Blackjoy

As it turns out, we actually agree. I ran staff/wp to 50 and I initially thought Willpower was what /Regen wanted to be when it grew up. In the mid 20's, it kind of plateaued. As I started ratcheting up the difficulty, I found it quickly got overwhelmed. The problem is exactly as you say, it lacks a +heal that can help it recover from alpha strikes. and big hit EBs and bosses. Willpower needs a big group to pump its +regen, but it struggles to cope with the damage. However, /WP, unlike /Regen, has some a little +def/-to Hit, I think slotted to max, you can get like 20% +DEF to typed damage and about 10% to S/L . That doesn't seem like much, but if you stack it with Weave/CJ/Stealth, you can get it well beyond what /Regen has. WP has a few more layers of mitigation than /Regen and also isn't really imipacted by -recharge like /Regne is. i have to say, I've been playing my high 30's KM/Regen back to back with my SM/Shield, and /Regen is so much more survivable when you're running IOs. I don't now why I thought Shield was so good. For the mid-game, its fairly mediocre.

Having played a SM/Regen to 50, and then SM/SR, SM/Shield, and Kinetic/Regen to about 40, I have to disagree. Savage works REALLY well with /Regen on account of SM giving you +Recharge. I will absolutely agree that putting Overwhelming Fear in Shred to get extra Knockdown is also very very helpful. I don't have Mids, so I can't share a build. But I would try to pick up ShadowMeld because /Regen's big issue is getting hit by Slow and -To Hit from +4 bosses, EBs, and AVs. Mitigation wise, adding more Resist would be better for /Regen, but that does nothing help you against the debuffs. IME, /Regen is better than Willpower on straight IOs. But if you had unlimited Influence, I would expect Willpower has a higher ceiling....maybe

Dark Melee is definitely weak in on the DPS side. So much so, I the tried to buff it in a patch at some point. The problem, as I see it, is that the developers lowered Dark's baseline DPS because it provides a greater amount of survivability/utility as compared with other primaries. I think Dark is also downgraded on account of Soul Drain. At max boost and recharge, I think SD outperforms the Build-Up. So to compensate Dark has a lower base damage. The problem is that solo, you're not hitting the SD cap and you're severely underperforming on damage. IMO, Dark is better paired with a secondary that can boost its damage, like Fire or Shield. I'm not familiar with Ice or Stone, but if one of them as a +dmg aura, I would go with that.

Sorry, ET is suppose to be Energy Melee

Then I would suggest ET/Rad. Impressive single target damage, a little bit of driving on the secondary side. But good +recovery and +regen. You can color your pom poms to match your radiation. If you're willing to suffer early levels of fatigue and low health and put in some effort into making a build, /Shield at lvl 50 does well, because you'll be doing more TFs and Phalanx wil come on. But you need to be careful on something like a 4x8 ITF where Against All Odds will draw a lot of aggro. But f you really like MA....then I would suffer through the low levels, spends some money to cap +DEF and solve endurance issues, and go MA/SR. I think visually it's pretty nifty. MA/Shield is probably pretty cool too. Just buy the Double XP buff and camp in the police station and you'll be past 30 fairly quickly.

