I’m not a scrapper, so I really can’t help you on that, but D_Odds knows the MA/SR quite well, so go with his advice.
The offical CoH boards are a great resource, so is the new hero planner.
I play on the Virtue server, if anyone would like to team up my characters range from 10-38. Usually on Fallout Girl (38 radiation/radiation defender).
I’m going to agree with CandidGamera, except I’d go PB / Swift / Hurdle / Stamina. You will be seeing more and more villians whose mezzes (mezmering attacks, which turn off toggles) will kill you, starting now. Practiced Brawler is the best mez protection in the game, better than any other scrapper or tank protection. With two SOs, you should have it up 24/7 (set it to auto).
You can respec at 24, which is when you will probably be right where you want to be. It will, however, allow you to move things around, get Stamina earlier, and have it slotted by 24. A common strategy for many (not me, though) is to earn the respec, then to copy the character onto the test server in order to test powers and builds. You can also scope out your build ahead of time with a Hero Planner. You can find one at http://coh.stratics.com/
Endurance Management
You are at the toughest time in your career, endurance-wise. It gets a lot better. I was lucky to adventure often with Volt Valkyrie, who greatly helped my endurance recovery. Befriend a kinetics or radiation defender! Until you get your defenses highly slotted, you should never leave your house without a defender or two in tow. OK, so that’s an exaggeration, but not by much
I kept one Reduce Endurance in all my toggles, and none in attacks. I didn’t have agile, yet I would still be selective about when to run Focused Senses. At the lower levels, most ranged attacks are weak. You may be able to survive with just Agile. That will change, and you are better off slotting toggles defenses before passive defenses. Even with 5-slotted Stamina, I still don’t use Evasion unless I know I’m facing lots of AoE attacks. Lucky is the one passive I’ll slot ahead of the toggle, as I only use the toggle situationally. And remember what I mentioned before about Sprint. Every little bit helps.
For offensive powers, if I were you, I would get Dragon’s Tail (“DT”). I have never heard anyone say a nice thing about Crippling Axe Kick. Not a single person. Stay away from it. I, personally, didn’t like Eagle’s Claw (“EC”), and dropped it when I did my last respec. However, others like EC coupled with Cobra Strike for stunning bosses. If you go this route, I would put a Disorient Duration as my last slot. I have Thunder Kick, Storm Kick and Crane Kick - same attack chain from when I was level 12 (only faster with Hasten). I only use DT when I have 3 or more foes in range. It does excellent knockdown, which means the foe will lose at least one attack against you.
For defensive powers, they are all good. I’d put Evasion at the bottom of the list; it is what I got when I dropped Eagle’s Claw. Lots of SR and Regen scrappers take the Fighting power pool to get Tough. They say that the damage resistance greatly helps against alpha-strikes (the big, bad, first attack many bosses and AVs like to use). I’m not one of them, but that doesn’t make it a bad strategy.
Note, most of these ideas (except for Praticed Brawler) are my opinion. You want to play a character that’s fun for you, not a carbon copy of every other MA/SR scrapper on the server.
Couple pieces of general advice on building City of Heroes characters…
As **Dangerosa **mentioned, doing some research on the CoH boards (in the Guides section under each of the Archetypes in particular) can be a huge help. That said, here’s some tactics in building that I find useful.
The first 12 powers you take (through level 20) are critical. Most of you already know this, but for reference:
Level 1: 2 powers (first or second from Primary, first from Secondary)
Level 2: 1 power (from either Primary or Secondary
Level 3: 2 slots
Level 4: 1 power (from either Primary or Secondary)
Level 5: 2 slots
Level 6: 1 from Primary, Secondary or a Pool
Odd levels going forward get 2 slots, even levels get a power.
(Until level 31, when you get 3 slots instead of two, and past 30 you get powers every 3rd level – but worry about that later.)
The first 4 powers you take are pretty tightly determined. Then, bBetween 6 and 20, you have 8 choices to make, and 5 of them are probably predetermined.
Why?
