Alternative Brute Farming Specs

[Aven0403]

Ok so ive had a few ideas. let me start out with what i am looking for in a generality. I want a brute toon that can both farm well, and do great in solo content, such as against AV's or GM's. I also would like him to be able to tank incarnate level tfs and such. so i have had a few ideas with pairings and need help deciding. Please note i do not want a /FA brute.

 

Titan Weapons/Bio Armor Brute

Rad Melee/Bio Armor Brute

Titan Weapons/Rad Armor brute

Electric Melee/Rad Armor Brute

Titan Weapons/Electric Armor Brute.

 

 

which of these would perform the best in all of those scenarios? and why? Thank you all for your feedback!!! this is a difficult decision for me because once i main a toon, i spend all my time and currency on it to build it up to be the best it can be and also use it to experience all the content. Thanks!

[Frostweaver]

To be completely honest, you should double box and have a content toon AND a farming brute. There's no reason you should restrict yourself to what is 'good for farming' or 'good for content'.
Farming is generally MUCH more demanding on a build than content. There is definitely a 'best' farmer (rad-spines-claws-SS /fa) and all other builds, while certainly CAPABLE of farming, will lag way way behind a best build.

Let's be honest. after the first few dozen runs, a farmer is simply not much fun.... you grind it out so that you can afford really neat content builds. The farther you lag behind a 'best' build the worse the grind becomes. You have unlimited accounts and a thousand slots per account... why restrict yourself to a split role? The worst part is, with a split role, once you have the badges you want you start to ask yourself 'why do this content?'. Why deal with the chaos on an MSR when you can buy 20 winter packs, get five times as many merits as you would earn on the MSR, as well as making more profit and not having to split drops with 47 of your closest friends? Why do an ITF or even incarnate trials when you can easily afford what they have to offer without all the headaches of beating up on Marauder 20 times?

Making a non-farming brute capable of farming won't hurt your content toon in the slightest, but it will farm SLOWLY. And that is 'grind time' not fun time. Or you can leave your content toon be as your main, make it capable of slow farming, and then build a REAL farmer for the grind.


That being said, all of those toons you mentioned above are entirely capable of farming once you get them up in levels. I don't recommend pairing TW and bio because there are a lot of 'click to not die' buttons in Bio that will interrupt your momentum. The most success I have found with TW was with a set that provides a nice recharge boost so you can avoid the constant momentum-interruptus of hasten... /EA and /electric both do the job nicely, as well as providing endurance boosts to help avoid brownout from TW.

Rad melee is a powerful farmer, because of it's aura being a prime proc monkey. Not as good as some on content, though, since it's secondary effect is better at clearing hordes of minions than it is, comparatively, at taking out AV's... but it is better than spines on hard targets, at least. It pairs exceptionally well with electric for pretending you are a decent farmer, but BIO will make it a very, very hard hitter against Content, while cutting it's farming ability somewhat.

electric melee and rad armor are a very good all-around content toon, without making it exceptionally good at or exceptionally weak at farming. Because of the Jacob's later suckage, however, it's not the aoe killer that a lot of people think it is (at least not on brutes). It does have a REALLY nice super hard-hitting single target attack, however.

The closet you are going to come to a 'decent' farmer is probably going to be rad/electric armor. You will still be a third rate farmer, but you will be among the fastest third-rate farmers. And I guess half of a real farmer's speed is still way better than pretending that the tiny damage boost (comparatively) you get from Bio armor makes any sort of meaningful difference when you are running at 96% fury with 3 build-ups triggered (2 from sets) .

Edited September 3, 2019 by Frostweaver

[dmaker]

I strongly second what Frostweaver said. I tried farming with a non-farming build. A Martial Arts/Willpower Brute. He can stand in the middle of a S&L farm and not take a scratch. The problem? He has one primary aoe (Dragon's Tail), and one from incarnate, Mighty Judgement. I can put DT on autofire and walk away and eventually he will have a mob ground down. Easy peasy, no attention required. Or I can drive him and use all my powers (again only two AoE) and earn a trickle of xp and inf compared to a farm specific build. 

