Metatheory

For soloing I think the blaster, dominator and sentinel as suggested offer the easiest path to at least partially ranged out of the box, and survivable. Theme-wise, I think 'WIllpower' secondary for Sentinel is the more obviously psi-adjacent defense set, as it has good psionic resist in it's basic shield, and psi defense in the mez protection. Don't forget the pool powerset 'Force of Will' which is a fantastic set of tools for a psi character, a must-have in this case it sounds like! You get three ranged 'blasts', one of which does a debuff, and the other two do light-ish damage plus either ST knockdown or a cone of kb which is a very handy tool for protection. The set also has a travel option and a 'tier-9' type self buff on a long cooldown. If you are curious about a melee psi-themed character (psi melee /WP for ex.) you can get them partially ranged by taking the blasts from the force of will pool.

My fave scrapper, and I've played a few, is my Ice/Dark. You don't see many around, and I don't care that 'you shouldn't play resist sets on a scrapper' or 'it doesn't have a taunt aura'. /DA is a super capable set on a scrapper - you have the big heal, exotic resists, stealth that means you can fight in close proximity to other groups without aggro-ing them, auras... and Ice is just fun fun fun, with a super reliable knockdown, some heavy hitting ST attacks, a literally cool cone attack... I just zoom-hover about looking like a flying smudge freezing stuff.

I would go so far as to say Defense is not the META for tanks; resist and absorb/heal is most likely superior. For DA you have the greatest heal in Dark Regen and it's not just a backup, it's part of your mitigation and you should expect to use it. So reducing endurance cost and enhancing recharge - both for the power itself and globally - are at a premium, as well as accuracy/+to-hit. The chance for +end proc is a no-brainer here. No one comes back from the last 5% of health like a DA toon surrounded by enemies! Energy resists are the weakest important area, and relatively important later in the game, so that should be a focus for patching the hole. On the other hand psionic protection is second-to-none. The stun and/or fear are important layers of protection - take at least one. Katana is not particularly synergistic, but it's a nice enough set with a bunch of useful powers and a cool taunt. My most played character on LIve was a Kat/DA scrapper and was great fun. I encourage you to stick to your (metaphorical) guns. You won't regret it.

Hello 'Trollers! I've been having fun with my Ice/Nature and I'm thinking how to build him out properly. I don't know ice control very well at all, either pre- or post- changes, but I have played nature a fair bit on controllers and 'fenders, so I know may way around there fairly well. The reason I rolled this combo is that I wanted to see what could be done with a PBAoE toggle approach. Mainly I wanted to leverage: Glacier and Entangling Aura. They combine for an up-to Mag 5 hold aura. Arctic Air and World of Confusion from the Psionic Mastery APP. They should combine for an up-to Mag 5 PBAoE confuse aura - always on! Factoring in Overgrowth's wild (see what I did there?) To-Hit buff, these powers should hit often. That seems to me like it could be pretty good, but you do have to get pretty close to the action to affect plenty of mobs. Probably the main risk there is getting mezzed (and dropping offensive toggles) so secondary power picks could be looking to provide a layer of mez-protect: Taking Psionic Mastery makes Indomitable Will available which offers a nice range of mez resistance Rune of protection can also be taken to use in emergencies as a super-BF Of course, one could also go down the defense road for mez-protection, but building up comprehensive def on a 'troller takes quite a lot of effort, and possibly isn't worth it (?) as this build should aim for a lot of recharge in order to get Glacier up as often as possible. In addition, Ice Slick is a single power pick, possibly a one-slot wonder, and offers a LOT of protection vs many mobs in the game. If it works as well as Ice Patch on melee characters it will offer a lot of mitigation. But *IF* one were to go down a defense route, how would you do it? Positional? Typed? Keeping in mind that this is a PBAoE based control character. So that's 11 powers I'm pretty much committed to (including Hasten for recharge, and the two qualifiers for Rune) which leaves a lot of room for creativity. There is one other power I want to take, which is Chillblain, as I'm sick of fighting AVs where the blasters haven't taken their T1 immob and the Brutes haven't taken a taunt. Not having the AVs run all over the map is a nice QoL feature, and fixed with one pick. And besides, it is very nice for setting up containment on bosses in one shot, and potentially a good place for a controller AT IO set. And, at the end of the day, controllers can't Brute/Blaster-shame if they haven't taken their T1 immob... Given the context of leveraging the PBAoE potential of Ice/Nature, what other power picks or strategies do you think would make sense?

