SM High Round Tanking "Controversy"/"Cheese"

I didn’t wanna start a new thread to ask this, and since everyone in this thread are mostly top level imma just ask in here... if im currently a atomic tank how do i play and not get knocked all around when doing the combos? I never had this problem with hardlight .. n i have all the special things in the acrobat tree bought so idk what im doing wrong... in the current level content if the enemies aren’t stunned while im doing combos i get knocked out of them 75% of the time

You can do half of a combo and then hit Proton Remedy or the breakout move (can't remember name rn) and you can get your aura. But there's nothing you can do actually guarantee you get your full combos off besides using a breakout trinket or power which have long cooldowns and only work for a few seconds. CC is your worst enemy as atomic.

Yea i just wanted to check and see if i was doing something wrong before i started looking to switch.. its bad yo epically when a dlc first drops n the trolls cant stun adds yet or i cant .. I really cant run new content as tank until maybe a week of gearing up because you need those combos to stay alive...

Im thinking ab switching over to a healer power, in my almost 10 years of playing ive never went a healer power, i might try out water once they do free episodes weekend and i can get a group together to get that gorgon gear.. just know imma have a cool looking Atlantian outfit

I think people are making this into a way bigger issue than it is. To me it sounds like some people are salty that they weren't the only ones to beat this SM.

Fact is this SM and bosses are easy thats a big reason why more people beat it but imo it was a good start for the first SM in years. Instead of acting all high and mighty we should be giving feedback to improve the next SM. Better bosses, room mechanics and some ad spawns in some rounds. Maybe even two bosses in a round or two. I'd like to see ninja batman in SM and some mechanics from that era of the game and earlier. Magic and his ads would be a cool boss also. Heck most of the stuff T5 and lower I'd like to see make it into SM. Oh and lets bring back 8 man if possible.

People need to get off their high horses and chill out. Also if your rolling around as a tank in man-bat I don't want to hear nothing from you lol.

^^^^^This 1000 times THIS^^^^^

The SM bosses are easy because there is a way (plus other methods to a degree) to avoid nearly every attack that is strong enough to kill you as a tank, pretty sure if you aren't taking damage as a tank you can assure yourself of the round completion because the only thing that can interfere is RNG. Feedback is 100% WORTHLESS if we just turn a blind eye to this or it will just be repeated next sm, what's the point of having 2 bosses if both tanks can just lunge and dodge any attack that is capable of killing them?

Crappy go into round 29 and when Soilder does a flamethrower or lightining just keep lunging him repeatedly in the face while he flamethrowers you and you take 0 damage and then come back and quote this post about myself and others "making a way bigger issue than it is"

1. Your group's tank was rolling and dodging any attack that was capable of killing him so that first paragraph is invalidated.
2. And when you get chunked and lose your shields to rifle melee hits he does after flamethrower or lightning or if he clips it and ends either early and you have to waste an amazonian/phase dodge if not both to live and have neither to eat his next set of mortars, you can come back and say if it was actually worth it as opposed to just walking out of range.

So I went back to youtube to actually watch the mechanics of the bosses you mentioned and they wouldn't work either. Even if you removed the damage avoidance from dodge and increased the immunity damage, the following problems still exist:

Superman from FOS:
- Heat vision attack would be getting nerfed by a water shield every use considering a new one would be every 6s. Even in the higher rounds, whether in an alert or raid, you could double up with bubble and tempest in addition to an ice tank to just soak that.
- He has a lunge start that would just be blocked once he's started the lunge and rolled off and if it's like Ultraman, it could possibly be dodged completely. Since we don't have to start in a blocking stance, there's no worry of bb's so you stand and reactively lunge back or block and roll or lunge forward at him.
- Also seeing a 3tap hold combo that he'd never get off considering I'd never be melee.
- AoE ground smash that I wouldn't be in range of.

I went to the bounty Superman in open world to see him somewhere else and:
Frost Breath - I can be out of range to avoid
Heat Vision - standard/bb version/feint into block version
Lunge - standard

This man doesn't even have a brawling bb in open world lol He just keeps rotating between those 3. He's trash as a SM boss if there's nothing added to him in SM.

