Edana

Good point. Possibly even the right point. Though from the way it works in play I'd argue that shield charge isn't well balanced, it is doing between 39 and 78 (unenhanced) more damage across it's aoe than the only other brute attack with a similar recharge after all.

I think we disagree on what makes "the best AoE attacks" though: footstomp is in that list because of a 15' radius and rage; spine burst because the set has quills along with ripper and throw spines to fill out an aoe chain; tremor has nothing going for it other than a large radius; frozen aura doesn't have any of what makes footstomp good, small radius, no damage boosts, I don't see why this power is even in the list.

Half way through blindly recommending someone take Gloom as part of their attack chain it occurred to me that I didn't actually know where it would come out in the DPA heirachy. So I went on a trawl through all the attacks brutes get to find out. The results actually surprised me.

1. Seismic Smash - 86.53
2. Clobber - 83.88
3. Shield Charge - 77.80
4. Burn - 74.33
5. Energy Transfer - 65.50
6. Knockout Blow - 62.50
7. Incinerate - 56.44
8. Gloom - 55.61

Ok, so on any possible brute Gloom will still be the second highest DPA attack you can put in an attack chain, nice to know common knowledge is so easily proved right. Burn is easy enough to justify considering you need to immob anything to make it take all the damage and that still takes 10 seconds. But seriously, why is the third best DPA attack available to brutes a 20' radius aoe in a secondary? And is Energy Transfer's reduction in endurance cost really enough to justify the self damage and that the stun is only 'chance for' not guaranteed like the holds in seismic/KO or the stun in clobber?

Two different recommendations depending on how much you want to go with the soul mastery. If you really want the darkness, look at taking gloom; it's the 8th best DPA attack brutes can get, (the first 7 in order are are seismic smash, clobber, shield charge(!), burn, energy transfer, KO blow and incinerate). If you're not so set on it, look at Mu mastery. The immob is a target based aoe not a cone; with soul drain being a pbaoe you don't want to have to jump back out of the mob and try and immob them with tentacles before you can go back in and drop a burn patch. Also ball lightning is higher damage than dark obliteration.

First; I like the new defence numbers, 6 slotting oblits is going to be a little expensive, but not in comparison to the lotgs. This build just got kicked up a gear.

Only new 'problem' is the chance for build up in follow up, the 5% chance simply doesn't go off enough and while 80% damage bonus is nice, on a brute that cruises at over +300% of base it simply isn't as impressive as it could be. Every now and again you'll notice something died quicker than expected, but it'll be relatively rare and the bonus doesn't last long. On average a damage proc will be more noticable simply because it will go off 4 times as much. On the other hand if you want to stick with it for the minor resistance bonuses; well, it is your call in the end.

Short circuit/power sink drains stuff very nicely as long as it cons low enough to you, if you start running on higher difficulty levels it's going to take more than one application of one or the other to fully drain some things; while you might be able to survive that, chance are a corr won't. Elec is also a little low on damage, primarily due to short circuit needing to be slotted for drain to the detriment of damage to be effective, and not having a heavy third blast.

Sonic/ is good for -res, but a lot of it is single target, howl is the only aoe with -res, the other two being a low damage sleep and shockwave, an aoe knockback that makes claws' shockwave look tame.

Sonic resonance is quite a fire and forget set, every 4 minutes you drop shields on the team and the other 3.4-3.9 minutes you've got two toggles running and no need to even pay attention to them for the most part. Which makes it one of the few sets you can put archery with and not have to worry about redraw. Aim->Rain of Arrows->Fistfull onto the ambulatory -res patch will be rather impressive, add in that you're not going to just be standing there watching and spawns will fall rather quickly.

The endurance cost of sonic in a duo or small team is relatively easy to manage since there's only one lot of shields to cast not 7. 4 slotting those impervium armours (res/end, res/end/rech, res/rech, res) in the two click shields can help with the +end bonuses; and that slotting also cuts the recharge time down to the cast time (a little over 1.3 seconds) instead of 2 seconds, so buffing up is noticably quicker. At 41 corruptors can always pick up power sink themselves if it turns out to be necessary.

