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You CAN soft cap to SLENFC with only one foe in range, and if you have the influence for it, do so without many compromises. But if your play style is to be constantly surrounded by large numbers of enemies, that may not be worthwhile, and soft capping with, say, five enemies may be perfectly sufficient in practice. I'd probably go for it with just one enemy in range for archvillain soloing purposes.

Solo leveling is, assuming it's easy to get teams (I have no idea), of course slower than teaming. Being a single-target specialist is only going to slow you down even further. I think it personally takes me around 150 hours on average to level a single target specialist Scrapper, which is mostly solo play. If you were instead asking about survivability during leveling, Dark Melee/Invuln feels very solid to me.

I don't believe the level shift applies to the pylon. I *think* it's like a giant monster in that regard. I could be wrong. I'm not thinking of anything other than the factors you mentioned that reduce (or raise) DPS. The 95% to hit sometimes works in more subtle ways, such as in the reduction of the utility of Achilles' Heel, combos and Follow Up type powers, but I don't think that matters on Fire.

Edit: LOL, no answer for two hours, then three of us answer in three minutes.

Yep, Dark Melee/Invuln is crazy survivable, and your list looks about right for the near high end (skipping PvPs and the like). The heal sounds about 10% high, though. Also, recharge starts when the attack ends, so you're actually getting that heal every five seconds or so, not three. The potential with the PvPs is basically what you have plus capped to the six standard damage types with only one enemy in range. Which, if you play with large numbers of enemies, will probably only rarely make any difference in practice.

Hey, Bass, how many giant monsters on monster island can you herd and survive for a substantial period of time? They're mostly smashing lethal, I think, so it's right up Invuln's alley. On my Katana/Dark I handled four for about ten minutes, then six for I think another five or so before they put me down. I also recall doing a rough calculation to say that a Dark Melee/Invuln could probably handle about double that. Given spikes, call it ten? What do you think? Mind you, your Siphon Life isn't even slotted much for heal, but I'm still sure you could beat my number. I'm just curious by how much. Love your build.

God I need to start one of these. Oh, wait, I have a Dark/Invuln Brute. I should probably do it as a Scrapper, though.

On the other hand, all the rules are changing with the incarnate stuff, and maybe something else will come out on top. Syntax42 hints at this in regard to common enemy damage types in the "new game".

Also, as far as Invuln survivability goes, I'm really enjoying my Invuln/Super Strength Tanker at the moment. He was stuck at 40 and I hadn't played him in forever because he was boring and slow. Boy did inherent fitness and frankenslotting breathe new life into him, allowing me to actually put together a good attack chain without losing any survivability, and now with I think sustainable endurance. He feels very scrapperish now. I know the damage is lower, but it FEELS like I'm hitting hard (thank you, Super Strength, for your delicious smashiness). I've actually been playing him instead of grinding out shards on my main Scrappers. I feel dirty.

Hmmm, that turned into a giant aside. Yes, Dark Melee/Invuln for the win. Carry on!

Electric - great AoE
Fire - good AoE, good single target DPS
Dark - great single target DPS, good survivability
Broad Sword - good leveling survivability, thematically appropriate

Yeah, in and of itself, the Gladiator's Armor keeps it from being called a budget build, though I'm going to guess that mine cost several times as much as yours, so there are definitely degrees of sticker shock.

On a budget, you might give up maybe 10% energy/negative, but basically keep most of the rest. That's my guess, anyway, without actually poking at it.

I'm going to guess that in many situations, the to hit debuff from Cloak of Fear gets you functionally comfortably over the soft cap. Your melee and ranged defense are at least decent, covering a lot of the other damage types better than their own typed defense.

I expected you to slot fear in Cloak of Fear instead of -to hit. I assume that was a compromise to get the defense bonus?

