Elec/Titan Weapons Owned by ITF

Hi.

I have an Elec/Titan Weapon Tanker. I am very familiar with the ITF, having played it on various squishy characters. I only have played 1 Brute, 1 Scrapper, and now 1 Tanker past level 30. The Tanker is now level 37.

Anyway my Elec/TW Tanker has done fairly ok on playing lead tank on radio missions. I do have to rely on inspirations a bit but overall I don't die too frequently. I just got Tough so Smash/Lethal is sitting around 70% resistance I think. There have been some close calls but Elec's heal has come through.

However, I ended up on an ITF a few nights ago that proved very difficult for this character. The Romans were the biggest problem for me. I died many times, often right at the start of the fight. The long animation on TW sometimes meant I missed a heal or inspiration when I really needed it. I would go to the nurse after each mission and load up on purples and greens and try to eat them dilegently, but I didn't seem to be able to turn the tide. Part of that could have been lack of support; the TF was struggling bad enough that we actually gave up on the second to last mission.

My main question is, is it expected for a mid level Elec Armor to eat dirt a lot on the ITF? I probably won't be IOing this character ever, at least not all too seriously. It's not going to stop me from playing him, although the whole thing was pretty embaressing and I felt like I wasn't doing enough to warrant a spot on the team. The character has been pretty decent elsewhere so it wouldn't be a total loss, but it did suprise me how quickly he dropped.

the biggest strength the romans have is the -defense, having capped resist wont save you much if your at -50% defense

my stone brute who is at about 70% smash/lethal resist while in granite can die from romans pretty easy once they start stacking too much -def

the -def along with their chances to crit is what you need to watch out for, other than that you shouldnt be doing too bad but those things are what can take out even fully IOd toons

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the ITF might be very difficulty for any set that doesn't include Defense Debuff Resistance. I tanked the ITF on my Fire/fire/fire tanker a couple of times, This tanker sits at 35% defense to S/L/E/N (normally fire has zero defense) and the defense does help, but in large groups I found my defense frequently in the negatives to the point that eating purples doesn't make a lick of difference and faceplanting is inevitable unless you can cap your S/L resist and have the greens to go the distance. (or in my case, healing flames, as it is quicker)

So yes, without some support, you are going to take a beating.

Now before people start jumping on me saying my tank is crap or whatever, hear me out. That tanker solos most everything at x8 +4 some psi heavy mobs I gotta take it down a notch, but other than the old style antimatter robots (which I haven't seen anymore of) nothing deals -defense like the Romans.

I feel your pain reguarding the squishiness, nothing like being the AT that takes the alpha yet unable to deal with it, but this is more game dynamic than power sets I think.

For a while now I've been advocating that Weave from the fighting pool get a small amount of Defense Debuff Resistance. Although it doesn't help the set, It would offer some help to the specific characters that take it.

I will say though, IO'ing up your character for defense, is your best option. It will make it that much tougher. I personally, have been amazed at just how delicious my fire tanker is, a couple of years ago, it was the set I avoided cause everyone said it couldn't tank anything but fire, but IO's really do level the playing field

A trick to help...
Lucks!
Lots of them

The important thing to rememeber is to eat them before battle, if a mob looks rough and you know its going to end badly, pop a luck or two, then go in. This way your defense will be higher and it'll take them longer before they get that first hit in! hopefully this is enough time to get their numbers down to a managable level before you can steady up and hit the next mob.

In all honesty, If you're not 50, its just simply going to hurt like blazes. Don't feel too bad if you felt squishy at that level

I've been sked up on the ITF where the leader was set rather high, I may not be the best foot forward, some scrapper in the team might be with their finished build and all that but one can try. The support might not be that good, and trust me I play every support set and read buff icons on whatever character I play usually, so despite the ftw defender type being there they maybe not that on it, some of the buffs are even at base and the ITF doesn't go as well as you hope.

