Hopeling

Millions eat at McDonald's every day. That doesn't make it good. The question wasn't whether WoW is good, but whether it does anything better than CoH. The fact that the food is bad has nothing to do with how good the company is at, say, supply chain logistics. For example, WoW is vastly better at strategically interesting boss fights. CoH barely began to experiment with rudimentary versions of that towards the end of its life; almost all AVs are what WoW players would call "tank and spank". Maybe you don't WANT a cheap greasy hamburger, er, a strategic boss fight. That is perfectly fine. But whether you want it or not, they're very good at making it.

Yes, it's a bit strange that slotting more recharge than you need can have a negative effect. However, in practice it usually doesn't matter a great deal: most procs offer only marginal benefits, and it's very rare that you realistically have a choice between 0% recharge and 95%. More often, it's something like 40% vs 60% because you're deciding between the Acc/Rech and the Acc/Dam to complete a set bonus. For powers where you DO want as much recharge as possible, that's because you're using the power as often as possible, so you still get about the same number of procs per minute: lower chance per use, but more uses per minute. That's kind of the point of PPM procs: they're supposed to be equally good in fast and slow powers. This is true, but a large part of that was unfounded hysteria. Before i24, the only PPM procs were the ones bought with real money. An overwhelming majority of IO procs in use were the original flat-rate kind, and compared to that, the new PPM formula was a substantial buff in almost all cases (although you might have to respec to take full advantage of it). I had a lot of conversations about this before shutdown: people worried because "slotting recharge reduces proc chance" sounds like a nerf, but for most people it was a buff from the previous 20% to a new ~60%, and only a nerf compared to a purely hypothetical 100% proc chance that they never actually had. A few builds really did get nerfed - buzzsaw attacks and AoE immobilizes are the major ones. But the 4 PPM procs that OP looks at get a proc rate of 32% in the worst cases, while before the change they had only a 20% chance.

Given how PPM procs work, you would probably deal more damage by just slotting the power for damage. Buzzsaw procs aren't really a thing anymore.

The FF proc should work fine in Thunderstrike, yes.

Titan Weapons is indeed very clunky until the mid-game. Once you have a gapless attack chain to make full use of Momentum, and when Build Momentum recharges in 30 seconds instead of 90 seconds, it becomes a great deal more fluid. That wind-up attack is always slow, but the next four attacks are blazing fast. If you love the set conceptually and haven't played it past the teens or mid-20s, consider sticking it out a little longer. Scrapper base damage is 50% higher than Brutes, and they also get crits. But Brutes have Fury, which by default is set to 0 in Mids. With three damage SOs in their attacks, Brutes break even with Scrappers on damage at around 60 fury. Overall, in actual gameplay, the two deal roughly similar damage, with a slight advantage to the Scrapper once damage buffs or ATOs come into play. War Mace, Super Strength, and Stone Melee are all great sets for feeling smashy, and do strong damage. If you want to deal energy damage, Rad Melee is also quite good. Electric Melee is good if you don't mind being an AoE specialist.

Do you mean Energy Melee (EM) and Energy Aura (EA), or the electric sets (more often abbreviated as Elec/ and /Elec)? My first brute was an Elec/Elec. Elec/ has pretty good AoE, and Lightning Rod is delightful, but its ST leaves something to be desired. If you're willing to make that tradeoff, go for it. Taking Gloom from your epic pool would probably help. Thunderstrike actually doesn't have knockback at all IIRC, just knockdown. SS/Elec should work pretty well, and /Elec should handle the Rage crash relatively well. I do find that /Elec is kind of squishy until pretty late in the game; ~60% S/L resist doesn't go all that far when your heal is on a 120s recharge. Once you have near-capped S/L resist, a decent level of defense, and high uptime on Energize, things should get better though.

