PleaseRecycle

Darkness mastery night fall and I believe also tenebrous tentacles use the scrapper ranged modifier. As a consequence of this, they do not do damage.

Also to vorpal's credit, while it does have a 2.5 second animation, the same as ion, it does its damage within the first half second. And unfortunately, VoodooGirl, cryonic actually merely shares vorpal's 120 foot range while having a much narrower cone. One advantage of cryonic is that the fact that it is targeted means that you can ensure you keep a specific target at the edge of its range without having to eyeball it precisely, though.

Good demo, Ideon, exactly what I was thinking of. The whole ITF is really pretty great for vorpal. Also very nice on the STF and RSF.

Ion takes a relatively long time to animate, but importantly it still can re-target NPCs that it has already struck. They've mostly fixed it so that it no longer does bonus damage to them, but this means that it can waste jumps, reducing its effective target cap. Ion also has the compelling ability to aggro as many as several more spawns than you were actually currently fighting, if there happens to be a bridge of runners for it to leap across. In target rich environments, ion is not guaranteed to hit any of the targets you want it to. I could go on.

Seems to me that the selling point of ion, aside from the fact that it is way cool, is its ease of use. All you have to do is target something that won't die in the next two and a half seconds and you're golden. The only easier judgements than that are pyronic, where it doesn't even matter if the target dies, and void which of course requires you to be in the middle of things. So actually, ion is sort of in the middle in terms of ease of use, heh. But it is easy to use and it is fun to use.

The other consideration would be secondary effect. Ion drains endurance, eh, that can be pretty good. Void is better, that damage debuff is massive. Pyronic... well it animates fast and is easy to use! The only judgement that actually seems like a comparative stinker to me is cryonic, and mainly because there is a radically better cone-based judgement out now.

Either I'm missing something or 1/3 * π * 120^3 is approximately 6.75 times greater than 4/3 * π * 40^3. You may frequently be playing on a plane but the powers are three dimensional and you can use that to your advantage. Vorpal much more so than pyronic.

But yes, the fact that judgement is buffed by musculature makes it all the sweeter.

Something that I haven't tested but after this post maybe I will is whether vorpal judgement always fires with respect to your character's perspective or to the camera's? As in, can you fire it down from above? That would in some cases make it much easier to guarantee hitting forty targets.

Radial not only hits more targets, the cone is simply ginormous. I don't think it's really much of a contest - who cares about, what is it, 20% extra damage compared to 33% extra targets and a difficult to quantify improvement in the ease of hitting those targets? The def buff is totally unnecessary for the radial version to be superior to core.

Sure, BrandX, I'm not against considering the advantages of taunt auras, cf. my first post in this thread. What I'm against is saying that they're always the number one criterion for any build. That's just not the case.

I just don't agree. You don't have to chase anything down, it all comes back eventually. Scrappers are just as well suited as brutes for ripping into a spawn in terms of hitting its initial, pre-aggro arrangement, yet they're actually much better since at that point the scrapper is doing full damage and the brute is not. Aggro aura or not, for the first few seconds of the fight everything will bunch up on you and in that period of time a DB/ELA can wipe out almost all of a spawn. The "thought" I mention is prioritization of targets. Maximizing cones, such as sweeping strike, as well as aura ticks. This is more complex if things don't always just stand next to you, but that's what makes it more interesting.

I say that not only will DB/ELA be significantly more damaging in scrapper form in most cases, it will be more engaging as well. The real tradeoff is, as you say, lower resists. I find that 75% energy resistance is plenty on a tricked out incarnate build that's already loaded up with defense and regen, and neither the scrapper nor the brute is getting anywhere near their HP cap with ELA so that isn't much of an advantage.

Not to be an ***, intentionally at least, but it kind of seems like people who place taunt aura above all else are mainly interested in easy mode. Is this character going to require thought on my part? Ugh. Pass.

Take, I don't know, DB/ELA for example. The scrapper is going to do better damage than the brute in many situations. To put it another way, the only time the brute will do damage comparable to the scrapper's is when she's the aggro focus and fury is already high from a previous spawn. That leaves off-tanking situations, warming up after a delay of any kind, heavy team damage buffs, and intermittent combat such as the Marauder fight as places where the brute will do substantially less damage. I'd call that an important factor, potentially as important as a taunt aura. Potentially more important. Certainly important enough not to dismiss /ELA out of hand on scrappers just because of that one thing.

My SJ/EA is level 41 now and is an AV soloing fiend. A future classic combination. I guess that may have something to do with my level of investment in the character. One of the things that I like most about the pairing is that dropping out of transparency into a built-up finisher is right up there in terms of satisfying things to do. Mechanically though, they play well together. Maybe it's just me but it seems like SJ uses a lot of endurance. EA can handle that (after levels 28 and 35). EA doesn't directly contribute any damage itself, so it's a good thing that SJ has deceptively strong aoe. In taunting the riff-raff that you're about to punch, EA also gives you a recharge bonus, nice for a set with a 25 second heavy hitter in it. Basically SJ is an above average new set, while new EA is an above average new set. It's hard to go wrong.

All that stuff I just said would also be true of TW/EA, right down to the build up -> kill crap out of stealth satisfaction. Just play whichever one works better for your character.

