Duckbutler

You're coming up a little short on the defense softcaps of 45. I only see one of the two 3% defense globals. Getting the other would push melee over and get the others to within one good set bonus of soft capping.

Just when you think you have a good handle on the game's mechanics, you learn something new. I had read the bit in the wiki about attuning purple sets being actively harmful because you lose the ability to boost them. I didn't realize the set bonus doesn't function like other set bonuses and you get it at all levels. I'll have to rethink my aversion to using purple sets, although they are still super expensive!

When I was playing my Invuln/Staff tanker, there was a similar tradeoff with staff mastery. At first I was switching between the endurance and the resistance stances. Eventually endurance problems worked themselves out and now I sit in the resistance stance all the time. If I start getting endurance drained and running into problems I'll switch it back. I think that's just how stance mechanics tend to play out in reality rather than the stance dancing people imagine when they see the mechanic.

Yes, brutes and tanks love the set. It started as a brute set and then got proliferated out somewhere in the mid teen's, issue-wise. The only reason scrappers wouldn't like it as much as the others is because of the general bias towards defense over resist sets due to the lower resist caps. Otherwise it's very durable, has good utility, and a damage aura! There's a lot to like here. A tank or brute with electric armor is on my bucket list. Unfortunately I haven't come up with a character using it that I truly want to play, mostly due to limited time and other character concepts getting my attention. I also haven't found a melee set I want to pair with it. There's something about electric melee that's not quite right to me. Interesting tidbit, the resistance you get from your secondary on a scrapper is identical to the resistance a brute gets. The only difference is they have a higher cap and slightly higher base HP (much larger HP cap).

I need to give the build a pass on this next time I'm on. I was sucking a lot of wind on a Penelope Yin TF last night. Then again, that TF with the Freakshow is particularly punishing in that regard.

This is kinda where I've come to with Hasten. It's never bad, pretty much any build except the more passive mastermind builds can be made better with it. It just isn't necessarily worthwhile if you aren't getting it at least close to perma. I'll have to see what I can do to get it closer, but not-quite-perma hasten may be the price of refusing purples. Attack chain logic, in general, not necessarily here, seems weird. There was a thread about calculating the recharge necessary for a smooth chain and it really seemed to be advocating for a 123-123-123 type chain. I've always played this game as a priority system, 3>2>1, and maybe skip the big hit if the attack is something slow like axe's Cleave, the mob is at 10% health, and the attack is likely to ghost when someone else hits the target. My fire blast corruptor skips hasten and doesn't chase global recharge. She ends up taking Flares, which I think most people will tell you to skip, and her single target attack chain is 4 attacks, often falling into a rhythm where she's alternating the weak attacks as filler in between the bigger attacks. But she's never idle and she's never forced to use an AoE as ST filler. Before I came here I was hanging out with the speedrunners and parsers over on FFIXV. Let me just tell you it is... a shift. Very different mindsets and standards.

I'm sorry, I misspoke. I meant to ask if procs deactivate more than 3 levels below their natural level and not to imply I thought Force Feedback was a global. I just swapped it for a damage proc, which might suit my purpose just as well. Hasten is more conserve power, build up, shield charge, and just going harder on the attack chain. I feel like if I'm going to skip the T1 I'm probably going to want it and I'm probably not going to want much downtime on it. The guy on the brute forum was saying beheader was strictly inferior to chop and while I haven't crunched the numbers on axe, every other T1 vs T2 analysis I've done has shown the T1 powers to be about 75% as strong as the T2 powers, so I believe him. I think you have the right idea with One with the Shield. It's not something I'm going to hit very often (I think I hit it once all weekend) and the resistance is superfluous once set bonuses are added. That may as well be a mule. I might have to steal the slotting on the Scirocco's Dervish set and go ahead with the full LotG sets, too. Looks like we agree on Obliteration for Shield Charge and 2x Mako's! So that's a win.

