Rumors

1. If memory serves right from someone's math, Brutes out-damage Scrappers at low level, but on most sets Scrappers pull ahead once Build Up and SOs come online and they tend to stay ahead. Brutes typically only out-do Scrappers on like... double Kinetics teams. Brutes are tankier though. Brutes also tend to have taunt auras in stuff where Scrappers don't, which can be detrimental if you DON'T want to hold aggro. Brutes also have a crippling weakness to waiting and patience. Their biggest threat is anything AFK related. 2. The Defender will have a stronger Rad set in nearly every respect except Fallout and EM Pulse's damage, AFAIK. Its Electric attacks, while weaker, will drain more endurance. Scourage is also fairly unreliable in most circumstances except really tough targets. Like, if you can Scourge a minion consistently, then you're probably not hitting hard enough to begin with. In general, there are some sets where Corrupters are much better than Defenders and vice versa. 4. Bio Armor definitely can do a lot of damage and stuff. Not much experience with the set, but it apparently takes a lot of investment to get to running Offensive Adaptation constantly comfortably? Even then, most other sets bring different utility to the table or can survive things Bio cannot or are much cheaper and easier to get to their peak or require less power picks, etc. 6. Broadsword still hits really hard and can still deal respectable damage. It might not be the highest DPS, but it has some utility to make up for it. Katana really does outshine it though. :/ Except with Shield, Kat/Shield is not possible. Your Defender would most likely do less damage, yes, but again, stronger buffs/debuffs/heals as the trade-off. Sonic Attack is really strong on a Defender, but less good on other ATs (although not bad). It lacks some things though, like a Snipe. It's also not great at AoE. Dunno Beam much, but from my understanding it's mostly/purely single target where AR has multiple cone options.

If my understanding is correct, Stalkers have much better single target damage with Savage Melee. But they lose Rending Flurry, which is an excellent AoE attack with very wide range at five stacks and recharges really quickly, making it good for mowing stuff down. Although that's really a trend in Stalker versus Scrapper in general. Stalkers tend to trade an AoE attack for Assassin's Strike. Although some Stalker sets benefit more from that trade than other. I wanna say Savage might be better on a Brute than Scrapper due to the fast recharge nature would be good for Fury building, I imagine, but I've seen Brutes complaining about the set pretty hard so... shrug. BS is pretty outclassed, but I think Scrappers run it better than Brutes do, if memory from Live serves me right, such because of the cooldowns.

Would it count as a gear check to make note of a preference of a certain role for LFG? Like "Looking for the Forum TF, room for 2, support preferred." I mean, I'd like someone to be there to save us if things go south in the content, but if I wound up with myself and seven Blasters in that situation anyway then I wouldn't worry too much about it and would roll with it. ...although I've been thinking about "gear-checking" for Incarnate-less TFs, make sure everyone has them entirely unslotted. But not sure that's what people are complaining about!

