R_M's I6 Guide to Energy Melee/Energy Aura Brutes
By
CaptainCure,
Posted on: 2006-04-06 16:05 in Player Guides
ENERGY AURA
Power: Kinetic Shield
Description: Kinetic Shield creates a harmonic Energy Aura that can deflect physical attacks. Your Defense to Smashing and Lethal attacks is increased as weapons and powers like bullets, blades, and punches tend to deflect off the shield. The Energy based nature of Kinetic Shield also offers minimal Defense to Energy attacks. Recharge: Fast.
Effects: Toggle: Self +DEF(Smashing, Lethal), Minor +DEF(Energy), +RES(Debuff Def)
Endurance Cost: 0.38/s
Recharge Time: 4
Base Defense: 12.75% vs Smashing/Lethal; 2.25%(?) vs Energy
3-Slotted Defense: 20.4% vs Smashing/Lethal; 3.6%(?) vs Energy
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Defense Buff
Available: Level 1
Viewpoint: The power that you are forced to take on starting out, the Kinetic Shield is going to be the mainstay of your defensive lineup. With this power running, you become somewhat harder for the average foe to hit with Smashing or Lethal attacks, and a little harder for Energy attacks.
The .38 End/Sec drain of Kinetic Shield seems small at first, but when you consider the other toggles you will be running, sooner or later you may want to add an End Reduction to it if you can spare the slots.
Suggested Slotting:
1-11 (TOs): Def x3-4
12-21 (DOs): Def x2-4/End Reduc x0-2
22+ (SOs): Def x3/End Reduc x0-1
Power: Dampening Field
Description: Your body resonates a mild Dampening Field that absorbs kinetic energy from physical weapons. This auto power permanently reduces all incoming Smashing and Lethal damage. This power is always on and costs no Endurance
Effects: Auto: Self +Res(Smashing, Lethal)
Base Resistance: 7.5% vs Smashing/Lethal
3-Slotted Resistance: 12% vs Smashing/Lethal
Enhancements: Damage Resistance
Available: Level 2
Viewpoint: Dampening Field, and its sibling Energy Protection, are two powers that represent a divergence in build strategies. Many Energy Aura Brute players regard them as undesirable; they provide a maximum of about 12% Resistance fully-slotted, and they only protect against Smashing, Lethal, Energy, and Negative Energy attacks, leaving Fire, Cold, Toxic, and Psi unresisted. They would rather spend the two skill slots on the Medicine Pool to get Aid Self, which is effective against any form of damage.
Some Brute players do go the Resistance route, however, at least in part; on the positive side, the Resistance powers are not toggles, so do not require End expenditure to run and cannot be knocked off by detoggling effects. When fully-slotted and stacked with Tough, Dampening Field can provide a quite respectible 25% or so resistance to Smashing and Lethal. However, that does require 3 power slots (Dampening Field, Boxing, Tough) and 4 Enhancement slots that might be better spent somewhere else. Energy Protection is less desirable, having nothing else to stack with and protecting against types from which the Energy Aura Brute is generally well-defended anyway.
Personally, I incline toward the Aid Self school of Energy Aura Brutality; 12% Resistance to a handful of damage types is not worth two powers and four slots.
Suggested Slotting:
2+: DmgRes x3
Power: Power Shield
Description: This Power Shield creates an Electro-Magnetic shield around you that can deflect non-physical attacks. Your Defense to Fire, Cold, Energy and Negative Energy attacks is increased as these attacks are refracted off the shield. Recharge: Fast.
Effects: Toggle: Self +Def(Fire, Cold, Energy, Negative), +Res(Debuff Def)
Endurance Cost: 0.38/s
Recharge Time: 4
Base Defense: 15% vs Fire/Cold/Energy; 10.5% vs Negative)
3-Slotted Defense: 24% vs Fire/Cold/Energy; 16.8% vs Negative)
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Defense Buff
Available: Level 4
Viewpoint: Complementary to Kinetic Shield, Power Shield provides the rest of the Energy Aura Brute's primary defenses. Between the two, the only types that completely lack Defense are Psionic and Toxic damage; these are covered somewhat by Energy Cloak's positional Defense. It should be noted that Negative Energy has a substantially lower level of Defense than the other types that are covered; this makes Dark-using foes such as Circle of Thorns a bit more hazardous.
Although available at level 4, Kinetic Shield is not necessarily a must-have until the teens, as lower-level villains will face relatively few foes who use these types of attacks. Certainly if you do take it, you will want to leave it off unless you are up against enemies who are known to use its damage types; the energy drain on top of all your attack powers can be moderately debilitating prior to Stamina and Energy Drain.
Suggested Slotting:
4-11 (TOs): Def x3-4
12-21 (DOs): Def x2-4/End Reduc x0-2
22+ (SOs): Def x3/End Reduc x0-1
Power: Entropy Shield
Description: Entropy Shield diminishes and dampens the energy of controlling type effects. The shield makes you resistant to Knockback, Disorient, Hold, Sleep, and Immobilization effect, for as long as you can keep this toggle power active. Recharge: Fast.
Effects: Toggle: Self +Res(Knockback, Disorient, Hold, Sleep, Immobilize, Debuff Def)
Activation Time: 2
Endurance Cost: 0.4/s
Recharge Time: 10
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction
Available: Level 10
Viewpoint: At .4 End/Sec, this is one of your most expensive early toggles. However, since it is one of those rare powers whose main effect cannot be slotted, there is plenty of room to drop Endurance Reduction Enhancements into it. Entropy Shield is one of the best anti-mez toggles in the entire Brute class; certainly the one that Fiery Aura and Dark Aura Brutes can only wish they had. In addition to the "standard" mez types, it also protects against knockback and knockdown, so there is no requirement that Acrobatics be taken as well. You will definitely want to keep this one running, so End Reduction is the order of the day.
Entropy Shield is also significantly slower to recharge than your other toggles (except for Energy Cloak); you might also want to consider slotting a Recharge Rate in it to get it back up sooner after End crash or toggle-dropping effects, especially if you PVP.
Suggested Slotting:
10+: EndReduc x1-2/Rechg x0-1
Power: Energy Protection
Description: Your ability to channel energy makes you naturally resistant to Energy and Negative Energy damage. This power is always on and costs no Endurance.
Effects: Auto: Self +Res(Energy, Negative Energy)
Base Resistance: 7.5% vs Energy/Negative
3-slotted Resistance: 12% vs Energy/Negative
Enhancements: Damage Resistance
Available: Level 16
Viewpoint: See Dampening Field, above. Generally considered the less desirable of the two Resistance powers, due to protecting against Energy which is already well-Defended anyway. The extra resistance versus the more weakly-defended Negative Energy might come in handy, but not enough to merit taking it.
Suggested Slotting:
16+: DmgRes x3
Power: Energy Cloak
Description: The Energy Cloak bends light around you so you become partially invisible. While Cloaked you can only be seen at very close range. If you attack while Cloaked, you will be discovered. Even if discovered, you still have a good Defense bonus to all attacks except Psionics. Unlike some stealth powers, Energy Cloak will not work with any other form of Concealment powers.
Effects: Toggle: Self Stealth, +DEF
Activation Time: 3
Endurance Cost: 0.75/s
Recharge Time: 20
Base Defense: 3.75% vs All (incl. Melee/Ranged/AoE)
3-Slotted Defense: 6% vs All (incl. Melee/Ranged/AoE)
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Defense Buff
Available: Level 20
Viewpoint: This stealth power won't make you into a Stalker, but it'll make you into the next best thing: a nearly-invisible Brute, able to complete missions that don't require defeating everything in record time. (See the section on mission-stealthing, below.) It is the cherry on top of your shield toggles' sundae, providing an extra little defensive boost that will help mitigate your damage when you have it on. It also provides the only Positional defense--defense effective against Psionic or Toxic attacks--that you will get from Energy Aura. (You can add to it with pool-based defensive powers such as Hover or Combat Jumping, however.)
Of course, this damage mitigation doesn't come cheap; Energy Cloak's .75/sec End cost is equal to what it takes to run both of your main shields. This power is a prime candidate for Endurance Reduction Enhancements if any of them are.
One noteworthy feature of Energy Cloak is that it is, apparently, the one form of Stealth in the game where neither the defense bonus nor the concealment bonus suppress when you attack. This is helpful in that it is sometimes possible to attack individual members of a spawn without the rest noticing. However, it is uncertain whether these lacks of suppression are intentional or not; if not, they will probably be fixed in some future patch.
As with all forms of Stealth, Energy Cloak does not mean you cannot be seen; it only lowers the detection range of the enemies. If you get right up next to them for longer than a split-second, they will notice you. It will stack with Super Speed's PVE pseudo-stealth effect to lower the detection range still further.
Some Brute players consider this a must-take power, slotting it into their builds at level 22, right after Stamina. If you have the Super Speed travel power, you can probably get by without it for a little longer if you need to; I didn't take it until 30 in my own build.
Suggested Slotting:
20+: Def x3/EndReduc x1-3
Power: Energy Drain
Description: Energy Drain leeches energy directly from the bodies of all nearby foes, draining their Endurance. Each foe you draw from increases your Endurance. If there are no foes within range, you will not gain any Endurance. Recharge: Long.
Effects: PBAoE: Self +End -- Foe -End
Activation Time: 2
Endurance Cost: 13
Recharge Time: 180
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Endurance Recovery,Accuracy
Available: Level 28
Viewpoint: Welcome to non-stop Brutality! Energy Drain will change your play-style like no other power has before it. Up to this point, you were dependant on munching blues to keep going, or else having to Rest and let your Fury bar suffer in the middle of a mission. Even with Stamina, your powers were draining enough that you could only go for so long and then you had to slow down.
But now all you need to do are find two or three enemies spaced reasonably close together and fire off Energy Drain among them. With a mighty glowing blue slurp, you're full up again. Unlike Consume and Dark Consumption, Energy Drain is an auto-hit power--it is not possible to miss. It will also drain a decent-sized chunk of the Endurance of those whom it hits.
As a control power, Energy Drain is of currently limited usefulness. Even with three Endurance Modification Enhancements, it will currently take a couple of hits to drain Minions and three or four hits to drain a Boss completely. Even if you are fully slotted for recharge rate, that isn't generally going to happen over the course of a battle. It may be more useful for draining enemies who self-rez, such as Freakshow Tanks and Wailer Kings, to keep them docile after they return to life.
Unslotted, three to four enemies are required to fill your End bar all the way up from the minimum safe level to cast Energy Drain. With three Endurance Modification Enhancements, it only requires two enemies--and if you only have one, you'll still end up 3/4 full.
The one major drawback to this power is that you need a good bit of Endurance left in order to be able to use the power to get more. If you're not careful, by the time you're ready to cast it you may be too low, and be treated to the sound of your toggles dropping just as your Endurance fills up enough for you to continue running them. Plan on using it when you've got about 20-25% of your blue bar left, and using an End Reduction in it might be a good idea as well.
Suggested Slotting:
28+: EndMod x3/Rechg x2-3/EndReduc x0-1
Power: Conserve Power
Description: You can focus for a moment to Conserve your Endurance. After activating this power, you expend less Endurance on all other powers for a while.
Effects: Click: Self Endurance Discount
Activation Time: 1
Endurance Cost: 9
Duration: 90
Recharge Time: 600
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction
Available: Level 35
Viewpoint: Although it's usually a great power choice when offered to any other class, for most Energy Melee Brute builds Conserve Power tends to be a fifth wheel. You've already got Stamina and Energy Drain to keep you topped off; adding the ability to cut your Endurance costs by half for 90 seconds out of every five minutes (when fully-slotted for recharge) is probably redundant, and the power could be better spent elsewhere. There have been a couple of times that I have wished I had Conserve Power, even with Stamina and Energy Drain, but those are mostly few and far between.
However, there are some proponents of a Fitnessless build for Brutes, leaving off (or respecing out of) the three Fitness powers to save power slots and taking both Energy Drain and Conserve Power instead. While I have never personally played with such a build, there are those who swear by it. However, it would seem to me that surviving without Stamina long enough to get Conserve Power would be an exercise in frustration. It might also be possible to take Stamina and Conserve Power while skipping Energy Drain, though I'm not sure what advantage this would confer; Energy Drain is much more versatile as it has a much shorter recharge so can be used more often.
Another potential use for Conserve Power would be alternating its use with Overload (which also has a +Recovery effect) and thus having enhanced Endurance for up to four and one half minutes at a time (or six minutes, with about a thirty-second gap--or less, if Hasten is used).
By and large, Conserve Power is skippable.
Suggested Slotting:
35+: Rechg x3
Power: Overload
Description: You can Overload your Energy Aura and dramatically improve your Defense to all attack types except Psionic Attacks. The Energy Aura is so powerful, that it can even absorb some damage, effectively increasing your Max Hit Points; however, when Overload wears off, you are left drained of all Endurance and unalble to Recover Endurance for awhile. Recharge: Slow.
Effects: Click: Self +DEF, +Max HP, +Recovery
Activation Time: 2
Endurance Cost: 2.5
Duration: 180
Recharge Time: 1080
Base Defense: 45% vs all except Psionic
3-Slotted Defense: 72% vs all except Psionic
Base Hit Point Bonus: 20%
3-Slotted Hit Point Bonus: 40%
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Defense Buff,Health
Available: Level 38
Viewpoint: Welcome to God Mode for Energy Brutes! It's kind of a "small god" mode, as it's only available for 3 minutes at a time and then gone for much longer, but while it's up, you're practically unhittable by anything except psionic and toxic attacks--and you have a higher number of hit points (20% unslotted, add 6.67% for each Healing SO) to handle the attacks that do get through. You'll recover Endurance faster, too, so you can really let loose with the attacks. Even against psionic and toxic foes, the extra hit points and Recovery rate will still help you survive longer.
When you hit Overload for the first time, you may be surprised that your health bar does not appear to change; if you were at 3/4 of your hit points before you hit it, you'll be at 3/4 after. There's a temptation to wonder, "Hey, is this thing really working?" But Overload's HP boost doesn't work like Dull Pain's, where you get healed for those additional HPs. Instead, your current HP are increased proportionately to the increase in your total HP. If you were at 900/1200 HP (3/4 bar) before you hit the boost, and you boosted yourself up to 1600 total HP, you would now be at 1200/1600 HP (still 3/4 bar). Oddly enough, any percentage-based heals you might have, like Aid Self, are not increased by the same proportion...so it would be most efficient to fire off that Aid Self before hitting Overload.
Base recharge time is 18 minutes, which can be cut to about 9 by fully-slotting for recharge--that's 3 minutes on, 6 minutes off. You can cut that recharge time still further with Hasten, which makes Overload one of the best arguments for including Hasten in your build. (For more on that, see the section on power pools below.)
When Overload crashes, your Endurance will drop to about 1 (and then crash when your toggle powers hit their next tick), and you will be unable to recover End naturally for about 15 seconds (though popping blue Inspirations will still work, and so will Energy Drain if you take a blue first to prime the pump). Conserve Power will not prevent this crash (though it can help you survive on just a blue or two afterward for the next 15 seconds of zero recovery).
For this reason, it is vital to keep track of that three minutes somehow--with an egg timer or stopwatch on top of your computer if you have to, but preferably with the more convenient HeroStats timer tracker. About ten seconds before the crash comes, retreat from the fighting if you can, take a couple of purple Inspirations if you can't, and drop your toggles; this will give them time to recharge so you can have them up as soon as possible again after the crash.
It is possible to fire off Energy Drain a second or so before the crash, so your bar will fill up right after the crash. However, this is somewhat dangerous, since you'll be running without toggles for the amount of time it takes you to get them back up. It is even theoretically possible, if you time it exactly right, for you to Drain so that the refill comes between your End falling to 1 and the next tick of your powers draining it to zilch, and thus avoid crashing at all. (I've only ever managed to do this once, and it was largely by accident.) It may also be possible to avoid the crash by popping a blue Inspiration during the half-second or so your End bar takes to drop from full to empty. Whether you use them during or after the crash, keeping at least a couple of blues in your tray at all times for Overload recovery is a good idea.
Leaving aside the three Recharge Rate Enhancements, which are pretty much a given for a god-mode power such as this, you will have three Enhancement slots to split between Defense Buff and Healing Enhancements. The temptation is to go all-Defense--because after all, "the more Defense, the better," right? However, you really aren't going to need to. Under I6, assuming that you've got your toggles, Energy Cloak, and optionally Hover or Combat Jumping slotted for Defense, then one Defense Buff SO is all you're going to need to cap or nearly-cap your total defense, when you are running Overload and your toggles at the same time.
You could still go with three Defenses if you're planning to use Overload instead of your toggles, to save End--but given that Overload increases your End Recovery too, why bother? You'd be squandering the additional hit-point benefit that Healing SOs confer. My own preferred slotting until Issue 7 comes in is 1 Defense and 2 Heal; this caps my Defense and provides me with a 33.3% hit point boost. Some people prefer to go with all three Heal SOs and enjoy mostly capped Defense and 40% extra hit points. It's largely a matter of personal taste--but if you regularly tackle missions on Relentless, a Defense would probably be a good idea.
However, after Issue 7 comes in, I advise changing to Recharge Rate x3 and Healing x3, and not slotting any Defense at all. Why? Because 45% will be all that is necessary to floor the accuracy of anything up to +5 levels higher than you. Minions, Lieutenants, Archvillains/Heroes, Monsters, anything. And by a peculiar coincidence, the base Defense level for Overload is 45%. Add the Defense from the toggles on top of that and you've got more than enough left over to counter most To-Hit buffs like Vengeance or Leadership that bad guys might have on them. Therefore, the extra Defense would just go to waste, so you can enjoy those extra hit points instead. (See the section on Defense later in this guide for more on the I7 changes.)
Overload does have one major drawback in PVP play: like all Defense-based powers, it can easily be overcome by To-Hit Buff powers like Aim, Build-Up, and Rage--or even just by popping a fistful of yellow Inspirations. Even 3-slotted for Defense and run at the same time as the Defensive toggles, that's only a total of about 100-120% Defense, which is mostly or completely cancelled out by even unslotted Aim--and most PVPers will slot Aim for To-Hit Buffs, and use it at the same time as Build-Up if they have it, just to defeat total-defense powers such as this. If your goal is PVP, it would probably be best to slot for Recharge x3 and Heal x3, to maximize the hit-point increase benefit so you can at least take more hits even if they don't miss.
Suggested Slotting:
I6: 38+: Rechg x3/Def x0-3/Heal x0-3
(My preferred: Rechg x3/Def x1/Heal x2)
I7: 38+: Rechg x3/Heal x3
TRAVEL POWERS
For Energy/Energy Brutes, as for most classes, travel powers are largely a matter of personal taste. You aren't practically forced into taking the Jump pool for Acrobatics's knockback protection like Fire or Dark, or the Teleport pool for increased mobility in heavy armor like Stone. Energy Brutes are free to choose any travel power they like--which is good, because we all have travel powers we love, and travel powers we love to hate.
Nonetheless, I do feel that some travel powers offer more benefits than others--so let's look at them now.
