Is Martial Arts really viable?

I'm not talking about, end game, 120b in purples slotted viable. I mean...between 1-50, working with SOs and some IOs, do you feel MA is really a viable powerset?

I ask because I got one to 22, the concept on the toon is possibly one of my favorite, I paired it with SR because of concept, but honestly. I have never been as underwhelmed as I am with this guy. I'm out of end before I take on one group of minions, and I know some of the issues with SR, but man, do I ever get my asskicked. Some of the numbers I see from MA are fun, and the animations are first rate, but I can't help but feel like I ought to give up and if I want him as a concept toon, either AE baby him or just leave him at 22 and hang out in Atlas.

So what do you think it takes to make MA/SR not feel so gimp? What secondary would you use with MA for best results?

My MA/SD is hit 26 last night. He's kinda clunky but he gets the job done.

SR is painful until you have evasion and you don't get that until level 35. Even then, I can easily make the argument that due to its one trick pony nature, SR is freaking painful until you have 45% defense to melee, range and aoe.

Especially thanks to the changes that happened to MA in the last year, I'd have to state that, yes, it is a viable set from 1 to 50 with normal slotting. At 26 you'll get dragon's tail for aoe damage and some nice mitigation with the knockdown.

If you can keep going to 35, I honestly think you'll be happy.

If not, dump him and go MA/WP for an easier ride. Or if you want to get really crazy, MA/FA so you can dragon's tail spawns onto their butts in a burn patch.

Going from 1 through 50, it should be viable in single target damage at the least, since Storm Kick was made into a DPS monster - and you can get that power at level 1. I don't have a MA/SR, but I do have a MA/SD and the combination has been incredibly fun for me. As Bill has already said though, SR is a late blooming Secondary.

Repeating a bit - Super Reflexes is a late-blooming set, and most Scrappers suck before SOs. Yes, Martial Arts is fine. To not feel so gimp, keep leveling until it gets good.

Had a lvl 50 MA/WP scrapper and rerolled her as my new main weird combo:
MA/FA. Incarnate, Praetorian, was leveled to 50 in less than a month.
No farms or pl... Just almost a daily ITF.
Love martial arts.

MA/SR is hellafun once you get in the 30's. Mine is my main (50) for several reasons. Her costume is pure sex and she's a monster in game. But, honestly one of her main appeals and its something you have to decide on for yourself, but one of the reasons I really enjoy playing her, is because she's an active build. By this I mean, its not just hit 1, 2, 3, 1, 4 and re-target or something to that effect. She's more of a 1, 2 (impressive number), 3, eyeball blue END bar (realize everything is fine) agro more for tension and go go go.

I like her because she requires me to have to pay attention instead of just wading in, do alot of chatting w/teammates in chat, or TF channels and repeat through map after map. I go into every map not knowing if this'll be her last fight. But, to be honest, as I slowly and slowly build up her sets and various slots she's becoming more and more invincible.


My kat/wp is extremely boring in comparison. I love her because she's simply indestructible. I mean it.. Honestly, I've been in team wipes where I've never even looked at any of my bars while other self-rez ect, because I know she cant die. I find it fun, but boring as well.
The sad thing is I really havent done much w/her. I dont have really any sets in her. I havent respec'd her for inherent stamina and she is just "God-like". Thus, for me, she doesnt get to patrol the city streets of Paragon like a truly loved hero should.

Use inspirations as they drop.

That is, admittedly, my advice for everything, but I haven't seen anything for which it didn't work yet.

My 50 MA/Inv is robust but the animation times makes her like a school bus.

She's one of my favorite concepts, but once I got her to 50 I parked her. She's maximizing damage and something else I don't recall, and has endurance problems.

MA, as you probably know, is about mixed forms of mitigation. Great for procs, in a way. IMO, SR might be what you're disappointing in. I was.

I have tried to play MA/* multiple times through the years. As a RL martial artist it seems that I should like it...but I don't.

I agree with Billz though, it works well with WP, even then I ended up with at least 1 -end in all of my attacks.

What is worse, is I have never been able to put my finger on what I don't like about it. I had thought the addition of punch animations would help, but it didn't. That may be because those animations suck.

Really, if KM had a few kicks it would make a better MA set.

