You forgot the really big one... being able to defeat +8s with Burn.
At launch, Burn did a gajillion damage, but it also had a fear effect. Mobs would take one or two ticks of damage before running away, making it more of a panic button than an offensive power. However, Taunt overrode the fear effect, making mobs stay in the burn patch until they died. I remember going through IP mopping up +5 and +6 Family, and beating +8s wasn't unheard of.
Two months after launch, the devs instituted the "Purple Patch", making mobs higher than +4 much harder to beat. They also tweaked Taunt so that it didn't override Fear. Players then switched to Ice Melee, using Ice Patch to keep mobs in Burn range. This resulted in a million FotM tanks with names like "Icy Hot" and "Frozen Fire".
Ironically, the fear was eventually removed from Burn.
and, I did all of the above.
What I did not do was PL people, caused real life problems at work, until issue 5 previewed what was going to happen to fire tanks. When the devs decided to declare war on tanks, I went nuts. For all the blame fire tanks got the blame for the PLing, it was nothing compared to Invulns were doing.
Lastly, do you remember when issue 6 went live and %70 of you "global friends" disappeared.
- Remember when fire tanks couldnt get teams because they were too squishy?
- Remember when the same folks that refused to take you on a team when you were below 18 would beg for invites when you were in PI?
- Remember when Gauntlet was introduced and all tanker st attacks became aoes if the mobs were stacked right?
My first memory of the "there is no aggro cap" phenomenon was in Perez Park. Someone was offering to get us our Skulls and Hellions defeat badges.
I'd be hovering up in the sky, so I could see farther downrange. The "Herder" would rush off and aggro pretty much EVERYTHING outside the park along the streets on two sides of the map and train them back to the Kill Zone we had set up. I remember looking north along the eastern side of Perez along the road ... and just seeing this OCEAN of Skulls and Hellions POURING over every available surface like a tidal wave, chasing after the herder. It was as if the entire city was sinking beneath the waterline of all these Skulls and Hellions! There must have been half a thousand of them, easy, all chasing after our Herder, and they weren't breaking off to return to spawn point either (because our Herder kept re-aggroing them periodically). The whole thing, from my location in the sky, looked like a huge swarm of rats racing out of a sinking ship, or trying to outrun high tide or something.
It's one of those memories I'll never forget, because of this game.
It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...
So who else here remembers being able to herd the entirety of a zone into a dumpster and killing everyone with a single attack?
Who else here remembers the days when the various armors didn't stack, so you had to choose between status protection and actual defenses? Although, sometimes it didn't matter because at the time, running something like Wet Ice gave you enough Defense with Energy Absorption to Tank everything anyways.
Who else remembers when armor sets had mez holes that could detoggle you? I'm looking at you, Ice Armor, with your sleep hole back in the day.
I look back on all of the changes that have happened over the course of the game in regards to Tanks, and wonder how the heck I could have done it "back in the day." But we all did. And most of us did it well, despite all of the limitations that game had on us back then, we still took the hits for the rest of the team.
So this is a thread for all of us old-timers to remember our impressive feats despite all of our weaknesses at one point, and to remember the overpowered-ness of other times in the game's history.
-Remember when Unyielding and Rooted didn't let you move AT ALL? I remember back when I started that every Invuln Tanker had Teleport just so they could keep their status protection up and still move around.
-Remember when Invincibility was giving twice the Defense it should have because it double-stacked from itself (and then remember when the Devs lowered the +Def it gave because of this, and then fixed the self-stacking bug but didn't give it the old Defense value back).
-Remember when we had only four primaries to choose from?
-Remember when you could one-shot kill yourself by gathering the entire zone's group of enemies into a dumpster, and then use Energy Transfer to hit 500 enemies at once, giving you massive XP, but killing yourself in the process. The original Self-Destruct button.
-Remember when you could get 100% resistance to damage types, and you could go up against +20s, and never get hurt.
-Remember being so slot poor before ED when you were trying to 6-slot all of your armors and still have some left over for attacks.
-Remember when we all (including the Devs) thought that Taunt was an actual status effect? "You need twice as much Taunt to steal aggro." Umm...not so much.
-Remember how boring it was to only be able to fight at +0/1 difficulty, at which point you'd never die, but couldn't really progress that fast, either?
-Remember when the Devs gave us more enemies to fight in the lower levels (Outcasts, etc.) that used damage types that Tankers didn't have protection against at those levels.
And I still think of these as "the good old days"!
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I was just the one with the most unsolicited sombrero." - Traegus