Flight: Flight is one of the slowest and most End-using of the travel powers (which is why most who take it 3-slot it with Flight Speed, and perhaps an End Reduction or two), but also the most versatile--offering good horizontal and vertical movement, without teleport's minimum travel distance restriction. For classes with ranged attacks, such as Corrupters or Blasters, Flight is one of my favorite pools. However, for meleers, the travel power is not quite as good--it loses the advantage of being able to hang out of reach of melee attacks, since you have to close to melee yourself in order to attack.
However, even if you don't end up taking Fly, there is still a very good reason to dip into this pool: the pool attack Air Superiority. Believe it or not, I have never actually used Air Superiority on any of my characters--I suppose I have a tendency to think of pool attacks as being "second-rate," and I just couldn't fit it into my build with all the other powers I took. But my friends who play Brutes and Tankers, and countless forum posts, tell me that Air Superiority is an absolutely top-notch attack for Energy Brutes. Its knockdown effect mitigates attacks far more effectively than Disorient alone, and its fast recharge means you can keep multiple enemies, even Bosses, flat on their backs and not attacking into perpetuity. I gather that it is also really handy for those missions where you have to defeat an enemy before he can run away. I reached level 40 without it...but looking back, perhaps I could have gotten there faster and easier with it. Perhaps my next Brute build will make sure to include it.
If you take Air Superiority, it is just one more power pick to take Fly. Since the change to Flight to make it suppress instead of penalize accuracy, you don't even need to take Hover as a prerequisite--you could have Fly on all the time (although it sucks down End like a boom box sucks down batteries). However, Hover is also a reasonable power pick since it provides a small Defensive bonus that stacks with all of your other Defensive powers when you have it on (including additional Positional defense to stack with Energy Cloak). And if you're going to take Fly anyway, you might as well be able to use CityBinder's Speed-on-Demand binds so that you can be in Flight while moving but Hover while standing still, for the lower End use and Defense bonus.
Some people have recommended, in the past, foregoing Fly and just six-slotting Hover, since Hover's flight speed when sixed was equivalent to unslotted Flight and did not have Flight's Suppression. However, this is no longer as feasible since Enhancement Diversification capped the effectiveness of SOs to three and cut Hover's maximum speed by 1/3. If Hover is your only travel power, you might as well resign yourself to moving very slowly.
Group Fly doesn't typically merit consideration for a Brute.
Leaping: Even if you don't end up taking the Super Jump travel power, you may still want to dip into the pool for the sake of Combat Jumping. Combat Jumping provides a small defensive bonus (about on par with your Energy Cloak), including Positional Defense, costs very little End to run, and adds some height to your jumping abilities. Every little bit of Defense can be helpful, especially if you're facing off against higher-level enemies or Psionic/Toxic types that are only covered positionally. I have also heard that properly-slotted Combat Jumping and Hurdle combine to form a very fast travel power, if you don't mind leaping like a frog wherever you go, but I have never tested this.
Super Jump is a very fast mission-to-mission travel power, with good horizontal and vertical mobility (second only to Teleport in terms of point-to-point speed--it may well be faster than Super Speed over the average distance, thanks to vertical obstacles), no need for additional Enhancement slots beyond the default, and a fun power animation. If it weren't that I feel Super Speed offers some additional benefits over and above Super Jump, I would have no reservations about recommending Super Jump as the travel power of choice for Energy Brutes. It's still a very good pick, even if Super Speed is better.
Thanks to Entropy Field, you don't need Acrobatics; Jump Kick is also redundant as it offers no advantages over the attacks you already have.
Speed: Now we come to one of the more useful pool powers to an Energy/Energy Brute: Hasten. Sure, it's not possible to permanentize it anymore, but you can still have it active for two out of every three minutes (when slotted with three Recharge Rate SOs). While it is active, it substantially decreases your powers' recharge rates. You can get by without it, but you can get by better with it.
Hasten is helpful in building Fury early in fights by speeding up your attack chain (though to an extent this is limited by the lengthy animation times of some of your lower-powered attacks), will let you get in more Total Foci and Energy Transfers faster against Bosses and AVs/Heroes, will let you recover health and end more quickly as Aid Self and Energy Drain come back faster, will make Build Up available more often, and will get your toggles back faster in case of a drop. You may find yourself using it even after battles, just to get Overload (and any Accolade powers, if and when they're added) coming back faster. The only downsides are that it takes a bite out of your End when it crashes, and that when you get used to attacking faster, that one-minute come-down is pretty rough.
If you're going to take Hasten, you might as well take Super Speed--it's just one more power slot, and there are several reasons that I feel it is the best possible travel power for an Energy/Energy Brute.
<ul type="square">[*]As the only travel power that is fully as useful inside missions as outside (except for those damned caves, of course), it can help you get from spawn to spawn fast enough to stay maxed out on your Fury bar--and escape when you've bitten off more than you can chew, if you can outlast its suppression.[*]Its pseudo-stealth ability enables you to start completing missions rapidly a half dozen levels before Energy Cloak is available. Indeed, with Super Speed you may be able to put off taking Energy Cloak for a few levels. And once you have EC, the stealth effects should stack well enough to make you the next best thing to a Stalker (for PVE; Super Speed doesn't have the pseudo-stealth effect in PVP). Note that if you use a speed-on-demand bindkit, such as CityBinder, you will need to make sure to disable speed-on-demand mode and have Super Speed on continuously while inside missions; if the bindkit drops it while you're standing still, the enemies will immediately notice you.[*]It doesn't require slotting to be useful, meaning there are that many more slots to spare for the rest of your powers.[*]The glowy animation effects match the glowy effects of your Energy powers pretty well. (Well, all right, so that's not a major selling point, but it is at least a fringe benefit.)[/list]"But wait," you say, "there's no vertical movement ability, unless you take Hurdle, and even that isn't very much." And it's true; anyone who's played with Super Speed has experienced the frustration of running headlong into a fifty-foot wall that requires lengthy circumnavigation--and let's not even talk about Faultline or the Shadow Shard. This would seem to make Super Speed a less attractive choice than any of the other travel powers.
But on the villain side, there is a very big mitigating factor to this problem: there are two missions in the 15-25 level range range that each provide you with an extended-duration flight pack: Marshall Brass in Cap au Diable (15-19) gives you a 90-minute Goldbricker pack early in his first arc, and Lt. Chalmers (20-24) on Sharkshead Island has a timed mission that gives you (and your teammates, via blinkies) a 60-minute Sky Raider pack.
Be sure to get these contacts and do their missions, and you'll get a total of two and a half hours of flight time--and if you're careful only to use the packs for a few seconds here and there to bypass vertical obstacles, you can make them last practically forever. You should also theoretically (I've not yet tried this) be able to get the Sky Raider pack again after you run out of it, by finding someone on Sharkshead who happens to have that mission available and exemplaring down to grab a blinkie. (Beginning-level characters can get the pack in this way, too, thus bypassing the all-over-the-island slogs of the Mercy Island and Port Oakes contacts; see "On the Levels" in the third part of this guide for more details.) Of course, whether this will be enough to let Super Speedsters get by in Grandville is an open question, but for the first 40 levels it works really well.
Rounding out the pool, Flurry is redundant with your other attacks, and although I do not have any experience with Whirlwind, I have been told that it is a power best avoided for meleers in general and Brutes in specific. It offers no protection against the increasingly strong ranged attacks you will face later in the game, it prevents you from attacking so that you will lose Fury while you have it on, and its knockback throws enemies away from you so you just have to chase them down to hit them. I expect it might be helpful for getting you out of troublesome over-aggro situations, and I understand it might be able to knock toggles off in PVP, and some roleplayers have found it useful as FX for a rapid costume change, but all in all it doesn't seem to be what a Brute really needs.
Teleport: This pool is probably not as advantageous to Brutes as some of the others, though there is no particular reason not to take it.
Even if you do not use Teleport as a travel power, Recall Friend might still be useful--especially after you have stealth abilities. It is terribly frustrating to stealth to the mission objective in order to save time on fighting, and then realize you're the only team member to have that ability. Recall Friend would let you bring in the rest of your team after you got there.
For most purposes, you would want to slot Recall Friend with just the default slot; a Reduce Interrupt Time is a good use for it. It is possible that in larger zones you would want to slot a Range instead, to increase the 10,000 foot default range so as to 'port teammates two miles or more away.
Teleport Foe is a power I do not have much personal experience with using, but I have seen it used. If it hits, it can summon a single foe to a spot you designate. It can be useful for single-pulling to thin out crowds of foes in PVE, or for grabbing a single subject to use as Energy Drain fodder, but where it really shines is PVP. If you are planning to do more PVP than PVE, this might be a power you would want. It would probably best be slotted with two to three Accuracies and perhaps one to three Ranges as well.
Teleport is an interesting travel power. Unlike most other travel powers, where you can pick a direction, hit "run," and then take an AFK secure in the knowledge that by the time you get back you'll have either reached your target or else have overshot it and be nuzzling a War Wall, Teleport requires concentration: you hit the teleport power, click the location, and you go. And then you do it again. And again. And keep doing it, or else you'll fall out of the sky. Of course, if you're smart then you've bound shift+lbutton (or control+, or alt+) to pow_exec_name Teleport so that all you have to do is hold the shift button down and click, click, click.
Teleport has several drawbacks and a couple of benefits. One drawback is the aforementioned necessity of continuing to port or falling out of the sky; another is that due to the way the target selection mechanism works, you have to teleport the maximum range with each hop unless you can find a convenient wall or other object to fetch up against. Teleport is also very Endurance-intensive, requiring a base of 13 End per hop. As you have only 100 End, unless you slot for reduction or have Stamina, that means you can make about 8 or 9 hops (allowing for End regeneration as you hop), or about a half mile at the base 300' range (a little less than a mile if you 3-slot for range) before gasping exhaustedly for breath.
But in return for this, you get one of the fastest long-distance travel powers in the game. At a continuously-teleporting sprint, with range slotted to max, you can cover a a mile in about 20 seconds--definitely faster than Flight. Whether it is currently faster than Super Speed over a straight line distance, I do not know (it was before ED, when it could be 5- or 6-slotted for Range). But taking into account the potential for vertical movement, avoiding ground-level obstacles 'speeders have to detour around, it is almost certainly faster at actually getting from place to place most of the time.
Most of the problems are, if not solvable, at least manageable. Falling out of the sky can be avoided easily enough by taking Hover or Flight also and keeping that active while porting. End usage can be brought down to reasonable levels by slotting for it. The only solution for the maximum-range-hop thing is to learn to live with it, of course (or to take Flight as a secondary travel power and use it for short distance travel after your last hop), but two out of three ain't bad. Suggested slotting: Range x3/End x2-3 (or less if you have Stamina).
For Energy Brutes, teleport might be particularly useful in combat for popping into the middle of crowds of enemies and drawing their attention away from the rest of the team, or as a quick escape button when enemy attention gets to be too much. All that being said, it is likely Super Speed or some other travel power might be more useful overall.
Team Teleport doesn't typically merit consideration for a Brute.
OTHER POWER POOLS
Concealment: By and large redundant. You might want to take Grant Invisibility in order to grant your teammates the ability to stealth missions with you, but it would be more efficient to take Recall Friend instead so you only need to put yourself at risk. Phase Shift might make a good panic button, but it's not worth three powers in a build as tight as an Energy/Energy Brute's--and at level 30 you can get a Hyper Phase Shift temporary power from Warburg that will work just as well and not cost a power.
The one exception is that if you have already made up your mind to respec into a different build at 24, you might want to consider taking Stealth very early and respecing out of it at 24 in favor of Energy Cloak; this way you could start getting the benefit of stealthing missions early on. As I have already said, however, I do not advocate intentionally building for respec.
Fighting: Possibly desirable, depending on whether or not you have space in your build to fit it in. While Kick is by all accounts skippable, Boxing is a decent attack, with a chance of Disorient that would fit in well with your Energy Melee attacks' Disorient effects. But you would really only be taking it as a prerequisite to the other powers from the pool: Tough and Weave. If you are taking Dampening Field, Tough will stack on top of it to provide you with a decent amount of Resistance. Weave would add a few more percentage points of Defense to your shields, but it is hard to say whether this is worth spending the extra powers and slots, or the cost of running another expensive toggle.
Fitness: Take it. Love it. As an Energy/Energy, you are going to need faster Endurance recovery more than you need anything else--and if it's annoying that it's going to cost you three power slots to get it, well, it's still worth it.
Whether to take Swift or Hurdle depends on what your other travel powers are; if you're taking Super Speed, then you will want Hurdle for the added vertical mobility. If you're taking anything else, you'll probably want Swift for the extra running speed in missions. Some people take both Swift and Hurdle and skip Health, but I generally can't recommend that; even with only one slot in it, Health provides a decent boost to your regenerational abilities that is worth more than being able to run a little faster as well as jump a little higher. I suppose it is possible that someone who takes Teleport as a travel power might wish to do this for the additional in-combat mobility Teleport does not provide, especially in PVP situations.
Some players, especially those who go the path of the Resistance powers, advocate 3-slotting Health and skipping Aid Self. While this would save a couple of power picks, I am doubtful that the increased regeneration would be quite as effective as being able to self-heal at need. Perhaps coupled with the increased damage resistance from Dampening Field and Tough it might enable decent survivability of Smashing and Lethal damage, but it still leaves the other types relatively unresisted. Of course, if you have the slots to spare, nothing is keeping you from 3-slotting Health and taking Aid Self; some people feel Health should be 3-slotted regardless. A 3-slotted Health won't save you in the middle of combat, but it will help decrease your between-combat downtime. Nonetheless, I generally feel that overall Enhancement slots for Brutes are tight enough that they could find a better use elsewhere.
Stamina, the crown jewel of the Fitness set, should be taken as soon as possible and 3-slotted with Endurance Modification right away. Energy Melee/Energy Aura is a very End-intensive combination, and you need that extra juice as soon as you can get it. On my first Energy/Energy Brute build, I waited until 24 to take Stamina--and even having waited on Total Focus until 26, I still found I had a hard time keeping up with my attacks until I had it. My final respec build put it back at 20, where it belonged.
Some Brute players suggest either building from the beginning as or respecing into a Fitnessless build once you have Energy Drain and Conserve Power. This would have the benefit of saving those three power picks spent on Fitness in order to spend them on some other use. While such a build might be feasible, if you were willing to Drain and Conserve Power more often than usual, it would become much less so if the Brute in question ever had to malefactor down below level 28 where those End-management options aren't available. In the interest of being playable at all possible levels, I recommend a Fitness-based build.
Leadership: For Brutes, the Leadership powers stack up thus:
Maneuvers: 2.5% Defense Buff; .4026 End/Sec
Assault: 10.5% Damage Buff, resistance vs Taunt/Placate; .4026 End/Sec
Tactics: 7% To-Hit Buff, Perception bonus; .4026 End/Sec
Vengeance: Minor heal, "Moderate" Acc/Dmg Buff; 25% Def Buff (All Forms); 300 sec. recharge
For PVE, these powers, while moderately useful, are not useful enough that they would be worth the power slots, Enhancement slots, pool choice, and End per second to run. .4 end per second and two Enhancement slots for an additional 4% Defense is laughable, even if it is to everyone in your party. Assault and Tactics might be a bit more useful, especially if you're mentoring lowbies, but again, not enough to be worth taking in PVE. As for Vengeance, forget it; you're not a Corrupter or Mastermind.
In PVP, Tactics might very well be worth having for the perception bonus. Whether you can justify putting it in your build is up to you.
Medicine: One of the few fundamental flaws of the Energy Aura defensive set is that it does not include a self-healing ability. This is somewhat ironic, since a set that is based on Defense is going to need that "burst healing" much more than a set that is based on Resistance--you may not get hit as much, but when you do get hit it's going to be for a lot. Furthermore, your most potent attack, Energy Transfer, will take off 10% of your hit points every time you use it. If you don't have some way of self-healing at need (and those green Inspirations will run out sooner or later), you will find yourself needing to stop and Rest (and thus lose Fury) for health reasons long after you've ceased needing to Rest for endurance.
Fortunately, there is the Medicine pool to make up for this shortcoming. Aid Self is a very good self-heal, capable of restoring 20% of your hit points every 20 seconds unslotted. (It also provides a short period of protection from Disorients, though with Entropy Field you generally won't need this as much. It could be helpful in PVP, however.) With my preferred slotting of 3 Heals, 2 Reduce Interrupts, and 1 Recharge, it will restore 40% of your hit points every 15 seconds (or less, if you have Hasten on). PVPers may wish to slot 2 Heals, 2 Interrupts, and 2 Recharges instead, trading off bigger heals for more frequent ones and firing off Aid Self continuously to stay healed up and mez-protected. Either way, that's an awful lot of healing, and it can easily make the difference between life and death.
Aid Self is interruptible, if you are hit by an attack while it is firing off, but the interrupt period is remarkably short--especially if you put one or two Reduce Interrupt Time Enhancements in it. There have been claims that it can even be fired off between ticks of a damage-over-time attack--and since Energy Aura is Defense-based, you'll be getting hit less frequently than most other classes anyway so there will be fewer interruptions. In my experience, if you're in battle with no more than 2 or 3 enemies at a time, you can usually get an Aid Self off with no problems; 4 or more make it more of an iffy proposition. Even when you have Aid Self, you should still carry a couple of green Inspirations at all times; they'll save your life when you're low on health and taking too much fire to get an uninterrupted Aid Self off.
There are some who advocate skipping the Medicine Pool and using other powers (such as Resistance or 3-slotted Health) to make up for it; they say that having to pause in the middle of a battle to heal breaks your rhythm and costs you Fury--not to mention that if you're taking enough hits, you may not be able to heal at all without being interrupted. I happen to feel that the ability to self-heal in an emergency--or after several uses of Energy Transfer have brought your health bar down--justifies taking it; you lose a lot less Fury from one use of Aid Self than you do from a 30-second Rest--let alone from faceplanting.
Being the third power in the Medicine pool, Aid Self requires taking another power as a prerequisite, and here is where a tough choice comes in: Aid Other, or Stimulant? The answer depends on your intentions for the character.
If you plan to solo most of the time, there is no question that Aid Other is the more useful pick. You may be scratching your heads over how healing someone else is useful in soloing, but the reason why is simple: pets. And not just the temp power pets, like Bocor's zombies or Bloody Bay's Shivans, or even the Patron Pool pet either. Every so often, you'll get a mission that requires you to rescue someone who is not just some docile hostage you lead back to the door--instead, they're an honest-to-god fighting villain, with a suicidal streak a mile wide. (Seer Marino's mission to rescue Wretch, for instance.) If they keep charging into battle and getting banged up, sooner or later they're going to be down to a mere sliver of health and die the next time they run into an enemy--and you'll fail the mission, and possibly the arc. Even unslotted beyond the default, Aid Other will allow you to heal them back to full strength with two or three applications between battles, so you can actually make it back to the door with them.
Aid Other will also be useful for tossing a bit of extra healing about if you should end up on a team now and again, or shepherding a less-capable lackey. (And if you're a badge completist, it will let you work on the healing badges too.) Note that since Aid Other's effectiveness is based on a percentage of its user's hit points, and Brutes have the highest hit points of any CoV class, slot for slot a Brute is actually the best Aid-Other healer on the villain side of the game (just as a Tank is on the hero side); it may even be worth putting an extra slot or two in it if you should decide you want to take a back-up healing role.