Game balance, challenging PvE content for small and large groups, endgame progression, well-polished and distinctive class mechanics, PvP in general, and amount of available content. On the community side, WoW is basically unmatched in terms of guides, databases, wikis, and general min/maxing and quant stuff; when your community is big enough to have a hundred Arcanavilles on pure statistics, remarkable things happen. This is by no means an exhaustive list. World of Warcraft is typically very good at the things it tries to do. Those simply aren't the things many of us want out of a game. If you don't like Holy Trinity group dynamics in the first place, it doesn't really matter that the game implements them really well.

Typically I just put 2-3 slots in it for leveling, and then respec to just 1 slot once I have a build with global recharge bonuses.

Is it actually a random toggle, or is it always Against All Odds? If you don't have much overlap with Active Defense, it's pretty easy for it to fall off for a few seconds in between when you're busy attacking. If you get mezzed during those few seconds, a toggle like AAO with a debuff component will get turned off. If it's other toggles, the only reason they'd turn off is because you run out of endurance. AD does not wait for the previous stack to expire, and will double- or even triple-stack if you have enough recharge. But its base recharge is longer than its duration; you need at least 67% recharge in the power to make it perma, preferably more so that you have a bit of overlap. Many /shield builds have Hasten for the same reason many other builds have Hasten: it's a pretty good power with no prerequisites and which only needs 1-3 slots. And yeah, you put one of the two on auto, then use the other manually or do clever tricks with /bind. OwtS is pretty good for a crashless t9, but it's very much optional. Aid Self isn't a bad idea for sets without a self heal, but you can get by with just inspirations and eventually Rebirth Destiny if you want.

Generally, people worry too much about Fury generation. Considering that it goes from 0 to ~75 within a few seconds and then runs into very harsh diminishing returns, it's just not an issue. War Mace is a bit slow overall, but not drastically so, and a slow set will hover at about 88 fury during a fight instead of 89. That's not going to cripple you.

Because we're nerds and like talking about it? :P Personally, I consider the Spidey discussion to be totally separate from the "can there be SS scrappers" discussion at this point. I'm not even convinced Spidey is a scrapper - sometimes he seems a lot more like an SR/ tanker or even a Web Control dominator. But, say, She-Hulk is very obviously Super-Strength, best known for her solo work, starts out at full power instead of having to build up to it, and has never been very good at filling the tank role on a team. It would be hard to come up with a more perfect fit for "SS scrapper". I'm not saying that a character has to have ALL of the powers for the set to be a good fit, but they should have SOME of them, otherwise why would you use that set in the first place? Supes doesn't really get mad outside story-relevant occasions (which are better represented by red inspirations) and rarely does foot stomps, but he definitely has hand claps and THOOM effects, so an SS tanker will at least resemble him. My issue is that Spidey doesn't do ANY of the things that SS does. It seems to me like a purely superficial association based on the name of the set rather than what the set actually does, like saying that Superman should have the Empathy power set because he's good at talking people down from ledges. Of the existing melee sets, MA or StJ are much better fits for how Spidey fights.

Most sets work fine while hovering. It's only an issue for attacks like Foot Stomp which require you to be on/near the ground.

Spidey clearly has super-strength as a power, but so does Iron Man. That doesn't mean he has Super Strength as a power set. Does he perform foot stomps or hand claps? Are his hits routinely written with THOOM sound effects? None of the powers in the Super Strength set particularly resemble the things he actually does.

To my knowledge, Doublehit is actually not based on the base damage of the power, even though the text description suggests that it is. Rather, it is calculated from scratch using the damage formula and a coefficient depending on the specific Hybrid power. Thus, Doublehit is completely indifferent to the actual effect of your attacks, DoT or otherwise. It just cares about their base recharge time and area of effect. If you're using a power that follows the damage formula, this is equivalent to doing that percentage of the power's base damage, but some powers break the formula - in particular, for fire and similar attacks which have a DoT as a secondary effect, the DoT is "extra" damage on top of what the formula would give.

