gameboy1234

Agree that FF seems to have the most skippable powers. Force Bolt is forced on you at level 1, and then the two shields and dispersion bubble and you are set.

Not sure what's hard to figure out about /Traps. 1. Run at mob. 2. Toe bomb. 3. Pets murder everything. 4.Profit!

I guess I'm more in the "put on your big boy pants and don't worry about it" camp. It's annoying if someone leaves an aura on at the BM or if there's 30 pets crowded around, but it's never stopped me from actually using the BM.

Now back when there was like 5x the population there is now (at least on the server I play on most), there regularly would be a lot of auras and pets around the BM, and I would dismiss my pets. However if there just 3 or so folks using the BM, as there often is now, I don't really bother. A few bots aren't bothering anyone, and I've never had a complaint.

There is no single best corruptor, as the other posters are saying. Even Fire/Dark (which I have one) is kinda situational. It's heavy AoE's are a huge End hog on solo and small team mishes. It's major advantage is the healing fluffy and Fearsome Stare, which is a great tool for managing alpha strikes. And on large teams of course you can do major damage.

I'm playing an Ice/Rad corruptor right now and it's very balanced. Strong solo with good single target damage, has Aim, and also two (so far) good AoE powers. Plus Ice Blast has two holds, for a somewhat controller-ish play style. There's a bit of synergy too in that Ice Blast is all about Slows and -Recharge, and Lingering Radiation will stack with the slows.

There's a bit of dis-synergy in that Rad likes things packed together for Rad Infection and Enervating Field, and Ice Storm causes scatter. It's not a huge deal because stuff dies quick enough regardless.

I like my Dark/Pain too, although again that's a toon heavily skewed to team play. It's a buff heavy build that's hard to solo. I ended up with two builds, one with mostly attacks for solo, and one with all the goodies in /Pain for team play. This works well but it's a bit of a pain not having everything in the same build. Again, I'm finding Ice/Rad more balanced.

So over all a good, balanced solo and team combo is Ice/Rad, imo. I'm sure there are others, but I don't see Ice/Rad mentioned much and I'm surprised at how good it is.

I think Claws nailed it.

The only thing I would add is regarding Taunt. I find it a great convenience to have Taunt. If you are new, I think you should get it. You can use it to build Fury (being attacked = Fury) and therefore it's useful on big teams where you can't always get all the Fury you want.

It's also useful on smaller teams because it's *ranged* aggro. It's not always easy, or quick, to move to another spot on the map and engage a mob to pull aggro. Cave maps in particular can be a bear. Also, if you need to pull, then Taunt is a ranged tool to do so.

After playing your Brute for a while and getting used to it, you can decide yourself how often Taunt it useful and whether you want to keep it. However while just starting out, I think you should take it because of the "easy mode" it often provides.

Well, on my corruptor, I found it useful to take everything. I skipped the first single target heal and went for Share Pain instead. It's a bigger heal, so it works better as a panic button. And the End cost is near nil.

I'd imagine MM play much the same way, but you'd have to experiment a bit to figure that out. A bit of experimentation and maybe some more focused questions on the MM forum should get you going.

P.S. I just noticed after typeing my post, on the CoH screen behind the browser window, "Mothership shield is down." So some of the problems I'm having might be due to a really laggy server on Champ right now.

I'm trying some small tests on Rikti dummies, and I'm having a hard time getting consistent and reproducible results. My number are in fact all ove the place. I get anywheres between 50% and 200% of what I "should" get. In one test, it took 14 seconds to lose 40% fury, so I don't think that 2 lost per second is accurate, or else that the server is terrible at keeping time. (Most time sharing systems are terrible time keepers, i.e., all modern mainframes and *nix based systems.)

I'm guessing server lag, network lag, and client lag are all factors in producing a pretty wide range of values.

The "exact" number should be the formula I gave you. The actual number will be whatever the server decides is fair, which could be pretty messed up if there's enough lag going on.

(Note: in the testing I've done, 1 attack = 10% bonus, and I seem to lose fury at 4% per tick. So I think 1 Fury = 2% bonus. Fits if you gain 5 fury per attack and lose 2 fury per tick. So 80 Fury = 160% bonus, which should be the most any generic Brute should be able to get easily.)