To take Dodge/Lucky or not...

You can skip Dodge and Lucky provided you never plan on running an ITF....Ever.

Sooner or later, one of them will hit you and reduce your defense, making it easier for the next one to hit you and reduce your defense, which makes it easier for the next one to hit you and reduce your defense. See where I'm going with this?

It's called "cascading defense failure" and SR is the ONLY set that is almost completely immune to it. But...it needs the passives in order to be. By skipping the passives you are giving up fully a third of your defense debuff resistance. Against Romans, or any enemy group that involves a lot of machine gun fire (which is most of them) you will be in danger of having your defense debuffed to the point of uselessness. And since your only defense is, well, defense, having it debuffed is not conducive to survival.

It's up to you, but if you skip them, you WILL find yourself dying in places other SRs wouldn't because your defense has been debuffed.

Quick comment on Hasten:

It doesn't help my claws/sr. I keep meaning to respec out of it but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Why doesn't it help?

The best claws ST attack chain is FU, Slash, Focus, repeat. You need 313% recharge in FU to do it. Even with Hasten, 4 purple sets and several other +recharge set bonuses, I don't have enough recharge for that chain.

However, even without hasten, I do have enough global recharge for FU, Slash, Focus, Swipe, repeat which is what I run now.

So for me, hasten has no worth.

What about AoEs? With or without it, I can cycle FU, Spin, Shockwave, repeat.

So, yes, there ARE cases where hasten is a wasted pick.

I dropped hasten on my BS/DA for 2 reasons

1) All it did was speed up the rate at which I burned endurance.

2) The only power it really benefitted was Dark Regeneration, and if I need that power more than every 34 seconds, my build has bigger problems than recharge.

Besides, I kinda like the pauses in my attacks. It gives them time to be afraid.

For all these reasons mentioned before TAKE THEM. For one, yes the defense adds up. The capping defense debuff resistance is very very nice. Just imagine, you get hit by an attack that does 20% defense debuff. Lets say you're at the defense cap. So that your 75% DDR vs 95% DDR

So you're looking at your defense going from 40%, versus 44%, that makes a HUGE difference if you care to look at any other of the millions of threads that go over how useful softcapping is.

Not to mention the scaling resistances, which i personally find to be one of the more useful aspecs of the power, considering the set itself is all defense based, and its your only resistances. When you add accolades, and +HP bonuses it actually increases the scaling resistances because it gives them more room to work.

On average, the 3 scaling resistances equate to about, hmm not at home so can't check my exact post till i look for it but about 15% resistance overall. Which may not seem like terribly much. With 20% max hp from accolades and what most of my SR builds get about 15%ish max hp, it takes that to about 20% average resistance. When the set is otherwise fully defense based, and when especially talking about the defense cap, that makes a very noticeable difference.

Plus just in general the fun of playing when your at next to no HP and not worrying like you would with other secondaries :P.

Also, to whoever said the 3 toggles max at 60%, is wrong. If you reach 60%, at... 0hp.. you're dead, they won't be helping you much then XD. Generally, as they work, increasing at .3% resistance per HP below 60%, you'll never really get use out of your 2-3%HP, which is where the resistances have their highest value sadly, because even at the 55%ish resistance you have at that point, the slightest damage is pretty much going to kill you anyways. So is the nature of the beast, very sad. Why i wish they'd make it .075% per Hp below 100% per passive, and starting at 2% at 100%. That way it avoids that horrendous spike damage, where its almost a curse to have full health on a SR, and lets the scaling resistances work the whole way through your HP bar. I calculated it IIRC the .075% scaling per HP below 100% per passive would be the same equivalent average resistance as they work now, but by being more useful working spread out throughout the entire HP bar.

You take Dodge and Lucky. Two reasons:

First, SR is all about the defense, and every little bit helps. While the autos don't provide a lot of defense, they are AUTOS. Free defense, always there, no cost. Added to the toggles, and perhaps CJ and Weave, they take that much closer to the cap.

Second, that scaling resist is vital. Defense is all or nothing, and thanks to the 5% rule, something will always be getting thru. But thanks to the scaling resist, the more you get hurt, the harder you are to hurt, and the resistance in the 3 autos STACKs. This will turn many situations where you would be eating pavement into just a little blip as you much a green or pop off Elude.

The only optional powers in SR are Quickness and Elude, and even those two should be taken if your build has the room.