MA can be a bit endurance heavy. I have four level 50 MA scrappers, so I like the primary quite a bit. It's fun, but mostly because of the animations, not because I feel like an awesome damage-dealer.

About MA: when I was leveling my first scrapper, MA/SR, the popular board advice at the time was stay away from Cobra strike, because it did no damage. I am glad that was changed, like clobber from War Mace to do a good amount of damage in addition to the stun. I took it early and it was always in my attack chain and I never felt overwhelmed.

The only MA power I skipped was Crippling Axe Kick. The animation is ok, there is an alternate gut punch that can be chosen that you might like better.
Why did I skip it? Took too long to activate. Might be changed now, however, just not sure.

They say /SR is easier to soft cap position defenses by taking Weave, but I never went that route. I took Maneuvers, and collected set bonuses to get there. Now at 50, with Combat Jumping and Tier 4 Nerve Alpha Im at >48% to all 3. I took Elude as an emergency power. One slot only. All my attacks are fully 6 slotted except for Thunder Strike which has 4 Kinetic Combats.

I have very much enjoyed playing my MA/SR scrapper. A friend of mine suggested I try the combo, and I found it a fun character to play. The lack of AoE is something I learned to live with. "Kickyer S" spent a lot of time solo, but I learned to adjust my tactics for teams -- I generally went after foes who were outside of the AoEs that my teammates were throwing out, and sometimes would use Crane Kick to send foes into the AoE.

SR does take a long time to get to the amazing level. In earlier levels, knockback was my friend. pulling foes around corners and moving around a lot was also important -- to stay out of the big groups. Once I was able to softcap to all positions, I basically don't worry about my health other than to keep an eye on it to see if I need to pop a green.

It may not be the highest damage scrapper, but I have enjoyed the aspect of this "natural" character keeping up with all the super powered teammates. I find both sets of the animations fun. I have one costume set up as a classic 70's style "karate man," while the other uses the Boxing costume set to be a mostly-punching kickboxer. I haven't been playing him much lately, mostly because I had to choose which of my many level 50s I wanted to focus on for the Incarnate stuff . . . and I have a few characters who are still leveling up, too. But I enjoy this character enough to eventually want to get more Incarnate stuff on him than the Alpha Slot I have now.

My main is MA/SR and made it to 50 with Flurry as part of his attack chain. Was it easy? No. Does he still die all too easily if things go south? Yes. Is he still fun to play? You bet.

At low levels, I made the most of the soft control from the old Cobra Strike (low dam, high disorient), backed up with the exta disorient chances from thunder kick and flurry. Target boss/lt, click Cobra Strike, move in and smack the boss/lt, switch target to minions and beat them down, smack boss with CS again if needed, rinse and repeat. Need to pay attention and get the hell out quick if you take a couple of big hits.

At higher levels (when you get Dragon's Tail), you can focus on boss instead and DT the minions to keep them down - it recharges pretty fast. Try not to get swamped or you run the risk of too many attacks getting through. Avoid / prioritise def debuffers (rularuu eyeballs were the worst) just like khelds do with quantums/voids

I just respecced (still had fitness as a power pool rather than inherent) and finally dropped flurry for the fighting pool. However, I did keep the 'flurry' veteran power (Sands of Mu) in his attack chain for old time's sake.

MA is awesome now, and for more than just really cool animations.

It lacks AOE, but not really nowadays. Using EC then DT for a highly increased chance of crit is awesome when it comes (lvl 32). And now you can dip into APP and PPP for fireball or ball lighting. And being SR its easy to softcap and have powers left to get them and still have slots left.

SR is power heavy, but not really slot heavy at all. I slot just enough to get 95% DDR. My newest build on my main, MA/SR, uses weave, steadfast and glad procs, and hits 45% without any set bonuses, which allowed me to focus on recharge and hp and other bonuses. You could easily take CJ and not have to worry about the expensive glad proc, but my guy is a flier and doesn't have the jump pool.

What other set can you softcap without having to slot mako's bit, or touch of death, etc? And have full DDR all the time? I know some /shield builds can get close though but requires tons of recharge and few hami Os.


