Erratic1

Hurl Boulder is the only knockback power with magnitude high enough to actually knock something back. The rest knock foes down.

Bio/Staff. Used to run early morning radio missions with one. She was a beauty to watch grind through foes.

SR has three Auto powers which duplicate the functions of its toggles. I am not sure that makes easier rather than it becomes pretty obvious one could do about it. But you have so many options through your offensive powersets that to my view, those auto powers are really kinda traps--you don't need to slot them for defense or the set values so much as use them for one-off slots like LotG:Recharge, or Shield Wall:+Res. The tradeoff between the two is really higher DDR vs lower DDR plus +Health/+Endurance.

If you don't mind, what was off-putting about it?

It was the topic of the moment. The thread is about Defense sets and SR is being championed beyond its pairing with Dark.

While Dark does have a healing attack (1) a person may not be pairing Dark with their SR and (2) the heal at default value is pretty minimal and if you're investing to make it heal better you are forgoing damage on an attack power. As goes ease of use, clicking a green inspiration is functionally the same as clicking a power--you are clicking something. But the power does not require playing inspiration Tetris to make sure it is available. I could probably make a serious argument that if you're not having endurance problems you're either (a) underinvested in recharge, (b) overinvested in recovery, (c), resting too much/not pulling enough, or (d) not using Radiation Melee (WM either if I am being honest) or Dark Armor. But again, different strokes. As goes Sentinels, last night my Dark/Nin repeatedly used her endurance recovery to keep pushing forward without needing to take a knee. But I will have to see how things shake out at higher levels/difficulties. I admit, I have no particular love or willingness to use RoP and that is purely on me.

Not having a heal or endurance recovery click is easier in the sense of not ever having to take those actions but I think I far more enjoy the ability to continue attacking when foes aren't dead yet and staying alive due to the endurance recovery and large heal I have on my Dark/Nin. But different strokes for different folks. If you go SR, I'd definitely invest in the healing proc from Power Transfer (and Reactive Defenses Scaling Resistance).

There is Fault at level 8 but it has lower chances to hit than normal. Guess you could load up Accuracy early on then swap to something else once you have better ways to up your likelihood of hitting. As for getting past Hodgkins, solo...well, that is going to be a challenge no matter what isn't it? His regen is far from minimal.

Yeah, I did go with the non-weapon animations. Not sure how I am summoning up sapphire boxing gloves, but I am just going with it. 😁

Going to guess I never made much use of Stone Melee before because of the aesthetics of the powerset. Not a big fan of the stone look of the attacks and a crystal mallet was not a big improvement. But I was looking for something different to make and justified crystal fists to myself in order to create my latest Scrapper. The set is like the offspring of Super Strength and Radiation Melee (which I know came after it). Very satisfying, big damage and OMG, Seismic Smash...you shall be my new cheat mode. It is somewhat of a shame I am on a break from Ninjitsu as the on-crit effect of double stun begs to be abused. But I am also looking at secondary sets I do not use often, and I have only done Super Reflexes twice before. Still, if I can get her recharge time down.... Wondering if I can abuse Force Feedback towards that end, but not sure what her end build is going to look like yet. But having a lot of fun with Stone Melee.

I looked for zodiac symbols and not finding any decided the ankh was as close to theme as I was going to get. Of course if they had zodiac symbols I'd want a character with 12 costumes. As for people not getting the reference, yeah it makes one feel old. Have a co-worker who had no idea who Paul Simon is. Not even going to get into the movies he's never seen.

Bio does an unusual split, leaning into Smashing/Lethal resistance with Fire/Cold/Energy/Negative Defense. That is not to say you should utterly ignore F/C/E/N resistance or S/L defense, but rather it is easiest to push the noted resistances/defense to cap. Importantly, it leans into being a hybrid set, so to get the most mileage out of it you also need to learn when best to use you ablative shield, heal, and regen/recovery boost--though you are a bit freer in not deeply investing in any of them.

I was driving home the other day, listening to a soul music of the 60-70s radio and a song came on talking about the dawning of a new age which inspired me to a new character...

I would expect F/C/E/N defense for a Bio Brute to be pushing 45%+. I suspect you may have shorted those by focusing on pushing your non-S/L resistances up. But a few more hits being resisted a bit more....cannot say it won't work decently.

