From a pure numbers perspective I wouldn't say Archery quite measures up to Ice or Fire because of the lethal damage, but it is still a serious AoE damage contender. RoA is an amazing nuke, and fistfull/explosive just add on to the package. I would dare to say that Archery/Fire is more of an AoE monster in some ways than Fire/Fire, though Fire/ or Ice/ are probably better for soloing (the lesser more than the former, of course).
But I'm also a bit of an archery advocate, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Archery is good now Whippy. It's gotten some love from the devs.
By what benchmark is this now true? People tell me that AR has pretty good aoe, but still suffers for being lethal and isn't so hot for soloing.
Is archery nearly as good as fire or ice for either grouping or soloing?
Well, first off, I don't think it's useful to compare every set to the "best" sets. That's just not the way I play CoX. Playing only the "best" sets (by numbers or conventional wisdom), or optimal combinations, isn't necessarily fun. Nor is it necessary in order to have fun.
So anyway, that little rant aside, Archery (and TA) have both gotten some buffs since they were released. Activation times and (I think) recharge, along with redraw changes. (I don't remember the exact buffs the set got.) The lethal resistance thing is far overplayed, particularly if we're talking about blasters. It has increased built-in accuracy like Pony said, meaning it's a bit easier to slot for other stuff. For soloing... it has no secondary effects, but one mez power (and a circle KB), so the secondary would be important for solo survivability... just like for most blasters. It's a solid set. And you can customize your bow.
Archery is near the top of my "sets to play next" list.
HarshLanguage on
> turn on light Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
I don't get the love the developers seem to have for Voltaic Sentinel. Blasters don't like it. And even the odd blaster who doesn't have a seething hatred for it can't say much more about it than "at least it's not as bad as Explosive Blast.
It's just a shitty pet. Totally unfit for a blaster. And now they're unloading this turd on dominators, too? I guess it's a better fit, but... it's just so lame.
The only good thing about Volt Sentinel for a blaster is that it gives a pretty large Defiance bonus when you cast it. Otherwise, its pretty much crap. Whats worse, its the reason Elec is so undefined. Its there instead of a third AoE or a third single target attack, so it ends up making Elec middle to bottom of the back in *both* categories. AR doesn't get a third single target, but it least it has more AoE than it knows what to do with.
Here's what they need to do with VS:
Make it a clone of of Dark Extraction, the warshade pet, only don't require a corpse. Give it Charged Bolts, Lighting Bolt, and Static Discharge.
Now that would be a pretty good power to have.
One other terrible thing about VS. It has no HP, so anything it randomly aggros instantly aggros on the blaster.
You know, looking at brutes' DA, I'm no longer very impressed with the set.
You kind of have to factor in Dark Regeneration when evaluating DA. It costs a lot of endurance, but its a truly enormous heal. 30% of your HP per target hit, unslotted. Thats twice as strong as Healing Flames or Reconstruction, even if you hit just one guy.
would anyone mind sending me a trial key? I'm pretty torn between what mmo I wana play, but getting a trial for Tabula Rasa seems pretty impossible, even though I would like to give it a try. I'm done with WoW so as long as CoH/V is cool enough to hold my attention for a good while I wont hesitate to go an buy it.
kerthu on
0
INeedNoSaltwith blood on my teethRegistered Userregular
would anyone mind sending me a trial key? I'm pretty torn between what mmo I wana play, but getting a trial for Tabula Rasa seems pretty impossible, even though I would like to give it a try. I'm done with WoW so as long as CoH/V is cool enough to hold my attention for a good while I wont hesitate to go an buy it.
I was going to send you one but apparently I can't because my account died this morning!
would anyone mind sending me a trial key? I'm pretty torn between what mmo I wana play, but getting a trial for Tabula Rasa seems pretty impossible, even though I would like to give it a try. I'm done with WoW so as long as CoH/V is cool enough to hold my attention for a good while I wont hesitate to go an buy it.
