aethereal

You're not wrong about WP. It's... fine, perfectly playable, but it's lackluster. I don't think DA is a good set on Scrappers -- it's a somewhat clunky old-design Resistance set. As a resist set, it has a natural advantage on Brutes/Tanks with their higher resist cap, and its really notable thing is a huge heal which also shines on the higher hps of brutes/tanks. I'm sure that you can make a credible DA Scrapper, but it just feels like you'd get more bang for your buck from another AT. Spines is spines. Weak ST, a damage aura, decent AoE attacks slightly hobbled by the annoyingly long animation time on Spine Burst. EA is an all-round good performer. It has a taunt aura on Scrappers, it's a defense set, it has a heal and an endurance tool, the only thing it doesn't really have is a big offense component. I think everyone basically thinks EA is good, though you won't post top-end pylon times.

Regen underperforms. Shield is good. I don't think that either Savage or Battle Axe really demands a particular pairing. Savage has no defensive component so it may be better with a solidly defensively performant armor (which Regen is not), but, I mean, you can broadly just go with concept here, especially if you aren't interested in just wringing every possible ounce of performance out of the game.

Incarnate softcap is 59%, not 54%.

That's not a taunt aura.

I don't know what you think the plural auras are, but Shield/DM on tanks offers only one taunt aura (not that there's really any point in multiple taunt auras on a tanker, it'll just overkill taunt stuff). Shield does offer taunt on a Scrapper, unlike a lot of scrapper armors. Certainly the scrapper has less taunt than a tanker, but I'd generally consider the taunt aura on shield to be somewhat an advantage to the Scrapper -- all tankers get taunt auras, not all scrappers do. If you're looking for a differential on "what AT is shield better on," it's notable that it's one of the scrapper taunt aura sets.

You absolutely shouldn't need physical perfection on a /Bio character. The big thing to understand about Bio is the timing of DNA Siphon. DNA Siphon gives healing and Endurance for every live enemy it hits, but it instead gives regeneration and recovery for every dead enemy it hits. The regen/recovery are more valuable albeit less immediate, and in most cases you want to get a good mix of alive and dead opponents. Use Parasitic Aura or Ablative Carapace as you hit the spawn, burst out your AoEs and kill most of the minions. Then use DNA Siphon midway through the fight and you'll see your recovery skyrocket and be in great endurance shape to finish the Lts/Bosses and lather/rinse/repeat with the next spawn.

Regen. I think Fire is Real Bad for scrappers.

I am correct, and that's included.

Sort of. The way a 15% resistance debuff works is that it always* provides 15% more damage to opponents. So like, take a completely non-resistant opponent. Your 15% damage resistance debuff lowers their resistance to -15%. An attack that does 100 damage base now does 115 damage -- 15% more than before the resistance debuff. Now take an opponent with 90% resistance. Your 15% damage resistance debuff is itself 90% resisted, so only lowers their resistance by 1.5%, to 88.5%. An atack that does 100 damage base does 10 damage before the debuff, 11.5 damage after the debuff -- 15% more than before the resistance debuff. If the resistance debuff was unresistable, then against that 90% resistance opponent, you'd lower their resistance to 75% and do 250% as much damage as before the debuff. So it kind of depends on what you mean by "higher resists cut its effective contribution." It magnifies your damage by a fixed multiplier, but not by a fixed amount. ----------- * There are always exceptions to "always." If the opponent is already at max resistance debuff, for example, or if it has overcap resistance. However, this is rare in practice.

The advantage of staff on stalker is twofold: trade a somewhat redundant aoe for assassin's strike, sure, but also get both build up and the form of the body benefit for free.

I quasi-beat her. Definitely couldn't without insps, but with a tray full of reds I just killed her before she got lucky and landed her stupid hold on me.

