Building an 'awesome' Scrapper

Dear gurus of the Scrapper forums…

I’ve been here for a number of years now and among the many things I still haven’t achieved is having a Scrapper I can be proud of. I have witnessed Scrappers doing amazing things, most notably soloing the end room of Dark Watcher’s final mission while the rest of the team was faceplanted (Dark/Regen Scrapper IIRC). But my Scrappers tend to be… well, a little weak. I know I slot ok and fairly sensibly but they struggle to run anything higher than +1/x4.

But here’s the thing: I don’t have oodles of inf or the patience to marketeer for rare recipes. My builds tend to be inexpensive and eschew PvP or Purples, favouring fun over uberness. For the majority of their career, my characters live on SOs, only getting IOed if I really enjoy them.

So, getting to the point, I want to roll a Scrapper that can be awesome with little investment and perhaps astounding with a lot. What powersets would you recommend this is easiest to achieve with? Current favourite is an MA/Inv Scrapper which I am told can be great with a bit of effort. Fighting Pool and Body Mastery are a must but is there anything else I should look at adding? What’s good to aim for with a ‘great’ Scrapper? None of my builds tend to get anywhere near the softcap without a ton of Kinetic Combats so should I look at maximising my recharge or HP perhaps?

Any advice is gratefully received.

My favorites have been MA/WP, MA/Regen, Katana/WP and Katana/Electric.

In the end, the one that I have really focused on is the MA/WP. With Inventions and and Alpha slot, he is truly a beast.

I have tricked out and un-slotted the others over time.

I'm partial to Shield, but Inv can be made into something quite sturdy as well. I wouldn't worry about the softcap ; while it's great to be there, defense starts being useful before that. In other words, don't maximise recharge or HP if the goal is survivability (first, because you're going to be at or near the HP cap with Dull Pain anyway!).

Here's a quick 5 minutes build I'd go with if I had your goals in mind (easier to do that so maybe it can give you some ideas than to try to say the same thing with words) :

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Katana/Electric sounds like an interesting combination. All Scrappers can be "awesome."

If your MA/inv is fun right now with SOs, then I'd say stick with that. I found that the resources I had available to me really began to bloom when I had fun characters that I enjoyed playing at lvl 50.

Look at your toon as a long-term project: Goalposts are(for me) first Endurance control, then either defense or recharge, depending on what I feel is most important for the toon. I'd probably chase endo, then defense, then recharge, on a MA/inv.

For /inv in general (from the perspective of my claw/inv/body scrap), what made it begin to feel really awesome was s/l/e/n def in the 30s when in combat, and perma-Dull Pain with the help of good slotting, Hasten, and minor global recharge. With higher def, it gets even better.

All that being said.../SR is the easiest set to def softcap, wp gives as good returns as inv.
/Shield is incredible when IO'ed, good lord.


And...
Don't be afraid of high price-points for things like Kinetic Combats. Be willing to wait a bit, and let a lowball bid sit for a while. Also, and even more important for those of us not rolling head-over-heels in Inf: Generate your own goods. Run tip missions, 5 per day, and use A-merits to get what you want. You'll get both inf and drops naturally that way, with regular progress towards your goal.

EDIT: Two other things you can do that just require time and effort: Open up your Incarnate Alpha slot, and do the legwork to get the +hp/+end accolades. The accolades especially; they are in the background, but an extra 20% hp/10 end does amazing things to any build, and function while exemplared.

The secret to roleing an amazing scrapper is to find a set the best suits your play style. Once you have a set that works for you, study what makes that set effective. What are the weaknesses? What are the strengths? Then you can find IOs, (even cheap ones) that close the weaknesses and maximize it's strengths.

Regeneration is a great set. I've seen amazing things done with Regeneration scrappers. None of my Regeneration scrappers are capable of doing these things. Simply put, Regeneration doesn't suit my play style.

Dark Armor is a great set. Most people give up on it early on. I routinely do things on my Dark Armor scrappers that leave other players baffled. Simply put, I like Dark Armor. Studied how it worked, and designed an IO builds to make bad *** scrappers.

Once you've found a set that works for you, then seek build advice here on the forums. There really isn't any one 'superior' scrapper combo.

I love doing builds-on-a-budget

I took Nihilii's build and gave it a bit of a tweak:

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Now, the point of contention that's most obvious to me: Dragon's Tail. I use Eradication and Cleaving Blow. These BOTH use rare salvage (nevermind the "uncommon" status of the Cleaving Blow recipes), so it's more expensive. But notice how the damage is at something crazy (like 130%) so you can buy lower level Eradications, which will give you the set bonuses while being cheaper, still hit the ED limit, and if you go low enough, use tier 1 rare salvage which is noticeably cheaper.

And consider the incarnate alpha slot: If you go for a Nerve Partial Core Revamp, you'll be at 40% S/L and 39.5% E/N, and the Tier-3 alpha like that is quite achievable in a short time.

