nihonsean

The -to hit from dark works well with defense because early on it helps keep enemies from hitting, and later it helps offset defense reductions .

Have they fixed the no redraw issue with the arachnos mace? I'd really like to get the mace mastery patron powers with war mace.

A blaster power suit set with gun/laser options like Ironman or War Machine. So shoulder machine gun or back mounted missile launcher. Chest mounted laser, wrist rockets and so on. Or maybe just being able to slot up set like that? Would be a lot of work though.

With the Force Field Generator (13.3%) + Weave(5%)+ Maneuvers( 3.5%) + CJ/Hover (2.5%) fully slotted you should be at around 38% Def. Toss in the Steadfast and Shieldwall +Def IOs and you're at 44%. Soft cap is 45%. Now generally you want a bit of a buffer to deal with the odd hit with -def. to avoid cascading defense failure. However you've decided to go with Scorpion Shield though. Scorpion Shield unslotted for a Defender is +15% S/L defense, and +10% Energy defense. This could be a bit of overkill, though the abilities that reduce defense are generally lethal and radiation (energy). So with all of the above buffs + unslotted Scorpion shield you're at 59% def against S/L, 54% against energy, and 44% against everything else. on the one hand this is definitely overkill for most content, but you really don't have to worry about your defenses getting burned down with debuffs so you can slot your IOs for damage or whatever else you want. I think you might want to look at what you're planning on tackling with this guy and decide from there whether you really need Scorpion Shield.

You can't apply deflection shield and insulation field on yourself. On other people sure, but not on yourself.

Defense for Dispersion Bubble (on a defender) is 10%, slotted up you're at 15.6%. You'll still need weave + leadership + hover, and even then you're going to be a little short. That being said where Dispersion Bubble really shines is protecting you from stuns, sleeps and holds. In Traps, Force Field Generator gives 13.3% defense, making it a little easier to cap defense. It also provides stun/sleep/hold protection as well.

You may have a little trouble with higher lvl enemies with attacks that reduce defense, but -to hit from DM's attacks should help out a bit with that.

Dark Melee/ Super Reflexes. Easy to soft cap defense, self heal, end recovery power, great damage. Touch of Fear is an AOE now, so you can hit up to 10 targets with it. You can solo all day, all night.

Somebody posted about the same idea over on the Brawler forum awhile back. I think his plan was to go Dark Melee/Bio Armor and recolor Midnight Grasp so that it looked like vines coming up out of the ground.

I went soft capped S/L on my EM/ElectArmor Brute. Works really well. Biggest hole is Psi. Carnies and Arachnos wreck me if I can't kill psionic attackers quick enough. I've been fooling with a Katana/ElecArmor build, only in the low 20's at the moment (so many alts lol). Katana is attractive because wit Divine Avalanche it completely covers melee and lethal. Most ranged attacks are either lethal (guns, bows, knives) or energy (lasers, radiation, electric), Divine Avalanche covers the lethal, and electrics ridiculous energy resists covers most everything else. In theory you would be covered for melee and most ranged attacks, leaving ranged AOE attacks, and Psi and Toxic attacks as well.

I've fooled around with slotting heal/end recovery procs in a couple of Brute builds and it works pretty well.

Crystal, Don't have a build but slowly leveling a SM/DA brute. CFARevival has some good comments/suggestions on this thread: You can probably ping him and ask for his build.

Just my two cents but on Scrappers I try to take +def sets like SR, Shield, and EA. Willpower, Bio, and even Invuln are good choices too. Since scrappers cap out at 75% resists, sets that are resist heavy aren't so great for them. Not saying that they're bad, you just don't get as much out of those sets as a Brute does. For a good soloing experience you want a build that has good defense, end recovery and health recovery. If you can get your build up to the defense soft cap (45%) you can skimp a bit on health high health recovery, since you won't be getting hit that much.

Are you using Touch of Fear? Now that it's an AOE I'm curious how it works with the Fear Aura

Wow, you aren't joking. Made a Savage Melee / DA Brute and ran him up to lvl 7. The end reduction you get from blood frenzy really makes it easy to run DA's toggles without killing your endurance bar. I even ran sprint and beast run and my endurance didn't flatline. I'm really excited for this since endurance is always the biggest issue with Dark Armor. And with 5 stacks of blood frenzy the damage is great. Question: How much does each stack increase damage/recharge? I'm not seeing that anywhere.