RobotLove

Rad/Rad anything. Defender will always have a special place in my heart as my first 50 on live. Still holds up as one of the best 'all-rounder' support pairings. On the melee side, rad/rad has everything dark/dark wishes it could. Quick, hard hitting AoE. Plenty of proc opportunities, with easy access to -res. More relevant resists (energy notably) that are just as easy to cap. And most importantly, endless endurance.

Get some recharge into Particle Shielding to bring it's cooldown at or below 60sec. Keep it up at all times as it has a major buff to recovery. If this doesn't solve your endurance issues, drop an acc for an end.redux in your attacks. Particularly Devastating Blow has a higher than normal base acc and shouldn't need two of them. Also, Radiation Therapy doesn't need acc. IIRC it's base is 3.00x and the scrapper/stalker variant is a bit different from the tank/brute version. It gives a smaller heal, but a major boost to regen, which doesn't need a hit roll to function.

In acro's defense, the Blaster ATO Defiant Barrage slotted into your T1 or T2 can break you out of a mag 3 hold with a single proc. It's a decent pick for a budget friendly blapper (100 merits for the proc). But if all you're after is the KB protection, IO's are the way to go.

Looking at the bottom string, "Teleportation_RecallFriend" should be " Teleportation_TeleportFriend". This handy list has been quite wonderful for finding the internal names of the icons since some don't match the powers they're associated with.

Burn.

More manageable than some of the screaming of the past might have you believe if you dig around some. Robots are what tend to be called out the most (but there are others), and they resist it hard. But you don't really run into packs of nothing but robots, and most other things they spawn with don't have much, if any resist to it. Scrappers are in their element focusing down the tougher Lt.s and bosses that survive an alpha nuke, and that's the rank that those enemy types start to pop up (praet BCUs, arachnos drones/spider bots, Council mechs, etc. ) so having that bit of -res helps.

Thanks.

Never been sold on Conserve Power, I'd move that second slot in health with Panacea's proc. Serendipity bonuses are pretty weak as well, since you're not chasing incarnate caps. I'd shift to 6pc Reactive Defense for that nifty resistance scale unique and the fat recharge bonus. Also look into picking up the other ATO set. At the very least get the proc from it.

For Psi, the T1 is skippable. Boggle is too 'cute' to be useful to a scrapper, though there are some nice bonuses in the confuse sets to give at least a little consideration too. The insight mechanic as a whole is ignorable. Greater Psi Blade is too good to not use on cooldown, and the DoTs from the other attacks don't make up for waiting. Finally, if you have the budget for it, get some -res in there (Glad's Fury proc namely). You WILL eventually run into the dreaded Psi resist wall at endgame, and this can help make it a little less painful, if only barely. Shield I don't have enough practical experience with to give nuanced advice towards, but it's a well rounded and strong standalone defensive with some neat tricks.

ironjoe knows his stuff and has all the good stuff covered. Only thing I'd like to add is be patient. Keep boppin 'em to keep their attention and don't be afraid to wait for them to bunch up a bit. Heard them a little at a time, and remember that there are a half dozen or so other pullers working too. Even if you're not the fastest of the bunch, there will be a steady stream of aliens for the raid to nuke.

I don't think scrappers had it on live. A number of sets were proliferated with the i25 changes, and when we all came back and recreated all our old characters, there's a good chance many who would have rolled scrap this time around didn't know they could. Then there's thematics. Ice is low tier on the 'rule of cool' (pun intended), and even though there are lowFX options for it now, it still has a reputation for ugly visuals. Performance wise, it's known to be strong, but is possibly the latest blooming defense based set. However, it's original draw was for it's amazing aggro holding capabilities. which means Tankers wear it better. No reason not to give it a try though, and I would assume DM to pair nicely.

Thunderstrike is skippable until later. It's great at what it does but is slooooow. I'd recomend waiting until you pick up energize (self heal) as the long animation will have you eating quite a bit of damage. I have two quality of life suggestions. 1) If you spend any amount of time air born in combat ( I run Combat Jumping in all my builds and tend to hop from mob to mob ) consider investing in one of the -4 Knockback IO's if you can afford it (Zephyr's in travel power usually won't break the bank). 2) Once you pick up Lightning Rod, make the following keybind - /bind <key> "powexec_location target Lightning Rod" or make it a macro if you prefer. This will get rid of the clunky reticle placement and makes it much smoother to use.

Since this isn't in the guide section, I'm going to make a light criticism. Particularly the 50 IO build's many 3'ofs are running hard into ED. The performance gains on a 3rd 50 are fairly negligible, and you're usually better off adding more end redux or recharge, or shuffling those slots elsewhere. I realize these builds were made in Mids/Pines and the limitations that program has with enhancement levels, but what you have is something that is more suited to level 35 IO's. If that is the intent you may want to mock up the builds in the game (test server is available for quick leveling) and go by screenshots of those instead. Since this seems to be aimed mostly at new players, it's important to convey good slotting basics.

Also curious about dropping the max endurance back down. That was one of the more intriguing changes to me. If it's solely related to the brute vs. tank conundrum, brutes have a way to bridge the gap in their version of conserve power from the energy mastery APP. 90% of the other... if you follow.

Nerd answer: Axe is Mace but lethal. Smashing and lethal are the most commonly resisted damage types by players and NPCs in the game. Of note, robots resist lethal particularly hard, and there are ALOT of robots at high levels and some of them are actually weak to smashing. The difference in performance isn't huge, but min/maxers do as they do and it disseminates. Other kind of Nerd answer: Axe isn't a sword and 'swords are cool'. Filthy commoners got no taste in badass weaponry. Axe on, brother.

APP > Energy Master > Focused Accuracy has all you should need to counter blindness passively. There is also a +per unique in one of the To Hit Buff sets that will slot into a Build Up, but I've seen it be rather pricey at times.

Have also had this after the DPI scale update. Seems the options.txt file isn't loading when logging in characters. All other player savable options (keybinds, windows, chat, etc.) work fine. Current workaround: set the options in the first tab the way you want, then on the bottom of the options menu click save button (to the left of cancel). Then use load button (to the left of save) every time you log in a character. Also noticed a -NaN in the "tool tip delay" when this started. Fixes when loading options.

It's called Sentinel, my dude.

Keep to the open progression. I like the simplifications made to token currencies and how I'm not herded into content I don't want to do just to progress a character. If you maintain the 'play how you want' philosophy we have now, I'm happy with just about anything else y'all do.

For the build up just dump a pair of 50 recharge redux and call it a day. Post 50, I wouldn't bother taking boggle on anything but a Tanker (it's pretty good mitigation with the purple set proc). Targets that you can actually confuse don't live long enough, and Insight pops often enough naturally without the increased chance. You just waste a fairly long activation time (while also being rooted) on something that's not doing damage. If you absolutely feel the need to take boggle, 1 acc and 1 confuse duration, no more (slots are precious).

Heather Townsend arc rewards 1 guaranteed common incarnate component in addition to the Empy merit and reward roll (for 2 total components per run).