Is there a general 'how to build Scrappers' tutorial or guide somewhere?

[ThaddyKane]

Hello,

 

I do enjoy looking at other people's guides for various powerset combinations but I lack the confidence to try my own, and when I do they tend to follow the same cookie-cutter layout and I get discouraged.

 

For example I am really keen on respeccing and kitting out my Stone/Bio/Ice Scrapper because I've really enjoyed playing the character.

So if there was a guide to 'how to build' that might give me some pointers, for example on a hybrid set like Bio what do I focus on? SR is easier because it's all defense, Bio has some resistance and some defense but also a variety of slottable secondaries (Melee AoEs, Defense, Resist, Heal, End Mod, etc)

 

I would like to resist always getting Combat Jumping and Tactics and doubling up with the Fighting pool, etc.

A bit of variety would be nice. But as I said I lack the confidence to build and tinker and know what I am doing.

 

Your help is much appreciated!

[venetiasilver]

For Bio, you're mostly aiming to get higher resists and recharge, targeting HP+ bonuses.
Think of what the set exceeds in and focus on its strengths.
Defense is fine, but you can hit a purple inspo.
Resistance is better since you'll gain more time to heal and shield with Ablative.

[Culach]

For general build advice for Scrappers:

     1. Your motto is "Defeating enemies is 100% damage mitigation!" This means you want to put down enemies as fast as you can. Your defenses offer you some wiggle room, but not to the level of a brute or tanker. While you CAN slug it out with an AV, an extended fight is NOT your friend.

     2. For your primary, you either want BIG orange numbers, or LOTS of bigish orange numbers. I would recommend leaning into what your primary is best at, but you can always try and make a slow, but big impact, set hit faster, or you can try and make fast, but light damage, set hit harder. All the damage IO sets have some recharge built in, but YOU have to decide if you want more, or if you are going to look for more ways to improve damage.

    3. If you can swing it, more accuracy, or to hit, is a good thing. It doesn't matter how hard you can hit, or how fast you can swing, if you can't connect. An accurate, low damage, attack is better than a hard hitter that misses.

     4. For your secondary, to paraphrase venetiasilver, look at what it excels at and lean into that. DO NOT try and force a resistance set to be a defense set or vice versa (while it can probably be done, the effort involved would not be worth it, in my opinion). If it has 2 things it is good at, work on finding ways to improve those. Your pool power choices and slotting should fall in line with bolstering what your secondary does best. Focus on Tough for resistance sets, or Maneuvers and Weave for defense sets.

     5. Minimize end usage, and maximize recovery, when you can. If your blue bar is empty, you aren't arresting/killing, meaning you are not mitigating damage in any way. Some sets are just end hogs, and you have to figure out how to mitigate that.

 

For your sets:

     A. Stone Melee has quite a few powers with knockback. Knockback is not, generally, your friend as a scrapper. If the enemy is out of range, you can't hit them to mitigate damage. That said, not all knockback powers are the same. Some don't knockback often, others have a minimal knockback. Check each power to figure out if it could use a knockback to knockdown power to be more useful.

     B. I, personally, would skip the Stone Fists in favor of the Mallets, but that is because I hate redraw animations. I know they aren't supposed to change the total attack time, but I find them annoying none the less. That said, I also haven't played Stone Melee high enough to know if the higher powers drop the Mallet forcing redraws, which might change what I would recommend.

     C. I have only one Bio-Armor character, and he is only level 10, so take my advice with a grain of salt. With that in mind, I see that it appears to be primarily a resistance/regen set at the beginning, and later develops into a regen/specials. I would lean into the resistance aspect, as well as the regen, and then just pick the specials that fit best with your playstyle.

 

Finally:

     Don't discount the cookie cutter builds. I have found more than one that when I first looked, I hated it because it was a cookie cutter. What I have learned over time is that those are the builds that are the foundations for the sets, but you can tweak them to suit your needs. If you look at one and see that it has a power that doesn't fit your concept, meet your needs, or you just don't like, you can always look into swapping those powers with ones that do.

