Tank LF Incarnate Advice... A few Q's

Hey guys, and gals.

Long time no see..... I finally got my Elec/Elec tank to incarnate last week and I realized I'm not sure what the heck to do with him. So I have a few basic questions to bounce off of you....

Soooo.... I have no endurance issues with elec/elec, and obviously being elec/elec I don't have much in the way of Def going on.....

So I was going to take the Musculature route. Not sure which one, but probably the one that gives me 45%. Does this sound reasonable? It seemed I could do with some help in the damage department. Any thoughts on that?

Second question regards my Invuln/SS tank. I haven't got him to 50 yet, and I farted around with tanks a LOT before deciding on elec/elec for my first incarnate tank....

But I couldn't help but wonder what incarnate route you would take with the Invuln. He seems rock hard in some ways, but less flexible than my elec/elec. What's the favoured incarnate ability for you Invuln tanks? And why?

Finally, the characters I do have that are incarnate are just halfway up one tree. I noticed with my Shield Scrapper, that if I want to make another ability in the tree, it has requirements that I've already created. To me this would seem to indicate that when you create an Alpha, it actually consumes the previous power you made. So if you need to make another power higher up in that tree, you may have to re-make some of the lower powers again.

Does that sound right? If so... I got a while to go to finish an incarnate tree! Woot.

I just realized this last night as I haven't touched my CoH account for a few months.

Thanks.

for my invuln/ss tank i picked the cardiac alpha because of endurance issues so i took something that would help my endurance out.

for destiny i took ageless because i really didnt need anything else that was available, rebirth would of been the second option but considering i dont even use dull pain having a second heal just seemed pointless to me but even with cardiac if i went full out on a boss or av i would be sucking some endurance pills during the fight so i got ageless and never have to worry about endurance now, just pop ageless when i get low and if its down and i have to use a blue inspiration i do it.

for judgement i took pyronic just because i like fire, and it seems to work well with melt and fireball, makes me a aoe machine. use melt, use pyronic, use fireball, use foot stomp, most minions even at plus 4 to me are dead at that point, repeat when they recharge. use ko blow and haymaker and jab as fillers when necessary.

for lore i took storm elementals, no special reason why just liked the idea of storm elementals.

the other one i took reactive for the 75 percent chance of the fire dot to add to my damage.

What my tank turned into is a unstoppable death machine without having to use unstoppable. im very satisfied with him now, he is nigh invulnerable with the io sets i picked i have maxed out defenses with invincibility and set bonuses, max resist to smash/lethal, 35 percent or so to everythign else, but with my defense i hardly ever take any damage and I pump out alot of damage to my foes. I can solo on plus 4 x8 without a problem, ran a itf last night and my health never got below 3/4 of a bar even on the second mission which used to be one of the hardest for me with all the neg energy attacks. even on rommie i didnt get hit for much damage at all, never even used dull pain the entire tf, dull pain might be a dead power for me now unless i just want to use to max out my hit points and since its perma now i may do that with it, cause i dont need the heal.

hope this helps, but those are the reason i chose what i did choose and I am very happy with my tank, very survivable and very good damage.

For my Inv tank, I took Spiritual. I already took the Energy Mastery Epic and built primarily with Endurance conservation in mind. So much so that Conserve Power is almost never needed.

Basically, run your build and see what seems lacking to you.

Are you spending time standing there (or using brawl) waiting for your attacks to come back up? Spiritual.

Are you missing a lot? Nerve.

Are you already running an optimal attack chain at the proper speed? Musculature.

Do you have endurance problems? Cardiac.

ALSO, look at the secondary/tertiary effects as well.

My Fire/Fire blaster went Cardiac because of endurance woes, yet also gained a range boost out of it. It enables him to hover-tank Lord Recluse in the STF if the main tank is having problems.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

For an Elec/ who doesn't have need of the other things (as noted above by Hyperstrike), the Tier 4 Radial Musculature is pretty nice.

It gives you the Damage enhancement, but it also modifies EndMod enhancement. This means that PSink will sap (and return) even more End. Lightning Field will also sap a bit more (from 3% up to 4% otherwise unenhanced).

