TheBruteSquad

A dark/dark/soul BRUTE can easily floor the accuracy of pretty much anything not an AV in short order. It's like softcapping your defenses (against a single target) - and darkest night helps the entire team. Four dark watchers in darkest night even gets you a recharge bonus and best of all none of the dark powers need to be slotted with -toHit (not even touch of fear - though if you have some slots to spare it certainly helps) so you don't harm your damage output.

Plus you have access to a fear aura (with more -toHit) and/or a stun aura. Back when I first started playing (about a year before my registration date) my first brute was a dark/dark and my supergroup leader remarked after teaming with me that I was like a 'spooky floating mez bomb that tears bosses faces off'. The added powers to soul mastery just made it better. It can be fun.

Practical in the modern game? Not so much. On a large team you probably have people that do it better. With IOs even squishies can have a decent amount of defense. Still fun to be a 'brufender' from time to time? Yes.

Damage increases, yes. Fury however does not. I just rolled a claw/elec brute and claw/elec scrapper to check. Using the aura to kill a single minion yielded no appreciable fury gain (since skull minions attack really slowly). Using brawl alone, no aura, to kill a single minion saw rapid fury gain (despite the damage aura 'attacking' every half second to brawls recharge time).

Brutes do more damage with damage auras than scrappers?

How, when blow for blow scrappers outdamage brutes with every other shared attack post SOs?

Since I don't have an attack chain with my spines scrapper at level 28 I can't imagine that spines would be any good at fury generation. At all.

My condolences to his and the other 150,000 families who lost a loved one on the 3rd.

Fault is worth more than some entire armor sets for mitigation purposes.

However, you still have to survive the alpha strike to use it, and deal with the fact that the heal is on a long recharge (at least the set has one now). Mind you I cheat and have a stealth IO in a prestige sprint so by the time most of the spawn realizes I'm there they're already flopping on their butts and staggering to their feet stunned.

Anyways, EM is a single hard target take down expert. If that fits your play style it's a good set - smashing and energy damage are less commonly resisted than lethal. If you prefer to see entire spawns die horribly at once it's a terrible set.

Back in the day EM/Elec with tough and aid self was *the* AV soloer for brutes. Energy transfer changes and invention sets have stolen some of that thunder but honestly I've always wanted to level one just to see how much *** a full fury Energy Transfer kicks. Only thing that has stopped me is the fact I have a EM tanker, and doing a thousand damage during a build up cycle makes me smile when playing him - I don't need to tarnish that by seeing a brute probably do closer to 2.

Ok, I retooled to drop Nova and go human/dwarf focusing on the 'Self reliant' hook. Slots are tight but I'm not doing TOO badly. I can't wait for the 30s, though, to add a few more slots to things that could really use it. Like stamina. Gah. Blue bar go down the ho-ole....

I think it did the trick. Now they play nothing alike so there's nothing for my brain to be comparing. I put Radiant Strike on auto, blast a target until it gets up to me, send it sprawling, and then blast it some more - kind of like my sonic/em blaster if power thrust did serious damage -and if their return fire was being resisted by 22 to 42%. For fun I herded up 8 or so even con Cage Consortium guards in dwarf form in a tip mission and crushed them effortlessly. I can work with that.

I did read your guide, yes, and it seemed to mostly bear out what I was thinking. I guess the problem is I've seen the Warshade higher highs but I haven't really seen their lower lows.

Both squiddies hover blasting in an extended fight do the roughly the same thing - the Peacebringer has a few heals to use and can do so while hovering safely out of reach, the warshade has to fly around a corner for a second to land and use aid self. Dwarf is really no contest - the PB has a stronger heal, but the Warshades is also a potent and much needed third single target attack - both of their AoEs are a little anemic in damage but the shades adds nearly a Double Origin in damage for each target it hits where the PB knocks things down.

I think I'll try a 'mostly human/dwarf if I must' build for my peacebringer and leave the tri-form stance dance to the Warshade. PB melee attacks are very pretty at least and hover blasting with those resistance shields and heals might just be the difference I'm looking for.

Once fury is built Scrappers and Brutes do around the same damage 95% of the time (that last 5 percent being a Crit) with the same powersets. Of course Brutes don't have martial arts.

Someone smart may be along to take the damage of martial arts and compare it to a brute running Rage and using super strength. Me, I'm going to simply tell you this:

If the animations you choose click with you - that scrappers is going to *look* positively anemic, whatever the actual numbers are. Knocking a crowd of people off their feet with a sweep? Nice. Shaking the screen as you bring your fists down (footstomps alt animation... I love it) cracking the ground and sending everything around you flying? Much 'stronger'. Both Pbaoes. Both doing knockdown... but the brute does it with authority.

Kicking a guy 20 feet? Nice and strong. Sending that guy flying 20 feet straight up instead? Stonger.

Like a scrapper you can't make a low damage brute. Hell, I played one that only used pool attacks and he STILL could thrash an EB without difficulty. Unless you chat on the globals a lot instead of keeping momentum going, that is.

