aethereal

Dual Blades comes online late with lots of recharge to help stack Blinding Feint. Sweeping strike is the gem of the set, a cone that does the damage of a ST attack.

I don't think that having the crit proc in Quills makes sense because then you only have a chance to proc every ten seconds. You've built for perma-hasten, that means that your proc rate can realistically be way higher than six per minute. Spines doesn't have an obviously great place to put that proc. Of the various compromised choices, I'd probably go with Ripper. Ripper has a base 11 second recharge time. With perma-hasten and the recharge in the proc, you should have it off cooldown in less than four seconds. I didn't do the proc math, but the rate shouldn't be too dismal, and you should easily be able to use the power 8 or 9 times per minute. While enemies are crowding you, the respectable cone should have a good chance of proccing. Things won't be great when you're down to just one or a couple of targets, but that's true of all your options, and at least Ripper is okay against a single target.

According to City of Data, Aura of Insanity gives a mag 2 mez (enhanceable) plus a mag 0.5 mez (unenhanceable).

I don't want to get too sidetracked into this -- there seems like there's absolutely no appetite from the dev team to do anything with the ATOs, including even just "make the claimed PPM accurate on the Scrapper ATO," which is wild to me. But just to be clear: In a well-optimized build for a level 50 scrapper, the ATO2 is worth at least as much as the base inherent + the ATO1 combined. Probably more. Like, if you dropped the base rate of criticals to zero, and removed the effect of the ATO1, (but kept the ATO2 as it is, so increasing crit rate by 50 percentage points) you'd remove less than half of the criticals that Scrappers would get. That being the case, I think it's really impossible to address Scrapper balance without going through the ATO2. The entire class hinges on it. Which is exactly what I think is nuts -- I think it'd be way more healthy to have a higher base rate of criticals and the ATO2 is a noticeable improvement on top of that to reward good builds, not have it be so incredibly dominant.

Your gloss that I proposed "nerfing the Scrapper ATOs so that Scrappers don't outperform Brutes" is a misreading, however -- what I proposed was that the power budget of Scrappers be redistributed from the ATO2 into the ATO1 and the base inherent, primarily for reasons of intra-Scrapper-set balance. Lower the ceiling on the very best Scrapper builds (which are extremely high DPS) in service of increasing the floor on most Scrapper builds. To the extent that I do propose inter-AT balance changes, I'd actually suggest that it's Stalkers who suffer the most from high Scrapper DPS -- they really do have an AoE deficit compared to the other classes, and it's a little sad how much their ST DPS lags behind Scrappers.

Scrapper's ATO2 is really bad design. The fact that it doubles in effectiveness from normal to superior is weird. The fact that it's, like, entirely responsible for Scrapper overperformance compared to Brutes and Stalkers -- that so much of Scrapper performance comes down to this one proc -- is weird. The fact that it's so incredibly sensitive to having a power which has a decently long recharge time and little animation-time-after-effect is frankly kinda dumb. I get that from the perspective of the build minigame and only that, it's fun to agonize over exactly which power should take this AT-defining proc in exactly what rotation, but for everyone who's not an all-in micro-optimizer of builds, this just makes wild annoying power swings. The Superior ATO2 should be dropped to PPM 3 (as it has always claimed it is!) and probably dropped to like +35% crit chance and the Scrapper inherent and/or the ATO1 should get steady bonuses to their crit chance to smooth out Scrapper performance (and lower performance a bit for the best builds). Also Stalker's chance-to-hide should have the lockdown period removed (and perhaps the PPM tweaked if that means too great a performance). And Brutes should be given ATOs they can get a little excited about, even if they don't greatly change their performance profile.

AV = Archvillain, one of the hardest classes of enemy in the game. Most TFs end with a fight with an Archvillain, which aren't really intended to be fought solo. That doesn't mean you can't fight them solo: it's very possible. But if you are new to the game and especially if you have a build that you just kind of threw together, you'll probably find them functionally impossible.

Yes, I believe it's the only armor set with unbalanced lethal/smashing resistance. Certain melee powers (the parry-lookalikes) sometimes provide unbalanced lethal/smashing defense, and other armor sets give other unbalanced pairs (like, obviously fire and ice armor give much more fire and ice resistance, respectively, than the other in their pair, similarly Energy Aura and Dark Armor), but I believe this is the only lethal/smashing resistance disparity. EDIT: Unbalanced lethal/smashing resistances are fairly common among enemy groups, just not player sets.

I don't know why MIDS is showing you as having the same lethal and smashing resistance, that seems wrong to me. Psychic Wall provides Scrappers, unenhanced, 22.5% resistance to Smashing and Psychic, and 15% resistance to Lethal. Does that constitute a "hole"? I mean, I dunno. But unless you somehow got lethal-only resistance from some other source that exactly makes up for the difference between the Smashing and Lethal resistance in Psychic Wall, I don't think you should have the same resistance values, like MIDS reports you do.

Savage Leap doesn't use a pseudopet, and Shield Charge copies boosts. The big issue with pseudopets in this regard is that they sometimes have lower caps than actual character entities, so while your Fury is copied to the Shield Charge pseudopet, some of it may be wasted.

I feel like Ninjutsu really benefits from going a bit overcap on positional defenses, given low DDR this gives you some buffer to prevent defense cascade. It won't stop your defense from slipping against enemies that really heavily debuff defense, but it helps a lot against opponents who just do sort of "normal lethal attacks that have a small defense debuffing component."

That is my understanding, but I have not tested it myself and it's a brand new power option, so like... the duration of it is super unclear and things like City of Data don't really know how to explain it. EDIT: But whatever the details, it is absolutely the case that you are supposed to get a "free" rez after you click Second Wind -- the power doesn't need to be off-cooldown. Basically the idea was that you sort of got the rez power "for free," because it's iconic to Regen but they know that people feel bad about using a power choice only for a rez.

The way it's supposed to work is that if you die while its buff is active, it offers you a chance to rez. There were some bugs with that in beta, but I believe it is supposed to be working now. If you die while in its activation period, and you don't get a chance to rez, you should report that as a bug.

Can I interest you in, "Willpower has the lowest ceiling of all armors in the game," rather than "Willpower is the worst"?

Pool and Epic attacks crit, at least for the most part. If an attack does Damage over Time as its main effect, generally it has a crit which does all of the damage over time that it "would" do in one up-front package, if it crits. Damage over Time secondary effects in Fire and Savage do not crit. Lightning Rod, Shield Charge, and Concentrated Strike don't crit. Damage auras in armor sets don't crit, except maybe Stone's deal.