Hjarki

The only reason for a Time/Water Defender to be in melee range would be Time's Juncture or potentially something from Epic/Patron Pools - and given that you're almost certainly either Power or Soul, probably not the latter. Time's Juncture gets less and less useful the more you ramp up difficulty. Not only do its debuffs get purple patch'd, but in four star content you've also got to deal with enemies having inherent +damage and +resist. So that impressive-seeming -25% ends up reducing damage more like 6% even against otherwise undistinguished enemies. Flight is also arguably the best movement power. It allows you to go anywhere and gives you two different Defense toggles in the same power pool pick.

This sample size is far too small to yield useful conclusions (around 25% margin of error at 95% confidence). It's also impossible to check your math because you haven't clearly explained what you're testing - for example, we know that 60%+ recharge must exist in your data set but we don't know where that recharge is coming from.

Why wouldn't you skip Cleave? It's an incredibly small radius AE that rarely hits multiple targets and it's not much use as a single target attack even when you're manipulating the ATO proc. It can slot the Armageddon proc, but the AF means that it's not appreciably better than just adding a standard proc to a single target attack. Likewise, you're not getting any additional set versatility since you've already got two melee AE.

Or you could put it in one of the other 4 defense powers you have that never get turned off.

Hide is a poor choice for Kismet. Kismet requires the power be active for it to work and there are times (such as escorts) where you need to turn off Hide. Given the plethora of other options, it doesn't make much sense to put it in Hide. I'd argue that Savage is far better on a Stalker than any other AT - and one of the best sets available to Stalkers. The ST is extremely simple - a very fast rotation that only needs Maiming, Savage and Assassin's. You constantly maintain 5 stacks, so you have an EndRed/Recharge advantage over other sets. For AE, you really only need Savage Leap. Unlike other AT, Savage Melee for Stalkers has a full power version of Build Up. Coupled with the increased ability to critical from Hide, this gives you a large radius alpha strike every 40 sec (before recharge).

In terms of Dual Pistols, let's start with the big issue: no Aim. This significantly impacts the value of Hail of Bullets since you can't Aim + Gaussian's proc into a mass damage attack. Instead, you get Swap Ammo. However, I'd argue you shouldn't waste a power on it (for a Defender). Cold Ammo gives a very minor recharge/slow debuff. Toxic gives a -damage debuff that - like all such debuffs - gets savaged by purple patch and resists. Fire gives a bit of additional damage. However, what Lethal gives trumps all of those: -20% stacking damage resistance. Given a Pistols/Executioner's/Pistols/Piercing rotation, this averages to around -30% resist. For Beam Rifle, the big objection I have is Disintegrate. It's a critical part of the set but it just feels so clunky.

Probably my go-to for a tanking Tanker is Radiation/Staff/Energy. Radiation is one of the best armor sets from a pure Tanking standpoint. It's a resist/regen-based set so you don't end up in a situation where the difficulty ramps up and the opponents blow right through your once-soft-capped-defenses. The weak resists for Radiation (every set has them) are a near-perfect Cold/Dark/Psi - all damage types that aren't very hard-hitting but primarily worrisome for their debuffs. Radiation has slow resist against Cold/Psi (and can be capped with IO sets) and you can use Focused Accuracy from Energy to cover hit debuffing. Radiation also has endurance recovery so you never run into that mid-level problem of constantly gasping for endurance. Radiation also has an auto-hit taunt aura, which can come in handy. Staff is probably the most defensively-focused melee set around. It can provide enormous amounts of M/L Defense (and from early on, making it easier to level than many sets) as well as Resists (or other options) from the ultimate attack. While its single target damage isn't anything special, Radiations -regen means that's far less significant solo (and, of course, no one really cares about the minor differences in Tanker dps in a group setting). Staff's AE is strong, especially with 10-target Cones. I run Flight as one my pools, so I can hover above enemies (sometimes out of range of their melee range with Staff's extra two yards of range) and sweep entire spawns with those Cones. While leveling, you'll be stuck with just Precise Strike and Guarded Spin for about half your journey, but you can do a lot with just those two attacks. Energy is really for the early mentioned Focused Accuracy to cover -perception/-hit debuffs. It also provides another healing mule (I use it for Regenerative Tissue) to save you a slot you'd otherwise waste elsewhere.

