SS/FA vs. DM/FA vs. SS/ELA

I'm just dipping my toes in the waters as a Brute, been playing Controllers and Doms (mostly) for over 6 years.

Just looking at the powers in the sets in a builder app SS/FA looks like it will work out well as a soloing build vs larger size lower lvl spawns. Since I started playing it I did a little trolling through this forum and from what I see it seems like it's a popular build for farming, but that's not really what I'm looking for.

So far the trip to 13th has been very quick (though I've used a LOT of insps and died more than a couple times!) and a fair amount of fun.

Are there any tricks to SS/FA to make it more survivable on the way up?

Or would I be better off looking at one of the alternatives like DM/FA or SS/ELA?

Is there a Primary that offers decent AOE early on that could be paired with a set like WP or SD for an alternative? I didn't see one, but it's not uncommon that powers turn out to be different in practice than they are on paper...

Anyway, thanks for any insight and advice that you can share with an experienced player that just hasn't played melee in general and Brutes in particular that much.

Arg

claws/ gets AoE at lvl 6 i think, so claws/anything lvls up really well.


Overall though, a DM/ or SS/Fa will lvl up really slowly if you dont cheat and use AE. They are REALLY squishy and they dont get good AoE until 28. But in the end its worth it.

I just recently started an Elec/Ela Brute and so far it is playing extremely well with good AOE. You get Jacobs Ladder at 2 which is a Cone directional cone, easy to use pretty much just put it on the biggest baddie and once the enemies group up to attack you take about 2 steps back and hit it, that combined with Lightning Field from Ela means I hardly ever target minions, and add in Thunder Strike at 8 and you have a pretty efficient AOE machine. I have mainly been running him solo at 0/2 at first till you start getting defense built up a bit, once get that going better I will probably crank it up more. I hit lots of Insp because they are pretty much dropping constantly with this build and it helps with the defense and using Respites as my heals, I pretty much convert all Cabs to Respites, since with the minor end drain on all the attacks I hardly ever get low on End.

While its not going to match SS/FA for farming Elec/Ela could be quite the good farmer itself since by lvl 8 you have an AOE Main attack (10 Targets), a Cone attack (5 Targets), and a Damage Aura (10 Targets). One of the other things that got me interested in this build was the Burnout power coming in i21 which refreshes all Primary and Secondary powers instantly, that would mean you could run Power Surge for almost 4 minutes with good timing which should be plenty of time to take out just about anything in the game.

I am planning for a fairly recharge heavy build, with a good bit of S/L Defense to have quick recharge of Energize (since that the only heal you get) and to make this build an AOE Machine. Between Lightning Rod, Thunder Strike, Chain Induction, Jacobs Ladder, and the 5th tier power from i21 adding in a second teleport in attack, it should be pretty crazy.

One other thing to mention is how the DM/FA and SS/ELA combos fit into things.

Dark Melee will shore up some of FA's squishiness early on because of Siphon Life's nice heal. The trade-off is that you lose Footstomp from SS which arrives at 32 and is a REALLY good AOE attack (DM is known for good ST but weak AoE damage).

SS/ELA is popular again currently for several reasons. It's a great all-rounder, solo or teamed it handles ST or AoE well. Nice tools like end-drain resist, a heal/regen and extra recharge help too. Finally it IO's very nicely and with capped 90% energy damage resistance copes great with the end game incarnate stuff. SS/FA will beat it for AoE damage though.

I saw a SS/ELA solo the Lambda warehouse the other day. We had already gotten the Emp Merit, and this was sort of a lark.

They got 6 of the crates before the other team was done and went to go help.

As I recall, they went to go and get Nightstar and Siege too... The towers were barely a blip on their health bar.

If Id've thought about it, I would have asked for some pointers or build advice...

I have a SS/FA and a DM/Elec, so, having played all three sets in question, I'll drop my 2 inf in here.

*/FA (for normal, non AE content) will probably be a lot squishier. But, Healing Flames is on a short recharge which helps cover this gap. Unfortunately, you're also more vulnerable to recharge debuffs (which /Elec has protection against) and endurance drains (again /Elec has protection against as well). The slows really can eat you alive because it slows down how much damage you can recover from with healing flames. Your heavy fire resist doesn't come into play as much in the regular game. BUT.. you get burn. And a taunt aura to leverage burn (scrappers don't generally have a good way of keeping things in the burn patch). You also get fiery embrace which adds damage to all of your attacks. So, you really trade off a significant amount of survivability for more offense with /FA.

