Erratic1

I have two Savage Melee characters currently--a Savage Melee/Invincibility brute and a Savage Melee/Bio Armor scrapper. I am not sure why the difference exists between what Paragonwiki has and what is in game, but if it was a late design change, I think the developers were a bit too cautious and did not think through the implicit tradeoffs of the set. Savage Melee has quick animations in part because Blood Frenzy stacks reduce your recharge time. At maximum stacks you are looking at a 20% recharge reduction. Moreover Blood Frenzy stacks also reduce your endurance cost. If you monitor the changes the scaling is oddly not quite linear, but seems to cap out around 25% endurance cost modifier. So you get 1-1/1.2=17% more attacks in a fixed period of time at a 1-1/1.25=20% savings. Basically you get the increased attack rate at no extra endurance charge so long as you maintain the stacks (technically you save 6.4%). The above is nifty enough but that does not really, on its own, stack up to what most other attack powersets bring to the table. But you also can spend your stacks to empower a couple of your attacks, gaining increased damage and depending on power increased area of effect or increased bleed duration. However doing so locks out your ability to gain stacks. I need to check to see if when exhausted you can pop Blood Thirst and get stacks. If so, that means you might want to build to five stacks, spend, then pop Blood Thirst and not spend (unless you just really need to use your other spender, since the first is likely to be on cooldown). The problems are: (1) The recharge reduction is tiny and so the corresponding boost in damage is as well. Moreover, it does not scale with outside recharge reduction. If you had perma-Hasten for 70% then full stacks of Blood Frenzy take you to 90% so you'd go from 1-1/1.7=41% more attacks to 1-1/1.9=47% more attacks. This is an artifact of the method of calculation so applies to adding more of any effect--damage boost, endurance cost reduction, etc. But most other effects that other powersets have are not likely to have anything that adds to them. Recharge reduction is baked into every damage IO set and Hasten is quite commonly taken. (2) The extra damage applies to one power and then you are locked out for a duration. Psi Melee at least gives you a period of enhanced damage where you can get in several attacks from the powerset in exchange for its empowerment being locked out. I think a better mechanism, which would have fit with the notion that the user of savage and driven by blood in the air, would have been to either give some benefit for the number of foes nearby with DoTs on them, or perhaps less computationally expensive, give a benefit for hitting targets who have DoTs to represent the empowerment a savage meleer feels from all that blood in the air. That all said, it's not a bad set. Not great, but not on the avoid list.

(1) Electric attacks drain endurance, not energy attacks. Energy attacks disorient. (2) The exhaustion of Savage Melee is nothing like a T9 exhaustion. Savage Melee exhaustion merely means you cannot gain Blood Frenzy stacks. Moreover, it is not invoked whenever you use a spender but only when you use a spender while at maximum (5) stacks. (3) Blood Frenzy stacks do not add damage. They do reduced endurance cost and recharge time of your powers. Spending the stacks increases damage and depending on the spending power increases area of effect or bleed duration.

Clearly you have never been the Kinetics Defender using Transfusion whose anchor got knocked away from the people needing healing.

