Umbral

Checking in game, it still debuffs defense. What's you're probably remembering is the issues that surrounded Eye of the Magus in which it once said that it reduced your recharge rate even after they removed the recharge rate reduction.

This is only true if you believe that people are actually intelligent (they aren't). Look at any random person's build and I will be able to tell you, with 99.99% assurance, how that person is built incorrectly from an effectiveness standpoint. At least 75% of those times, it will be a gross build error, such as forgetting a mez toggle or ignoring a powerful attack or completely ignoring endurance sustainability.

If you really believe that the people that think that healing is a more powerful survivability tool than buffing are accurate gauges of balance and comparative power, then you need to realize that most people have only the barest clue of what's going on and use incredibly inaccurate heuristics to gauge power rather than actual balance. You've got people like Ultimo that still, to this day, attempt to compare Defender performance to Scrapper performance while solo and believe that it is a valid demonstration of imbalance when the Scrapper handily outperforms the Defender. You've got people that believe that Tankers are outperformed by everyone except for Defenders because they've got lower damage capabilities even though they've got several magnitudes more survivability. You've got people that believe that Force Field, Trick Arrow, Sonic, and Storm are atrocious Defender primaries because they lack a heal even though, appropriately used, any of them will equal or even outperform a Kinetics, Rad, or Emp Defender when placed on a team and tasked with keeping everyone alive and dangerous.

The average person has no clue what balance is or even what it looks like. All they know is whether or not they enjoy playing a character. You could have the most overpowered AT/powerset that has ever existed and it wouldn't get played by the average player because it isn't fun. There's a reason fewer Defenders and Controllers are played/made than Scrappers and Blasters: Scrappers and Blasters are a more popular play style. This has nothing to do with game balance. It has everything to do with how interesting the ATs are.

Now, if you really want to see where the population is decent at determining game balance, it's better to take a more involved look. Players are remarkably good at figuring out which powersets are balanced within an AT based on how many people take them, keep them, and play them. Players are also remarkably good at figuring out which powers within powersets are balanced based on how often said power is taken and even when it is taken.

I don't think I've ever seen a dev site comparative populations of ATs as a reason why any AT is weaker than any other. Inter-AT balance is almost always brought up as a matter of performance rather than population (re: Stalkers revamp, Dominator revamp, Scrappers getting Critical, Blasters getting Defiance 2.0, etc.). More importantly, the devs have repeatedly cited the lack of a power getting chosen by the players as a whole as a reason why they have changed a power. Siphon Life got improved for Dark Melee because almost no one took it (and many people, like myself, kept telling the devs that the DPS was too low considering the AoE costs). Conserve Power is getting turned into Energize, not only because it was largely useless in a set that already had an overflowing blue bar but because almost no one took it and used it. Moment of Glory got altered into its current awesome form for the exact same reason.

To summarize for anyone that isn't really into reading my various rants on the subject of people at large being blundering idiots, it's pretty simple: the comparative population of the ATs simply serves to demonstrate what playstyles players prefer within the context of the game; it does nothing to demonstrate any fundamental imbalance within the ATs in question.

Well, what could easily be your biggest problem is that you're running an SS/Shield Brute. For every Rage activation you're cycling, you're also eating up 25 endurance which adds up rather quickly, especially if you're packing enough recharge to double stack it.

In order to alleviate your endurance problems, you've generally got to stack +end (10% +end is easily accessed via the passive accolades), +recov (Stamina, which I assume you've got), and end redux (which is generally more important for Brutes than it is for Scrappers). Without seeing your build, I would be hard pressed to tell you what you could do to improve it, but the +end procs (such as the Perf Shifter proc) will definitely help. The Perf Shifter proc is the single best enhancement you can put into Stamina and easily arguably the best enhancement for Quick Recovery as well. If you've got an IO build with passives that can take the Perf Shifter proc that don't have the Perf Shifter proc in them, you're operating less efficiently than you could be.

If you link your build, I can check out your build to see if I can improve the endurance efficiency (and other optimization).

Yes. Any power that grants defense debuff resistance will have the defense debuff resistance enhanced by enhancing defense as long as the effect is not tagged to ignore enhancements and buffs. If you're ever curious about a power, just check out http://coh.redtomax.com/data/ under power quantification. It looks a little cluttered but once you learn how to read it, it makes perfect sense. For this purpose though, all you need to know is that if the RES(Defense) entry of a power has the [Ignores Enhancements & Buffs] tag at the end of it (none of the */Shield powers do).

Seeing as the toon you're talking about is a DM/Regen, feel free to ask me about tactical or build advice as well. I feel more than confident saying that I'm one of the most knowledgeable individuals where that combo (or even the power sets individually) are concerned.

The only resistance unique that's actually worth it is the Steadfast Protection 3% +def IO (well, and the Gladiator's 3% +def IO). The status resist and psi resist contributions are so tiny that it's functionally pointless. I'd ignore them on an Invuln as well.

All of that is actually part and parcel of how the APPs are balanced. I can't remember the specific numbers, but I believe that APP powers are supposed to be somewhere on the order of 3 times worse than the original version of the power. This is why Body Mastery ET has twice the recharge and an extra quarter of the endurance cost of the Blaster version (which, thanks to Scrapper APP ranged attacks using the melee damage scalar, uses the exact same numbers otherwise).

