TheBruteSquad

I know how the brute was built.

"Poorly"

He's built for hit points - 2460ish - and even that could be optimized further I'm sure. 46% global recharge is just kind of there.

The tankers in question were superstrength or shield (or both) and probably running hasten with god knows how much global recharge. I do not... I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 45% global recharge (5 x 5%, 3 x 7.5% looks right).

Well, if you want to use the Pylon threat as a damage metric...

See me there at 151? I can't remember the exact time that was (24 or 25 minutes I think).

Post I18, same build, same recharge, same number of fury generating greys, same attack chain I gave up at 50% of the pylon's health at the 38 minute mark.

As an alternative to searching...

Soul Mastery rocks. Gloom is incredible. Darkest night adds a lot of survivability to any brute build, even softcapped ones. Dark Obliteration is fast animating to-hit debuffing AoE goodness.

You forgot energy melee as a set that brutes have that scrappers don't yet. Just for completeness - I don't think it actually does outdamage anything a scrapper has access to.

In any case, outside of shield defense, brute and scrapper damage is still close - due to resists my stone melee brute still outbursts and outdps's my broadsword scrapper against anything not Carnie. My ss/fire can clear an entire +2 spawn in the time it takes said scrapper to kill a Council robot lieutenant.

Since not every scrapper is shield defense pairing shield defense with any brute primary and keeping your fury high should get you higher than the 'average' scrapper. However, you *will* lose a damage competiton to any scrapper who IS using shield defense and there's nothing you can do to change that. The design decision with GR was to make scrappers the top melee DPS AT in the game and changes were made accordingly. Hard to fight against that.

Since fire armor with a decent AoE primary can kill very large amounts of minions very quickly your inspiration tray should always be full.

A fire armor with a full inspiration tray is death incarnate. Or death incinerate as the case may be. I usually have one row eaten, sometimes two, at all times on my ss/fire. He's pretty fun to play then. Without them way too frail for my liking. I'm just SO's, though. Fire's one of those sets that gets insane really quickly with set bonuses.

Sm/wp/soul is tough as hell. I have one. It's my favorite brute.

WP does have a few counters. -Regen and -Recovery. Either one or both are common late game (longbow, malta, carnies, vanguard I think, circle of thorns, Mu). The +4 ensures that those debuffs will be landed more often, and once Rise stops helping out WP can be taken out by burst damage - and like anyone else an empty end pool doesn't help either.

Even IOing out isn't a guarantee - the random number generator is against you. One in twenty attacks should hit you, and a +4/x8 spawn can make that many attacks every second or three.

No, a defensive set with less 'holes' is SR. SR's hole is non-positional attacks (rare) and bad luck (common).

You won't have to worry about someone suggesting stone armor. A lot of the late game groups eat granite for breakfast. Especially at the 'what was I thinking?' +4/x8 level of diff.

The scrapper forum swears by /sr for this task. I would think a stone melee/softcapped sr, while being an endurance hog from hell, could take just about any group. Fault drastically lessens the numbers of attacks made and delays problem mobs: SR dodges the lessened amount of attacks.

In a similar vein perhaps stone/softcapped shield. The reason I keep suggesting stone is because at that diff I don't think any brute armor set in the game is up to keeping you alive by itself, no matter how much money you've thrown at it, and stone is by far the most damage mitigating primary available to a brute.

Especially considering that you can drastically change Stone's end problems with slotting, but can't do anything to mitigate that sudden chunk of end at a rage crash. If you're stacking rage and running hasten it's even more noticable

Stone Melee/Willpower.

Pros:
- High burst damage not reliant on a gimmick like Rage
- Seismic Smash holds bosses in addition to being one of the heavier hits in the game.
- Fault + Rise to the Challenge. Seriously. Getting hurt? Seismic smash the boss, fault everything else in the spawn. Boom. 10+ seconds of rise to the challenge regeneration.
- Cheap. Basic SOs will see you through all content smoothly so long as you keep your team size modifier reasonable. Any sets you add are candy.
- Fault + Rise to the Challenge.
- Extra damage to most robotic enemies, which are fairly common.

