What are people Alpha slotting for Brutes?

I'm new to brutes and almost at my first 50, working on an EM/EA right now... any thoughts as which direction to head?

EA already has built in end red so...

Agility
Muscle

The best thing you can do is pay the toon and see what holes it has and use Alpha to plug them or augment your strengths.

It's easy to say as a EM/EL Brute you shouldn't need "X" or you should have "Y", but the truth is there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of possible builds.

So my advice would be to play the toon out and see what he needs. You might want extra damage, you might want more recharge or even accuracy, heck maybe even more resistance better suits your build/play style.

Good luck!

Agility Core is pretty excellent for Energy Aura.

* End Mod boosts the effectiveness of Energy Drain which is fairly significant. Stamina gets a boost, but it's small beans.
* Defense boosts the defensive powers as a whole (also including Energy Drain).
* Recharge is always good, naturally, and the extra end/sec Recharge imposes is offset by the End Mod increase plus EA's in-built powers.

Energy Aura basically gets full use out of Agility. The only thing it lacks is Heal to boost Energize.

If you feel you've got Energy Aura pretty well covered, Musculature's a good second bet. You don't really need Cardiac for Energy Aura; Energy Drain should be seeing regular use.

I'm big on Spiritual, Agility, and Cardiac (depending on sets) for Brutes.

Due to the nature of Fury you're probably gonna get more damage output out 22-45% recharge (depending on slotting) than 22-45% damage enhancement.

Cardiac for resistance armors is amazing for +res -end (since most of the resist armors are a bit more endurance heavy anyway, partially due to increased reliance on clicks and a damage aura).

Agility with a Defense armor, as Bosstone said, is wonderful for the hybrid offense/defense bonuses of +def and +rech/+endmod.

Spiritual, finally, I like when I either really need every drop of Recharge I can get, or I benefit a lot from the +Healing as well.

I24 Proc Chance = (Enhanced Recharge + Activation Time) * (Current PPM * 1.25) / 60*(1 + .75*(.15*Radius - 0.011*Radius*(360-Arc)/30))
Single Target Radius = 0. AoE Non-Cone Arc = 360.

I am going to play the odd man out, Muscle. Most brute frown on big red because we don't get the as much of a bonus as scrappers, blaster and other due to the lower damage base/scaling.

However, Crims and judgement on big red, are just vicious. Damage boost to your attack is significant as well.

Having said that I normally play pretty expensive builds with very high global recharge/capped L/S at min, so I do not see a big hit from spirit/agility and others.

I do normally get two or more alfa's. 99 percent of the time I run muscle, I just can't pass up the damage but I buy the one that I feel is best fits my toons power, agil for example in your build. I would suggest buying both Muscle and agility T3, see which one you like best go for t4. (Get the t3 45percent damage muscle, you get the full 45 percent on crims and Judgement).

I went with Agility on my Claws/Electric, since my resists are already great but my defense was lacking.

I went w/ Spiritual on my /EA brute for a high recharge build, but Agility wasn't out yet when I went down that route.

If I ever cycle back around to the character I might build out Agility and switch over.

OP- I guess the point we are all illustrating is that there is no right answer. You have to think about your individual needs and observations. I think of the Alpha slot as a way to shore up something that has been lacking in the performance of that toon. For my ss/shield, I went with cardiac initially because he was thirsty and needed blue bar help. When development released more Alpha powers, I explored Agility and found that it was a good match because of the increased defense and because the end modification boosts worked well with the fact that I went body mastery (or whatever its called for brutes). Would it have worked so well if I went with the Fire Epic? No- because there aren't any powers there that would benefit from the endurance modification boosts that Agility grants. I probably would have ran back to Cardiac like a long lost love.

The other thing I love about Incarnate boosts are that you are never tied into things permanently. So as long as you have the threads/shards/components, you can craft until you are blue in the face and find something that works for you, and try different boosts out for different situations.

I dont usually care about recharge, and I am such a fanatic about endurance that even /ea and /elec dont have enough endurance tools to satisfy me. So I usually go cardiac on sets that have accuracy boosts (super strength, invuln) but otherwise I prefer vigor. I like the t3 one that gives level shift, acc, and end reduction.

I am pretty sure I am the only brute who uses vigor tho.

Lewis

My KM/WP Brute loves him some Vigor. So it's not just you.

I've been using nerve for the defense bonus on my dm/wp brute, but I've been wondering if I shouldn't switch to something else lately. I just can't really think of anything better at this point as the accuracy is nice.

Well, you get Accuracy in Vigor as well - not quite as much as you can with Nerve if you take the Core path, but it's an option and I find the other aspects (Heal and EndRedux) more useful for my Brute than the HoldDuration and Defense from Nerve. Just something to think about.

Thanks for weighing in all