Muon_Neutrino

Yeah, I wanted to make a demon/pain MM where everything was a bright, obnoxiously cute pink, but I discovered to my dismay that pain just looks like a muddy reddish-grey if you try that. I would love a 'bright' power option for that set.

When this sort of thing happens, it's often people going after the various 'craft X common IOs in this category at this level range' badges, whether for the field crafter accolade, memorizing them for easier crafting, trying to score extra recipe slots as a badge perk, or simply for the badge. If you're crafting so many IOs and your goal isn't profit, it makes sense to dump them for cheap just so that they sell and get out of your market slots quickly.

So in other words it does happen fairly often. Now I think you got a bit unlucky by having it happen to both items you tried to use so close together, but it does happen. That said, the dumpers will run out of stock and the price will almost certainly recover sooner or later. Just leave them up and they'll sell at some point - that's why I like commons, even if it's not the most lucrative, it's a very steady and easy way to make money.

This is an interesting angle to take on this. I'm personally one of those who would like an alternate set of animations, but I will admit I had not thought about making them all distinct as a potential issue.

That said, I don't think this is necessarily an insurmountable roadblock. Let's look at each power's cast time and animation individually and see what I can come up with for possible alternate animations.

Pistols: animation time 1s. The character raises one arm and snaps off a quick shot with one pistol. No gun-fu here, no alternate animation needed.

Dual Wield: animation time 1.67s. A 360 degree right handed spin into a crouch, firing both pistols held sideways, then spinning them as he stands back up. The alternate animation I would use would be for the character to raise one gun to eye level and fire a shot, then raise the other and fire. Optionally, if that doesn't take up enough time, have him fire off another shot from each pistol after they're both raised.

Empty clips: animation time 2.5s. The character fires off quick volleys of three or four shots from each gun with the pistols held over his head, crossed in front of him, and normally. An easy pick for an alternate animation is to keep the volleys of shots, but just hold the guns normally and slightly change aim between each volley.

Bullet rain: animation time 2.4s. The character fires off three shots from each gun while swinging his arms in broad arcs. This one I'm not sure how you'd make an alternate animation for. No matter what animation plays on the character, the curving bullet trail effects will be the same (I think), and I'm having a hard time coming up with a non gun-fu justification for that.

Suppressive fire: animation time 1.67s. The character turns his right side towards his target, crouches slightly, and snaps off a quick shot with the right pistol while holding it sideways, spinning his guns as he returns to the ready position. Kill the spinning and this animation is fine as-is.

Executioner's shot: 2.57s. Turning side-on to the target, the character raises his right arm above level, spins the pistol, brings it down, and fires off a single aimed shot. Again, kill the spin and this animation works for a non gun-fu character, in the same duration.

Piercing rounds: animation time 2.5s.While spinning to his left, the character throws both guns up into the air for no apparent reason. After completing his spin, he catches the guns and 'punches' the right gun at the target while firing it. For an alternate animation for this I would have the character kneel, bring both pistols up to eye level and aim carefully, then fire off a pair of shots from each gun in a measured 1-2-1-2 and stand back up. Keep the motions deliberate and calm and it can easily fill the allotted time.

Hail of Bullets: animation time ~3.5-4s (doesn't list it in-game for some reason). The character performs three complete 360 spins while firing his guns continuously in a variety of different directions. The thing about this animation is that it's intentionally flashy in the *details*. The spins contain quick crouches, turns, and jumps, the guns are held at strange angles while being fired and are re-aimed quickly. It would actually be relatively straightforward to create an alternate animation that does more or less the same thing (spinning in place while firing in all directions) but lacks all of the overly-fancy elements that put it over the top. Simply make the spins more deliberate with no hopping or jerky crouches, and have him hold his guns in normal outstretched arm positions while firing them. He can still fire in two directions at once and reorient his guns quickly, but make it feel controlled and measured instead of acrobatic and 'faster than the eye can follow'.

Honestly, I think it can be done. I just came up with distinct alternates for all but one attack in an hour or so of thinking. They might not be polished ideas, and of course I'm no animator to implement them, but it ought to be possible.

--Eviscerate/ripper - the backflip just looks bizzare.
--Barbed swipe - because when I think about attacking someone, I think of flailing like a spastic monkey.
--Impale just looks silly. Anything that doesn't look quite so cartoony would be good.
--Crippling axe kick - neither animation for it really looks good. The kick looks awkward and jerky, and the punch lacks oomph. An alternate animation with a more flowing and graceful kick would be nice.
--General melee sets - for unarmed sets or two weapon sets, it'd be nice if there was more options and/or alternating animations to use both hands. With claws in particular it is very easy to end up using only your right claw the vast majority of the time.
--Ice and fire melee/assault/manipulation - alternate sword/non sword animations for all melee attacks so that you can have an elemental sword build (or avoid them altogether if you don't like them).