For something crazy: Drop the medicine pool and take the presence one: More taunt sets and you'll be near the defense cap in no time

EDIT:

This is more expensive, but gets you to the S/L Softcap with the Tier-2 alpha slot, although I have the Tier-3 selected because I think it's not that hard to acquire, all things considered (or use a few more enemies in range of invincibility if you go for the EndRedux Alpha, which would be a sensible choice for the budget-concious):

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Don't be fooled by Reactive Armor: It's really easy to acquire using AE tickets at 35-39. And of course the +Recovery uniques aren't strictly necessary - specially if, as I said, you go EndRedux in your alpha slot.

Ah, for a laugh I did something different: Elec/Inv!

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The key to achieving Scrapper "awesomeness" is to reach high levels of mitigation. This can be done through resistance, defense, or healing (regeneration), but it is easiest to perform with defense. At 75% resistance (Scrapper cap) you still take 25% of the damage dealt to you. It is difficult to boost resistance significantly through IO sets. At around 1500% regeneration (approximate for /Regen) you heal about 140 HP/s. Many encounters may do more than this, and spike damage will kill you. At 45% defense, most enemies will only hit you about 5% of the time because their base chance to hit is 50%. This means you only take 10% of the original damage dealt. With only Health and IO sets to enhance regeneration, a Scrapper can easily regenerate 14 HP/s. Multiply that by your defense and it is easy to see how they can mitigate 140 DPS like the Regen mentioned previously.

Any power set can be built to be defensive enough for what you saw. Squeezing in offense through recharge bonuses is the only difficult part, sometimes. That Regeneration Scrapper probably had a fair amount of defense, or used a combination of Moment of Glory and Shadow Meld to reach the defense soft cap.

You don't have to reach 45% to feel invincible. At 32.5% defense, one small purple inspiration can put you at 45%. For most fights, you won't feel the need to use an inspiration. If you have a defense-based set (Shield or Super Reflexes) you should hit the soft cap.

Combining resistance, healing, and defense makes your character much tougher than just getting high levels of defense. Resistance and healing is mostly limited to your secondary set, or Dark Melee's heal: Siphon Life. While a defense-based character is easy to reach the soft cap, a resistance or healing-based character will be much tougher when IOed out.


Invulnerability is a defense-based set when not fighting S/L damage. Dull Pain is a big heal, but the long recharge makes it unreliable for staying alive. Praetorian Clockwork in the Incarnate content make this set's primary strength (capped S/L resistance) insignificant. A lot of people like it for how easy it is at low levels, and how easy it is to reach the soft cap.

Willpower includes defense, moderate resistance, and regeneration that increases when you fight more enemies. It is a great set for low and high level content.

Fiery Aura has decent resistance and a nice heal. Its biggest feature is AoE damage through Burn, and Fiery Embrace enhances that damage in a unique way. With IO sets, it can be a great balance between AoE offense and survivability, but may lack high amounts of recharge.

Shield Defense and Super Reflexes are easy to reach the defense soft cap. Both sets lack a heal, but they can also be made to ignore defense debuffs through defense debuff resistance.

Dark and Electric Armors are resistance-based sets and have resistance to just about everything. They both have nice healing powers. Dark can heal to full health every 20 seconds or so if there are enough enemies in range.

Regeneration is the weakest set in the game until you obtain high amounts of defense. It is difficult to do this without high global recharge (expensive) so you can cycle between Shadow Meld and Moment of Glory.

I'm personally not thrilled with my MA/Inv but ymmv. I've gutted her IOs and she just sits, my first 50, so I keep her.

My only other 50 is my Katana/WP which is fun and uber and while not cheap, she's not trucking around with over 2b of equipment. Katana's Divine Avalanche is the best defense at the best price, nothing. Then build for ENFC and you're good to go. No worries on endurance with Stamina and Quickness.

DM/Shield scrapper.

Bask in your awesome, and laugh at all the other "subpar" scrappers

*/Shield can perform really well without purples. In fact you're encouraged to avoid them to hit softcap. You will need steadfast +3% def and to pick up some somewhat-expensive 6-sets (oblit, mako's) but all in all it is a fairly cheap build compared to a 5x purlet-set character. Still probably in the neighborhood of 2 billion, but... that's less than a single purple set which can go north of that mark in 4-5 IOs.

My personal shieldie is a BS/SD right now, though I'm poking at building out a DM/SD as an alt if I can find the costume/name/background. I'm worried I might be getting SD heavy in my roster though, with a SD/Axe tank wandering around there too. I hate to get too into a particular set and then have the devs take the brutal nerf bat to it. With the way player-survivability is with +def in game I'm a touch worried about that.

I kinda wish he was katana/sd. Katana got pretty sweet after they went through and updated animations, etc, back when it was a second-class broadsword. But the concept said BS, and so thus it was.

I've built kat/wp and kat/elec. They are indeed fun.

My DM/SR/body/T3spirit and T3musc is the i1 champ
Fire/shield/body/T4spirit is insane
Dm/shield/body/soon to have T4 spirit blows my DM/SR away (sadly)

Last (for inclusion) Stone/dm/body(?)/T4Spirit just cant be killed (soft-capped def, fully slotted granite, 2.54% regen (w/o siphon life healing for 461 a pop at 121% rech), EE heals for 1600+