Sovera

If you like the Psi Mastery then it can be reworked in. Respecs are cheap and all gear can be sold back or given to an alt anyway so there is no loss if it does not work out.

Check the normal Will of the Controller. It's usually 8-10 million. A Catalyst from the AH is invariably 1 million.

.... FIRE BREATH.

Cremate is godly. 100% chance of KU on demand and decent damage. But Combustion ALSO is godly as two PbAoEs makes maping a breeze. A pity we are not allowed to have both.

Yes, as the peregrine falcon said. If you want to have zero taunt you should play a Stalker or a Scrapper, but even with a Scrapper some of the armor sets have agro auras. So, Stalker is safe since it has zero of that.

If you use Mids you can see the direct damage improvement of slotting a proc. Recharge time and animation plays a factor and sometimes slotting a damage proc can be as little as seven points of extra damage averaged out. But it's easy to slot for damage, look at the numbers, then slot a damage proc and look at the numbers again and just compare. Even so much as single damage procs are nearly always an improvement but more than that usually costs things like IO bonuses and recharge. Sometimes its worth it, sometimes its not, sometimes the build is made for level 50 only with incarnates and/or full team coverage providing buffs to cover the deficiencies the slotting has wrought.

I suggest sticking to Ourobouros and just do random arcs. I would not recommend soloing TFs despite being nearly the same as Ouroboros as TFs always end with an AV which you might or might not be able to solo. Ouroboros lets you log off mid-way and come back to it later and you do not outlevel the mobs or the contact. With half hour gaming sessions that exclude teaming this is the way to go. Don't do random AE mission arcs or radio missions as these only give XP and random loot (since double XP cuts off influence). Ouroboros will also give XP and loot, but always give merits as a reward for the final mission. If you CAN spare an hour then ITF is the absolute best bang for your buck.

Focus is KD, not knockback, and Shockwave has the the IO to make it a KD as well. Shockwave can do a lot for survival since it is a wide and 40y deep cone constantly knocking things on their butts. That said neither my Claws/Fire Brute nore the Tanker take it and just went to town with Burn and Spin. My own dragon used a mix of Vanguard claws colored firey since they glow and look cool, and then an 'in combat' tailor aura (which is when we pop out our claws) to further make fists wreathed in flame with one of the firey auras. If you took Maneuvers you can safely replace it with Combat Jumping as it gives almost the same defense and costs 0.06 instead of 0.28. If you don't want to use Hover (though you could have wings and flap flap in combat) then Combat Jumping is great for combat mobility. I never bothered to use Cardiac of ageless in any of my builds. Consume is enough. It's not as high as it looks because A) Focused Accuracy costs half than what the tooptip said since this last patch but Mids did not update that, B) there are four endurance procs in the builds that Mids does not account for. At worse just toggle off Focused Accuracy and only use it for debuffing mobs but I can say I never bothered to. If I meet recovery debuffing mobs I can always fall back on Recovery Serums. Other mobs that make other combos quake like Sappers are a joke for Fire Armor since Consume makes us immune to endurance debuff (just not *recovery* debuffing). S/L defense is still useful-ish as not ALL attacks were changed, just some in some factions. The devs did not want to castrate that approach and just wanted it to not be so OP. So it's not what will save you if you're in too deep, but then rarely does salvation come from one single thing. It's just another layer for mitigating danger. You can skip it if you want, but, I don't see much else to go for barring some super procced out 4-procs-per-attack approach. You don't really need to take SS if you want more KB protection. Replace the LoTG for a Karma -KB. Or do take SS. Same end result. Tbh I barely noticed KB, but, I also play with Hover and Evasive Maneuvers and EM has a ton of KB resistance and when in Hover even when get KB we just do a lil twirl in the air. If you're not hovering your mileage may vary.

Nowadays Fire Melee is just entrenched as #1, we can't beat two PbAoEs AND early AoE AND fast animations AND exotic damage. I just haven't updated that thread in a while. But Claws and MA then I'd say MA. Dragon's Tail is amazing even if Spin does more damage and it is satisfying to build the Turtle and have each block slide in place.