Wonder Woman from Oan:
Went to youtube and saw the same mechanics as below

*went to Shadowlands from Oblivion Bar ranking up*
- Throws a rock that can be walked around/avoided.
- Has a shield bb that can be lunged.
- Has leap into amazonian aoe move that can walked out of the landing spot.
- Lunges to you with shield

*looked at legends pvp for loadout*
- aoe melee smash
- whipthrash that can either completely miss or do only 1 damage tick if you're at max red range
- rock to throw that can be avoided with a well-timed roll
- melee 35%er
- amazonian deflect
- lasso that would just be a damage tick unless you wanted to remove the immunity to cc during dodge from weapon lunges as well. Either avoided using breakout ability/trinket or just rolled using man-bat before the kick combo could be executed.

She's trash as well. All you do is roll/lunge to stay as far back as you can mitigate how many ticks of whipthrash you take and just roll or walk away or lunge away from any rocks she could throw. The melee abilities you don't need to worry about.

And after thinking about, every boss in the game would be trash for SM in the current state because of what I said earlier. They're all based on weapon attacks or lunging or easily avoidable special moves. If I don't have to block 24/7 just to live, every NPC turns into a basic 1v1 pvp match. And not even a good one. The kind where I can tell the other player is obviously new and I end up killing him from counter damage alone and I'm just playing with him being a bully for 15 minutes. Every lunge is going to be blocked, rolled, or sidestep'd. Every melee combo is going to be invalidated. And the bit you said about tanks having to counter the boss themselves instead of having others do them is actually not the case. Back then ppl did reactive lunges as in you see the bb and then lunge. But now, between Johnny Quick and other examples, we know the vulnerability is actually present before the damage even occurs. Which means if my teammates are spamming lunges with rifle/jump cancels or another tank is just watching and timing, we actually have 4 attempts to land that perfect lunge that will knock the boss down before damage occurs to even need the blue. You can see it happen fairly often in this vid from Costs where he lands a lunge as soon as Minotaur raises his hand before he can even drop it for the actual bb.Starts off rusty but gets better/more consistent later on.


I went back to look at old footage and the reason you don't see lunge spam in any previous SM's is because you couldn't afford to take a boss lunge without the defense buff from blocking. You couldn't afford to eat say a heat vision. Back then it was technically possible, just not practical because of how tank passives work. There's also the fact that PS PvP'ers didn't Roll/Lunge Spam until the PC Server Merge. That server merge didn't happen until Feb of 2016 and the last SM of FoS was in May of the same year. You're not going to develop new methods of playstyles in 2 months. That was a mechanic that we didn't know about/use. Now that we can eat a few hits, it actually opens that up. And it basically means that the best strats for survivability in SM are going to be the same strats as with PvP arenas where you have full access to every mechanic in the game because you're not forced into one stance. Aka years of turtle tanking experience became useless and ppl with pvp experience became the new leads.

After realizing that good, pvp mechanically knowledge tanks aren't capable of dying in SM with the current system of how tanking passives work in addition to various other factors such as artifacts and white mods, I realized instead of throwing in the towel and just saying that it's impossible to make SM difficult, that we could switch the standard. the normal harzard or most common in SM and in regular content is on the tank dying. What if instead of trying to kill the tank, you actually tried to kill the group repeatedly instead. And when I thought about it, those are the hardest rounds in the current SM. Johnny Quick with his 1shots that can sometimes kill 2 people. Ultimate Soldier with flamethrower and grenades and elec. Ultraman with Lunges, Scattershot, and Heat Vision 360. What if we bumped it up a notch and searched for bosses in game that had higher than normal kill threat on group members? My list of bosses that would be interesting to see in SM from this approach would be (for an alert setting at least):

