First Time Scrapper: Spines and Fire, seeking insights
Do you have 67 slots at 38, or at 50? Your shields and rather underslotted and I would take a slot from Blazing Aura and Quills to help fix that. /fire is squishy as is. Two slotting your mitigation tools is only going to make that worse.
If you have a PC, you should really download Mid's planner.
67 at 50: At level 40 you have 49 slots to work with, so already I'm digging into my post-40 slots to slot up pre-40 powers, and am gonna need a few more too. Yay for underslotted epic powers!
The [] is meant to represent the slot the power starts with, to make it easier to count the ones I actually can work with, so I'm looking at 3 in each of the main shields, and with high-enough IO's, Res + Res/Endx2 should be enough to go well over ED cap on resist and get some healthy end reduction.
Speaking of fire being squishy though, I know I'm gonna miss tough, I'm used to it on my tanker and don't know how it's gonna feel without it, but I don't see a good spot to jam it into the build... except for ditching temp protection and uh, my 30 pick that I haven't chosen yet. Hmmm, maybe it's not so hard to get tough after all. Just not exactly relishing this toggle load, and POOF there goes 3 more slots (Steadfast in the base slot, Res Res/End Res/End in the allocated slots, 55 used, 12 remaining for all my post 40 powers. 57 if I do like I should and 5 slot Healing Flames with like, Heal/Rech's.)
Speaking of underslotted epic powers, is it just me, or is Body Mastery looking like it leads the pack as usual? Conserve is always nice, even if only base slotted, And Energy Torrent for Melee Archetypes is a 100% KnockDOWN, which is always glorious, and Physical Perfection is more of a good thing, which is important when your build maintains 2 damage auras and 3 armor toggles. Is any other set gonna stand out as well on 9 invested slots as that? It's not looking like it at a glance, but I'm open to suggestions.
I would use mids, but banging on the O key is a lot faster than whipping something up in mids, and I get information overload when I start looking at a fully printed out mids build with unintelligible abbreviations and slot levels listed and so on.
Since I'm not going for sets, I think this gives a simple and quick overview of how "invested in" a power is without needlessly going into detail about the slotting especially since I'm likely going to do it on a trial basis, adjusting attacks for End-Red versus recharge as needed and on the fly, and so on.
So that leaves me with:
Code:
01) LUNGE []OOOO 01) Fire Shield []OOO ( Res, Res End, Res End, and Muling a steadfast -KB) 02) Blazing Aura []OOOO (Franken Acc, Dam, End) 04) Spine Burst []OOOO 06) Air Superiority []OOOO 08) Impale []OOOO 10) Build Up []OO 12) Healing Flames []OOOO (Heal, Rech, and 3 Heal/Rech's, or such similar?) 14) Fly [] 16) Plasma Shield []OO (See Fire Shield, minus the -KB enhancer) 18) Quills []OOOO (Just like Blazing Aura) 20) Consume []OOOO (Franken Perf Shift and Eff Adapt gets results in 5 slots) 22) Hasten []OO 24) Boxing [] 26) Ripper []OOOO 28) Burn []OOOO 30) Tough []OO (See Plasma Shield) 32) Throw Spines []OOOO 35) Firey Embrace []OO 38) Rise of the P []OO (HO dam/mez's for lols) 41) Conserve Power []OO 44) Physical Perfec []OO 47) Energy Torrent []OOOO 49) Group Fly [] (Alternatively: Recall friend, Super Speed, Assault, Pizza)
Mission Arc: Metatronic Mayhem (Id 1750): A tale of robots gone wrong, rogue robots gone right, and madmen gone every which way but loose.
Mids' is mostly useful for viewing stat totals and putting together IO set builds. The text output it generates for forums isn't really that useful. Importing the build from a forum link or data chunk is very useful, though.
What you have posted is a fine format for a non-IO set build.
Some advice on your build:
Skip Fly if you can. Jet packs are 10k INF at the vendors and fly just as fast as the power. Burn only works if you are standing on the ground.
Air Superiority is not a very good attack, compared to your main powers. Air Superiority will also cause the spines powers to suffer from re-draw. If you absolutely need fly for concept, save the slots in Air Superiority for other attacks.
