Oysterhead

Yea shield can be pretty rough on endurance on its own. Rad Melee is also really hard on endurance, it has an aura in it and all of its attacks are big, slow, high end cost ones. Shield/Rad Melee would feel a lot better leveling if you've got all the +recovery unique IOs ready to slot in as you go and some -% end cost IO sets where doable. Savage Melee, one of Warboss's recommendations, is relatively light for endurance costs and its mechanic helps with that too. Savage Melee is great fun on a tank with the area size and target limit increases!

Shield's only real gap is a self heal, Dark Melee is a nice pairing for offering that. I did a Shield/DM tank and enjoyed it! Rad Melee is another option for that reason as well.

Oh I grouped with you on I think Posi TFs earlier in the week! The pinned Sentinels guide has some great Stone Armor advice for slotting that Underfyre posted, I'd recommend a glance at that. My advice here is based on that. Terra Firma does not need many slots or any slots if you're getting a good amount of accuracy from set bonuses, I dropped in Rectified Reticle: Increased Perception to it because that's always handy against Archanos. The armors I did 3 or 4 Luck of the Gambler for Rock Armor (which also has Kismet +6% accuracy) and Minerals and Weave, 3 Shield Wall + Performance Shift Chance for +End in Crystal (it takes end mod, so take advantage of that!) Brimstone I put Aegis, Stone Skin gets the two +3% def uniques and Aegis. That's going to give you a nice bump to accuracy/to-hit, push up your cold/fire def values which are our lowest. Celerity Stealth IO in Sprint lets you stack with Stealth giving you essentially full invis to most things, well worth it if you're taking stealth.

I'll mention it then, its possible to still have knockbacks with the kb->kd enhancements slotted (or even just any <1 kb power) against low level and weak to KB mobs. Very easy to confirm against clockwork mobs, which are weak to knockback, you'll still do knockback against clockworks with the conversion slotted.

Mids was updated yesterday for i27 page 5. Are you using the newest, homecoming specific version of mids reborn? Hit the update twice if so (first time updates the software, second updates the database), it should sort itself out. If that doesn't, hit the mids section of the forums and start fresh. As for going single target only, certainly a choice you can make, but, the energy blast AOEs with kb->kd slotted are rather excellent in practice. You can make everything flop so often you feel like a mini controller all on your own, which makes the area attacks going from team annoyance to team benefit.

Katana is going to work very well with any secondary set. If you're specifically looking for a synergy around Divine Avalanche, I'd say the sweet spot for that is a set that has some defense to lethal/melee, but struggles to hit soft cap, which Bio and Willpower and to an extent Dark Armor offer. Invulnerability as well. (All of those can hit the softcap with heavy IO investment, but DA would give options specifically for lethal/melee). But then the argument can be easily made that layering on a bit of defense to any of the pure resists sets works well too. And then, as discussed in this thread extensively, pairing it with a defense set like SR, EA, Ninjitsu, Ice, will let you drop DA eventually in favor of a higher damage attack chain.

You certainly won't need the defense from DA once fully built up with SR, but it'll help on the journey to that point. SR is more than capable of hitting the softcap on its own, and yes without weave as well (with tanker values its possible to hit incarnate softcaps with SR without weave!) The only things Weave and/or DA would do is potentially let you ignore set bonuses that grant defense and focus on other things. The SR powers alone with basic slotting you end up at roughly 30% defense to the three positions, a bit higher depending how close into ED you go on each power. Add in Hover/CJ and you're at 31-32%, so you need to pick up 12-14% to each to be softcapped. Weave will give you 5.5% of that and change, but its easy to hit those numbers without it as there are some nice easy set bonuses that grant large amounts to positional defense. So it entirely depends on your budget. Willpower would benefit greatly from DA and fits natural characters. Willpowers defense ends up lowest to Smash/Lethal, so the 15% lethal from DA is a big boost. However, by default it doesn't have anything to melee, so you end up with a Smashing hole, where a positional set like Ninjitsu and SR get full benefit. Ninjitsu can make sense for natural, depending if you like the ninja theme and if you consider the heal/end clicks to be magical or not, and its base defense values are lower than SR, Weave and DA will certainly be of use there.

