Kioshi

Why? You're not gonna use Super Jump or Fly when fighting. Anyhow I tend to put a steadfast -KB IO in grounded, since slotting grounded for resistance wont do wonders for your neg resists, and energy res will be capped on DOs anyway on a scrapper (SOs on a Brute because they have a 90% cap). If you're building for defense, Grounded is a good place for 3 steadfasts, (unique, res/end and KB) because of the +hp bonus since the recovery bonus becomes irrelevant after Power Sink.

The reason I like a KB on Grounded is that (I don't know if this was fixed) sometimes you get KB'ed when you are on the ground but on some edge or irregular surface like caves. This happened a lot with my Brute till I put the KB IO, haven't experienced this on my DB/Elec scrapper but she's only 24 and I don't know if there was some fix because I took a 1.5 year break.

JL is good even as a ST attack. It has single-target attack recharge and end cost, like shadow maul. SM does more damage but JL has a wider cone and doesn't root you forever, 1.67 seconds versu 3 seconds from SM. Plus it's easy to hit 2-3 mobs solo and even 5 on big teams, just takes a lil practice, but it's not like the attack is wasted if you hit one. It's better than hitting one with Chain Induction, because CI has AoE end cost and recharge (14 sec vs JL's 8) and does less damage.

I deleted some of your post, leaving the part I want to comment on:

1) Air Sup is not a bad idea. Bad idea for my db/elec, yes, because of redraw and db is great on St and AoE and demanding on attacks already, but it does decent damage (a little more than Charged Brawl, CB recharges in 3 secs and AS in 4) in a set like ELM with terribad ST damage. I shelved a 50 elm brute because of the horrible ST damage, now I'm leveling an ELM/Regen Stalker and loving her because, you know, Assasin's Strike, lots of crits, Placate + guaranteed crit, Thunderstrike crits the smashing part all the time and the rest 50% of the time from hide... And in a few levels I'll have L. Rod which won't unhide me and I can follow up with an AS or critical attack.

Maybe AS is a good pick for leveling because after you can have CB-JL-CI-Fire Blast you may not need it anymore. I still didn't change my 50 DM/DA build (took a 1.5 year break, she still has Siphon Life slotted for healing, no tough, etc) and A. Sup helps my survivability SO MUCH on that toon (I'll respec her for defense and tough so I won't need it anymore, but it's nice - last +2 iTF i died thrice but the SM/WP Brute too, and all in the first mission, after the team adjusted none of us melee guys died).

2) Flight is good imo. Laziest travel power in the game, I like it.

3) I LOVE Jacob's Ladder, although it could use a reduction in the animation time (or at least deliver the damage earlier). But as I mentioned I have a 50 dm/da... and it took months to take her to 50 (before dev powerleveling... oops I mean 'xp smoothing'). So it's easy for me to hit 3-5 mobs with JL because of my large experience with Shadow Maul. But I think everyone should learn to use the melee cones because yuo can get a LOT of use from Sands of Mu if you have it on any toon in the low levels and even at later levels (like an earth troller with tons of -def, a rad defender/troller/blaster, my SS/Fire brute still uses it at 33 in Rage crashes, usually popping a yellow first because Sands is affected by tohit buffs, but not by damage buffs/debuffs)

4) Travel powers are cool and give you the superhero feeling, but on min/max builds I really don't see the need for them anymore if you have Ninja Run. Seriously, I dusted off a Rad/Psy defender I hadn't played since 2008 who has superjump... And i found myself using ninja run (he has hurdle too) instead of SJ because I was too lazy to change to SJ when traveling to missions, and I didn't find I was slow or anything. Sure, slower than SJ, but good enough for me. When I decided to use SJ to travel to a mission I thought 'meh, not much better'. Even redside I can navigate very well with NR, especially since nowadays you can buy a jetpack for that aberration of a map that is grandville. The only toon I respecced after my return that kept her travel power was my mind/emp because she has recall friend, stealth IO and SS for ghosting in TFs and she's so IO'ed out I can leave SS turned on all the time and have no end problems. Maybe I'll keep SS on my fire/kin too when I respec him, but only to get to mobs faster in farm maps.

