PleaseRecycle

Unfortunately heal bonuses not only do not apply to max health or regen effects, they also don't apply to any heals that also give resistance. Reconstruction, for example, is not affected by heal bonuses. Dull pain is, but only the initial heal portion of its effect. This makes them pretty dang sad for anyone other than support types who have a lot of plain heals.

The reason I think you'd be fine with less end mod slotting is that my SJ/Regen brute has more than enough endurance between two slotted QR, one slotted stamina, both recovery uniques and superior conditioning. Scrappers can't get superior conditioning but I also don't have all the endurance accolades yet so in that sense it's fairly equivalent. I actually didn't even need superior conditioning, it was just a prerequisite for stuff I did want that I'd never taken before and it's good with one slot. In fewer words, WP uses about as much endurance per second as regen does and regen has no trouble keeping up with SJ.

The brute needs twice as many damage buffs as the scrapper to cap their damage. Conversely, any single damage buff on a scrapper is twice as good as it is for a brute. Musculature, red inspirations, assault, build up, anything.

Where's the one place that your damage is always capped? AE farms. Almost any other situation will see you fall short of the damage cap, and there the scrapper's advantage is quite pronounced. So yes, you could lobby for buffs for ATs that by no means need it, or you could recognize that the brute's damage cap advantage is illusory 98% of the time. Particularly when compared to their very real damage buff deficit.

Looks pretty good, here are some things that come to mind. I'd lose the nucleolae across the board, you already have some accuracy slotting from the KCs as well as several 9% global bonuses (or bonae, if you will). If you wanted to get downright jaunty you could use dam/end/rech pieces, but the obvious alternative is mako's quads. I would not slot quick recovery so heavily. Two common endmods should be sufficient unless you're really sure you're going to be having end problems. My own experience with SJ and WP independent from one another indicates that it isn't actually that costly a combination in endurance terms.

I assume this is a "final build" because you definitely want to take combat readiness while leveling up. Build up is one thing but CR is just awesome, in a "use as often as possible" kind of way. Oh, and I don't remember exactly what the four slot bonuses are for numina and miracle, but I do remember that I slotted mine in the same powers as you but decided fast healing could do with only three slots of it while RTTC would be better off with three miracles and a common heal. I just checked and the fourth slot of each of them is a healing bonus. For willpower that does literally nothing at all so yeah, replace the heal/rech with a common or drop the slot. Further, you can drop the posi's blast dam/range and lose a tiny amount of damage while gaining a slot.

I'd make a cold/traps defender and carry around a stack of revolver temp power recipes that I could hand to GMs so they could just shoot themselves in the head.

The problem with skipping any of the single target attacks is that in a single target situation you'll pay nearly twice as much endurance for the same damage level by using the aoes. Some secondaries may be able to get away with that but I can assure you that willpower cannot even with both recovery uniques. The problem with skipping titan sweep is that you're giving up a giant scale 1.5 cone that can animate in one second. That's nearly as good as dual blades' sweeping strike, a phenomenal attack.

If you had to skip something, surely defensive sweep is the obvious pick, but even it is by most standards a great attack. Against one target it's below par for tier 1s, but if you hit two targets with it it's suddenly one of the best melee tier 1s available, and it goes all the way up to five. As Flower said it also makes it ridiculously easy to get momentum, and oh right, it grants a ton of defense.

The only problem with titan weapons is that it's so stupidly good that we don't know how to react to it.

You don't really get to say "well I IO therefore parry isn't worth anything." If you don't IO, or choose to IO in a different direction, parry is an incomparably huge bonus. WM is nothing like as survivable as BS/Kat, though it does get better aoe damage in exchange. If you plan to have defenses softcapped to your liking then by all means go mace instead. Do so with the recognition that someone else might be happy to take slightly reduced damage for scads of easily available defense.

I went TW/WP and while I removed defensive sweep from my tray once I got arc of destruction slotted, I kept it with five slots in it for four eradications and a lotg global. Beyond the set bonuses, when exemplaring to 25 and under this means that I still have something resembling an attack chain. It also means I'm not skipping a single power in the set, but whatryagonnado, right?

Gee Talen, looks like you didn't get the memo. Scrappers are the new blasters, in terms of their total badness.

I guess the damage difference is bigger if you consider proc chances, which I was admittedly not doing for some reason, but in and of itself the top chain has sweep up a little less than 50% as often and subjected to double stacked blinding feint whereas the AV chain has single blinding feint and 50% bonus damage 85% of the time. Before procs, that's really not that bad.

Making a chain of TE didn't even occur to me because I find that power super freaking dorky.

