Werner

Incinerate -> Scorch -> Cremate -> Scorch is a great attack chain if you're trying to avoid the swords. Heck, it's a great attack chain period.

As for an ALL swords attack chain, well, that's never going to be competitive. But if concept is critical, you could go Fire Sword -> Fire Sword Circle -> Fire Sword -> Greater Fire Sword -> Fire Sword -> Gap.

Yeah, mixing the two does seem a little clumsy, somehow.

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DA needs an across the board increase in resists and a simultaneous reduction in end cost of the toggles.

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Because Dark isn't awesome enough?

I'll agree with some tweaks to Cloak of Fear. That's about all I think could use any work. The damage aura has the same DPE as other damage auras, which is to say it's an absolute BARGAIN for the damage it does. Oppressive Gloom is cheap since it damages you. The other toggles look pretty normal. As for resists, just how high do you want them? They're already great.

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I am still not giving up on KB protection for all melee toons even if it is mag 4 and 50% resistance. It makes no sense even with damage toggle that melee toons have to resort to IO and pool powers to get at least some kb protection. Those change alone would get threw 90% of the content and the sets would still get benefits from kb IO's

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I guess there are so many ways to cover the knockback hole that I consider it a non-issue in practice. As Achilles' heels go, it's... well, not one.

I'd say Resilience is worth having, but it's not huge. That's why I recommend it “when and if you can work it in”, and don't suggest slotting it out. Well, slot it out if you have the slots, but there are probably better things to do with them.

I can definitely tell the difference with Tough on vs. Tough off, though.

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DA needs an across the board increase in resists and a simultaneous reduction in end cost of the toggles.

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Because Dark isn't awesome enough?

I'll agree with some tweaks to Cloak of Fear. That's about all I think could use any work. The damage aura has the same DPE as other damage auras, which is to say it's an absolute BARGAIN for the damage it does. Oppressive Gloom is cheap since it damages you. The other toggles look pretty normal. As for resists, just how high do you want them? They're already great.

Here's my basic boilerplate for the Regen secondary:

“There are definitely other approaches, but here's what I'd consider a basic plan for the Regeneration secondary using SOs or common IOs:

- Fast Healing at 1, 3 heals
- Reconstruction nice and early, 3 heals, 3 recharges
- Quick Recovery nice and early, 1 endurance modifier at first, add 1 or 2 more as necessary
- Dull Pain when or shortly after when available, as there is a lot to squeeze in at that level, 3 heals, 3 recharges
- Integration at 16, 3 heals, possibly 1 endurance reducer
- Resilience when and if you can work it in, 1 resist
- Instant Healing when or shortly after when available, 1-3 recharges, no heals unless you're swimming in slots
- Skip Revive
- Moment of Glory when or shortly after when available, 1-3 recharges
- Hasten when convenient, 3 recharges
- Health when convenient, 3 heals
- Tough when convenient, 3 resists, 1 endurance reducer
- Stamina if and when you start having endurance trouble, which may not be until 30 or later, 1 endurance modifier at first, add 1 or 2 more as necessary

If it were me, I'd also try to get some basic defense, but it will use up even more power and pool choices. Combat Jumping or Hover, but don't worry about slotting for defense. Weave with 3 defense. Maneuvers with 3 defense. The Steadfast Protection unique in Resilience or Tough. With even-level SOs, that will give you 14.3% defense to all. Not great, but not bad.

The astute observer will notice that I've now recommended 5 power pools – Leaping or Flight, Fitness, Fighting, Leadership and Speed. You can't have everything, so you'll need to make some choices. I dropped Speed, using IO set bonuses and my primary (Katana) to drastically improve my defense. Most people should probably drop Leadership instead. You'll probably find Hasten more useful than Maneuvers.”

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My dm/invuln brute is tough enough where against anything short of multiple AVs I don't really have to worry about dying. I doubt willpower can say the same.

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Think again. We have a reliable report of a Willpower scrapper going AFK in the middle of a Rikti War Zone challenge spawn.

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Enough already. First it was /WP vs /regen. Now it /WP vs /invul. I don't believe that any of the sets are better then other.

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No, no, Willpower is clearly superior to all other secondaries. We have all these debates all the time so that people will learn there is only one secondary worth playing. Why the forum population still insists on playing and loving all secondaries is inexplicable, perhaps the result of some form of collective delusion brought about by wanting to believe they're even in the same league as Willpower. It's madness![/sarcasm]

Reply to multiple posts.