I have a question about CoV actually. I bought CoH around the 2nd or 3rd patch, got a scrapper to around 26 or so and stopped playing till then. I am actually thinking of trying the game out again. I tried looking at the web site, but could not find out the answer to my question. Do I still need to buy CoV to access that side of the game? I seem to remember hearing that at one point, if you bought CoH, you'd have access to the CoV content as well automatically, is that correct? or am I just going nuts?
You know, looking at brutes' DA, I'm no longer very impressed with the set.
You kind of have to factor in Dark Regeneration when evaluating DA. It costs a lot of endurance, but its a truly enormous heal. 30% of your HP per target hit, unslotted. Thats twice as strong as Healing Flames or Reconstruction, even if you hit just one guy.
Oh, I know, but it's also a huge endurance hog in a set that's already hurting for endurance.
Your best bet is to buy the GvE pack, actually, which will give you a free month and cost less than a month of subscriptions, get you CoV AND the free jetpack, if my memory serves me correctly.
whew 46 tonight, Ein best be farming all day tomorrow so I can gets mah squid and then 30 odd levels later realize just how incredibly dissapointed I am.
whew 46 tonight, Ein best be farming all day tomorrow so I can gets mah squid and then 30 odd levels later realize just how incredibly dissapointed I am.
Fixed
I realized that after 7 levels.
I no longer have a kheldian.
Truth be told I actually like my Kheldian, just don't expect them to be better than anything else in the game and in most cases expect them to be worse.
By the time you get to 50, you'll have enough slots to make getting to 50 bearable! Oh wait...
Seriously though, IOs seem like a pretty big boon for khelds, which are slot-starved. Still will have to respec to put early slots into the forms, though... and still take useless powers if you don't want human form... and still will only have 4 powers in each form... but frankenslotting IOs will help.
HarshLanguage on
> turn on light Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Squidies look interesting to play, but I don't like how you spend most of the time looking exactly like everyone else. Sort of negates the awesome costume designer.
Which is why I'm so looking forward to EVATs.
EDIT - And SR is good because it's got scaling resists, the recharge boost and can soft cap it's defense for not too much money with IOs. Like Arcas said, it beats the shit out of Energy Armor and Invuln, and has better defensive numbers than Elec Armor to boot.
SR/ELA unenhanced numbers:
Seems like ElA's got SR beat in the mitigation department, although it has that toxic hole. And SR's scaling resists really seem to help.
...unless you meant actual defense, but ElA doesn't have any of that.
Uhhhh, you don't think that 20% defense beats 26% resists? Did you forget how defense works?
EDIT - And it's pretty disingenous on how you wrote off DA. Even if Death Shroud breaks the fear it slows the attack rate, and yeah, stunning every minion around you certainly can't lead to much mitigation. I also like how you say "it has a self heal." Only the most powerful self heal in the game.
Uhhhh, you don't think that 20% defense beats 26% resists? Did you forget how defense works?
I'm well aware of how it works, Duck, including the part where it's incredibly streaky and prone to being debuffed. At the end of the day, you're still just mitigating x% of damage, whether it's via resistance or defense. Layered is best, but at least resistance is predictable.
EDIT - And it's pretty disingenous on how you wrote off DA. Even if Death Shroud breaks the fear it slows the attack rate, and yeah, stunning every minion around you certainly can't lead to much mitigation. I also like how you say "it has a self heal." Only the most powerful self heal in the game.
I didn't write it off, I just said I'm not as impressed by it anymore.
Let's be honest: Dark Armor has crippling endurance issues. Cloak of Fear is an endurance guzzler that, at best, does nothing but slow down minion attacks a small amount (assuming you're running Death Shroud). Oppressive Gloom, likewise, is only predictably useful against minions. Sure, it might stun the odd Lieutenant for a couple seconds here and there, but you can't count on it. This isn't a bad thing, but you've got primaries that provide this sort of mitigation. Consider Footstomp, or Fault, or Tremor. More or less on-demand, AoE knockdown that works against everything from underlings to bosses.
