aethereal

Yeah, my question was whether the OP intended the toggles to be mez protection or mez resistance. While, of course, mez resistance is not mez protection, I think that the way that the game usually shorthand-describes mez-protection toggles is the way the OP describes them. For example, the short description of Indomitable Will (from Willpower) is "Toggle: Self Res (Disorient, Hold, Immobilize, Sleep, Fear, Confuse, Repel, Knockback). DEF(Psionics)". But obviously that power grants protection from disorient/hold/immob/sleep/fear/repel/kb, not just resistance to them. Even if he does envision protection, I don't think this set would necessarily be overpowered. It doesn't grant any hold protection, nor exotics like fear/confuse, and running two toggles for protection from KB/Repel/Stun/Sleep doesn't necessarily seem overpowered.

Parasitic aura makes a (smaller) carapace too. I know you don't include it in your build, but for those who do.

It's not number, it's name. Probably only a relevant difference in that a LotG +7.5% recharge bonus had a different name from the normal +7.5% recharge bonus, so you can theoretically get a total of 75% global recharge from 5 LotG procs and five normal set bonuses. (In practice, the normal +7.5% recharge set bonus is rare enough that nobody gets five of them, but 5 LotGs and 1-2 normal 7.5% bonuses is not uncommon).

Why not put cobra strike back in and take crane kick out? They do the same damage and same cast time, you don't have to spend a slot of kb2kd, and you get stuns.

@Sovera I think you need to compare proc firings, not just random to hit rolls. If we do have a situation where the pulse that fires procs procs hit at 95% but then subsequent pulses of IG have a lower hit rate, then that maybe doesn't matter much.

I looked up Chief Soldiers in CoD, and they don't appear to get any defense from their powers, either. https://cod.uberguy.net./html/entity.html?entity=reflections_armoured_rikti_boss_soldier

If you're interested in fighting a particular AV, you should look them up in the wiki, which should say something like, "Heroes can fight So-and-so as an AV in Whoever's Arc." So for example see the top of this document for Manticore: https://hcwiki.cityofheroes.dev/wiki/Manticore

Savage melee bug fixes in the last page: Hemorrhage got a change to fiery embrace damage. No impact unless you were pairing Savage with Fiery Aura, and the uptime on Fiery Embrace is such that it's not a huge deal with the change. Savage Strike got: A fiery embrace change, a PvP change, and a Scrapper-only critical damage change. Only impact for PvE Brutes is if paired with Fiery Aura. Shred got damage buffs to PvE and PvP: PvE change was from 1.17 scale to 1.26 scale (7.7% increase in damage). PvP had a much higher change. Rending Flurry got an endurance cost decrease and a PvP damage fix. Maiming Slash got scrapper-only changes. Total impact to a Brute, in PvE, who does not pair it with Fiery Aura: One (not-terribly-good) power got a 7.7% damage increase, one power got an endurance cost decrease.

The bugs that it had fixed had little to do with Brutes. I disagree that it's really good now. It's, like... fine. Middle-of-the-road. EDIT: Also, OP suggests using +range on Savage Leap to get more damage -- that won't work. There's a max applied to the range bonus of the damage calculation, your range bonus damage caps out at 65 feet (base range of the power is 70 feet).

I'm dubious that Savage Melee should be rated anywhere near so high.

Diabolique is notably a difficult AV to solo if your damage isn't great, because at low hit point amounts she'll bubble up and become invulnerable and heal herself, and then you have a limited amount of time to kill her while her force field is on cooldown. (However, she doesn't do a ton of damage, so if your survivability is marginal she shouldn't stress you). Monitor your last-hit-chance. Ideally, it's consistently 95%, or very near that. If it is, you don't need more accuracy/to-hit, and you can focus on more damage, endurance or survivability.

Note that interrupt time reduction doesn't actually reduce the amount of time you wait before the attack fires, it just reduces how much of the time is actually interruptible (the rest becomes time where if you are hit, it does not disrupt your attack). To me, this makes interrupt time pretty useless on modern snipes. You don't have any interrupt time in combat. Out of combat, you don't reduce total time necessary to use the snipe, and 99% of the time, you're out of combat, so nobody's interrupting you anyway.

Hemorrhage had a bugfix to its fiery embrace damage in the latest page. Not relevant unless you were playing savage/fire. Then maybe barely relevant? Edit: Er, this makes it look like I'm contradicting @carroto. I'm not. I was replying to @Without_Pause. The earlier bugfix to Hemmorhage that carroto was referencing (2 or 3 pages ago?) was indeed a big nerf to stalker savage melee and has relegated the set to meh status.

These crits were not (seemingly) changed in the latest page, so thought I'd just bump this for attention.

Haven't run the numbers, but unless your bonesmasher has half the proc rate of your Energy transfer, shouldn't you reverse the slotting of those two? Give all those procs two chances to fire per rotation. Edit: Ah, you probably need the recharge in bone smasher to keep the chain hapless, hasn't really seen that it's back up with just a TF between uses.

