TheBruteSquad

That video reminds me of why I play +0/x8. Gah. The pacing of those fights was painful.

And the detractors who thought the first one was all about the difference between tank mitigation and brute mitigation have a lot to learn about set bonuses.

DarkGob: I didn't notice when that happened specifically in the video but I'm guessing it had to do with a +end proc in dark regeneration firing off.

edit: Beaten by Dechs himself.

I was tanking for an Underground trial and seeing as I was flying (I love punching giant sized things in the face) I was pretty visible to the league, which led to one person saying 'Holy crap an Energy Melee toon'.

That's really not a selling point for a set, unless you want to stand out on a league of 24, over half of which were other melee.

(Though as a tanker it works out well anyways, of course. As long as gauntlet is being thrown about it really doesn't matter what your primary/secondary is).

It's specifically an American tradition, actually. Canada's Thanksgiving was in October.

This is kind of a hard theme. 'Something to be thankful for' covers just about anything in the game, from being able to play a superhero in the first place to maxed chest sliders and the eden pattern to animated cat tails.

And all too often all three.

Just make a mission with as many patrols as you can fit and get back to burninating as usual.

Not really. It makes it less optimal, certainly, but two rows of 4 purples + whatever drops will keep you going for two or three minutes, which is a significant amount of time. Fill the rest of your inspiration tray (once you have more than 8 slots) with reds as before and go to town.

Brutes can already kill mostly everything with a SPin attack at low levels on Fury alone.

For pure aoe I think it's going to be hard to beat Titan Weapon/Fire Aura (when titan weapons comes out, which might be Tuesday).

Mace/Fire, SS/Fire (king post 32), Claws/Fire (level 6!), and Elec/Fire are solid, and actually exist. Katana/Fire, Broadsword/Fire, Db/Fire have a wide arc and a pbaoe each so they're certainly not bad.

Basically anything /fire will be an AoE god.

Midnight grasp is integral to any of the best dark melee attack chains.

I'd lose shadow punch if you have the rest of the attacks (and in point of fact, I did on my own dark melee characters).

Agreed. Fix it. Knockout blow deserves more than to see an enemy not even clear your chest. Your hand blows through the top of their skull rather than sending them flying. It's sad.

You have the gist of it. Fire is good at damage, Elec excels at keeping your blood pressure down with it's resistances to whacky and un-fun attacks (energy drain, psi, recharge slows, etc).

Once you're softcapped to everything (32%+ defense in as many things as you can and then pop a purple or use Darkest Night) most of the most annoying things (knockback, energy drain) go away for all intents and purposes. Any secondary can do that with enough money and once you do it's hard to not see how far ahead /Fire is when it comes to dealing damage.

That said I prefer elec. 5% chance to hit comes up often enough in groups of x8 for its superior resistances to shine, and I just hate when one bad sapper hit ruins my day. Power sink's recharge time vs consume is a factor for me as well, as those high def builds tend to be pretty endurance heavy (weave, maneuvers, running darkest night if you go that way).

Mobs falling down dead before you even get to CLOSE to melee as a brute isn't that uncommon on a task force, especially Incarnate Trials. You ARE falling behind on damage, as you're not a Blaster.

Your glorious fury filled damage is waiting for you on the AVs (it only takes a few swings against one to get up to speed because attacking AVs gives you more Fury per attack). Like _Pine_ said it's better for your damage if you focus on being tough enough to survive being toe to toe with them long enough to get your licks in.

The other 'easier' fix was to remove the inspiration vendors from AE. I'm glad they decided to take the more difficult route since, as FredrikSvanberg said, they did indeed want the inspiration tray size to mean something.

There's already a Virtue Monsters channel. It's old, but it still has a fair number of members. It could use your scheduling ambitions rather than making a new channel, but hey, whatever works.

My Super-SKull is a war mace (bat)/inv brute.

Thematically it should be /Dark, since the only powered Skulls draw their abilities from the Nether.

However, since the Skulls don't have any defensive powers it's wide open.

I explained the arc to a friend, who is a Premium player, and all he said was 'How many babies are you going to steal candy from as an encore?"

Really, a villain killing an old lady didn't strike us as being any more surprising than robbing a bank or even saying 'Curses, foiled again.' If the writing here was to surprise or shock or anger anyone... well, reading the thread I guess it did, but I don't see it.

Needed, no. But hey... when has extra resistance and recovery ever hurt anyone?

I use it in pvp of all places. Fighting with all those toggles and superjump on is taxing even for WP's recovery, and my pvp Destiny is barrier. Plus you'll be dead before you have to deal with the crash (light as it is.)

I'd actually like to have it on my Tanker to push smash/lethal from around 65% to cap, but he's softcapped to everything (including psi) and I just couldn't find a way to do that with it in.

Though really, Speedball's powers are better emulated with Force Field. Shaw's and Guido's are just good old fashion invulnerability stand ins. Gambit charges things with kinetic energy, but (as far as I know) can't drain speed from others, increase speed in others, steal speed, etc.

I would say like Spines (pretty much unique to Marrow to the best of my knowledge) and issue 1 Claws being identical to Wolverine's it was indeed just the Speed Force that had kin put into the game.

Stone Melee/Willpower brute.

I'm of the opinion that incarnate powers are why we're getting so many under-40 capped things. The SSAs so far, the halloween trial, sewer trial, First Ward...

Anecdotal from earlier today I found when I lobbed taunt at a pack of longbow the one I targeted with taunt would rush forward to launch the sonic grenades and the others in the pack would not. I have no hard data to back that up, but it certainly seemed to happen every single x6 pack (I lead with taunt to draw out the sonic grenades before diving into the group with most of my brutes).

I'll keep an eye on it next time I use a brute with taunt.