PleaseRecycle

90% resistance and oodles of def is great but I don't see why you would ever take that when tier 4 radial rebirth gives you an effective... According to my calculations, four billion hitpoints. Huh, how about that.

But really, only one of them helps against untyped damage, and would you really take permanent 5% def and 5% res over permanent 200% regen on an invuln?

Brutes would absolutely get more out of barrier, but even a brute invuln would have to be some kind of maniac to take barrier and not rebirth. I think the survivability aspect is basically a wash except under unstoppable. The HP advantage isn't insignificant but at some point you have to ask just how survivable you need to be, and in my opinion an invuln of either AT is so far past any requirement you might have for that that the scrapper's damage advantage becomes all the more appealing.

To put it another way, it isn't like the invuln brute is going to be soloing Malaise and Mother Mayhem at the same time while the scrapper can't. Neither of them can do that* and, honestly, would either of them ever want to?

*I just remembered what forum I'm posting this in, I should specify that I mean brutes and scrappers that are not operated by crazy people.

Electric armor is great, but I notice a conspicuous lack of fire armor on your list there. Especially given that the three primaries you suggest don't require redraw, you should consider giving it a try. It's a somewhat squishier, much aoe-ier version of electric. Since you plan to do the incarnate thing, and presumably some IOing while you're at it, your squishiness should approach zero as your level approaches 50+3 regardless of your secondary set.

Again, elec is great, but considering what you've already played, fire is probably more different. I personally find its increased clickiness more engaging than elec's set and forget style, as well.

Assuming you don't actually want to farm, DB/Inv is a severely cool combination. My most-incarnated character at the moment is that in scrapper form. Cardiac alpha all the way both for the resistance and never having to worry about endurance, and aside from the new trials there are vanishingly few situations where you could ask for anything better survival-wise. Add destiny and interface and you're tough to even scratch, and judgement turns this relatively low aoe combo into a real stuff smasher.

BF->AV is definitely the way to go, as permaing DP will get you that chain easily as well. This also means you can skip hasten, which is nice. I didn't bother softcapping anything but s/l with a single target in range and it has never been much of an issue. Especially for a brute, if anything were giving you trouble, unstop cures what ails ya.

So yeah, give it a shot I say. Two great tastes that taste great together.

When you put it as reroll vs respec, though, bear in mind that DB/Inv is never going to do as much aoe damage as DB/Dark. They're good at different things.

I can see why people spurn the humble self-rez, after all the ignobility of defeat is basically the only feedback you get in this game for making an error, short of costing your team a trial victory. Still, said trials are one of the reasons why I would recommend finding a way to fit the rez in there. I can assure you that you will find ways to die on BAFs and Lambdas and hitting the hospital seems a lot more agonizing when Siege is at 1% and Nightstar just went back up to 6%. Personally I don't bring awakens on trials (or other high level tfs for that matter) and converting three tier 3 inspirations into one is not only annoying but relatively time consuming compared to just hitting revive and being good to go immediately.

KM is similar to claws in that both offer high-uptime damage buffs, moderate mitigation by way of knockdown, knockback, -damage and/or stuns, and relatively balanced levels of single target and aoe damage compared to some sets. Both also do their best aoe damage in spherical pbaoe form, my favorite kind on a scrapper. They differ substantially in that claws does much better aoe than KM and KM does perhaps not quite as much better single target than claws, as well as claws requiring redraw and KM not.

In my opinion most of these traits add up to making both of these sets ideal pairs with resist-based secondaries. The damage buffing is a major boon to damage auras, and the mitigation is useful even after you've ioed yourself into some s/l defense. This is going out on a limb, but if you can bear with me for a moment, both sets also perform admirably in situations where you'd find your target cap saturated with minions and lieutenants for extended periods. Who knows if they'll ever add anything like that to the game though, right?

I have a 50 claws/elec and a 50 km/fire. I went elec with claws because it rarely requires redraw and in my opinion benefits from claws' strong mitigation in shockwave. Fire and km work well together because fire has all kinds of amusing toys that you want to be firing off frequently and healing flames is a superior enough heal that you don't need a reliable mass knockback as badly. Fire also supplements km's aoe damage greatly whereas between spin and spin, elec would be hard pressed to do more than it already does via damage aura. I imagine both primaries would pair about equally well with dark, which is to say just fine once you have your tier 4 cardiac.