Dark Regeneration isn't really helping matters any, either. Yes, it's the most powerful heal in the game. And in most cases, it's utter overkill. That's not bad, except that its power is balanced against an absolutely enormous endurance cost, while it's in a set that already has zero means of endurance management.
The problem that I've noticed when trying to slot DA brutes is that you're left having to slot your primary to control endurance, which is fine for most of the game, but it becomes an issue when you want to do sets. Nothing provides a very substantial amount of -end within a set for melee attacks. You're left having to frankenslot your powers, giving up set bonuses. And all that so that you can have extra melee-ranged mitigation against the sort of trash mobs you'll kill in a few seconds, anyways.
I'm not saying DA's bad at all. But having actually tried turning it into a functional brute build, I'm not at all impressed anymore. Cloak of Fear is an absolute turd of a power, and the endurance issues presented seem to seriously hinder your slotting later on.
I'm not saying CoF isn't a turd of a power either, unless you intend to stack fears from other sources on top of it. But since you're pimping out IO builds it's kinda silly to ignore that you can max out whatever you like on DR without any issue. People who rely on Aid Self as the crutch for every melee set gloss over the costs for failing to fire it off, and they can just as easily burn through end trying to do so.
And really, on slotting, CI doesn't do a lot out of 5 slots? 48% accuracy, overcapped damage, 69% end redux and 48% recharge aren't good enough for you with a slot to spare? Gimmie a break, it's beyond disingenous to say that you have to give up good set bonuses to achieve anything, because that 5% recharge, 7% accuracy and the HP boost are pretty fucking desirable.
On the subject of SR, catastrophic failures are overblown, especially when SR gets scaling resists when HP drops. You tend to avoid defense debuffs in the first place, and even when you do get hit you resist them. I'm not sure how many auto-hit effects you run into in PvE, but it isn't many (I know Rad Wardens have one). Plus, the bonuses that SR gets to defense from IOs are subject to that defense debuff resist, while what you get on an ElA aren't. Yeah, an AV can punch through and hose you, but from what I've seen on the LRSF that happens to more than just defense builds.
I'm not saying CoF isn't a turd of a power either, unless you intend to stack fears from other sources on top of it. But since you're pimping out IO builds it's kinda silly to ignore that you can max out whatever you like on DR without any issue. People who rely on Aid Self as the crutch for every melee set gloss over the costs for failing to fire it off, and they can just as easily burn through end trying to do so.
And really, on slotting, CI doesn't do a lot out of 5 slots? 48% accuracy, overcapped damage, 69% end redux and 48% recharge aren't good enough for you with a slot to spare? Gimmie a break, it's beyond disingenous to say that you have to give up good set bonuses to achieve anything, because that 5% recharge, 7% accuracy and the HP boost are pretty fucking desirable.
On the subject of SR, catastrophic failures are overblown, especially when SR gets scaling resists when HP drops. You tend to avoid defense debuffs in the first place, and even when you do get hit you resist them. I'm not sure how many auto-hit effects you run into in PvE, but it isn't many (I know Rad Wardens have one). Plus, the bonuses that SR gets to defense from IOs are subject to that defense debuff resist, while what you get on an ElA aren't. Yeah, an AV can punch through and hose you, but from what I've seen on the LRSF that happens to more than just defense builds.
Take a look at the endurance use on a high-end, say, SM/DA or SS/DA. You're going to absolutely need 100% (functionally) endurance reduction to be able to sustain anything resembling an attack chain, and even then you're going to be using blues as a crutch. Now, you're right in that you can probably give up the psy resistance on that sixth slot and get more endurance reduction, but you're also giving up some serious melee defense by using CI instead of Touch of Death; over 15% worth if you're slotting it into 4 attacks, a 10% damage buff, plus 4 damage procs in those powers and a slightly more powerful HP boost than CI. Not that CI is, by any measure, a bad set. But you certainly don't have the slotting flexibility with DA that you do with, say, WP, or even ElA or FA. Endurance is always going to be your primary focus.
