nihonsean

Fun fact you can slip in Power Transfer, chance for +Heal (heals 5% of your health on average 3 times a minute) into any electric attacks that will take endurance mods (Jacobs ladder, Havoc Punch, and Chain Induction) AOEs work better. You can slot them in any +endurance power, like Stamina as well. If you load up on Luck of the Gamblers as well the first 2 will give +10% regen, the 3rd +1.15% health. I've been fooling around with this set up on my Elec/SR Brute, works really well. Still have to eat a green from time to time, but if you're soloing missions you should be getting those off of mobs pretty regularly.

Oh nice. I run a pretty similar build, though a bit lower budget. Still, a ton of fun. Perma hasten really keeps the attack chain going, and lets you cycle through single target attacks or aoes. Glad to see I'm not the only elec/energy/elec out there.

Katana is a great power set; low end use, great damage, and Divine Avalanche, which really opens up a lot of possibilities with defensive sets. It's hard to gowrong. For resistance sets like Fire, Electric or Dark, DA gives a great layer of defense on top of set resistances and self heals. For sets that offer defense to energies like Bio or Willpower, it lets you plug the lethal dmg defense hole and lets you concentrate on maximizing the defenses you do have. One thing to remember for S/L damage, most smashing is melee, so the +melee defense covers that. Most ranged S/L damage is actually lethal so the + lethal defense would protect you from that. Bio, Willpower, Invuln, EA, Ice, provide good/great protections to Eng/Neg/Fire/Cold which covers pretty much all other ranged damage. This leaves you with Toxic and Psi as spots to worry about.

I've been slowly leveling an elec melee/DA build and last night got around to slotting him up with 3 Performance Shifters +End in attacks and a Theft of Essence + End in Dark Regeneration. I'm really happy with the results. He's only lvl 22 but with all toggles running, plus tough and weave he doesn't have trouble with endurance. It's a little streaky since the procs don't fire off exactly when you want them, and the smaller the spawns the less likely they are to go off. Firing of Dark Regen with 5+ targets in range can actually give you a huge endurance boost, it's kind of nuts. But again, it's not consistent. I've had to eat blue inspirations every so often, but I'm really please with the results since the biggest issue with DA is the endurance burn. Now I just need to figure out how to slot this guy up. I'm thinking of pushing base defense and then energy/neg defense, and then S/L and Psi resists

Been running up a DM/Bio Armor scrapper and it is pretty fun. The self heal is pretty helpful for regenerating back health, but the surprise star has been touch of fear. It was changed to an AoE and it is stellar. The damage is so-so, but the to-hit debuff is 10%? and lasts 20 seconds. Recharge is low enough that you can keep this up full time. I've pushed S/L defense on him, so with a combination of reduced accuracy and defense mobs seldom get hits in. Best way to win? Don't die. Also, love the idea of recoloring midnight grasp green so that it looks like vines entangling the bad guys 😄

I did something similar on a couple of Brutes, one Regen the other WP. The +Def works well with WP's En/Neg/Cold/Fire defense. Probably works really well with Bio Armor too.

I was wondering this too. Electric Melee has some interesting options; healing, +end, stuns. Looking at starting a new build and looking at options for Electric Melee.

Make sure to try out Touch of Fear. It's now an AOE, hits 10 targets. The fear is nice, the huge to hit debuff (-11% on scrapper) that lasts 20 seconds is even better. With a fast recharge and low end cost you can spam it all day long. It really helps survivability, especially on a set without any built in defense like Fire, Electric or Regen.

Because Dark is an endurance hog anything that has low endurance attacks or helps your recover endurance is worth a look. You go Electric Melee and recolor your dark powers to look more like a cloud and be the Avenging Thunderhead 😄 I'd also look at Katana, Broad Sword or Staves for extra defense. With Cloak of Shadows + Weave you can get a decent amount of extra defense. With Parry from Katana/Sword you can push your melee/lethal defense up to the soft cap with 2 applications. It's pretty noticeable. From there you can use sets to increase your ranged defense or AOE defenses. Capped defense + great resists makes for a lot of silly fun. I haven't made a staff character but I believe they get a good defensive boost as well. Brute Martial Arts, one of their attacks was changed to give +7.5% defense too everything but psionic. Downside is that Martial Arts isn't that good. I have a claws build as well that is pretty fun, not super optimal, but fun.

Checked this morning and the issue appears to be fixed! Go go development team!

Great guide, thanks for posting. Started a solo Bubble/Fire defender. One little trick I noticed was that you can put out the shield drone pet from the PTW and bubble it. +2.5% def and 5% end recovery isn't too bad for free. The best part is that mobs will attack it. Fully bubbled, and inside your dispersion bubble they'll swing away at it before they finally get a hit. In a sense it really does act like a shield 😁

Energy Aura power Entropic Aura provides status protection as well as a 5% recharge buff, +3.5% for each target in range, up to 10 targets. It's also supposed to reduce their recharge by 16%. If you look at the power descriptions it is actually debuffing the players recharge by 16% as well.