*/Elec (for normal, non AE content) will be sturdier. You have endurance drain resist that lets you laugh at Sappers. You have knockback resist (which /FA lacks, although IOs can help). You have recharge debuff resistance. However, your heal is on a signficantly longer timer. It comes with a side of endurance cost reduction, which is handy, however. I would say that the resistances between the sets are fairly comparable, but energy damage (/Elec's strong point) is encountered more often in the regular game. Additionally, instead of additional damage, /Elec can drain endurance from it's targets with Power Sink and Lightning field. If you slot for it, it can be a nice secondary way to keep the incoming damage down. On top of that, Power Sink can refill your end bar and is on a faster cooldown than consume. So, you'll have that going for you as well.

Dark Melee- Most of the truly damaging powers in dark melee are single target attacks. Shadow Maul is a short cone that you can use as an AoE, but it takes practice and it has a very long animation. Dark Consumption does a little damage but is primarily used to refill your endurance bar. Siphon Life is just handy as heck. It heals you a little and does decent damage. On my DM/Elec, I use it to keep my HP bar topped off so I'm not relying on energize as much. Touch of Fear is another nice tool to have. 1 application on a boss may not fear them but they hit noticably less often. 2 applications fear them and not only do they not hit as often, but now they rarely attack. So, in summary, DM has a lot of nice tools, very light on AoE. Good single target damage.

Super Strength- SS has a lot of single target attacks as well. Instead of DM's -tohit, you get lots of knockdown and a nice HEAVY HITTING HOLD in KO Blow (do slot this for recharge and endurance reduction as well- it will drain your endurance bar dry but it's so sweet when it connects. It's like a siren song... "c'mon, press me. I'll nail that Tsoo Sorceror into next week. Look! Rest is recharged... there's no reason not to press me..."). The gems of Superstrength though are Rage and Footstomp. Rage adds +80% damage and a little tohit when it's up. It lasts for a few minutes and then crashes. When it drops off it's a bit of PITA as it sucks a good chunk of endurance and it gives you a -9000% damage debuff. I find it useful to monitor my damage in the combat attributes monitor on my SS characters so that I notice when rage drops. YMMV. It's still a sweet power and the debuff doesn't last more than a few seconds, but it is an annoyance to be aware of. Footstomp is just awesome. Excellent damage, probably the best range of any tank/brute PBAoE, and a side of knockdown for mitigation. So, superstrength I would say has good single target and aoe damage (on the basis of footstomp alone) without many of the tricks and tools of DM (but few other sets have as many gadgets as DM). It's more heavy on the endurance bar than DM in my experience (mostly due to the regular rage crashes and KO Blow/Footstomp endurance costs).

So that's my long-winded, totally IMO, qualitative evaluation of the sets you asked about. DM/FA, DM/Elec, SS/FA, and SS/Elec are all good builds that can be fun to play. Personally, I like /Elec more than /FA for regular content and I like DM more than I like SS as well. But that's just me.

Claws is very nice for brutes, with spin at level 6, a nice ranged attack in focus, and a few other AoEs. War Mace is fun too, although it's AoEs come later in the set.

My favorite brute of all of mine is my War Mace/Shield. She has a relatively cheap IO build (cost me 300 million influence about 6 months ago, the build's here on the forums and has been referenced in a few other posts), but she's soft capped and can open up a can of AoE or Single Target Whooping. And the mace attacks just hit with a soul satisfying CRUNCH. None of this wimpy smacking or slapping that you get with Dark Melee (nevermind DM is probably doing more damage). The feel of the set was just fun for me. She started out as two sets I hadn't played before and figured I'd try and became my "go-to" brute. She had endurance problems early on, but IO sets fixed most of that and Physical Perfection / Superior Conditioning did the rest (I went Spiritual for my alpha slot on her).

Bottom line is that I don't think you can go wrong with any combination of brute (maybe stay away from energy melee). Pick a few, level them to level 6 or 10 or so and see what you like.

SS/ela is a monster.

SS/fire is a nice gimmick that's been done to death.