Rokkeb

I must play savage melee wrong, cause it consistently scores high on your tests but it seems like such a lethargic, weak set to me. I've got a couple different savage up into the 40's but i just can't continue on them, cause it seems like nothing ever dies.

Needs more Prodigy

Yeah I use effeciency mode at lower and mid levels if I need help with endurance, but other than that it's all dmg all the time.

I have some at max smallness, and some at max tallness, but most are close to base. either a little under 6' or a little over 6'

I reconcile it beause every time I play the set I have endurance issues, again unless i'm putting in 20million or so IO's to fix endurance issues, which the whole point is finding sets that flow without spending any money while leveling. And it's not fun because to play optimally you either sacrifice your endurance and recharge bonus for a lock out, or you count stacks. I don't enjoy looking at the tiny stack number to play my character. Its fine that you like it, but I think other sets out perform it, and are easier to use while doing so.

Spending stacks loses your endurance discount, and locks you out of gaining endurance discount, so either you don't use spenders, or you use them at 4 stacks instead of 5, and I find savage melee to be an end hungry set especially at lower to mid levels when you don't have a bunch of set bonus, and IO procs sending endurance your way. So now the game is to never use spenders or monitor stacks, both of which makes for an unfun experience to me. Again the whole point of my set list is "which sets are fun and easy to use while leveling, with no IO sets" of course if I just went straight into building up endurance procs and recovery sets I wouldn't care about savage melee stacks I'd just burn them, but I don't want to drop 500mil on every alt I make anymore, I just want to roll up characters who are fun to play with base inventions to give acc/dam/recharge at 3-4 slots while leveling, and not buying 10million panaceas and and pvp uniques and all that. Some sets are very bad in that situation in my opinion. They are an endurance nightmare, or in the case of savage their mechanics don't work out as well as I think they should, when they are a fully fleshed out build, or they are very slow with massive gaps in attacking, all these things make for a not fun leveling experience in my opinion, and some sets stack these troubles on top of each other. I might concede on Energy secondary, I still feel like its on the weaker side until you start to really flesh it out, not as bad as the other 3 I point out, but I've not had as much luck with it as I have other sets. Of course people hate dark and I rank dark above it, so w/e again its all opinion.

I agree that it's all subjective, and my list is based on what I felt, not parsed numbers. For me savage sea of small numbers mixed with having to monitor blood stacks instead of just mindlessly using the combo system with orange circles like Staff or Street or now Energy Melee, along with if I mess it up and finish with 5 stacks I've just tanked my endurance for the next while, it was an unsatisfying way to play. I'm not saying its a bad set, I'm saying its not fun for me to play, and trying to explain why. what I like in a melee set is a fluid attack chain, it doesn't have to have big combos like street justice or energy melee, but I want to be able to set up my buttons and hit them in a chain, without massive gaps. I rank both katana and broadsword above warmace for a low to mid level build, because warmace will have massive gaps in the chain until you have 5 single target attacks because the cooldowns are so slow, but at 50 IO'd out WM crushes both kat/bs with ease, and goes down to a 3 attack, attack chain. I have a 50 WM, but it will never do anything but lvl 50 content, cause WM is garbage below that, IMO. And as for the secondaries I still stand by Shield, Bio, Rad, and Energy is almost there with them, being top end sets, not leveling sets. They are real weak for soloing until you have sets to prop them up. Of course if you run TF's and team oriented stuff 100% of your leveling time, you could any set, and not turn on any of its toggles or use any of its powers, and still probably be fine.

That's all I run at this point on him, he's lvl 35 I think now, and i don't think I've ever left that stance yet. Maybe later when I'm outfitted in IO's and have end coming out my ears, but for now i'll take that end reduction

I have a dark staff tanker, and its my favorite tanker by far. the resists you build up are insane so you can start to work on defense through pool powers and set IOS, but even still for group content and TF's while leveling its crazy good. And that self heal is crazy good.