Thanks Tonality, I knew I'd forgotten something about grounded. Not only does the kb protection only work on the ground, but the AI always seems to know when you aren't and occasionally the game can have some horrendous ideas of what is ground in caves. So, especially if you're going with superjump, you'll want a -kb IO in somewhere; best option would be to drop an extra slot in one of your toggle shields early on and put the steadfast -kb there the moment you can afford it. Then you've got combat jumping covering immob and the IO covering kb so can push grounded back into the 30s or even 40s. Easiest place to pull that slot from in the long run would be shockwave, the 6th slot bonus of a few % toxic resistance isn't going to make enough difference to matter.

Yep, in energize the 6th slot bonus of a couple % toxic/psi is probably not worth the slot in its own right, but there's no way to get capped heal and recharge slotting in there with only 5 slots of doctored wounds, so you might as well stay in set for slot 6 and have it anyway.

Health is a bit underslotted, but an extra 0.9 hp/s at 50 isnt really worth moving a slot from something like powersink for. If you have the spare inf, merits or get really lucky somewhere; moving a slot from stamina into health and slotting it with the numina unique and heal would boost the regen by 2.8hp/s while also increasing the recovery marginally.

My suggestion on lightning field would be to change the 4th scirocco from acc/rech to dam/rech and the multistrike from acc/dam/end to acc/end, keeps you with enough accuracy to not need follow up that much, increases the damage and reduces the end cost a little; all without losing that fifth 9% accuracy bonus.

While picking up boxing/kick as a dead power is going to hurt, having tough earlier makes quite a difference to how you cope with the common smash/lethal damage. If you've been around long enough to have a vet-respec or can get on a respec trial after level 24 it might feel better to take useful powers at each level, then retrospectively lose one to put boxing in after you're not going to miss it taking up space.

As you're levelling you might want to look at picking up a few accolades, a lot of people don't seem to bother with them yet a bonus 20% health can make a lot of difference. Then you've got Demonic which (imo) is the best panic button in the game. The best place to look for how to get those is (as usual) on the wiki.

[edit : link was a little off + realised just how little difference a 5% chance of +80% damage makes to a brute]

Addressing the stuff that doesn't need a build change first.

If you can find a few quid spare and haven't already done so, buy the latest booster pack; ninja running is good enough for 90% of vertical travel in the game.

For a duo, sonic would boost your resistances nicely, capping smashing/lethal and getting within a few percent of fire/cold, even negative energy would be well into the 70s. Then you'd have the extra mez protection, very useful on pure resistance sets against some groups; and the ally toggle based pbaoe -res aura.

Cold's shields would get you up to around 25% defence, having half the people hit you for half damage isn't as good as having all of them hit you for 1/10th though and the -res is patch based so needs casting rather than existing just because you jumped in.

Kinetics actually makes an almost decent survivability match. If you can convince your wife to reliably cast increase density on you every minute for the resistance buff to smashing... No? Ok.

Ones you didn't mention: Thermal, same resistance shield benefits as sonic but with heals rather than as frequent -res debuffs.

Dark Miasma, well you simply can't go wrong with a /dark; just don't get offended if at some points her corruptor starts tanking for your brute.



First thing inside the build; Hasten's downtime is 25.4 seconds, you forgot to take into account that during hasten's downtime, hasten isn't working. Slotting for recharge and being 16% short of ED capping the internal recharge enhancement is a bit weird; try and fit another common recharge IO here, it brings hasten's downtime down to 17 seconds.

The slotting in the armours I'm more than a little baffled by to be honest, you've chosen to slot the Impervium Armor Psi resists in your main toggles, to the detriment of their basic function, then not fully slotted the power that gives you psi resistance by default. A /Elec that doesn't have capped energy resistance is also somewhat unusual; what exactly were you aiming for with these? Might want to try swapping to 4 slotting Reactive Armors in charged conductive and tough, 3 aegis in static and the steadfast res/def in grounded. Better resistances to everything but psi and 5-7% defence across the board cutting down the damage that hits you by between 10 and 15%.

With that little downtime on energize and powersink being on a short recharge I'm doubting you really need the end/rech in stamina and the Perf. Shifter proc.

For that matter it doesn't look like you need those end reds in spin/evis, you can keep going Follow Up->Spin->Evis->Repeat indefinately without them, even without touching energize.

On the flip side strike and slash don't seem to need that much recharge even with hasten down; swapping the dam/end/rechs for dam/ends gives a very slight boost in damage output and a little reduction in end use when working against single hard targets for a long time.