To the OP, MA/SR is awesome fun. If I made it through it before IOs, you should be fine now. Get the steadfast proc ASAP and throw in tough when you take tough. And use tough, it helps some when you get hit. I run a crazy attack chain, both ST and AOE chains, and have ageless, which solves all end problems. I use barrier for Lambda, but ageless the rest of the time. If you go barrier, you can include the 5% or whatever the perma version gets you to add to ease of softcap, but I just use it for icing on the cake.

I also used air superiority back in the day, but now dont as I can take fly with one power.

With the changes to Cobra strike, I find it very hard to believe your having doubts about MA's damage potential. Even before that, you could have a really good attack chain at lvl 8. SR is a little squishy low lvl, but really only against groups with a lot of AOEs.

Regardless of primary and secondary, I always throw an end reduction into every attack while leveling up. If its a choice of an end redux in an attack or toggle, go attack and do toggle later. One end redux SO in a toggle is plenty until you do IOs.

Thanks for all the feedback, I actually dumped SR (sorry guys) and picked up SD. This was primarily a concept change (the character is now 100% natural) but I have some experience with SD and really, really like it, even if it has a click mez protection and a bunch of toggles.

I think I will end up making another MA/SR toon though, because it was a lot of fun, and I'd like to try air superiority plus slotting for end redux. Ultimately before I rerolled him I reslotted the attacks for more redux and banged out a couple more lvls, I see a lot of potential in it.

Thanks again for all the feedback, scrapper forums rule.

This is an end-game MA/SD build that someone posted recently (I forget the name, sorry!!!) that I thought was awesome. So I am using it. The build below it is a variant I created to include Fireball. My issue right now is that the build is not yet 100% endo-sustainable, but that's it. It does chain SK-CS-SK-CAK. I wish someone could tell me the base DPS of that chain.

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I made a lvl 50 MA/Will Stalker because I want to know how the dev thinks it's balanced for a set to have ZERO aoe attack. Scrapper version at least has one Dragon Tail. It's not the best aoe in the game but it's better than nothing.


Well, let's just say I am not impressed. I think for MA to work, all attacks should take less than 1.33s. MA set feels "slow" to me. Yes, each hit is pretty hard but it feels slow and I think that's what my biggest problem with the set is. Many games I've played, Martial Arts is usually a fast-attack style but besides Storm and Thunder, all the other attacks take at least 1.67s. Storm Kick is what I would expect from a Martial Art set.

Somebody did dps comparison and MA only edges out other sets with aoe by a small portion. It's not good enough to justify the lack of aoe.

I've made a lvl 27 MA/Elec Scrapper and endurance was a big problem early on because each kick costs like 8-10 end. However, Electricity Armor has some ways to deal with endurance issue (Energize) so as long as I have enough blue, I kill pretty quick. And Scrapper also has DoT aura and Shield Charge to make up the lack of aoe. Stalker does not.


Is it "viable"? Definitely. I know it's weird to complain about Stalker MA on the Scrapper forum but the set really needs to be improved further. Stalker does not need 7 Single Target attacks from the same set. Give it an aoe!!! Eagle Claw hits hard but it is still only one target. And if you are fighting something with heavy Smashing resistance, Dark Melee out dps MA with better utilities and it has a small cone.

It doesn't matter what you pair it with, SR will feel like total suck for over half the way through the levels. Then, one day you will turn around and notice that you're being apprehensive of fights for nothing. Enemies can't hit you, debuffs can't land on you and your health rarely goes down. And I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts you won't even be able to tell exactly when that happened.

As for Martial Arts, it's an incredibly solid set. Yes, it lacks any meaningful AoE, but it more than makes up for that with solid single-target attacks. Now that Cobra Strike and Crippling Axe Kick don't suck, you're looking at a set which quite literally has no weak attacks. Every time you swing, they WILL feel it, and it's fairly easy to keep piling on the damage. In fact, I've gone toe-to-toe with a Sword/Shield Scrapper (in the early 20s) and stood my ground against large numbers of foes by one-hit-killing them while the other Scrapper was damaging the whole group by smaller amounts.

I used to have a MA/Inv Scrapper at 50, but that was before the changes. For concept reasons, that one got rerolled to a SS/Inv Brute (now also 50). But the one I'm playing now is MA/Will, which takes care of most of the endurance concerns with Martial Arts, as well as constituting a pretty solid, early-blooming protection set. If you can solve your secondary and not die all the time, Martial Arts is a great set.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.