aethereal

Remember that AVs resist -regen. Envenomed daggers give -250% regen, so -100% isn't insignificant, but it's a lot less. I think that not using quick Energy Transfer and instead using Barrage is unlikely to work out as a positive, even against an AV, but admittedly I haven't tested.

Wait, VEATs have fingers?

This is incorrect -- defense can go negative and you do become more vulnerable when it does. However, the degree of additional damage is generally pretty limited. If you have no defense at all, then an on-level minion hits you 50% of the time. If your defense goes negative, then -45 defense is the "softfloor" as it were, at which point that minion will hit you 95% of the time, for slightly less than double their base damage. But, relevantly, LTs and bosses have a higher-than-50% base chance to hit, so their effective damage can't get as much of a boost from negative defense. In practice, high-resist, low-defense types may see a noticeable step up in damage taken when their defense is heavily debuffed, but it won't be the kind of catastrophic "many multiples of usual damage" that softcapped defense people see when their defense is heavily debuffed.

I have the one experience with it, which is I took a Staff/Ninj Stalker 1-50, in a mix of solo and teams, and like... it was solid. But it didn't feel as powerful as my Street Justice stalker that I leveled up later, and I redid the same character as DB/Ninj Scrapper and that felt better as well (though perhaps because Ninjutsu is better on a Scrapper than a Stalker).

Yeah. Kinda the flip side of that is: "even with that, Stalker Staff isn't lighting the world ablaze, which maybe tells you something about Scrapper Staff."

I don't know that Staff on Stalkers is all that great even with this (and I have a Staff/Ninj level 50 Stalker), but in addition to getting another strong ST attack, Stalker Staff also of course has Build Up as do all Stalker melee sets, but it keeps arguably the best "Form" (Form of the Body) for free in addition to Build Up.

I think in fairness he said that the buff to Tanker damage should've been 50% as high as it was, not that tankers damage should be reduced by 50%.

It's a chance. So for example, the Brute Katana power Sting of the Wasp has a 5 second recharge time and a 1.17 second animation time. The result of that is that a standard damage proc has a 35.99% chance of activating in it (if there is no local recharge). But also, Sting of the Wasp does 48.something damage unenhanced. That proc that only has a 36% of going off does 71 damage, much more than the entire damage of the attack. So when you multiply that out, you get that the expected damage contribution of the proc is like a damage enhancement does a reliable 52% enhancement. Can you get unlucky where you just don't roll your procs as having a very high chance of going off? Yes. But if you have lots of procs, the law of large numbers favors you. Everything works out fairly reliably. On this attack, fewer procs activate than average. On the next attack, more do. In this case, it's just more damage, it's not like the proc activation thing is a lynchpin for the rest of your actions. The other critical thing to understand is that global recharge doesn't reduce proc rate, so, I mean, nobody thinks that attacks with a 5 second base cooldown like Sting of the Wasp are great choices -- they go for ones with 10 or 12 or 15 or 24 second cooldowns, and you can build a good attack chain out of a few of those, with global recharge, and with pretty reliable proc rates -- not 90%, but also not 36%. So that's the theory: sacrifice some set bonuses for greatly increased damage. The key insight is that it really is greatly increased damage. Yes, you're introducing another random component. Yes, you're making build trade-offs. But you aren't doing it for a tiny marginal damage advantage, you're doing it for average damage performance that greatly exceeds what you can get via other means. Beyond that, I bow out. @Spaghetti Betty showed you some videos and builds above. You can decide if you like it. She's a way better builder than I am, she probably has more nuanced opinions on exactly what tradeoffs are and aren't worth it. Just trying to give you the basic theory here.

I grant you that I of course do not have perfect knowledge into you. For example, on this topic that you self-describe yourself in grief about, that you obsessively post on to the near-exclusion of all other topics, when you make clear misinterpretations of what everyone else says into a simple "pro-or-anti Brute" frame, perhaps that's not emotionally driven. Perhaps your reading comprehension is just terrible in this one specific way that works identically to how it would also work if you just quickly read everything through the filter of, "Everyone else must feel like they fall into the sides that I have decided are emotionally important." Maybe it's just coincidence! But I know how I'm betting. And, genuinely, I suggest this to you: you're clearly a smart guy. You have good points. But you are in fact emotional about this in a way that is not helpful to your aim to get people to agree with you that Brutes need buffs. You've gotten so wrapped up into this that you're just out to make enemies of anyone who expresses any nuance. Now, look, I don't really think it matters much what any of us post on this forum. My experience after years at Homecoming is that the devs are gonna do what the devs are gonna do. But to the extent that anyone does care what the opinion of the posters here is, I think you make yourself deeply dismissible by picking pointless fights with people who agree with you.