Lots of great advice. Thanks guys.

The musculature is the way I was leaning, but wasn't sure. Recharge is nice for sure... Lightning Rod is fun, but my attack chain is 'ok'.

My damage is a little lethargic, and the advice on secondary is great advice. I often cycle sink and I've 6 slotted my electric field to do some end drain so this would be even better. I never thought of that, so thanks.

I am unsure about anything beyond Alpha as that stuff is all new to me.... but I didn't realize I'd have to re-create some slots for consumption by higher abilities in the tree.... I guess I'm going to need a Lot more shards!

I do enjoy my elec tank a lot. I got him up to 80% resists and he seemed good... and great Psi resist.... but with my Invuln/SS tank I felt a bit lost. So I appreciate the advice there too.

hyper gave great advice though and that is run the build for a while and see what tends to be missing. I originally went the energy mastery pool on my invuln/ss and just didnt like the damage output i was doing vs the endurance consumption, when conserve power was running I had no endurance problems but when it wasnt I did. now this was back before i had a alpha slot and before the io sets I have, but still. I wanted more damage, so i respecced into fire, which gave me the damage, but started having some endurance issues at times, not like i was popping blues every two seconds, just occasionally every 40 seconds or so. now that i have ageless ive been debating trying out spiritual, although my recharge is good to me and i like extra damage resist from cardiac also, but the best thing is just see where your lacking at plug that hole with your alpha slot.

the other incarnate powers for the most part are just simply your choice, destiny is an exception cause you can further plug another hole in your character with that. key thing is enjoy the character and try to fix some holes that your build has left, at least that is the way I do things with mine.

One thing to consider is that while as Elec you may not have end issues Cardiac also on a couple of trees offers you damage resistance, and as you go up the tree increasing amounts of it bypass ED. At Tier 3 it's giving you the equivalent of another DO of resistance in all your armors, at Tier 4 you'll get about another 15% of resistance enhancement... it's enough to bring your S/L to almost the 90% cap with Tough.

Spiritual will give you more recharge, the other effects are generally less useful for a tanker. Still, since very few of your powers will be ED capped for recharge it does provide a lot of bang for the buck since you'll get full value for almost all the boost.

Nerve's primary boost of accuracy I generally think is more or less a waste of time on a level 50, you should have all those issues long squared away. On the other hand it does have that secondary defense buff that could be helpful with Weave... considering you're starting from scratch though and probably working with set bonuses to build defense I'd think it's less useful to you.

Musculature I generally don't consider all that useful; first off your attacks are likely already at ED cap damage so that portion isn't getting you much until you get to Tier 4 and secondly because it lacks secondary effects that really help a tanker all that much. The secondaries seem more tuned to a control/debuff character in my opinion.

On the higher tier incarnate abilities I've found Ion Judgement to be the most useful... it has by far the widest area of effect. I'll admit I find this somewhat frustrating as 3 of my characters have already invested in tier 3 Pyronic

For Destiny it's hard to beat the Rebirth Radial (+Regen) tree; first you have a massive heal followed by a brief Instant Healing level regen tapering off to a minimum of +200% regeneration at the tail end.

Barrier offers nice resist/defense at the start but it drops off rapidly and you really don't need the resist buff while the majority of the defense buff isn't enough to help you much. Ageless gives a nice utility of +recharge & recovery, I'm not sure it's as useful as the Rebirth though. Clarion is basically mez protection... something I wouldn't consider on a tanker.

For Interface I don't look any further than Reactive; all the debuffs are very low % even stacked to the cap, therefore I go for the added damage proc.

Lore is a big question mark; of the original 4 choices the Warworks had the best damage while the Seers had the best buff. I haven't studied it since all the new pets were added to know what the situation is now.

You definitely got me thinking about Cardiac in my Elec/elec tank now. I figure it won't get me to resist cap, but around 86.5 %

But it also helps my Psi resist a lot, same with some other obscure damage types. Probably looking at Cardiac Core Paragon to get the full 45% and 20%(res) since the Radial won't really help me much.

i use cardiac on my fire tank....gets my s/l resistance to 86.51%..i can live with that!