Nihilii

According to many people, people use the "according to many people" expression when they want to claim their personal opinion is shared by anyone else. Scientific research has shown nobody but their mom ever buys it.

I'd definitely be more excited than for any primary if we got a new secondary, specifically, something that worked mechanically exactly like Shield Defense, and didn't force a shield on your costume nor alternate animations on your character.

I know, I know, it will never happen.

Going from "it's unfortunate that this game moved away from full character progression available to any team size" to what you said in just one post is truly a feat worth recognising, and for this, sir, I hereby dub you fanboy of the week.

I've leveled a KM/FA scrapper when it came out, expecting a damage powerhouse based on the numbers, and was extremely disappointed with its actual performance ingame. Damage is excellent... If you fight a static target or have someone else to hold things in place for you. Otherwise, everything runs for the hills every single time you drop a Burn patch or kill an enemy, which hurts much more than on a normal scrapper as you need things in melee consistently to optimize PS stacking.

I haven't tried a KM/FA brute. However, I just recently went from a KM/SR scrapper with Confront to a KM/SR brute, and despite the ~40 DPS hit on paper I find the character to perform better on every metric, including damage, thanks to stuff not running away. Considering SR scrappers don't have Burn or Blazing Aura and hence don't cause nearly as much running as FA scrappers...

I think if you aim to be a ST specialist and pick Confront, the scrapper can be more efficient. A properly slotted Confront won't need to be used more than every ~20-25s even against a +4, once you're levelshifted, so it's not a very significant damage loss, and the difference in damage output compared to the brute is tremendous.

If you want AOEs, I'd go brute, as even doing +50% (total) damage breaks down if you hit half of the targets.

I have no interest in Aid Self since Rebirth +regen is an option, as Aid Self eats up animation time. YMMV.

No one should click that link.

Seriously though, reading more than the OP and the last post before posting a reply can help understanding why a discussion went from point A to point B.

Additionally, not labelling players as "brutes" or "scrappers" can help understand the discussion itself. If you get so emotional about specific ATs or characters you play that you'll take any claim of better performance from another AT or character as a personal attack, how do you expect to have any kind of conversation on relative performance? Or maybe you don't and just want to act smug like the forum goers who chant "play what you like, play what you like" in answer to OP asking "which is better?", but again I fail to see the point.

Really, if you want to make this personal I'm a scrapper at heart. I wish scrappers weren't so far behind on survivability and aggro capabilities compared to brutes in the highend game. That there are combos like Claws/Elec where everything is better as a brute is just adding insult to injury ; and of course, same goes the other way with, say, KM/SD and DM/SD being ridiculously better on scrappers.

Ideally it'd be best if any given powerset had more or less the same strength regardless of the AT and if indeed the only consideration would be playstyle. That it isn't is one reason balance is worth discussing, so people can make informed choices.

To bash people for supposedly claiming that (which I haven't seen) and then assume rerolling is an ordeal or a black and white thing strikes me as a bit silly.

Some people will take 2 hours to go from 1 to 50, some people will take 200 hours.
Some enjoy rerolling, some hate it.

Additionally, it's not like there's a specific threshold of performance at which you can say "oh, yes, definitely, reroll now" or "no, not worth it at all, never". Best you can do is give an idea of the performance gap, say what you'd do personally and let each individual decide for themselves.

I look at it that way: I've never died from lack of regenerating fast enough on my WPs. WP already has great regen (which incidentally means stacking more regen on top of it won't have the same returns as it would on a lower regen character).

What kills me is damage spikes or cascading defense failure. Barrier helps with both of these things, whereas Rebirth wouldn't do much if any.

I agree it's probably not worth it here, unless you don't mind doing everything you've done all over again.

WP is a different beast than Elec. You already get an aggro aura as a scrapper, so one of the biggest benefits of going brute doesn't matter as much (although as RttC is weak by itself, it's still a small improvement, but moreso for tanking than soloing/pure damage).

While brutes have more HP, it's in the range of ~10% or so. Such a small amount isn't going to make or break the character, it's certainly not the same as 250% as much energy resistance.

As for the resistance cap, it can come into play if you go Cardiac and use SotW, and it is definitely nice considering S/L is the most common damage type. Barrier being the optimal Destiny choice (IMHO) for a WP character, that's another plus for the higher res cap.

Still, for that character, as a scrapper you're looking at a minimal damage loss (and arguably, in high +dam buff situations, which are rather common in team environments, you'd actually come out on top) and medium survivability difference compared to the brute version. I wouldn't sweat it.

Definitely. The difference is going to be night and day - on top of the plain number advantage, you'll have things glued to you rather than running away all the time, making for an actually bigger increase in damage.

At 90% res you can take 2.5 times as much punishment compared to 75%, that means Energy all the time and all damage types save psi while under Power Surge.

It's one of the (thankfully few) combos where there is simply no performance reason to use it on the other AT. Better damage, better survivability, better everything.