Best /SD Scrapper Primary

Mine just hit 50 yesterday! Yay!

Now to figure out what I want to do with the guy.

While the game doesn't give rewards for it, I've always felt pretty rewarded by damage mitigation. Just not quite enough to find a Tank satisfying. Think I'll go the opposite direction on my Fire/Shield, though. I've made too many survival machines. Time to put out some serious damage.

Gratz!!! I hit 50 about 3 weeks ago with mine, almost done with the build just need like 3 more IOs but it is a lot of fun to play

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

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I've made 3 tankers in the 5+ years I've been playing and I don't have the patience to get them to 50 lol.

And the beauty of it all is that you can have a super survivable Fire/Shield and still put out a metric ton of damage.

Grats wern. That's what I did with my fire. Sure there's some things that I can survive better with more defensive builds/set ups, but those things are rare and far between. It's a nice change of pace to just obliterate stuff with massive aoe's. Jump into a big group, let aao get juiced, then shield charge, FSC, fireball... so nice...

I agree with absolutely everything you said, except your conclusion that fire melee is king for AoE.

Fire melee gets you FSC, which is admittedly pure distilled liquid awesomesauce. After that, however, you get fire breath. Fire breath is... well... nice on a scrapper. I guess.

Elec Melee, on the other hand, nets you Jacobs Ladder (love hate, I know), Thunder Strike (again, love/hate, but more to love than JL), Chain Induction (Say something bad about this power, I dare you), and Lightning Rod (Which you can alternate with Shield Charge for massive win).

Honestly, I cannot fathom saying that fire/sd has more AoE deliciousness than elec/sd. I really don't get it.

Why not do both?

Well, I'd LIKE to, but I haven't worked out how to make a post-BotZ soft-capped build chaining Incinerate -> Greater Fire Sword -> Cremate -> Fire Sword Circle -> Fire Ball with sustainable endurance, good set bonuses in general, and Aid Self.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I could drop Fire Ball in favor of Conserve Power, Physical Perfection and Energy Torrent, and pick up Aid Self instead of Health/Stamina. It would totally work, and be more survivable, and a LOT more survivable with no inspirations. I know, I know.

But Fire Ball! I mean, c'mon. You can't make me skip Fire Ball. That would make the baby Jesus cry.

So dropping Aid Self seemed like the only sensible move.

I know what you mean, Love Fire Ball I didn't even think about getting Aid self when you can have SC>FSC>FB. What I did was just use a marco to combine 3 insps to make greens. When I need them I just need to click the marco and it will combine all that it can, very nice to have.

"All right, they're on our left, they're on our right, they're in front of us, they're behind us...they can't get away this time"- Chesty Puller US Marine Corps

My Characters Deviont Art page Currently-reading Me Skydiving

Very few fire melee / shield builds get fire breath. They usually take fireball from the blaze epic. FSC and fireball is more than enough to decimate spawns between shield charge cycles. I have enough recharge on mine that I can go FSC + fireball + FSC.

Don't confuse having more AoE options as being better. In many situations, Jacob's Ladder and Chain Induction aren't really used that much. Shield charge + LR will kill everything except for bosses, and then Jacob's Ladder and CI become expensive single target attacks. Thunderstrike is the only other AoE attack that gets alot of use. If your electric/shield gets fireball as well, these AoE attacks get used even less.

I agree with the disagreement. (that's kind of a strange thing to say actually)

If it were not as damaging as it is it would still be taken, it would just be slotted very differently.

If you wanted a heal and didn't want to waste a power pick on Aid Other in order to get Aid Self, Siphon Life would still look very nice. It's taken now largely as the second most damaging attack in the set, with a nice self-heal side effect. If it had never been changed it would be a nice self heal with a useful damage/debuff side effect.

Originally Posted by Dechs Kaison See, it's gems like these that make me check Claws' post history every once in a while to make sure I haven't missed anything good lately.

That'd be true if SC and LR recharged in 5 seconds, but it's closer to 25s ; you can either use one and lieuts + bosses will be alive, or both and have to rely on other attacks until it's recharged. So, JL and CI get a lot of AoE use, at least for me.

Not possible. Fireball has a second and a half animation, FSC recharges in 20s base. At the recharge cap, you're going to have a 2.5s gap after Fireball before you can use FSC again.

... I guess you could argue you didn't imply "without gaps", but then recharge is irrelevant, isn't it ? On SOs you can just as well do FSC -> FB -> FSC, the gap is just a bit longer.