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Primary/Attack Chain (5)
Blinding Feint
Ablating Strike
Vengeful Slice
Sweeping Strike
Power Slice

This seems to be pretty standard unless one can get really crazy recharge bonuses.

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I wouldn't bother slotting and using Power Slice on an AV build. You don't need really crazy recharge to run Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals. You need +128% recharge in Blinding Feint, +109% recharge in Sweeping Strike, and +96% recharge in Vengeful Slice. That should be easily in reach on a good set IO build. If budget for recharge is a problem though, then yeah, you might get stuck running Power Slice while Hasten is down.

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For DB, you want to pay close attention to the guides to DB. I'm no DB expert, but based on what I know about its similarity to Claws, you want to look at using the lower level, fast recharging attacks & spamming your version of Follow-Up as much as possible.

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Unless he's planning on a multi-billion influence mega build with “really crazy recharge bonuses”, Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals is the way to go. The higher DPS chains happen at truly insane levels of recharge.

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3) Take Fighting (kick/toughness/weave)
Don't really need to get softcapped

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No, but they're a very good idea. Toughness helps reduce the severe spikes of damage that you take from AVs. And Weave is a nice big push towards the soft cap.

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5) Stick a "Steadfast Protection: Resistance/Defense" in one of the slots you have for Toughness.
Again Don't really need to get softcapped

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Technically correct. You can do a soft-capped build using just SOs. But that would be a really bad idea for an AV soloing build. Slot a Steadfast Protection.

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From what I gather Aid Self is handy for soloing AVs but not required, give a bit of wiggle room if you will.

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While you can solo a few AVs without Aid Self on an otherwise extremely solid build, you can probably solo several times as many with Aid Self. I'd keep it.

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And Hasten would depend on the ideal DB attack chain, which I'm not very familiar with. If you can use combos and have a good attack chain without Hasten, it would be convenient to save a power pool.

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I'd say that Hasten is useful but optional. I'd be shooting for the Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals chain outside of Hasten, at which point Hasten is mostly speeding up Aid Self. I'm sure that would make the difference on a few AVs, but it might be more convenient to grab Combat Jumping, or Maneuvers, or Tactics with a Gaussian set, or whatever. The point is that there are a lot of powers that are good at that point.

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Bobcat?

Edit: Her damage may not exactly be super low, but she uses almost all melee and doesn't have any res to lethal. She was the easiest AV of all of them for me on my kat/regen.

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Made it about ten minutes. Didn't make much progress. She has Elude or something, so I'd go through periods where I couldn't hit, which meant my defense would drop, which meant I'd get hit a lot. She is vulnerable to negative energy, so I might be able to get her on an SO version of Sergei.

Malaise tore me apart quickly, maybe three minutes or so. So even though he's vulnerable to lethal, it doesn't look good.

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Ohhh...
Werner, If you could have Chimera stay at range for most of the fight, I'm thinking that might be the way to go...

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AI exploit! It might just work!

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Bah. I forgot that Chimera is resistant to lethal. He's a no go, so I gave Marauder a try. He hits harder than Manticore, but at least I'm not dealing with debuffs. I made better and faster progress, getting him down about 1/3 of the way in about 20 minutes before he finally killed me. If one point of data is an average, then I should be able to beat him about one time in 8, but that's still a lot of work. I guess I need an AV vulnerable to lethal that does mostly melee or lethal damage.

Anti-matter is vulnerable to lethal, but he'd probably snuff me about five seconds after Moment of Glory wore off. Malaise is vulnerable to lethal, but he's got a lot of non-positional psi damage. Worth a shot, I suppose. I'm not seeing anyone else that is susceptible to lethal. So I guess the next best bet is a low damage lethal AV so that I can focus on attacking instead of staying alive. Ideas?

1.2 billion over 3 weeks purpling out a build

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I can't imagin how you people are purpling out your builds when a single set of armageddon is going for 900 million.

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Bought mine last year some time, I think. Not sure what prices are like these days, but the “over 3 weeks” part of what I said above is important. Bid creeping and waiting on a handful of toons at the same time, and except when a lowball bid would fill, crafting my own IOs.

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if i have 75-90% damage bonus in the power already - why not add some procs ?

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Because it would be better to put the slots somewhere else in your Build IMO.

