Jack_NoMind

FF/Dark defender. BR/Rad Corr. (Never run into another of either.) Flying (Hover only) SR or ElA melee.

The brief guide to mitigation is:

• You want about 45% to either all three positional defenses (melee, ranged, and AoE) or all seven typed defenses (smashing, lethal, energy, negative, fire, cold, and psionic).
• You want to come as close to 90% (as a Brute or Tanker) or 75% resistance to things as you can.
• You want get as close as you can to your HP cap. http://wiki.cohtitan.com/wiki/Hit_Points
• You want as much over-time (regen and heal over time) and on-demand (click heal) HP recovery as you can get.

For a Brute, achieving either of the first two points will essentially reduce the damage you take over time by 90%, and of the two, the easier by far (especially for Shield Defense) is the first one. The last two are secondary goals but they can contribute significantly.

As for Taunt: All of your attacks do a single-target Taunt when you hit with them. However, the Taunt power is a ranged, automatically hitting Taunt that additionally reduces enemy range by 75%, forcing them to get closer to you to attack you. It is especially effective in a very common situation : you are fighting one significant enemy or a group of smaller enemies, but one of your allies is being attacked by another group of enemies. Having Taunt will let you pick up aggro on all those enemies very quickly and with a minimum of disruption of your existing chain, and that ability will very often save your allies' lives.

Before I get into the actual build I want to fore-warn you that the next Issue coming out, 25, will include a number of changes to IOs that may mean that you will want to change it around. It's unfortunate, but unavoidable. I haven't included anything ridiculously expensive, so that shouldn't be too hard or painful, and this won't get *worse* -- there just might be something slightly better possible.

It's typical to include the DataChunk, because DataLinks don't work for everyone. I usually only use the Chunk.

This is a basic build. I think better could be done, but I put it together while distracted (also, I typed up this long forum post explaining it as I was doing it.)

Some of the changes : You have Hold and Knockback resistance in Active Defense, so you don't need Acrobatics. You do, however, need Grant Cover, since that helps protect you against enemies that debuff your Defense (irrespective of the buff it provides your teammates). You don't need both Focused Accuracy and Tactics. You very much need Tough and Weave on a Shield Defense character, and unfortunately taking Boxing or Kick is the only way to get to them. One with the Shield can be skipped; it cannot be made to be up all the time and whenever you use it you will endurance-crash and probably lose all of your defensive toggles, which is a very bad situation to be in as a tank. Taking Build Up will increase your damage much more than Slash; you can only use one attack at a time, and Slash's damage is terrible, but Build Up buffs all of your damage. You don't need Parry since you should always have 45% melee defense without it.

I typically use an attack priority system rather than a proper attack chain. Your attack priority versus a single target is: Use Shield Charge whenever you can. After that, use Hack whenever you can. After that, use Disembowel whenever you can, after that Head Splitter whenever you can. If you can't use anything else, use Slice, and if you can't use that, use Whirling Sword.

And lastly... I put Pyre Mastery in your build in place of Energy Mastery. Melt Armor is a great power and you shouldn't need the additional endurance recovery from Energy Mastery. If you strongly prefer Energy you can switch it back. So actually in that priority system I mentioned above, put Melt Armor after Shield Charge but before Hack.

(Oh, and the very first enhancements you should get are the Steadfast Protection +3% def one, and the full set of Gaussian's Fire Control. After that, slot your main toggles: Deflection, Battle Agility, and Weave; then your main attacks, Hack, Disembowel, and Head Splitter. After that everything else.).

Slick, that wasn't a quote, it was a parody or allusion. If you don't think Lovecraft was intensely xenophobic in every way, even for his time, you're in a very tiny minority even of those who do like his writing. (Look up his correspondences.)

I can't attend (I'll be travelling, and I have limited or no access for the next few days). But I'm very excited about the SG!

Eh. I might be willing to grant that Lovecraft was the Carl Macek of cosmic horror.

Fire/ corruptors are a strong choice. However -- and I realize you'd have to buy the set, but you could run it on SOs -- I would suggest Beam Rifle. I think (I'm not certain without figuring out what kind of recharge rates you can get on SOs) Fire can do a bit more single-target damage, but BR also debuffs regeneration, which is extremely important on those classes of foe. Depending a bit on the specific enemy,

For Secondary, the best I can think of are Kinetics, Radiation, or Time Manipulation. Any will work, but they each require different strategies.

You'll want Hasten (especially for Radiation; you'll switch between Accelerate Metabolism and Hasten to keep up your attack chain and debuffs), so the Speed pool, and probably Leadership (Assault and Tactics).