Okay look mauk, I understand that coming up with a couple builds and crunching various numbers takes effort and I'm not trying to wave away your argument, but you basically showed that the brute is approximately 12% better at survival and constructed a circumstance where that 12% betterness is the difference between life and defeat. I'm not denying that it is possible for that to happen, what I am denying is that that's a common situation in actual play. You sort of give the game away when you say "and then the brute takes an orange" because what is keeping the scrapper from taking a purple or a green at some point here? If you're taking sustained 80 dps through all of your defenses and resists, you must be killing the hell out of a lot of things. Brutes aren't the only ones who get to use inspirations.

In any case, my point is not that WP is a bad set for brutes. I'm saying that WP is one of the brute sets that has the smallest advantages over the scrapper equivalent. Any set that can cap one or more resistances or has access to dull pain has a much larger advantage over the scrapper version than WP does.

If you think a few set bonuses worth of HP is a really huge deal and the brute primary's damage is enough for you, by all means make a WP brute. I prefer WP on scrappers since the HP difference is, all together now, about 12%.

New EA is mad excellent, G. It's sort of like ice armor but with better all-round protection, no damage aura and no immunity to slows. Also, instead of looking like jack frost swallowed someone whole, you look like a sneaky energy skeleton that appears only to attack. I won't be building another any time soon but that's because I like the one I've got so much. The principal advantage for an EA brute is 160 extra hitpoints at 50 and 66 extra hitpoints from overload. If you crave scrapper damage, you lose essentially nothing by going that way.

Assuming HPT fully slotted for healing, the brute's HP advantage is 210 at level 50. That's a scant advantage indeed. It also results in a 12% advantage in regeneration. Accolades and set bonuses are also about 12% better for the brute. To that I say, "Big deal." Neither gets anywhere near their AT's HP cap.

My TW/WP scrapper is actually going to have better HP than a brute who doesn't specifically focus on it just because I'm pursuing a defense set slotting strategy that nabs a few HP bonuses as well. The brute can do the same thing but nothing will change the fact that their edge is, at best, about 12%.

On a speed team most members should be able to solo cysts, so you just fan out and attack the first cyst you see that is not currently engaged. Some debuffers aren't as good at soloing them so they perhaps pair up to take em down. Mission 2 should always be the shortest mission since it has no cutscene and no waiting on NPCs.

This isn't a scientific analysis or anything but in my own experience WP's regen is necessary in almost every actual fight just to get by. Invuln is capable of filtering out so much more damage that by the time it actually starts to feel any pressure, dull pain is there to make it all go away. Dull pain's HP boost is kind of an ad hoc regen power, too.

Primary makes a really big difference for WP, though. My first one was a DM/WP scrapper and at that time I didn't have the sense to build for defense bonuses, with lame old pre-buff DM being an aggravating factor for survival. Now I'm running a relatively well defended TW/WP and all the knockdown gives me breathing room after the alpha inevitably strips away half of my HP. The character is only level 32 and doesn't even have weave yet so I fully expect it to get far stronger than it is now, but at this level my DB/Inv scrapper was softcapped to s/l with four or five targets in range and essentially never in danger.

Perhaps I'll change my tune when I've finished softcapping e/n and can plough through carnies on the settings I used for freaks and malta on my invuln, but it still seems that the overall prize goes to invuln.

The resistance levels that WP can have during SOW are permanently available on invuln and it is also capable of capping all non-psi resistance with better uptime than SOW, amusingly. Invuln has much better defense numbers than WP and softcapping the main four types with one target in range is a relative cakewalk. Dull pain's hit point boost is very significant but having a gigantor heal on demand is something WP just can't compete with. Invince is an awesome taunt aura and RTTC pretty much just gets the job done.

WP does catch up specifically in places such as trials in that fear and confuse protection can be worth their weight in gold. That doesn't change the fact that for each breakfree that the invuln would have to eat to equalize its performance, the WP is going to have to eat a luck and an orange at the minimum. Invuln is simply tougher than WP against everything but psi.

The brute can do it too, but unless the previous spawn was right there it feels like I forgot to take off my foam #1 mittens after the big game. Going through an elevator is usually enough to take some of the wind out of my sails even with build up, so fickle a mistress is fury. Three metaphors in two sentences is approximately sufficient to convey the extent to which I prefer scrappers' flat, high damage to brutes' constant flux. But don't get me wrong, the brute is fun too. I just think this combination would be better off on a scrapper.

The only advantage WP brutes get over WP scrappers is hit points. Well, okay, if you fully slot HPT, MOB, SOW and tough for resistance then when SOW is up you're looking at 82% s/l resistance which the brute can have and the scrapper cannot. This is available two fifths of the time, when it is available it's not that big a deal, and using SOW isn't always desirable in the first place since it does have a crash. Point being, the survival bonuses for brutes are pretty marginal barring the most extreme and specific conditions.

