PleaseRecycle

How is making scrappers more similar to brutes inherently a win? "I don't see the harm in this change" isn't just way less than is required to convince the devs to spend their time doing something, it isn't a reason to do something at all.

I'm not going to say that I couldn't deal with aoe confront, but why should I have to? I like it how it is. Is that any less valid than your desire for it to be aoe?

And since you went there, Nihilii, if it were aoe then its utility in picking groups apart, say extracting an AV from a spawn on a TF, would be severely impaired.

I have a great idea for the next Freedom Phalanx inductee: she's from Indonesia and wears a niqab, plus she's the most powerful psychic in the world! It's basically win-win.

Are you positive that the fabric of the universe won't be rent asunder by a change to the skin of the trainer in Atlas Park, Hopeling? It's pretty important that we get this right the first time.

Has anyone pointed out that Shadow Hunter is showing more skin than Penelope even has? Just another example of shameful objectification of werewolves.

I'd say if you wanted a good build as fast as one used to be able to complete one you're probably looking at something more along the lines of 500 million. Possibly up to a billion if you're buying it all now and playing power sets that have been recently popular for whatever reason. If you're very patient, or have the foresight to begin buying your enhancements on the character's creation and before it actually needs them, then a couple hundred mil should certainly suffice.

The extent to which converters have smoothed out prices has impressed me. I don't think they have anything to do with the relative scarcity I've been noticing of things like mid-level uncommons, but they certainly deflated the heck out of purples and PvPs. Even if one were to accept my hypothesis that the mid-range build is now slightly dearer than it was a year ago, the other side of that coin is that high end builds are now vastly cheaper than they had been since about a year after the introduction of purples. I was pretty proud of a fifteen billion inf character I made last year, now I'm making better ones for less than a third of that.

So the capacity for learning and knowing things about the game is an onerous requirement and a bridge too far for you?

Staff uses about half as much endurance per second as titan weapons before you even consider that it gets a powerful endurance management tool on top of that. Titan weapons does significantly more damage per attack and the attacks are extremely quick which is frequently as fantastic as it sounds. The problem it can run into is that it doesn't have any "little" attacks to finish things off. That's doubly painful when you're looking at a boss with a sliver of health left and you know that you either have to spend two seconds minimum on a crushing blow, if it's up, or hope that your next aura tick does the job while risking waiting even longer than two seconds. Your annoyance with this may vary. It certainly is fun to rip into a big horde of stuff and revel in the chunks being lopped off of their health bars, but that doesn't change the fact that you're overkilling things all the time but paying full endurance for it.

You can tell which set I prefer but both of them are really solid on the whole. In spite of staff's versatility it's never going to take down a pylon like titan weapons will, though it may well clear rooms about as fast. How much do you value crazy single target damage compared to easy endurance sustainability?

Stone/ice would be a great combination if you wanted to do some intense roleplaying. For example, a famous Olympic sprinter who looted a mummy's tomb and was cursed to be the slowest thing in the world yet completely unable to end her own suffering with the sweet release of death. Or maybe a fanatical Bill Murray stalker who fell into a river of mutagenic toxin outside of Mr. Murray's New Jersey condo and ironically gained the ability to repeat the same futile actions over and over, day after day, in defiance of death itself?

I believe UberGuy or someone did an analysis of degenerative that showed that against AVs it was competitive with reactive core's overall effect. That's cool and everything but the reason I bring it up is to point out that against anything short of an AV, the damage proc is waaaaaaaaay more useful than any of the debuffs or controls. Which damage proc? Take your pick, I believe reactive is the strongest but even the psionic one beats any of the debuffs against minions, lieutenants and bosses.

I just hate to pile onto Shubbie but he's even wronger than he appears prima facie due to super sidekicking. Remember bridging? Who could forget? I can't even explain the concept without using profanity so I hope it's fresh in everyone's minds. Suffice it to say that I can now take basically any of my incarnates and powerlevel seven arbitrary door sitters. That's somehow worse for teaming than it used to be? Sure.

On topic, I liked how sturdy my old regen scrapper was but what could we really do with it? In considering now versus then balance we must also consider what was on offer in terms of activities. The only way to challenge yourself was pointlessly soloing giant monsters for no reward, tanking hami which said regen scrappers could do while unconscious, and the thrilling challenge of trying to complete a task force back when a disconnect of any kind meant you were permanently kicked. I didn't see anyone bring up issue zero smoke grenade but it's demonstrative of my point: great, you can kill everything in dark astoria with literally no risk. Then what? Then you probably cancelled your sub in anticipation of WoW's fantastic launch. Now we not only have plenty of absurd power, we have challenges to apply it to.