Focus isn't ED capped on damage and you don't need the end/rech from the last slot, the extra acc is only useful if trying to hit +4s without using follow up. If you want to use focus against +4s before hitting melee then a cheap thunderstrike acc/dam will do fine, if not then the Perfect Zinger Psi Dam proc will average out at a little more damage, and when it goes off in normal play it can make the difference between a minion taking 2 hits or 3.

If you want sustained single target DPS you'll want to get the Achilles' Heel -Res proc into slash, running the FU->Focus->Slash->Strike chain it's got a 16.67% chance of being active on any attack (doesn't stack, so can only trigger if the last one didn't) [Edit: I think it's actually higher than this, I forgot to take into account that if it isn't checking then the -res is still in effect. Wish I hadn't lost my old spreadsheet, had this proc all worked out once.]

Oh, that Mako quad in Kick is just absurd; sorry.


Best single target I can see on the original build is:
Follow Up->Focus->Slash->Strike->Focus->Follow Up->Strike->Focus->Slash->Repeat for 170.64 DPS;

or if you want to keep things simple,
Follow Up->Focus->Slash->Strike->Repeat for 170.08 DPS. (Both assuming fury is maintained at 80%)

With those four changes to the single target attack slotting mentioned above the simple chain is up to 182.18 DPS.

Regardless, you need Mu lightning about as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Especially since it's going to be causing redraw whenever you use it. So possibly as much as a fish needs an electric bicycle.


AoE is a little difficult to work out, since your best DPA AoE has a slight habit of throwing everything to the other side of the room and whether you like to spend a moment lining evis up or not is a matter of personal preference rather than maths.

If you like to shuffle a bit to get the most from your cones you can run Follow up->Spin->Eviscerate->Repeat with little enough wasted time.

If you can't stand any gap between powers then a decent AoE "chain" might be Follow Up->Spin->Eviscerate->Ball Lightning->Follow Up->Spin->Eviscerate->(Jump back)->Shockwave, on the basis that anything left standing after that lot is probably hard enough that you want it to stop hitting you.

There is the option of swapping out Mu Lightning for Elec. Fences allowing you to root stuff before using shockwave, but that pretty much completely eliminates your active mitigation. The alternative is to keep it and use it and focus for finishing off scattered stuff without running after them.

And a datachunk with all those modifications.

Having got one of each epic AT into the 40s I've come to the conclusion that on both heroes and villains there feels like one well done, fully fledged AT and one that they didn't quite have time to make work properly, and for opposite reasons.

For me Crabs are the worst VEAT, simply because you have two single target attacks, you inevitably get stuck chaining them to kill a boss... and they're the exact same animation; then you get 3 AoEs... with only 2 animations. Banes aren't quite as bad, but the mace attacks feel clunky, always feel like you needed one more coffee before going out to fight stuff that morning; and the mace attack in the patron pool again matches the animation of something you've already got.

Widows on the other hand I like, except that slash doesn't do defence debuff, the icon is just plain wrong and that bugs me no end.

For HEATS, well Peacebringers, they look lovely, but the powers don't seem as well thought out as Warshades, it's more a pick n' mix of stuff the other ATs weren't that bothered about giving up than a unique flavour. Unless the 'flavour' was knockback, in which case could we have kb on the heal please? Being able to move teammates and pets out of doorways would make it so much more useful. Really though Solar Flare is my pet annoyance - stamp my foot as a 6' tall girl and everything goes flying into the corners of the room; do the same move as a 12' tall crustacean behemoth and they just fall over... eh' wha'?

So, VEATs look like the animation shop was overworked (possibly due to the branching producing 4 ATs worth of work by the end), HEATs feel like it was the power design side (equally possibly due to getting forms to work)... Anyone who was around for both launches feel like combing their memories to see whether that tallies with what else was in progress at the time?

AT mez modifiers change the duration of the stun/hold/fear/etc, not the magnitude.

Brute CoF is mag 3, stalker/scrapper/tank is mag 2. None of the other mags on brute powers are higher as far as I am aware. It's either a long standing bug, or a design decision that at least seems to be at odds with the reasoning behind brutes not getting ice armour.

In the instance of a pile of freaks and with doms having a patron shield that goes a long way toward decent s/l/e defence, why exactly are we building for ranged here? Did I miss something obvious?

