Jabbrwock

Completely mystified here as well. My SS/Elec Brute is my main villain, and I would have deleted him and /ragequit without Power Sink.

Fiery Aura is pretty much the squishiest Scrapper secondary, and works best when paired with a primary that can provide mitigation and/or some way to keep an enemy (or several) in the Burn patch for a while. Fiery Melee offers absolutely no mitigation at all, just lots of damage, and has no way to keep enemies in the Burn patch. Fiery Embrace just isn't enough motivation for me, at least, to pair a primary and a secondary that have so little other synergy.

I prefer /SD personally. In some ways, it's like Fiery Aura done right - its offensive punch doesn't make enemies run away, and its mitigation is mostly in the form of positional defense, which combine well with IO set bonuses to provide very solid mitigation. It's kind of squishy without IO's, but not abusively so. Even on just SO's, /SD feels a lot more rugged than /FA.

A secondary choice for me would be /Regen. Fiery Melee is a general purpose exotic damage set that doesn't have weapon redraw issues, that makes me like it with /Regen, which is a click intensive set that can cause redraw issues (in my mind anyway) with weapon based sets.

/WP just goes pretty well with anything, but I have other sets I prefer with /WP.

I don't see any AT dying. I do expect to see some AT's experience a net loss of players - the new players they gain from people leaving formerly opposite faction substitutes to the AT they always wanted will be fewer than the old players who regarded them as substitutes for the opposite faction AT they really wanted to play.

That is, I think there will be more Tankers who really wanted the play style of a Brute but didn't want to be villains than there will be Brutes who really wanted the play style of a Tanker but didn't want to be heroes. I think Corruptors will similarly win out over Defenders. It doesn't mean Tankers and Defenders will die out - ignoring issues of simple fandom, there are entirely legitimate game-mechanical reasons to prefer a Tanker or Defender over a Brute or a Corruptor. I just think that the equally legitimate game-mechanical reasons to choose Brutes and Corruptors will tend to speak more strongly to more players. So in the end, there will be fewer Tankers and Defenders after GR than before.

Of course, there's likely to be a big rush to villain AT's anyway with GR, since there are just more heroes playing than villains, so adding 5 "new" AT's to hero-side will naturally attract more attention than adding 5 "new" AT's to villain-side.

Corruptor damage scale and Scourge makes up for a lot. Semi-regular freespecs take care of much of the rest.

Low levels suck for everybody. By the time you get out of the "everybody hates this part of the game" era, your Corruptor is, if not complete, at least beginning to approach it. Yeah, waiting until 35 for Transference and 38 for Fulcrum Shift blows goats. Then again, so does waiting until 38 for your nuke. Further, not every set is as bottom-loaded as Kinetics. Radiation is positively top-loaded - while EMP is awesome, it's the first powers in the set, which Corruptors get at a reasonable level, that really make the set the jewel that it is. Traps is much the same way.

The long term advantages Defenders offer are better buff and debuff scales, and the ability to skip the first power in the buff/debuff set. Corruptors offer buff and debuff scales that are generally good enough, a substantially better damage scale, and an inherent that's worth the electrons it takes to display its icon on your screen.

In summary, I think that Corruptor secondaries are good enough, and Defender secondaries really aren't. Thus, I see Corruptors being net winners in the war for players once they are in direct competition with Defenders.

As I understand it, applying negative knockback magnitude currently provides knockback protection.

Most likely, the easiest (and this isn't saying much) way to provide a negative knockback effect would be to spawn psuedo-pets on the far side of every enemy in range and have them all do a knockback effect. Doable, but a hassle, and not obviously requiring that the way knockback effects are coded be completely rewritten at the game engine level.

In team dynamics, Scrappers stack far better than Brutes. Brutes depend on high Fury (or amazing levels of buffs) to reach or slightly exceed Scrapper damage. Maintaining high Fury typically requires that you hold aggro. There's only so much aggro to go around, and generally, it's going to be focused mostly on a single character. If that one character is a Brute, he's golden. If it's a Tanker, or some other Brute, well, any additional Brutes will grossly underperform compared to Scrappers.

In terms of solo play, Scrappers underperform compared to Brutes somewhat, in the low levels when enhancements don't do much of anything and you can't carry many inspirations. Once you hit SO's, there's not much difference in capability, except that Scrappers perform better when they are pushing the limits of their defensive capabilities and have to take breaks between fights to recover, while Brutes perform better when they are able to keep going constantly and never need to take a breather. That's a matter of your preferred playstyle rather than a meaningful balance metric, though.

Scrappers and Brutes are unlikely to significantly cannibalize off of each others' populations. I can see Brutes cannibalizing Tankers, though - Brutes can tank well enough, and deal a lot more damage than Tankers, while maintaining the general feel of a comic book "brick." Still, there's likely to be some new Tankers cannibalizing Brutes who only rolled Brutes because they wanted to be the best tanks available red side, too. I just don't see any AT dying out, although some may have flaws previously hidden get revealed more starkly when there is a similar feeling AT operating at a balance point the player population likes better. We'll just have to wait and see.

I would argue that this is profoundly unlikely.

First, it hurts everybody, even folks who don't use IO sets at all or have any meaningful defense of any kind.

Second, the problem is more easily solved (assuming they want to work things that way) by just altering how much defense it takes to reduce final to-hit chance. No need for initial to-hit chance to budge from 50%.