 

So, I two box as recommended. I created a Spines/Fire Brute and got him to 50 and now almost have t4 incarnates and all powers slotted with purple sets (where advised). This one can earn such a higher rate of xp/inf per hour that my attempts at smashing/lethal farming with my Martial Arts main look ridiculous in comparison. 

 

Now I can think of a concept build (which I do very, very often since I am a raging altoholic), and within a couple of hours can have the concept built up to level 40 and fairly well slotted and ready to take out for a spin. 

 

The upfront investment in building a level 50 farmer on a second account with which to two box and PL/fund your main account toons is well worth it, in my opinion.

 

Side note, boxing (running more than one character at a time using multiple accounts) is allowed but there are some restrictions. These are posted on the forum and can be easily found, but basically keep an eye on server player load as that determines when, if and how many accounts you can box with at a given time. 

 

 

 

[Hjarki]

Spines/* and Rad/* are really the standout farmers for one simple reason: they have toggle damage auras in primary. This not only means they tend to do more AE damage than other primaries, but you can more effectively farm while afk - you can just stand in the middle of a crowd and come back when they're dead.

 

*/Fire is more easily replaced. FIre's main advantage is Burn. However, you can re-purpose a number of mid-to-long recharge abilities with a lot of damage procs to make them into effective PBAoE nukes. As long as your secondary has a damage aura as well, Fire Armor isn't necessarily. It isn't even necessary for fire farms since capping Fire Resist is so easy with purple/winter sets. However, the investment required for a fire farmer who isn't Fire Armor will be significantly greater.

 

There are also non-Fire farms. If you're building a non-Fire farmer, you might as well just build for S/L farms (there are also Energy, Cold, etc.) - especially given that there are S/L 'farms' in actual missions (there aren't any reasonable fire farms outside of AE).

[Frostweaver]

I disagree about fire being easily replaced. Burn does almost (or in my case, over) 80 dps in a radius around you, the aura is a perfect proc mule or, even better, when slotted with the brute set it (for some weird reason) tends to keep your fury insanely high (like mid 90 percentile) and the usefulness of fiery embrace as a second build-up cannot be overstated. with /fire, almost any melee set could run in the upper percentiles of farming, and set with parry (or similar attack debuffs, like dark) allow you to redesign around not having to cap your defense so hard.... a katana/fire brute, for example, might be much more comfortable on a lethal farm, and would be WAY cheaper in IO's

Capping fire resist isn't the issue. The insane damage numbers are.... frankly, SS would be a pretty lackluster farming set if the interaction between burn and rage (and epic aoe's)weren't so acute. heck, my farmer does just as well on an s/l farm as a fire farm, albeit with slightly more attention paid to endurance, since I have to turn tough and fire shield on to cap it all.

Some people like idle farming. Me, I like spending 20 minutes doing a set of 4 minute rainbow farms for about 40 mil inf+recipes, and then turning my eye towards actually PLAYING the game with an alt.

[Werner]

3 hours ago, Frostweaver said:

...frankly, SS would be a pretty lackluster farming set if the interaction between burn and rage (and epic aoe's)weren't so acute...

Rage is great for damage. You do more damage with Rage. You do even more damage with double Rage. Do something else during the Rage crash. That's what the numbers say...

 

...in nearly every normal situation. But farms are not normal. We have to be careful when extending our normal thinking to a highly-efficient farming build being played by someone with keybinds and/or macros to efficiently convert all inspirations to reds to chug down at a rapid clip. In such a case, you can often find Rage banging up against the damage cap, and even more often find double Rage banging up against the damage cap. 

 

Let's say that I do 50 base DPS and have 100% damage slotting, for 200% damage so far. We max out at 775% damage, so at 575% damage bonus beyond our base + slotting. 