Again, I just want to reiterate that I don't think that DA is a bad set. My primary point of contention, though, is that the mitigation is provides is more or less matched by all of the "Big 3" primaries. And looking at just the armor and heal, it seems to place some serious slotting constraints on your attacks, which just isn't cool to me.
I could probably find out, but that'd involve asking someone in the beta. And the last beta info I got and posted didn't turn out so well.
No worries. I can wait till the beta gos open to find out.
edit:
There's a really nice study someone did of all armors (scrapper I think) floating 'round the official boards. I believe DA was one of the top performers.
I'm not saying CoF isn't a turd of a power either, unless you intend to stack fears from other sources on top of it. But since you're pimping out IO builds it's kinda silly to ignore that you can max out whatever you like on DR without any issue. People who rely on Aid Self as the crutch for every melee set gloss over the costs for failing to fire it off, and they can just as easily burn through end trying to do so.
And really, on slotting, CI doesn't do a lot out of 5 slots? 48% accuracy, overcapped damage, 69% end redux and 48% recharge aren't good enough for you with a slot to spare? Gimmie a break, it's beyond disingenous to say that you have to give up good set bonuses to achieve anything, because that 5% recharge, 7% accuracy and the HP boost are pretty fucking desirable.
On the subject of SR, catastrophic failures are overblown, especially when SR gets scaling resists when HP drops. You tend to avoid defense debuffs in the first place, and even when you do get hit you resist them. I'm not sure how many auto-hit effects you run into in PvE, but it isn't many (I know Rad Wardens have one). Plus, the bonuses that SR gets to defense from IOs are subject to that defense debuff resist, while what you get on an ElA aren't. Yeah, an AV can punch through and hose you, but from what I've seen on the LRSF that happens to more than just defense builds.
Take a look at the endurance use on a high-end, say, SM/DA or SS/DA. You're going to absolutely need 100% (functionally) endurance reduction to be able to sustain anything resembling an attack chain, and even then you're going to be using blues as a crutch. Now, you're right in that you can probably give up the psy resistance on that sixth slot and get more endurance reduction, but you're also giving up some serious melee defense by using CI instead of Touch of Death; over 15% worth if you're slotting it into 4 attacks, a 10% damage buff, plus 4 damage procs in those powers and a slightly more powerful HP boost than CI. Not that CI is, by any measure, a bad set. But you certainly don't have the slotting flexibility with DA that you do with, say, WP, or even ElA or FA. Endurance is always going to be your primary focus.
Again, I just want to reiterate that I don't think that DA is a bad set. My primary point of contention, though, is that the mitigation is provides is more or less matched by all of the "Big 3" primaries. And looking at just the armor and heal, it seems to place some serious slotting constraints on your attacks, which just isn't cool to me.
Are you actually lamenting the loss of a 10% damage buff on a brute? For an AT where you're probably going to be hovering around at least a 250% damage buff I don't think that 10% is going to hurt ye-olde DPS too much. And seriously, if you're slotting something like KO Blow, TF, ET or anything in Stone with procs then you're only hurting yourself damage-wise in the long run.
Dark Armor offers a lot of tools, and it's not like you actually have to be using them all at the same time, all the time for it to be good. This game is really about synergy, so if you use OG with a set like EM or Stone, it gets better. If you use it with the presence pool (not really a good choice, but some people do it) or with DM it gets better. ElA, by the numbers, is the least survivable of the brute sets unless you're fighting Mu. It has some nice bonuses, but I'm finding the end drain to be less and less important as I use IOs more. The only two great things in ElA that I see are the recharge boost and end drain protection, and Dark offers the latter.
