Hopeling

It may not be for the specific attack chain comparison you're looking at. But it would be surprising if NO attack chain can be improved from the addition of an attack with 80 DPA before slotting, the loss of Focus notwithstanding. What math are you looking at that says otherwise? Also, a snipe is an opportunity to slot another category of sets, potentially including a purple damage proc.

A level 40+ blaster should comfortably be able to kill almost any EB within about 60 seconds, so popping four purple inspirations (plus maybe a Break Free, and any reds you have on hand) makes it very doable. At that point, you're no worse off than a Super Reflexes scrapper. If that doesn't work, load up on even more inspirations when you hit the hospital; you can carry twenty. Shivans work, but should be unnecessary except maybe for the ones that refuse to die, like Diabolique.

Absorb is great against alpha strikes when you have a power like Ablative Carapace in Bio Armor that can give a big absorb shield at the start of a fight. Blaster absorb powers don't do that; they give a small tick of absorb every two seconds. Regen and absorb from Sustain powers are both good for longer battles and weak against alpha strikes. The difference is that regen fills up your health bar continuously, while absorb ticks just go to waste if they're not used before the next tick. Absorb powers can prevent more total damage than regen powers heal (for comparison, Cauterizing Aura heals about 36 per tick with slotting, against the 85 absorb per tick that @Uun mentions), so if you get full use out of the absorb, it's significantly stronger. If you take one big hit every ten seconds instead of one small hit every two seconds, absorb is significantly weaker. Regen also helps you recover between fights. For soloing, I'd give the nod to absorb overall since you're the only thing around for enemies to attack. Regen powers are still quite good though - +300% regen is nothing to sneeze at - so I wouldn't stress over it if you really want to play /Tactical or something.

I'm going to say Scrappers. Stalkers lose Follow Up, which is a bummer. Brutes don't benefit as much from it due to their lower damage scale. But for Scrappers, it's a great power.

You can use a [Power Analyzer] from the P2W vendor.

The demon axe is kind of a scythe, but otherwise this seems to be a popular request. A regular hammer or mace would also be nice.

They don't. Brutes and tankers can have 90% resists, and have more HP than scrappers or stalkers do. 90% resistance is 2.5x tougher than 75% resistance. That said, scrappers and stalkers can still be incredibly tough, far beyond "meh". What they cannot do well is tank, because tanking is not just a question of durability, but also aggro management. Brutes and tankers have [Taunt] and taunt effects on all their attacks; Scrappers and Stalkers do not. Because scrappers have higher base damage. Specifically, scrappers do 1/8 more damage with all attacks. Scale 1 damage with a 31% crit rate comes out to 1.31 average; scale 1.125 damage with a 10% crit rate comes out to 1.24 average, which is pretty close. Without a team, the scrapper has the same crit rate and deals more damage. Stalker primaries all have Assassin Strike in place of some other attack, usually an AoE attack.

Yes. It gives +70% recharge for the first ten seconds, +30% for the next 20 seconds, +20% for the next thirty seconds, and +10% for the last sixty seconds.

Yep, don't worry about it. As a mitigation tool, it's not great: you can't use it on command since it takes three powers in a row to set up, and using it effectively means you're committed to taking and slotting 1K Cuts and Power Slice, which you could otherwise do without. If you want to take those powers anyway, it's not an awful combo, but the knockdown isn't enough of a perk to be worth 6-10 slots and a power choice.

Yes, but a 6-foot sphere is comparable to a pretty wide melee cone. It's a targeted AoE, not a PBAoE, so you can aim it where that sphere will contain the most enemies rather than just hoping they cluster around you tight enough. I agree that StJ is a bit lacking in AoE, at least until you add in something like a damage aura, Burn, or Fireball. Not cripplingly bad like Dark Melee or Energy Melee, but not great.

Basically any combination of those powersets can meet your stated goals.

I don't believe so.

What?? Where? I'll go yell at them, haha.

The Flavour of the Month data only counts live characters, I think. Unless you played on Justin quite a lot, I'm not sure it would count as "true experience overall" though.

Other nukes already don't follow the damage formula: with a 145s recharge and a 25-foot radius, you would expect a power like Nova to deal scale 4.96 damage, but instead it's scale 4.00. That said, I still don't see any reason for Thunderous Blast to have a longer recharge. Neither its damage nor its secondary effects are better than various other nukes with 145s recharge.

