aethereal

Sir, this is a brute forum.

Generally feel like the -res proc is a mistake on AoE. I'd take FF instead of that and not sacrifice any damage. My reasoning is that -res is most useful against single hard targets, where you don't really want to be spamming AoE because of its low DPS (outside of specific cases where the AoE attack is weirdly high DPA and can be usefully used in ST attack chains, which I don't think Axe Cyclone is). Proccing a -20% res on some rando minion is low value.

I certainly agree that DB is awkward with the skippable combo system etc. I think you're underselling Blinding Feint, which maybe is somewhat awkward to use and certainly has constraints, but having a very easily achievable +25% damage and +6.6% to hit all the time is a thing. I don't really think that the lethal damage penalty should be addressed by buffing individual lethal damage sets of the very large number of them in play. But basically, DB right now has good ST damage (with very high recharge) and okay AoE damage because, as you said, of the really solid Sweeping Strike. If you buff 1k Cuts (or the PBAoE) to be quite good you get a set that's good ST and good AoE. If you make another ST attack quite good you dramatically open up the slotting choices of the powers by removing the requirement on extremely high recharge. If you improve the combo system, I dunno. My point is, there are actually a lot of vectors in which it would be easy to improve the overall power of DB without buffing BF, AS, or SS.

Seems difficult to justify? DB is a pretty good set already, albeit with a lot of skippable powers, not sure it needs to be better.

Hide in fact costs no endurance.

I don't have Mids (I'm on a Mac), but as far as I know it's always been a builder on every AT. That's what City of Data says, and it's also what my experience was on a Brute sav melee that I was playing a couple of weeks ago.

Brute Fury enhances Savage's DoTs, Scrapper crits do not. As a result, Brute damage is ahead of Scrapper damage in Savage until like highly late-game 50, at which point they're mostly at parity (Scrapper can probably pull mildly ahead with a really good build). I don't really worry about building Brutes as tanks, personally.

Shred is a builder, not a spender. Savage only has two spenders: hemorrhage and rending flurry.

Personally, I'd play Savage Melee as a Brute, not a scrapper. Hemorrhage is a very skippable power in Savage. The cone attack, Shred, is a fine cone attack, but some people just don't like relatively long-animating melee cones and would skip it. As is typical for most attack sets, while you'll want both the T1 and T2 early on, you'll probably eventually get to the point where you can drop one of them once your global recharge gets high enough. EDIT: As Oysterhead says below, Confront is always skippable.

This build takes both the T1 and T2 ranged attack powers. I don't know much about Beam Rifle in particular, but I'd generally be inclined to wonder if that isn't overkill. Lots of people liked to take both powers with the old Sent inherent where you triggered the two different kinds of opportunity with them, but under the new system, you should only take both T1 and T2 if you either want one as a useful mule or you need them both in order to manage a ST attack chain.

It's a pretty bad approximation. I'm taking about something that's specifically designed to be as seamless as possible.

One of the things that's a little out-of-step with modern fashion in the CoH costume designer is that chest pieces almost all come down to a sharp end at the border between the chest piece and the leg piece. It would be great if we could make it look like we were wearing shirts or sweathirts that were untucked from our pants. I think this could be done with the addition of a couple of belts. A belt that smoothly continued the "Baggy 1" pattern for a top but went down a couple of inches would give us a lot of power to create sweatshirts/hoodies. Another that matched the female Cyberpunk 1 (and related) patterns would give us a nice way to create some subtle differences in a popular top option. One that extended the Dress Shirt pattern would perhaps be tougher to get right, but also valuable. Oh, and one that continued the Retro Scifi 6 shirt would really help complete a number of choices for representing ordinary clothing.

I mean, up to you. Lots of people do put it on autofire. For the clicky-mez-protect armors, personally, I try to just develop some discipline about checking whether they're available between spawns, rather than keep them on auto. It's easy to get all of them to greatly-more-than-permanent, so I generally think that clicking them on cooldown is a bit of a waste, and if you do let their coverage drop and get mezzed, it's generally not that hard to recover, but that's a matter of personal taste.

Shield gets Knockback protection/resistance in Active Defense, you shouldn't need to slot for it.

The idea that claws could possibly be considered the weakest melee set is flatly crazy. SR and Ice are both good armor sets, though again, there isn't an obvious bad choice there.

This is a persistent myth. Streakbreaker is irrelevant to the performance of SR or other defense sets. If your enemy's adjusted chance to hit you is less than 20%, which it should be for even high-rank opponents with a built out defense set, then in order for streakbreaker to kick in, a single opponent must miss you 100 times in a row. In practice, streakbreaker never kicks in for two reasons: 1. Almost no fights last long enough for any opponent to attack 100 times at all. 2. If for some reason someone does get 100 attacks on you, it is vanishingly unlikely that they will all miss. If streakbreaker does ever kick in, that's a sign of huge durability, not a problem. It would mean you literally took zero damage from an AV for several minutes.