Really, Duck, no, I won't miss a 10% damage buff on a brute. 15% melee defense though? Yes. Plus, procs deal full damage through Rage crashes. Reason enough to keep them in and of themselves? No, not really. But it's useful, nonetheless, since I'm still firing off attacks during the crash to keep up my fury.
Regarding ElA: I never intended to pick it for its durability, which it obviously spends most of the game lacking. I wanted four things out of ElA: actual endurance drain protection (which ElA is virtually immune to as opposed to Stone and Dark, which are only partially resistant to it and still get drained), slow (both run speed and recharge) resistance, which is only offered by ElA and SR, the 20% global recharge in Lightning Reflexes, and Power Sink, which is the best endurance management skill any brute could hope for.
DA is a nice set. It's frankly flat-out better than ElA in terms of consistent mitigation. In fact, looking only at the armor, it's probably the single best defensive set brutes can get; even better than Stone Armor against anything that's not an AV/EB/GM. But then again, ElA's got capped resistances to damned near everything ~50% of the time (depending on your build), with huge endurance regeneration.
Meanwhile, the level 50 SM/DA or SS/DA with hundreds of millions of infamy worth of enhancements and uniques looks like a fucking one-man apocalypse on paper, but comes to a screeching halt when he runs out of blues.
That's the key: DA has No Power Sink. No Energy Drain. No Quick Recovery. Not even Consume. At best, you can pair it with DM for Dark Consumption. And yet it's also the most endurance-hungry secondary. Forget slotting, forget comparing mitigation. DA can slot for max endurance redux in its attacks, pick up Numina's unique, the Miracle unique, and the Performance Shifter unique, and still require a stockpile of blues to run an attack chain.
EDIT: I should point out that I'm really looking forward to playing DA on a tanker. But on a brute, where you want fury and it's in your best interest to be attacking at every possible second, I don't see DA being self-sufficient, even with all the endurance recovery unique IOs.
Posts
By what benchmark is this now true? People tell me that AR has pretty good aoe, but still suffers for being lethal and isn't so hot for soloing.
Is archery nearly as good as fire or ice for either grouping or soloing?
But I'm also a bit of an archery advocate, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Steam | XBL: Elazual | Last.fm
Is this bad? Am I bad?
Well, first off, I don't think it's useful to compare every set to the "best" sets. That's just not the way I play CoX. Playing only the "best" sets (by numbers or conventional wisdom), or optimal combinations, isn't necessarily fun. Nor is it necessary in order to have fun.
So anyway, that little rant aside, Archery (and TA) have both gotten some buffs since they were released. Activation times and (I think) recharge, along with redraw changes. (I don't remember the exact buffs the set got.) The lethal resistance thing is far overplayed, particularly if we're talking about blasters. It has increased built-in accuracy like Pony said, meaning it's a bit easier to slot for other stuff. For soloing... it has no secondary effects, but one mez power (and a circle KB), so the secondary would be important for solo survivability... just like for most blasters. It's a solid set. And you can customize your bow.
Archery is near the top of my "sets to play next" list.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Steam | XBL: Elazual | Last.fm
This is terrible and I fully endorse it.
The only good thing about Volt Sentinel for a blaster is that it gives a pretty large Defiance bonus when you cast it. Otherwise, its pretty much crap. Whats worse, its the reason Elec is so undefined. Its there instead of a third AoE or a third single target attack, so it ends up making Elec middle to bottom of the back in *both* categories. AR doesn't get a third single target, but it least it has more AoE than it knows what to do with.
Here's what they need to do with VS:
Make it a clone of of Dark Extraction, the warshade pet, only don't require a corpse. Give it Charged Bolts, Lighting Bolt, and Static Discharge.
Now that would be a pretty good power to have.
One other terrible thing about VS. It has no HP, so anything it randomly aggros instantly aggros on the blaster.
You kind of have to factor in Dark Regeneration when evaluating DA. It costs a lot of endurance, but its a truly enormous heal. 30% of your HP per target hit, unslotted. Thats twice as strong as Healing Flames or Reconstruction, even if you hit just one guy.
