Vaelorn

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Thank you everyone for the great information, we even got a developer post! I'm going to remake my Brute and take everyones advice and see if I like it any better. I'll also be evaluating the power sets to figure out what would best suit my style. But, maybe you guys can help here too!:

I want a self heal. Fiery Aura has Healing Flames
I want good damage mitigation. (+res) Fiery Aura has +RES to everything but Psionic, with high Fire RES but lower Cold RES
I want to avoid an abundance of toggles. Fiery Aura really only has two inherent toggles: Fire Shield and Plasma Shield. Most "gurus" will probably suggest you take the Leaping pool for Acrobatics, because Fiery Aura is VERY vulnerable to knockback, however you can "ghetto" the knockback protection with Hover or Fly if you really have to
I want a great single target attack. Fire Sword, Cremate, Incinerate, Greater Fire Sword (long activation but hits like a freight train for great burst damage), I even use Scorch instead of Brawl as my "every attack cycle" Fury builder (along with Air Superiority, SMASH!!! ) , because the END is the same but the damage is much much better
Summary: Great solo.

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I've gotten my Fire/Fire Brute up to 23 now, and he's a BLAST (literally! Fire attacks are awesome!).

Early on, life is good, once you figure out an attack chain that keeps you constantly swinging to keep your Fury up; fast attacks are key here, so do not skip the "wimpy" first level attacks. Use Brawl and the first power in your primary to build Fury quickly, and use your harder hitting attacks once you get some Fury damage behind them. Once you start getting higher level attacks to use as your "howitzer" attacks, you can start using more of the early attacks as part of your Fury chain. For example, early on I used Brawl and Scorch to build Fury, and saved Fire Sword and Cremate for when I had some Fury built up to increase their damage, which allowed me to 1 and 2 shot even level minions. Now, I alternate using Fire Sword and Cremate as part of my Fury chain (+ Air Superiority + Scorch) so I can dish out some good damage while I'm still building Fury.

After level 10 or so, mobs start getting a bit tougher and you're still stuck using TOs so things will slow down a bit, but if you end up doing story arcs full of those damn Mu Strikers, things will slow down A LOT because their electrical attacks will drain your endurance faster than you actually use it yourself, so be warned.

You'll get plenty of damage from Fury, so you don't really need to slot up your attacks for damage unless you choose to do so much later on. This lets you allocate slots to other powers, so you should really focus on mitigating your damage absorption and your downtime. Try to get your defensive toggles slotted up early, and squeeze slots into downtime reducers when you can (self heal, end recovery, etc.). Once you get to level 12, the first DOs you should probably get are +ACC for your attacks and End Reduction for attacks and toggles.

Given the "GO GO GO GO GO! MUST NOT LOSE FURY!!! MUST SMASH!!!" nature of the Brute AT, you will almost always want to include Health and Stamina in every build, and get 3 SOs in each one (Swift helps you GO GO GO GO GO, as an added bonus!). After you get Stamina slotted up, you can see about putting damage SOs in your attacks instead of endurance reduction to increase your output, but depending on your particular playstyle you may want to conserve as much endurance as possible at all times. After all, you will never need to stop fighting as long as you still have health and endurance, so if you conserve your endurance you just have to worry about health, and health can benefit greatly from properly slotted defenses and any healing abilities you may have.

If you find yourself running solo missions where your health never drops, and your endurance never drops, and your Fury stays above 90%, and you never stop moving, well, you should probably consider doing more challenging missions! Unless, of course, you like simply steam-rolling +0 and +1 minions like a hot knife through butter...

At any rate, you really have to get any characters you play up to at least level 12 before you start seeing how they're really going to work. Before that it's basically all the same for everyone; inspirations + Brawl could carry ANY AT to level 10!

Being able to do all this non-critical stuff with Mastermind pets *almost* makes up for the bug with enhancement slots in the pet summon powers. It gives us lots of fun distractions until they get the pet enhancements fixed.

It would be interesting to see a "play" using the various pets, but I really can't imagine more than one or two people putting in all the time and effort to get a single scene worked out, let alone an entire act. I think the biggest problem would be that you can't get your pets to reliably face a certain direction without a lot of goto commands to move them around into position. If only there was a "petcom turn15degrees" function...

Not only is that a ton of scripting work with key binds, but it would also be a ton of work to run the scripts without screwing them up!

It's the 21st century. Computer games are NEVER finished before they are released. EVER. It's standard operating procedure for game publishers to push their games out the door ON TIME, finished or not, because they have millions of dollars invested in them and they want/need to get a return on that investment on a specified timetable, quality of their product be damned.

In other words, the game has already gone gold, the master CD has already been made, the copies have already been manufactured and boxed with (outdated) game manuals and other printed material, and they will probably start shipping out pre-orders to their major suppliers within the next week or so.

Expect a rather large patch on opening day, to fix all the bugs and balance issues that existed on the CD and have been fixed or addressed in the past couple weeks, and expect even more frequent patches for a few weeks after that, because after all, the game won't be remotely finished until long after it's gone live.