Erratic

Not in any real sense.

You get 14 more character slots. The creation options however remain the same.

Wrong in so many (though not all) ways it hurts to try to keep track of them all.

Conventions != Rules

If you are alive you can grab aggro. To a certain extent, suvivability == tanking.

There are of course instances where that isn't true.

Knockdown is nice (I have an Ice/Stone tank) but it still leaves you open to ranged opponents who have little inclination to come close or don't get knocked down (e.g. Rikti Drones). Being able to repeatedly snatch life from targets via Siphon Life is never a bad thing.

Missed upthread where I noted this was a necro thread? 8P

I was speaking about this thread going back to being discussed in earnest.

Perhaps, but I literally see nobody speculating on it whereas Brute/Scrapper and Brute/Tank I see every other day.

Seems that way.

It helps to bring it back to actually discuss the topic of the thread.

Having the powersets on the brute somewhat blinded me to the fact. Thinking too much like my brute and not enough like my tank.

I was not speaking of spamming the Electric Heal, I was speaking of spamming Siphon Life. I spoke of the Electric Heal in terms of being there to deal with incoming alpha strikes.

When I say "shoot for perma" I do mean get as close as possible without hurting yourself. I am at 28.9 seconds downtime for Hasten on straight SOs (Spritual Radial Boost). One of the IO builds I have as a build reference gets that down to 11 seconds without making any attempt to grab +Recharge via sets. Hasten just doesn't take much to become useful to you--the power itself and add one slot, fill both slots with a level 50 Recharge IO and you're done with it.

I also think you're potentially making a penny wise/pound foolish mistake. Yes, you're a tank, you want to control aggro. . .I can assure you very little comes off my brute after he leaps into a group, fires off Soul Drain thereby ramping Lightning Field's output, and fires off Dark Obliteration in the middle of the group. Dealing damage to everything IS a way of controlling aggro. But of course there are differences between the ATs so I am not suggesting that as your path, but rather that you look at the indirect benefits that help you to your goal. As example, having Soul Drain up all the time (via having Hasten up most of the time) means you're boosting not just your damage but your To-Hit as well. And it serves as a reasonable repository for Gaussian's.

I would say it is situational. On my DM/Elec Brute I use Power Sink more often, but Dark Consumption gives me better returns versus individual targets.

Agreed. My first stalker is/was an Electric/Ninjitsu who was perfectly fun to play up into the mid-30s but kinda lost steam from there for me. It plays differently from my newer Spines/Electrical and the play difference is what has hooked me on the newer character.

My Spines/Electrical should pick up Shadow Meld tomorrow.

Obviously you can start every fight with Assassin Strike if you choose, but frankly I find BU, Throw Spines, Ripper to be a wonderful way to open and chew through crowds.

What I am suggesting is that /Elec brings with it a recharge bonus that highly suggest taken Hasten, slotting it up, and having most of your powers benefit from reduced recharge times.


I will say this again--if you are standing in the middle of a crowd of enemies, you do not have to work particularly hard to hit multiple targets with Shadow Maul. No, it is not a great AoE but it is an AoE.

If you think Siphon Life is useless then that means you are not pushing your difficulty to where it could be. That is of course a style choice. I however greatly enjoy and rely on Siphon Life being up every few seconds because I am pulling and dealing with enough difficult targets at a time. The synergy is there, you simply have to be pushing hard enough to need it.

A saturated Lightning Field is in fact working away on everything around you once you have Soul Drain (which admittedly you do not get until level 26). Given you get Lightning Reflexes as 20 and can have Hasten working with it and slotted fully for Recharge by the time you get SOs, your attacks should cycle pretty quickly.

If you hit 6 targets in the time it would otherwise take to hit 3 the extra three blows can be considered the equivalent of having made an AE attack with one of the initial 3 blows which actually hit 4 targets (witht the benefit that you can of course hit the same thing multiple times).

I find when I am standing in the middle of a dozen enemy that Shadow Maul invariaboly hits multiple targets with not effort whatsoever in getting it to do so.

Lastly, yeah, once you get to Epic pool choices you can grab AoEs.

If your'e knocking them back then its a tradeoff at best because now youv'e scattered them and so much for using Area powers on them. Add too that you know have to wander around picking them up or waiting for them to stand and come back to you. Knockdown is a somewhat better deal (that I enjoy abusing on my Ice/Stone tanker).

In the early game it gives you a one-shot ability to drive your endurance bar back to the top. No, you won't be able to chug-away non-stop, but what you'll be able to do is survive the long fight better than those without such tools and overall drive longer than others. As for not needing it late game. . .that suggest to me you are driving your character hard enoguh because at 50 I can drink Endurance like nobody's business. Handilly I can recover it like nobody's business too. And what I get out of that consumption is perma-Hasten driven attacks by which to deliver damage at a quicker pace than otherwise would be the case and the added safety of tossing out something like Darkest Night (which drinks a copious amount of endurance all by its lonesome) slotted to maximize To-Hit debuff and not slotted at all for endurance despite costing 0.65 endurance per second because (a) slots are precious and (b) I can offset the cost becuase I can gain endurance at need (though to be fair I also have Power Sink so I really am rolling in the realm of copious consumption).

That depends a lot on how survivable your character is already. For me Siphon Life is up every 5 seconds and in hairy battles you can be sure I'm dropping it every time its up. Its kinda nice grabbing back almost 20% (19.78%) of my life every 5 seconds while at the same time dealing out damage. If you're not getting touched enough that you need the healing one supposes that you could in fact be fighting larger crowds where the healing would be more necessary.

Its added AoE, not an AoE power unto itself. Your problem is you keep trying to fit square pegs into round holes. DM is a single target set. Neither Soul Drain nor Dark Consumption are truly AoE damage powers even though they deal AoE damage--they are damage buff and endurance recovery powers with a bit of damage tossed in.


I generally solve the problem by standing in crowds thick enough that using it almost guarantees multiple targets will be hit.

So largely you already had made up your mind and this was an exercize in allowing you to soapbox, eh?

Hmmm. . .drop Darkest Night on a mob in the middle of one spawn, toss Dark Obliteration (area attack btw) on a second spawn while moving to occupy the center of a third spawn. Once they all converge pop Soul Drain, toss out Dark Obliteration, and get to work cycling Siphon Life amongster your attacks (with Energize admittedly up my sleeve to deal with any excess damage that comes about while the spawns are coming together) and all the while Lightning Field is burning away at the crowd. Oh. . .and Shadow Maul doesn't have to be aimed in such a situation. . .use it and it will be hitting multiple targets.

This is what I do with my DM/Electric and it works quite well. Sorry if you either can not or do not want to look at what the set gives you and leverage it properly. I and others can merely point out water is over there. . .getting you to drink it is utterly beyond us.

DM is fundamentally a single target set. You're trying to push it into some sort of equivalence with other sets on the AoE front. As I noted upthread, I tend to look at sets for what they don't do (at least as much for what they do). I wanted AoE damage and picked that up via secondary and epic power pools because I recognized that DM is not fundamentally about area damage.