Broadsword/Fire build... Anyone?

Hi guys.

I'm not really very much into how things work in CoH yet, so I was hoping to enlist a little help from the wiser sages of the game.

I'm thinking of makinga scrapper with the broadsword offensive powerset, and the fire defensive powerset (eventually Darkness as the ancillary pwrset).

Broadsword is simply my preference for the character due to the models (looks means all right? and I was thinking the fire pwrset as I read somewhere that it's scrapper def pwr that enhances your dmg the most.

So I was just hoping if anyone had any ideas they could tell me if the build is viable at all, and if so which abilities would be musts in such a case?

Thanks.

Adding to what Fury just said...

Broad Sword should stack up nicely with Shields, maybe even better than with /Fire. You should get to the magical Def soft cap for melee (45% Def, means only 5% of incoming melee attacks are going to hit you) with only one application of Parry (slotted for some Defense).

Overall, BS/SD is capable of some really nice ST and AoE burst damage and it won't be as expensive to go godmode if you're willing to use Parry.

Welcome to the game, and congrats on choosing the most awesome archetype. While no AT is really 'better' than another in this game, I certainly think scrappers are among the most fun to play.

Warning: wall of text incoming.

in regards to your questions, I think that BS/fire will definitely be a viable character to play. At the moment, shield defense probably boosts your offense more than fire, but a lot of that is due to an ability in shield defense being accidentally made much more powerful than the devs intended, and that's getting corrected shortly. In addition, there are persistent rumors that fire aura will be getting buffed at the same time, so I definitely wouldn't worry about it.

Broadsword is a good, solid attack set with a decent array of single target and area of effect moves. Like most weapon sets, it has slightly improved accuracy. The secondary effect is a slight defense debuff, meaning that once you hit your foe, it will be easier to hit him again. Broadsword's signature move is parry, which is a light damage melee attack that also significantly boosts your defense for ten seconds. This defense boost applies against melee and lethal type attacks - so any kind of sword, punch, or anything else melee, plus all of those gun attacks those guys over there are shooting at you.

Must-haves for Broadsword: Hack, Disembowel, Head Splitter, Parry.
Hack, disembowel, and head splitter are your three strongest attacks. Head splitter is actually a narrow cone, so if two foes are standing very close to each other, you might hit both. Parry is the set's major defensive contribution - use this every second or third attack to keep the effect double stacked and you will notice a significant amount of missing on the part of your enemies.

Other useful Broadsword powers: Slice, Whirling Sword, Build Up.
Slice and whirling sword are your main area of effect damage powers. Both are solid AoEs that will serve you well on teams, where there tend to be lots of foes to beat up. Build up is a self buff that greatly increases your damage and significantly boosts your chance to hit for a few seconds. It's a very useful ability when there's something dangerous that needs to die *now*.

Skippable Broadsword powers: Slash, confront.
Slash is actually a serviceable single target attack, it just doesn't have any special characteristics to set it apart, and doesn't usually end up being needed once you have the rest of your powers. You can still take it if you feel you need more attacks, or if you have power choices left after you've taken everything else you want. Confront is a single target taunt power, which every scrapper melee set has and which I've honestly never seen a single scrapper actually take. In general, if you really want to get something's attention, just walk over and stab it in the face and leave the taunting to the tanks.

Fiery Aura is a very offense-heavy armor set that pays for this by having some holes in the protection it offers. It relies on a combination of resistance to reduce the incoming damage and self-healing to heal back what you do take, along with a fair chunk of the 'dead enemies do no damage' style of protection. Notably, it offers no protection against knockback effects, and while it does layer two types of mitigation the overall effect is still less than some sets. What it does have is a strong damage aura and several other offensive effects.

