aethereal

Well, break frees give mag 10 protection from hold, but yes otherwise.

They give you Mag 5+ protection from all status effects for a period of time depending on the size of the insp. Luminara linked them for you. It's certainly possible for the game to layer on enough of a status effect to overcome an insp, but in my experience, it's unusual for the game to throw a status effect on you that exceeds the protection of an insp, besides maybe knockback (and things like Ghost Widow's mega-hold). What is an example of a situation in which you need more than one break-free?

But if Brutes didn't deal any damage, they would obviously suck at the optimization targets that actually matter: Hard Mode, solo performance, pre-50 performance, small team performance. I mean, I'm not advocating for intentionally trying to make Brutes as unbalanced as possible on a 8-person level 50 team. I'm just saying, let's handle the optimization targets that matter, and not go down a rabbithole of arguing obsessively whether a PI Radios team would prefer to have a tank that does 12% less damage but was 9% better at handling aggro versus a Brute, and recognize that the actual answer is that they completely don't give a shit.

I am also unsure of it. But I do think that it's notable that Stalkers get +21% crit chances in that circumstance. But also... Who cares about your performance on an 8-player level 50 team that's not Hard Mode? Seriously. What is the content that is mostly gated by performance on such a team rather than by, like, whether you stealth missions or whether people are joking in team chat or whatever? Maybe LRSF or MLTF? It just seems like for the most part, 8-person high level teams make non-Hard Mode content very easy. I don't know, maybe some of the revamped or new enemy groups make that less true? This is a genuine question, but it seems to me like it's just not that rewarding to optimize whether it you're contributing 12.5% or 15% or 10% of the damage that takes down a spawn in less than 20 seconds. It seems to me that places where people actually care about the performance of ATs are: 1. Hard Mode 2. Solo at fairly high difficulties 3. Low level 4. Maybe small teams at high difficulties, especially below level 50 And for whatever it's worth, I think those are very different optimization targets, and it's plausible that an AT that excels in one of those targets will suck in other ones. It seems to me that people get upset over the idea that a Brute might underperform in an 8 person non-hard-mode ITF or Peregrine Island mission team or TinPex, but actually it's going to be very hard to tell whether they over or underperform and also the team will be very successful regardless and also nobody will ever say, "I can't take you, a Brute, I need a Tanker or Scrapper instead."

Savage Melee is perhaps the melee set that is most uniquely best on a Brute (due to the emphasis on the DoTs that are improved by Fury). Savage/Psi seems like a thematically weird pairing, but it probably plays just fine.

The recent patch nerfed Tankers, so Brutes seem like they probably in almost all circumstances now do more damage than Tankers did (where before that wasn't true if you leveraged Tanker target caps).

My understanding is that basically the DPS check of Hard Mode is in fact high enough that people do want characters to each bring a lot of DPS, and that because of team buffs including rolling Barriers and the bonuses that HM enemies get, the difference between the mitigation of "an indifferently slotted armored class" and a "go for broke maximum mitigation armored class" is de facto very small. But this is all hearsay, I may be missing nuances.

I mean, I think that Brutes are perfectly capable of tanking sufficiently well to handle an AV or GM in most situations (so are Scrappers. My experience with several Stalkers indicates that they're also sufficiently durable to handle the aggro of an AV/GM, but can't hold its attention). Of course, AVs and GMs are hardly a speedbump for a well-optimized 8 man, level 50 team under most circumstances, so who knows. I have no experience with hard mode, so I can't comment with any authority, but the fact that hard mode players are vocally extremely against building lots of mitigation suggests to me that the durability of a Tank isn't super important there, either.

I think it's just been traditionally a hard balance to hit, not that there's anything inherently conceptually wrong with it. At least until recently, Tankers have been "pretty good damage, actually," and Scrappers were and are, "actually quite survivable and do a decent job tanking if they have a taunt aura," which has not left a large and fertile ground for Brutes to be actually functionally worse at tanking than Tankers but still actually functionally better at tanking than Scrappers, and similarly with damage. A big thing about mitigation is that all the armored classes are capable of a ton of mitigation, so being "more durable than a Scrapper" often doesn't cash out to much. Like, having overkill survivability isn't necessarily a meaningful advantage. With the recent Tanker changes, I could see Brutes resuming the function of the premiere AT for "if you need something tankier than a Scrapper without giving up more damage than you have to," which was their role before the Tanker buffs. But who knows, maybe this time they actually hit the dynamic of being well-situated in the middle of Scrappers and Tankers.

I think it's helpful to consider the way that Brutes functioned when they were introduced: where they were a risk/reward class, pushed by Fury to barrel ever onward in an environment in which it was common to rest either with the power or just by taking a 15 or 30 second wait for blue and green bars to recover -- maybe to wait for a heal to come off cooldown. The Brute, in an environment where Fury was harder to build, was instead trying to keep forward momentum as long as they had the absolute minimum viable endurance and health. That world is long, long gone, and without that dynamic, Brutes are in an awkward place, with Fury not really so much serving to push a style of play, but merely to be a damage bonus of whatever the current level of sustainable fury happens to be. And this isn't a thing that you can bring back -- we'd have to rewrite almost everything about the modern game in order to recreate the dynamic of early Brutes. But it's helpful to look at the current conversation as it would look if that dynamic still existed. The Brute was not originally intended to function as "a scrapper with slightly lower damage and slightly higher survivability/taunt." It was supposed to have a whole different style of play.

I do think that benchmarks tend to overstate Scrapper performance slightly: again a consequence of the ATO2 proc being, like, "The entire class's power budget." A big downside to Scrappers if you kinda have to choose whether you're AoE focused or ST focused. If your ATO2 is in an AoE attack, then that's great for clearing spawns, but your DPS gets catastrophic in ST situations. If your ATO2 is in a ST attack, then alpha-ing a crowd gets hard -- you kinda have to alternate between ST and AoE in order to get good performance. This certainly leads to Scrapper overperformance in pylon tests (where you can brutally optimize totally ignoring AoE and eking every last tick of the proc window out of your ST chain with no concerns about repositioning), but I think it also leads to milder overperformance in Trapdoor tests, and certainly these solo tests make Scrappers look better than their team performance (though I'm not sure that Scrapper team performance is that much of a concern). Anyway, none of this should be taken to mean that Scrappers don't overperform even adjusting for this -- I think they do. But it is true that Brutes offer more reliable performance once you have basic damage mitigation and endurance concerns sorted out.

Interesting further difference between Stalker KM and Scrapper KM: On stalkers, the "recharge build up" effect of Concentrated Strike works with one of the stalker crit mechanics: it is 100% from hide. (It is not, however, affected by the crit chance bonus from being on a team). On Scrappers, the chance to recharge Power Siphon is not a crit and does not interact with any Scrapper crit modifiers.

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.