Hopeling

TW/WP works really well. It was my main on live, and I remade him for Homecoming, and he's still as excellent as ever. If you like the idea of TW/SR, consider TW/Nin. This plays up the dichotomy even more IMO, and the endurance refill would be really helpful for TW's thirst.

Soloing AVs is easier with Incarnate powers, but if you can solo an AV without inps/temp powers/Lore pets, your build is still doing pretty well in terms of damage, durability, and endurance.

There's little need for Heavy Blow or Sweeping Cross, except maybe at low levels when you don't have the other attacks yet. Placate is also pretty optional in the post-ATO world.

I thought that characters with original Stamina didn't get inherent Stamina, at least not in the initial patch. Maybe that changed later.

Now that Focus exists, using AS from hide mid-combat is essentially never worthwhile. You're better off using your Focus stacks on AS while not hidden, and using any Hide crits for an AoE power or strong non-AS attack. For example, AS with Focus crit - ATO hide proc - Crushing Uppercut is a great combo for Street Justice, doing more damage in less time than an AS from stealth.

Any */fire brute will be a pretty solid farmer if the primary has halfway-decent AoE. SS/Fire used to be the popular build. Brutes work better for it than scrappers, because of the resist cap and because they get a taunt aura so things won't run from Burn. If you don't want to do fire farms, there are lots of other options. Elec/SD is a classic, and works fine on a scrapper; other primaries could also work. Ultimately, if you hate farming, you could also just... not farm. You can make pretty good inf from merits and maybe playing the market a bit. I purpled out multiple 50s on live this way, and IOs are only easier and cheaper to get on Homecoming.

Besides what arcanaville said about mindset, brutes just literally get less benefit out of damage slotting than scrappers do, both in absolute terms (lower base damage) and proportional to their total damage (because Fury already gives them a lot of +dmg). Three damage SOs roughly double a scrapper's damage, but for a brute with 80 fury, it's only about a 36% improvement. So even on a pure min/max basis, lowbie brutes will tend to slot more acc/end/rech and less damage than scrappers do, especially at low levels when you don't have enough slots or strong enough enhancements to just do everything. When leveling a brute, I often don't slot damage AT ALL until I start using IO sets...

I'm not sure what you're asking here. If you're asking whether using the hide proc for another attack is better DPS than hardcasting AS, the answer is pretty firmly yes.

PPM proc rates don't favor fast attacks. It would work fine in another attack instead of AS if you prefer. I think people might be over-extrapolating from StJ, where it goes really well in AS because that also gives two combo points, so you're frequently using CU or another finisher right after AS.

They're not mutually exclusive, so it's not clear to me why this is a versus...? The Critical Strikes proc probably contributes more value overall than the small passive crit rate buff in Scrapper's Strike, but both are pretty good. They both have strong set bonuses.

Those numbers don't appear to include a stalker ATO, though, which kind of misses the point. Placate is of course an extra crit, giving double damage on your next attack. But Placate itself has a cast time - you could have just thrown another attack. Getting 2x damage on one attack, instead of 2 attacks with normal damage, is still a net gain if the crit is from a strong attack. That's what you've shown: a TS crit is more extra damage than throwing in another Havoc Punch or Charged Brawl. But with the stalker ATO, you can already get auto-crits on your strongest attacks. This literally reduces the value of Placate: you can't use it for a TS crit because you've already got those; all you get out of it is a CI crit. CI does the same damage to the initial target as Havoc Punch, so HP+CI does the same damage as Placate+CI, and has the same cast time. Except HP+CI has a chance to crit and do more damage, so using Placate instead of an attack is a DPS loss. Fewer controlled crits does not automatically mean less DPS.

WM still has a pretty good amount of knockdown though. Crowd Control actually has a 100% chance for knockdown, compared to only 50% on its counterpart Pendulum.

