The appeal of Scrapper Primaries

IMO Foot Stomp with stacked Rage is better especially with the larger radius.

Yeah, I kinda got that impression too.

The OP read very much to me as essentially saying "Why does everything suck but Martial Arts?"

Understandably, that is going to get people a little defensive of their favorite set, and more inclined to point out that MA isn't the end all-be all the OP is painting it as.

I don't have anything against Martial Arts, though I used to. I used to detest the fact that it was all kicks, and Martial Arts is much more than just a bunch of flashy kicks. Now that it has the option of some punching attacks it's a little better in my eyes, but it's still kinda meh to me.

My personal favorites are Claws and Broadsword, which both have their flaws. But I like them.

The OP would have gotten less friction if he had phrased his post more along the lines of "I really like Martial Arts, but I can't seem to get into the other sets. What am I missing?"

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

You're not going to find people saying I don't love MA, but there's a difference between liking a set just because you like it, and saying you like a set because of objective criteria that may be either shaky or strange to compare to other sets.

For example:

1. MA does not have knockup. MA has knockdown in Dragon's Tail and Knockback in Crane Kick. That might be a minor error, but its worth noting. And unless you have *really* high recharge, Dragon's Tail is not a great crowd control power. Its recharge is too long to generate enough knockdown.

2. The immobilize in CAK is only guaranteed mag 2. That's only enough to immobilize a minion. It has only a 50% chance to generate mag 3, which is only enough to immobilize an LT. There's two problems with this effect. One: you're only immobilizing things you're capable of killing in only a few attacks. Immobilizing an LT is barely useful. Immobilizing a minion is essentially worthless, and I'm not in the habit of saying things are worthless. Two: its a melee ranged immobilize. If you're using immobilize on a runner, chances are pretty good it might have decided to run before you use it. If you're going to give a scrapper an immobilize to deal with runners, a ranged immobilize makes a lot more sense. Take a look at Impale in the Spines set. Its a *guaranteed* mag 3, so it will at least immobilize LTs in one shot every time. And it has 40 feet of range, which makes it an effective runner tool. Now take a look at Focus in Claws. Its also a 40 foot ranged attack, but instead of immobilize it has knockdown. Guaranteed knockdown. So as long as the critter doesn't have KB protection, Focus will actually stop a runner for about five seconds. All runners including Bosses. More than enough time to catch up with them.

3. Ah, stun. MA used to have one guaranteed mag 1, one guaranteed mag 3, and one chance at a ridiculously short mag 3. Then it was changed to a ridiculous chance at a mag 2, a guaranteed mag 3, and a chance at a ridiculously short mag 3. Now it has a ridiculous chance at a mag 2, a 75% chance at a mag 3, and a guaranteed ridiculously short mag 3.

For those not familiar, Thunder Kick as 10% chance at mag 2 stun. That's a 10% chance to stun a minion. Need I say more? Cobra Strike has a 75% chance of mag 3, enough to stun an Lt. That is a decent, but not stellar stun. It it could stack to affect bosses, that would be better. But stacking with itself is problematic because the stun has base 11.9 second duration and the power itself has base 11.7 second cycle time. It starts off with no overlap, and while slotting (particularly recharge) can help, it starts off not easy to stack and without high recharge usually ends up with only a little bit of overlap. It could stack with thunder kick, but TK has only 10% chance to ever stun. It could stack with Eagle's Claw, which is a guaranteed mag 3, but, well lets talk about Eagle's Claw.

Eagle's Claw is a guaranteed mag 3 now, but its duration is ridiculously short: 4.8 seconds at level 50. I should point out that the stun takes effect 1.3 seconds after activation of the power and the power has a 2.53 second cast time, 2.77 second arcanatime. That means that EC's stun only lasts about 3.5 seconds after you activate EC, and only 3.3 seconds after EC finishes and you can use another attack. To the best of my knowledge, that is one of the worst mez durations that exist anywhere. In fact, back when EC had 3.0 second cast time and I didn't know what the delay was between activation and the effects starting, I used to say that Eagle's Claw was the only mez that could actually expire on a +3 target at the same time the power finished casting.

So EC's stun is so short its control effects are not very good on its own, and its a poor candidate for stacking with Cobra.


As some people have said, at high levels control is not as valued as damage or mitigation. But even if you like control, the control is just not there in MA relative to other scrapper primaries. I think Claws has more mitigating control. I think Dark Melee has more mitigating control with just one power than the whole MA set when it comes to tough targets.

The phrase melee ranged minion immobilizer has been such a long-standing joke for me that I lobbied really hard to get something, *anything* else into CAK, which is why it now has defense debuff. But then Castle decided not to make it slottable for -DEF sets, sigh. I understand why, but I'm still going to try to get that decision reversed eventually.


