Blood Red Arachnid

Good with numbers I am. Not so much with words. Not sure what you mean with the second half.

Anyway, once the trials die down I think I'll analyze the minion damage rate for various mobs and see if I can pick up a pattern.



EDIT: since I'm not a fan of double posting, I might as well put down my anecdotes.

I... have never made a scrapper. Or a brute. No, I've made just about every other AT with melee, though (Stalker, Tank, Bane, Night Widow. Non-exclusive melee is PB, Dom, Blaster). Amongst all of those, the ones that felt like they were underpreforming were the stalker and the tank. The stalker prior to ATOs and focus was the toon of my greatest effort, and not because it was great at doing things but because I wanted it to be great at doing things. It seemed like no matter what I did, it just wasn't enough. My damage was high but not high enough, my survivability felt like I was basically a squishy who was crazy enough to get in range, and my overall team contribution felt lacking at best. I must've rebuilt and tweaked that set a dozen times just to get it to work. Suddenly the ATOs come out and I am ridiculously scary. Even before assassin focus, I could've sworn I had high enough DPS to solo nightstar on a mini-BAF trial. Focus comes out, and then enemies next to me drop left and right. The stalker finally felt... complete.

The Tanker is the other "underperformer". I turned my difficulty up to +2/x4 at one point, because the tanker could take that aggro just fine. After two missions, I turned it back down to +2/x1 because it felt like I was wasting my time more than anything else. Though he could take it, the tanker would just spend forever fighting one group of enemies just to go to the next and spend forever fighting that group, even though I had taken every AoE available in the Battleaxe set. By the middle of the second mission I took one look at his survivability and went "...yeah I get it", and promptly lost interest. This was before bruising, so this may have changed with time, but one of the reasons why I almost never solo with my tank is because it feels like a grind more than it feels like combat.

What made me feel the ineptitude were the Bane and the Night Widow, both built primarily for melee combat. Now, I am not sure how the VEATs were supposed to factor in to the grand scale of balancing, but those two seemed like they had it all. Stealthy AND hard to kill AND good damage AND AoEs AND team support? No wonder they quickly become my favorite toons to play on. Doing so many things and doing them well, after playing them I took a look back at my old melee ATs and just felt that something was mising.

Stalkers have undoubtedly been fixed. I no longer have a yearning for more while playing them. I have that sense of accomplishment that comes from blowing a hole in my enemy's chest. I can talk about scrappers because, well, scrapper simplicity makes them quite straightforward to understand and use. As far as brutes go, this is where I am actually skeptical at how well they really do damage wise. I know that a lot of brutes to through the "squishy phase", but I also wonder other things, like if fury is dependent on your team being bad enough that they can't kill the enemies fast enough for you to build it, or if a brute really is as durable as a tank in most situations, or if AoE mezz negatively affects your damage output as much as I think it would, or if a brute only has that distinctive damage output bonus while fighting large groups of enemies. This, I guess, will have to wait after I'm done with my current projects.

BTW there's a huge hole in your chest.

I was referring more to what we should consider the level at which we are comparing ATs rather than the overall average critical hit rate. My case for considering the 10% base critical hit chance wasn't on an averaged per hit enemy hit basis but rather on a threat neutralization basis. Minions, while affecting the critical hit rate, are much less consequential to the outcome of a battle than their hardened brethren, who will stay alive and keep attacking. The critical per second aspect (or critical per attack used) becomes more important than critical per damage point when factoring in the enemy's damage rate. Though doing so would have to be on a set by set basis where you compare AoE DPS to single target DPS...


So I guess it it isn't about what the average critical hit chance is as much as how relevant the average critical hit chance is to balancing.

Should the situation arise where we are comparing an AT with a damage ATO proc, I will include it. Though more difficult, I don't believe it would be that hard to figure it out, since the procs have their activation number per minute listed. If you find their damage and their activation rate, it should be easy enough to calculate their additional damage output for any amount of recharge.

This is cool info to have. There is something I would like to comment on, though. When dealing with an assortment of minions, Lts, and bosses, the total scaled HP of that spawn needs to take into consideration that by spreading out amongst multiple "nodes" it provides a means to multiply the damage done by cones, auras, and AoE attacks to this HP base. For this reason, if we have a regular spawn of 1 boss, 3 Lts, and 6 minions, then an AoE will do up to 6 times the damage to minions than on bosses, and twice the damage to minions than Lts. Though many cones have a 5 target maximum, so this becomes 5 times bosses and 66% more than LTs.

This is a far greater difference than the changes in critical hit rates applied to different classes of enemies. As far as the overall damage output goes, I am unsure of exactly how much threat each boss and minion poses through their damage and accuracy and other abilities. My *perception* has always been that the bosses do more damage than the minions that surround them, though this may be mistaken. Regardless, the ease of which minions are killed or overall disabled means they are not as much of an overall threat as the stronger but fewer bosses and LTs that occupy the spawn. Exceptions do apply.

With both AT's solo, Scrappers will still have more of an advantage because enemies always appear in groups of 2 and 3. They apply their superior base damage to all of those enemies at the same time, where as a tanker has to play whack-a-mole with their tier 1 attack to get an even damage output. This also assumes that the difficulty hasn't been altered to that of more than x1, which is a very real possibility, even on SOs.

Now, there is a much bigger case as to why you don't want to balance around IOs, and that is because IOs require real life money. Either from VIP subscriptions to just buying the license. The ATO bonus does not require this. There are those other petty differences between them, such as how IOs need sets to be of any use while the ATO doesn't, how IOs require certain levels to be achieved while the ATO needs only level 7 to be at peak effectiveness, how IO sets require dedicated sloting for them while the ATO bonus doesn't. The only thing the ATO has in common with the IO is that it has bonuses as a set and it isn't a SO enhancement.

