siolfir

Taunt not showing up in power information is a known issue and a result of moving the taunt part to a global proc instead of it existing in each power.

You can spawn the Ghost of Scrapyard by killing Scrapyarders in Sharkhead. If you hit Ionic Judgement in the crowd coming to him right after he dies you can have him respawn in under a minute. With BP Lore and a way to keep the aggro off of the Ravager you can kill him twice in the time it takes the pets to despawn. He has two main starting points: one in Potter's Field at his grave, the other is by the Arachnos base in front of the Chum Bucket, and you can tell which one he'll spawn at because the Scrapyarders start heading towards it before he spawns.

I've had that happen before this patch - I fixed it by rearranging the entrance room to the base. Since you can clip items in the base editor, that's also a way to get out.

Sadly, reports are coming in that the fix either wasn't part of the release today or something else changed in the subsequent patches that occurred yesterday (version control merge issues?) to re-break it. But this is fairly common for even professional teams, so I stand by my meme earlier.

The Night Widow path is, as you said, primarily a Stalker with better team buffs and more options for ranged attacks. It's easier for them to perma Mind Link because it has a shorter recharge and they get a Quickness/Lightning Reflexes clone that boosts their recharge. If you care about this sort of thing, there are a few sub-2:00 times in the Pylon thread for Night Widows. Fortunatas aren't the "Jack of all trades, master of none", though. You can build for that if you want, but even a little bit of focus on any of those aspects will have you performing well at it. I built mine for soft-cap without Mind Link but with enough recharge to keep Mind Link permanent; that gives me a cushion for incarnate content, mobs with to-hit buffs, or defense debuffs, and also helps the team if there's anyone that didn't build for the softcap. You have most of the good powers from Mind Control, with all the proc options that they provide, plus Psychic Wail to nuke spawns and stun what survives. You can go pure ranged at the cost of some damage, but that's because the melee attacks are that good and not that the damage modifier is low (my first Fortunata was a ranged build, my current one is a melee hybrid). As for which... unless you just want to run melee only or want to go for single target DPS I recommend the Fortunata path; whichever you go with I recommend the scaling resistance and absorb procs - combined with the scaling resistances you get from your auto powers and a few set bonuses you'll be set on staying alive even without a heal.

I haven't run it to any degree on anything but a Stalker, although I tried a KM/EA Brute right after the set came out. As for how Power Siphon works, you get a +damage buff while it's active when you hit things, and it's limited to 5 stacks; I don't remember offhand how much each stack provides since it's been a while and Stalkers get Build Up. If you've used Hybrid Assault Core, it's similar in effect.

Refer to:

I agree, but wouldn't it be fun (and thematic, given source material) to knock a mob 20 feet away and Burst of Speed to hit it again before it lands?

I ran a DP/Traps Corruptor to 50 on Infinity; FFG will give you some mez protection and defense all the time, but you won't use the rest of your secondary all that much on a quick-moving team (or duo) unless something gets away from the Brute. If something does come your way you have several ways to deal with it, and you'll be able to debuff anything into oblivion given time.

Yes, wildly different. It replaced a PBAoE with a 7th single target attack in a set that already had 6. That's so wildly different it's nigh incomprehensible how anyone could figure out how to play one.

Crane Kick or Cobra Strike. They both are single target attacks that do the same damage, with the same endurance cost and recharge. Put both secondary effects on the one you keep so that you don't lose either the stun or KB and add the animation of the one you ditch as an alternate for the one you keep.

...since nobody else responded...

Looks like you don't need to worry about it for long:

Yes. It's also possible to have an inherent that does extra base damage, which can be enhanced. The difference is how much work each would take to add, and how much maintenance each would require for power changes.

It would require extra lines for each and every power in every Primary. Like a Scrapper having "Additional Fire Damage" coded into every single primary attack just in case they grab the fire build up. To specifically answer the question asked, a power like Assault doesn't require extra lines in each power, because it applies +damage (for all types of damage). That counts against the +damage cap, though, instead of changing the base damage of the power. This is how Fury and Defiance work. To have additional base damage, the extra lines are added to each affected power.