Power Transfer Chance to Heal really shines in passive powers (stamina, etc) over active. With its PPM it turns into very, very impressive regen, but if you aren't getting every possible activation of that then it gets less impressive fast. 2 of them slotted in passives on an SR or Inv character + panacea/numinas/preventive/absorb proc is enough to keep you going indefinitely, I imagine Ice would be similar, But yea I'd not put it into Energy Absorption.

I've been using it, I'd say its well worth taking. A targeted AoE with that big a radius (radius 9 with the tanker buff) will very consistently hit everything, the damage isn't amazing but even without procs its equal to Shadow Punch but against 10+ things at once. The occasional ability to fear a single annoying Lt, or honestly stack it and fear a boss, is just a bonus now.

No comments on the build as its all outside my wheelhouse, but for this... Update your mids 😃 It went up to 3.0.5.6 a couple of weeks ago and matches i27 page 2 now, including replacing afterburner with Evasive Maneuvers, and the other recent travel power pool changes. If you haven't already since this post!

Oh I just thought of one other thing, you'll probably really want a KB->KD slotted into Shockwave. Its one of my favorite powers in the game with that, and supremely annoying without it. In the various tests of scrapper primary power, they had to split Claws into Claws that that slotted and Claws without, because it had a such a large impact on overall clear speed when things aren't flying all over the place.

My experience with claws is on a scrapper, but my thoughts reading through your build... Follow Up seems way underslotted to me and taken far too late. You'll want to use that constantly from the first level its available, it is a decent enough attack on its own (while its damage per activation is lower, its damage per animation is only 10% under Strike), and has a lot of proc potential, I'd say 5-6 slots easy, but its really the corner stone of Claws as you can maintain two stacks of it. I know the +dmg is less impressive as a total percentage of damage with fury, but that's still +75% damage and +20% to hit most of the time (that to hit alone is like having 3x tactics running at the same time). Normal attack chain ST will be Follow up->Focus->Slash and area will be Follow Up->Shockwave->Spin (or other order depending how things are stacked up). Follow up will take Gaussian's chance for build up, so good to drop in, and then % chance to damage's and such for consistent good damage from it. Eviscerate is potentially skippable, but I am seeing Brute recharge timers on Spin and Shockwave are longer so will probably see more use than on Scrapper. If you find you don't have time to use it, Spin and Shockwave are nearly always better to use. So depending how you feel when using it, looking at current refresh timers you will have a slight gap in the area chain, and Eviscerate will over fill it. (everything will be up when it stops animating) You can probably lose the straight end mod slot in Stamina, with three performance shifters and panacea, that's doing very little for you. Change Miracle to Numina's Regen/Recovery potentially, I'd trade 5% recovery for 20% regen. If you do find end still an issue, you could add that Stamina IO slot to Dark Regeneration and put a Theft of Essence +End, but that's still probably overkill. With Cloak of Darkness giving half stealth, if you put a +Stealth IO in Sprint or took SS instead of SJ, you'd have complete stealth. Something to consider if that is of use to you! This build looks very strong and sturdy as is, if you find some slots of Follow Up and move things around to take it at level 8 I imagine it'll be golden. I'd drop slots from Cloak of Fear, Physical Perfection, Maneuvers and Strike to get 5 for Follow Up. You'll likely never use Strike in rotation so just as a mule for Kinetic Combat is good) Edit to add: "Hero Designer 2.6.1.25" You may want to update your mids as well 😃 Its been updated a lot since then, currently on version 3.0.5.6

It does sound very strong on paper. I think Rad/Dark would be similar, and the heal/absorb on rad is arguably a bit better and you've got multiple end recovery methods. No damage aura with that though, so that'd be the big point in Elec/Dark's favor, but Ground Zero proc bombed might math out to higher damage over time? Just started on a Shield/Dark and it's tough to imagine that any set wouldn't greatly benefit from Dark Melee's utility. I say go for it! I'm betting there's some decent power effect synergy possible with Soul Noir colors and Electric Armor's colorings.

Where's the other 967??

Not at start, but if you're willing to play through to 35+ you can pick up the patron pools and get an armor toggle at that point. With tough+weave+patron armor+cj/hover+IO sets you can get reasonably high on defense/resists. Also Domination gives status protection and can be made perma. The other thought would be the reverse, a melee AT picking up holds/controls in a paron/epic pool.