For comparison purposes, here's what I consider an excellent-for-the-budget positional soft-capped Katana/Dark build by Ramia Angriffe with a few modifications by Iggy Kamakaze. There are, of course, many ways to build, so I'm very much not saying, "do this". I just wanted to put it out there to look at so you know the kind of thing that ClawsandEffect and I have in mind when we're talking about soft capping, and can also see the kinds of compromises involved. There are fewer compromises at much higher price points, of course. But I assume you're not looking for a ten billion influence uber build.

Midnight Grasp (4.48 seconds, +235% recharge) -> Smite -> Siphon Life (4.62, +117%) -> Smite (2.11, +185%)

Aim for at least a little faster than that. First, there are recharge debuffs. Second, our approach to calculating required recharge is known to be slightly off, but unless Arcanaville figured out what was going on, they're the best estimate we have at the moment. And yes, all you do is add up the Arcanatime of the other attacks between each use of that specific attack. Mids' can now be configured to report Arcanatime, simplifying things. For recharge enhancement required, calculate base recharge/necessary recharge - 100%.

It's an interesting alternative to a fully soft-capped build, but at low recharge like that, I doubt you're getting all that much extra damage for your ranged and AoE defense sacrifice. Dark Regeneration is making me sad. Oppressive Gloom might do more damage to you than it prevents since your melee defense is soft capped. You'll want to choose an alpha slot - I'm thinking Cardiac given your high endurance usage compared to recovery. Hit points are good, at least if you have or pick up the accolades. I don't like seeing Gaussian in Build Up, but I understand that slots are tight, and that it might be difficult to move the set to Tactics where it "belongs". Accuracy on Hack is lower than I'd want, which is to say lower than 95% against +4s. Moving the Gaussian set, if possible, would solve that. Let's see, you could drop the extra slot from Soul Transfer, put two recharges in Build Up, and the Gaussian set in Tactics. Build Up would recharge faster for more damage, you'd have a better chance to hit tough enemies, and your endurance usage would go down. Not that endurance usage is likely to matter if you get the Cardiac Core Paragon alpha boost. I really wouldn't want to make do with only mag 4 knockback protection, though I suppose it's good enough most of the time.

Broad Sword/Shield was the most fun I've had leveling 1-50. It should be excellent IO'd out as well, but I didn't bother since it wouldn't do anything that other of my Scrappers couldn't already do. Broad Sword gets you the defense you need before Shield Defense comes into its own. Then IO'd out, you could either skip Parry, keep it to make soft capping easier, or keep it to deal with enemies with extra-high to-hit.

I understand je saist questioning your DPS calculations. Broad Sword is capable of somewhat better than 143 DPS, and unless you've discovered some trick that nobody else has discovered, your Claws build isn't going to come close to 260 DPS before those procs. Yes, in the most basic sense, DPS is damage of the chain over Arcanatime of the chain, but I think you're calculating something wrong, at least on Claws, and possibly on both.

DPS mattering is obviously a matter of what you do in game. Like you, I'm one of the few players where it matters. The encounters I care most about are the encounters where it matters most.

I'll completely disagree with "Soft-cap on a regen is relatively pointless. You have no Defense Debuff Resistance. All it's going to take is one defense debuffing attack from an enemy..." If you can soft cap melee with a single Parry, you can get drastically above the soft cap with multiple hits. My Katana/Regen takes two Divine Avalanche to soft cap, but still has no problem with cascading defense failure in MOST of the game. He can farm the wall in Cimerora just fine, for example. I've only been on a single ITF, but I'd only attribute a single death on that task force to cascading defense failure. I haven't done a study, but it feels like most defense debuffs are melee or lethal, which are exactly what Parry is protecting you against. Melee/lethal soft cap on a Broad Sword/Regen is anything but pointless. It's exactly what you should aim for.

To answer your question, Claws/Regen will probably be squishier than Broad Sword/Regen, but doesn't have to be at all squishy. Here's (Iggy's? Claws and Effect's?) Claws/Regen doing the Riki War Zone Challenge using only Swipe. I don't know that YOUR build has this sort of survivability, but you CAN build for survivability.