Cons:
- Resistance set blues: Cimerorans, post 40 longbow Nullfiers and special ops (-regen sucks), and Sappers.
- No way to get health back should you find something that has your regeneration beat. But with all the knockdown you're leveling you'd be surprised how rarely that occurs. Nothing carrying four emergency greens can't handle typically.
- End piggy. Of course, that's what stamina and quick recovery are for.

Fire melee is great, but WP really shines with a decent mitigation primary like Stone Melee, Katana, or Broadsword. For extra fun I have a kinetic combat chance to knockdown slotted in brawl, which I have on autoattack for fury generation of course. Barely anything stays on their feet while I'm attacking them, and every time they hit the floor... 5 seconds of rise to the challenge for me.

Ignoring the existence of sets, EA feels to me to be the weakest defensive set by far. I have one, a DM/EA, but DM covers all sins. I went EA for the energy drain (and even with dark consumption, energy drain, and stamina slotted I can and do run out of endurance thanks to the fairly costly toggles I run to beef up my no-set bonus defense values. Like Manoevers. Ugh.)

Seriously it plays like a stalker. Good at single hard targets who aren't Bane Spider Executioners or Master Illusionists, crap in large spawns due to the sheer amount of -def being flung towards her. I use small lucks as my tier 9, and some missions I munch them as fast as they drop to counter defense cascade failure, 'softcapped' because of the -to hit in dark melee and soul mastery stacking with my defense or not.

edit: Hmm. I logged in an ran a malta mission, +0/x3 bosses on. After losing 9 to 15% defense per spawn to their alpha strike with a 39% lethal defense I got creative and slotted a -to hit in dark oblivion and used it as my own alpha strike, since I normally don't even use it as it doesn't really change my spawn to spawn time. Poof. problem solved.

My job on a team is to beat the everliving crap out of things, and be tough enough to survive doing so. Since I have good fury building chains as is, taunt is more of a detrement to the second than a boon to the first. The only brute I have Taunt on is my stone armor, because it's easier than chasing mobs around. I'll be adding Hasten, not Taunt, with I19... to beat the everliving crap out of things even faster.

Brutes are not Tankers.

As an aside, something's been bothering me since I18. Why don't Scrappers get in trouble for skipping Confront? They're just as tough as a non-buffed Brute and do more damage but nobody expects them to tank. Why?

No it won't. People who come looking for the 'best farmer' will always find it more time efficient to hit 'new topic'.

I haven't faced a super stunner with a character without mez protection yet, but their endurance drain is pretty nasty on its own. I could see how both their stuns and drains might make them about 1/4 as annoying as a Sapper.

As for the CoT post 40 they still pack some punch. Behemoth Overlords have a wicked aoe alpha. The ice mages -recharge toggle can be annoying. Succubus are freaking annoying with their confuse and espcially Placate, which punishes you for being softcapped (since the succubus can't hit you, you stand there like an idiot unable to affect her for a LONG time). Death mages not only make melee painful but do a pretty good amount of damage and have access to Twilight Grasp, which can floor a /regen's regeneration rate for several seconds. However, post 40 peoples builds have matured: These days even a fair number of 'squishy' are running amok with capped ranged defenses, etc. I don't think the Thorns are any weaker than they ever were (though they are indeed at their strongest in the earth thorn caster phase) - I think they're the most noticable victim of power creep.

Get some form of knockback resistance, either from IO or Acrobatics. Fire armor is pretty squishy all things considered. It relies heavily when leveling on Healing Flames, which can't be used while on your butt.

Other than that get Rage and Burn as soon as you can, target smart, and watch out for enemy groups that other brutes take for granted. Council, for instance, is largely laughed at... but for a developing fire armor that -recharge has a HUGE impact against your survival.