Having actually done a fair amount of PvP with melee classes: Tanks aren't nearly as unkillable in PvP as they are in PvE, and they still do garbage ST damage, so in general I find that they tend to lose to the other melee classes. Sometimes they draw, with neither side able to kill each other. Exceptions I've seen have been Fiery Aura tanks and Rad Melee tanks that can abuse broken proc mechanics on burn and irradiated ground. That said, my PvP is fairly scrubby, and things might be different among really serious PvPers. But blasters own them all.

I think it would be reasonable for the critting classes to get the crits on fire melee and savage melee to include their bleed damage in the crit. Brutes get to enjoy fury bonuses on the bleeds, after all. (I guess the counterargument is that it's nice to have sets that push you towards particular ATs)

7.5% if playing a Brute.

It is possible to make some kind of decision about what they are "worth" and then make things balance an equation there (so, like, we could say that a to-hit debuff is worth 5 damage per -1%, while healing is worth 0.5 damage per 1 hp healed, then convert everything to a damage equivalent, then make every power have the same damage-equivalent-per-combination-of-activation-time-and-recharge-time). But, first: all that does is take the exact same judgments that people make now on an ad-hoc basis and codify them into the false rigor of a formula. There is no way to determine how much a to-hit debuff is "really" worth compared to whatever else except human judgment. And second, the formula still won't capture the complexity of the game, and two powers that, per the formula, are balanced, wouldn't actually be balanced. Like, ignore multifaceted secondary effects for the moment. Just think about the denominator of that formula. Is it activation time or recharge time? Well, activation time is probably more important than recharge time, but recharge time isn't meaningless! If you can make an attack chain out of two powers because they have a really low recharge time, that's a big advantage to a powerset, giving you LOTS of room to skips powers/use them as mules/get situational powers. And, again, any formula that someone might make couldn't just be a single-power formula, it'd have to be a powerset formula, because it's obviously true that a big part of the balance of CoH is about "holes" in a powerset. But this just makes any implementation of a formula yet more multifactor and complex, and you're going to have to codify yet more human judgment into what this balance "means." How valuable is it to have a self-heal somewhere in your attack powerset? Your armor set? Trying to create an inflexible equation to balance CoH would be a gigantic undertaking, probably months of effort, that would result, after all that work, in bad balance.

I feel like people have been talking around the reason for this. Mids defaults to showing your global recharge as though any force feedback proc you have anywhere in the build is actively giving its +100% recharge. People who don't understand the actual game mechanics assume that this will be reflected in play. They are wrong. It is not worth slotting FF recharge in kick. FF does not proc unless the power it is allowed in is used, and it has a low PPM and is unlikely to proc in kick.

Not just SO's, though that's part of it, yes. Someone here wanted them to balance around SOs, with a specific slotting scheme, and no epics. And, like, here's my question: what is the good that people imagine will come from it? Are these people actually advocating for unbalanced sets? Like, do they appreciate the fact that in the game-as-it-is-actually-played, some sets are way better than others? Is that a virtue in their mind? Because that would be the result of balancing around arbitrary constraints that nobody actually plays under. Balancing around equations is, you know, nice and all, except that you can't. What equation tells you the value of, say, a self-heal versus a resistance debuff for your opponent versus a bonus to your own smashing and melee defense? There isn't one, and if you did create some kind of equation around that, it would be garbage-in, garbage-out. Sets also need to be balanced holistically -- a set with two very good attacks and three bad attacks is better than a set with five decent attacks.=

People's determination to demand balance around "stuff that is not remotely how the game is played" kind of baffles me.

I feel like a revamp of Electrical Melee should spend some time on Thunder Strike. It's a cornerstone power of the set, and one of two big reasons why the set is considered "good at AoE" (the other being Lightning Rod), but I think it's been kinda left behind. It still has the 3.3 second animation time that Total Focus and other powers that share the "jump in the air, bring down two fists" animation have, despite Total Focus being reduced to 2.53 seconds. Its single-target damage is fine (but not comparable to Total Focus), but its AoE damage is not great, especially for its animation time. It has a nice 80% chance of KD, but that's really all it has going for it (especially for non-critting ATs (Total Focus benefits from now-obsolete limitations on crits, so its crit damage is all of its (good) ST damage applied to even the AoE recipients, so if you do crit, it's nice). An animation time change would be great, but also I think that Electrical Melee could use some kind of relatively reliable AoE damage. Lightning Rod is great, of course, but it's once-per-spawn if that. Chain induction gives you a little bit of "bonus" AoE, but it's not a game changer. But both Thunder Strike and Jacob's Ladder aren't great AoE, and I think the set could really use one of them being solidly good. Maybe some kind of gimmick mechanic that let Thunder Strike do bonus AoE or wider AoE when certain conditions were met.

Hide suppresses offensive auras.

Dual Blades is a strong set as well. Savage has bleed already (and isn't very good).