If you're going to be teaming the majority of the time, then Stimulant will probably be more useful; there will often be a Corrupter or Mastermind on the team who can heal like crazy (including healing those suicidal pets I mentioned), but a little bit of extra mez protection/mez cancellation can come in very handy when someone cries out "ZZZ!" It could also be especially helpful if you do a lot of team-based PVP.
If you've got two Medicine Pool powers already and team a lot, Resuscitate might also be useful, especially if your team is doing missions way out in the wilds of the Nerva Pensinsula where a hospital trip can mean several minutes of travel, followed by finding your way back into that damn jungle mess. It's just a question of whether you have the power slots to spare in your build.
As for when to take these powers, there is a bit of a dichotomy between wanting to take them as soon as possible--so as to be able to stop carrying so many greens and carry more blues instead--and wanting to put some of the more useful powers in. In my first Brute build, including the two Medicine Pool powers in the teens was what made me have to push Stamina off until 24 and Total Focus off until 26. In a later respec, I moved them to the early 20s in order to take Total Focus and Stamina at 18 and 20.
Presence: Redundant and/or unnecessary. You've already got a better Taunt than the first two powers in this pool, and in most circumstances you don't want to subject your enemies to Fear because you want them attacking you to build your Fury. It is possible that Invoke Panic might be useful in some circumstances, but you would have to take either two lackluster taunts or one lackluster taunt and a single-target Fear to get it; the power is not worth spending three powers on.
EXPECTO PATRONUM: PATRON POWERS AND YOU
At the time this guide is being written, preview information about the I7 patron powers has just been released. Though the hard numbers aren't yet available, they actually will be when the powers are--marking the first time ever the developers have ever committed to give the complete information about what powers do. The numbers will be available on plaques in lobby of the Grandville Arachnos building, and should be perused before final selections are made.
Although we do not have the numbers yet, and so should not make a final determination until we can consult them, we can actually tell a great deal from the information that is already there, due to the similarities to other powers already in-game. Patron versions will probably have different special effects, a longer recharge time, and possibly lower effectiveness than the primary and secondary pool versions, but they will still offer some additional versatility that will be a welcome addition to our game.
Unlike CoH's Ancillary Pools, which can have different types of powers depending on what the base type is, all four of the CoV Patron Pools are largely identical except for damage types and secondary effects. Available at 41, 44, 47, and 49, the powers include:
<ul type="square">[*]a ranged blast[*]a cone or AoE Immobilize[*]a cone or AoE blast[*]a pet[/list]For descriptions of each Patron pool, click the above link; no need to make a long guide even longer by copying and pasting them all in.
Given that the powers are all so similar, the choice of which Patron to pick could come down to a matter of roleplaying and character concept--if your character is most sympathetic to Ghost Widow, for instance, then becoming her pupil would grant much the same general abilities as any of the other Patrons. Nonetheless, since a Patron, once chosen, is permanent, your choice of Patron is something that should be given serious consideration--including viewing the numbers for each power when they become available. And it could be a tough decision, as the secondary effects of each of the Patrons' pools has something to offer the discerning Energy/Energy Brute.
Ghost Widow's powers' secondary effects are the traditional Negative Energy Accuracy Debuff. Taking this pool will give you a taste of the synergy that Dark Melee/Energy Aura stalkers enjoy, with the accuracy debuff stacking onto your Defense to make you even harder to hit. When I7 comes in, depending on slotting, this could bring you a lot closer to flooring enemies' chance to hit you without having to resort to Overload. However, the fact that the Immobilize attack is a cone does mean you will have to position yourself outside of the group of enemies to hit most of them, then move inside to hit them with the rest of your attacks.
Black Scorpion's Mace Mastery blasts are Energy damage, like your own attacks. These blasts do Knockdown, and his Immobilize, while doing no damage, does slow enemies' attack rate and prevent flying and jumping. This is a larger-scale version of the same sort of attack-mitigation effect for which many Brutes take Air Superiority; it could help keep you from getting in over your head.
Captain Mako's shark attacks, while somewhat silly in concept, nonetheless do a variety of different damage types--Lethal, Negative Energy, and the infrequently defended or resisted Toxic. If you're just interested in dealing raw damage and don't care as much about secondary effects, this could be the pool for you. However, the fact that both the AoE attacks are cones does mean you will have to position yourself outside of the group of enemies to hit most of them, then move inside to hit them with your melee and PBAoE Whirling Hands.
Scirocco's powers are the Mu Mystics' red lightning. Aside from being Energy attacks like your own, they will drain Endurance and perhaps even add it back to you. This will synergize nicely with Energy Drain to drain your enemies even more, and perhaps provide you with even more Endurance to keep you going longer.
Each of the four powers in the pool could be useful to you, some more so than others. The ranged blast is simply another single-target attack to add to your chain, especially useful for pegging runners before they can get away. The immobilize won't be as useful to you as it would be to a Fiery Aura Brute with Burn, but it will still hold them still for you to use Energy Drain, Whirling Hands, and/or the AoE or cone attack, and then knock down one at a time. (In PVP, depending on its effectiveness, the Immobilize might be just the thing to use in conjunction with TP Foe.) The AoE or cone attack should stack nicely with Whirling Hands (the AoEs more so than the cones, since you won't have to worry about positioning; you can just attack the nearest guy and let the AoE radius hit the others), and the pet will be another handy source of damage and aggro gathering and management. (Some Brutes complain that the pet might steal aggro, and thus Fury, from them, but I believe it's still too early to tell if that will really be the case.) It's doubtful the pet will be perma-castable, even with 3 recharge rate SOs in it, but for those times it is out, it should come in handy.
But both the immobilize and the AoE blast will serve another, even more important purpose than just holding enemies still: assuming Brutes' Patron powers include the single-target punchvoke like their melee powers do, they will be two more AoE taunt-equivalents to add to your aggro-getting/Fury-building arsenal. If you use Taunt for team-based aggro management, you may well be able to respec out of it when you get these.
To a certain extent this is guesswork; we should know more when I7 comes around.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
The Fast and the Fury-Us
According to equations from _Castle_ (as provided by Dragonov):
CurrentFury increases by 5 * the lesser of 80 or ((100-CurrentFury)/20)^2) points each time you attack
CurrentFury increases by 2.5 * the lesser of 80 or ((100-CurrentFury)/20)^2) points each time you are attacked
CurrentFury increases twice as fast vs. Lieutenants
CurrentFury increases three times as fast against Bosses, players, EBs, AVs and Giant Monsters
Damage increases by CurrentFury * 2%
CurrentFury decreases by 2 points per second
(Note: _Castle_'s formulae originally placed Bosses in the "twice as fast" category, but testing suggests that they actually belong in the "three times as fast" one, so that's where I list them.)
The ^2 in the preceding formulae does not mean "squared," it is a logical wedge to imply that the value has to be "greater than or equal to" the value of 2.
I am indebted to anarchicgorilla for greatly simplifying the above formulae to the following simple ones:
For a CurrentFury value of no greater than 80:
(100 - CurrentFury)/20 = Gained Fury from YOU attacking MINION
(100 - CurrentFury)/40 = Gained Fury from MINION attacking YOU
Multiply Minion value x2 for Lieutenants, or x3 for players, Bosses, Elite Bosses, Archvillains/Heroes, and Monsters
For CurrentFury values of 81 or greater, calculate as if CurrentFury equalled 80.
Each Fury point = an additional 2% of damage.
If you attack a Minion at 0 Fury, you gain (100-0)/20 = 5 Fury. If you attack the Minion again before that Fury decays, you gain (100-5)/20 = 4.5 additional Fury, and so on.
If you attack the same Minion when you have 80 or higher Fury, you gain (100-80)/20 = 1 Fury each time.
If you attack a Boss at 0 Fury, you gain ((100-0)/20)x3, or 5x3, 15 Fury. If you attack the Boss again before that Fury decays, you gain ((100-15)/20)x3, or 4.25x3, 12.75 Fury.
If you attack the same Boss when you have 80 or higher Fury, you gain ((100-80)/20)x3, or 1x3, 3 Fury each time.
Although Castle's formula above just says that Fury deticks at a rate of 2 ticks per second, this does not actually seem to be correct. Based on observations by anarchicgorilla, these figures are probably closer to correct:
from 1-49 CurrentFury, 1 pt deticks per second
from 50-99 CurrentFury, 2.5 pts detick per second
at 100 fury 5 pts detick per second
Even these numbers are not necessarily accurate; it seems likely that 80 Fury should be a threshold point for faster decay as well as slower build, but I have not been able to test this. At least they provide a ballpark estimate.
In short, what these formulae mean is that your Fury goes up slower the more of it you have (but gets no slower per attack once you've reached at least 80%), but goes up twice as fast if the attacks come from or are directed against Lieutenants, or three times as fast against players (3), Bosses, Elite Bosses, Archvillain/Heroes and Giant Monsters. Your Fury also goes up twice as fast for a single attack that you make on one of these as it does for a single attack made by one of these against you. AoE attacks and damage auras do not build Fury directly, but they help in Fury generation by getting the enemies you attack mad enough to attack you back. And the more Fury you have, the harder you have to work to keep it up; at the high end, you can lose 1/4 of your Fury bar in ten seconds of inactivity.
((3) However, testing has shown that Fury is not currently building as we had been told it should against other players in PVP. _Castle_ has researched the matter and found that the Boss/Archvillain bonus for PVP does not kick in until the 80% diminishing-return point. Castle wrote: "That's not exactly what we wanted, nor is it exactly what you folks were told. I'm sorry for that. I'm uncertain at this time what can be done to improve how this works, but I'll be exploring possibilities.")
What all this means for you is that in order to build Fury the fastest, you should make sure to concentrate first on Bosses or Lieutenants, or if there aren't any, get as many Minions as you can safely handle mad at you. If you are soloing on the first, third, or fifth difficulty levels, you will probably only have two Minions per spawn, and no Lieutenants or Bosses except in the final room. Thus, you may need to herd two or more groups together in order to get enough attacks coming in at once to help you build it faster.
When you attack, make sure to have Brawl (or some other attack if you use it instead) on auto-fire and (unless it's a tough Boss or worse) start out with your least damaging attacks--Barrage, Energy Punch, any pool-power attacks, and Bone Smasher. If you have Hasten available to you, you may want to use it first, depending on whether you think there are other enemies to be fought soon whom you might rather save it for. If there are several enemies but not enough to overwhelm you, you might also want to throw in Taunt, Whirling Hands, and perhaps the Patron Pool attacks if you have them. These powers all cycle reasonably fast, so you can get a good attack chain going that will keep the Fury building; they will also do fairly small amounts of damage so you can keep whaling on the same enemy for a while, until you've built up a lot of it. Once your Fury bar is mostly full, then you can start unleashing Total Focus and Energy Transfer.
Building Fury on Teams
Building Fury is a tricky balancing act. You have to get just enough aggro to keep your bar full, but not more than your defenses can handle. For Energy Aura Brutes this is particularly important, because you're not like a Resistance-based Brute who gets hit frequently for smaller amounts and thus can better balance the load. The hits you take will be rarer, but they will generally be for the full amount of damage, so your life bar will drop in large chunks. This can make it harder to judge when to heal, pop a green, or run.
When you're solo, this is not so much of a problem; your spawns will be relatively small and you would have to herd two or three together to get more than you could handle. But teaming is the real challenge; when you put a large number of people together, especially pickup-team people who've never worked together before, your Brute will either be overwhelmed very quickly, or else be unable to build Fury at all due to everyone else drawing all the enemy fire. The problem is exacerbated if you only rarely team, so do not get much practice at dealing with team aggro situations.
The first thing to remember when teaming is that a Brute is not a Tanker. He may look like one, having a Tanker's melee power sets and more hit points than a Scrapper, and he can tank reasonably well in a pinch, but that's not his main job--his Defenses are only Scrapper-level so he can easily be overwhelmed. His job is to draw enough aggro to build his Fury, not enough to protect the entire rest of the team--so if he tries, he's just going to get in trouble. A Brute is more akin to a Scrapper--he goes out and hits things a lot. If City of Villains has a meat shield, it is actually the Mastermind.
The next thing to keep in mind is that Tanker or not, you do still need to draw a reasonable amount of aggro to get your Fury on. Probably the easiest way to do this is to take the alpha strike--that is, draw the attention of all of the enemies in a not-yet-aggroed crowd simultaneously, before anybody else on the team does. This will result in all those enemies attacking you at once, and each attack will raise your Fury by the amounts shown above. However, taking the alpha with a Defense-based character can be a gamble--with your normal levels of Defense, each enemy still has a nontrivial chance of hitting you with his attacks, which can include mezzes, debuffs, Endurance drains, or other effects. And the more enemies are hitting you at once, the less likely it is you will be able to use Aid Self to recover. Fortunately, if you are on a team, you will likely have support types (such as Kinetic or Thermal Corrupters) who can back you up with heals. If not, make sure you have a good supply of greens and your health insurance is paid up.
If you can frequently take alpha for your team, and survive it (a Luck Inspiration or two should help, or Overload if you have it, not to mention buffs from Masterminds or Corrupters), you should have few problems getting your Fury bar up and keeping it up. The Fury you get from the multiple attacks should carry you through the rest of the fight without even needing to Taunt or use Whirling Hands all that much.
However, this need to take alpha puts you in conflict with Dominators, Corrupters and Masterminds--because if they break alpha by casting AoE Holds, Sleeps, or (to an extent) Fears on the crowd of enemies before you can aggro them, the enemies are not going to attack you and you're not going to get much Fury at all. Of course, you can break Sleep and temporarily break Fear with Whirling Hands, but breaking Sleep could get you yelled at.
Another potential problem to watch out for comes when teaming with the only class who has a higher single-target damage attack than you do: Stalkers. When Stalkers meet a spawn of foes, their usual tendency is to assassin-strike the toughest member of that spawn first--Bosses or Lieutenants. This is only the natural thing for them to do, of course; being weaker at taking damage, their inclination is to take out the biggest damage source as quickly as possible. However, you would ideally like to dance with that Boss or Lieutenant for a while as a fast way to build Fury. You can't do that if he's 1- or 2-shotted by an Assassin Strike before you ever get there.
So, in order to build maximum Fury, you should discuss alpha strike strategy with the rest of your team. Ask mezzers to let you draw the alpha for a few seconds before stepping in with their mezzes. Ask Stalkers to Assassin Strike some other target, or else wait a few seconds until you've traded a few blows. That should give you a good head start on your Fury and might possibly even rescue you from taking too much damage at just the right time.
If working with a Mastermind, who is more of a "meatshield" class than you, you may wish to share the alpha duties. If the spawn looks particularly nasty, you could have him send in his henchmen first to draw the alpha strike, then follow right behind them with Taunt and Whirling Hands to draw the enemy onto you. This will lessen the danger to you from the alpha, but should still ensure you get a decent share of the aggro. Otherwise, you will want to try taking the aggro first and then having the Mastermind's pets go in behind you to make sure it does not spread uncontrolled to the rest of the team.
If you're not able to take the alpha strike, you may have trouble gathering Fury during the battle that follows--especially if there are Masterminds in your team doing damage from every which way. This is when you most need to use Whirling Hands, Taunt, and/or Patron Pool AoEs if you have them. Just attacking single targets isn't enough; you need to make sure the punchvoke effect from Whirling Hands and the Taunt effect from Taunt are hitting as many foes as possible, and turning their attention back to you. The AoE immobilize and attack powers from your Patron Pools will come in handy for this, too, when you have them. You may even wish to consider temporarily turning off Energy Cloak; as a stealth power, it makes you harder to notice, so without it you will draw more attention. Conversely, leaving it on should help keep you from getting too much attention.
(One thing that was discovered during the Valentine's Day missions, where heroes and villains could team up, is that a Brute who teams with a Tanker often ends up unhappy. The Tanker's Gauntlet and Taunt override the Brute's single-target punchvoke and Taunt no matter what he does, so building Fury becomes difficult. The only thing to do in such a circumstance is ask the Tanker to let you take the alpha and have aggro for a few seconds before he taunts; that will at least give you a good chunk of a bar, so will be better than nothing. Bear this in mind when other hero-villain crossover opportunities inevitably arise.)
One common situation that comes up while Brutalizing on a team is the dilemma of the Fury fall-off. You've just finished taking out a big spawn, your Fury bar is maxed out, and you don't want to lose that damage rush. You want to find something else and hit it, hard, before your bar goes down again--but the rest of your team is still busy recovering from the battle, recasting Mastermind henchmen, re-issuing buffs, and so on. You can tell it's going to be at least a minute or two before they're ready to move on again--by which time you'll be starting from zero again.
The great temptation is just to rush off and find another spawn of mobs and start attacking them by yourself while you've got that Fury bar on, let the others catch up when they're ready. And on small teams, it may be possible to do this and get away with it--but on larger teams, it's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Unless you've got Overload or plenty of purple and green Inspirations (and maybe not even then), you don't have any chance of surviving a 6-8-person-team-sized spawn for very long--especially if they're yellows through reds pre-I7.
Furthermore, even if you don't get faceplanted, your running into the group is likely to trigger the misplaced maternal instincts of the rest of the team, who will then run in and get themselves faceplanted trying to save you, rather than using an organized strategy. This can lead to a decrease in your reputation among the other members of that particular team--especially if it happens more than once. At the extreme, it could even get you kicked from the team.
If you find yourself in this situation, the best thing to do is ask your teammates, "Hey, can we get moving before my Fury bar falls too far? I'm a much more effective fighter with it than without it." If they are not inclined to agree, then just grin and bear it; Fury isn't that hard to build back up again, and it's better to wait and not accumulate more debt than to charge in blindly and get it for everyone. This is why some Brute players, myself included, tend to prefer playing solo--once they build their Fury bar to the maximum, they don't need to slow down for anybody but themselves.
Building Fury Solo
Playing solo, you can set your own pace much more freely than playing on teams; you can run to the end of the mission bypassing all the enemies, or you can move from enemy to enemy fast enough that your Fury bar never falls very far. You can complete your own missions as quickly or as slowly as you want, and you don't have to worry as much about outlevelling your contacts due to the extra XP team play gets you. (This is especially important down below level 10, where you can outlevel contacts just by sneezing.)
Early on, soloing may be a touch challenging. When you start out, you will want to divide your Inspiration tray between greens, blues, and purples; you'll need the greens and blues to recover from the hits you take and give, and the purples to bolster your relatively weak Defensive powers before you're able to get SOs. (See the Inspirations section below.) No matter how many blues you carry, you will find yourself taking advantage of the "Rest" power sooner or later. It will cost you roughly half your Fury bar, but there's no way around it--so it would be best to save the greens and blues for in-combat emergencies and use Rest for in-between battle recovery.
Hitting level 12 and getting DOs will make soloing a good deal easier (assuming you have someone from whom you can sponge Infamy to slot out all the way; otherwise, slot your attacks first and your shields when you can manage it). Once you hit level 14 and get your travel power, soloing can become easier if you take Super Speed and thus can zoom past the majority of the enemies clear to the end of the mission. Even if you take some other travel power, your between-mission travel time will still become much smaller so levelling will become faster regardless.
