Snarky

I find myself liking the Sentinel comment and agreeing. I am a meta game min max builder and find Sentinels impossible to do that with. I think that was the design but at low levels and with little effort they will do well because of range/mez prot and some light armor

I need to revisit rad/invul. While half of my game is madly min maxing toons the other half is deep seated perfectionism in concept. That is one major reason certain ATs and sets never even get tried. Water Blast. So many things i wanted for so long. Water. Conceptually i can’t do crap with water. It does not fit my personal style. Thankfully i found a way to live Dark Blast. Rad/Invul i have concepts for. Just need to continue rolling them around

when I start a new character and slow grind story arcs at low level Brute is the easiest by far. As has been mentioned they do great damage, huge health and can be kitted out for ACC and End Recovery by 2 DFBs Then I shut off exp at 4, 9, 14, 19, etc and finish arcs. I did this on a Tank recently and it was annoyingly slower. So, on the heavy side, for me, Brutes are easier than Tanks. I cannot conceive how giving up a ton of health and some armors (no pre 20 character has 'great' armor) in order to get ...some extra damage or damage mitigation (just like Melees armors do not come in fully until after 20 or later trollers and doms don't mez whole spawn one after another pre 20) is going to make it easier. I will concede in the hands of a very good player a well built I/o'd squishy can blast through content faster than most Brutes. I have never done it, but I have seen it. It is like watching a wizard or hacker at work. But at low levels the Brutes mechanics and high health, mez protection, and damage shine.

I have only experimented with claws. Never ran it more than a few low levels or days. I am looking for a good oairing for a Willpower Brute and Claws is right there of course we are talking derivative city. Even Deadpool (er the one Deadpool shot in the head with arm blades) was derivative of Pullverine. Great Tank name i just realized lol anyways i am wondering if anyone has build ideas for willpower they will share? I am thinking 45% s/l def and from there not sure where to go. Do you chase high health or high resist or is it dependent on planned use more. (Running incarnate higb energy and ooss psi res?). I have more questions than answers. About 95% sure about softcap on s/l

Driving a semi through metro traffic and sharing wisdom on the message boards

Me sarcastic? What does this word mean?

Train wreck. Name for a redside death metal dominator oh wait. Some people would find the concept of naming a character after such a thing bad we should have the homecomin team scrub the servers of all potentially disturbing names i will suggest one first. Godchild. An be offensive to some people anyone want to pick the next?

I tried war mace. stopped at about level 30. one arm moves. that is the whole animation. like a bad SNL character pretending to fight.

My dark/dark build is expensive but insanely powerful. It does not need or use ToE because the high recharge makes Dark Consumption part of the PBAoE attack chain it runs. I do not know how to hide the build so sorry for the block text: and build is now hidden above. thanks

If you want an efficient (not perfect, but dependable relatively easy and constant levelling strategy) here is mine. Get 2x Exp power from P2W vendor. Do 4 DFBs for powers (last until 22) start doing teams/task forces. Team with a high level team if you can, but don't sweat it that much. It is better to run with a team (any team that is killing) than sit around strategizing about levelling. Continue doing that until about 35. Get midnighter badge. Do ITF. Do more ITF. Done, 50. You might find ways to do better. Farms, high rolling teams, a fun TF, a fun team. If you stall out, go back to basic strategy.

I am putting this in General rather than Brute or Tank Forum because the question is....which to go with. I Brute easily, it is my 'native' class for the game. Tanking, I "can" do. It is work, or feels like it. Also, with SS Rage I feel it works better thematically with Brute Fury. Having said all that I want to explore kitting out Willpower to it's ultimate Nth degree of awesomeness. I know that that will be better on a Tank, as Willpower loves a larger health bar. However there is also the law of diminishing returns, and I do not know where that kicks in in this context. My thinking is chase 45% S/L def, pump up Resists as smoothly as that ties in with....chasing huge health? Is that the plan? Hmmm. Sounds good, but is it good? I have memorized and can riff a bit on Invul thanks to playing a dozen Hyperstrike derived builds. But Willpower is not something I know well. Any thoughts or info would be greatly appreciated. Will be incarnating, consider No I/O off limits, and chasing accolades of course. For purposes of finalizing numbers etc.

