Sailboat

Is this a character you've played a lot and are just setting up the final build for? Or is this more theoretical?

Update from Washington, DC:

I'm on the 8th floor and there was a very slight lifting and fluttering feeling -- I instantly thought "big fire on the floors below me" -- and then a few seconds of shuddering vibration -- followed by a few seconds of sway as the building itself swayed a bit. The combination of a big adrenaline dump into my bloodstream and the side-to-side motion had my knees feeling like lead for a few minutes.

The USGS says it was a 5.9 Richter, and a VII on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. VII described thusly:

I keenly feel the lack of AoE on Dark Melee Scrappers and in the case of /Shield, Shield Charge only partly offsets it.

Everything else about the set is gangbusters, though -- if it had better AoE it would be grossly overpowered. It may feel a bit laborious leveling up, since you'll often be punching things one at a time...but when you get your first Soul Drain off in a crowd, paired with Against All Odds, you'll see what the fuss is about.

Don't neglect to slot Siphon Life like an attack -- acc, damage and recharge. It's an okay self-heal but a fantastic, hard-hitting attack.

My own fiery angel is a Fire/Fire/Pyre Tanker. No shield, but a flaming sword. Healing Flames recolored white as purifying holy fire.

Also, Burn represents the ability to smite the ground so that it bursts into flames.

If you're not increasing the spawn sizes with the difficulty setting, a Rad/Rad shouldn't be defeated TOO often once you've got SOs for the toggle debuffs. Accelerate Metabolism provides some small amount of help by shortening mezz, and the self heal should let you get away with carrying more breakfrees than I usually do on my characters, since you won't need as many greens.

That said...the following is opinion, leavened by some experience playing and reading:

Dual Blades, Martial Arts, and Katana are the prettiest primaries, in roughly that order.

Spines, Claws, Electric, and high-level Dual Blades are the best AoE, followed not far behind by both sword sets...and with a special mention of Fire, which has only one AoE but it's the hardest-hitting, and half the damage is a good damage type to boot.

Dark Melee, the sword sets, and Martial Arts give the most mitigation (so far -- the eventual introduction of War Mace and Battle Axe will give Scrappers new mitigation-heavy primaries).

Dark Melee, Martial Arts, and Fire are the main sets people think of as single-target. All three are hard-hitting. The sword sets also do well here -- each ends with two essentially single-target heavy hitters, and Broadsword has a third very hard-hitting ST attack in Hack, which is matched by Katana's substantially smaller but blazingly fast Gambler's Cut. Spines and Electric Melee are actually not especially good at single-target, probably as a concession for being so good at AoE.

I'll let someone else tackle the secondaries.

My Granite Tanker was soloing Rikti Bombs today with Granite and Rooted running. That's a LOT knockback protection (20 points) AND Knockback resistance:

The Damage Received channel in the combat spam seems awfully close in color to the Damage Inflicted, General Combat and Combat Warnings channels. One's orange, one's slightly pinker orange, one's orange with brighter highkights and one's red-orange.

I'd like to advocate re-coloring these channels a bit, since they're often used together in a "Combat" tab, and it's particularly hard separating damage inflicted and received out of the flow of information.

• Does this bother you at all, or is this too minor to complain about?
• Should I treat this as a bug or a change, i.e., the Bug forum or the Suggestion forum?
• Has it always been this way? I vaguely recall Damage Received being a bolder red, but that could be my imagination.

Eh, Dechs is right -- it's not hard making Willpower strong to everything.