It would help if you answered a couple of questions: 1. What difficulty do you want to run at? +1, +2, +3? 2. What size groups x1, x2, x8? 3. How hard do you want to work at staying alive? 4. Will you spend more time playing 1-49 or playing at lvl 50? I've been running several secondaries solo from 1-40. I've run DM/SR, Staff/WP and Savage/Regen all to 50. I've also got Kin/Regen, Savage/SR, and En/Rad to 40. Finally I've got a Sav/SD to just above 30. Of all the secondaries i tried /Regen is by far the fastest leveling and the best survivability if you're running straight IO's, no set bonuses, and no power pools for mitigation. But /Regen takes the most work and knowledge. It has the most overhead. The real problem with /Regen is that once you hit the 40's, the debuffing can be extreme and it makes it harder to run x3 and x4. Unless you pump a lot of money into it, it's going to have the hardest time soloing 4x8. /SR is probably the 'safest" in terms of avoiding death.....providing you aren't facing toxic or non-positional attacks and Psi...or fighting AVs who punch right through your passive resistance. The scaling passives do a great job of giving you time to run away. But, /SR doesn't heal or recover endurance, so it's one of the slowest leveling sets. Once you get Elude, like in the early 30's, you basically have an "I win" button for EB's and other harder targets (just don't fight around a Quarrtz". /SR if you put the money in, is probably one of the easiest sets to get to the point of soloing 4x8. But honestly, if you're soloing, why spend all that time fighting? I typically just run my DM/SR at 4x1. /Shield...I originally thought this was way better than /SR, but not anymore. /SR is way more predictable in terms of running away and living and arguably has better mitigation. Like /SR, Shield's lack of healing and recovery means you level at a slower rate. Where Shield shines is in groups...and if you're soloing, you generally won't see the benefit of Phalanx. But shield does what /SR does with fewer powers, so that opens up more Power Pool mitigation. If you do have millions, Shield can fairly easily cap +DEF and then it surpasses /SR. If I were teaming, I'd say /SD wins, but solo, I'd go with /SR. /Rad is good. I'd put it behind /Regen in terms of survivability and put it ahead of /Regen in terms of ease of play. No at as easy as /SR and /WP, but less thinking than /Regen. Put your Particle Shielding on auto-fire and you can get buy with only an occasional use of Gamma Boost. One of the toughest scrapper builds I've seen was 400+mil /Rad that had massive +Recharge and Shadowmeld. /Willpower. Initially, I thought WP was the new and improved /Regen. I was wrong. /WP does great up until about the 30's. But once you start pushing +2 mobs, you quickly realize that /WP has no big heal and you faceplant because of it. /WP, like /Inv, wnats to fight against big groups. But /WP doesn't have a Dull Pain or Reconstruction to recover from an Alpha or a hard hitting EB. So soloing with /WP makes /WP under perform. I'd also say that making a /WP build is probably one of the more difficult on account of trying to figure out which way to go with it. Do you build for +Regen, +Res, or +DEF? In terms of primaries, I'd say Energy Melee if you're solo. I've played DM, Savage, Claws, Energy, and Kinetic. EnM/Regen or EnM/Rad is going to be good at killing small groups and not having to take a knee. Now.....if you're goal is running 4x8, I would not go /Regen. If you want to set it and forget it, then avoid /Regen. If you are going to keep it at +2x1, anything/Regen is going to be the best performer. And in groups, you'll generally get lost of buffs.

Oh, I wish it were just me. But forums have a way of getting people to group think. I didn't invent the pylon test or the trap door test, or the posts about soloing ITF on 4x8. Or post videos of me on Monster Island. Tankers are all about soloing TFs on 4x8, or tanking Lord Recluse. Even Defenders talk about soloing ITF on 0x1. And it follows that the people that frequent the forums are more concerned about min/maxing than those tthat don't. So it's not a surprise the 50+ game is framework for how people talk about the game. But is the predominant framework and the basis under which people trash /Regen. The fact that you both keep harping on this tells me neither of you are actually grasping what is being discussed...at least on my part. I'll explain it one last time so that the next time either of you post a statement like this, I'll flag it for trolling. I am more interested in how the "sets" play as a function of their design. I am not interested in what I can build with the sets. In order to understand how the sets play in comparison to each other, I play them with what every I can afford leveling up...and then non-Set IO's (except Overwhelming Fear which I just love) I don't use power pools and I don't use inspirations (except when fighting +2 EBs or higher). I also try and play the same Primary. If you aren't interested in how the sets play naked, then you do you But stop acting like I'm telling others how to play the game or accusing others who do things different of badwrongfun.

What you're seeing is the zeitgeist of people on these forums whose singular focuses is "what are the extremes I can accomplished at lvl 50?" Little to no value is given to quality of life aspects or the journey from start to finish.

