Werner

Congratulations! And I'm guessing that not only could you survive other than a few slip ups, but you put out a ton of damage as well? Or did you run mostly in defensive? I have a Titan/Bio Scrapper that I've just not done anything with because I'm not sure what to do with him. I was thinking maybe pure damage with just enough survivability to be viable, but that would be rather unlike me. Yeah, Hover was very helpful for the last fight, one of those cases where I'm glad I went with flight on that toon.

What's the reasoning for 70% rather than low 60s?

I threw this together quickly for a friend, but he abandoned the toon before hitting 50, so no real world trial to see how it works. More of a damage build than a survivability build, and damage could be further improved through a more intelligent use of procs, though likely at the cost of some set bonuses. Other than that, I've taken what I think should be taken, and skipped what I think should be skipped from the primary and secondary. Oppressive Gloom instead of Cloak of Fear is an option, though. Anyway, needs at least a little more polish, maybe more than that, but it might be a decent starting point.

You made me curious. Tried this on my DM/SR Brute without using Siphon Life or Rebirth. Very blinky scary hit points almost the whole time, but I went over 10 minutes without them finishing me off, then left the mission. A million small DoTs seem like ideal circumstances for scaling resists, but it's still fun to see them in action like this.

Hi! Ah, yes, those old old videos. That was fun. I just checked one, and it was 360p. For probably most of them I couldn't even run screen capture at the same time as playing, and had to resort to playing back the demo files and recording from that. Later, for I think a single video, I was running two good graphics cards in parallel and was able to screen capture in gorgeous high-res 480p! And then one of the graphics cards died, and I was back to 360p. For DM/Shield Scrapper vs. DM/SR Scrapper, I don't remember what I might have said back then, but I'd think that for most people in most situations, DM/Shield would be significantly better. In Homecoming, I rebuilt both my Katana/Dark Scrapper and DM/SR Scrapper as Brutes, and that's what I mostly play right now. But that doesn't make them the best or anything, just the most nostalgic fun for me. The thing with Cardiac Core and Agility Core buffing Barrier Core caught me by surprise. I only noticed it when testing Reactive Defenses and SR scaling resists to make sure I understood them when replying to a post. During that testing, I'm not even sure why I hit Barrier, but at some point I did, then as it was wearing off, just happened to see 6%. What the heck? So I did more testing to the get the numbers. And I only tested the tier 4s, so I don't know if other tiers work like this, or what the numbers might be if so, but I'm always aiming for the tier 4s, so the rest doesn't matter much to me. I wonder what other numeric synergies might be lurking in the incarnate powers.

It depends on what you're after. I made this for a friend who wanted his SS/Invuln to be an unkillable aggro magnet, and sees attacks as just another tool for getting and holding aggro rather than as a way to do damage. A couple build quirks to note - he said he didn't care about the psionic hole at all (?!...OK), and he insisted that Super Jump be two-slotted. This was prior to the Power Transfer proc, so maybe I'd find a way to fit that in if I were doing it today. Anyway, he has incarnate soft cap defense to all but psionic and toxic with only a single target in range. That also means that in non-incarnate content with normal enemy counts, it is very hard for defense debuffs to drop him below the soft cap. Easy to swap in Flight. He prefers Jumping. Like you he prefers Laser Beam Eyes, but I talked him into Fire Blast, I think so that I could get the set bonuses from Superior Entomb in Char. I don't remember anymore.

It looks like you're only counting 5% from Barrier, but Cardiac Core buffs the resistance of Barrier Core from 90% -> 32.5% -> 7.5% -> 5% to 108% -> 39% -> 9% -> 6%. (Agility Core does the same to defense.) So you're actually 1% higher on a couple rare damage types. Woo?

Almost. I'd heard 3% + 7% scaling for Reactive Defenses here and there too, but confirmed last month with in game monitoring that it is indeed 3% + 10% scaling. And it scales like you show, linearly between 100% and 0% HP. So Reactive Defenses are giving you 3% + 10% * (100% - 20%) = 11% damage resistance when you're at 20% hit points. Add in the 40% from Super Reflexes scaling resists and 20.1% from the ATO, and you're at 71.1% damage resistance. Add in Shield Wall and you're at 76.1% damage resistance. And let me second and thumbs up everything @Redlynne said. And I want to extend the lesson to other primaries as well. With 10% scaling from Reactive Defenses and the ATO and maybe you pick Barrier, you really don't need to be sitting at 90% in Mids to be there in practice in almost every situation where you'd have any concern that your life was on the line, and it's probably better to work on other aspects of your build.