--Dual pistols' Dual Wield - the twirl looks cool the first few times, but on the tier 2 it just plays over and over and gets repetitive.
--Dual pistols in general - a less 'gun fu' alternate animation set might be nice for the more straight up gunfighter types.
--All snipes with the 'hold arm... hold... recoil straight up!' animation where the effects don't mesh properly.
--Anything with the 'total focus' animation - any chance of getting to use the new ET animation (or some sort of ground punch/foot stomp animation for PBAoEs that use this) in place of it? I'm not a fan of the long pause in midair.
--The 'beach ball' animation (repulsion bomb/neutron bomb) is a mite odd looking. Something more 'blasty' would be a nice alternate.

--Medicine pool tricorder - please allow for the object you're holding to be customized to fit better with different origins. A crystal, a wand, etc.
--Jump kick really looks silly. Since the animation is now interruptable after 1.5s, there shouldn't be any problem with crafting a more normal looking, shorter kick animation.

Agggggh....

Jaxom, if you don't mind me asking a brief off-topic question, what program did you use to record your screen, and is it free? I tried downloading a couple of free screencap programs but I couldn't get anything to record at better than ~5 FPS, and my computer should be more than beefy enough to do better than that.

Problem is, that's not an axe kick. It does look a lot better than what we've got now, but I don't think they'd use it, especialy since it looks like it ought to do two separate ticks of damage instead of one.

Leo, all I'm saying is that, regardless of the realism of the move, to me it looks very jerky and awkward. Given the meaning of the phrase 'axe kick', it should be possible to make a less strange looking alternate animation that still fits the power's name.

I will second the statement that choice of secondary doesn't matter as much as what you do with your primary.

First, as long as you take and slot your attacks, any shield/ tank will do decent damage. SC shores up the AoE of any set lacking in such, and AAO will beef up damage of both the ST and AoE variety. So, while the damage will of course vary based on your choice of secondary, you'll still do *enough* damage regardless.

Second, the most important thing, if you want to tank TFs and whatnot, will be to beef up your defenses. You will want to be softcapped, you will want your entire primary, and you will want tough (which also gets you access to weave to help with the softcapping).

Completely aside from its mitigation benefits, you will want to be softcapped because shields doesn't have enough DDR to stave off cascading defense failure otherwise. While shields is somewhat of a hybrid set, defense is most definitely your primary type of mitigation - you don't have nearly as much resistance to back it up as something like invul does. As such, you *have* to make sure it stays strong. You get about 65% DDR, and I find that about 50%ish defense is enough of a cushion against debuffs to prevent cascading failure.

For your primary, obviously you'll want all the defense/res/HP stuff, your aura and mez prot, and SC. Even though the defense doesn't affect you, you'll also want grant cover for the defense debuff resistance (and the slow resistance is a nice bonus, too).

You'll want one with the shield for the same reason you want tough: sometimes, pure defense isn't enough. If you're in the middle of a big crowd of dangerous foes, even the 1 out of 20 attacks that get through can add up quick (even ignoring the possibility of cascading defense failure). Since the odds are very good that such attacks will consist at least partly of S/L damage, doubling your resistance to such damage with tough makes a quite noticeable difference. And for those especially dangerous situations, the extra HP and resistance from even a minimally slotted one with the shield can really help. Those two powers can turn you from a primarily defense based tank into a true layered mitigation powerhouse, which really comes in handy sometimes.

After all that, your secondary really doesn't matter nearly as much. You can still of course get mitigation from it, but exactly what sort and how much can vary without crippling you. Dark will be useful for the self heal and endurance recovery. Mace and axe provide lots of AoE knockdowns. Electric and fire provide lots of AoE 'make them dead before they can make me dead'. Ice melee has all of its usual KD and slows. Stone has KD and stun. SS and DB have some KD. All of them will work.

What I would recommend is try to figure out which powers you can live without from each secondary. Shields/ will be a *very* power hungry build, so sets where you don't need as many powers will be very nice.

Oh, I'm sure sleet won't stay a clone of the existing version for long, but even if they double the recharge and halve the debuff it'll still kick ***. I'm looking forward to being able to ice slick-sleet-ice storm-frost breath things, with an ice sword circle chaser if needed.

Thinking a bit more about the fire APP, I realized I'd forgotten about fiery embrace. It's slightly scary that the one APP for which there exists a buff specifically suited to its damage type gets the most AoE damage in all the APPs. I'm not sure exactly what the result of an (oh, say) earth/fire/fire doing something like stalagmites-stone cages-fiery embrace-rain of fire-fireball-fire breath/combustion, but I'm thinking it'd be something like this.