You might want to mention that the point of the pet is mainly to cast ally powers on, which can then chain to yourself when solo

Lots of good information in here, thanks. Seems that /EN is still alive and kicking in blaster world. I like the potential for power boost to interact in interesting ways, and the clear path to get a lot of mez protection without going down the sorcery route. I have been playing a dark/en and I do like energize a lot, it feels good for a sustain.

How do people feel about /EM in the current game? Still useful? Any good tricks beyond making cones better or niche uses of power boost? Any secretly good synergies with blaster primaries?

Confirm that I cannot get this story arc from Ann-Marie Engels at level 18

Jill Pastor's first contact introduction offered me only Kong Bao and Mercedes Sheldon. I'm level 15 so Kong Bao seems correct, even though the wiki does not mention him under 'introduces' - I assume hcwiki is incorrect as he is a 15-19 contact. Mercedes Sheldon a) has no description, and b) cannot be selected as her minimum level is 20.

Love this story thread - looking forward to the next update!

Dr. Graves (Mercy Island) and Twinshot (Atlas) are the contacts. It would work exactly like it does now in all respects except when you craft you would be able to sub any common, uncommon or rare for the salvage stated on the recipe. From the market perspective it already works the same. If you wanted to craft a LotG +global it would cost 2 commons (any) 1 uncommon (any) and 2 rares (any) but in your inventory it would look exactly like it does now, with different types and so on.

+1 to the idea of bucketing salvage for crafting, not just for the markets This can be done without losing the lore and flavour.... the individual salvage would remain, but any drop would be useful Most of the objections in this thread are pretty much gaslighting IMHO - over focus on the OP's mention of newbies for justification without addressing the main proposal

Holy moly!

Dark Armor on scrappers. In life, cool beats numbers.

That's all well and good, but it's still fun on a scrapper ;) Seriously though, great information, thanks for sharing it!

I'm really glad I asked this now, as there are a lot of great thoughts and comments here in the answers. Pretty sure that Hemorrhage isn't broken anymore; there are numerous bug fixes in the patch notes at the end of 2021. That's not to say that it hit's like a truck, it surely doesn't... and the DOT/crits thing mentioned above is a bit of a sad face. The information about the best use of Blood Thirst - to get the Frenzy stack back after consuming it - is golden though! And I appreciate the advice regarding Assault Radial. Despite a few nitpicky issues I'd recommend any non-minmaxer to give it a whirl on a scrapper. The play experience is pretty pleasing if you like that scrapper blender playstyle, which I personally prefer over the big hitting sluggers.

I'm quite enjoying mine. I like the fact that it feels fast and has pleasing animations, and despite the fact that it doesn't really have any serious heavy hitting attacks and is lethal damage type I still manage to shred through most baddies. I really like the low endurance cost once blood frenzy starts getting stacked up, and it's easy to maintain and swish away for as long as necessary. Good for that old scrapper-blender effect. But, I am kinda curious about the best way to use the 'consumer' attacks Hemorrhage and Rending Flurry. The damage buff is noticeable, but so is the increased hit on the blue bar afterwards, and I find that a lot of the time I tend not to hit either of those powers once I reach 5 stacks of Blood Frenzy as I *think* I like the end cost reduction better. It's hard to tell, because the damage boost is all DoT so you don't get that instant 'crunchy' feedback you get with a classic buildup for example; you have to kinda trust that it's there. Speaking of... Blood Thirst, the buildup replacement, is also a strange beast because of how it interacts with that Blood Frenzy mechanic. As it instantly gives you 5 stacks on top of the classic +dmg/+to-hit it's both good... and potentially a fast track to depleting your blue bar if you hit Hemo/Rending. How is everyone else working with/around the inherent weird mechanics of the set? p.s. Don't drop in just to say 'savage is rubbish' =) There's no such things as a rubbish scrapper primary and this one is interesting as it even allows a little - *gasp* - thinking while scrappin'

How about something like a sonic/ice def? You get debuffs, potentially the most useful one, plenty of CC in your blast set, one anchor but it's an ally power and easy to use and potentially useful throughout the game buffs. Worth a thought? I quite like playing mine. Very team oriented IMO.

The Dr. Vahzilok arc "The Vahzilok Plague" (15-19, available from mutation origin contacts) has pretty much all you want from a low level story on blue side: badge mission easy street hunt one delivery mission (with a twist) couple of instanced missions one of the earliest AV battles you can find in the final mission (I guess it was the earliest before the Faultline revamp?) with a nice custom boss room You can easily enough solo the early missions, then put together a team for the last one or two if you prefer working alone. The last mission is very often in Boomtown which makes it one of a pretty small pool which sends you to that zone and gives a nice sense of traveling off the beaten path for the final showdown. It's pretty dark content by early blueside standards, too.

