Sancerre

i have avoided stone melee because the aoe capabilities looked god awful but maybe i am missing something? Tremor has a massive radius (especially for scrapper) but does peanuts damage. the set is great otherwise and you can supplement aoe with ball lightning but seems kind of awful having -only- ball lightning as actual aoe damage (and i guess judgement). incidentally, i always felt like hurl boulder should have a (small) radius explosion around the impact site.... it is a really cool skill with absolute dumpster DPA values in a powerset that already excels in single target damage (and yes i know it is ranged).

you can craft super optimized builds to cycle t9 defense clicky and Unleash Potential (Force of Will power pool) for... 'mostly'... perma overcapped defenses with extremely high DDR at all times as well (ageless radial). works with energy aura, super reflexes, and ninjutsu. you need to be fairly aggressively slotted towards recharge on the t9 but it works. it is a bit frustrating dealing with the crash every 4 minutes as that is the window that you are not within the 'mostly' umbrella... but if you time the ageless perfectly, you never actually drop your toggles. also locks you into taking the force of will power pool which can be inconvenient to squish in. very strong but requires far more attention than basically anything else in the game and there are no great ways to track the actual crash timing in game with hard numbers so it becomes a bit of an unwieldy guessing game (would need something similar to world of warcraft's WeakAuras) in practice, this is really only useful in solo play if you plan to do that sort of challenge. in party play, the common /cold corruptor bubbles you up with insane defenses anyways and all of this is just unnecessary. incidentally, a side benefit is that your endurance recovery is absolutely bonkers the entire time (both unleash potential and the t9 clicky do major work here).

storm has no self heal and the hurricane repel effect is extremely love it or hate it. the hallmark of the set is to offer more damage as individual skills (not buffs or debuffs particularly... and yes i know freezing rain debuffs) via tornado and lightning storm. scourge does not work on these buttons, unfortunately. also, many of the corruptor primaries dont need supplemental damage buttons when fully built. storm IS a good set but not in a selfish way that the OP wanted. i feel like it is better for defenders anyways, mostly due to the (lack of) scourge interactions.

i think fire blast always wins outright for best mix of single target and aoe. others are 'fine' like ice, AR, etc... but you know the deal here, im sure. corruptors do not shake up things compared to blasters in any substantial way. /kinetics, as others have mentioned, will likely just be the king for pure damage... it is certainly less survivable than others, but it can be built to be survivable enough for most content. /time does not offer substantial damage but it does offer the most comprehensive list of buffs to just about everything else otherwise (importantly to SELF unlike many other sets) that allow you to play very aggressively forward without much consideration. not a tanker here but can honestly feel more durable than scrappers. incidentally, the massive global recharge and defenses allows you to enhance more aggressively as well. /rad offers something in-between. good mixture of massive debuffs and self sustain... but conditionally... which is (potentially) the frustration with it. the anchors are very powerful but you have to play very methodically with it. /nature deserves a shoutout here for being able to provide strong power gains to self and being survivable but ultimately feels more team oriented and less selfish. the above top 3 feel astoundingly strong and self-sufficient, when fully kitted out. a lot of other sets are certainly 'good' (like trick arrow or dark) but are definitely more team oriented... unfortunately a number of sets require too much investment into the powerset itself and dont allow you explore into power pools to supplement your defenses... and/or the major hallmark powers just dont effect yourself.

Well Ackchyually you are technically correct. the best kind of correct. hope you are happy -- you win this battle of semantics.

tankers get an inherent punchvoke taunt aura on every attack button they press. that is the multiple. tankers also have a higher magnitude taunt. taunt aura is 10 targets... there is value in being able to hold 16 on you. there is also value in higher magnitude taunts (and stacked magnitude taunts) so that the critters most assuredly do not run away. as far as shield defense for scrapper is concerned -- i agree shield defense is one of the higher tier powersets for scrapper. Also correct that not all scrapper armors have a taunt aura and... to their detriment... i personally believe there is no META value in running a scrapper armor set without a taunt aura included.... for fun is a different consideration. i dont have many criticisms for shield defense (both tanker and scrapper version) other than lack of heal and poor endurance management... both of which are covered by dark melee. that being said... dark melee offering that healing and endurance utility is to the detriment of it's design intent damage output.

