Talk to me about Willpower

I've been playing this game a month after quitting when Enhancement Diversification hit. Came back and I hear all of this stuff about willpower, and I want to understand the set, but after looking through the tanker, scrapper, and brute guides for it I don't really feel any better off except for slotting ideas than I did before.

I'm not looking for "give me a build to use" so much as I'm looking to understand why a build is good, or why it sucks. I've gotten alot of "this power should be slotted this way" information, but I haven't gotten the picture of how willpower fits together as a whole and functions, which is something I always have to do before I roll a set.

So my questions are as follows

1) What is willpower strong at and what is it weak at?

2) What is the best way to address or mitigate the negative aspects (like the alpha vunerability I've heard so much about)

3) If someone could post a build for Mids and explain it in detail, Id love you forever, preferably high end expensive ish build, with a mind towards maximixing strenghts

4) Aid self and willpower, genius idea or stupid idea?

I'm posting this here because, for better or worse, I hate the tanker class. The only tank I ever loved was my fire tanker, which they gutted one day long ago when they added a fear component to burn patches.

My opinion :

1/ Willpower is strong out of the box with SOs, and performs well against every kind of damage. The completely passive mitigation means defense isn't going to take away from your damage. It's relatively vulnerable to debuffs and very high burst damage.

2/ SoW is good for that. Active mitigation from your primary or epics can help ; AoE knockdowns in particular are fantastic tools to take the alpha. Inspirations are yet another option.

3/ You'd want to specify a primary. While there's some common grounds, WP builds can vary greatly based on primary.

4/ It's not a good idea. Aid Self takes away from your damage and active mitigation, and WP having already high regen you'd be getting a comparatively lower return from Aid Self than you would on other alts - and some already argue Aid Self isn't worth the damage loss on these other characters.

1) WP is a bit weak against alphas and debuffs. Especially Def Debuffs with enemies that have hard hitting attacks. This is because WP has no Debuff Resistances except for Regen Debuff.

2) Building for +HP and +Def would be ideal with WP. You already have truck loads of Regen and WP doesn't benefit from +Rech. That is not to say that +Rech does not benefit you, though, because all of the attack sets benefit from additional Recharge to allow you to use your best attacks more often.

3) Can do this later if you tell me what set you want paired with WP.

4) It might help you, but personally I don't see the need. WP can easily exceed 50 HP/sec regeneration making Aid Self quite superfluous. Also when you have no Def Debuff Res, the situations where you'd need Aid Self will have you being hit so often you probably won't get the chance to fire it off.

1) WP offers a combination of +Def, +Res and +Regen powers. If you add some power pools (most WPs include Tough, Weave and often Maneuvers and/or Combat Jumping) you'll get several layers of defense, which gives you a good survivability. Most powers come as toggles or passives making it an easy set, too.
Plus what the others said.

2) Add defense and HP. SoW is an option, but I was always a bit disappointed when I used it (in the end I respecced out of it).

3) I think Werner just posted a link to a BS/WP guide in a nearby thread.

4) Forget about Aid Self in WP. A power pool that gives you a +defense power is much better to increase survivability.

Just gonna add that one of the best things about willpower is its "set and forget" nature, just turn on your toggles and go, and it's very steady performance. The worst thing about it is when you find yourself in a situation where incoming damage exceeds your ability to regen it, you can sometimes know you're going to die and there's nothing you can really do about it save click inspirations madly, kill everything before you die, or run. That may not sound like such a bad situation but I just mention it because it's a very different mindset from, say, regen. With regen you can be in an impossible situation and survive if your "oh ****" powers cycle fast enough. With willpower, impossible situations are more rare but usually are impossible, if that makes any sense. ^_^

Back when I used aid self on my brute I had it slotted with two interrupt reduction IO's (as well as some heals), and that seemed to allow me to get it off pretty reliably in battle.

But I've since come to the conclusion that those slots can be used in much better ways. ^_^

Updating , I set up a Katana/WP. I've got a claws/sr brute and a fire/SD scrapper, so this one seemed logical and I like Katana's speed and lower end cost compared to broadsword.

For pools, I'm thinking fighting, possibly fitness, leaping (my default choice for anything melee's travel) and something else. Maybe leadership, maybe stealth. I've only got one hero in the 40s and its a troller, so I'm thinking I want kd or kb in my APP for waltzing in and smacking down an alpha. I had the idea of stealth and an Unbound leap stealth to combat jump into mobs and hit them with a power that stops them from attacking me for a second to break alphas, my claws brute is really loving shockwave as a way to walk up and smack enemies into a wall to keep them from nailing me at once, but then she's almost softcapped so it doesn't really matter for her.

So now I've worked up a mids build, and would love suggestions.

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Oh yeah, definitely don't get any more LotG's than you need, especially with a secondary like willpower. If you do decide to put that in heightened senses, putting some of the other LotG enhancers in there wouldn't be a bad idea for its set bonuses, which are also additional regen and +HP. Your milage may vary though, enhancers like those can be a tad on the expensive side.

Looks like it will rock 95% of the PvE content for sure.

Some other food for thought, Getting a kismet +accuracy enhancer in a defense power that you can afford will give you +6% tohit. I notice you have 41% global acc already, so you probably won't need it, but it's just something to think about when you start fighting +6's like werner does, as it definitely looks like you could, if that strikes your fancy. *wink*

I would definitely say that willpower, when combined with DA for melee defense, or kinetic combats for smashing and lethal defense, is one of the most solid secondaries for scrappers, despite some of it's other short comings, like lack of defense debuff resistance.

17.3 it looks like

Might not be a good idea to have it at 60%

17.3 is almost as good as nothing, considering the size of defense debuffs that most mobs wield. Usually 7.5% per hit on most sharp weapons and guns, 10 - 20% on the specialized attacks like radiation and stone.

Agreed..

So maybe they should just take it off?