The 20%+ smash/energy res for allies is good as well

Awesome! Here is my Judge Anderson.... and I saw Judge Mortis (think it was that one) in Pocket D a couple of weeks back so maybe he will show up here as well!

Am I too late for a fox? I'll share a quick (literally) fox...

Super reflexes is super easy to play: just take the powers as they come and slot up def until you hit the cap! Not only can you slot LOTG +recharge everywhere, you also get Quickness as well... It has only two issues: 1. the main AOE def comes pretty late (overall, not too bad) 2. in an IO/incarnate world the tier 9 is completely redundant (just don't take it) Bio is good, but it is considerably more complex and only really comes together very late with slots, IO set bonuses and all that jazz. As a 'beginner' I would say go SR, you definitely can't go wrong there. Maybe also have a look at Ninja too? It's pretty similar but also has a heal, and end tool and stealth which is traded for overall slightly less total survivability when there are a lot of def debuffs flying around. But you can't go wrong with any secondary really.

Obviously there is no right or wrong way to build out a character, but I am hoping to stimulate a bit of discussion (with or without builds) about building Dark Armor scrappers because there are a lot of options, perhaps more so than the majority of other sets, with regard to specifically which layering to shoot for. Obviously the direction of travel is somewhat influenced by the primary set which can include benefits such as generating defense, crowd control which may be complementary to powers in /DA’s arsenal, etc. Additionally, incarnates, particularly Alpha slot come into play as well. Dark Armor has solid resistance to most damage types, energy aside, with the caveat that it cannot exceed more than 75%. So a lot of the toughness which is inherent to tanks, and a lesser extent brutes who have to work harder to cap it, is absent from scrappers and there ain’t squat we can do about it directly. Generally pushing the resists as high as possible is a good idea, but is it worth to push for very high energy resistance from set bonuses? Generally the second layer of mitigation is provided by its heal, Dark Regeneration, which is extremely effective, especially in groups of minions/lts, but is less dominant vs single hard targets. Dark Regeneration is a good example of the options we have. Pretty much regardless it needs to be slotted for some endred and some accuracy, but curiously it doesn’t need to be slotted for healing effect and can instead be slotted purely for AoE damage or as a proc bomb, including damage types, -res, +end, KD, even +health effects for the crazy out there. It can be 6-slotted, hybrid slotted, or just enough to cover accuracy and end issues. Generally recharge can be covered by global recharge, but you can also throw in hasten/alpha/rechred slotting to keep this important power up as much as possible. And its importance as mitigation is a very strong argument for making sure that recharge debuffs are covered by slow resistance where possible. Dark Armor also brings defense (and stealth). With Cloak, hover/combat jump and weave and a few defence SOs achieving 15% def is a piece of cake. And, it’s def-ALL as well, which means we keep options open for how to build in more def if that’s the way we decide to go. While a complete lack of DDR is an issue when relying on def with a /DA character there is plenty of content where def debuffs are not common and building for some def on /DA character is generally a good idea I believe. As I see it the options with a /DA are to build for melee defense OR S/L defense. Additionally it may be possible to prioritise E/N defense as a way to cover the energy resistance gap. These are pretty much all achievable; it just influences which IO sets should be slotted, but pretty much all scrapper primaries are a blend of melee single target, melee AoE and possibly also ranged AoE which give plenty of IO slotting options, and +def is also provided by several resistance sets. I am very interested to hear what people think about the relative advantages and weaknesses of pursuing one defense method over the others and how to achieve the best coverage. Then there are the crowd control powers. As I see it these are all good. You should probably take one, maybe two. Primary symbiosis and theme are important considerations. Slot availability may also play into the thinking if Cloak of Fear is the choice, as it is not really usable as a one-slot-wonder. Finally there are the ancillary pools which contain quite a lot of good options for adding more mitigation to /DA. Most commonly considered are Body (for endurance management tools) and Soul (DPS/+def boost), but there are other flavorful options too such as Leviathan (Hibernate), Weapon (Caltrops), and Dark (theme/-Acc). So what about it scrapper forum? Would love to read some thoughts about build options for /DA, and hopefully pick up some tricks and discover a new thought or two.

I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism is (PC has +1.0 mez protect naturally or whatever) but it is subjectively useful against holds. One time I was duoing controllers vs Carnies. I kept getting held and the other player didn't. Noticing they had acrobatics and following a conversation with them I respecced into it. Since when, I only get held if I mess up my initial mez roll out on them (i.e. they have time to stack blind on me). It is a good option for squishies IMO, even if it can be hard to squeeze in sometimes.