PleaseRecycle

Perhaps because Aett's entire point was that the ATs have their pros and cons? Just a guess.

Last time I checked, the correct choice of meleer for PvP is "none of the above."

Shield and elec get teleport attacks that do their damage by summoning what's known as a pseudopet at your location. Pets have a 400% damage cap. This is fine for scrappers because their archetype damage modifier is very high, so limited buffability for their pseudopets isn't a factor. Brutes, on the other hand, have a much higher damage cap, much lower modifier, and fury is a huge damage buff. This means that it's trivially easy for a brute to cap their pet's damage... at a much lower value than scrappers get.

Titan weapons, on the other hand, seems like a fine set for both brutes and scrappers so I'm not too sure about that one.

Scrappers don't really have any shiny tricks to their name. I think at this point that's the problem more than any major numerical deficit. The stalker buffs highlight that issue but beyond that it isn't as though anything has changed between scrappers and brutes per se, both retain the advantages and disadvantages that they've had for years before issue 22.

The question is, how do you give scrappers something unique and attractive without it being a multiplier of their already great numbers?

That's the Recluse's Victory recruitment officer in Peregrine. He probably shouldn't be saluting at all, but given the status of relations between Freedom Corps and Praetoria, well, if someone posted a video of him doing that on youtube he'd probably be discharged fairly rapidly.

As a vigilante or rogue you can: run papers and scanners in zones of the relevant level, start any TF or SF unless I'm forgetting some exception, run both sides' SSAs, run tips and of course badge. Seems like they did their best to make sure there was plenty to do. Letting a faction get the opposite faction's contacts would involve non-trivial programming work. Expect to see that the day they merge ouroboros, i.e. possibly never.

As a matter of fact, that twelve billion cost me all 1500 reward merits that my rogue had been sitting on. Decided to call it good there. Still, in the future the existence of converters definitely makes the grey alignments more tempting since now there's a pretty cool prize that you in no way miss out on.

12 billion influence in about fifteen minutes and I didn't even have my evil plan in mind before logging on in the first place. The stake through the heart of high purple prices? Let's hope so.

Looks good to me, DarkBlaster. I hope it hits the notes you were after.

Vimes, I haven't done any specific testing or anything but in my experience it seems like the will proc essentially just works like a standard proc in shadow field. It tends to hit some but not all of a spawn when you drop it, and after that it's hard to tell since I usually hit the display limit on overhead numbers pretty rapidly between all the other procs, dots, heals and teammates. I certainly wouldn't say it appears to substandard.

This might have something to do with why my SJ/EA, an otherwise perfectly exemplary character, goes largely unplayed anymore. At first the visible-in-combat thing seemed pretty nifty. Sometimes, though, you want to admire the spiffiness of your own costume design skills and shutting off a key defensive power for that purpose feels like a betrayal of a basic principle of scrapping. At least with stalkers hide comes with the territory. Speaking of, the other reason I don't play that anymore is due to the recognition that since I22, that combination is better in almost all ways on stalkers.

I second dark/time, and in fact can vouch for BrandX's as well, as we ran an ITF on matching-setted controllers. But that was before I was eligible to slot purples! The damage is pretty darn nice with those in the mix, and I still don't have musculature past tier 1.

It also sounded like you were comparing a completed, possibly incarnate level 50 to something below that. If your plant/kin has APP damage powers and your dark/dark does not... That's going to make a difference in their damage.

Just the past weekend I ran loads of highbie TFs with teams of non-50s, most of them not even IOed as they were progressing so quickly. Old content can easily be as difficult as it ever was when you don't have a team of level 51s crushing each spawn before it can blink. One STF was frustratingly down-to-the-wire but at the same time it brought up a truckload of olden-dayes nostalgia. It can be as easy or as hard as you want it to be if you're the leader, and if you think people won't join challenge TFs I suggest that you haven't tried it lately.

The main difference, in my opinion, is less the fact that players are stronger now, which they are, and more the fact that we've done this stuff before and we know the tricks at this point. If we were to imagine a STF race, I'd put money on a team of level 50 STF veterans with no inventions and no incarnate powers over a team of decked out 53s who had never run it before. In fact I could see the latter team failing to complete it.

"Outrageous" might be slightly hyperbolic for a matter of less than one real dollar that is likely to be easily fixed by a couple of additional emails.

Skipping living shadows basically came down to the fact that /time gets something even better: distortion field. It's like baby's first shadow field in that it is far worse at holding enemies and instead of -tohit it slows movement, but that isn't the whole story. The whole story is that it's autohit and you can keep two of them out at once for five proc chances each. If something is foolish yet sturdy enough to sit in my distortion field for forty seconds after casting, it will have twenty five procs rolled against it. All that for one cast of one power with a twenty foot radius. Where damage is concerned it just blows living shadows away. Having said that, I do not establish containment as easily as many controllers, nor do I keep spawns locked in place. Dark/anything other than time should by all means use living shadows as its proc dispenser instead.