Thoughts on dark melee/shield: shield charge is deceptively mediocre on scrapper and very good on tanker the taunt auras (plural) on tanker is MUCH better than scrapper. stuff will run away from scrapper, just less than a scrapper with no taunt aura. shadow maul and touch of fear actually feel like real aoe on tanker your ST damage sucks cause you are playing dark melee period scrapper dark melee doesnt 'fix' this your thinking is inverted here... tanker damage is not that much worse. dark melee doesnt particularly 'shine' on scrapper the crit proc ATO doesnt have a great home i personally find build-up is better for scrapper playstyle dark melee lacks the PUNCH that scrapper wants. generic thoughts not pertaining to dark melee or shield defense: at the end of the day, scrappers will certainly do more single target damage than tankers, but this game is rarely about putting down single targets. tanker will clear missions faster if you herd stuff properly. tanker will feel more durable along the way. tanker will feel more self sufficient earlier in the leveling process. tanker is very consistent. tanker is better for teams to passively keep stuff grouped and not hitting squishier party members generic damage procs on scrapper do the same damage as generic damage procs on tanker. scrapper can get streaky crit luck and feel amazing and then see no crits and feel awful.

the reason is actually all the same that you outlined. with how fast groups blitz through enemies, what difference does another damage proc make? if you stick with the group, it doesnt matter much what you have slotted. however, if you decide to splinter from the group or just run solo, these -res procs are more valuable and should help clear faster than a single damage proc. i would note though... no need to go overboard. do 1 of each only where it makes sense. some powersets, it just doesnt make sense.

armor sets, on a role that is geared towards damage just need to be viewed from a different lens than durability alone. scrapper is not about surviving to infinity. scrapper is about killing them before they kill you. and the 'better' armor sets will allow you to take on more foes, stronger foes, and with less downtime. to touch on fire armor -- fire armor has the highest potential damage but bio offers SIMILAR damage output with better durability AND a taunt aura. if fire armor had taunt aura and the consideration was strictly durability (and theme), fire armor would absolutely be considered strong. fire armor is more durable than people give it credit for (especially with the buffs in the last year) but it currently has too many flaws and there are better alternatives. the comparisons are always relative to what you can be using instead -- what is this powerset offering that the other powerset is not?

By what metrics are you defining 'worst'? I feel like this topic is less subjective than people make it out to be. There are easily identifiable objectively bad performing armor sets that have terrible survival and offer little to no utility or offensive power to offset that. This comparison is all relative to what other, objectively better armor sets offer. The high bar is going to be bio armor for having the best offensive capability while still being sufficiently 'survivable'. The adjacent comparison is something like invulnerability or energy aura for just being able to literally survive the best, generally, while also offering some sideways utility and a taunt aura. Some armor sets are at least 'close' to these 3... others are light years below (hello /regen). Fire armor is probably the one and only oddball in the mix because it does have substantial offensive power to offset its terrible survival, but not enough to warrant its use in SOLO play. The one and only buff Fire Armor needs for people to like it on scrapper is a passive taunt aura -- this one single change alone would instantly shuffle scrapper fire armor up to the top of the table next to bio armor. not advocating for scrappers to get even more taunt auras though... im personally in the camp that scrappers shouldnt even have taunt auras in the first place. Also -- Dont need people coming out of the woodworks to claim that regen is actually sleeper OP top tier if you mail 10000 purple/orange inspirations to yourself and always party with a bubble defender. regen sucks. it does not perform anywhere near any of the other sets in terms of survival. it offers some of the absolute worst debuff protection. it offers no taunt aura. it offers no offensive utility at all. it is bad. if you want to say otherwise, you are wrong and delusional. if you still want to play /regen for theme, you do so fully understanding it is a meme or a challenge.

city of data https://cod.uberguy.net/ not sure how accurate it is to homecoming anymore (when the last update happened) but it is generally the most accurate and detailed data available for everything. there is an attack chain builder tool somewhere... i dont have a link to it.

dark melee is bad for damage but it is still scrapper damage. to the OP -- mids can sometimes be weird when comparing skills with critical strikes active... it may apply to the powerset you are building and NOT the ones you are comparing against. that may be what you were running into.

regarding kick -- i thought all of these animation redraws were cleaned up and no longer matter (years ago at this point). i dont actively use boxing/kick to know because they are terrible but i wasnt aware this is even a consideration aside from a thematic style choice of wanting to literally kick someone at the cost of using one of the worst DPA attacks in the game. i will note that kick is technically better than boxing as a synergy buff to cross punch, presuming you never plan to actually kick anything. regarding synergies or self buffs (or whatever semantics) -- they can be fun when designed well. it is fun to look at powers interacting with each other in a meaningful way and build around that. the joke is that these barely matter and the bigger problem is that even when fully collaborated, they dont even bring the powers up to an acceptable baseline.

