Noob Brute Needs Help

So I have spent the last couple hours reading guides, and visiting websites. So much for productivity at work today.

I got City of Heroes/Villains last week and finally decided on a character I liked. I made a DW/SR Brute. I like being able to run up and hit stuff and I am enjoying the mechanics of the game. Downside is running out of endurance and running low on health when doing missions solo.

What I am trying to get is some insight in tactics for a Brute so I can fix some of the problems I am having.

For Primary power I was doing good with accuracy/endurance enhancements. I didn't even know DW had combos until an hour ago so I might have to find some way to respec so I can get nimble strike. Are there powers I should avoid like taunt?

I am really confused with secondary powers because the I was going more passive tank, when it seems the only real way to go is active tank. I didn't know I can have all the toggles for SR on at once. Should I get the passive powers? What about elude/brawler and quickness? Are they any good?

I wanted to go leaping as my travel power because I am Ninja and it gives a nice bonus to defense. Is acrobatics worth getting?

I did see a claws/SR build and as soon as I figure out how to use the character creator I was going to look at in a readable context, but not much info on duel wield.

I am also under the impression that stamina is a must have and that powers you get after level 40 aren't that useful. It also seems like having fighting power pool is good to have.

Sorry for the wall of text, but any help or insight would be great.

Pretty much what Claws said.

Just to add to the combo bit, the only combo that I would strongly suggest using is Attack Vitals. Weaken and Empower are very much skippable, but if you have the powers, you might as well use 'em. Sweep can be useful in the lower levels for the added damage mitigation but, once again, you will not be gimping yourself if you decide to skip it.

Keep in mind, combos are NEVER mandatory. You can easily get by without them and, while leveling, you may have a better attack chain if you decide not to worry about them.

As for picking up Stamina, I have never had a successful toon who did not pick it up. YMMV, but unless you're playing an extremely low endurance character like Claws/WP, I would not skip it. It really makes a noticeable difference in your CoX experience.

And, finally, Taunt. I can't tell you that it is never useful but, as a Brute with: 1) No taunt Aura 2) Low-ish survivability in the lower levels 3) A combo that is less about tanking as, say, a /Stone Brute I would, without a doubt, skip it. Redside, teams don't usually depend on a Tanker, and solo it is completely useless, so I would pick up another, more useful power (especially since /SR needs so many powers to be effective.) Besides, slashing people in the face with two swords should be a (generally) effective way of getting and maintaining aggro.

Oh, and welcome to CoH!!

~Alpha

I think Claws nailed it.

The only thing I would add is regarding Taunt. I find it a great convenience to have Taunt. If you are new, I think you should get it. You can use it to build Fury (being attacked = Fury) and therefore it's useful on big teams where you can't always get all the Fury you want.

It's also useful on smaller teams because it's *ranged* aggro. It's not always easy, or quick, to move to another spot on the map and engage a mob to pull aggro. Cave maps in particular can be a bear. Also, if you need to pull, then Taunt is a ranged tool to do so.

After playing your Brute for a while and getting used to it, you can decide yourself how often Taunt it useful and whether you want to keep it. However while just starting out, I think you should take it because of the "easy mode" it often provides.

Welcome to the game! Since others seem to have answered most of your original questions, I thought I'd touch on a few other points that might be possible sources of confusion.

(And, by the way, that wasn't a wall of text. *THIS* is a wall of text! )

First off, enhancements. I'm guessing your brute is still probably relatively low level, which means that you wouldn't have seen all the different types of enhancements. Below level 12, all you can slot are 'training' enhancements. These can be used by any character, but give pretty small boosts to your powers.

Starting at level 12, you can start slotting 'dual origin' (commonly abbreviated 'DO') enhancements (they start at level 15, but you can slot enhancements up to 3 levels higher than you). These are twice as powerful as training enhancements, but you have to make sure to get the proper ones for your origin. As implied by the name, each of these enhancements can be used by characters of two different origins. A technology/science origin damage enhancement, for example, can only be slotted by technology or science origin characters.

Starting at level 22, you can slot the final grade of normal enhancements, 'single origin' enhancements, or SOs. These are twice again as powerful as dual origins, but are now limited to one origin at a time, so if you're a technology origin character you have to specifically track down technology SOs. Keep in mind that DOs and SOs tend to have fanciful names, so be careful that you're buying what you think you're buying. For normal play, these are the last kind of enhancement you have to worry about.

It's at the SO level that you have to start worrying about 'enhancement diversification', or ED. Basically, the general rule is that you get effectively no benefit from slotting more than 3 SOs of the same type into a power. So if you have a damage power, it'll do about the same damage whether you've got 3 or 6 damage SOs slotted. This makes things a bit more complicated in some cases, but it's also useful in that if a power only does one thing then you don't need to assign more than 3 or 4 slots to it most of the time, which saves you slots. For example, your defense powers can easily be slotted with 1 end reduction and 3 defense SOs without sacrificing any real performance.

I would personally suggest slotting your attack powers with 1 accuracy, 2 damage, 2 endurance reduction, and 1 recharge SOs. Most characters would slot 3 damage, but since brutes get such large damage bonuses from fury it's less important for them, and you've already seen how endurance is a limiting factor.