I would six-slot attacks instead of putting slots in Air Superiority and Rise of the Phoenix.
I strongly encourage you to get past your fear of invention set bonuses. A well-built character doesn't have to be expensive, and it can be more than 10 times tougher to kill in PvE. Farming alignment merits can easily get you enough INF to put together any build that doesn't include purples by converting the merits to LOTGs or other valuable IOs and selling them. Building your character with enough defense can make you get hit 1/10th of the time you are getting hit without defense bonuses. Recharge bonuses from sets can make your attacks recharge much faster so you can do more damage.
The different set bonuses available can be confusing or intimidating, but it is much easier to look at others' builds than to try to tackle a build alone for your first time. Do a search for other Spines/Fire builds. I have posted a couple in the past. Finding others should also be easy due to the popularity of the combination.
So I play this game, on and off, for 7 years. Over and over, I play AT after AT, always leaving one in the cold. I try out controllers to start. Right up my alley. Defenders and Tankers come next, and come naturally, almost like an extension of my controller experience, if fragmented. Blasters follow in tow, and I revel in destruction. But always, one AT thwarts my attempts to play and build it.
The scrapper.
They were always so difficult to build as I leveled, always having to postpone core powers to make room for supporting dreck like Fitness and Hasten and attacks. I always wanted it all, wanted it now, and lacked the patience to wait it out. I've never done well with late-blooming powersets, and aside from precious few, scrappers seemed to fit that particular bill to a tee. However, times have changed, and with the advent of I19's inherent stamina, I think building a scrapper is finally easy enough for me to take a swing at it.
Prior to yesterday, my highest leveled scrapper ever was a level 14 Katana/Regen which I shelved in frustration and deleted years ago. But now as my newest project, "Puncturation Mark", an english teacher turned battle armored hero, develops and absolutely TEARS through the levels, questions arise, and experienced scrappers seem like the best bet for getting something resembling answers, and failing that, knives in my gut:
Some background: My "Build Goal" for most of my characters is something to the tune of "Frankenslot for Enhancement values, don't bother so much with set bonuses", so I'm not really looking for "Go for this set bonus in your IO's", and aside from 3 slot Hasten, no recharge bonuses should be really expected to be present to tighten my attack chains. I may invest more later, but I don't make great efforts to make inf in this game, and don't see that changing, so it's a waaaaaaaaaaaaays down the road.
Anyhow, on to the questions:
1) Single target attacks are essential to doing things. Barb Swipe is terrible, worse DPA than brawl if the in-game info is accurate. Do I supplement with Pool attacks, and if so, how many? Right now I'm rocking Air Superiority, Impale, and Lunge, but it is gappy and halty at my young young level of 18. I'm tempted to toss in Jump Kick, since it's been buffed to be about as good as Air-Sup DPA-wise, but is that excessive with Ripper coming up at 26? It's top-spot in DPA, coupled with what appears to be single-target attack DPE and recharge, despite it's respectable AOE-ness, seem to indicate that maybe I should just be patient, but I thought I'd ask what others do.
2) I often hear people moan about the "excessive" costs of damage auras and how skipping them can help in the lower levels. However, if my math is right, 4 seconds of Blazing Aura + Quills costs 4.08 end and the 2 ticks you get in that time deal more total damage than a single cast of lunge, which costs 5.2 end, and that's against a single target. If you're really running out of end, it seems to me like dropping attacks from the chain would be a better call than detoggling the auras. Am I batty? Is there some practical concern I'm overlooking? The fact that they're both AOE's seems to tilt things so far in their favor that I'm thinking I'm spot on and should skip all my attacks and just run the auras. Or something.
I've hashed out a half-way build on paper, and it looks something like:
So thoughts, concerns, obervations, and answers welcome, and thank you, very much, for taking the time to wade through the rubbish and come out of the pool soaked in axel grease. Cheers!
Mission Arc: Metatronic Mayhem (Id 1750): A tale of robots gone wrong, rogue robots gone right, and madmen gone every which way but loose.