[Uun]

Bio is a hybrid set. It relies on resistance for S/L/T, defense for F/C/E/N/P, then adds +regen and +absorb on top of it all. Focus on adding typed (rather than positional) defense and S/L resist. The absorb shield is very important and should be used proactively (I put it on auto).

 

49 minutes ago, Culach said:

Stone Melee has quite a few powers with knockback. Knockback is not, generally, your friend as a scrapper. If the enemy is out of range, you can't hit them to mitigate damage. That said, not all knockback powers are the same. Some don't knockback often, others have a minimal knockback. Check each power to figure out if it could use a knockback to knockdown power to be more useful.

The only power in Stone Melee that does knockback (and requires kb>kd) is Hurl Boulder. Everything else does knockdown.

[Gobbledigook]

Bio and probably ice armor also like lots of +recharge. It will help keep Bio's absorb and +regeneration powers up and IA's Ice Bastion. It will also allow you to rotate the best attacks for more dps.

 

Get some slow resistance for Bio. If you cant fire your clickies enough you will fall.

 

 

[Yomo Kimyata]

I think the most important pro scrapper thing you can do is to understand how the Critical Strikes ATO proc and where it is going to fit into your attack chain.  And once you figure it out, let me know!  I’ve never been able to get exact confirmation on the exact timing on when the window for the CS bonus is open, and I’m not currently willing to gather the data…

[Sovera]

Look at other people's builds and see how they did their build. If they happen to be the combo you were after then all the better.

 

Posting your first draft of a build is also a good way to have the flaws pointed out so you'll know better for next time.

[biostem]

On 10/26/2024 at 8:03 PM, ThaddyKane said:

A bit of variety would be nice

If you want to try something different, give war mace, battle axe, titan weapon, and/or katana a try with the ninjitsu secondary set - it's actually a fairly new armor set for scrappers, and has some great utility, not to mention a sort of "lite" version of a stalker's hide ability.  If you want something a bit tankier, give savage melee/radiation armor a try - it's a very tough and highly sustainable/self-sufficient combination.  If you are up for a somewhat different experience, (namely, one that requires a bit more attention to play), try dark melee/shield defense.  It's a bit more end-intensive, but you have a ton of tools to draw upon and the tohit debuffs stack nicely with shield's defense.

[tidge]

On 10/30/2024 at 3:39 PM, Yomo Kimyata said:

I think the most important pro scrapper thing you can do is to understand how the Critical Strikes ATO proc and where it is going to fit into your attack chain.  And once you figure it out, let me know!  I’ve never been able to get exact confirmation on the exact timing on when the window for the CS bonus is open, and I’m not currently willing to gather the data…

 

I think I gave up on trying to understand the 'best' place for each of the Scrapper ATO %procs. I've defaulted to this sort of thinking:

 

AFAIK Scrapper's Strike: Recharge/Critical Hit Bonus is a global, so I either

1. Add it to a power that needs recharge (when chasing a 3-slot bonus), like an AoE that will get %damage, or
2. Toss it in any-old power that is going to get a 5-slot bonus

In contrast, I find that I typically consider the Critical Strikes set to be harder (intellectually) to break up (for level 50+ builds) because the 2- and 3-slot bonuses are easy to come by from other set choices (most Purple sets offer similar bonuses on the way to getting a 5-piece global Recharge bonus), so essentially by default I end up slotting all 6 of Critical Strikes in the same attack... so my primary concern is not so much about that single +50% Critical Hits %proc, but rather which of the Scrapper attacks doesn't have better slotting options (either for franken-slotting(*1), or for set bonuses)

 

Often, I end up with the Critical Strikes set in one of the first three attack choices (on a build, not necessarily in the primary)... I'll make the call based on what the likelihood of %proc will be, but those powers are all fast recharging and slotting a set like Critical Strikes will end up essentially capping recharge times anyway, so the %proc chance will suffer no matter what I do.

 

(*1) Soooo much depends on what the rest of the build offers. I never start a Scrapper concept planning to fraken-slot (because: high damage, often my Scrappers take relatively few attacks), but if the primary has something odd like low-damage AoE, lots of Damage-over-Time, or offers the chance to reliably stack %-Resistance I'll consider franken-slotting.

