Kriticism

I was addressing the build as a whole. It's the combination of Brute+WP+DB that makes it so frustrating when mobs get tossed away from you.

This is true, but DB has fairly long animations on many of it's attacks, so getting attacked is the primary source of the Fury most of the time.

Yeah, but every little bit helps. I've generally found that 80% is a good spot to shoot for, personally.

Heh...I know what you mean. However it is, you must admit, a fairly fiddly primary, combining heavy positioning, timing (such as avoiding overlapping the 2xKD in Sweep), and precision to get the most out of it.

That is, unless you do what I usually do when surrounded, which is target a pack of enemies behind me with the cone-finisher, then spin back and continue pounding on the main target. That way, you've got numbers rising on both sides of you.


As I said, I'm a knockback user myself with my Defender. I just recognize that my Brute is, in pretty much every way, antithetical to knockback. The fact that knockdown is among his own techniques means that he's cutting into the knockback user's contribution too, since they don't stack that well.

It's an edge case, as I said. While Knockback isn't the boogyman that some people make it out to be, there are some builds that it IS fairly hard on.

Then again, it's hardly the only conflict we see among builds, just one of the more common. Just ask the Ice blaster who's knockdown field isn't working because the Earth controller just Stone-Caged everything.

And in the meantime, the Fury bar is dropping, and my combo just broke, which means that the big DPS from Attack Vitals won't happen, or the extra damage and knockdown from Sweep won't occur.

You can play this build with Knockback users on the team, but it'll be frustrating as heck, and you'll be functioning at maybe 60-70% normal effectiveness unless the KB user is VERY careful.

This is an extreme case, though. Most melee builds aren't as utterly dependent on being in the midst of tons of foes as this one is.

EDIT: Just to clarify, I often DO wind-up being in KB using teams with this character (bots are really popular among masterminds, for one). Generally, this results in me being forced to play extremely aggressively. The moment enemies start being knocked away, I superjump into the next pack of mobs, while the KB users finish off the last batch. They benefit from the mitigation of their knockback, and I'm happily surrounded. They catch up, and I move on. We go through missions like a buzzsaw. However, staying together just results in grief.