Radiation Armor/Ice Melee -- 50 Fiery Aura/Martial Arts -- 50 Invulnerability/War Mace -- 50 Bio Armor/Savage Melee -- 50 Super Reflexes/Kinetic Melee -- 50 Bio Armor/Titan Weapon -- 35 Shield Defense/Psi Melee -- 34 Dark Armor/Staff Fighting - 31 Bio Armor/Savage Melee -- 26 (Yes this is a repeat, forgot I'd started this one when I made the other!) Willpower/Super Strength - 23 Shield Defense/Dark Melee - 9 Shield Defense/War Mace - 8 Willpower/Dual Blades - 1 Electric Armor/Electric Melee -- 1 Radiation Armor/Radiation Melee -- 1 Ice Armor/Energy Melee -- 1 I'm alternating between a tanker and another AT these days 😃

Eagle's Claw being a cone or even a targeted AoE like Touch of Fear would do a lot for making the set far more attractive.

That frankenslotting where you just toss things in for the unique effects rather than set bonuses is pretty common and supremely useful. Those two pieces in Resilience are each +3% defense to everything, so combined that's 6% def to all for 2 slots, heaps more than any complete set gives. However, they only go into resistance sets, so that power is a perfect place to park those! Likewise on CJ, you'll see I put 4 unrelated IOs in there. You're getting your LotG recharge, +5% resist all, Scaling Resists (you'll get 0-10% resists to all depending how low on health you are) and +6% to hit. So for 3 extra slots you're getting almost as much resists are you are from resilience, and almost as much to-hit as you'd get from Tactics but for no end or power pick. For those, they can only go into defensive powers, so CJ is a perfect spot for them. Those 5 uniques (Steadfast, Gladiators Armor, Shield Wall, Reactive Defense, Kismet) you can and likely should find a place for on every character and build. Likewise on the ones I put in Health and Stamina, which you mentioned I think you already went for. RE: Kick vs Punch. You shouldn't have any reason to ever use either. With your DB attacks alone you shouldn't have any gaps at that point, and the attacks are better than Kick or Punch. If you are still having gaps, I'd also recommend Kick, but actually because of another IO. Force Feedback +Chance for Recharge. Kick will take that, and it works great as a single slot filler, as it'll grant you momentary 100% recharge on occasion, getting your other, better attacks back up faster.

