Erratic1

I ended up starting a Regen/Fire Tanker last night. Lived through some things I shouldn't have though also had a couple of instances of, "How'd I die so quickly" too. FM attacks come available so slowly. Ugh. Look forward to continuing tonight.

Wanted to try out the new control set and a Something Wicked This Way Comes thought came to my mind, so I paired it with Dark. Let me just say up front, a taunt column is a beautiful, wonderful, quasi-abusive thing to have. Posi 1, first group, toss out Glittering Column right before the melees run in and look at that, nobody takes damage before we lock things down and clean up. Sure, higher levels will no doubt make that less effective, but oh how I have loved it. And I noticed Glittering Column does -To-Hit, just like Darkest Night. Visions of Folding Space on top of a column and applying Darkest Night to keep things from hitting dance in my head just now. So anyone else giving this combo a go?

While the magnitude on Blinding Powder is not high, are you fight crowds composed of lieutenants? But I would agree with BP being the expendable power. I would not skip the Heal, even if you find you can only weakly slot it (mine is fully slotted but doubtlessly because more was being considered in set bonuses). I absolutely would not drop the Fighting pool. Its bedrock for achieving survivability. You clearly planned Willpower as part of your build, getting your travel power and having use for Unleashed Potential, so no, dont drop it either. I have never truly found Ball Lightning all that useful. So I would probably trade it out. But if you find it more useful than the Heal, don't change a thing.

I have SR and EA Scrappers and don't find Nin to be particularly weak in comparison. There are tradeoffs of course. SR neither heals nor recovers endurance but has the best DDR, though that means little against foes not inclined to debuff it. EA has healing, endurance recovery, stealth, and scaling recharge in exchange for weaker DDR and more clicking. Nin has healing, endurance recovery, stealth, enhanced crit chance from stealth, and Sleep/Confuse/-To-Hit but the worst DDR. Note: You did not take Blnding Powder either. If you are not taking and using the powers of the set, why are you expecting it to perform as well as other sets?

You didn't take Kuji-In Sha? If you want to live, why would you not take your healing power? You should probably take Tough and Weave somewhat earlier. FWIW, these are the numbers on my WM/Nin Scrapper:

Captain America is known for his leadership, the Human Torch is not. Do the pool powers have some sort of massive influence on most encounters or are they mostly rounding characters out?

I so want to run EA/KM but KM is soooo bad, I just cannot do it.

Perhaps it does, but most Brutes are chasing survivability and unlike Tankers that means scouring every IO set for things which boost their defenses--including their choice of damage sets. When Mako or Touch of Death is consuming 5 or 6 slots in an offensive power to get you to caps Tankers trivially achieve there are not many slots left to proc bomb with. And that before the extra shots invested in Tough and Weakness (you're likely to 5- or 6-slot both). All sorts of oddball Frankenslotting occurs in area attack powers to drive defenses. Of course you can choose to not be at cap; but that means something too as dead Brutes do no damage.

A Brute, on his own or even buffed by a single Defender/Corruptor, will not reach the Brute damage cap, even with maxed Fury. All a Brute gets from underslotting attacks for less damage is less damage. To be parallel with Tankers, in terms of build flexibility, a Brute would need to be capping their damage...ovecapping even.

I definitely want to do a Regen Tanker. The problem is I am not sure what secondary I want to try with it, especially in light of not wanting to repeat ones I have done recently. Currently I am weakly leaning Dark Melee, but honestly have no great thrill with that choice.

My guess would be that building to play exclusively on teams or only solo would be the far less common way to build a character, but heck if I know how to substantiate that. What I don't get, is why one would do so given every character has the option for multiple builds they can swap between every 15 minutes. So even if focusing on a style of play is what one wants to do, you can still have one character who can change their style.

When I set to x8 I get plenty:

Have you set your difficulty up to +nX8?

Area of Effect for the brute is 'Single Target'.

The cap was to prevent dumpster diving a zone full of foes, which is a type of farming I suppose.