PleaseRecycle

ITF soloing is an unusual way to measure a build partly because that mainly comes down to player skill and tenacity on the last mission. If you know how to pull Rom without his friends you don't really need an especially fancy build at all, you only have to overcome an av's regen four times: a trifle for fire/mm. By tenacity I mean that if I got to Rom and botched the single pull I'd probably just declare the thing a loss and get on with my life, yet it does remain quite winnable with redoubled effort and shiny incarnate powers.

At any rate, the build seems fine. I would take two of the slots out of stamina, slotting the remaining two with generic end mods, and put one slot each into weave and maneuvers. Something tells me that if all you did was slot generic end reducers in those you'd come out better right there, but def/ends of some sort would get them a bit closer to being ed capped and maybe you could lose a bonus somewhere if you were so inclined. Even if this didn't by itself improve your endurance situation, the point is that as a mental blaster you have access to the best endurance recovery tool available to blasters and shouldn't be shy about using it. In fact, I hope you're extremely comfy with drain psyche, because if you're planning to solo TFs you're going to be getting a heck of a lot of mileage out of it.

What I didn't say and could have said was that I consider permahasten levels of recharge to substantially infringe on the defense you can get out of a build on a scrapper. Every purple set you slot is a set of kinetic combat or obliteration that you can't. Permahasten takes what, 100% global recharge? That's a hell of an investment, slotwise. This is particularly problematic if you aren't trying to bring down the recharge of any especially long powers, since as you are no doubt aware, recharge has returns that diminish by half for every additional 100% of it that you have.

Complicating the situation are, as you noted, incarnate powers. Spiritual core paragon is worth five lotg globals all by itself, and then some. If this is what you use to push from 70% global recharge to permahasten, you aren't just running into diminishing returns on power siphon, concentrated strike, and energize, you're also missing your chance to massively boost your damage with musculature. At 70% global rech, you're still using a ton of slots primarily on recharge with good enhancement values and a couple slightly improved procs occurring incidentally. Most of your powers get no benefit from recharge, beyond 50% global or so, at all.

To get these bonuses you're giving up defense bonuses of whatever type you'd care for. Purples give no defense to speak of, likewise posis, likewise stupefys, et cetera. This point is uncontroversial.

The other reason recharge is less important lately is that incarnate powers ignore it completely. You want good healing? Forget perma energize, get you some rebirth. Tier 4 radial is permanent, is better than energize full time, and has you effectively immortal one quarter of the time. Were you interested in energize for the endurance boost? Mayhap I could interest Sir in ageless? Not only does this give you infinite endurance, it also gives you either massive debuff protection or, heh, massive recharge. The only incarnate powers that give you defense are nerve and barrier. Nerve... yeah. Barrier is great, but it isn't as great as rebirth, and you can make up what barrier provides so much easier than you can make up what rebirth provides.

What material advantage does km/elec get from permahasten at this point? The optimal KM chain doesn't really take that much recharge, especially with spiritual. Lacking mids, is the point of those builds to take musculature instead? On an elec, I'd probably go with rebirth, so perma energize also seems a bit outmoded. This wouldn't be the first time I've missed the obvious point, but I still don't see why this combo needs that much recharge.

A set of ragnarok and a glad armor global? That looks more like a nine billion inf build if you were selling all of those things at their max level. In my opinion it's more fun to consider a build in terms of what you'd get for it than what you paid since that is more likely to make you feel like a clever coupon clipper.

Sometimes it feels like I've eaten a discarded cake labelled "Smash!" and been transported to a hallucinogenic world where only I can see that scrappers do more damage than brutes. In the case of claws, it appears fairly egregious. Brute claws seems like it might do more single target damage in high recharge scenarios. For it to remotely compete with spin on a nine second timer, you're going to have to be at the recharge cap. Or use eviscerate as filler, I guess, but I'd rather "focus," hehe, on doing double stacked followup spins.

I admit I've literally never made a single spreadsheet about this game. If nothing else though, you're applying that many more oblit or armageddon and reactive procs, which surely must count for something.

In reply to the original question, clearly scrapper and I'd certainly pair it with a less clicky set, such as invulnerability in the case of my own kickass DB scrapper, or if I wanted a damage aura, then certainly elec.

I'm not sure what measure you need to be using to say elec is in the top three clickiest sets. It seems quite clearly to be the fourth clickiest - with the same amount of recharge, dark armor will have dark regen up more than energize and power sink combined, thus in the bizarre fantasy world where you are required to click a secondary power as soon as it's up, dark as well as regen and fire are clickier than elec. In actual gameplay, of course, you are never forced to click a secondary power. You may well want to if you need to, but under those circumstances elec looks a good deal better.