What I did after being SKed up, tanking on the ITF and not happy with how things went was immediately get back on the horse so to speak for a rerun. The next random team was miles better, I found it easy.

The ITF is designed to challenge lvl 50s on SOs, so when it comes to lvl 37s with unfinished builds, in perhaps not so good teams, its a bit harder.
It's going to be harder depending on what you play, my Invuln finds it a doddle compared to my Firetank.

Not only that, the AV bits are always easier to me. I used a lvl 38 Spines/Regen to tank all the AVs on it the other week. I did have good support from 1 controller who did exactly what I suggested (being a mate an all) and it was perfect. In that case I was the sum total of my team mates and me.

I used to say that there is nothing to fear but the team I am in and it's still true.

As kangaroo mentions, tanking the ITF isn´t easy with all the defense debuffs flying around.

A couple of tricks which can help...

Enhancement boosters. I´ve used these a lot. Together with a bit of overslotting (two extra slots) and the cardiac alpha can got my elec tank to 90% res against smashing & lethal damage. Alternatively the 3% resist proc from the PvP set would help, but too expensive for many (including myself).

This may be frowned upon, "wasting" two extra slots. It´s well worth it in my experience. In several builds I´ve used far slots chasing defense bonuses. And increasing smashing/lethal resistance fro 80% to 90% halves the amount of damage received. That is well worth the 2 slots! (and boosters etc)

Power sink, especially when franken-slotted to enhance recharge and drain, can make a huge difference.

Knock-down. Gives you extra time while the heal and power sink time are recharging.

Once your tank is level 50 and you do have your build finished complete with bonuses, the survivability will be much better too.

The last suggestion has absolutely nothing to do with building/slotting. Try to encourage the team to work, well, as a team. With the advent of IO´s and soft-capped defenses, the survivability of AT´s has skyrocketed. I´m a huge fan of them. The down-side is that various team-members can have a tendency to charge off on their own eg. most of my own scrappers

When the team´s working well together, getting buffed, keeping enemies on debuff patches, not killing debuff anchors as fast as possible and so on, the whole teams survivability improves.

I do realise that most of this is self evident to many players. Even so, teams do end up splitting up for various reasons.

Hope this helps.

Pit Viper aka Crash Induction @ Union

Thanks guys. Part of the issue was definitely something going on with the team... I mean, it's been a while since I was on an ITF that wiped 3 or 4 times before getting to the last mission. I seem to recall we might have had 3 Blasters, and a Peacebringer. We had a Nightshade who took over for tanking for me to some extent. Overall people were pretty good natured about it, but it was still embaressing to die 4 or 5 times during the first mission.

Interestingly, we did pretty well against the large groups of Elite Bosses and the all-boss group on the hill. During the crystal destruction phase I told the Rads that were with us to put their debuffs on the crystals and as long as I taunted everything close to that we did okay. I also did okay when I still had purples.. I just ran out really quickly. Luckily I had an email full of wakies from the MoM trial.

On the other hand, I think either Requiem or the other guy might have basically two-shotted me at one point. Granted, I was fighting him after recovering from the team's fourth wipe and had nothing but a Break Free to my name at that point.

I should add one fairly nasty but funny surprise: I never realized how much I tend to jump and jet pack around until I played an Electric Tanker. The ability of enemies to time knockback as I'm leaping is hilarious. Not specific to the ITF, although at one point I had to jet pack away from the Phallanx robots and they blew me out of the sky.

You really want to slot at least one extra KB io on an elec, especially a tanker that is taking aggro. It is way to easy to just be jumping a bit and get KB'd. One IO in Grounded will fix that up to almost everything.
As others have said..a level 37 on ITF..you are going to get pasted. Hardly anyone has a full IO build by then, and especially on a melee with no defence. I would not even consider doing an itf that low.

