Im new to brutes, alittle help here plz :)

I heard that brutes are like scrappers with tank abilities. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also, I noticed that brutes have a "fury" bar. Can someone please break it all down to me? What exactly is a brute? Thanks

Brutes really sucked for me at first, until someone on the forum advised me to put Brawl on auto-trigger to help build Fury. It doesn't do much damage, but it recharges very fast and activates very fast. All the little attacks help Fury build up quick. So I thought I should pass that along.

Also being attacked helps build fury, so you want to be a target for as many attacks as possible. As many as you can handle anyway. Not a problem solo, but the Taunt power and taunting auras will help in teams.

And keep moving. Fury fades.

Thanks guys. Very helpful info. When I saw that "fury bar" it reminded me of that bar that blasters used to have. Similar concept, I see. Anyway, thanks again

Might want to ask amy additional questions in the Brute forum for more opinions and expertise specific to the AT. They've always been good for me when I have questions about my one Brute.

To get into a few key specifics:

Actually hitting an enemy doesn't matter for the sake of building Fury; how often you attack and how often you're being attacked are all that matter.

Fury decays faster outside of combat than it does in combat. While you're in combat, it decays at the rate of .75 points a second. If you're neither attacking nor being attacked for 5 seconds, the decay rate will increase to 2 points a second until you once again enter combat.

Part of the recent Fury re-work has made it impossible to completely fill up the Fury bar on your own. No matter how fast you're attacking or how many enemies are swarmed around you, Fury will max out at between 75 and 85 depending on the situation. This is still doing quite a bit of damage, mind you.

You CAN completely fill your Fury bar via Frenzy, the Villain alignment power. If you remain a Villain for 7 days after completing a Villain morality mission, you gain this power. Should you become a Rogue, however, you'll lose it in exchange for the Rogue alignment power.

When fighting AVs, Monsters, or other players, Brutes gain an additional 5 points of Fury for every attack that hits their opponent, up to 70%. Since this is on top of normal Fury generation, it's fairly easy to hit your maximum when fighting these tough enemies.

I want to clarify a little bit on the "like scrappers with tank abilities" description: Brutes, unbuffed, are essentially just as tough as Scrappers with the same powersets. They have a few more HP, but they get the same powers with the same effects. There's none of this business where 70% on a Scrapper becomes 87.5% on a Tank and they're two and a half times harder to kill.

Brutes can be BUFFED to higher levels- they have a 90% max for resistance, compared to the 75% max for Scrappers- so they can reach Tanky levels of toughness with a little help from their friends. But they don't start out there.

The way I like to say it is that a Brute is a Scrapper, but you use a Tanker strategy to play it. It's not a Tanker; for those who try to charge into spawns like a Tanker and not pace themselves, as if they were a Scrapper, they'll die. But likewise, they're not a Scrapper, you can't just charge in and start dealing max damage, you have to build up to it.

Another way I like to describe it is that a Brute is like a freight train. It takes it some time to get in motion, but once it does, it's REALLY hard to stop it. Once it DOES stop, you've got to build back up again. So the Brute really lends itself to a strategy where you move from spawn to spawn, using the momentum you gained from the last to smash into the next.

When this becomes an obsession, it is called "Smash Addiction".

Basically, like a Tanker you're going to want to draw as much aggro as possible. But not for your team, this is for yourself. Go for the Bosses and AVs first, so you have plenty of his minions around you to keep your Fury up, but be careful about adds, or drawing too many spawns together. You also want to hold back at first, don't waste Endurance when your Fury is low, save it for the big attacks when you have full Fury, and can lay waste to the whole spawn at one time. (Brawl, of course, is the most End efficient attack of all, as it costs NO Endurance)

You build Fury by either attacking or being attacked. The faster you attack, the more Fury you build, and the more foes are fighting you, the more Fury you build. Because of the way Fury was changed recently, it decays really slowly as long as you are still in battle. When you have no foes around you, though, it falls much more quickly, so try to spend as little time as you can out of combat. Hurry between spawns, (as long as you don't get yourself in over your head, of course) and pause only when you've reached the end of your HP and End and need to Rest.

SMASH...

sorry..


as a side note most brutes tend to have two types of attacks

quick low dmg attacks that are slotted for end redux
and slow high dmg attacks that are slotted for SMASH!