HelenCarnate

I was expecting a "Scrappers will be gone to the Americans!" in there.

*I *morons. *This *I *forums. Fixed that for ya.

Clearly just a troll at this point. Should have closed the thread long ago as OS and others have suggested.

And yet you have not even explained what changed. Please explain how things were before and after the change.

Feel free to link the patch notes that list the change. Because how you are explaining it makes no sense. What elude effect? The patch notes from issue 9 until the doors were shut are still out there.

Had a Bots/Time and just picked random Russian names for all my bots. Like Igor, Dimitri, Ivan, Leonid. Crush my Russian bots? I'll just make more.

Not sure your memory is working correctly. Nothing was changed with scrappers. What changed was AE. When it first came out you could have a group full of EBs with almost no attacks and get full XP for it. That was nerfed to force you to mix up groups with Bosses, Lts and Minions if you wanted full XP and also required you to have mobs take more attacks. If you didn't mix up the mobs or didn't make they difficult enough, then you would get reduced rewards. This started in Issue 16. Soft cap has always been the same. Mobs have always had at least a 5% chance to hit. The only change they made to scrappers that would affect what you are talking about is a change to Fiery Embrace back in issue 18. Fiery Embrace power now adds bonus fire damage for all Melee Power Set attacks instead of being a normal damage Buff. All Melee Power Set attacks made for 20 seconds after activating Fiery Embrace will do bonus damage based on that attack's damage. This bonus damage IS affected by enhancements and outside buff/debuff effects. At low levels, this means Fiery Embrace will have lower impact than the old implementation, while at high levels or on teams with lots of +Damage effects, you will see increased damage output. Critical damage is not affected by the new Fiery Embrace That change made FE even more useful at the damage cap (where many people tend to be when they are farming). Scrappers were never that great at +4x8 fire farms simply because their cap to resists are at 75% instead of 90% compared to Brutes and Tanks. Even at the soft cap you are going to get hit some but at the caps, the Scrapper will take 250% more damage on top of having lower HP. Another reason they are not that great at farms is a lack of a taunt aura. Without a taunt aura, mobs tend to run away from DoTs and from things they can't hit. Because of this, /fire scrappers tend to have mobs running all over the place unless they have other means to lock them down.

May as well go /Stone if you are intent on poor performance.

Mids numbers are wrong for the regen on soul absorption. I think what it is doing is adding every single target together instead of going off of the base + additional per target hit. Mine for example (on live targets) gives an extra 9.81 HP/Sec regen as a base plus 1.84 HP/Sec for every target. I think what Mids is doing is adding that 9.81 on every target instead of only the first.

If you are using it as a mule and never actually activate it, I would try to fit 1 more slot in and toss in Mocking Beratement. For those that have cones down, this seems to work rather well.

Agreed. Some people go nuts with recharge and 5 slot Red Fortune on top of LotG and may just need that 1 extra slot to get by. That is about the only reason for Elude.

My main issue is that offensive only works on 1 target. The only time you actually get anywhere close to optimal damage is when solo against AVs and GMs. Otherwise stuff just dies too fast to make use of that function for its full duration. My other issue is the nukes. Most are fine but some of the weapon ones make no sense. Inferno for example is fine. It is on a 90 second timer instead of 145 for Blasters so I totally understand why it has reduced damage. However, it makes no logical sense for Full Auto and Rain of Arrows to take 50% longer to recharge compared to the same Blaster powers and also do lower damage. They should either be reduced to 60 seconds and have comparable damage or if they stay at 90 seconds, get a significant damage boost. Also not a fan of messing with the recharge timers and thereby lowering the base damage even more for some of the sets. Ice for example on blasters has the first 3 single target attacks at 4, 8 and 10 seconds. On Sents that was reduced to 3, 6 and 8 seconds. And with faster recharge also comes lower base damage. I can understand wanting to have a decent rotation at low levels compared to blasters who also have secondary attacks, but many melee characters are in the same boat and they do just fine. I believe that most Sent players would much rather have slightly longer recharge on their lower tier attacks (to at least the same as the same blaster attacks) if it meant higher base damage.

If you want decent times with a spines character, you will need to learn to use Throw spines and hit as many targets as possible every time. Outside of that power, Rad is way better for farming.

Well that answers that. Hadn't paid attention to those powers since I played on live and wasn't around for the last few issues.

More like a toggle. Turn it on it activates on the target and if you do nothing it lasts the full duration. But you could also end it early by clicking off the toggle and then it would go on cool down.

I love the street justice animations on short characters. Most shots end up being right below waist level.

And pair with Ninja

They can't have their headquarters in another state?

My Claws, TW and SJ/Ninja scrappers would like to disagree. Ninja is great for scrappers. The self heal and endurance and your clickie mez protection also gives psi resist to help with those rare non positional psi attacks. Down side is the DDR is not that great but Shadow Meld can help mitigate that somewhat if you don't have any lucks around. Claws is a great all around build. Plenty of AoE and Single target and probably the easier to level.

Thank you. It stands up well to pretty much anything except defense debuffs and rularuu. And to be fair I was chugging any inspirations that dropped so I always have 2 or 3 empty.

