aethereal

Okay, so Battle Axe is endurance-heavy. Bio is an overall strong set that gets an early Recovery power (Inexhaustible at level 1), then Efficient mode and at 24 can get DNA siphons which is another endurance tool. It also has a damage aura (albeit not until level 28) which is strong on Brutes and just generally a good set. Its hole is dealing with debuffs/controls: it has holes in its mez protection to exotic mezzes and and has no debuff resistance. Psi is a new set so you aren't sick of it yet, and it gets what's reported to be a pretty powerful endurance tool in Consume Psyche at level 10. I've never played it and some people I think don't love it, but you might want to try it out. Other sets with endurance tools are Willpower (overall simple set, I think it lacks some performance ceiling but comes together fine) and Regeneration (I think still weak unless you pair it with very specific pools and incarnate choices, but better than it was). Electrical, Energy Aura, Ice, and to some extent Dark have good endurance tools eventually, but not by the 20s.

The concept that I believe the OP has is that this enables people to cover defense holes in their builds with high-end inspirations. You open AH between every mission and fill your insp tray with purple/orange insps, and if you run out you grab more from your email even in the middle of a mission.

You're just gonna love the new update where all enhancement values listed in the games are lies. And so are the power descriptions.

Just to be clear, Blinding Powder doesn't work on lieutenants (without stacking). And has only a 50% chance to confuse (and the sleep is only mag 2 as well). Having it be mag 4 ("works on bosses") would clearly be a stretch for an armor power, but working only on minions makes it a not great power IMO. This isn't an indictment of the set, just the power. I have extensively played level 50 /Ninj scrapper, stalker, and sentinel toons.

It being mag 2 kills it for me.

Ninjutsu has lower defense values and much worse DDR, and no recharge bonus, in return for a heal, an endurance tool, and a stealth bonus with a once-per-combat crit chance increase. SR gets resistances too via scaling resists, so, meh, call that a wash. (EDIT: Oh, Ninjutsu gets good psi resist too, which is nice.) I like Ninjutsu. It's a good set. But it definitely has a much, much bigger problem with defense debuffers than SR does.

You can also proc bomb Bio's DNA Siphon, though I feel like doing so significantly impairs survivability.

What sets are you thinking of? Besides Stalker sets, I don't think any melee set is in a truly dire AoE situation. Fireball and Ball Lightning in the epics are good, solid attacks.

I think there's a real difference between "near-perfect knowledge" and "Does this proc which advertises a rate of approximately 3.5 procs per minute proc massively more commonly or massively less commonly than that." It's fine not to have players be able to figure out the exact proc rate based on in-game numbers. It's not fine for players to have no way of knowing whether the proc will activate something vaguely like its advertised rate or not. A solution to all of this would be: 1. Revert procs to having a percentage chance to fire. 2. Give powers an (advertised) multiplier to that percentage chance. So you might have most procs have a baseline 20% chance to fire, and then powers have a x0.5, x1, x2, x3, or x4 chance to activate procs, with a cap of 90%. Base the multiplier on the base recharge time and area factor today, but make it like the damage formula: it's a design principle, not an algorithm that the code follows. If you then wanted to make a given power that seems basically fine but procs too well a little less good, you could just adjust the proc chance multiplier for it. The builder types could go searching for powers that were "near the line" of a multiplier -- so like if a power with a 4-6 second recharge had a x1 multiplier, they could go look for powers that are right at 4 seconds. I think this would have the following effects, all salutory: 1. Vastly clearer to the player 2. No local/global recharge time shenanigans 3. Makes it simple to tweak proc rates and gives another route to adjust powers 4. Shake up the build minigame, let builders take a fresh look at a bunch of powers to try to wring optimization out of them, without, if numbers are chosen right, totally invalidating most current builds

To be clear, procs do function in most pseudopet powers, they just have a bad activation rate. But yeah, it's just a welter of confusing information that you have no way of getting through the game itself. My favorite proc fact: the Superior Critical Strikes: Recharge/+50% Critical Hit Chance Proc has always claimed to have a PPM of 3. Its actual PPM is 4.

I agree. Feels like a sweeping change to the Brute AT would anger lots of people even if it set things on the right path, and would just be objectively hard to do. I'm more... commenting on why this is hard than trying to provide a solution.

To me the issue with procs is primarily the illegibility. Look how many engaged, frequent posters don't know things about procs. To understand whether a proc is amazing or worthless, you need to understand not just local vs global recharge and the basics of PPM formula, with special casing for auto-powers and toggles, but also things like pseudopets, executions, and various kinds of special cases, lockouts, and more. It's as though we decided that damage enhancements would not only depend on a moderately simple formula, but would look at the number of letters in the internal name of a power and use that as a big component in how much it enhances the power. Nobody would think that's a good idea! Why do we think it's a good idea to do the same with procs? I think there are an engaged group of ultra-mechanics-oriented builders who love this complexity -- it lets them broker obsessive levels of systems knowledge into performance that exceeds normal levels of the game. And I get that, obviously "making builds" is in a lot of ways a fun minigame. But I don't think it's actually healthy to cater to that minigame as much as procs do.

There's a suggestions and feedback forum if you want to put it somewhere where devs might read it. I do want to reiterate that various suggestions around allowing swordless/all sword (and other various suggestions around swords) have been made and made and made again, with no apparent effect so far. But if you want to throw in your two cents, it won't hurt besides whatever time you want to invest in it, and again the Suggestions & Feedback Forum is the place for it.

I played a Staff stalker to 50 and it was, y'know, fine there. Assassin's Strike + getting build up + getting Form of the Body "for free" take it from "really bad" to "fine." Doesn't take it to great, mind you.

And I've soloed TFs with my stalkers. The game is easy. If I need to establish cred, I mained an Ice/Bio stalker for a long time, soloed 20+ AVs and some GMs (though that was before recent GM changes), blahblahblah. I've played other stalkers to 50. I like stalkers and while I don't know that I'm a particularly great player, I've certainly focused more on performance than most players in the game. But you're simply wrong that Stalkers do as much ST DPS as Scrappers, and Scrappers can get Ball Lightning or Fireball too. This is all fairly straightforward and apples-to-apples. Pylon tests have many failings, but they're a good apples-to-apples comparison of Stalker and Scrapper ST damage, and the best Stalker times are consistently worse than the best Scrapper times. But, and this is my actual point, because this is the Brute forum and I'm not here to turn this into a complaint about Stalkers: the fact that Stalkers don't perform as well as Scrappers isn't very salient to most players (as you see here), because Stalkers have enough differences in playstyle and approach, and enough sets are sufficiently different on them, that they provide a different play experience and so they don't fall into the same, "Oh, well, what's the reason to even bother playing a Stalker when you could play a Scrapper instead" that Brutes do -- even though I think that if you took away that subjective experience, there would probably be less reason from a pure performance perspective to play a Stalker over a Scrapper than a Brute over a Scrapper.