I tried 801.1 for the first time this morning. I just hadn't gotten around to trying these missions. I took my Katana/Dark Brute's beta build and went in at +4x1, figuring I'd ease into it, and it still offered up a challenge a few times. One time I even had to run. Well, or take inspirations, but let's not get silly. 😉 I liked it!

Devouring Earth maybe? I just got a Devouring Earth mission, and I was like, "Oh! I forgot about them. They're nasty. Can't brute force them. Gotta play smart. Probably going to die. Yay!" Then I got in the mission and they were level 38. Wut? Ah, well. I'm sure I'll hit them again soon enough. Well, huh. I took Elude as a set mule on my DM/SR Brute. Maybe I could actually use it here to brute force a couple spawns, crash and wait a couple minutes? Is 114% defense enough? Might be faster than repeatedly kiting them off of their buffs while whittling them down.

Oh, right, Rularuu! I must experiment. I remember using an attack sequence macro for at least one group, but otherwise being OK on my old Katana/Dark Scrapper in the old game. I kind of remember Shadow Shard grinding for fun and profit. I’ll find some Arachnos to try as well.

I can only speak for myself, and these aren't Scrappers, but at least on my Katana/Dark Brute and Dark Melee/Super Reflexes Brute, it basically means what you said. Amended and clarified a bit to "I can blindly walk into any mission I'm assigned, incarnate or not, and not worry about changing my difficulty settings or taking inspirations, with an exception for the AVs vs. EBs setting, as there are a number of AVs I can't handle solo at level 54 on my Katana/Dark, and my DM/SR doesn't currently have the DPS for them." Some enemy groups are absolutely much harder than others. Some are walk off and make a sandwich easy. Others are nasty as hell. Some will require pulling. Some will kill me now and then. But I usually only turn the difficulty down if I'm doing something like speed running the first Dark Astoria arc for salvage, or if I know I can't handle the AV at the end of an arc, or if I'm bringing lowbies along with me, since +5 to them is just too painful, so I switch to +3 so they fight +3 and +4. Basically, I get my variety of difficulty based on which groups I'm fighting rather than by changing my settings. I have less experience on my DM/SR, so for specifics I'll mostly talk my Katana/Dark. Carnies were doable with occasional deaths prior to my most recent respec, but are now an exercise in frustration until I pick up T4 Ageless Radial, which testing on beta shows will address the problems I added to the build in the name of L54 AV DPS. Longbow are tough with pulling and the occasional death. Incarnate Banished Pantheon are tough but doable diving in, with only very rare deaths. The rest of the Dark Astoria incarnate enemies are fairly simple. Malta are no problem. Arachnos I've somehow, and not intentionally, never solo'd on him. I anticipate them being a little easier than Longbow - tough, but doable - but I don't know. There may be other enemy groups I haven't fought that will be tough, ah, like I skip over the breaking Malta out of prison part in Dark Astoria. What is it, PPD? I suspect they'd be painful. I'm sure some other people mean something like I do about running +4x8. I'm sure some people mean something different, like only certain groups, or a majority of groups, and with liberal use of inspirations and temporary powers. I think it's one of those things that just means different things to different people, and so "I run +4x8 solo" tells you something, but without more context doesn't tell you a whole lot. A War Mace/Shield Defense Scrapper is an amazing little beast, but you might be expecting too much from what I consider to be a damage-oriented rather than survival-oriented combination, particularly if you also build to emphasize the damage output. I haven't started one, but I've been fiddling with damage-oriented incarnate builds and DPS testing on beta, and with costumes. I've not tried regular enemy groups, just pylons so far, but I don't expect to be able to play +4x8 almost all the time like I do with my Brutes. I expect to be learning what I can and can't handle, and where I need my settings.

