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In my opinion, very little of top end Scrapper survival comes from kill speed. |
Originally Posted by Atomic_Toy_Guy
I am surprised to see DM suggested as the most survivable primary for a scrapper. Sure the -ToHit and extra heal are handy. But the fact that the set lacks any substantial AOE seems like a pretty big deal. I always thought part of a Scrappers survival is kill speed. If you have to run around the mobs one by one and kill them it seems like its going to take a very long time to flatten an 8 man spawn. Heck I've always felt the reason that Dark Melee gets a 30 second damage buff was to make up for the fact that they have to run around punching everything in the face one at a time.
Most survivable for a Tank sure, but as a Scrapper I know I would at least like to have access to one real AOE in my primary. |
Barring Invuln kryptonite, anything a top end AoE kill speed Scrapper with no heal can kill before getting killed is something that a top end DM/Invuln can park themselves in the middle of indefinitely. And then they can go and pull an AV or maybe five AVs to add to the mix.
I'm not poo-pooing AoE. AoE is great. Dark Melee isn't a great primary for kill speed, and kill speed is what most of the game is about. But AoE has very little bearing on a survivability discussion compared to, say, a heal.
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"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
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Having teamed with bAss Ackwards on Succubus Kali (DM/Inv) on several occasions I'd have to say the two large edges she has on GRETA-001, my Claws/SR, in the survival department is she doesn't need to be nearly dead to have her S/L resistances sitting around 73% (and generally higher overall as well), closely followed by the massive heal of Dull Pain available against a large spike of damage.
That resistance (backed by the rest of the build/power sets picture) is really why I'd lean towards */Inv in general over other secondaries for overall survivability.
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And just to be super contrary*, INV/SS Tanker -- comparable-to-low-end Scrapper damage, much higher passive survivability.|
Originally Posted by EvilGeko
Just to be contrary: DM/EA instead of DM/Invul
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(* - I don't want to be that guy -- you know, the one who creeps up in almost every thread outside of the Scrapper forum to give a smarmy answer -- but I honestly believe that the three melee ATs** have lots of cross-over among them, and so you almost have to take all of them into account when you're trying to evaluate what will best fit your latest build idea.)
(** - Yeah, yeah, I know, Stalkers are a melee AT too. Or are they?
)
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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since there's hostility in this thread i'm removing my posts
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Why do you say things that you know will hurt me? |
Originally Posted by Obitus
(** - Yeah, yeah, I know, Stalkers are a melee AT too. Or are they?
) |
Not really seeing a "stand out" in terms of scrapper durability. Yes, some builds will excel in certain scenarios, but on average I still think most the secondaries are about equal.
Granted play style will always be factored in. I can see the durability of Regeneration on paper, but I can never achieve it game and usually abandon every attempt in frustration. Nothing I've played holds a candle to my DM/DA but then I have oodles of experience with it and hefty investments into the build.
Now if we discuss "the easiest durable" scrapper to build, I'd vote for DM/WP. While DM/Inv can achieve greater defense values, DM/WP can achieve decent numbers via IO builds and already has impressive amounts of regeneration inherently.
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This is what I have seen also. Some tend to take longer than others to get to that point, but for me they have all ended up there. There just really are no bad scrapper secondaries.
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Originally Posted by Desmodos
Not really seeing a "stand out" in terms of scrapper durability. Yes, some builds will excel in certain scenarios, but on average I still think most the secondaries are about equal.
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I find my Kat/Inv to be very durable in most situation. I would also recommend Kat/WP.
I have to agree with Des, a DM/DA scrappe built right is pretty darn tough.
With IO's. DM/INV
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am torn between DM/Inv and DM/WP.
I think that Inv would have the edge given budget and time to iron out the build though, I dont have a DM/Inv myself but seeing how much more survivable my DM/WP is to my Claw/WP gives me the idea that a DM/Inv would be like a jacked up version of my Claw/Inv. Both my Claw/inv and Spine/inv have great survivability and the primaries dont really help them much so give it DM and watch it keep going and going
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These days, with i21 launched, you really should consider Energy Aura for a top-spot on the "most durable" list.. Easy to soft-cap against types, +Def/+End drainer which is very good, a Heal/EndDiscount power, +Res autos to help things along if you want it, quite nice DDR AND a t9 panicbutton if you have a spare powerslot :P
i've had it on a lvl50 brute and now also on a scrapper that's in progress, and i must say that i was really impressed with the survivability of the brute, soloing +3x8 with ease, barely needing the heal and +4x8 worked really well too though i needed to heal a bit more.. pair it with an AoE heavy toon, like spines (which my scrapper is) and you will soon be unstoppable.. Consider it 
@EU Brimmy - Union and Exalted servers
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"Soft-capping is great relative to the strength of conventional SO builds, and its night and day for squishies. But on its own its actually not all that fantastic without additional support when it comes to high performance melee. Softcapping an Invuln is fantastic. Softcapping a Willpower is amazing. Softcapping SR is kissing your sister." - Arcanaville|
Originally Posted by Swift_Frost
Ill put another slash for super reflexes.