Background: Peacebringers are one of the three reasons I took the plunge and upgraded from City of Villains to the GVE edition (the other two being broadsword/regen, which I hate, and ill/rad, which I find boring to play. Sigh.) It took me *years* to stomach leveling that broadsword/regen to 50 to unlock peacebringers at last.

I was running a duo of a warshade and a peacebringer for a while but it became evident in the late 20s that anything I could do, he could do better (we joked about the song. Then I laughed and said "Yeah, but at least I can heal with a touch!" and he immediately hit me with aid other, having taken aid self for fighting EBs when there's no bodies around to chow down on).

He's long gone (AE burned him out. Leveled 10 characters to 50 on the Rikti farms in the first wave, felt hollow, and walked away.) but my 28 peacebringer remains.... but a level 27 warshade I rolled a few months ago is closing in on them fast - feasting on corpses and double miring their way to the top.

What can my Peacebringer do differently than my Warshade to not feel like I'm playing a low damage version of the same AT? I don't really *care* that the Peacebringer does less damage so long as that's not the primary difference between them.

Tough certainly helps. Weave if you're planning on slotting a lot of defense.

With 0 defense... none at all... not even combat jumping.. my SM/Elec brute can confidently wade into +0/x3 with bosses on. Add a purple inspiration or two for tough fights (I believe in softcapping for 300 inf, rather than 300 million) and they're practically unstoppable.

For a good mix of single target and aoe - or at least aoe control - it's hard to go wrong with superstrength or stone melee. Fault covers a multitude of sins, and footstomp is... footstomp.

That said you shouldn't be running into a lot of packs of 8 white mobs on x1. If you add toughness and then drain them dry with a single power sink with your damage aura running it shouldn't matter much that you're beating them one on one.

Plus, of course, there's always the "I don't have to put up with you scrawny weaklings" Power Surge coming up as well.

If you avoid things with -def, psychic attacks, or toxic attacks softcapped EA *is* better than SR - it does everything SR does plus gives you a better tier 9, endurance recovery, and a stealth power. The only thing it misses out on is the (significant to some builds) recharge bonus.

However, -def is available to many (perhaps most) enemy groups in the game, psychic attacks are no longer rare even blueside due to tip missions, and even toxic in the late game has seen some more proliferation. Really, it's been like taking a hammer to the hands of a guy hanging from the edge of a cliff.

I wonder if giving EA the same defense debuff resistance of SR would lead to 'sr sucks' threads?

As it stands as far as worst of the worst goes my least enjoyed brute primary has been dual blades, neck in neck with battleaxe, and my least favorite secondary has been energy armor, followed closely by shield defense. Yeah, yeah... shield defense is a beast when IOed out... but I IO as a hobby for level 50s, not a goal in and of itself so I judge what I like and don't around SOs while leveling, not what mids says will happen once I get there if I slot 5 sets of this and that. I've never slotted a set of kinetic combat, and likely never will.

Also Brutes have more health so get both more of a benefit from the scaling resists and can take a little more punishment when you do get hit.

... and never show her this thread.

And never show her this thread.

I've run into the 'waiting for boards.cityofheroes.com' wall of suck fairly often. Usually I just go and read 20 or 30 webcomics while waiting, since it won't even give me the decency to time out and say this page cannot be displayed.

Also I've taken to highlighting and copying my messages because more often than not I'll be logged out and the post destroyed.

I'm playing around with Google Chrome (Loading images takes far longer than it does in IE for some reason for me so I'm not really enjoying it) but part of the reason I tried Chrome was because of all the problems I've been having with the city forums.

At this point I'm guessing that

- Slade banished to the Phantom zone took with him a piece of the 'darkness' which will possess someone powerful there, such as one of Zod's lieutenants. They will escape to be the 'Darkseid' level foe Clark knocks out in one punch in the series finale.

- All the problems with people guessing Clark's identity will be erased when the 'darkness' is defeated, as nobody will remember anything that happened while they were influenced by it. Thus the vigilante registration act, etc, will cease to exist and only the heroes will remember what happened.

I find the second to be the more likely of my two guesses, but I'm not counting the first guess out.

"We're going to need another Timmy." - Captain James T Kirk

That was a long time ago in a galaxy far far away before the ability to set x8 came along tempting us hardcore melee to do so.

I just finished the new 50 hero mission and butchered my way through probably 10 or 15 Arachnos bosses as well as Savage Siren, Mangle, and Silent Blade... so it's definitely still a viable set.

It's very streaky, though. Sometimes I'll go an entire mission without clicking a heal, sometimes I'll get killed through double-parry+dull pain+instant healing.

I've been running into the same with my own BS/Regen running tips at 50. The moment I got murdered by a Bane Spider Executioner (red con) through double stacked parry with instant healing and dull pain running *twice* was the closest I've ever come to deleting a 50. It's not his fault, though.. Arachnos is tough. Still, when most of my other level 50 brutes see that same Executioner as a speedbump not a roadblock it's a little disheartening.

My third attempt at it the RNG was a kind and merciful god and I didn't even get hit through stacked parry. Then I got killed the very next spawn by a tarantula mistress boss. They have an *insane* amount of -recharge on those psi blasts of theirs.