Stone melee attack chain

Hey all,
I'm half way through with a side project of mine (sm\wp) and I'm one bubble away from 32 and i decided that I wanted to repec him a little at 32. My current attack chain, which has served me relatively well from lvl 1 has been stone mallet\brawl\heavy mallet\brawl\air sup and then toss in seismic smash where necessary. I've done some searching and I've seen a number of people recommend doing away with stone mallet and use stone fist instead.

So, for a lvl 32 stone melee\willpower brute, is there a better attack chain for ST damage\fury building (obviously endurance is less of a problem for this toon...as I have both stamina and qr).

Thanks for any suggestions!

I normally use Stone Mallet, Heavy Mallet, Seismic Smash, Boxing, and Brawl with Fault thrown in when it is up. I don't generally have a set attack chain and just use whatever is ready at the time. I also tend to go for some +recharge so I can use heavy hitters as much as possible.

From a DPA perspective, the powers to drop from that chain are Brawl and Air Sup. Stone Fist does 1 DS in .83 seconds, while Brawl does 0.36 DS in .83 seconds and Air Sup does 1 DS in 1.5 seconds. Air Sup has good KD mitigation - but you have Fault.

You do have Fault, right?

Also, what Gruumch said about boosting your recharge, via frankenslotting, Hasten, and/or set bonuses.

With regular SOs and IOs, pick up Hasten if you can, and slot attacks for accuracy, endurance, and recharge rather than damage. Boxing and Stone Fist are decent Fury builders due to their quick activations, but I'd recommend using all your attacks all the time rather than saving the stronger ones for high Fury.

As for your inf situation, money becomes less of an issue at higher levels - and if you're keen on it, you can play the market game to get more money earlier. Look to the market forum for how to do that - I've never bothered, myself, as just playing my 50s keeps the coffers full enough for my needs, and SOs are entirely sufficient for my leveling characters.

My main is a tanker with SM / WP. Hasten does indeed help. My chain runs something like this,

Start of fight if grouped:
Fault-->Taunt ( take out taunt if solo )
SS-->HM--> * Usually this takes out anything but a boss *
SM-->SF-->Taunt ( if grouped )
_Fault_
SF-->SM-->HM-->SS--> rinse repeat.

@44 I'm never without an attack up, and with Stamina and Quick Recovery I'm never without end. Pretty painless build really

Tremor, IMO is disruptive to the flow of this build. I tried it, hated it, dropped it. It DOES have it's uses, but with all the KD .. having KB slows the speed of your teams progress and worse, it makes your taunting tougher to pull off if they're spread all over the place and wandering away while disoriented. That makes Stone / WPs main weakness even more glaring.

Tremor does roughly 20% less damage than Footstomp with a recharge time 30% faster. Your AOE potential will balance closer to footstomp over time than you might think, though of course footstomp will probably stay ahead due to rage. The faster recharge also means you are applying the knockdown more often, benefiting from the mitigation. Tremor shares the same enormous PBAOE range as footstomp.

Unless you plan on always fighting fewer than three enemies, or just think it's the ugliest most nonthematic power in the world, I would really think six times before skipping your most substantial AOE.

I have Fault and Tremor on my stone/stone brute and really couldn't imagine dropping either one. If the no damage in fault bothers you look into procs, there are 2 you can slot into it.

I dont know what it is, but on my 2nd build where I have both fault and tremor, it actually does seem to flow much better, to my surprise. Will have to see how it can be tweaked...thanks for nudging me towards taking it and trying it out.

My SM/WP brute is about halfway IO'd. I dropped fault, kept tremor and slotted it for damage. The damage isn't great, but I also have Dark Oblit, so it evens out a bit.

If you are going to attempt to softcap defense on your SM/WP, mitigation becomes a luxury that you can live without.

Fault is great for giving yourself a second to regen back an alpha, but so is tremor. I really don't understand why so many consider fault a must have power, when the zero damage/aoe mitigation powers available in just about every other set are usually skipped.

Like I said tho, until you get softcapped with IOs(if you go that route) it is definitely nice to have fault/tremor.

Personally, if you are working around a buzzsaw playstyle, softcapping Def with IOs and dropping tremor and/or fault are not bad choices. At the very least it can open up your build a bit.

I really find it kind of disturbing that whenever anyone makes a suggestion that goes against the norm, or what is considered "mandatory", everyone acts like they have committed a cardinal sin.

Isn't part of the advantage of fault + will power the disorient that applies to minions? So that if you are surrounded by a lot of minions you would buy yourself more time then just the time it takes them to get up from the KD to regen via Rttc. My thought with having both was to open with fault, kd and disorient...fire off some single target attacks and when they are back up and wobbly...hit tremor to knock them down again and then rinse and repeat. This would seem to buy a lot of regen time. When patron powers come into play, combining a fully slotted fault with a patron immob make this even easier to accomplish and keep them in rttc range. I'm still new to will power, but that is what i had envisioned and it seems to be working so far (although only lvl 33 right now).

If you're IOing, you can get fault to apply to more than minions. It stacks with itself, so you can Fault bosses into submission.

That's how I use it, anyway.

A point of note: Stun is very much not an AoE stun. It is a ST mag 3 stun with minimal damage.

Carry on.

My Stone/Elec's modus operandi usually consists of running into the mob, hitting Fault to mez/KD stuff, hitting Power Sink as they get back up, hitting Tremor to KD them again, and after that I'll usually alternate Stone Mallet and Heavy Mallet on single targets, throwing in Seismic Smash as it recharges or as target health warrants.