Greldek

My plague character is bio/savage/leviathan . Bio has the swirling infectious clouds around it, savage has the vermin attack leaving you bleeding, and leviathan has me vomiting all over my enemies in a huge cone .

I have to switch back to classic controls on every character. New controls are horrible for me. And I agree that updating the default to the new stuff is a bad choice.

I've gotten 2 baby Luscas, a Kronos titan, and a jack as drops. I've got 4 or 5 adamasters, a KR titan, and a Sally trading in MAs for random recipe roll.

I'd agree with Yomo, they definitely rank differently depending on how casually you play. And I'd agree that Energy Aura outshines the other two by a lot if you're going to invest in IO sets, and are willing to play it "right". If you just slap in SO's and play casually SR probably wins.

Yeah bio doesn't need defense really at all. I even feel bad putting the 2 unique defenses into it. It can get E/N up high just on its own, and you can get a good HP set bonus from putting shield walls in that power, but other than that i take weave/maneuvers only for lotg i don't even toggle them on, and you could use stealth powers for that too, and have the added bonus of sneaking through missions if you wanted. I farm easily +3/8 s/l solo, and have no trouble in group content in thte game at all. Absorb and absurd regen is what keeps you alive, not defense that can easily be stripped away. the +4 s/l is sorta doable solo but i have to only take on 2 groups of enemies at once, and the way the maps load up that's not always possible. there's going to be a few times you get 3 or 4 groups at once, and at +4 that's just too much for my scrapper. i don't have mids, but this is my current build i'm still toying with it, but have no complaints currently. some comments: inexhaustable - i went 3 perf shifter over 3 prev medicine only because in this particular build i'm putting in little random +movement speed cause i like to go fast. that's also why you see the synapse shock + run speed in harmonic mind. those aren't meta picks, they're flavor picks. I don't need kick 2 slotted for more recharge resist, w/ it i'm at 95% so when i pop destiny i'm way over cap. wasn't quite sure where i wanted to put that slot and so though i'd just take the extra slow resist. dna siphon most people proc slot it, and i did have it proc slotted. when i was trying harder solo's i was wanting more and faster heals so i took the procs out (except for +end) and loaded it with the healing/recharge from nictus. its a barely noticable difference and i may well go back to proc slotting it for damage. with force feedbacks slotted how i have them, it seems perma vs groups and nearly perma vs 1 hard enemy. my st AT is chop/snipe swoop cleave - cleave basically comes off CD right as swoop finishes as long as FFB has been up, on the rare occasions it hasnt' then ill just snap in a chop or snipe whichever is not on cd, which leads into the next swoop into the cleave. swoop - with having 95% recharge reduction slotted i could take thos winters out, put in 1 more crit stirkes (acc/dam) and another dmg proc for more damage on swoop. which i may do. i could also be really dumb and swap the inexhaustable 3 set for synapse shock 3 set and be 105% recharge(so 100% capped) reduc and not need ageless to cap it. but i haven't run into anything yet that would make me want to do that. with this build hast is at a 2:06 cooldown before any FFB procs or ageless are considered in. edit: i realize you don't attune purples, i accidently have bought a boatload of them over the years already attuned, so those just hang out in my base and get swapped around while i figure out builds, then i look for recipes across characters/or just buy good ones and boost them once i have a final build

Savage rad will be an AoE monster . And that's the one I would recommend. Inv is fine on scrappers but nothing special. Can't do a build for you , don't have mids.

Its fun and i enjoy leveling up as /elec on a scrapper but i don't enjoy it at 50+ content compared to other sets. Its good on a tanker though if you build it right you can get 90% to all resists except toxic. which is pretty crazy.

Well you'll never get performance out of bio by slotting for defense. it's not what the set was meant to do, so you're sacrificing all it's strengths to be chase after its weakness. You want to slot primarily to get as much recharge and recharge protection as possible, which is super easy with axe because you have lots of force feedback opportunities. Your attacks should be chop, swoop, pendulum, cyclone, cleave. You don't need any of the others, and def don't need to be wasting slots on boxing. You can mix in epic attacks but going for fold space is going to hog up some power picks. Build up is a take too, but just needs the 1 slot for the build up proc. You should make key binds or macros to easily swap between offensive stance and endurance stance. Endurance stance gives you big regen bonus' on your click powers, and it's worth stance dancing on a scrapper to get those bonus. You can cap E/N defense pretty easy on bio but I haven't found it to be particularly useful. So I don't specifically chase hardcap on it anymore i just take w/e incidentals I get w/ it.

axe is very end hungry, and so is shield. unless you plan on mitigating that significantly from a low lvl axe/shield will be kind of a bummer to run.

