Werner

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Incinerate -> Greater Fire Sword -> Cremate

But it's not a cheap build by any stretch of the imagination. It requires much higher recharge and burns through endurance somewhat faster.

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How about if I add Scorch?

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That's doable. It'll take +153% recharge in Greater Fire Sword. You lose about 5% DPS for about a 3.5% reduction in EPS and require one more attack be slotted up.

Compared to the Incinerate -> Scorch -> Cremate -> Scorch chain, it does 6% better DPS but requires 10% more EPS, 8% more recharge, and slotting up one more attack.

But if you want to use Greater Fire Sword, don't want Fire Sword, and want only medium recharge requirements, that's probably the chain for you.

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Numerically, top tier Katana/Regeneration and Katana/Willpower builds get similar survivability scores in my spreadsheet when soloing a one or a few enemies without temps or inspirations. Willpower pulls ahead when surrounded by enemies to fuel Rise to the Challenge.

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So, they're about the same except when Willpower is better?

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A good summation, yes.

Incinerate -> Greater Fire Sword -> Cremate

But it's not a cheap build by any stretch of the imagination. It requires much higher recharge and burns through endurance somewhat faster.

Before single origin enhancements (level 22), I mostly just slot accuracy and endurance reduction in my attacks. I did slot enough recharge for a seamless attack chain on my Katana/Dark Armor, but I blew through endurance very quickly, so there was a lot of down time between fights. Not sure I'd do that again.

It is typical for low-level scrappers to focus on offense rather than defense with both power picks and slotting.

You will want the Fitness pool. You have two prerequisites for Stamina, and you'll want Stamina at 20, so make sure to work in the prerequisites before then.

You will probably want a travel power. While you can make do with the temporary travel powers, for a first-timer, I'd suggest getting a real travel power at 14. The travel powers also come with a prerequisite, so you'd want to pick that up before 14. My favorite is Combat Jumping leading to Super Jump (I personally pair it with Hurdle from the Fitness pool). But you might, for instance, want to fly. I think everyone should have flight on at least one character for the fun of it. In that case, I'd go with Hover leading up to Flight (paired with Swift from the Fitness pool).

In the long run, you'll probably want the Fighting pool, but that's probably in the twenties or thirties.

As others have said, there's nothing wrong with Katana, and I think it pairs well with Super Reflexes in that it smooths out the ride up through the levels.

Your Katana must haves are, in my opinion, Divine Avalanche, Build Up, Soaring Dragon, Golden Dragonfly, and Gambler's Cut. Sting of the Wasp may be useful while leveling up. Flashing Steel and The Lotus Drops are your AoEs. While I often skip many attacks in my builds, for a first timer leveling up, I'd probably just grab them all for the experience. Do skip Call of the Wolf. If you want to taunt something, stab it in the face.

You mentioned a “basic attack”. For Katana, I'd say that Gambler's Cut is your most basic attack. Most of the time, I use it every other attack on my main.

Your Super Reflexes must haves are everything but Elude. Focused Fighting, Dodge and Practiced Brawler are critical. Practiced Brawler is how you avoid the stun lock you're experiencing. What you'll find is that at a low level, it isn't always up, so you'll still sometimes get mezzed. But at a higher level (22+), two single-origin enhancements will make it permanent, and you'll probably almost never get mezzed again. Elude is optional. I personally hate it, but again, as a first timer, you might want to go ahead and take and and form your own opinion. Lots of people like it.

I may or may not be around. If I'm around, I'm up for whatever. If it turns into an LGTF, and we have slightly too many, I'll bow out since I've been on two of these in a row, and someone else should be able to get in on this fun.

I wander away for a couple days, and Ultimus himself shows up for the first time in forever on the scrapper boards to beat a dead horse. I AM amused.

Numerically, top tier Katana/Regeneration and Katana/Willpower builds get similar survivability scores in my spreadsheet when soloing a one or a few enemies without temps or inspirations. Willpower pulls ahead when surrounded by enemies to fuel Rise to the Challenge.

Private spreadsheet results for a specific primary in edge case situations is never going to settle the debate, of course. But this IS a dead horse we're beating.

I love my toggles, but it wasn't me that invented Toggle Man. I'm not THAT brilliant.

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Does Mid's treat Enzymes right? Something odd in the way they're described....

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Shhhhhhhhh. These are not the droids you're looking for. Nothing to see here. Move along.

