Werner

Recharge, recharge, more recharge THEN defense. Yes on Shadow Meld.

Your big attacks are Smite, Siphon Life and Midnight Grasp. The best end-game attack chain uses nothing but these three attacks, though you won't be doing that any time soon. Shadow Punch is a decent filler. I like Shadow Maul, but some people do not. I'd personally skip Touch of Fear, but some people like it. Skip Confront. Dark Consumption is good. Soul Drain is a must.

From Invulnerability, the skippable powers are Resist Elements, Resist Energies and Unstoppable. Everything else is a must have. I'd personally want the two resists, but they aren't top priority. Some people love Unstoppable. I hate crashes.

Agree with not six-slotting damage. Enhancement Diversification means you don't get much benefit from more than three of any particular enhancement. A typical slotting might be accuracy, recharge, endurance, and three damage. But it really depends. Basically, I'd start there, then change based on actual experience in combat.

Agree with not taking flight on melee unless it's for concept reasons. Leaping won the travel power wars. You take Combat Jumping and you combine it with Hurdle. That's your in-mission, in-combat travel power. Take Super Jump only if you can't stand how slowly you move.

Definitely get into Tough and Weave, but powers from your secondary generally come first.

For your last power pool, I'd probably grab Hasten. It'll bring back Dull Pain and Siphon Life faster to improve your survivability, and your other attacks to improve your damage output.

Yep, 50% lethal resistance. So you need to be doing 200 DPS to even kill her really slowly. Claws/SR is technically capable of higher than that, but putting it together in an AV soloing survivability package would probably be quite difficult.

Full potential? Iggy Kamakaze soloed the ITF no temps, no insps, no deaths with a Katana/Willpower (same difference). He also soloed a pylon while surrounded by two full RWZ challenge spawns (total of 6 L54 bosses), then finished off the spawns, again, no temps, no insps, no deaths.

So what I'm saying is that you can get some amazing survivability out of it. It's one of the best in that regard.

Damage? Eh, not so much. But it doesn't suck.

It's a great combination.

Just a minor correction: GC > GD > GC > SD > GC > DA
And for your survivability chain: DA > GC > GD > GC > DA > GC > SD > GC

You'll notice the three chains mentioned are all very similar. They all have Gambler's Cut every other attack (making it an ideal home for an Achilles' Heel proc, and a purple proc if you can afford it). They all use Golden Dragonfly and Soaring Dragon. Then it's just a matter of how often you use Divine Avalanche. So if you have the recharge for the DPS chain, you can switch to either of the other two as the situation requires. I like that flexibility.

If you want to do any tanking at all, take Invulnerability. Super Reflexes won't hold any aggro.

While there's no damage buff in Super Reflexes, end game damage output probably WILL favor Super Reflexes. With Super Reflexes, you can soft cap without Divine Avalanche, so you can take advantage of Quickness and boost your recharge to run the top DPS chain. Might be able to fit in both AoEs more easily. With Invulnerability, I'd probably be using Divine Avalanche for lethal defense, and accepting a ranged/AoE smashing hole in my defenses. I'd want recharge, but not to the extent that Super Reflexes has it. You wouldn't be running the top change. So yeah, it would hurt your damage. Probably not hugely, but some, likely noticeably (if you were running the two back to back).

Either should group fine, solo fine, lead the charge fine, do stupid scrapper tricks, and solo AVs, as long as you have an appropriate build for the task.

As others have said, it doesn't suck, but it's not awesome either. The defense problems have already been noted. It also doesn't put together very good defense debuff resistance, which is one of the big perks of a high budget Shield Defense secondary. Slight gap in the top DPS chain, though you'll barely notice. Is Fire Sword slotted to fill the gap when Hasten is down? Just for set bonuses? Endurance doesn't look sustainable. You'd get more mileage out of the purple proc than the damage/recharge in Cremate. Accuracy seems fine. Hit points are good. Resistance is decent.

Claws/Fire/Mu sounds good on the surface. Claws doesn't suck for AoE. Add in Burn and Ball Lightning, and it sounds pretty good.