Okay, so, Kaeladin's recent post inspired me to just say screw my wrist and investigate my curiosities. ...and I also realized I can just navigate with my right hand and then just click my powers instead of using my left hand >.> So, I threw together a quick build to test Hemmorage, Shred, and Waterspout with Savage. I think Kael's post is proof enough that Hemmorage at 5 stacks all the time = bad, which is what I suspected, but is kinda sad. But there was still a few other things I wanted to check out. So, I threw together a quick (and very bad) build with all the powers on it (to eliminate possible variables from differing enhancement bonuses). Used Savage/Regen, since A) Regen has no offensive benefit and B) ...well, my main is Savage/Regen. I did not slot any procs save for Achilles -Res on Shred and Waterspout to remove possible randomness from proccing (and to really tank my times, I imagine). Only used T4 Spiritual Core (to perma-haste since my build is bad) and T4 Hybrid Core Passive (no toggle, just passive) to speed things up a little. No other incarnate powers. Build ran Assault and Hasten, but no other pool powers to boost damage. My build is really, really bad, so these times won't be great. Heck, my main's times are better But, the point is to compare individual powers with as few variables as possible. So, for baseline, used attack chain of Vicious > Main > Savage > micro gap while using Blood Thirst on CD. I was a little inefficient at the start, so could probably shave a few seconds or so off of 8:24. I think Vicious > Savage > Maim > Savage would have done much better, or if I had a little more recharge to remove the gap but, eh, no biggie. So Kael's test showed using Hemmorage at 5 stacks all the time resulted in lower DPS. But what about Hemmorage > Bloodthirst whenever the latter is about to come off CD? This would get the DOT while maintaining 5 stacks. Using same chain as above with that thrown in, and doing things more efficiently, my time came to... 8:38. Actually worse despite not being thrown off from different recharge times than on the normal servers. So... Hemmorage is either a DPS drop regardless it seems. :/ Or, assuming a change of the base chain affects things for it, might be DPS neutral at best. Okay, now Shred! Is it worth using it with resistance debuff procs? It can take up to two at once, but the second one is not identical to the second one Waterspout takes, so I only used Achilles in both to remove potential varibles. So, the chain here was Vicious > Main > Shred first attempt and second attempt was Vicious > Shred > micro gap. What were the results? Did the Achilles debuff give a massive boost to damage? Would this make my poor, lazy, half-assed build actually do decently? Well... 1st attempt: 13:03 (Probably closer to 12 since the Dropship made me pop Moment of Glory three times) 2nd attempt: Gave up at around 7:50 with the Pylon at ~50% HP. Looked like it'd be a 16-18 minute run. ...yeah, Shred is awful for single target damage. Even with the proc, it's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad. Using both -Res procs ought to be an improvement, but I doubt it'd be a 4+ minute improvement, especially since I'd have to unslot an enhancement giving stats to the move. And even if I did that, I could take three of Shred's slots to put them into the single target attacks for procs or more stats/bonuses, which ought to give a good boost to the original time. ...yes, the ST attacks in this build are only 5-slotted. Shred is probably still worthwhile if you can nail multiple targets. But, we can't squeeze multiple Pylons together to test AoE damage so... dunno! Ooookay, so, what about Waterspout with the -res debuff? So far, everything's pointing to "just use the basic three attacks for ST only". Is this true? Is this the only way to do things when it comes to big, beefy targets that Savage encounters? Well... 7:21 Hoooray, an improvement by about a minute over the original time! Yes, my first time was a little inefficient, but I didn't know the best time to pop Spout in my chain, so there's probably improvements to be made here too. And this is only with an Achilles, it too can also take a second -Res proc. As far as Pylon times go, Waterspout is by far the superior option, especially if you can somehow squeeze enough recharge in your build to keep it up all the time (I had around ~15-20 seconds downtime). For other situations though, Waterspout might not be so viable for general use since it might go chasing minions, knock things away, or whatever else. Still though, if your AV is cooperative, it could be useful for AV soloing. There's still one thing I wanna test, but I need to stop and go do other things. But basically, I'm wondering if Blood Thirst's activation time might be causing the move to be DPS-neutral or a DPS-drop. I mean, even if it is, it's still good for alpha strikes or doing double maxed Rending Flurries for clearing crowds in a pinch. But, definitely need to compare my time to alpha-only and maybe Blood Thirst + Gaussian proc.

I believe it'll shut down minions on its own, but nothing higher (in most cases). Oppressive Gloom does the same thing there for much less endurance cost, albeit at a later level and a cost of your APP/PPP pick. You can also stack it with Screech for quick stuns on most bosses. But really it's up to you and your playstyle. And partly depends on your APP/PPP pick. It's a useful power, but hardly essential.

