Claws: SR vs. Electric

I currently have a level 50 Claws/SR, and I'm considering rerolling him as claws/elec. I'm assuming that on the same level of recharge, the elec will do more damage thanks to lightning field, but I'm wondering about survivability.

SR:
45% M/R/A def
18% S/L res
130+% HP
280+% Regen
Aid Self

Elec:
33% S/L def
61% S/L Res
38% N Res
75% E Res
55% F/C Res
44% Psy Res
569% Regen
130+% HP
Perma Energize

Will the elec be tougher than the SR, and will it perform better?

A /sr scrapper with Aid Self is going to be rather hard to kill. I think in most situations the /sr is going to win out. While the /elec will certainly do more damage, it's up to the player to decide if that is "better." Agreed on looking at /elec on a brute due to them getting better numbers from it. /elec develops late on a brute due to getting Energize at 28, but that's the only real downside.

I wouldn't say damage auras cause things to run. Burn does and it's in the same set as a damage aura but I've never noticed increased incidence of flight on my elecs and darks as compared to my other non-taunt aura meleers. It's still true that the brute will grab attention better, but scrapper damage auras don't make things run.

Without running the numbers, my intuition is that scrapper claws/elec will do better aoe than brute claws/elec for two reasons. The first is that followup is a much more pronounced buff on scrappers, boosting spin of course but also the aura. The second is that scrapper spin has a much shorter recharge than brute spin - less damage, in terms of base values, but good luck chaining followup -> spin -> focus on a brute while still achieving substantial s/l defense.

I'm sure the brute would still be great but if you're not doing the most damage, it just isn't the same...

Regarding their toughness in terms of scrappers, elec is "differently durable" than super reflexes. Their defenses work in utterly different ways, thus they do well in different situations. With elec, arachnos and their autohit defense debuffs are quite obnoxious, while carnies are no more threatening than council or nems. SR would perhaps be tougher in the greater number of highbie situations but then again it doesn't get a damage aura or an end recovery power.

Er, no? The only way scrapper damage auras cause things to run is by killing them. They have absolutely no other fear effect whatsoever. This is incredibly easy to test for yourself and I suggest you do so. For example, jump into a spawn and do nothing but leave your damage aura on. The first enemies to run will do so after one of their number dies, or if your defense prevents them from hitting you three times in a row.

I'm not sure if it's always guaranteed that they'll flee after exactly three whiffs, but if that isn't exactly the rule it's a workable rule of thumb. Enemies get discouraged by a number of things - allied deaths, recharge debuffs keeping them from attacking, patch powers, and being unable to hit you among others. I'm not sure how much influence any one of these factors has, or how big of a difference in AI behavior there is between villain groups. That's certainly a large part of it; the clockwork never drop aggro but seem quicker to enter escape behavior, for instance. Mook hitmen are tuned to flee after doing virtually anything. My only exposure to this is from playing the game, not rooting around in files, so unfortunately I must admit that I can't offer much more accuracy than this.

In any case you're definitely right that enemies do eventually flee from damage aura scrappers in the course of a fight, but it isn't exactly due to the aura itself which is basically just a normal attack.

I've not found the above comments to be truel.

If the three hit rule were true - while playing my SR scrapper the mobs would randomly run off, as they miss the majority of the time - they don't they surround me and continue to try to hit me.

Damage auras deal damage and as such pull aggro from surrounding mobs, they do not run away.
For example if an SR scrapper (no damage aura) and an Elecric scrapper (damage aura) both jumped into a mob and didn't attack, after the initial alpha most of the mobs would attack the Electric due to the aggro that the aura was pulling.

Would you say that there's a difference in chance of AI panic between doing 50% of their life with an aura and 50% of their life in one hit? I think there may be, but mainly in that if you're attacking the enemy actively, it will be dead soon and thus will not get a chance to flee. If you're focusing on a boss while your aura whittles away at the minions around you, they clearly will get a chance to act on their desire to flee. Again, I wasn't saying that damage auras never cause anything to flee, but I don't see how you can say they are more prone to it, hitpoint for hitpoint, than anything else except as is related to player behavior.

Keep in mind also that if you do have enemies running away from you, you should in theory be finding new ones to replace the ones you've just caused to die. The runners will return to you as long as you maintain any amount of aggro with them. I can understand the mildly obsessive desire to leave nothing standing in thy wake, but it isn't that hard to maintain contact with the remnants of the last spawn while engaging the next. Even if you were to move so fast that you outran some stragglers, the damage the aura is putting out will more than pay for the loss in drops from a couple guys left unslain.

Oh and as for the "if they miss you so many times they run" thing, all I can say is I notice way more running when I hit a bunch of purples on a character who normally lacks defense! It's true though that thinking of my SR scrappers, they don't seem particularly worse than others for it. It is certainly conceivable that having defense and causing things to be strewn about merely have a common cause in my experience.

I don't notice a problem with mobs running away on my kat/elec or db/elec. Per mob I might get one enemy that wants to run away; for the kat/elec I tag him with a ranged attack, for the db/elec, I had to take confront for a set mule anyway so that pulls them back in. /e shrug

Haven't seen it mentioned in forever and I'm not so sure the mechanic is a set 3 misses. But there was said to be a mechanic that made the mobs flee if they couldn't hit/damage you in "n" amount of time as I recall. What "n" was I've no idea any more if I ever knew. I also suspect it's well mixed in and hard to see with all sorts of other things related to threat, aggro etc. and mob AI.

Remember claws is often positional in it's damage, this means you'll need to reposition a lot to get the best out of your cones. Movement can be a hugely counter productive to aura's.

So you might not be getting too much more damage out of the set. Although you might just change up some of your AoE options to get rid of shockwave, but then you're loosing the mitigation of group knockback.

I suspect too, you'll find you have more freedom in slotting things with SR than builing an Elec. (Could be wrong on that front, but that's my intuition speaking).