Ran this character a bit ago and have been meaning to share the build, the servers being down seems like as good a time as any! "Budget" here means no Purples, no Superiors, no winter sets. I used this exact build and slotted these in as I was building and it works well at level 50 and beyond. The Build: This gets to 50% Melee, and just over 45% on Ranged and AoE. Kuji-In Retsu and Blinding Powder I almost never use, but I found them on occasion useful when solo or ITF-def-debuffing-me-like-mad situations, and had nothing else I wanted. Focused Accuracy is a personal preference, I hate not having it, though the build honestly does not need Physical Perfection, I just didn't have the slots for attacks in Mu or something which would certainly be more damage. There's certainly a lot of room to improve here, I think my end set in Seishinteki can likely be improved up, but that capped my ranged resists nicely. Review: Claws - This was first and foremost my first time trying Claws, after reading on here on the Trapdoor test and Galaxy Brain's tests that show Claws as a top performer, if not the top performer, and I wanted to see how that works. And it works. Claws is amazing. Single target ends up being Follow Up -> Focus -> Slash, Area is Follow Up->Spin->Shockwave or the reverse order if I am running into a new pack. I don't use Strike or Eviscerate, they are mostly there as set mules and Strike for exemping, I occasionally hit Eviscerate if I see a situation where I know I can hit 3+ things for certain to make the animation time worth it. In all, one of my favorite melee sets so far. Shockwave is a joy, watching the little spinny graphic travel forward and things sequentially flopping on their backs. I think the KB->KD is a must for obvious reasons. Spin is every bit as great as advertised, doing more damage than other PBAoEs and being up constantly. Ninjitsu - Always wanted to try this out, based on a thread recently comparing Nin with SR. I will say from a raw numbers perspective, SR and Energy Aura are almost certainly 'stronger' sets over all, able to hit the defense softcaps much more easily, I was able to get there on Ninjitsu without too much effort, and the extra Ninjitsu gets makes it one of the nicest to play, quality of life, sets there is, specifically... Shinobi-Iri, stealth + def + crits. The added crits is nice, but ended up being less impactful than I'd hoped. My routine when I first picked it up (and, btw, you cannot pick it up at level 4! Mids allows this, because every other t3 secondary power in the game can be picked at level 4, but Shinobi-Iri requires level 6. I've posted about it in the bug forum...) I used Spin as my opener always, and later Shockwave from range. Crits against ~1/3rd of things is great, but with the frantic pace of combat and how quickly you normally progress with groups, getting back into a hidden state for another bonus drops the utility a lot. The Stealth so early is good, made SS the obvious travel power pick for stealthing, but you get this same functionality from Energy Aura. Overall nice, not as set defining as I was expecting. Kuji-In Sha, click heal. It's reconstruction! Nothing special here, very standard. Compared to SR obviously this is great, because it exists, compared to Energy Aura though, Energize providing an endurance discount increases value. Though with Energize, I often either use it early for the discount, or want to hold it for that rather than a heal? Kuji I just hit whenever I am a bit low without concern. Seishinteki Kyoyo - Endurance click! This is what makes Ninjitsu so nice to play with. Lots of sets have an end click power, but most of them require enemies in range and scale based on how many you hit and have accuracy checks. Some require 2 or 3 enemies or lots of end mod and end redux to even be net positive (looking at you, Ice Armor!), and also have a secondary function. Energy Aura and Ice Armors endurance recovery and +def per enemy create this opposing situation where you want to use them early in a fight for the defense bonus, but later in a fight for the endurance, so before slotting fixes that you are juggling that choice. Where this requires zero enemies near by, has no endurance cost of its own, and is only for endurance. 1.8s animation that doesn't lock you in place and can be clicked on the move, it becomes something you tap whenever you notice you're around 50% endurance. With my slotting and recharge, its 18 second recharge and 60% endurance recovery. That translates to 3.33 end/s, which if used constantly is above rad armor levels of recovery. And with its zero cost, if you get distracted and end up near zero end, click this and you're golden. In all, I'd rank Energy Aura a stronger set numerically and glowily, but Ninjitsu the easier and possibly more enjoyable of the two to play just because of how easy the end click makes things. And Claws is amazing. My final thoughts are that to run this to its fullest potential, you need a properly Ninja looking character. When the game is back up and running I'll get a screenshot and update this with one of my Ninja for reference of a proper ninja looking scrapper.

Here's something I came up with quickly, which isn't expensive though it isn't super cheap. Quick math says this should be doable in just a few hours of farming for you depending what you already have. This is leaning heavily on some of the same sets over and over to push melee and S/L defense up, and S/L resists to decent levels, and the big uniques that you'll want eventually. I didn't do the full ATO sets, but did get the procs that are most important and slotted them in. Those Kinetic Combat sets are nice for defense, but not the best for actual attacks as they stop at level 35 power level, but they do end up near capping damage and a good amount of accuracy, recharge and end redux. Long term you'd drop those for the full ATOs or hetacomb or more mako's, and possibly procs on top. Stops at 38, so for the rest you'll want to pick which epic pool, if any, you want, a travel power, and decide if you want to get Maneuvers (I would). Only 9 slots left though so if you pick up more attacks you'll need to shuffle things some. The attack chains here would be blinding feint, which may proc build up and your +50% crit chance, then Attack Vitals combo (Ablating->Vengeful->Sweeping). When doing Area attacks, use Blinding Feint into Sweep Combo (One Thousand Cuts -> Power Slice -> Typhoon's Edge). Those heal sets are expensive, but I'd recommend filling out later on integration or fast healing. The 5 and 6 bonuses are recharge and endurance reductions which are nice. You want to get Dull Pain to the point it is perma, the big HP pool boost translates into a regen doing a lot more. Power Transfer chance to heal is a nice amount of extra healing, I honestly am not sure how good that is on top of regen, but I love them typically always (two of those + panacea are usually enough to keep my tankers alive with no outside healing) Edit to add: Oh, Resilience could use slots I realized. Cheap way would be 1-2 Resist IOs which will add about 4.5% resist to all, the more expensive option (both in inf and slots) would be another 4 set of unbreakable guard for the melee/S/L defense yet again. This is stats as of the posted build with Resilience missing resist IOs:, Instant Healing not on (which will add ~1000% regen)

