Scrapper Early Game

[venetiasilver]

So far I've done a lot of early game playtesting to feel out different primaries and secondaries.
And I've kind of come to a decent 1 to 15 Advice.

For a Leveling build, I think by Level 15 you should have 2 Attacks 6 Slotted. 
Yes its overkill, but I see it similar to how masterminds 6 slot their pets immediately.
If you have the influence for Panacea Proc and Performance Shifter Proc; I think the recommendation would be 1 Acc / 1 End / 2 Recharge / 2 Damage.
So if you're a Broad Sword scrapper, Slash and Hack should be performing very clean and clear at this point.
I've tried the split offense / defense slotting and it just feedbacks to feeling like everything takes longer to kill.

[nihilii]

I don't have hard rules, but I tend to lean towards the same approach. I fully slot attacks ASAP and only worry about defenses later. Although I prefer to go with 1 acc 3 dam 2 end.

 

It's a pain in the ass to damage slowly. But you can always have enough survivability, as it is binary: either you're alive or you're dead, and you need just enough to be alive.

[Yomo Kimyata]

In my experience, 1-15 goes very quickly.  It goes even more quickly when you have three or more attacks.  If you can afford SOs, then I will generally slot:  accuracy, damage, recharge, damage or endurance.  If you need more than four slots to absolutely destroy content that was designed against characters that are either unslotted or have training enhancements in them, well then you may be playing a different game of checkers than I am.

[StrikerFox]

I don't normally slot for +recharge at low levels. Just whatever recharge Prestige Enhancements give. Prestige attacks (Nemesis Staff/Blackwand/Ghost Slayer Ax/Sand of Mu) are pretty decent fillers. I'll even use Brawl and the origin power from levels 1-6ish. Emailing influence for new characters allows us to pick up other START powers like hand/stun grenades, taser, Envenomed Dagger, Revolver and a hammer. I'm pretty sure Achilles' and Shield Breaker procs are slottable at level 7 if you can get them. Typically I 6 slot attacks early. 1 acc, 2 dam, 1 end redux and 2 prestige enhancement procs. Also I think ATOs are slottable at level 10. I would slot the procs just to improve crit chance.

 

 

Edited March 22 by StrikerFox

[Zect]

Much of this advice is, surprisingly, good. I also think 3 attacks is the sweet spot: 2 ST and 1 aoe (you can drop one later when you inevitably respec for the higher-level ones).
 

And they don’t actually need to be 6-slotted if you can’t, because we have SO’s from level 1. 
 

I also agree with not slotting your defenses heavily in the beginning, because you can get a surprising boost just by slotting the def/res uniques.

 

The early game was never designed for any of this and it really shows. If you pause to pick up 8 hours of amps for pocket change you breeze right into the mid-20’s. Leveling 1-27 is more fun for me than the mid-30’s slog: leveling is fast and it feels like everything you do, and I mean everything, gives good xp. 

[Psiphon]

Pre 15 or so I tend to run DfBs so don't slot any enh as I outlevel them too quickly; just sell them. 

The buffs from DfB plus popping the odd red or yellow are enough. 

When I do slot, I always go for two accuracy, two or three damage depending on the recharge and end usage of the attack.

Quick charging attacks will get an end, slower AoE attacks recharge. 

Any gaps in the attack chain will be filled with Sands of Mu and the two Start ranged attacks. 

I'll start to pepper with +def etc as soon as as I can, build allowing and provided that I've got the cash available at the time. 

Edited March 24 by Psiphon

[venetiasilver]

26 minutes ago, Psiphon said:

Pre 15 or so I tend to run DfBs so don't slot any enh as I outlevel them too quickly; just sell them. 

The buffs from DfB plus popping the odd red or yellow are enough. 

When I do slot, I always go for two accuracy, two or three damage depending on the recharge and end usage of the attack.

Quick charging attacks will get an end, slower AoE attacks recharge. 

Any gaps in the attack chain will be filled with Sands of Mu and the two Start ranged attacks. 

I'll start to pepper with +def etc as soon as as I can, build allowing and provided that I've got the cash available at the time. 

I tend to stay away from DFB's a lot.
My general play goes: Do I want the Isolator Badge? If no straight to AP.
Then I have 4 routes afterwards. First Step: Turn on Bosses, 2nd Talk to one of the Origin contacts, or street sweep till level 5 to get to the Hollows.
But overall I like this archetype, I've just had a hard time learning the pathological build planning to make the 1 to 20 experience smoother.

[Haijinx]

Scrappers are the 2nd best AT to run the goldside arcs.

 

Stalkers being slightly faster since they get Hide and can avoid a lot of fighting.

 

There are more than enough arcs to get to 20.

[Sovera]

I would go as far as to say to pick three ST attacks if possible. T1, T2, and whatever is available. T1, T2, small gap, T1, whateverisavailable, usually allow a relatively gap free rotation, but the prestige attacks are very slow to animate and the origin power we start with is only good for the first 10 levels even with the recent changes made. By level 15-ish or so it hits for 5 damage at which point it might as well be removed from the tray.

 

Two of the prestige enhancements in the T1 and three in the T2 cover the bases until level 10 when ATOs open, but despite prestige enhancements being better (those procs do a lot of early damage) I will still swap to the ATOs at 10.

 

If you can afford the ATOs then my go to is splitting them. Three slots for each attack will do most of the work early on while avoiding the usual problem of having nothing interesting of low level to slot. I will usually place a 4th slot for one of the PvP quadruples since they can be taken at level 10 as well. It also frees slots to put in armor toggles though using inspirations and replenishing them from a vendor in a base via teleporter is the smarter going to consolidated low level squish. I'm soloing Posi 1 and 2 at 0x6 by level 8 using this strategy.

