Werner

Because scrappers are always teamed with tankers that have all the aggro all the time?

Yay: It can add significantly to survivability in bursts when that's what you need. It's also a good spot for the Steadfast Protection +3% defense when you're tight on slots. Not so much against AVs, because if you can survive the 4 minutes while it's down, you don't need it the other 2 minutes. Not absolutely required, but a good power to have.

I agree with BrokenPrey. Your problem with pylons comes from a lack of good single target attacks, and from Siphon Life being slotted for survivability.

And as he indicates, Laser Beam Eyes is no substitute single target attack. It is a set mule and a ranged power for pulling and finishing off runners. On my Dark Melee/Super Reflexes, I also use it in an alternate chain that spams Siphon Life faster when I'm badly hurt, but I'm losing some serious DPS when I do that. It's just better than not attacking. Not worth slotting an Achilles' Heel in, no matter how tempting that is on the surface.

You're at the edge of being able to run Smite -> Midnight Grasp -> Smite -> Siphon Life while Hasten is up. You could swap Shadow Punch for Midnight Grasp and shoot for that, as you then wouldn't have to lose any other powers. If you go that route, you need Midnight Grasp to recharge in 4.48 seconds, Smite in 2.11 seconds and Siphon Life in 4.6 seconds. You're already there on Smite and Siphon Life, but Midnight Grasp is going to be a challenge. Mind you, even if you miss it by a couple tenths of a second, it should still be a big improvement.

If you can find a power to drop, you may be better off with the chain BrokenPrey mentioned, Smite -> Shadow Punch -> Midnight Grasp -> Smite -> Shadow Punch -> Siphon Life. Need Smite to recharge in 3.16 seconds, Shadow Punch in 3.3 seconds, Midnight Grasp in 6.6 seconds, and Siphon Life in 6.73 seconds. The good news is that you won't lose much DPS with that chain, and you can sustain it while Hasten is down, which may mean losing no DPS at all or doing even better than the top chain in practice. The bad news is that it takes an extra attack, and that the Siphon Lifes are spread out a lot more. I'd personally go for the higher-recharge chain, but it's going to be tough on a budget.

As for Siphon Life, having it as a fast recharging heal is definitely part of your survivability. But it's such a critical power with so many components that need to be enhanced that it's one of the few powers I recommend frankenslotting to get some damage and accuracy out of it as well. I'll point you to this thread, which has a whole lot of good options for how to slot it for various goals and at various price points.

Cool. Thanks for the info. I need to flip at least one just to say that I have.

Let me just scroll through the attack chain EPS for some IO'd builds, most of them from other people... 2.73, 2.8, 2.64, 3.02, 2.87, 2.98, 2.8, 3.36, 3.21, 2.69, 3.34, 2.73, 4.06, 3.43, 2.84, 2.6, 3.07, 2.9, 2.78... you get the idea. If that's a representative data set, the eyeballed average looks to approach 3 EPS. On most builds, it's perfectly fine to burn through maybe 0.5 EPS while fighting flat out, because there is time switching targets and time between spawns and there are blues. So yeah. As a VERY vague rule of thumb, you could target about 2.5 EPS for recovery minus toggles.

Yep. Builds are very specific to play style and budget. What do you plan to fight? What is your tolerance for endurance drain? What sort of balance between single-target and AoE damage are you looking for? Do you prefer to just hit the same three attacks over and over, or would that drive you completely nuts? Do you want to be a generalist or very good at one specific thing?

My builds suit me, but I do not play this game like most people. They're probably good builds for people who enjoy the same things, and there are a lot of those on the boards, but we're a small minority of the player base.

Totally. I solo and I STILL hate that I don't have Shadow Maul. I LOVE Shadow Maul. But I designed that build specifically to solo AVs and NOTHING else. There is no compromise for practicality (like a travel power or exemplaring) or for more normal fighting (like Shadow Maul).

I agree completely. As an example, one of the biggest things is that a whole lot of these builds, mine included, are designed for no inspiration use. Who does that? Only crazy scrappers doing specific challenges. Even if the cool kids are tying one hand behind their back before jumping into a fight doesn't mean it's the SMART way to fight. Use inspirations. Keep inspirations in mind when designing your own builds unless you're one of us crazies.

If you use one of my builds for normal game play, other than the not dying part, which is always nice, you'll only do OK. That's it. Just OK. And you don't want to spend billions to do OK. You can do OK with SOs.

And that's true too. One thing I like about these builds is that you can go anywhere and do anything. You don't care what you're fighting. You don't care about team composition. You'll always be fine. You might not match others damage output, and others may with buffs match your survivability, but you'll be fine.

And with I16 and custom difficulty levels, I think the extreme survivability builds become more interesting for general play. At the moment, when I'm running invincible missions on Sergei, I often turn off all of his toggles to make things more interesting. In I16, I can get the same level of challenge by simply cranking the difficulty level up to the max, and that's much more fun.

Quite. Sergei gets destroyed unless he pops purples. Werner finds him easy.

But the non-positional psi seems to be very rare. I don't plan builds around it, and it isn't in my survivability spreadsheet.

Yes, I suppose I could finish leveling up my Claws/Super Reflexes. I hit the soft cap at 36, and my brain went, “finished!” I've barely touched him since. Or maybe I should finish leveling my 44 Spines/Dark. It'll be easy now that I can make my own crowds. So many possibilities.

Well, sure, but it's pretty out of date – I12 sets but taking into account the I13 changes to Dark Melee. No travel power and no Shadow Maul. Should be able to add those without compromise these days due to the good travel power and AoE sets.

Thanks, and true, but in the context of this thread, I actually AM a relative newb. Before I9, I hadn't even bothered learning how the game worked. I wasn't even lurking on the forums. Only with the introduction of IOs did the game become NUMERICALLY interesting to me, so that's really when I started paying attention, learning how the game really worked, and actually planning out builds.

Back in the old days, I did have a fully Hamio'd Assault Rifle/Devices blaster that was pretty decent. A lot of the guesses I made about how to optimize him turned out to be correct. But from a numerical standpoint, no, I didn't know what I was doing.

That is sometimes a problem. Purples are just a tool. Yes, they're the nicest, most expensive hammer that you've ever seen. But when you need a screwdriver, you should use a screwdriver.

...

The Sweep combo is good. So good I also worked out a Blinding Feint -> Sweep build for the AoE and damage mitigation. Might have been fun, but I ended up retiring my DB/WP at 50 instead.