Erratic1

Guess that confirms things have been this way for a while.

I have a tentative "final" framework, with some wiggle room (about six slots and an open power slot) for her. She is currently holding somewhere just short of 40th level. The real problem has been frustration with my playing situation. I play her on Indom with a friend who refuses to consider other servers to play on (he has reasons for this). In particular, my frustration is with the low population of the server and the culture which has developed--they gather nightly for Adamastor, GM kills both blue and redside, and mothership raids happen frequently. But it is a challenge getting a single instance of a weekly TF done, let alone across multiple characters. Faced with such, I have been playing other games much more than CoH of late. Planned build has her positional defenses all floating at 53% or so, with the option for perma-Hasten (though I have been blah on using Hasten for some number of years short of it transforming some other ability from a semi-periodic boost to something permanent, say like Energize in the Energy Aura set or shooting for double-stacked Rage or Folow Up). Hopefully I will get out of the funk I am in and get back to playing her (and others) more.

Odd, as I have been secretly hoping you'd go Stj/Nin. 😛 Go Scrapper. True, but it's not like he is going to take hits like The Thing or Colossus.

Not sure a thread which is 5 months old, had its original end 4 months ago, and was laying inactive for over two months until it came active again can be derailed as it was mostly dead. Arguably the derail started with the person you are saying had good observation posting the following last Friday: 😁

I have not found Stone Melee to be that bad, but Rad Melee is definitely up there (got 2 50s with it, and both struggled until I found solutions).

Scrappers are top damage and that is not really anything anyone debates. And while a Scrapper would not be my first choice to tank something like Recluse, it is not like people have not soloed most content, including team content, on a scrapper (though at that level of gear/play, you are talking a tiny fraction of both play and populace).

Allow me to caution you on this power combination. You will need at some point to do something about Endurance sustain/recovery because Rad Melee is hungry as goes endurance and Shield does nothing to help you in that department. This is far from saying, "Don't do it" just you may want to carefully consider your slotting, set choices (with an eye toward endurance cost reduction and recovery) and possibly Epic powerset choice. On the upside, it will not nearly be so...challenging...as say Dark Armor/Rad Melee--the path for those who hate the concept of endurance.

Guessing Stalkers are out of the running then? 😛 But I do love Ninjitsu on a Scrapper. Speaking purely subjectively, I think StJ/SR or StJ/Willpower are probably what most people would think of for best portraying DD, but StJ/Nin is not outside the circle of sanity, particularly on from a mechanical standpoint.

Blah, blah, blah, Tanker, Tanker, Tanker..."I am afraid someone is coming after Tanker" is what the above is and explains so much about the pushback in this thread from you and others. I have said nothing about Tankers needing to be nerd. I do not advocate it. So your, "herp derp", "want to make Brutes gods" crap is just that--crap. It is the repeated run-to claim of all those who are Tanker uber alles. If you want to relevant, then perhaps deal with what has actually been said and offered in the thread.

Don't try to word salad some sort of justification for your continued misbehavior. I suppose I should grant that English may not be your first (or even necessarily second or third) language and so you are working with some misunderstanding of it words. The stage of grief before acceptance is depression. Am I depressed about the state I see Brutes in? Yes. That does not make me "emotional" in my posting. What it does is explain why I am even bothering, particularly when dealing with people who are much more interested in scoring Internet points than remotely dealing with the topic at hand. So once again, I am telling you to step off that claim.

You don't know me, so don't presume you know my emotional state. And you are fine with them being suboptimal. Not much more needs to be said.

Here you go @CYPHERPUNK, plenty of people who do not play Brutes, ("I just prefer other ATs, honestly.") and only show up in this thread but otherwise do not discuss Brutes, building them, or playing them, asserting that Brutes are fine. This is why Brutes are as they are and will remain as they are. Good luck with your Brutes. I've made my final one. To the extent I play CoH, for melee I do Tankers and Scrapper. I would advise you to do the same.

As opposed to having Scrapper and Tankers, eh? It is quite literally suboptimal to bring Brutes to a group. Everything after the word "If" above is you, given I quite literally wrote (and you quoted), "The simple solution would be to give Brutes a boost in their survivability. To Tanker levels? No." Everything that follows is you knockdown your own creation and nothing I put forth. You forget, Brute damage caps were nerfed. So Brutes brought down in damage and Tankers buffed. Not just Tankers boosted and nothing else occurred. You're right. Let's do what has been happening...NOTHING. Well, glad we solved that. "We'd love to do something but nothing can be done, not even fix the utterly craptastic ATO Brutes have" because "It might go too far." 🙄 I am going to offer true respect and say nothing to this.

If Croatia has giant monsters wandering around, it is coming off the visit list for when I visit Europe.