Power sink is rarely necessary if you've built in a somewhat sane manner, especially as DB is not particularly endurance heavy compared to a lot of the brute primaries you could pair with elec. Energize: why would you click this every time it's up? If you're having endurance issues, by all means use power sink and go for a complete refill when you're quite low. This should happen every other spawn at worst. If it's for the regen, well, again look at dark, regen, or fire. Under similar damage pressure they'll be hitting their heals far more often than elec even can, much less would need to.

I don't buy the argument that you need to use power sink every time it's up as a defensive measure unless your build is truly wonky. In my own extensive experience with elec, it is more fire and forget than SR or shield, with their constant mez reupping. Then again, I build for defense, ymmv.

Priority #1: Theft of Essence chance for +endurance in dark regeneration. Put out a reasonable bid today and by the time you need it you'll have it.

Melee defense is all right, yes. An advantage of s/l for something like dark is that it keeps protecting you if, for example, you need to excuse yourself briefly after taking an alpha, healing, and discovering that there was more alpha where the first one came from. Melee defense won't filter out as many incoming bullets, boulders and blasts. If nothing else, you can use smashing haymakers instead of kinetic combats. Half the bonus, a lot less than half the price. On the other hand, kinetic combats aren't that expensive if you're willing to lose just one or two percentage points of enhancement value and buy em in the high twenties rather than thirty to thirty-fives. Losing any enhancing piece in favor of the proc also slashes the cost but of course has an impact on efficiency.

I wouldn't make a anything/dark armor without putting the miracle and numina's procs into health, but then I take those on basically everyone anymore. Numina's procs are fairly affordable now but the miracle proc is one you'll probably want to obtain via alignment merits, rolled or bought.

If you don't mind forgoing a few merits, the fastest way to get your alpha slotted is surely to run the TFs that give incarnate components. Some of then, such as Kahn and speed LG, aren't all that great for shards, but if you need the Hero 1 DNA sample or dimensional keystone, that's four shards right there. Then you have your ITF and STF which are highly likely to drop shards in addition to the component. Lady Grey also produces vanguard merits, which you can convert into G'rai matter. If you're careful to chase the TFs that give you exactly what you need, you should be able to get to tier 3 in a week or less without any sort of grindy play.

I'd specifically recommend not doing trials to get your alpha boost as that simply adds even more trials to the pile that you'll already need to do to get your further incarnate abilities.

Not sure I agree with that, Desmodos. Even back in the day running TFs was lucrative but now with the WTF they could hardly make generating pool Ds any easier. They practically hang a big bullseye over one TF a week, so far selected for variety and avoiding the terrible ones, and yell "Hey, fastest players on the server! Here's something you're probably going to want to do at least half a dozen times this week because the reward for time invested is insane!" In my experience this usually results in pick up teams with at least a few lowbies on em and they typically level at least once from the colossal bonus at the end, while also earning a minimum of iirc 40 merits so far.

Farming, for me, is the thing to do when nobody else is on and tips don't sound exciting and there's no clerical work to take care of in the form of working on an accolade power. In spite of that, every character I complete lately seems to be about two billion more expensive than the last because what else is there to do with all the money you get?

When I want to read up on a set I'm totally unfamiliar with I just go through the forums of the ATs with access to it and see what people say in any build thread that mentions it. More often than not those threads contain more detailed analysis than simply the builds themselves. KM has recently been discussed quite a bit in the scrapper and stalker forums, a little less with tankers and the brutes don't seem very interested in it. But there is plenty of reading material available!

The good things about resilience: You can slot a steadfast in its default slot and leave it at that. It's half as good as tough but it doesn't cost any endurance so I guess in the long term it probably has some minor positive effect on your survivability. The disorient aspect seems to be designed to make low tier awakens more useful to you, a powerful boon to a set that already comes with a power that's effectively a tier 4 awaken. Does it seem like I'm reaching here? Resilience isn't that good. I'd still take it just for the easy res/def slotting unless I had a desperate premium on power choices for some highly specific build I was working on. Since inherent fitness, that has yet to occur.

The only reason to take combustion instead of neutron bomb is if you prefer the animation or desperately need a pbaoe set instead of another posi's blast. NB does better dpa than combustion, it animates in slightly more than half the time, and they have the same radius. Combustion is more endurance efficient yet it also takes over ten seconds from the initial activation to do its damage.

Neutron bomb is a conventional taoe that can be just as easily used as a pbaoe by firing it off in conjunction with your other pbaoes. Combustion is some perverse version of hail of bullets that does a third as much damage over twice as much time and doesn't give you any defense during its horse tranquilizer of an animation.