Both would also be fine with other secondaries of course. You can't do claws/shield and km/shield looks even dorkier than km/other things so I would steer clear of that. KM is easily better than claws when paired with regen unless you just adore redraw. WP and invuln are very claws-friendly, SR has more redraw than you'd expect unless you specifically avoid enhancing practiced brawler for recharge at 50 and carefully avoid firing it too often so I would imagine that it could be a good fit for km.

Both sets are cool, I'd say make one of each, heh.

Interestingly, of the sets brutes and scrappers share directly, the only one where brutes arguably come out on top would be fire melee. The same fire melee that is popularly known for its great single target damage and fairly garbage aoe. Whether that counts as a feather depends on your cap's existing plumage.

Every other shared set either relies on permanent BU-level buffs, favoring the scrapper, or pseudopets, favoring the scrapper. I would argue that even claws' damage buff for brutes isn't incredibly impressive because spin, its most damaging power, suffers a nearly five second recharge penalty in comparison to the scrapper version.

Overall, then, there are some edge case brutes that do passable damage, but the real bonus they get is in being surly chunks of beef that generate tanker style aggro without the drawback of being as fearsome as a soggy baby. Therefore, your choices of damage level are the following: of the three melee ATs, you can opt for The Full Scrappy, The Close-If-You-Squint Brute, or The Saddest Tanker. That fully describes all melee AT options available to you, you're welcome.

Yeah when I said twice per fight, I meant twice per fight against those specific, arc-exclusive groups of nothing but fakes, the knockbackiest knockers-back in the KB Kingdom. Ordinarily with one -KB I would say I average less than .1 knockbacks per mission, possibly a lot less.

I could definitely see going cardiac instead of spiritual but I think the resistance buff it provides will be a lot less pronounced for a scrapper. Not to say it won't help, but I think spiritual's boosts to healing flames, burn and fiery embrace (and your primary, and hasten, et cetera) are significantly larger boons to the scrapper's survival. What would make me consider cardiac is that the build I posted above uses 1.55 eps just for toggles, throwing in attacks drains the ol' blue bar muy rapido. In normal play this means nothing since consume is up whenever you want it for a full refill, however if you were specifically interested in soloing hard targets, the loss of spiritual's recharge would almost certainly be worth guaranteed endurance sustainability.

Solo, I consider carnies and arachnos to simply not be worth the effort. The former due to my lack of protection against their debuffs and the bosses' primary damage type, and the latter due to their autohit colossal defense debuffs. Again it's probably easier to make up the difference here on a fire tank than on a fire scrapper, I suspect. With determination and insps, or a second build as GP says, even those groups are plenty doable but I look at it more as a case of playing to my character's strengths rather than trying to make him just as good against everything. For one thing I don't really want to spend an additional eight billion on a build with psi coverage

I don't use mids so this will be terribly quaint but here: http://i.imgur.com/hxM13.jpg is my KM/Fire's build as of yesterday, at level 48. I believe most of it is self explanatory, but: that's the steadfast res/def in temp protection, I only run a single karma -kb*. Burst is getting an extra slot and five armageddons at 50. Hasten is coming in at 49 and getting two slots at 50. No kinetic combat KDs except in boxing which is not used, and the single target attacks are slotted with supplemental acc/dam/end/rech except concentrated strike, which only needs dam/end/rech.

The upshot is that I hit the softcap at level 47 and currently have 40% global recharge, which will be 50 at 50. Spiritual alpha of course. The only time he's felt weak so far was on an ITF I ran last night, and only until it became clear that for a softcapped fire scrapper, aoe hit and run is the name of the game in ancient rome. After that, smooth sailing. I felt good about that performance since I was at an effective level of 49, as opposed to 51.

Question for you: How many aoes do you feel that you really need? I had planned to take an epic pool but it is now apparent that burn, blazing aura and burst will by themselves out-aoe any scrapper I've ever built before, with the added advantage of being there when I exemplar down to midbie TFs. Relevant in these WTF-ey times, no?

I don't recall what they are, but I do recall that what used to be the best fire melee single target chains (best at moderate global rech, best at high global rech) required three or maybe four powers each. I bring this up to cast further doubt on taking the fire epic - unless you simply love it, I don't see why you need fire blast.