Once you get Total Focus at 18 and Stamina at 20, you will really start to kick into high gear--able to deal more damage at a time, and last longer while doing it. SOs at 22 will make another huge difference in effectiveness, as you can finally start slotting your attacks for full damage. Energy Cloak will add to your defense, and make mission stealthing and shedding unwanted aggro easier. Aid Self will let you replace some of those greens you carry with more blues and purples--and your ever-increasing number of Inspiration slots will give you room for yellows and reds, too. When you get Energy Drain at 28 you will be able to solo non-stop, and pauses to Rest will be a thing of the distant past. Energy Transfer at 32 will let you crank your difficulty to Relentless. Overload at 38 will let you survive Bosses, AVs, and huge crowds without recourse to purple inspirations--just the icing on the cake, but mmm, what tasty icing it is. Finally, your Patron powers should give you a bit of extra versatility and aggro power to help you on your way to level 50.
One thing to watch out for is your setting on the difficulty meter. Because of I6 Defense's scaling problem (see the section on Defense, below), higher-difficulty-level missions become more difficult all out of proportion to their difficulty setting. If you come from a background of primarily Resistance-based characters, such as Fire Tankers or Brutes, Dark Scrappers, and so on, you will be in for a shock the first time you try to take on reds, oranges, or even yellows--they will hit you far more often than they have any right to, for the full amount of damage. This should change in I7, and tougher missions should get a lot easier to take, but at the time this guide is being posted, we've still got a hard row to hoe.
With that in mind, it's best to be conservative in your use of the difficulty slider until I7 comes in, staying on Villainous or Malicious even after you get DOs. Villainous missions will be faster to finish, as the "Boss" at the end will be a Lieutenant instead, but Malicious missions may help you build Fury better and be good for a little more XP since there are more enemies and a Boss. Staying Villainous will ensure that you are able to complete more contacts' arcs, since you will outlevel them more slowly. On Villainous missions (and Vicious, and Relentless), you may need to herd two or more spawns of Minions together in order to get enough of them beating on you at once to build Fury quickly. (Check out this guide for some tips on how to use corners and terrain to herd enemies together.)
Once you get SOs, you can move up to Vicious, Ruthless, even Relentless if you do it with care. Vicious or Relentless should go faster with the smaller number of enemies; Ruthless will help you build Fury faster with more enemies. All the same, I would be inclined to advise sticking low on the bar until you hit 32 and get the big DPS boost of Energy Transfer. With that in your arsenal, you should be able to mow down the toughest enemy spawns quickly; just make sure to carry plenty of purples for the Lieutenants and Bosses. Overload will be your Boss- and Elite-Boss-killer.
To a soloist, Elite Bosses can be tricky, though some are harder than others. A lot of Elite Bosses are just tricked-out versions of normal Bosses with more hit points and another attack or two, and can be handled easily enough. However, the special ones such as Longbow's Ballistas and Elite Boss versions of Archvillains/Heroes are almost as tough as archvillains in their own right. They're not impossible to defeat solo, with the right combination of powers and Inspirations, but you should be prepared to pop at least 2 to 3 purples (or Overload if you have it by then) and any reds and yellows you might have before engaging--and hopefully you're carrying plenty of greens and blues too.
Thanks to the Archvillain-to-Elite-Boss patch, AV missions no longer impede your ability to solo. Just make sure your Difficulty is set no higher than Ruthless when you're on a mission against an Archvillain or Hero, so that they will appear as Elite Bosses. (If on Relentless, they will always be an Archvillain even solo.) On the other hand, you may wish to get a team together specifically to take that AV down for the higher XP award, +3 SO, and Tier 3 Inspiration that they grant on defeat. If you're strapped for cash, passing up any opportunity to get a free, potentially useful SO is not the best idea.
A Slight Case of Over-Aggro
Sometimes in your quest to build Fury, you may discover you have too much aggro lovin' from your adoring fans. There are a number of ways to deal with this.
<ul type="square">[*]Get away. If you're not entirely surrounded, you might be able to run around a corner and buy a little breathing room. This will be easiest to do if Teleport is your travel power.[*]Hit Overload, or pop a purple Inspiration or two if you don't have it yet. Even if you don't have Overload, your Defense is good enough already that you'll get more benefit out of Defense Inspirations than most classes; it should be enough to buy you enough breathing room that you can take out the worst damagers, use Aid Self, or just make a break for it.[*]Use Total Focus, Stun, Whirling Hands, and/or Air Superiority, if you have them. These are your best powers in terms of stopping enemies from attacking for a while. Total Focus and Stun will definitely apply a Disorient effect that should stop most Minions or Lieutenants (or even Bosses if stacked) for a few moments, Whirling Hands will probably Disorient about a third of the enemies it hits, and Air Superiority will put an enemy flat on his back for a while.[*]Panic. It doesn't usually work, but it might make you feel better.[/list]Sometimes no matter what you do you won't be able to lose all that aggro, or the dice will just break the wrong way, and you'll end up kissing carpet. Just chalk it up to a "learning experience" and move on; as fast as you defeat things, the debt will be gone before you realize it anyway.
I tend to make a point of carrying one Awaken and one Break Free at all times, so that if I fall in a safe enough spot (far enough away from where the enemies were hanging out that they walk back there and aren't watching me anymore) I can rez, de-mez, and Rest or pop greens/blues back to full health/end, without needing to take a hospital trip. (Sometimes this can even be done with the enemies standing right over you, if there are few enough that you'll have time to pop greens, blues, purples, Energy Drain, and/or Aid Self before you re-faceplant. And if it's unsuccessful, the double-dip debt protection means you generally won't get more debt from it.) This is especially crucial before travel powers, when a hospital trip can mean five or ten minutes of walking to get back to the mission.
It's Just Overkill (Day After Day, It Reappears...)
Energy Melee is characterized by attacks that do a great deal of damage, are fairly slow to recharge, and cost a great deal of Endurance. In terms of Endurance per damage per second, every attack save for Energy Transfer is roughly equal (unless slotted for End Reduction); the amount of End you spend is directly proportional to the damage you do over time. Therefore, if you waste less damage, you also waste less Endurance--and it also doesn't slow down your attack chain as much.
This brings me to a problem that is commonly observed among the CoH/CoV damage classes: over-damage. I'm not talking about one-shotting enemies with power attacks; if the enemy is close to your own level, you probably didn't one-shot him by very much. I'm talking about using stronger attacks where weaker, less expensive ones will do. For example, if you knock an enemy down to a sliver of his health, you should not then use Total Focus on him. It wastes the extra damage (if you could have tabbed over to a nearby mostly-full enemy and Focused him instead, then switched back to hit the first guy with a lower-power attack), as well as the extra Endurance you just used. It also also means you don't have Total Focus available to you again for at least seven to ten seconds, and you might need it in the meantime. On a lesser scale, this also applies when you use Bone Smasher when Energy Punch, Air Superiority, or Brawl would have sufficed.
One of the best Endurance-conservation techniques you can practice is learning just how much of the average enemy's life bar each of your attacks will account for, and then getting in the habit of chaining attacks so as to just barely defeat him, wasting the minimal amount of damage (and hence Endurance). This is especially important below level 20 when you don't have Stamina, but it is a good habit to keep all through the rest of your career.
Never Let Them See You...At All
Energy/Energy Brutes, especially those who take Super Speed, are uniquely equipped to complete most missions extra-fast. They do this through the expedient of stealthing and/or superspeeding to the mission objectives, bypassing most of the enemies within the mission and earning the mission completion bonus (and hence, arc completion bonuses) extra-rapidly. About the only missions where this can't be done are "defeat all" or rescue/kidnapping missions--and even then, Energy Melee has the single-target damage to clear them out quickly.
Completing missions, and thus arcs, rapidly is one of the fastest ways I've found to level a character up quickly. (For more information on this sort of thing, see R_M's Comprehensive XP Gain/Debt Loss Guide v6.0; the fellow who wrote it seems to be reasonably clever.) Although you do not get as much total XP per mission by leaving so many Minions undefeated, by completing missions and arcs faster, the big bonuses come closer together. Thus, your average XP per minute is higher and you level faster. As a fringe benefit, getting less XP per individual mission means you are less likely to outlevel your contacts before you finish all their missions.
Of course, speed-completing missions also means that later in the game you're likely to run out of contacts a level or two before the next ones open up. However, unlike in City of Heroes, you have newspaper missions and PVP zone missions to fill in the gap--and any paper mission that doesn't involve kidnapping someone can be speed-completed too. You should never be reduced to street-hunting in order to level up.
Inspiration is Where You Find It
Knowing how to use your powers and Fury isn't the only important part of being a Brute. The proper selection and use of Inspirations can make a major difference too. Let's look at the various colors and how and when to use them. Except for Break Free and Awaken, which are special cases, and Sturdy, which is on a different scale, all Inspirations confer 25%, 33%, or 50% to their respective values, depending on size.
It used to be that Inspiration stores were entirely unavailable to participants in a Task/Strike Force. However, the Arena stores and Pocket D bartenders will now sell to anybody, regardless of whether they are on a Task/Strike Force or not. The Arena sells everything except Awakens; the bartenders sell those too.
Rage (Red): Damage. You would think this would be one of the most important Inspirations to a Brute--except that Brutes, due to their low base damage and huge damage cap, actually get less benefit out of these, relatively speaking, than any other class. Adding an extra 25% of base damage to a Build Up-using Scrapper cruising at 300% increases his current damage by 1/12, but adding the same amount to a Brute with Build Up and Fury at 500% increases his damage by only 1/20. Nonetheless, reds can still provide a decent damage boost, especially if you manage to pop several of them at once. When your Fury bar is full and Build Up is on, any extra damage is a good thing. Conversely, they can also give you a little boost at the start of a fight when you don't have any Fury built up yet. Not really worth stocking up until you start hit 25 and have more Inspiration slots to spare.
Insight (Yellow): Accuracy--well, technically "To-Hit" because they are applied to the left side of the to-hit equation in the same place as To-Hit buffs (see next section) rather than the right side with Accuracy Enhancements--which actually makes them a lot more powerful. In PVE, these will be most important to you early on, before you've been able to slot for Accuracy really well--but may also be handy against enemies such as the Circle of Thorns who debuff your accuracy any time in the game. Aside from debuffers, 2 Accuracy Enhancements in your attacks should be enough that you will be capped against anything you're usually likely to face in PVP. Insights also have a secondary effect: they increase your Perception, counteracting enemy Stealth or Blindness powers. This will be most useful against Stalkers in PVP, and against mobs who use smoke grenades (such as certain Arachnos Bosses) in PVE. If you're going up against Thorns or Arachnos, or into a PVP zone, be sure and carry a few with you; otherwise, you shouldn't need them too much once you get DOs.
Respite (Green) and Catch a Breath (Blue): Health. Until you're able to add Aid Self and Energy Drain to your build, these will be your Special Friend. I strongly suggest keeping half your tray full of greens, half blues (with a couple of spaces left over for other things like purples and Awakens), through your teens and early twenties. Once you get Aid Self you can back off on the greens, and Energy Drain will let you back off the blues. You should still carry 2 or 3 of each, though, for emergencies.
Luck (Purple): Defense. These will be another of your special friends (especially after I7 hits). One purple will double or almost double your defensive capabilities once you're fully slotted out with SOs; it will significantly outshine your inherent defensive capabilities until then. Either way, it will greatly enhance your survival should you meet up with tough crowds, Bosses, archvillains, and "can-openers" (see Can-Openers section below). Of course, up through the time you get SOs, if you're running at the difficulty level you should be you won't need them as much, and carrying too many will cut into the number of greens and blues you can keep around. By the time you hit the mid-20s, you'll start having Inspiration slots to spare to carry more.
Sturdy (Orange): These aren't really worth keeping around, unless you went the damage resistance route and have inherent resistances to stack them on. The amount of damage they allow you to resist is so small (5%, 10%, and 20% respectively) that if you just dumped them and replaced them with purples you'd be much better off in terms of damage avoided over time. The only exception would be if randomness of drops gives you a couple of medium-sized or large versions; it might be worth keeping them around to use when facing an archvillain or particularly nasty foes. Otherwise, use 'em as soon as you get 'em.
Break Free: You won't generally need these in PVE thanks to your inherent mez protection. However, as stated above, it's worth carrying one around to pair with an Awaken if you happen to fall in the heat of battle. They will handily take care of the residual wakey-woozies. You may also wish to carry a few of them when going into PVP zones, or into battle against foes you know to have End draining or toggle-dropping powers, such as level 40+ Longbow or especially Malta (if they show up in Grandville). Unlike most other Inspirations, which all last for 60 seconds regardless of size, Break Frees last 30, 60, or 90 seconds depending on their size.
Awaken: Some people don't believe in carrying rez Inspirations, figuring it's better to use the space for something that will help keep you from dying. While there's a certain amount of sense to that, sooner or later you're going to end up dying anyway--it's unavoidable. You might as well have the ability to recover from it when it does happen. However, I generally advise just carrying one, maybe two at most, and restocking between missions--if you die more often than that, you should probably rethink what you're doing on that mission.
TWO ACC, OR NOT TWO ACC?
Now it's time for a little lesson in just how buffs and SOs apply to our actual chance to hit things.
The simplest form of the equation used when you fire a power off at a foe is this:
(base to_hit + buffs - debuffs) * (1 + accuracy SOs)
base to_hit = your base percentage chance of hitting a foe of that particular level relative to you. Numbers recently given by _Castle_ are:
+0 = 75
+1 = 68
+2 = 61
+3 = 55
+4 = 48
+5 = 41
+6 = 34
buffs = percentage buff from any powers that increase your accuracy, such as Supremacy, Tactics, Fortitude, Build Up, Aim, etc., and also yellow (Insight) Inspirations
debuffs = percentage debuff from any powers that decrease your accuracy, such as Negative Energy blasts; also any Defense value the enemy might have against your attacks
For most PVE purposes, you're going to find that two Accuracy Enhancements per attack are sufficient to defeat anything you'll face on your own--provided that they don't have Defense bonuses or Accuracy debuffs.
In a solo mission, on Relentless, the maximum level of enemies you fight will be +3. You have a 55% base chance to hit +3 foes. Multiply that by 1.66, for base accuracy plus 2 Accuracy SOs, and you get 91.3%--only a few percentage points below the 95% cap. Anything lower than that, you are capped against. (Of course, this does assume that the enemies do not have Defense bonus or To-Hit Debuff powers, but you'll have Build Up to add an additional 50% to the base to-hit to counteract those.)
Of course, on team missions you may encounter +4 or +5 mobs, which you'll only have a 79.7% or 68.1% overall chance to hit--but that's what Build Up, yellow Inspirations, and teammates with Tactics are for.
Note that in PVP, you will only have a 50% base chance to hit other players--which works out to 83% with two SOs. It will take three Accuracy SOs to cap you in PVP.
STRADDLING DEFENSE
As a Defense-based class, every Brute player needs to understand exactly how Defense works--especially since it is going to be changing radically come Issue 7. The very best way to study up on this is to read Arcanaville's Guide to Defense v1.3, and the posts that follow, so you can get it straight from the horse's mouth. There's a lot of mathematics in there, and it may be a little complicated to understand. So I'll just hit some of the high points here, and hope I don't get them too far wrong.
First of all, under the current system there will always be at least a 1 in 20 chance (that is, a 5% Accuracy floor) for the bad guys to hit you, no matter what their level and how much your Defense has reduced their chances. That's the old concept of the "natural 20" from D&D rearing its head. So, even if you're able to floor the bad guys' accuracy to what should be less than zero, they'll still hit you sooner or later. Furthermore, there is a "streakbreaker" in the attack code that won't let the bad guys miss you (or you miss the bad guys) more than a certain number of times in a row. So, sooner or later, you will take hits.
Second, the major problem with Defense right now is that it does not scale adequately. The following example is an oversimplification for the sake of explanation; if you want the complete story, read Arcana's Guide and the comments that follow--if you can understand them.
Take the examples of a level +0 Boss and a level +4 Boss, and for the sake of simplicity let's say you have a 30% Defense to their attacks (which, coincidentally, is just about what you will have vs Fire and Cold attacks if both Energy Shield and Energy Cloak are 3-slotted). A level +0 (orange) Boss has a 65% base chance to hit you. If you subtract your 30% Defense value from that, you drop his total chance to hit you by about half, to 35%. However, a level +4 (triple-purple) Boss has an 88.4% base chance to hit you. If you subtract that same 30% Defense value, then you've only cut it to 58.4%--or by about a third.
Compare this to a Resistance-based character with a hypothetical 50% Damage Resistance. His damage resistance cuts damage by the same amount--half--no matter whether it's a +0, a +4, or a +10 attacking him. (Though he's likely not to survive even half-damage from a +10 for very long, the principle is the same.) Thus, Resistance scales with level--but Defense does not. This is why playing a Defense-based character against oranges and reds can be a terribly painful experience.
But this is changing in issue 7. Instead of enemies' Base To-Hit being increased as they go up in level, their Base To-Hit is staying 50% and instead they gain Accuracy multipliers for relative level and type. Thus, your Defense is going to be taken off their chances before the level (and type) modifiers are applied, rather than after as it is now--meaning that they will lose the same percentage chance to hit you at level +4 as they do at level +0. Furthermore, your defense against even +0 level enemies will improve; that same 30% Defense will bring a +0 Boss down to 26% Accuracy instead of 35%, and a +4 Boss down to 35.4% Accuracy instead of 58.4%. Defense will scale.
Furthermore, 45% Defense will be sufficient to floor the accuracy of anything--Minions, Lieutenants, Bosses, Archvillains/Heroes--up to +5 levels above you (assuming they don't have To-Hit buffs such as Vengeance or Tactics in effect). 50% - 45% = the 5% floor. However, that floor will no longer necessarily be 5%, since Accuracy buffs are applied after the 5% floor has been reached. (For example, if you had 45% or more Defense, that level +0 Boss's final Accuracy would be 6.5%, and the +4's would be 8.84%.)
If all these numbers confuse you, I apologize. Suffice it to say that things are going to be much better for everyone with Defense in Issue 7 than they are right now.
If you like the numbers and you want a more detailed explanation (as I may well have oversimplified into incorrectness), check out the Arcana's Guide thread linked above. It looks very much as though Issue 7 is going to be a great time to play an Energy Aura Brute (or, for that matter, a Super Reflex Scrapper or Ice Tanker).
ON THE LEVELS
Level 1-10
Get through the tutorial as fast as you can; don't forget to go upstairs for the Jail Bird badge. The tutorial shouldn't present you with any problems you can't handle; if you've done it enough already to be really sick of it, you can skip the first few errands and just run straight out to Saki, the ninja-masked orange-clad convict in the courtyard, and start from there. Make your choice of contact--I personally tend to prefer the mercenary contact, Matthew Burke, because his missions are a lot more fun (especially the snake hatchery--whack-whack-whack-SPLORTCH!). If you want to experience as much content as possible, keep your missions on Villainous and solo them; they'll complete faster and you won't get as much XP, meaning that you're less likely to outlevel contacts. Otherwise, feel free to join teams and do all your missions together; you'll be level 10 before you know it.
