Help with secondary, options

Hi all! I am working on a TW/something. I am totally lost, confused, and more lost.

I have looked at all sorts of possible options for secondaries. A good friend whose opinion I trust says I should focus primarily on damage and beating things down before they beat me down. Use of defensive sweep he thinks is a poor decision. Another says that defensive sweep may not be a bad choice, but that if I am going to slot for defence, I should slot for typed defence instead of untyped defence.

I just don't know. I have 2 sets of oblits and 3 sets of erads to slot in something like /elec.If I went with /fire, I could slot 4 sets of erads and 2 sets of oblits. I am using 4 sets of makos, 1 complete set of gausian, 1 2part set of zephyr, 3 or 4 sets of reactive, 1 3% unique (not ga), weave, and sj. I have no clue what resists are like in scrapper set. I am going cardiac because I dont want to ever run out of stam. This gives me somewhere between 29 and like 33 or 36% ranged def. I have no clue what it gives me for melee defense (i may go 3 erad 3 oblits instead of 4 and 2), but with one application of membrane/lyso def, it should be pretty decent.

What kind of defence do I need as a scrapper to smash up 0/8 or maybe 2/8? /elec seems like a good partner, but is /fa maybe better for slotting for untyped def? I tried /ea, but its good on its own. You end up having to slot a bunch of other things for typed defense. Maybe instead of makos i could slot 4 sets of kincom?

At a low to medium level, killing them before they kill you is a viable strategy. But you're talking about sets and incarnate powers, so you're talking end game. For end game, you should be able to do high damage AND have high mitigation and health recovery, and should no longer be in kill them before they kill you mode (other than taking out particularly pesky mobs like Sappers). I haven't looked into Titan Weapons, so that's just a general observation.

Hey Witch!

As a wildly opinionated player, I'm not a huge fan of redaw.

At all.

Personally, I'd pick Willpower. You get resistance, regeneration, and defense built in. I personally like the idea of the AoE Parry power because it lets you build up Momentum for your big attacks constructively. Willpower will likely end up being the most overall survivable set to pair with Titan Weapons.

My second choice would be Electric Armor. Energize now and again isn't a big deal. I never notice it on my Claws/Elec Brute and I've got it set on auto. Then again, redraw on claws isn't much of a bother. You don't have defense built-in, but it's possible to softcap S/L/E with the right primary and plenty of cash. TW/Elec would have greater endurance management than a TW/WP due to Energize and Power Sink. My /Elec Brute runs full out at all times and never burns through all the endurance he has. Another small thing of note is the recharge/movement speed boost from Lightning Reflexes. It doesn't seem like much, but it's noticeable on a brute.

Well, I managed to scrounge up what looks like, without doing silly things to my powers:

32.75% e/n, 30.25% s/l

for an elec scrapper. I could get the 3% gladiator proc, but wasnt sure if it was worth it. Is this survivable at incarnate level madness? Could it probably hold a 2/8 mission with a +1 alpha?

Thanks!

I would consider positional defense if you're going to use Electric, since Electric doesn't have any native defense to build on.

Defensive Sweep, unless I'm mistaken, gives Smashing/Melee defense. That would leave a hole to ranged/lethal attacks, which would be annoying as hell with all the machine guns in the game. If your lethal and ranged defenses are lower than the rest, the machine guns will hit you pretty often, and they'll debuff the rest of your defense into the dirt in the process. You'll find yourself cruising along and then all of a sudden it's "What the hell just happened?" What happened is your defense got debuffed and all the guys who had been whiffing at you started landing everything.

It sucks to get your defense debuffed when you're not expecting it.

I originally tried this for melee/ranged, and got at best 28.5% ranged, and 22.75% melee (not including one or possibly two applications of 16% def from defensive sweep).

Is that a better option than 32.75% e/n, 30.25% s/l for elec?

Or should i just go for 32.75% e/n, 30.25% s/l and pick energy armor? My concern about energy armor is that if I get hit at all, I don't have much resistance or anything to help save my bacon.

It's really unfortunate that Shield isn't an option, because playing a Scrapper without a taunt aura sucks, and playing a secondary without some form of offense also sucks. With that said I'd go /WP (or Invul if you don't like WP), cause everything else doesn't have a taunt aura and with all the AoE in Titan Weapons you will want a taunt aura.

Well I would suggest pairing something with minimal redraw because of the Momentum mechanic of Titan Weapons.

In practice a number of secondaries would work. Invuln, Willpower, Electric, and Energy are all excellent possibilities. I'll try to outline the basic strengths of them for you in this post, but please don't think of this as the end all of Titan/? posts. I have little experience with Titan and none with any of the sets I'm going to discuss (except /Invuln which is my main's secondary).

Mixed Protection:

These sets provide a combination of Defense, Resistance, and Regen/HP/Heals to give you what is commonly referred to as "layered defense". This means that these sets give you various survival tools to use. They include Invulnerability and Willpower.

Willpower provides primarily +Regen, with a decent amount of Defense and Resistance. Typically, Willpower's weakness is alpha strikes. Defensive Sweep from Titan Weapons would add little to this set IMO as the Defense from Willpower is typed. That means you would be gaining Smashing defense, but a high end IO build would be aiming for 45% (the softcap) to S/L/E (and usually ends up with 45% to N as well). Willpower also has the benefit of not really needing click powers which means no redraw. However, Willpower has less resistance to defense debuffs than Invulnerability does. That means you will be taking more hits, and counting on Regen from Rise to the Challenge to deal with that. In extreme situations, this may be a problem since Regen can also be debuffed. That won't be noticeable in normal play though.

Invulnerability provides a mix of Defense and Resistance, while offering a powerful heal/+HP power in Dull Pain. A well built Invulnerability Scrapper will easily be softcapped to S/L/E/N in normal content and have a much better start towards the Incarnate softcap in trials. They will also have capped S/L resistance which will deal with a lot of the damage that makes it through your Defense. Dull Pain can be up whenever you need it and means you'll effectively have capped HP at high levels. Invulnerability's only real weakness is the lack of protection from psionic attacks which can be covered using a combination of IOs, temporary powers, and accolades. Invulnerability is something of a late bloomer though in comparison to Willpower, IMO it's worth it but YMMV.

Resistance:

A Resistance-based armor set lacks native Defense, but arguably gains more from an IO build. Electric Armor fits into this category for you.

Electric Armor will have very high Resistance, meaning you'll take less damage. IO sets will allow you to get Defense to lower the number of hits you take (to a theoretical minimum of 5% of incoming attacks, due to the softcap). You should aim to get positional defense because you will always have one application of Defensive Sweep (which you should take for this set, unlike Invuln or Willpower) to give you a good bit of Melee Defense. With careful selection of IO sets it should be possible to reach M/R softcap I think. It's also worth noting that Electric Armor has a damage aura, which would make your AoE damage even more insane and help DPS when you are regaining Momentum.

Defense:

Energy Armor is your Defense set. It would allow you to reach the softcap very easily, and let you use IOs to slot for other bonuses. I know very little about the set beyond that, but the lack of Resistance shouldn't be as much of a problem as you seem to think it will be.


Really any secondary should work for you, some will just be harder to level than the others. For example, a Titan/Regen would be frustrating to level but would be an effective character at high levels. I suggest you pick your powerset for concept, and worry about synergy afterwards.

@Rorn ---- Blue Baron ---- Guardian

Based on the above detailed bits, I think I am going to go elec. I have a powerful defense building tool in defensive sweep, but it only really provides meaningful melee values. Now, have to figure out what combination of powers works best.

Thanks all for the help!