Taunt and Confront

Taunt is Invaluable on a Tanker for 1 reason, and Invaluable on a Brute for another. I never take any grab agro power on a scrapper. There are a few Brutes I do not take Taunt on, not because it's not valuable, but because I am consciously working against the archtype. I have a Dark/Will Brute that plays like a Scrapper, with no taunt, and the only reason he needs agro is to pump his damage. He gets plenty of agro for that. I still have to warn my teams I cannot tank for them. Willpower has a crappy taunt aura, and he is light on AoE, so i just kill what I pick out. That is a rarity for me. Mostly, Tank/Brute = Spam Taunt, Scrapper = no Confront.

I just hope they hurry up and get rid of confront ASAP. It's impossible to conceive of any scrapper wanting a way to manage aggro and eight-power primaries would be an improvement in comparison to the blight upon mankind that is confront.

I pretty much always go with scrapper secondaries that have a taunt aura.

It may be almost non-existent duration ones like WP or EA, or it may be beasts like Shield and Invuln, but usually it comes on a power I was going to take anyways and I usually don't have the power picks to spare on confront or the pool AoE taunt, and if I did have a free power I'd never have the slots.

I am slightly annoyed they gave tanker SR the WP treatment. Sure it's dead easy to softcap but any new content seems to be guaranteed to have autohit or untagged attacks (I'm looking at you positionless blaster twins in the SBB).

On a tank? Yes. On a character I'm going to tank with? Yes. Just because I have it? No.

On a Tanker or a Brute, I always take Taunt, but I don't usually get it as soon as it becomes available. I like to spend most of my early power choices on the basic attacks, and the basic armors to be able to survive the aggro I would draw by taunting.

On Brutes and Scrappers, I usually put off the "taunt aura" for a while for similar reasons, and so I'll have access to better enhancements to manage my endurance costs. Typically, I'll take the aggro aura at Lv 22, and Lv. 24 will be Taunt, or vice versa. On a Tanker, I'll usually take the aggro aura sooner since the attacks I'd otherwise take unlock more slowly.

There was a point right after Inherent Fitness came out where I took Confront on my namesake main Scrapper, but I later respecced out of it. If I had a spare power choice on a Scrapper, I'd consider taking it, but it's not a very high priority.

And on AT's that don't get taunts in their Primary or Secondary, I've never gone into the Presence pool for Challenge or Provoke, since drawing aggro isn't the purpose of those AT's, and is usually a hinderance to their purpose. Although the Placate power they're planning to replace Challenge with is something I might take on my Ninjas/Poison MM for concept reasons. I'm torn between that or the AoE Placate they plan on adding to Concealment. My MM already has Stealth, though having to devote two additional power choices to it and another Concealment power to unlock it is making that option less attractive.

But one thing I like to do on my characters that have Taunt powers is to create a few keybinds so they'll say something in local chat when they use the power. I use the taunt binds sparingly, since I don't want to annoy my teammates by spamming the same few phrases all the time like some fighting game character. But occasionally, I'll hit one of them every now and then instead of the basic non-chatbinded Taunt to spice up the action.

Usually, they are in-character taunts. My main had knightly phrases like "Have at you, $target!" during the brief time he had Confront, for example. But coming up with good taunts is hard. The best put-downs are ones tailored to the target, which I can't really do in the context of stock phrases.

But no matter the character, one of their taunt binds will always be "Your mother was a hamster and your father smells of elderberries!"