TheBruteSquad

This fix is rectify a situation where people have paid real money for mission teleport charges and ended up losing said money. I don't believe it will have any effect on non-charged interuptables in the slightest.

All of the pure resistance armors, save fire, are currently out of fashion. They're harder to softcap with inventions which means they take more damage and suck more asphalt when trying to tank for large teams - a problem that has plagued Fire Aura/x tankers for as long as I've played the game.

Dark Armor is one of my favorite armors, though (second to WP, and it was first *until* WP). I love being a mez bomb of doom and despair. I love the psychic resistance and strong resistances all around (well, not energy so much). I love the monster heal. I love damage auras. I even love the self rez (and before inventions were put in game you really needed to love the rez, as you'd use it frequently).

These days I still love all that. I also love the 30% to most defenses I sport. Combined with Darkest Night and I'm far more powerful than I was in Issue 8. And that was pretty damned powerful (not every brute could beat Lord Recluse as an EB on SOs).

The internet has killed the art of deadpan.

Joss Whedon would never kill of a fan favorite supporting character. It's not his style.

No, it's newbie fleecing.

If you bought it in the costume generator you'd never even KNOW there was a magic pack bundle for sale.

It's not a true pay to win, though, until SO builds become unplayable.

A lot of MMO are going this route to keep farming profits where they belong - in their OWN hands. Those ridiculous profit margins on gold farmers can belong to the company instead since the same players who would pay real money for fake currency might pay real money for virtual goods directly. Frankly I have no problem with that.

Until SO builds become unplayable.

Or you can take the silence AS feedback.

Regen is trash for tanking.

With no defense debuff resistance any defense you muster will be stripped away. Like /dark or /fire your main form of staying alive is healing. Unlike /dark or /fire that is your only trick. No wall of fire that kills everything before they can kill you. No mez toggles to reduce incoming damage. No resistances to speak of.

With dull pain and instant healing running you can expect an obscene level of regeneration. Many late game factions have no problems at all either shutting it down (longbow, malta, carnies, arachnos) or just killing you through it.

My experience is with a fully tricked out IO'd and incarnated scrapper, and a brute will be tougher, but I can't see it being that MUCH tougher (FOR TANKING) - outside of when MOment of Glory is being awesome.

Don't forget the other half of the 'balanced around SOs' thing: Balanced around +0/x1 difficulty.

Back before the detailed custom difficulty I think diff 2 and 4, the ones with 'lots' of enemies to fight solo, gave you as many enemies per spawn as x2 does now. Perhaps x3.

That's right. The most difficult any character could get without filling was either level 4 (+1/x2) or level 5 (+2/x1 ).

There are a lot of bugs to stomp at the moment. Problems with the costume creator, problems with being out of phase in the new phasing missions, problems with crashing when zoning for the first time after logging in.

Plus, they're activating the 'Who Will Die - Part 2' content.

Patches are Tuesdays, maintenance is Thursday. That's just the way it is.

Hell, I don't expect to be able to log in ANY morning after 7, as the servers used to go down for maintenance at this time every day.

Agreed. My level 42 blaster has two 45 fly IOs in it and has a fly speed of over 80 mph. It's almost what they said the servers couldn't handle - a fly speed as fast as superspeed. It's very noticable compared to the 58 mph regular fly cap.

A way to kill two birds with one stone would be to add a splash AoE component to one of the attacks, like Thunderstrike. Sure, it's pretty weak, but it's better than nothing and wouldn't be out of place thematically on either Total Focus or Energy Transfer.

If every enemy type, from minion through to arch-villain, is dying in 3 seconds a brute might as well be using brawl for what he's contributing to the team.

I still use EM heavily on my most IO'd tanker and while the occasional corpse blast happens for the most part I've trained myself to not bother using ET or TF on anything less than a boss on a team.

That said, if we set the animation time threshold for corpse punching to 2.5 seconds or higher we find:
- battle axe has 2 - whirling axe, cleave
- claws has 2 - spin, eviscerate
- dark melee has 1 - shadow maul
- dual blades has 1 - thousand cuts
- electric melee has 2 - thunderstrike, lightning rod
- energy melee has 3 - whirling hands, energy transfer, total focus
- fire melee has 2 - breath of fire, fire sword circle
- kinetic melee has 2 - burst, concentrated strike (which doesn't have people saying 'skip it. You'll only punch corpses with it.')
- stone melee has 2 - throw boulder, tremor
- super strength has 1 - hurl
- war mace has 1 - whirling mace
- broad sword has 1 - whirling sword
- katana has 0 (the only set that has no animation time higher than 2 seconds)
- spines has 0 (only put here because I think that's kind of interesting as it also has a reputation for slowness)

What sets EM up as the slowest set is that most of those other slow powers don't get worked into attack chains (concentrated strike being a glaring exception, with cleave and thunderstrike being honorable mentions).

Personally, since I love ET's new animation, I'd like to see Total Focus' animation time reduced. I'll support the opinions presented here that at least one them should be.

I would offer a kat/elec brute as a consideration.

Elec has two resistances that exceed the scrapper cap of 75% - Energy and energy drain resistance. Both are noticeably nicer at cap. Also, should you use it, the tier 9 godmode is better on a brute for the same reason.

Both very nice builds (I might yoink the /regen actually).

There's two factors you didn't mention that I'd put on the WP 'pros' column.

-It has superior smash/lethal resistance
-It is not as vulnerable to slows (simply because nothing in its secondary requires recharging, whereas regen likes having its clicks ready for the unexpected.)

As brutes? Not even close defense wise, nor even resistance wise to smash/lethal.

That depends on what you want to do with it, as always.

If you're soloing on x2 then recharge and hp (hp over regeneration) is... ok. Not great. Some factions will still murder you.

If you're soloing on x8/tanking for a team without buffs then you're going to have to get those defense numbers up or die horribly to every alpha strike that Moment of Glory isn't up for.

I'm going to guess that like all 'indoor' areas in a zone City Hall is located below the map and this wayward Hellion fell through some geometry and crash landed there.

Anything /wp will do just fine. Paired with a heavy mitigation primary like stone melee or dark melee and you'll even be able to run a few enemy groups at x8 without inspirations.

Similarly, anything /stone will also do just fine running granite.

And any secondary - ANY secondary - will do just fine if you start your x(x) difficulty low and ramp it up to a point you're comfortable with. Some sets this will be x3 or 4. Some will be x5 or x6.

On just SO's you might find your brute out-surviving a tanker with the same power sets because of a difference in kill speed. This was the case with my own sm/wp brute vs my wp/em tanker back before inventions got put in the game.

There's one dark horse in this race these days, though. SR on tanker. It softcaps on SOs. That's pretty damned tough as far as SO builds are concerned.