JuliusSeizure

Yeah-- it's only worth it if you are purpling your character anyway. The Fire/Cold resistance is basically a freebie before 10% recharge and 15% Accuracy. Ironically, especially in relation to the post title, a high end recharge build with five stacks of 10% values will also have some of the best resistances. It's not a give-and-take only because resistance, outside of Psionic and Toxic, is practically non existent in the IO system.

As long as you take the alpha strike and employ Taunt, you will have no problem building Fury. It can also maintain high Fury against AVs, but you will not have an attack chain as optimized as other builds. The recharge debuff has been lessened with the advent of IOs while the -damage is far less detrimental to Brutes than it is to Tanks. That's because a Tank is subtracting 30% damage from 95%, while a Brute is often subtracting 30% from up to 275%. It's proportionally a lesser hit for Brutes than Tanks.

That's City of Soft Cap +95% DDR.

I'm glad you raised this because I'm not entirely familiar with how threat works and the language you guys employ to describe it, but here's what I meant:

I call it a 400% Taunt if only because it's labeled such in real numbers. What I'm specifically talking about is the mag 4 taunt with 13.5 seconds of Duration. Brutes have this attribute on almost every skill that affects an enemy, meaning that PBAoEs, damage auras, Power Sink, and taunt auras are producing lots of agro for the Brute-- especially when they are doing Scrapper levels of damage while having similar taunt mods as a Tank.

Gauntlet makes a big difference here, and clearly puts Tanks in the lead for drawing agro and generating threat. And I definitely agree that Tanks have a huge advantage in the 5 taget -range of their Taunt skill; it is insanely effective at clumping.

I don't know exactly how threat works, but my experience is that having the exact same mag 4 taunt with 13.5 seconds of duration WHILE doing Scrapper levels of damage produces one of the stickiest ATs in the game, one that can sometimes (rarely) peel agro off a Tank when running at full Fury with outside +damage.

The gist of my post is that Brutes are better at generating threat and holding agro than MMs and Scrappers, and I suppose this is why they granted them Tank level resistance caps. In a team setting, the developers may have thought that the Brute would get stomped with the amount of threat they can produce and granted them Tank level caps because of this.

Given that almost every damage skill for a Brute has a 400% taunt attribute, that secondaries are granted 400% taunt in Power Sink and Energy Drain, and that SR was ported to Brutes with an agro aura, it's pretty clear that they were intended to be more than anti-Scrappers. The amount of agro that a Brute draws, even if it was designed to feed Fury, is likely the reason Brutes are granted Tank caps. A Scrapper is just not as sticky as a Brute. In fact, I'd argue that the Brute might be a little too sticky relative to a Tank, and this is a bigger overlap than their damage encroaching on Scrappers.

Even more to the point, a Fulcrum Shifted Tank at the damage cap isn't that far ahead of a Brute at 90% Fury with 95% Damage socketed in its attacks.

Throw a similar fulcrum shift on the Brute while adding Rage, Soul Drain, or Build Up, and its a smashing good time.

The old ET would have a DPA of 500 for stalkers, or 700 with BU...

The old ET would have a DPA of 380 for Brutes, 722 with 90% Fury, and 874 with 90% Fury plus BU...

If that's not clearly overpowered, then nothing is. It had a DPA 90% higher than the current melee champ, Seismic Smash. Go ahead and place the old ET on a bell curve and notice that the range of the worst attack to the second best attack (Seismic Smash) is LESS than the difference between Seismic Smash and ET.

Statistically, it was clearly overpowered and there's just no debating that. Mechanically, it was clearly overpowered, as so many people came to define an entire set by a single skill.

But there's really no point in rehashing all of this this. We've calcified all our positions on the ET debate long ago. It's like beating the fossil of a dead horse, there's no gooey splat anymore.

Scrapper Lock is stage one of Fury-- attack relentlessly from the top of the pyramid to the bottom of enemy rankings.

Fury stage two also involves agro management akin to a Tank.

You want War Mace, specifically, you want Crowd Control against a tightly packed spawn.

Here's the deal. Do you like to play your Scrappers in "scrapper lock," attacking the hardest opponents relentlessly? Well, you get big-time rewarded for this type of play style on a Brute. If you like to play your Scrappers at a slower pace, and be more methodical (*cough*lackadaisical*cough*) in your play style, then you might get frustrated as your fury bar will never be maxed.

You get rewarded for grabbing agro like a Tank. You get rewarded for attacking like a Scrapper locked maniac. And as you get rewarded for these actions you become a dervish that's basically 90% Tank and 110% Scrapper.

Players that prefer the way CoV plays over CoH largely like the speed of teams and lack of ponderous gathering before spawns, followed by having a tank grab agro, rinse-repeat. Brutes are arguably the biggest force in speeding up game play, but Dominators also aid in this. My favorite ATs in the game are Dominators and Brutes, as both provide significant rewards for being aggressive.

You will never go back to the Blue now...

The clobber treatment halved the duration of the stun effect, going from 11.92 to 5.96 seconds. There's some give and take that took place so his concerns are not unfounded.

While granting a 2.92 damage scale to Stun would be interesting, having a set with three attacks that approach or exceed 3 DS would likely never happen (TF=3.56, ET=4.56, Stun=2.96). Clobber in the context of War Mace appears to be a QOL improvement for a set that basically had no AOE until tiers 7, 8, and 9, and had a horrendous sustained attack chain and single target damage for tiers 1-6. Energy Melee gets AoE early, even if you don't like WH, and has 4 attacks available as early as tier 5, a formula that every other set has after the Clobber change except for Stone Melee, which gets Fault.

The highest value that I could see the developers adding to this skill would be 1.96 DS, which would make it roughly equal to Disembowel and mirror the changes to Siphon Life, which in the context of Dark Melee was granted to a set that already had solid single-target damage but needed another viable attack at the tier 5 slot for low level QOL. At 1.96 DS, 10 seconds of recharge, and 5.96 seconds of stun duration we would get the best of both worlds. The stun duration relative to recharge would stay the same, and it's just more likely that the skill would receive this type of change over the massive 2.92 DS buff that was granted to Clobber.

This exactly sums up my thoughts on ET. The skill is wicked powerful, has top tier DPA, and most complaints about it animating too slowly can be alleviated by upping team difficulty or picking targets more intelligently. If a boss is dropping in 3 seconds, there are plenty of wasted attacks being levied across the team spectrum, and you are certainly not alone.

Now, I'm not completely discounting some people's balance complaints for the set, which I used to do. I definitely feel that a tweak upwards in the DPA of Total Focus would go a LONG way in addressing the issue of balance, and even the "cumbersome" feel of the set.

The set needs to be defined by the big, hard hitting attacks, to have an effective identity. It's not going to be about speed, which sets like Claws, Dual Blades, Dark Melee, etc already employ. If the DPA of Total Focus could be increased to about 54 for Brutes, and 57 for Tanks, the set would hover near the top in single target damage while maintaining the current feel of the set-- which is bombs attached to fists, dropping slowly but surely. A 2.7 second animation for Total Focus would achieve this, while knocking half a second off the current animation would certainly make the skill feel faster.

There is only one thing that I want that animation to do-- it needs to look like you are jumping into the air and slamming your fists down into the ground. It's all floaty right now, you leap s..l...o..w..l...y into the air, hover for a second, then appear to float down to the ground. I want to see a toon leap into the air quickly, hold the peak for a split second, then come slamming down to the ground.

This attack animation should look brutal. It simply does not right now.

A side effect of speeding up this animation would be increasing its DPA to a bit less than that of KO Blow.