Thanks for clearing that up. Which argument? I was on Live before poster A was making these posts. I was there when IH was a toggle and it /Regen was God-Mode after you got it. So I'm not sure what arguments you think were started by that post. This analysis by poster A is fundamentally incomplete and presents a flawed analysis or methodology when analyzing the Secondaries. It fails because it doesn't look at the full scope of how scrappers were designed: Primary + Secondary. Poster A uses a methodology that has been used by others and which focuses Secondary mitigation, and nothing else. Another form of this is called "effective health." But these models all fail to grasp a crucial aspect: Your secondary only needs to keep you alive long enough for you to get the incoming damage to so low that your mean-time-to-failure approaches infinity. It's all about the "I win" equation, which poster A's analysis fails to discuss or evaluate: Time to Defeat Me - Time to Defeat Them > 0 The reason why /SR is playable despite the worse "immortality line" is because it's paired with a Primary that is designed to eliminate incoming damage rapidly. /SR doesn't have to be immortal, it just needs to keep you upright for the 15-180 seconds it takes for you to beat down the spawn so that your no longer in danger of dying. So the fact that /Regen can take more damage lying down is largely irrelevant for game play.....because no one takes the damage lying down. The "I win" equation also explains why the devs game /SR a power like Quickness and /Regen Quick Recovery. Sure, they are thematically appropriate, but these powers offer no benefit to mitigation, so why have themt? Because Quickness improves the rate at which a scrapper can cycle its attacks and thus statistically reduces the Time to Defeat Them....and Quick Recovery extents the duration a /Regen can sustain its attacks. And when you think about it, both powers are very well suited for their respective sets. /SR wants a short fast fight /SR can't recover health fast enough so it wants a higher DPS. /Regen wants to extend the fight so it's superior +regen can do its thing. The other part of poster A's analysis that leads to misinformation is that there is no ability to evaluate debuffs OR reaction times. On the debuff side, /Regen's effective health or "immortality line" is impacted by debuffs. -Defense, -Res, -Recharge, etc. The Time to Defeat Them equation is also extended by debuffs that lower a scrappers ability to do damage e.g. -To Hit, -Damage, -Recharge, -Speed, Fear, -Perception. The "immortality line" can't contemplate the factors, so it leads to incorrect conclusions. How good is DA going to be if it can't use Dark Regen on account of -To Hit? It should also be pointed out that when poster A wrote this, MoG worked completely differently. IIRC, it lowered you down to about 10% health and gave you massive +DEF and +RES. I think it still works this way for boss Paragon Protectors. So a powerful untyped psi attack was often a one-shot, but more importantly, you couldn't heal while it was active and this is why many hated the power as it was inconsistent with the rest of how the set worked.

Did you exemp down from 50 to do this arc? If so then, I would totally expect any scrapper could handle a +2 EB. My results were with a true level 35, strict non-Set IO build (excluding 4-5 Overwhelming Fear), so unfortunately the comparison doesn't really provide much insight, imo. I do have my naked SM/Regen at 50, so I will go back and try this arc and see if I have better results exemp'ing down.

No. That's not what anyone is claiming. We're talking about how you can assess the different secondaries as separate from someone's individual build. We're also talking about the paradigm on which the game was balanced. According to Wiki, the game was released in 2004 and the Invention System didn't come along until 2007. So the game was originally balanced around SO's. And this explains why a power like Elude was a big deal back then, and now, hardly anybody even takes it. It's a safe bet that the devs were not able to balance the impact of the Set IOs would have on all the various ATs and their Primary/Secondary configurations. But if you were to play the game using SO's, you'd have more insight as to why the Secondaries work the way the work and how they would have balanced out under the game's original vision. When I level up toons for comparison, I try and play the same Primary. I use SO's until I can afford IOs with just money from that toon. I try and play the same Story Arcs. I don't use Inspirations unless I'm fighting +2 EB's or higher. I also don't use any mitigation from Power Pools. But I have used Hasten on /Regen to reduce the downtime on IH and DP. By way of Anecdote. I fought Nosferatu as a +2 EB with a SM/Regen and and SM/SR at around level 35. With /SR, he beat me like five times, even with Elude. He has some Psi power that cuts right through /SR. He also has damage aura and can still get lucky and crit. I finally was able to beat him with Elude up and a ton of reds and yellows. But in previous Issues, Elude wasn't available until lvl 38, so had that still been the case, I'm not sure I could have beaten him. Maybe. Elude allowed me to not have to take any purples. With /Regen, I couldn't beat him at +2. I couldn't pile on enough small purples and reds and yellows to get him down. IH and DP just weren't effective for long enough and the real issue was the To Hit Debuff and his use of Siphon Life. This is the first time I've played /SR since they re-ordered the powers. Being allowed to take Evasion and Elude by lvl 30, does dramatically improve /SR's experience. Now, you can take out EBs and have an Oh Crap option.

I know, having my cake and eating it too.

