Persuade me to play any set OTHER than Dark Melee

Haha, that always seems to happen to me, Fury Flechette. I pick what seems like a cool combo, and then BAM! FOTM like a week later and I seem lame...

I actually would like to pose the opposite, and ask the OP: Persuade me to play DM. I cannot for the life of me get into the set.

That's WAY too easy, like you said, HORRID lack of aoe. I deleted 2 DM toons already, would NEVER do it without a secondary that has a damage aura or shield charge. And honestly, with most secondaries, i'd prefer a more actively mitigating set. DM's debuffs are usually ignored as with SR or shield you can cap anyways, and any other set won't notice it much, especially since you're not doing to the whole spawn, just single or small cone enemies. And the self heal in siphon life, is nice to have, but the sheer fact of spawns lasting longer cause you can't aoe them makes it more or less not worth it.

Build Up also has some subtle advantages over Soul Drain. Sometimes it's nice to be able to use it preemptively and BU + Shield Charge the spawn before idiot Peacebringers can scatter it. It's arguably better against single hard targets (ignore pylon benchmarks, as many of those are done with saturated soul drain). And it does not need to hit anything to work, which is better when you're ToHit debuffed.

I sort of forgot to mention I almost always solo, except for TFs and Raids and AP Sewers. So usually I'm facing smaller groups. But thank you all for your responses and for giving me things to think about. Now that I'm DO range, I'm greatly enjoying a Katana/WP, which I know is super popular, but I came up with his concept about a year ago, so yeah.

I dont like DM cause I actually like... hitting my opponent.

there are only 3 techniques in DM that animate a strike of any sort, iirc

Girls, guys! Keep it simple!

Two reasons to play something other than DM:

- Lightning-*************-Rod.
- NINE. THOUSAND. CUTS!

Most things that you say are a bonus, can actually be self defeating too. You say you mostly solo. Well, from there, you can set your missions to +8 team members for one. So aoe can still be a huge factor. But also if you're not setting for high mobs, then you're self defeating your soul drain as it won't be getting a large drain/buff off the mobs.

Also as to any type of a safety issue, if you're not fighting larger mobs even solo, then you shoudln't really be having much problems no matter what primary you have.

Perhaps i think you might like IO'ing a Fire/SR or Claw/SR it'd rock your world :P

There are plenty of character slots available to each player. Variety is a good thing.

If you roll another Dark melee toon, you already know exactly how its going to play out... can you say booooring!

Whats the opposite of Dark Melee? Spines maybe?

Take a chance on something different. Spines/Fire for example. If it turns out by level 25 or so, that you can't stand the build, no real harm done.

To the OP.

For solo play vs hard single targets, I agree, DM is the top option.

However, if you team frequently, or fight large spawns, DM is no longer the top option. DM is still good on teams, but other sets do better. Almost every other set has more damage output versus large spawns. And in most teams, scrappers do not benifit from having a heal. Actually, in 99%+ of solo encounters, scrappers do not benifit from having a heal either. I've mentioned this before, but I'll say it again as it applies very well to this setting. My DM/Shield is more powerful then my DB/SR. However, if I list all the solo encounters in the non-AE content of this game where my DM would succeed and my DB would fail, i'll get a list of about 5-6 NPCS. That's really not that big of a deal.

Very frequently we scrappers numbercrunch and argue/discuss about ultimate power builds as though we solo everything and everything we do requires every ounce of our greatness. But believe it or not, this is actually a team oriented game, and the structure of rewards in this game favors speed over difficulty.

Here's a specific example:

The wall in Cimerora is an area I frequently solo while waiting for an ITF to form up, or just for kicks. I do this with either my DM/Shield, my DB/SR, or my Fire/Mental blaster. All 3 of them are fully IO'd with purples and PvP IO's. All 3 of them have no survival issues if I do 1 spawn at a time. Of the 3, you would probably expect the blaster to clear spawns fastest, followed by the /Shield scrapper who happens to have DM. However, it's actually the DB/SR scrapper who runs the fastest on the wall. The DB/SR scrapper can herd 2-3 spawns at once. The Blaster could not survive pulling that many enemies with -defense buffs, and the DM/shield scrapper doesn't have room in his build to get enough +tohit to make pulling multiple spawns that have a stacking +defense buff a viable option. The DM/Shield scrapper can drop a single spawn fastest by using shield charge, but even with a 27 second recharge, it's not up fast enough to keep up with the DB/SR's damage output. The DB/SR can herd 2-3 spawns (I usually agro by killing the surgen then move to the next spawn), then back up to a corner. Then everything comes crowding into my cone attack range and get dropped remarkably fast.

Elec/Shield, no doubt would out perform the DM/Shield by even more at this type of encounter.

Don't get me wrong. DM/ is awsome... DM/Shield even more so.. so much so, that I really just quit playing him out of boredom. But there are some very common encounters where other scrappers out perform him by a wide wide margin.

I'd like to know how much the OP solo's and teams. A lot of this thread seems to be asthetics vs right-tool-for-the-job. DM very nice set esp for solo play, but in teaming situations, I perfer to help with the carpet-bombing and use fire/shield. Working on elec/shield, but really dont care for the lower levels and the ride is rather slow for me.

I'm really liking my kat/elec a lot, nice tools there. That maybe a nice change for you.

Yeah, roundly seconding what Shred said. I love DM. I have it on a Scrapper an a Stalker. But its single-target focus is also a limiting factor. Things like Elec, Fire and DB are much more helpful on a team, and much better at tasks like raw XP or inf/hour (or drops/hour if you're into farming).

I have lots of Scrappers, and because I love playing a breakneck pace and don't always have capped defenses, a self-heal is very, very useful when solo. For this reason several of my Scrappers who lack an in-powerset self heal have Aid Self. When teamed, I typically find myself either with enough buffs to make healing mostly unnecessary or allies who can heal me when needed (or both). In such cases it's often better for the team to have stronger AoE.

Don't get me wrong. Even on a team, I love being able to lay into an AV or GM with buffed up DM damage. But most team content isn't an endless stream of AVs and GMs... sadly.