One Dark Armor change

So, relying on just the Armors, CoD and the Self-Rez? But costing as if CoF, OG and DS were on? Base Endurance Cost would be 2/sec before enhancements. No Dark Regen means you don't spend 33.8 Endurance but that also means you have no Heal.

So, for 2 End/sec, you get 22.5% S/L/F/C resist. 15% Energy/Tox resist. 30% NE resist and 37.5% Psi resist. And a trivial 3.75% Defense to all types. This is for a Brute/Scrapper. Tank would obviously have 33% more. (30% S/L/F/C, 20% E/T, 40% NE, 50% Psi; 5% Def)

Of course, all of this is unenhanced but even if you cut endurance cost by 40% and improve all the resists/defense by ~55% (ED cap), you're talking a pure resist set without any healing mechanism, no endurance recovery mechanism, no kb protection and no way to increase defense/resistance. On the upside, you have no real hole in resistance, pretty good NE/Psi resist, aren't as susceptible to Fear/End Drain, have Stealth and can self-rez for full HP/End if you have a few bodies around.

To be honest, a lot of players already operate on the pure-resist side of DA with Dark Regen thrown in. They wouldn't miss CoF/OG and could take or leave the Self-Rez. A lot don't like CoD being on all the time (for aesthetic reasons, though you can turn that off) because it doesn't offer a lot of mitigation and Stealth for a Brute/Tank is somewhat counterproductive. Dark Regen makes the set viable, though. DA without all the other "stuff" would be a variant of Invuln without Dull Pain, Invincibility and Unstoppable, where S/L resist is traded for NE/Psi and Defense isn't nearly as prominent. It would be playable but it would not be a high-end armor set in the least.

Oh, I dunno, Shield without haxing its DDR with HOs (which no one is going to be doing in the 20s) comes to mind.

It's not a Tanker primary (yet) but Regen being severely recharge debuffed comes to mind too, though that is also a problem for DA.

I disagree with this strongly. I don't IO my characters out heavily until they're near 50, and despite that I do play them to 50. (No PLs or even fast XP things like ToT for my lowbies.) Absent IOs and the their benefits, stunning minions in big spawns is a big freaking deal. I use OG on my non-IO builds and not CoF, because I can't sustain CoF's cost with everything else. Plus, absent defense bonuses, its -toHit isn't that signficant. (The reduced attack rate of terrorized foes is a fairly big deal, but I still cant sustain the cost on my present builds.)

OG only has ever been an issue for me when my passive mitigation (things like defense and DR) reach a point where OG is doing more damage to me than the foes are. At that point, my build is so mature that I can look at using CoF instead, because by such a point, I also usually have my endurance under better control. (And at 50, I can have Cardiac, which boosts my DR as well as making endurance woes all but vanish.)

If you are specifically referring to tohit buffs, the fact that players successfully play Dark Armor suggests its still playable, just that some situations are more dangerous than others.


SR can have the entire set negated by a single tohit buff at any level. By the thirties, there's a very common tohit buff - the DE quartz eminator - that offers enough tohit buff to negate Elude. And then there's Nemesis vengeance. +30% tohit per application: one takes away most of an SR tankers defense, two takes it all away and then some. Also, the Rularuu have tohit buffs. Also, all turrets including Malta engineer turrets have +25% tohit, as well as all pet class critters. That's half the defense a high level tanker will likely have, and a lot more than half the survivability taken away.

And then there's non-positional psi, which ignores all SR defenses, and SR has no scaling resistance to, no heal to mitigate, and no +health to buffer. You see that in the 20s with the Tsoo. You see it even earlier with the Lost. You keep seeing it in the Rikti and Carnival of Shadows.

And then you reach the 40s and have to tank the KoA. Scrapping the KoA is one thing. Tanking the KoA is another thing. Because another thing that negates the entire SR set is autohitting damage, such as that from caltrops. Which, if you have a ton of them spammed on you while tanking for a full team, actually amounts to sizeable autohitting damage. It can kill you all by itself even if nothing else in the mission touches you (rough estimate: 5 dps per caltrop: twelve of them from a single full spawn non-stacked is 60 dps of autohitting damage. Compared to an SR tanker with just 40% defense, that is like seeing 50 minions suddenly appear and start attacking simultaneously).

So: tohit buffs that can negate SR defense, non-positional attacks that avoid SR defense, and autohitting damage that ignores SR defense. Everyone has problems.

If you're soloing a raid, then sure, they won't be much help. But I'm sure you will have league mates who will be stacking mitigation on top of yours. Against an AV it won't do anything but you can provide much mitigation against the mobs

The main argument I'm trying to make is that 99% of the time, you pick CoF or OG, but never both. They overlap in role too much and they don't compliment each other much at all. If you can afford slotting CoF, you get it. If you can't afford slotting/running CoF, you get OG. There is virtually no incentive to leave CoF at base levels and virtually no incentive for slotting OG. I just find having (for all intents and purposes) mutually exclusive powers in the same set to be bad design. At the very least, they're highly competitive with each other. Dark Armor is not unique in this regard but I would say the same thing about other powersets too.

