Erratic1

It is not like Foot Stomp does not take Recharge enhancements. To get a 145s Recharge down to 40s would requires 262.5% Recharge. At equivalent recharge Foot Stomp is up every 5.5s

So by your reasoning Energy Blast is just a miserable set because its attacks knock things away and that can mean out of range so you'll have to move, hence its working against itself? Yeah, good luck on that one. At the point where you're thinking you're talking to yourself and everyone else is wrong? Certainly possible but the odds favor you needing to re-evaluate what you're saying and how you're saying it. Reiterating something which isn't true, no matter how many times you repeat it, does not make it true.

There is a difference between objectively bad and subjectively not to your tastes. You do not want to move around in using your powers. That does not mean others would have a problem with it. Not sure why Sonic/Dark gets a special mention when any other */Dark combo is going to want to get close for various Dark effects. Beam's schtick is spreading Disintegration. The one and only Blaster I not only could tolerate but enjoyed sufficiently to play to level 50 is a Beam/Martial character. You live for the joy of seeing DISINTEGRATE and DISINTEGRATE SPREAD appear over the heads of things. So I am not sure where the notion comes from that it is lacking in area damage. Its all about how you arrange to clump foes for it. But not liking a combo? Well, I burned my way through dozens of Blasters and broadly its not a favorite AT of mine. Does that mean Blaster is objectively bad? No, it means that on the whole the AT is not my cup of tea. Likewise your dislike of various combinations within it--they do not appeal to you for perfectly valid subjective reasons. But not workable? Not appealing to someone? Doubtful.

Its possible I am doing it wrong, but I am never in Offensive stance. Efficient is where I spend 95% of my time.

I have an Atomic Guardsman. Perhaps we should team up? 😊

I keep the crit proc in Savage Leap and do follow that with VS. At that point you should be at full stacks.

The lower, exclusive, boundary is the brutes are effectively only getting Fury from their own individual attacks. Exclusive because at least one of them will be getting attacked in the minimal situation (one foe, 8 brutes). The upper boundary is they are all Fury saturated from making attacks and having enough opponents attacking each to peg their Fury bars. Realistic situations will be somewhere between, and likely closer to saturation than not. I just pulled up a video of a run on one of my brutes (two other brutes, two warshades, one mastermind in the group) and my Fury bar is about 80% full while in the thick of things.

An all Brute group is going to have the issue of splitting Fury gained by being attacked (well, unless they all run off to get their own group...which is something I can see happening).

The do not all have the same recharge but then again they also do not do the same damage. This holds for both blasters and brutes. Blasters Nova: 145s, 250.2 damage Hail of Bullets: 105s, 204.5 damage Brutes Foot Stomp: 20s, 59.2 damage Lightning Rod: 90s, 133.5 damage A cursory glance through the AT's powersets suggests there is less variance on the blaster side in regards to damage and recharge. As goes Brutes, while Lightning Rod does more damage it also comes up less frequently. In the time it takes Lightning Rod to recharge you could do four Foot Stomps. 4*59.2=236.8

No Nova, but Brute high damage area attacks also recharge a lot faster. Nova is base 145s recharge, Foot Stomp is 20s.

Agreeing.

Hemorrhage just plain should never be taken.

You keep insisting the powerset is endurance hungry despite a video showing a series of attacks and ending with a mostly intact endurance bar. How do you reconcile visual proof with your claim? [EDIT: And keep in mind, I have Energy Aura, so I get in more Recharge bonus when things are nearby. Look at the video clip a few seconds after I engage and you'll see the Recharge Bonus leap to 42.5%--the extra 22.5% is from Energy Aura, so ending with two-thirds of a bar left should suggest to you just how not endurance hungry the set is because I was roughly at the point of being able to make 3 attacks for when otherwise would have been able to make 2.] The endurance discount is a bonus. Not having it is the default that everyone else on other powersets is working with. Moreover it exists mostly as an offset to getting to make more attacks while you have Frenzy stacks. Say you would make 5 attacks with no Frenzy bonus at a cost of 20 endurance over a period of time, N. With full stacks, over that same time N, you will instead make 1.2*5=6 attacks so you gained an extra attack. 5 attacks at a cost of 20 endurance is an average cost of 4 endurance per attack, so you would expect 6 attacks to cost you 24. But you got a discount. Per the video it was 23%. 24/1.23 = 19.5, or basically 20 endurance. So the benefit of the stacks was that you got an extra attack and it cost you nothing. Not having the endurance bonus isn't a loss to you because you will spend the same endurance per chunk of time as you otherwise would have spent when you had the bonus. The problem is that your fun and not fun is based on a misunderstanding of how a set works. You think you're losing something you in fact are not. That erroneous perception is causing you to come here and declare that you did not have fun but the fact of the matter is that while you may not have had fun it is not because the powerset you disparaged was in fact acting poorly. It was not. I do not question the subjective aspect of liking some things in game and not liking others. But if you're going to say, "I don't like the ocean because the ocean is purple and purple is my least favorite color" it is not someone questioning your likes and dislikes for them to say, "Uh, the sea isn't purple." Same here. You talk about extra endurance cost on Savage melee when it in fact is the only powerset in the game that lets you attack faster at no cost. Lightning Reflexes in Super Reflexes and Electrical Armor? They let you attack faster too but they do nothing to save you endurance, Savage Melee does. [EDIT: Energy Aura also allows you to attack faster and will allow you to regain endurance but those mechanisms come at different points in time.]