You can still take it, and the penalties were even alleviated in the last Stone Armor rework. There is just not much of a point nowadays as the rework made the other armors pick up the slack that Granite was carrying by itself.

You can't increase the magnitude of powers except with procs. Two magnitude CCs minions, three magnitude CCs lieutenants, four magnitude CCs bosses. But you can't make a 2 mag CC stun, for example, work on a lieutenant. They CAN stack though. So if you have one power that has 2 mag and a second that has 2 mag and you use them both on a boss it will CC the boss. Or if the power recharges quickly enough you can use the power twice. You probably knew this but just to make sure. So if you want to, say, hold a boss but your Hold is a mag 3 (they usually are) you want to stack it twice. That's where increasing the % and recharge comes in. If it lasts 10 seconds and you max it you get 15 seconds of the CC lasting on the boss. It won't do anything since it has not reached the threshold, but it's there. But that gives time for your Hold to recharge and use it a second time and have it become a 6 mag. With that said the chance a power will have of working is not beholden to anything in your power. If it's 50% then it's 50%. As the others have pointed out you can slot KB procs into the power if applicable to give yourself two chances of applying the power though there is a chance of both happening at the same time and the stacking making it a very large knockback (unless you're using the Overwhelming Force unique which works with different mechanics). First, if you have a KB that is at least one magnitude it will push enemies away. Less than 1 magnitude will make the enemies just knocked down. Knocked down is the much less obnoxious version and is a good source of soft CC with the mobs spending time getting back up and not using their attacks. If you have powers that knockback then consider slotting the appropriate procs that turn KB into KD. And then you make more powers do KD if you like the idea. Keep that power with the 50% as is, but slot the Avalanche proc in any other PbAoE or aura, slot the Overwhelming Force proc in any power (it works in all powers as it is an universal set) and now you have three powers doing KD.

Rad is resistance based. Brutes get resistances to 90% instead of 75% and a bigger HP pool so Brutes. There is the interaction of Fury boosting DoT numbers which is Savage's thing. Ultimately there is the 'are going to level it or play it?' because for leveling Brutes feel a lot better than Scrappers do. The thing about Brutes not having Fury in teams is pretty obsolete. Brutes have little problems with Fury even in teams after the Fury pass the HC devs did precisely to mitigate this problem.

It doesn't 100% if wanting to reach certain thresholds but you can level it just fine and worry about respecs once/if at 50. For leveling you just slap the usual culprits on since reaching thresholds while leveling is not easy or even necessary. Tbh I'd stick with Claws/Fire purely on playing the game without looking at theme. Savage Melee can feel a lot like flailing at the air since it's a DoT set and you notice bosses melting when the DoTs stack but for hitting a minion it kinda feels bad to flail three times to kill it since the DoTs take a while to get going. But if the heart wants Savage then listen to the heart. I happened to just have fixed a Savage/Fire Brute for someone else so I'll respost it here: Master Rune Brute (Savage Melee - Fiery Aura).mbd Since it was for someone else it doesn't have Fly as I usually take but it's not hard to move things around.

My dude, I have this, like, whole thread about Fire Armor being made for general content. 😄 My own dragon was a Fire Armor/Claws and how I got into Fire Armor. Rad Melee isn't that great (wasn't to begin with) and didn't get better with Irradiated Ground being fixed, but if you skip Devastating Blow (it hits hard and it increases your ST damage instead of the alternative, but, slow ass animation) and go with just Radiation Siphon, Contaminated Strike and Radioactive Smash you have a pretty simple and forgivable ST rotation. Do try Devastating Blow though and it might click. Keep in mind that the tailor lets you faff around like wreathing your body, or just the hands, or just the eyes, in a dozen different auras likes flames or such so you can take something else and dress it up.

You could say that 😄 Most of your questions, and others, can probably be found in my signature. The build you want is the Turtle.