Ice storm doesn't actually have twice normal accuracy. The 2.0 acc reported in the detailed info screen (or the 150% mids says) is the accuracy on the power that *summons the pseudopet* that does the actual damage. Almost all powers which summon pseudopets have this 2.0 base acc, which I believe simply denotes that the power will never fail to create the pet (you can't 'miss' the summon). However, the damage is actually dealt by the pseudopet's powers, which do *not* have that 2.0 accuracy. In the case of ice storm, blizzard, and rain of arrows, the peuodopet's damage power has standard accuracy, which means that it *does* need accuracy slotting.

As for set bonuses, as far as I know they are handled as very short duration self buffs, which means that, even if they do transfer to the pet, they'll expire almost instantly, most likely before they can have any effect. I certainly wouldn't rely on accuracy bonuses to ensure hits with rain powers, at the very least.

No Stone mastery? *Is a sad panda*

That said, the rest of these look friggin' awesome. I could definitely see the fire APP being *extremely* popular for AoE output, and hey, RotP if you draw too much aggro with all of those aoes! Energy also has a fair chunk of AoE, and ET? Wow. And then ice mastery gets sleet and ice storm! I know what I'm using my ice/ice's freespec on. Psionic is still saddled with lolWoC, but even that might be vaguely useful if it's affected by domination.

I'm a controller at heart. Not necessarily the AT specifically, but in general. I like to control the battle, define when and where and how the fight will take place, and in general be the fulcrum around which the playing field is tilted such that the enemies have lost before the first point of damage is dealt.

As such, I play a lot of controllers, tanks, defenders, and dominators, and also a few corruptors. I've tried, but I can't really get into MMs as I find controlling the pets too fiddly for my tastes.

I also have a few scrappers, for when I don't feel like having to think.

Well, I've got a claws/dark scrapper that's waiting for GR since she's planned as a villain from the start. I always have a bit of a problem justifying lethal weapon wielding heroes to myself - I can usually figure something out, but it often feels a bit strained. I could have just made her a brute, but I really don't care for that AT's mechanics, so a villain scrapper it is.

If illusion had been proliferated to doms already, I would be waiting on making an ill/nrg dom redside and then taking him blue. Instead, I'm waiting on the devs to proliferate illusion to do the same.

It looks pretty good overall to me. I'm not really into the higher end builds, so I can't really comment too much on the slotting, but reaching the softcaps is definitely the goal I would pick. The thing I would change, though, is to drop wolf spider armor. Considering that you're softcapped to everything, the extra mez protection shouldn't come into play, and for the same reason mag 4 KB protect should still be enough (and you can put a karma -KB into CT: defensive if you like - not like you need that bit of ranged def anyway).

Instead, I would take Call Reinforcements, because summoning robots is awesome and they are actually pretty helpful. The only problem is that they really deserve 6 slots and I don't know where you'd get them. You can get one by swapping from 6 detonation in arctic breath to 5 posi - you lose a bit of range (77 feet to 69 feet), but you wouldn't have been able to *use* that extra bit of range because you'll need to get within 65 feet to use heavy burst anyway. You're still at the AoE softcap, and you pick up a bit more accuracy and recharge to boot. You can get another by stripping the second endred out of assault - it'll be a hit, but you can probably get away with it.

That just gets it up to 3, unfortunately. That's enough for a couple of level 50 acc/dam and a dam to make them effective when you use them, but you can't get any recharge into them unless you can find more slots somewhere. That said, I'd still take them for boss work. ST damage is not exactly a huntsman's forte, so having some backup for those situations could definitely be useful.

Welcome back to the game! On to the questions:

1: No, and in my opinion no. Hasten has a 450 second duration, so to get it to recharge in 120 seconds requires 275% recharge. Enhancements and hasten itself can supply 165% of that, but you still have to scrape together 110% more from set bonuses. It's extremely expensive to do so, and willpower doesn't even have any powers which would benefit from it. I'm sure it'd do wonders for your attack chain and lightning rod, but it'd be a huge effort.

2: Quick recovery is nice. It's actually a bit stronger than stamina, even (30% instead of 25%), and if you weren't taking tough and weave I wouldn't bother with stamina. However, those two extra toggles are quite expensive, and stamina will definitely help with that.

3: It varies. I personally never use SO style slotting, so I'm not up on what's currently considered the best.

4: Confront is indeed totally skippable. Build up couples so well with lightning rod that I'd consider it practically mandatory. Jacob's ladder and chain induction are both good attacks, but you can probably get away with not taking them. I'd still try to fit in one or the other, though, just to fill in your attack chain some. Charged brawl, havok punch, and thunderstrike are good, but I'd personally want more attacks than that.

