Kinetic Melee and Brutes

Hey
Thinking about making a new Brute and was wondering if anyone has tried using Kinetic Melee.
I love the animations but I'm not sure how well the set works.
Specifically: How does it rate with other attack sets?
Do you consider it a good offense or lacking?
what defensive sets work well with it?
Conceptually I was thinking of a Kin/Inv Brute.

All replies are appreciated

THANX

Kinetic Melee on brutes is lacking. The problem is that it was balanced as a scrapper powerset first and foremost, with brutes getting it as an afterthought: it relies heavily on self damage buffing to deal optimal damage.

As brutes already get Fury, the bonus is proportionally lower than for scrappers and final damage ends much lower. Even worse still, brutes inherently get lower mods on damage buffs.

Is this to say the set is unplayable on brutes and will melt your computer the second you try it? No, of course not, you can get through the whole game just fine. To give you an actual figure on the difference I'm talking about, using an identical attack chain of CS SB BB QS SB BB, with identical procs and everything, the brute will do 175 DPS and the scrapper 200 DPS. So, 1/8 damage loss, or 12.5%.

If anything, the psychological effect is more noticeable. The scrapper is going to buff himself to +150-160% from time to time and throw 800 damage concentrated strikes all over the place. The brute is going to have a hard time reaching 700 damage.

So I'm kind of dodging the question here, but that is to say that if you don't care about ludicrous survivability, going KM/Inv scrapper can make sense - as Inv is very sturdy regardless of which AT you pick, and the damage increase you'd get from that specific swap would be significant.

How does KM compare to other damage powersets? Well, it has a hard-hitting T9, a slightly better than standard damage PBAoE with a long animation, a cone that KBs, a so-so ranged attack, and 3 decent ST attacks. It's fairly good while leveling for ST DPS, as you get your aforementioned 3 ST attacks by level 4 and that's all you need to have a decent chain going. It's poor on AoE as realistically, you only get Burst to play with, with its 3 second animation and 8' radius. Super Strength, Claws, Stone Melee, War Mace, Axe, Dual Blades, Fiery Melee, Elec Melee all have you beat on that front ; or, to put it another way, the only worse sets for AoE output are Dark Melee and Street Justice.

On the bright side, Kinetic Melee doesn't force redraw, and coupled with Power Siphon, even though it does less on a brute that it would on a scrapper, that means any potential epic AoE you might add will work a bit better than it would on most other brutes. If you're willing to lock yourself in the specific pools with a 15 feet radius TAoE (soul, pyre, mu), your AoE output can be fairly decent by the time you're level 41 or so.

For the same reason, it can make sense to tie KM to a secondary with damaging powers, as you get more out of it thanks to Power Siphon and it helps mitigate the lack of AoE output from the primary.

That said, there's nothing wrong with Invul and KM/Inv can work just fine if you enjoy the animations. Just don't expect to keep up with SS/Fire or something.

Instead of comparing across Archetypes (Scrappers are supposed to out damage Brutes, so that any given set would do more damage on a Scrapper is a given not a revelation), it's far more useful to compare it to other Brute sets IMO. Measured as a Brute set, it is very good. I'd love to see someone run the numbers to see where KM is among Brute sets.

The Fury generation is probably among the best given how quick those attacks are, and it competes with Super Strength and Dark Melee for self-damage buff.

The set is a much better Brute set than it gets credit for.

WARNING: I bold names.