marcussmythe

Don't have a full Pines build laid out here, but what I'm kicking around in my head - KM/Invuln, drop Concentrated Strike (week long animation, nocrit), and MAYBE Quick Strike (maybe), run BB, SB, and FB as my builders for Assassins Focus (could be convinced to put QS back in if the gentle reader thinks it will make a big difference) Grab Dark Blast and Moonbeam. Use Moonbeam (with instant-in-combat snipe changes on test), Dark Blast, and Focused Strike to give a ranged attack chain, use Moonbeam to be the 'crit from stealth' power (higher damage than Focused Burst, and Concentrated Strike is, again, nocrit). Alternate lyrics version goes Mu, for Mu Bolts, Zapp, and Ball Lightning - gives more AOE - but Zapp is hilariously bad compared to Moonbeam for $reasons. Far from optimized, I know - but Ive always had a soft spot for flying, energy blasting, stealth, bricks - but hilariously bad? Or just 'well, its not StJ/Bio' bad?

Kinetic - try it out. Youll love the animations or hate them. Mathmatically the set is kinda middle of the road. Suffers from a 1 week animation time on its best attack, witb all the attendant problems. Poor AOE. StJ - Very good damage, Single target with some AOE, very pretty animations. If you want your hands to glow, get an aura for it. Dark - Very high utility - the heal is attractive espc. for an invuln. Weak AOE.

The Brute Base damage modifier is quite low for a 'damage dealing' AT, it is simply leveraged across the massive bonus supplied by Fury. This has some unusual knock-on consequences - External Damage Buffs, or Debuffs, have a much smaller impact on a brute, inasmuch as most characters baseline around +100% Damage (from Enhancements) while the Brute is usually at around +250% or so (75% Fury, Enhancements).

If you set it to minimum fx, you only get a brief flash from the crapace powers, and some glowies from you adaptations that can be tuned down. Dropping back a second, and specific to TW/Bio - I wonder how much damage the Brute version gives up? You lose crits, Fury will be lower without a mob swarming you, and Bioarmor gives a smaller bonus to Brutes - but at the same time, you gain a pile of HP, a smoother leveling process, and the Bio Brute is wearing 90% Smash/Lethal Resist.

Some powersets that give damage buffs (Shield, Bioarmor I know) give a larger buff to Scrappers than they do to Brutes - I anticipate that the Scrapper will ultimately do more damage. Given the Brute’s advatage in hit points, res cap, aggro, and leveling smoothness (fury is huge in the early going) the fact that its close enough to even have a conversation lends clarity to why Brutes are such a popular Melee AT.

Let me know how it works for you. My perception on mine (again - Brute version) is that the character is nigh unkillable while a fully saturated PA is up, due to the combination of resist, defense, and regen - barring a full scale cascade collapse.

Take all of Bioarmor.

-nods- Valid points, and an excellent defense of Bioarmor as the ‘best of the bunch’ set. Id guess our differences go to ‘early vs late bloomer’, ‘set and forget vs decision making’, and ability to handle defense cascade collapse (though shield will require an incarnate to get -really- tough against this - which does raise the attention requirement). This is likely a product of playstyle and main levels played at - you may finish and IO characters more often than I. An aside, have you tested the additional toxic damage component of offensive stance? It seems to be ~22% of base (ignore brawl, something is strange with brawl and that toxic component), with that ~22% entirely separare from and in addition to the 30% raw damage bonus from Offensive Adaptation. RE: Parasitic Aura - Ive noticed that you tend to slot it more lightly than I do. I tend to run a 4 or 6 slot PA, heavy on heal (regen) and recharge. My recollection is around 50% uptime, with +Regen numbers that seemed to challenge WP (though again, only while up). Holes in this uptime get plastered over with careful timing of the other two clickies, or incarnates. My main Bioarmor is a Brute - so perhaps Im more incentivized to chase the regen.

I find it the best general case scrapper set for the below reasons: 1.) A large damage buff via AAO (larger than the bonus of Gooo BIOARMOR!) without a resistance hit. Situational (requires a crowd), but that is a common situation. 2.) A powerful, built in AOE. Additional AOE is always handy, and this either stacks towards specializing an AOE focused character, or supplanting the AOE of bad sets. 3.) Positional defense, which is superior to typed defense, inasmuch as it is simpler to enhance with IOs (many IOs offer large positional bonuses and a pair of smaller typed bonuses), and lacks the glaring Psi (and Toxic) hole present in most defense sets. 4.) Defense Debuff resistance, valuable on mixed-mitigation sets (rather than on pure defense sets, where it is expected), and a fair amount of it, once you start stacking active defense. 5.) 3 powers that while addiing value are also easily skipped... saving you 3 power choices if desired. 6.) Phenomenal return on a tiny slot investment. Before you pursue set bonuses, the set is seeing most of its performance with 9 total slots added to Deflection, Battle Agility, and True Grit - you can cut this to ~5~ added slots if you use 50+++++ IOs... 17.6% Positional Defense and the same resist to all but psi for 3 powers and 9.. or 5.. slots? Yes, please, thank you.