It's pretty simple actually: Conserve Power and Focused Accuracy trump everything else that the other sets get (in general) since they augment Scrapper abilities rather than attempting to replace them (using methods that Scrappers have horrible modifiers for and thereby horrible performance with). LBE and ET are really just set mules for most players. ET is arguably the best AoE of the 3 APP AoEs though, so many AoE farming Scrappers take it for that reason.

As to Darkness Mastery having 2 AoEs (Torrent and Teneb Tents), it does... kind of, in the same sense that Weapon Mastery has 2 AoEs (Caltrops and Exploding Shuriken): Torrent is low damage and largely counterproductive to dealing damage because it's loaded with KB. Caltrops is largely low damage (excellent DPA though if you can immob the target) but is largely counterproductive because it scatters enemies.

Interestingly, before we knew about Arcanatime, Darkness Mastery used to be the old standby for the non-weapon sets because Dark Blast was awesome for DPA (re: it used to be used in the same way that Brutes and Stalkers use Gloom).

Still, the APPs for Scrappers are still largely unimportant. The debate as to which is "best" is closer to which is "least mediocre". All three of them are painfully underwhelming (as compared to APP performance for Blasters, Defenders, and Controllers) because they don't really work with what Scrappers do. They give Scrappers little bits of stuff that takes a large degree of to be effective (control and ranged attacks).

There, it should be fixed now. Apparently data links don't last through previews.

No, Scrappers have to choose between soloAwesome and soloAwesome+2. Scrappers sacrifice the significant amounts of synergy that every other AT brings to teams. If you're trying to look at Scrappers compared to all of the other ATs from a solo perspective, of course you're going to find everyone else worse compared to Scrappers but that's because are designed as expert soloers. They've got just enough defense and everything else goes into offense. On a team, that's less important because you don't need to balance your characters internally. You just need to balance the team and you get better balance and performance by choosing role specialists, which scrappers are not.

In general, you just want to go at the AV alone. In some circumstances (re: high mitigation), the amount of damage that the minion will contribute will be less than the additional hp/sec that it provides by being in melee, but that depends entirely upon how much damage mitigation you're bringing to the party.

Actually, as Castle said, */SD was designed around achieving a similar level of survivability as */Fire (re: lower than everyone else) to account for the additional offensive output that the set is capable of (AAO and Shield Charge). It's actually perfectly serviceable from this standpoint and excellently balanced as such. The reason it's generally seen as a powerhouse is because +def is much easier to work with from a optimization standpoint than +res is and */SD's offensive capabilities have much greater utility than */Fire's.

It was never intended to be on the same level as other sets that are more fully developed to survivability. That's the reason why, in SOs, it's lower and, as many people that enter into it assuming incredible performance all the way through learn, a much harder time leveling than they originally bargained for.

You would be wrong. Honestly, */WP does fine on single targets. RttC's additional regeneration for additional targets serves more to allow you to survive the higher levels of damage that are going to be hurled at you by larger groups than to feed your need against a single hard target. It is still perfectly serviceable against a single target.

It's one of those things that Mids doesn't account for but the game does.

I'm kinda curious which "well known scrapper player" you were teaming with.

It does fine. The only times it should be severely disadvantaged would be against AVs that specifically resist smashing damage more than any other type. It'll still put out the DPS to kill 'em. It'll just take longer. All it takes to be able to kill and AV is just shy of 100 DPS. Anything over that just serves to make said killing take less time.

Check the Limits page on Paragonwiki here. The regeneration cap for Scrappers at level 50 is 3000%. The recovery cap is 500%.

You won't get to either of those without external buffs though. You'll barely get up to half, even if you build for it.

It's gonna be about as effective as you can get while still being MA/Regen. That's how I build em.

The issue with "soloing all AVs" with any */regen is that */regen is highly skill based. I have no clue how good of a */regen player you are so it would be hard to gauge whether you could solo all or even most of the AVs in the game. I'm confident that, if played intelligently by someone that knows the ins and outs of */regen like I do, the build could solo pretty much any AV except for the most annoying custom AE AVs.

Lol. I was the kid that wanted my dad to explain the mechanics of the internal combustion engine when I asked that question (I was a precocious *******).

As to your question, it's pretty simple: the softcap is friggin' awesome. From a survivability standpoint, that last 5% +def you're getting will prevent as much damage proportionately as the first 40% +def you got. The softcap really is that awesome.

The reason why everyone is so softcapped crazed is explicitly because of this. Defense gets exponentially more effective the more of it you stack on until you reach 45% wherein you're harder to kill than most tanks outside of IOs.

The problem that I've always had is that it's not constant. I've gotten 10 end, 11 end, 10.56 end, and a bunch of other numbers less often. I've yet to actually see the number be stable as would be expected if it were a constant value. What makes me believe that it does scale with max end rather than base is because in all the times I've tested my performance in game, it's always meshed with the calculations I've done assuming that it scales with max end.

Yeah, I didn't take Heightened Senses with that build. The build was utterly atrocious though. Completely unplayable from a damage and attacks string perspective (for me), and I doubt it would be anywhere close to endurance sustainable. The entire point of it was to say, "It's possible", not, "It's effective".

I'm still gonna dispute that. I routinely get rewards above 10 endurance on those toons of mine that have more than 100 endurance.