It kind of is though. SS dominated the brute/tanker meta for a very long time, primarily because of Rage. In isolation, SS is reasonably balanced because the set only has one AoE and only one really good ST attack, so even with Rage it's not doing anything too incredible. But when you add in outside powers like a damage aura, Burn, or ancillary attacks, the fact that these all get bonuses from Rage gives a very clear advantage over other primaries. Moreover, the reasoning in the quote just doesn't hold. Everyone seems pretty comfortable saying that other sets with damage buffs, like Claws or /Shield, are better on a scrapper, because scrappers get more out of damage buffs - not only because we have higher base damage, but also because we get larger damage buffs even as a percentage. Taking these two together, any damage buff power is 62.5% more beneficial to a scrapper than to a brute in absolute terms (more than that if you count crits). If Blinding Feint is better for scrappers than brutes, Rage would be too, except to an even greater degree because it's a much larger buff. (Plus, scrappers can take snipes in their epic pools, so they'd really get to take advantage of Rage's large +tohit.) When you take a set that's already overperforming, then hand it to an AT whose modifiers make it much better, it's at least plausible that you're going to have balance issues. I don't know if this would really make Super Strength overpowered on a scrapper, at least not moreso than the sets we've already got. TW pretty clearly overperforms, and yet people still seem happy to play other sets. But SS would definitely be a stronger set on scrappers than it is on brutes, for the same reason Dual Blades is, except moreso. Frankly, with how badly the Rage crash change affects the set, I think Rage needs to be reworked a little anyway, and maybe that rework could make it more palatable for a scrapper port. I also don't know if this is the real rationale behind not porting it: Stone Melee is another classic "brute force" set that didn't get proliferated, and there's no obvious balance concern there. Stalkers didn't get War Mace, again for no clear balance reason - and after getting both Fire sets, it's hard to imagine that thematic concerns were the issue either.

I'll second WM/SD. I liked it better than BS/SD, and I've played both to 50. He's talking about Recovery Serum. Most pets cannot be given orders at all. Mastermind pets and Lore pets are (I think?) the sole exceptions. Summon Backup will indeed die pretty quickly if you call him into a hairy situation.

In WP, the last two powers are optional. Fast Healing isn't transformative, and can be put off until pretty late in the build if needed. In Mace, you can skip Bash. In Elec/, you can skip one of the first two punches and Jacob's Ladder. Confront is of course always skippable. You probably want everything else.

Tech Shield 1 and 2 are still there, along with the Vanguard shield and the Tech Knight shield (not on the paragonwiki page). I don't recall any other tech shield options. What did it look like?

Brute. Enemies like to run from scrapper damage auras because they have no taunt component, and the higher brute resist cap is very relevant for /Elec.

If Rage must have a defense crash - which isn't totally unreasonable; it kind of dominated the meta before shutdown - then it either needs to be a lot smaller, or resistable. If you're something like /SR, -20% unresistable def means basically taking away your entire secondary, which is ridiculous. Rant aside, Rage isn't unusable, but you can't put it on auto anymore. In tough missions you may not get to use it at all, but in a strong team or with multiple brutes/tanks, you can still use it a lot. I don't think that's a *good* place for the set to be, but it's not utterly ruined.

Katana is definitely a straightforward set. The only things you really have to 'worry' about is lining up enemies for Golden Dragonfly (but if you don't, it's still a solid single-target attack), and keeping Divine Avalanche up when you want it - but that's easy if it's simply part of your attack chain. I haven't played Staff. It has three stances, and a combo-ish mechanic, but I'm not sure how fiddly that is in actual play.

I'm going to vote War Mace. There are no power interactions and no fancy mechanics to keep track of. You just hit things, and they fall down, and after doing that a few times they stop getting back up.

I know this doesn't quite answer the question, but it sounds like you may want to play a Dominator with better damage (which can be a pretty decent fraction of the way to Blaster damage), rather than a Blaster with lots of control (which will always be a pale shadow of Dominator control). Some sets and some builds are much better at clearing rooms than others. For example, fire/psi is IIRC a pretty strong dominator combo for damage.

In a similar vein, Irradiated Ground is a damage aura that happens to apply a debuff, not a debuff aura that happens to do damage. Don't slot it with Analyze Weakness; slot it for damage.

Use Energize and Power Sink more...?