I was on my first non-farm Magisterium today and all I can say is, "Huh?" On a scrapper I was easily able to ride the lightning *guitar wail* out in melee range by just positioning myself so I wasn't in more than two patches. Tyrant's hittable area is absolutely massive, if you're anywhere near him you can target him with melee attacks. I don't see how you could fail this trial due to too much melee without also failing it due to too little debuff, which is really more important in the first place. If you don't have rebirth radial epiphany, well, that's your problem. This is currently the ultimate trial, deal with it.

Nihilii, in my experience it simply isn't true that the really incredible "squishy" combos are more generally useful than a SS/FA in the hands of a highly skilled player. Is a fire/cold a more desirable teammate in most cases? Absolutely. Can a fire/cold solo most AVs? Of course. Can a fire/cold do it completely off the cuff with no set-up and no regard for what other enemies may be around? This is where they falter. Remember that trials don't just throw around untyped damage patches for meleers, they throw around unusual controls with pernicious durations. They throw around constantly spawning enemies in such quantity that you cannot reasonably expect the league's meleers to keep all of the aggro off of you. For that matter, while your meleers are scattering in terror from the very concept of harm they're even less effective than usual at watching your back.

To summarize, let me get out my incredibly tiny violin and play a stirring dirge for the fact that you can't just sit still and take it like before.

MA does better single target than SJ but the aoe is arguably worse. Dragon's tail is a lot more straightforward to use, basically, but spinning strikes is approximately as good, if fiddlier, and you also get sweeping cross. As someone with a purpled MA/DA and a number of purpled SJ scrappers and brutes I'd say I find MA to be the more natural pairing with dark armor. It doesn't matter when you break up your attacking to throw a fireball or a dark regen because there's no combo system pressure, for one thing. For another you just don't need as many attacks to make a good single target chain with MA. Storm kick is basically better than crushing uppercut but you get to use it every two seconds as opposed to every eight or nine. SJ requires what amounts to filler just to sustain your one really good single target attack as well as your aoe. Dragon's tail, again, works just peachy right out of the gate.

Honestly I was pretty enamored with SJ for a few months but now that the shine has dimmed slightly I think the main thing about it that beats MA is the fantastic animations and the fact that brutes get it. Oh, and it's a hell of a lot better for stalkers. It is not better for tankers or scrappers in most cases. Having said that, the difference between them is not incredibly substantial so whichever works better for your concept is perfectly fine. The thing is that they pretty much work about the same for many concepts so why not take the one that's a little stronger with a little less fooling around?

Oh right, but specifically about end draining? They're both complete beasts. As in, I had to go ageless on my MA/DA because cardiac would not have been enough. I feel that it's worth it though.

Well, it's for the same reason as you mentioned, but the overwhelming force antiproc is why I'm working on a claws/dark scrapper right now. My principal build goal is to make my teammates stop and say, "Uh, are you allowed to do that?" My reply shall be, "Apparently I am!"

Obviously not a brute but I don't see what about the build I would change. Works well. That's with musculature and rebirth. Focused accuracy is admittedly pretty pointless but could be swapped out for one-slotted water spout or something if I ever respec.

Psi ended up not being as universal a threat in incarnate content as it was looking like a couple issues ago since lambda and to a small extent underground are the only places where you'll fight augurs. I still disproportionately value having either psi defense or fear protection simply because I like soloing the crates and having to carry a breakfree on an otherwise-impervious scrapper feels a little silly. Maybe I should just get over it.

My question, which I'm not sure any non-devs can answer yet, is whether absorb is protected by defense and resistance or whether it is outside of them? It seems incredibly exploitable for it to be just as secure as normal HP if indeed you can build it up indefinitely and it never decays. On the other hand, if you can't keep things from stripping it away, how useful can it be? Guess we'll find out.

It also seems worth bearing in mind that the radial version may or may not suffer from the upcoming PPM changes while the core version certainly oughtn't.

Staff's best single target chain is precise-serpent's-precise-sky. Staff's aoe chain, for approximately the same amount of recharge, is guarded-innocuous-guarded-eye. As you can see, the only skippable thing in a high end staff build is mercurial blow. On my staff/elec, I took it anyway as a place to put kinetic combats and also as a big help to my chain when exemplaring. Your mileage may vary on that.

It feels like a lot of the pre-release talk of staff being best on stalkers has everyone severely undervaluing innocuous strikes. As I've said before, it's basically a good single target attack that happens to hit five targets in a giant cone. With the fury of the gladiator proc in guarded spin the aoe you can put out with staff is bordering on ludicrous. It would be a shame to skip a big part of that.

I totally agree that epic pools are redundant for this combination, but as for the alpha I will say one major advantage of going scrapper instead of brute is that musculature is just beautiful for staff/elec. For those who are addicted to taunt auras, well as of today you can have that too.