I'm trying to remember when it became totally intolerable to about 50% of posters (or at least those who produce 50% of posts) to play any meleer that doesn't have a taunt aura. It's a relatively recent development, because it used to be the case that brutes didn't exist at all and three quarters of scrapper sets lacked taunt auras. Plenty of people played scrappers back then! Indeed, in the game today there seems to be no special bias among the unwashed masses against tauntless sets. Why, then, the guaranteed hostility to the concept on the forums?

DB is quite a bit better for scrappers since it has blinding feint. The buff numbers are higher, and those higher numbers have a much larger impact since the AT mod is also higher. You're right that gloom has no place anywhere near DB's top chain*, but I suspect BF -> AV also could not be improved by adding gloom. However, brutes do have other ancillary pools available to them, though we sometimes forget.

Brutes do get 90% energy resistance but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me most of the time. Rare is the villain group that does almost exclusively energy damage. It is a nice bonus but it isn't as nice as the fact that the brute can cap all of their resists using the tier nine. That's considerable. Also, while the brute will not be doing as much damage with their damage aura (it's like 5% less when at the damage cap, big freaking deal), the main selling point for running this in brute form is that their damage aura is also a taunt aura. The scrapper aura doesn't specifically make things run, but it doesn't keep them from running either. You may or may not consider that a deal breaker.

How do you choose? Look into your heart. If there you see virtue, grace and humanity, choose scrapper. If you see the eyes of the devil staring back at you, beckoning you deeper still, you might consider brute.

*Double checking the numbers, I'm not actually sure of this. What I am sure of is that redrawing your swords once every five seconds or so would be utterly maddening.

You can get a full set of pounding slugfest for peanuts. That's better than generics or SOs. Full set of razzle dazzle? People pay you to take that from them. Far better than the other options. The salvage can be expensive if you cannot possibly wait to have it, but if you can wait just put out bids on the stuff you need for 555 influence or so and watch them fill within an hour probably, or overnight definitely, even on things like circuit boards and luck charms that can be pricey during prime time. You almost have to go out of your way to spend any significant amount of money on low level frankenslotting, the real investment is a few minutes of your time as compared to SOs where you just buy whatever you want and you're done. To me the performance advantage of IOs makes that time investment a no brainer.

The regen cap for scrappers is 3000%. You don't have to worry about hitting that unless you're rocking instant healing, regeneration aura, adrenalin boost and possibly also rebirth.

Surely the problem is that the rarity of PVP IOs makes this pain in the *** method the best way to obtain them? Make it so being on a TF doesn't keep you from automatically logging out and make PVP IOs much more common. Problem solved... ???

Just to jump right back onto this dog pile, I'd like to point out that I start IOing anywhere after level 20 and I prefer to be softcapped at level 30 by level 40. There's all kinds of ways to get through this crazy old game of ours.

I'd just like to correct Captain-Electric's erroneous endorsement by saying that if you truly care about seriously burnin' up that City of Heroes Winter Event 2011 Pocket D Ski Chalet Ski Slope, and who doesn't, the peripheral for you is a Logitech G9 laser mouse. Logitech: It's In The Game.

Yyyyyyes, which is why it would not be helpful to be softcapped before fortitude when fortitude is guaranteed to be available.

If you're going empathy, I suggest that the scrapper be something other than SR, SD, Invuln or EA. In other words, something that will definitely get the full benefit of fortitude. It's a great power because it turns any set into a defense set, so why start with a defense set?

I would actually say titan weapons is one of the sets that least needs to stress about accuracy due to the fact that if you keep defensive sweep in your build it will almost always succeed at hitting at least one thing on one side of you, building momentum. This is helped by the fact that if you have kept it, you probably want to be using it approximately once every ten seconds. If we break approximately ten seconds down into two approximately five second momentum intervals, this means that defensive sweep used only once per ten seconds will keep you regular, as it were, half of the time. That's better than Activia! It's also better than dual blades, for example, where the best combo is mostly single target and therefore very prone to breakage via miss.

I'm wondering what exactly you're trying to do. It seems fairly clear to me that you're not specifically talking about soloing spawns during the collection phase on a lambda, for example. I am guessing that your typical strategy is to be the first one to hit a spawn with the expectation that your teammates are a few seconds behind you?

Without doing actual math, as you specifically requested, it seems to me that leading with ice slick and moving into aoe damage is going to be the best option. Ice slick ticks really fast. Frostbite is, heh heh!, glacially slow compared to the other aoe that you're throwing around. Most of all, though, if you start with ice slick, fire ball, and rain of fire, you're getting all the benefit of the knockdown as well as the rapid proc chances. At that point you can work frostbite into the rotation and the chance that your playmates will already be controlled in some way is much greater. Frostbite can miss, as you well know. If that occurs when you're leading off with it you've basically been caught with your pants down. Ice slick's presence means that even once you do transition to the immobilization, a miss isn't a big deal.

The one worry I have is that seers do not suffer from the full effects of knockdown, and obviously neither do war walkers and such. Still, I can't imagine that relying on confuse alone is going to be better than confuse plus knockdown plus even more confuse a few seconds later.