on 2) yes. I agree sort of with siolfir. up until I don't. I can snipe with a Blaster and sometimes irritate no one around them. (any attack is a "taunt") othertimes…..it hits the fan. The more your AT is made to be a melee taunter, the harder time you will have just getting 1. Taunt for Brutes and Tanks affect more than one mob by design. so, to pull the blaster trick it has to be 1) physically far enough away the taunt does not auto hit it 2) not "connected" to another mob you taunt. THat is why sometimes you can attack and be fine, other times not. I do not know the mechanics behind it. But some mobs are "bound together" you pick on one you fight the whole trailer park. Other times you can pop a Snipe on one right in the middle of 3 others and everyone stands around without realizing their companion just vaporized. agro is not a normal mechanic like sleep or hold or knockdown. it is part of the underlying reaction programming of nearly every mob. they are defined by how they react to a hero (or villains) presence/attack/taunt. that is one of the reason a Tank is the best controller in the game. they can guarantee you safety from 17 mobs because they are hooked deep into their behavior programming. mez/sleep/hold is a nice thing, taunt is king. so once you taunt one.... all the dominoes start to fall.

it is indeed one of those odd procs that give no indication they are working. you have to dig into your attributes to see it.

Exactly right. In an endurance hungry build you slot Stamina Perf shift Proc, Perf shift endmod, lvl 59 i/o endmod. Health. Panacea Proc, Miracle proc, Numina proc. If that doesnt kill your endurance issues you are probably running dark armor. Hopefully you bave taken dark melee and get the pbaoe end recovery attack

How did you know how i would respond?

Ever have your endurance recovery nerfed to zero? This is unaffected by that

isn't rare salvage infinite stocked at a mil?

the only thing to keep in mind is that pre22 those enhancements are gold. after that they turn into a pumpkin. ditch them and get something real

I would second the wisdom of chasing 45% s/l defense and from there just building as strong a melee as you can afford. You can never cover everything in the City, and a strong Willpower Build does not need to try. 45% s/l def will make you nigh invulnerable to 85% ? 0f the attacks in the city. anyways, a lot of them. Then you deal with the rest using...Willpower.

For me I concentrate on ranged def. the only plavce this fails me is AoE, which I try to avoid lol. But 8 ft is ranged. heck 3 ft is ranged if they use a ranged attack. So softcap Ranged covers a lot of ground I don't have to shovel other stuff into. Then...I stay ranged. I hop into PBAoE when I calculate it best, then pop back out to cone range. So, did I mention range?

I would suggest soloing, unless you really enjoy organizing PUGs (who generally are grumpy when dragged through someone elses story arcs...PUGs are grumpy beasts) When you solo you can explore the storylines yourself. Better than any "resource" is doing. There are a bazillion strategies for this. You can do "COMPLETIONIST!" Must do every story, every side mission, from every contact until they say go away I have nothing, shutting off experience to do so. Or...taking your alts and calmly leveling them through different arcs as you gain levels. Relaxing, new, and you earn merits and learn the lore. Or...do a lot (not all) of the story arcs in the game through Ouroboros. Again, earning Merits, experience, and the lore. But in a less constrained fashion. Or....a Bazillion -3 other ways.

two main points in my first glace at your build. Your defense is all over the place. The only thing that hits softcap is energy. Are you going positional, or type, or...blech lol second, Blasters get 3 powers that fore off when mezzed. you took two of them. Blasters have TONs of power choices. (compared to melee who have to devote so much to armors) I think the pick is unwise unless you never plan to exemp, then, maybe...

elec secondary is very much a point blank and melee set. you might want to look at ice/ice instead if you leave off the melee from ice secondary that leaves you with some good ranged tools. the ice aura is great mitigation and a pbaoe sleep can be situationally incredibly good

Looks at OPs name for first time. This was sort of a forego e conclusion wasnt it lol okay. On the bright side cold/cold is very survivable. Forget the melee powers. The PBAoE aura in ice manipulation is very good. Remember ranged is 8ft. So if you build for ranged defense even if the seem right on too of tou the game has them at 40 ft. Sometimes being near but not in melee is your most survivable spot. And given ice abolity to really slow down enemies it can take them forever to move 1 ft

Ranged tier 9s are a thing i chased. Sadly not happy with them. I dont love weapons. So that rules out rifles bows guns. If you like them they are decent. Ice...not a true tier 9 as we are used to. I would run it...except a lot if ice is location AoE. Loc AoE is nearly impossible to land accurately in a busy fight. So if you want to run older content at original settings content then the set is good . If you want to run in hard running teams the native controls for landing these attacks are useless. So you need to learn and keybind a ton of various location casts depending on where you want it to go based on your location. Hope you have a huge keyboard lol Elec is not true ranged although the tier 9 is. Also the secondary drain is nearly useless in hard running teams