Bill Z Bubba

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So I guess its safe to say that a scrapper player isn't necessarily in love with brutes lol?

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Actually I'll probably be leveling a handful of Two Pistol characters.

<makes John Woo double pistol motions>

BANG BANG

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For me:
Dual Pistols/Energy Manipulation Blaster
Dual Pistols/Pain Corruptor

I've seen a spike in claws/sr lately. I doubt most of them will see 50 because I know SR gets frustrating before SOs.

I don't see a lot of fiery melee and I'm unsure why this would be.

I probably see less invul on scrappers than any of the other secondaries.

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it's pretty darned difficult to create a closed letter thread...

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Actually it's very easy. But if I say more they'll have to kill me.

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Super Reflexes for Tankers. You do realize how big Tanker defense values are, right? We're talking "beyond soft-capped while solo with no pools or IOs or T9" here. Also, a defense set with NO other survival tools seems very un-tanker.

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Scrap Toggle: 13.875 base
Scrap Passive: 5.625 base

Tank Toggle: 18.5
Tank Toggle: 7.5

Total Defense to each position for a tank: 26. Slotted: 40.56% defense to each position after slotting for a tank.

Add slotted combat jumping and we hit 44.46

Close enough to the softcap to call it done. The tank then gets far more benefit from the passive scaling damage resistance.

Where the scrapper's won't even turn on until he's down to 803.16 HP at lvl 50, the tank's starts scaling up when he's down to 1124.46.

The tank will benefit more from health. The tank will benefit more from HP buffs from setIOs.

Matter of fact, since the SR tank won't be worried about how to get to the softcap, he'll be able to concentrate his IO slotting more towards other areas of mitigation and even damage.

Tanks should get SR just as they should get any other mitigation powerset.

Course... I still won't play tanks, but that's a different story.

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Never, ever start an ITF with more than two sidekicks.

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1 was sk the others were exmped

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ITF I was on last night had 4 SKs. We finished in 1:39. I had a blast.

I've been on ITFs with 0 SKs that fell apart.

It's not the lackeys. It's the team makeup. Some teams are just doomed to fail no matter what.

Unless it's 8 scrappers on 5th diff. They are incapable of failing.

With QR and Stamina, the extra end cost of leadership over tough/weave might not be a problem, and any team you find yourself on certainly won't gripe about the extra buffs.

And you have the dual build option to lean on as well.

My only concern would be the lack of tough backing your s/l damres. But if you can get that high enough from other sources, go for it!

Powerforge, it pleases me that you have seen the dark.

Remember, evil spelled backwards is live, and we all want to do that, don't we?

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I prefer redheads. Spicy!

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I've grown fond of my grey. I'm not dyin it for NObody!

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You know, you people could just take this over to CoHFaces. 'Cause, ya know, it's kind of what the site is for...

I posted a picture of myself there, but my username is diabolically tricky to deduce. I doubt you'll be able to find it.

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I'm over there! Brunettes for the win (although my best friend is a blonde).

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Me, too! Brunettes faded to grey for the win!

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So here's the real question:

Is the Brute versus Scrapper damage argument put to rest? Can we all agree that 3% damage difference is low enough to ignore?

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I think we can ignore it once scrapper health, def/res caps, and aggro mitigation is within 3% of brutes.

I love both of these AT's but it's pretty obvious that one of them has a clear advantage over the other, lol.

Good job on the calculations bill.

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Thanks much, man. On the scrapper/brute equality front, I've been convinced by the arguments that state "scrapper up all the time/brutes fluctuate and must force themselves into situations that scrappers don't in order to keep fury high."

To really lay it all out, the more I look into brute vs scrapper comparisons, the more impressed I become with just how close they are.

EDIT: Little side note... ran an ITF with some folks last night on Bill Z. When we got to the final confrontation with Nictus Romulus, someone said, "Hold up til we buff you, Bill." And then they hit me. Painbringer, someone read me a fortune, some other madness lit up on my buff bar.

As pointed out to me later, I should have said, "Hold my beer," but I dove in. It wasn't until Rom was about to fall for the first time that I looked at my combat monitor:

Recovery: Blue
Smashing Resistance: Blue (That's all I monitor. I assume most types were capped.)
Defense: 50+%
Damage Buff: Blue

I can't recall in 5 years of playing that I was ever that cranked up before. Autohit fluffy? Pfft. Barely tickled. Gods below it was glorious.

I should team more often.

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With the advent of switching sides will you find yourself making a brute over a scrapper?

Discuss

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<shrug> I rarely team so it doesn't matter which one I play or on which side.

Bill Z will be crossing over if he can go run the patron arcs and hunt in The Fab.

This OP was singletarget only. Quills from spines was added only because it would be hitting that single target in question.

The last few posts gave just some of the reasons why it won't be me doing the aoe comparisons.

SR is a late bloomer. Until you get to level 22 and SOs, SR barely aids you at all.

So push on 6 more levels and then you'll find yourself saying, "I survived what? grooooooooooooooovy."

