Two powers that USED to be cool

It sets up Containment (and also gains from it: Useful for Plant). Also for my Dark/Time it's got a 7.5% to hit debuff which stacks with Fearsome Stare. And I've a few procs in there.

If I'm on a team with an Ice or an Earth I move it though (unless I'm on my plant because Plant can't help it anyway, Creepers and Flytrap also have AOE immobs, plus Plants does decent damage). I have a few Ice Dominators so I understand what a pain in the **** it is to have someone Fire Cage your Patch. Most depressing is when it's an Earth Control person doing it : "You should know better! *sob*"

Ice Slick really should have something extra though. It trades the -ToHit Earthquake has for a bit more slippyness. Some useful debuffage would be good (I think -damage as no Controller primary has that and it's a nice counter to the -toHit in quake). That or a Chance to Stun or something (something like Shadow Field but with Stuns)

The stop KB point is also a good one. Normally past the first 5 seconds I don't want things knocked back out of the patches I've placed, or in the case of my GunCrab I don't want to Frag Grenade things away from the main melee, so firing off Web Grenade makes sense.

The AoE immobs makes the whole group subject to containment for all subsequent attacks with just one power.

--Rad

I don't know what AT's you are referring to but my Controllers never been insta-killed by mobs they have in their hold/immobilize combo. For some strange reason when I have NPC's held they seem unable to attack me, and I pick them off at my leisure. Of course I don't wait around for my hold/immobilizes to wear off. I have them slotted for fast recharge and keep them stacked on the mobs until the they are dead.

Then I boot the player that's been goofing off for being a lazy mooch instead of getting in there and participating with the rest of the team.

I smell Inventions Diversification at some point, then.

I'll agree on Granite Armour, and I'll extend this to the whole of Stone Armour. I hate the whole set. It's mediocre at best without Granite Armour, costing FAAAR too much to run for the protection it gives, while Granite Armour essentially makes three quarters of the set pointless to take. I dislike that this power disables the other toggles and I REALLY dislike that, at least on a Brute, it's essentially balanced by annoyance. Yeah, you'll be hard to kill, but good luck doing much of anything. Yes, the drawbacks can be overcome, but that just makes it all the more pointless to add drawbacks in the first place. You can't overcome the Unstoppable crash, you can just mitigate it somewhat, but if you're in a situation where you NEED Unstoppable (and I have been, quite often), then having most of your health and all of your endurance fly out the window is a pretty solid death sentence.

I guess it's better than it was before when Granite Armour used to kill your accuracy, instead of your rechange, but still.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Wow, I don't remember this. It's funny to think on what has changed!

I disagree 100%. There are chars, like dark doms, which can leverage a very significant amount of control with their immob, including -tohit, -fly, -immob, and some damage to boot. While you complain as a tanker that you cant herd them, maybe you should consider there is no need for you to herd them, but simply taunt and engage, The game is not all about taunt-herd-kill. There are multiple ways to engage the foe, and the significant amount of control a dom under dom can leverage more than makes up for the inconvenience of you having to walk 3 feet from mob to mob. For sure, your taunt has an aoe, so they are all focused on you anyway.

Yeah, this stops me from taking 90% of the tier9s. I just hate doing something doing something doing something and then getting flattened because I used a tier9 in a panic.

It is just easier to chew on inspirations than to use the t9. Moreover, since you can convert, it makes most sense to just autoconvert with a macro to get the inspirations your char needs most at any given time. As a result, the added defense, resist, damage, or other bits are all renedered useless by your ability to convert inspirations to what you need to survive.

The two exceptions to this are crashless nukes and self-rezes, both of which do not nuke your ability to continue fighting when the effect wears off.

Chance to Stun or -Damage or -Defense or ALL THREE would make a great deal of sense for Ice Slick. The other problem is that Ice Slick cannot take ANY IO sets. I Proc the heck out of Freezing Rain, which also has great debuffs in addition to the slippery stuff, but Ice Slick gets nada.

My first 50 is Ice/FF, who got to enjoy Multiple Jacks for 3 days before ED went active. I also have a 50 Ice/Storm and am leveling an Ice/Time, so I really concur that Ice Slick could use some love, because the Immobers are gonna Immob, so at least let Ice Slick debuff or something like Freezing Rain does.

