Werner

Likewise. I vendor everything but rares these days. It's just not worth the time to find the one or two things out of your entire full bag-o-salvage that the market is actually buying. Vendor and get back to playing.

Well, I was personally just talking about my character and my experience. Specifically, I'm very happy with where my build has ended up in I20. You're not. My satisfaction with my build shoudn't imply somehow that you should be satisfied with your build when you're aware of a performance gap between it and similar characters like your Willpower Brute.

Reskimming the thread now. OK, summarizing how I read it, it seems like most of us don't feel like reaching the new soft cap is a good use of our resources. However, many of us are not running a taunt aura, and probably most of us are not tanking for teams with our Scrappers (or at least not often). As you said:

If I were a Tanker or Brute taking the lead on teams, I'd want to know that I could survive almost no matter how bad my team was. I would want to be at the new soft cap IF I could do that without gimping the rest of my build. Darkest Night sounds great in that regard. However, I'd want to avoid swapping to Ageless insted of Rebirth or Barrier (I loves me some Barrier). Another possibility is switching to Cardiac from whatever you're in, but that's probably just as drastic as going to Ageless. However, it sounds like you're already in trouble as far as endurance goes, so you may be forced into Ageless or Cardiac. So about all I can say is that I'd TRY to manage my endurance with lesser sacrifices, but that ultimately, Darkest Night looks like it would be worth a bigger sacrifice if necessary. (I have never used it, and don't know how it plays in practice, but it sure LOOKS nice. And even if AVs resist most of it (?), that's the part where you'll likely have the most support.)

Still, even though I would personally get to the new soft cap one way or another if I were team tank, I'm not convinced it's actually a good idea. I expect that within a few weeks, everyone will simply always run the same pattern through the temp power portion of Lambda. Teams will stop getting separated. You will almost always have your support. Times when you don't will become quite rare, and for those few times, the occasional emergency purple might well suffice. The other legs of your survivability (resistance, healing) will then perhaps be at least as significant as defense.

Still, there WILL be new content. If your Brute is at the new soft cap, you're probably ready for it. If not, well, maybe you'll be fine, but maybe you won't.

So, if I were you, I'd go for it. I'm not convinced it's a good idea, but I'm pretty convinced it's what I'd do if I could pull it off.

As far as the two options you've proposed, Barrier is great for burst survivability, so it's tempting to go with that and leverage Diamagnetic to make up the additional -tohit with your AoEs. But Darkest Night also debuffs their damage, and seems more reliable to me somehow. Also, I see a lot of barriers. Adding some damage debuff may bring more to the team on top of being more reliable for you personally. I suspect I'd go with Darkest Night, but again, I have no experience with it. And again, what I would TRY to do is pull off both Barrier AND Darkest Night. I just don't know if that's possible in your build and meeting other goals.

Indeed. Unfortunately, it's also only as strong as the devs allow it. And what they allow is for it, when played perfectly, to be merely as strong as the other sets. You don't get any special benefit for the difficulty of playing it perfectly.

Mind you, I need to think further and poke around at what's possible in I20. All the negativity (including my own) reminds me of how I started posting on the forum. Back then, people thought that the Rikti War Zone challenge would be impossible for a Regen. So I went and beat it with my Katana/Regen on my first try and posted about it, post #1. Prevailing wisdom isn't always right, and I20 could be game-changing in ways we're not thinking of.

OK, I'm off to Mids'.

If it's any consolation, I think very few Scrappers have.

This, and likewise, my second 50. I have 1500 hours or so on my namesake Katana/Regen. I loved playing him. But all my other serious Scrappers are better. I DO think that if I throw some love his way, he could be quite good again. But I don't think he'll ever be AS good. I haven't really tried to see what's possible, though. With shadow Meld and the Incarnate stuff... well, it's tempting. I have the influence. I have the pricey PvP IOs just sitting there, waiting for me to come up with a new project. Maybe my new project should be my oldest project (unless you count a fully Hamio'd blaster back in the Hami farming days, now very retired).

Heh. Well, they won't likely look for it on the market forum, but it would be a nice thing to get into people's hands.

I would guess that most people actively dislike using the market, and consider it one of their MMO chores. They're going to want to limit that time, and I don't mean to an hour a week, I mean to a quick dump of their drops before getting back to other parts of the game. It's a game, so I don't begrudge them that. People like what they like, and dislike what they dislike, and we're all different. But there are other ways to get a whole lot of influence, and even if most of them take more time (say, random missioning), surely ONE of them is something they enjoy doing, or they wouldn't be playing an MMO. Then it's just a time investment, and MMOs are time sinks. And hopefully, if the drop problems people are having is actually a bug, it'll get fixed soon.

original build thread

It was designed for I19, but I don't currently have any changes I'd even like to make for I20.

It was built primarily for survivability with high defense, high resistance and a rapid fire full heal. With an earlier iteration of the build, I soloed 11 Praetorian AVs in a row with no temps, no insps and no deaths. I did a double RWZ challenge at that time as well. In early I19 I went to monster island as a survivability test and survived four monsters for about ten minutes before increasing it to six and living another five or so before they finally put me down. Barrier should do great things for my survivability. I'm calculating about a 30% increase from the resistance alone, and the defense should help a lot with defense debuffs. And hopefully the rest of the incarnate powers will give me some of the damage that I'm lacking. There are tougher Scrappers out there. Dark Melee/Invuln built for survivability comes to mind. But this one's pretty tough, I've always been a big fan of Katana, and I've become a big fan of Dark Armor. So it's great for me.

Ooh, yeah, that's nice. Same for ignoring the endurance drainers and debuffers on the Lambda trial. Well, I don't ignore them. I try to take them down fast because I know they're a big problem for some people. But they're not a problem for me specifically.

It's also nice being able to run Carnie missions without endurance trouble. I still hate them because it takes forever to take down Illusionists and Master Illusionists due to their phasing, but endurance isn't the problem.

I think Ageless will be quite good for a number of builds. Taking proper advantage of it, though, may "require" rebuilding around greater endurance consumption. That's what I did when I took my Cardiac Alpha. I was just barely endurance sustainable before, and I'm just barely endurance sustainable now with the tier 4. It's what you spend that extra endurance on that matters - can you get more out of that extra endurance than you could get from one of the other options?

For some people with the Cardiac Alpha, Ageless may also be an alternative to that, allowing you to slot a different alpha. For instance, take Ageless and pick up Spiritual instead of Cardiac for big recharge.

I went Barrier myself. I have endurance covered, more recharge isn't huge for me, and while debuff protection is nice, just straight defense and resistance is even nicer.