TheBruteSquad

I had 8 or 12 grey con nemesis and rikti beating on me to fuel fury and rise to the challenge (was the cap, but some got bored and left).

Using the real numbers box before I could bank on having +170 or so bonus damage from fury. Now it's 150.

Similarly, my granite armor brute now caps out at around 110. 112 to 114 if I'm at aggro cap.

That 20% adds up against a pylon, which regen so fast that screwing up your attack chain for even a few seconds can cost you minutes of progress.

With the new fury the lows are higher, but the highs are lower.

More options are always nice. No mixed feelings here - though I probably won't respec half my characters to take advantage of it, any new character is going to enjoy it.

As for one slot powers... self rezzes, passives that get skipped, rezzes, build ups, taunt/confront... there's a lot of powers in sets that provided a benefit at one slot and often get binned just because there's no room to pick it as a power on endurance thirsty ATs.

Disagree. Also interested in learning how you came to that conclusion, as in general pve anything a stalker can do another melee AT can do just as well or better. I even have tankers who 'ghost' missions by simply running to the objective. Only 16 mobs will follow you.

It is a good combo, definitely, but it does fall into the 'scrapper does it better' camp. Scrappers get more benefit from Against All Odds. Single/low number of targets there won't really be a difference, but once Against all odds gets saturated there definitely is.

1. Find a spawn of 3 level 54 Rikti bosses and entourage in the Warzone (far north is best for this). Aggro the entire spawn. Win. Do not use temps. Do not use inspirations. Do not use accolades. Do not use Tier 9 armor powers.

2. That is indeed where the name is from.

3. For 99.999% of the game the change is indeed positive. It's only at the fringes of brute sustained damage output (100 dps+) where the change hurt. Since the game isn't balanced around that kind of IO'd performance hurt means nothing more than 'bruised ego'.

Cloak of Fear is a HUGE amount of damage mitigation. Death shroud doesn't break fear every tick - it breaks it every seven seconds or so.

With the new fury changes as long as you keep attacking your damage remains at +150%, the mobs remain clustered around you to die to whatever AoEs you or your team are using, and as a bonus it even stops runners - who get a step or two and then cower.

Plus it's one of the coolest looking toggles in the game as a perk.

I don't use OG, though, and won't even at I19 where it could be dropped in effortlessly with a respec (it only takes one slot to be good). Stunned warwolves staggering off in all directions at warp factor 9 soured me to it.

My stone/wp used to be able to reliably solo a Rikti pylon in 25 to 30 minutes (depending on lag). It's not a speed record by any stretch, but I worked hard for it. Now a half hour takes a pylon to 50%. Same build, same attack chain, same latency.

While overall I approve of the new fury mechanic (my stone/elec who double stacks fault as a core part of her survivability and my dark armor fear bomb are both enjoying levels of fury they traditionally weren't able to sustain) losing that pylon time smarted. At least he can still do the RWZ challenge.

Actually - since fury gets rid of the damage penalty (in spades) and you still end up with an 86% smash/lethal resistance if you take the passive and tough I would say stone armor does have a place on a brute. I would (and have) taken stone armor on a brute over stone armor on a tanker any day of the week. Yes, the tanker is tougher by a LOT (especially against everything not smash/lethal) but the damage penalty and even recharge penalty are are a lot less noticable on a brute because of fury (if your attacks do more damage you don't need to chain as many together to defeat an enemy so recharge is less needed).

You won't be soloing pylons or anything crazy, but there is a joy to pulling two spawns of Cimerorans on the wall and knowing that you'll win every time. With no money invested save the price of SOs and no inspirations remotely required.

Also, stone is King of Resistance (elec comes close, but not close enough except against energy). Defense can be taken away by most mobs in the game - millions of investment gone with a single lucky longbow burst (unless you have a lot of defense debuff resistance). Not so with resistances. Hell, since they made longbow nullifier grenades resistable a stone armor running granite can take a shower in the damned things. No random number generator can take away your awesome. It's not much, but it does have an appeal sometimes.

edit: Syntax has faster fingers and actual math. What he said.

