In CoH, I always thought the Devs made a mix-up in the the power balance between scrappers and brutes. The role of the tanker was pretty well defined. Tankers clearly had the maximum defense and resistance, max hit points and minimum melee damage. Brutes were to be less tough, but do more damage, and scrappers even less tough but do the most melee damage in the game. There were several problems with how this was implemented in CoH. First, I always thought the special abilities of brutes and scrappers were reversed. Critical hit should have gone to Brutes, and the much more valuable rage should have gone to scrappers, and should have ramped up to 100% very quickly. And, even without this change, the level of damage a scrapper could do was just a bit low for what he was supposed to be. With no ranged powers at all, he should have been more of an unstoppable offensive force for 10 seconds or so.

Instead, with the weightings we had in CoH, it was the Brute class that ended up doing almost as much (sometimes more) damage than the scrapper, but having dramatically more defense and resistance -- almost as good as a tank. Brutes became the top of the pyramid for melee characters -- one could even add good taunt to a brute and significant PBAOE.

As a result, i quickly migrated from playing scrappers as melee toons to playing brutes. But I still think brutes were (relatively) overpowered and scrappers (relatively) underpowered in CoH.

This leaves an opportunity to expand the capabilities of the two classes, and do something better in CoT.