Erratic1

I would kind of expect a character named Metalhead to have a metal head...and just a metal head. 😛 Now not saying it is a good idea but then, War Mace/Ninjitsu has turned out to be a blast, so why not go all the absurd way to Titan Weapon/Ninjitsu on a scrapper? Mother, tell your children not to walk my way!

Radiation Armor's endurance management tool is Theft of Essence proc in Radiation Therapy. 😛

I know I have put him up here before, but I came up with new costumes which really curl my toes. So once again, my War Mace/Ninjitsu Scrapper Ghosthammer: Yeah, he is a definitely a bad guy.

You can put what you want in them. Certainly you probably want to reduce the endurance cost on Focused Accuracy. As for cost, you can replace the slotting of Winter sets as follows until you have the influence for them: Devastating Blow: Shield Breaker (2/3/5/6) + 2 basic damage IOs Laser Beam Eyes: Shield Breaker (2/3/5/6) + 2 basic damage IOs Icicles: Mocking Beratement You will lose 5% S/L/E/N Def and 9% F/C Def. For most game content you will not notice the first and the impact of the second will be minimal.

Sorry, the day got busy and got to this late. What follows is not God's gift to brute builds but it is hopefully a useful first pass. Issues it has are: Gap between endurance consumption and recovery is low so relies on Performance Shifter procs and Energy Absorption. Agility Core Paragon is probably the only sane Alpha choice. Hoarfrost does not recycle in 120s or less Would like an extra slot in both Frozen Armor and Tough for 6.75% more S/L Resistance Global Recharge could be higher. Relies on 3 Winter sets (though may not be an issue for you depending on budge). You can tweak slots around to reach different goals. As always, I suggest testing a build on the test server before committing to it.

Are scrappers and brute prone to sneaking around? Besides, if you are sneaking, you shouldn't need mez protection. 😛

I said I would NOT like to grab. 😁

The question is how many are of them are names anyone would want. Toilet Bowl Man is not one that I am anxious to grab. 😛

Yeah, just logged into a brute I got to 50 last Sunday for the first time in a week. I had other characters I was focusing on and got back to him today. On red side I have a number of characters I play with on the group of friends I have who play red side exclusively. They have far less time to play than I do so any of the characters there may not get logged into for weeks at a time and that is with them playing every other to every third night.

You do not have to play. You have to login. The frequency of necessary login to maintain name lock decreases with the level band of the character. Of my 96 characters: 19 are 50 so their names are not coming available period. Roughly a dozen more are characters I currently intend to play going forward. That leaves 60ish characters whose names are up for grabs. Logging out will not take more than 20s. Add in load time when logging in and being generous with the estimate you are looking at no more than 60 seconds to login and reset a character for the duration of the level/name release band they are in. So perhaps an hour of my time were I to want to do that. But no reason to do it all in one sitting. At no more than 10 minutes of time per day, all the characters could be safeguarded in under a week. Mind you, I am not going to do that. There are perhaps a half-dozen names total out of the 60 which I might be inclined to try to hold onto and truthfully, I am unlikely to make much effort for them let alone the rest. But were someone inclined it is not massive effort. Granted, were someone trying to hold 500-600 character names they would have to put in 5-6 times the effort but still doable and with low time investment unless one is trying to hold onto names of sub-level 10 characters.

Proton Sweep is barely tolerable on a Tanker because of the increased area. Feel free to drop it on a Brute. And it's filled with Mocking Beratement? (Not that it gets hurt overly much that way.) Do take Radiation Siphon. OMG, take Radiation Siphon. Why is Radiation Siphon not in the build? It is your heal. Is the goal to be a Tanker? Damage does not seem to be the build's raisons d'être. Sure, Irradiated Ground is proc bombed to hell and back.... Hey, is this meant to be an afk farmer? If it weren't 1:00am I might try to put something together. Maybe tomorrow morning depending on my mood.

Took the build for my StJ/Inv brute and danced things around. Not saying what follows is God's gift, but it may at least give you a starting point:

If you are not going to have melee, then ATs with a combination of control and healing. Masterminds can definitely fit both of those requisites (filling in tanking via pets). I would probably suggest Corruptor + Mastermind because you get overlap in control and healing with the proper choices (triple overlap on control with the right choice of blast set on the Corruptor).