The devs do look at the IO sets still. I remember awhile ago Blessing of the Zephyr received a nerf because it was too powerful. IOs aren't an instant "screw balance" button the devs put into the game and continue to ignore. However I digress: your assessment is flawed because not every tanker uses bruising. I didn't even know bruising existed until I went to the forums, let alone did I build and slot to take bruising into consideration and construct an attack chain to maintain the resistance debuff.

It only supports if you ignore everything else I brought up, like AoEs and having to maintenance bruising by taking away from the attack chain.

Scrappers opening with a critical is irrelevant, since their damage is averaged out over time to get those numbers. Because of this, a scrapper is always performing at their peak regardless of whether or not any particular attack lands a critical. A tank isn't suddenly doing more because they have the option to open with a bruising attack. Opening with a bruising attack isn't itself always optimal, since you may need to open with a taunt /+ an AoE in order to draw aggro before the enemies run off and pwn the blaster.

The scrapper ATO doesn't discriminate: it applies its effects to all scrappers that slot it. It is readily available as low as level 7 to free players and provides a global bonus applied to all all relevant attacks. The only reason why someone would not slot this enhancement given the resources to own it is by some personal ideology that would stand firmly against ATOs. It must be taken into account because at any point in which we are comparing ATs we must compare them when they are being set towards optimum performance and not when being purposefully gimped. Doing otherwise creates a problem where we can arbitrarily limit the performance of any AT based on chosen slotting. For example, I have seen many tankers that work specifically around AoE attacks and do not slot their first attack or use it regularly in an attack chain. Because of this, you can assume arbitrarily that bruising does not apply to all tanks due to player actions, much like the ATO.

The ATO bonus takes special mention because it is a unique buff to the AT; the critical hit increase exists outside the regularly available methods of increasing damage output and is unique to that particular AT. It is not restrained by recharge rate or damage caps, and it costs no endurance. It is not an additional damage proc. It is because of this uniqueness and ease of usage that it has to be a factor when comparing Scrappers to anything else. Though you can neglect the SATO version since undoubtedly not every scrapper is level 50 with a catalyst.

Players on the same team are cooperative, not competitive. The bruising increasing the damage of all players is even more so a reason to have a tank on the team.

You do know that I already came up with the numbers for scrapper critical hits? But I'll tell you how to get some of those numbers.

Now, critical hits from a scrapper apply double their damage, which means it is an extra 1.125 base damage applied to attacks. What you need to do is make a weighted average. That is, you take how much damage a regular attack does (1.125) and multiply it by how often it occurs (95% against minions), then take how much damage a critical hit does (2.25) and multiply that by how often that occurs (5% against minions), and add those together. So, the weighted damage that a scrapper does is...

1.125(0.95) + 2.25(0.05) = 1.181

There is actually a shortcut to the math. To show the algebra...

1.125(0.95) + 2 (1.125)(0.05)
1.125(0.95) +1.125(0.1)
1.125(0.95 + 0.1) = 1.125 (1.05)

Which is essentially one + the critical rate. Doing this, you can very easily find the scale damage done with ANY critical rate. That is how I got the following numbers with procs and different enemies:

1.181 vs. minions, 1.203 w/ ATO minions, 1.215 w/ SATO minions, 1.238 vs. others, 1.2823 vs others w/ ATO, 1.305 vs. others w/ SATO.

Where ATO = the global bonus from the scrapper enhancement set, and the SATO is the superior ATO version.


Now, your numbers are done with minions. However, minions are the worst thing to balance against since they are so weak they get killed very quickly. Lets balance things against bosses...

Now, bosses con at +2 your level, so all effects have only 80% effectiveness. This affects things linearly, so you can multiply it against the base damage output of the classes. However, the Tanker's resistance debuff is affected separately from their damage output, meaning that tankers only get a 16% resistance debuff instead of a 20% debuff. So, doing the math.

0.800 x 0.800 x 1.16 = 0.7424 scale damage from one tanker.

A scrapper's damage output depends on whether or not they have the critical increasing ATO slotted. I'll just give all the numbers:

No ATO =0.9904
ATO = 1.0258
SATO = 1.044

Which, as you can see, means the tanker always does less damage against a boss than a scrapper. The tanker approaches the 75% mark if and only if you pretend that the scrapper ATO global critical bonus doesn't exist. But since Scrapper's Strike does exist, it needs to be factored in.

A second flaw in reasoning is assuming that bruising would make a tanker on-par with a scrapper in terms of damage is AoEs. Unless I have missed my guess, enemies are almost never alone. A scrapper's cone's and PBAoEs still receive that critical hit bonus, applying a greater damage to whatever targets they are hitting. A tanker's bruising affects one target, and to apply it to multiple targets would require attacking each one of them with a tier 1 attack which leaves less time to use AoEs that a scrapper is already firing off.

Something not mentioned in a tanker's favor is the positive effect of bruising to their teammates. This isn't very good regarding comparing the damage output of other ATs since it benefits those other ATs, but nonetheless the whole team benefits from bruising. But, only if it is one tanker. Bruising doesn't stack, so any more than one tanker is redundant, whereas you can have multiple scrappers that continue to contribute to the teams overall DPS. The only benefit to multiple tankers is that you can apply bruising to more than one target, but alas with aggro needing only one tanker to really be held it is far more efficient to replace the tanker with a corrupter/defender/mastermind/controller that has a global resistance debuff in their set already.


As to whether or not a tanker's bruising truly compensates for their low damage, I would say that no it does not. Applying a single resist-able resistance debuff from their tier 1 attack to a single target doesn't perform at the expectations needed since the release of ATOs, and in an AoE centered game the single target resistance debuff only gives a marginal increase to the overall damage output of the team.