I still like MA: my MA/SR scrapper is by far still my favorite scrapper. But MA has had issues for every second of its existence from beta to two seconds ago. Its a fun set to play, but it has always had performance problems.

Really? No wonder I failed engish...

Let me rephrase then with that in mind;

I really enjoy playing a MA scrapper (Despite the fact that its not the most powerful).
I have trouble finding enjoyment playing the other scrapper sets. Maybe because swinging your sword in a different direction isn't as cool looking as the crane kick or swinging your sword harder isn't as rewarding as jumping up, kicking the bad guy in the skull and then back flipping off of their face....

Mind you, since starting this thread I have made a Broad Sword/Shield toon and I can see some things that I like. Like being able to 1 shot -1 minions at level 2 without criticals. And now at level 8 with parry, I'm able to get my melee def up to 62%. I said to myself "OH! That's the appeal..."

I've never played a spines toon because I could never get a toon to look good with spines even though I really want to play that set. I think I care too much about the look and feel of a toon because its stopping me from playing what I want to play

.... Now that I type it out, it really sounds silly.

Well why didn't you say so in the first place? Of course MA wins there: that's *its* one real trick:


YOU DON'T SERIOUSLY THINK I'M AFRAID OF YOUR LITTLE...


HOLY &^*! WHERE'D MY BRAIN FLY OFF TO!?!

The above-quoted post 1,000%.

The reason I originally registered on the forums was basically to campaign for MA, back in May of 2004. I did that for a long while, and though the set did see some fairly large improvements in the early life of the game (not due to my campaigning, mind), I gave up after awhile. Arcanaville has pointed out MA's flaws far more effectively than I ever did ever since.

And the set has seen even more improvements, I think largely as a result of her efforts, in recent years.

But MA is still, at best, a stylishly mediocre melee attack set. Haven't paid much attention to all the number-crunching work you guys have been doing in Scrapper land lately, but I'd be shocked if MA rated higher than about third-to-last in its presumptive specialty, single-target damage. Martial Arts is, to me, a monument to the sometimes mystifyingly disproportionate weight the development team has always placed on certain effects. MA has a lot of control in theory, but it seriously lacks for useful control.

But hey, I guess we can all hang our hats on the fact that disorient no longer gives staggering NPCs superspeed.

TL;DR: There's certainly nothing wrong with liking a powerset, but the OP's premise -- that there's no reason to play anything other than MA -- struck me as hilarious in a morbid kind of way. Heck, I'm not convinced this thread isn't an ingenious attempt at reverse psychology.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

I made a Spines/elec since with power customization I could make the spines look like metal and then change the colors of /elec to match the metal look.

EDIT: With certain sets it might be you need to get to certain powers. Spin, or certainly Focus on a Claws scrapper. Pulling off the AV combo on a DB with it getting a crit. Hitting BS's, or Kat's tier 9 and getting more than one crit on it. FSC on Fire. Even at 18, the sheer orange numbers a Spines scrapper can put out with 2 damage auras if paired with the right secondary. Etc...

Hence why I say that MA/* is filled with substantially useless *tricks* that are of exceedingly little value to Scrappers and which seems to have been deliberately crippled so as to make sure they are as useless as possible ... all while making MA/* pay through the nose for the "privilege" of having them (at all).

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

But then the green posion spewing everywhere doesn't look right....

Yeah, that's the problem I have with Dual Blades especially. I don't mean to sound shallow but "It gets good later" always bugs me.



Kenetic Melee seems cool though. Was thinking about a KM/Inv scrapper, match the -dam with the +Res to equal win! Thoughts?

The vast majority of scrapper primaries get good 26+. Something like Claws which gets Spin at 6 and Focus at 18 is a rare thing.

I think Kin is a solid set that is comparable to MA in that it looks really pretty even if there are sets that put up better orange numbers. It's definitively a DPS set. I wished I liked the animations of Kin/sd better. I like the idea of the stacked +dmg/-dmg.

You should have seen what we were telling people about MA back in the day. Consider that of your first three attacks, one used to lock you into a four second animation (Storm Kick), and one had almost no damage (Cobra Strike) we used to tell people that eventually, it got less bad.

Less bad was an attack that knocked things out of melee range, an attack that knocked many things out of melee range, a melee ranged minion immobilizer that said it slowed recharge and lied about it, and the worst tier 9 attack ever in the history of the game, even if you include Frozen Aura in there.

For all the problems MA currently has, the people playing it today are playing a joy of a set by comparison to what it used to be.