I agree that hasten and build up don't necessarily need to already be ed capped if you're going for spiritual anyway, especially since that'll have build up many seconds before hail of bullets and the way I see it those two powers are meant to be used together every single time. On the other hand, an extra second and change on bullet rain might make a more significant difference since it is tied for your best aoe with hail. Depends on your priorities of course.

Dropping one of those melee attacks would be practical, I think a power pick and five slots is a high price to pay for even 3.75% ranged defense if you aren't going to use the power very often, but the last one I would drop is energy punch as it does the best dpa in the set. Great for quickly punishing a lieutenant for straying too close before hopping away again, if you're into that sort of thing.

Oh, and I too only have conserve power one slotted and even with hasten quite far from perma it's up every time I get around one third endurance left in long AV fights, you probably don't have to worry about that.

Are you planning to run tough? If so, replace the res/rech with the res/end/rech. If not, stick the steadfast res/def into it and save slots in both tough and temp invuln.

That boxing slotting is a little weird. Do you really want to spend four slots just on a 6.25% bonus? Presumably you don't plan to actually use boxing as it is inferior to any energy manipulation attack.

The original plan of taking boost range makes much more sense to me than the suggestion of switching it for power boost. Power boost is frankly not very useful with DP/EM, especially if you aren't taking an epic hold and you aren't taking suppressive fire.

Speaking of, why aren't you taking suppressive fire? Or piercing rounds? You can live without them, sure, but they're among the more unique tricks that DP has access to, might as well work em in right? Hell, you can stick those stupefies into suppressive fire if you wanted to. Or, you could slot six lockdowns. Piercing rounds takes a set of posi's, of course. Good powers that can go well with this build, if you ask me.

That's a lot of nits picked, but I think your build looked pretty solid to begin with. Just some alternate ideas to consider.

Fire armor is the best melee secondary for the purpose of farming, which should be all you need to know regarding its popularity. It's also good for other things but that's why half the threads in the brute forum are about fire armor builds.

As far as dps in a vacuum, well, do you mean aoe or single target? What circumstances are you trying to do this damage under? Fire is also good at facilitating single target damage but shield, for instance, is I believe still considered far superior to it for that as it tends to make you much sturdier against a wider variety of enemies while you apply that damage. No set is "best at dps" in all situations. Every set can do something that fire armor can't do in one way or another.

The short and long answers are both "no." Pistols is the only attack in DP that doesn't gain a significant chunk of damage from incendiary rounds, instead simply becoming 30% fire. Dual wield, in contrast, turns 30% of its base damage to fire and gains nearly an additional 30% overall damage on top of that.

Oops, slightly misread the question. Yeah, pistols is the worst of the single target attacks for defenders since unlike blasters they don't get the bonus of being able to fire it while mezzed.

Hands down the most pleasant PvP IO purchasing experience I've had. Also, the only PvP IO purchasing experience I've had. I can vouch for LaDiva!

Would you say that there's a difference in chance of AI panic between doing 50% of their life with an aura and 50% of their life in one hit? I think there may be, but mainly in that if you're attacking the enemy actively, it will be dead soon and thus will not get a chance to flee. If you're focusing on a boss while your aura whittles away at the minions around you, they clearly will get a chance to act on their desire to flee. Again, I wasn't saying that damage auras never cause anything to flee, but I don't see how you can say they are more prone to it, hitpoint for hitpoint, than anything else except as is related to player behavior.

Keep in mind also that if you do have enemies running away from you, you should in theory be finding new ones to replace the ones you've just caused to die. The runners will return to you as long as you maintain any amount of aggro with them. I can understand the mildly obsessive desire to leave nothing standing in thy wake, but it isn't that hard to maintain contact with the remnants of the last spawn while engaging the next. Even if you were to move so fast that you outran some stragglers, the damage the aura is putting out will more than pay for the loss in drops from a couple guys left unslain.

Oh and as for the "if they miss you so many times they run" thing, all I can say is I notice way more running when I hit a bunch of purples on a character who normally lacks defense! It's true though that thinking of my SR scrappers, they don't seem particularly worse than others for it. It is certainly conceivable that having defense and causing things to be strewn about merely have a common cause in my experience.

Eegh... Do you like to pvp? I hear stalker regen is okay for that. Otherwise, do not select regen, go directly to nin.

At this point, yeah, make it a stalker. You don't have to use ninjitsu but it's a good idea to use a defense secondary and ninjitsu is really cool.

All this talk has got me in a strange mood. I didn't realize I'd be making a stalker today.