- Tala with her Man-Bat's and Serums mechanic. Having the gas etc., having the 1shot to the person in the back.
- The Cyclops boss fight in Gom. Having the lava on the floor, the fire spitting on the walls, and the anvil hit 1shot.
- Gentleman Ghost from US. Having his flame throwers and cogs and teleport.
- Bombshell Paradox last boss with the back holes.
- Blackest Day last boss with the corrupted adds.
- Gorilla Grodd in Prison Break with his purple aoe's.
- Hall of Hades Forge Master possibly
- Lex Luthor as we see him now, but several versions of him combined with the Nexus shield Mechanic
- Avatar of Magic from Gates with his pancakes, lion adds, statues, and cc
- Avatar of Meta from Fos2 with his tentacles
- Stompa and Mad Harriet together (boss health split obviously) (possible R10 fight, would be cool introduction to Survival Mode Season 3: Tag Team Edition where we do have 2-3 bosses inside of the alert for 1 tank to deal with, that would actually be fun to pvp the bosses inside of)

Example combinations of Tag Team:
- the 3 bosses in CoT last boss
- Lashina and WW both using reflect
- Superboy and Superman
- 2nd boss fight of GoM

Well that’s very noble but frankly, you deserve better.

If you want hard and a challenge?
BLIND QUEUE INTO THAT THANG, turn your mics off and then beat level 30.
Do that AND.............Then we can talk about SM not being hard enough.


I blind Q into it every day.
It's just like a box of chocolates. Fun stuff

Mad lad

To be fair, next season of SM bosses should be all heroes.

1. As ive mentioned there is a huge difference between timing a lunge/roll down to the exact second and just repeatedly spamming it. Look at Happy in my R29 video compared to Memories in Costs R29 video and tell me they are of the same skill level. You continually bringing up this point is moot because 1 method has already been accepted by the devs and the other method is being roasted by the devs.
2. I am not talking about strictly as a tank, you want to avoid dying to his arc lightning as a controller or dps/battle tank etc? just lunge every skull solider does YOU WILL NOT DIE AS ANY ROLE if you lunge him repeatedly and just wait till you counter him and run back out of range, illiterately the only thing that will kill you as a role besides the main tank with a taunt is the nuke because that isn't dodgable and if he drops it on himself while you lunge you will die. Please just don't think of this from only the tank perspective because these apply just as much for the other roles in the group to survive certain rounds.

So lunge for invincibility? Got it...lmao!

So kill SM then, I'll just put all my weight and feedback behind never having SM again because all this SM has shown is that the community can't be trusted with any sort of moral or competitive integrity and don't deserve survival mode coming back just so that they can flex and convince themselves they are good players because they can beat a SM after stats revamp where they wouldn't be able to make it to round 10 of the previous survival modes.

DCUO can come up with a laundry list of activities to drive revenue and the community wanting a challenge is just a lie because they automatically turn into just like the community was during Paradox Wave on USPS where every group would find every single little glitch and exploit to get the gear and marks because they didn't care about doing it correctly.

1. I don't see a Memories in any of Costs' SM videos

2. I don't even see R29 uploaded on Costs' channel point blank, just round 30

3. All you do as Ice in R29 is just walk away from Soldier all the time and just lunge clip a strong shield to live lol If you're always walking you're out of flame range and even when he lunges toward you, you'll be out of range before a melee tap. You don't even need a shield for half the fight until he does mortars or has the occasional ranged elec attack. There's more skill in perfectly timing a lunge like Costs on Minotaur than being able to just walk around and catch late lunges and still live because shields are just that strong.l And tbh, I don't think 90%+ of pve/SM tanks are even that good or "skillful". They're all trash at pvp. They couldn't counter an actual person to save their life. They need a dumbed down NPC that's repetitive and predictable to feel like they're actually good at counters. I don't think I've fought a pve tank yet that hasn't been 5-6k+ kd'd in legends. It doesn't take skill to be the strongest tank in the game just rotating overpowered shields. It doesn't take skill to just pre-roll out of attack range everytime the boss does an attack. PvE tanking is a joke when you're Ice or Rage as long as you don't have mental handicaps that cause you to rage crash or visual handicaps that stop you from seeing the cooldown or visual effect of a shield. If you want to have any hope of calling someone skillful, tell Happy to switch to Atomic and beat Ultaman without dying as the main tank who keeps aggro and not being hand held by a secondary tank lunging for him because he can't do it himself because he's out of range from rolling so far. Tell Happy to tank 3-4 sets of SGE last boss adds at the same time as Atomic or Fire without 2 healers spamming arion's.