Must-haves for Fiery Aura: Fire Shield, Plasma Shield, Blazing Aura, Healing Flames.
Fire shield and plasma shield are your two main resistance toggles, offering resistance against smashing, lethal, fire, cold, energy, and negative energy damage. Between them, they also give you protection against stun, hold, and sleep mez effects. Blazing aura is one of the set's bigger offensive contributions, continuously doing damage to every foe in melee range of you. The damage of each tick is relatively small, but it adds up quickly considering how many foes it can hit. Healing flames is the other half of your mitigation, a decent self heal on a 40 second recharge. It also gives you resistance to toxic damage for one minute after each use.

Other useful Fiery Aura powers: Consume, Fiery Embrace, Rise of the Phoenix
Consume is an endurance recovery power - fire it off and you get back a quarter of your endurance bar for every foe you hit within 20 feet. It's not quite as good as similar powers in other sets, but it's still useful. Fiery embrace is similar to build up - it offers a large damage boost for a short period of time. It has twice the recharge time of build up and lacks build up's tohit boost, but the increase to fire damage does last 20 seconds instead of build up's 10. Rise of the Phoenix is a pretty good self-rez. Let's face it, with fiery aura you're going to get killed from time to time. When that happens, RotP lets you get right back up while simultaneously blowing up the enemies who put you down. It also leaves you invulnerable for 15 seconds, plenty long enough to turn your toggles back on and start smacking around the baddies again.

Skippable Fiery Aura powers: Temperature protection, Burn.
Temperature protection gives a small amount of cold and (redundant) fire resistance, as well as slight protection from slows. It can be useful, but it's not usually worth the power slot. Another power to take if you end up with spare slots after you've got everything else useful. Burn is a weird power. When used, it gives you immobilization protection for a good while, as well as creating a patch of fire that burns enemies. However, the immob protection can be replaced with combat jumping (see below) and enemies have a strong tendency to run out of the burn patch, taking very little damage. This leaves it a power without much of a defined role. As it stands it's skippable, however, watch this space, as there have been persistent rumors that this power will be getting some sort of buff soon.

Other thoughts about this combination of power sets:

Fire is an offense-heavy, defense-light set. Therefore it's good to think about ways to compensate for its weaknesses. Broadsword's parry will be a big help here - get a couple defense enhancements in parry and keep the effect double stacked, and a surprisingly large amount of attacks will miss you. Combined with your resistance reducing the damage of attacks that do hit, your healing will have a much easier time keeping up with the damage you take.

The other major holes to plug are the immobilization and knockback holes. For this reason, the leaping travel power is a common choice for fiery aura characters. The prerequisite, combat jumping, gives immobilization protection, and the last power, acrobatics, offers protection from knockback.

However, acrobatics is an extra power you might not have room for. For this reason I recommend an alternate method of getting knockback protection.

First, when you hit 15 head over to the steel canyon university and complete the invention tutorial. This will teach you how invention enhancements, recipes, salvage, and crafting work.

Then, keep an eye on your salvage window. You will earn 'reward merits' for completing your own story arcs as well as completing task forces. As soon as you have 75 of them, find a 'merit vendor' (found in most zones) and buy a level 10 'Steadfast Protection: Knockback Protection' recipe, craft it, and slot it in one of your resistance powers. This enhancement will protect you from the vast majority of knockback effects. Once you get 75 more merits, if you want you can even craft a second, slot it in a different resistance power, and stack their effects to block stronger knockback effects. The synapse task force (level range 15 and up) rewards 58 merits, and the two parts of the positron task force (level 10 and up) between them reward 26 merits, so those are good to join if you see anyone forming a team to do one.

The other common way to boost fiery aura's durability is with the 'tough' power from the fighting power pool. This is a toggle power that gives you a significant amount of extra resistance to smashing and lethal damage, the most common types in the game. Stacking it on top of the smashing and lethal resistance granted by fire shield will significantly improve your overall toughness. Unfortunately, you have to take a useless attack power (boxing or kick) as a prerequisite (and they really are nigh useless - if you take it, don't bother wasting slots on it or trying to use it), but it can still be worth it.

