aethereal

Levels you play seriously at. I don't bother doing a lot of slotting at low levels either. But I'm also not trying to "solo all story content." Now the OP was pretty light in his explanation of what exactly he means by that! I don't know if "soloing all story content" means just "I'm going to solo up to level 50 mostly with story arcs," or "stop XP to exhaustively play every single arc available at every level" or "solo all TFs" or what. If he's going to turn on 2X XP and just solo, I'd do pretty light slotting at very low levels. But if he's going to spend hours or days below level 20, he should slot! Again, you and I may not, but he might be! And you did not in fact say anything about scalars below level 20. It takes a few seconds of fighting to get back up to high levels of Fury, and Fury decay is a joke now. There was a point in this game's evolution where building up to a high level of Fury and sustaining it was hard, but that point is not today.

Certainly true, though I note that the scalars don't come fully "in" until level 20 -- below 20, Brutes enjoy much closer base-damage parity to Scrappers, and Fury is just whoah-good. Not generally a big deal since levels 1-20 go by fast, but potentially relevant at for someone who's being a completist. (So for example at level 10, a Brute Beheader does 15.4279 damage and a Scrapper Beheader does 18.7338 -- Scrapper's damage advantage is 1.29, not 1.5) People should slot enhancements for levels they are going to play at seriously. This thread is specificallya bout someone who wants to "solo all story content." Brutes are massively better than Scrappers at very low levels, since as mentioned above their scalar deficit is mitigated, while Fury is what it is. If you have trouble maintaining 57 Fury, idk man. Maybe look into your play. I don't know how you feel, but I assure you it's not very hard for Brutes to actually be more damaging than your Scrappers in their 30s. At 50, a Scrapper has a few major advantages over a Brute: First and most importantly, their critical values can get insane. A Scrapper with the Superior ATO1 slotted starts at 16% critical rate against LTs+. Then they have 4 PPM of the +50% crit value ATO2. With perma-hasten level global recharge, that's about 10 activations per minute, which leads to about half of your attacks benefitting from the +50% crit rate. So call it 25% crit rate all told, leading to about a 41% total crit rate. In contrast, if you're level 49 or lower (truly level 49-, not exemped down), you're starting at 14% instead of 16%, and you're at 2 PPM instead of 4 PPM. Even if you're perma-hasten at level 49, that still means you've got about 5 activations per minute instead of 10, call your total crit rate about 26.5% instead of 41%. Huge difference! But you're probably not perma-hasten at level 49, because you don't have access to 10% global recharge bonuses. Your ATO2 proc rate might be more like 3 activations per minute, instead of 10. Secondly, Scrappers get much more out of Build Up than Brutes do, with both a higher percentage value and it working off their higher scalar. But of course the Build Up uptime is again heavily affected by global recharge, so... same deal. Thirdly, Scrappers get epic snipes instead of the less-effective ST attacks that Brutes get. This bonus comes in earlier -- you can get your epic snipe at level 35 and even fully slot it at that level with your respec, though it might more likely be slotted at more like level 37 or later. Of course, global recharge also helps with these long-activation-time powers. Fourthly, Scrappers get more use out of the armor sets that give +damage, most notably Bio. Relevant at much lower levels, but I note that the OP is planning to use either Fire or Energy. Specifically for the OP's somewhat strange use case, assuming he plans to do the story content as he levels, rather than going up to 50 and exemping back down, I think he'll likely get more use out of a Brute than a Scrapper. This isn't to say that Scrappers don't have a significant damage advantage over Brutes at level 50, but people overestimate how much that translates down to pre-50. (EDIT: I'll add that if you want the most damaging melee class at mid levels, I think there's a solid case for Stalker over both Brute and Scrapper.)

Below level 50, for the most part Brutes will outdamage Scrappers. This may change in the late 40's, but level 50 per se is a big power jump for Scrappers. So if you're planning to do all story content at its level appropriate range, you'll probably have an easier time with a Brute. If you're going to go up to level 50 and have, for example, purple and superior ATOs, then lower your level with ouroborus, then that favors Scrappers more.

If you have a "patch" power, its recharge will typically be irrelevant to its proc rate -- it will proc as though it has a 10s recharge + animation time. This is the pseudopet thing. All patches are pseudopets. HC may have special-cased a few patches (Burn?), but most work this way.

It's not possible under current powers code.

Not possible with current powers code, though. Would take probably pretty significant code changes.

No. The Brute I tested with has the ATO slotted, she did not get over 90 even when overcapped on aggro.