[Uun]

24 minutes ago, tidge said:

AFAIK Scrapper's Strike: Recharge/Critical Hit Bonus is a global

This is correct. It can be slotted in any power.

 

Critical Strikes: Recharge/Chance for +Critical Hit% is a proc (2 PPM for the regular version and 4 PPM for the superior version). The proc increases your chance for a critical hit by 50% for 3.25s and has an animation time of 0.5s before effect. While you want to slot this in a power you use before your heavy hitter, you also want to slot it in a power that has a short animation time after effect (because this animation time eats into the 3.75s window). You can determine this by subtracting the animation time before effect from the total animation time. For example, on my MA scrapper I have it slotted in CAK, which has an animation time of 1.6s and animation time before effect of 1.033s (0.567s animation after effect).

[ThaddyKane]

Hello all, thank you for your responses.

 

I guess a lot is still trial and error then, I did actually manage to make a build I was happy with (that didn't look the same as every other build I make!) shortly after posting this - of course I did! Always the way.

 

I will post at some point for critiques but since then I've been enthused by a couple of other non-Scrappers and have been playing with them, getting them to 50, and trying not to fret too much about ANOTHER character to worry about slotting!

Altitis is real.

 

 

[ThaddyKane]

On 10/31/2024 at 2:29 AM, biostem said:

If you want to try something different, give war mace, battle axe, titan weapon, and/or katana a try with the ninjitsu secondary set - it's actually a fairly new armor set for scrappers, and has some great utility, not to mention a sort of "lite" version of a stalker's hide ability.  If you want something a bit tankier, give savage melee/radiation armor a try - it's a very tough and highly sustainable/self-sufficient combination.  If you are up for a somewhat different experience, (namely, one that requires a bit more attention to play), try dark melee/shield defense.  It's a bit more end-intensive, but you have a ton of tools to draw upon and the tohit debuffs stack nicely with shield's defense.

I have actually made a BS/Nin Scrapper which is sitting around the mid-teens mark that I quite liked the feel of - my first ever 50 on live was a Kat/SR Scrapper and I really enjoyed Nin when it came out (launch of CoV, iirc) and much later got a DM/Nin Stalker to 50 before the servers shut down.

 

[biostem]

8 minutes ago, ThaddyKane said:

I really enjoyed Nin when it came out (launch of CoV, iirc)

It was originally stalkers-only, (in a slightly different form), but was propagated to sentinels and scrappers either in the SCORE days or when HC took over/was made public...,

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 11/2/2024 at 1:57 PM, Uun said:

This is correct. It can be slotted in any power.

 

Well, any damaging power from your primary or secondary.

 

On 11/2/2024 at 1:57 PM, Uun said:

Critical Strikes: Recharge/Chance for +Critical Hit% is a proc (2 PPM for the regular version and 4 PPM for the superior version). The proc increases your chance for a critical hit by 50% for 3.25s and has an animation time of 0.5s before effect. While you want to slot this in a power you use before your heavy hitter, you also want to slot it in a power that has a short animation time after effect (because this animation time eats into the 3.75s window). You can determine this by subtracting the animation time before effect from the total animation time. For example, on my MA scrapper I have it slotted in CAK, which has an animation time of 1.6s and animation time before effect of 1.033s (0.567s animation after effect).

 

Very useful and thank you for making this clear!  The part that I've missed in the past is the italicized bolded part about the animation time before effect of the proc, which is entirely different from the power where it is slotted.  That animation time before effect is most certainly going to eat into the "dead time" between the remaining time after effect.  I've never bothered really testing this out because I don't particularly want to and also because you need a fair amount of data to determine whether or not a given Critical Strikes! is due to just regular chances or from the enhanced chance from the proc.  But that animation time for all intents and purposes is going to extend the window of how many powers you can get in during the proc activation.