I was going to send you one but apparently I can't because my account died this morning!
=[
pm me an email and I will send you one.
I hope that made sense.
Xbox Live: Kunohara
Xbox Live: Kunohara
It is a beast of a heal though, to be sure.
They only gave it to accounts that were active. Which was kind of stupid IMO. I doubt you can even find a copy of CoV in a retail outlet these days.
Steam | XBL: Elazual | Last.fm
Fixed
I no longer have a kheldian.
Here's hoping VEATS are better for my play style.
Truth be told I actually like my Kheldian, just don't expect them to be better than anything else in the game and in most cases expect them to be worse.
Seriously though, IOs seem like a pretty big boon for khelds, which are slot-starved. Still will have to respec to put early slots into the forms, though... and still take useless powers if you don't want human form... and still will only have 4 powers in each form... but frankenslotting IOs will help.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Which is why I'm so looking forward to EVATs.
Got my brute up to 37hps/sec while just standing around by himself, which ends up being around 100hps/sec in a fight with 4 guys on me.
I also now have a 10% chance to heal myself for 60hps ever 1.7secs!
Uhhhh, you don't think that 20% defense beats 26% resists? Did you forget how defense works?
EDIT - And it's pretty disingenous on how you wrote off DA. Even if Death Shroud breaks the fear it slows the attack rate, and yeah, stunning every minion around you certainly can't lead to much mitigation. I also like how you say "it has a self heal." Only the most powerful self heal in the game.
I didn't write it off, I just said I'm not as impressed by it anymore.
Let's be honest: Dark Armor has crippling endurance issues. Cloak of Fear is an endurance guzzler that, at best, does nothing but slow down minion attacks a small amount (assuming you're running Death Shroud). Oppressive Gloom, likewise, is only predictably useful against minions. Sure, it might stun the odd Lieutenant for a couple seconds here and there, but you can't count on it. This isn't a bad thing, but you've got primaries that provide this sort of mitigation. Consider Footstomp, or Fault, or Tremor. More or less on-demand, AoE knockdown that works against everything from underlings to bosses.
Dark Regeneration isn't really helping matters any, either. Yes, it's the most powerful heal in the game. And in most cases, it's utter overkill. That's not bad, except that its power is balanced against an absolutely enormous endurance cost, while it's in a set that already has zero means of endurance management.
The problem that I've noticed when trying to slot DA brutes is that you're left having to slot your primary to control endurance, which is fine for most of the game, but it becomes an issue when you want to do sets. Nothing provides a very substantial amount of -end within a set for melee attacks. You're left having to frankenslot your powers, giving up set bonuses. And all that so that you can have extra melee-ranged mitigation against the sort of trash mobs you'll kill in a few seconds, anyways.
I'm not saying DA's bad at all. But having actually tried turning it into a functional brute build, I'm not at all impressed anymore. Cloak of Fear is an absolute turd of a power, and the endurance issues presented seem to seriously hinder your slotting later on.
And really, on slotting, CI doesn't do a lot out of 5 slots? 48% accuracy, overcapped damage, 69% end redux and 48% recharge aren't good enough for you with a slot to spare? Gimmie a break, it's beyond disingenous to say that you have to give up good set bonuses to achieve anything, because that 5% recharge, 7% accuracy and the HP boost are pretty fucking desirable.