Kick will get used when I exemp down for something like Posi 1 or if a buddy wants to run Frostfire, that's why I took it at level 4 despite not taking the other fighting powers until 47/49. I figure it won't matter if I've slotted it out or not at that level, but it will matter if I only have one or two attacks and a big gap in the attack chain where I'm sitting on my hands. Optimization aside, that'll annoy me! The proc doesn't function like a set bonus the way globals do, does it?

There's a lot that can be sussed out before you start, especially if you tend to stick within an AT or set type. I like melee and all melee end up using the same two set types even when they put their own twist on it. And the sets have a certain amount of consistency across them. The bigger question tends to be what I want out of the character and whether I have a theme that is enjoyable and fun. I make brutes, don't invest much into them, want them to be both a tank and high damage, and then lose interest in the mid levels when I can't just ride Fury to victory anymore. The latest one I'm on the 4th iteration of the character, swapped AT to scrapper, dropped an aspect of the character concept that wasn't inspiring, and I've been pretty certain from level 1 what I'm doing on the current iteration of the character. But it also took me 4 iterations to get there.

The AoE on axe is fantastic, I haven't seen it that strong on any of the other sets I've played. I particularly like the draw in effect on cyclone for keeping everything bunched together when it's otherwise getting bashed around. I'm not making too many scrappers. I keep trying to make brutes happen and they all fizzle around 30. The few scrappers I do make tend to be more successful because I have a clearer idea what I want from the character.

This is my axe/shield scrapper so far and I'd like to know if I'm making any glaring mistakes in the build. The build goals are to softcap defense, crank global recharge, and then take a well rounded approach to adding durability. I'm pretty much happy with the power picks, though I could take or leave One with the Shield. Specifically, I'm looking at the placement of the scrapper ATOs. I'm also intentionally avoiding purples. True Grit and Phalanx Fighting are mostly carrying globals, and that seems like something that could be improved. I thought about mixing in the Winter enhancements and it didn't seem like I was getting a ton of mileage from replacing Multistrike with Avalanche, not as compared to the cost. Scrapper (Battle Axe - Shield Defense).mbd

Up to 17 it's been a problem but a completely manageable one with some wise use of inspirations and a good team. Putting in a little cash to pick up some attuned Power Transfer IOs for Stam at 17 helped. I've got a few others in my back pocket for when they become available. I'm thinking it's only going to get better from here because even though I've still got a lot of toggles to pick up, I have zero endurance reduction slotted and I should also be grabbing conserve power and physical perfection. I think had I not paid some early attention to Endurance, I'd probably be stalled out.

There's tons of options and tons of character slots so you can always tinker until you find something you like. I think some of the armor sets really take over the character concept and costume and Bio armor is one of those. I have yet to make one, despite how good everyone says it is, because I don't wanna play some sort of weird monster. I was already thinking of giving an axe/shield scrapper a go next weekend because my brutes all keep stalling in the mid levels. The problem I have then is I start looking at my weapon/shield characters and I start saying, "I can do this in any other of a dozen games that I love where it's more thematically in line with the game. What can I do here that I can't do there?"

I think this thread has gotten to the same placed I've gotten to with the set. It's fine, just not for everyone. Admittedly, I've been playing it on a brute rather than a tank and I don't even have foot stomp yet. Nor do I have the recharge to double stack rage. I just don't like the fact that I'm CC'ing myself for 10 seconds every time I cast it. If I'm double stacking that, casting it every minute, and only doing 1 damage per hit for 10 of every 60 seconds, that's going to annoy me more, not less. None of that is to say that the set doesn't work. With some (probably flawed) math, the numbers check out that double stacked rage is still a damage gain. I could very easily switch to Street Justice or Martial Arts for a similar theme/feel and I may do just that. This reminds me of the pacify on berserk for Warriors on FFXIV. They had their big damage cooldown and when it was done they had a 5 second time out, outright couldn't attack at all. That lasted for two iterations of the game before they decided it just wasn't an interesting mechanic and removed it.

