Nihilii

This combo, solo, is arguably one of the strongest AV soloers available to scrappers right now. With two of them, it'd likely require concerted effort from both of you guys to manage to fail at the task.

For epics, I'd go with Pyre or Mu for Fireball / Ball Lightning. Nothing should live long enough for endurance to be a concern.

Fair enough.

I can agree that tankers should be best at generating aggro just using the one same power as an identical scrapper version, and 4-5s on scrapper auras would make more sense.

That said, there's lots of overlap between ATs in this game, for example it doesn't strike me as very fair or balanced that my Fire/SS tanker can outdamage my scrappers while also retaining superior mitigation and aggro control. Admittedly that's a specific combo, just like the specific issue with scrappers being possibly too good at aggro control is mostly limited to Shield and Invul.

It seems balance is getting worse and worse. With incarnate powers being essentially the same, ATs that offer multiplicative effects or have particularities that you can't get through incarnates benefit so much more. That they force us to go through large teambased content is kind of a copout to me - in a smaller group, individual minmaxers can potentially break stuff if the game isn't balanced, whereas you can hide many balance issues by designing encounters requiring a bunch of people. Don't get me started on the amount of autohit unresistable damage and mezzes thrown around, if there's one thing that can say "we don't know how to balance our game so we're going to ignore most of its established rules" better than this does, I don't know what it is.

Here we can see the longtime effects of AE crack. The above poster has lost perception of up and down. His ability to form sentences is severely impaired as well. Even basic words may elude an AE addict, for example saying "LOL" instead of the intended "aargh I am shaking with rage at the idea that a random stranger on the internet dislikes my playstyle in a video game and I am now going to punch my keyboard and post the result".

I remembered having read it as "planned for I21" or somesuch, so, it was all in my head. Thanks for setting me straight!

It's hard to comment without knowing if you left out incarnate powers on purpose or not ; this stuff can (and should) affect the whole build.

As always, I'm all for no/lower team size requirements to start things.

Sarrate, I usually find your posts insightful but I don't think you're making a lot of sense here. To me, your argument essentially boils down to "I don't mind the weaker aggro in RttC because I stack other aggro tools on it"... Tools that aren't available to the AT the topic is about.

Thing is, a scrapper with just AaO/Invinc will hold most aggro without needing any special effort. The same scrapper with RttC will have to work at keeping that aggro. Whether scrappers having ridiculously strong aggro auras in AaO and Invinc is intended or not is irrelevant, the point is RttC is significantly weaker.

Simply put, I think I remember reading about this somewhere, but now I can't find any reference to it.

Two bombs are enough to spawn U'Kon Grai.

You'd think people wouldn't mind a "hiscore list" that you have to go out of your way to even see in a coop video game. It always amazes me how resentful people who can't compete get about people who can, in any medium.

You're not going to solo GMs without temps/insps/lore pets ; on the other hand, any scrapper combo can solo GMs with temps/insps/lore pets.

That said, stuff with an aggro aura will have an easier time to do so. So that's Shield, Invul, and to a lesser extent WP (much weaker aggro aura, stuff will occasionally run every now and then). Shield is ridiculously easy to softcap to positionals, comes with full mez protection, high to capped DDR, good HP/resists, *and* boosts your offense, it's the obvious choice if you don't mind the look.

For AVs, I believe every scrapper combo should be able to solo these now, even something like spines/invul or whatever thanks to Reactive.

DM/SD used to be the top dog for AV soloing, the self heal comes in handy for Shield and the DPS was impressive provided you kept full fodder around. Nowadays, it's all still useful but the gap has lessened with stuff like Rebirth, Reactive and Lore pets. Of course, that means DM is free to pursue other things or stack even more, but bottomline is you can go with pretty much any primary and be able to solo most level 50 AVs/GMs without insps/temps, as a Shield scrapper.

I would build a SS/Fire brute. I mean, built.

Defenses definitely aren't anywhere near 45 to all (I build for 20ish positionals), but soloing the kill speed is fast enough to keep 2 lucks on at all times and then some (which is actually needed quite often due to lacking DDR). Reaching enough survivability for +4/x8 is trivial and can be done on most powersets for every AT, I'd wager ; however, you can never have too much damage, and out of the so high I'm glad my username isn't tied to my real life identity number of characters I've played, the SS/Fire brute is really the only one that tears through +4/x8 like it's on +0.

For less extreme but still solid damage as well as much easier survivability out of the box (as in, without insps), Shield is definitely the way to go. It's hard to argue against a DM/SD scrapper these days. ~300ish DPS chain without Lore pets, ~40hp/s regen through SL, SC and Fireball for AoE while Ageless takes care of any endurance woes and pushes your recharge and debuff resist further. SS/SD/Soul Cardiac/Rebirth would likely be nice as well, less ST but more AoE.

I've had reasonable success on my fire/cold/psi controller taking on +4/x8 missions with AVs. Stacking a fast recharging AoE immobilize on softcapped ranged/AOE, decent S/L res and Rebirth makes for a surprisingly sturdy character in many situations. That combo won big time with the AOE buff changes, the ability to throw shields on all three imps + two lore pets in just one (well, two, one per shield) click is invaluable, and coupled with maneuvers/arctic fog it makes for some nice pet survivability. That said, with squishie HP and lacking AoE mez 4+ controls it's still vulnerable to bad luck streaks every now and then, and the AoE damage while decent isn't anything to write home about. I couldn't see such a character soloing the RSF or STF without extreme dedication, incoming damage is simply too much in the final missions without melee survivability or tricks (Phantom Army, Confuse, the usual). On the other hand, I doubt the meleers mentioned above could take on a +4/x8 LGTF (assuming the mitos scale up ; never tried it).

Then there's stuff that seems plain impossible on either AT to me, like soloing a +4/x8 Barracuda. Just plowing through through Reichie's humongous HP + res is hard enough, but having to deal with his fast recharging phase/regen/DP... Heh. I've had teams of 4-5 struggling to get it done on +0. So you'd want a defender or mastermind for that, and if any combo on these ATs can be built to be reasonably fast on +4/x8, I don't know how.

Aah, this is turning into a bit of a rant, so let's leave it at that.

Nice.

Sounds like a vertical sync problem to me, but I barely know more than turning my computer on, so best to let the experts chime in.

I get killed more often on my Stone/DM tanker than on many other melee characters, due to the lack of mobility. Having most of your defense and resistance tied to a single toggle doesn't help either when you get held (gotta love itrials!).

Add to that it's the only character on which I've managed to fail a TF in the last year - Eden, my 2 teammates were meleers and died from the crystal titan, and I didn't have enough DPS to kill it solo nor could I fly and taunt up while they would attack since, yeah, rooted to the ground unless I want to say bye bye to most of my mitigation as well as my mez protection.