I have all 3, bio scrapper, rad brute, shield tanker. Bio and rad are great. They both have fantastic endurance recovery tools to help with axes insane hunger for endurance. Shield does not. So you need to make a lot of slotting sacrafices on that end, and I even ended up taking body master for physical perfection. Cardiac would also help and allow you better mastery choices, but that only helps on 45+ content.

First it was claws willpower, because I was fresh to homecoming, and it was familiar and easy. ( My old main from the before times) Then it was claws/ rad. Because I wanted more engagement with my secondary. And rad was new and exciting, while still maintaining the familiarity of claws. Then an itch grew, and I tried many more... And savage/Sr and savage/energy were occupying my time. I had a disease , and the cure was savage leap. And then , and then, I discovered bio. Claws/savage/ma/bio all getting tons of playing. Learning the ins and outs of that ridiculous set. Savage got fully incarnate, and I made twin tanker alt, bio/sav , and it took is amazing. But that all came crashing down after I returned from a break. And heard battle axe got a revamp. Always wanting axe, but being sorely dissatisfied with it's performance, I thought I'd give it a try. I wasn't even creative, I copied my bio/sav tankers name and costume and swapped out the sav for axe and the tanker AT for scrapper. It's got to be my fastest to lvl to 50.. and it's 2 t4d the rest t3, and I'm still working on t4ing the rest. Not even Oppenheimer could have imagined destruction on this level. Axe/bio is absolute carnage... And I love every second of it.

Brutes and scrappers have the easiest time if any ATs starting outm they are both damage machies compared to everything else, you could probably add stalkers to that short list. You focus entirely too much on the below 20 game, it's perfectly fine that brutes out perform scrappers from 1 to 20, because from 21 to infinity scrappers out perform brutes Is it somewhat of a bummer that they are so tied their ATO? Sorta I guess, but so are kheldians, stalkers, tankers , I think arachnos soldiers too. They all have bonus tied to their ATO that greatly benefits class, kheldian forms get a significant buff they can't replicate otherwise. Tankers get massive resists buff proc to help them cap resists. Stalkers damage rotation depends on their hide proc and they make liberal use of their build up recharge to get their numbers. I'd much rather have interesting ATOs like those than some of the duds other ATs get. This game is 20 years old and thousands of people play it daily, and hundreds of of them are playing scrappers. They have potentially the highest ceiling of all ATs and def of the melee ATs. Scrappers are in a good place. They have a few sinker sets that need reworks but so does every AT.

Isn't Lusca the merit pinata now? I thought i read she was worth like 20 merits now. Go farm that.

I'm missing about 70mil from my mail , not too worried about it, just glad to see i wasn't going crazy cause i was sure i mailed myself inf and now its not there :p

Titan did receive a nerd but it's still a top tier set. People act like the nerd dropped it down to kinetic melee levels. I believe it's still a top 5 overall set. It's just not 5x better than all the rest for no reason.

I came back from a few months break recently and prices on everything except atos, purples, and winters are lower than when I left. And those have held at about the same price as before I left, but skewing to the higher end of their average.

Most other pirate server MMos have horrificly broken economies with all the wealth being held by players hove no life's the servers since it sounds up. Often being able to dominate markets. It impossible to lock down anything on COH , with all their QOL changes to the market, and things have an upper limit because nothing is unattainable , the only thing close are the hami Os where you have to run specific content where they drop. Otherwise all other recipes and sets can be purchased by the player from vendors . And that first character is rough, but once you get one to 50 in is trivial to gain. Just running missions youll see a lot of it pile up, and get into the AH game and you can build 100s of millions of inf in no time . Consider how many old times are sitting on billions and billions of inf, and most IO sets enhancements go for 1 to 2 million still. On live you could sell white salvage for that.

I like the flow and feel of staff, but dislike greatly it's anemic damage. So don't really bother with it anymore.

Sav/rad/body I have a solid ST rotation and an insane AoE rotation , I have 0 need for an epic attack So I take body just for the accuracy toggle cause missing sucks. Build for recharge and recharge resist as well as proc out your proc bombs and lay waste to everything.

It would be pretty dang strong. The scrapper I run with that combo feels almost unkillable , let alone with tanker hps and caps.

Idk but I see so many obvious superman ripoffs , costume, powers, some of them deep into vet levels. It's one thing to do a ripoff character.. it's another to ripoff such a lame character? Who's your next inspiration going to be, Darrel from Accounting?

Claws scrappers are my absolute favorite. I have 1 of each at various level stages, and doubled up on some of my favorites. At 50 I have rad, willpower , elec, and energy armors with dark, stone, and SR not far behind.