But a lot of things suck for fury already. Make a Mace/DA Brute, you'll stun EVERYTHING and have low fury lol.

Seriously, when I had to tank in the sky raider SF on my Stone Melee/Elec (I really had to do it, the squishies were getting hammered bad), I was spamming Fault (stun+knockdown) because /Elec on SOs (and before energize existed) isn't exactly OMGTanker material. I had like 10% fury during the whole SF but it went smoothly after I assumed the role.

Protip (j/k but it worked well for me): the last 2 times I bought these two IOs together (27 fm/sd and 27 claws/sr at the time), I just did two or three trips to Dark Astoria and sold the orange salvage and luck charms and stuff that had some value, then buying the recipes in WW. Took me like 2 hours, maybe less, to get both, without depending on randomness like rolls.

And now that you can email things it's easy to get a 50 toon, exemplar via ouro, kill green mobs on DA, buy them and send the items (or infl) to, say, your warshade or dark melee toon that does like 3 damage to the banished pantheon because they resist negative (weak to energy and I think weak to fire too, my fm/sd kills them very fast but she kills everybody quickly lol, I'm 100% sure about the energy weakness, it's a great place for a Nova form PB to make some cash).

Yup, but DM/Shields won't be bad while leveling, just not as survivable as DM/SR or Kat/WP.

My 30 claws/sr is more survivable than my 31 fm/sd but the fm/sd just kills things so fast, it's not a big issue (sure FSC helps a lot but DM has siphon life and will have AAO too with shields). But of course I use more insps on my fm/shields. Both have the same setup (SOs+CJ+Steadfast unique) but the claws/Sr is capped at melee/ranged with one purple.

OP, you should also consider how important AoE damage is to you. DM has none except for Shadow Maul, which I love but I have a lot of practice to hit 3-5 mobs with it (don't tell me soul drain and D. Comsumption count as Aoes please), but a DM/Shield will have a very decent PbAoE at 35.

Another thing I love about my shielder is the ability to hold aggro on teams (sure, she needs support to tank at her level), AAO is a great taunt aura.

Just ignore je_saist's post. Except on the tech forums, everything he posts about gameplay and powersets is crap. Th'td be okay if he posted it as if it were an opinion, but since he posts in a tone of 'this is the absolute truth'.... Well you saw the responses he got.

I wouldn't play Ice Melee on a scrapper because I think it's still subpar as a set (as I posted, GIS should have Clobber numbers at least and Frozen Aura should have Footstomp radius, then it'd be a set I'd love to try), but it would be a welcome proliferation by a lot of people.

~

NEVER EVER EVER EVER skip a damage aura on a melee toon. Or even a fire/ controller. Skipping those on a blaster or a dominator (not Hot feet! But Mud Pots is kinda lame on a dom) is acceptable.

Yup., same thing as me, bad gfx/ greyed shader opstions.

Actually the game has not crashed at all for me after i17, I didn't crash often before but had some nasty ones when training / accessing the markets. The 'useTexEnvCombine' thingie worked for those who had crashes with Intel cards.

The guys from support told me to try safe mode lol. I don't know if I lose hope and laugh at them or keep my faith that they'll solve the shader intel issue, since it's not only me and you who have shader/low gfx quality problems among Intel users, meaning the supposed 'shader fix' wasn't ideal.

Do you use an intel video card? Because it's been the same for me and others with Intel cards, shader options greyed out.

If those are the 'minor reflections' you're talking about, I'm still experiencing this - comparison i16 x i17 - as you can see my toon and the npc besides her had reflections and shading in the i16 pics and now they look plain.

Anyhow never hurts to see if you're running the latest drivers (I'm assuming you have an Intel chip because the shader options were supposed to be fixed and our 'minor reflections on toons and npcs/enemies corrected):

http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/detect.htm

Lol so true. I did the new posi tf with 5 other scrappers and at the ambush door in Atlas Park... I was popping greens and purples like mad to stay alive, and the others' health bars barely moved and I was all 'wth do I suck at this game now?'... Till I realized I was the only shielder and all the aggro was on me.