OK, I'd really like to see us get at least a few hard numbers for AoE capability, like we have for DPS in the pylon thread. I'll start.

Or... maybe I won't. Herostats isn't showing me Shield Charge. Hmmm, well, it knows I USED it 24 times. It just doesn't know how much damage it did? Yeah, total defeats is much more than total damage would indicate. But it only tells me total defeats, and doesn't break them down by type of enemy, so I can't even calculate damage done from defeats. Oh, there we are, 139 lieutenants = 111,895 damage, 205 minions = 88,150 damage. Total is 200,045 in 13:04. 255 DPS?

I suck.

Well, let me compare to my Katana/Dark/Body who has the same map. 28 bosses = 71960, 118 lieutenants = 94990, 247 minions = 106210, so 273160 damage total in 27:26 is 167 DPS.

Wait, what? Why so close on a mostly single-target character vs. AoE nuking? Also, how were there 42 more minions? I think I missed a category of minion on the original run.

Well, unfortunately, I don't have time to redo it, and I didn't save it. I'll have to try again some other time.

Anyway, any REAL farmer want to show some numbers?

Yes, I remember, and it would be interesting, but unless you used your second build for the purpose, you wouldn't be seeing glory days capabilities. And now you have two completely different sets of rules to learn and keep track of (three if you PvP). And how far back to you roll? City of Blasters? City of Burn Tanks? Since balance was much worse at the time, they were only the glory days for a fairly small group of players. For many people, any such rollback would be a return to the sucky days before their sets got fixed.

Me, I'd be happy to try it out. But I don't think it would be widely appreciated. The game is better now in my opinion, even if I don't get to watch my health bar fill like I've shoved a fire hose in it.

Super Reflexes if you're on a budget. Shield Defense if you can afford the good stuff or aren't as concerned with survivability. DM/SD can do about 25% better single-target DPS in its element (surrounded), plus it has Shield Charge, but it takes more effort on the survivability side, and more effort to pull off a top attack chain.

Dark Melee. It's also more survivable with those secondaries than the other two.

So when Shadow Meld is down, you're taking three times as much damage as when it's up. I think you'd be stuck targeting your difficulty level for the period when it's down unless you have something else to fill the gap (e.g., Regen) or you can set up your game play so that the first 15 seconds are 3x as difficult as the next (e.g., farming on a 30 second cycle).

And yeah, Hasten is going to be hard to turn down in I19.

I've not tested it, but I wouldn't personally go that route except on a Regen. If you're running 15 seconds up, 15 seconds down, you have a high end build. A high end build, assuming there's any focus at all on survivability, should be able to fight nasty, slow spawns, and will probably cause boredom in anything but. If you're fighting a nasty, slow spawn, the 15 seconds of downtime will occur while there are still plenty of nasty enemies pounding on you. Sounds like suicide to me.

The Regen exception is because Regen has so many OTHER tools to smooth out the performance.

Another exception might be a farmer. If you're on a 30 second cycle for the spawns you're hitting, that might fit in well with Shadow Meld. It'll absorb the alpha, and the enemies left after 15 seconds probably won't be standing long enough to finish you off.

And I suppose there might be other exceptions. Like a Dark Armor, with that exceptional heal and good resistance. They'd have to kill you twice over in 15 seconds, basically, to take you down. But I probably wouldn't be running a recharge build on Dark Armor, making Shadow Meld less useful.

I guess we really need actual in-game experience like you asked for. It's one of those things that might be great, and might suck.

Yeah, the main problem with Shadow Punch is opportunity cost, which is now lessened.

Adding a Shadow Punch at the end of the top chain will lower your DPS perhaps 3%. But as long as you're willing to just spam your heal when necessary, and can afford another attack, I think Shadow Punch is a good way of reducing your recharge requirements. Looks like it's just what you need. Midnight Grasp in 5.54 seconds and Smite in 2.24 seconds are your targets. Shouldn't be any problem reaching those.

I've taken so little advantage of custom targeting binds. I've done it on one character, so I can only blame the lazy. I really should. They can make some groups so much easier. Devouring earth is one of them.

I haven't noticed, but if there's a difference, it is almost certainly an animation difference only.