It would be nice to have metallic versions of patterns. On the left is the character with Metallic chest using the Chisel pattern. Middle is Bodysuit Leather with Chisel pattern. Right show the idea--the pattern itself is metallic.

A desire for regen, endurance, and enhanced damage on sentinels.... ...so you're playing Bio?

Had an itch to scratch which needed scratching in terms of powerset combo (SS/EA) and so.... This is my new Brute, Sidera: I really wish the leg stipes could be more metallic, like belt and gloves.

Got a red side WM/Nin myself and it is fun, especially when combined with an AoE attack. But boy is it frustrating when it misses.

I would shoot for 40%+ on F/C/E/N defense and 75% S/L resistance. I would take Rebuild DNA over Parasitic Leach (and actually did so on my Fire/Bio sentinel) as the "Oh crap, my life is low" situation is going to be addressed by Rebuild DNA whereas Parasitic Leach requires you to be closer to targets than I prefer, even with the sturdiness of the build. As always, trying out the build on the test server is recommended to see if you are getting the performance you want out of it. --- Edit: I went ahead and did some tweaking of your build. Assuming (praying really) you were not really planning on engaging in melee, I dropped the slots from Box/Brawl and tossed Mind Probe out the window. Danced some things around and landed on: It has 8.5% more F/C defense and 7.5% more E/N defense, and it is considerably more honest about having Hasten toggled on. It is not quite to perma, but you will only experience 6.7s of downtime every 126.7s with the changes compared to the original build's actual downtime of 51.5s every 171.5s. Functionally that is 94.7% uptime vs 70% uptime. Yes, it curb stomps your S/D defense down to 14% or so. Between Ablative Carapace, Rebuild DNA, and not standing in melee when you can help it, you will be fine. You can even actually be in melee long enough to build down the occasional foe or small group which manages to make its way to you (routine on my Fire/Bio is to pop Ablative, pop Aim as I am running into a group, and then setting off Inferno and Fireball point blank--which is not something I would do if I were worried about being beat down by a group of nasties). Swapped Mind Link for Dominate. Trust me, you will use it a lot more and to more meaningful effect.

I am the only one in the "conversation" providing numbers (and can provide the videos as well if need be. What I know? You've blowing a lot of smoke. At this point, pics or it didn't happen as I am frankly sick of your condescension and you're about a click away from the ignore list.

As it happens, my favorite blue side arc is Twisted Reflections/Through the Looking Glass, so I do it on each of my characters. Because I enjoy it so much and how character costumes get inverted, I like to screenshot the clones. As this happens when fighting I have taken to simply recording the fights so I can later pull out the frames I like. As a result, I happen to have a number of videos lying about of various characters fighting portions of the mission at a point where I will have first slotted enhancements in them and will have distributed roughly the same number of slots (3 slots in Stamina, 3 slots in each attack though usually with 2 damage and 1 endurance reduction--I hate fights being limited by things other than health total). And along the way I had a scrapper (Savage/Shield) I remade as a brute (Savage/Electrical)--so not quite an apples-to-apple comparison. Last fight against the clone was 13 seconds for the scrapper, 16 seconds for the brute. Despite the brute reaching roughly 80 Fury by the end of the fight, the scrapper came out with faster time. And while the brute comes out around 80 Fury, he is down about 30% of his endurance. How many more fights is he going to rush into before needing to rest and dropping Fury? It is all wonderful to talk about Fury as if it is always max, but that is not the case even now.

What? I don't play seriously? My expectation is that I am not going to be at low levels long enough to make the hassle of replacing enhancements worth it. I start slotting with crafted level 25 basic IOs at level 22 because (a) they give a significant bang (level 50s damage IOs only give 10% more then 25s) and (b) I will not need to replace them before moving on to set IOs. Which is pretty much what I said. But you are not spending any real time at level 2 and not much time getting to level 10. Maybe read what was written as opposed to whatever fever dream passed your eyes. As noted, they are not going to be majorly more survivable than Scrappers, every rest they take brings them down to 0 Fury, and Scrappers enter every fight at full damage value. The Brute's ability to be ahead depends on their ability to mitigate damage and sustain endurance. So long as they do not have to slow down to rest or spend time travelling, they can maintain superior damage output.