Most of my characters run all combat toggles for less than 1 end/sec and recover 3 to 4. I still toggle off sprint every fight. Pointless endurance drain is... pointless.

I am hearing impaired and I am definitely trying that target glowie macro the second I log in.

It always amuses me when people spend millions upon millions on a farm build.

My farmer is a fire melee/stone armor brute. He uses SOs. A quick respec at I18 got me Fire Mastery. Fire Sword Circle followed by Fireball with my damage aura running = Everything not a lt is dead. The lts die to an incinerate or cremate or greater fire sword if I'm feeling frisky and on to the next spawn I go. Granite means anything without psychic damage has no chance to even hurt me.

Total cost of build? Probably 10 to 15 million. One set of Obliteration is a lot more money than I spent on my entire build. Total money made by drops and salvage? A few billion. Will the billion inf farmer farm faster? Yes... but if someone can make that much inf in the first place why would they need a farmer?

It's the Master Illusionists for me. Even with characters who can survive the storm of pets the dark servant combined with their timer phase which ignores being mezzed can stretch a fight with a single Master Illusionist out to EB levels of time to defeat.

Surprised that nobody's mentioned the Longbow Nullifiers yet. Somtimes spacing or being surrounded by mobs doesn't let you get out of that sonic grenade. To say nothing of all the Longbow ambushes in tip missions. Defense bonuses are all the rage these days, which helps, sure, but at base SO/IO levels those grenades can make even the minions in the spawn deadly.

Ice/ice is very NOISY.

My ex only ever asked me to turn down the volume when playing two characters: an ice/ice blaster and a grav/kin controller. Both of which have since been deleted on account of the sounds driving ME crazy. The poor ice/ice blaster never even made it to SOs.

Warmace. Definitely. All other things being near equal, as they are, I would never chose a lethal set over a smashing set.

That's personal preference, though, based largely on gritting my teeth in frustration as a build-up fueled Headsplitter from Broadsword as a scrapper does 232 damage where a build-up fueled seismic smash against the same target does more than 500 (council bosses, especially the robots, and Rikti are the most noticable culprits for this).

Once Scrappers get access to the smashing damage tanker sets brutes enjoy (stone melee, super strength, war mace)... well, it won't be pretty. Seismic smash anyone? A thousand+ point crit against most mob types with a mag three hold?

Brutes get more mileage out of popping orange inspirations and their tier 9, it's true. That, and more defensive primaries are their advantages (only Shield Charge rivals the sheer mitigation, not just for the brute but his entire team, of Fault or Footstomp - both of which recharge a lot faster: Stacked fault crushes stacked parry.) Not damage dealing.

Now, at low levels I *think* brute damage is still ahead of scrapper damage due to fury - as a result I've always found the Race to SOs more enjoyable on a brute (hence, 10 brutes level 22+ to one scrapper).

Gragh. I wish forecasts would make up their mind. One weather site says I can expect the storm to hit Saturday morning. The path listed above says Sunday night. That's a hell of a swing.

Dead accurate on the quick fact sheet.

What Hollywood execs seem to miss is that there's not as many geeks as they might wish. Any hype generated by the geek community *can't* be turned into big money. Near riots at a comic con may SEEM like a sure thing to bet on... but you've probably just managed to sample a significant part of your viewing audience, rather than a statistical representation of wider geek interest.

Add in being hard to please and you have two strikes against you going into a geek release. The third strike will range from geeks liking to download things for free instead of paying for things to something they want to see more is coming out to competing with new comic day. But it will be there.

Though Snakes on the Plane is a bad example to be trotting out. It might not have made the Spiderman, maybe even Titanic!, levels of hypemoney they were hoping for, but I'm pretty sure it came out ahead of projected earnings for a movie about Sam Jackson on a plane. With snakes.

I hope he makes it. The odds are not in his favor, but he's always been one of my favorite hosts. Not that I get TBS and could watch.

I remember watching that movie and wondering how something so faithful to the source material could be so hollow.

No it wasn't. It was PvE too. RttC has *always* detoggled when you get mezzed, and, so long as that -toHit is part of it, probably always will.