War Mace is almost strictly superior to Battle Axe (Clobber vs Swoop, smashing vs lethal, otherwise basically identical). Between mace and broadsword, broadsword's only real advantage is Parry. Mace has better damage overall, both single-target (thanks to Clobber) and AoE (thanks to Crowd Control, and Shatter's wider cone). Having played both to 50, this is as true in-practice as it looks on paper. All three are plenty playable, but WM pretty clearly stands out as the superior set mechanically. If you're indifferent between the three conceptually, go WM.

TW is a very thirsty set, and the Momentum mechanic makes it feel bad to use other powers too much. So you want something that gives endurance and isn't too clicky. /WP works great; I have once. /EA or /Elec should also be solid, although TW/Elec might be better as a brute. Bio or Rad might also ne good, I haven't tried them. I got a TW/Fire to 50 before shutdown, but ended up shelving it. Too clicky, and Burn actually doesn't help that much considering how much AoE TW already has.

It definitely works that way for Dark Regeneration. Not sure about rad melee.

Every power in the game is target capped. You can see the target cap in the power info.

In all honesty, the best thing for that is a Blaster. That's not a putdown to sentinels; the thing you're asking for is simply what blasters are built for. They have longer range, they have higher target caps on their AoE, and without defenses there's actually a reason for them to stay far away. If you're staying at 40+ feet on a Sentinel, you're barely in range to hit things, and completely out of range for many AoE powers, especially cones. Even when you can hit things, you hit 6 instead of 10, or 10 instead of 16. And of course, between AT multipliers and Defiance, Blasters just do more damage overall. But if you specifically want to do this with a Sentinel anyway, then AR, Fire, or Water would all be fine choices. Buffs and debuffs don't favor any set in particular.

Not all builds need to be at 45% (and depending on the secondary, it may not even be feasible to get there), but even capped resists (75% mitigation) are way worse than 45% defense and no resists (90% mitigation). Resist sets can still aim for a decent level of defense - 32.5% is a common target, so that one small purple puts you at the cap. When farming, you should be getting enough insps to have one purple up basically all the time.

Everything in this game is grossly overpowered. That's why we love it.

The ideal situation would be to have the buff up when you cast LR/SC, which would require putting it in something else. Chain Induction or TS would be good choices. But you couldn't have the buff for an alpha strike that way. I'm basically guessing though, and it won't matter a ton either way.

Remind me, can Lighting Rod and Shield Charge crit? I haven't played either set since shutdown. If they can crit, you might want it in something else, to get the crit bonus on your telenukes. If not, and if I'm right about the proc chance being per hit, then sure, putting it in a telenuke is fine. With their area factor of 4, the proc chance per target isn't going to be capped out, but if you hit a few targets it will almost always go off.

The best use case is the one that gets you the most total procs, not the highest chance per use. A 45% chance every five seconds is no worse than a 90% chance every ten seconds. This doesn't inherently favor slow or fast powers; it favors powers that you use on cooldown. Right, but that's how Force Feedback works too, and it gets a chance to proc on every enemy hit. I'm asking if Critical Strikes works the same way: does it roll on activation, or on hit? I put it in Arc of Destruction, and after using it for aw hile, I suspect it's be per hit because it seems to go off pretty reliably when I'm hitting a crowd, seemingly much more often than the ~30% chance given by the formula. But I haven't tracked exact stats to be sure.

With resist sets, you build to achieve a decent amount of defense, even though softcapping is usually out of reach without big compromises. 25% defense, on top of /Elec's resists and regeneration, will make you pretty durable. 32.5% puts you one small purple from the softcap. With the i24 changes to resistance set bonuses, it probably wouldn't be very hard to cap your S/L resist at the same time.

The set definitely feels slow at those levels. You don't have enough recharge to really keep an attack chain going, you only get the one AoE, and Build Momentum still takes ~90s to recharge. TW doesn't really bloom until 30+, when you get Whirling Smash and Arc of Destruction slotted so your AoE ability takes off, and you spend less time waiting for recharge.

Does this have a chance to proc for every target hit like Force Feedback, or is it just one chance on activation? In other words, is it a good or bad idea to put it in an AoE power?