I log in and find myself in RWZ and realize I haven't got all the exploration badges. So I get them all and then remember the last one is on the ship. I was about to start a MSR but then.....I wonder.....Can I drop the shields on my own? So I set to find out. I start clearing the map out and it is going well. A couple times the ship tags me but I ignore it, heal through and keep going. I get down to 6 and then they start popping up again. So I pull out temp pets and daggers to try and speed things up. I get it down to 4 left but that seems to be my limit. Then I find someone also taking down a pylon. Apparently @Bill Z Bubba was testing out his WM/Bio scrapper and I kinda interrupted one of his tests right before he dropped the pylon. So solo I failed and I am pretty sure it is not possible with a Sent but anyone who can fit travel powers in and get under 2 min regularly without incarnate or temp pets could probably manage it with the proper planning. When the stars align and I get great luck on my procs and don't miss I can get just under 2 min but normally I am around 2:12 ish. Side note. It is totally possible for a sent and a scrapper to duo a MSR. After that we cleared out the remaining pylons and hopped on the ship to grab the badge. I announced in chat that the shields were down but only one other person came to help so 2 people dropped all the pylons and 3 people were in the middle killing. Only after everything was over did I realize I should have joined the vanguard before I started. Woops, life goes on.

I heard a rumor that there are also ways to make it pretty. Honestly though I still want a SS/Bio scrapper with Shadow Meld to handle the Rage crashes. May as well swap Jab for the old Energy Transfer while we are at it.

Really to compare you have to look at the whole picture. Start with the powers that are similar. Stone Fist vs Punch Same recharge, damage and endurance. Stone has faster cast time. Stone wins by 0.396 seconds. Stone Mallet vs Haymaker Same recharge, damage and endurance. SS has faster cast time. SS wins but only by 0.132 seconds KO Blow vs Seismic Smash Stone recharges faster and has shorter cast time and has mag 4 hold vs mag 3. Stone is the huge winner. They have the same ranged attack so that power is a tie. At this point stone is clearly better. Stone pulls ahead even more when you consider at this point, they both have 1 melee attack left. Jab vs Heavy Mallet. Brutes take jab for 2 reasons. As something to use as an attack while they are leveling and as a set mule. For an actual attack it is useless. Boxing is even better than Jab. For mitigation, they have Fault vs Hand Clap. No one wants the clap. KB instead of KD is terrible for melee and it takes 10 seconds longer to recharge. Fault can also be cast at range (20' but still range) so you can knock down all those mobs surrounding that poor blaster that pulled the extra group by accident. (if you care about those things). So far in every way except one power taking slightly longer to cast, stone is way better. Now we look at the things that are different and that is where things get difficult. Rage Vs BU. Rage is on all the time so all those powers that seemed to be the same now do more damage. But of course there is a down side. The crash was fixed/broken so you always get hit with the defense debuff. This can get some builds killed if they rely on defense to stay alive. They won't be in huge danger every time a crash hits but it has caused more than a few people to eat floor when the crash hit at a really bad time. BU on the other hand means no crash but only that extra damage in spurts. For some the extra damage adds enough for them to overlook the crashes and they double stack rage and love it. Others stay away like it was a recently arrived exchange student having a coughing fit. Lastly we have the AoE. On stone it is crap. Up every 14 seconds, like most other AoE attacks but has the same or lower damage than all the other 14ish second AoE attacks. It also has the longest animation time of all of them as well. The only good part about it is the large radius. In situations where you are surrounded, the long cast time and low damage are offset by the number of targets you can hit but if you only have a few mobs to kill, many times you are better off smashing them with your single target powers. Then we move to SS which has Footstomp. This is the AoE every set wishes it had. It does take longer to recharge but the damage is decent, and it casts fairly quickly (for a PBAoE attack anyway). If you manage to go nuts with recharge and are daring enough to double stack rage you can stomp on a huge area every 6-7 seconds for close to 400 damage. This tips the scales back to SS. How far is up to each person and depends on how much weight they give to each power.

Too many variables for a math problem. Rad/Fire is the short answer. I'll give a long answer when I get home. Ok long answer. Your builds with the fastest clear times all use Burn, Electric Fences, Ball Lightning and the main AOE from the primary. Spine Burst has terrible damage and while Atom Smasher takes just as long to cast it does more damage. Rad also has the benefit of being able to slot -resist procs from Achilles heel so you can potentially have 3 -resists procs at the same time. As far as incarnates go, that will depend on how you farm. If you are on the asteroid map that you can clear in a couple min, then for your Aplha you would probably want Agility. At that point you can fill up on damage inspirations before you start and be at the damage cap the whole time. Agility would give you a little more recharge for even fewer gaps between casts. If you run longer maps then Musculature since even when solo and combining inspirations, you tend to not always be at the damage cap so there is always room for more damage. Judgement again is a preference. I like Ion because it hits targets all over the place but others like Pyro due to the fast cast time. Interface I like Degen for -HP in addition to damage. Others like Reactive for -resist. For lore Banished Pantheon Radial is the most popular. The untouchable pet tosses out a rain of fire like attack that gets aggro. Keep them by your side and you can basically double the aggro cap at times. For Destiny, Ageless. You will run out of endurance without it. Hybrid Assault Radial. +damage doesn't do anything at the cap so double hit offers more benefit. Now is this THE best farmer build out there? There are probably better ones out there but this is certainly near the top. Only 5 slotted brawl but it still gets the job done. It is not 45% defense but it doesn't have to be. I still don't take enough damage to worry about needing to heal.

I think they run more due to not being able to hit you. I am pretty sure a taunt would force them to attack but you would have to either work it into your chain otherwise it will run out and they will take off again. I would copy to test and try before wasting potentially 2 respecs on a live build to be sure.