Werner

This.

Save the lieutenants for last. Depending on how much AoE you have, that may mean not cutting loose with it for most of the fight. On my Katana/Dark for instance, I leave my Death Shroud on but don't use The Lotus Drops. When there are nothing but lieutenants left, even out their hit points at some low level, then try to drop them all at the same time (easiest with Build Up + The Lotus Drops). Playing +?x8, sometimes one or two will live, but even with stacked vengeance letting them hit you every time, one or two lieutenants can only kill you so fast. Plus Build Up is still up (and I have Kismet and Tactics) so they usually die almost immediately after. If necessary pop some yellow, but I rarely find it necessary. The result of all this is that I don't find Nemesis more dangerous than other groups, just more annoying because I can't cut loose with AoE.

The snipers are an annoyance. They won't ever move, so you can pull everything else around a corner if desired, or just take the fight to them.

You've probably noticed that a Fake Nemesis will throw up an impenatrable bubble near the end unless you kill him fast enough. Try to kill him fast when he gets near the end. But since that doesn't always work, my attack order generally goes Fake Nemesis until bubble, then start on War Hulk, back to Fake Nemesis when bubble drops, finish up War Hulk, then clean up the minions, then handle the lieutenants as noted above.

Oh, and it can sometimes be worth moving the fight out of the toxic cloud if you end up in one. I'm usually too lazy.

I was just commenting on the primary. Didn't check the secondary, and have company at the moment, but I wouldn't want you to be misled by what I didn't say in my comments.

DPS chain.: GD>GC------>SD>GC
1 DA chain: GD>GC------>SD>GC>DA>GC
2 DA chain: GD>GC>DA>GC>SD>GC>DA>GC

In other words, it's just a matter of inserting one or two DA>GC into the DPS chain as necessary for defense. However, for Willpower, since it doesn't benefit from recharge, and since it does benefit from defense, I'd probably forget about achieving the DPS chain.

Also, you don't have enough recharge to run ANY of those chains at the moment. One problem is Gambler's Cut, which needs to recharge in 1.58 seconds. That could be easily solved with a sixth slot, but you should really have an Achilles' Heel proc in that sixth slot, so solving it will be at least a little more complicated.

I'd probably recommend the 1 DA chain most of the time. As you have Divine Avalanche slotted, one will get you to the soft cap. However, you also don't have enough recharge on Golden Dragonfly to pull that off. You need to recharge in 5.94 seconds, and are at 7.43 seconds. One recharge IO would get you there, though I'm not specifically saying that that's your best slotting option.

When defense debuffed, you should then be able to smoothly transition into the 2 DA chain, but spend most of your time with just 1 DA to avoid losing TOO much DPS.

Who says they're "supposed to be"? You? The devs? General consensus? And regardless, I've never found other people's visions of "the way things should be" to be very compelling.

And Super Strength seems plenty Scrappery to me. Brutal destruction seems no less Scrappery to me than expertly-trained finesse. I've never felt that finesse was central to the Scrapper archetype. To me, the Scrapper is a melee AT. So is the Brute. So is the Tank. Whether you melee with finesse or just raw power seems a completely different subject than what archetype you're playing. I see nothing strange about brute strength scrappers or finesse Tanks. To me, archetypes are more about roles and strengths and weaknesses than they are about whether you fill those roles with finesse or brute strength, which I consider to have all the importance of a costume option.

Anyway, if you don't like the idea of brute strength Scrappers and finesse Tanks, don't play them. But is it really going to ruin your game if someone else plays them? Is the fact that they exist going to break your immersion or something?

Welcome back! I quit for a few months myself after repeated nerfs issue after issue. Not only does that appear to be long since over, but there have been a number of buffs. To me, overall power levels feel about like they did before all the nerfs, just with nothing obviously broken, and a whole lot more balance, and a whole lot more interesting complexity to it all. I LOVE what's been done to the game since those days. I hope you will too once you get used to everything.

Willpower has good defense, good resistance, good hit points, and very good damage recovery.

Strengths:

Easy. Easy to build, easy to play. Nothing to click. It just fades into the background and keeps you alive. Your hit points generally move fairly slowly, giving you time to react with inspirations or changes in tactics, or time to simply keep smashing heads until everyone is down.

Good at surviving a big spike of damage, such as you'll find fighting large groups of uplevel enemies, Archvillains and the like.

Survivability ramps up in large groups. You "Rise to the Challenge".

More complete Status Protection than most sets.

You have to really work at it to give yourself any endurance problems past level 20.

Taunt aura. Enemies will glue to you, which is what you want for Rise to the Challenge to do its work.

Weaknesses:

Too easy. No personality. Boring at parties.

Almost no resistance to defense debuffs. That only matters against certain enemies, but there seem to be a lot of those enemies. Still, some is better than none, and you have a lot of other tools in your toolbox when debuffed.

With a mixture of defense against some types of damage, and resistance against other types of damage, you aren't really one inspiration away from god mode the way you can be with some sets. This can be fixed with IOs, and on high-end builds to the point of not needing inspirations, but that's likely just in the end game.