Also, SS post Rage is a much different beast than pre-Rage. A boost in survivability is on your horizon as you finally get to catch up to other primary's damage.

And, to be honest, the sooner you can fit the Fighting Pool (I think weave is a waste of end until you're ready to respec into a 'superbuild' where every percentage of defense matters, so stopped at Tough) and Hasten the happier you'll be.

WP is a very well rounded defense set but it's not 'too strong'. It does have weaknesses... spike damage being a big one. Where it excels is against fast attacking low dps mobs, such as Council. Where it falters is against slow attacking heavy hitting mobs, such as the PPD Peacebringers you see late on. Regenerating 100+ hp/sec works well when they're trying to tick 20 to 40 you to death. It doesn't when three mobs slam you for 500+, then do it again a few seconds later.

IOs fix this, but IOs make every set better... and frankly when IO'd other sets begin to seriously outclass WP.

For me, the brutiest of the brutes have to have screen shake.

Stone Melee and Superstrength provide this, but SS has periods where you don't do damage, which is as anti-brute as it comes.

If I was told I could only keep three characters, they would all be brutes. And they would be my stone melee/willpower, superstrength/fire armor, and fire/stone armor.

The first is tough as nails and hits like a truck. I built for recharge and max hp, not defense, so he's not as tough as he could be... but he can handle the War Zone Challenge and until the fury change could solo rikti pylons. That's tough enough for me.

The second is a pansy who dies as soon as enemies look at him (kinetic combats are too rich for my blood), but backed by a few inspirations (1000 inf on four lucks isn't) transforms into a raging flaming juggernaut of AoE destruction that spawns crash against and die in seconds to. Die. In a fire.

What the last lacks in screen shaking attack action he makes up for with shaking the screen every step and nigh invulnerable fire sword circle shennanigans. Plus he's so cranked for recharge that when there's a tanker on the team and I *don't* run in granite to 'tank' he turns the world to slag.

Depends on the brute, but most of the time +1/x2 or x3, bosses on.

While half my brutes are capable of handling the 'leveling' factions (ie not malta, arachnos, or longbow) at +2/x8 I find it takes too long. I have one exception: an inspiration spamming ss/fire.


Damage output is probably a limiting factor moreso than survivability... that's why the ss/fire gets away with what he does: inspirations make anyone invulnerable, but only go so far towards raising your damage.

Cat: Less than one billion

Powersets - Stone Melee/WP/Soul Mastery
Build Focus - HP/Recharge but no hasten so not really
Inspirations? - No

Farm ID - 449116 (Nemesis Farm)
Time Completed - Unfinished, 55% of map only

Farm ID - 449127 (rikti)
Arc non-existant

Farm ID - 449129 (freak)
Time Completed - Unfinished, 60% of map only

I wasn't expecting a tie between nem and freak but I guess it makes sense. Nemesis buffs and vengeance vs freakshow sheer numbers, dull pain, and resurrections. My health was a lot more stable with the freakshow (less lucky bursts with exploding warhulks and such).

Red teams function different than blue teams.

Every single red side AT has decent damage and decent survival. Because of this if a Brute tanks anything it's typically just the toughest mob in the group, and punchvoke is enough for that. Run in, take alpha, tackle the toughest thing, watch the spawn explode around you, finish off the toughest thing, next group.

Good blue side groups do this too... it just this play style comes built in to red side.

Now that GR is in play it's pretty much all steamroll, all the time. I expect in time even more tankers will start respeccing out of Taunt (already a fair number who skip it).

No. Unless you consider brute fury applying to fire's damage ticks and a handful of extra hit points worth playing the same character all over again.

I don't actually mind the change for earth 616. A normal guy running around killing people, with all the superpowers saying they're irked and that he should be brought in but never doing so, never made sense to me. It would take someone like Vision all of an hour to find him, beat him, and arrest him. He's not Batman.

Leave the Punisher character in the Max series. It's a better fit for him.