I think the list you're looking for is Bio, Stone, and Shield, but let me go through one-by-one: Bio: Has a damage aura, +global damage, and an added proc to all your powers, and powers that can be proc-bombed Dark: Has a damage aura Electric: Has a damage aura, and +20% global recharge, which improves your procs and lets you use your most damaging attacks more Energy: Has +20% global recharge, which improves your procs and lets you use your most damaging attacks more Fiery Aura: Has two directly damaging powers, plus a damage aura and Fiery Embrace, which directly adds to your damage, but isn't a toggle, it's a low-uptime clicky Ice Armor: Has a damage aura Invulnerability: Invincibility adds +to-hit, which I guess increases your damage by making you hit more often/do more proccing/less accuracy enhancement Ninjutsu: Has a crit-from-hide deal which does increase your damage, once or so per spawn Radiation: Has proc-bombable abilities, plus Meltdown which directly adds to your damage, but isn't a toggle, it's a low-uptime clicky Regeneration: Literally no offensive adds by any description Shield: Directly damaging power and +global damage Stone: +global damage, and an added proc to all your powers Super Reflexes: Has +20% global recharge, which improves your procs and lets you use your most damaging attacks more Willpower: Literally no offensive adds by any description So in summary: Bio, Stone, and Shield all gives +global damage 100% of the time, and Bio and Stone also add a damage proc to all your powers. Fiery Aura and Radiation have +damage, but not as a 100% of the time toggle, just as intermittent clickies. Ninjutsu adds critical hit chance, but again not with every attack, which is not I think what you're looking for. Most armors have something that gives some kind of bonus to your damage if you construe that very broadly.

I'd personally take the view that aesthetics triumph here and if your claws are at the end of your fingers (as are most of the images that you posted), you're savage, not claws. I think you're leaning more like whether they feel more stylistically like a frenzied animal vs a more controlled weapon-user? Edit to add: it's a little disappointing how few claws options there are. There's not even an option for classic Wolverine-style claws that doesn't clearly have an attached mechanical base on your hand! You can't color fury claws, widow blades, or rularuu's talon. This is an area where HC, in my opinion, consistently does itself a disservice. They don't seem to have anyone who creates new models for costumes, and while the game has a great base of models/costume pieces, there are gaps.

I mean, you do you, man. But if you're fighting really tough enemies, they'll hit you past softcap defenses quite a bit. And regardless of whether you get interrupted, you're: 1. Getting probably spend two fewer chance to hides per minute than you could have. 2. Not able to increase your chance to crit on your AoEs. 3. You've got kind of a weird pause in launching your third AoE for the group there as you wait for your glacial AS to go off. 4. Not sure about this, haven't done the math, but if you are in a ST situation against a hard target, is the chance to hides reliable if you use Savage Leap against a single target? I could imagine it is because of its extremely long recharge time, despite the area factor, but not sure. If we go back to scrappers: having your +50% crit proc in savage leap has some similarities and some differences. You don't have the same concerns about forcing an attack into a slow version, since none of that applies. But the scrapper proc doesn't have the same internal cooldown that the stalker proc does. It's fundamentally impossible to get your chance to hide proc to fire more than once per 10.25 seconds. So savage leap doesn't "waste" that many activations -- you can get SL's recharge down to around 15 seconds and have four chance-to-hides per minute. Scrappers on the other hand can pretty easily achieve 8-10 procs per minute with their ATO, and you're just not going to get SL's recharge down to 6-8 seconds. So you're wasting more potential activations.

If you are hidden after savage leap, assassin's stroke will be the sliw, interruptible version. A serious mob will hit you and interrupt the power. Perhaps you meant that you put the chance-to-hide proc in assassin's strike, which would make sense (savage leap, then assassin's strike, then hidden, then rending flurry for 50% chance to crit). But you said that you put the proc in savage leap.

If you're interested in a defense set that goes well with natural origin and has a heal, there's always Ninjutsu. Now, unfortunately, I think the Stalker version of Ninjutsu is just straight up inferior to the Scrapper/Sentinel version, which includes an endurance tool as well. To some extent, if you want to make a ninjutsu stalker, I like... sort of endorse making a /ninjutsu scrapper instead -- you get a lite version of Stalker hide mechanics, you get some stealth in Ninjutsu (though not full invisibility like a Stalker), and you get a typed defense set with a heal and an end tool. But I've taken a /ninj stalker to 50 and it was fine too.

Parasitic Aura doesn't debuff Regen; I think you're confusing it with DNA Siphon, which does.

I played an Ice/Bio stalker to 50 and T4 incarnates, mostly solo, mostly without 2x XP, mostly at high difficulty modifiers where there were large groups, and I gotta say that all this angst about taunt auras strikes me as extremely overblown. I've been playing a Brute recently and there are still runners with the taunt aura/punchvoke, and usually it doesn't matter.

Uh, what's an "infinity inspiration"?