Here's a tip that won't cost you any inf:

1. Go to your SG base and look for the temp power machines(forgot what they're called)
2. Find out which components are required to make the lethal resistance temp power(they'll be common/uncommon salvage).
3. Add 10 of each to your vault/make sure you carry enough components to make the power at all times.
4. Before the ITF starts, use your SG base teleporter and activate the power.
5. Congrats, you now receive 25% less lethal damage for one hour(assuming your Tough+Charged Armor are well slotted).

Yeah, it's the defense debuffs coupled with not having capped lethal resistance. I have Fire/Fire/Pyre Tanker who has really solid defense, but no Defense Debuff Resistance (DDR). She does really well on most content quite easily, but throw in defense debuffs, especially on the ITF, and things proceed very quickly to crisis -- exactly what happened to you (the character has about 70% s/l resistance, just like you).

My main solution to this collapse of my primary is to unload the damage from my secondary and acillary/epic (.../Fire/Pyre), and simply outkill the enemies. Then I hit my big heal (Healing Flames) and I'm good for the next mountain of Romans.

Another minor point -- the Romans can make themselves resist knockdown for short periods of time; this may make Titan Weapons' knockdown mitigation less effective.

You probably should have been using Oranges, not purples, against the Cimerorans.

4 purples probably got you through the alpha strike just fine, but as stray nicks and taps landed, denting that buffer of defense, quickly spiralling it into the negatives, it starts taking more and more purples, and frankly, your tray isn't that big.

Meanwhile, 2 small Oranges or 1 Large bring you from 70 to 90% resistance. 1 medium brings you from 70 to 85. This either Halves or Thirds the incoming damage, and while the debuffs will re-double it as the fight goes on, it will still be 1/2 to 1/3 as much damage as you were suffering while chugging purples after the debuffs piled up.

That said, it's hard to Insp Chug through a whole TF, keeping up the supplies and recombining enough of them for each fight gets to be taxing.

Yes I must also say that capped S/L resist does help a lot

Eh the problem might also be that your team might of been trying to speed run it I have been on many that r like that. Even on lower lvl toons i have been on but as spoken before it is hard to tank when your defenses are in the negatives. Haveing caped your res will help out.

Do not feel bad about it. On the night of Tanker Tuesday on Freedom, our entire team of tanks (lvl 41) spent a great deal of time studying the grains of sand. We finally had to give up the fight in the end because we could not defeat Romulus no matter what we tried to do.

One trick I remember from when the ITF was new is to keep the Romans moving. You don't have to run all over the place, but making them take a couple steps before attacking you makes them a lot more survivable than just jumping into the middle of a group and taking hits. Run past the group and taunt them, and while they're all turning and moving towards you, your team should be shooting/stabbing them in the back.

Never be bothered by being eaten by Cimerorans, they are rather brutal. There is a reason Cim Incarnate pets are so good at single target DPS. You either need a defense that hits well above soft cap, or you need high defense debuff resistance.

Here is my current level 50 build, He runs ITF very well.

Hero Plan by Mids' Hero Designer 1.953
http://www.cohplanner.com/

Faero Malitriton: Level 50 Natural Tanker
Primary Power Set: Electric Armor
Secondary Power Set: Titan Weapons
Power Pool: Speed
Power Pool: Fighting
Power Pool: Leadership
Ancillary Pool: Energy Mastery