My brother in Christ, what I presume is that you are the same person who wrote three posts prior: "My posting on these forums had dropped considerably because I am still working my way through the stages of grief and have not quite made it to acceptance."

There's nothing magical here: you get more damage by proccing attacks, but you lose set bonuses. Procs are really strong damage-wise. On a Brute in an attack without local recharge, a damage proc is the equivalent of 50-65% damage enhancement (and not affected by ED and giving your more headroom to take other damage bonuses like red insps on top of that). If you have four damage procs in a power, it's the equivalent of what 7-8 SO's would be without ED. It's really strong! So builders figure out ways to do without the set bonuses. They're less durable or other build goals than they would be, but they get massively better damage.

You're so emotional about this topic that you don't read what people say, and you're like, "Oh my god I'm going to shock you by saying this: Brutes are suboptimal!" I said right from the start that Brutes are invalidated by Scrappers and Tankers. Yes, they're quite literally suboptimal. You aren't arguing with anyone. But despite your deeply emotional beliefs, no, it's not in fact better to have Brutes invalidate another class than it is for another class to invalidate Brutes. If we can't figure out a way for all three of Brutes, Scrappers, and Tankers to be valid at the same time, there's no point in fixing Brutes. No, it's not about turns or retribution or penance. I don't think you read what I wrote, which was about Brutes invalidating Scrappers, not Tankers. Just to be clear, though: the likely result of slightly raising the defensive values of Brutes is "nothing." They probably remain just as invalidated as ever: Tankers continue to outclass them in clear-speed (because they continue to have better AoE and largely similar ST), and Scrappers continue to outclass them in DPS both AoE and ST, and Scrappers are durable enough that it doesn't matter if Brutes are a little more durable than Scrappers. Again, remember that back before the Tanker buffs, Tanks were largely invalidated by Brutes despite having way better defensive scores. But the build environment is complex, and it's hard to predict exactly when builders will be able to leverage additional baseline durability into higher proc performance that would allow Brutes to out-damage Scrappers. There's no real way for Brutes to outclass Tankers this way: the extra target caps are too potent. But maybe at some point they do outclass Scrappers. Homecoming's whole balance doctrine is not based in "let's make a speculative change, see what happens, and tweak." This is nothing particularly to do with Brutes. They just don't say, "Well, this current status quo is bad and we don't quite know what to do, so let's make a change for the sake of a change and see how the environment responds." Like, look at regen. Obviously has been in a bad way forever. Are they making little changes again and again? Nope. Or Kinetic Melee. Or Broadsword. Energy Blast. Archery. They make big changes that they think will conclusively solve a problem with a strong theory for what the new status quo will be. Is that a good doctrine of balance change? Eh. I'm not personally in love with it. But it's not insane: they clearly think that constant change is frustrating for players and perhaps strains their very limited development resources. Whether they're right or wrong, it's got nothing to do with Brutes.

