With GR basically allowing Brutes to be heroes, are scrappers obsolete?

Boy, people can be hilarious on these "replacement" issues. Stalkers are too OP'd compared to Scrappers. No, vice versa. Scrappers are better than Brutes, no, it's otherwise. Brutes are too unbalanced compared to tanks, yada, yada, yada.

There's probably room improvement, I guess, but the supposed shortcomings are never as great as people try to make out.

As for Stalkers, Test Rat, we know your line. You hate how Stalkers are and somehow have the worst in game experience with them. Whatever. I think you need to start finding new people to play with, as Stalkers can add to a team's damage just fine and shouldn't be excluded at all... and I don't see them being excluded. Your bad experiences don't make the AT itself bad, however.

Stalkers can stick and scrap just fine... about the only thing they need is an adjustment to their HP cap, as that was not changed when their base HP was nudged upwards. It's a little unfair to some sets or the buffing they can receive.

I don't have any problems in PvP with my Scrappar! There are so many inexperienced people playing ranged characters its like shooting fish in a litter box.

IMHO no , scrappers will still be played .

Just they need a update .
Look its like comparing a old model car to a new model car.
On paper scrapper look and feels fine , just the new model brute is out .
And it feels and drives beter , does both do the job ? yes they do .
But sadly criticals need to be changed into something psychical viewable .
Remember blasters gotten trough 2 changes before settling down on this current system.
And it works well .

Scrappers needs a update in VIEWABLE something , i dont care if its a red bar that builds up then suddenly unleash all your criticals . (ok ok too overpowered)
But something that makes criticals more controlled would be lovely .
Especially since stalkers can control there criticals .

I'm all in favor of something visually cool when a Scrapper critical hits. Not sure what, but something that makes you "wow". As it is, I don't notice it, and it almost might as well not be there. I don't think we need a buff, but visual enhancements? Sure!

Everything is obsolete, just read the AT boards.

OP

Not gonna happen...
the 1st char I rolled when GR hit was a Scrapper.... and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one

I'm going to continue the threadjack with a little story.

I love melee ATs. It's what I settled on early in CoH, and while I certainly play other things, I have more melees than anything else. I have a strong preference for Scrappers. I like Brutes and Stalkers, just not as much as Scrappers. I don't dislike Tankers, but I am not often struck with the desire to roll one.

I have a MA/Regen Stalker which I have been playing this week both to bask in the MA changes and to make into a Rogue. I tend to play most of my characters on +2/xD, where D is at least 4, but goes as high as 8, depending on how tough the character is. I play my Stalker on x4. This is heavily driven by the fact that MA for Stalkers has no AoE. With I18 you can dip into proliferated epic pools for AoE attacks, but my build didn't go that route, so I'm stuck with ST attacks. That limits how fast I can kill things, and thus how many foes I can survive at once with a /Regen.

In the alignment change mission for Villain -> Rogue, you get a lot of ambushes at the start. I think having Arachnos poured on your head is a nice stress test, especially as a Regen, who's going to soak a good portion of their debuffs even with a good +defense build.

I had an absolute blast fighting those ambushes. I was running around, placating this, stunning that, constantly trying to prioritize targets based on the benefits of the powers I had recharged, trying to apply tactical planning so I didn't get debuffed or burst damaged into the ground. As much as I love mowing down masses of foes, having to think about what I was doing, because I couldn't AoE everything and I knew I was comparatively fragile, was really enjoyable.

In terms of raw performance, it's likely true that many of my other IO'd level 50 melees could have outperformed my Stalker in kill speed and/or number of foes fought simultaneously*. Fortunately, raw kills/time performance isn't the only design goal game devs can use. I won't claim Cryptic had a good game vision for Stalkers when they created them, but they have been tweaked since then, and I find them both viable and fun to play. They play differently than the other available melees. Should they never be tweaked again? I don't think so - there are a few things I'd like to see changed. (As owner of a /Regen, I'd like their HP cap to be raised.) But I don't think their core playstyle should change much, even though it's maximal performance is often not in line with other melee ATs. If you don't like how they play at that level, then you shouldn't play them.

* I think the Stalker may have outplayed some of other characters with comparable mitigation but better AoE, simply on the strength of high-recharge Placate. Automatically keeping one foe out of the fight nearly full time is really effective if you choose the right target.

Edit: On topic - I wasn't worried about Brutes displacing Scrappers before the Brute Fury changes, and I'm really not worried now.

Thinking about what I have hear people say like "It will be nice to have a real tank on the LRSF" I would think Brutes are the endangered species. But then again I know better than that.

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