 

Let me give an example just to exercise my fingers and let me know if you agree with my math.  Let's put Critical Strikes in Radiation Therapy from the Radiation Armor secondary.  Radiation Therapy has an Arcanatime of 1.188 seconds, and an animation time before effect of 0.733 seconds.  So you activate Radiation Therapy and 0.733 seconds later the effect is checked to see if the proc activated at least once (this is why I like to put it in AoE powers since you can get proc activation well over 90% since it only needs to activate on one of your targets).  Assume it activates.  There are now two counters running:  the 0.500 animation time of the Critical Strikes proc and the remaining animation time of Radiation Therapy which has (1.188 - 0.733) = 0.455 seconds.  When you activate your next power, let's say it is Whirling Sword and you had it queued up so there is no wasted time.  Whirling Sword has a 2.904 Arcanatime animation time, and 1.200 second animation time before effect.  So I activate Whirling Sword and:  a.  0.045 seconds pass and now the Critical Strikes proc is in effect; b. 1.155 more seconds pass and we hit the time when effect is checked -- the proc is in effect so the power has a bonus to crit and the proc is in effect for 3.25-1.155 = 2.095 more seconds c. we wait out the dead time of 2.904 - 1.200 = 1.704 seconds for Whirling Sword to finish and when it is over the proc is still in effect for 2.095 - 1.704 - 0.391 seconds.  If you activate another power that has less than 0.391 seconds of animation time before effect, the proc will still be in effect, but as it turns out there are no other powers in broadsword that fit that bill.

On 11/2/2024 at 1:11 PM, tidge said:

In contrast, I find that I typically consider the Critical Strikes set to be harder (intellectually) to break up (for level 50+ builds) because the 2- and 3-slot bonuses are easy to come by from other set choices (most Purple sets offer similar bonuses on the way to getting a 5-piece global Recharge bonus), so essentially by default I end up slotting all 6 of Critical Strikes in the same attack... so my primary concern is not so much about that single +50% Critical Hits %proc, but rather which of the Scrapper attacks doesn't have better slotting options (either for franken-slotting(*1), or for set bonuses)

 

My experience differs a bit, but that's my quirk.  I like to put the Crit Strikes proc in a power that is going to activate a lot, and that means that other procs will also activate a lot in that power.  I rarely 6-slot Critical Strikes, and usually either 1-slot the proc or 3-slot the proc + 2 other pieces for the accuracy bonus.

 

With Scrappers Strike, I usually split the set 3 and 3 because I rarely play pure defense builds and I want the doubled defense bonus.  If I'm playing a pure defense build, then I'll 6-slot the set in a low level attack.

 

Also, I'm generally always looking for slow resist, and since I am made out of inf I will try to 5-slot Blistering Cold in my T1/T2 attack and I will try to 5-slot Avalanche in a PBAoE if I can.  For snipe powers from the epic pools, I'm currently a fan of 5-slotting Winters Bite and throw in a Decimation proc, you know, for the effort.

[Uun]

51 minutes ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

Let me give an example just to exercise my fingers and let me know if you agree with my math.

I think this is correct. The only piece I'm not sure of is whether ATBE uses Animation Time or Arcanatime. In any case, it's pretty rare that a power has an animation time after effect of less than 0.5s.

[Yomo Kimyata]

3 hours ago, Uun said:

I think this is correct. The only piece I'm not sure of is whether ATBE uses Animation Time or Arcanatime. In any case, it's pretty rare that a power has an animation time after effect of less than 0.5s.

 

I'm quite sure it's Arcanatime, since the next power cannot begin until the current power's Atime expires.

 

Kinetic Melee actually has a bunch of powers that have effect times come very late in the animation, meaning that time after effect is pretty short.  It's another reason why people don't like the set!

[Octogoat]

This thread should be stickied it's incredibly informative 

[Yomo Kimyata]

9 hours ago, Yomo Kimyata said:

If you activate another power that has less than 0.391 seconds of animation time before effect, the proc will still be in effect, but as it turns out there are no other powers in broadsword that fit that bill.

 

It's also worthwhile noting that the order matters.  In my example there is no other BS power that can follow WS that will get the bonus.  However, you can absolutely do something like Radiation Therapy, Disembowel, and Whirling Sword and the last two will both be affected by the proc.