Fire/SD scrapper vs. SD/SS tanker

Playing my Fire/SD scrapper on trials today, I noticed how little the primary contributes to the build. Except for Incinerate, and to some degree FSC, most of the really good attacks - fireblast/ball, shield charge - come from the secondary and APP. It strikes me that an SD/SS tanker would offer a lot more advantages, including:

• gets shield charge earlier
• better radius on footstomp vs FSC
• better aggro control (particularly, reducing the ability of tankers to interfere with my pulls)
• better soft control
• much better survivability outside of Keyes
• capped defdebuff resistance without using membranes (important to me, since I expect a fix to the various Hami-O exploits soon)

I got into building beyond 45% and up to 59% on defense alts recently and found the increase in survivability to be significant (in any kind of content, as many foes have some kind of tohit buffs).

I don't play a shield/SS specifically, but having experience with shield and SS on tankers as well on other ATs and with FM/SD, for itrials I definitely like tanker SS much better than scrapper FM and agree with your analysis. FSC often hits a mere 2 or 3 targets due to the huge size of war walkers, Foot Stomp ends up much more efficient.

Rage crash doesn't necessarily render you useless. Damage procs still work, so does aggro. You can spam Jab for -res, and use any clicks (AD, Hasten, etc.) during the crashes.

Why not SS/SD broot?

Thanks for sharing your experience; I hadn't thought of rage crash as a chance to refresh clickies. And with interface and Judgement, there's certainly more to do during rage crashes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dz131 Why not SS/SD broot?

Because broots have the same defensive modifiers as scrappers. The attraction of the tanker is that, outside of huge +Dmg buffs from allies, Tanker SD/SS does roughly the same damage as Scrapper Fire/SD while having much higher survivability.

Specifically, with only 1 enemy in AAO, Tanker with 2x Rage only does slightly less damage than the Scrapper with Build Up. AAO saturation will swing this back and forth a bit, but it seems like the scrapper is going to need +Dmg buffs to pull ahead damagewise and Diamagnetic interface to even come close in survivability.

I'm still weighing the impact of downgrading from fire damage to smashing, and how significant the loss of damage during the rage crash will be - but the tanker advantage here is really quite significant.

So what you are really saying is, Scrappers should get Super Strength...
I concur!

Well it depends on your chain really.
I find myself using GFS sometimes on bosses (victorias, walkers, etc), between incinerates/FSC/Fireballs/Judges.

I think the added surv is a great plus though, as with the 45% softcap I find myself dying sometimes on trials while taking on groups alone.

Though it's rather remarkable that with a few greens I can take on several mobs + bosses by myself.

I'm FM/SD/Blaze T4 ageless, spiritual, rularuu T3 pyronic.

Fire Melee was never meant to be an AoE power house like Super Strength is. Fire Melee is leaning more towards single target damage with more AoE than say Dark, where as Super Strength's single target damage is pretty poor in comparison. Not to mention you're comparing a T5(?) power to a T9 power so of course it is going to be hugely different.

How much lower do you think will the ST damage be, compared to e.g. Scorch > Cremate > Scorch > Incinerate, and how significant will it be considering I can mix in fireblast to improve ST damage?

(the optimal choice would be Gloom, but I'm willing to settle for Pyre based on concept provided other advantages, mainly the additional survivability, are large enough.)

The survivability is really a big draw for me. Having 45% defense instead of 59% in trials is like having 31% defense rather than 45% defense in normal content. It knocks the character back down to pre-IO levels of survivability, and characters without IOs may as well be unslotted.