Werner

Treat Blazing Aura as an attack, and one of your best attacks. It's basically an AoE that costs about the same endurance as your single target attacks for the amount of damage done. More specifically, on a low level character, I'd be shooting for something like two accuracy, two endurance and two damage. That's a lot of slots, which you probably don't have, but that's what I'd be working towards. Endurance and accuracy come first. On paper, you'd probably even be better off stopping attacking and letting Blazing Aura do the work when you're running out of endurance, but that's probably not as much fun.

And yeah, stop slotting Brawl. Your Fire attacks are MUCH better, and worth spending a power pick on. Some day you can respec and get those Brawl slots back, but I wouldn't make it a priority, particularly since you'll probably make other mistakes as well. I tend to do one big fix everything respec in the thirties.

Yeah, all the travel for the contacts can be quite annoying, particularly before you get a travel power. But if you've mostly been running police scanner missions, you probably have two temporary travel powers already. Speaking of which, I generally just use those until I'm in the thirties as well. A real travel power is better, but not so much better that I delay any yummy powers that are available in my primary, secondary and pools.

I'm a fan of slotting and using Tough, but I'm also a fan of being unkillable. I guess it depends on where you want to draw the line between that and other things you want out of the build.

And I'll third what Fury Flechette said about IO levels. I buy 50s, but that's because I have this insane need to have the best, even if the best means an extra 0.05% smashing/lethal resistance, for instance. If you don't share that particular insanity, and ever plan to exemplar, you're better off with lower level stuff.

Yay! Grats!

I guess word hasn't trickled down that Shields can be rock solid. Besides, the squishiest Scrapper secondaries still aren't actually squishy at level 50, particularly if the team has any buffs, or a Tanker, or some controls, or other people actually killing things. Am I wrong? I don't pick up group, so maybe there are a lot of sucky level 50 Shield Scrappers out there?

(Edit: In any case, based on hanging out too much in the scrapper forum, if I saw your broadcast, I'd read “unkillable damage machine looking for team”.)

Bill beat me to it, but:

DPS = 38343.75 / seconds to solo pylon + 127.8125
= 38343.75 / 315 + 127.8125 = 250 DPS

Incinerate -> Scorch -> Cremate -> Scorch is a particularly endurance efficient chain that gives up some but not a lot of DPS, and doesn't take huge recharge.

I haven't hit 200 DPS on ANY toon. Maybe a blaster, but I've never checked my DPS on those. Some day I should make a DPS toon.

While defense and -tohit aren't technically the same thing, they plug into the same portion of the formula the game uses to figure out your chance of hitting the enemy. A drawback of -tohit is that it can be resisted, and the tougher the enemy, the more they resist it. A bigger drawback in many cases is that defense affects everyone, while your -tohit only affects who you hit. On the other hand, defense can be debuffed, so everything has its weakness. In any case, yes, they stack.

I'd take Weave and stack as much defense as I could get, but just Weave on its own isn't going to do much for you. Your main priority should be recharge, so Hasten is pretty much a must.

You may find that you never need Stamina. On a Regen, I would typically delay it into the early thirties. On a Dark Melee/Regen, you also have Dark Consumption to help recover endurance, so you may find Stamina to be completely redundant. You might even be able to skip the Fitness pool entirely, if that's something you're interested in. I'd probably take it, but you can probably get away without it pretty easily.

Your immobilization protection is in Cloak of Darkness. If you don't want to be a fuzzball of doom, then you'll want to pick up Combat Jumping. I'm a huge fan of Combat Jumping anyway. There are both single IOs and IO sets that offer knockback resistance. I use Steadfast Protections while leveling because I bought a bunch of them back when they were cheap. Last time I looked (a long time ago), they were moderately expensive (10 million?), probably because they're so useful. Even better is slotting a couple Blessing of the Zephyr sets, but I hear those are extra special pricey. One knockback IO will handle the majority of knockback, but you will still get knocked back occasionally. To me, one is good enough, but you may want two or three. In any case, if you have the influence, I'd definitely recommend IOs over Acrobatics, which wastes both a power pick and a lot of endurance on an endurance-hungry build.

I haven't fiddled with Spines attack chains, so I can't really comment there. I haven't hit 50 on my Spines/Dark yet, so I'm still using the “hit whatever has recharged” approach and haven't calculated anything out. I just checked, and I don't have Hasten, but that's not really a recommendation since I'm just winging it.

On paper, I have a Katana/Dark build soft-capped to all positions with only moderate (instead of crippling) compromises to other aspects of the build. But Katana (and not worrying about budget) makes it a lot easier to pull off. I wouldn't even attempt it on a Spines/Dark, as even if it's possible, I think the build on the whole would end up horribly compromised. Defense is still good, so grab some, but settle for less than the soft cap.