5: Vertical movement is nothing nowadays. There are so many different varieties of temporary jetpack flys that I have a hard time even remembering them. I wouldn't personally use them as a main travel since they will run out eventually and they're slower than even regular fly, let alone SS/SJ, but they will more than suffice to get you over obstacles with SS.

As for other issues, getting to 22 and then slotting generic 25 IOs is a perfectly viable plan. Level 25 generics are roughly equivalent to SOs, so it'll work at least as well as that always did, with the bonus of not having to replace them or have them turn red in the middle of a mission.

To change the level of an IO in mids, right click on it, type in the new level, and then click on it again to set it. To get your veteran reward powers you have to go into your badge screen, select the veteran rewards tab, find the power you want, and hit 'claim'.

Looking at your build, it's pretty good overall, although there are a few things I would change.

First, I really don't much care for lightning clap. PBAoE scatter with a side order of low accuracy isn't very useful in my book, *especially* with a secondary that gains survivability from having targets in melee range. With willpower, I honestly think you'd *lose* survivability by using it since your regen would go through the floor. I'd skip it and take buildup instead.

Second, I would consider skipping charged brawl and replacing it with boxing, since you have to take it anyway. The two powers are very similar in stats, boxing having just a bit less damage and recharge and a bit longer of an animation. This would involve taking havoc punch at 1 instead of charged brawl, and moving boxing to 6. This gives you room to take either jacobs ladder or chain induction, whichever you prefer.

To slot whichever of those two you take, I'd steal the defense slots from combat jumping and the tohit debuff slots from rise to the challenge. Both effects are quite small and enhancing them doesn't really bring meaningful returns - the defense goes from 1.88% to 2.89% and the tohit debuff goes from 3.75% to 5.19%. While those boosts might be worthwhile if you were going for the defense softcap, in this case I don't think it's a worthwhile use of 5 slots.

Finally, I'm not really a big fan of focused accuracy. I mean, you have to take it anyway but I don't think I'd slot it heavily or use it, and if you *do* want to use it I'd definitely slot more than one endred. Notice on the totals tab that even with QR, stamina *and* physical perfection you still have a net endurance recovery of only 1.94/s with all those toggles running (after adjusting to use level 25 IOs instead of level 50s, and assuming you're not using super speed in combat). Combined with no endreds in your attacks, that spells trouble to me.

To get your endurance more under control, I would drop the extra tohit buff slots in focused acc (since it only has a 5% tohit buff nowadays, along with a 20% unenhanceable acc buff) and not use it apart from when you get your tohit debuffed. As well, I would swap tough, weave, and combat jumping around so that tough comes at 30, weave at 38, and CJ at 49 - this lets you actually get some slots in weave so you can add an endred. Just those two changes gets your net recovery up to 2.61/s, which sounds much more comfortable to me. If you're really worried about accuracy, use merits to buy a kismet 6% tohit IO and stick it in indomitable will.

With ice/? There isn't, at least not as far as I can tell. You've got the two methods down: jack, and ice-slick-from-behind-cover. There are only two other possible options.

The first is the aoe sleep, flash freeze. Unfortunately, I found it to be extremely unreliable in preventing an alpha strike in practice. Even after I had enough slots in it to hit reliably, results ranged from sleeping the whole spawn before they got a shot off, to letting the whole spawn shoot at me once before they fall asleep. So not only did it not prevent the alpha, it did so in a seemingly completely random and inconsistent way, which is exactly what you don't want in a control. On average, I'd say I would usually take maybe a half alpha when using it, but as noted, it was extremely variable.

The other way would be to stealth into the spawn and use a PB and/or dom'd glacier. Unlike the sleep, the AoE hold will at least reliably prevent mobs from attacking - as long as you have full stealth and can get into the middle of the spawn without them seeing you, anyway. I don't use this trick as I have fly for my travel instead of super speed, but it should work.

Aside from that, I haven't really found any reliable way to take alphas on an ice/ice unless I just slam purples - in which case I might as well not even bother casting a control at all. I love the set, but this is easily its biggest weakness.

Well, electric, like fire, is a resistance + self healing style of set. Overall, it provides similar or slightly stronger mitigation, has somewhat less offensive contribution, but has much more utility and much fewer holes in its protection.

The resistances electric gets are slightly stronger (about 6% more when slotted up), and it gets resistance to psionic damage, which fire does not. Both sets get very high resistance to their signature type of damage (fire for fire armor, energy for electric armor), but fire damage is uncommon in the game, while energy is the third most common after smashing and lethal.

Fire's heal is significantly stronger over time than electric's (even factoring in the electric heal's regen component), but the electric heal also gives you an endurance discount on all your powers for 30 seconds after each use.

Electric's protection from mez effects is split into separate powers rather than included on the basic resistance toggles like fire, but it does have protection from immobilize and knockback effects. It also has protection against endurance drains and slows, and lightning reflexes gives all of your powers a recharge boost.

Electric gets power sink, which is like consume on steroids. It returns more endurance, recharges twice as fast, and is auto hit. Electric's damage aura is slightly weaker than fire's, but also drains a small amount of endurance from the enemies it hits. Normally that's useless, but there are ways to leverage it. If you slot up both power sink and lightning field for endurance modification, power sink will drain most of an enemy's endurance and lightning field will drain the rest of it over the next 10 to 15 seconds. This is somewhat slow and unreliable, but once the enemies are drained they will only be able to attack infrequently as they occasionally recover a small amount of endurance.

Finally, in the final slot where fire gets a self-rez, electric gets a traditional 'godmode'. For three minutes, power surge gives you massive resistance to everything and increases your endurance recovery - however, when it wears off you will 'crash' and lose all your endurance and almost all your health. Given the long recharge and nasty crash at the end, it's not a routine use tool, but when you get in waaay over your head it may let you survive long enough to cut your foes down to size.

Overall, electric has better resistances than fire, massively better endurance management tools, fewer holes, and some nice perks, but much worse healing and significantly less offensive punch. It probably outperforms fire on overall mitigation if you leverage the endurance drain, but with less damage, and it's also a tighter build as there are no real skippable powers (unless you want to skip grounded and get your knockback protection through inventions like fire has to).

Welcome to the game, and congrats on choosing the most awesome archetype. While no AT is really 'better' than another in this game, I certainly think scrappers are among the most fun to play.

Warning: wall of text incoming.

in regards to your questions, I think that BS/fire will definitely be a viable character to play. At the moment, shield defense probably boosts your offense more than fire, but a lot of that is due to an ability in shield defense being accidentally made much more powerful than the devs intended, and that's getting corrected shortly. In addition, there are persistent rumors that fire aura will be getting buffed at the same time, so I definitely wouldn't worry about it.

Broadsword is a good, solid attack set with a decent array of single target and area of effect moves. Like most weapon sets, it has slightly improved accuracy. The secondary effect is a slight defense debuff, meaning that once you hit your foe, it will be easier to hit him again. Broadsword's signature move is parry, which is a light damage melee attack that also significantly boosts your defense for ten seconds. This defense boost applies against melee and lethal type attacks - so any kind of sword, punch, or anything else melee, plus all of those gun attacks those guys over there are shooting at you.

Must-haves for Broadsword: Hack, Disembowel, Head Splitter, Parry.
Hack, disembowel, and head splitter are your three strongest attacks. Head splitter is actually a narrow cone, so if two foes are standing very close to each other, you might hit both. Parry is the set's major defensive contribution - use this every second or third attack to keep the effect double stacked and you will notice a significant amount of missing on the part of your enemies.

Other useful Broadsword powers: Slice, Whirling Sword, Build Up.
Slice and whirling sword are your main area of effect damage powers. Both are solid AoEs that will serve you well on teams, where there tend to be lots of foes to beat up. Build up is a self buff that greatly increases your damage and significantly boosts your chance to hit for a few seconds. It's a very useful ability when there's something dangerous that needs to die *now*.

Skippable Broadsword powers: Slash, confront.
Slash is actually a serviceable single target attack, it just doesn't have any special characteristics to set it apart, and doesn't usually end up being needed once you have the rest of your powers. You can still take it if you feel you need more attacks, or if you have power choices left after you've taken everything else you want. Confront is a single target taunt power, which every scrapper melee set has and which I've honestly never seen a single scrapper actually take. In general, if you really want to get something's attention, just walk over and stab it in the face and leave the taunting to the tanks.

Fiery Aura is a very offense-heavy armor set that pays for this by having some holes in the protection it offers. It relies on a combination of resistance to reduce the incoming damage and self-healing to heal back what you do take, along with a fair chunk of the 'dead enemies do no damage' style of protection. Notably, it offers no protection against knockback effects, and while it does layer two types of mitigation the overall effect is still less than some sets. What it does have is a strong damage aura and several other offensive effects.

Must-haves for Fiery Aura: Fire Shield, Plasma Shield, Blazing Aura, Healing Flames.
Fire shield and plasma shield are your two main resistance toggles, offering resistance against smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, and negative energy damage. Between them, they also give you protection against stun, hold, and sleep mez effects. Blazing aura is one of the set's bigger offensive contributions, continuously doing damage to every foe in melee range of you. The damage of each tick is relatively small, but it adds up quickly considering how many foes it can hit. Healing flames is the other half of your mitigation, a decent self heal on a 40 second recharge. It also gives you resistance to toxic damage for one minute after each use.

Other useful Fiery Aura powers: Consume, Fiery Embrace, Rise of the Phoenix
Consume is an endurance recovery power - fire it off and you get back a quarter of your endurance bar for every foe you hit within 20 feet. It's not quite as good as similar powers in other sets, but it's still useful. Fiery embrace is similar to build up - it offers a large damage boost for a short period of time. It has twice the recharge time of build up and lacks build up's tohit boost, but the increase to fire damage does last 20 seconds instead of build up's 10. Rise of the Phoenix is a pretty good self-rez. Let's face it, with fiery aura you're going to get killed from time to time. When that happens, RotP lets you get right back up while simultaneously blowing up the enemies who put you down. It also leaves you invulnerable for 15 seconds, plenty long enough to turn your toggles back on and start smacking around the baddies again.

Skippable Fiery Aura powers: Temperature protection, Burn.
Temperature protection gives a small amount of cold and (redundant) fire resistance, as well as slight protection from slows. It can be useful, but it's not usually worth the power slot. Another power to take if you end up with spare slots after you've got everything else useful. Burn is a weird power. When used, it gives you immobilization protection for a good while, as well as creating a patch of fire that burns enemies. However, the immob protection can be replaced with combat jumping (see below) and enemies have a strong tendency to run out of the burn patch, taking very little damage. This leaves it a power without much of a defined role. As it stands it's skippable, however, watch this space, as there have been persistent rumors that this power will be getting some sort of buff soon.

Other thoughts about this combination of power sets:

Fire is an offense-heavy, defense-light set. Therefore it's good to think about ways to compensate for its weaknesses. Broadsword's parry will be a big help here - get a couple defense enhancements in parry and keep the effect double stacked, and a surprisingly large amount of attacks will miss you. Combined with your resistance reducing the damage of attacks that do hit, your healing will have a much easier time keeping up with the damage you take.

The other major holes to plug are the immobilization and knockback holes. For this reason, the leaping travel power is a common choice for fiery aura characters. The prerequisite, combat jumping, gives immobilization protection, and the last power, acrobatics, offers protection from knockback.

However, acrobatics is an extra power you might not have room for. For this reason I recommend an alternate method of getting knockback protection.

First, when you hit 15 head over to the steel canyon university and complete the invention tutorial. This will teach you how invention enhancements, recipes, salvage, and crafting work.

Then, keep an eye on your salvage window. You will earn 'reward merits' for completing your own story arcs as well as completing task forces. As soon as you have 75 of them, find a 'merit vendor' (found in most zones) and buy a level 10 'Steadfast Protection: Knockback Protection' recipe, craft it, and slot it in one of your resistance powers. This enhancement will protect you from the vast majority of knockback effects. Once you get 75 more merits, if you want you can even craft a second, slot it in a different resistance power, and stack their effects to block stronger knockback effects. The synapse task force (level range 15 and up) rewards 58 merits, and the two parts of the positron task force (level 10 and up) between them reward 26 merits, so those are good to join if you see anyone forming a team to do one.

The other common way to boost fiery aura's durability is with the 'tough' power from the fighting power pool. This is a toggle power that gives you a significant amount of extra resistance to smashing and lethal damage, the most common types in the game. Stacking it on top of the smashing and lethal resistance granted by fire shield will significantly improve your overall toughness. Unfortunately, you have to take a useless attack power (boxing or kick) as a prerequisite (and they really are nigh useless - if you take it, don't bother wasting slots on it or trying to use it), but it can still be worth it.

Also, like nearly every character in the game, you will want the 'stamina' power from the fitness power pool. This passive power opens up at 20, and will substantially increase your endurance recovery rate - which you will greatly appreciate by the time you get there! The prerequisites of health and swift or hurdle are also useful to have.

Finally, there are several resources that I and others find very useful. First, there is a huge variety of general information about the game at the Paragon Wiki (I would specifically review the pages on enhancements and 'enhancement diversification'). Second, you can find more technical information about every powerset in the game at the City of Data pages. Finally, Mids' Hero Designer is a very useful tool to plan out power, slotting, and enhancement builds for your characters, share those builds with others, and view the builds that others create.

Again, welcome to the game, and I hope you will find your stay here to be enjoyable. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions - you'll find that as long as you're willing to listen, the community here will quite happily bury you with advice.

I don't know why shield has this reputation of using so much more endurance than other sets. It's just not true. Looking at the ongoing toggle costs of all the brute sets, we get:

Stone (non-granite): 2.03 EPS
Dark: 2.0 EPS, plus dark regen
Electric: 1.25 EPS
Stone (granite, mud pots, rooted): 1.248 EPS
Energy: 1.04 EPS
Fire: 1.04 EPS
SR: 0.78 EPS, plus another ~0.1 for practiced brawler
WP: 0.832 EPS
Invul: 0.73 EPS

Shield: 0.78 EPS, plus another ~0.1 for active defense

So basically, shield costs less than dark, electric, energy, fire, and both varieties of stone, is on par with SR, and costs more than invul and WP. Now, electric and energy have good endurance management, but shields is still cheaper than dark, fire, and stone, equal to SR, and only slightly more costly than invul. Additionally, even though the effect is less pronounced for brutes, shield's AAO actually saves you endurance by letting you kill stuff in fewer hits.

In other words, shield doesn't really cost much more endurance than comparable sets. You're just running into the same problem almost everyone does pre-stamina.

I spent some time thinking about this a while back, and there are actually some interesting subtleties.

First, while the stalker melee sets do lose an AoE in the translation, it's interesting to note that it's *never* the tier 9 AoE (if the set has one). Headsplitter, shockwave, 1K cuts, lightning rod, golden dragonfly, throw spines - stalkers keep all of these. So, if we follow that precedent, stalker ice melee should keep frozen aura.

The second issue is: what do you put at level 2? If you drop frost and the taunt for AS and placate, the natural order would look something like:

1: Frozen Fists
1: Ice sword
2:
6: Assassin's strike
8: Build up
12: Placate
18:
26:
32: Frozen Aura

The three remaining powers to fill the empty slots with are freezing touch, ice patch, and greater ice sword. None of those really seems like a tier 3 power to me - can you imagine the ability to lay an ice patch at level 2? Freezing touch is mechanically the set's best ST attack, and GIS is obviously *supposed* to be the big hitter, even if it doesn't work out that way.

So unless you invent a new attack, whatever you put at level 2 will seem a bit of an odd choice for that slot. The best choice would probably be greater ice sword, even if it does seem a bit odd, simply because freezing touch and ice patch would be even more so. Of course, there's also the possibility of moving ice patch over to the secondary and inventing a new power for the level 2 slot, but that's problematic because...

While I can't say why at the moment, there is no problem at all with leaving chilling embrace in the secondary (remember that dark keeps its mez auras). Icicles does definitely need to go away in favor of hide, but CE would stay. Of course, that leaves no empty spot in the secondary for ice patch.

The secondary has a different problem, though, because stalker leviathan mastery has hibernate in it. In previous cases when a newly proliferated primary/secondary collides with a power in an APP/PPP, the primary/secondary gets changed, so hibernate would have to be replaced. With what, I don't exactly know, but my guess would be some variant on a traditional godmode.

My best guess as to what the sets would look like is:

Ice melee
1: Frozen Fists
1: Ice sword
2: Greater ice sword
6: Assassin's Icicle
8: Build up
12: Placate
18: Ice patch
26: Freezing touch
32: Frozen Aura

Ice armor:
1: Hide
2: Frozen armor
4: Hoarfrost
10: Wet ice
16: Chilling embrace
20: Permafrost
28: Glacial ice
35: Energy absorption
38: <random godmode>

There are also a couple of specific changes I would make to individual powers.

First, frozen fists needs to become a 4 second, scale 1 attack, switch to the 0.83s brawl animation, or both. As it stands, its DPA is absolutely pathetic - the only worse tier 1 attacks are super strength's jab and spines' barbed swipe, and both sets more than make up for it elsewhere.

Second, freezing touch's damage should be 1.96, not 1.68. This is actually more of a bug fix - freezing touch has 6 ticks of 0.28 damage, but based on its endurance cost, it should have *7* ticks. This puts it on par with greater ice sword in damage, which makes it more believable that it would be later on in the set than GIS.

The way MM pet commands work is you set for the pets two states: a command, and an agression level. Go to, stay, and attack are all commands, and as such each will overwrite the previous. Thus, when you issue the 'attack' command, the bots forget the 'stay' command and run off to attack your target as their AI sees fit.

What I might try is issuing a 'goto' followed by a 'stay agressive'. I haven't tried that personally, but that might get the bots to stand on one spot while shooting. Of course, you wouldn't be able to get them to attack a specific target like that, but whatever.

Also, there apparently is currently a but in the AI of some pets that makes them run into melee even when their AI type is supposed to prefer ranged combat. That might be part of what you are seeing, and if so, it should get better when the devs fix that bug. Unfortunately they're all working their rears off on Going Rogue at the moment, so that might be a while.

Three more things to keep in mind:

First, while self damage buffs (only really present in kin, pain, and rad) will be larger for the defender, for the corruptor they'll be acting on a larger base. For rad and AM, it becomes:
Defender: 0.65 * (1.0 + 0.95 + 0.30 + 0.25) = 1.625
Corruptor: 0.75 * (1.0 + 0.95 + 0.20) = 1.6125
So the defender has only a very small advantage, even though his damage buff is larger. For kin it actually favors the corruptor, since both will be pretty easily capping their damage and at that point the corruptor's higher base damage wins.

Second, several resistance debuffs are applied by pseudopets that have the same debuff value between corruptors and defenders - namely sleet, heat loss, tar patch and fallout. So when comparing dark miasma or cold domination defenders and corruptors, the defender doesn't receive his usual buff/debuff advantage.

Finally, while it won't matter at the level cap, during leveling defenders will get buff/debuff powers sooner, while corruptors will get attacks sooner. Depending on the powerset combinations involved, this may favor the defender, corruptor, or neither. For example, a */dark corruptor is better off in this regard than a dark/* defender, since they both get (an identical) tar patch early, but the corruptor gets damage powers faster. On the other hand, cold domination corruptors have to wait considerably longer for sleet/heat loss than defenders.

Also, don't forget that defenders still don't have access to fire blast. If damage is your sole concern, a fire/ corruptor will probably outdamage any defender you can bring to the table. This isn't exactly relevant to a general comparison, but if all you're looking for is the highest damage, you'd probably want a fire/* corr.

First, there's an easier way to share the builds you create with mids'. At the top, click Import/Export and select 'short forum export'. There are a variety of options - make sure the formatting is set to 'Official Forums', pick 'Export data chunk if creating a datalink isn't possible', leave all of the 'don't export X' boxes empty, and pick 'export bonus totals' but NOT 'export set breakdown'. With the 'fruit salad' color scheme, this IMO results in the most readable and useful export. Then click 'export now', go over to your forum window, and hit paste in your reply. You'll see a huge mass of codes, but when you post you'll get this nicely formatted output of your build.

Now to the actual build. You've skipped a couple powers that are pretty important, which I would try to add in at some point - namely, mind over body, blinding feint, and sweeping strike.

Mind over body is your primary resistance toggle. Willpower as a set is based around different types of layered mitigation: resistance, defense, and regeneration. It has a reputation as a strong set, but it only turns out that way if you don't skimp on the layering. Skipping mind over body cuts out most of the 'resistance' layer against the most common damage types in the game: smashing and lethal. It can be comfortably pushed off until after you have stamina or quick recovery, but skipping it entirely is a mistake.

Blinding feint is your main method of boosting your own damage. Most melee sets get build up instead, a short duration high magnitude self damage buff. Claws and dual blades instead get a much faster recharging moderate damage buff that is also an attack. It doesn't buff as much as build up, but on the other hand it's very easy to keep the buff up all of the time. Blinding feint is a 37.5% damage buff and a 10% tohit buff, both for 10 seconds on a 12 second recharge. Taking this attack and working it regularly into your attack string is critical to achieve the set's full damage potential.

Finally, sweeping strike. On its own, it's merely a pretty decent melee cone attack. However, it's also the finishing move of one of your best combos, attack vitals. Setting up this combo will result in a fair amount of extra damage being done to everyone hit by sweeping strike. It's a quite nice move, and I personally wouldn't skip it. Weaken and empower are both pretty weak combos (and require nimble slice, which you quite rightly skipped), so skipping this will leave you with only the sweep combo. That's a nice combo, but I still would personally set myself up with the attack vitals combo as well.

Of course, to take these you'll need to drop some of the powers you already have. One choice is obvious: invisibility. There's no pressing need in the game to be invisible, but I can definitely see it as a personal preference. However, both super speed and stealth carry partial stealth effects. When they are both run at the same time, they stack to offer complete invisibility, which means that there is no need to actually take the 'invisibility' power.

To free up room for the other two, I would drop one of your travel powers, as there's no real need to have more than one. In this case, if you want super speed's stealth effect, you'd drop jump kick (which, by the way, is one of the goofiest looking and less effective attacks in the game, even ignoring how it would cause redraw of your swords) and super jump.

Finally, depending on your preferences, you may consider taking the fighting pool (tough, weave, and boxing or kick as the throwaway prerequisite) instead of the dark ancillary. More or less, it'd be a choice between concept /fun extra powers and the more boring but probably mechanically more powerful increased durability of the fighting pool. You definitely don't *need* fighting - it merely boosts your already good survivability into the 'very very good' range. It's not really mandatory unless you want to pull off some of the truly absurd challenges people have set themselves over the years, but it definitely falls into the category of 'nice to have'. You can always wait until you actually get to that point to decide which you want - when you hit 41 you can think about how well you've been handling stuff recently and decide whether you want more survivability or the extra utility of the dark pool.