There is an understandable tendency to focus on "best" and "powerful" builds on the forums and in game. Twice this past weekend I noticed requests for "Best Tanker build", which lead to the inevitable discussion of what the person in question meant by "best". However that discussion is not what this thread is about. Of late I have been working on two melee builds which are very much not Flavor of the Month and do not qualify as particularly powerful. They are solid, but will never grab headlines. In combination with the above experience, I thought I would start a thread where people speak about their hidden gems powerset combos. Unlike "powerful", where it is going to be pretty widely agreed by anyone with experience with the powerset combo that it is indeed ahead of other combos, what qualifies as a hidden gem is going to be more in the eye of the beholder. Even so, let me put forth a criteria for determining what is a hidden gem.... Take two reasonably solid powersets and put them together. You likely have a solid performer because both pieces do their job. But a hidden gem emerges when the two sets work in concert to get you better performance than you might have otherwise expected, but not such good performance that you're left wondering why everyone isn't playing it. Or perhaps the hidden gem aspect emerges from working within the confines of of the mechanics of one powerset, thereby alleviating what would otherwise been a problem for the other. I will get the ball rolling with an example (one of the aforementioned melee builds): Electric Armor/Fiery Melee If you check the FotM thread where the frequency of powerset combos at level 50 are presented, you will find that for Tankers Electric Armor sneaks into the top 10 most frequently played sets when paird with Electrical Melee. After that, it is not seen again until ranks 37, paired with Titan Weapon (obviously piggy-backing its endurance hunger to Electric Armor's ability to refil an endurance bar), and rank 38, paired with Super Strength. After that there is rank 67 (Radiation Melee), rank 88 (Energy Melee), rank 114 (Dark Melee...I could probably write about the hidden gem nature of this one), and finally, the subject of this example at rank 123 (Fiery Melee). In the realm of players level 3 to 49 Electric Armor/Fiery Melee is even further down, at rank 202. Why would one pair Electric Armor with Fiery Melee? If you're not enamored with thermocouples, thematically, it does not necessarily seem like fertile ground unless you happen to think of stars--giant balls of ionized nuclei which generate intense heat. Mechanically, Electric Armor is a very solid resistance set whose only serious weakness comes in the form of Toxic damage. Moreover it comes with both ways to recover endurance and heal--and the heal lowers your endurance costs for 30 seconds by a whopping 59.6%! Add to that a minor boost to Recharge and you're looking at the powerset that was Radiation Armor before there was Radiation Armor. I bet Electric Armor would like to take Radiation Armor down a dark alley and beat it senseless for copying most of Electric Armor's goodies and having resistance to Toxic. Fiery Melee's mechanical pull is setting things on fire for extra damage. What is the synergy? Did I mention you are continuously damaging anything that is near you via Lightning Field, setting things on fire, and endlessly making quicker than normal attacks? And they are going to give Tankers (a) more damage and (b) bigger area of effects?!?!? Muhahahaha!!!! The powerset combo does not match the iconic, take incredible blows without flinching and backhand opponents through walls even if you do take incredible blows and melt your opponents. It is not stand there and watch things melt for stupidly getting close to you--your damage aura helps put things down but you have to take action if you want to defeat foes in a timely fashion. You do not control your foes and thereby prevent them from attacking you or those around you (though once you've gotten their attention they are not likely to look elsewhere). Electric Armor and Fiery Melee are not two solid powersets that just happen to be solid together but rather they rise in combination to be more than the sum of their parts. So tell me, what are your hidden gems?

Will do. Thanks for the suggestion!

Yeah, it was a bit endurance hungry early on. 😁

I struggle to recall which came first in terms of flouting conventional wisdom. Having taken a Rad/Psi Tanker to 50, I think it was hearing all the bashing of Super Reflexes which prompted me to plan an SR tanker to begin with and that having gone down that road I decided to go whole hog and pair Titan Weapon with it. It is a work in progress, with me having quickly worked him into his 40s before getting distracted and letting him languish. So I cannot speak to end game tanking on him. I can speak to how it was getting there and what I plan on aiming for. Capping Defenses is trivial using SR. Slot SOs in your defensive powers and you are pretty close. On a resistance based set it would be like slotting SOs and being at 80% resistance--close enough that sneezing would cap you. So the question becomes what to layer on top of that. Resistance is the obvious thing to look at, but unlike the case playing a resistance based set and looking to layer defenses, there is a lot more ground to cover trying to build up resistance than there is when trying to build up defense. SR has scaling resistance baked in. You get 1:1 resistance for every percent your life is under 60%. There is also the Reactive Defenses special IO which gives 3-13% scaling resistance which scales from full life downward. Obviously there is Toughness, which gives a base 15% (smashing/lethal). Also I have tried out absorption shields available via the ATO and Preventive Medicine. Neither is playstyle altering in terms of impact, but even so I am leaning towards loading up on Health to get the most out of them.

Having an SR/TW Tanker in his 40s, I haven't found TW to be too slow.

If I were going to make the AT live up to its name, I would not be looking to trample the domain of others but rather build something unique for the AT. Corruptors and Defenders cover the -Res concept perfectly fine before we get to other ATs which dabble in that realm. Something along the line of gaining extra damage and/or aggro (or conversely, lowering the target's aggro at its current target) when what is hit by the sentinel seems appropriate.

