How well does Dark Armor proform?

Or is it preform? Hmmm...

Anyway, for an endurance heavy armor set, seems like a jack of all master of none type thing at first glance but that is at a glance. I want to know how effective is the set and maybe an extra bit. What seems to work well with it?

I'm a returning player who hasn't done a lot of the end game stuff yet but DA is a favorite set of mine so I wanted to put my 2¢ in.

I think the keystone power is the heal, knock back is not your friend, and I often found myself wanting a hold power for things like Tsoo Sorcerers that kite you. Alternating between chasing and grouping enemies for the heals is annoying and inefficient.

Dark/Dark seems to stand out as having endurance help, multiple CC powers, and another heal. -acc can also be thought of as +defense. I haven't actually done a dark/dark though.

Dark Armor Sucks.

Even on a Brute.

Properly set with an IO build, Dark Tanks can be made into one of the toughest tanks, with no endurance issues. My current Dark/Dark tank rarely uses Dark Consumption for endurance recovery. She's sitting with 3.95 end/second recovery vs. 1.50 end/sec usage running 10 toggles. Defenses sit at 42.31% s/l and 32% e/n. Eventually this version will be soft capped to s/l.

Dark Armor is an interesting beast. It's a powerset that has multiple interesting strengths which set it apart from other Tanker primaries - it's use of control powers and its amazing heal power in Dark Regeneration primarily, along with high psy resistance and endurance drain resistance.

On the other hand, Dark Armor has several frustrating weaknesses. Dark Regeneration, arguably the key power in the powerset, has a very high endurance cost out-of-the-box. The powerset does not offer knockback protection. The powerset is significantly vulnerable to energy-type damage, which is one of the most common damage types behind S/L damage.

Now, that list of negatives seems like a lot. For a free player without Inventions, those are going to be factors that heavily influence how you build the character since you'll want Acrobatics to protect from Knockback and you'll have to slot to handle the endurance usage of using Dark Regen.

HOWEVER, once you factor in Inventions, the entire picture changes. Every weakness that Dark Armor has can be addressed or even outright eliminated with Inventions pretty easily. Don't have KB protection - well, now you do. Dark Regen's endurance cost is high - well, throw in a Theft of Essence: chance for +end and the power may actually give you endurance sometimes. Vulernable to energy damage? - Build in S/L/E/N defense to compensate (or positional defense, that works too). The end result is that a well-thought out Dark Armor tanker becomes very powerful with Inventions. And we're not talking super-expensive builds with lots of purples or pvp IOs here either. You can afford everything you really need on a reasonable casual budget.

So how well does DA perform? It's by far my favorite Tanker primary and it does wonderfully, assuming you have IOs. With just SOs it's still good, but there's a lot you have to build around.

Rangle and Justaris, could you post your builds please? I just took my dark/dark tank out of retirement and I'm looking to rebuild him...yes, I have the technology.

Thanks.

If you search through my previous posts you'll find it. The toon's name is Interruption. There are two builds out there.

I just realized that thread title actually answered the OP's question.

Dark Armor is Pro Form.

Also, you meant to say 'perform.'