For soloing Banished Pantheon in Dark Astoria missions, my /Dark Brute leans on Barrier Core. 30 seconds of incarnate soft cap defense and hard cap resistance to all but Toxic, and usually only Energy then also dropping under the hard cap. I've seen resistance debuffs, but it's mostly a ton of defense debuffs, and resistance and healing can keep me standing even when defense debuffed. But Barrier wouldn't plug Dark's energy hole as well when tanking for a group or with lower level or fewer enemies due to moving from spawn to spawn much faster than 2 minutes. Plugging the hole is perhaps less necessary in those cases, though. Answering the OP, I get to 90% resists with: Tough well-slotted but generally not over-slotted powers set bonuses uniques Cardiac Core Barrier Core Easier to hit 90% on a Tanker than on a Brute, of course, so there'd likely be more room in the build to do more about the energy hole than I did.

Yeah, personal test only. I made my own AVs with no resistances or debuff resistances. They did accidentally have to-hit debuffs, and I'd initially used Nictus Romulus, so they had Cimerorans with them so there were defense debuffs as well, but I didn't bother tweaking further. I put it together quickly for me personally and specifically for my Katana/Dark Brute. I probably spent 40+ hours trying to find the best combination of attacks, the order in which to make those attacks, how best to slot and proc those attacks, which incarnate powers to use, and so on. Then once I finished the respec on live, I switched to my DM/SR Brute and have been playing him instead mostly, trying to finish up his incarnates. Yes, please! I'd tell it 100 billion hit points, no regeneration, no resistance, and see how many years that took. Convert to sustained DPS. Emphasis on sustained. 😉

Lazy, maybe? For start, I click Hasten, Assault, Start on my phone, Golden Dragonfly. For stop, I just glance down the moment the pylon goes boom. I figure I'm within a second or two on each run, and with runs often differing by tens of seconds anyway due to other random factors, it just never felt worth reading back through a log. What mattered to me was that I was being consistent. I could have instead always started the clock before clicking Hasten and Assault, for instance. I'd have gotten different numbers, but my relative performance would have been the same. I'm not sure what you mean by controllability? The AVs occasionally jog off briefly. There's time to travel between the AVs. Entering the mission after the mission clock starts takes a few seconds. But again, what matters to me is that I'm being consistent in the measurement. There was another unintended random factor, in that I had given them Dark Melee powers, and some of my builds couldn't sustain 95% to hit when debuffed. But I decided to call that a pro of the measurement instead of a con - if you can't hit, it does indeed reduce your practical DPS. Giant Monster killing I think remains outside of my capability on any of my characters. I might have a shot at very slowly doing it on my current Katana/Dark Brute on giant monsters not resistant to lethal damage. I'll have to find out. Burst AoE is where most of the game is at, I think. For AoE I'll grab my SS/Fire/Mu Brute, built to handle regular content, not built for farming. But I don't grab him much anymore, even if he has the most veteran levels of my characters at this point. I usually have more fun playing my single-target specialists for some reason, even solo. I'm not sure why. It's slow and inefficient. In any case, the Pylon testing is about sustained single-target DPS, mostly relevant for uplevel AV fights, but that's still something reasonable for some people to care about.

Roughly equal in practice. The game picks whichever defense is best against the attack - positional or typed. Some rare attacks lack a position, so would ignore positional defense. Some rare attacks lack a type, or are toxic, so would ignore typed defense. No way to change your primary or secondary, right.

<grabs some gasoline for the fire> I don't actually use logs or my proposed formula or the "official" formula. I use my phone's stopwatch and 38344 / time + 128. Close enough. Easy to remember. Accuracy vs. precision when so much of the damage is random. Blah blah blah. I've even mostly abandoned pylons when doing comparative testing of my DPS. Instead, I time beating five basic L54 AVs in a row in AE on beta. That gives me a better picture of the average contribution from things like Assault and non-perma-Hasten. I also wanted to be certain, rather than fairly certain, that what I was learning was relevant to L54 AV fights.

