Aoe farm build?

Hello all. I was hoping for suggestioins on an affordable (200 - 500 million) farming toon. I suspect that Spines/FA, Spines/DA and Elm/SD might be pretty good but not sure about how affordable they are or even how to build them.

From what I've gathered around here it seems that /DA and /SD are not the way to go when looking for an affordable build.

What do you guys think?

SD builds are very affordable. All positional defense sets are, since you can easily softcap yourself with red fortunes and multistrikes. Expensive SD builds are an attempt to softcap and pursue other high-end build goals like permahasten levels of recharge.

Aye, Shield Defense builds are cheap to start, they're just a bit expensive to perfect. You'll be pleasantly surprised how much mitigation Shield Charge and Lightning Rod give in knockdown, you will be farming before you are soft capped easily, so you can start building up your influence to pay for extra recharge and defense as you move along.

Electric/Shield. Very easy to soft cap melee with the investment of one Obliteration set and the rest Multi-Strikes. Easy to cap range with Blessing of the Zephyrs. Easy to cap AoE with Aegis in Tough and 6 slotted Performance Shifter or 3 slotted Blessing of the Zephyrs.

It's honestly far less expensive to make an electric/shield than a dark/shield or fire/shield becaus of all the cheap PBAoE sets you can use.

Thanks for the reply guys! It sounds like Elm/SD might be the way to go afterall.

Anyone have any advice on what should be skipped? Any and all build advice is welcome and greatly appreciated.

For anything more than +2 I'd suggest Shield Defense. If you're going to be farming with bosses I'd suggest going with Fire over Electric because Fire has vastly superior single target damage than Electric without giving up much AoE.

Honestly if you are planning on farming there is no scrapper combination that can beat a fire/kinetics.

If you're set on a Scrapper, Electric/Shield is a solid choice. I don't have one myself, but I do have the Brute version and I imagine they don't play very differently.

However, if you can be persuaded to go the Tank route, I've found that I can farm as quickly (if not quicker) as my Fire/Kin and Arch/MM on my Shield/SS/Pyre Tank. It's easier to soft-cap the Tank, the damage is still incredible (Footstomp, Fireball, Shield Charge, Footstomp, Fireball without any break in the chain) and your survivability is off the charts.

The thing I love about this build is that Footstomp and Shield Charge each have an incredibly large radius...and Footstomp recharges so, so quickly that you can almost cycle it without interruption. That huge radius comes in handy. Add to that a big hitter in KO Blow and a couple of decent single-target attacks, and you are a one-man wrecking crew.

And then there is this: no worries about mez, never any worries with greens...if you're farming just keep eating all the inspirations that drop and you'll speed up your kill rate and increase your survivability. I've done various farms with mine (BM, Freaks, AE etc.) but recently I've found an RWZ mission featuring Rikti (a decent bump in xp and inf from them over other factions) that I can totally wreck - it's an xp and drops bonanza.

Anyway, good luck with whatever you decide on!

I have a fully io'd fire/kin/stone that farms the BM mis at lev 52 or 53 set for 8 with relative ease. My fully io'd el/sd scrap can farm the same mission 3-4 times faster within each mob but falls short overall for one reason--recharge. I don't have her purped out but even if I did I'd only save 4-5 seconds on the two tp aoe attacks and these are what make her so fast killing lev 52-53 mobs. This puts me waiting for the two vital attacks to come back up and there fore a slower farmer in this mission.

Now if you consider other missions farmed the scrap has better survivability and therefore excels over the f/k.

I would agree that overall a fire/kin/stone is tops as a farmer, and if capped for s/l as mine is can run tf's like the ITF with equal ferver.

Having said this el/sh is one of the most enjoyable combos of any AT I have played (76 toons and have played all but stone mallet and TA.) It has revitalized my excitement in the game and on ITF's is just pure crazy fun.

I am intererested to see how a fire/sh does and am leveling one now. I do miss having that extra ST damage that you lose with EL but the aoe more than makes up for it.

Elec/SD is the best overall AoE farmer. Fire/SD is a superior overall build, but you kind of get to make a choice between going fire/SD the AV killer build, and fire/SD the farming build. Essentially its choosing between Cremate, aid self and grant cover over hasten and the fire ancillary. Elec is Elec, there is a best general build that does everything well, and it just happens to be the best at farming AoE.

But fire/SD is ten times more fun to play.

Are you alternating DC and LR on each mob or using em both on the same mob

Sorry, asking because I don't know.

Is this Solo farming or Group farming ?

If it is group, my question would be can you solo farm with the scrapper or are we talking more the Tank route ?