You should do all of your first contact's missions, at least until you get to level 5. If doing Kallenda and Mongoose, you should only do Mongoose's first job, the bank heist. You actually don't even have to do that one, but I recommend it anyway because bank heists are just so much fun. The rest of Mongoose's missions are more annoyingness with Snakes plus a timed Hellions job; they're all quite boring, not necessary to get your next contact, involve a lot of running all over the island, and if you do them you'll get enough XP out of them that you could have a hard time doing more than one of your 5-10 Port Oakes contacts when you get them.
Dr. Creed's missions seem a good deal more fun, but if you want to outlevel as few arcs as possible, either skip them or try to complete them for the least amount of XP possible, skipping to the end of non-defeat-all missions and defeating as few mobs as are necessary. This is the only way to make sure you don't outlevel, since below level 10 you can't get debt.
Go on to Port Oakes once you've done Mongoose's bank job or Creed's missions, and make your way to your first broker there. Do your paper missions and take the bank jobs until all three contacts are available to you, and then do as many of your contacts as you can before you outlevel them. I'd advise doing Bocor first to get that nifty 5-shot zombie temp power, then Billie Heck for the imp temp.
Mercy Island and Port Oakes may be very frustrating to get around without travel powers when your contacts seem to delight in sending you to all corners of it; however, there is a workaround to this. If you can tag along with a higher-level character who has the Sharkhead Isle Sky Raider contact Lt. Chalmers's timed mission to save their base from Longbow, you will be able to get a 60-minute jet pack from one of the blinkie crates near the entrance. You will have to make your way in safety to Sharkshead Island in order to do this, but that one long journey will save you many other long journeys afterward.
(If you should get this mission on a higher-level character yourself, you can actually get any or all of your other characters this pack off of that mission. Just get them in position on the island before you accept the mission from Chalmers, and invite a friend to your team to go into the mission and hold it open for you while you switch characters and then have him reinvite you to the team. Repeat as necessary for all your characters until it runs out of blinkies, then relog to the original character to reset it. If you're soloing or duoing the mission, you should only need about 15 minutes to complete it anyway, so you can run down half of the hour-long timer doing this with no worries.)
If you use this jet pack sparingly, you should be able to get around with much less frustration all the way up to level 14. However, do be sure you have used it up entirely by the time you encounter Chalmers for yourself; if the jetpack still exists in your powers list, you probably will not be able to get a fresh one.
Level 11-20
Continue your arcs on Port Oakes, and thence to Cap au Diable. If you're concerned about missing content, then continue soloing missions on the Villainous difficulty setting. Do only as many newspaper missions as are necessary to get you to your next round of contacts. There are an immense number of contacts, even not counting the unlockable ones, so you may have a hard time fitting everything in. You may even want to make a habit of intentionally getting killed a few times to carry additional debt; this will also have the side-effect of earning more Infamy with which you can buy Enhancements and make progress toward the Bling badge.
If you have an aversion to debt even though you know it's good for you, another thing to try is finding someone at least 3 levels lower than you who is about to start a contact you also haven't started yet. Take the same missions (as much as you can), exemplar to the lowbie, and do the lowbie's instances of the missions. Make sure to click "yes" at the end when the dialogue box asks if you would like to clear your own instance of the mission at the same time. You will get only Infamy instead of XP (and what's more, you'll get Infamy as if you completed a mission 3 levels higher than you!), but will still clear the mission and see the content.
If you're just concerned with levelling speed, see if you can put together a big team averaging 2 to 4 levels higher than you are. If you can construct it in such a way that there is one lackey slot too few and you get left as the "odd man out," then so much the better for your XP. Even if you have to lackey up, do mainly "retrieve item" or "kidnap person" newspaper missions, and make sure the others let you unlackey one full minute before saving the hostage or clicking the glowie so you can scoop that bigger bonus. In the teens, you can get 2 or 3 bars of XP off of just one mission completion bonus that way. (See that guide I linked in the section on stealthing missions for more advice like this.)
If you're into unlockable contacts, remember to go farm 100 ghosts at Fort Hades between levels 10 and 14 to get the badges and unlock Veluta Lunata; she has a couple of fun arcs and some useful anti-ghost temp powers. You'll probably need a team and/or higher-level helpers to do it safely, as ghosts will respawn as level 15 when the traps get full.
Once you hit 15, scoot off to Bloody Bay and do the meteor quest. With a good travel power--especially if it's Super Speed--you should be able to scoop the meteor samples relatively unmolested. If necessary, do the patrol mission first to gain the "Hyper Stealth" power. For advice on how best to solo the meteor mission, see this mini-guide, which was also written by that clever R_M fellow.
You'll probably want to come back and do the meteors several times more before you hit 25; the 5-shot renewable Shivan pet makes a nice panic button or hero-killer, and its Radiation powers will make it easier for you to overcome the Defense of tough enemies. Even after you pass 25 (which is where Shivans are capped), you may still want to keep a set of Shivans around for the times you have to malefactor lower.
If you're not concerned about missing out on content and don't mind risking ganks on the way in or out, the PVP zone door missions are a great way to earn some levels. Longbow give 110% of "normal" mob XP, and the mission completion bonus is a good 25% bigger than normal, even if they tend to be a bit monotonous. The Listening Post missions are particularly recommended, as their warehouse-based layout is less annoying than the standard Longbow base map.
Whatever you do, be sure to do Marshall Brass's first 15-19 arc in order to get the Goldbrickers flight pack--especially if your travel power is Super Speed. I also recommend doing the Tarikoss Strike Force before you hit 20; it's got a fun storyline to it, especially if you do Marshall Brass's second arc as a sort of prelude.
Level 21-30
You'll be moving on to Sharkshead Island and the Nerva Archipelago now. Much of the general-purpose advice from 11-20 holds true for this section, and all of those further on in fact. But here are the high points.
The 20-25 Silver Mantis Strike Force is only available to villain groups with a mission computer. But if you're not in a villain group, don't despair. It only takes one person who is in such a villain group, and whose base is set to permit teammates to enter, to offer the SF to everyone. So if you're not in such a group, maybe you can find someone who is and do it that way. If you lose the final bad guy during the last mission of this Strike Force, don't despair! He's just flown off into the sky in some remote part of the map; get a flier to hunt for him.
Also during this time comes the first supervillain respec, which is in some ways easier and in some ways much harder than the City of Heroes version. Entire guides can be and have been written about this mission, so I will refer you to them; my advice is to take a party size of no more than four to five people, period.
If you're into unlockable contacts, remember to help take down Scrapyard for the Hammer Down badge to unlock Crimson Revenant. Also, if you are in a supergroup, you will also want to start playing outside of Supergroup Mode at level 25 (and perhaps also exemplaring a lot) until you get the Bling badge for earning Infamy in order to unlock the Doc Buzzsaw hidden contact. It took me until level 28 to earn Bling with no supergroup at all, and if you don't earn it by level 29 you may not get to do both the Doctor's arcs.
Be sure not to miss out on Lt. Chalmers on Sharkshead Island for his 60-minute Sky Raider flight pack!
If you're still doing missions on Villainous, you may run out of contacts early for the first time before hitting 25. Just make sure you've done all of the unlockable ones, and then do some newspaper or PVP jobs to get you the rest of the way.
Level 20 grants you entrance into Siren's Call--and if you're strapped for cash and enjoy (or at least tolerate) PVP, I advise spending some time there taking down heroes and earning bounty. Every 6,000 bounty points means a free +3 SO in your origin, so have a blast. Considering the PVP Fury bug, it would probably be simplest for you to find a team of Stalkers who can use you as a stalking horse, and mooch off of the points they get from their kills to earn your rewards. But be careful; there are enough NPC mobs around, especially at the hotspots, that it's a good way to see just what the debt cap really looks like.
As with Bloody Bay, Siren's Call PVP-zone door missions are a great way to grind for XP. The Supply Depot mission, in an abandoned-office-building map, is one of the easier ones to do. Also, don't forget to do the patrol mission to grab the Hyper Invisibility temp power. Even though Energy Cloak makes it redundant, it's still free, and can be used when exemplared lower.
You may want to start adjusting your difficulty up a notch or two in the mid to late 20s, once you get your SOs on. This will give you a little more of a challenge, and will also narrow the gap between completing all your contacts and getting the next set.
Level 31-40
Congratulations, you're almost there! As you pass 32 and start getting the final powers from your sets, it's probably safe for you to crank the dial up to Relentless. You're going to be working both in St. Martial and Nerva for this phase of your career. Apart from the newspaper missions you do to unlock your contacts in St. Martial, you may find you prefer grinding with them in Nerva, as Nerva's paper and bank jobs are all spaced a lot closer together (with only the occasional job that requires a trip all the way north), unlike St. Martial which routinely sends you all over the map.
The 30-40 PVP zone is Warburg, which is different from the earlier zones in that it is a free-for-all: if you're not teamed with someone, they're the enemy even if they're a villain just like you! This can make adventuring there "interesting" in the Chinese sense--and yet it's lucrative nonetheless. Rescuing the scientists from the underground labs can provide you with some nicely potent one-shot super-nukes that make great Archvillain/Monster/Hero-killers; you can carry one of each of the three kinds. And once you hit 32 and get Energy Transfer, you'll be fully capable of owning the spiders in the underground labs. (And as a nice side benefit if your origin is Technology is that those spiders drop mostly tech SOs, and drop them more frequently than just about any other mob I've ever seen.)
Some Warburg regulars (Warburgers?) hold to a kind of code of honor that says they don't mess with people doing scientist saves. Others, however, do not, so don't take your safety for granted; each time you get ganked, you'll lose one of your three codes, not to mention any scientist who might have been following you at the time. Try to do Warburg during "dead" periods, like early mornings or afternoons when there's nobody else around to interfere with you. Learn the ins and outs of the underground corridors so that you can navigate with your scientist to whichever tunnel exit is closest to his bunker of choice. Since Warburg scientists don't lose track of you if you're stealthed, stay under Energy Cloak to get him there; turn off Superspeed and Sprint (if you have them) so you're less likely to outdistance him. Bear in mind that you don't actually have to take him up the ramp most of the time; his "thanks for saving me, here's the code" will trigger if you can get within about 25 feet under the door with him on the ground level. Once he's saved, hie yourself back to the nearest tunnel entrance at all possible speed to get the next one.
As always, the PVP zone door missions continue to be a great way to grind for XP--but after you hit 37-40 they become a good deal harder thanks to the Longbow Flamethrowers' and Special Ops' upgraded powers (see the next section). Favorite Warburg missions include the Supply Depot (which has no Bosses in it, so you can run through it quickly and with minimal risk) and the Kidnap Longbow Agent mission (as the agent is apparently bugged, and will fight at your side with radiation attacks after you "kidnap" her, grumbling about it all the while). The Patrol mission will give you a "Hyper Phase Shift" temp power, which makes a great panic button and, given that it can be used at any level, is probably better than having the real thing for as often as you're likely to need it.
If you haven't yet gotten your Gangbuster badge (for taking down 200 Marcone Capo Bosses) to unlock the Slot Machine (one of the more fun contacts in the late game), you should go to Port Oakes and do it before you hit 34. The best time to do it is when the zone is really busy; the more people are in the zone, the more Capos are spawned. Ideally, you should get a team of high-level characters together who are also looking to earn their Capo-hunting badges, split up, and hunt the zone individually--you will each get credit for everyone else's Capo defeats in addition to your own. You will most often find them in the streets or on top of buildings in Marconeville or the Docks, or on top of the warehouses in the west part of town. Sometimes they will step out of doors along the street, and if you don't get them fast they'll go back inside. The Capos are easy to spot because they are always either wearing dark suits with white fedoras, or wearing white suits and completely bald. In Port Oakes, you don't generally need to worry about cleaning up the rest of a spawn after you cherry-pick the Capos; the others will usually run to a nearby door and go inside, thus cleaning up after themselves.
Level 41-50
To be written after I7!
CAN-OPENERS
It seems like every class has foes who are specially designed to pose a specific danger to that class--so-called "can-openers" who can open up your defenses as easily as your power can-opener opens a can--and Energy/Energy Brutes are no exception. Some of these foes are the same no matter when you encounter them; others only become a true pain around level 37. If you're soloing or duoing, there are generally few enough of these that you can handle them safely, with a little extra caution. On a large team, however, look out: if a couple of can-openers are bad, a half-dozen of them will be even worse. You may want to reconsider taking the alpha in these circumstances, and discuss strategy with the team before engaging.
"Psyyyyyche!"
There are three damage-type holes in your defenses--two major and one minor--that you will have a hard time patching over no matter what you do. These are your high vulnerability to Psychic and Toxic attacks, and your weaker protection against Negative Energy attacks. Your only real Psychic/Toxic defense is positional, that is, defense to ranged attacks of all kinds, which can be found within Energy Cloak and any pool Defense powers you take such as Combat Jumping or Hover. Even Overload's description proclaims that it protects against everything except Psychic (and there's no Toxic defense in the game save for positional). This means that you're going to be quite vulnerable to many attacks from Psychic, Toxic, and Negative-Energy-using enemies--including the Hero Aurora Borealis, the Carnival of Shadows (who will also steal your Endurance when they die), the Devouring Earth, and especially the Circle of Thorns. Engage with care. A friendly Force Field Corrupter/Mastermind or Ice Corrupter could come in really handy.
"De Buff! Boss, De Buff!"
As a Defense-based Brute, your Defense is usually the one thing keeping you alive. When you get hit, you get hit for full damage. So when something debuffs your Defense, so you get hit more and more often, it is not a pretty sight. Your Shields provide some resistance to Defense Debuffs, but it's not enough--it's never enough. When you go up against enemies who debuff your Defense, it doesn't take long for you to get in big trouble. Defense-debuffing enemies include the Shivans with their radiation blasts, and the bane of Super Reflex Scrappers everywhere, the Rularuu. Fortunately, you only go up against the Rularuu in one arc and a couple of odd missions in the pre-40 game.
"The Longbow of the Law"
All through your career up to about level 37, you may sneer at the Longbow agents--somewhat-ineffectual red and white dogooders who are fairly easy to take down, even if some of them can cloak. But once they start spawning at level 40 and up, things change. Suddenly the Longbow Flamethrowers get Ignite, and the Longbow Special Ops get EMP Grenade.
Ignite is a Burn-patch attack that you may not even notice at first (due to Burn's special effect having gotten a lot harder to see in recent patches), until you smell Mohican burning. It's the Longbow version of a silent-but-deadly; it has a high base accuracy so it will often bypass even the best Defense, so you'll need to keep on the move to keep it from causing you more damage than necessary. (Scrapyarder Demolitionists on Sharkshead have a similar attack, but at least you would expect something like that from someone who chucks dynamite around.) EMP Grenade is an annoying area-of-effect sapper attack, which can stop you dead in your tracks with just one or two shots. It's not fun when you're chugging merrily along and suddenly all your toggles are dropping and all you can do is stand there and look dumb (and frantically pop blues and purples if you have any).
About the only solution is to try to take out the worst ones first--but since both the Flamethrower and the Special Ops are Minions, you can have more than one of them, and even more than one of each of them, per spawn. If this is the case, consider the Special Ops more dangerous and take them down first. For more than one enemy, use your cloak to get in position, Build Up and Energy Transfer the first one, then Total Focus the next one; even if it doesn't knock him all the way down, it should leave him stunned for long enough to take care of before he recovers enough to attack. Air Superiority is another good method for keeping them distracted long enough to finish them, if you have it; also, Teleport Foe could be handy for taking Spec Ops down separately from their companions so the toggle drop from End drain is not as dangerous to you.
(Until I7) "Red Means Stop"
Because defense won't scale until Issue 7 comes in, orange-and-red-conning enemies of whatever type are some of the worst can-openers of all--and worse still if they also fall into one of the other can-opener categories. Proceed with extreme caution.
SAMPLE BUILD
The following is the build that I presently have for my level 40 Energy/Energy Brute. It is not my first build; it is actually my third, having burned both of my respecs to make up for my mistakes and set it up this way. It probably isn't the best possible Brute build, and it could probably be improved a number of ways. (For example, taking Air Superiority at level 8 instead of Build-Up, then taking Build-Up at level 22 and pushing Aid Other and Aid Self back to 24 and 26 might be a viable option--but then I would have to steal slots from other powers to put into Air Sup...and so it goes.) I don't offer this as a prescription for what your build should necessarily look like. It's just a way of showing what's been viable in PVE for me.
If you're interested in PVP, well, you'll just have to come up with your own build.
---------------------------------------------
Exported from Ver: 1.7.5.0 of the CoH_CoV Character Builder
---------------------------------------------
Name: Pouncetta Purrfect
Level: 41
Archetype: Brute
Primary: Energy Melee
Secondary: Energy Aura
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Energy Punch==> Acc(1)Acc(3)Dmg(5)Dmg(7)Dmg(9)Rechg(11)
01) --> Kinetic Shield==> DefBuf(1)DefBuf(11)DefBuf(13)
02) --> Bone Smasher==> Acc(2)Acc(3)Dmg(5)Dmg(7)Dmg(9)
04) --> Power Shield==> DefBuf(4)DefBuf(13)DefBuf(15)
06) --> Hasten==> Rechg(6)Rechg(15)Rechg(23)
08) --> Build Up==> Rechg(8)Rechg(17)Rechg(17)
10) --> Entropy Shield==> EndRdx(10)
12) --> Hurdle==> Jump(12)
14) --> Super Speed==> Run(14)
16) --> Health==> Heal(16)
18) --> Total Focus==> Acc(18)Acc(19)Dmg(19)Dmg(23)Dmg(25)Rechg(25)
20) --> Stamina==> EndMod(20)EndMod(21)EndMod(21)
22) --> Aid Other==> Heal(22)
24) --> Aid Self==> Rechg(24)Rechg(27)Heal(27)Heal(29)Heal(36)
26) --> Taunt==> Rechg(26)
28) --> Energy Drain==> Rechg(28)Rechg(29)EndMod(31)EndMod(33)Rechg(37)EndMod(40)
30) --> Energy Cloak==> DefBuf(30)DefBuf(31)DefBuf(31)
32) --> Energy Transfer==> Acc(32)Acc(33)Dmg(33)Dmg(34)Dmg(34)Dmg(34)
35) --> Whirling Hands==> Acc(35)Acc(36)Dmg(36)Dmg(37)Dmg(37)
38) --> Overload==> Rechg(38)Rechg(39)Rechg(39)DefBuf(39)Heal(40)Heal(40)
---------------------------------------------
01) --> Sprint==> Run(1)
01) --> Brawl==> Acc(1)
01) --> Fury==> Empty(1)
02) --> Rest==> Rechg(2)
---------------------------------------------
PARTING THOUGHTS
I hope you've enjoyed my guide, and that I haven't put you to sleep too badly. Hopefully you haven't found too much to disagree with--and if you think I'm wrong about something, you'll (politely) let me know why. Even if my preferred playstyle is not your own, you should at least be able to use the information I've provided with yours.