I'm the opposite as a Tank.

I like the times when everyone can just go crazy with powers and have fun without needed any sort of tanking strategy.

I just go in and unload damage with everyone else and taunt when needed.

I play a character with tanking abilities to keep the team alive and control the situation when needed...not to be the center of attention.

Also..."getting their rear handed to them" typically means you're doing something wrong as a tank.

immobilizing them separated greatly reduces the effectiveness of other AoE's
there are multiple ways to engage the foe and the immobilize just ruined most of them

Yeah, and that happened AFTER the various Stone Armour toggles were made to not be mutually-exclusive. There used to be a time when Stone Tankers were called Poo Tankers because Rock Armour was a total model conversion to something akin to the Earth Control's pet. Back then, you could only run one toggle at a time, which is why Granite Armour made sense - it gave you ALL toggles at once, but at a higher penalty. Yeah, that psychic protection the set is so famous for? If you needed that, you had to shut down your physical protection to get it. It's a good thing you never take physical damage when psychic damage is involved, right?

Oh, and Rooted used to literally root you to one spot. Self-immobilize with the exact same effect as Stone Cages. You think Granite Armour is bad now? Before it was even worse. You want status protection? Have at it. Now you can't move! Forget street curbs and low running speed, you couldn't move AT ALL.

Granite Armour makes sense for Stone Armour as it was back in 2004. When your only status protection rooted you on the spot and you could only run one toggle at a time, then having this Tier 9 great power which gave you almost all protections AND status protection while allowing you to move, albeit slowly, was a great trade-off for most of your accuracy. You weren't supposed to run it all the time, but it was there when you got in situations with too many damage types and effects.

Now, though? Now the set is kind of weak without Granite Armour because the toggles aren't that strong AND being able to run four armour toggles plus Rooted PLUS Mud Pots just puts too much of an endurance strain for what it does, exactly because the set was not designed to have all shields run at the same time and nothing was ever done about it. Like Stone Armour, Dark Armour was designed with mutually-exclusive shields, but soon after they were made concurrent, Dark Armour shields were reduced in cost significantly. I believe down to 0.19 from 0.26. Sure, Cloak of Fear is still hideously expensive, but that's Cloak of Fear for you.

I actually really like T9 God Mode powers because to approximate their levels of protection, you really need to build with Inventions and I just don't like that. I'm sure an Invulnerability Brute can cap all of his damage resistances to 90% with some weird build and inspiration use, but mine can do that with just Unstoppable. It's VERY strong for not that much of a build strain, plus most don't need too many slots.

Now, yes, the crashes are harsh, but it's kind of to the tune of the powers - you get three minutes of extreme survivability, so you BETTER have killed what was threatening you by then. The game gave you a generous window of opportunity, so if you fail... Well, you have only yourself to blame. Besides, with power blinking, it's easy enough to tell when a T9 will drop. Unlike other click effects, T9s start blinking LONG ahead of time, I think at least 30 seconds early or some such.

Again, they're not ideal, but they give you a fair chance. Compare that to, say, Blaster Nukes which pretty much pull your pants down after you use them. If you don't kill everything, you're vulnerable, and there's no way in hell the game will let you kill everything in a single shot every time. Blaster Nukes are designed to be a gamble, and one that the game loads against you. God Mode powers are an opportunity, Nukes are a roll of the dice.

And that's NOW. Before, they used to stun you for five seconds after you used them.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Ok, catch is, if you are in a vicious fight with an AV or giant monster, you may not whack it before your 3 minutes is up. I totally agree with the bit on nukes. You said it very precisely.

Fallacy. Most AOEs have a diamater sufficient to handle grouping of a 0/8 spawn, excluding some pbaoes. However, many pbaoes even have a diamater sufficient to tag all mobs in a 0/8 spawn anyway without them moving. If you disagree, then I suggest you do some testing.