Here's a table of DPS by damage bonus beyond our base + slotting based on how much Rage we have:

 

0 = no Rage
1 = single-stack Rage with 128.68 seconds recharge such that we hit Rage only during the crash
2 = double-stack Rage with 63.68 seconds recharge such that we hit Rage only during the crash

 

bonus   0    1    2     1     2 stacks of Rage
100%  150  175  195  +17%  +30%
200%  200  221  237  +11%  +19%
300%  250  268  279   +7%  +12%
400%  300  314  322   +5%   +7%
500%  350  358  328   +2%   -6% <-- double Rage hurts us
600%  388  358  328   -8%  -15% <-- single or double Rage hurts us

 

As we might expect, the benefit of Rage decreases as our damage bonus from other sources increases. What is perhaps less obvious is that once that damage bonus starts getting extreme, Rage and especially double Rage can become counter productive due to the damage cap and time spent not doing damage.

 

I monitor my damage bonus on farms, and I'm going to guess that I average about 450%, but with wide swings around that number. At that level of damage, Rage might still help me just a tiny bit on average, but it would often hinder more than it helps. Double-stacked Rage hinders even more often, and might not even be considered a help at all on average.

 

Beyond theorycraft, I can provide a couple data points that hint that this might be true in game, though two data points do not a statistical analysis make. My SS/Fire/Mu does not have Rage. I only measured one farming pass, but it was at 2.1 million influence per minute. Using the same methodology, a different SS/Fire/Mu farmer with Rage measured... 2.1 million influence per minute. I'm sure there are a ton of factors involved beyond Rage or no Rage, but it is at least a little bit suggestive. Super Strength is an inferior farming set either way. A good Spines/Fire, for instance, can farm about 2.3 million influence per minute, I believe. But if you like Super Strength, and you can accept a 10% loss in farming efficiency, a Super Strength / Fire / Mu farmer can do just fine - with or without Rage.

[Frostweaver]

As the (Very long standing) Rage Guru, I can certainly accept your word on that 🙂

 

All I know was that foot stomp was very disappointing damage-wise, and didn't have any secondary effect other than maybe a knockback chance for recharge, that could be manipulated well to increase DPS. As the retired farming champion, I was willing to accept that people still considered it a top-tier farmer. I just never played it myself.

As time passes, I am more and more happy that I chose rad/ for my farmer, as the hidden potentials of contaminate exploitation and the set's weird synergy with fire unfold to drive it past spines. It is definitely the next FOTM without the irritating 'flrrrit flrrit flrrit".

A guy just put up a less than 4 minute video for rad/fire, and I am pretty sure he can still shave a few seconds off of that. Super strength is starting to feel like the old, out-of-shape boxer that used to be heavyweight champion, that everyone still respects because even though he cannot compete with the new, faster, tougher kids fighting over the title he could STILL put someone in the hospital just by sneezing.

Edited September 3, 2019 by Frostweaver

[Werner]

I hardly think I'm a Rage Guru, let alone a long standing one! In the old game, I leveled a SS/Fire non-farmer the old-fashioned way by missioning and street sweeping, and he definitely had and used Rage. I never liked the crash, but eh, whatever, we all live with it. I know Rage is good despite the crash. But now the crash is even more annoying. And, like, it interrupts my flow, man. LOL So I dumped it, even knowing it was good numerically, and even thinking it would hurt my clear speeds. I was surprised when dropping Rage did not seem to put me at a disadvantage, so I thought more closely about why. Still theorycraft, but I think it makes sense.

 

Anyway, I just wanted to recreate that old character, basically. I don't think I ever even took him on an AE farm. 

 

If I were making a farmer for farming's sake, I'd probably go Rad/Fire. I hate Spines.

[Frostweaver]

thrrrrip. thrrrip. thrrrip. thrrrip. thrrrip.