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I use my hands. I can't find a working neural interface, and I'm shite at writing with my other appendages.

That still doesn't mean it's invalid. It was an impersonal comment which was no more an attack than asking a server in a restaurant if he/she can break a $20 constitutes an inquiry into his/her personal finances. You're overly sensitive. I finally understand why you focused on Soldiers of Arachnos now. I thought it was a really odd choice, since a single Kin can do more, but you showed your hand this round. 14x Assault, always on, always active. You're discounting everything in the game that doesn't meet that stricture, which is, effectively everything except Assault and SoA Assault. Build Up, nukes, Fortitude, FS, Siphon Power, teammates, inspirations, all of the click +Damage buffs in the entire game, it's all meaningless to you because it's not 100% permanent, 0.0 seconds down time, absolutely assured +Damage without active input. You want brutes to be balanced in a vacuum in which no click buffs exist, no teammates exist, nothing but the brute and his/her Fury bar. The fact that all of these other buffs do exist, that they would put brutes so far over the top that it would be insane, is irrelevant. I guarantee that no developer, now or in the future, will consider that. Ever. Now you're saying that brutes need Incarnate buffs in order to hit their Damage cap? If you move that goal post any further, you'll need another planet to stand it up on. Whichever /tell came first. That's my honest answer, and it's not an evasion. This isn't a trinity game. No-one needs a tanker or a brute. Neither tankers nor brutes are essential to the success of any team. I proved that in I5 when I tanked AVs and GMs, successfully, with a defender, with no Defense, no Resistance and no status protection. Supergroups like Repeat Offenders, Green Machine, Fruit Salad, Pinball Wizards ran things on every one of the original servers every night, without a single tank or brute, and they wrecked shit. Of equal importance, eight players all going banana balls with attacks so grossly overshadows any difference between tanker and brute damage that it's meaningless. It's not even a notable difference in comparison to the overall output of the entire team. What, 0.7%? Maybe 1%? I'm supposed to pull out a calculator and spreadsheet and base a decision on that, when we'll all be hammering things so hard and fast that we need a better word than "overkill" to describe it? As long as the player is contributing, I'm not going to base any decision on a variable so small in the big picture that it takes a goddamn microscope to find it. I don't care what other people play or bring to a team, because I know the mechanics and I know it always works out, as long as people are having fun.

Target cap 10. Not 1. 10. 15% (mastermind FS) * 10 = 150% 20% (controller/corruptor FS) * 10 = 200% 25% (defender FS) * 10 = 250% 150-250% +Damage with FS. That's not including the buff around the Kin (another 30-50%), which is applicable if said Kin is within 20' of the melee character. Now. It wasn't niche when hyper-inflation prevented many players from using set IOs, ATOs didn't exist, converters didn't exist, catalysts didn't exist, Winter sets didn't exist, Incarnate abilities didn't exist... or even later, when some of these things were available, but locked behind pay walls and exorbitant reward merit costs. Back in the day, having a Bio nuke on hand wasn't niche, it was normal, because they are powerful buffs (400% Regeneration, 150% Damage) and people running around with builds using yellow SOs and franken-slotted set IOs found it very handy. TF? Bring nukes. Hydra? Bring nukes. Kronos? Bring nukes. Terra Volta? Bring nukes. It's niche now because the healthy economy, removal of pay walls and drastic reduction in merit costs have given all of us a laissez-faire attitude. We don't get nukes because we don't need them and acquiring them is "work"... but that doesn't mean using them isn't a valid tactic. The purpose of mentioning them wasn't to sidestep a restriction or cobble together a solution, but to point out that not only does it not require any specific combination of teammates for a brute to hit his/her damage cap, it doesn't even require one support character. Anyone can do this. Everyone can do this. That you don't, that I don't, doesn't mean it can't, isn't or shouldn't be done, or that doing it isn't an acceptable tactic. It's a team buff available to everyone, and it serves as a reminder that it doesn't take seven Soldiers or Arachnos, or seven Emps, or seven Thermals, or whatever, to buff a brute's damage. All it takes is brains. But sure, call it niche. The way I slotted the Fury proc is niche, too, but as is evident in the screenshots I posted, it's clearly the superior slotting approach. Dismissing something that works simply because it's not en vogue is foolish and self-defeating.

