Why did Stone Melee fall off the map?

SM has been my favourite melee attack set for a long time simply because of the brutal animations and the wonderful, wonderful noise it makes. No amount of number crunching can come close to quantifying the grin invoking effect those two factors have. My main is a sm / fa brute and playing him is one thing: therapeutic. Incarnate system and ios allows me to deal with that combos failings beautifully, namely recharge, end useage and general squishyness. Im no min maxer, i dont care if ss or tw perform better neither are nearly as much fun imo.

Because that slow set does more DPS...with or without /FA as a secondary...has more AoE inherently...AND has more than 1 big hitter for ST and AoE.

Stone/electric brute. Most fun a brute can have, every attack looks like smash, sounds like smash, one power is even called smash. Smash with fists!! Guy falls down? Smash him into the ground with smash hammer!! Guy standing there, trying to hit you? Smash him into the air with even bigger smash hammer!! Stomp on the ground and make a line of smash that hits foes so hard they fall down and get dazed!

I mean, Super strength is a performer, and footstomp is pretty smashy in its own right. But One shotting guys with siesmic smash, two handed smashdown in 1.5 seconds? Thats brute style right there.

I will concede that earlier builds before the animation changes were more fun, by quite a lot mostly because you could unload on a hard target in mere seconds(of course your poor endo bar paid for it) and old fury made stone melee truly a monster.

IMO, they should up the base dmg on tremor so the long animation correlates to the dmg delivered. As it is, you expect buildings to collapse, cars to explode, enemy spawns 12 blocks away to fall down when your avatar finally lands that massive crushing strike, but end up dissapointed when it only does like 40% of a minions health(at mid level fury even) I do not think that would "break" Stone melee- the changes to the mallets more then negate what a new change to tremor would bring to the set overall.

Where does Super Strength fall when at damage cap compared to other sets?

Stone/FA is pretty sick. Fault+Burn more than makes up for Tremor having the same animation as Thunderstrike, but then Burn does that for every other set too, so if you're really worried about DPA/S efficiency, it's probably not the set for you. I'm clearly not since I took Tremor and use it. I figure I don't have a problem with Thunderstrike on my ElM/Invuln Brute, Tremor should just be a little better since it has a massive radius and as a Brute more radius is more targets taunted which is more fury.

Have to say I have been following this thread since its inception. I had a SM/Fire brute that I rolled a couple issues back when I was worried SS/Fire/Mu or Soul would get nerfed with a steel baseball bat. I had fun playing it but the end was rough. Incarnate power helped but she still sits on the shelf while I still run my SS/Fire.

But after reading through this I rolled another brute, SM/Shield and I have to say this girl is just downright fun! Running in First Ward with her at level 28 and running at +1x5 and I havent died yet. Anytime I am in trouble hit fault, things fall down, get up woozy and I just continue to smash away.

SM may not be the beast of dps or even dpa but you cannot deny it is fun!

To me, SM is more "useful" on a Tanker than on a Brute, though no less fun. My favorite Tanker of all time is my ElA/SM, due to his staying power (including all TFs and iTrials), usefulness, and flat out fun factor. I don't use Tremor for it's AoE damage, but as an occassional AoE KB/Taunt (when I don't have something better to do).

I got one, so long as titan weopons is being discussed-
At release, the forum consensus off of beta was that AT, between scrapper and brute, was largely irrelevent on dmg output. More of a choice between if you like criticals or fury, but the end result was very similar.

Now, i see a whole lot of talk about the set on brutes, but mostly talk about lvl 50's. So, is brute TW better in the end then scrapper TW? Did it take some time to work the bugs out of the l33t builds to accomplish this? Or is this more a comparison within the brute AT more then an overall comparison, when TW is discussed as so powerful?

Not to derail the thread or anything, but I havent leveled a TW character past 13 yet, i made a scrapper with a costume I really like, but no backstory or theme yet. So, if lvl 35-50+ TW is more fun on a Brute, i would consider reroll.

On a side note, regardless of opinions on TW, I find Siesmic Smash>TW. Numbers are great, but I gots ta have my screen shakin' smash soundin' fun.

If, you have run the numbers than you would acknowledge that without /Fire or even without Gloom, SS is just not close. SS/Fire you can use gloom and burn...TW/Fire you can't...

So what set is leaning heavily on other powers not inherent to it to get the amazing damage you're talking about?

Add Burn and Gloom to any melee set for a brute, and they also do amazing damage...just because KOB is a good power to add to it does not mean that SS/Fire is dominant or even close by itself.

Also, as was pointed out earlier, double stacking Rage is the only way you get there, at the damage cap, where rage is nullified, the difference is even greater.

I've edited my post a few times, might want to check it again, but ss doesn't need fire armor for amazing dps. It does need that RAAAAAAAAGE though. a lot of my argument and opinion is based on that tw is not easy to get to ss levels of damage. And sustain it. Much like hitting god mode with dark armor.

I said /Regen because:

(A) You could easily fuel a build with either set

(B) There is no extra damage from the secondary...no damage aura/dmg buffs/attacks

(C) It lends itself well to recharge so you can run optimal chains.

(D) The comparison would be even.

I would be ok with a comparison of both running elec armor...even though there's a damage aura...I could live with it for the sake of argument.

If you look at the base numbers...TW has much higher damage modifiers.