OG being picked at all is more of a failing of CoF than it is the attractiveness of OG. If CoF was less endurance-heavy and/or more accurate (which was the assumption when I trashed OG), who picks OG over CoF? Stunning minions by level 35 (if you're a Scrapper/Brute) is not your main priority. It is a good form of mitigation but then you've also caused a lot of the melee mobs you want around you (for Dark Regen, other powers in melee powersets, or AoE for teammates) to wander away.

My Dark/Dark Brute got to 50 on SOs before IOs were introduced. I've used OG in my Brute and hated it. Every time I try to justify gaining a few slots by dropping CoF for OG, I get into playing with OG and remember why I don't like it. Unless you have a form of AoE Immobilize or run CoF with OG (which is overkill on minions and now you're dealing with having to slot/run CoF, too), the wandering mob is more of a headache than a boon. You are free to disagree with me, of course, but I just couldn't stand all the chaos caused by mass stuns. Playstyles differ and I'm not presuming my playstyle is better/worse than anyone else. For me, however, OG needs something more (like a slow effect or a higher magnitude stun, or something) for it compete with CoF and it currently doesn't have it.

I would say end game raids are an entirely different ball game. Not only are you forced to have a vip account (meaning access to IOs) but also likely already started building on your incarnate powers.

At the very least, CoF and OG both serve as potential taunt auras. OG would be the endurance free one.

Unfortunately, most of the arguments in this thread have no much weight when we dive into that bucket of game content, since as you stated in your first post, it is free and premium players that will find the set's endurance cost an issue.

What you find bad design I assert is great design, albeit the devs stumbled into it mostly by accident.

Setting aside people's issues the individual powers, having both OG and CoF means DA has several things going for it that are highly desirable:

1. It's more likely to synergize with your offensive set. If you have stuns, you can take OG and stack. If you have fear, you can take CoF and stack.

2. You're more likely to get most of the maximum effectiveness of the set with less power choices.

This one takes some time to explain correctly. The obvious objection to #1 above is "why not make a single toggle that does both, then you can free one of them to put in something 'useful'?" But this presupposes you can add more stuff to the set without making it overpowered. Lets work backwards. Lets say we are designing a powerset that is going to end up with strength 80, not including the tier 9. How do we do that? Well, we can, in this simplified example, make a powerset that has eight powers (minus the tier 9) that each is worth 10. Then the total is 80, and we're done.

Except to get the full strength of the powerset requires taking all eight powers, and each one you don't take cuts your strength by a significant amount. That's not a desirable feature. So we could concentrate power. We could make four powers that were 15 each, and then another four powers that were 5 each. Now, taking four powers gets us 75% of the total strength of the set. We can then decide how many of the remaining four we want, or trade them and take other things elsewhere.

But that has a different problem. We now have some powers with strength 15, and some with strength 5. Some powers have only one third the value as others. Its easy to perceive them as being relatively worthless. Think the Invuln passives. Players could argue that those powers are so weak, its too obvious they are the lesser choices in the set to almost always be avoided. It puts everyone in the same situation of taking the same four powers always, and then maybe one or two others.

To solve this problem we need a way to somehow create a set where every single power is strong, but removing one power doesn't reduce the sets strength by a lot. If we had two powers such that having one was worth 15, having the other was worth 15, but having both was only worth twenty, we could actually construct a set with six powers worth 10 each, and these two powers A and B. Having the full set would be worth 80, our target. Losing A would drop the set to 75. Losing B would drop the set to 75. Losing both would drop the set to 60. The cost of losing one of those two powers is less than the cost of losing any of the other six. The powerset allows players to take less than the maximum number of powers with minimum penalty, and that means more viable options to players.

The short version is Dark Armor encourages you to take at least one of the two mez toggles, but doesn't penalize you for taking only one. But if you choose to take both, you do get a higher benefit, just not a dramatic one.

This property of providing multiple valid options that don't involve taking the entire set and don't involve making deliberately weak powers is so difficult to do that in fact Dark Armor mostly does it by accident and the devs have never been able to accomplish this task deliberately. In fact, when they tweaked the Invuln passives they mostly just leveled off the set, and when they tweaked the SR passives they actually did the exact opposite: made the passives super-synergize with each other and with the toggles in such a way that the penalty for losing any one defensive power is actually *higher* than 1/6th the total strength of the set. SR actively punishes you for not taking all three toggles and all three passives.

This is an underappreciated design feature of Dark Armor, except to players who have experienced the opposite problems: having powersets that have powers that either seem worthless to them, or seem absolutely necessary, without sacrificing a disproportionate amount of strength. In effect, because OG and CoF overlap significantly, each is theoretically allowed to be stronger than they otherwise might have, because otherwise the combination of both would be too strong.