Even though its warped my brain for the bad, simply because once you've soft capped it. It destroys any chance of you trying to play anything else. |
Yes, the soft cap makes you pretty durable. Yes, Super Reflexes is the easiest to soft cap. It can be a revelation if you haven't played a soft capped build before. But one shouldn't confuse "easiest to soft cap" with "most durable possible". The soft cap is only ONE aspect of survivability.
There are basically three pillars of extreme survivability - defense, resistance/hit points, and healing/regeneration. (Active mitigation is also important, but I'm ignoring it for simplicity.) Super Reflexes natively has only one of these pillars, though its scaling resistance can be better than most give it credit for. Dark Melee, Aid Self and/or Rebirth give it the healing/regeneration pillar. But solo, it will always come up short on the resistance/hit points pillar with its lowish resistances and lack of hit point buffs. Really, when fully kitted out, its main advantage is its 95% defense debuff resistance, but that puts it in the realm of "situationally better" not "ZOMG Super Reflexes!"
Now consider a Dark Melee/Invuln fully IO'd out. You're sitting at 45% defense to all but psionic facing one enemy, 56% when surrounded, which gives you a buffer for debuffs, or gets you close to the incarnate soft cap. Your smashing/lethal resistance is over 70%, and you have non-trivial resistance to other types except psionic. Your hit points are capped. You're spamming a small heal, have an infrequent but large heal, plus have massive regeneration from Rebirth scaled to your capped hit points. There are also some more subtle points here, like how Siphon Life and Rebirth are keeping your hit points topped up all the time, giving you huge protection against spike damage, and spikes of damage are what tend to kill extreme durability Scrappers. This spike protection is one of the major things that allows DM/Invulns to solo multiple AVs at once.
Yeah, they have their kryptonite - psionic damage. But some of that psionic damage is non-positional. I bet my Dark Melee/Super Reflexes gets torn apart by Malaise faster than a Dark Melee/Invuln despite psionic not being my kryptonite.
My Katana/Dark mostly laughs at psionic damage, but with comparatively low potection from spike damage, he'll crumple faster than a Dark Melee/Invuln in more common situations.
I need to look into Energy Aura. I haven't studied what it's capable of. Edit: OK, on brief glance, it's just a positional defense set with low resistance and no hit point boost? Am I seeing that right? If so, it'll have the same issues as Super Reflexes - good on a budget, but not as good as something like a maxed-out Invuln in most situations. What tricks am I missing, or is "defense" the trick?
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
At the high end electric should also be considered. Softcap it to s/l and you get defense to the vast majority of attacks on top of its solid resistance (also able to cap all but psi with t9), protection from all sorts of annoying things like slow and edrain, heal+regen, no psi hole, and very powerful active mitigation with powersink (if modified properly).
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The "trick" is the 'layering' of type-based defense, meaning that Energy almost always have Smashing, Fire tends to come with Lethal etcetc, and the Heal/Regen power is, for a def set more useful than a HP boost with slower recharge... And having Energy Drain which gives even more +Def is simply great for tougher situations, especially if you get debuffed, you can just 'drain' some of the def back.| I need to look into Energy Aura. I haven't studied what it's capable of. Edit: OK, on brief glance, it's just a positional defense set with low resistance and no hit point boost? Am I seeing that right? If so, it'll have the same issues as Super Reflexes - good on a budget, but not as good as something like a maxed-out Invuln in most situations. What tricks am I missing, or is "defense" the trick? |
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| At the high end electric should also be considered. Softcap it to s/l and you get defense to the vast majority of attacks on top of its solid resistance (also able to cap all but psi with t9), protection from all sorts of annoying things like slow and edrain, heal+regen, no psi hole, and very powerful active mitigation with powersink (if modified properly). |
@EU Brimmy - Union and Exalted servers
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I can see that. I haven't tried to put one together, and there may be a better approach, but it seems like you could make a very solid one. Take Barrier and go whole hog on defense pools and bonuses to get to the positional soft cap (smashing/lethal would do for most purposes, but I'm trying for the MOST survivable build here, and I'm guessing that covering all positions from 0 is easier than all types from 0). Resistance should be over 50% to almost everything. Regeneration and healing wouldn't be that great on a soft cap build due to lack of recharge, so go with Dark Melee for the constant healing. But then, Siphon Life is slow there compared to most Dark Melee builds. Hit points are kinda meh. Hmmm, maybe going smashing/lethal IS better, as it allows more build flexibility, and you really need some recharge here, I think, for the powers to work properly. Eh, not sure. I can see it all maybe working, but don't have the experience to say for sure. I know someone that loves his Electric Tanker, but he loves all sorts of things for not strictly performance-related reasons.