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And because if you're at 75% damage, you'll do MORE damage by sticking in a damage IO than you will sticking in a proc. At 90%, yeah, maybe add some procs if you want more damage. But I don't think you're hitting 90% with only three slots without some serious compromises to accuracy or endurance.

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What would be a great DPS chain for this build?

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Let's see, looks like +147% in GFS, +99% in Scorch, and +123% in Fire Sword, Cremate and Incinerate.

Probably Incinerate -> Greater Fire Sword -> Cremate -> Fire Sword. Also, swap the Hecatomb damage for the Hecatomb proc. When slowed, just toss in a Scorch at the end. You won't even notice the trivial dent in your DPS.

You could also consider swapping the Hecatombs into Scorch, dropping Greater Fire Sword completely, and running the Incinerate -> Scorch -> Cremate -> Scorch chain. It's probably lower DPS, but with a shorter chain and two purple procs, it's going to be close. You probably don't need the saved endurance on a Regen, but you might be able to do something nice with a power pick and four free slots. For instance, pick up tactics, move the Gaussian set over there, three recharges in Build Up to get it up more often. Then you still have another two slots to play with.

Oh, wait. You need the recharge in Incinerate, not in Scorch. So you're not getting as much out of the purple proc, plus you end up 3% short of the required recharge. Well, you could swap for a Doctored Wounds set in Instant Healing, suffer with a tiny gap, who knows.

OK, I'll shut up now, because this is what I'm SUPPOSED to be doing for SpiderTeo_OC, and I haven't gotten to it yet.

For base damage, it'd probably look like Starsman's Charts at 40% recharge. He has Dual Blades rated highest for sustained single-target DPS, followed by Claws, Katana and then Broad Sword.

At the insane top end, I'd rate them Katana, Dual Blades, Claws, and then Broad Sword.

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assuming that you 6 slot a damage aura and use 3 of those slots for chance for damage procs, what is the best slotting for those other 3 slots to maximize endurance reduction and damage ?

I've been thinking of using 2 quad IOs (Eradication and Obliteration), then throwing a dam/end in. Of course I'd go with more dam/ends instead of quads once I get better +acc and +tohit.

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You don't need recharge in a damage aura, so the quads are partially wasted.

Maybe Armageddon dam/end, Scirocco's acc/dam/end and Multi-Strike acc/dam/end for 42% acc, 75% dam and 75% end. However, the premise of the question is flawed – you should not put three procs in your damage aura.

Another chain to consider is Incinerate -> Scorch -> Cremate -> Scorch (+145% recharge in Scorch). It takes another step down in DPS, but only requires three attacks and has better DPE, both of which can significantly relieve slotting pressure in a high-end build. I suspect that's the one I would build towards, but I don't have a Fire scrapper yet.

I don't have a Spines/Willpower, but I have a Spines/Dark in the 40s. My endurance consumption has been manageable with SOs and frankenslotted attacks, and I only keep a single column of blues in my inspiration tray.

As for survivability, meh. On the other hand, I took Spines/Dark to be the opposite of what I normally play – unkillable single-target monsters. Maybe the survivability is fine in comparison to more normal characters. It's not like I die a lot, but I generally hunt larger and lower level crowds than I do on my other characters. That's probably where the XP sweet spot is anyway, so it's not like I'm suffering. I'm just used to better.

Also, any survivability issues may be a problem with the guy behind the keyboard. It's a different enough combination from my normal play that “you're doing it wrong!” is a reasonable explanation for any problems.

Oh, and I got creamed through the teens. But that's often the case with scrappers. It got a lot better in the twenties.

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I don't have a spines/dark scrapper but I have a spines/fire scrapper so is my friend. I placed 3 procs on Quills and 3 procs in Blazing Aura and my damage is at 70ish percent. My friends has same build as my scrapper but he does not have procs in his auras but they are at 97% damage.

We went to MA and tested on a pack of mobs and I killed mobs way faster than my friend.

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Blazing Aura at +97% is 136 damage every 10 seconds. Blazing Aura at +70% is 117.3 plus 3 procs. You're unclear which ones, but let's assume they're the basic 20% * 71.8 = 14.36 damage each every 10 seconds, so 117.3 + 3 * 14.36 = 160.

So yes, three procs are much better than +27% damage.

Here's a tip for you, though. Replace one of your procs with a damage IO. Blazing Aura will then be at +97% for the 136 damage, plus two procs at 14.36 each is 165 damage. And I believe that's what we're trying to say – until you've ED capped your damage, enhance your damage. Don't switch to procs until you've done that. And then the next question – is another 30 points of damage every 10 seconds worth the two slots to you? Might be. Might not be. I'd probably do something else with them.