I can definitely understand the sentiment of wanting to see the set by itself on its lonesome. But, not to be uh... rude or confrontational or anything, but it seems like a weird place to draw the line at APP/PPPs when, in your videos, you were using Hasten, Assault, Quickness, and Incarnate passives. Not to mention all the set-bonuses that come from non-SM powers. I think at that point APPs/PPPs are all fair game since you have everything else any primary can have. And I went into Waterspout since... in best case scenario, Shred you have to continously activate to get its -Res debuffs and it's a long, slow attack, so much that you're way overslotted for recharge in your Hemmorage-less videos versus 'Spout having roughly same up-time from pseudo-pet ticks while you do other things. Worst case, Shred's low cooldown means it's harder to maintain the -Res debuffs due to PPM while Waterspout pretty much applies them 100% of the time for a looooot less animation time over the course of a fight. You use Shred for your debuff, you use it a loooooot, and its low DPA/S may potentially be negating the usefulness of the proc over a naturally stronger ST chain. Especially since Shred is going to be affected by the "area factor" that reduces its PPM since it's a cone. (Waterspout is affected too, but seems like less of a big deal since you fire it and then it does it's thing instead of needing a recast every 5 seconds.) Mind, I'm not 100% sure what the superior option is since there's frustratingly little information on how current PPM works in any real detail and Paragon Wiki's equations are probably outdated. I'll try to make note of looking into it myself whenever my wrist stops being a dick lest someone beats me to it.

If I understand right, Waterspout is a pseudo-pet with a 30 second duration and a rather long recharge (not 100% sure how PPM works with pseudo-pets, but, at worst, the Spout would be attempting to proc on its own while you do other things). It also only has a ~1.3 second cast time. Shred has a cast time of 2.3 seconds, which is enough time to use both Maiming and Savage Strike and is slightly faster than Savage + Vicious (before lag and server time), and you're using it constantly. And since it has a muuuuch shorter recharge, you have to use it constantly to reliably proc. I think you might be spending too much time animating Shred to get the same value from it as in Waterspout or a lot of other -Def powers in other sets It's also about the same cast time as Blood Thirst (which REALLY needs to be dropped down to Build Up's cast time), which you can easily have up 50% of the time before you even touch set bonuses or Blood Frenzy. I'm not sure on the duration for Achillies or Fury procs or how much uptime is possible on them in PPM, however. I'm not super mathy on this game, but I think if you're going to utilize the -res debuff procs in Savage, you might be better using Waterspout from Leviathan for them and running different melee powers. Maybe a lot better even.

It's basically a faster version of Ninja/Beast Run + unslotted Sprint with lower jumps. It does drop all of your toggles, but otherwise it's easily usable as a travel power. You cannot stack it with other travel powers because you cannot use other powers in that form. It's neat, but something to really only buy for funsies.

Apparently the best way is to go back in time, make a Defender on Freedom, mark yourself as LFG, and take every blind invite that comes your way. With a smaller playerbase that's bit more hardcore and dedicated, it's gotten a lot less common in my current experience. Even then on Live, it wasn't super common as long as you didn't take blind invites. Or marked yourself as an Empath. On Live, I had an Empath who I gave up on in the low 20s because every other groups had one or more people screaming at me for heals while they were on the other side of the map hitting the aggro cap. These days it's mostly been through radio-team PUGs in the 20s. But I've only encountered a scant few toxic/useless players, like the one mentioned above or a like a Bots/FF MM who just kept their pets on aggressive, stayed a distance behind everyone, and stood there, not even running their bubble toggle even though they had the power nor giving commands to pets, leading them to stand around if he wasn't close enough to the enemies. On live or now, it doesn't happen too terribly often to me, my above Empath aside. But the instances are usually pretty memorable. >.>

I'm not expecting Savage to have outstanding single target DPS, considering its big move is a massive AoE rather than a mega-smash or something, so underwhelming isn't the real concern. Your videos suggest Hemmorage literally doesn't increase or decrease DPS by any appreciable amount, so using it seems somewhat pointless. But I kinda feel like there's some missing variables in there. ...although I do wonder why you're using Shred in a ST attack chain. I'm not a numbers guy to calculate this myself, but Pines suggests it has among the worst DPS and DP-Animation in the set and its DP-Activation is slightly worse than Maiming Strike. I mean, I get you can put a -Res proc in there, but I'm not 100% sure the proc is worthwhile when the base DPS is about half of the other single target attacks.