This would require you take Subdue. It's not appreciably different damage-wise vs. abilities like Dominate, Char or Chilblain that you have to take anyway - and all of those attacks from primary can slot the ATO. An ability like Thunder Kick that's actually part of an optimized ST rotation and recharges/activates quickly enough to triple stack is the ideal.

Classically, Ice and Mace were strong choices for the defense toggles. After 27/4, S/L/E and S/L/E/R are much less comprehensive defenses for melee-based builds (which virtually all capable Dominators are). Sleet is a nice enough power, but the increasing emphasis on +4 play can diminish its importance. As a result, I argue that for most Dominator builds, your best bet is probably going to be Psi Mastery. It provides you status protection before you get Domination online, two LotG mules, broad-based hit/defense buffs (for the entire team no less) and a Coercive Persuasion mule if you need it. Psionic Tornado is also a solid ranged AE. Primal Forces is a (distant) second. Dominator Assault sets are, for the mot part, clunky. They have excessively long recharges and it's difficult to build functional ST rotations. Energy Transfer can solve the ST rotation (unfortunately, it does nothing for the often more problematic issue of how to slot the ATO proc without crippling your dps).

From what I can tell, it's essentially just a Power Boost effect in reverse. So let's say I have a Hold with no enhancements slotted (so 100% Hold Duration). If EMP Arrow has -50% (don't remember the exact numbers), this would reduce my Hold duration to 100% - 50% = 50% in the same way that a +50% Power Boost would increase it 100% + 50% = 150%. Overall, not very useful - the main purpose of the power seems to be the bubble.

An interesting question is whether the ATO in Arctic Air would yield more overall damage than Hot Feet does.

I'd argue that aiming for such benchmarks is counterproductive. You're shifting an enormous amount of effectiveness from everywhere else to 4-star level defenses/offenses and not actually doing much for the team. Sure, you'll be able to handle the beating but your teammates will be flopping over dead on a regular basis because you normally can't tank everything. So it's normally going to be a lot more effective to just build for normal content and then include a '4 star' Defender/Controller who takes the entire team from normal to 4 star.

My personal opinion is that all those procs are a poor choice. You're far better off just straight-slotting and using opportunistic procs - Elec/Bio/Elec has all three ST purple procs already and trying to cram in extras is only adding marginal dps at a huge loss of overall effectiveness. You also have to consider that the accept-no-substitutes best Alpha for Electrical Blast is Agility - which will diminish the impact of those procs. You might consider slotting Thunderous Blast with Power Transfer. One of the great virtues of Electrical Blast is that massive end drain ultimate - opening the fight by zero'ing out the end bar of 10 targets is a 20% buff to all subsequent damage. Between end mod slotting in Thunderous Blast, Charge Up and Agility Alpha, this is something you can do even against +4 enemies. Personally, I don't think Bio is a particularly effective combination with Electrical Blast, but if that's your concept it's your concept.

Farming tends to come in two forms: afk and active. For afk farming, you really want to be able to put a single ability on auto-fire and just rely on passive damage sources. Abilities like Rage or Hasten are useless since you've only got a single auto-fire power and it has to be an AE damage ability. For active farming, +damage abilities are (mostly) useless because you're converting all your inspiration drops to reds and chewing them to the damage cap anyway. So I don't see how Rad/SS would be a worthwhile approach to farming.

The OP is correct: the Scrapper/Stalker version of Energy Melee is inferior to the Brute/Tanker version. Energy Transfer is easy to see. Scrappers and Stalkers flat-out lose most of their critical bonus - a rather big deal for Stalkers who can controllably crit with Energy Transfer - for a healing bonus that just isn't very useful in most cases. Total Focus is a bit harder to see, but getting an extra fast activating Energy Transfer is not worth losing double damage on Total Focus. This is especially true once you consider how it creates a variable recharge rotation that can require special management. However, Scrappers/Stalkers will do more damage with Energy Melee for the same reasons they do more damage with everything: they're inherently harder-hitting AT. Scrappers/Stalkers just have less of an advantage with Energy Melee than they would with, say, Broadsword.