Arcanaville all these things by the time you get to them you can have the tools and/slots to overcome the problem yourself. As an Invuln versus Sappers I initiated the shoot in and KoB while everyone was inviting SRs for that particular problem, it's how I think.

There is tohit debuffs with CoT, with Tsoo as well in the low levels that can effect half of a Dark Armours primary, at a time of finding slots to overcome knockback is bad enough. I think with Banished Pantheon where I can sometimes find myself with 3 shamans tohit debuffing there might be a little special case. With CoT or Tsoo you don't normally get more than one debuffing you, you can say that about BP but in my tanker comparison test on this faction, that's exactly what I look for so all tankers are compared exactly.

The problem may lie with the secondaries because not every secondary offers +tohit by level 25. The problem maybe that this group really belongs in the 30+ category. Where they might present a problem but not matter what you do have the tools. The problem maybe me and the way I compare tankers but I like to put things like Ice/Ice together, Dark/Dark together, find a challenging group to stick to and do that group with theme builds without insps and same slotting philosophy.

The pre buffed Firetank struggled less but one of its saving graces was build up with Fire melee. If you put the concept of Dark/Dark together Soul Drain comes in at 26. Still if the Banished Pantheon were moved to 30+ Soul Drain would be that new thing that also relies on tohit but there would be more slots.

Maybe Foc Acc with its 60% res to tohit debuffs and its +tohit is there to attract Dark Armours mainly, another toggle for the pain, eventually I might have a Black cloud running toggles mainly, dark regening, soul draining, shadow mauling and dark consuming, another thing relying on tohit.

There is quite alot on Dark/Dark that relies on accuracy, perhaps I will sit back, sort it out but I am used to having to hit things to sort it out.

Defense and Tohit debuffs negate much of Dark/Dark.

The problem is that, using your analogy of "5", "10", "15" point powers on a scale of 80, CoF and OG may be "5" point powers but getting both is actually less than the sum of its parts because they overlap. It isn't 5+5, it's more like 5 + (5-6) because either you a.) got CoF, spent slots and OG does practically the same thing for slightly more End Use/HP drain/wandering and then wasted a power or b.) you got OG to save slots but then got CoF on top of it, which does effectively the same thing and needs slots. Theoretically, if they were "exclusive" of each other, they ought to be "10-15" point powers that pretty much count on you only choosing one or the other. Instead, we have two "5" point powers that instantly turn the other into a negative once chosen.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, and I find your logic quite sound, it's just that reality of CoF/OG is like two ankle-biters fighting to see who gets to sit next to the window at the back of the bus. These are not heavyweight powers vying for our picks. It's not quite like Invuln's passives where, given a few more power choices, I would imagine everyone would want all of them. They don't overlap roles at all and they compliment each other. CoF/OG compete against each other so getting both really doesn't add anything.

If I were writing a guide to Dark Armor, I would rate CoF and OG at about 3 stars out of 5: nice but not completely necessary, with the caveat that once you pick one, the other drops to 1 star (totally skippable). I believe where I am, at the moment (and many others are not, which is fine), is that I want CoF/OG to both be 4-star powers with the same caveat mentioned above. I just feel that altogether skipping both your T7 and T8 power isn't acceptable, which is the case now. Bump them both up equally and force a choice: it might limit variation somewhat (i.e. the choice to skip both is taken out) but it does create the "hard" choice that would create two breeds of Dark Armor classes: the Fear DA and the Gloom DA. Then there can be endless debates on which is better...

That's sort of an ambiguous statement, because its unclear what you mean by "overcome." Other Dark Armor players overcome the problems you mention as well, so we have the tools to overcome those problems as well. But if you are trying to imply that the problems I listed for SR only occur late in the game whereas tohit debuffs happen much earlier, I will point out that non-positional psi first appears with the Lost around level 11. The first time you encounter heightened tohit is probably Frostfire's pets, except on the red side where its probably RIP Lts in the teens. SR has no protection against AoE attacks which arrive long before Lucky does at level 26 for scrappers and Evasions does for Brutes. Autohitting damage such as from caltrops first appears with the Tsoo in the teens.

If you're aware of some major tohit debuff problem Dark Armor has at level 2, I'd like to hear about it.

Why is this relevant to /dark and not /fire /regen /wp etc.?

They're not tanks. If they were tanks then most of those sets do not require a tohit check for most everything they do.

I'll take you on a mission and you can show me how you achieve this when your supposed to be aggro controling everything.

Forgot about this thread.

Uh, what?

They're not. Most of what a Dark/Dark relies on requires a tohit check where as most other combos don't as much. Half of Dark Armour requires a tohit check. Swamped with a alpha of tohit debuffs it could be lights out in a game where everyother combo buys that bit more time. Jayboh was asking where we thought a hole in Dark Armour lies.

How does any of that pertain to: