Nihilii

For me, I've found I need something where either the concept/feel just clicks, or something that is very easy to use as well as powerful.

Can't help you with the former, but as for the second part Fiery Assault fits the bill perfectly.

Claws gets animation locked fast.

Without aggro holding capabilities, stuff runs away.

Some forumites live in a world where optimal situations are commonplace, including and even when such situations are actually mathematically impossible.

Those are the three important facts to keep in mind when looking at Claws, in my opinion.

Stacking Rage is always beneficial from a pure numerical point of view up until you go above the damage cap, before procs, reactive interface, veteran powers, travel times and misc clicks are considered... Speaking about pure damage. I've never looked at endurance consumption, because it doesn't tend to be a problem for my builds (emphasis on infinite sustainability with ST chains tends to give you enough to spam AoEs in normal gameplay).

Bumping this because I've been under the same misguided notion for years and just thought I was being unlucky / there was enough tarentulas spamming it fast enough that it just hit me: as of today, Mental Scramble ignores defenses, despite all the info about it listing it as ranged and psy. If it doesn't always hit (something I'm not convinced of), I'm willing to bet it does 95% of the time.

You're quite right. In the normal game, damage auras tend to contribute a lot of damage due to their passive, always on, AoE nature. People who've watched it with data tracking software reported numbers in the 20-30% range more often than not.

In the highend game, as characters plow through groups faster and content gets more dynamic, at least the kind of content much of the playerbase seems interested in running (itrials and speed TFs), burst AoE gets more important, but damage auras remain interesting.

One thing that sometimes works for me: use the first build to experiment, draw lessons from the results to make the second one a serious build.

Truth be told, a character with relatively messed up power and slot selection still has high enough performance to get through the game.

Someone naming himself TheGodOfGods calling out an alleged ego trip, while using the word gosu seriously. The jokes practically write themselves.

Winning in an environment largely void of competition isn't an indication of skill. Pointing out basic strategies that anyone can reproduce shows the opposite.

Regardless, thanks for your illustration of my above point regarding zone PvPers sensibilities to trashtalking.

I won't tell you how to feel about game content, but from the other side of the fence, I like having missions more dynamic than old static kill mcboss and buds.

If you like playing at a casual pace without ambushes, you've still got 90-95% of the game content available, which I think is a fair amount. Me, I prefer the newest stuff and generally stick to it.

The Blood Coral is a bit too much though, that's true. They should have added a temp AoE power in that mission. I see it in one specific case of poor design rather than the rule.

For me it'd be (easiest to hardest):

Apex - can't lose through deaths, easy to get without even trying for it.
TinM - relatively easy to get without even trying for it, as long as people enter the warehouse on time.
Kahn - nothing really threatening in the whole TF, final AVs pop one by one and won't be too much trouble with anyone decent at keeping aggro.
ITF - while it remains easy, ambushes can kill a sloppy squishie.
LRSF - the AV fights themselves are easy as long as you have a decent aggro toon, the biggest threats are either a squishie getting too cocky and PBAoE'd to death during those fights, or getting killed by robots in mission 2 or the longbow inc in mission 4.
STF - the tree part can get squishies killed, as well as the ambushes during Dr Aeon's mission. No real challenge otherwise if you play it cheap and safe with Recluse (i.e. jetpack taunt).
Barracuda - either requires a defender or mastermind, heavily incarnated alts, or more than 4 players. Lots of ambushes.
LGTF - players with mez powers are almost mandatory for that one.
BAF - need at least 12 players to start. High chance to have someone screw up.
Lambda - less restrictive than BAF, but harder. Squishies can get killed relatively easily unless there's more than the minimum and/or people with multiple level shifts.
Keyes - as many players required as BAF and the unwillingness of the playerbase to run it at all, combined with an overreliance on heals easily makes this one of the hardest one if not the hardest to get.
UG - no clue, I haven't even done the trial yet, but hearing friends saying how long it takes and it being heal based once again, I'm inclined to assume it might follow the same pattern as Keyes, with very few people willing to do it at all.

I have no problem with the AE selfrez change. Being able to get the XP for a mob that rezzes with only part of its life and spends time animation-locked, considering the speed at which a well built SS/fire brute kills things... Seriously, even bosses sometimes die before their animation completes. I definitely can see how it can be considered exploitive, from a certain point of view.

Trying to look at this rationally, there's two reasons to use AE farms, powerleveling or farming influence.

Powerleveling: ambush farms remain much faster than standard farms, rez or no rez.

Farming influence (tickets): on +0/x8, there's already some overkill (with rezzes). Slightly raising rep should take care of the difference.

So, while AE farming is going to be slower, regardless of the goal it remains more attractive than regular farms.

I'm confident purple prices will remain at or around the current level, for the time being.

I took out RV NPC heroes on a DB/Inv brute in I19.5 (alpha level shift already, but before further incarnate slots) with a spider. Spiders actually hit higher than mechs I believe, if you make sure to position them in melee for their "nuke", a PBAoE move that does well above a thousand damage IIRC. For most AVs I happened to have help, but I soloed a few.

Thinking about that specific case, what might have helped is that DB can slot 2 -res procs, which might have boosted spider damage a fair bit. I was using BF AS SS AS with a minimal gap ; as for survivability, I had (outside of PVP zones) S/L softcapped and 33-35% F/C/E/N, with reasonable resistances (cardiac + normal slotting) and Unstoppable. I can't remember if I had Aid Self or not, but I probably had it, and made liberal use of inspirations.

Another few things coming back to my mind (not that it's necessarily needed, but I've found it helpful on some occasions): sitting in the +def bubble from pillboxes, luring AVs to NPC helpers.

The one hurdle was Statesman, most likely would not have been able to kill him solo, spider or not, due to the speed at which his Unstop recharges. That was before the change to prevent him from having 100% res most of the time and before I20 slots, so now, who knows. I'm thinking with judicious use of Lore pets he should go down.

This should put it on par with Shockwave, albeit with a slightly longer range and much smaller angle, which might make it easier to control... But then again, the KB isn't 100% and is higher magnitude, which I think is bad.

Roughly the same arguments should apply, in that if you can find corners and use KB efficiently, it might be worth it. Otherwise, the scatter might be hurtful to your damage over time.

Another consideration for KM (over Claws) is that Power Siphon is more demanding than Follow Up, as you have to attack almost consistently to keep those 5 stacks up, so moving around to position yourself for an efficient RT might hurt more than it would on a Claws that just have to use FU every few seconds.

All RV AVs can be pulled from each other, with sufficient enough running. Easiest way is to use the usual tactic: attack once and let both of them come to you, wait for them to lose aggro, attack the closest one again while they're running back to whatever tower they were hitting.

Throw a Heavy into the mix ; congratulations, you win.

I'll second Fiery Melee. Incinerate, Scorch, Cremate, Scorch is a solid, DPE efficient attack chain, requires a minimal amount of recharge and isn't resisted much.

Taking a look at other primaries at level 22:

Claws - all ST attacks are available, and Claws is efficient on end. Another great choice.

Dual Blades - Sweeping Strike makes the set, and it's at level 26. Avoid.

Elec Melee - not really a ST set. Avoid.

Super Strength - all ST attacks and Rage are available, and the tohit + damage can be especially nice at those levels ; however, lacking Gloom and with limited recharge, as well as with limited end management, getting good ST damage out of it might be too difficult. Meh.

Stone Melee - all ST attacks are available, but it's going to be fairly end heavy at this level. Meh.

Battle Axe - lacks Cleave. Not a great ST damage set anyway. Avoid.

War Mace - about the same as Stone Melee, with slightly lower damage and redraw. Avoid.

Kinetic Melee - while this set matures early, due to Power Siphon mechanics it's still terrible on brutes. Lacking Concentrated Strike and having much lower recharge won't help. Avoid.

Energy Melee - Energy Transfer is the only power that makes EM decent in ST damage, and it's not available at 22. Avoid.

Dark Melee - lacks Soul Drain, which isn't too big of a deal on brutes, and Midnight's Grasp, which is much, much more important. Avoid.

Katana/BS - the two best ST attacks aren't available. Avoid.

I liked Dr Graves arc. As a matter of fact, that's the first time I felt somewhat involved in the story of the game, rather than point and laugh at all of it being so bad and childish in the way it assumes the protagonist is an omnipotent being.

No more godmodding here, nor bland killing a warehouse of glowies before being fed a fanfiction-like wall of text. My character actually acted roughly as she should at this point in her career, with down-to-earth reactions (save for the mind bomb part ; that was a bit too much), and so did the NPCs.

I especially liked the player dialog, as it felt like something that made sense to say in such a situation, at that power level. Laying low by playing dumb, but not so stupid that important people wouldn't want to work with you, slowly making alliances and getting more resources without drawing attention to yourself, would be a big part of surviving somewhere like the Rogue Isles in my opinion, and this arc hit it just right, as opposed to the rest of the game where you generally spend your time doing stuff that should have arbiters play soccer with your head within days.

It took me halfway through it to notice it also acted as a tutorial, as the different locations were woven nicely into the story.

The recurring characters were fun ; even Crosscut, even though the creepy psychopath theme is a bit lame and overdone these days, is pulled off well. I liked that everyone was generally hostile to my character, as they should be, and had motivations of their own rather than being pawns reactive to my actions.

I didn't see either of the twists coming, and in hindsight immediately saw that I should have seen both coming, the clues that I missed or ignored ; that's the best kind of twists, if you ask me.

The ending was especially nice ; neat unique map, fun fight and having Scirocco saving the day for his own purposes was just the cherry on top, wrapping it all up by giving the player character a reward (as Graves says himself) as well as once again, handling the game universe much better than telling the player he's essentially Superman, with threats that are actually threatening.

It all made sense, is how I'd sum it up, and feels more mature than most of the storytelling done outside of Praetoria, which was a nice and unexpected surprise. I hope to see more of that sort of stuff in the future.

Last time I checked on beta (which admittedly was a month ago or so), IO boosters made an IO "+", not higher level ; and indeed it makes sense, as you would not be able to slot a level 54 IO or above.

I haven't tested it with a lowbie personally, but it seems someone else did, and didn't run into MARTy.

Specifics:
SS/Fire/Soul brute, solo
+4/x8/bosses ambush farm
Approximately 4 minutes completion time (punching the first mob to death of the final mob)
Done it twice