Third, the whole idea is poorly conceived. The problem is not that defense is too powerful, it's that defense is too easy to get. Another power pool option for resistance, a balancing so that defense and resistance are available in functionally equivalent amounts in set bonuses, and they're done. Or they can rework the basic rules of combat and adjust every single other power in the game to make sure that characters with just SO's don't get gimped but leave set bonuses alone. Yeah, not so much.

Scrapper is the obvious choice. Try not to pick one of the fast-action primary sets, but rather something that focuses on big hitters. Fiery Melee feels that way to me, as does Broadsword. Super Strength isn't bad either, but won't get any area effect abilities until level 32, while Broadsword and Fiery Melee get them much earlier. For the secondary, Willpower is a good choice, since it's a "set it and forget it" power set that is all toggles and passives and does not use up any actions on just staying alive.

All IMHO.

I couldn't disagree more about the armors - I have none of my defense or resistance toggles slotted for endurance reduction at all, and had essentially no issues until 33 or 34, at which point Power Sink was close enough for me to bull through. Endurance reduction is far more effectively slotted in your attacks.

That said, I delayed Lightning Field until level 30, I believe, and didn't run it much until 36, so that's probably why. I'll agree that LF needs some serious endred until you have Power Sink well slotted. I believe Power Sink is autohit, though, so it's endurance mod and recharge for me, until, as you say, Efficacy Adapter replaces basic IO's.

I think there's a certain degree of "once bitten twice shy" to some KB haters - myself included. I have been deliberately harassed by a teammate on my Scrapper, said teammate targeting through me and using Energy Torrent and Power Push every time I got anywhere near an enemy - and the enemies at the time were KoA spamming caltrops. I had to leave the team because nobody else was having problems - mostly because they were not being deliberately harassed. Sadly, the whispers they were sending me were not visible to the rest of my team. If this sort of thing had happened to me more than just the once, I'd probably be in the "no-KB on my teams" camp. However, every other time I've had KB issues, they were readily resolved with a simple polite request, or my own realization that a team full of Storm Defenders, Energy Blasters, and /FF Controllers probably wasn't going to be a good place for my Scrapper to make any useful contribution.

An approach like mine, or really anything involving the secondary, would also be a very clear indicator that Defender secondaries are intended to be used. Still get occasional idiots trying to argue that point, more ammo against them is always welcome.

I would actually delete my level 50 scrapper and reroll if they ever ported Ninjitsu to Scrappers. I think there's quite a few sets folks are waiting on - like, every set that hasn't already been ported, at a guess.

Teaming is not a moral right. Liking or not liking knockback is not a moral position, it's a matter of personal preference. It is entirely appropriate to avoid teaming with somebody whose play style interferes with your fun. It is amazingly selfish to insist on teaming with somebody when you know your play style interferes with their fun.

If you won't fit your play style in with the rest of the team, you need to go. If your team likes knockback, you can just shut up about knockback and enjoy, or you can leave. If your team doesn't like knockback, you can keep your Gale and Energy Torrent under control, or you can leave. Either way, your leaving may or may not be voluntary. All of this is entirely appropriate. Demanding that somebody change their opinion on what they, as a matter of personal preference, enjoy doing in a video game, is frankly not appropriate or reasonable at all.

Whether you love knockback and refuse to keep it under control, or despise knockback and can't tolerate having to deal with it, either way you're restricting your teaming options based on a matter of personal preference. Neither position is one of any particular moral superiority sufficient to demand that the other change. It's not the anti-KB crowd who needs to get over themselves, it's both sides.

Since you cannot reasonably build for all 3 positional defenses, I'd go for S/L instead - it's gonna defend you against more stuff than any one position. If you're willing to blow wads of influence and can manage a build, covering all 3 positions with reasonable amounts of defense is better, though - it's just that if you can only pick one defense stat to build, S/L covers more than any other single defense.

At least, that's my impression.

Just checked in game, the powers list the same activation times in the character creation screen. I'm gonna have to think that the difference is a myth.

Yeah, pretty much. But hey, if he feels the need to complain about one thing, I can spare the electrons to complain about another.

I think that the problem is not so much what the tutorials hand out - even newbies can figure out that if they need more endurance, they should slot for endurance cost reduction. The problem is that low level enhancements don't really do much of anything, compounded by a severe lack of slots to put them in.

Even if you could get SO's at level 1, with costs the same as current TO enhancements, you'd still be relying in large part on powers with only the single default slot for a long time. Likewise, even if you got 3 slots at non-power levels starting at level 1 (or level 3 in practice) you'd still have only crummy TO's to put in them.

I've occasionally toyed with a suggestion that all enhancements operate at SO levels, with the difference being how early ED kicked in, with TO's counting as, effectively, 3 SO's for purposes of ED reduction and DO's as 2 SO's. It would make low level enhancements effective enough that fewer people would simply skip all enhancements at low levels as is common now, but hinder them enough that high level players would use SO's or, more likely, IO's. I've never made the post because the change is likely too complicated to describe usefully to new players who don't even get ED yet, and would thus sow confusion instead of helping them out.

Electric Armor is hax against Rikti - it's really unfair. I'd go for Fiery Melee instead of Dark Melee, though. Dark may deal damage faster against single targets, but the price is essentially zero AoE damage potential. Fiery Melee gets excellent single target DPS in a damage type Rikti don't resist much, and gets a fairly ordinary amount of AoE goodness as well. With Electric Armor, you won't much miss the utility of Dark Melee - at least, not against Rikti.