I have an em/elec brute I made pretty much for the same reasons. He was a rebuild of an old 'live' character, so I wasn't expecting him to be amazing. He's IO'd out and pretty resilient, capable of hanging in +4/8 solo missions, slow but steady. Last night I ran a portal mission and solo'd NightStar. Only trouble I had was her jumping off a roof and getting stuck in the fire escape, I literally had to punch her out of it lol. The single target dmg increase is noticeable and impressive. Scrapper EM dmg should be even more so.

I've been playing an Electric/Energy Aura Sent. for awhile now, I play a lot of character and cycle back to him every few months. By the mid 30's he was doing really well, just with regular enhancements. Getting Thunderous Blast really helped a ton. So this last week I decided to gear him up (I was feeling wealthy from the Halloween events). So 5 sets of Luck of the Gambler later (just 4 per power) some positron's blast sets in AOE and a decimation set and I was able to get him to the soft cap for defense and get hasten pretty close to perma (about 8 seconds down time). Really, really fun to play this guy. I mostly play brutes and scrappers and this guy is right up there in survivability. It takes him a little longer to kill stuff, but with Thunderous Blast up every 25 seconds or so, plus other AOEs, groups are easy to knock down. The unexpected synergy between Energy Aura's Energy Drain ability and the endurance drain/recovery suppression from electric attacks means that you can push most mobs endurance to zero pretty quickly. I started hunting Fake Nemisis in PI at 39. Watching them try and put their bubble up with no endurance never fails to make me smile. They still do the little arm move, but without end it doesn't activate. And then they die. Same with Master Illusionists, no endurance = no illusionists or other shenanigans. The big hole for this is Psionic damage. I'm using the psionic shield temp power from Vanguard to help with this (+15% def vs. Psi), but it can still hurt, especially when soloing large groups of Rikti or Arachnos. Still really surprised, and happy, with how this guy is working out.

A force field defender, controller, or mastermind, or traps defender, can provide a huge amount of +def. You can grab a heal from the medicine pool. You can pretty much cap her defenses and heal her up when the odd hit gets through. I went this route with my wife, she's happy so I'm happy.

Thanks for posting. I usually play Brutes and Scrappers, recently levelled up an Elec/Storm corruptor, was thinking of making another one.

I went a different route and pushed S/L defense to 45% and have hasten down to 5 seconds, have S/L resists at 85%, energy 90% and everything else at 60% plus. Does really well though Carnies are super rough for me.

Regen is a lot better than people make it out to be. With Dark Melees -to hit and the self heal it pairs up nicely. I have a couple Regen Brutes (SuperStrength and MartialArts) and I have a lot of fun with both. I did get them to the defense soft cap for S/L (45%) with IOs and Weave+ Maneuvers + Combat Jumping. It shouldn't be too hard with DM because you have a lot of single target melee attacks you can slot with Kinetic Combat (3.75% S/L defense for 4). The Brute archetype enhancements also offer up some S/L defense too (2.5% and 1.875%). Once you get to the S/L soft cap your play experience will be completely different, since most attacks have a smash or lethal component (no matter how small it is, you get the full defense bonus against the entire attack). After that work on global recharge, and make sure you have hasten. Getting your defensive powers up more often will help a ton. A different route to take would be to look at some of the end tier powers in the pool sets, like the Sorcery pool. It's more clicky powers but they go for 30 seconds to 90 seconds, so could be really helpful too.

On my Em/Elec Brute, with perma hasten I go BS>TF>BS>ET for single target damage. I'm curious how the changes are going to affect that. I guess if TF makes ET insta it would go BS>TF>ET>BS>TF>ET. or on my powerbar 2-3-4 over and over lol. Really looking forward to the changes. Really leaning towards a EM/SuperReflexes scrapper for the +recharge. Getting permahasten makes EM amazing. Getting self healed on crits with ET could help with SR's lack of a self heal too. Also the Mu Patron Power stuff really fills in the AOE hole for Energy Melee, though it can make fighting energy resistant bad guys a pain.

Regen gets a bad rap because alot of the new sets are flashier but regen means you almost never need to worry about endurance or your basic health. I have a SS/Regen Brute and a MA/Regen Brute. I have both capped for S/L defense with the Regen clickies for back up. Get Tough, get weave, get manuevers. You have the endurance to run all of it. With SS or MA you have a bunch of knockback/knockdown powers that stop enemies from attacking. Those extra couple of seconds really help mitigate in coming damage and keep you going. Try and fit a force feedback+ recharge IO into your build and work on getting your global recharge as high as you can. Do that and cap your S/L defenses and you'll be golden.

Just did this with my mind/psi dom. Set him up at 35, where he had been languishing, just finished Black Scorpion's patron arc and he's at 38 now. Hasten has a 10 second cool down, so not quite perma, but getting there. The difference is pretty remarkable. Solo I can keep groups confused/held continuously. The only thing that gets me soloing missions is getting stunned, so just need to make sure I have a supply of break frees for that.