I'm not sure that Tankers really have any "bad" primaries. I'm not that enthused about Willpower or Dark, but you should be able to build a solidly tough Tank with anything. Kinetic Melee is probably the worst melee set now? Broadsword isn't terrible, but it's outshone by all the other weapons in my opinion. Martial arts has one big saving grace, which is its massive defense bonus. I wouldn't say it's bad, but if you pair it with a defense set as an armor, especially on tanks, you're left with a set that's very short on AoE, has fine but not amazing ST, and its big advantage is superfluous.

Its (crashing) T9 has 70% toxic resistance base (Tanker numbers). It doesn't have any toxic resistance in its non-T9 powers, and it doesn't have any defense at all to anything, but it does of course have healing and regen in Energize and sapping in Power Sink, which are mitigation against all damage types. (Weirdly, I found that despite offering no Defense, Electric Armor has DDR in Static Shield. ??? )

I mean, a different secondary that has an endurance tool would certainly make it easier. Also the global recharge in SR acts as a sneaky way of worsening your endurance economy, since you can use your powers more often. But really, this is a pretty straightforward issue of: "You're slotting with SOs and you don't have any endurance reduction." I feel like people here really, really work to make their own lives difficult by ignoring IO sets for actively played toons. Just buy a bunch of attuned yellow sets. You will get endurance reduction, you will get better enhancement values on your abilities, and you'll also pick up a bunch of minor endurance economy benefits through set bonuses. It will cost you, I don't know, 20-30M inf? If you just flush that money straight down the toilet (ie, make no effort to recover it), then, what, that makes your end-game cost for this character go from 500M inf to 530M inf? Who cares! If you do care, buy a couple million inf worth of enhancement unslotters, unslot all the yellow sets, and then gift them to your next toon who's going to do this, so you don't have to do it again. For people who insist on SO builds for whatever reason, you need to slot endurance reduction.

Here's a discussion of the build up proc on Tactics and what it means for uptime: https://forums.homecomingservers.com/topic/34762-how-and-when-to-use-procs/?do=findComment&comment=451717

My ice melee stalker -- who was quite a beast -- was ice/bio. That's a not-obviously-thematic pairing, of course. One source of synergy there is that bio has a sleep aura that stacks with frozen aura for potentially quite a bit of mitigation. Honestly, of your options, I'm not sure I see a particular source of synergy of not. They're all reputedly strong sets (I only have direct experience with Energy Aura). Ice wants lots of recharge, since it doesn't have a third strong attack in its primary to go with frozen touch and assassin's ice sword, so Energy Aura's +20% recharge is welcome. But I think ice is pretty forgiving, it goes well with whatever.

I think you can for scrappers/stalkers? Because they don't have granite?

Ablative Carapace is the simple click absorb Rebuild DNA is the heal. On other ATs, it's a fairly complex power (DNA Siphon), but it looks like Sentinels just get a straightforward heal/end heal that does a bit more healing if in defensive mode, a bit more endurance if in uh, whatever the endurance mode is called, and a perception increase if in offensive mode Parasitic Leech is the capstone, a cone. It gives you absorb, regen, and recovery per target hit. Max of 5 targets, and a 90 degree cone, so it should be fairly forgiving to max it out. You probably want to hit it at the beginning of a spawn if it's up, so that you are in a target-dense environment and can max it, and so that the absorb is there when enemies are still alive and regen works for the duration of the encounter.

Clicking the vulnerability power applies a ST debuff that lasts 15 seconds. This is not a situation of your attacks getting a proc or anything, just the power Vulnerability is a debuff that's more-or-less exactly like what a Defender might get in their primary powerset.

Okay guys, let's talk Eagle's Claw, because you all are killin' me here: https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=stalker_melee.martial_arts.eagles_claw&at=stalker It has three effect group blocks: one PvE, one PvP, and one any. The "any" is just to add a stack of assassin's focus (100% chance). The PvE and PvP blocks are quite similar, just with the fundamental differences to PvE/PvP. Basic PvE effects: 100% chance of 162ish smashing damage and a 9.5 second mag 3 stun. Two child PvE effects: Crit-from-hide (doubles the damage, 100% chance, if hidden), and Crit-from-not-hide (doubles the damage, 15% chance + 3% per member of your team (including yourself)). Basic PvP effects: 158ish smashing damage and a 2.0 second mag 2 stun. Two child PvP effects: Crit-from-hide and crit-when-not-hidden-but-target-is-held-or-sleeping, both doubling the damage, both 100%. So, to sum up: Eagle's Claw ALWAYS does a stun, but the stun is NOT AoE Eagle's Claw has an 8% higher chance to crit than normal stalker attacks