Some people don't like SJ on scrappers because critical finishers gain the base damage rather than the combo damage. A trifle, I say. For one thing, you're still getting critical hits and the finishers do high base damage in the first place. For another, consider that the scrapper can hit build up and immediately drop a spinning strike or crushing uppercut on a spawn or boss at full effectiveness. I have a SJ scrapper as well as a SJ brute and that's something I sorely miss on the brute.

You do know that as a VIP you can read the beta forums and see much of what is coming up, right? And also that there's already quite a bit of information about issue 22, even though it is currently at most in closed beta? Would it be that much better if all of this information were conveyed from developers and not from players? I'm glad they're spending a lot of their time working on the game, myself.

I don't even see how it doesn't make sense to some people to skip past the rabble and complete the objectives. Why should you kill every single armed-or-not roman in the place? All you're trying to do is free the sibyls, destroy the shadow cysts, assassinate the generals and stop Romulus. Have I ever read the mission text? Maybe I haven't! Just from the sound of those objectives you'd think they must be severely demoralizing at the least.

It is hard to relate to people who do not speed TFs. What's the point of doing them? Yeah experience is great but just by playing the game anymore you have a giant supply of experience boosters and whatnot, patrol experience, the fact that dying in this game means nothing... Leveling is easy. It isn't that speed TFs are necessarily hard, it's that they give you a goal to work towards rather than simply letting you sleepwalk your way through whatever it is you are doing. I find that the "feeling of team effort" in a ploughing TF is thoroughly explored about halfway through the first mission. You're going to start firing rain of arrows, she's going to run in and punch the meanest man in the face, he's going to stand in a corner with healing aura on autofire, et cetera.

On a speed TF, it's a race. Who among us can clear the boss room before everyone else has finished loading the mission? Who knows! It depends on your sense of direction, your rugged good looks, et cetera. The ITF is actually quite a poor example to hold up as "that stupid speedy thing," as Uberguy and others have said, since it adapts much more smoothly than most TFs to being speed-run.

Breaking empyreans down into threads is useful because it means you can run far fewer trials if the main thing you're after is the incarnate boosts for use in regular content. Trials are great and everything but I'd rather run a couple a week than a couple a day. Then again, I haven't run a trial since issue 21 because I've been too busy with all the new power sets. By the time the mood strikes, issue 22 may be upon us and the new incarnate zone may well change the way empyrean merits are regarded.

Now we're fairly far off topic but the ITF is not a good demonstration of speed content in general. Each of its missions lets you string together a series of objectives in a way that never existed in any previous content and has really only existed since on a couple of the trials. Speed TFs in general include the ITF and every other TF. Manticore, as you may recall from recently, is loaded with giant, stealthable missions that you do not fight through at all. You reach the last room and start from nothing. Brutes are not as fast in this circumstance and never will be.

That may have sounded grumpier than I intended. I'm not saying brutes are bad at speed stuff, rather that I find their drawbacks particularly obnoxious on speed stuff. If you don't, more power to you. Most of the time I just want to be able to kill that boss right now which is less a strategic concern and more a personal foible.

Yeah I'm not typically accused of being slow either, heh, though of course this being the forum one could hardly be expected to guess that. Recent WTFs have been extremely illustrative of the problem with brutes compared to scrappers as I've been able to run the same primary on the same TFs with builds of approximately the same cost. Anything where you're stealthing, the scrapper is twice as fast, straight up. I feel as though I've failed when a teammate catches up before the boss room is cleared which is bad news for my brute. On kill alls the difference is far less meaningful, but this goes back to the difference between "the majority of the time" and "virtually always."

On the other hand, I can see why people prefer brutes on farms. If you know your target caps are going to be saturated in the first place then what's the advantage for scrappers?

I used to keep a giant stockpile of phenomenal lucks on every character which I never used so they were basically pretty purple window dressing. After inventions came out I noticed that little things add up to a more impressive whole, so I tried to keep just four columns of phenoms and one to actually use.

After getting inner inspiration, I can go from an empty tray after a harrowing session to a full tray just by hitting the power whenever I log that character in for marketing purposes or whatever, so now holding onto them seems a tad silly. And hey, it lets you punch way above your weight. TF team going slow? Hit a big purple and go clear the next spawns by yourself. Oh, that didn't motivate them? Keep doing it, it will only take four or five before the mission is over!

That's the theory at least. I still tend to hoard two or three columns of big purples or oranges, as applicable, but freeing myself from the "must save all inspirations..." nag was probably one of the more significant improvements in my playing skill lately.