An Enhancement increases what the power does, not the base value on the sheet. So, lets assume a power that gave 20% defense against melee. And its the only power you have. Turn it on, your melee defense is now 20%. Slap an enhancement worth 30% in it, and that 20 becomes 26. Turn the power on, your defense is now 26. There are diminishing returns on enhancing a given aspect of a power. If you slapped 6 of those 30% enhancements in the power, it would not buff the power to 56% - in fact, more like 40%, or 39%. The general rule of thumb is that enhancements much past 3 even level SOs, or 2 lvl 55 IOs, is almost entirely wasted.

For -pure- damage out, at 50, with incarnates and dream IOs, aingle target (and maybe AOE) TW/Bio. But thats a long list of assumptions, and your taking a reistance hit, and the only reason it does better than /Shield is because of TW, and because TW really loves IOs. For a general case scrapper with ‘thats not right’ damage combined with serious survability and fun playability from a much lower level, Id say Dark/Shield or Fire/Shield. Shield is strongly the best scrapper secondary in the general case.

My attempt to use ‘chance for knockdown’ in Rain of Fire was totally underwhelming. I knew not to anticipate an Ice Patch level of slip and slide - though once can dream - but what I got was no noticed knockdowns at all in play. No doubt some minion in some group fell down once - but I did not notice. The KB to KD seems to give much more value - Im sending some to the Energy Blaster in my SG.

“Which I never respeced out of” Yannow, I wish I had thought of that at the time.

Kinetic/Invuln, picking up two ranged attacks from pools and going for an odd hybrid between Stalker and Sentinel - close to melee to do more damage (assassin focus stacks) or hover up and play blaster. Prob not ‘good’, but fun.

My main is a Spines/Bio Brute. Shes basically done (4/4/4/3/3/3) and I still spend a lot of playtime on her because its so much fun. The layers of stance-dancing and deciding when to use your three clickies keep it from getting boring, but its solid enough that Im not stressed unless Im pushing the envelope. Id make different choices on incarnates if I did it all over (the resistance to debuff one looks better and better!) and I still have some problems with +3 AVs... but its just so much fun that I cant make myself care.

War Mace has been an underrated set since forever. I believe the magic was when rechave hit the point that Clobber was up so often. And yes, I admire its simplicity. Many of the best DPS results we see here rely on a long attack chain, careful timing, and other micro tricks. Warmace? Hit stuff. Stuff falls down. Would be both pretty and strong and fall-asleep-at-keyboard simple to make it shine in general plah with a shield. I now have a ‘War Priest’ character concept. Dammit.

Thats a combination of things: AOE is almost always good. Single target is rarely of great value, usually only a big deal when trying to best an AVs regeneration. Most AOE sets push sufficient single target, the reverse is not the case. Many single target focused sets are release sets, and release sets have aged poorly. Later implented sets pay more attention to AOE performance (developers learn) Some single target sets got clubbed in the early ‘balance downward’ days, or released during the ‘balance downward’ era.

Now I want to put the Taunt Damage Proc in invincibility...

Several sets - Stone and Invuln leap to mind - show strongly the ‘we dont balance for IOs’ aspect of development. They show very well in an SO environment. To some degree I think this is true of the Tanker Archetype more broadly - its strengths show best before IOs and set bonuses are involved.

Neat, but unless it drained max HP rather than just HP, youve just ensured that EM only gets used with WP, Bio, and maybe DA and Regen.

I second SJ/WP Wrasslin. Scrapper or Brute, great on both. WP works quite well at endgame. Being a mixed mitigation set (Resist, Defense, and Regen) its a very good chassis for building set bonuses onto.

The proc works on all attacks, I can confirm this in testing from above that I've had the proc fire off a fresh Build Up on pretty much every attack in my chain at some point. Edited to specify this: I had the Build Up proc in Concentrated Strike, and my final run I didn't use the ability at all and relied purely on natural BU recharge and proc refreshes. I had plenty of moments in there with double stacks BU effects. So, for best DPS, dont use the best attack in the set. Thats a problem with the set design - suggest that we should lose the 'no crit refresh buildup' for just 'crit' on Concentrated Strikes RE: Quick Strikes - maybe since its a CHANCE to add assassins focus, the superfast recharge and animation on Quick Strike is hurting our chances?

Essentially trading TWs AOE and good CC for not needing to manage Momentum and an energy damage component? Yeah, thats what EM was for. Best single target and lack of worries.

Id love to see some confirmed data on the use of HOs, slipped into powers that provide debuff resistance, to increase that debuff resistance. -sigh- I need to play around on Justin...

Assuming equivalent power set choices (the powerset is available to both, and the Stalker version loses nothing you will terribly miss) play a Stalker. You may find in some instances the Stalker version is a straight upgrade of its Scrapper Cousin (notable invuln).