Just to point out the obvious, elec fences stops all the knockdown in shield charge/footstomp, which will really suck if you forget and try and use the breathing room to cope with any defence debuffs that hit; and with active defence only stacking 2/3rds of the time at best, and skipping grant cover; you are really going to feel them.

Should be nice if you can manage the end bar; once you get footstomp it will of course be better since, well, footstomp makes everything better.

Brute specials: cloak of fear terrorises lts, don't ask why and hopefully no-one will change it.

Add 'Damage Bonus' to your HUD asap if you don't already have it, that number dropping to -3000% or so when rage crashes is rather effective at reminding you why you're suddenly hitting like some passing stalker tied pillows to your fists.

Also if you can keep half an eye outside the melee blinkers take note of when rage is going to crash, especially on an ss/da; the -end is really going to hurt if you've used dark regen recently.

If you haven't played brutes in a long time, check out the new i16 brawl, a 0 end cost attack does nice things for sustainable fury. Between 160% from fury and 80% constant from rage (once you've got 3 rech SOs in it (and if you get a bit of +recharge bonus from IOs and start stacking rage that damage bonus readout from earlier will have some really rather nice peaks above 320%. (Woo, nested parentheses!))) slotting for damage is rather more optional than almost anything else in the game, feel free to use extra slots for end-red if you need it.

Unless the size changes are kept I'd have to go with 'hell no'.

Granite is bigger than huge; half the time when I'm running granite it's not for the defensive numbers, it's so the team has a very large, very obvious focal point. It's a lot easier to get people to follow you when you're the largest thing on the map. While a 4' tall tank has some humour value it's a lot harder to find in the middle of a fight.

Yep. Good thing too, my ignore list was beginning to feel unloved.

Saturday afternoon/evening would be good; I got unexpectedly called away at 1:05 today.

While toward the end of that I was swearing if I ever saw hami again... I'm not going to be beaten by an amoeba.

Green team : Edana (Fire/Kin Controller)

I'll even lead it if so wanted.

[ QUOTE ]

The i13 toggle changes only apply to players not computer controlled enemy's

Also turns out you need mag 100 to get past the mito's regen which our total lacking of controller green team couldn't hope to achieve. Next time ill have to be stricter and say controllers only and try and fit two trollers who have mez protection to share with the group.

[/ QUOTE ]

Nice to know the changes weren't the problem at least.

Theoretically we could have just about got the 100 mag needed with just 5 but due to the predominance of /kins our main mez protection came from increase density - so no fear protection and we spent too long trembling; maybe we'll leave that job to an empath or thermal next time.

Firstly I'd like to apologise for being one of the people missing from the EoE collection on Friday, for some unknown reason I'd got that in my diary as 1pm on Sunday with the raid itself starting at 7... Oops.

[ QUOTE ]

Green team

Your job is just like the blue team. Go Hunt kill mito's


[/ QUOTE ]

I'd would however like to note that this seemed to be rather wishful thinking. We ended up with only 5 controllers, so between deaths before reaching the target, terrorizes from the blues and being occasionally blasted across the jelly by annoyed yellows we didn't have enough mag stacking to hold a green consistently and stop it's regen. It was also raised in team chat that with the I13 toggle changes, would being held actually help? If so is end drain the only option in which case green team needs to be sappers and kins not controllers?

Just something to think about before the next attempt.

I'm in; Ennexa's sitting in PD with 'Stop Project: Wildflower' showing.

Need to check this forum more often obviously... If there's still space on the controller team I've got a my namesake, a 50 fire/kin. Or Ennexa (dark/sr scrapper) if space should happen to open up on a yellow team. If not, I wish you all good luck.

I don't know where the time went; got my SS/Fire Brute from 18 to 32, Son/Rad Corruptor from 37 to 43, and during the first day acquired an all consuming fear of nemesis vengance that I will probably never get over.

I think we won't be getting extra arms, that would give us a single origin that could use dual-blades/shields... or pose the question of why we have redraw when we could simply have used the *other* hand while holding our sword in the first 2...

BABs already said that rather than spend time animating a third arm he'd prefer to do something less 'bat **** crazy' :P

I'll let you know what I think if the game's still going by January 2014... By which time you 'old guys' will have access to so many powers at level 6 your brains will explode on seeing the selection screen.

On a scrapper Midnight Grasp is fairly good too, even if just to keep the victim from running off so much. Not sure what effect the activation time has on fury though.