I know this is the scrappers forums, but I have an Energy Aura question

I've always liked the community here in Scrapperville, and you've all proven very helpful over the years, so I have a query:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: I've played SR many times and love it, and I've never played EA, so I'm not an EA fan trying to troll or start a fight. This is an honest question

I know Energy has a rep as "teh gimp" and is often viewed as a joke in comparison to other brute secondaries, but I'm not clear on why. I don't want to compare with shields, because shields is just ridiculously awesome once you softcap, but my real question is, "why is EA worse than SR?" *once you attain the softcap

Frankly, softcapping SR and EA are both ridiculously cheap and easy, even though EA is typed instead of positional. They're both cheap as heck, so that isn't an issue. (But EA has a small hole to negative, which isn't a real issue with softcap S/L)

EA costs more end, but has FAR better end management (equivalent to the old ELA) and has a minor heal, and has more resists but inferior Defense Debuff Resistance (and no scaling resists). However, EA has overload, which is WAY better than Elude, softcap or not. EA lacks a taunt aura, and has stealth, but grabbing aggro with a brute has never been tough, and you could even take taunt (it makes a great set ***** for S/L defense bonuses (especially perfect zinger))

So why do people think EA sucks?

Mainly low defense against psionic (toxic is a little problematic as well), and not enough defense debuff resistance. The stealth is not useful most of the time, people take energy cloak for the defense. With energy drain, conserve power is not really useful, except during overload crash.

EA does not really suck. Just that a power set has only 9 powers, it is not very appealing when the toggles and passives are just standard, and the special features are not that useful.

I wouldn't say it sucks, but compared to SR you sacrifice higher rech/speed and full DDR for end recovery (and many brute primaries are end heavy) and a minor self heal (which means aid self not required in top end builds)
SR Pros:

Has Quickness (that's plenty of free rech, -slow in an auto, moar smash)
Has Scaling Res
Has 97% defense debuff protection (no cascade failure, ever)
Negligible end usage stacking mez protection

Cons:

No Self Heal (No self heal)
No supplementary recov tools

EA Pros:

Has a minor/moderate self heal (depending on saturation)
Has major end mod tools (You should never have end issues later in the game)
Has a cloak tool and an awesome tier 9.
Looks cool

EA Cons:
Lacks complete DDR, cascade failures can and will happen from time to time
Lacks slow resist / +rech
Defense power is combined with the cloak, so sometimes you will lose aggro without meaning to.

As mentioned, much of the /EA hate came before it had a heal.

Also a few months ago changed the +defense IOs to add more typed defense availability
which makes it more conveinient to soft-cap /EA then it used to be.

Generally speaking, /EA isn't as bad as it used to be.

And lets not forget, when EA gets ported, it'll get improved more.

How much more? No idea. But Conserve Power will become a better power.

I doubt it will be a straight heal like ELA got, and personally I'm hoping to see it become a End Discount/+Resist/+DMG clickie power on the same scale as Energize.

And for the set to beable to cap Energy Damage Resist (*edit...forgot to mention the resist part, not just damage). To make the set really shine

I played a DM/EA brute before inventions came out (so obviously it didn't have a self heal either) so my comment is quite a bit dated. So for me the pros where:
* No endurance issues ever!
* Stacked with DM the survivability was great
* I didn't mind the lack of heal due to siphon life in my chain

The first point is the most critical for me. Brutes should in my opinion attack more or less constantly. For me that means I need Stamina plus one more endurance managing power.

Yeah the changes to EA have been great.

way back when i made an em/ea brute, but by the time i had hit 19 i was tired with it and it sat for 2 years, since then though, thanks to the changes I have come back to it every now and then, glad I hadn't deleted it. Now its another fun build I get to mess around with and to see what I can get out of it.

oh and I can totally see pairing it with dm, even now. hehe all that debuff plus a self heal, helps any set XD

EA wasn't too bad for me even on just SO. I have it paired with Claws. The ability to run all your toggles + maneuvers, tough-weave and CJ without any concern on the blue bar is a plus. With all those defense slotted up, you should be looking at 37+% defense on s/l/f/c/e with around 33% on negative.
Quick draft going on just SO.

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The other thing I really liked about /EA on the brute I had several years ago was the -perception aura. Sure if you're tanking, then reducing agro is a bad thing, but I usually solo'd. You can actually fight on the edge of a spawn without agro'ing the far side of the spawn with an /EA brute. That's an entirely different form of mitigation that's hard to account for with numbers, but still contributes significantly to survivability. And if you're a single target type damager, then you can really play a lot of games with agro management.