First, because you probably want Stamina at 20. It’s a really, really helpful power, and almost every build you will read about features it. To get Stamina at 20, you need to take 2 other powers from the Fitness pool. I recommend Hurdle, because vertical is nice with any power. The second choice is pretty build-dependent – those with healing power can probably skip Health, while those taking Super Speed probably don’t need Swift.
Second, you want a travel power. I’m partial to Super Speed, because the Speed pool gives you Hasten, which is just as useful as Stamina, but whatever travel power you take (at 14, when it becomes available) requires that you take one other power from its pool first.
So of the 8 choices, 5 are
- Swift (or Hurdle)
- Health (or Hurdle or Swift)
- Stamina at 20
- Hasten (or Recall Friend, or Combat Jumping, or Hover)
- Superspeed at 14 (or Teleport, or Superleap, or Fly)
Sequencing these is important. As **Nordic **is finding out, realizing at level 18 that you are going to need Stamina and you don’t have anything in Fitness yet means that your next 3 power choices are predetermined, which sucks, because some cool powers are starting to open up at that point and you’re not getting them. It also means that you’re waiting hours of playtime to get a power that is instrumental to your success.
I lived this pain with Super-Collider. Learn from my mistake.
The moral of the story…
Think ahead in building your character. The first 10 levels or so come fast, and making good power choices can make you really happy later on. Going without another attack at level 8 in order to get Hurdle so you can take a cool power from your primary at 18 and still get Stamina will make you very happy.
Great advice, folks, thanks a lot. I wish I had known this before, but I suppose it’s my own fault for not checking the website. I’m not a patient type; I don’t want to do research, I want to play. I honestly did not anticipate the endurance being such a problem, since it wasn’t at the lower levels. The only other character I’ve gotten this high is a blaster, and I don’t recall endurance drain being a big factor with him either. I figured it was a peculiarity of scrappers, sort of a trade-off because they can take hits so much better.
Oh well, lesson learned. With the current plan I’ll be in good shape by 24 so I won’t need to respec, right?
How do you set Practiced Brawler to auto?
And what time are we hooking up on Sunday? Anything works for me, though I’d prefer not to start too late in the day.
Corii, feel free to send a /tell to Jingo Belle. She’s too low to team up with you (unless you want to sidekick her) but you can certainly say hi.
One advantage a MA scrapper has over some of the others is you can use the Air Superiority attack without intervening animation. (one slot - Accuracy) Not much damage, but it will knock down any foe whether or not they are airborn. That also opens the way for flight, which is my favorite travel power. It’s not very fast, but it’s safe, and has total vertical control.
How in the hell did I get mixed up with two incompetent team leaders in one night?
Just a guess: Accepting a blind invite?
A good hint - incompetent team leader turns into “gee, I hear my kids calling. I need to go.” If you don’t have kids (or young kids) ferrets will do. Basically, you need a CoH equivelent of “I need to wash my hair that night.”
Or you can just pretend you have kids. Or that you’re transgendered… wait, that’s been done.
The person who recruits the team doesn’t have to call the shots. I’m no master strategist, but I frequently have to admonish people not to rush blindly into gaggles of bad guys. If they don’t listen, and I get killed repeatedly as a result, I’m outta there.
The Synapse Task Force yesterday was a smashing success. It was my Jingo Belle, CandidGamera’s White-Russian, Redwing’s Bride of Ash, and a charcter whose name I can’t recall (I wrote it down, but I’m at work – the only time I’m on the Dope 
) belonging to, if I’m not mistaken, Pleonast. We also had a few additional members we managed to pick up. In total we had, IIRC, 3 Tankers, 2 Scrappers and 2 Controllers. No Blasters, no Defenders. But we still kicked butt and suffered no casualties, thanks to good rapport and teamwork. Call on me any time, guys.
By the time it was over I had reached level 21. I went on to get my second costume, plus a cape for each costume. And I now have Practiced Brawler and Swift. 
Dangerosa, how about, as an excuse, daughter’s motherboard gave up the ghost and she needed to do her homework on my computer?
