Yomo Kimyata

I just took my 50 out for a spin, no incarnate stuff but pretty solid build for the meta about two years ago. I thought I would like this combo better than I do, but I think that's because I don't love the look and feel of stone melee. Endurance is always going to be a bugbear, even after you get Energy Absorption. EA is a great power, but it's awful against just one or two opponents since you don't get enough endurance back to keep running at 110% until it recharges. Using Icy Bastion as a doubleclick solves that problem, but it's not up all the time so you'll still have to slot out Health and Endurance sufficiently. I would think that Musculature T4 with endurance modification would help a lot as an Alpha.

I think we are seeing from the discussion of @battlewraith and @tidge that strong opinions are had both ways on this.

No, they should add some really nice 8 or 9 piece bonuses, and then people will lose their minds because they can't get them.

I do wish there was some sort of enforceable framework to make a lot of these self-imposed challenges stick. Not just, "eh, that death really didn't count" but more along the lines I run across old alts and rarely can remember exactly what challenge I was running with them and accidentally ruin it.

Tradeoffs exist in order to dissuade min-maxxers from zeroing in on one optimal framework. You can frankenslot to whatever you are looking for in particular. Example: generally, when I am looking at a standard defense power like Weave, where the two relevant enhancements are defense and endurance reduction, how I look at it will depend at least slightly on what is going on with the rest of my character. I find most of the defense set bonuses underwhelming, and I don't want to "waste" slots on a power to six-slot something like Reactive Defenses unless that character really could use a single example of that set bonus. So I usually go with LotG proc (attuned) and 2x lvl 53 Cyto. But not always. I remember a Energy Armor scrapper I had that simple had too many slots, so I found myself doing things like 5 slotting defense powers for a tiny tiny incremental bonus.

This is not what you are asking at all, but my favorite/best scrappers lean heavily into stun and knockdown and I let that influence my choices when playing other ATs as well.

That's actually not accurate! From my understanding (and testing) you can indeed get effective knockBACK from the OF proc. The way the proc works if I recall correctly is that it takes the inherent knockback/down value of the power and divides it by ten. Effectively, this reduces any value of knockback inherent to a power to under 0.75, which functions as knockdown. However, procs are additive with respect to knock*. I know from testing experience that when the Avalanche proc and the OF proc both trigger in a melee AoE, the knockdown value is over 0.75 or thereabouts and it will cause knockback rather than knockdown. I do not remember from my testing whether the order in which the procs are slotted affects this, but I don't think so. Also, you can get both knockup and knockback on a power, since they are different effects. This probably means you can get knockup and knockdown on a power, but I don't know how you would recognize that visually.

I think @Troo said it nicely in page 1 of this thread, and I will paraphrase, there are a lot of mini-games within this metagame. Some people find some aspects of some mini-games more enjoyable than others.

Spite.

This is generally why I tend to craft in bunches of 50 or 30. Honestly, I don't mind that this is a bit of a governor to slow down crafting slightly, but I do find it interesting that you get 150 salvage slots at level 5 (I didn't bother to look when I mentioned 30s earlier) but can only increase that to 200 at the max through pretty significant effort. That said, the ability for one character to hold, say, 500 or 1000 pieces of salvage would probably make it easier to manipulate the salvage market over the short term.

I think my progression with character play and development went something like this (no specific timeline): 1. (Re)discover game. Joy! Remake old characters, make new characters, play (mostly solo). 2. Learn more about the mechanics of the game (all hail @UberGuy) and try to make my existing characters better. 3. Learn even more about the mechanics and then get way into min-maxxing. Joy fades. 4. Try new ATs and power sets, rejecting them when they are not as good as what I have already developed. Alt list grows. 5. Take break from the game. 6. Stop using Mids or planning characters at all. Play at regular xp instead of zerging through levels. Joy builds a bit. Understand that good enough is good enough and even my crappiest level 50 is totally fine for any content that I want to play on a team, and is conditionally fine for anything I want to solo. Still a work in progress, but I still enjoy this game for now.

I've got a series of builds that only deal damage passively. They are hardly the most effective builds I have. Offensively, I prefer the Radiation Melee over Spines purely for Atom Smasher. They fixed Irradiated Ground a few patches ago (it was pulsing faster than it "should"), and I don't love that it is some sort of a pet rather than a true aura, but hey, I'm not picking nits here. Defensively, you've got a choice of Bio (very late aura), Dark, Electric, Fiery, Ice, Psionic, Stone. Some of these you can add psuedo-auras by putting in procs in various powers, and some of them you can probably justify as "aura"-like powers. I initially went Dark Armor, and that would probably still be my go-to for a project like this, but I haven't investigated Psionic Armor yet.

Replace Rage with Build Up and then you can port it to scrappers and stalkers.

Yup. You'll find that normal play is generally sufficient (by the mid 30s, you'll be around 150ish pieces of salvage), so you need to ask yourself is that extra 50 really worth the effort.

This is as good a place as any to declare that my singularity was renamed "Singularity" by the devs after someone apparently complained about "Your Mom."

Clear reference to the Ship of Theseus. Nice try, Minotaur! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

Well, I never!

Yes, but over 9000 of those missions are in the layer cake cave map.

Either Tim Night Shamalot, Humperdinck Bandersnatch, or Gordon Love-Hewitt.

I would have missed it in Discord, but I always trust your work and word!

Aw, I just came back to this character and now running at +4/x999 just gives you one character's worth of enemies at +5-6 instead of eight!

I have given up trying to figure out why the devs do what they do (except for buffing tanks, that's because they like them!), but if I were to guess this was a way of trying to make a "sleeper" mez more relevant. I can applaud that, and I'd like to see fear be worked on as well. The problem is, of course, is that holds are still the gold standard in mez, just like defense is the gold standard in protection. What else can be done? I would personally like to see new sleep and fear sets with interesting effects be introduced. Maybe make some enemies immune to certain types of mez, but then you run the risk of people gatekeeping their teams (MUST HAVE SLEEP, pst)l Sleep is killer for solo players. One thing I always do is slot a Call of the Sandman proc into AoE Sleep powers. A 15% heal that goes off nearly every time in saturated environments? Yes please. This is one of the reasons why I like Ice Melee so much...

I usually level organically, and an attack from the Fighting Pool really does help in levels 4 or 6 to 10 or 12 (throw an accuracy in it). I choose Kick mostly because I like the looks of it. There are so many punching animations that are boring, and the kick animation actually seems to have your leg elongate slightly. The chance for knockdown is not insignificant while this is in the rotation. And even at higher levels (when I sometimes put the knockback proc +recharge in it) there is a certain satisfaction to killing an AV with a kick.

Both. I played almost nothing but scrappers for a long time, and every one ended up more or less the same. Like Ukase, every one had: Combat Jumping, Kick (so much better than Boxing!), Tough, Weave, Hasten. Those were just the best powers I could put together for a +4/x8 solo build. And they all did well, but some a little better than others.