aethereal

Not at low levels it doesn't! People really underestimate how garbage Scrappers are at low levels. 10% crit rate (5% against minions, and you're fighting lots of minions here) is terrible, and there are going to be substantial fights in which you just never crit. It takes a matter of five to ten seconds to get your Fury up high enough to match low-level Scrapper damage. This is dumb. There is no "what the set can do" in isolation from the rest of the game. I mean, we can say, "I want to see what a set can do (exclusively as it relates to doing negative energy daamage)," and, I mean, cool, you'll find that Dark sets are the best at everything -- as long as by "everything" you mean "this highly arbitrary benchmark that's unrelated to the actual game." Not that Tough and Weave are hugely game changing at these levels, but I wish we could just excise this whole type of discourse of these fora which is like, "I have fifteen invisible rules in my head and as long as you play with these totally arbitrary limitations, all of my weird claims are true." I'm sure that Blackjoy can find some set of restrictions which makes his experience valid. They are his experience, after all. But what I'm saying is if you are playing with these restrictions and you find that under those restrictions Shield is inferior to Regen, the solution is not "roll Regen," it's "relax whichever of those restrictions is leading to your character being so bad." (Or do roll regen! I did, it was fun, good experience. But don't kid yourself about what you're doing there.) In general, we now see some huffing and puffing about well, how dare you, my arbitrary restrictions are extremely important, they're only natural. But they aren't. You can make Shield (or Rad, or Bio, or Invul, or EA, or whatever) better than Regen without using the amplifiers, without having a dedicated AFK farmer and a billion inf, without PLing up to 50 and then going back and doing all your content through Ouro, without anything particularly onerous. If you choose not to do that, then hey, cool, you do you. But you could have.

This subthread is about the low level experience, and @Erratic1 specified "defensively."

Go wild man.

I actually played an Energy Melee/Regen brute, just recently. I was resting all the time with it. Mostly due to health concerns, not endurance, but endurance wasn't great either until I, you know, got a couple of Performance Shifter procs and so forth -- all the things that you claim Regen is good at. Regen is not as awful as you might think given the forum memes -- I mean, it's an easy enough game, it's not like there isn't plenty of slack to play somewhat suboptimal sets. I enjoyed my /regen brute. But Regen had a mildly worse 1-30 experience and a much worse 30+ experience than any other armor set I've played.

Fiery Aura is interesting. 180 second base recharge on Fiery Embrace, 20 second duration. That means an uptime under constant maxed recharge conditions of more than 50% (20 seconds on, 16 seconds off, repeat), and unlike most things that would conditionally add damage, Fiery Embrace is operative (since it doesn't add a damage bonus, but rather adds another effect to a power, which is then enhanced by your +all-the-damage). I actually wonder if the answer here isn't something weird like a Sonic Blast Blaster (or maybe Corruptor?), since probably what you're looking to do is find ways to leverage the +damage in all kinds of ways. Though the Scrapper's crit lines are obviously a good way to leverage the +damage. I kiiiiiinda doubt that Energy Melee is the right set, though I don't know what is. Is there a melee set that gets some longer-recharge powers than Energy Melee does? A world where all your recharges are costlessly divided by five is a weird world.

-Res is a good point! As with all -res, it opens up the question of "what level shift are we assuming here." But that's under normal circumstances, where Bio gives you a +31.25% global damage bonus. Under the assumptions of this thread, that (big!) bonus is non-operative for Bio, 'cause you're already at damage cap.

This isn't true -- Regen has lots of downtime. It's a poor mitigation set, so you're more likely to need to rest after a battle, a lot of its mitigation is in long-cooldown panic buttons, so you're more likely to need to wait out some of those cooldowns, and its endurance tool, which was impressive back in Issue 0, is not impressive now. To the extent that anyone needs to care about endurance issues (ie, mostly before level 40), you'll have a rougher ride with Regen than with many other armor sets. In modern CoH, sets with low downtime are like Ninjutsu or Bio, which give you refill-your-end-on-demand and layered mitigation such that resting is rarely necessary. To a great extent, in high level modern CoH, nobody has downtime.