<Alexei charges into +4x8 incarnate Banished Pantheon, and dies 15 seconds later screaming, "My eyes! The goggles do nothing!"> Oh that's right - Barrier Core caps my energy resistance and incarnate soft caps my ranged/AoE/energy defense for 30 seconds. Though I do think I'll pick up Ageless Radial for situational use, like vs. Carnies, Neuron, or Black Swan. And I could still poke at a build with Musculature Core, Ageless Radial, and Melee Core to address resistance. Well! I just learned something! Cardiac Core buffs the resistance of Barrier Core from 90% -> 32.5% -> 7.5% -> 5% to 108% -> 39% -> 9% -> 6%. Agility Core does the same for defense. Good to know! That means my Toxic resistance will hard cap at 40% hit points for 30 seconds. Nice. It's less of a hole than I thought.

Well, it’s fairly easy for me to try it with my current build on beta without wasting any empyrean merits. I need to remember that even if it’s not as good, building around it might still result in a better overall package. But if it’s better despite me being built around Barrier, the answer is obvious. Take on some +4x8 Cimerorans and Banished Pantheon. It’ll give me a good starting point for understanding how it behaves. Apologies again for the threadjack.

Except in incarnate content as Bill Z said. To me, one of the main advantages of SR is the ease with which it can reach the incarnate soft cap. OK, maybe "ease" isn't the right word, but easier than most sets. The other main advantage is little fear of defense debuffs. This seems worth expanding on. I believe that SR has 60% scaling resists (20% per auto power) that kick in at 60% of max HP. I believe the Reactive Defenses unique has 3% resistance + 10% scaling resists that kick in at 100% of max HP. Confirmed on a Brute as best I could in beta from in-game combat attribute monitoring of % max HP vs. those two sources of resistance. But I could still be wrong because the monitor doesn't seem to be updating the two numbers in sync, with some delay between one and the other, and because it's possible that Scrappers get a different value, though I don't believe so. Maybe someone knows better. It was actually a little shocking, even after all these years, to really watch the scaling resists in action. I turned off all of my toggles standing in front of a Pylon for this testing. It was trivial for the Pylon to hurt me bad. But it was very hard for the Pylon to kill me. With only Tough on, it looked like it could never kill me. Freaky. Anyway, resistance is similar to defense - the more you have already, the more each additional % helps, until you hit the cap. So let's say your resistance starts at 30%. With 70% scaling resists on top of that, you resists should hard cap before you die, whether on a Brute or a Scrapper. But if a hit takes you from 40% to dead, they won't get to that level. So let's say you're at 40%. Your scaling resistance is 20% from SR and 6% from Reactive, so 54% total. 46% of damage gets through. Hit Barrier and you cap your resistance. 25% of damage gets through on a Scrapper, only 10% on a Brute. It's very significant, at least to big hits like AVs and GMs. A million smaller hits and Barrier won't provide as much benefit over your scaling resists as they smoothly scale up to the cap. And yes, your team will appreciate you using Barrier, and also using Rebirth. At least if you have any experience defending squishies. I don't, so on my DM/SR I keep hitting Rebirth about 1 second after a teammate died. It turns out they don't appreciate you as much then!