Oh, wait, that’s the truth.
Nordic, any time you see ERG-4 on, send a tell or even just an invite. Scrappers love defenders, and ERG-4 needs help completing his missions. Lots of help. If I know you are along, I’ll raise my mission difficulty a little, the better to get you leveled quickly. Alternately, you can sidekick to my MA/SR scrapper, Jim Beam, and we can street sweep in Brickstown and you can see the unbridled joy that MA/SR becomes. Plus, I can help you switch to SOs when you ding level 22.
Also, I think I have a couple of large team missions waiting in ERG-1’s queue, for a time when we have a number of people online.
There’s a new Hero Planner. Very nice for planning respecs and future development. It will also tell you the effects of many enhancements in their slots, so you know how much damage you are doing or what your defense really is.
I’ll second D_Odds’s request for Scrapper aid - Shadow Stranger always needs someone to do the dirty work for him. I’ve come to the conclusion that the ForceField Defender is the most unsoloable AT I’ve ever played.
Lute, as it turns out, there were no Vamps on my mission last night, so mez resistance would not have mattered a whit.
On a related note: Master Electric should have his last mission on the “Rise of the Vampyri” story arc tonight. Any takers? If we can find a defender or two, then they should be able to cover for a lack of mez resistance.
Brainiac4 and I have a new team going - his fire/rad controller, my fire/devices blaster. Once again, finding a combination that addresses the weaknesses in the other’s choices. We originally tried the fire/devices blaster with a tank, this works better.
(D_Odds, caught you on the ferret, tried to get you on slotting brawl, but you didn’t take the bait).
(I have a fortune teller mission if anyone is interested. Don’t know when I’ll play it).
I should remember to check this thread more often. So Jingo Belle is a Doper. I didn’t realize. Yes, I was playing Kitsune-hime my Oriental Mythos alt. Nordic, you’ll quickly realize it’s the players, not the characters that make the difference in a team’s success or failure. The archetypes are well enough balanced that almost any team is viable if the players are flexible and work together.
I should add you to my global friends list. Do you know about global chat yet? It makes it very easy to find your friends in-game, no matter which character they’re using. My main characters are Volt Valkyrie (lvl 30 Defender, Kinetics/Electricity), Eye of Maya (lvl 24 Controller, Illusion/Kinetics), and Kitsune-hime (lvl 29 Scrapper, Claws/Regen). I’m always happy to team up, and I’ll switch characters and SK/RSK if needed.
Well, Ms. D_Odds started up an Elec/Elec blaster (level 3) and I have a Fire/Kin controller (level 6). That would be some foursome. She’s not used to moving around in these games yet, though.
I missed the slotted brawl. Either that, or I conveniently forgot that I had done so, only to have you come along and reopen my repressed memories! Bad Dangerosa! :mad:
Maus, look for me. I’ll either bring on ERG-4 (healing, AM to shorten mez periods, debuffing so nothing hits us and we hit everything), or you can SK Blue Genesis (stand around and get hit, repeatedly).
I’m still trying to talk Mrs. Magill into opening an account. One day… one day…
Regarding the Elec/Elec build. Most of the secondary powers… well they suck. In fact, I respec’d out of all of them except Electric Fence (couldn’t avoid it) and Build up.
Dear Og, I thought that was a joke. You really didn’t, did you?
Mmm… Nazis weak as kittens. I’m happy to bring along whomever you have on at the time. Actually, it might be fair to bring Blue Genesis, since Soren Surt stole his place last week.
Jim Beam, level 3, wanted more in his second attack power. Was that way until level 24.
Before I read the official boards, I thought you could only slot one of each type of enhancement in a power. So if you could only slot Reduce Endurance and Increase Defence, you only could have 2 slots in a power.
Thank the great and terrible Og for respecs.
Don’t feel bad D_Odds, I did the same thing on my first alt. Well actually on my first character, JB is my first alt, who quickly became my main. I only recently went back to that character and used the free respec to do some changes. He is a much better character now. 
Lok