Indomitable is a low population server and getting TFs going sometimes feels like the work of pulling teeth. So often I go with fewer than I'd like. Case in point, the Posi 2 I started earlier with 3 people--two widows (including myself) and a controller (Dark/Dark). And yet we did incredibly well up to the penultimate mission when the other widow had to go. But the controller and I figured we'd see what we could do with just the two of us. We had two wipes in that penultimate mission due to exploding cadavers, but we were pretty sure we could keep going. We did and made it to the final mission.... We stealthed the initial bombs, made it inside, and confined our fighting to what had to be fought. Wasn't too bad. Again stealthed the bombs out back and for the final bomb, had the fight. No problem. Then came Vahzilok. Really wondered if we could do him. Only way to know was for me to leap in. Got him to about half but I was out of inspirations and managed to get myself dead twice (rezzed once by controller) with him at half life. So off to the hospital I go while she keeps him occupied. Made it back and he was back up to 3/4ths. Start working him down but there is a full heal. Figured we would keep going. Again I blow through my inspirations and periodically now I am having to step back, kneel, and then rejoin the fight. But we keep working it. Then he leaps off the bridge, the filthy cheater! So we fight him below along with more of his minions. But I get low on life and have to fly up to bridge to recover. Of course he follows. His mistake. We get back to working without his minions pounding on us. Still, I have to back and kneel...and he's so close. Just kept praying he would not full heal. And then he was down! No IO sets...heck, I don't even slot enhancers until level 23, so no enhancements on my part at all. And we put him down. So some PUGs are just incredible.

Marine. Marine buffs resistance, endurance, damage, and provides an absorb shield on top of debuffing enemy damage, speed, and hp. It's not flashy but is amazingly potent.

Oh...I wasn't trying to do that. There are definitely trade-offs. But it has been working (or at least not not working) for me. Please let me know how it works out for you.

You should be able to solo +1 stuff without IO sets. Not sure how using IO sets is min-maxing while not using them is somehow pure of intent, but you can start into IO sets at least 25 levels earlier. So swap when inclined, you have the resources, and have a plan in mind.

For a given amount of health, regen, and resistance there is an amount of incoming damage which will eventually bring health to zero with higher rates of damage doing so more quickly. Having increased defense shifts that threshold for the amount of damage necessary to see defeat upward. So against opponents which do not debuff defense you are better off. Let's posit defense is absolute worthless versus defense debuffing opponents. You're no worse off against them than you'd have otherwise been short of whatever other survival investments you could have made. If your powersets do not bring you high regen, IOs aren't getting you there. Nor are you getting substantial hp gains. Defense, of some sort, is omnipresent...you just have to configure it for the most part. The place your argument goes wrong things the leap from if you did not need defense to survive debuffing enemies to that suggesting you did not need it against non-debuffing ones. If Cimmerorans debuff me with their spears, there is still 90% resistance to their Lethal attacks. A non-debuffing foe targeting a lower resistance is less of a threat when it has to overcome defense.

Used to, so no longer does now that they are only checked against by Cold as damage type. So going S/L defense does not help any longer and going Positional does not hurt. 👍

Think I found it: Highlighted the ones where Melee positional would serve you better than Smashing/Lethal typed. Rather obviously things like Council machineguns and Cimmeroran spears (which I hope are S/L) would be better served with S/L defense.

I will need to go back and check that then. Capped Melee has been working fine for the character but then you figure a lot of what comes that way would be S/L anyway. Not sure what exactly would be delivering F/C/E/N/T/P via mele (well, maybe Behemoth demons could do F with their swords).

I think your information may be a bit out of date about the majority of attacks having smash/lethal components. That got changed. As for positional vs typed, I wanted to minimize things in melee hitting me regardless of type. Yeah, there is ranged S/L damage, but I am not generally worried about that as it is not hard to get things to come to you and I am at capped S/L resistance (E resistance too, which made the screenfuls of Mu I fought recently with the character on a Scirocco arc laughably easy). What I would like to pull off someday is something like capped resistances and soft-capped Range. Then I'd be set.

My original character in Live was a Radiation/Electrical defender. Many years later, after I was no longer playing the original (for reasons we'll skip past), I made a character who was her son as a Dark Melee/Electrical armor brute, corrupted in the womb by the dark magics used by one of the foes his mother had fought before knowing she was pregnant. Even took the brute around the alignment wheel via morality missions (as opposed to Null) to represent him falling to the corruption and redeeming himself (had to get those Patron powers some way).

Well, there is no singular "right way" to play the game. But as I noted, you are going to run out of content at some point. There are a finite number of different bank and radio missions on top of story arcs and trials. Boy, there is something that is going to be interesting...only going after Hamidon once, win or lose because narratively, you could win or lose and whatever happens is whatever happens. Let me seriously warn you about going after Lord Recluse because I have seen that one fail more than once. OTOH, you could always recreate a powerset combo as the offspring of the previous hero, determined to take down the things that their parent could not handle.