Not to rain on the parade but I'm going to say that power siphon for scrappers is technically better than build up for stalkers unless you just hate the mechanic. However, among melee sets that were given the stalker treatment, kinetic melee arguably got the best deals of any of them. You not only get to keep your pbaoe but it always crits from hide, concentrated strike's crit instantly recharges build up, including its guaranteed hidden crit, and the set is just generally good for stalkers with its varied mitigation and split damage types. You can't go wrong with it on scrappers, or indeed brutes, but if you were thinking of playing a stalker you might as well make it KM.

It's kind of funny to make two characters with a specific trial in mind for each when you could probably just make one character who is quite good at both, but then again what is the point of CoH if not to produce alts?

On lambda I find that two tactics are effective: either go for all out survivability so you can run roughshod through the joint's corridors blowing up the objectives by yourself only to triumphantly kick the main doors down, pick them up, and slam them across Marauder's lumpy face like a turgid pillar of heroic... sorry, where was I? You can either do that, or you can go for more of a aoe/ranged damage approach. That way you smash the spawns outside and during the collection phase you can use stealth to shoot the glowies from a distance. The spawns surrounding them will ignore you except for the special sybils, who you will need to teach a lesson to periodically. Both fine choices.

For BAF I almost always feel more useful if I have strong aoes. Anyone can pound on AVs, which is what most of the trial is about, but the prisoner phase goes off without a hitch if just a couple people are capable of totally locking down a set of doors by themselves. My DP blaster and fire armor scrapper really shine here - most of the time the minions don't even spawn properly before they're dead, and the lieuts don't get far.

So, that said, it seems to me that the answer to the trials, much like the answer to everything else, is "blasters or scrappers."

I'm not sure if it's always guaranteed that they'll flee after exactly three whiffs, but if that isn't exactly the rule it's a workable rule of thumb. Enemies get discouraged by a number of things - allied deaths, recharge debuffs keeping them from attacking, patch powers, and being unable to hit you among others. I'm not sure how much influence any one of these factors has, or how big of a difference in AI behavior there is between villain groups. That's certainly a large part of it; the clockwork never drop aggro but seem quicker to enter escape behavior, for instance. Mook hitmen are tuned to flee after doing virtually anything. My only exposure to this is from playing the game, not rooting around in files, so unfortunately I must admit that I can't offer much more accuracy than this.

In any case you're definitely right that enemies do eventually flee from damage aura scrappers in the course of a fight, but it isn't exactly due to the aura itself which is basically just a normal attack.

I don't really build characters in advance, opting instead to wing it as I go along, but here are some general pointers that will help you according to my own demented opinion: It's okay while leveling up, but eventually you want to not have thunder kick in your build. Eagle's claw is similar for damage but better since it stuns more reliably and has the critical chance boost. Take either cobra strike or crane kick, but not both. You can put together a better chain by trying to maximize your usage of storm kick and crippling axe kick.

I like taking everything in dark armor except for cloak of fear - yeah, by some standards it's better than oppressive gloom, but OG's advantage is that it either works great with one slot, or you can stick a purple set into it. This is fairly expensive but if you buy only one IO for this character, you MUST get the theft of essence chance for +endurance and put it into dark regeneration. If going from SOs to frankenslotted IOs is a 200% improvement to the power of the character, just getting that one IO is at least 100%, and it's just one thing.

Er, no? The only way scrapper damage auras cause things to run is by killing them. They have absolutely no other fear effect whatsoever. This is incredibly easy to test for yourself and I suggest you do so. For example, jump into a spawn and do nothing but leave your damage aura on. The first enemies to run will do so after one of their number dies, or if your defense prevents them from hitting you three times in a row.

I wouldn't say damage auras cause things to run. Burn does and it's in the same set as a damage aura but I've never noticed increased incidence of flight on my elecs and darks as compared to my other non-taunt aura meleers. It's still true that the brute will grab attention better, but scrapper damage auras don't make things run.

Without running the numbers, my intuition is that scrapper claws/elec will do better aoe than brute claws/elec for two reasons. The first is that followup is a much more pronounced buff on scrappers, boosting spin of course but also the aura. The second is that scrapper spin has a much shorter recharge than brute spin - less damage, in terms of base values, but good luck chaining followup -> spin -> focus on a brute while still achieving substantial s/l defense.

I'm sure the brute would still be great but if you're not doing the most damage, it just isn't the same...

Regarding their toughness in terms of scrappers, elec is "differently durable" than super reflexes. Their defenses work in utterly different ways, thus they do well in different situations. With elec, arachnos and their autohit defense debuffs are quite obnoxious, while carnies are no more threatening than council or nems. SR would perhaps be tougher in the greater number of highbie situations but then again it doesn't get a damage aura or an end recovery power.