My wife and I were talking about this last night when I turned Netflix on and it popped up. Remember that live action movie we got before that Lake Laogai wants you to forget about? Part of the reason it sucked so hard was it tried to condense all of season 1 into a two(?) hour movie. It pulled out all the filler. But the thing is, the filler is the real soul of the show. There's a lot of character building done there. A major part of Aang's character is that he's a kid. He's avoiding his duties that were thrust upon him unfairly by a world in crisis. Even as he learns to deal with that, he never stops having fun along the way. One of Aang's greatest strengths as a character is that he can find and create joy. That dance episode in season 3 where he teaches the Fire Nation kids to dance really drives that point home. The first time through, the plot is super compelling. Rewatching the original series for the nth time, it's not the plot that I love. The dramatic tension is gone, I know what's going to happen in the plot. It's those weird filler character episodes that let the cast shine. So I hope this new remake learned something from the movie.

After roughly 7 weeks back I think I'm at probably 150 million across all characters. I have one level 50 that got what she could at the time and another that got some real love. Everyone else gets by on common IOs until I decide I want to keep them. Building conservatively helped but then leaning into anything that generates merits even while leveling made a big difference!

I really want to like both of those sets and they do not like me back. At this point I've decided the breakup is mutual and it's time to move on.

Yeah, I think all the practical considerations are the real answer: you want a mix of both. Also, unless you're capped, more is always better despite the effective diminishing returns of additional +damage. If you can otherwise afford to take Assault in a build and that's part of your plan, it's still worth doing. For my part, getting into these mechanics also answered the question of why I barely felt the bonus damage from Blinding Feint on my Dual Blades Brute many years ago. From what I have been seeing on Dual Blades, BF is nevertheless still part of the ideal attack chain for the set because more damage is still a good thing and it's an attack, too.

I think Montecarla's got it right, just based on the research I was doing last week. A 35% resistance debuff should always result in a 35% increase in the damage taken. So if a target has a bajillion resistance and you're doing 10 damage after their resistance, apply the debuff and attack again, you should then be doing 13.5 damage. The caveat is that it refers back to the base resistance before the debuff, so if you and I are both attacking this enemy and apply that same debuff, instead of 13.5 we're now doing 17. In your example, I think it would lead to a hit of 135 damage.

Sometimes you have to let that sort of thing come out in play. It's true in tabletop RPGs where a complicated past might be cumbersome and it's true here. My main hero became a timecop because she spent so much time in the Hollows and then Ouroboros. My main villain had a team oriented build and a standing "villain night" group. She became an out of control party girl gone off the rails because... I wanted to put her in a pretty dress.

That's good to know, thanks! I've always thought it was weird that defense is balanced around how much enemies suck. If they stop sucking even a little bit it can result in a huge swing in actual damage taken. Like when you're fighting Nemesis and the LT goes down and you could have sworn that back on the live servers that's how you were supposed to do it....

I see stuff about the incarnate softcap being higher but I never see anyone offer a number. Is it because we don't know what it is or is it because it varies? I think I have been told that the enemies in places like Dark Astoria and iTrials buff each other. Separately, I wish resistance was better. It's more reliable than defense and I love that. It's just not generally as available and then you see the lower cap for most ATs and susceptibility to debuffs. Then it gets harder to argue on behalf of resistance, even though I love my invuln tanker.

The badges has the perk of unlocking the long range teleporter accolade, which is *extremely* useful. From then on, any zone in which you pick up an exploration badge will get you instant teleport access. Since I learned how easy this is I never leave Atlas Park without it. Everything else is optional, I think. If people haven't learned to roll DFB into Posi 1 and 2, they will very naturally be pulled towards running contacts. Just knowing that boosters, converters, and unslotters can all be competitive options to spend merits on is enough to keep them going. However, there is also value in demonstrating that a level 6 can earn 2.5 million, which is ample influence to build common IOs when the time comes.

I may borrow this. I always wanted an electric brute on the live servers because I thought they looked cool but it never worked for me. I may know where I was going wrong now in not picking up toughness until the late levels, if it was ever part of the plan at all. This resource was really helpful in looking at the set as a whole, too:

I really like that a) you made and posted both builds and b) that you're prioritizing the fix for Endurance. This is kinda sorta what I've been trying to do but since I'm only a month returned I'm still figuring a lot of it out.