TL;DR: For low to mid level content on a budget without IO sets and such : Claws, Staff, Street Justice are my top 3 for easy to use primaries, Ninjitsu is a clear winner for secondary, maybe invuln and ice as runners up, though as you gain in levels dark armor for me pushes out ice. and then at 50 of course bio/rad/shield/energy are the winners cause boost your damage, recharge times and all that. But honestly for secondary pick w/e you want, you can make them all work. I've been struggling with lvl 50 boredom, and my my current 50 scrappers are absolute trash when I examp down to anything below 40's. I could obviously build them an exemplar spec, and may still do that, but instead I've been experimenting with different combos, and other than a few uniques that I don't roll without on any toon, such as performance shift , and some sort of end. recovery in health be it miracle or panacea etc. I've been trying to find which scrappers sets are a solid leveling experience. How I base it: is it fun, am I good in a group, or solo? can I solo on higher than base 0/1 ? What I've found so far: Street Justice is solid at low levels but end heavy. Take the first 3 attacks and you have a solid attack chain that will get you through solo and group content. take whatever other attacks you like as you level, but with just the 3 attack you've got a solid rotation to work with. katana and broadsword are about equal to me for leveling. They both depend on parry/da to keep their attack chain full. They both outperform mace and axe at low levels with basic slotting. and then are both outperformed by axe and mace later on with sets and IOs and high recharge, and massive end recovery. BS you'll want some help with endurance recovery for sure. claws is great, follow up is amazing. You can skip one of the first 2 attacks if you want, or take both so you never have a gap in attack, and if you have the endurance under control spin still works grat as a filler and hits hard even on 1 target. But because its a fast attack you're always spending endurance, so have a secondary that helps with that or invest in some performance shift and panacea. Easiest way to afford them is start running SBB and selling those enhancements. staff is great fun, and an easy to use set, but it always feels low damage. I've read its amazing on a stalker, and I love it on a tank. you'll never have problems with staff, but you'll always feel like you're not doing as much dmg as other sets. Has build in endurance managment which makes leveling it easy, and makes it easy to pair with stuff like dark armor. energy melee is fun and powerful, but you gotta take barrage at low lvls, otherwise you have massive gaps in your attack chain and thats just no fun. elec melee - garbo set. everything is slow and weak, and you're waiting for your 32 power to feel like you're halfway good. and then to be 3/4 good you have to pair it with shield, which sucks to level with. If you really want elec melee, try stalker so you at least get assassins zapp and have a good single target attack chain. savage melee - i also just struggle with this set, its mechanics don't seem very well put together. to make the most of it you have to count stacks and make sure you never use a finsiher at 5 stacks and always at 4, or you'll drain end like crazy. On top of that everything is low numbers.. which is not satisfying to watch as a scrapper, if i wanted to spam tons of low numbers i'd play controller. which is a shame because savage has the best animations IMO. MA - haven't become very familar with this yet, i've tried quite a few so far, but none felt like what I was going after .. with the character concept/secondary choice so they've been rerolled a lot trying to find something that fits. what I can say is the attacks are fine, and it's decent, but i get overloaded with attacks, there are so many and I feel like i need to figure out which ones are good and which ones can be skipped easily. very easy to make an attack chain though which is nice. psionic - hits hard, especially at lower end when almost nothing seems to have psi resistance. I expected all the robots to in posi1 but they didn't seem to mitigate it any better than anything else. slow attack chain though, and i just ignore insight, and follow my chain trying to use it "best" just means you aren't attack and waiting on CDs. dark - i just don't have fun with it, so i abandon it every time. I know some people love it, i'm clearly not one of them. Again, its if I wanted to play a controller I'd play a controller. fire, ice, kinetic, dual blades - haven't used them at all. tw - I took a TW scrapper to 45 or so and ended up deleting it - I just dont' enjoy that set. not fun at all for me. rad melee - i know it has potentional but it seems like mace and axe its a late blooming set, and will get significantly better with high recharge and IO sets. its slow and boring at low levels. spines - i used to hate spines, i still do, but i used'ta too. spines is good ae set, theres nothing "wrong" with it, but the long attack animations that lock you down, and the ae focus never jived with how I want to play a scrapper. If that's your thing then awesome, go hunt, kill skuls. as for secondaries. ninjitsu surprised me. its stong, easy to use, has movement bonus when paired with ninja or beast running gives you like 3/4 of super speed and 1/8th of super jump together allowing you to skip travel powers for quite awhile in favor of attacks or armor which is nice. I would say over all ninjitsu wins for me for strong leveling secondary. rad bio shield and to a lesser extent energy all are late bloomers in my opinion. I feel like they are all weak while leveling, with big holes that get you killed often, until you've kitted them out and then all of a sudden nothing in the game can touch you. Rad is old regen, its just about spamming your abilities nonstop, not a fun playstyle for me, but people who enjoyed old regen may like it. elec and fire both take a lot of damage, but have a decent heal to make up for it. every once in awhile you come across missions or TF's where your armor set helps negate the enemies damage, elec more than rad. both are viable, but they'll start pretty slow. willpower, super reflexes, shield, all can work pretty good but get used to bringing greens around with you. WP regen doesn't really keep up till you start getting some set bonus from what I can tell. or pair it with dark for the self heal attack. ice does pretty well while leveling, the self heal is ok, the ae slow is nice, a little end hungry to start with but they get an end drain to help with that later. dark is one of my favorite sets, i prefer it on brute or tanker though where you can really push those resists. Skip the AE dmg aura for awhile it will really help your endurance issues to start with, or run it with staff. invuln pretty strong and reliable, has a self heal/hp buff thing that helps. regen - people talk so much shit on regen i was surprised how halfway decent it is for a no budget leveling build. I like to pair it with kat, staff, or broadsword to stack defense on yourself while attacking like normal, but it'll work with any primary. bonus is, any of those endurance hog primaries benefit from regen. Get used to running around corners while soloing though to get just an extra tick or two of regen to catch your health up. Pick any primary match it with any secondary, and at 50 with IO sets and incarnates it's good, so that doesn't matter, but I found exemped or leveling to be a struggle with some of my scrapper combos, and honestly I have more fun running mid lvl TF's than the spam/skip rush style of 50 content you find.