@twozerofoxtrot are you looking at this? https://cod.uberguy.net/html/power.html?power=incarnate.hybrid.melee_genome_7 I see it as 10.2 "points" of taunt, not 13.6, with scrapper modifiers. I strongly think that "points" of taunt means mag of the taunt -- it already has a duration listed. It kinda seems like this is an error, since that high-mag taunt is unprecedented in usual taunt powers. Here's how I assume that taunt works, though I am liberally guessing here and not doing anything based on real data. I assume that taunt is a status effect (hence being listed in mag with duration). I assume that there is a fork in the target selection code that basically says, "If the taunt condition is currently active, then choose the taunter to attack (unless the taunter is at aggro cap), else use threat." I also assume -- with even less evidence -- that if there are multiple taunt conditions applied to a single target, it marks target priority based on which is the higher mag. All of this could be wrong! I'm basically just guessing. Taunt duration enhancement doesn't make a ton of sense for auras (where the taunt is universally re-applied long before its natural duration), but makes good clean sense for the actual taunt powers or other attacks with a taunt component -- it lets you not need to re-apply the taunt for longer, allowing you to do other things (including potentially taunt other targets) before needing to re-apply. In general, there's lots of stuff that the game could do with mag protection or resistance from taunt, that would potentially make tanking much challenging, but which it seems to eschew, I think largely for legibility reasons -- that is, I think the devs think it would be very confusing to try to apply a largely invisible status condition to enemies if the enemies had highly diverse reactions to the application of taunt.

Attuning a purple is useless, but the only "bad" thing it does is prevent you from boosting them. If you weren't going to boost the purple, there's no reason to trade them in for unattuned ones (well... there's my OCD about having one circular enhancement surrounded by four hexagonal ones). I generally buy things attuned and have a couple of times by habit bought my purples attuned. It's a little annoying, but NBD. In general, the angst people have about attuning things is way too high. Boosting is a huge amount of resources for a very marginal benefit in most cases. I'm not saying that there aren't some people who have money to burn and only play at level 50 and will get some benefit from boosting everything, but I think the vast majority of more casual players are best-served by attuning almost everything. (But not purples, there's no point in attuning purples. But also it's not a huge problem if you buy them attuned by accident).

Or just get your IOs. I feel like we often get this mentality of "I'm not satisfied with my character, what should I do, PS: I don't want to slot it with IOs." Like, if you're just farming up to 50, don't slot! But if you're playing single-player and enjoying the experience except that your character is underpowered, then, like, my dude. Just start buying your IOs!

I've played a lot of Bio and while I agree it isn't super strong defensively, it feels like you're underselling it here. You might want to just tune up your existing character's mitigation. While I don't personally like to proc bomb DNA Siphon, it also can help you with AoE. If you want a solid set for mitigation with some AoE punch, there's always shield. The epics can also shore up your AoE. Probably the power move is Mu Mastery for ball lighting while retaining access to a snipe, but Fireball from fire mastery is obviously satisfying for a fire character.

What? Both sides give merits for completing story arcs, at any level. I don't know what you mean by "if you get to the point where they offer them to you," but, I mean, of you do the arc, you get the merits. Older content on blueside has this annoying deal where the contact won't offer you a story arc until the second mission -- first you have to do a one-off mission for them. And a few contacts don't offer arcs at all. But on the other hand, new content gives you arcs right away.

This doesn't really make sense? If you Savage Leap and then chance-to-hide, presumably you do not want to then try to use Assassin's Frenzy on the now-alerted spawn that you're in the middle of, and just get interrupted out of it. If you want to use chance-to-hide on SL, that sounds like your plan is to do Savage Leap > Rending Flurry. You, uh, can't slot either Scrapper ATO into build up. The problem with slotting either the Scrapper +50% ATO or the Stalker Chance for Hide proc into Savage Leap is that Savage Leap's core cooldown is 40 seconds and thus you're wasting a lot of potential activations of those rather critical procs every minute. You want them in 20ish second core cooldown powers.

I feel like all the elec/shield energy went to Stalkers.

In my mind the advantage of -damage is not that it adds up with resistance to reach the normal damage mitigation cap of resistance, it's that it can take you overcap. Get 90% resistance and 30% -damage and enjoy 93% mitigation.

I'd probably use it. Not for leveling all the way to 50. But an hour's worth to get to level 20 or so? Sure.

Guys, you are literally killing me. @EmperorSteele there is no realistic scenario in CoH as it stands where an enemy hits a Def 0 character 95% of the time and hits a "soft-capped" character 5% of the time. Like, that's theoretically possible within the mechanics -- for an enemy who has normal (1.0) Accuracy and +45% to-hit, and where your "soft-capped" character has 90% defense (not 45%). But there are no enemies with +45% to hit and no accuracy, and 90 defense is an insane bar. @Troo streakbreaker is irrelevant to high-defense characters. It would only kick in after 99 consecutive misses from the same opponent. That's a vanishingly rare proposition -- the hits you get from normal probability are much more common than a streakbreaker hit. The basic deal is that 45% defense mitigates 90% damage in ordinary content. Not 95%. 90%. Yes, there are exceptions and caveats. But if the level of nuance that you're looking for is "one sentence," then here it is: "In ordinary content, 45% mitigates 90% of damage, just like 90% resistance."