You put way too much work into trying to create that specialized team. Team with one Kinetics character. One FS is 150-250% +Damage, depending on the archetype, and that's just FS. Siphon Power is a team buff, too. Or get a nuke. Two players with Warburg Bio nukes can cap an entire team's damage for 5 minutes, including brutes, and with 8 teammates, that's 20 minutes of everyone being at the cap.

I listed pictures of @Snarky and they're not selling. GODDAMN WIZARDS!

I did not. I said brutes have a 700% Damage cap and tankers have a 500% Damage cap, and at their respective caps, the brute deals more damage. I presented no scenarios, I simply pointed out the numbers. You and @Rudra are the ones throwing out situations, all of which appear to be deliberate attempts to portray brutes as struggling weaklings who are overshadowed by tankers. No -Res for the brute, insisting that brutes can't hit their Damage cap without some kind of miracle team... Don't lay that at my feet. I'm correcting the misinformation I see, not twisting the facts to make an archetype look bad. Speaking of which... 275% is +Damage, not the total. 100% base plus 180% from 90% Fury plus 95% from Damage enhancements = 375%. Discounting any other factor, doing nothing more than adjusting your figure to account for the base 100% Damage, the brute is at 585% in your hypothetical team. If you substitute any tanker for the brute on that team, he/she is over-buffed by 85%. His/her Build Up/Soul Drain/Rage/whatever is useless, whereas the brute still has 115% head room before hitting his/her Damage cap. This means the brute can still benefit from those other powers, like Build Up. Just Build Up would put the brute at 665%, a mere 35% short of the cap. Maxing out Fury would reduce that gap to 15%. Yes, it takes more than a single small Rage inspiration to hit that 700% cap, but Fury provides up to +200%, enhancements are good for another +95% (~128% if using Musculature Core Paragon), almost every primary has Build Up or a comparable Damage buff, so they don't actually need 600% +Damage, they only need ~200-225%. And it doesn't take a special team to do that. It's not as complicated or unusual as you make it out to be.

Yeah, I totally don't get why flooding the market with an item would cause the price to drop either. It must be sorcery! A FUCKING WIZARD DID IT!

250.95 (capped, per @Rudra's post) * 3 (300% -Res (capped)) = 752.85 291.97 (ditto) * 3 (also capped, cap is 300% for all archetypes) = 875.91 You were saying? No, please, go on, continue explaining how the brute's higher damage cap is irrelevant because of -Res making tankers hit harder. I'm dying to see where you go with this. And the brute on the same team will also benefit from the same -Res. You're not even comparing apples to oranges at this point, it's stove pipes to potted ferns. Deliberately manufacturing a scenario in which one character is denied access to the same tools as another character doesn't prove anything, except that you're terrible at proving things. Stop. I want to respect you in the morning, and if this goes any further, I won't.

+Damage buffs aren't exclusive to any archetype or character. Controllers, defenders, masterminds, corruptors and Soldiers of Arachnos, more than one third of all archetypes, can buff +Damage. Anyone with Assault or Vengeance can buff +Damage. Half of the Lore pets buff +Damage. This is a huge part of the complaints from players of support archetypes over the past couple of years, everyone can do everything, without specialized team compositions.

You mean exactly the same IOs and *PP powers brutes has access to, which allow brutes to exceed their cap as well? The options are identical across archetypes (Energy Mastery is the only *PP with a variance, tankers have Conserve Power, brutes have Superior Conditioning, neither can be slotted with -Res procs, so it's irrelevant in this context). The brute still has the higher Damage cap, higher damage at the Damage cap and, thus, higher overall damage when equivalent -Res is factored.