There are two things that leap out at me. You definitely want ragnarok in fireball and posi's blast in living shadows if you're going to slot living shadows for damage at all. I would strongly suggest considering a proccy slotting instead, though.

Five slotted coercive persuasion makes me very sad deep down inside. Places where you could recover another slot include hasten and consume.

Oh yeah, and instead of the thunderstrike acc/dam, use the dam/end or dam/end/rech.

Here's the direction I took my dark/time. I would call my single target damage pretty excellent and most of it comes from dark/ and from /fire so I think it's fairly comparable. Now, several things:

Pull the will of the controller proc out of living shadows and replace it with cloud senses. Yes, the cloud senses proc is hard to get on the market, but you can just buy it with merits if you need to. Having done that, for goodness sake put another slot into possess and another slot into wherever you put your will of the controller set. For two slots you're passing on 10% ranged defense. Not a good trade! Incidentally, I strongly agree with others who say that -tohit and fearsome stare go together like Dr. Pepper and trout. Shadow field is a great place for will of the controller in its entirety and if you wanted to keep lockdown you could find a way to slot dark grasp more.

I would drop one of the slots from tar patch. Well actually I'd drop two, but if you want to keep two recharge in it then lose the slow but add an impeded swiftness proc.

Red fortune and thunderstrike are questionable in a purpled build. Thunderstrike makes some sense if you want the ranged defense, but if you're only five slotting red fortune just drop it entirely and slot shadow fall with three or four lucks of the gambler. I would also consider saving a couple slots on umbra beast: he is a good source of damage, but I found that in the end the extra slot for the soulbound proc didn't seem quite as competitive as more damage procs in spammables.

So, on to single target damage. Yes, you want to have shadowy binds and fire blast. Depending on the circumstance, I either alternate those two or throw in dark grasp as well. Even on a monster recharge build SB-FB-repeat is gappy but I feel like when I don't need the hold it seems to do slightly better DPS. Haunt is theoretically part of the ST chain yet I feel like I get better results when I instruct them to kill one boss and I focus on another boss, in terms of spawn clearing. Against a single hard target when you can bring all of it to bear, though, it definitely gets pretty hurty.

This is all, like, my opinion, man, but it would drive me nuts not to have at least two reliable, single target "blast" type powers and the nice thing about shadowy binds is that it does a lot more than just damage.

Dark/time observations having hit 50 and slotted all but one of the purple sets I'm going to:

What a great combination. The word support does not do it justice for, to me, it implies hanging back and making others more effective at their jobs. My typical spawn approach in anything but extreme debuff or mez circumstances, such as the ITF, is to hit fearsome stare, shadow field or heart of darkness at the relevant point along my trajectory toward the center of the spawn. Next, distortion field goes down. Ah, distortion field. Five slots, five procs: impeded swiftness, ghost widow's embrace, neuronic shutdown, gladiator's net, and unbreakable constraint. I feel hesitant to share this, but did you know that distortion field is autohit? You will once you give it a whirl slotted like that. In any case, once that's working its magic, out come the shades, the fireballs, and the slowed responses.

I have slowed response one slotted with an analyze weakness acc/recharge and it tends to be up more than once per fight. Goodness, how does that work? I think it has something to do with the perma chrono shift. What can even be said about that apart from, "Damn?"

On the whole it worked out to be what I'd been expecting on paper. I never expected it to be quite so maniacally fun, however. Many of the key powers come in past level 30 but at no point while leveling did it feel weak. Instead, exemplaring down to 30 feels like playing a really powerful controller, but playing at 50 is more like trying to hang onto your bearings from the control room of a hurricane. There are so many crazy things you can do and all of them will wreck the bejesus out of anything around you.

If you'll excuse me, I think Trapdoor has a date with destiny.

Yeah having gotten my elec/ice off the ground, I easily build focus with just CB and JL. I can hardly imagine that CB-JL-CB-CI-CB-CL-CB-AS is going to fail to leave me with a triple stack most of the time seeing as that's seven pre-AS attacks in under ten seconds. As I see it the actual problem might be that it doesn't take enough advantage of AS's potential availability, but maybe I could swing CB-JL-CB-AS-CI if I really break the bank... Much to contemplate.

Being able to run any TF at any time is extremely significant. I had never tried the half-way alignments until just recently because I assumed I cared more about alignment merits. How wrong I was! I would so much rather be able to jump onto anything that looks good that someone advertises on a server channel without having to switch away from the character I want to play. I'd be lying if I said my stance had nothing to do with the fact that everything is dirt cheap on the market now, though.

Speaking of SSAs, did you know that rogues and vigilantes can run both sets of SSAs? It's really true! That's another reward: you can make the NPCs look like raging morons for thinking you're on their side after you just beat the stuffing out of them.