Things to help even more: Combat Jumping, tough and weave from the fighting pool and the Steadfast unique that gives +3% defense to all placed in tough.

The magic number for Defense is 45%. If you can get to there with your melee, range and aoe defense, you'll be at what's called the softcap. This means that more defense than that won't generally help you in normal PvE.

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This is the only end game content I've got left. Don't ruin the mystery.

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that.

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On the other hand would it be possible that you try to calcul the dps that could do a spine scrapper in a 8 man team, when you have your power hitting 10 foe each time ?

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I wish. But I wouldn't know where to start on calculating average aoe output.

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It is far from easy on a PuG. Only attempt with a PuG if everyone is willing to do a Shivan run and a nuke run beforehand, as needed. You may have a prayer of sucess with plenty of temp powers.

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And this is precisely why I haven't bothered with the LRSF since it was introduced.

It is broken. It is horribly designed.

Changed all crits to 10% except those marked as 15%
Added 15% crit to battleaxe cleave and warmace shatter.

Brutes now do .94% more damage than scrappers on average.

DM, if the team isn't allowing the brute to take the alpha, sadly an all too common problem, then yes, I can't deny what you're stating there.

And it once again brings out the fact that my perceptions of gameplay will forever be biased toward how these two archetypes perform while solo. It's why DM and I have never clicked well.

Besser, yes. End burn is too high on the large cones/aoes.

Werner and DM, I have no issues correcting all the crits to 10% if that's what my scrapper/brute brothers and sisters call for. EDIT: Except those calling for 15% as noted. Also, I may go through some of the brute only sets that I "proliferated" and give 1 power in each of them a 15% crit if it makes sense to do so.

Des, while it has already been determined that Scrap DM will out damage Brute DM when SD is saturated, at that point fury will also be capped due to incoming attacks and we see that as the numbers fueling SD fall, Brute DM takes the lead.

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I don't believe anyone would go 1-50 just on street content alone.

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I tried on my fire/regen. He's stalled in the high teens.

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I salute you for giving it a shot! He may get there yet. Hopefully, you won't get that bored as to challenge yourself in such a way

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If I can push through to fire sword circle, it'll be cake after that. Getting there, though.... such tedium.

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On top of that, while I do tend to utilize low tier attacks more often on brutes *while leveling them up* once they get into the late game, they tend to utilize only optimal DPS chains as fury generation is just not a problem for me due to soloing.


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I'm looking at this discussion here, where Siphon Life and Midnight's Grasp are labled break even attack (nor fury lost or gained). So in an ideal DM attack chain of using Smite, Siphon Life, Midnight's Grasp, and some filler, SL and MG do not contribute to your fury. No matter at what level of recharge you achieve, the problem would persist.

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That concept appears to ignore that incoming attack attempts also build fury. Building attack chains that only utilize the attacks with activations short enough to perpetually build fury will mean that you're missing out on a lot of damage output.

In other words, it's not a position that I find relevant.

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I don't believe anyone would go 1-50 just on street content alone.

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I tried on my fire/regen. He's stalled in the high teens.

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what the analysis doesnt show you is that (and correct me if i'm wrong) the harder the target ,the more often a scrapper will crit.

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Crits normalized at 7.5% to cover all minions, LT,s bosses, EBs, AVs, pylons, monsters, etc. From what I've been told, that number should probably be lower considering that the % of minions we face might be higher than all the rest. But since I don't know the facts on that, I stuck with 7.5% on crits.

Against Lord Recluse, a brute is going to be pegging out at 90-95% fury for a 180%-190% base damage buff.

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Brought War Mace up to 149.2 DPS. All of these are brute values, btw. Chain is Clobber>Pulverize>Jawb>Shatter>Pulveri ze>Ccontrol>Clobber>Jawb>Pulverize> Shatter>Ccontrol>0.28s.

Maybe I should do a few Scrappers...

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Can't use crowd control. No cone 90degrees or larger is allowed.

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Even with the assumptions in place (and I'm unsure what assumptions could be further reduced or removed,) shouldn't this analysis show enough parity between the damage output of the two archetypes that we can dismiss the topic?


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As I understand it, your using identical attack chains across brutes and scrappers. For example, the ideal Dark Melee attack chain is not ideal for Fury Generation. Meaning a Dark Melee Brute would have to use a different attack chain to build fury and then shift to the ideal DM chain. That kind of variable affects the overall damage when measured over time. I suspect this would not be true across all shared primaries, but these minor disparities will always fuel the debate.

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I'd have to dismiss that based on the fact that I normalized fury at 75% and crits at 7.5%. How the brute gets to 75% fury and maintains it seems irrelevant to me when considering long period damage output.

On top of that, while I do tend to utilize low tier attacks more often on brutes *while leveling them up* once they get into the late game, they tend to utilize only optimal DPS chains as fury generation is just not a problem for me due to soloing.

EDIT: Thanks, Jetpack. Really.. it was fun, not work.