Purge, I think what Ahmon wrote is the common reason DM is not so popular. It has no lack of oomph. Just look at the rikti pylon thread in the scrapper forums, dark melee and fire melee are always at the top in ST damage.

DM is very powerful. I was on a mission 2 days ago with my 50 dm/da and I was lol'ing at the spines/DA scrapper because he took an eternity to kill an orange boss, I took them out quickly.

On an ITF, I was killing bosses as fast as the Stone Melee/WP Brute with my DM/DA (Stone melee has one mediocre AoE attack only btw, and a terrific mitigation tool in Fault, but DM has other cool stuff such as the heal in SL, D.Consumption which you probably skipped because you're /EA and Touch of Fear, I love ToF). Soul Drain is fine, BU is fine, Rage is OP, that's it.

Yeah actually you're right, not a different case from the other shared defensive set. I compared SR and Stalkers get 3% extra def with Hide suppressed, compared to Brutes/Scrappers (as long as Hide is slotted for def, but anyway suppressed Hide with 1 def IO gives 2.3% defense and with 3 IOs it's 3% so not a big difference).

Stalker SR don't get Lucky but Evasion gives a whopping 21.3% defense for them - 33.9% AoE defense enhanced, that's not even counting suppressed Hide, so around 36.5-37% AoE def with Evasion + Hide suppressed alone. So in the end it's an even bigger difference than the EA ones.

The only significant difference between brute and stalker numbers is the 3% extra from s/l, now SR gets 3% extra to melee/ranged and 5.9% extra AoE compared to brutes and scrappers (always with hide suppressed, I'm tired of writing 'hide suppressed' lol).

And btw about the EA buffs: the link you posted has wrong info, the heal is not 2% per target, it's 3%, enhanceable to 6%. Maybe the guy who wrote that forgot to change it if the initial number was 2%, the i13 release notes corrected that. And I knew there was some toxic buff I had forgotten, the 'super useful' 7.5% toxic res on one passive.

Also, there was another 'buff' which was the addition of the taunt to E. Drain, but I don't recalll if it was added at the same time or shortly after, I don't have an EA Brute.

They have looked at Energy Aura in i13, but the buffs were kinda... lame. The heal isn't significant, and I think there weren't any other buffs , looking at the i13 page I just found this:

Energy Aura/Energy Drain - Modified Energy Aura's Energy Drain heal aspect to have some healing ability. The heal is roughly 3% of your health per target hit.

But I think shortly after (or maybe simultaneously) they added the taunt component to E. Drain. Not a regular attack taunt, but a +13.5s Taunt (mag 4) like the regular taunt auras, which it didn't have before.

So yes, EA was looked at in i13, and they did nothing significant to the set.

Well I never got a rude response for trying to help, and I usually help people with builds in the forums (especially the Stalker ones because they are such a ghost town, I feel bad for people asking for help and getting few answers, poor Stalkers ).

And as you can see, people who have simply answered my question instead of mocking me for unrelated issues were thanked by me. I was never rude to anyone trying to help, not in this thread or any other.

Quoting myself from people who simply answered that 'there is no precedent in giving free time or refund for time 'lost' with bugs', which was my original question:

I was only rude to je_saist because he told me to 'shut up', assumed things I didn't mean and lashed out at me for that, he didn't try to help as much as mocking my hardware and stating I have no idea how the game is developed and stuff. A bit rude to Thirty-Seven because she lashed out at me for maybe understanding I wanted refunds for all the time I played the game (II didn't express myself very well in the OP), but she apologized and I did too, no harm done.

As I said, that's the first time I experiment any kind of impoliteness directed at me in these forums. Of course, if you troll a lot you're prone to being flamed, but I know that one can ask here things like 'what are enhancements?' (which you can learn in the tutorial at level one) and most responses will be helpful, that's why I like the community and got a bit surprised with people lashing out at me.

I mean, go to some forum like the imdb one and make a constructive and polite criticism of some movie stating the reasons you didn't like it, you'll get a lot of 'go f.. yourself' responses. Those forums scare me (many others too).

Oh that was the intention, believe me, I wouldn't put a lonely PF endmod, I'd just use a generic endmod if I didn't want the proc. Thanks for pointing out my mistake.