After teaming up with a bunch of god-awful tanks, all of whom knew nothing about aggro, I decided to start playing a few new tanks of my own, setting aside my other characters for now. (yet again, I didn't make it past 25 on the CoV side :P )
I tried a few different combos and here's the results of that:
An Ice/Fire. This one I haven't really gotten anywhere yet, and is currently sitting at a lowbie L7. I imagine it'll be a nice AOE type like my WP/Fire, except that it gets all kinds of ways to slow down enemies down to my level of regen, instead of the WP way of boosting regen to match the # enemies. This pairing should have no problem with aggro the way I did with WP, where I had to manage it fairly intensively.
An Invul/SS. I started it up cause it's a classic combo for a CoH tank. The tank is actually named Classic Tank. It does tank pretty easily except for a stint in the teens against psionic Aberrant Lost. Its currently up in the low 30s. I dont really expect to see any trouble with it until I get to the 40s and psionics start showing up more commonly. This tank is great for the mid level Task Forces like Manticore and Citadel.
A Dark/Energy. Darks are supposed to be some of the top all-around tanks once they get some IOs and defense. Being a resist set, if you stack that with a good defense, it should be a really good tank. This tank does definitely need a little more management than the invul though. This tank basically survives by using it's health leech power, Dark Regeneration, between taking damage, and if you're not on the ball with the timing, you will bite the dust. The knockback was also sort of irritating, and a bit dangerous if you get KB'ed when you need to hit your leech power, so I fixed it up with a Steadfast Defense IO to prevent it.
I decided to take the energy secondary attack set so I could take advantage of the stuns stacking with Dark's Oppressive Gloom. I've just gotten this tank up to the level where I can take OG (L26) and it works beautifully, with Lieutenants and Bosses getting stunned the way the Minions were before OG. The health loss is is well covered by the leech healing, which is really nice. The mobs wander a bit out of AOE range sometimes, but there's always more mobs crowding in, since I play at -1Lvl x5 heroes solo.
Previously I'd played dark up to 15 as a dark/dark, but I didn't like how it didn't have a quick charging AOE attack. I've also played as dark/fire up to the mid 30s too, but I didn't like that fire didn't have anything to help mitigate damage, which occurs with regularity on a resist set like dark. At the time IOs weren't available though, so today it could have been a different story.
The ability to customize the effects also helped a lot too, since I don't especially like the dark effects and the stealth cloak turning you into a shapeless blob. I set up this tank with a grey-white set of effects that look like hot steam pouring out of the tank, and I named it "Steam Powered Tank".
Upsen.