Yeah, that's the dance you dance with these. I actually kind of enjoy this part of the powers, as well. Can I be sure that I'll be able to take that guy down before my Tier 9 expires? It's a risk, but unlike nukes, it's a calculated risk that I really should be making from an informed standpoint.

Take my fight with Marauder on my Titan/Inv Brute, for instance. Titan Weapons is all Smashing damage, and Marauder is highly resistant to Smashing damage, becoming damn near immune when he uses his Unstoppable. He hits pretty hard, so it was difficult for my Brute to just outlast the guy for the whole fight AND the three minutes it takes for his Unstoppable to crash... So I beat him at his own game. I stood my ground until Marauder fired up his Unstoppable, then I waited. Around a minute later, just when I was running out of inspirations, I fired up mine. For the next two minutes we kept hitting each other without any real progress. Then Marauder's Unstoppable dropped and drained all of his endurance. He still put up a fight, but I had over a minute left on mine, which was more than enough to beat his now non-resistent ***.

"God Modes" aren't really "I Win" buttons and they still come with their dangers, pitfalls and limitations. However, they're still a decent tool if you plan ahead for them. They may not be great, but they're not really bad as such. Not to everyone's tastes, sure. I can get behind that. But even despite the crash, there are still uses for them, and still situations where they help tremendously.

Not everyone plays at x8 and not every team is made up of 8 people. Plus, even at x8, on larger outdoor maps the spawns can start pretty scattered. And even then, most melee sets don't exactly have huge PBAoE powers.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Already possible.

I have an Invulnerability/Ice Melee tank that hits the Smashing/Lethal defense softcap without using any toggles. Though, I didn't slot brawl to accomplish it.

Already possible, and that's kind of my point.

Both ED and the GDN came about because of pretty much the same reason - people were reaching their caps for various stats by themselves, making both T9 God Mode powers and, more importantly, DEFENDERS pointless. There were a couple of arguments at the time asking "Why would you need a Controller to hold stuff when you could get a Blaster to just kill stuff outright?" (City of Blasters) and what you needed a Defender for when his or her buffs did nothing for you.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

An aoe hold with little cost and procing damage is useful . . . for the controller.

Alas, my "Six Slotted For Damage In His Nuke" Blaster back then was Electric Blast. I kept waiting for the "kills everything outright" part, but what happened was that after the baddies quit shaking, I was making my co-pay at the hospital again.

I have since rolled Blasters to 50 who probably would have killed everything outright, but I never got to enjoy Blaster Godhood Back In The Day. I did get a pretty cool screenshot of about 200 of Chimera's ninjas chasing a tank as I hovered above, though, before those days, too, passed into history.

And yet I don't really feel I was cheated, since I have never conceived of my heroes as being all-powerful Superman types, but rather more like Spider-man: very formidable, but hardly all-powerful. And I also enjoy teaming and figuring out how to interact with the other heroes on the team to solve particular problems. Usually the team is happy to let me Wormhole the Nems out of the Multi-Platform Room of Death into the hallway with my Grav Controller, unless Leeroy Jenkins is playing. Leeroy just is not happy unless he can rush in willy-nilly and bludgeon everything without a second's thought and always walk away smiling.

Not me. That is why I am fond of Ice Slick and Freezing Rain and my Elec/Time Controller who can slow the baddies down and/or put them to sleep while draining them of all their power. It is not always 100% effective, and that is the challenge. How do I solve the problem if solo, or how do we leverage the team's abilities to solve the problem? That is a big reason I am still here 7 years later.

This mostly came out of Tankers straining against their caps to the point where they didn't really need any more help in containing the enemies, and only really needed as much damage as they could find from their team-mates to make the killing faster. The "Great Defence Nerf" was squarely intended to end this, slashing pretty much all defensive number more than in half, if not down to a quarter. I remember a time when Combat Jumping gave 5% defence, for instance, and now it gives about 1.125% or so. The whole point was to put Tankers, and to a lesser degree Scrappers, in danger again so they'd WANT those support ATs who help you survive more than they help you kill things faster.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

um, no
sands of mu
umbral torrent

many if not most cones have a hard time getting a lot of foes in the area if they are spread out.

if my most you mean fireball and rain powers, then use
but pbaoe's and cones - no