As a suggestion, you don't have to monitor blood stacks. You only have to know what sequence of attacks is going to produce full stacks and/or pop Blood Thirst. If you notice in the video clip, I pop Blood Thirst heading in because I want maximum stacks for the Recharge bonus. Thereafter and throughout the clip until I use Rending Flurry I stay at max stacks. And of course if you're at max stacks you're going to have an orange ring around your spenders. What I do not get is the notion that somehow being at max stacks hurts your endurance. Each stack is a savings on endurance cost (to offset higher recharge you get from the stacks). Spending the stacks locks you out of accumulating stacks for a period but you're no worse off than any other character at that point, you just do not get a savings to endurance and extra recharge. Look the clip at 2 seconds in. I keep the power monitor displaying on the upper right. With full Blood Frenzy stacks I am getting +20% Recharge and an Endurance discount of 23%. I grant the negative sign implies (to anyone who sanely uses the language) it is costing your extra endurance, but its a savings, not a cost. [I could rant for some time on how language has shifted since I was a child with such things as "three times smaller"--no, its one-third the size. The use of a negative sign muddies understanding, apparently meaning to indicate lower cost but being applied to the word Discount, implying a negative discount. *shudder*).

One might expect from the above (heavily snipped) that Savage Melee/Energy Aura would be the land of small damage, no endurance, and repeated deaths. With no IOs slotted, at 15 seconds of fighting 4 of 6 opponents are down, two-thirds of endurance remains, and health is almost full. KingsRow2020-12-2604-46-53_Trim.mp4 Seeing two simultaneous hits for 98 on a target may not be as satisfying as seeing 196 fly by, let alone a stream of 20s coming off target as opposed to the entire thing being summed up for 120. I grant, big numbers versus a sea of smaller numbers is subjective. I could post my WM/SD scrapper one-shotting guys and its a great feel. But its not the only feel I draw joy from.

Also, the 6th slot of Superior Might of the Tanker is boosting Smash/Lethal resistance which is already way past cap. Move that to Hecatomb or Armageddon and you pick up 6% Toxic/Psionic resistance.

Minor change, I'll let you be the judge of the improvement. Drops Hurl (You run in and grab aggro, why are you throwing things?) in favor of Rage. Drops Hurl in favor of Rage (because without it Super Strength loses all meaning by comparison to any other secondary powerset). With the slots saved it ups the slotting where you have Unbreakable Guard, giving you more Toxic/Psionic resistance.

If you're not using Kick then the Force Feedback proc slotted in it will never fire. Its doing nothing for you. As for Handclap, I appreciate the use of KB->KD in it but suspect it is unnecessary to your survival for the most part (like 99.5% of the time--made up number but want to get the qualitative sense across). Invulnerability boosts its Defense values based on the number of nearby foes so in a crowd most things probably aren't going to be able to hit you. I seem to recall, long, long ago on my DM/Inv Scrapper leaving trash alive while fighting bosses to maintain my defenses. Of course in a group you cannot really rely on this as your teammates will be killing stuff around you. Even so, with higher resistances than Scrapper get you should be fine. I am not a build god. But I may try to come up with something between doing work today and if nobody has posted anything by the time I'm done, if I have something I will post it.

Actually I think your plan of ranged and the benefit of Sentinel armor preventing Mez makes a lot of sense for no muss, no fuss. The only thing that might be a potential downside is if that results in lack of engagement on your wife's part. To that end, certain powersets are probably better than others. Water Blast is, to my mind, a very fun primary. Might not be the highest damaging one but it comes with a lot of visual rewards (and a self heal). Geyser, Water Burst, Water Jet, and Whirlpool are all visually enticing. That moves you on to secondary powersets to consider. There I would lean to one with low maintenance--turn it on and forget it. Of course that only matters if you're making the character for her. If she's choosing the powersets, then whatever she likes.

That is what I do. You can see it in the video above.

Another in the series of Its Not Mine, But Its Aweome! (permission granted to post):

Not that your point on Defenses is not something to keep in mind. I do not generally notice it on my Brute but that is probably because Bio comes with a number of survivability powers--Ablative Armor, DNA Siphon, and Parasitic Aura. Electrical Armor (Tankers don't get Energy Aura) doesn't have the same up its sleeve. Arguably Radiation Armor with Beta Decay might be the best option here if a rebuild is in mind and sticking with Super Strength. Of course could go Rad Armor/Energy Melee too.

His complaint was about the endurance crash. That is what I was addressing.

The other option is to pair Super Strength with a powerset which will make you not care about the endurance crash--Bio, Electrical, Energy, or Radiation.

The clip below is 13 seconds long. At 2 seconds I use Foot Stomp, which has a Force Feedback: Chance for Recharge IO in it. At 7 seconds I use Knockout Blow which also has Force Feedback: Chance for Recharge slotted. No Recharge IOs are slotted in either power. At the end of the clip Foot Stomp is ready again. You can see when the proc is applied (blue icon of a guy lying prone with an up arrow). If you pay attention to the countdown timer, you can see it leaping around based on when the proc is active and where it runs out. The time to recycle corresponds to no Recharge bonus and two back to back procs of the Recharge proc. ForceFeedbackWorkst.mp4 I know you have one in Kick but you don't have anything else slotted in the power. Do you actually use it? The benefit in Foot Stomp is its being checked against everyone hit by Foot Stomp. Knockout Blow is single target but has a fairly long recycle time. Not sure if you can scrounge up the slots for it (video is of a Brute with Bio Armor).