Like a bizarre love cild of a Hellion and a Skull...

Good morning, everyone!

I'm here looking for some opinions.

My Altaholism decided to strike again, and among the concepts my mind has expelled during this round, is a psychopath who draws energy from death and also has fire powers. And, since I didn't want ANOTHER Fire Blast/Dark Miasma character, I thought I'd swing by and try the combo out on a Brute.

But I'm having trouble deciding which way to go. Fiery Melee/Dark Armor? Or Dark Melee/Fiery Aura? (I'm not even considering Ancillary or Incarnate powers, yet...)

If it helps... I generally enjoy both Team and Solo play, but will end up solo more often because I (a) tend to play at odd times, and (b) suck at building teams myself. I also generally dislike Farming - I do it on occasion, but generally won't bother for long due to the utter tedium of the experience. As such, I am not min/max obsessed or looking for the most efficient attack chain or the like.

So, given all that, how am I likely to find these combinations?

Thank you!

Fire/Dark will be a great damage dealer but will have some issues with endurance as you level. You'll be very end hungry until you can frankenslot everything. Your big heal is particularly thirsty for endurance but you can slot it for a chance to recover some of that with the right IOs. These downsides can be overcome by careful power choice and IO slotting.

Dark/Fire will have less AOE from the primary but pick up Burn & Fiery Embrace from the secondary. It has the benefit of two self heals and two endurance recovery powers. The lack of AOE isn't so much and is probably not even an issue when you pick up your PPP/APPs.

A lot will depend on how much you intend to invest into the character and what your pet hates are. If you don't do much group content, I'd probably suggest Dark/Fire because you have more than enough AOE for anything solo and come with 2 self heals plus a 2 endurance recovery powers. Your single target attack chain on Dark/Fire is going to be hard to beat.

My choice is based off my own pet hates: stopping and resting. With Dark/Fire that will quickly become a thing of the past

yeah, dark melee/fire aura will rocks !

My vote: Dark/FA/Soul

You'll have access to Shadow Maul, Soul Drain, Dark Consumtion? (forget the name!), Burn, Burning Aura and Dark Obliteration (PPP). You'll not be hurting for AoE damage at all.

Fire/Dark is by no means a poor choice but the easier road to 50 and beyond lies with the former imho.

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Dark Melee/Fiery Aura is a fun combo. What's not to love about two heals and two end recovery powers? Went with Pyre mastery and never looked back.

As for Fiery Melee/Dark Armor, I've never tried it, but I've seen a handful of pretty tough characters running it. I'm not a huge fan of /Dark, myself, but it has potential.

Dark Melee/Fire offers insane amounts of damage and very good survivability. If memory serves, I believe Dark Melee has the highest single target damage attack chain of anything available to Brutes provided you take Gloom from the Ghost Widow Patron Powerset. Fiery Embrace on top of Soul Drain are going to take your already considerable ST damage to ludicrous levels. Burn, Fiery Aura, and perhaps Dark Obliteration should help take care of your AOE needs very handidly. You'll also have a very hard time running out of stamina with Dark Consumption *and* Consume. It may actually be overkill to have both, quite honestly. You're going to do it anyway, because it's awesome.

Now, Dark Melee's biggest draw back is lack of decent AOE options, but /Fire solves a lot of that. Fire, on the other hand, still has some 'problems' to be aware of. It's a resistance based set, meaning that it suffers if you're trying to build a soft-capped character. You'd basically be starting with nothing, and while it's not impossible to soft-cap a few positions (typically smashing/lethal) from what, it's still difficult to do and usually requires a lot of defense toggles to pull off.

/Fire also suffers from a lack of KB protection, but that's pretty easy to remedy with an IO in a few of your travel powers.

/Fire also has kind of poor S/L Resistance for a Resistance based set. Fire Shield, when slotted properly, should give you about 35% S/L Resistance, and while that will make a difference in how long you survive, it's definitely a good idea to throw Toughness on top of that to get your S/L Resistance up to around 53%. Still, you need to be aware that most your mitigation is tied up in Healing Flames and your impressive damage output. More than anything, /Fire relies on killing things quickly to avoid taking hits.


On the Flip side, Fiery Melee is no slouch for DPS either, and regularly competes with Dark Melee for the top single target DPS slot. It has better more reliable AOE options as well, which could make it more ideal for a farming build, or just smashing a lot of people in the face at once. You'll still want Gloom for the highest ST attack chain available to Fiery Melee.

I also, personally, think the fire swords are cool looking.

Dark Armor is very toggle heavy, and unlike Dark/Fire, Fire/Dark does not have any AOE endurance draining options to help remedy. You'll want to intelligently plot your power choices so that you aren't trying to run a bunch of toggle before SO's. Besides that, you'll also want to make and use blue inspirations, and be sure to Frakenslot your powers with IO's as soon as it is feasible to do so. Now, I don't consider any of these things difficult to do, but some people do find them annoying, so it might impact your choice.

That aside, Dark Armor offers 'better' mitigation than Fiery Aura. While it has similar S/L values, and might want to pick up Tough, it also has resistance against every damage type in the game (including psionic) which means it will handle mixed damage, or pure elemental damage better than Fiery Aura who needs to rely on Healing Flames to deal with more exotic damage.

Dark Armor also has one of the best Heals in the game, fully capable of completely restoring your HP with only two enemies near you. With proper slotting it refreshes in about 15 seconds, and can be brought back even faster with Hasten and other global recharge from IO slotting. In short, it is *very* hard to die with this power. If you took nothing from Dark Armor except this power, you would still be incredibly hard to kill.

Finally, Dark Armor has it's choice in dealing with minions with Oppressive Gloom and Cloak of Fear. Cloak of Fear provided a mag 2 fear effect against everything nearby you, meaning minions will cower helplessly before you. Oppressive Gloom requires more of a sacrifice from you in that it lowers your HP, but it offers more consistent damage mitigation in that it stuns enemies instead of fearing them, meaning that they can't attack back. *however* stunned enemies also like to do things like wander out of of Oppressive Glooms radius.

You only really need one of these toggles, and personally, you may find that you need neither of them. I personally do not use them, as I feel Dark Regeneration and the shield offers enough mitigation to make these two powers a redundant use of endurance.


And since I'm advocating Soul Mastery so hard, you might also look into picking up Darkest Night. It will greatly debuff enemies To-Hit (-16% when slotted) and Damage (-21%) provided the 'anchor' you cast it on isn't killed. It's a fantastically great power for both Resistance and Defense based characters. Unfortunately the To-Hit portion of the power is obliterated to almost nothing when fighting Arch-Villains, but the damage reduction will be in full effect. It makes a good power whether you pick Dark/Fire, or Fire/Dark.

Ultimately, I don't think you can go wrong either way. Personally I think Fire/Dark is a little stronger in that it offers comparable damage capabilities, but exceeds Dark/Fire in survivability.

Mine skipped Shadow Maul in the end because the AOEs were just too spicy at the top end.

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