a perception to fix is that low tier powers are worse than high tier powers. in dark melee, smite is a T2 attack that outclasses every other button including the T9 midnight grasp (for damage). The ask is not that boxing/kick should be a mid-tier AT attack, but rather it should closer to a solid T1/T2 attack performance (boxing is not quite there, and kick is absolute trash currently). The other part of this is questioning why kick exists, adjacent to the superior boxing -- boxing/kick are largely viewed as gatekeepers (blocking access to tough/weave) but other than fulfilling a requirement for the fighting pool to literally have (2) tier 1 powers, what is the purpose of Kick? i think the synergy system in the fighting pool is a joke. brawl is never going to be anything but a meme. even fully synergized, boxing and kick are not good. cross punch is only relevant because it allows access to force feedback recharge procs that builds otherwise might not be able to include... and supposing you do grab cross punch, you dont really care about the double synergy anyways (mathematically, you shouldnt). all that said -- i would not advocate for any change here. i think there are creative directions that could possibly be taken here but the fighting power pool is currently desirable overall... and that is more than can be said compared to other power pools.

there is a stigma in this forum against spelling out the realities of powersets. so let me go ahead and get the PR statement out of the way -- play how you want and if it is fun to you then nobody can tell you that you shouldn't be having fun. Reality -- Dark Melee is functional but low tier for damage. dark melee offers a ton of utility that other sets do not in the form of healing, endurance management, and hit chance reduction (inverted defense). it is very crucially missing knockdowns (fuels the absolutely busted force feedback recharge proc), -defense (that can fuel resistance reduction procs), and reliable AoE damage (shadow maul is fun but is objectively bad, touch of fear is 'good' but lacking in comparison to other sets). positive to note that smashing and negative energy damage are much better than lethal damage (that _MANY_ other powersets are stuck with), but that doesnt help the damage output enough.

this this this. the whole point of build up+Gaussian is to assure total destruction arrest. you can play with the proc and 'maximize' how much recharge to put it the power while still achieving 90% proc rate...... but once you have enough global recharge in your build it actually doesnt do much to add a recharge IO into build-up anyways... shaves off like 2 seconds. this is especially true if you have FFeedback recharge procs in your attack string (you should if you can).

relatively speaking, scrappers benefit less from damage procs than other ATs but it is still the last remaining way to eek out more damage. if you are planning to run musculature incarnate (you should), then reaching an 'effective' enhanced damage cap is really easy (for the most part 3 enhancements with a damage component will do it). procs work best with minimal recharge in your power and maximum GLOBAL recharge (IO set bonuses, party buffs like chronoshift, self buffs like hasten). you want to try to maximize your global recharge so you can hit perma-hasten self buffed and then maxamize your enhance damage scale through IOs in the individual power first (again only takes about 3 enhancements typically). beyond that just weigh your set bonus options against more procs. there is a lot of flexibility and nuance here but most of it doesnt matter _too_ much for scrapper. it is mostly a decision on your end of if you want more defense/resistance to survive self buffed or do you want to rely on party buffs and/or inspirations more.

there is a lot of nuance in the topic and that is why the conversation spiraled. the simplest answer to your original question is that both scrapper and brute are fine, so play what you want... and if you cant decide based on all this conversation, then flip a coin and you will still have fun. you really would never notice any substantial difference until you dump influence into a fully optimized build at or near level cap... and even at that point, people will tell you about all the workarounds you can do like stuffing your mailbox full of inspirations and buying temporary buffs to make bad builds functional! **you cant ask 'which one is better' and then not expect people to talk about the META.

My point is actually that whoever is META will make the non-META AT(s) irrelevant however you balance it. The definition of META dictates this in the first place. There is never going to be a point in the game where all 4 (dont forget about stalkers) of the main melee ATs are all equally useful on every team. In order for there to be a winner, there has to be a loser. Frankly speaking, scrappers already dont really have a place in parties as it stands when blasters and corruptors exist. The META role for scrapper right now is to be the high damage tanker that survives because the game doesnt necessitate tanker-level defenses for most party content. But if you wanted my opinion on how to 'better' balance the game to ATTEMPT having all of these extremely similar melee ATs somehow having carved out useful party roles in a game where party composition barely matters in the first place: scrapper taunt auras would be 100% removed from every armor set. tankers and brutes should be the only classes with the passive taunt auras bump brute's base damage scale reduce brute's max damage buff (compensation) goal of generally improving the baseline performance without effecting their peak damage brutes would have *real* ATOs that actually do something meaningful brutes would have corruptor-level values for power pool options (slight bump for things like tough/weave, combat jumping, and leadership buffs) damage and buff procs (especially FF recharge) would see a BIG overhaul