I killed some 20 or so AVs with an ice/bio stalker (not scrapper). A few comments: People make way too big a deal of taunt. I did this on a stalker. It was fine. In general, you do not need to absolutely max your ST DPS to do a fine job killing AVs. It's easy for a scrapper/stalker to get above the regeneration rate of an AV, and it's largely impossible to get such high DPS that you can race it and kill it before it kills you. You need to be able to survive ~indefinitely against an AV in order to kill it, and you need to be able to stay above its regeneration rate, and if you're a little less than top DPS, it'll take longer but you'll be no less successful. There are a few AVs who are particularly tough and you may want to eke out every possible bit of DPS, but that's not at all the majority of them. The weakness of Bio is its lack of DDR. AVs who had defense debuffs were very hard for me, and usually I could only do them with purple insps to avoid cascading defense failure. Enjoy Ghost Widow.

However, the non-superior proc has half the PPM of the superior proc, and your global recharge will be much worse. There really is a sharp cliff of power at 50 for scrappers.

I'm on a mac so I don't use Mids. Also I've changed computers since I last played CoH.

Don't put slots in brawl.

But that just means that the loss isn't literally "the entire proc is completely wasted." If the proc is conflicting 70% of the time, that reduces its value by a little more than a factor of three. I think that the resistance procs are the prime example of something that looks better on paper than it plays. The combination of "doesn't take effect during the opening salvo," "best on big teams which don't really need help on damage output anyway," "popular and non-stacking," and "best on rare big opponents" is pretty brutal. But feel free to test it out and see if at the end of the day you feel a difference with them.

I have no doubt that the first Achilles Heel proc that you have in a group leads to a big gain in group DPS. However, if you're analyzing it for its results in a group, you have to weight the chance that other people are also running the same proc, and it does not stack. It's a popular proc! This clearly mitigates its power, in probably unquantifiable ways since it's hard to know how many people will be packing it.

Reliable online source: https://cod.uberguy.net In-game: There are test dummies in the Vanguard base and I believe you can get a temp power to summon them. People also use Pylons to test DPS, or the Trapdoor test. You can just fight random enemies and look at the combat tab, though lots of information gets dumped there.

No, you're just ignoring all the things that weigh in for Brutes. For example, Brutes get more damage from damage auras (which don't crit), and the DoTs of Savage and Fire, and their damage works with things like Energy Transfer and Total Focus, which get nerfed crits. They get their Fury bonuses on non-critting attacks from pools. Because their damage is less feast-or-famine than Scrappers, they also are less likely to "waste" hits on overkill attacks on low-health opponents. They get their full damage against the most numerous enemies of the game, etc. Again, actually try this. Go do a pylon or a trapdoor or whatever with a Scrapper who isn't using the ATOs. It's a whole different AT. (Note also: Brutes have real survivability advantages over Scrappers, and punchvoke and taunt. Scrappers don't just need to be able to stay about even with Brute damage, they do need a damage advantage over them. Just not the gigantic damage gulf that they have with optimized 50 builds.) Damage procs do not eat into Brute fury, they do eat into Scrapper crits. For any number of damage procs, they benefit a Brute more than a Scrapper. I'm not trying to make a very exact "what is precisely the crit rate of a scrapper overall." But the best builds have absolutely absurd effective uptime of the ATO2, and specifically they get it for their heaviest-hitting attacks. The natural PPM of the superior ATO2 is 4. With 180% global recharge (and no local recharge), its effective PPM is more than 11. Its buff window is 3.25 seconds, so we would expect more than 50% uptime for it. But you can finagle it so that some of your "downtime" from it is eaten by the tail end of the animation of attacks that were effected by it. So if you have let's say 60% uptime with the ATO2, then your crit rate overall is .16 * .4 + .66 * .6 = 46%. If the attacks that benefit from the higher crit rate are disproporionately your heavier-hitting attacks, you'll see that as the equivalent of an above-50% crit rate. You'll probably only really achieve that in a pretty controlled circumstance where you don't have to move and can concentrate on cycling your attacks absolutely optimally, like a pylon, yes, the upper limit is somewhere around a 50% overall crit rate. And that's what you're seeing. You're seeing effective crit rates of 30%, 40%, yes, even 50% in top Scrapper builds, in their pylon times and trapdoor times and just their holistic performance in play, and then you back yourself into imagining that that performace doesn't come mostly from ATO2, because it seems impossible. But it really is true. Like 2/3rds or more of the crits that an effective level 50 Scrapper build come from one source: the ATO2. People just imagine that the basic class chassis must be better than it is, because it seems so crazy that so much of the Scrapper's performance comes from just this one proc. But that's actually the case, and Scrappers really are pretty anemic without their ATOs. So: Scrappers need more than a 10% crit rate. They just don't need a 50% (or 40%) crit rate.

