23 I could have RPD 3 slotted, TI, Uny, CJ, and Invinc 4-slotted (one end red), Dull Pain 6-slotted, and Stamina 3-slotted. With even SOs that gets me to 70% resistance s/l, 26% f/c/t, 16% e/n, and with five targets in Invinc about 20% defense. Plus the effects of Dull Pain which will be up 2/3rds of the time. That's actually competitive (stronger s/l, weaker everywhere else) with a soft-capped SR tanker which will likely not materialize before 25.

Where the SR tanker will excel is in high-order debuffing situations, where most of those debuffs won't stick. But outside of that I think there will be issues. I think most people think soft capping is strong because they usually see it in end game builds where it is supplemented by a ton of other mitigation.

I'm also a little concerned about SR tankers not actually having permanent status protection before SOs come around. Shield Tankers have a similar problem, but Shield Tankers have arguably better passive protection: they get to keep phalanx and true grit.

I've looked at Bill's build in-game (we both play on Pinnacle), he does not have Aid Self.

I think it's against his religion.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

I've always disliked the clickie-status protection in SR/SD, but dealt with it back in the day because there were genuine tradeoffs in play. I don't really feel it provides tangible advantages in today's incarnation of the game.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

Here's what I'm actually thinking:

I managed to get my SR scrapper to 50 before ED and the GDN. What I have done with him, even what I do with him now, is irrelevant to how I think SR on tanks will play out.

Have I even played SR recently? Yes. I ran a claws/sr brute to 25 starting in Praetoria. He did just fine. I deleted him only because I knew that he'd be superior to my main character and, quite frankly, I didn't want to see that.

I may be misinterpreting a lot of the SR bashing going on in this thread, and if I am, I apologize, but it seems to me that most of the arguments are being based on truly odd situations:

It appears that many are believing that a tank with SOs should be able to tank the incarnate trials without support from teammates. Or Hami or whatever.

Yes, the lack of permanent mez protection before SOs I agree is a problem. But that's a problem for brutes and scrappers as well. Why should tanks get special treatment? EDIT: And now would be the perfect time to change PB/AD so that they have a breakfree effect since toggle mez protection can only be suppressed these days.

Passives only need 3 slots. 4*4 + 3*3 - 7 = 18 slots needed
Granted, that's still tight but doable. And even if you choose not to slot your passives, which frees up 6 of those 18, you'd still be sitting over the softcap at 22 if you do fully slot the 4 toggles in question. (Well, ok, you'd be a slot short on weave until 23.)

Toggles: 18.5% base (w/3def = 28.86)
Passives: 7.5% (w/1def = 9)
Weave: 5% (w/2def = 7)

Ok... 44.86 def. Total powers used: 3 SR toggles, 3 SR passives, boxing, tough, weave = 9

Total slots used: 3 in each SR toggle, 2 in weave at 21 = 11 slots total.

4 powers and 9 slots to use as I want.

That is a great idea that I would dearly like to see as an across-the-board improvement to those powers.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister.

That's kinda what we do around here.

Here's what will tick me off to no end:

The devs choose to make changes to SR for tanks and don't push those changes back to Scrapper/Brute SR.

It's bad enough that brute SR got the power order change and the taunt aura on evasion without those changes being backtracked to scrapper SR.

Any further such shenanigans will probably cause me to get banned from the forums for good. Course... they might like that.

Well how often do the Devs listen to the players suggestions? People been asking for BS for the tank and we end up getting MA, me and a few friends been asking for the shoulder kitty for male toons for couple of years and still no kitty for male toons (look at my Avatar wouldn't a kitty be kwel for that toon?) also I asked for a stop sign for the BA and WM but still none, I know a few others been trying to get rad/rad tanks as well.

Who said anything about having there tank SO during any of the trials?

I did accidentally four slot those passives. But tossing weave into it nullifies much of the notion that SR will be easy to soft cap: if it does that it will be taking the fighting pool to do so.

It will also have more endurance drain issues because weave is a fairly expensive toggle. If we slot the 3 SR toggles and weave with 3def/1end SOs, we end up with 0.83 eps of endurance drain (vs 0.59 with just the three SR toggles and 0.63 with 3 SR toggles plus CJ). 3-slot stamina is 2.48 eps, so net endurance drops from about 1.85 to 1.65, a drop of about 11%. I've compared the difference between 3+weave and 3+CJ under so slotting and its pretty noticable to me. Its half the difference between unslotted and slotted stamina.

These things are correctable with slotting, but not likely in the 20s.

Because unlike Scrappers and even Brutes, Tankers are explicitly intended to take aggro pretty much continuously, and theoretically without significant assistance. A Brute or Scrapper with a status protection gap can disengage. You might not want to, but they are designed to. A Tanker is not designed to disengage from aggro periodically and continuously.

To put it another way, if a Scrapper or even a Brute said they couldn't consistently tank for a team of four at standard difficulty in any standard content against any standard critters at any level, the devs would say "so?" But if a Tanker says that for any legitimate reason, the devs are supposed to take notice because that's the historically stated design target for all Tankers. That problem is an actual balance-critical problem according to the last known statement of the Tanker design target.

(I don't have a link to the quote, but I know it was publicly stated on the forums a while ago).

Continuous mez protection in the earlier levels is a nice to have for Brutes and Scrappers, but I can make the case that the lack of it is actually a design-breaking error for Tankers.

I'll buy that, but it doesn't explain why the change shouldn't be backtracked to scrappers/brutes any more than Castle's explanation to me on why scrapper SR didn't even get the taunt aura. "Cuz they don't need it" just doesn't sit well with me.

"Because they don't need it" was Castle's way of trying to point out that not all SR scrappers want to draw aggro every time they turn on AoE protection. Unlike, say, Invuln, their protection doesn't scale up with targets rushing up to attack them. So while Invuln's taunt aura helps invincibility, a taunt aura in Evasion just draws more incoming damage.

The same is true for Brutes of course, but with Brutes the devs made the decision early on to give Brutes a taunt aura, and so they could make that decision with a relatively clean slate without changing how lots of players with existing SR characters had to deal with a change to aggro.

This may come as a shock Bill, but not everyone considers drawing aggro on something other than than a tanker to be an actual advantage.

As to backporting continuous status protection to Brutes and Scrappers, its not high on my list of things to argue for, but I also wouldn't argue against it if it was contemplated.