What Brute Primary Can Compete With SS For Farming?

I have my eye on Dark Melee, i've seen some do some nasty things. Any gem's out there thats over looked?

Take a look at claws. You have a fair number of solid AoEs you can use out of the gate. Spin is super underrated.

Claws or Fire. Claws moreso in a target saturated environment (read: AE) Fire moreso on regular maps.

Define farming. Are we talking ticket munching, or PLing others? For PLing, nothing really matches it, but you can get close enough to where it won't matter. Claws, as previously mentioned works. For sheer ticket munching, I would pick Claws over SS just because it's easier to do since you only need a damage aura and Spin versus waiting until 32 to get FS and since you can do it via low level maps, you can do it unslotted.

/fire/mu is good enough to carry a crappy AoE primary. If not SS, then Claws works, but again, it's rather difficult to screw up if you have /fire/mu to begin with.

Claws.
FM.
WM, but it's very endurance intensive. My jury is still debating this one.
Not DM, it's more a hard target killer than an AoE powerhouse.

I'll toss in support for claws. If you're gonna level it up solo i recommend using the AE arcs in my sig.

Clawls is nice, i have both ss and clawls and both are good for ambush farms. 2 caveats though - redraw with mu/burn will be annoying. i skipped patrons on mine but if you want to use them i'd try to use the mus/burn at once then back to follow up/spin just to minimize redraw.
Also if you're wanting to do television's nemesis farm ss will greatly outperform claws against all the stacked vengeance, even on 0/8.

If anyone has seen my dm/fa/mu brute INSANE farm, then they can tell ya that DM can rock it with the right build..faster than most SS/FA. Also keep in mind that perma soul drain is the shiz if u can accomplish it.

Its gonna be expensive build but i absolutely love my dm/fa...and not just AE...farming reg mishs is fun and not overly boring. DM is a fun set if you know what your doing and have the inf to build it right.

I would think electric melee could work too, its got a lot of aoe. Might be expensive to get the recharge up high enough though.

I Just had @Crayehal-v2 time me in cyborgs 4/8 on my DM/FIRE/MU...Ran it in 3:58 mins...thats so far my personal best. whats yours?

Hey Fiery-Enforcer guess what?..stop telling me what to do.. and yea i mentioned i like it for outside AE....exactly my point why perma soul drain is fun.

Im just sharing my experience with it and what its capable of so dont be a friggin naysayer. Its just another option if your bored of ss/fa...it does perform well and mine can compete with ss/fa

and what i mean by faster than most ss/fa is that MINE is faster than the hundreds of ss/fa's i see farming on freedom...i just happen to have a superior build and i make dm/fa a good farmer...everyones experience will vary.

Of course SS/FA should be faster and is, but imo it can be a good competitor against elec...claws...fire

And seeing how the OP said he had his eye on dm/fire..i thought id give him my thoughts on it since i probably have the best DM/Fire build out there.

TOTALLY irrelevant in AE farm mish...i have to agree to disagree with ya.. it definetly helps keep my damage up so i dont have to use so many reds and its also pretty darn good damage.

You can farm with anything, but you'll farm better with the right powersets. There is a reason why SS/FA Brutes are so popular. If you're sold on a non-SS option, then I would recommend Elec, Claws or DB for the primary. They won't be as good, but they'll still be very good.

Some people are having a lot of fun and good results with minimum-level farming (see the "CEBR" thread) and that tends to preclude SS/* builds. My minimum-level farming preference leans toward Claws/Fire Scrappers, but Claws or DB paired with Fire, Elec or Dark will work great on both Brutes and Scrappers.

I've actually been farmed by and with a few DM/Fire/Mu brutes before and they are VERY good. They arent slouches at all. Hence why that was my original plan. I went with Elec/Fire because I'm just a redraw snob and claws nor DB wouldnt work for me and when it comes to fire it has one good AoE, it is very good but I think Elec would serve better.

No one said that DM/fire/mu sucked. They said that it was the fire/mu that makes it good. After that the primary doesnt even matter that much, fire/mu gets you 3 AoEs, a dmg aura, and the SINGLE BEST POWER IN THE GAME FOR INCREASING DMG...FE.

After that the primary is just filler to get you a full attack chain.

One of the problem with elec though is that it doesnt have that one really good AoE attack. While fire has FSC, and claws has spin. But thuderstrike is nothing more than a glorified cone and ends up being even WORSE than most cones, for AoE its really ****. And then LR gives you an amazing 10 dps. So unlike almost any powerset elec does an awful job of giving you a good attack chain.

It isnt THAT bad, and elec/ will do just fine.

One of the really good things about elec is that thunderstrike can take the FF+rech proc. (LR can as well but it not that useful) Right now that is the biggest reason SS is better than fire. But the problem with thunderstrike is that it will rarely hit 10 targets, even in AE, and its AoE dmg is even less than FS. To top that all off its got an animation that is almost 30% longer. Jacobs ladder isnt even worth getting.