A ST rotation of PS -> SR -> AS -> SS is actually quite hard-hitting. You've got 3 attacks in between Assassin's Staff, so you never waste a Focus. Sky Splitter hits like a beast off an ATO proc and the only true weak attack in the mix is Serpent's Reach. Unfortunately, it requires a somewhat inconvenient 334% recharge (a bit too high for non-Hasten builds, too low for Hasten builds). Staff is also tough to make work with typed defenses: +Melee covers an entire category while +Lethal only covers half of one from Guardian Spin Avalanche + LotG and Armageddon + FF are the almost automatic choices for the two AEs, but Avalanche is primarily Melee Def rather than typed Def. Neither Hecatomb nor Blistering Cold works well in Sky Splitter since they're low recharge sets. You really want to pack the ATO into SS since that's where you need all the recharge - but that leaves you without a home for one of Hecatomb or Blistering Cold since your only other melee attack is Precise Strike. I think my favorite implementation of Staff on a Stalker is actually Staff/Electric/Soul. With the Sky Splitter proc, you can easily cap most resists. With Guarded Spin, you can over-cap Melee Defense. For the rest? A good offense is the best defense. In terms of Ice Armor, I think sets like Kinetic Melee or Stone work well.

On City of Data, it is not.

Claws is a fairly solid Scrapper set. However, in picking secondaries for a Scrapper I tend to confine myself to one of four options: Bio, Energy, Radiation and Shield. Claws can't be used with Shield. Radiation is problematic on a Scrapper because it is an entirely resist-based set. This makes slotting 5 LotG difficult and it doesn't provide nearly the durability as it would on Brutes/Tankers with their 90% resist cap. Bio is commonly used to boost offense for Scrappers, but I'd probably favor Energy here. Energy has more generally balanced defenses than Bio and the huge boost to recharge in crowds makes Spin truly devastating.

I'm a big fan of Darkest Night myself. It's a nice way to augment your defenses. However, I'd caution against relying on Darkest Night. As with all debuffs, it gets reduced by level differences and AV/GM status. So while it may seem like you can run around with nothing more than Weave and an enhanced Darkest Night, this just isn't the case.

Most sets get 'key features' - reasons people play the set. Martial Arts has two: The +def Storm Kick The rapid-activating, Force Feedback-proc'ing Dragon's Tail Stalkers get neither of these keys features. There's also a good reason to play a set as a Stalker: to bolster single target damage in an otherwise lacking set, especially one that is short on such powers or has a heavy-hitting power that works well with the Stalker's critical strike structure. This describes few sets so poorly as Martial Arts. I guess you can look at building a Martial Arts Stalker as an intellectual exercise, but Martial Arts just really isn't a Stalker-friendly set.