That's a good point, one I may have glossed over in my bemusement over the OP's position. MA may quite possibly be the most-buffed single set since the game's release. There've been some small nerfs here or there (like the change to Thunder Kick's chance to stun way back when), but the net change has been overwhelmingly, even implausibly, positive.

Just for kicks, I was just reading over some old text files of forum posts I either made or admired back in the day, and it really is amazing how far the playerbase has come. All the acrimonious arguments about whether it was an advantage to have animations that were so long you rarely had to pause for a recharge timer seem downright absurd in today's game -- but they happened.

Heck, I'd forgotten just how long Eagle's Claw's activation used to be until you just reminded me. I'd forgotten that Cobra Strike at one time did less than 70% of Brawl damage, and it had a 3+ second animation. These days, any animation (no matter how potent the attack, no matter what effects it carries to however many targets) that even flirts with 3 seconds is considered glacial. For original MA, 3 seconds was short. It's no wonder I was so unsympathetic (and perhaps unjustifiably so) when people defended Total Focus' former mag-4 stun.

My subjective idea of what constitutes good damage or even good control is forever influenced by the formative experience of playing release-day MA. The first, major animation overhaul happened like six months after release, and yet even seven years later my brain processes anything but the original animations as new, somehow.

All of that is just self-indulgent rambling though. Apologies. The thing that I'm trying to get at here is that all of the great strides MA has made manage to be, at once, both uplifting and discouraging. In my experience, it's almost impossible for any dev team on any MMO to lavish so much (comparatively) on one power set and still manage to leave it mediocre. Usually there's at least a little over-buffing somewhere.

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build

This.^

Also, Arcanaville, you mentioned that "REDOUBTable" decided to leave Def Debuff/Accurate Def Debuff sets out of CAK and that you understood why. Er...why again(must have missed something good/horrifying-like-a-train-wreck, somewheres)?

As an aside(derail) why can't Thunderkick provide Moderate Damage and a 20% chance for a Mag 3? And Stormkick become a melee cone? And on top of all that query, why can't Eagles Claw provide the usual 9.5634662899vinculum3(blah) Stun?

The whole thing seems like page one from the Emmert School of Anti-fun Developing. Where 'Fun' is only seen as a balanced numerical equation. And where the balanced "FUN" equation is purposely non-sensical in its counter-intuitiveness and brings incomprehensible hours of mind-numbing, rage-inducing struggle, where the only proper reward is a pre-tendy-funtime of annoyance, despair and peer-supported shame and that anything else a developer might do equates to useless fan-service for players who should never be considered anything more than knuckle-dragging droolers.

I picture this game's Powers Team like the Egghead Chicken from Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, showing Foghorn a diagram and mathmatical formula that proves that he was actually hiding in the Feed Chest instead of standing where he was durning a Hide-N-Seek game. And Foghorn, to prove to Egghead that he was missing the point of the "FUN" despite the exactitudes of his mathmatical formula, approaches the Feed Chest to show Egghead he wasn't in fact in the Feed Chest, then stops himself, saying "Oh, I better not. I might, I say, I just MIGHT be in there."

The devs may have a point as to why powers are the way they are. But, it does not seem like they do and that they actually missed the point somewhere down the line(or bell curve).

Martial Arts' performance may be suspect even to this day, but I'll give you that advantage easily - it's one of the most customizable sets in the game. No other set can vary by this much in its general "theme" as Matrial Arts does when you mix in old an new animations. Granted, not all new animations are actually GOOD, but even the bad ones have their place.

I still use the original all-kicks variation on my teenage schoolgirl super heroine, just because they look more athletic, but I use more punches on my robotic-arm-wearing lizard girl because they're all right-hand punches that fit VERY well. I've ended up with two characters who may as well have two different sets.

Yeah, I still remember Martial Arts way back at Launch. I had a Scrapper with it - guy by the name of Jack Hammer whom I can never remake thanks to the Resistance - and his performance was... Sad.

However, I don't really find MA perofmance all that bad these days. Sure, the secondary effects on most attacks may as well not be there for all they matter, but single-target damage on the set is actually very respectable now that Cobra Strike is a legitimate attack. In fact, it's one of the few STALKER sets that I didn't end up tearing my hair over levelling up, since it does indeed have solid single-target attacks. That's as compared to something like Electrical Melee, which singularly lacks any power worth using out of Hide, Assassin's Shock notwithstanding.

The set can probably use a few more tweaks, like secondary effects that matter, but as it stands right now, it's well playable and still very pretty. That alone is enough to get me to play it, personally. Just not enough to make it my favourite. Broadsword still has that distinction.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.