Emberly

Shoot for at least 25%. Get it from Reactive Armor sets, Kinetic Combat sets, and Oblit sets. Flavour with Steadfast +3% def unique, baste with Weave and voila!

edit: 30% is noticeably better than 25%

This is exactly accurate.

I'm playing around with a build planner and it looks like I can fit it all in after all. I am committing the sin of not taking the fighting pool(!) because I intend to fit a fully-strapped RotP in my "attack chain." I hadn't considered dropping Focused Burst, but on consideration I sure could. I hate the animation length and I have vet staffs to deal with runners. Maybe that's the way to go, we'll have to see.

Adding S/L defense to any of the resist sets is going to make a ton of difference for your survivability. It's like the creamy defense frosting on the delicious resistance cake, with a decent heal on top. From my own experience, no attainable amount of +rech in electric armor is going to trump ~30% S/L defense, and I've never tried to build a fire armor brute for recharge.

I'd recommend claws/electrical or claws/fire. Electrical armor will be tougher, fire armor will do an absolute ton more damage. Electrical also has the advantage of being capped to a much more common damage type, in my experience. From 35 on, my claws/electrical armor brute leveled solo at +2/x8 in the RWZ, and that was with no IOs at all. Fire armor is easily capped to fire damage, but so what It's just not that common. On the other hand, the new Fiery Embrace is a monstrous damage buff to all your attacks, and Burn is freaking amazing now. Slot your damage aura with 3x dam/end IOs and a single acc/dam/end IO; it's one of, if not your most efficient attacks, even with only one mob in range.

My own experience with claws, over a lot of brutes since it was released, is that it's a murder machine. I have a really hard time rolling or playing brutes that aren't claws, now. Take or leave FU, it's pretty optional on brutes with their abysmal base damage so if you don't like it don't feel bad about skipping it. Two of my claws brutes have it, two don't, and two are still on the fence. Spin is awesome, eviscerate is awesome, shockwave is. . . an acquired taste but definitely helps keep me alive in tight spots.

Taunt is nice for a set mule but not required, Perfect Zinger is great in there. Some folks find that it helps them gain fury in teams, I find that if my fury is slow gaining I should go find another fight in the mission and leave the current one to the rest of the team

My brutes are in love with the Soul Mastery pool because Gloom rocks so very hard, and Darkest Night is always nice. On an electrical armor brute with its bottomless end pool, DN is a godsend. However the APP with Superior Conditioning appeals to some secondaries; my invulnerable brutes are eyeing it up with lust.

I must approve, because I came here to post Atomic Robo.

That reasonable middle ground is pretty much at 25% defense, when you are hit half as often as when you are at zero defense. That said you are still gonna be super squishy at 25% defense. As someone upthread said, carry purples, they will benefit you a lot more than greens because they are building on your already substantial level of defense.

If you haven't already, take a read of Dechs Kaison's excellent writeup on defense. TL;DR: every point of defense is more valuable than the point before it; the first 25% cuts your incoming damage in half from zero defense, and the last 5% cuts your incoming damage in half from 40% defense, so at 20ish% defense, you are not quite mitigating half of the incoming fire.

It gets a lot better. Stick with it, once you get up there and get some good slotting in your defenses, you will feel like a bullet-dodging maniac. Hit the softcap (45%) and you will be a tiny god.

Haha well three rolls tonight and not one good recipe in the bunch Regressing towards the mean, I guess! Sure was nice to slot out my SR brute and still stash four in the base though!

edit: it's amazing how little it irritates me to have fifteen random recipes all be crap when it's only three rolls, when back in the old merit days if I rolled five in a row that were crap I got ticked enough to stop rolling for the night

Please tell me how to bypass getting rooted on my DM brute. Shadow Maul wants to know!

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Oh yeah, uh, grumble, grumble, server is borked <--avoids total derail