Siolfir

Ice is another one of the top performers, yes. I think Bio will be also, although I haven't played it nearly enough on a Stalker to claim any personal experience with it (I got bored soloing at level 10).

The Mako event was okay... I didn't enjoy it all that much personally because the mob selection was a bit limited (yay, 10-15 arachnos flyers over lusca). No badges, just yellow titles for everybody and I guess there was supposed to be an after-invasion party in Pocket D where some Dark Matter auras were handed out?

I really wouldn't know about the Pocket D stuff since about 45 mins into the event I was bored senseless and decided to log off and go read.

Forget worrying about clicks.

Water/Kin. Fulcrum Shift plus that many AoEs means lots of dead mobs, really really quickly. They won't last long enough for your Tidal Power stacks to start wearing off.

Shield Defense is available for Brutes, but really it's best on either a Tanker (higher defense numbers without as much work allowing you to focus on other things) or Scrapper (more damage, higher damage bonus from AAO on an already higher base damage).

Brutes lose out on powers that use pseudopets to do damage (like Shield Charge) due to the pet damage cap, and persistent damage buffs (like Power Siphon and AAO) provide a smaller damage increase due to Brutes having the lowest AT modifier of the melee ATs plus provide a lower percentage buff due to being somewhat drowned out by Fury. It's not that they don't get a benefit from it, but you'll notice it a lot more on the other ATs.

I'd recommend the Scrapper if all else is equal in your mind - IMO Shield just works best on them.

One of the fun parts about answering this question is that not all GMs are created equal - they actually have set levels which determine their hit points. On top of that, AVs are also not always using AV hit points.

Generally speaking a GM will have twice the regen of an AV (just due to modifiers) before taking into account the higher hit point pool to regen from, so at +4 when your powers have 48% effectiveness you could claim to be worse off against an AV... except that's overlooking the much higher hp pool. But not all AVs are equal, either - the iTrial AVs have GM-level hit points.

But for your comparison, Adamastor has always been pretty easy.

The problem with "best secondary" discussions is that they're purely subjective and we may not build or play the way you do.

I like Ninjitsu because it's got enough tools that I have an answer for almost everything, but that's if you're going to build for extra defense (to get as close to or over the soft cap as you can) and recharge (to bring back the extra tools more quickly). It manipulates the mob AI, has decent defense numbers to build on, and has a self-heal... but it can run into endurance issues, has a knockback hole in its protection that you have to plug, and other available sets are capable of being more sturdy from a raw numbers perspective.

It really all comes down to this: how often are you going to exemp below level 33?

Because once both have Fulcrum Shift, it's not really a comparison.

In my specific case, I'm likely to be skipping the whole set.

Nice powers, pretty graphics, but I can't think of any concepts I'd want to play with the set and I already burned myself once picking up Beam Rifle and never using it due to lacking concept ideas that I personally found interesting.

As far as the powers themselves - as others have said, Entangling Aura looks very skippable.

Ninjitsu (and Energy Aura, Ice Armor, and so on) is (are both) stuck by the absolutely retarded, archaic thinking that "only Super Reflexes should have slottable defense debuff resistance because it doesn't have any backup to its defense". It has some, but not much - about twice what Willpower gets, and you can double it by popping the tier 9 that you otherwise don't need until you have a cascade failure.

Of course, the same thinking didn't go into Shield, which has slottable DDR plus a stackable power that offers comprehensive mez protection, on top of having layering maxhp and resistance to go with the defense. But why would we expect consistency now?

All of that said, Ninjitsu has tools to deal with the lower DDR - Blinding Powder with a Contagious Confusion proc is essentially Seeds of Confusion on a longer recharge that adds -tohit, Caltrops messes with mob AI enough that it alone provides enough mitigation to stop a cascade failure, and Kuji-in Rin gives you a boost of both more defense to cover what you've lost plus extra DDR to keep it. I just think that if any sets get slottable DDR then they all should get it.

Not that I expect it, but if a slot is still available I can tag along. I filled in the alpha slot (finally) on two different dominators this morning.

They don't have to use wolves. They could just use kitties instead.