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Ohhh...
Werner, If you could have Chimera stay at range for most of the fight, I'm thinking that might be the way to go...

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AI exploit! It might just work!

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Realize I am running at 45+% damage buff with 1 target in range. I do not have Werners or others handy dandy attack chain spreadsheet so I have gone totally by feel and experimenting on my attack chain

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It's a good attack chain, but Greater Fire Sword takes 2.51 seconds, while Fire Sword recharges in 3.34 seconds. So it looks like you have a 0.83 second gap?

If so, you could do more damage just by shortening the gap. Your other attacks recharge fast enough to be gapless, so Fire Sword is the only sticking point. Basically, you want the highest recharge you can get in Fire Sword without big compromises. If it were me, I'd drop the Pounding Slugfests (44.9% ranged defense is “good enough”), put in a Hecatomb dam/rech and dam/end/rech, and probably finish off with a Mako's acc/dam/end/rech. That gets your gap down to 0.08 seconds as well as getting you the +15% accuracy bonus, which is nice.

Still, sounds like your damage is good enough, and it would probably only add about 5% DPS, so it's hardly a high priority.

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Are these AV runs done on Invin ? what's the standard ? is there a standard other than no insp's ?

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There's no real AV soloing standard, but there are obviously levels of difficulty depending on what tools you do and don't allow yourself. The hard core tend to run it “no temps no insps” for greatest difficulty, but since there isn't a standard, we also tend to state it explicitly. Another common approach is “no temps small insps”, which, while easier, isn't particularly easy either.

They're generally done on invincible because that's generally the only way to get AVs to spawn while soloing.

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So coming full circle, I just don't think an SO build could pull off all three, but it could come close, very close.

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I believe DM/Regen could do it. I might try to make an all-SO build in build slot 2 just to try it.

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Hear that, Umbral? Now you GOTTA solo an AV using only SOs!

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Am I being called out? Wha?


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Well, SOMEONE has to get this ball rolling, and Arcanaville thinks it'll roll, so it's totally official now. Maybe you can beat us to the punch. My build is JUST on the edge of being able to do it, but I've been busy, and it looks like it will take a lot of tries. Thought maybe you'd want to be the first of what I hope will become many.

Maybe there's some other AV that would be easier for me. Manticore was easiest for me on my IO build, but the debuffs are an issue on the SO build, so maybe there's an easier one. None of them are jumping out at me, though.

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If I remember correctly, the DPS leader is dependant on recharge. On low levels of recharge, Katana is better, in very high amounts of recharge BS pulls ahead and in extreme amounts of recharge Katana pulls back ahead. (I don't remember the math, I know the first two are correct, I don't remember the third very well).

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If you're certain about the first two, I'm certain about the third, so that's where it stands.

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SD - hard at lower levels and you need a ton of inf for it to be any good

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There's a big danger here of overinterpreting things that myself and other powergamers might say. Yes, it takes a lot of influence for it to be absolutely top tier, but it is VERY good out of the box and from a low level. My Broad Sword/Shield Defense scrapper has been extremely solid for leveling using a combination of SOs and then attack frankenslotting in the 30s. One of my favorite scrappers while leveling up, for certain. Possibly my favorite.

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WP - good at start and allthe way through. Falls behind regen but is not as involved

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I think Willpower is just as good as Regen, even at the top end. Katana/Willpower is my default recommendation for a new scrapper, though all scrapper combinations are good.

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SR - hard at first, but outshines the rest in the higher levels

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Well... not necessarily on either count. Parry will fill in your low level defense, so it won't be that hard at first. And it'll be hard to outshine the other secondaries at high level because Parry fills in their defense as well. One nice thing that Super Reflexes does is that at a high level, you won't need Parry anymore, and the extra recharge from Quickness will help you put out a high DPS chain. So I'd say that Katana/Super Reflexes and Broad Sword/Shield Defense (Against All Odds) are probably the best DPS, though I don't know which would be better.

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So it all activates in the same amount of time but the main gripe is just the fact that the animation takes place regardless of no loss in time?

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No, it doesn't activate in the same amount of time. It USED to. Weapon sets were changed to STOP including redraw in the activation time. That sped up the weapon sets significantly, but created a redraw penalty. Redraw is now an issue, and generally something to be avoided in attack chains.