Jabbrwock

When I was leveling my /SR Scrapper, I despised Knives of Artemis with a passion - stupid Caltrops! Fortunately, a /SR Brute isn't likely to face KoA all that often. I only mention this because nobody else was talking about KoA, which either means that they don't spam Caltrops as much, or that it's not as threatening (not to mention humiliating) to die from 50 stacks of Caltrops in one place. Or that I was leveling back when people herded the entire Chimera map and less stupid (and today, more possible) pulls aren't gonna stack that many Caltrops.

There is one benefit of evening out the availability of resistance vs. defense. The devs are allegedly working on making some seriously challenging endgame content for the high end builds. The question is, who is it going to be challenging for? For the characters using defense based sets who softcap to everything early on and then can't do much of anything to help their survivability? Or the characters using resistance-heavy sets who take much more investment to softcap, but then have the advantage of substantial resistances to back up their defense layer? The defense sets scale very quickly with low investments, but then sort of plateau. The resistance sets take longer to start scaling appreciably, but get measurably tougher once they have enough investment.

It's seriously going to suck if the devs say "Sorry, you're a Super Reflexes player, you don't get to participate in this content." Likewise, it's going to be pretty sad to hear "Oh, Electric Armor, yeah, here's your free Incarnate benefits, congrats on choosing a set that scales with massive investments."

TLDR: The different rate at which players of resistance-heavy and defense-heavy sets scale with IO investments is going to make it tough for the devs to produce content that is challenging yet still possible for all sets. Adding resistance set bonuses is one potential way to even this curve.

No mixed feelings here. Why would I have any concerns about a change that most significantly affects the early (read: most miserable) part of the game by reducing downtime (read: the part of my play time when I cannot actually play). Frankly, my approach would have just been to remove the cooldown from Rest, but this works too.

Super Strength and /Ninjitsu for Scrappers. Yeah, I know and even understand the reasons why not, doesn't change me from wanting them.

Willpower is an excellent layered defense set, with low downtime, and no need to pay attention to the set once you turn on your toggles. That makes it ideal to pair with a set you actually want to pay attention to, like a brand new flashy looking melee offensive set. By contrast, a set with lots of click abilities you need to manage to make it perform properly, like Fiery Aura or Regen (hey, I can dream can't I?) will distract from the shiny new melee offensive set.

Willpower is a lot like not having a secondary at all, except for the part where you die because you don't have a secondary.

The ability to play a blueside Brute is relatively recent. Scratch that, extremely recent. Thus, if you thematically wanted to play a comic book brick type, and wanted to be a hero, you were a Tanker. Lots of comic book bricks don't tank, they wade into combat and pummel things until they run out of things to pummel. Thus, lots of players interested in playing comic book brick types blueside play Tankers who don't tank, they just wade into combat and pummel things until they run out of things to pummel. It's gonna take time for the existing population of non-tanking Tankers to wear down and slowly convert to the far more satisfying non-tanking blueside Brutes.

In the mean time, don't invite a Tanker assuming he can or will tank for you. He'll probably soak up some aggro no matter what, but he's still reasonably likely to have no serious interest in tanking. Over time, this will likely change, but for now, we have a bunch of people out there playing Tankers for reasons that have nothing to do with what the AT does really well and everything to do with what AT fits (or at least used to fit) the comic book image of who they wanted to play best.

There's nothing wrong with telling a Tanker who doesn't want to tank that you really want somebody who will put forth a serious and effective effort to control aggro, and that if he cannot or will not do so, he's really not who and what you need in your group. There's also nothing wrong with just bringing him along for the ride, Tanker damage isn't really that bad, after all, and like I said, even if he isn't trying to tank, he's probably going to soak up a good bit of aggro regardless.

I can't see any reason to play a non-tanking Tanker any more beyond inertia. You have time and Inf invested in making the character as close to your chosen image as possible, and don't want to scrap it to start over from level 1. For fresh, newly made Tankers, this holds rather little water, IMHO. Maybe I'm just deluding myself, though. Personally, the only thing I can see that a Tanker does better than a Brute is tank, so if you don't want to tank, roll a blueside Brute instead. Well, that and Ice Armor, anyway. Not holding my breath on that one.

I'd say recharge and smashing/lethal defense. It will be ruinously expensive to even approach the defense soft cap to any more than a single type or position, and smashing/lethal defense gives the most coverage. I am pretty sure that getting a heavy layer there will do more to help you survive than any amount of +hp bonuses - still, those would be third place in my reckoning, so certainly worth going for as well.

Willpower and Invuln are both layered defense type sets, and as such, are both plenty rugged. I'd put Willpower marginally ahead of Invuln in terms of raw survivability (I'm not Arcanaville, don't ask me to quote numbers, this is a purely subjective analysis), but Willpower pays with the worst taunt aura in the game. In terms of what you want, Willpower might not fit perfectly either - the set depends on defense and regeneration for a lot of its survivability, and that means some pretty serious health swings. Invuln's combination of defense and resistance might *FEEL* more like your guy is just shrugging off the enemy's attacks even if in practice he's technically able to endure somewhat less damage before dying.

Either set would be pretty hard to kill, but Invuln sounds like it might match the feel of what you want better.