4. It's funny you say that it's being roasted by the devs when you got your comments removed in the last thread and Mepps said you weren't an authority in SM and how it should be and no developers have said anything publicly to back up what you claim. And on the off chance they were, they'd probably be roasting you for when you pvp'd with HoB and got focus fire'd by any A team from Nightfall or Aesthetic/Platinum and were feeding in 4s and 5s until you started lunge spamming like the rest of us to live. You should probably message DN and thank him for not uploading you because you weren't known/relevant at the time in the pvp world to warrant an upload.

5. You can lunge the lightning or you know...take that same pause/time to roll back and not get hit either lol I'm not sure if you're aware but you can't Flurry and lunge at the same time. If you lunged forward, you're going to proc the melee elec have to lunge back, which is just the reverse of rolling back, not taking damage, and then rolling back forward again. Both options don't take damage and take the same amount of time. You just hate the idea of people avoiding mechanics in ways you don't use. Those are 2 methods to avoid lightning, meanwhile Ultraman has 6 different methods to avoid his 360 heat vision. You can get frozen, you can go clean across the room, you can hide behind an ice block, jump over the beam, if you're lucky you can time a roll through it and not get hit, and you can follow behind it like most tanks at R30. But you'd probably complain if I could lunge and dodge the heat vision even when I have multitude of other easy methods to avoid the same mechanic.

Can you even name 1 person that has a R30 crown that hasn't/couldn't beat R10? I mean hell I beat R10 pugging for christ sake as a troll lol

I agree with you in general but this isn't KoF/Tekken/SF/SC/Injustice/MK or any other fighting game with tight af netcode.... the servers are not consistent in their latency. Even when doing it perfectly, you're not "reacting" to the enemy, you're predicting and pe-empting them. With most bosses, this is fairly easy to do as it's telegraphed or follows predictable behaviour and won't instagib you if you fail to lunge after the first visual signals for the combo begins. Solar Flame is basically the limit of what can be countered w/o pre-empting the attack, and it's hard to do depending on what kinda mood the server's in. Brawling characters, however, pretty much can't be reacted to with any sort of normal latency and have to be preempted, as even if you start your lunge once the Stomp part of Stomp Smash begins, you still eat full damage before the Smash part visually happens and well before your deflection kicks in. Which leads me to:

Uhhhh c) brawling opponents in general, d) Vs Ultraman, Fire tanks who have to pretty much sustain balls-out combat in order to maintain Fire Soul at the level required to survive the room's random damage + UM's attacks, without exposing themselves to counter. Sorry we can't sit on our ***** with a half-dozen shields and wait for the exact lunge/dodge frames on a brawling boss who flies around the room at will while we're soaking random damage at half our nominal defense buff. (To be fair, we didn't use to have to keep Fire Soul perma-maxed but seeing as the devs decided to ninja buff the content and make fundamental changes to certain bosses and specific attacks, it's kinda the only option for 20/30).

Again, in general, I agree with your sentiment that it's cheesy for people to be non-stop perma lunging stuff they're not supposed to be. At the same time, though, it's a bit much to call it an an exploit when most of the bosses are more easily managed by simply countering when they mega-telegraph that they're begging to be countered in a sec. KS/UM punish you for not being proactive and in their faces, however. Mechanically, speaking, Ultraman is the polar opposite of US, hard punishing you if you don't stay in/near his face while tanking, baiting him just enough that he doesn't feel like he's being ignored to trigger his OHKO feinted Stomp Smash to Block bs.

Glad I'm not the only one to have a "um wtf" response to the idea of lunge spamming US when mortar can literally be lunged then mitigated like... a full 1-2 seconds after the animation begins, then subsequently predicted.

Pretty much this. 8/10 of the bosses are fully predictable or predictable enough that there's always an optimal course of action to take at any given time. For the other two, their move list probability results in specific courses of action being taken consistently having the best results. Neither is like fighting a real person with real reactions and human adaptability/unpredictability (and it shouldn't be, not as long as the outcome for "failing" to perfectly react is instant death).

Oh hey,happy actually did that as fire with a solo heal,but I guess it doesnt count if its not on youtube