Bio is a fairly strong choice for a Scrapper 'farm' set. It has the taunt aura, it easily soft-caps Fire Resist and the plethora of winter sets make hard-capping fire resist fairly easy. Additionally, it has strong regen so you can make up for the shortfall in Fire Resist and slightly reduces incoming damage. However, I'm not sure it's enough to really beat the Brute: Quills (Scrapper): 9.3842 / 2 * (1 + 1.25 + 0.3125) * 1.09975 = 13.22 Quills (Brute): 6.2562 / 2 * (1 + 1.25 + 1.75) = 12.5 Genetic Contamination: 9.3842 / 2 * (1 + 1.25 + 0.3125) * 1.09975 = 13.22 Blazing Aura: 9.1757 / 2 * (1 + 1.25 + 1.75) = 18.35 Spine Burst (Scrapper): (56.3054 * 1.1 + 2.3616 * 6.2562) * (1 + 1.25 + 0.3125) / (16 / 3 + 3.168) * 1.09975 = 25.43 Spine Burst (Brute): (37.5369 + 2.3616 * 4.1708) * (1 + 1.25 + 1.75) / (16 / 3 + 3.168) = 22.30 So even before we look at Burn, the Brute is slightly ahead with +125% damage. If we scale up to the damage cap: Quills (Scrapper): 9.3842 / 2 * (5) * 1.09975 = 25.80 Quills (Brute): 6.2562 / 2 * (7) = 21.90 Genetic Contamination: 9.3842 / 2 * (5) * 1.09975 = 25.80 Blazing Aura: 9.1757 / 2 * (7) = 32.11 Spine Burst (Scrapper): (56.3054 * 1.1 + 2.3616 * 6.2562) * (5) / (16 / 3 + 3.168) * 1.09975 = 49.62 Spine Burst (Brute): (37.5369 + 2.3616 * 4.1708) * (7) / (16 / 3 + 3.168) = 39.02 However: Dragon’s Tail (Scrapper): (73.9352 * 1.1) * (1 + 1.25 + 0.3125) * 1.09975 / (14 / 4 + 1.716) = 43.94 Dragon’s Tail (Scrapper): (73.9352 * 1.1) * 5 * 1.09975 / (14 / 4 + 1.716) = 85.74 Spin (Scrapper): (98.8472 * 1.1) * (1 + 1.25 + 0.3125) * 1.09975 / (9.2 / 3 + 2.64) = 53.69 Spin (Scrapper): (98.8472 * 1.1) * (5) * 1.09975 / (9.2 / 3 + 2.64) = 104.77 So our Scrapper would beat the Brute - at least not counting powers not listed - as you scale up to the damage cap or if you're using sets like MA or Claws. However, with Claws I think you'd probably have some survivability issues - both MA and Spines reduce incoming damage substantially. On the other hand, if you were actively using Follow Up, I think the Bio/Claws would probably beat most Brute builds and you could probably slot Spin with Overwhelming Force to cut down the damage a bit.

Damage Auras are great from the standpoint of convenience and low levels. However, they're not actually all that effective once you're higher level. They don't receive the increased radius/targets that conventional targets do and they don't benefit from recharge reduction. Consider Dragon's Tail. This is about 62.4 damage every 14 + 1.716 secs, or 3.97 dps. It's 16 targets with a chunky radius, but still not impressive. Blazing Aura is 11.6 every 2 sec, for 5.8 dps. But once you're 50 with all that recharge and Force Feedback in Dragon's Tail, you're probably doing 62.4 every 5 sec, which is 12.48 dps. Note: This is before any +damage, which affects both attacks equally. Indeed, this is why X/MA Tankers are so good at farming despite the fact that they only have a single AE attack - the Force Feedback doesn't just power up your Dragon's Tail but also effects like Burn.

I run Bio/FIre and it's very solid damage. I don't think the burst damage powers are particularly strong. In a fire farm, you can just endlessly much reds and keep yourself near cap based solely on drops. In standard play, you're normally going to have a team able to buff you. Tankers also have relatively few ways to use Build Up-style powers effectively since they (mostly) lack big alpha strike powers. In terms of procs, Tankers get better return from +damage than non-purple procs. So 'proc monsters' normally don't work particularly well. So you end up with decisions like "do a trivial amount of additional damage or get +10% more recharge" that normally end up being decided in favor of recharge unless you're in a situation where you can customize your defenses with extreme precision.

With Granite Armor, Stone is as close to unkillable as you get. Without Granite Armor, it's still one of the toughest - and most damaging - sets around.

My personal choice is Dark Control/Storm. Storm has a lot of effects that want enemies on the ground, unable to be knocked back and incapable of running away. This tends to strongly favor control sets over blast sets or pet sets - most particularly pet sets that can -fly/-kb immobilize. Dark Control is one of those sets and its secondary effect (-hit) stacks well with Storm while also bringing some of the best overall damage with its pets.