With Elude up, /SR is going to be near top tier, if not top tier against all non-Psi/Toxic. With Elude down, I think you're probably going to top out around 40% with CJ, Stealth, and Weave? The problem is you probably won't have the endurance to really sustain that on SO's. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't /Shield a set that you had to pay-to-play on Live? Maybe /WP, /BIO were as well? If I'm right, then it's not really fair to compare the legacy sets. /Shield was designed to better than /SR and it is. Not overwhelmingly so, but in small ways. For example it's four toggles cost the same as /SR's three. And if it we drop Grant Cover, it burns less endurance than /SR. It also has Fear protection and a straight up tele-attack. Regardless, /Shield is a tougher call. I'm not an expert on /Shield's numbers, but it looks like it's base +DEF is just under 22% with Phalanx running. Let's get that to 32% with Power Pools. If on a team in a 4x8, /Shield is getting around 18% more +DEF? That would crush /SR if my numbers are correct. So even without power pools, /Shield is in a fight with 4 or more mobs teammates seems to be getting around the same +DEF with three powers as /SR is getting from six. And we haven't even gotten to /Shields +RES powers. However, without Power Pools, I think /SR might out performs Shield in a 4x8 as with T9s running, running solo. With Power Pools, /Shield is going to do better, assuming it can manage the endurance. I've run SJ/Shield brute to about 40 and it has been horrible using IOs. I have similar health issues as /SR and worse endurance issues. And because I'm having to contirually take a knee, my Fury is low and I take more damage and use more endo during the next fight. I finally bought some Endo Procs and that helped, but running IO's, /Shield is not the great. /Willpower I ran to 50 and it started out wonderful. But then it peaked about mid-20's. It still ran much better than /SR, but not as predictable in running away. /WP has a weird balancing point with wanting more mobs, but not as high a level. I also felt that /WP's lower +DEF meant that if I started taking damage massive, I wasn't going to recover. Unlike /SR, you aren't going to get as lucky and you don't have the rising +RES to try and risk getting lucky. So overall, better play experience and slightly better output. But..../SR with Elude would blow away /WP's survivability with its T9. I actually feel /WP's T9 is one of the least effective I don't have scrapper experience with Bio. /Rad is definitely better than /SR sans Elude. It's almost as good as /Regen leveling up. Without Elude, I suspect /SR would be dead last on SO's. EDIT: Oh wait, if you're talking +4 AV's, /SR will probably the the swingiest. You can die in two hits, or you might survive until Elude drops. EDIT EDIT: Mistakenly thought Phalanx was per enemy, instead of per teammate.

Yeah, it actually is until you reach the cap. The difference between 90% DEF mitigation and 95% DEF mitigation is probably far greater than all the +RES, Heal, and +Regen you can get from Set IOs. If you have 1400 hit points. 90% mitigation gives you an effective health of 14,000 hit points. If you add 5% more +DEF and get to 95% mitigation, your effective health goes to 28,000 hit points. That's right. Simply adding Weave to get you from 40% +DEF to 45% +DEF provides as much mitigation as everything you've done to get to 40%. Weave is waaaaaaaay more effective for a /SR and /Shield than Tough. I witnessed this first hand. I used to run a scrapper test with some Incarnate mobs and invite scrappers and brutes to come test it out.. A Katana/SR was able to clear a 4x8 mob of incarnates without without too much difficulty. I had her turn off Tough and she still cleared it without much of a difference. Than I had her turn back on Tough and turn off Weave. She died in like 15 seconds. She couldn't clear the spawn without Weave. No other power pools made a difference. Again, if you can cap +DEF or +RES, adding different types of mitigation is the only way to improve. Now the irony is that I don't run Tough or Weave on my /SR. I actually wanted to diversify my mitigation as you suggest. But my lack of Weave makes it hard to fight Incarnates at 4x8...and it's one of the few times that Elude is actually really helpful. I can still do 4x8 Cimaroreans on my /SR, but it's a roller coaster. And my lack of Tough makes it hard for me to weather +2 or higher AVs.

