Tips for Elec Armor

I've brought up an spines/elec scrapper to lvl 40 and am still puzzled how to play this secondary effectively.

I took for granted how well my main, a kat/regen, who can jump into the alpha and brush off just about anything. However, even with a few enemies, my /elec scrapper is easily brought into situations way over his head imo way too easily.

I have tough, slotted attacks effectively, and have a miracle proc to help with end management. I've even taken away his travel power until i19 hits where I can replace with stam's power slots. The heal is a very effective burst heal, but due to its slow recharge and burst from enemies, my hp bar goes back down fairly quickly.

If I want to play this guy to his max, a tank is required. I have a hard time with mobs even at +1 if the damage isn't s/l. A weapon primary would of been nice due to a parry type attack... but haven't built a spines up yet.

So, at 50, how have you /elec armors dealt with some of the secondary's dull drums? The build I have on mid's will shoot for 80%+ recharge, but should I focus on building defense with IOs? End drain? I'm not a billionaire but I can dish out some cash to get this guy up to performance.

You definitely want to get as much Recharge, Defense, and HP as you can from set bonuses.

Once you do that and start carrying purple insps around, you should have no issues surviving.

I didn't go S/L defense with my Elec tanker. Too much inf involved. I went for positionals as it's a lot cheaper, and gives you better coverage.

Try to get s/l defense to 33% or better so that a single small purple inspiration puts you at or above 45%. Then focus on recharge. This will make you a great deal sturdier. A couple issues ago I posted my old spines/elec build; I don't have it handy but I'm pretty sure if you search keyword "spines/elec" and username Chaos_String in the scrapper forum you'll find it. Anyhow my spines/elec with s/l defense and some recharge soloes effectively at +2x8, and I think others can be built to do so as well.

Well, can't offer too much advice for getting much tougher since my ele/elec brute is still a bit squishy, but you said you can only do +1 vs smash/lethal mobs. Smash/lethal isn't your strong suit, energy and end drain are, so freaks will be easier since you can ignore stunners (and even super stunners) while concentrating on stuff that can actualy harm you. If you do AEs, you'll want to fight stunners, mu, and sappers.

As for increasing your survivability, tough/weave is a good start, slotting for def is always good advice, and rech will help with making stuff dead faster and getting heal up more often, so again agree with those. Perhaps consider switching villian for a little bit to get soul patron pool and shadow meld? Hitting it right before your t9 crash should make surviving it much easier, and it'll be up far more often than the t9 as a mini panic button.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler That...was a Herocon 09 exclusive easter egg. The powerset will not have doves associated with it. Namely because you guys would want to color tint the damn doves, or make them hawks/ravens/flying sharks/etc and that's just a headache I do...not...want...to deal with.

I have never played a Electric Armor character. However, from a purely hypothetical standpoint, it looks like you could be more survivable by draining everyone's endurance at the start of a fight.

Power Sink can drain 75% endurance from your enemies every 30 seconds, which is fast enough to use it at the start of every fight. Lightning Field can drain 5% every 2 seconds. If you get Ball Lightning, you can drain another 10%. That leaves most non-boss mobs at 90% endurance. By the time you activated Ball Lightning and Power Sink, they should have taken two ticks of endurance drains from Lightning Field and be just one tick away from being completely empty.

Defense and your resistances will help you take the alpha strike for those first few seconds. After that, it should be easy cruising with most mobs attacking only every few seconds due to endurance recovery.

I have a level 47 Elec/Elec scrapper (Terry Watt). Electric Armor is certainly a fairly squishy set, and I get some of my mitigation via pure "kill them first" with an alpha strike of build up/lightning rod/chain induction/thunderstrike.

But now that Terry is relatively built out, I haven't had many fragility problems. I brokered Quickness and set bonuses into presently 47.5% global recharge, plus Hasten, which makes Energize come back quite quickly. And then I've built up 32% Melee defense (and assorted other defenses in the process, of course).

One thing I'd caution people about: lots of the people first interacted with Electric Armor as a Brute set, and tend to overemphasize the tier 9, which, in my experience is, nice enough, but certainly not wonderful on a Scrapper with their lower resists. It's not a panic button, there's no point in clicking it when you have under 10% health, and it won't save you from situations where you're completely in over your head. It's nice if you use it proactively, early in a combat in which you're just a little overmatched in. Purple insps are a much better panic button.

You definitely can get a fairly effective secondary/tertiary amount of mitigation out of Power Sink. I don't lead with it -- I trust my damage resistance and defense to handle alpha, and then after my initial barrage I usually Power Sink and Energize while I wait for my better attacks to cycle back.

Ok, awesome. All very good feedback. And I agree with going melee +def as the oblit sets and ToD sets will def boost that up fast.

I had the miracle proc installed after some hero merits came in because of the 6 toggles running and, after unleashing the slew of spines attacks, only a few mobs were barely standing to recoup endurance from.

Someone stated that they were doing just fine with 40 something% recharge, so I suppose sacrificing the 80%+ some at the end-build for survivability will be doable. Can't benefit from it if I'm dead anyway.

Alright then, I'll start the slotting a lvl 40 scrap can do now to start compiling some %'s up to some levels and redesign my build for that 6th slot def boost in sets.

Thanks for all the input!

However, those of you with Lightening Field, do you slot it for end drain or procs? As a scrapper the best defense is a good offense especially with the amount of procs you can put in, but end drain would certainly be much faster on higher lvl mobs/bosses with end manip sets/IOs in the 'field.

I'm personally planning on leveraging recharge with both energize and shadow meld on my spines/elec.

Shadow meld, man.

S/L softcap, perma hasten and Shadow Meld every 28 seconds.......
GO!!!!!!!!