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I'm the opposite. I consider the procs less valuable than their average would indicate because they're random, and therefore can't be counted on. I do see your point, though.

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They also don't scale down when exemp'd so they're better for that reason as well.

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Ah, good point if I ever exemplared. Still, that's probably enough to make me switch my opinion as far as recommendations go.

I'm the opposite. I consider the procs less valuable than their average would indicate because they're random, and therefore can't be counted on. I do see your point, though.

As something else to toss out there, here's what I'm using as my second build – nothing but SOs. I thought I remembered some minor mistakes in it, but nothing is jumping out at me. No AoEs, so I'm not saying to use this build, just giving you some more input at the low cost end of the house.

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|-------------------------------------------------------------------|</pre><hr />

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Well, it was closer than I thought. 238 DPS vs. 215 DPS. Still, that's more than a few DPS behind in my book.

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I don't believe that number is right. Running that chain, with a hecatomb proc in BF, an arma proc in SS, both -res procs, I was always around 190 DPS on both my db/inv and db/wp. I still have trouble figuring out how -res works, but my ingame speed (fighting pylons without stopping more than 1s in the whole fight) didn't show my characters over 200 DPS, ever. Adding one normal damage proc in each attack might give you about 2 or 2.5 more DPS per proc, but at this point you'd need much more global recharge and it'd probably be best to go for the high recharge chain.

Have you considered Attack Vitals' higher miss rate (as 3 attacks have to go off in a row) ?

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Yeah, it does look like I gave a 100% chance for the extra damage if Sweeping Strike hits. Oops. I also had my global damage 1% too high. I also forgot to include one of my damage procs. End result was 214 DPS instead of 215 DPS.

Here's the spreadsheet with the calculations and the build if you want to look for other problems.

The build has 31.5% global damage, purple procs in two attacks, both -resistance procs, two regular procs in one attack, and one regular proc in another. Endurance usage isn't going to be even close to sustainable for soloing a pylon. Those might explain the differences between what I'm calculating and what you're seeing.

While we're waiting for the data chunk fix, you might want to look through John Printemps' Shields guide, assuming you haven't yet. He has an example Martial Arts/Shield build in it. I haven't checked how it compares to others that have been posted, but it's a good guide either way.

Looks like it just lost the line feeds, and since there are no spaces, it just strung it all out. You could edit the original post to put back in the line feeds. That should solve it.

I'm in the same boat as BrokenPrey. I run Blinding Feint -&gt; Attack Vitals while Hasten is up, and add Power Slice on the end when Hasten is down. And as he says, the best single target attack chain is Blinding Feint -&gt; Ablating Strike -&gt; Sweeping Strike -&gt; Ablating Strike. Almost nobody runs that one due to the extreme recharge requirements.

And yes, it's a decent all around scrapper. I wasn't bored by the primary, but Willpower does bore me a bit. It keeps you alive, but it has no “personality”.

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Blinding Feint -&gt; Attack Vitals is fairly easy to pull off and is only a few DPS (fully enhanced) behind the top perma-Hasten chains.

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Actually, I don't think it's even close. Let me add that chain to my top-tier DPS comparison and see what I get.

Well, it was closer than I thought. 238 DPS vs. 215 DPS. Still, that's more than a few DPS behind in my book.

I don't use Touch of Fear. I hear it's great while leveling up. I didn't bother. I'm soft-capped, so no Elude. I tried Elude out before I was at the soft cap, and hated it.

If you have Dark Consumption, you aren't likely to need Conserve Power for regular play. I have both, but I'm soloing AVs without inspirations. On the other hand, you won't likely need Elude for normal play. I think you're much better off popping a purple to put yourself at the soft cap than popping Elude then using inspirations to recover from the crash.

In normal play, I use Dark Consumption and Conserve Power very rarely, so in theory, I could probably make do without either in normal play.

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I'm betting my hat that any alternate animations put into the game will have 100% identical states to the primary animation.

To do otherwise would cause the number crunchers to go into seizures.

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Not seizures. It would just completely defeat the purpose of the aesthetic changes for anyone that cared about performance, because we'd just pick the better attack in every case, regardless of if it was a kick or a punch. So yes, I'm betting they'll have completely identical stats. It wouldn't make sense for it to be otherwise.

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Are these two posts basically saying that against a single target opponent, as MA, you should just cycle through SK, CK, SK, CAK?

Is EC right out then on single targets? Since it has no AE value, should you even take it?