Dark Melee/Shields is the flavor of the month unlimited-budget AV soloer, and for good reason. You can soft cap your defense, have buffed up hit points, some resistance, extra damage from Against All Odds, keep your hit points topped up with Siphon Life without interrupting your DPS, and so on. Also, Shield Charge is great fun, even if it isn't an AV soloing power.

(Edit: An AV-spec'd DM/SR doesn't get squashed by two AV hits in a row. Often not by three. You'll have high hit points from accolades and sets, Siphon Life recovering some health even in the space of three sequential hits, and Tough plus your scaling resists helping reduce damage. A couple lucky shots won't generally be enough to take you down. All that said, Shield Defense should have even less trouble with bad luck, and will make the fight go faster due to superior damage output.)

(Edit 2: Doh! Like Demobot says, Soul Drain! Surround yourself with bad guys to buff Against All Odds, hit Soul Drain, and tear the AV apart. You should be seeing DPS in the upper 200s.)

I'd like to apologize, Smite King. I'm not sure why “cranky old man” Werner came out last night. Nothing you said deserved me going off like that. Sorry.

Yes, go with Fire/Super Reflexes, and listen to everything Broken Prey said.

Adding to it, I'd definitely take Aid Self if you're planning to do it without inspirations. You'll be able to do some without it or inspirations if you crank up your regeneration a lot, but you'll get more AVs with Aid Self. Sustainable endurance may be the biggest hurdle if you don't use inspirations, and assuming you don't want to blow your whole budget on the Numina and Miracle uniques. Not sure what Performance Shifter procs are going for these days, but you'll want one of those if it's in budget range. Grab the endurance accolades.

I don't remember the build, and exactly what was and wasn't softcapped. Until that point, I'd been trying to build Willpower the old-fashioned way – cranking up the hit points and regeneration. Mind you, this was probably a couple issues ago, back before the changes to defensive set bonuses. Based on that experience, I was saying that while Katana/Willpower was a great build and all, it fell behind at the top end. Then defense got easier to get, someone (why do I always forget people's names?) put together a serious defense build with lower hit points and regeneration than I was coming up with, and it kicked the **** out of anything I'd made. The current approach to optimizing Willpower was born. (OK, others were probably doing it before then, but that's when *I* got on board, so that's what's important, right? )

The easiest and cheapest way to solve your endurance woes is to frankenslot your attacks. The thirties are also when I usually do that, so you're right on schedule. Just look for cheap multi-aspect IOs, and try to get most of them with some endurance reduction in them. It makes a HUGE difference. Much more difference than, say, slotting for max endurance or endurance recovery bonuses. Your other big hitter for endurance reduction is to slot a Theft of Essence proc in Dark Regeneration, but I don't know how much those cost. Still, you'll keep that one forever, so it isn't a throw away purchase.

Scorch is definitely worth taking. In fact, I'd be shooting for an end game chain of Incinerate -> Scorch -> Cremate -> Scorch. However, that's not the top DPS alternative. It's good because the DPS is fairly good, recharge is moderate and endurance use is very good. I don't think it's a particularly popular chain. In any case, yes, Scorch is a good attack for at least leveling up.

I'd take Weave, but then, I'd also stack as much defense as I could on top of it. On its own, I wouldn't bother with Weave, but I'd still burn a prerequisite to get into Tough, and I'd stack it with Resilience. Might not bother slotting Resilience, though. Depends on how much I was swimming in slots.

Chimera has 25% lethal resistance. If you can't take him down, don't worry. Wipe him out as an EB and continue with the arc.

But I see the rest of the problem now that I'm looking at your build. Both Parry and Disembowel lack any damage slotting. I recommend slotting them purely as attacks, and using a chain of Head Splitter -> Parry -> Disembowel -> Hack -> Parry. I don't know if it'll be enough to take down Chimera, but it should get you through some AVs.

Agreeing with everyone. Katana/Willpower is an excellent first scrapper. Dual Blades isn't at all gimp, but is perhaps a little less straightforward and a little less solid while leveling. But since you're experienced with the game itself, you could pretty much take any primary and secondary and do very well with it. There are no gimp combos on scrappers.

Yeah, DA-GC-GD-GC-DA-GC-SD-GC is pretty much the optimal double-stacked DA chain, though it technically drops the double stack for a fraction of a second. I remove one or two Gambler's Cuts on the fly if and when necessary to keep my defenses up. Not sure you'll need a double-stacked DA chain for Willpower, though.