Actually, it's not. What /SR does is get you close enough to the +DEF cap that it's comparatively the easiest set to cap +DEF with +DEF not coming from /SR. It's far more than that if you start fighting up. A +4 AV is capped at around 10% to hit you. And that's capped with both -To Hit and +DEF. As an /SR, you aren't gong to do enough damage to a +4 AV to survive that. This goes back to the "I win" equation. The simplified form: Time for your hit points to go to 0 = A Time for your opponents hit points to go to 0 = B If A>B ....I win. You'd be surprised how often an AV can string two hits together and flatline a scrapper. What's worse, /SR's passive +RES is worthless against AV type hits. /SR's Quickness isn't going to up your damage output enough to survive getting hit 1 every 10 attacks from +AV type of damage. Especially when /SR doesn't have any natural heal. In addition, you'd run out of endurance. So with /SR, you have to build massive +RES or massive +Heal or +Regen. And if the damage is Toxic or Psi, you're +DEF isn't helping you either. Contrast that with my SM/Regen at 50 and he only has a single endurance mod in QR and Stamina, and Endurance is never an issue. No endurance procs needed. So for /SR to compete at the +4 layers, you need a bunch of extra stuff on top of capped +DEF. But the good news for /SR is that you can get it. You can easily cap +DEF and then go out and grab a bunch of +RES S/L. I met a DM/SR the other night who said he had +47% RES to Psi in his 900m INF build. So what was CF saying? Again, that's true in engineering, it's not true in CoH. The best defense is the one that gives you the best value for A. Adding 25% +DEF with 25% +RES, is not better than adding 25% +DEF with +25% +DEF. In CoH, because there's a cap, and because of the way the +DEF and +RES work, adding more of the same is better than adding the same of the other. In fact, if you have 40% +DEF, adding another 5% +DEF is going to double your survival time. Adding 20% +RES, is not going to double your survival time. Now, once you're at the soft cap, you need to start adding other forms of mitigation. Mathematically, +RES and +Regen work better together than +DEF. In fact, the more +DEF you have, the less benefit you get from adding +RES and +Regen, but it's still better than adding nothing. I will admit that back on Live I petitioned the devs to add +RES to /SR similar to what CF is arguing. A certain person, whose name I will not mentioned, insisted that what /SR needed was more +DEF. The reason why she argued this is becase of what I said. More +DEF on +DEF is better than adding something else. She wanted /SR to get closer to the cap unaided. I wanted something that worked when +DEF did not as I felt that if /SR needed more +DEF, you can hit Elude. The devs obviously agreed with me, but they had their own twist of scaling +RES (something I had not aruged for). Unfortunately the way the scaling resist work, it still leaves a massive hole to AV hits. I would have rather it give you +RES equivalent to what it would have left you at, now what you are at now. I do believe the Scaling +RES makes /SR much more playable and survivable for normal content. There were no iTrials or Incarnates mobs back when they did this change. I still think /SR needs more Quality of Life improvements for 1-30. Having to take a knee after every fight for 30+ levels is lame. A the top end, I think it's fine.

I'm glad it helped. When you read forums opinions, you need to keep in mind the context under which those opinions are offered and whether that applies to your situation. Are you planning on doing 4x8 solo? If not, then a lot of what people post on here will be inaccurate.

The irony of this statement is that it's 100% correct, but not for /Regen, but for a set like /SR and to some extent /Shield. It's precisely because you can get /SR or /Shield or other sets to the +DEF or +RES cap via Set IOs, INF, Incarnates, and Power Pools that people think those sets are the best sets. /Regen is one of the few sets the it's really hard to hit either the +RES cap or the +DEF cap, and /Regen's reputation suffers accordingly. And if anyone out there doubts this. Go solo 4x8 solo one of the TFs where you can disable Incarnates, Set IOs, Inspirations (Heck keep your Power Pools). Then you'll really find out how true this statement is. /SR is way worse than /Regen when you aren't capping and when you don't have Set IO's fixing your endurance issues. I haven't found /Shield to be much better. Of course if you're hitting Sappers or fighting sets with lots of Defense Debuffs, then /SR does better.

I actually don't think /Regen needs a boost. Not because it doesn't have weaknesses, but because those weakness are intentional. All sets should have aspects of combat that they more or less suck at. And even with -Recharge, /Regen's big time powers are still functional. Dull Pain, IH, and MoG are not meant to be fired off multiple times in a single combat. So all the crying about -Recharge only comes up when you're fighting an AV...assuming it is hitting you with -recharge, or you're doing some repeated waves. In both those instances, you are expected to have teammates. The only debuff that I think is probably more substantial than intended might be -To Hit vs soloing +2 EBs or tougher when running solo. But then I haven't been running Focused Accuracy or Targeting Drone on my /Regen's, so it's not like I don't have options. I will concede that when you do 4x8, even on teams, if you aren't getting some type of +DEF or +RES buff, and you think you are a tank, your reaction time to hit DP or MoG or Recon is substantially reduced. Compared to a scrapper at the RES or DEF cap, /Regen is going to look like it under performs. But the flip side is that it's easier to get a lot of +DEF or +RES in teams than it is to get a lot of +Regen. If you're already flooring someone's To HIt, getting more +DEF doesn't do anything. So at the 50+ game when everyone is already capped, /Regen is getting more out of teaming. But if you aren't capping, you have to be really careful about taking Alphas from 4x8....and that's why /Regen gets a bad reputation.