I have a few, dunno which is the biggest. Probably #2, but you be the judge. My first Scrapper took neither her mez protection nor Stamina. I managed to make it to the upper 20s before my complaining about endurance and mezzes in a group led to helpful players steering me along the right path, which gave me a much improved character! When level pacting came out, I level-pacted a new alt with a friend. Once we got about 12, they just vanished. We got along well enough and I stubbornly believed they'd come back, so I slogged my character all the way to 50 while level-pacted. I basically gained around 40 levels at half XP mode. My friend never returned to the game that I am aware of and I have no idea what happened to them. I like to think that, during a time I was unsubbed, they happened to come back and found a random level 50 just waiting on them. Not being subbed when the game entered sunset mode, which meant I was permanently locked into freemium mode, which really sucked. Between that and the game shutting down, I was super hardcore disheartened and never played again until Homecoming. Many times in the years between then and now I wished I had played at least a little bit more and gotten more out of the game.

Letting them use IOs, especially optimal IO builds, makes this pretty easy. Make it a SO-only scenario and then we'll actually need to do some thinking and debating.

Either I think you're misunderstanding the complaining or, instead, I'm misunderstanding the fellow complainers and they're being more complainy than I am. Like in the OP, if the person is rolling their toon for a certain playstyle or RP concept, fully aware of the sacrifices they are making, then fine, sure, no problem. It won't be the most efficient thing, but that doesn't matter most of the time. I'll take your super tanky tank no problem. I'll take my extreme-control Controller from Live (which I really need to remake once my wrist is feeling better). I'll take someone's Man-build for most content. "The healer" is a different sort of mindset though. These are the people who insist the only good Defenders (or Corrs or Trollers) are those who overload themselves with heals and support powers. Take a blast? You're a noob. Play something other than Empath or Pain? Instant kick. Buffs are worthless, you need to be pre-casting heals, etc. etc. etc. These aren't people who are going for crazy and weird concepts knowing what they're getting into. They're being ineffective out of ignorance and, pretty often, being toxic about it as well. I've had my Rad/Sonic Defender kicked from a PUG on live because I never used my heal. I didn't need to since it was a +0 mission team and hardly anyone took damage due to my tohit debuffs. I've had a FF Defender on live kicked mid-mission because they realized I had no heals, only for me to watch them instantly wipe to the next spawn since they lost my buffs. I've had teams panic when I brought a Sonic Resonance Defender because I didn't have the heals they were expecting and didn't tell me they wanted. Hell, my Pain Dom Defender got yelled at for actually using her blasts by one person in recent times, which are Dark and slotted for -tohit, instead of using my heal. ...when everyone was at full or close enough my toggle would top them off. Don't dare try to correct these people, it rarely ends well. I can't speak for all the people ranting here, but at least myself, and maybe, hopefully, some others are not ranting about weird builds and concepts, but instead are about the more toxic "healer" mentality. Was a bit nervous of making this post since I don't want to come across confrontational or defensive, but at the same time I feel like the original complaint is getting a little bit warped.

One thing I'm curious with on Savage Melee: how does Hemmorage impact DPS. I want to look into this myself, but my cubital tunnel syndrome (carpal tunnel syndrome's lesser known sibling) is flaring up and preventing me from playing any WASD-controlled games (which is like... 75% of everything I have) for more than a dozen minutes, so it'll be a while before I can look into it myself. So, if anyone wants to look into it, I'm curious on these scenarios... 1. No Hemmorage 2. Use Hemmorage all the time 3. Hemmorage > Blood Thirst only (no/minimal loss of Blood Frenzy stacks) If anyone wants to look into those on some Pylon tests, that'd be great. If not? Well, I'll get to it myself in a week or two and share when my left wrist isn't wanting to nuke me for using WASD controls, holding my steering wheel a certain way, or whatever other arbitrary actions it decides it doesn't like.