For consideration: This build gets these values: That's pre MotT Procs, so its really capped on S/L/E/F/T and just off Negative, 56 on Cold/Psi. Lower than yours on those two, but, up from 32% S/L and 35% Melee defense to 39.5/43.9%, near cap. Regen a bit lower, but the defense will make up for that. Recovery looks lower, but is actually higher with the procs in health and stamina. I did add Eviscerate, mostly for the melee defense in the set bonus, but if you try the attack I think you'll find its almost worth the animation time on Tanker. Tankers get the area bonuses, so it ends up being a 135 degree cone with 10 targets, vs 90 and 5 on other ATs. I also added chance to build up to follow up, so you didn't lose that with Arcane Blast gone.

The build as is looks capped to everything but cold and psi without Rune or Meltdown. Remember that what mids shows is missing the two stacks of Might of the Tanker you'll typically be at, which is +11% more resists. With that you're actually way over cap on everything, with negative at 89%, Cold at 71% and Psi at 66%. Your resists are in such a good place, I'd recommend dropping the sorcery pool entirely, picking up an epic pool and different travel power and maybe maneuvers, the added defense will do more for you than Rune and Meltdown pushing you way over caps. I'd personally (and did for my Rad tank) drop meltdown as well. Claws gives such amazing soft mitigation that the very slight psi hole won't be a huge deal. I personally went Energy Mastery for Focused accuracy, you could also get Laser Beam Eyes to replace your Arcane Bolt set to keep those bonuses. Proc slotting, some easy starters: Ground Zero is your big power for this. Put Obliteration chance for smashing, Dervish Chance of Lethal, Erradication chance for energy, and you've just turned that from a power that does 274 damage on click to one that does 425 with the same slotting. Add Lady Grey's chance for negative, perfect zinger's chance for Psi, and Shield Breaker Chance for Lethal and it is 619 damage to 16 targets per click. You can do almost this identical slotting to rad therpay, but I'd honestly probably drop that to a single slot a heal/recharge or something to use those else where, as claws is pretty high on area damage already. Because you are so over S/L resist, you could drop one Gauntleted Fist from Follow Up and drop a proc there. Edit to Add: Just noticed, you're missing some classics, you don't have any of the procs in Health or Stamina. Most builds use this setup because it is so effective, though Rad Armor can get away with doing a bit less. Health: Panecea: Chance for Health/End is more regen than a Heal IO and end to boot, Numina's Regen/Recovery as well. Miracle sometimes goes in there but that's very low value for Rad Armor. Stamina, Performance Shifter Chance for Endurance is more than the recovery from an end mod by itself.

Ha. Took me a bit too. Rune of Protection and Incarnate Hybrid Melee Core I believe?

I always go attacks first on a scrapper. Dead things do zero damage! Actually attacks first on everything for that reason, even my tankers. Most defensive powers will rarely need or benefit from max slots unless you're chasing a specific set bonus, ED means you just cannot get that much benefit for them. (as in, if you put 6 healing enhancements into Intergration, you're only getting benefit from the first three, the others are useless) You'll definitely want the Fighting Pool, and honestly if you can get Maneuvers in there as well its very useful, regen gets a lot of effective HP out of additional defense, giving you more time to let that steady regen do its work. I don't have a specific build, could look at one, do you have a budget in mind? Are you at the point you have sets you can get this early or just working with basic IOs/SOs? Have your ATOs? DB is an odd set in that as you increase in recharge it benefits you to start dropping attacks and focus on rotating the attack vitals combo on repeat. That gives you a lot of room for other power selections if you are going that route.

I've had that experience with both Rom and Req on mission 3, both before and after the recent patch. Taunt them over and over and they'll still refuse to run to you and take off on their own. I wonder if its some sort of aggro cap issue with all the inactive robots? Could they be counting towards the cap and thus the AVs keep dropping off?