General thoughts? Katana/FA

I'm getting close to 50 now with my KM/SR scrapper and thinking about my next project. I have a Katana/Fiery Aura scrapper sitting around level 22-ish and waiting to bloom but, to be honest, I'm not sure what to do with her. I'm not looking for a build but are there any general thoughts on the combination? My last couple characters defensively have been positional defense oriented and that was easy enough to noodle out. I'm not convinced of the synergy between Katana and Fiery Aura with the latter resistance based and the former all about Divine Avalanche for the +Def. But I haven't played it enough to know, either.

I like the character concept and would like to slog through it regardless but if anyone knows what I'm getting into, please speak up. Either way, I'm sure it'll be a paradigm shift from the raw +Melee/Ranged/AOE DEF mindset.

Divine Avalance can help you get decent positional defense. I wouldn't depend on it for S/L defense because it only gives Lethal.

Combining healing, resistance, and defense makes a character very hard to kill. My Spines/Fire has tanked AV's with ease because I have 32.5% positional defense. Fire's resistance and heal make it very easy to stay alive.

I'm currently playing one in a concept group that meets weekly. Progress has been slowish, playing only once a week, and I'm around 26, iirc, without much in the way of fancy IO slotting, and feeling starved for slots as always.

I too was concerned about the durability at first. However, having a team every time has alleviated that concern -- since I'm not tanking, I can follow the Tanker around and just lay into whatever he's got gathered up. Often, I only need to hit Healing Flames a couple of times a night.

However, in this case he's a Dark Tanker, and every once in a while he mis-times Dark Regen in a large herd and pays the price. I've been startled to see that most of those times, my Katana/Fiery Aura Scrapper has held up quite well, including a few times when I had to hold the line against tons of foes while the team recovered. I think the key is that (so far) I've already had a Divine Avalanche buff (or two) up before the Tanker went down, so that within seconds of finding myself unexpectedly the point man, I've been able to triple-stack DA. I don't know if I'd do so well if I had to absorb the alpha before getting DA stacked up, however.

45% melee defense, plus my resistance and my (half-slotted!) Healing Flames, is a potent combination. Add to that the fact that my Blazing Aura is still only one-slotted and I don't even HAVE Burn yet, and you can see that religious attention to stacking DA can make this combo formidable for churning through crowds.

So I've been playing a BS/FA from before the FA buffs (she was my first character, i didn't know FA was bad!) and here are a couple thoughts:
-With reasonable IO investment, you can easily get to melee softcap with just one stack of DA. Before then you can double stack it to get the same thing. It does make an otherwise very squishy secondary more survivable.
-Fiery Aura + Build Up gives you a TON of burst damage. When something absolutely must die, you can kill it really fast.
-BS/Katana are more single-target sets, Burn gives you a lot more AoE. I took Fireball from the APP; Whirling Sword was just too slow for me.
-While leveling, you should go to Crotoa and laugh at the Fir Bolgs as they attempt to harm you.
-Fun fact: because of its +resist component, Healing Flames actually works on Hami raids.

IMO, instead of having synergy, it's more like the sets cover each other's holes.

It also seems the game designers are beginning to indirectly nerf pure +Def by giving the new content lots of +ToHit, which makes resistance-based sets (and the big self-heal) attractive.

Katana/FA is an amazing scrapper combo and is up at the top for DPS potential.

You can get a lot of DPS just from the top attack chain and your damage aura. Multiply that by Fiery Embrace and the -Res you can get from procs(Achilles' Heel and Fury of the Gladiator), and you get a Scrapper that not only deals monstrous levels of damage by itself, but also gives -res to the team and can have good survivability due to how well Divine Avalance stacks with Fire's resists and self heal.

Here's a build I made just now, showcases the combos potential pretty well: http://www.cohplanner.com/mids/downl...B5FE0F8849DF50

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