Your words not mine. You can of course try and walk them back if you think that will tangentially prove that /Regen sucks. At this point you're just trolling. No one said Brutes had trouble maintaining Fury. You keep trying to throw out straw man arguments. I said you can't maintain Fury when you're recovering health. You don't maintain Fury will taking a knee. You don't maintain Fury while "resting all the time." I've never had to "rest all the time" with any of my /Regens scrappers playing solo and fighting stuff I was at leas hitting 65% of the time.. I'll let you do the math. If /Regen sucks for you, then I don't know what to tell you.

If you think that's a valid response, then you do you.

It's not a "constraint." It's how you benchmark. It's how you compare apples to apples. Power Pools and Set IO bonuses don't benefit all sets equally. The devs on Homecoming even acknowledged that. In order to understand that dynamic, you need to understand how the sets perform naked. Tough and Weave are not part of any Scapper secondary. They are entirely elective and not part of any requirement to level up a Scrapper. If you can't accept any comparative data on Secondaries because they don't include Tough and Weave and Performance Shifter, that's entirely your prerogative. But by telling you how played the sets I am at least giving you the information to decide.

I kept the picture because I think it aptly applies to your response. No, the Brute is not ahead. When you start the first encounter, mission, the Brute has no Fury. The scrapper is doing more damage. After the first or second spawn, the Brute takes a knee and is back to 0 Fury. The Brute never gets ahead becuase in both my situation and Aetheral's we are describing a situation where we both had to stop to recover health. So every singe time that happens the Scrapper is doing more damage. Eventually the scrapper starts to crit and that continues to widen the gap. Whether or not that applies to this situation, that's not what you're doing. And this is where the *facepalm* applies. This situation isn't accurately understood through DPS. I'll try to prove this to you tangentially, but I'm not sure it'll stick. The Live devs used a formula to determine that stats on each attack. It considers Damage and Endurance cost. On Live, someone figured out that big hitters like ET don't follow the formula. Why? Because the devs recognized the asymmetrical benefits of front loaded damage. To spell it out, there are asymmetrical benefits to scrapper having a higher base damage and crits that front load damage. These benefits are amplified when the Brute cannot build Fury. Those benefits translate into a Scapper killing faster, taking less damage, and using less endurance. You can refuse to accept that because your average numbers tell you something different. I'm okay with that.

1. What the sets can do independent of Power Pool and Set IOs and Incarnates is 100% relevant to someone asking about leveling from 1-50, than what is possible at 50+ with 200m build. I will point out, once again, that Scrapper discussion are routinly distorted by what people do at 50+ as if that's the only thing that matters or counts. It's not. I actually tend to lose interest at 50 and spend more time playing alts than playing my 50's. I doubt I'm alone. 2. I have no invisible rules. I am disclosing the circumstances under which I am evaluating the sets so that each reader can decide if those circumstances are representative of how they will play the game. This is in contrast to the vast majority of posters who act like their individual build or their individual experience at lvl 50+ should be the basis of judging the entire set. It's pretty ridiculous when you recognize it for what it is. If you want to solo from 1-50 and don't want to bankroll a tune, IME, /Regen is one of the better sets. I have no idea how it compares to other sets if you put in 100m by lvl 20 or 30. Just like I don't know how the sets compare if you have a dedicated bubbler on your team. What I see is people who can't make /Regen work at soloing 4x8 at lvl 50+ and they want to insist the set is trash in all circumstances.

I think you're missing the point. When the scrapper crits and kills on that first shot, the Brute cannot catch up. There is no negative crit that balances out getting crits. Every time the scrapper crits and gets a one-shot kill with ET, that mob is no longer doing damage and no more attacks are needed. That means the scrapper takes less damage and uses less endurance. Both myself and Aether are having to pause to recover health on our Brutes. So a Brute is not maintaining Fury. And that 10-15 seconds to build it up is not insignificant. The Scrapper is doing full damage right from the start and any lucky crits cumulativelyskew the endurance saving and damage avoidance in the Scrapper's favor.

That I would be resting more as a scrapper due to Endurance or Health. The faster I can kill mobs, the less damage I take and the less endurance I use up. Be the 40's, Brutes can get enough defense to not rest. But if you're fighting +2/+3s, you're taking damage and having to rest, and that lowers your Fury and makes you less effective on the next spawn. The sets do not play the same below 50+. As you approach 50, it becomes more about your build than the set.