Scrappers and Stalkers exist far more closely and there is no problem. But when it comes to Brutes and any other AT, Brute has to be nerfed to preserve the distinction of the other AT. When Tankers were made more damaging did Brutes become more survivable? No, perish the thought! But when on edge cases involving multiple buffs on teams Brutes minorly outperformed Scrappers for damage, OMG, clutch the pearls, its time to get the chainsaw out and nerf. That was an offset for them being nerfed, and if it didn't happen they'd level even more slowly than they do (and I note, you can level a Tanker faster than a Brute nowadays, nevermind Scrapper or Stalker). I would say there are caveats on this... Scrapper and Stalkers do it by playing Defense oriented armor sets. If they play Resistance ones, well, it gets nasty. Of course, Brutes can do the same, but at that point, why play a Brute and do less damage? Because in theory you can have a higher resistance cap? If you're playing a Defense oriented set, you are not pushing to the Brute resistance cap. So that notion should come off the table (but it doesn't). Of course you can also make a resistance set Brute, but unlike the Tanker you do not get any more on your resistances (or defenses)--you have to pay for them via slots and appropriate set choices. And that means you are not investing in dealing damage. The simple solution would be to give Brutes a boost in their survivability. To Tanker levels? No. But give them say 33% of the difference in resist/defense values on powers. But its been a long time and much like supposed nerfs to procs, changes to Brutes ATO, and The Second Coming, we've been waiting a while. Was not a problem when Blasters got to use their T1 and T2 powers while controlled, was not a problem with Tankers getting larger area of effects, was not a problem with Defender getting damage boosted when solo, etc. As for invalidating Scrappers/Tankers, why do they deserve validation over Brutes? If invalidation had been a disqualifying consideration Brutes would not be where they are. And it does not have to be something which is strictly damage related. I have suggested (more than once) making secondary effects of powers notably better when delived by Brutes--higher Stun magnitude, better drain, etc. tied to Fury. But again, nothing has happened and not expecting anything will. My posting on these forums had dropped considerably because I am still working my way through the stages of grief and have not quite made it to acceptance. We'll see if therre are changes before I reach acceptance and drop CoH for other pursuits.

You do end in a cool looking crouch. 😁

Elec/DM has two endurance drain/recovery powers, two heals, and +Damage. It was beastly good on just SOs for a Brute back on Live (had one). On a Tanker, it should be plenty good. But really, it is going to be hard to make an utterly suck Tanker regardless of what you do.

I enjoy a variety of Scrapper defensive sets, but you're right...once you've tasted Ninjitsu, it is hard not to come back to it. Had to force myself not to pick it on my most recent Scrapper and even then, there were times where I not quite regretted not having gone Ninjitsu as opposed to SR (and that with the character being perfectly fun and fine as SR).

His comments are not negative, but honestly...behind Everquest 3, which does not exist (and he states that)? Same with City of Titans. 🙄

Do the resources exist in the community to do this now (as opposed to back in Live)?

I don't know.... Weren't the original words to the song:

I am hard-pressed to remember which has been coming for longer now, Aprocalypse or The Rapture. Put me down for, "I will believe it when I see it."

90s/270s cooldowns.... If you are at +100% cooldown that becomes 45s/135s, or seven clicks in 1m 15s at most...with you obviously not making the clicks if they are unnecessary. Were you playing a musical piece at 7 notes every minute and a quarter it would make dirges seem like the Flight of the Bumblebee. And global recharge applies to your attacks too, so you're not proportionately giving up any more in that regard.

Bio is "known" as a clicky set. It gives you a damage aura and an Offensive Stance which adds toxic damage to all your attacks. Its click powers are Ablative Carapace (cast time 2.03s every 90s), DNA Siphon (cast time 1.6s every 90s), and Parasitic Aura (cast time 1.8s every 270s). If you are using the powers every single time they are up, you are losing 12.69s out of every 270s doing 7 click. That is 4.7% of the timeframe occupied with clicks. I don't know, but I have to think the offensive gains more than offset the 7 clicks across 4.5 minutes...before we consider that actually living means you will continue to deal damage as opposed to waste time face-planted and/or travelling back from a hospital. Or that one of those click powers increases your regeneration and recovery so you can continue to deal out damage when otherwise you might have run out of endurance or health and not been dealing damage. I am not sure how the word intensive means when the powers are on cooldowns of 90s/270s by default. You are clicking attacks considerably more often.

Not a personal criticism, but I honestly do not get how being able to click a power to address a need/situation is so onerous to so many. DM has a click Endurance recovery power, so does Nin. Nin adds a click-heal (DM's being part of its attack, so doesn't count). One whole extra click power and yet you'd think it was like playing Rachmaninoff on a piano.