As for Syntax's warning about accuracy against +4s, I have to wonder when that could be relevant. If you're running a farm, you're swimming in yellows. If you're running a TF or incarnate trial, you're swaddled in teammates. If you're soloing maria's arc to flex your scrapperly might, shouldn't you be running on 1x8 with AVs instead of 4x8?

To summarize then, I think a heavy focus on the s/l softcap with a secondary focus on recharge, since you make up so much of it with hasten and spiritual, can turn any fire scrapper into a heck of a tough cookie regardless of primary.

*Say what you will about KB, but I ran the gaussian RWZ arc at around level 45. Wasn't softcapped yet, and it was on x6. That means two missions containing groups consisting of nothing but six fakes at once. I think I got knocked down twice per fight, and it didn't do them much good.

No clue unfortunately, and my dude isn't level 50 yet so even if I had the inclination to test it wouldn't work so well right now.

Assuming you mean fiery embrace there, it does indeed boost scrapper burn. Power siphon certainly does also so if you meant soul drain, I don't see why that wouldn't.

Well assuming nobody objects to Kyria's numbers from the previous page, saturated soul drain and full fury considered the scrapper is doing 11% more damage. This is on smite, which does not have an elevated crit rate, though even if she was factoring in a 10% rate, we can clearly see that 11% is more than 10%. At the very least, burn and blazing aura should break even for the scrapper, yes?

Since burn's initial tick only hits five targets, I see no reason to assume that its continued damage can apply to more than five targets at once at any given instant. If you have more than five targets within its range it will certainly hit more than five of them, but not, I suspect, at the same server tick. Therefore, without some evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that the solution to the problem of the scrapper's targets running around in fear is to simply ensure that there are enough targets mad at you at any given time that burn will always have five targets within its radius, even if they may be different ones in the process of entering and exiting the patch.

In my experience with my own KM/Fire scrapper, which I created specifically because power siphon, like soul drain, is such a huge boon to scrappers, siphoned burn tends to not only kill minions before they can flee (with blazing aura) but often also lieutenants, particularly in the ever amusing combo of burn + burst. With soul drain slotted for damage I imagine you'd typically clear a spawn with just those two powers.

I don't actually know how much damage scrapper burn does exactly, as the game does not say and I don't use mids, but clearly the answer is at least "plenty!" In any case, how could saturated soul drain possibly not cause its damage to exceed a full fury burn?

If that's what he meant then presumably he would advocate slotting two SOs worth of accuracy in virtually every attack. This seems bizarre to me, so I assumed he figured auras had some sort of penalty. Either way, you don't need that much accuracy in anything, heh.

Kractis: Burn has one chance to proc, when you first drop it. So, if you drop burn more frequently than once every ten seconds, it is the better place to slot the procs. Course, the aura has a higher target cap. I guess it depends on what sort of farm you're running!

And you don't think that a 50% heal every 15 seconds, a shield charge-level aoe (with a smaller radius, sure) every 10 seconds, and a uniquely amazing proc-boost power every 50 seconds qualify as "something?"

Uhhh, do you realize I was suggesting crafting a grand total of three envenomed dagger recipes? You don't get one dagger per recipe, you get thirty.

If you have the portable workbench you can theoretically throw 90 envenomed daggers at a gm, one every ten seconds for fifteen minutes. I should think that this would be plenty to take out most GMs, provided you can also survive their attacks for the same period. Pretty pricey barrier for entry however.

Looks largely fine, but a couple of things stand out. If you have to choose between empty clips and bullet rain, bullet rain is the one to take. A much superior power. Also, the presence pool? Don't get me wrong, you have room to take some fluff powers and it's not like having them will actively hamper you, but if I were gonna take a fourth pool to leave unslotted, it would surely be medicine. Also consider moving GSFC into tactics and slotting BU with just recharges, not that I've run the numbers but I don't think it's going to benefit from end redux nearly as much as an expensive toggle.

I'd also move CJ up to the early levels and put an additional slot into hurdle by SO time. The bouncy lunatic playstyle is rewarded on any blaster, including DP.

I can see the appeal, in a way, of slotting 50 ios, but I usually start inventing at around level 20 to frankenslot and then begin replacing them with what I plan to keep by 27, if not 25. These days at level 20 if you start in Praetoria, or earlier than that if you don't, you can start making serious money. Praetoria wins for me because I'd rather enjoy the fantastic missions there than begin the relentless optimization a few levels earlier.