For APP/PPP, Soul Mastery is probably your strongest choice, but I could see arguments for Mace (possibly a strong one here but I can't remember what debuffs, if any, the pet can apply), Mu, or even Power Mastery.

Edit : Kin/Sonics and Rad/Sonics used to be able to solo certain AVs on SOs. I think Shivans and nukes were a big part of this strategy. I honestly don't know if it still works.

Honestly, I have nautical. The man is a total mr.sea. I'm just glad I wasn't baited into punning, as finny as most of these entrees have been.

Lessons I Learned From The Lovecraft Mythos :

While many people were apparently seduced (or bludgeoned, perhaps) by Lovecraft's fondness for the bang sign and ripping off better authors, I was paying a more careful attention, wracking his tomes for the true mysteries of the cosmos. And therein, these eldritch secrets were revealed to me:

Non-white men are evil. Women are evil, although it may be because they are weak and easily possessed by the devil, rather than because of any inherent capacity to do wrong, mom. The best weapon to kill a god? Tugboat. Accreditation is over-rated. All ancient societies wanted to end the world. Anything you don't like is probably trying to kill you. Schizophrenia just means you're doing a good job. English food is disgusting.

As I lived according to these principles, I noticed the deluded and weak men of my acquaintance moving further from me and conspiring behind my back to chain me in an institution for those they claim are mentally unfit to be in society. But it is they who are unfit! They who have shackled society to the whims of dark and coptic spirits, who placate their black masters (TOTALLY NOT RACIST, GUYS) in the capitol houses (OKAY MAYBE A LITTLE) and halls of parliment, they who have -- BY ZEUS'S FLAMES, IT COMES FOR ME!!!!!!

(To be clear, the *mythos* is great. But basically everything great about it was invented by other people.

The Dream Key of Unknown Kadath was okay, I guess.

I will grant that most English food is pretty gross. It gets better the more alcohol it's made with and/or served with.)

Fiery Aura, and I do use the Dark APP on my Claws/FA to root. If you've got a convenient wall, you can Torrent -> Tenebrous -> Burn pretty effectively.

Edit : Oh, and, I'd recommend just taking Confront over a single-target immob; it's more generally useful.

Freeform? You *sure* you're on the right forums?

My first character -- the one my forum name is from, before I deleted him out of embarrassment -- was a Katana/SR scrapper with all the Travel pools.

This was before inherent Fitness, mind.

There are ways this could be resolved, but nearly all the ones I can think of that would work in the current game (eg, disallowing more than two travel pools on a character, for instance) are very likely to irritate more experienced players. After a certain point, the ability of a player to make a character that takes five times as long to defeat an enemy is simply the natural dispersion of the system. If you had a character that literally could not beat even-con minions or lts, then I'd be asking you some much more specific questions.

I'm absolutely in favor of any suggestion that includes the phrase "dire bear."

Interesting mutation:

Give him a tohit penalty while moving.

Arcanaville, I don't have time to respond to this thread properly right (just reading it has put me late for work) now but I am wearing a very toothy grin. I am especially appreciative of the ideas of facefirstness and alternate universes, since they both answer questions I hadn't gotten around to asking you yet. And the conversation as a whole...

Just thought you should know.

(We need a crocodile smile emote.)

This isn't specifically a Scrapper epic. At least one of the powers I mentioned is not in a PPP, regardless of whether or not APPs and PPPs can or can't be similar; and I find the statement "citing Patron Pool Powers as an example of how Ancillary Pools can follow a different design path is disingenuous" to be itself disingenuous, as (among other things) the existence of any 'type' of power in a class's APPs *or* PPPs invalidates the argument that that type of power is mechanically inaccessible to the class.

Contrary to what 37 said, melee do get a few powers that improve their mitigation or survival line. The most obvious is Shadow Meld in Soul Mastery, but Physical Perfection, Hibernate, and Darkest Night all also qualify (I may have forgotten some). I think he'd probably hedge on Darkest Night, anyway.

While I can't think of any direct ally buffs, I think the reason for this is more because the global 'design document' balance modifiers for melee's affect-other powers (except Tankers) are awful. But I don't see a truly *objective* reason for them not to get these powers (they'd just be bad).

That being said, I don't particularly like the pool.

I'd prefer a "Psionic," rather than necessarily "Telekinetic" pool with something like Levitate, Dominate, World of Confusion, Link Minds, and Psionic Tornado. I don't think many people would take Link Minds, because it would probably be similar to the Dominator version in terms of numbers. But I wouldn't mind the option of it existing. (Edit : And World of Confusion is iffy, since it would probably go into a Psychic Armor set if one were ever made. A PBAoE "Carrie" tk storm would be an okay replacement.)