Silencer7

Well, it could just be a targeted cone with the "player flying at the enemy" part being entirely graphical.

I don't really see the need for a dark controller, frankly. It'd be cool, but miasma is practically a controller primary already. It just replaces the moderately useful aoe hold with the fantastically useful darkest night.

I'm as much on the power proliferation bandwagon as anyone, but I also think it's sort of neat if classes have a unique powerset or two.

It's kind of amazing to me how much stock people put in the influence of the forums. If /shield is going to get nerfed it's going to get nerfed, so matter what kind of messaging people try to propogate in the scrapper forum. The devs aren't so clueless that they have no idea what /shield is capable of.

I have an SS/shield brute and I'll cry as hard as anyone if shield charge gets toned down, but... it needs it. And that's on my brute, who has to balance defensive needs against damage. I can't imagine how nuts it must be on a scrapper who can just go all out for damage and recharge.

I like it and I'm planning a similar thing with my fire/electric blaster. I question the need for nrg typed defense if you're already softcapping your ranged, though. I don't know offhand, but I can't imagine there are that many energy attacks that won't roll against either s/l or ranged instead.

I would think that you could put less emphasis on your energy defense, and try to work in a six slot gaussian's in build up. I'm posting from my netbook right now and I don't have mids, but if i have time later I'll put together a build like the one I have in my mind.

DP is fun enough. I personally wouldn't pay thirty bucks for one power set if I wasn't already planning on buying GR, though.

Aside from looking awesome (seriously, even though they're silly the animations are very well done), DP is a generic-ish set that's lowish on end usage and has decent aoe. And like people have said, it's output is lacing compared to other blasters.

So, is Virtue LFG Alpha now considered deprecated? Lots of folks still seem to use it. MotD needs an update.

If you take one of the secondaries that has 2-3 melee attacks, it would behoove you to get into melee and use them. Especially with sets like /fire, /nrg and /elec, you're missing out on a lot of the utility of the set by not taking advantage of their high damage melee attacks.

If you don't want to be in melee, you'd be better off to choose one of the sets that doesn't feature strong melee attacks (/dev, /ice, /mental.)

ugh, irritating

Shield defense for a brute is pretty damned squishy on common IOs. Its tank just isn't that strong, and unlike some of the other squishier sets, doesn't have many panic button options. One With the Shield is decent, but it crashes hard and isn't available that much. I don't even have it in my final SS/SD build.

Don't get me wrong, I would put SS/SD up against anything for solo farming speed, but with the way prices are on IO sets you should expect to lay a half billion at least to get it to a point where you'll really be comfortable. Contrast that with willpower, which is very strong right out of the box.

What you're essentially doing by picking /SD as a brute is saying "Yes, I am willing to pay through the nose for the privilege of blasting entire spawns down with shield charge." And it is awesome, but it is also expensive.

I would like to set up QoS on my router to prioritize game traffic, but I can't figure out what IP(s) of the servers. Is there a list somewhere?

UltimaDR's build looks a lot like mine, although I have aid self in there.

That build looks fine on paper, but it's really reliant on purple sets for it's +rec and +rech. Unless you have a billion+ ready to drop on the character as soon as it can use those sets, it might be good to develop a less expensive build.

pvers can also farm the wall, or has that fallen out of fashion these days?

Anyway, I say SS/shield but, maybe only because that's what I play. It makes quicker, neater work of groups than fire aura seems to, and I can just alternate footstomp/ball lightning with shield charge as I move from group to group.

hey, my /shield has tanked everything I've thrown at him so far

haven't had a chance to do an LRSF with him, though

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"Brutes are extremely durable, but not really built for tanking."

Why aren't they?

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If the best I can hope for is that 1/20 hits from enemies will get through at full damage...then what's the point. I might as well be playing my Invul Tank who gets 90% resist to 100% of the attacks, plus 45% defense in a herd. SR is significanly less useful than invuln at this point.