Stalkers are in fact pretty clearly significantly worse than Scrappers, but they have some gimmicks that give them some identity, and that helps. Nobody was suggesting that Brutes should struggle to gain Fury. I think Brutes were in the best shape they were in back when there was a struggle to maintain Fury, which also necessarily means that you shouldn't be able to regain it from zero trivially. But the game has simply moved on since then, there's no way back to those days. There aren't really that many pure-resist sets. Fiery Aura, Electric Armor, and Dark Armor are all pretty bad on Scrappers/Stalkers. Radiation Armor is clearly better on Brutes/Tanks than Scrappers/Stalkers, but it's such a strong armor overall that it's basically fine on Scrappers. Regen is kind of the opposite: it's better on Brutes than Scrappers, but it's so bad on both that it's not much of a consolation prize for Brutes. Three armors isn't a class identity. I don't think that a survivability boost will do anything for Brutes. Like, survivability is not the problem that Brutes have! If you gave them huge amounts of survivability such that, like Tankers, they could start to devote a ton of build space to procs, they might surpass Scrappers and then we'd have two ATs again -- Tankers and Brutes. That's not preferable to the current situation of two valid ATs: Tankers and Scrappers. If the buff doesn't go that far, we still end up with: Brutes are less durable than Tankers and less good at AoE/clear time/farming, while they are less good than Scrappers/Stalkers at ST DPS, and with Fury kind of flattened out, they don't really have a gimmick, so they are mediocre and ignored. The Tanker thing was clearly a problem. This is crazy. The Tanker buff was just an overcorrection. Nobody set out to rub their hands together and try to invalidate Brutes, they just misunderstood how powerful the buff was. Given that we are in a status quo in which we have two of three of Brutes/Tankers/Scrappers valid, it doesn't make sense to go and try to make a change to switch which two are valid. Seems like a lot of work to go and do that to a very uncertain reward and hard to really explore the playtesting. With respect, touch grass. Nobody should tie their feelings so much to the mechanical balance of a particular class in a game that they feel the stages of grief about nerfs to it. It's a group of game mechanics, not a person.

The basic problem is that Brutes exist in a very crowded space. There are five armored classes, and particularly Scrappers, Tanks, and Brutes live in a continuum where it's just hard for all three to be valid at the same time. It's also understated how much the core concept of Brutes has been broken as the game has gone on. The original concept of Brutes was that they were a high-risk, high-reward class, where you would careen from mob to mob in order to keep your Fury high, when other classes might instead take a rest to recover health/endurance. But then we got Inherent Fitness and access to set IOs were democratized, and the pace of the game accelerated. Now everyone careens from mob to mob. Building to durability goals that keep you from needing extensive rests, and recovery goals that make endurance management fairly trivial, is easy. It's no longer high-risk, high-reward to sustain movement from mob to mob, it's baseline. Brutes in the modern environment pretty trivially keep their Fury at near-maximum all the time. We've made it trivial to build fury, so that a Brute can play well on a team with other Brutes or with a Tanker -- we don't want Brutes to sit at very low fury levels if someone else is getting a significant portion of the aggro. That's well and good, but it removes the core concept that you have to make gameplay adjustments in order to maintain your fury. So if the Brute experience isn't "deal with highly fluctuating Fury," then we just have "Brutes have a damage level that's mostly fairly constant at whatever the maximum attainable Fury is." Tankers and Scrappers and Brutes are all melee classes with largely the same powers with a damage level and a mitigation level. Okay, you say, but then why doesn't the Brute have a viable existence as "less damaging than a scrapper but more damaging than a tank, less mitigation than a tank but more than a scrapper"? Well, the basic issue here is that all the armored classes can build enough mitigation to be able to solo +4/x8. Brutes can do it, Scrappers can do it, Stalkers can do it, Sentinels can do it. So if Tankers' role is "more mitigation than the other four classes," but the other classes can be defensive enough to not die to a full team's max-level content solo, what does that role actually mean? That was the situation at the start of Homecoming. Tanks were seen as widely useless because you might as well have a Brute that had mitigation that was good enough to survive everything and better damage. There are some asterisks there (a few very hard TFs, then as time went on Hard Mode), but for 99% of content of the game, Brutes invalidated Tankers. So they buffed Tankers. Too much? Yeah, too much. Now Tankers get vastly enhanced AoE damage. And as build sophistication went on, we increasingly saw ways for Tankers to use procs to shore up their ST damage. This crowded out Brutes. We can imagine a large number of things they could do to make Brutes better, but: a. Unless those things are "nerf scrappers and tankers," they'd power-creep the game. b. It's likely that these buffs would invalidate one of scrappers or tankers. It's just genuinely difficult to find a niche for these very similar classes.

Proc rate for an AoE has nothing at all to do with number of targets, and everything to do with the physical area that the AoE affects. The larger the physical area, the lower the proc rate. It checks that proc rate separately on each target, so if you do hit lots of targets, you can potentially have a very high chance of the proc going off at least once. Vice versa, if it affects a large area but a small number of targets (either inherently because it has a low target cap, or just situationally because right now there's only one target in the area), then you gonna get screwed.