Playing City of Villains is a constant learning process--you'll never know everything there is to know about it. (This is even more true with the way the updates often force us to redesign our characters entirely, but oh well.) With that in mind, you shouldn't stop with just my guide. Check out other guides, too, to see if they have different opinions, or information I might have missed. For example, Inspector6's An EM/EA Brute's Guide to Level 40 disagrees with me on the usefulness of Taunt, favors building for damage resistance rather than healing, and is more interested in PVP than PVE. It also has a potentially-useful template of when you should take the "must-have" powers that I was very tempted to steal for this guide, but thought better of. There's no One True Way to build a CoV character, so read and learn and make your own decisions.
But don't just read other Energy Melee/Energy Aura Brute guides--guides to Energy/* and */Energy Brutes, and even Energy/Energy Stalkers and */Energy Tankers might have some useful hints to offer as well. We share some of the same powers after all, even if the order and uses are a bit different.
Welcome to the world of the Energy/Energy Brute. May you have a brutally good time!
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to all the members of the Brute forum and friends from elsewhere who read the draft version of this guide and provided some excellent feedback, corrections, and helpful information. Thanks especally to Sable_Blaze for his kind comment, "I was seriously considering an EM/EA guide myself, but after seeing this...well...no point in it now!"
Extra-special thanks to Dragonov for providing _Castle_'s Fury equations, and anarchicgorilla for simplifying them and saving me many headaches.
(Somehow the darned board interface double-posted on me. If a dev could remove this one, that would be good.)
Lots of info here. No one should ever have any doubts about what they're getting into once they read your guide.
[Also, while I appreciate the plug, apparently I overstated the usefulness of damage resistance in my guide. I think that both Aid Self and Tough (with Dampening Field) are among the better options for an EA, but the truth is, I have niether on my own build at the moment.]
---------------------
Inspector 6
Victory Server
MATH ERROR
Boy is my face red.
The calculations, and the conclusions I draw based on them, in the Fury part of the Inherent Powers section of the guide are wrong.
I had misread the base damage percentages for Scrappers.
I had thought that Brutes were at .75, Blasters were at 1.0, and Scrappers were at 1.25...which would make Brutes' damage equivalent to exactly 60% of a Scrapper's. (.75/1.25 = 60/100).
But it turns out that Scrappers' base damage is actually 1.125, not 1.25...somehow I missed reading that pesky extra 1. Which throws the calculations and conclusions off.
Thus, at full Fury and with Build-Up, Brutes do still outdamage Scrappers. When you take into account the higher Brawl Indexes of Brute attacks, they do so even more. And their damage caps out higher too.
And naturally this comes out only when it's too late to edit the guide in place. I'm going to have to rewrite that section of the guide completely and put it up here sometime in the next few days.
Wish someone had caught that in the draft version. :/
Also, I'm told that powers don't start recharging until the activation time ends. (The annoying thing is, I actually knew this on some subconscious level as I figured it into my damage per second calculations that way.) Which means I need to rewrite the parts of my descriptions of Barrage and Energy Punch that talk about recharge rates vs activation times. I'll likely end up moving the thing about slotting to cut the time in half up from Barrage, and also add something about spending 3 recharges to gain 1 second of recharge reduction not being slot-economical.
Luckily I7, and an excuse to do a new edition of the guide, is just a month away!
Still the best EM/EA guide out there.
Flagged, Tagged and Bagged.
(Well, flagged for favorites, anyway 
)
Back after 18 months away!
INHERENT
Power: Fury
Description: As a Brute engages in combat, it unleashes his Fury. The longer he remains in combat, attacking and being attacked, the more damage he deals.
Effects: +0% to +200% of base damage
Available: Inherent
Viewpoint: This inherent ability, along with the 850%-of-base-damage cap, is what gets Brutes the reputation of being infernal damage machines--to the point where some people seem to believe that it isn't necessary to slot attacks for Damage, because Fury will take care of that for them.
While these are good effects, they're actually only part of the story--because that is only 67% that of a Scrapper. That's right, 67%. While Tankers get 80%, Brutes have to make do with 67%, which means that Fury is no longer a neat extra, but rather something that is required to do our job. However, when we have it running, we can outdamage just about any other class in the game.
The version of this section that appeared in my I6 guide was a maze of mathematics and footnotes, and more than one person complained that it was moderately incomprehensible. Furthermore, due to a misreading on my part, it was mathematically wrong on top of that. I intend to do better this time.
But if you'd rather not risk mathematical confusion, here's the executive summary: Brutes can outdamage Scrappers in most situations provided they can get full Fury. If that's all you need to know, feel free to skip ahead. If you'd like to know by how much, read on.
There are two aspects of Scrapper versus Brute damage we will look at: base damage percentage, and attack brawl index.
Base damage percentage compares the damage that each class could do if they used an attack that would otherwise do exactly the same amount of damage--for example, Brawl. By having a character from each class use these attacks and comparing the amount of damage, we can discover how much more damage ability some classes are granted than others.
Because until recently, the only attack that every single character in City of Heroes and Villains had in common was Brawl, Brawl has become the standard unit of measurement for comparing the effectiveness of attacks. Thus, it has become common practice to measure how much damage an attack does in terms of "Brawl Index." If a power is listed as having a Brawl Index of 2.7778, that means a character using that attack, unslotted, does 2.7778 times as much damage as the same character would do using unslotted Brawl.
Base Damage
When we investigate base damage, this is what we find. Using the Blaster as the standard against which other damage-dealing classes are measured (don't ask me why), we have Blasters' melee damage set to 100%. By comparison, Brutes do 75% and Scrappers do 112.5%. (The numbers for ranged damage are different, but we aren't concerned about those for the most part.) Thus, Scrappers do 75/112.5 as much damage as Scrappers. At first these numbers look kind of ugly, but if we divide both sides by 37.5, we find it reduces to Brutes doing exactly 2/3, or 66.67%, of the base damage of Scrappers. (See this guide for more information than you could possibly ever want to know about base damage percentages.)
What this means is that, if we invented a made-up melee attack that could be taken by both a Scrapper and a Brute that did 100 points of damage for the Scrapper, it would do 66.67 (which I'll round off to 67) points of damage for the Brute. This assumes, of course, that the attack is not slotted and none of the above ATs are using Build-Up, Aim, Fury, or any other damage-boosting powers on them.
Imagine a Brute and a Scrapper have just been created with this mythical 100-point attack, and have just exited their respective Training Rooms. The Scrapper will not have access to Build Up or any other damage-enhancer--but the Brute will have his Inherent Fury, which can add up to 200% to his attacks (1). His base damage with that attack (67) is lower than the Scrapper's (100), but he only needs to get his Fury bar up to about 25% full (50% extra damage) to equal the Scrapper's base damage--and if he gets his Fury bar all the way full, he will be doing 200 damage compared to the Scrapper's 100. The calculations look like this:
Brute: 67 * (100% base + 200% Fury) = 200
Scrapper: 100 * (100% base) = 100
This means that, from the very outset, a Brute can do twice as much damage as a Scrapper if he lets Fury build. This, in turn, means that a Brute has no real need to slot for Damage until he reaches level 22. His attacks will do a significant amount if they hit, just on Fury alone--and it is far more important, thus, to be sure they do hit and deliver that damage (by slotting as many Accuracies as possible), rather than risking them not hitting as often but delivering a tiny amount more if they do.
Now let's imagine that the Scrapper and the Brute both advance several levels until they can both take Build Up, a 100% damage boost over the course of 10 seconds. If they both use Build Up, and the Brute still has full Fury, then over the course of that 10 seconds they're kicking it up a notch to where the Brute does 300 points of damage with this made-up attack and the Scrapper does 230. The damage gap has narrowed, but it's still there.
Brute: 67 * (100% base + 200% Fury + 100% Build Up) = 267
Scrapper: 100 * (100% base + 100% Build Up) = 200
Let's now imagine that they both hit 22 and can take Single Origin Enhancements for their attacks--and they slot 3 Damage SOs, to add another 100% to their firepower. For the 90% of the time they will not be using Build Up, but assuming the Brute still has max Fury, their numbers will look very similar to the above: 267 Damage for the Brute, 200 for the Scrapper.
Brute: 67 * (100% base + 200% Fury + 100% 3 DMG SOs) = 267
Scrapper: 100 * (100% base + 100% 3 DMG SOs) = 200
Now let's assume they both use Build Up. For the next ten seconds, their respective damage rates will be
Brute: 67 * (100% base + 200% Fury + 100% 3 DMG SOs + 100% Build Up) = 333
Scrapper: 100 * (100% base + 100% 3 DMG SOs + 100% Build Up) = 300
And thus at the maximum rate of damage they can do unassisted, the Brute is still outdamaging the Scrapper by 33 points. (And note that if we were discussing a Fire/Fire Brute in the above equations, with both Build Up and Fiery Embrace, the numbers would look even worse from the Scrapper's point of view.)
There is one last measurement to compare before we move on to Brawl Index: the damage cap. Scrappers have a 500% cap--meaning that no matter how many damage-enhancing effects are stacked onto them, they can never do more than five times the base damage of their attacks. Brutes, on the other hand, can reach 850%.
Let's assume that our Brute and Scrapper both receive infinite Fulcrum Shifts or pop infinite Enrage Inspirations, or at least enough to reach their respective damage caps. If they used the same imaginary attack we've been using so far, their caps would be:
Brute: 67 * 850% = 567
Scrapper 100 * 500% = 500
Thus, at their caps, a Brute still does more damage than a Scrapper can.
It should be noted, however, that a full-Fury Brute actually requires more Fulcrum Shift icons or Enrage inspirations (14 if using Build Up along with full Fury, 18 with full Fury alone) to hit his cap than a Scrapper (8 if using Build Up, 12 if not). So, if both the Brute and the Scrapper received 8 Fulcrum Shift icons or popped 8 Enrages, while using Build-Up, the Scrapper would actually outdamage the Brute. This is the only situation that I am aware of where an equally-buffed Scrapper would outdamage a Brute using the same attack.
((1) In actuality, due to the way Fury falls off faster the more you get, you probably won't ever see more than a 190% (95% Fury bar) damage boost from Fury--just as you won't see more than a 95% damage boost from 3 Damage SOs due to Enhancement Diversification. In both cases, I have rounded up for simplicity's sake.)
Brawl Index
However, base damage percentages only tell half the story. We have been assuming, for the above examples, that the Scrapper and the Brute are using an attack that does an identical amount of damage--that is, an identical Brawl Index. However, the only attack for which this is really the case is Brawl.
Let's compare one of the Scrapper sets to Energy Melee in terms of brawl index for its attacks. We'll look at the Broad Sword set, which is the highest-damage Scrapper primary. However, its damage is entirely Lethal, which is heavily-resisted in the late game, and it is also the slowest-animated Scrapper set. Still, it is only fair to compare the highest damage Scrapper to the highest damage Brute.
These are the Brawl Index values of the attacks for Broadsword, as taken from this post:
Broadsword
Hack - 4.5556 Lethal
Slash - 2.7778 Lethal
Slice - 3.4444 Lethal
Parry - 2.3333 Lethal
Whirling Sword - 2.7778 Lethal + (0.2778 * 3) Lethal = 3.3334 total
per target
Disembowel - 5.4444 Lethal
Head Splitter - 7.2222 Lethal
Energy Melee
Barrage - (0.6944 * 2) Smashing + (0.2500 * 2) Energy = 1.8888 total
Energy Punch - 1.9444 Smashing + (0.8333 * 2) Energy = 3.6106 total
Bone Smasher - 2.7778 Smashing + 1.7778 Energy = 4.5556 total
Whirling Hands - 1.6667 Smashing + 1.1111 Energy = 2.7778 total per target
Total Focus - 2.7778 Smashing + 7.1111 Energy = 9.8889 total
Stun - 0.4167 Smashing + 0.2778 Energy = .6945 total
Energy Transfer - 4.3333 Smashing + 8.3333 Energy = 12.6666 total
This comparison shows us that the Broadsword Scrapper's lower-damage attacks tend to be more powerful than the Energy Brute's--but this is probably balanced by their recharge times, since Broadsword is a slower set. The thing that is the most noteworthy, however, are to compare the sets' two most powerful attacks. It has already been shown that a Brute can outdamage a Scrapper on an attack with an equivalent Brawl Index. Consider now that the most powerful Scrapper has attacks that do 5.4444 and 7.2222 times their (100%) version of Brawl--but the most powerful Brute has attacks that do 9.8889 and 12.6666 times their (66.67%) version--and 2/3 of that is in a less-commonly-resisted damage type.
Let's compare brawl values adjusted for the differing base damages. We'll take the most damaging attack from each side, multiply the Brute's version by 2/3 for a direct comparison, then plug them into one of the equations above in place of our fictitious equivalent attack.
Head Splitter = 7.2222 Lethal
Energy Transfer = 12.6666 * 2/3 = equivalent of 8.4444 Smash/Energy
Assuming the Brute has full Fury, and both he and the Scrapper have
popped Build Up, the attacks would compare as follows:
Brute: 8.4444 * (100% base + 200% Fury + 100% 3 DMG SOs + 100% Build Up) = 42.222 times the damage of the Scrapper's unslotted Brawl)
Scrapper: 7.2222 * (100% base + 100% 3 DMG SOs + 100% Build Up) = 300 = 21.666 times the damage of the Scrapper's unslotted Brawl
So, assuming Fury is full, each respective attack is fully slotted, and Build-Up is running, Energy Transfer can deliver twice the actual damage in a single hit that Head Splitter does--and two thirds of that in a damage type (Energy) that is significantly less commonly resisted in the late game than the Broadsword Scrapper's (Lethal). And if they both hit their respective caps, the numbers look even worse: 71.7774 for the Brute, 36.1110 for the Scrapper.
Of course, this comparison is not completely fair, since it doesn't take into account recharge times, Endurance cost, and so forth. What it shows is that a Brute is capable of dealing a much higher amount of damage in a single blow than the highest-damaging Scrapper can; it does not compare relative damage per second rates or any other comparative performance over time.
But all of the above calculations are contingent upon your being able to obtain a good head of Fury and keep it there while dealing your damage. It's not usually too hard to get it up--there will be specific tips on that further down in this guide--but keeping it up can be a challenge, especially if you are on a team. However, if you can keep your Fury up, no class in the game except another Brute can outdamage you.
The truth is, I'd made that same mistake about thinking that Scrapper damage was 125%, not 112.5% I was using the wrong number for quite some time. So don't feel bad. 
One correction, though, you compare the Brute's 75% (of Blaster damage) to the Scrapper's 112.5% (of Blaster damage) and conclude it does 66.7% of a Scrapper's damage, which is correct. However, in the same sentence you say a Tanker does 80% damage. 80% of a Blaster's damage, yes, but not of a Scrapper's damage, which is what you are comparing the Brute's 66.7% damage to.
A Tanker's damage is actually 71.1% of a Scrapper's damage, which is about what you'd expect considering it is about 5% more than a Brute's damage.
Thannks for all the hard work RM. I just started a Em/Em Brute recently and it was nice to read your take on it.
Infinity
Co-Leader, Paragon City Defense Fleet
Co-Leader, Scions of Arachnos
Captain Cure, Emp/Rad Def
Captain Corruption, Robot/Traps MM
and many many more alts
Altoholics Anon.
awesome guide.. will read most of it later
R_M'S I6 GUIDE TO ENERGY MELEE/ENERGY AURA BRUTES
Whether you've got a Energy/Energy Brute already, are thinking of making one, or just wandered in off the street because it's raining out there, welcome to my Energy Melee/Energy Aura Brute guide. As the guide will only be fully valid for about a month, I considered just posting it to the Brute forum until I7 came in on the Training Room and I could post an I7-updated version. However, there's no real point in posting an I7 guide before I7 actually hits the live servers, and it would take me some time to do the updates anyway, so there's no point in not making this guide easily-found so interested players can make the most of it in that last month or so before I7 comes out. There's still time to get an Energy Melee/Energy Aura Brute to level 40 if you hurry--especially if you don't mind outlevelling content. As for what it is that drives me to write immense guides when I already know they're shortly going to be obsolescent--don't ask me, I just don't know.
Whether you have or plan to make an Energy/Energy Brute, an Energy/* Brute, a */Energy Brute, or some other kind of Brute, you'll probably find something in here you can use; for example, the sections on understanding and building Fury apply equally to all Brutes. Even if you don't have a Brute, you might find this guide helpful for understanding their needs so you can work better with them on a team.
Before we begin, you might want to glance at these other two guides, which cover Brutes in general:
Brute = SMASH! - An intro guide to the Brute AT
The Art of SMASH! - Basic Training for Brutes
Some of the information in them is out-of-date (such as a quote from _Castle_ giving Fury's percentage boost as 300% when it was changed to 200% at the end of the CoV beta), but by and large they offer a good foundation for understanding who it is Brutes are and what they do.
I hope you've got an hour or two to spare, 'cuz I'm gonna go way in-depth here. If you have a copy of War and Peace, it might be shorter if you went and read that instead. I'll start by going over the overall reasons to choose Energy Melee, Energy Aura, and Energy Melee plus Energy Aura. Then I'll go one by one through each power in the set with my commentary and viewpoints on what they do and how to use them most effectively. After that I'll discuss Travel Powers, Power Pools, and Patron Pools, then I'll spend some time discussing how Fury is figured and how to build it and manage it, and other miscellaneous tricks of the trade. Next, I will talk about how Accuracy and Defense are figured, and how Defense is projected to change in Issue 7. After that I will give some tips for how to advance level by level, and talk about some particularly pesky foes you need to watch out for. I'll close out with my own Brute's current build as an example.
Bear in mind, this is all my opinion, even if it sounds like I'm making Pronouncements From On High in the body of the guide--it just looks too wishy-washy to preface every statement with "I believe" or "I think" or "In my opinion." If it helps, add a mental "IMO" to the beginning of every sentence. I'm writing what I've found in my 40 levels of EM/EA Brute experience, and it's possible my experiences don't match yours.
There are all sorts of playstyles in this game, and I can only write definitively about the way that I personally play--though I try to give a good accounting of opposing arguments when I know a lot of people prefer a different style. It's possible you may find some of the tips in here don't work with the way you'd rather do things, and that's fine. You may even find I'm completely dead wrong about something (though my ego rebells at this notion). In any event, I'm committed to making this the best guide that it's possible to be, so if you think I'm wrong on some point, or left something out, don't just call me a doodiehead--tell me why you differ with me, and if it makes sense I'll incorporate it into the next version so people can make up their own minds.
Furthermore, when writing this guide, I drew information from a number of sources, including version 1.7.5.0 of Sherk Silver's Hero Builder program (which is known to have some inaccuracies; if that particular version conflicts with something written here, what's written here is probably the accurate version). I'm not completely positive of all my numbers; if you have information from a reputable source (including Herostats hit testing and so forth) that contradicts what I say in here, please let me know.
WHY ENERGY MELEE/ENERGY AURA?
This is a valid question, but when you think about it it actually breaks down into three valid questions: why Energy Melee, why Energy Aura, and why both together.
Why Energy Melee?
Energy Melee is the highest-damage single-target set that Brutes have. If you're interested in taking down enemies quickly one at a time, this is the set for you. For Tankers, Energy Melee used to be referred to as "the archvillain-killer" because its single-target damage was far enough above other classes' to allow an Energy Meleer to defeat archvillains single-handedly over time. The Brute's version does not suffer by comparison.
