Kinetic/something

I'm very interested in rolling up a kinetic melee scrapper, but I'm having trouble deciding what secondary to go with. So I'm looking for someone to convince me of a good reason to play something in particular. I've already played super reflexes, willpower, and shield defense toons up to 50, so I'm not interested in doing another of those. I'm looking with the most interest at invulnerability (I've never played the set, literally at all), and regen (never played past 20), but if someone can make /fire, /dark, or /electric sound really good, I'll consider it.

I'd say there's nothing really bad about any of the scrapper secondaries and you could manage with any that you want.

Regen would be more active in that you have to click stuff to keep alive, and looking at the others you got to 50 that would probably be new to you and may not fit your play style, but would be good in pvp zones.

Invuln is a good all around set I think, I've never tried it though, the minimal fx settings would make a more natural looking character.

As for the others you haven't done, I would say elec may have some synergy given a damage aura for extra AoE with Burst, and Lightning Reflexes for the +recharge since one of the gimmicks for kinetics is to get power siphon up more often and stack it by attacking.

Kinetic/something is the problem that is keeping me from logging into the game so I feel your pain.

During beta I tried both Kinetic/Regen and Kinetic/willpower. I had read somewhere that Willpower was superior to Regen because it was all toggles that you didn't have to worry about while Regen was all clickies.

Well, I found the regen was much easier to survive than Willpower. It gives you more options. If your Dam Res. is not helping, you just die. And all the toggles drain end at a fast rate so you are constantly sucking wind and needing to rest. At least with Regen you get Quick Recovery at level 4 and the only toggle is Integration which lets you keep attacking at a good rate.

While I would pull groups with willpower I was much more confident wading in with regen.

Of course with my current builds I really didn't have much chance to try out much more than the second and third attacks in Kinetic Melee as I wanted to get my defenses up and then travel powers and Stamina, etc. I like AoE attacks and look forward to getting Burst.

I find the animations for Kinetic a bit too long but the stun effects are nice.

I think that when you will be maxing out KM's potential with io's, you'll be stacking recharge. With that in mind, I think that a click set like regen, which benefits greatly from recharge, may have good synergy.

I'm fairly new to scrappering, but in theory, picking a secondary that can take advantage of a recharge build would be better.

Also, I've heard that km animations are actually pretty short. Though don't quote me on that.

They are about even with other set's attacks or just a tad shorter due to the actual attack animation being nearly instant. Its the wind-up that throws people off.

All the secondaries work pretty well w/ KM on paper. It's a flexible set.


Try narrowing it down to the 2 or 3 sets you're most interested in and make a character for every combo. Power level them up to level 6 or 8 and pick the one you like best.

It's hard for me too, I am deciding between Regen and Fiery Aura

i made a kinetic melee brute and i even deleted my other toon for it, kinetic melee is suppose to lower the enemies damage but the debuff is so small i only shave off only 1 hit of damage, and what if i dont want power siphon, thats not fair that all other powersets debuff doesnt need a build up power to work well, and even then at least they have debuffing enchanments to make it stronger, and kinetic melee doesnt, there are so many disadvantages to this kinetic melee and i really dont care about how the powers look like but just how they function, so PLEASE can you fix this problem to make it fair to the other powersets

Unless I'm missing something, you don't need Power Siphon to get the damage DEBUFF on targets; Power Siphon allows you to ALSO accrue a stacking damage BUFF to yourself.


PS allows you to build up a very sizable buff on yourself at the end of your chain and is thus back-loaded, as opposed to Build Up which is front-loaded. Due to the stair-stepped progression of PS its harder to fully calculate the total effect, but its not a trivial over all damage boost.

With BU you generally want to hit with your highest base damage attacks up front (though timing animations to squeeze the most benefit out of the buff's time window can affect that decision) to reap maximum benefit. With PS you want to chain your fastest, smallest attacks first to build up a bigger buff and then hit with your heaviest attack at or near peak boost. The overlapping time windows of the stacked mini-buffs both gives you a little wiggle room and also puts pressure on you to build up the biggest possible boost without animating yourself off the summit as the mini-boosts decay.


I've played a KM/ Brute up to 28 this past couple of weeks and I'm overall pretty happy with the set, but don't use PS as often as I should as I prefer to keep it up for Bosses and bigger spawns and I don't have enough recharge yet to feel comfortable popping it unnecessarily. However, it definitely makes a big difference. My usual strategy using it is to concentrate on the toughest target, click PS as I leap in to defer some of the animation time, smack the hard target with the first three attack powers and then hit BURST at near-peak boost, then cycle back down the cooled off attack powers as the PS boost wears off. With good timing you can sustain the boost very well and milk it for respectable numbers. Note however that, unless I am mistaken, Burst only counts as 1 hit for purposes of PS, not one per target hit.

The damage mitigation aspect of the damage debuff is harder to measure and I haven't attempted to run any numbers on it, but I can say via empirical evidence that Burst does have a very real and important impact on overall survivability. Part of it is obviously due to its AoE Knockdown, but the larger damage debuff it imparts en masse is probably also part of the equation.


Overall, similar to DB, KM works best with high Accuracy and Recharge. With PS going missing with an attack doesn't just affect that attack, it affects your overall damage boost which detracts from the next one or two hits as well; it also doesn't impart its share of damage debuff to the target which has a mild effect on your survivability. Recharge, for obvious reasons, is important to help keep PS available. Note that for Scrappers, the crit special might make that not an issue (I haven't tried KM on a scrapper yet, so can't speak to this).

If you are building into a high Recharge build anyway, then KM will synergize better with defense sets with lots of clickies better than defense sets with lots of toggles.

I ended up going with KM/Invuln. My wife decided to make a fire/pain corruptor, and I thought that meshed better with invuln than regen.