 

I used to not slot Hasten until 22 but now with SOs I triple slot it as soon as I can as even a level 15 SO is worth 30%.

 

 

Only after Synapse (even if I have outleveled thanks to double XP) do I usually use one of my free respecs and take the T1 or the T2 out depending on my end build. Yin is when we have access to most of the goodies and are not as constrained.

 

 

3 hours ago, venetiasilver said:

I tend to stay away from DFB's a lot.
My general play goes: Do I want the Isolator Badge? If no straight to AP.
Then I have 4 routes afterwards. First Step: Turn on Bosses, 2nd Talk to one of the Origin contacts, or street sweep till level 5 to get to the Hollows.
But overall I like this archetype, I've just had a hard time learning the pathological build planning to make the 1 to 20 experience smoother.

 

As a Scrapper I will turn bosses on and go x2 since there is barely a difference and it's more XP. If I have early AoE (Frost, Spin, whatever) in whatever form I go x4 instead.

 

I do the Hashbury (spelling?) arc(s). He's in the open behind and slightly to the left of Miss Liberty in front of the Atlas Hall. Finishing their arc gives another contact. Finishing that contact gives a third contact. Usually it's about 20-30 minutes to do all three and I'll be level 8-9 with 9 merits. 8-9 is great to start Posi 1 which will usually have me end at level 15-16. Doing Posi 2 (only solo this if capable of handling the AV) leaves me at level 22-ish.

[tidge]

Unless the Primary/Secondary have some powers that really don't benefit from slots at low levels (for example: resistance toggles), it is very rare that I slot more than three slots in attacks early in a career. I may invest more if I am leveraging one of the P2W/START %damage pieces to good effect... and if by level 10 there is some sort of 4, 5, or 6-slot bonus from an ATO set. Once I can slot Global bonus enhancements... powers that can hold those will get enough slots for them.

 

As other's wrote: having an extra attack (that you can always respec out of) probably speeds up (solo) play at low levels more than anything else.

[Haijinx]

I usually add all my slots to my attacks in a fairly even way .. then worry about defense

 

While leveling I take all the primary power attacks as soon as available, and usually respec out of the T1 later 

 

This is the same for me Scrapper, Stalker or Brute. 

 

Blaster is close, except secondary attacks are often better so I choose those. 

[Uun]

I wouldn't bother with 6 slots in any attack before lvl 15. 3-4 slots is more than adequate and you'll get more value spreading the other slots around. 

[Doomguide2005]

And I'll add a Kismet +6% as early on as can (~lvl 10 or so) frequently starting with 3 damage SO in my early attacks then add endred and acc as those start to suffer.  May run a single DFB and grab acc or recovery depending on current needs.  Particularly combined with Kismet i can wait a bit for actual Acc SOs.

[Sovera]

On 3/25/2024 at 5:30 PM, Doomguide2005 said:

And I'll add a Kismet +6% as early on as can (~lvl 10 or so) frequently starting with 3 damage SO in my early attacks then add endred and acc as those start to suffer.  May run a single DFB and grab acc or recovery depending on current needs.  Particularly combined with Kismet i can wait a bit for actual Acc SOs.

 

Early acc doesn't seem necessary thanks to 'luck of the beginner'. But the early Kismet may actually quite smart as for one slot we avoid slotting all other attacks. I would need to check on Mids where the cut off is.

 

I return from checking Mids. Mids does not account for 'luck of the beginner' that slowly wanes until it disappears at level 20 but just a Kismet gives standard attacks 71% chance to hit. Which means at least by level 21 it's not enough.

 

Mids doesn't allow level 23 generic IOs, but a level 25 generic IO leaves accuracy at 85% by level 22 so 32% is almost enough against +1.

 

I usually guide myself by Mids for the accuracy needed to hit +1 when compiling leveling builds, but now that I think about it considering the ATOs numbers we get are for level 50 the accuracy is most likely under the limit. Kismet is probably a good choice. (Man, I do my own chain of thought and my reasoning is better for it).

 

 

I do always keep track of Last Hit chance and it reports 95% most of the time until fighting AVs and such but I think the Kismet could indeed be a smart thing. I already loathe miss the archaic 5% always present miss chance without adding even more to it.

[Duckbutler]

For power picks, I've found that melee tends to like an equal ratio of attacks to defenses. This usually results in brutes and scrappers getting their secondary powers as soon as they become available. Tanks, if you wanna be a super tank, might want to stick with fewer attacks and aim to get their primary source of mitigation fully in place by the mid game. The tank I just leveled only had 4 attacks including taunt up through maybe 26, but had the full fighting pool and everything but tier 8/9 defense powers

 

For enhancements I always prioritize getting endurance fixed. The first 3 enhancement slots I get, I put into health and stamina. Then I forget about them and only ever have to worry about it when I'm actually buying enhancements. If I don't do that I'll also forget about them and eventually find I don't have them slotted at all, and it comes up because I'm having endurance problems. After that, each attack power gets 1 accuracy, 1 damage, 1 endurance. A second pass adds accuracy and a third pass adds damage. Most recently I did the +to-hit kismet and recharge instead of the second accuracy and it worked amazingly well. I wouldn't do that on a character I didn't have a high level of confidence I'd keep, though.

 

Run the first DFB, pick up the to-hit buff, find you're only level 7 so you can't do Posi 1 yet, do a second DFB and you may as well grab the recovery buff. Posi 1 into Posi 2 and you're probably level 20-ish, but maybe 22 if you're lucky.

 

I might do this differently, with the 6 slotting on the attacks, if I were going to add an ATO or Winter set to that attack long term and then I could see the lower tier filler attack that recharges quickly being a relatively huge source of damage. Then again, this post probably took as long to write as it takes to get to level 15.