Okay, but your major endurance drains aren't toggles, they're attack powers. I like Regen's one-toggle approach! And Rad is certainly not the end-all, be-all of endurance tools. Try Bio if you want a set that gets great endurance efficiency early and then gets a second tranche of endurance later. This is going to turn into one of these weird conversations where someone packs a ton of assumptions into their post about "the right way to play," isn't it? For whatever it's worth: I sometimes fund alts and sometimes don't. I don't use "full time temp power buffs," unless we mean 2x XP. It's easy to fund any character from what they can afford by "just playing," as long as you are willing to use your merits to buy enhancement converters and then convert enhancements and sell them (not just sell the converters). And levels 1-20 go by very fast. If you're soloing to 50 (which I almost exclusively do, doing regular missions), the majority of your time is spent 20-50, not 1-20. It's not by level 50, though. With lots of sets, you'll get your endurance problems straightened out by level 25 or so. And a problem with Regen is while yes, its endurance tool is available very low, so if you like turn off XP and spend a lot of time in levels 10-20, you may appreciate that, it doesn't have a very strong endurance tool, so you do in fact need lots of help after that, while sets like Electric or Energy struggle until the 30s, but then have limitless endurance forever.

It's weird to act like Regen has some kind of great endurance management that's a big advantage. That was once the case, but it hasn't been true for a long time. Bio gets Inexhaustible as its second-tier power, which is more +recovery than Regen gets if you're in Efficient mode. It also gets DNA Siphon at level 24. Electric gets Energize at 20 and Power Sink at 28 Energy Aura gets Energize at 24 and Energy Drain at 28 Fiery Aura gets Consume at 20 Ice Armor gets Energy Absorption at 20 Ninjutsu gets Seishinteki Kyoyo at 16 Radiation Armor gets Gamma Boost at level 1 (and Meltdown at 30) Stone Armor gets Crystal Armor at 20 (and Geode at 30) Willpower gets Quick Recovery at 20 Armor sets that don't have endurance tools are vastly outnumbered by those that do (just SR, Invul, Dark, and Shield don't), and many of the armor sets have significantly better endurance tools than Quick Recovery. Most (but not all!) armors get their endurance tools a little later than Regen, but in return they get better tools and with the latest page, they get them a bunch of levels earlier than they used to.

The value of Bio seems like it's significantly less in a world where you're damage-capped. Then it's just the global proc and the damage aura, right? Might as well do Stone instead of Bio, get a global proc that crits. Fire is also a distinct possibility. Scrapper seems to me to be way better than Stalker in this case, because Scrapper can broker all of that free global recharge into their ATO2, and a Stalker remains restrained by the 10.25 second internal timer on their ATO-chance-to-hide.

It's actually the middle managers who are dragging the group down. Upper management and rank and file are good!

I mean, it would presumably allow you to stack taunts and up the mag that way.

Fiery Embrace only adds to fire damage in PvP. In PvE, it just "turns on" the Fiery Embrace line for melee powers. However, it looks like Fiery Melee does get special bonus DoT when using Fiery Embrace, so it does remain true that Fiery Melee gets a little more from Fiery Aura than other melee sets do. Just, the mechanism of that "little extra" is other than you described.

Beast Run (like Athletic Run and Ninja Run) does not have slots.

Did you copy and paste it verbatim? It has the word "key" where you'd actually want the key you're trying to bind. So if you want to make the "y" key trigger the power, it would be: /bind y powexeclocation target teleport Obviously you actually need the teleport power as well.

Traditionally, the Theft of Essence proc could fire on multiple targets in Dark Regen, reducing endurance cost of Dark Regen not by 10, but by 20, 30, or even making it endurance positive. I haven't played dark armor recently, and it's possible that the proc was changed to no longer fire on multiple targets. However, I can see no sign of that in CoD. If the proc can still fire multiple times in a single power activation, @Zect's analysis above seems incomplete.

As @kelika2 succinctly said, you can already do this, with that bind/macro. There is a range limit, of course, but you should be able to select an alt from the team window, then use that bind/macro, and teleport to them through walls, if there in range. You can also teleport to enemies, most notably Tsoo sorcerers or Sky Raider Porters, if you have them targeted and they teleport away, with the same macro.

Nope, sentinels do not get snipes.

I don't know, dude, maybe you should just be better at this? Seriously, while Fury isn't literally at 85 all the time, it's trivial to keep it well above 60 95% of the time -- which is all you need to outperform Scrappers. I agree that at SUPER low levels, or before you genuinely are slotting things, there's lots of resting and that does hurt Brutes -- but they're helped by their scalars and so forth. There may be an island of time in the low 20s where it's hard to have good endurance slotting due to low numbers of slots available/low enhancement values, where you still need to rest a lot and thus you decay your fury. But even then, I don't usually go to 0 Fury during a rest. Now, for one ~10 second fight, if you have Build Up available, that fight will probably be slightly on the edge for a Scrapper. But at low levels, Build Up is available every three or four or five fights, not every fight. If you're routinely finding that you end all your fights having used up 70% of your endurance, I think you should more aggressively look at endurance tools.

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.