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That's the top chain for DPS, but there are some potential gotchas. First, it requires +225% recharge in Storm Kick, which means Hasten plus a whole lot of expensive +recharge bonuses. Second, it has Crane Kick, which means knockback. So except against things that can't be knocked back (e.g., AVs, Pylons), you won't actually see that DPS. If you like Crane Kick for its mitigation or just because you like kicking things around, then you should still be happy with the chain. But a lot of people don't like that.

Eagle's Claw is a good attack, just behind Crippling Axe Kick for DPS, with better DPE, and you'll probably find a stun more useful than an immobilize in most situations. So if you don't feel the need for the very top DPS, you can certainly work it into an attack chain.

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Now we gotta work on getting 121 less defeats.

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LOL!

Yeah, I'm not up for an MoSTF. I'd love to see it done, but I don't want to be part of it.

AoE damage is still lackluster, I believe. There were a lot of animation time adjustments, though I didn't pay much attention to Martial Arts specifically. It's still on the low end of single target damage, but can pump out over 200 DPS with the right build, so isn't exactly hurting (I kill AVs with my mere 175 DPS). Regen is still vulnerable to burst damage, but Moment of Glory was changed to be a 15 second god mode, which allows you to take an alpha strike very well. It's pretty much a must have power now.

It's definitely worth playing for a while and seeing how you like it. At the same time, the more recently introduced sets are very strong. Willpower is pretty much easy mode without giving up top end power, and Shields is less easy (takes more thought, blooms later, no endurance recovery power), but comes with a damage buff, is melee team friendly, and appears to be the new top choice for powergamers with limitless influence.

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Im impressed myself. but i had a feeling we could do it. the funny part is, some people I know that run STFs on a regular would of had a heart attack if the team did some of the stuff we did. from spawning sands while still underground thus casing the massive ambushes. to dropping two AVs while still being chased by the security chief ambushes. and fighting GW in melee!! That right there was the highlight of the whole thing for me. ITF was a little funner. But this drops all the talk about how you "need" certain ATs to do certain things. like you need range for GW and you need a tank paired with an empath for LR. you need debuffs to hit mako when he has elude up. (well, we did have two tactics running lol) The truth is all you "need" is to know what the hell you are doing. I wish we had it on video.

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Wait... I'm not use to this teaming thing... you're saying massive ambushes are bad???

Me, I didn't know what was ambushes and what wasn't. I was just happy to have targets. Often I wouldn't even know we were fighting an AV until my tab key would land on something purple.

I do think that taking down Ghost Widow in melee was kind of the highlight. I think it helped that we had three Maneuvers and two Grant Covers going to buff everyone's defense and make it difficult for her to land her heal or her death hold.

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Well great Job Guys!!!

So how did you like it Werner?

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It was fun, but I did enjoy the ITF more. The ITF had fewer cramped corridors, more pure scrapperlock, more kill all, more consistent difficulty level. The STF seemed to ramp up. So the first few missions seemed pointlessly easy, the main challenge sometimes being simply moving down the hallway with so many scrappers and bad guys. I think our first death was on the tree mission, then a number of us got wiped out by Aeon when we got premature aggro (might have been my fault – I was charging around killing everything that moved, and suddenly I was fighting Aeon). I don't think it really got challenging until the final mission. Even then, the AVs other than Lord Recluse went down pretty easily. I mean, we had trouble splitting them up and there were a number of deaths taking them out, but even with Ghost Widow, we just beat her face in until she eventually collapsed. And then Lord Recluse himself was pretty seriously difficult. I think almost half of the time and the majority of the deaths were from taking him down. But it felt the whole time like we were making progress, so it was never particularly frustrating. More this exciting sense that we were going to be able to do it despite the bugs (if it was still bugged), and without resorting to temp powers.

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Out of curiosity, what'd you do to keep LR busy till enough towers were down?

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Just some scrapper tanking (wasn't me... I was getting one shotted).

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I haven't had the time to get the nukes or shivans, but I'll still be there.

Can't wait

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Starting to look like we'll have enough to run two of them at the same time, at least if people keep showing up. *chuckle*

I don't consider it a temp power, but if you're thinking about some “no temps no insps” challenge, it's definitely iffy. I figure I also shouldn't use veteran powers, base empowerment buffs, or any of that sort of thing. Still, if your build is centered on, say, using the Shield Drone to get to the soft cap, it would be ridiculous to tell you you shouldn't use it. So yeah, gray area, so I'd say do what you want.