At this point, I wouldn't suggest taking taunt, at least not early in your character's career. While it can be a useful power, it's by no means required, especially for brutes. Managing aggro is an entire other minigame in and of itself, and I would just concentrate on hitting things and staying alive for now. Evasion, your area of effect type defense toggle, also applies a taunt effect against enemies in melee range of you, so even without the taunt power itself you still have some ability in that area.

The other reason to put off (at the very least) taking taunt is that this particular powerset combo has a lot of powers you'll want to take. You'll want all of super reflexes aside from (maybe) elude, and to get the two most useful combos (sweep and attack vitals) requires 6 different dual blades attacks. You'll also want blinding feint for the tohit and damage bonuses, so that leaves only nimble slice and taunt as possibly skippable powers. If you want to take stamina, its prerequisites, combat jumping, super jump, tough and weave and their prerequisites, those together with 7 powers from dual blades and 8 from super reflexes will fill up all but one of the *total* number of powers you'll get all the way to level 50. The only free slot would be your very last power choice at 49. I wouldn't personally put taunt any earlier, simply because it'd be cutting out something actually important.

Also, the reason people are talking about getting defense to 45% is due to the way the game calculates an enemy's chance to hit you. They start out at 50%, and your defense score is subtracted from this base 50% chance. Once you get to 45% defense, the enemy is at 5% chance to hit you, which is the lowest the game will let it get (you can have more than 45% defense, but they'll still be at 5% chance to hit). As you might imagine, getting hit only once out of every 20 attacks is a pretty darn powerful survival tool (compare that to getting hit once out of every 5 attacks (30% defense), which is what you get from just the base super reflexes toggles, fully slotted). Getting to 45% is referred to as 'hitting the softcap', and is highly sought after. With the super reflexes toggles, weave, and combat jumping all slotted with 3 defense SOs, you're at almost 40%, which is getting pretty close. Any defense buffs from a teammate will put you the rest of the way there, which is why the fighting pool is recommended.

Finally, you will probably see people referring to another type of enhancement at some point, 'IOs'. These are 'invention origin' enhancements, which are considerably different from standard SOs. They can be used by any origin, they don't expire as you level up, they can boost more than one type of effect at the same time, and they can confer additional bonuses when slotted in sets. However, they also must be acquired as drops and crafted using recipes and salvage before they can be used, so the system as a whole is considerably more complicated (and often expensive) than the 'buy-slot-go' of SOs. At the highest levels of monetary and planning investment they can make characters nigh unto gods, but for now I'd suggest sticking to SOs, which are perfectly adequate for any normal content. By all means, investigate IOs at some point, but I wouldn't suggest worrying about that just yet.

The real reason I brought up IOs is to give you an idea what you can do with the salvage and recipes you'll get as drops from the foes you fight. If you stick to SOs, you won't need any of it yourself. You can simply sell it to the NPC stores, but this might sometimes be a waste, as other players may well have some use for it and be willing to pay more than the NPC would give you. Therefore, I would recommend checking out the black markets scattered throughout the rogue isles. These are where you can sell and buy recipes, enhancements, and salvage to and from your fellow players. There's an NPC at each market who will explain how the system works. When your salvage or recipes fill up, consider dropping by a market to see if any of it is valuable. For any given item you can see the prices and dates of the last few sales, which can give you an idea if it's worth anything to other players (and if it's likely to sell any time soon). If so, put it up with a relatively low asking price (I like to put things up somewhere between 50% and 80% of whatever seems to be the going rate) and see if anyone buys it over the next few hours or days. You might not always get a price quite as big as the last few sales, but hey, it's free money. A lot of what you find will be junk that sells for hundreds to a few thousands (if anyone wants to buy it at all, if not just sell it to an NPC), but it's entirely possible to get a lucky drop worth tens of millions and set that character up practically for life. Even if you don't, it's still likely to be a useful revenue stream. I personally think this is one of the most important tips to give, as there's nothing that sucks worse than leveling up only to discover that all your enhancements expired and you don't have enough money to replace them.

WOW, thanks for the advise, the information has been very helpful

Also, it's best to steer new players to the real content, not AE so they can learn the setting, the stories, the zones, etc. And since the devs did a reasonably good job of scaling the difficulty to add new powers as you go up in level, and so the enemies get more and more complex/dangerous powers as you go up in level.

In AE it's all a mishmash based on farming preferences and custom critters, etc. Not nearly as friendly for a new player.

I just feel the need to note: I spent about 3 minutes wondering what the hell DW was.

One thing to note about Teen Brutes, DOs and slotting. It's generally better for a teen Brute to handle their Accuracy and End woes with DOs rather than slotting for Damage. Fury boosts your damage anyway so maintaining high Fury by ensuring you can constantly attack is a better move for a Brute.



All my teen brutes slotted their attacks with 1-2 accuracy DOs and the rest of the slots End Reduction DOs. It makes a big difference to maintaining your Fury and keeping your damage constantly at a high level.


Once you get *Stamina at 20 and SOs at 22 you can experiment more with your slotting, 1-2 acc, 1-2 End Reduction and the rest either recharge reduction or damage as you see fit (my rule of thumb is long animating powers tend towards slotting for damage, short animation ones with a longer recharge slot for Recharge more but you'll get your own feel for it).