Shield defense is known for endurance issues, and in my experience the IO's like panacea, miracle, and performance shifter don't make up for it. On my axe/shield i'm running all those and have stamina 3 slotted, and still have to run the recovery serum from p2w on cooldown when i'm doing missions. I know it'll get better with incarnates but that's a ways away still. IMO if you hate endurance issues you should try out rad armor. I personally think claws is the best scrapper set there is, but you can pick literally any set to go with it, and it will be fine. Even the super endurance hungry sets are fine with rad. On rad armor you essentially ignore defense, build for recharge, and resists, and use your absorb shield as much as possible, and that's how you survive. It's pretty active and fun. If you're set on a defense based set I'd look to stone armor, its a little ugly, but if you find a nice concept it can work. again pick almost any attack set you want and it should work fine, stone has some built in endurance recovery as well. I can't think of an attack set that wouldn't work well with stone, but the almost comes from like if you chose elec melee, it's kinda a stinker set on scrappers so you probably won't have as much fun with it as other sets. Energy Aura would be my 2nd choice for a defense set leveling up solo and without help. Both SR and Shield are tougher to level IMO if you don't have INF to pour into them. New axe is very fun, and i highly recommend playing it, but its super end hungry, and wants a lot of recharge to perform well, so you'll want to find an armor set that compliments that. /rad, /stone, /NRG, /bio I think has some end recovery, /willpower, and kind of /electric, its a tough set to level with, doesn't get strong till built out IMO. Willpower is very set it and forget it, you turn your toggles on and thats it. either you survive or dont. and it has a mix of res/defense. IDK i have a 50 claws/wp and it was fun to level up, but i lost interest in it at 50. And I would say bio has a slightly tougher learning curve than the others maybe. It's also an active set like /rad, where you use your absorbs and heals to keep alive, but it also has 3 stances most of the time as a scrapper you'll either be in damage (which makes you take more damage) or endurance stance, but this could also help you out, since you don't like endurance problems while leveling. Its also butt ugly. People like to shit on staff, and its' true it's not a top performer, but its quite fun to use, it does lots of little numbers fast, not very good in the big hitter department compared to other sets, but it does have sky splitter which will give you some of those big crunchy hits. . But if you like the quick play and look of the animations its solid especially for a solo toon who hates end issues, as one of the stances helps with endurance recovery. And keep in mind no attack set is so bad it's unusable. There are plenty of 50's of every attack, and they do just fine running TF's and group content, and soloing. The min/maxers in this game go hard, and will declare something unplayable garbage because its not #1 in whatever random ass ranking they decided to use to determine what's #1. I noticed you mentioned MA, it's fun i have an ma/rad brute, and an ma/shield scrapper both are fun, but again shield eats your blue bar prepare to use recovery serum all the time. and MA will work well with any of the other secondary sets i mentioned above. MA is a little end hungry as well because you attack so often with it. lots of quick strikes with short cooldowns. I mean you could run ma/Wp, no clicks to worry about in the secondary (other than the self rez, if and when you would need it) and the t9. and it has built in recovery help. IDK thats a lot of rambling but hopefully it helped some.

Stalkers are great, and always welcome on a team, except maybe for the people that only run at +0/-1 where even bosses die in the initial AOE wave from everyone else. And it's not that they aren't welcome on those teams, just their large single target damage isn't as useful on those teams that only run everything on ez-mode. Spines, Staff, and Elec Melee all seem to have quite a bit of AoE still in them with stalkers, so that will help with the minion clearing. Ice armor, dark armor, have soft control to help lock things down. Shield defense has an AoE knockdown, and a team buff, but its very END intensive to run Shield Defense, so be prepared to mitigate that through hoarding blue insp, p2w recovery power, or IO's to grand end (or all 3). I ran a manticore the other night and we had a stalker who was just deleting paragon protectors, that was very, very helpful to the speed of the run, cause when they can't get a MoG off and become impossible to kill, thats a great team mate putting in that work. Also a lot of TF's have AV's at the end, great ST damage is always wanted in those situations, and stalkers bring a ton of that.

both are already in game, but i doubt the devs will ever give it to me claws/shield defense scrapper! and a totally new powerset, elemental summoning mastermind.. think a magician from EverQuest, earth, air, fire, and water pets & attacks. I could see it going something like earth pet being the solo high lvl pet, maybe 2 water pets for the support tier using bubbles to protect their allies (could go lazy and just rename the FF bubbles robots get to be more themed, or do something new and unique , don't matter to me), and a mix of fire/air for the 1st lvl damaging tier.