Microcosm

Sometimes you have give the forums here a little time for someone with specific knowledge to respond.

In regards to your build and set bonus questions: 1) try the Builds Workshop forum; that should be the best place for this and will get more knowledgeable answers. 2) Dual Blades and Fire both love recharge bonuses, so try for those. Also you would do well to try for s/l defense bonuses for Fire. I haven't looked at your actual build, but those are the two most important things to shoot for. Kinetic Combats are probably the best way to get s/l defense.

Edit: I should say Dual Blades only loves recharge bonuses if you are trying for the very highest dps chain. If you want the next best, it requires very little recharge at all.

If the shift times were shortened and toggles suppressed, I would pick dwarf for a quick mire or taunt, but I still would not actually use the form because I would be losing both damage and survival in doing so. The forms should be worth using for more than a quick buff.

They are blasters in the sense that they are more fragile, but very much not blasters in the damage department. Even if that was the intent it was a failure.

/Signed...except the Death part.

I would say take it a tiny bit further and allow pool powers to continue working in forms, not just suppress, but suppress clearly 'human' toggles like Orbiting and Inky. I know some people think that might possibly be overpowering, but I cannot justify taking dwarf form otherwise except as a mule. If I simply have combat jumping and maneuvers running in human form with its shields, by switching to dwarf I am losing mitigation along with lowering my damage potential; all I gain is some hp and mez protection, the latter of which I can get elsewhere easily enough.

I have figured out the most durable scrapper: DM/Ice...which doesn't exist yet.

Seriously though, when ice gets ported from stalkers I will never play another secondary again.
-Capped HP
-easily softcap s/l/e/n with only one opponent
-a toggle slow/-dmg
-resistance cap cold (that one's not a big deal, but it's nice)
-immunity to slow
-all the endurance you could ever want +the active mitigation of /ea and /elec
-extra defense when surrounded to help get closer to incarnate softcap or for help against debuffs

That alone wouldn't sell me, but the new power, Icy Bastion, is amazing. It will hard cap s/l/f/c/t with a significant chunk of e/n, and give you a sizable amount of +regen and +recov. It can be active a little bit less than 50% of the time with a good build (it's crashless) or you an use it with burnout and hibernate to be as tough as possible for a scrapper to be for 2 minutes straight.

All that and it will still have a damage aura!

Ice does have a similar hole to psi that invlun has, but it has more tools to take care of that with its slow/-dam aura, enddrain, and Icy Bastion.

Confirmed that it's a chance of stealth (don't remember the %), but as the AT specific enhancements aren't live yet there's always the possibility of change.

I'd rather they leave hp lower than scrappers, raise the damage so that they actually fit into the melee AT continuum, and change the +hp powers to not be wasted. If they raise hp to match scrappers, they would probably never raise damage, and we would end up with relative survival parity but lower damage. That would put us right back into the underperforming camp we are in now and let the devs believe they "fixed" our problems.

"Taken by itself" is probably not very useful. It's all about synergy between primary and secondary. But if you just want to know the pets' inherent resistance/defense numbers, you can check them all here.

Hey Pilgrim, who's Smoking Joe?

Having one pet that periodically summons a photon seeker is something Smiling Joe has mentioned in the past, and I think that could work. I really don't think they would give you mastermind controls or a summons like Dark Extraction's though. One non-expiring Light version of Dark Extraction (that is basically the old Lightform animation) that can also summon the occasional photon seeker would do a heck of a lot toward closing that damage gap. It would be better than Dark Extraction in certain situations and worse in others, following the basic theme of the two AT's as they currently stand.

One sold, but have another. PM if interested.

Edit: Sold

I agree. In fact, /ice would be my new favorite if Hoarfrost weren't so freaking and utterly awful for a stalker. Seriously, turn it into a clone of kuji-in sha (still a heal and still gives toxic resistance) and the set would be practically perfect. Also, chilling embrace shouldn't actively keep you from reentering hide while around enemies...

But ya, the set is like "Hello, I'm kind of like /sr. Wait, no, I'm kind of like /electric. Wait, I think I'm like /regen."

This set will work great on scrappers once it is ported over, as they won't have problems with hoarfrost and will also get icicles.

The damage problem is entirely the fault of photon seekers. Without pets, pb's easily do better damage than warshades. With pets, warshades outclass them by a very large margin. Fix photon seekers in some way to actually be worthwhile dps (perhaps summon one or two light versions of Dark Extraction, no bodies required but can't do more than two) and your damage problem is solved. Well, that and the option of kd instead of kb for some powers.

Gladiator's Armor +3% defense unique lvl 50 for sale, 2.7 bil. PM me here if interested.