A side benefit of Energy Melee is that all the attacks have at least a 30% chance of applying at least a 5-second Disorient effect. Over time, these Disorients can stack and result in enemy stuns (and toggle drops in PVP).
The downside of Energy Melee is that it tends to use a great deal of Endurance, and has only one multiple-target attack. (Some would class the "pink pompom" glowing fist effects and the "ka-smacka" sound effects as a downside, too, but that's largely a matter of personal taste.)
Why Energy Aura?
Energy Aura is a primarily Defensive (with some minor Resistance also available) Brute set, brought in to replace the Ice set that was removed from CoV during beta. First of all, it provides excellent Defense against every type of damage except Psionic, Toxic, and Negative Energy (and mediocre Defense against Negative Energy) and optional Resistance against several of the more common damage types. Furthermore, it includes a mez-defense toggle that covers knockdown and knockback in addition to the usual types, a Stealth power that does not slow movement or (currently) suppress on attack, not one but two Endurance recovery/conservation options, and a panic-button/"god mode" that combines some of the better aspects of Elude, Dull Pain, and Stamina.
The downsides are that, as a Defensive set, Energy Aura suffers from the same at-least-1-in-20 chance of taking a hit for full damage (or 9/10 damage if the Resistance is fully-slotted) as Super Reflexes, as well as the Defense-based power sets' inability to scale when facing higher-level foes (although this latter flaw will be remedied with the Defense changes in Issue 7). More than any other Brute set, Energy Aura is vulnerable to runs of bad luck--if an EA Brute takes too many hits in a row, he can go from full to no hit points faster than the player can react. Also, Energy Aura is a bit of a toggle-intensive set, meaning that a good deal of Endurance-management is required--especially when used in conjunction with an End-intensive primary such as Energy Melee.
Why Both Together?
Energy Melee and Energy Aura don't have any huge synergies beyond those that Brute power sets get in general, so the choice of the two together largely boils down to an individual choice to take each one. (If synergies are what you're looking for, a better choice might be Dark Melee/Energy Aura; the to-hit debuffs in DM stack nicely with the Defense of EA to make you even harder to hit.) It might simply be that you feel obliged to match attack and defense types when two matching types are available. However, Energy Melee's Disorients do provide a helping hand to the Energy Aura set's Defense hit-mitigation: if a foe is disoriented, he's not attacking you.
Well-built Energy/Energy Brutes are extremely good solo characters, being capable of dealing damage, avoiding damage, healing damage (if their build includes Aid Self), and (at level 28) recovering Endurance rapidly, so they can tear through missions without ever having to slow down. In fact, since the patch that changed Archvillains or Heroes to Elite Bosses for small enough teams on given levels of difficulty, there are very few missions that would require an EM/EA Brute to team at all if he did not want to.
EM/EA Brutes are particularly good at rapid mission completion through the expedient of superspeeding and/or stealthing to the mission objectives; for those missions where this is not possible (such as "Defeat All" or "Rescue/Kidnap Hostage" missions), they can still do damage fast enough to clear the entire mission in a very short timeframe.
PVEVPVP
One of the biggest flaws with the City of Heroes combat system is that there is a fairly wide gap in effectiveness between PVE combat ("player versus environment"--going up against computer-operated enemies) and PVP ("player versus player") combat. Due to the difference in the way accuracy is calculated, a build optimized for PVE will get handily spanked in PVP by a build optimized for PVP. This means that, by and large, PVP is a binary proposition: either it's what you do, or you don't do much of it at all.
As I'm not all that much on PVP, and so never bothered to optimize my character for it, the main focus of this guide is on PVE. Nonetheless, I will touch upon the differences in selecting or slotting given powers for PVP and PVE when they come up (though, given my lack of experience, this will generally be based on observation and thread-reading rather than experimentation); this should let you come up with your own optimizations for PVP.
As a general rule, a PVP-focused Energy/Energy Brute will have three Accuracies in his attacks rather than two, and will have Build Up slotted with To-Hit Buff x3 in addition to the recommended Recharge Rate x3 (see the Viewpoint on Build Up for full explanation). He may also carry more Disorient Durations in his attacks to assist with stacking to overcome mez resistance.
Brutes in general, and Energy Aura Brutes in particular, may not be the best choice for PVP, overall, for two main reasons. First, Fury generation currently does not work properly in PVP--instead of generating Boss/AV levels of Fury when in combat with a fellow player (as we had previously been told), you only generate approximately Minion levels (until you reach the 80% diminishing-return threshold, when you start generating AV levels of Fury), making it very hard to generate and keep full Fury. And without Fury, you're worse off than even a Tanker when it comes to dealing damage. It is not certain when or if this PVP Fury problem will be fixed. (See the section on the Fury Inherent power below, and the section on calculating and building Fury later in this guide.)
Second, Energy Aura is a Defensive-based set, and Defenses can be overcome in PVP as simply as hitting Aim or Build Up. In fact, just one use of an unslotted Build Up (50% To-Hit Buff) is capable of more-than-counteracting all benefits of an Energy Aura Brute's stacked toggles--and unslotted Aim (100%) by itself can counteract the toggles and Overload combined. Put them together and slot them and your poor Defense-based set doesn't stand a chance. The Developers have said they will be looking into ways to adjust for this discrepancy, but it is unclear when or if it will be fixed.
In forum posts, I have read that when playing an Energy Aura Brute in PVP, it is best to play like a Stalker--striking and fading, rather than trying to stand toe-to-toe like a Tanker. How effective this strategy would really be, I cannot say, as I have never been an extensive PVP participant.
POWERS TO THE PEOPLE
Note about Recommended Slotting: For my recommended slotting under each power, I have given the slotting you would give it if you decided that one power was one of the most important powers in your build--i.e., if you were going to six-slot a particular power (save for powers that don't gain any worthwhile benefit out of being six-slotted), what you would put into it. I did this even for powers I recommend skipping, just so if you feel you need them you'll know what I think the optimal slotting would be. In practice, if you tried to slot out everything with the number of slots I list you would quickly run out of slots. My goal here is to give you information about what I believe each power needs to be at its individual best, not to lock you into any one particular build.
Remember that powers can be slotted all sorts of different ways depending on what effect you are trying to achieve. Just because the slottings I suggest make sense to me does not mean they are necessarily the right thing for you. Also, these slottings assume you are optimizing for PVE; as mentioned above, PVP will often have different slottings.
Note About Percentage Calculations: For the calculations that involve 3-slotting powers, I used the rounded up values of 60% and 100% for simplicity's sake, even though with Enhancement Diversification they're likely to be closer to 55% and 95%. This might make a difference of one to two percentage points in the final calculation--not really enough to be important, but something to keep in mind if exact accuracy matters to you.
For calculations that involve 2- or 1-slotting, I use the base, "white" SO values of 20% and 33% per SO depending on schedule. If you stay green they'll be a couple percent higher; if you go yellow they'll be a couple percent lower.
Also, I commonly refer to maxed-out Fury as being +200% base damage. In actuality, Fury decays so rapidly at the high end that you are unlikely to experience more than +190% very often.
INHERENT
Power: Fury
Description: As a Brute engages in combat, it unleashes his Fury. The longer he remains in combat, attacking and being attacked, the more damage he deals.
Effects: +0% to +200% of base damage
Available: Inherent
Viewpoint: This inherent ability, along with the 850%-of-base-damage cap, is what gets Brutes the reputation of being infernal damage machines--to the point where some people seem to believe that it isn't necessary to slot attacks for Damage, because Fury will take care of that for them.
While these are good effects, they're actually only part of the story--because what they don't mention is that Brutes have a base damage ability (measured in terms of Brawl Index--the amount of damage that 1 unslotted Brawl attack from each class will do) that is only 60% that of a Scrapper. That's right, 60%. While Tankers get 80%, Brutes are given a mere 60%, which means that Fury is no longer a neat extra, but rather something that is required to do our job.
Consider how the effects of damage buffs stack up. Let's give both Scrappers and Brutes a hypothetical attack with an identical Brawl index value that does exactly 100 damage points base for the Scrapper, but 60 for the Brute.
Scrapper: 100 dmg * 100% base + 100% 3 dmg SOs + 100% Build Up = 100 * 300% = 300 damage
Brute: 60 dmg * 100% base + 100% 3 dmg SOs + 100% Build Up + 200% Fury = 60 * 500% = 300 damage
In the end, the Brute and Scrapper do exactly the same amount of total Brawl index-adjusted damage--except the Brute has to work for it, by building Fury up. And over time, the Scrapper will actually average out about 5% higher, due to the 1-in-20 Critical Hit effect that is the Scrapper's inherent ability.
And let's say that both the Scrapper and the Brute were given infinite Fulcrum Shift boosts so they would both hit their damage cap.
Scrapper: 100 dmg * 500% = 500 dmg
Brute: 60 dmg * 850% = 510 dmg
So, the much-vaunted 850% damage cap is worth a whole 10 extra points of damage on a 100-point Scrapper-base attack. And it takes substantially more Fulcrum Shifts for a Brute to get there. (14 shift icons (or small Rage Inspirations) for the Brute, assuming he starts from full Fury and Build Up, as opposed to 4 for the Scrapper.) When you compare Brutes to Scrappers in terms of total raw damage output capacity, the Brute clearly comes off second-best. (However, that does still give him a 25% advantage over Tankers, damage-wise, and most of a Brute's damage sets are comparable to Tankers rather than Scrappers.) (1)
While these calculations show that it is necessary for a Brute to slot for damage if he wants to be comparable to a Scrapper in what he can dish out, ironically Brutes don't need to slot for damage as early as a Scrapper does. Since Scrappers are dependant on Enhancements for the larger portion of their damage, Brute damage is actually front-loaded thanks to a portion of it being in Fury. If we repeat the above calculations with the 100% from Damage SOs left out of the equation... (2)
Scrapper: 100 dmg * 100% base + 100% Build Up = 100 * 200% = 200 damage
Brute: 60 dmg * 100% base + 100% Build Up + 200% Fury = 60 * 400% = 240 damage
...you'll see that Brutes definitely come out ahead. Leave out Build-Up and the difference becomes even more pronounced (100 vs 180). Thanks to Fury, Brutes have a big advantage in the early game of being able to do more damage at the outset. This is why Brutes should slot their attacks exclusively with Accuracy from levels 1-11, and mostly with Accuracy (with perhaps some End Reduction or Recharge Rate thrown in) from levels 12 to 21: it's far better to be able to hit the enemy and do base-plus-Fury damage to him than it is not to be able to hit the enemy but to do an additional +8% per Training or 17% per DO to them if you do. Also, consider that an additional 8% damage to the lower-end attacks that are all you'll have during your Training phase will usually work out to about half a point of actual extra damage, if that. Until you get SOs, slot predominantly to be able to hit, and let your Fury take care of the damage for you.
((1) To be fair, base damage percentage does not tell the whole story. It has been pointed out to me that the Brawl Index multiplier, or amount of damage per attack as measured in multiples of that class's Brawl damage, tends to be higher overall for Brute attacks than for Scrapper attacks--meaning that, Brawl index-adjusted multipliers of base damage being equal a Brute could still out-damage a Scrapper attack for attack. Nowhere is this as true as for Energy Melee, which has the highest Brawl Index of any Brute Primary. No Scrapper primary has any attack that can compare to Total Focus or Energy Transfer, especially at full Fury and Build Up. It's still a good idea to slot Damage SOs, however, to press this advantage as far as you can.)
((2) As a side note, the same numbers apply if you keep the 100% base from SOs and leave off the 100% from Build-Up. Thus, when Build-Up is not available to either side--which is the case most of the time--Brutes can still significantly outdamage Scrappers, especially when you take the Brutes' higher Brawl Index into account. Likewise, Fiery Melee/Fiery Aura Brutes who also have Fiery Embrace have an even bigger damage advantage, but that's a subject for another guide.)
Fury is a fickle friend; it is sometimes very hard to get that bar all the way to the end and keep it there. Slow down for just a few seconds, and you've lost a big chunk of it. And it can be very hard to build and keep Fury as an Energy/Energy Brute while on a team, due to our lack of a damage aura and many AoE attacks.
I'll give some specific tips for Fury generation and maintenance in later in this guide.
Power: Brawl
Available: Inherent
After the first half-dozen or so levels, Brawl tends to be considered a useless power for almost every class, and is often removed to a secondary tray to make room for more useful icons. It does very little damage when it hits, and there is usually something better that can be done with the Endurance and time spent casting it when you have later powers.
But Brutes are the exception. Brutes actually need Brawl, to help fill out their attack chain--and that's just as true at level 40 as it is at level 1. As an attack, Brawl builds Fury, and prevents Fury from dropping, every bit as much as any other attack. As such, it should be set on automatic fire (by holding down control and clicking the icon so that a green circle appears around it) in most circumstances. As a fire-and-forget attack, it builds Fury for you even when you don't realize you're using it. This can sometimes be the difference between a mostly-full bar and an empty bar, and the extra damage capacity attained thereby.
For what it does, Brawl does a trivial amount of damage, but uses a fairly high amount of Endurance--and since it builds Fury equally well whether it hits or misses, you don't need to worry about Accuracy. Once you get into the teens, you may wish to slot it for Endurance Reduction instead. On the other hand, if you're doing PVP, you might want even more Accuracy for that chance of knocking off the other party's toggles if it hits.
Some players of Brutes advise not bothering with Brawl and instead using autofire another power, such as Barrage, Boxing, or Air Superiority, that fires off about as fast but has more damage or some other useful effect when it lands. Whether this is feasible depends on whether you have enough powers in your attack chain that you can afford not to use your "freebie". It is true that auto-firing Brawl can be more End-intensive than using some other power, but it also means more attack powers are available to use in your manual chain.
ENERGY MELEE
Power: Barrage
Description: You perform a quick punch that deals minor damage. Coupled with other energy punches, Barrage can Disorient a foe.
Effects: Melee -- Foe Disorient
Activation Time: 2
Endurance Cost: 5
Recharge Time: 2
Range: 5
Brawl Index: Smashing(0.6944*2),Energy(0.2500*2)
Disorient: 100% 5 sec @ Magnitude 1
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Disorient Duration,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 1
Viewpoint: Barrage is one of the three most damaging powers over time, in terms of damage-per-second output (obtained by adding animation time and recharge time together and dividing this by the attack's Brawl Index), in the Energy Melee set. However, this calculation can be deceiving: the attack's activation time and its recharge time are identical, so if you're obtaining the maximum damage per second out of this attack, you don't have time to fire off anything else. As a "basic" starting attack, Energy Punch is much more effective--it has the highest overall DPS of any Energy Melee power other than Energy Transfer, and a long-enough cast time that there's room for throwing other things between.
Barrage does have a 100% chance of applying a 5-second Disorient, making it one of only three 100% stun chance powers in Energy Melee (the others being Stun and Total Focus). However, it is a stun of only Magnitude 1, not enough by itself to overcome the mez resistance of almost any other NPC or PC enemy--and at 5 seconds' base duration, it doesn't have all that much time to stack with other powers. This 100% stun aspect may be somewhat useful in PVP, where the goal is to stack as many stuns as quickly as possible so as to drop toggles, but it is doubtful it will be terribly effective in PVE. (It has also been suggested to me that the Disorient chance may actually be less than 100%--100% should mean 2 hits would be sufficient to Disorient a Minion, which does not always happen. However, this is the only number I have, and I'm sticking to it unless someone else can provide me with a better one. If it's not 100%, then I would guess it's most lilely 60% based on what other powers in the set have.)
Some have claimed that Brutes' Fury gives players a reason to take that first attack in their melee class--the one that they always wished they could avoid when they were playing Tankers with the same sets. They say that all the attacks are vital for building an attack chain that will grow their Fury bar faster. In theory, this may be right. However, at least for Energy Melee Brutes, by the time you put on a dozen more levels you will have enough stronger attacks that you can fill out your chain without ever needing to hit Barrage--which makes Barrage a wasted skill. And besides, the new Origin-based level 1-10 temp powers make having an extra weak attack at the start less necessary to the chain.
Furthermore, I have become convinced that a good attack chain is only about 1/4 to 1/3 of successful Fury generation. By far more important is getting the bad guys to attack you and keep attacking you. Even though Fury builds twice as fast for an attack you make on a foe as for that same foe attacking you, getting several foes to attack you at once can still build Fury several times as fast as you can just by hitting one of them. You can punch a Minion forever without getting much more than half a fury bar to show for it, but if you're taking the hits--especially from Lieutenants or Bosses--you can get a full bar very quickly without throwing a single punch.
From my point of view, you have two options where Barrage is concerned: skip it in favor of Energy Punch, or else take it for attack-chain-building on the way up and respec out of it at 24. I would be highly inclined to suggest the former, as I am not a believer in the practice of building with the intention of respecing to a different build down the road. I feel this way for two reasons: first, it squanders a valuable, nonrenewable resource that you might later need to use due to unforeseen power changes or a mistake in build, and second, respecing into a new build without thought given to lower-level survivability can cripple you if you ever need to malefactor down to those lower levels again. Better to do it right the first time.
I would strongly suggest skipping Barrage; if you really must have another low-level melee attack besides Energy Punch, wait until level six and take Air Superiority or Boxing. At least Air Sup will have a useful knockdown effect, and Boxing will serve as a prerequisite to Tough and Weave if you are putting those in your build.
Note, by the way, that I do not suggest placing a Recharge Rate in Barrage--for the simple reason that it will not do any good. Barrage's activation time of 2 seconds is exactly the same as its recharge time--so no matter how many recharges you put into it, you're not going to be able to use it any faster than its animation time allows.
Suggested Slotting:
1-11 (TOs): Acc x6
12-21 (DOs): Acc x3-4/End Reduc x2-3
22+ (SOs): Acc x2/Dmg x3/End Reduc x0-1
Power: Energy Punch
Description: You perform a powerful Energy Punch that deals moderate damage. When used with other Energy Melee attacks, Energy Punch can Disorient your opponent.
Effects: Melee -- Foe Disorient
Activation Time: 2
Endurance Cost: 7.5
Recharge Time: 4
Range: 5
Brawl Index: Smashing(1.9444),Energy(0.8333*2)
Disorient: 30% 5 sec @ Magnitude 2
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Disorient Duration,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 1
Viewpoint: A good attack that deals a decent amount of damage, has a fairly short recharge rate and animation, and thus will be one of your mainstays in terms of overall damage-per-second (it has the 2nd-highest DPS rate in the Energy Melee set, just behind Energy Transfer). Take it as your Level 1 attack power. Until you get the more powerful clubs for your bag, such as Bone Smasher, Total Focus, and Energy Transfer, this is going to be how you deal the majority of your damage.
Energy Punch has a 30% chance of conferring a 5-second Magnitude 2 Disorient on a succesful hit. While this is not something that should be counted on to save you from getting injured, this Disorient is nonetheless helpful in mitigating attacks if it happens to take effect--and as an Energy Aura Brute, you need all the attack mitigation you can get.