Also, like nearly every character in the game, you will want the 'stamina' power from the fitness power pool. This passive power opens up at 20, and will substantially increase your endurance recovery rate - which you will greatly appreciate by the time you get there! The prerequisites of health and swift or hurdle are also useful to have.

Finally, there are several resources that I and others find very useful. First, there is a huge variety of general information about the game at the Paragon Wiki (I would specifically review the pages on enhancements and 'enhancement diversification'). Second, you can find more technical information about every powerset in the game at the City of Data pages. Finally, Mids' Hero Designer is a very useful tool to plan out power, slotting, and enhancement builds for your characters, share those builds with others, and view the builds that others create.

Again, welcome to the game, and I hope you will find your stay here to be enjoyable. Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions - you'll find that as long as you're willing to listen, the community here will quite happily bury you with advice.

Thank you all for your contributions. I have been reading a bit around on the different powers, but most sites I found seemed terribly outdated, but I now feel pretty confident that I can actually make a BS/FR scrapper without people rolling over the floor laughing at me.
I found your "wall of text" particularly helpful Muon, so double thanks to you

I think I will follow your suggestions more or less to the letter, just to wrap things up I was wondering how Electrial defense compares to Fire Defense, with Broadsword still as the main powerset?

Well, electric, like fire, is a resistance + self healing style of set. Overall, it provides similar or slightly stronger mitigation, has somewhat less offensive contribution, but has much more utility and much fewer holes in its protection.

The resistances electric gets are slightly stronger (about 6% more when slotted up), and it gets resistance to psionic damage, which fire does not. Both sets get very high resistance to their signature type of damage (fire for fire armor, energy for electric armor), but fire damage is uncommon in the game, while energy is the third most common after smashing and lethal.

Fire's heal is significantly stronger over time than electric's (even factoring in the electric heal's regen component), but the electric heal also gives you an endurance discount on all your powers for 30 seconds after each use.

Electric's protection from mez effects is split into separate powers rather than included on the basic resistance toggles like fire, but it does have protection from immobilize and knockback effects. It also has protection against endurance drains and slows, and lightning reflexes gives all of your powers a recharge boost.

Electric gets power sink, which is like consume on steroids. It returns more endurance, recharges twice as fast, and is auto hit. Electric's damage aura is slightly weaker than fire's, but also drains a small amount of endurance from the enemies it hits. Normally that's useless, but there are ways to leverage it. If you slot up both power sink and lightning field for endurance modification, power sink will drain most of an enemy's endurance and lightning field will drain the rest of it over the next 10 to 15 seconds. This is somewhat slow and unreliable, but once the enemies are drained they will only be able to attack infrequently as they occasionally recover a small amount of endurance.

Finally, in the final slot where fire gets a self-rez, electric gets a traditional 'godmode'. For three minutes, power surge gives you massive resistance to everything and increases your endurance recovery - however, when it wears off you will 'crash' and lose all your endurance and almost all your health. Given the long recharge and nasty crash at the end, it's not a routine use tool, but when you get in waaay over your head it may let you survive long enough to cut your foes down to size.

Overall, electric has better resistances than fire, massively better endurance management tools, fewer holes, and some nice perks, but much worse healing and significantly less offensive punch. It probably outperforms fire on overall mitigation if you leverage the endurance drain, but with less damage, and it's also a tighter build as there are no real skippable powers (unless you want to skip grounded and get your knockback protection through inventions like fire has to).

Since Fire in on topic (and it might give ideas to the op as well) what set bonuses work best with a /Fire.. ? Instinctively I'd think recharge / hp but please correct me if i'm wrong

Some try to build Defense with IO sets, but that ends up with very little in the way of Other bonuses and slightly gimps your Enhancements. I believe the general consensus is, as you guessed, +Recharge and +HPs, allowing one to 'power-through' the damage on Healing Flames. This makes Alphas problematical, but gives a more well-rounded build.

Have fun flipping-out and "arresting" stuff with Fire!

Be Well!
Fireheart