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Originally Posted by Microcosm
At the high end electric should also be considered. Softcap it to s/l and you get defense to the vast majority of attacks on top of its solid resistance (also able to cap all but psi with t9), protection from all sorts of annoying things like slow and edrain, heal+regen, no psi hole, and very powerful active mitigation with powersink (if modified properly).
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"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
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So defense IS the trick, and it's another one trick pony like Super Reflexes? A heal and regen power is nice, but I'd disagree with it being better than a HP boost when Siphon Life, Aid Self and Rebirth are available options for a most durable Scrapper. It's the resistance/hit points aspect of survivability that is generally more difficult to achieve on a Scrapper. As far as Energy Drain helping with defense debuffs, I'm sure it helps a little, but it looks like 6% defense or so at the top end if you slot it up and are surrounded? In the same situation, Invincibility is giving about a 11% defense buff over baseline in a toggle. Neither seem great, but it seems like 11% full time would be better, though Energy Drain looks like it could be stacked several times in a high recharge build?|
Originally Posted by Brimmy
The "trick" is the 'layering' of type-based defense, meaning that Energy almost always have Smashing, Fire tends to come with Lethal etcetc, and the Heal/Regen power is, for a def set more useful than a HP boost with slower recharge... And having Energy Drain which gives even more +Def is simply great for tougher situations, especially if you get debuffed, you can just 'drain' some of the def back.
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Apologies if I'm way off base. This IS almost my first time looking at this set. Y'all can slap me around and call me a noob if it's appropriate. Some sets I know. This one I don't. And my track record at immediately comprehending the potential of "new" sets is rather dismal. (Shields? Pfffft. What a stupid set.)
Edit: Also, one reason for my curiosity is that I'm close to starting a new Scrapper or Brute. I was thinking Super Strength/Fire for the mass AoE carnage, but I'm also tempted by more "exotic" sets like Electric or Energy.
"That's because Werner can't do maths." - BunnyAnomaly
"Four hours in, and I was no longer making mistakes, no longer detoggling. I was a machine." - Werner
Videos of Other Stupid Scrapper Tricks
Going on that criteria, Werner, the only place that /EA really falls down on is the resistance. Paired with DM it's healing would probably be ok.
It has regen like resistance, but I would actually say that it's resistances are actually worse than regen, currently.
If you completely IO'd for resistance on every power you could possibly do so on and use the shield wall resistance unique you can around 38% S/L, 31% Energy, 18% Negative, 4.3 fire and cold (It has no ability to provide this), 18.9 toxic, and 3% psionic.
Eve if you took cardiac the reists only go up a few points. But taking cardiac on /EA really seems to even more pointless when you have abilities like energy drain and energize available.
You can softcap pretty much all the typed resists, excluding psionics, but you won't get very far on positional, if you're looking to have decent defense there too.
The good thing about energy drain, assuming you are using it just for it's defense boost is that it doesn't take much recharge to get it to a permanent use. You can even get it to double stack fairly easily for a decent duration. Well slotted for defense this can provide another 6% defense to all types (Except psi, again) when full saturated. It's an auto hit power as well so you don't have to worry about missing your targets. Unfortunately, without at least 5 targets you'll see less than 3% defense boosts per stack.
It's endurance efficency is amazing though, especially if you can get energize to a permanent level. I've gotten it down to around 32 seconds with a 30 second duration just using regular IO sets and spirit incarnate. That doesn't include the recharge bonus from entropic aura during regular use.
So, I think if you really take a look at the set you'll find that healing can be there, softcap is there (If you aren't worried about positional attacks), but resists certainly aren't there.
I'd put more stock in /Inv or /DA than I would /EA with this criteria.
Edit:
Definitely take a look at /Elec. DM/Elec could probably do some amazing things. You can easily cap energy resist, get smashing and lethal to ~60 or so, fire and cold in the mid 40's, psi and negative energy resists around the 40% mark too. No toxic resists, but very few sets have the capability to have that anyhow.
The extra 20% recharge from lightning reflexes is a boon too. Lots you can probably manage to do with that. Defense is rough on /Elec though. Since it has no native defense powers you have to rely on power pools, incarnates, and set bonuses. You can still soft cap it against S/L, but it'll take a lot of slotting to do.
However, it definitely needs to be supported by some outside healing, whether it's aid self, rebirth, or siphon life. I don't think a 50% heal every 30 seconds is enough.
Kat/Elec might be interesting with a little work.