On the subject of SR, catastrophic failures are overblown, especially when SR gets scaling resists when HP drops. You tend to avoid defense debuffs in the first place, and even when you do get hit you resist them. I'm not sure how many auto-hit effects you run into in PvE, but it isn't many (I know Rad Wardens have one). Plus, the bonuses that SR gets to defense from IOs are subject to that defense debuff resist, while what you get on an ElA aren't. Yeah, an AV can punch through and hose you, but from what I've seen on the LRSF that happens to more than just defense builds.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Take a look at the endurance use on a high-end, say, SM/DA or SS/DA. You're going to absolutely need 100% (functionally) endurance reduction to be able to sustain anything resembling an attack chain, and even then you're going to be using blues as a crutch. Now, you're right in that you can probably give up the psy resistance on that sixth slot and get more endurance reduction, but you're also giving up some serious melee defense by using CI instead of Touch of Death; over 15% worth if you're slotting it into 4 attacks, a 10% damage buff, plus 4 damage procs in those powers and a slightly more powerful HP boost than CI. Not that CI is, by any measure, a bad set. But you certainly don't have the slotting flexibility with DA that you do with, say, WP, or even ElA or FA. Endurance is always going to be your primary focus.
Again, I just want to reiterate that I don't think that DA is a bad set. My primary point of contention, though, is that the mitigation is provides is more or less matched by all of the "Big 3" primaries. And looking at just the armor and heal, it seems to place some serious slotting constraints on your attacks, which just isn't cool to me.
No worries. I can wait till the beta gos open to find out.
edit:
There's a really nice study someone did of all armors (scrapper I think) floating 'round the official boards. I believe DA was one of the top performers.
Are you actually lamenting the loss of a 10% damage buff on a brute? For an AT where you're probably going to be hovering around at least a 250% damage buff I don't think that 10% is going to hurt ye-olde DPS too much. And seriously, if you're slotting something like KO Blow, TF, ET or anything in Stone with procs then you're only hurting yourself damage-wise in the long run.
Dark Armor offers a lot of tools, and it's not like you actually have to be using them all at the same time, all the time for it to be good. This game is really about synergy, so if you use OG with a set like EM or Stone, it gets better. If you use it with the presence pool (not really a good choice, but some people do it) or with DM it gets better. ElA, by the numbers, is the least survivable of the brute sets unless you're fighting Mu. It has some nice bonuses, but I'm finding the end drain to be less and less important as I use IOs more. The only two great things in ElA that I see are the recharge boost and end drain protection, and Dark offers the latter.
Regarding ElA: I never intended to pick it for its durability, which it obviously spends most of the game lacking. I wanted four things out of ElA: actual endurance drain protection (which ElA is virtually immune to as opposed to Stone and Dark, which are only partially resistant to it and still get drained), slow (both run speed and recharge) resistance, which is only offered by ElA and SR, the 20% global recharge in Lightning Reflexes, and Power Sink, which is the best endurance management skill any brute could hope for.
DA is a nice set. It's frankly flat-out better than ElA in terms of consistent mitigation. In fact, looking only at the armor, it's probably the single best defensive set brutes can get; even better than Stone Armor against anything that's not an AV/EB/GM. But then again, ElA's got capped resistances to damned near everything ~50% of the time (depending on your build), with huge endurance regeneration.
Meanwhile, the level 50 SM/DA or SS/DA with hundreds of millions of infamy worth of enhancements and uniques looks like a fucking one-man apocalypse on paper, but comes to a screeching halt when he runs out of blues.
That's the key: DA has No Power Sink. No Energy Drain. No Quick Recovery. Not even Consume. At best, you can pair it with DM for Dark Consumption. And yet it's also the most endurance-hungry secondary. Forget slotting, forget comparing mitigation. DA can slot for max endurance redux in its attacks, pick up Numina's unique, the Miracle unique, and the Performance Shifter unique, and still require a stockpile of blues to run an attack chain.
EDIT: I should point out that I'm really looking forward to playing DA on a tanker. But on a brute, where you want fury and it's in your best interest to be attacking at every possible second, I don't see DA being self-sufficient, even with all the endurance recovery unique IOs.
I'd be surprised if it was any different for Tanks from a magnitude point of view.
Yes
Gear Girl
No
Gear Sucks!
Well, the CoF for Scrappers and Stalkers is mag 2. The Brute one is mag 3.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)