Hopeling

This is kind of just a lowbie problem in general, especially for sets with damage auras (which are expensive). Toggle Electric Field off when you're not fighting groups, and don't try to run Fighting or Leadership toggles until the endurance is under control. More importantly, slot your attacks for endurance reduction. People tend to blame endurance problems mostly on toggles, but even with a damage aura, the majority of your endurance is spent on attacks. Thanks to Fury, brutes can get away with slotting damage barely if at all for quite a while; try slotting your attacks with something like 1 accuracy, 2 endurance, and 1 recharge, and then maybe think about damage enhancements. Frankenslotting is always a good option too. At low levels, you're better off with 3-4 attacks that each have 4-6 slots, instead of 6 attacks that each have 3 slots. Electric Armor in particular gets *much* better on the endurance bar later on: Energize is a beefy cost discount for all your powers when the buff is up, and Power Sink will refill your endurance on command. But those don't come into play until 28 and 35 respectively.

My main is a TW/WP scrapper. He's plenty durable. Brutes have 12% more HP and the same resistance/defense numbers, so they're only marginally tougher. Brutes also have a higher resist cap, but /WP doesn't have enough resistance for that to be super relevant except with inspirations or Strength of Will. Rend Armor crits are super satisfying, but on the other hand, a brute would have a reason to take Taunt, and the TW definitely has the game's best taunt animation.

Yes. The game applies your stats to the power, and powers like Aim buff your stats. I don't recall whether location AoE powers take a snapshot of your stats at the time of casting, or if they update as your stats change. If it's the latter, then when Aim wears off, your Rain of Fire will start doing less damage.

Scrappers arguably get the most out of Shield Defense due to their higher damage scale and damage buff modifier, and it doesn't have enough resistance that the lower resist cap is especially relevant. So yes, it works at least as well for a scrapper as it does for a brute. Elec/SD is a classic for the double telenuke. DM/SD is a strong combo with great synergy; DM has a heal and endurance recovery which shield lacks, and /SD has a strong AoE attack that DM lacaks. War Mace works thematically and offers excellent ST and AoE. Almost anything else pairs well with /SD too, honestly.

BS has been directly outclassed by Katana for quite a long time. It used to be able to at least say that it had especially large hits even if its sustained DPS wasn't the highest, but with Clobber, War Mace beats it at that, and many of the other post-launch melee sets get KO Blow-esque powers that hit harder than Headsplitter. Its AoE damage leaves something to be desired, and its only other unique thing is Parry, which is dramatically less valuable in a world where every scrapper can be plenty durable from IOs without compromising their attack chain to do it. It's no worse than it ever was, so it's certainly not unplayably bad, it just doesn't really have anything that makes it stand out anymore, and has generally been a victim of power creep. I'm not sure it's better on a stalker in an objective sense, but at least stalkers play well to the Broadsword fantasy of "I want to do big single hits" thanks to AS and autocrits. Using Headsplitter from hide and killing two lieutenants in one shot feels pretty good.

TW is a very late-blooming set; it won't feel very good until you have Whirling Smash and Arc of Destruction with some slots in them, but at that point it really takes off. As others have said, it's also pretty thirsty, so a secondary that helps with endurance is nice. The Momentum mechanic means the set isn't actually slow overall: it's one slow attack, then four fast ones, then repeat. But that slow attack is frustrating when you miss (and don't get Momentum), or when you're doing things like badge hunting where you have to wind up again every time you see a target. Titan Weapons was released well before shutdown, and definitely has sound effects. It has a ton of whoosh sounds and not so many impact/explosion sounds like Super Strength or Stone Melee, so sometimes it sounds a bit like Wiffle Bat Melee, but it has sound.

Neither, actually. Imagine that each power has a bar that fills up as it recharges. Recharge buffs make the bar fill more quickly, for as long as they're up. The bar only ever moves upward, it just moves up faster or slower if you have buffs or debuffs. Unfortunately, the way the game displays recharge is weird, so the icons bounce all over the place when buffs/debuffs are applied or expire: the size of the icon is supposed to represent how soon it will be up, relative to its recharge before buffs - not how full the imaginary bar is. If you use a power with a 20s recharge, and at the 15s mark you get hit with a -300% recharge debuff, the game will show you a tiny icon because you won't be able to use the power for 20s, even though it's 3/4 recharged. This is also why, when you get hit with slows, your powers seem to sit at the smallest icon for a while before they start growing. So Force Feedback helps all your powers come back faster, whether they were cast during the FF buff or not. The icons shrink when the buff expires, but the game isn't taking anything away from you; it's just updating its prediction of when the power will be available.

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.