brutes just offer an optional middle ground between scrappers and tankers. generally speaking, for teamplay brutes are not 'more useful' than having another scrapper or another tanker on the squad. brutes will do less damage than a scrapper but offer some better mobbing control with taunts and will feel more tanky with party buffs. for soloplay, brutes dont really feel any more 'tanky' than scrappers typically because armorsets run the same exact values as scrappers and it is very difficult to get above 75% resists without temporary and/or party buffs... and you just do less damage. that said, brutes are perfectly fine where they are at. if brutes did the same damage as scrappers but were more tanky, we would be having the same conversation about scrappers being pointless. if brutes were just as tanky as tankers but did more damage, we would be having the same conversation about tankers being pointless. brutes are entirely functional/playable but the 'pure' classes are just better when optimized in the current patch. funny enough, i made this same argument for sentinels in a different thread and got all kinds of unhappy responses. lets see if it happens again.........

brutes and stalkers can feel pretty fun while leveling but tankers and scrappers end up being miles better at level cap with incarnates and a solid IO'd loadout. as others have said... the critical strikes proc ATO is what makes scrapper feel so much better. it is a complete game changer. also, yes elec melee is............... underwhelming.

not the math nerd on DM particularly here, but as a baseline... smite is the best place for the crit proc to go for pure DPS. it is not necessarily the most reliable place though. midnight grasp would be the most reliable. i believe there was some oddity with the ArcanaTime of siphon life and/or midnight grasp as far as *WHEN* the crit proc happens (mid animation) such that you lose a substantial part of the buff duration. that said, the biggest problem you have right now is that you have your crit proc button slotted to hell and back full of recharge. whatever button has crit strikes in it should have ZERO recharge (aside from the crit strikes proc itself...... unfortunately coming with recharge). the goal should _not_ be to just move the crit strikes set to another button. stop being bamboozled by set bonuses. check out procs-per-minute math threads if you need a better explanation. **ArcanaTime is a real interesting thing to dive into if you wanted to read up on it but also just a whole lot of 'more-than-you-needed-to-know'.

take everything except geode. geode is fine to take but very optional. overall stone armor is very much a 'set it and forget it' armor set. you do want to upkeep earths embrace though... and you probably want that to auto-renew... recommend you macro that (unless you skip hasten for some reason). stone skin is a tougher power to slot due to being both defense and resist. the bonuses are meaningful on both defense and resist. would recommend splitting it even and not worrying _too_ much about IO set bonus there. as an interesting piece for earth's embrace. scrapper HP (alongside standard accolade bonuses) actually caps out with a SINGLE healing enhancement in earths embrace. aside from IO set bonuses... it is quite wasteful to over-invest there. earth's embrace just gives that big of a bonus. Rooted gives -substantial- regeneration, especially combined with earth's embrace massive HP cap buffer. do be sure to invest some healing IOs into rooted to enhance the regen further. not sure there is much else to talk about stone armor. it is great all around.

that is the strange part about ice armor _in comparison_ to other 'better' armor sets. you can find ways to 'fix' ice armor and it is certainly 'playable' but you could also just pick an armor set that works out of the box and doesnt need to be 'fixed'... or just enjoy the theme and supplement your weaknesses through party buffs. claws and katana are great powersets fundamentally but are driven down by lethal damage type. so... great when the critters are not specifically overly resisting lethal damage. im not personally a fan of claw's follow-up in place of build up though. fiery melee is extremely strong.

nin is not uniquely the only armor set with a t9 that can do this but it does uniquely have the endurance clicky. t9 has a 3 minute duration. The goal is to get the t9 to a 4 minute cooldown with a TON of recharge. what you are covering from there is a 1 minute gap... which is the exact duration of Unleash Potential. Final step -- you just also need Unleash Potential to have a 4 minute cooldown... which is a lot easier. having the endurance clicky power baked into the kit allows you to 'bypass' the crash if you time it right... alongside ageless radial (which you will want for debuff resistance and recharge anyways). the neat thing about the combination is that the t9 and Unleash Potential both give a ridiculous amount of endurance recovery so the blue bar (outside of the crash every 4 minutes) is essentially infinite. practically speaking though, it is overkill for party content where you get tons of group buffs anyways and can be annoying to play around.