Undoing stat flattening: what would it mean for tanks?

GU47 solved a lot of problems with tanks. Ice had become an impenetrable tank, causing the devs to implement Armor Penetration, which was devastating for a Fire tank who had no defense buffs. Earth and Fire had a lot of success with GU47. I would go so far to say that Atomic is also successful due to stat flattening.

So if we remove stat flattening what happens? Is armor penetration back? Should the tank buffs be revisited? Discuss.

Is it the entire flattening, or just cr differential that's being removed?

If it's just the cr differential I think tanks will be well off when tanking npcs of higher cr because you won't have that "take more damage/deal less damage" rule in effect, and it'll be your stats and skill in the spotlight.

Downside to that is each episode won't bring a great deal of stat increases for tanks, so progression could feel a little flat.
Whereas in current live environment you can go from feeling squishy to unstoppable with just a few cr depending on the differential.

I think you'll see a more linear adjustment as you progress like you did before. Those pieces of gear will still matter, just not to the extent they were prior. Heals and the Tanks actual skill will be taken more into account, rather than just their CR.

Sounds like a promising outcome, yet one that could see tanks become rarer than they already are (how many of these new-gen earth dps actually tank anyway )

Looks like both, which makes sense because removing the CR differential and replacing the old growth curve will still provide us with functional progression from T1-2-3-4-5-6-7.

No ****, I'm starting to think I'm the only ice character in the game who still has a Tank armory...

Fire tanks were very strong prior to gu47. Now that they are changing them back it will be a great tank again. As for atomic, idk. I know 156 atomic tanks that are weaker than fire right now

I would not say I'm unskilled, but I hated the idea that you had to be better than average or have X number of SP in order to be successful as Earth or on any power other than Ice.

But don't we risk Ice being invincible again?

I'm okay with that? Heh.

<- - - Plays Ice Tank as primary Alt. Wrong tree .

More seriously, shrug... I like the idea of end-game Tanks being difficult to kill.

They SHOULD be difficult to kill.

Besides, Ice doesn't have a health inflation mechanism (fire, rage), a health restoration mechanism (fire, atomic, and to a degree rage), or any external damage sink capacity (earth). It *only* has high defense and shields. You mismanage that, you die pretty fast. Admittedly, it's hard to mismanage Ice tanking... that's the other part of that discussion.

My two ice characters both dps and tank, although they are both alts.

I'm also a traitor because one of them is going water but than they're going to DPS and heal.

Really? I still recall that Fire and Earth tanks were only welcome to tank the Essence in Thrones with Rage or Ice tanking adds.

More to do with rage and ice being better suited for mob punishment with their respective health buff and consistent shielding. Especially when your dps had poor burn.

And DPS with poor burn was like the subtext of 75% of the LFG spam in that era...

'BEAST DPS LFG TOTD GROUP NO SCRUBS'

transl.

'DPS w/Entry CR and Carry Me Sign, 15 SP, and Possibly Overcompensating for Something Seeks Group For Punishment'.

sorry, that was mean...

No, I'm with you.

I remember the time when tanking more that one enemy with Earth was pretty much instant death during a boss fight. 1 enemy would use a block breaker, the other a strong attack, and that was it for you. It was even worse with multiple adds.
My 3 favorite powers/toons (Earth, Electricity and Quantum) have been through so many ups and downs I'm just hoping for the day when all of them are balanced (not OP or useless as it is now).

The support roles I don't think will be affected very much at all, support roles have always been more stat driven than DPS, the only thing CR really did was alter survivability, basically whether you got one shot.

The stats will compensate for the changes and I honestly think you'll feel very little difference at all, unless of course you're sitting on no mods and low skill points then you might hurt a bit more.

Nope, I have one too. I like to tank with my Ice toon.

I don't think they will need to restore Armor Penetration. On the one hand because it's impractical and on the other hand because they already fixed that problem by changing how Defense scales. They can change the stats now without reverting Defense back to the fixed 71 Def = 1% rate, since the dynamic mitigation rate we have now allows to scale pretty much any Defense stat to a balanced mitigation.

Think about it like this, mitigation scales with CR now just as power costs do.