Frost is pretty good too! High damage for an AoE, and the range is enhanceable so you can get it to be a pretty meaty size. But man, Frozen Fists and Ice Sword are rough.

It's because you decided to call out an Omega K'ong fight as your basis for why you didn't want a softcapped build. Hope this helps. It's nowhere. As I said from the start, lack of context is endemic on these fora. Why am I responding to you? Because you're the one who said, "WHAT??? HOW DARE YOU IMPLY THAT MY BUILD IS ORIENTED TOWARDS THE HYPER-SPECIFIC SITUATION THAT I MYSELF CALLED OUT???"

I'm sure that you thought that your caveats about teaming vs soloing and doing it at level 50 with Barrier support and so forth were apparent in your first post, but in fact, they weren't, nor was it particularly the case that your advice was targeted towards people who might care about hard-mode LGTF. I think it's probably the case that more people want to solo Carnies than want to do hard-mode LGTF. But, to be absolutely clear, there's nothing wrong with advice that's targeted towards people who want to group Hard Mode content, nor am I arguing against your advice for people who have similar characters goals to you. But it is just endemic throughout these fora that people shear all context away from their advice. Half of the content on these fora is person A saying "Build X is way better" and person B saying "You're insane, build Y is miles better," with person A not saying, "I care about the leveling experience on SOs," and person B not saying, "I care about the level 50 experience with billion-inf builds." The advent of first incarnate trials and then hard mode has created yet more pretty highly divergent environments for builds to target, and for people to fail to specify.

It's certainly not! But also, like, nobody at all is suggesting it is? It is certainly possible to overemphasize durability. I played an excruciating mission duo with someone who built a tank into like god I don't know the mid 20's with only their T1 and T2 attacks (and I was vastly underleveled and still doing all the damage). And one also understands that the regulars on the forum have now built 500+ characters and are desperately starved for novelty. Just, like, adding the note that the reason the whole meta of building defense or resistance came up in the first place is it is a generally strong tactic.

Lots of people who reply are saying: Oh, I don't build for [softcapped] defense [and I instead eat purple insps constantly to actually have softcapped defense] Oh, I don't build for defense [because I'm doing 4* Hard Mode content and my team will give me 100+ defense with rolling barriers and other team buffs] Oh, I don't build for defense [on my perma-dom dominators who lock down the entire spawn] Oh, I don't build for defense [on my character who only does large-team faceroll content] etc But if you don't fill in the stuff in []'s, you are not getting a clear view on what's happening.

Ice Melee has Freezing Touch. Its base damage is lower than Energy Transfer (148 vs 232), but its crit is on-par, because it gets full crits and not partial crits like ET -- so 296 damage for a critting Freezing Touch vs 297 damage for a critting Energy Transfer (and both have a 1 second animation time). Half of Freezing Touch's damage is DoT, which is worse than ET, but on the other hand FT is also a hold and thus can fit an additional purple proc and lots of additional normal damage procs. What Ice Melee lacks is a decent third ST attack -- it has Assassin's Ice Sword, Frozen Touch, and then very mediocre attacks like Ice Sword, or you can use Frost as a ST attack to, again, mediocre effect. If you have high recharge, you can mostly just use AS, FT, and an epic snipe, but when you do that your ability to build assassin's focus suffers.

I don't think that there's anything magic about Fire/Shield in terms of Tankers vs Scrappers. I mean, is there an argument that tankers outperform all other melee? Sure. But Scrappers, more so than Brutes or Stalkers, do have their own merits (they can achieve much higher DPS than the other three ATs), and while yes you can always argue that the greater durability of Tankers plus their AoE bonuses outweigh that, at least it's an argument (while with Brutes in particular you are in the situation of Tankers not being that much lower DPS).

Slotting sets early really helps with endurance, both because minor endurance bonuses are pretty common filler set bonuses, and because the increased slotting efficiency of sets vs SOs means you get more acc/dam/end redx into your powers earlier.

No, sorry, I got that, I was jumping in to support you.

I've run Scrappers with and without taunt auras, and honestly I don't holistically notice a difference. I know that some players really, really, really feel like taunt auras make a big difference in their experience, and I'm not here to fight anyone about what they should like, but I just want to inject a note of ambiguity into the constant refrain that taunt auras are super important -- reader, you may not agree with that! Try it yourself and see if it bothers you.