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Layering type-based DEF? I might be confusing what you're trying to say here, but to clarify: if an attack is dual-typed (say Smash/Energy), there is no benefit in having high DEF to both types. The higher value of your DEF applies; the lower value is ignored. |
Originally Posted by Brimmy
The "trick" is the 'layering' of type-based defense, meaning that Energy almost always have Smashing, Fire tends to come with Lethal etcetc, and the Heal/Regen power is, for a def set more useful than a HP boost with slower recharge... And having Energy Drain which gives even more +Def is simply great for tougher situations, especially if you get debuffed, you can just 'drain' some of the def back.
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Other than that, yes, new-era Energy Aura is very nice. I had some fun drawing up a build that soft-caps Psi on top of everything else -- looking forward to playing some variation of that build when Street Justice comes out, in fact. And the extra +regen/end discount are really nice perks. In terms of pure (quantifiable) survivability though, EA seems to be basically a less-consistent version of SR, potentially stronger in some cases, potentially much weaker in others (IIRC less DEF-debuff resistance, no inherent DEF against Psi). If SR is a one-trick pony, then EA is a slightly more diverse but singularly less talented cousin.
Subjectively, and ignoring aesthetics, I'd rather play EA over SR these days, but that's a different discussion.
(Edited because I forgot EA has Toxic RES.)
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Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze
Nice build
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SS/FA is also capable of some nice ST DPS.|
Originally Posted by Werner
Edit: Also, one reason for my curiosity is that I'm close to starting a new Scrapper or Brute. I was thinking Super Strength/Fire for the mass AoE carnage, but I'm also tempted by more "exotic" sets like Electric or Energy.
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SS/FA is the devil......
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Sadly, I think the top end ELA user, is better off as a Brute or Tanker, in terms of survivabilty, than use on a Scrapper.
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Originally Posted by Microcosm
At the high end electric should also be considered. Softcap it to s/l and you get defense to the vast majority of attacks on top of its solid resistance (also able to cap all but psi with t9), protection from all sorts of annoying things like slow and edrain, heal+regen, no psi hole, and very powerful active mitigation with powersink (if modified properly).
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Would also vote for DM/Invul. Add in Fire Ball, a Judgement attack and the Destiny heal/regen power and everything is just off the charts amazing. Almost unkillable.
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I don't see /EA as a one-trick pony at all. I see EA as a high-defense, minor resistance, minor healing set with two additional forms of 'soft' mitigation, -recharge and -end. The ability to drain enemies doesn't really show up against AVs, of course, but otherwise it's quite the benefit. The -recharge also slows down incoming damage.|
Originally Posted by Werner
So defense IS the trick, and it's another one trick pony like Super Reflexes? A heal and regen power is nice, but I'd disagree with it being better than a HP boost when Siphon Life, Aid Self and Rebirth are available options for a most durable Scrapper. It's the resistance/hit points aspect of survivability that is generally more difficult to achieve on a Scrapper. As far as Energy Drain helping with defense debuffs, I'm sure it helps a little, but it looks like 6% defense or so at the top end if you slot it up and are surrounded? In the same situation, Invincibility is giving about a 11% defense buff over baseline in a toggle. Neither seem great, but it seems like 11% full time would be better, though Energy Drain looks like it could be stacked several times in a high recharge build?
Apologies if I'm way off base. This IS almost my first time looking at this set. Y'all can slap me around and call me a noob if it's appropriate. Some sets I know. This one I don't. And my track record at immediately comprehending the potential of "new" sets is rather dismal. (Shields? Pfffft. What a stupid set.) Edit: Also, one reason for my curiosity is that I'm close to starting a new Scrapper or Brute. I was thinking Super Strength/Fire for the mass AoE carnage, but I'm also tempted by more "exotic" sets like Electric or Energy. |
The on top of all that you have Overload, if you really need a good buffer in a hurry. Being able to cap HP, even with a crash, is very nice.
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I noticed a statement about Inv that struck me as odd in the OP:
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What does "manage very high energy resists" mean? Isn't Inv's energy/negative resistance pretty much the same as its fire/cold resistance? And not, on Scrappers, what I would describe as "very high?"
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Originally Posted by Gospel_NA
With the ability to cap s/l resistance, manage very high energy resists, and other resistances at a respectable level
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Just going to point out something about Overload that a lot of people miss. Unlike a lot of other "godmodes", Overload only crashes your Endurance, not your Health. One small blue, or wait just a second, and you can Power Drain yourself back up, retoggle and keep going.
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Originally Posted by EvilGeko
The on top of all that you have Overload, if you really need a good buffer in a hurry. Being able to cap HP, even with a crash, is very nice.
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Most survivable for a Tank sure, but as a Scrapper I know I would at least like to have access to one real AOE in my primary.
The dark/dark kills faster, but not outrageously so. They can both clear a x8 paper mission in 10 to 15 minutes. Shadow Maul is fantastic for that. Easy to use, incredible damage for a cone, especially for its recharge. It's my pippity-pippity-pap minion lawnmower of doom.
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