Hero Profile:
------------
Level 1: Charged Armor Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(3), TtmC'tng-ResDam(3), S'fstPrt-ResKB(5)
Level 1: Defensive Sweep FotG-ResDeb%(A), Erad-%Dam(5), Erad-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(7), Erad-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(7), Erad-Acc/Rchg(9)
Level 2: Conductive Shield Aegis-ResDam(A), Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(9), S'fstPrt-ResKB(11)
Level 4: Crushing Blow Mako-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(A), Mako-Dmg/EndRdx(11), Mako-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(13), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(13), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(15), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx(15)
Level 6: Static Shield Aegis-ResDam/EndRdx(A), S'fstPrt-ResKB(17)
Level 8: Hasten RechRdx-I(A), RechRdx-I(17), RechRdx-I(19)
Level 10: Taunt Zinger-Dam%(A)
Level 12: Lightning Field Oblit-%Dam(A), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(19), Oblit-Dmg(21), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(21), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(23), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(23)
Level 14: Energize Mrcl-Rcvry+(A), Mrcl-Heal/Rchg(25), Mrcl-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(25), Numna-Heal(27), Numna-Heal/Rchg(27), Numna-Heal/EndRdx/Rchg(29)
Level 16: Grounded S'fstPrt-ResDam/Def+(A), GA-3defTpProc(29)
Level 18: Follow Through Mako-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(A), Mako-Dmg/EndRdx(31), Mako-Acc/EndRdx/Rchg(33), C'ngImp-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(33), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(33), C'ngImp-Dmg/EndRdx(34)
Level 20: Lightning Reflexes Run-I(A)
Level 22: Build Momentum RechRdx-I(A)
Level 24: Boxing Acc-I(A)
Level 26: Maneuvers LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def(34), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(34)
Level 28: Tactics GSFC-Rchg/EndRdx(A), GSFC-Build%(36), GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(36), GSFC-ToHit(36), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg(37), GSFC-ToHit/Rchg/EndRdx(37)
Level 30: Power Sink P'Shift-EndMod/Rchg(A), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc/Rchg(31), P'Shift-Acc/Rchg(31)
Level 32: Rend Armor T'Death-Dam%(A), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(37), T'Death-Acc/Dmg(39), T'Death-Dmg/EndRdx(39), T'Death-Dmg/Rchg(39), T'Death-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx(40)
Level 35: Tough TtmC'tng-ResDam(A), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx(40), TtmC'tng-ResDam/EndRdx/Rchg(40)
Level 38: Whirling Smash Oblit-%Dam(A), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/EndRdx/Rchg(42), Oblit-Dmg(42), Oblit-Acc/Rchg(42), Oblit-Dmg/Rchg(43), Oblit-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(43)
Level 41: Arc of Destruction Armgdn-Dam%(A), Armgdn-Dmg/EndRdx(43), Armgdn-Dmg/Rchg(45), Armgdn-Acc/Dmg/Rchg(45), Armgdn-Acc/Rchg(45), FrcFbk-Rechg%(46)
Level 44: Weave LkGmblr-Rchg+(A), LkGmblr-Def(46), LkGmblr-Def/EndRdx(46)
Level 47: Vengeance SW-ResDam/Re TP(A)
Level 49: Focused Accuracy GSFC-ToHit/EndRdx(A)
Level 50: Cimeroran Core Superior Ally
Level 50: Ageless Radial Epiphany
Level 50: Cardiac Total Radial Revamp
Level 50: Ion Radial Final Judgement
Level 50: Diamagnetic Radial Flawless Interface
------------
Level 2: Swift Run-I(A)
Level 2: Health Panac-Heal/+End(A), RgnTis-Regen+(48), Numna-Regen/Rcvry+(50), Numna-Heal(50), Numna-Heal/EndRdx(50)
Level 2: Hurdle Jump-I(A)
Level 2: Stamina P'Shift-End%(A), P'Shift-EndMod(48), P'Shift-EndMod/Acc(48)
Level 1: Brawl Acc-I(A)
Level 1: Gauntlet
Level 1: Sprint Clrty-Stlth(A)
Level 2: Rest RechRdx-I(A)
Level 4: Ninja Run
Level 1: Momentum



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Resistance cap to SL is fine, and can get you a long way, but their defense debuff will get you to a point you are taking 95% of their attacks.

Also, you really have no choice to ignore or not ignore defense debuff resistance, as that is specific to your power set. You either have it, or you don't, or you had option for it and didn't take it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Spiritchaser Again, I'd strongly suggest ignoring defence and defence resistance, and instead looking to resistance for protection. In the endgame, Electric is particularly close to cap and can get there a couple of ways. Earlier? go for oranges. EDIT: this is in the context of S/L and romans. There are obviously places where res only presents serious problems