Not true. Shriek will self-stack with enough recharge. Buy a Power Analyzer from the P2W Vendor and check it out for yourself. AM + Hasten alone can easily maintain a -40 and sometimes hit -60 on just Shriek stacking alone.

+1 I have fond memories of chasing Rikti and Zombies during invasion events with lowbie characters. The mobs also dropped higher level recipes and such, if memory serves right, so it was a good injection of early influence too. Players who do not want to participate can either keep moving (mobs don't spawn if a player is moving too fast), stay up in the air, leave the zone, stand under cover (mobs won't spawn if you're under a bridge, overhang, or whathaveyou), or hang near the drones. Additionally, harder mob spawns require more eligible players to be present in an area. The current rules will make it MUCH harder to get things like the Rikti Heavies, which are needed for the Elusive Mind accolade, to spawn. I'm really hoping for a Rikti Invasion Week to come along to fuel my nostalgia (I first started playing on Live during such a week), but it'll be very sad to see it neutered by excluding level 25 and below players from triggering spawns.

Honestly, the worst thing about healers is when they put their healing aura on auto. Not because laziness or anything, but because they never take it off auto. Waiting for everyone to arrive at a mission? AUTO HEALS! Someone is AFK? AUTO HEALS! The healer is AFK? AUTO HEALS! Standing at the trainer working on a costume? AUTO HEALS! Roleplaying? AUTO HEALS! Standing with a League waiting for it to fill before doing a MSR or something? MULTIPLE AUTO HEALS! Pleeeeeeeease turn off auto heals when you're not in combat! Especially if you have lots of recharge, especially if you're not going to be in combat soon. And extra especially with Empathy or Radiation! Those both have a high pitched whining noise that gets super seriously grating when you're hearing it every 2-3 seconds for minutes on end while nothing is happening! Also, if you wanna get technical, well-timed heals are both more effective and more efficient than auto heals. My favorite is when I'm the only support on the team, don't use my heal, and get told "Great heals!" ...it's even better when I'm using a set with no heals, like Force Field.

Same-mezzes stack. Otherwise most Controllers would never be able to solo hold a boss without blowing their AoE hold on them. But you can probably skip Screech for team mez since you're liable to have one or more Controllers or Dominators to lock bosses down more efficiently, which you can aid more efficiently with Choking Cloud, EM Pulse, or an EPP Hold. Or heck, take Oppressive Gloom and you can walk up to most bosses to single-shot stun them with Screech or Dreadful Wail.

So, using my live build concept Savage/Regen Scrapper using 35 IOs for examplaring (I didn't know about Attuneds >.>) with no purples, ATOs, only PvP is a Pancea, and built for hybrid ST/AoE, using a chain of Savage > Maiming > Vicious > Savage > Maiming... Using T1 Hybrid Assault passive only, T3 Spiritual Partial Radial, and T2 Reactive Radial and I get 188.97 DPS Adding the Hybrid active, T2 Pyronic Core, and T2 Storm Elemental (one of which died about a minute in), I get 217.82 DPS. Not impressive, but not bad I suppose since I don't have a single-target optimized build, let alone an optimized build for my own goals, or T4 Incarnates yet. If I find the time, I might reroll on Justin to try things maxed out, more optimized, and more ST focused. And would be a good test to see if Hemmorage is worth using or not without having to respec or second build. Either way, there's a loooot of room for improvement here.

Ha ha, go for it. At least until the day they change Energy Melee.