No that's not what your own post showed. Scrapers draw even with Brute damage with a 10% crit rate at about 65 fury. Brutes easily get and maintain 80-85 fury, which as it turns out is a significant amount better than 65 fury. Sure, build up is better for Scrappers than Brutes. And damage procs are better for Brutes than Scrappers. Scrappers need more than a 10% crit rate. They just don't need the kind of de facto 50% crit rate that the top builds can achieve.

No. Fury in its present state is just fine to make a Brute handily outdamage a scrapper who isn't using the ATOs. You're just wrong. If you want, you can go ahead and post a pylon time or whatever else without the ATOs -- heck, even with ATO1, or with both but with the ATO2 proc in an attack you don't use, if you want its set bonuses. You simply have an incorrect view of where the scrapper's power comes from.

People can believe two correct things, we aren't forced to believe a correct thing and an incorrect one. Right now, Scrappers are absurdly more powerful than Brutes at 50, they outdamage Brutes by a million miles and the small Brute compensatory advantages don't come close to outweighing the Scrapper damage. But also, below 50, Scrappers have little or no damage advantage over Brutes. People really, really want it to be the case that either Scrappers outdamage Brutes 1-50 or Brutes outdamage Scrappers 1-50, but that's not so. The 50 and 1-49 experiences are very different. I was agreeing with you. There's no point in worrying about the Brute or Scrapper 1-20 experience.

Meh. Brutes at level 40 with just SOs and Fury can do like 317 and 407 damage base with shatter and clobber. Sure, they do less damage than scrappers when scrappers crit twice in a row, but they do it every time, while a scrapper with just SOs critting those two attacks one after another is a 1% chance. The odds of either attack critting is less than 20%. And don't just look at whatever particular scenario someone brings up here. We know what the situation was holistically back when Scrappers had the same damage scalars they do now, but no ATO's -- it was that way for years on live with thousands of players. And the exhaustive result of that was: "Brutes are just better Scrappers." You need better than 10% crit chance to make Scrappers worth it. This however is correct. Like, if you're someone who turns off XP and exhaustively plays levels 1-20 as the entirety of your gameplay, by all means enjoy a Brute's better scalars at very low levels. But I used to solo all my characters through missions, no teams no farming, and levels 1-20 still went by like lightning. And levels 1-10, which is where Brute scalars really shine and they're absurdly overpower, are both over in the snap of your fingers and also are easy for all classes, it's not like scrappers suffer for the low level experience.

Sort of, but note that the Scrapper ATO, perhaps more than any other ATO, really cares a lot about the difference between regular and superior versions (because +1 PPM is a much bigger deal for going from 3->4 than from 5->6 or whatever). Also, the performance of Scrappers at 50 through their ATO has a ton to do with the usual global recharge-based PPM abuse, and you really can't have anything like the global recharge that you have at 50 earlier on, because the +10% recharge options (superior ATOs and purples) are locked to 50, which in turn means that you don't have perma-hasten before 50 -- so just the difference between 49 and 50 for a Scrapper is probably like roughly a 25% optimized crit rate? The way they could address this is to lower the power of the +50% crit rate ATO and push some of that crit chance into the other ATO and the basic class feature. This would both increase the floor and lower the ceiling on scrapper performance, which would overall be good.

It'll check for chance to activate for every target of Invincibility. Invincibility has Max Targets 10, so at most 10. But Invincibility has a smaller radius than Tactics, so that helps.