I was going to make a comment on this last night, but I was not up for doing the digging to support what I wanted to say. Guess sleep energized me. If we look at a powerset, say for example Battle Axe, we have the following raw damage values courtesy of [url=City of Data v2.0 (uberguy.net)]City of Data 2.0[/url]: Battle Axe Brute Scrapper Ratio Beheader 41.7 62.6 1.5 Chop 68.4 102.6 1.5 Gash 81.7 122.6 1.5 Pendulum 56.2 84.2 1.5 Swoop 95.1 142.6 1.5 Axe Cyclone 41.7 62.5 1.5 Cleave 115.1 172.7 1.5 Call that the messy way of demonstrating the scalar difference between ATs with Brutes being at 0.75, Scrappers being at 1.125 and the ratio of those two values being 1.5. The Scrapper has higher base damage and criticals, the Bute has Fury. In the early game is the point where players are least likely to slot enhancements. True, some people always do so, but some people don't really bother for a while. (Personally, I don't bother until level 22.) Depending on target the Scrapper has a 5-10% chance of critting for double damage so the ratio goes to 1.575/1.65. A Brute needs 29/33 Fury to be matching the Scrapper. Those are not really hard values to achieve or maintain and broadly the Brute will surpass them. But there will be some healing (at least when solo), travel, and possibly organizational (party) downtime which can push the Brute back down to no Fury between fights. Overall, the Brute is probably more effective in delivering damage. Move into the realm where both ATs have slotted for damage and things shift a bit. Say the Scrapper has triple-slotted damage enhancements for a bonus of 96% (level 30 damage enhancements should put you there with level 25 enhancements being only somewhat behind that). That takes the Scrapper ratio compared to the Brute base to 3.087/3.234. So the Brute needs to pick up 210/224% damage. He of course can slot as well for 96%, leaving him wanting 114%/128%, which Fury of 57/64 puts him at. The thing is that Fury falls off faster the higher its value and those downtime bits from before are still there. So the Brute has to ramp up damage and is behind until he does while the Scrapper walks into each fight at full value. Sure, the Brute can push up to 85 Fury (it is hard to get past that value) but that has to be balanced by whatever time he spent beneath break even. It does not strike me as quite so obvious the Brute is significantly ahead of the Scrapper. This is going to be the case from somewhere in the mid-20 level range. And while Brutes do have a higher resistance cap, they are unlikely to reach anywhere near it until set bonuses come into play. Short of that, the only thing they will really have over the Scrapper is a larger health pool. From their 30s upward I cannot say my DM/EA, WM/Shield, or WM/Nin scrapper have felt less damaging than any of my Brutes.

Not so obviously because the statement, "They do. It's fine, it doesn't lean to any of a Brute's strengths, though" makes no mention of a comparison, being a flat statement in regards to Brutes. Nor is it obvious to me how EA leans to any particular Scrapper strength. But hey, maybe I'm slow. Higher resistance cap is always going to be a benefit to a Brute regardless of the set focusing on Defense or Resistance because either way there is more effective health which foes have to beat through. For example, my previous Brute project achieves 90% S/L resistance while soft-capping S/L/F/C/N/E defenses (well, not quite on N/E but close) when facing just a single target and hard cap facing 8 targets. A Scrapper, at equal defense values is never going to equal or surpass a Brute who has taken their resistance values past 75%. Likewise a Brute using Shield or EA or SR is going to be considerably better off than a Scrapper so long as the Brute pushes their resistances past 75%. I get where you're headed, though I think I might invert the phrasing. It is less that EA (and other Defense sets) are stronger on a Scrapper than a Brute, they are stronger on a Scrapper than Resistance sets on a Scrapper because you are able to come closer to full damage mitigation with them. All this talk of EA has me strongly considering remaking my SS/EA Brute from Live.

Yes, but I am not holding that Energy Aura is not beneficial to Scrappers so that seems like an odd rebuttal. What precisely would you say is armor set which leans to Brute strength over Energy Aura?

Attacking more often due to Entropic Aura is not leaning to a Brute's strength (Fury)?