Brutes have the higher Damage cap, 700%. Capped Fury plus Damage enhancements plus Build Up plus Assault plus Incarnates plus set bonuses still doesn't get them close to their cap, whereas a tanker with the same buffs is nearly at his/her 500% cap. And that's the brute's advantage. Buffs which would be wasted on a tanker carry much greater value for a brute. It requires teaming to gain that advantage, but there's nothing untoward about that. This is still an MMORPG, despite the low population and tendency for many of us to focus on solo play, and with so many similarities between archetypes, team play is where differentiation becomes evident and important. How each performs in a solo environment... well, not only does it not matter, as long as they're both performing well enough, but it would actually be detrimental to make brutes deal more damage solo simply to put them ahead of solo tankers because that would bleed over to team play and make brutes too strong on teams. If you want to see your brute exceed tanker damage output, team. Get buffed, get to the brute Damage cap and tell tankers to eat your rubber while you burn dust.

I don't know. Since I can cap it so easily, I haven't investigated other methods of building or maintaining high Fury. As I said, though, it doesn't really mean much. Each point of Fury is 2% +Damage, and all +Damage is additive, so we're really talking about 20% +Damage tacked onto an attack that is already at 275% +Damage (180 from 90% Fury, 95% slotted +Damage), and it just doesn't add much overall. On my Staff/Willpower, it adds about 11 points of damage to Guarded Spin, 13 points to Innocuous Strikes, 10 points to Eye of the Storm... the biggest bump is to Sky Splitter, which gains 23 damage. Twenty three. That's it. The difference between 90% Fury and 100% Fury is, as far as I'm concerned, negligible. It doesn't matter enough to make any effort to pursue it. The only reason I have the proc at all is to build up Fury as rapidly as possible.

Guarded/Innocuous/Guarded/Eye is my AoE chain, Guarded/Serpent's/Guarded/Sky is my single-target chain. Superior Brute's Fury: Recharge/Fury Bonus is 5 PPM. It has about a 1 in 3 chance of triggering on every enemy hit on this character. If my cone is saturated (5 targets), it's very, very unlikely that it will fail to trigger. Even if I'm down to a single target, it's about a ~34% chance, and since I'm using it every 2-3 seconds, it's sufficient to maintain my Fury above 90% in worst case scenarios and peg 100% very often. As can be seen in these screenshots, I'm hitting 100% on every spawn as I work my way through this mission. And that's with the proc slotted in a power with a 9' range (reduces proc chance), 90 degree arc (reduces proc chance), short base recharge time (reduces proc chance) and 123.53% Recharge Reduction from slotting and Agility Radial Paragon. Easy peasy dirty sleazy.

I hit 100% on my Staff/Willpower frequently. I have the Brute's Fury proc in Guarded Spin and use it every other attack. It's almost meaningless, because it's really only a few extra points of damage, but it's not hard to do.

Is your base on Krynn?

What would be Combat Teleport's replacement? How would all of the people who selected Combat Teleport, and didn't take Teleport, be placated by the power's removal? Unless both of those questions can be answered, I don't foresee the HC team going down this road. Powers aren't removed without good reason, and "because Teleport doesn't have a popup power" isn't a good reason.

Heh. Mop pole. 🤣

The 60th anniversary is coming, and the last few series haven't garnered the acclaim of the previous ones, so it makes sense that they'd find a reason to bring back the most popular of the modern Doctors and tie up that hanging plot thread.

No. Inf* purchase only, and only through the AH. You can purchase most of what's in the packs, though, in other ways. Merit vendor sells Winter enhancements for reward merits, the Candy Keeper sells the winter buffs and Universal Travel recipes, et cetera. The packs themselves don't drop or sell in any other way than the Special Salvage section of the AH.

Ooo, drama. Better get my 3D glasses.

It goes poof. Unless something is passed from one player to another, it's created or destroyed, not recycled. When you receive a drop, it's created on the fly. When you sell that drop to a vendor, it's destroyed on the fly.