Ice Armor and Radiation Armor are both available for Tankers. Ice Melee and Radiation Melee are both available for Tankers. A Rad/Ice or Ice/Rad Tanker is buildable.

When someone activates all the panels in the Yin TF, you and your party will be deliriously happy you dropped Dimension Shift at the entrance to the reactor room. (Not the only place it comes in handy, just a very predictable one.)

Waitaminute. . . Other ATs do not get an area hit out of Greater Psi Blade when Insight is up? I have a Rad/Psi Tanker and getting that his is a real damage boost.

Yeah, Werner is correct: Limits

None of the Tier 9 defense powers can be made perma. The maximum recharge reduction possible in game divides recharge by four. All Tier 9 powers have recharges high enough that division by four leaves you short. As goes Particle Shielding, I can see little reason not to make it perma as it is trivial to do so and even if you have generally godly resists there is something that is weak.

My apologies to the OP and the readers of the thread for dragging the conversation away from the original post. I will be deleting my previous posts in the thread to try to get things back where they should be.

You want Propel and Lift, even with having the blasts from Energy Assault, for the Impact modification to damage. I went without Lift for thematic reasons but will be grabbing on my character's next respec having justified it as fitting theme. Propel however has been a definite plus to damage output. I admit I do not use Crush much at all. My respect plan drops it. Gravity Distortion I am keeping. As for Power bolt, you don't have a choice other than to slot it or not. You might as well slot it because some damage is better than no damage. As for synergy, it is partially what you state--you can choose which targets get held and so not knocked back by your attacks. That is huge. It allows you to single out targets and to temporarily remove from consideration others. Something causing problems for a team member? Knock it away from them. Or if you have the time to spend, hold it and blast it down. I do sometimes wish we had better pet control but ultimately you can move to force your pet to engage, and it is a real help in terms of controlling things.

You are not going to change other's behavior...at least you cannot count on doing so. If a blaster kills something there is no problem as that was everyone's presumable goal anyway. If a blaster knocks something away from me, I presume they have the target under control and turn my attention elsewhere. Certainly when I, as a blaster, do so (which is rare) I am expecting to handle the target myself.

Kinetic Melee/Bio Good damage output, solid survivability, and an active playstyle (especially if you slot Overwhelming Force KB->KD in Repulsing Torrent). Routine attack routine is to pre-activate Repulsing Torrent and charge forward. Once at maximum range, the charge will be interrupted by the activation of Repulsing Torrent, launching an attack which knocks groups down. Then the charge will continue to the targeted foe. Once up in the group, activate Burst. By that time most of the foes you have knocked down will have just gotten to their feet and be knocked down again. . .at least the ones who aren't defeated. Melee individual targets until Repulsing Torrent is available again, at which point you leap away while activating Repulsing Torrent. This will cause you to spin to face your most recent target and again do an area attack which knocks down everything in range. Rinse and repeat. Power Siphon is nothing short of amazing, especially while in Offensive Stance.

Focused Accuracy, since you should have endurance to burn?

I was not impressed by Ground Zero as a power. Is the set bonus meaningful to you? If not, you could free up the power/slots for something else. My Rad/Psi is 50 (my first post-shutdown 50 in fact), but I have not done much with her since hitting 50.

Glad it worked out for you. Very nice costume!

Does that real Build Up give a damage bonus of 300% Because that is what I cracked last night in a Summer Blockbuster run. To be fair I was in Offensive stance from Bio Armor, so if you want to answer in relation to 275%, that's fine. And Repulsing Torrent, slotted to convert knockback to knockdown is awesome. Edit: I am not saying do not take Kinetic Melee on a Brute (or Stalker). You should find what works for you and if that is different from what works for someone else, so be it. Not getting Power Siphon reset on a Brute may not matter to you (though I might advocate for double Fury gains during its duration to the current developers).

I am enjoying my KM/Bio scrapper. If you make the Brute version, I would be interested in how you like it.

Slot KB->KD in Repulsing Torrent. You pick up a very useful area attack that way.

I had been casting about for something to pair with Dark on a Blaster, and while I had looked at Plant, it just wasn't doing it for me. So made a guy to try out Atomic because of this thread, and at level 31 it has not been bad so far. Of course a lot to be determined in upper levels. Small annoyance in not having a third single target blast until level 26, but lower levels go by quickly.