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ITT we take a long [censored] time to realize obvious things.

It's pretty obvious the OP has no idea how defense actually functions.

Mobs have a 50% chance to hit by default (modified by class, relative level and buffs.) 45% defense reduces their chance to hit to 5%, which is the minimum. More than that in a situation with even cons and no debuffs does nothing.

You will still get hit, of course; if 20 guys are hitting you, you'll be hit fairly frequently. If all those hits can apply def debuffs you can get spiked pretty quickly, because every successful hit means more hits are coming. It is essentially a random thing, but the ITF can be rough in particular because even the roman minions have def debuffs.

There's nothing wrong with defense; my shield brute rips romans apart 20 at a time on the wall. You just need to be aware that it can happen, have your def% shown, and be ready with greens/purples when you get a debuff or two.

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The strength of Energy Blast is its single target damage, and when dealing with a single enemy, knockback isn't an issue. Like I said earlier, focus on the single target aspect and use the AoE's at opportune moments and the set is more than good enough as is.

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You would have a point if energy's single target damage was better than any other set, but as we discussed before the tree got modded away, it isn't. It only looks like a "strength" because knockback makes energy's aoe so terrible.

Yes, players who are competent will understand when they can and cannot fire their powers; the problem with energy is that the time that it can't fire it's aoes without reducing group effectiveness is almost all the time.

KB and KD are the same effect, only the magnitude changes. Some powers that are thought of as KD will cause KB if used against lower level enemies, enemies weak against KB (clockwork mostly), or enemies that somehow manage to have KB effects stacked (not sure if this is possible.)

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I once sincerely congratulated a player on how well they portray a mentally handicapped characterwithout making it seem like they're begging for pity or being silly. The player pretty much exploded in my face as they had no intention of portraying a mentally handicapped character and went on to tell me how smart and lovely their character was.

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Virtue in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen, home to Mary Sue and all her estranged relatives! XD

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This is fantastic

My SS/SD brute is essentially done (waiting on some purple sets but w/e), and it isn't too difficult to build one with softcapped defense, ridiculous aoe and enough +rec to run it all feasibly.

The problem is that it's expensive. Mine didn't get really comfortable until I got ahold of a numina's unique last week. He's pretty self-sufficient now, but I still carry blues so I can eat'em if there's a rage crash at an inopportune time.

For a brute I would look at it this way: you want damage, soft-capped defense and roughly three end/sec recovery; if you want to do it cheaply, pick two. This can mean just doing less damage, not being softcapped, or having both and needing to eat blues to sustain yourself for a while.

I went the eating blues route, which really isn't that bad if you're watching your end bar and combining insps diligently as you go.

And good god don't drop rage. If you need to do something to mitigate your end issues turn off AAO (or possibly weave.) Rage contributes more damage, a big tohit buff, and isn't that much more expensive to run than AAO (and about the same as weave IIRC.)

edit: just realized I can't post my build because I don't have an updated version in mids, but I have two lotgs, the numina's, a performance shifter and fairly standard defbonus slotting. ~40% global recharge, 3.2 end/sec recovery, and softcapped ranged/melee (aoe's at 40% or something.) Hard to estimate cost because stuff came from a lot of sources, but I could probably build it again for six or seven hundred given current market prices, minus the lotgs maybe.

The nice thing is that SS/shield is such a wrecking ball that I'm making my money back at a pretty good pace.

edit2: I also didn't take OwtS, and I wouldn't advise taking it unless you somehow have a loose build and you want to use it to mule a steadfast or something. It's not a good panic button, and even less so for SS/ with the crash.

arch/ice is a pretty good soloer.

fire/something with a lot of damage. elec, nrg, mental and fire all fit the bill for secondaries. Let the rest of the team worry about buffing, defense, alphas, etc.

I think I saw most of it, and I didn't think it was anything modworthy.

Going back to i1 (or 4, or whatever) won't bring back what made that era fun, which was the high population and ease of finding teams to run story arcs.