I think the easy way would be to code in better the enemies you face and their level changed as you go through the sewers, as well as sprinkling in a few trainers and vendors along the way. It always sucked to work your way down into the sewers then suddenly you've past the good spot and are back at the lvl 1 crap basically bringing an end to the sewers run so everyone just trains all the grey mobs to kings row zone line.

I like a speed/endurance combo from one of the flight sets, + I will max slot it depending on how many mules I want to fit in a build. Will usually have Gamblerds Recharge, PvP Unique, maybe Kismet accuracy. Just depends on if I need easy slots to put more global mules.

Yeah Panacea and Performance shift are must haves for all my characters.

The real solution is to give the toggles to the scrappers, stalkers, tankers, and brutes a toggle that turns any KB's into KD's within what 20' of them, I think thats like the size of the electric control aura, pretty smallish. That would remove the majority of the KB complaints, with melee not having to deal with dick head NRG blasters or robots knocking their targets all over the damn place.

Dark is pretty great on a tanker IMO. I run a dark/staff tanker and love it. I also have a claws/dark scrapper but its still just mid lvl with no sets or anything. Dark is very END hungry though, and because claws attack chain is so fast, it feels like it is as well cause you're always attacking so be prepared to deal with that however you want. I just know that I haven't even really tried with my tanker and almost nothing in game touches him, can't wait to see hwo beastly he is when I actually put sets on him that make sense. What he has now is just random enhancements I stripped off unplayed characters and sent to him.

I started going rikti pets cause they cast 3 AM's on you during its time up. BP rain of fire made too many runners for my taste, I'll just have a personal AM machine. I've also tried Seers for fortitude, but I feel like I get more out of the Rikti.

When I was a kid I read Spawn and The Darkness... comics code didn't really apply to those books. 🙂

I feel you on this, I had 5 pages full of characters i never touched ranging in lvl from single digit to high 40s. Sometimes a character just doesn't play how i thought it would, or wasn't fun, or I couldn't get the concept to work on high concept characters. Or just felt like a shitty version of another character I already have and enjoy. So who cares if you have 1000 slots, why do you want to scroll through pages after page of garbo cahracters to find the ones you actually want to play? that was my thinking anyway. I spent awhile stripping and deleting some characters over the last 2 days, and I think i've deleted about 30 now, with maybe 30 more to go, then clean up (move position) all that's left, and organize them.

It hides my costume.

You fool! Now that you realize how great claws is, you're going to need a Claws to go with each secondary! One of us! One of us! So far I've got Claws / Energy, Dark, Elec, Rad, WP, Fire, Ninjitsu, Bio

Dark Armor Staff. Only level 35 now and he has some IOs but hed not tricked out at all. Just a ton of fun, control, survivability, and staff is fun to use. Big cone and big pboae to help keep things focused on you instead of team mates

I take the first 3 attacks while leveling and for an exemplar build, but none of them are needed for a 50 lvl build. The lvl 1 attack can hold you're overall crit chance ato IO if you arent running the set elsewhere, especially if you want those slots for a patron snipe. I do have the lvl 4 cone in my current build because I found ae lacking and when you have total focus on it makes its cone larger. It some but now that I have incarnated coming together I'm not needing body mastery and might respec into mu and just take lightning ball instead. And then I'll have zapped as well.

I like a fluid attack chain i can rely on for most situations, be it AE or single targert, with a couple fillers to do the opposite of whatever the chain does. Melee AT's have so much shit that doesn't really have a good use or fit into a nice chain that you really want to skip a lot of it, and trim it down from 9 powers to 5 or 6. At least I do.

Thanks for the info, that gives me something to work off of.

I bought some med packs from the p2w vendor. pretty expensive for what they are IMO.. 25% heal on a 1 minute timer with a long cast time (3.33), and I've pretty much stopped using them anyway. But its an option if you're really struggling. https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Med_Pack