I can't say that you're wrong. I have Cardiac Core, Barrier Core, and Assault Core on my Katana/Dark Brute right now. I think the most competitive alternate combination for how I play would be Musculature Core, Ageless Radial, and Melee Core, and I've not done a Mids build centered on those incarnates, which I could then run on beta for in-game comparison in addition to looking at the final numbers. I can at least talk about what my choices do for me, though, in the build as a whole. It's not about any one incarnate power. So let's actually start with the Alpha. On Scrapper you go Musculature because it's a big damage boost. On a Brute, it's not nearly so big a damage boost. And on a Brute, my resistance caps are 90% instead of 75%, so my resistance benefits significantly from Cardiac Core. Cardiac Core also comes with a 45% endurance reduction enhancement, which looks like it ends up being slightly better than what Ageless Radial offers, at least on my current build. Ageless Core would blow it away, but we need Radial on /Dark. Setting Barrier's defense aside for the moment, let's look at its resistance. We can even just look at the 5% second minute. Ignoring my Energy and Toxic holes, my worst resistance is 81% to Negative. 5% tail end of Barrier is 86%. Then at 60% health, 4% more from Reactive Defenses caps me. That's huge. Combined with the defense, it basically turns off their damage for 10 seconds. That means I can use it very reactively, in only the direst of circumstances, as I plunge into the red - which admittedly happens a lot with defense debuffers. Damage stops, Dark Regeneration resets my HP to max, and I'm back at it. Ignoring resistance, Ageless is the surely the better answer for defense debuffs. And it's nice to resist other debuffs as well. (Edit: Ageless doesn't resist resistance debuffs, though, while Barrier does. Resistance debuffs seem a lot more rare than defense debuffs, but they're out there.) But I suspect that for my character at least, with resistance a significant factor, Barrier is better in practice most of the time. As for the recharge, it would help some, yes. My current build has about 30 seconds downtime on Hasten, and I've tuned my recharge times around Hasten up for maximum proc chances, which means I'm throwing in an extra attack when Hasten is down, lowering my DPS 20% of the time. I tested using a couple Force Feedbacks to get me to almost perma Hasten, but it was significantly better for DPS to just take the recharge hit and use other procs. Having Dark Regeneration up more often is also good. But so is needing Dark Regeneration less. Combining Ageless with Melee Core might be even better than Barrier most of the time. But it takes longer to click 2 powers than 1, and Melee Core lasts 2 minutes, then is down for 2 minutes. If I'm playing cautiously against +4x8, and since my AoE is poor with Katana, I'm not waiting very long between spawns for Barrier to recharge. I'd be waiting over two minutes for Melee, which I wouldn't do, so half the time I just wouldn't have it available. Anyway, that was my thinking in choosing Barrier over Ageless. On a /Dark Scrapper, the first combination I'd look closely at would be Musculature Core, Ageless Radial, and Assault... Radial? Aim for resists in the 70% to 75% range without incarnates so that Reactive Defenses caps your resistance before you're down to 50% hit points. Ageless is then your best answer for defense debuffs, with some other significant benefits, and we take Assault for more damage. And something something DM/SR something back on topic something. 😉

I went with Rebirth Radial, but I probably should have done some quick math to see if that or the extra mitigation from Barrier Core would have been better. Rebirth has treated me well the few times I needed it. But I’m at 59% plus, and currently picking up the Blessing of Tieleku or whatever her name is for some additional defense to better handle defense debuffs. I think the worst I’ve seen was 2%, so that should do nicely. But if I were at 54%, I’d go with Barrier. Well, that’s not true, I’d get myself to 59% without Barrier. I might still get Barrier, but I’d want to hold it in reserve for emergencies. Yes, the final minute of Barrier is 5%. 10 seconds of I forget because it’s insanely high, 20 seconds of 32.5%, 30 seconds of 7.5%, 60 seconds of 5%, both defense and resistance. Going by memory too, but I built around and live and die by Barrier on my Katana/Dark, so I hope my memory is right. 🙂

For the Alpha, I took Agility on my DM/SR Brute, giving me +4.3% positional defense. Well, it will when I hit tier 4. But on a Scrapper, I'd probably take Musculature. I'm not sure, though. Don't bother with Resilient - if I plug in Resilient Core in Mids, I get 2.6% smashing/lethal resistance. It's enhancing your damage resistance powers, which is why it's so anemic on Super Reflexes. I'm not sure which interface would be best. I have Degenerative Radial on my Brute, but Brutes are not Scrappers. You may be on target with Reactive Core, but I don't know. I'm sure someone does.

My DM/SR Brute has 10 toggles and a 1.7/1 ratio with accolades turned off. Yet in actual play, he can punch things all day long, his endurance bar rarely dips far, and I keep forgetting that I took and slotted Dark Consumption. Turning on accolades brings him to 1.9/1. Mids doesn't include the average recovery from procs, and he has 3 Performance Shifters and a Panacea, bringing him to 2.4/1. He has 117.3 endurance. Some toggles are easily-dropped depending on the situation. He has Dark Consumption. A simple ratio, even if it's a decent rule of thumb, misses too much to be very useful as a way of understanding a build's endurance management.

It looks to me like you already understand how to fix the problem - that build shouldn't have any endurance issues at all. Quite the opposite, I would expect.