Filling my dream of a DB scrapper.

Get enough recharge for Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals -> Repeat

Then build for all the defense you can!

Then build for additional recharge (to get Dull Pain up more often) with maybe a few (if you want to go this way) +PSI Resist bonuses thrown in!

Good to go!

This is pretty much it. I have a DB/WP that has a seemless attack chain of Blinding Feint -> Attack Vitals or Blinding Feint -> Sweep. Plus softcapped S/L and 33% on the other four. With Invul it should be even a lot easier AND cheaper to achieve those numbers of defence allowing you more room for recharge and accuracy.
Oh, and try to cram in as much accuracy as possible. Regardless of what the numbers say DB tends to miss more often than other stuff, which is bad because it relies on all its hits landing for the combos to activate.

You should try running Herostats. That usually cures accuracy problems.

The fact that it relies on hits landing doesn't mean that it misses more often than other stuff. It means that it's potentially impacted more by missing, which is different.

Of course I tend not to use my combos much, generally only using Vitals Strike when I can hit a lot of foes with it, so that doesn't actually affect my DB/Regen much.

I use one combo and love it for aoe runs and that is the sweep combo the only combo I have available on the toon

You don't need the purple IOs or PvP IOs.

(whistles innocently)

The fact that it has a very easily perminately double stacked tohit buff actually makes DB considerably more accurate then other sets... and thus more able to overcome -tohit debuffs then other sets.

Unfortunately, slotting for accuracy won't really help - most of the time, a scrapper is sitting at the accuracy cap, especially with stacked Blinding Feint. The problem is, with a capped (95%) chance to hit, the chance of successfully landing a BF/Attack Vitals chain and not missing any of it is about 81%, and missing any part of it noticeably hurts your DPS, either by losing a BF buff, or botching your combo. Four out of five combos either failing or missing a BF buff means DB is the set that most notices the hit-chance cap.

That does depend. If you are debuffed before your buffs land, you're usually not in a good place. A bit of kiting often helps me here, but it depends on how the debuffs are delivered.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

Nihilii. Thread here. Nihilii was one of the pioneering Scrapper no temps no insps AV soloers after the advent of IOs. The build is there, but it is, of course, fairly old.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier

I remember that. I don't think /invul was really talked about during that point so it was kind of out of the blue to see somebody pull it off.

That's not what I meant. I meant that from what I've seen in DB (I've played three DB toons to 50) is that DB attacks tend to miss more often than other scrapper primaries. Plain and simple.

This is most probably why I'm seeing this I guess. Or at least why I'm noticing this more often than my other scrappers.


Side note though:
While I do agree that having double stacked Blinding Feint helps a lot with your ToHit buffs and subsequent attacks, in order for the initial Blinding Feint to actually connect reliably to begin with, you will need to have a good amount of accuracy invested in your build, no? Unless you're willing to pop a couple yellows every time. This is also very much more noted when playing against enemies with good amounts of defence (iTF, for example).
When I first built my scrapper I had only 27% Global accuracy on him and 6% toHit (Kismet unique). Was planning to rely on Blinding Feint to carry me through its ToHit buffs. But in practice, about half of my attacks pretty much missed consistently, especially when the opening BF fails to connect (which happened very often).
To make all this actually understandable, I should also state that I had a 44.14% Accuracy boost on my Blinding Feint from IOs. Which, according to Mids, would put the total accuracy rating on that power to 138.6%.

So, I had to tweak him again naturally. I added an additional 9% Global accuracy, and grabbed Focused Accuracy (5% ToHit buff, 20% accuracy bonus). Which put my global accuracy bonuses at 56%, and my ToHit bonus at 11%. Which raised the overall accuracy on Blinding Feint to 172.1%. The difference in performance was huge. Now my attacks hit a lot more reliably and actually having double stacked Blinding Feint is almost constant as long as I have stuff to actually hit. I still miss on occasion (and yes, I know the cap of ToHit is 95% and about the steak breaker thing) and planning to add a bit more global accuracy to the build once I can afford that purple set, but the overall feel and performance of him is very satisfying right now as is.
I'm not the best expert on in DB, or good in number crunching either. This is just my latest personal experience with this.
I'm not saying that this is everyone's thing with DB. Nor am I saying that this is what everyone should do. I'm just saying that after 3 50 Dual Blades toons, that is my impression about the set. While it's one of my favorite melee sets, I still find it misses more often than the other ones...in my game.

Well, I'm afraid you're almost certainly mistaken (even just in your own game).

Don't take it as some personal attack that we don't accept declarations like this that don't have data to back them up. Human beings usually suck at perceptions of patterns in statistical processes like this in general; it's been shown in several formal studies, and some claims of things like this around here (accuracy, drop rates, etc.) are local legends. So we're used to these claims, and they have never been backed up by data when people making them actually started logging their real hit rates.

You can check this yourself using Herostats, or, for a simpler (and less CPU-intensive) approach, just enable the in-game display of "Last Hit Chance" in your atrributes monitor.

This makes sense, and fits with what I'm saying above. If this is what's happening, you're projecting the odds of landing a complete combo onto the accuracy of your attacks overall.

Well, what do you consider a "good" amount of accuracy? I go for around 66% slotted accuracy if I can get it, because this is around the accuracy cap for hitting +2 foes with no toHit/Defense in play. If I can't, and a few popular melee sets don't allow for it, I can usually make up the difference with +accuracy set bonuses. I always also slot a kismet +toHit unique. (That's not just on Scrappers, I slot that on nearly everything.) That will normally cap me or nearly cap me on anything up to +3s who have no +defense.

Any attack set lacking a Build Up or Aim equivalent is going to have the same issues DB does when their foe is +2 or higher and starts with +def (or debuffs you before you can get to them).

Nah, I didn't take it as a personal attack. I fully understand what you mean, I was just making sure that I wasn't misunderstood. I'm also very aware that "random numbers are random" so to speak, because even at capped accuracy/toHit there's still a 5% chance to miss, just like even at softcapped (or anything higher) defence there's still a 5% chance to get hit. If not the streak breaker will ensure you do miss/get hit.

I suppose that's accurate enough.

Personally, I consider the total accuracy of 145% or higher (be it from direct accuracy slotting in the power or from global accuracy bonuses) on a power to be a "safe zone" for reliable connecting on almost any power. But for some reason Dual Blades just doesn't follow that in my games. And yes, I agree. The Kismet unique is almost on every single one of my toons. For me if the toon doesn't have an Auto Def power to slot that in I put it in Combat Jumping since I can turn that off and back on in a second to renew the buff for it.

This is something that I don't fully understand.
I know ToHit buffs counter Defence. But what does Accuracy counter exactly?
And, at what point do accuracy bonuses seize to be actually "useful"?
Like the majority of my toons have 40-50% global accruacy to ensure all my powers have at least a 145% accuracy rating on them. But my main toon has 96%. Does he actually get to benefit from all that accuracy bonus?

P.S: I realize I'm going off topic here...if you want I can create a different, separate topic about this in the player help section.

P.P.S (or is it P.S.S? lol): I apologize if I came across like an ***, wasn't my intention.

I'm off to dinner so I'll try to post something (here or elsewhere) when I get back ... if someone hasn't beaten me to it!

And no worries.

I laughed.

They ALL float down here. When you're down here with us, you'll float too!

@Starflier