The suggested slotting I give below assumes that hitting with Energy Punch and doing the maximum damage when you use it are important to you--as they will be most at the low levels where it is one of your only attacks. However, there is an alternate philosophy of slotting the first few powers, when you have your harder-hitting powers in, that reduces the number of Accuracies and Damages in exchange for slotting more Recharge Rates and End Reduction. The idea is that, if you're just using your low-end attacks as Fury builders anyway, you don't need to hit as often or do as much damage with them; they're just raising your bar so your more damaging attacks do more damage, so you should fire them off as often as you can.
This is certainly a legitimate choice. However, if you're going to slot a fast-charging power for recharge, pay attention to the recharge time versus the activation time--it does you no good to make the recharge shorter than the activation. For example, Energy Punch's activation is 2 seconds and its recharge is 4. This means that it only takes either 3 Recharge Rates, or 1 Recharge Rate + Hasten, to reduce its recharge time to the same as the animation. If you're using Hasten in your build, you might as well not put more than 1 Recharge Rate in the power, or else it will be wasted 2/3 of the time you're fighting. And even if you do get all the way down to recharge rate equalling animation time, you're not going to be able to get full benefit out of it because if you're using it as often as it refreshes, then you won't have time to fit anything else in between.
This is also a concern when slotting fast Power Pool attacks, such as Air Superiority or Boxing; however, since I do not list their stats in this guide, you will need to check a Hero Builder program or other guide to find out what their activation and recharge times are.
Suggested Slotting:
1-11 (TOs): Acc x6
12-21 (DOs): Acc x3-4/End Reduc x2-3
22+ (SOs): Acc x2/Dmg x3/Rechg or End Reduc x0-1
Power: Bone Smasher
Description: A Bone Smasher attack can be slow, but it compensates by dealing a good amount of damage and having a better chance to Disorient than Energy Punch.
Effects: Melee -- Foe Disorient
Activation Time: 1
Endurance Cost: 12
Recharge Time: 8
Range: 5
Brawl Index: Smashing(2.7778),Energy(1.7778)
Disorient: 60% 5 sec @ Magnitude 2
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Disorient Duration,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 2
Viewpoint: Bone Smasher will be your first "finishing move" attack. Its recharge rate is slow enough that you will be able to hit several times with Brawl, Energy Punch, and your Inherent Temp for each Bone Smasher attack. Nonetheless, don't count it out; its ability to deliver an extra chunk of damage quickly at the right time means it can finish fights before they finish you.
As a stronger version of Energy Punch, Bone Smasher has a 60% chance of delivering a 5-second Magnitude 2 Disorient effect, which can be helpful in taking some of the heat off if you haven't quite finished the foe yet.
You will note in my suggested slottings for these attacks I do not include any Disorient Durations. The reason for this is that you really don't need them. As an Energy Melee Brute, you have the highest single-target damage of any Brute in the game--you're going to finish off most of your PVE foes before that Disorient runs out anyway. In PVP, where Disorients may need to stack to a magnitude of 15 or more, it might be advisable to forego some damage in favor of Disorients on some of your attacks. And if some equivalent to Hamidon Enhancements arrives with Issue 7, replacing Accuracy with Acc/Mez or Damage with Dmg/Mez could be beneficial in some circumstances. But for plain PVE, you should be good without.
Suggested Slotting:
2-11 (TOs): Acc x6
12-21 (DOs): Acc x3-4/End Reduc x2-3
22+ (SOs): Acc x2/Dmg x3/Rechg or End Reduc x0-1
Power: Build Up
Description: Greatly increases the amount of damage you deal for a few seconds, as well as slightly increasing your Accuracy.
Effects: Self +DMG, +ACC
Activation Time: 1
Endurance Cost: 6
Duration: 10
Recharge Time: 90
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,To Hit Buff
Available: Level 6
Viewpoint: Build Up provides a decent boost in attack effectiveness (plus 100% base damage, plus 50% to-hit bonus), and is best used with a full Fury bar and a couple of powerful attacks ready to fire. Build Up plus Fury plus Total Focus and/or Energy Transfer can quickly equal a dead Lieutenant or Boss. The only question is when to take it.
When taken early, Build Up can help make up for the fact that you aren't able to slot your powers with the optimal combination of damage and accuracy until you get SOs at 22. However, because Build Up works by multiplying the effect of the attack powers with which it is used, its overall effectiveness with powers like Energy Punch and Bone Smasher is going to be much smaller than with Total Focus and Energy Transfer--and there are all sorts of useful powers vying to be taken early. Nonetheless, if you're planning on a PVP build, you should probably try to fit it in as soon as possible.
When you are playing PVE, three recharge rates are all that you need in Build Up, to bring it back on-line as quickly as possible. By itself, without any Accuracy Enhancements in your attack powers, Build Up's 50% To-Hit boost would, for the 10 seconds in which it was in effect, cap your accuracy against any PVE foes who are up to 4 levels higher than you. (Base chance to hit +4 mob = 48%. Add 50% and you're at 98%, 3% higher than the cap.) If you use Build Up in conjunction with an attack power 2-slotted for Accuracy, you'll be capped against levels of up to +7 or +8 or more for those ten seconds--assuming those enemies don't have defense bonuses or accuracy debuffs. As you can see, there's no need for any further To-Hit Buff Enhancements for taking on the +2 to +4 enemies that are what you will commonly face in PVE.
But if you're playing in PVP, your base chance to hit is only 50%, and defense bonuses and accuracy debuffs are far more common than among PVE enemies. Therefore, in order to squeeze every last bit of competitive PVP advantage out of Build Up, you should probably slot it for 3x To-Hit Buff as well (bringing its To-Hit boost up to about 95%).
Suggested Slotting:
6+: 3x Recharge Rate
Power: Whirling Hands
Description: By focusing your energy into the muscles in your arms, you can launch a dizzying flurry of attacks against every foe in melee range. Some foes may be hit hard enough to be Disoriented as well.
Effects: PBAoE Melee
Activation Time: 3
Endurance Cost: 19
Recharge Time: 14
Brawl Index: Smashing(1.6667),Energy(1.1111)
Disorient: 30% (per target) 5 sec @ Magnitude 2
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Disorient Duration,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 8
Viewpoint: Whirling Hands is the Energy Melee set's only multiple-target attack, a Point-Blank AoE that uses a similar animation to Fiery Melee's Fire Sword Circle. This attack deals a moderate amount of damage to all the enemies surrounding the Brute, as well as having a 30% chance to confer a 5-second Magnitude 2 Disorient on each one. In practice, this means that if used in the middle of a crowd of foes, it will briefly stun about a third (on average) of the members of that crowd whom it hits (assuming the foes are not mez-resistant). In a critical situation, this can give the Brute a little much-needed breathing room to recover from being pummelled.
It will also serve as a centerpiece of a team-oriented Brute's Fury-management strategy, as each foe who is hit with the attack will be effectively taunted onto the Brute for a while. (See the Viewpoint on Taunt for more information on Fury management in teams.) Since this is not a highly-damaging power anyway, you may wish to consider slotting some Taunt Durations in place of Damages to make the single-target punchvoke last longer.
The question is, when to take this power? Because the focus of an Energy Melee fighter is on single-target attacks, and there are no other AoE attacks that support or depend on Whirling Hands (at least until the Patron Pools come in at 41), it is not a critical power that must be taken as soon as possible. Leaving its role in team-based aggro management aside, it is never going to be more than a support attack; your actual defeating is going to be done with the single-target punches. Therefore, there is no real rush to take it as soon as it becomes available. Indeed, some Brutes never end up taking Whirling Hands at all, seeing it as a distraction from being the best single-target Brute they can be. (It is also not a very useful power for PVP, so should generally be left out of PVP-oriented builds.)
Either way, the single-digit levels are best spent on making sure the basics (such as single-target attacks and shield toggles) are covered. My own build didn't take Whirling Hands until level 35.
Suggested Slotting:
8-11 (TOs): Acc x5
12-21 (DOs): Acc x3-4/End Reduc x2-3
22+ (SOs): Acc x2/Dmg x3/Rechg or End Reduc x0-1
Power: Taunt
Description: Taunts a foe, and all foes around him, to attack you. Useful for pulling villains off an ally who finds himself in over his head. Taunted foes tend to ignore other Heroes and focus on you for quite a while, so use this power cautiously. An Accuracy check is not required to Taunt your foes.
Effects: Ranged -- Targeted Taunt
Activation Time: 3
Endurance Cost: (wasn't included in the character build program from which I cribbed these stats, will research it later)
Recharge Time: 3
Range: 70
Enhancements: Recharge Reduction,Taunt Duration,Range
Available: Level 10
Viewpoint: When soloing, Energy/Energy Brutes rarely have trouble getting and keeping Fury up. All they need to do is pick some bad guys and whale on them for a while with their weaker attacks, taking the hits the bad guys put on them in return. Sometimes they may have to herd two or more spawns together to raise the Fury bar high enough, but that's not usually problematic.
However, teams are another story. Many Brutes find it hard to keep aggro (and thus Fury) on teams, when everyone is dealing damage to and drawing the fire of the enemies.
Despite having some of Tankers' melee and defense sets, Brutes are not Tankers. In particular, they don't get Tankers' Gauntlet (aka "Punchvoke") inherent, which allows Tankers to smack one enemy and get five enemies aggroed onto them. Gauntlet is what allows a Tanker to keep enemy aggro on even the largest of teams.
According to the developers, Brutes actually do have a weak form of "punchvoke" (which is why their attacks are also slottable for Taunt Duration)--but it only affects the target of a given attack, not the target and several others like a Tanker's. This means that a Brute actually has to hit an enemy to keep his aggro. For most Brute primary and secondary sets, this is not a problem; many Brute primaries have AoE attacks (especially Fire), and many Brute secondaries also have damage auras (such as Blazing Aura). A Brute with those can wade into the middle of a group of enemies secure in the knowledge that he's going to hit enough of them to keep their aggro.
However, not only do Energy Melee/Energy Aura Brutes have only one AoE attack (at least until the Patron Pools become available at 41) and no damage aura, but part of their Defense is an invisibility power which makes keeping aggro even harder. Without aggro, they build up very little Fury no matter how many punches they throw--and without Fury, Brutes do even less damage than Tankers. This is where Taunt comes in.
Brutes get much the same Taunt as Tankers do: auto-hit, affects up to 5 targets at a time. The duration may be a little shorter, but that doesn't matter; getting the enemies' attention is the important part. Once you have it, keeping it (and building Fury) is generally easy. You don't really need to slot Taunt beyond the default--after all, you're not a Tanker.
Whether or not to take Taunt is one of the biggest controversies that you can usually find at least one ongoing argument over on the Brutes board. Detractors claim that it's a power that could be better spent on another attack, that Brutes aren't supposed to be Tankers, and that Energy Aura Brutes in particular are so flimsy already that they really have no business drawing more fire than they can handle. But on the other hand, Brutes do need to be able to keep their Fury up on a team, or else they're less damaging than Tankers as well as less durable.
It is possible that a teaming Brute may be able to get by on just Whirling Hands to keep the enemies around him occupied. But Whirling Hands is a point-blank AoE attack, requiring the Brute be right next to the enemies in question to hit them. Taunt has range, so it can be spammed before the Brute even closes with the enemies.
On the other hand, if a Brute is able to take the alpha strike of a team-sized spawn, his Fury bar is going to go from nothing to possibly over half-full in the space of just a couple of seconds. If a Brute can manage to survive through that many attacks, he should have little problem keeping Fury during the rest of the battle, without needing Taunt at all.
In deciding whether to take Taunt, you should first figure out whether you plan to be primarily teaming or soloing. If you don't plan to team much or at all, you can probably get by without Taunt. If you do have teaming in mind (especially for things like Strike Forces and Trials), you might find Taunt to be handy--but you might also find you do not need it after all.
Suggested Slotting:
12-21 (DOs): Rechg x1
22+ (SOs): Rechg x1
Power: Total Focus
Description: Total Focus is complete mastery over Energy Melee. This is a very slow, but incredibly devastating attack that can knock out most opponents, leaving them Disoriented. Due to the exhausting nature of Total Focus, recharge time is very long.
Effects:
Activation Time: 3
Endurance Cost: 27
Duration: 10
Recharge Time: 20
Range: 5
Brawl Index: Smashing(2.7778),Energy(7.1111)
Disorient: 100% 10 sec @ Magnitude 4
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Disorient Duration,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 18
Viewpoint: Energy Melee Stalkers don't get this power until level 32. Energy Melee Tankers don't get it until level 38. You get it at level 18--aren't you lucky?
This is the first of your two "ultimate power attacks". In fact, for the other two Energy Melee classes, it's the ultimate power attack (which is where the "complete mastery" in the power description comes from). However, for some reason Brutes get this one early and Energy Transfer becomes your level 32 attack instead.
Total Focus has a fairly long, albeit impressive, animation (which I like to call "the Bouncy-Bouncy of Doom") and a lengthy recharge time that together put it toward the low end of the damage-per-second scale of Energy Melee attacks. However, that doesn't really matter, because the damage it does in one lump is surpassed only by Energy Transfer, making it a great one-shot or finishing attack. A fully-slotted Total Focus is easily capable of one-shotting white or yellow minions, especially with a full head of Fury and/or Build Up behind it.
In keeping with its original ultimate-power-attack nature, Total Focus has a 100% chance of applying the highest-magnitude longest-duration single Disorient effect you get: ten seconds of Magnitude 4 stunnage. This makes it good for neutralizing pesky Lieutenants, such as Longbow Nullifiers, until you can finish them off--and if you can stack it with another Disorient (such as from Barrage or Stun), it will even keep a Boss stunned for a while. Note that Total Focus does not Disorient you upon using it, even though its power descriptions in some places may still imply that it does.
Endurance-wise, this is your "thirstiest" power in the Melee set--Energy Transfer does more damage, but uses much less End as it takes most of its power from your hit points. Even when you have Stamina it is going to suck down a big chunk of your bar with each use. With that in mind, you would do well to consider devoting a slot or two to End Reduction, at least until you get Energy Drain and can replenish faster. I would advise putting End Reduction in the 6th slot until Energy Drain, then swapping it out for a Recharge Rate so you can damage faster. When Dam/Acc Hami-Os or the equivalent come in with I7, this power is a prime candidate for slotting them so Endurance use (or recharge time) can be reduced still further with the benefit of the freed-up slots.
You should plan your power picks so you can take Total Focus the moment it opens up. You can get by without it--my original build waited until level 26 to take it--but once you've seen what it can do, you won't want to. If you're getting Fitness, then I would suggest you take Swift or Hurdle by 14, Health at 16, Total Focus at 18, and Stamina at 20.
Suggested Slotting:
18-21 (DOs): Acc x3-4/EndReduc x1-2
22+ (SOs): Acc x2/Dmg x3/Rechg or EndReduc x0-1
Power: Stun
Description: By focusing your internal energy on your fists, you can turn them into personal tasers. This Stun attack deals minor damage, but has the best chance to Disorient a target.
Effects: Melee -- Foe Disorient
Activation Time: 2
Endurance Cost: 14.5
Recharge Time: 20
Range: 5
Brawl Index: Smashing(0.4167),Energy(0.2778)
Disorient: 100% 10 sec @ Magnitude 3
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Disorient Duration,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 26
Viewpoint: This power does almost no damage, but has a 100% chance of conferring a Disorient effect just as long as Total Focus's at 10 seconds, and only slightly lower-magnitude, at Magnitude 3. This would make it a natural candidate for a one-two Total Focus/Stun double-whammy that will mez Bosses immediately and put Archvillains/Heroes well on the way to wooziness.
Stun will be most useful in PVP, where stacking Disorients on enemies to get their toggles to fall is the key to an easy victory--especially given the dev comments that toggle-dropping from detoggle-powers will be toned way back in I7. With so few 100% chance stuns, you'll need every one you can get.
There is no question that it can be useful in PVE, as well, for quickly mezzing bosses and AVs to keep them from hitting you. The question is, is it useful enough to spend the power and Enhancement slots on? For most PVE-focused players, the answer seems to be no. In PVE, damage is key, and even tough enemies tend to go down too quickly for stun effects to matter. The extra mez power would be handy, there's no denying that--but there are enough better powers out there for you to take that it's probably not worth the opportunity cost.
Suggested Slotting:
26+ (SOs): Acc x2/Disorient x3/Rechg or End Reduc x0-1
Power: Energy Transfer
Description: Mastery of Energy Melee begins with the ability to transfer your own Hit Points into a punch that deals extreme damage.
Effects: Melee -- Self -HP(10%)
Activation Time: 1
Endurance Cost: 14.5
Recharge Time: 20
Range: 5
Brawl Index: Smashing(4.3333),Energy(8.3333)
Disorient: 30% 5 sec @ Magnitude 3
Enhancements: Endurance Reduction,Recharge Reduction,Taunt Duration,Accuracy,Damage
Available: Level 32
Viewpoint: Available at level 35 for a Tanker but level 26 for a Stalker, this level 32 power is the Energy Melee Brute's "ultimate" attack. More damaging and with much less Endurance expenditure than Total Focus, it also has a very short animation time and a decent recharge rate that puts it in the top three attacks a Brute has in terms of overall damage per second. This uberness does come at a price, however: you lose 10% of your hit points (calculated as a percentage of your total capacity, not your current HP level) every time it is used.
For an ultra-super-duper power attack, "Energy Transfer" has a rather dull name, doesn't it? Whereas other classes have impressive "nuke"-sounding attack names, an Energy Melee Brute's sounds like he's jumpstarting a car. And the animation is rather unimpressive, also--unlike Total Focus's "Bouncy-Bouncy of Doom," Energy Transfer is just an ordinary-looking punch. It's over before you even know it. However, so is the target's life-bar.
With build-up and Fury behind it, Energy Transfer is a one-shot "you-can-die-now" button for anything short of the tougher Lieutenants and above. The first few times you use it, you'll be amazed. "Hey...I just punched him a little, where'd his life bar go?"
Energy Transfer has a 30% chance of a 5-second Magnitude 3 stun on a hit target--on a par with Energy Punch, just a little stronger.
The cost of using Energy Transfer is, of course, 10% of your total hit points if you hit--in the 100 to 140 range for level 32-40, depending on what level you are when you use it. (If you whiff, no hit points are subtracted.) This is actually not as bad a thing as it seems. 140 hit points at a time is about the same as a decent smack attack from an average bad guy--substantially less than a Boss will do. Most of the time you'll hardly even notice it. Besides, if you have Aid Self or greens in your tray, you can erase the effect of multiple Energy Transfers all at once. (Energy Transfer is one of the best arguments for fitting Aid Self into your build; sooner or later all those greens will run out in mid-mission.) And as a side benefit of this health cost, Energy Transfer takes hardly any Endurance to use--so you can use it when your blue bar is almost empty without worrying you'll cause your toggles to drop.
It is apparently not possible to Energy Transfer oneself to death directly any longer--if you use ET when at 10% or less of health, you will bottom out at 1 hit point, just as if you had fallen off a skyscraper. However, when you're at 1 hit point, a hit by anything else will kill you, so it would be best to avoid that circumstance if you can.
Suggested Slotting:
26+ (SOs): Acc x2/Dmg x3/Rechg x1