...and usually does at the onset. It's not until the new people are up to speed that any extra progress is made, and how long that takes depends as much on the system complexity as it does the new people.

You're not that new to game forums are you? 😛 With all of the "proliferate everything!" calls that have been around since before I started, you know that as soon as someone sees that an assault wasn't ported as-is there will be complaints, and then someone is going to demand that a new <insert attack type here> set is created because they couldn't possibly make their concept work any other way even using power customization options to make it look different and no they won't just play the AT that already has that powerset combination because it needs to be on this one instead. "Happy with 4x4 set options" won't even make it past the patch notes announcing the new AT.

Or a Fortunata. Joking, joking... Fortunatas don't get taunt auras and have a 400% damage cap. But you won't be doing all of those at the same time anyway due to limited power selection in the various forms. The limited selection of powers means that you're already not doing those jobs as well as the ATs you're copying from anyway: if a Dwarf is tanking as well as a Brute (you were the one bringing up Tankers) it's doing less damage while doing so; when blasting away in Nova your sustained AoE damage is probably around a Blasters but you aren't getting as much burst; unless the Scrapper gimped their build you simply aren't going to keep up with one in melee damage; and a few control powers - most of which already exist in similar or better form in melee damage sets - does not a Controller make.

Right, it doesn't currently affect knockback, but the request was (emphasis added):

But that path is so gorge-ous!

Well, yeah. I mean, I didn't see what I care about in there, so they obviously aren't keeping me up to date! (apparently I wasn't being obvious enough about the sarcasm, so I'll add this line to indicate that I'm joking)

Amusing note: per the design formulas, if Dark Consumption was treated as an attack, it should be doing scale 11.664 damage based on its 180 second recharge and 10' radius*. That's 729.71 base damage as a Scrapper. The same formula has Whirling Hands doing scale 1.18 damage instead of scale 1: Dragon's Tail is the only one of the 14 sec recharge, 8' radius PBAoEs that meets the formula. Whirling Axe and Whirling Hands each do scale 1. To do scale 1 damage the radius should be 10 ft, 8 inches. Whirling Sword and The Lotus Drops do scale 1 base, with differing amounts of guaranteed DoT over the same time span (scale 0.3 total for Whirling Sword, scale 0.36 total for The Lotus Drops). Whirling Mace does scale 1.12. Spin from Claws has different recharges based on AT and uses different formulas for all versions. * - it would also cost 151.63 endurance.

After complaints about swapping many of the T1 and T2 powers during the initial round of Tanker changes caused a rollback (on the swaps), that was the decision moving forward, with the caveat that it wouldn't happen until after the Tanker changes were complete. They were just put in last week, and that caused a few other issues that are still being patched.

The Widow version is even worse than the Scrapper version, because it doesn't even have the -range. Also, the single target taunt in the Presence pool was replaced with a single target Placate, though: it's now a single target Placate, 15' AoE Taunt, single target Fear, 20' PBAoE Fear, all of which require to-hit checks, and a nice buff for using up two power picks on the set mules that the rest of the pool contains. To work this way it would - as you seem to state - only be used as an ally "buff" power, since the assist code would otherwise target through your teammate to their target. I also don't see it making Confront any more popular than it is now, and as mentioned earlier I think that if there was going to be effort put into stripping the aggro of of a teammate that it would (and should) probably go to Tankers. Addressing the "higher critical chance against the target" option: Placate animates in even less time (1.5 sec) than Confront does (1.67 sec) and offers a much higher critical chance on the next attack for Stalkers (and Night Widows), but it often gets skipped because usually the critical damage doesn't make up for the animation time. I could see throwing in a non-stacking to-hit debuff (they're mad, they swing wildly!), but that's pushing the limits of being thematic and still won't get anyone to take Confront that wasn't likely to in the first place.