Savage definitely needs a little tweaking, and it definitely feels unfinished. I think it's biggest failure is it doesn't quite sell the "Savage fantasy". It has the constant stream of attacking and most of the animations are good, but it's lacking some good ripping, slashing audio and a few visuals to accompany it. You'd also think of it as something where you'd jump in and start blinding ripping and tearing at enemies, but instead you need to be thoughtful on when and how you build and consume stacks of Blood Frenzy and when and how you use Blood Thirst. Hemmorage, IMO, is also kind of disappointing since, as juicy as the DoT is, it's costly to execute since it puts you into Exhausted and most targets will drop to a team, or even just the Scrapper themself, before the DoT finishes. It does seem excel at steady damage output without stopping. I mean, you can have a (near) gapless very early (Savage > Maim > Savage > Vicious > Savage > Shred > repeat). One thing both a friend and I noticed is that his Titan/Bio Scrapper can like... do massive alpha damage to a hard target and do like 60% to an Elite Boss' health in a blink of an eye by blowing everything, but kind of struggles towards the end with a combination of everything going on cooldown and blowing his endurance bar. Meanwhile, my Savage/Regen Scrapper just steadily takes them down without any real struggle at any point and is pretty much immediately ready to jump at the next several groups without a break. I think the only other one I'm aware of that's "bad at what it's trying to accomplish" might be Dual Blades. It's a perfectly fine and servicable set, but its best chains make little to no use of the combo mechanics as far as I can recall. So, as a first go at a combo set, it kind of flops at combos. I wouldn't say any Scrapper primaries are bad in general, however. Then again, Scrappers don't have Energy Melee.

Somewhat support. Make a similar power that does this and leave Reveal as is. That way people who want to reveal the map but not all the objectives on it still have that option. ...plus I wonder if adding that feature to Reveal might cause issues when using it on non-mission maps.

The real step 1 everyone is overlooking: Go to the P2W vendor and buy the 5 prestige enhancements. They're absolutely free, have pretty strong values, have a nice damage proc from 1-20, and never expire. You can replace them at your leisure once you hit 22 and go for 25 SOs/IOs. In the teens though, unless you're powering through them, I at least recommend slotting Accuracy DOs/IOs and maybe some damage and/or endurance reduction depending on your powerset. Going through those levels with zero enhancements is a slog, especially without any accuracy, especially if you skipped the DFB accuracy buff. It won't cost you very much and makes the 12-22 experience much smoother. You don't need a full set of enhancers for all your slots, just accuracy and maybe damage/end redux will do.

You can rig a bind to execute a power and then load a new file to bind a different power to that key. The Force Fielder Bible topic has an explanation of how to do it with bubbles, which could easily be adapted for any other set. Though I do see problems with these being offensive toggles that can be dropped, get split up, or whatever. For example, if you use RI and then get stunned, you'll have to cycle through EF and Choking in order to get RI back up. Or if you RI and the target teleports or flies away, you can't disable RI like this without activating EF and Choking. At the very least, don't keep Choking on the same key, since it is a PBAoE toggle centered on yourself rather than a TAoE on an opponent.

I'm not a super numbers person, but a quick glance at Pines for raw values shows that Howl does the same damage as Shriek but at twice the animation time, so it'd probably be a lower DPS for the Defender. But the group debuff would overall increase team DPS if you can aim it right. If your goal is maximum debuff values, (don't quote me on this part) I feel you'd probably want to cycle in Screech somewhere for its 12 second resistance debuff. For reference, Shriek lasts 5 seconds, Scream lasts 7, Shout lasts 10, Howl lasts 8, and Dreadful lasts 20. I'm not 100% sure what the optimum debuff attack chain is, that'd take a lot of number crunching with different power selections. Either way, basic chains without messing a lot with IOs and stuff should let you maintain ~40-60 debuff between your attacks, before debuff resistance applies. (Which, ironically, comes from resistance.)