In my opinion there are few sets in the game where the optimal level to have them is not 32. 29-31 are fine because they're very similar in terms of values, and of course with purples and such you're waiting until 50 anyway. 32, though, lets you exemplar for virtually anything you'd care to heroside other than psyche and new posi. Synapse is terrible, as are many of the old lowbie arcs, while the great new midbie arcs let you exemplar to level 29, keeping all of your level 32 set bonuses.

Grey Pilgrim, of course, points out the biggest benefit of this slotting strategy: you get to actually use your best stuff vastly earlier in your character's life. By the mid 30s it is very plausible to have, I would estimate based on my own experience, about 60% of the defense bonuses that you're planning to have at 50. This certainly leaves you room for improvement, but it's nothing to sneeze at compared to playing through the mid levels as though inventions weren't there to be used.

If the difference between level 30 thunderstrikes, i.e. 97% damage enhancement, way beyond necessary accuracy enhancement since you get so much from set bonuses (including thunderstrike itself), 58% end reduction and 58% recharge really bothers you when compared to level 50 thunderstrikes, i.e. 99.5% damage enhancement, the same accuracy, 67% end reduction and 67% recharge, well, thunderstrikes cost almost nothing at level 50, so you can always just replace them, right? Me, I don't even notice the difference and appreciate keeping most of my defense when I do exemp.

One way that anyone can make easy money is to do moralities for hero merits and, if you don't want to roll them, just save up two to trade in for a lotg global recharge. Selling just one of those crafted will by itself pay for two or three sets of thunderstrike and red fortune, and maybe a set of posi's blast while you're at it if you shop carefully. Do that once and your build is halfway completed. Do it twice and there are your lockdowns, or whatever else you'd like to go with. Even if you don't have a lot of prime time play time, soloing tips on -1x1 gives merits just the same as doing them on 4x8, and everything in between.

I skipped melee attacks on my blaster but if I were going to take just one, it would be energy punch. Better DPA than both bone smasher and total focus, and with such a short animation time you can use it with relatively little risk, even on those big slicy tanks. Oh, and when you're on a big team, don't be shy about literally hiding behind meleers when someone is trying to give you an unwanted hug, as their taunt and damage auras will often peel enemies off of you.

Since my blaster is dp/em, as opposed to mm which simply begs to be slotted with coercive persuasion, I stopped at 35% ranged defense rather than softcapping it. I forget how much global rech I have, maybe 60ish%? But that and hasten are plenty. It's one of the cheapest builds I've done in ages, mostly using thunderstrike, posi's blast, lockdown, and red fortune with a few lotgs for flavor. Barring the lotgs, all of that is pretty affordable if upper-30s sets are acceptable to you. I try to shoot for low 30s but that tends to be more pricey.

35% ranged defense is nice because as you can see, it puts you any sized purple away from softcapped defense. If you're soloing on x3 or higher, you should be getting quite a few inspirations, which tends to keep you cruising safely at a good clip, even against things like malta. I don't usually even carry breakfrees unless a particular EB is vexing me or something.

Backing up the defense I've also got aid self, great for reducing downtime after fights even if you don't feel comfortable using it in the midst of everything, as well as fire mastery. Why fire mastery? The following reasons: rise of the phoenix is the best self rez in the game (and they gave it to blasters!), fire shield isn't on my tray but it allows me to slot a steadfast res/def without having tough, bonfire ensures that you don't have to worry about having any melee defense, and char takes a set of lockdown and stacks with suppressive fire to take out a boss or two lieuts with neither fuss nor muss.

Believe me, I get annoyed pretty fast if I'm being chain-held to death or whatever, but between all of these tools the result is some very safe and very quick blasting. It's a long road to level 47 and the self rez, but once you get there the last feelings of vulnerability you may have had melt away in the searing flames of joy. This is hardly the only way to make a blaster a good soloist but it works for me!

An added bonus of the dark epic is access to soul transfer, a power I have found indispensable. Maybe in a perfect world having loads of -tohit means you and your team will never get into any trouble, but I still find ways to get Ked resoundingly O. Soul transfer in combination with howling twilight (and vengeance to taste) means there's really no such thing as a team wipe, though, just a collective power nap.