Said to be weak to the beta strike (not the alpha strike), though I haven't really experienced that. The idea is that it has enough defense, resistance and hit points to survive the alpha strike, but while it recovers rapidly, it doesn't have any spike healing to get it back to the point of surviving the next wave of attacks.

Taunt aura. On a team with no tank, you may find yourself the center of attention. That may be more incoming damage than you are prepared for (or it may not). Or if you WANTED a taunt aura to act like a tank, it's kind of a weak taunt aura, so people can peel aggro off of you.

Well, let's see, three of the weaknesses were being more than one inspiration away from god mode, being weak to the beta strike, and potentially having a hard time dealing with your taunt aura's aggro. To address those in a leveling build, I'd focus on pool powers that buff your damage mitigation - powers that give you defense and resistance. Best among those would be the Fighting Pool for Tough and Weave. Flight Pool for Hover or Leaping Pool for Combat Jumping (my preference). When you can afford it, splurge on a Steadfast Protection +3% defense IO.

Not much you can do to give it more personality.

Obviously we'd want to know your primary, unless you to tell us what sort of things you like, and have us suggest some for you. I'm not too likely to post a build myself, as I bored of Willpower so don't have any even reasonably-current top end builds on my drive. There are lots of them out there, though, and we can probably point you at guides.

As far as what to maximize for survivability, I believe current consensus is to soft-cap most positional defenses (45% to smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy and negative). After that, you probably want as many hit points as you can get. Then you can find a really nasty group of bad guys, stand in the middle of them, and go make a sandwich. It's not just tough; it's AFK tough.

You'd THINK it would be a great idea. What is Willpower obviously lacking? A self heal! But even though that seems self-evident, it's... kinda not true. Willpower is already huge in the damage recovery department. It has amazing regeneration. You'll get a lot more out of buffing your damage mitigation. Absolutely insane things have been done on Willpower without Aid Self, and I don't think any of the forum-regulars with Willpowers have used Aid Self.

It's not that Aid Self is bad... no, wait, Aid Self IS bad. It's takes forever, it's interruptible, you pull out a tricorder... I frickin' hate that power. I'll take it if absolutely required, but frankly, I just level up toons that are better off without it. Willpower is probably better off without it.

And we can look at it another way. Let's say you take Aid Self instead of some additional damage mitigation, specifically defense. Now it still takes a lot for Willpower to get in over its head, so we're talking about being surrounded by a large group of enemies all pounding on you. Now you want to hit Aid Self. Unfortunately, your defense is only so-so, particularly to smashing/lethal, which are the most common damage types in the game. So they're going to be hitting you the whole time. That makes it hard to get off an Aid Self without it being interrupted. So it MIGHT work and save you, or it MIGHT mean you just rooted yourself in the middle of a nasty pounding and got nothing for your effort, and now you're almost dead or dead. (Granted, this is theorycraft, as I've never taken Aid Self on a Willpower.)

Oh, yeah, you're right. MA/Fire/Blaze it is! Phear me!

(Edit: No. No! I will NOT name myself Killspeed Fail.)

If I ever make it to epics... dono, which is the most gimp? Body's way too useful, so that's out. Wait, have I EVER done a different epic? I don't think I have. Weapon doesn't fit concept. Either Blaze or Dark would be fine.

Yep. The 34% will take 23% more damage.

The longer activation time of Punch takes away from the higher DPA attacks in the rest of the chain. I *think* that I calculated that that made Boxing superior, but I can't remember. I could easily be in Boxing simply to save a power choice.

As far as Jab, the recharge doesn't matter in that chain. Endurance might be an issue, but wasn't something I was worrying about when I came up with that particular chain. And again, saving a power choice.

Or run circles around expensive IO builds if the builder thinks that spending influence is a substitute for knowing the mechanics of the game and what bonuses they actually need. In any case, yes, I think selling it was an excellent idea. I had no idea they were going for 60 million these days. Sweet!

I think Tanks DID adopt the 2xRWZ challenge as one of their tests since the RWZ challenge was too easy for Tanks.

What I'm thinking I remember (though my memory sucks, so maybe my subconscious is just making it up and pretending it's memory), is someone in jest suggesting that we go solo a pylon with two RWZ challenge spawns beating on us. This would be back when the RWZ challenge was considered hard, and taking down a pylon was at the high end of DPS. So I think it was in the Scrappers bragging about both stage. And I think the pylon->2xRWZ was sort of a response to the bragging, "Oh, yeah? Then why don't you do this?" It was obviously impossible at the time, so much so as to be a joke. I remember what I thought was JUST in the realm of possibility at the time was to solo a pylon with a single RWZ challenge spawn beating on you, and I think I mentioned it, and I'm not sure how many people believed it could be possible. I made a number of attempts on Sergei, but the closest I came was having the Pylon down to 25%.

Flash forward to the present, and...

LOL. Yeah.

You can min/max up a pretty good Katana/Fire. Everything tastes better with Katana spread on top.