It's worth pointing out that we only have eight data points for TW, all of them mine. Moreover, the TW average so far is split between two different approaches: five runs without Defensive Sweep (averaging 5:41, similar to Claws), and three with (averaging 5:04, far and away better than any other set). Parry-type buffs are really really powerful in this test, because they allow you to herd a ton of enemies safely, and TW has enough AoE to really take advantage of herding. That's also why Broadsword is doing so well; without Parry, I got times around 7:00, with one unusually good run at 6:27. In real play, Parry buffs are not as useful as they look here - any set can get a similar effect by using inspirations, and not all incoming damage is flagged Melee. I'm tempted to say we should keep two entries for each of TW/Broadsword/Katana, one with their parry power and one without. (I don't think the same concern applies to eg Dark Melee with Siphon Life, since that's a strong attack that is worth using even when you don't need the heal.) Without Defensive Sweep (which lots of builds don't take), it looks like TW is "only" a top-tier set on SOs, rather than in a tier of its own. So far, TW does seem to be the only primary that is limited by endurance in this test, and very frequently has gaps when all its attacks are recharging. So it does look like it stands to benefit more from IOs than other sets - most sets take advantage of high recharge by replacing weak attacks with strong attacks, but TW will replace dead time with strong attacks, which seems like it should give a larger improvement in performance. We'll see though.

The best counter is moving out of the smoke grenade 😉 but not every debuff is location-based, so it's not a perfect method. Focused Accuracy gives pretty beefy debuff resists against -perception and -tohit. Never been blinded with it on.

Extremely feasible. It's how I level most of my characters. I often end up doing a respec at 50 anyway, but that's just because playing the character more has made me rethink their build, not a serious power-up. A lot of sets have minimum levels, so you'll probably want to slot commons at 12 to hold you over until Crushing Impact at 27 (for example), but that's just overwriting one with another, no respec required.

Eh. It's no slower than, say, SS: Rend Armor without Momentum animates as fast as KO Blow and recharges faster, and the next four attacks are faster than everything in SS. With Fury generation as flattened as it is past about 80, I haven't found slow vs fast sets to make much difference anyway.

Eh, those work about equally well IMO. The sets that really favor scrappers are the ones with +damage, or the ones where crits are a major advantage. Dual Blades and Kinetic Melee come to mind, as does /Shield. Electric Melee strongly favors big alpha strikes, too. Scrapper epic pools also have a couple cool things Brutes don't get, like snipes, Water Spout, and Shadow Meld. Using one of those may also help.

Yep, basically the same. If Lightning Rod came up and I was at high health but only had a few mobs left, I would run to the next spawn and try to hit everything at once. I didn't take Lightning Clap though. If you slot it 3dam/3rech, it has a 45-second recharge to match Build Up, so you can get 8. In practice probably 6-7, since you're probably not using it exactly on cooldown. I didn't change anything, but when I logged in just now, under My Creations it had an error message that I hadn't set the contact. I put him back and republished, so it should be available now. Not sure why that happened, maybe the patch broke something somehow...?

I can do Dual Blades and Street Justice, and I'd like to try Fiery Melee too just because I'm surprised to see it one of the slowest sets. But if it's a mitigation thing, that makes sense.

This is what I see in-game. Recovery debuffs can indeed take NPCs to zero: As to point 1, I tested it by making a custom enemy in AE whose only attack is Spine Burst (costs 20.44 end). I sat next to him with Conductive Aura on, which drains enduranc but does not debuff recovery; his endurance was visibly ticking upward before getting drained. But he never used Spine Burst no matter how long I waited, because one tick isn't enough endurance to afford it; as soon as I turned off the aura and let him get two ticks, he used his attack. You don't need to posit strange mechanics to explain the things you're seeing. NPCs can attack with one tick of endurance because lots of attacks cost less than one tick's worth of endurance, especially for bosses/EBs/AVs who have a larger endurance bar and thus larger ticks. Recovery debuffs don't always floor the target's recovery because, like everything else, they are subject to the Purple Patch; Short Circuit on a +4 target is -48%, not -100%.

To my knowledge, points 1 and 2 are not correct. Do you have a source? I mean, endurance drain really does offer very little benefit, but only for regular boring reasons as far as I know, rather than because NPCs have fundamentally different endurance mechanics from players.

It's mediocre even with Electric Armor, and nearly worthless without. By the time an enemy is drained, they're probably about to die anyway. Worse, endurance drain is just not very good as a form of mitigation, because it requires a lot of setup, enemies don't have toggles to drop, and if they get one tick of recovery, they'll get to attack before you can drain it. Electric Melee is a fine set though. Lightning Rod is an incredibly fun power.