I've got some big green insps for ya man, lose the tricorder and bring the fire!

Point taken. I couldn't find a way to fit in that attack chain and still get all the other stats the way I want them. I ended up going with scorch>cremate>scorch>inc. I would have used the top attack chain if I could have figured it out.

I skipped Aid Self and don't miss it. But keep in mind I also refuse to take Aid Self on any of my Scrappers, so my opinion on that may be a little biased.

Of course they don't. Fire breath is not good on a scrapper, it kills your dps and generally requires you to reposition before using it. I guess my sarcasm didn't come across there. My point was exactly that, FSC is the only AoE power you get with fire melee.

This is hardly an argument in favor of fire melee, now is it? You're basically saying that once you take this other power from a pool you have all the AoE you need. Well there's nothing stopping an elec melee scrapper from taking fireball too. And then they also have LR. And CI. And TS. And... well you get the idea.

I haven't run any numbers yet, but I'd guess there's a concept of "enough" or as you say "all the AoE you need". If you have "all the AoE you need", why pick more AoEs? If you can move from spawn to spawn, nuking each and moving on, you have "enough" AoE. More AoE attacks won't help you.

Not sure if Fire's quite there, but I'm guessing that on a high recharge Fire/Shield, you'd Shield Charge -> Fire Ball, move to next spawn, Fire Sword Circle -> Fire Ball, move to next spawn, repeat. Not so sure that second spawn will be dead, though.

Let's see. On my in-progess build, let's set AAO to five enemies. Fire Ball is a sad little 214 damage, and Fire Sword Circle is 361. Well, any minions in 10 feet will be dead, but lieutenants will still be standing, as will minions outside of 10 feet. So in my case, by my definition, I don't have enough AoE.

Well, except that I can probably Build Up every other spawn. Fire Ball climbs to 294 and Fire Sword Circle to 487. Still not quite enough to kill lieutenants in 10 feet. I can also crank up the numbers. How about eight in range of AAO? Fire Ball at 310, Fire Sword Circle at 514. There we go. So lieutenants and minions in ten feet dead, but anything outside of ten feet still alive. So still, by my definition, I don't have enough AoE.

And is Shield Charge -> Fire Ball OK without Build Up? Shield Charge is 415, and Fire Ball is back down at 214, so no, it's not enough. Lieutenants will still be standing.

So if I want to Nuke with just two attacks, I'm using Build Up -> Shield Charge -> Fire Ball on group one. That leaves me with just Fire Sword Circle and Fire Ball, not built up, for the next group. That means survivors. Eh, I can use three attacks. First spawn gets Shield Charge -> Fire Ball -> Fire Sword Circle. Ignore any survivors. Next Spawn gets Build Up -> Fire Ball -> Fire Sword Circle. Ignore any survivors.

Now in practice, I have an aggro aura, so if the spawns are tightly packed, I'll hop to the next spawn, and probably nuke everyone once the survivors catch up. Might not be too much slower than Electric, even if Electric has fewer survivors moving from spawn to spawn.

Actually, there's reason to think it just isn't slower than Electric. There was little difference between the top Electric/Shield and Fire/Shield numbers on a farming influence per hour thread. They were neck and neck, if I recall. So I suppose that's a sense in which Fire/Shield has enough AoE.

It doesn't have more, but I'd say they're about on par with eachother thanks to FSC's faster recharge than LR (Chain induction is nice, but JL and TS are about on par with firebreath imo - ie, not so great, lol). As another poster noted, they compared pretty evenly on farm tests. I have both combos at 50 and io'd to the gills and I'd say they're pretty even in farming kill speed.

But theres a noticeable difference in single target damage, which is why I prefer fire.

Bingo, thats it.

I broke out my ElM/SD last night and hit some council radio missions at +4/x8. There really is something magical about SC and LR with Fireball and even a Thunderstrike thrown in. It's alot of fun. But for some reason I had it set for bosses, and it was killing me to have to drop a boss. The ST target damage was paltry and it too long enough that I'd actually just drop them with a second helping of SC or LR which comes up fast in my build with hasten.

My FM/SD scrapper though, tears through spawns with bosses with ease. FSC may be the only AoE you take from your primary, but with its damage, radius and quick recharge it's pretty badass. And any Lt.'s or Bosses still standing after a SC + FB or FSC + FB + FSC is quickly dispatched with GFS and Cremate. And I wouldn't think of taking my ElM/SD scrapper up against an EB or AV solo, that would be painfully slow.